I have no quarrel with this, other than that even while acknowledging the concept that possibility is not probability, one may easily be shoehorning in way more probability for a pet idea than is warranted.
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I would say probability canât factor in - the variables are unobtainable for any option, and saying that the different types of reality are equally probable is more likely to misrepresent the fact that they would only be equal because there are no variables, so better to say that probability doesnât factor in to any of them.
Not quite. And the way you formulate it sounds like a dichotomy, when reality is that there is a scale. So in that sense one could say that you formulated a false dichotomy. In any case, there is âunavoidableâ. So the scale would be extended to
(Unavoidable, ⌠, Possible, ⌠, Impossible]
Feel free to find a synonym to unavoidable that would be more precise or a word that will extend the scale further.
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Possibility is a claim, it carries a burden of proof, and to argue that something is true until it is disproved is the very definition of an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
Again this is fallacious, and disbelief of a claim, is not itself a claim that the negation is true.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy. Both are claims, and both must be demonstrated, and in the absence of such a demonstration I would withhold belief from both the claim and itâs negation. This would mean I was agnostic and disbelieving, which I am about all unfalsifiable claims, itâs why science discards unfalsifiable claims as unscientific.
Itâs not, and your argument to support that claim is fallacious.
If the claim is unfalsifiable, then it cannot be weaker than its negation.
So you accept invisible mermaids that are undetectable in any empirically objective way are possible then? Thatâs nonsense sorry.
itâs ironic that youâre invoking logic by using a known logical fallacy.
âArgumentum ad ignorantiam, or the argument from ignorance, is a logical fallacy that asserts a claim is true because it has not been proven false, or false because it has not been proven true. In essence, it wrongly equates a lack of evidence with evidence itself, shifting the burden of proof to someone else to disprove the unsupported claim.â
Now hereâs your use of that fallacy again:
Itâs meaningless to talk about the probability of a claim, if one cannot even demonstrate if it is possible.
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He said it was possible, not true.
Itâs possible to start from existence and arrive at nothing. Meaning that even from the possibility of existence there is a possibility of it turning out to be nothing. In other words, the possibility of existence is possibly not possible given that it originates from nothingness. However, since nothingness is also a possibility, the possibility of existence remains valid even if it can be falsified. The confusion arises when one fails to appreciate the depth to which nothingness goes. Consider that when we die we will experience nothing in an absolute sense. Hence the possibility of existence not being possible exists only inasmuch as we are conscious beings. That extends also to the capacity for a conscious being to conceptualize nothingness in all of its cascading levels of negation.
He said things are possible if they havenât been proved impossible, that is a truth claim. It is also a logical fallacy.
GibberishâŚ
I donât believe you, please demonstrate something beyond the bare claim.
To experience nothing is not an experience, it is the absence of all experience, literally. I was dead for billions of years, and it left literally no experience.
Word salad again.
Unavoidable is a subset of possible.
You wouldnât put avoidable at the other side of impossible either.
Theyâre different terms that depend on something being possible.
By that flawed logic you could break many if not all absolutes.
âoffâ and âonâ - "but you can add âbrokenâ too (yes I know quantum states can also have indeterminate but for the sake of the analogy, weâre talking about a standard binary off/on)
I didnât state it was true, I stated it was possible. The burden of proof is satisfied on the basis that a thing is possible unless it has been determined otherwise.
Same goes for âunknownâ - you could argue unknown is a claim: âA thing is unknownâ, but again, the burden of proof is satisfied on the basis that a thing is unknown unless it has been determined otherwise.
Both are defaults for the same reason - they reflect a state of the absence of knowledge. Something is possible, not because there is something positive in support of it, but because there is an absence of knowledge to either determine it is impossible, or that it exists/has happened/is an available option/etc.
Disbelief of a claim is just that - âI donât believe thatâ
You didnât express disbelief in a claim though, you stated:
Which is a claim in its own right.
My response is setting out that there must be a default - if we donât know if something is possible or impossible, thereâs no middle word. Saying âitâs possibleâ is meaning âit may be possibleâ - itâs a position of lacking knowledge and certainty.
Argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy only applies if a claim is being asserted true - by definition calling something possible is not calling it true, it is calling it possible. Something being possible is a position of lacking knowledge, so it is not an argument from lacking knowledge, it is an argument of lacking knowledge - calling it possible is a recognition of the absence of knowledge.
Itâs no different to saying something is unknown - you can argue that it is true that something is unknown just as you can argue that it is true that something is possible - the true statement is only in reference to it being unknown/possible, not that this state (unknown/possible) supports a theory in any way.
For example, someone could claim it is unknown whether a tesla car is on an exoplanet 1500 lightyears away from Earth. Someone could equally claim it is possible if there is advanced alien life in the universe that secretly stole a tesla car and placed it on an exoplanet 1500 lightyears away from earth.
Saying it is unknown and saying it is possible doesnât lend the idea any credibility, because the idea joins infinite other ludicrous claims that are equally unknown/possible.
The demonstration of something being possible is the absence of any logical or physical evidence for it being impossible. Just in the same way that something is demonstrated as being unknown by the absence of any knowledge.
Itâs an absolute though. Known/Unknown. Possible/Impossible - there is no middle ground, hence unknown and possible being the default states. One cannot have the position of something being neither possible or impossible because no such state exists.
Of course, as you say, you can withhold belief in the sense that you donât have a belief either way, but that doesnât address the position itself.
Like with the Tesla car example, a person can dismiss the possibility simply by not choosing to believe either way, but that doesnât impact the point that it is possible, it just means that you as an individual are not engaging with the idea/thought.
The problem here is though, you are not just withholding belief, you are trying to argue about âpossibilityâ. Withholding belief for both states means stepping away from the argument.
As I pointed out, âpossibleâ is weaker because itâs the default, and in some instances it can end up unfalsifiable for that reason. âImpossibleâ is the stronger state because itâs based on knowledge and is therefore falsifiable in all cases.
False dichotomy - just because something is possible, doesnât mean it canât also be nonsensical.
So yes, invisible mermaids that are also non-corporeal are technically possible, (for what itâs worth), but it would also be nonsensical - it would be one of infinite unfalsifiable âpossiblesâ.
Doesnât this highlight to you how something being possible doesnât really count for anything? Itâs not a hill to make a stand on, itâs just a grain of sand on a beach.
To avoid repetition, I will stick with my earlier response to the stated fallacy as above.
Thatâs literally what I was saying when I said probability canât factor in. Not because it cannot be demonstrated it is possible though, but because it being possible and unfalsifiable.
It never occurred to me that you were making a claim you believed to be untrue?
Here it is again then:
Do you mean to say you donât think your claim is true?
If you donât know whether something is possible, then you cannot claim it to be so, else we would have to believe all unfalsifiable claims and their negation, which would violate the law of non-contradiction, believing some, but not others would simply involve bias either for or against, and thus be the definition of closed minded.
No, something is possible if it can be demonstrated to be so, and this is still an argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy your using.
Correct, do I really need to assert that I withhold belief from bare claims?
Why are you telling me this as it hadnât occurred to me? yes it is a claim, if I am wrong and you can demonstrate a deity is possible it is reasonable to imagine youâd have done so.
My default is disbelief until a claim is supported by sufficient and sufficiently objective evidence.
The assertion âit may be possibleâ is semantically identical to the assertion âit may not be possibleâ, it tells us nothing about the possibility of something, since they mean the same thing.
Can you demonstrate a deity is possible? If so please do so, and I will give it due diligence. until then I remain disbelieving.
A while ago we had an atheist on here who stridently declared no deities exist, and no evidence would ever demonstrate otherwise, he was of course challenged, and asked to demonstrate objective evidence for the claim, he failed, and I remained disbelieving.
I treat all claims the same, as I must if I am to remain open minded.
I know, and I assumed when you made it, you believed your claim to be true, are you saying you donât think your claim is true?
If you mean for example, something exists and then ceases to exist, I would call this a subjective nothingness.
There could also be a conceptual nothingness for possibilities that exist and are then no longer possible, for example, âI could have typed a completely different sentence here but I didnât, so that possibility no longer existsâ - the possibility that existed is now non-existent.
In a contextual sense, something that is considered to possibly exist may actually not have been possible to exist (for example, it may have been considered possible for me to write this paragraph without being interrupted, but evidently it was not, so a possibility was possibly not possible given that the possibility only arose from circumstance and didnât exist prior to that.
Of course, that in itself is a matter of context - the possibility only existed in a linear time perspective. if viewed externally, that moment exists timelessly, and there is no âpossibilityâ, there is only what is and what is not. Potential is subject to linear time.
If you mean that existence as a whole is possibly not possible, I would disagree, because existence is self-proving. Even the state of being not possible/impossible is the existence of the state of something being impossible, which contradicts absolute nothingness.
This becomes confusing - because in the context of nothingness, we do not experience nothingness, but the absence of experience can be said to be âexperiencing nothingâ (i.e., there is no experience) so within a discussion of ânothingâ, we donât experience ânothingâ, we have an absence of experience - at least in a biological sense.
Although, one may consider the continuity of experience - if in a biological sense, our bodies are changing (cells dying and new cells created) in an ongoing process, at some point(s) in typical lifetimes, the âpersonâ that has experience no longer has experience. The cells that comprise a person may have once been cells that comprised other people (or at least the atoms from which the cells are comprised may have once comprised cells belonging to another person) - on a cellular level, experience that ceased has resumed once more.
One may consider experience is an emergent property, not something specific to individual cells, but then single-celled life could be considered to have rudimentary experience - even if that experience is limited to existing as a single cell, and perhaps dividing to make a new cell, etc.
If one considers the emergent property of consciousness to be contingent for contemplation of the abstract, then one could make that argument for all concepts - it becomes a question of - do concepts objectively exist or are they dependent on the subjective awareness/recognition of them?
This becomes a circular argument though, because the question of whether concepts exist objectively or subjectively is a concept in its own right, and one can consider that the view on whether concepts are objective or subjective is a subjective view, and could never be an objective view because this too would contradict itself.
I would say there are limits to comprehension. We are limited in comprehending nothingness because the very act of comprehension is something - we canât contextualise the something of nothing, because a true nothingness, even a subjective nothingness, is a nothing of nothing, as opposed to a something of nothing, so the only manner in which nothing can be fully âconceivedâ is by not thinking about it, but then one has a barrier to the conceptualisation as it requires the absence of thought, and by extension, the absence of subjective conceptualisation to match it.
I see, very edifying. This means you must believe a godless universe is possible then, as this has not been proved impossible.
You havenât demonstrated they are possible, only used a logical fallacy, and no that is not a false dichotomy fallacy. I have not falsely claimed we are limited to any two choices, only refused to accept an argument you made, as it is irrational and nonsensical.
Itâs a first hurdle if one is claiming something exists, obviously.
I know, I was agreeing.
No. It is a probability scale from impossible (probability P=0) to unavoidable or certain (probability P=1). Possible implies there is some doubt, so the probability would be somewhere in between (0 < P < 1).
Thatâs a false dichotomy.
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What I personally think and/or believe of the claim (or any equivalent claim) is irrelevant - that something is possible is the default state, at least by the virtue of lacking knowledge to the contrary.
To put it another way, the truth-value of something being possible remains unknown, but possibility as a category remains open.
If you donât know whether something is impossible then it cannot be claimed so as the default is that something is possible unless proved otherwise.
This doesnât extend to other states except where a state is also a default. I have given the example of something being unknown, which is an equivalent default state.
Being true is not a default state, so it would not be correct to say that because it is not known otherwise, something must be true - in this case, true/false is not a binary choice because there is the default middle state of uncertainty - (unknown).
You donât need to no, you would just need to withhold making claims.
I told you this because you stated:
My rebuttal was pointing out it was a claim because you said it was not.
as to the reference to a deity, I am not sure why youâre bringing that up in this thread? Weâre talking about reality and at this point, whether the idea that a simulated reality like âthe matrixâ is a possibility.
Agreed - âit may be possibleâ also means âit may not be possibleâ. However it doesnât âtell us nothingâ - it tells us that it is not yet known if it is more certainly possible, or factually impossible. Possible/Impossible is a binary, but within âpossibleâ there can be a sliding scale of knowledge pertaining to the possibility, ranging from âabsence of knowledge - possible only by defaultâ to âit has happened and could happen againâ
For example, possible by default is your invisible non-corporeal mermaid, and possible as it has happened and could happen again is âitâs possible to touch your nose with your thumbâ.
I am not making any such claims, and donât intend to make any such claims. My personal belief/view is what it is, but I am aware that making such a claim would carry the burden of proof and I am of the view that when it comes to the âsupernaturalâ, proof of any specific claim (entity, etc.) is impossible because if one considers the hypothetical situation where the supernatural is âprovedâ in a general sense, the very concept of proof breaks down.
Science works because it has a framework. There is order to the natural world and as long as that consistency is maintained, the framework exists.
Consider this framework is âinsideâ - a closed system, conceptually. Science deals with what is âinsideâ - i.e., anything within the scope of the natural, physical universe.
The âsupernaturalâ would be âoutsideâ - anything that doesnât fit âinsideâ and is beyond the scope of science.
Proof works âinsideâ in the framework because the framework defines the borders of âinsideâ, whereas with the supernatural, itâs a case of âanything goesâ - thereâs no framework that could be validated, even if there is a framework of some sort (an order in which things work) we would have no way to validate it because there could be unknown unknowns.
Science operates on a presumption, which in turn secures that framework. The supernatural would also require presumptions to make a framework, but then what do one call the things that may fall outside that presumption? âSupersupernaturalâ?
It doesnât fit. Proof doesnât work outside the framework of consistency and the natural, physical world
Youâre adding belief to the mix - what a person personally believes is up to them. I believe that âa godless universeâ cannot be claimed to be impossible (or at least the debate on the subject is very much open) just as the reverse cannot be claimed either.
They are possible in the sense that the category is open, but that doesnât mean the truth-value is known.
Thatâs a slippery slope fallacy.
Great, weâve agreed on something, thatâs cause for celebration 
Weâre not talking probability, weâre talking possibility.
So yes, a probability of 0 is potentially the equivalent of impossible (though this sounds like a reversal of cause and effect - if something is impossible, it is therefore a probability of 0, but can something be declared impossible (when it hadnât already been) because its probability has been rendered 0?
The point of possibility is the binary choice possible/impossible. They are two categories. Possibility is categorical, either something is possible or it is not. Probability comes later, when something is measured on how likely it is within the possible space. So when I say âunavoidable is a subset of possible,â I mean that certainty (P=1) is still within the possible category, just at its upper bound. Treating possibility as a binary avoids confusing the question of âcan it happen?â with the question of âhow often will it happen?ââ
Probabilities in fact must be considered since we do not possess perfect and all encompassing knowledge or data on any topic.
For example, while is it possible that some vast, dark âbig pharmaâ conspiracy has corrupted science to the point that it is advocating vaccines as the greatest boon to public health ever, when in fact they are causing autism and filling people with microchips that the government uses to surveil and control us, it is not likely. And while conspiracy theorists might ardently believe vaccines are not only ineffective but harmful, plenty of data is available to show that they have reduced mortality (especially child mortality) and eliminated many diseases to the point that those diseases are (or at least were) considered eradicated â and that the benefits FAR outweigh any signals regarding side effects. In this I will trust people who have devoted their lives to improving the health and welfare of society over some grifting crackpots.
In all your posts you seem to be pushing hypotheticals and possibilities as if they are on an equal footing with all other ideas (and with each other). Hypotheticals and things that arenât falsifiable not only arenât worthy of the time of day just for existing, they are often a complete waste of time. If we had no standards here then weâd have zero discernment. Last night for example my wife came across some random guy on the internet claiming to be an MIT-educated PhD in some unspecified field who had found that you could fix deteriorating memory and even dementia by pulling on your ears in a certain way. Guess what probability my wife assigned to this being true, and whether she decided to spend time listening to the attendant video?
Without considering probabilities, your concept of binary possibilities make little sense. It is possible that all we know about natural sciences is totally wrong, and that it all is just a test from aliens that have superior knowledge about and control over Nature. You canât rule it out (i.e. it cannot be falsified), therefore it is not impossible. However, the probability for this to be true is negligible. Thus, the concept of binary possibility that does not involve probability is just plain dumb and does not give us information about anything.
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Yes, thatâs fine, as I said in my last comment:
So as per your example:
- While it is possible (possibility acknowledged)
- It is not likely (probability is determined)
I agree with that order, and the distinction between possibility and probability.
That is not my intention. With hypotheticals, it is side-stepping the questions of possibility and probability in order to discuss something for which the hypothetical is a pre-requisite. The hypothetical itself is not given any weight or consideration in my view - it doesnât have any footing on this basis.
With possibilities, I have tried to explain that something being possible simply means it is in the category, not that any truth-value is known, or that any probability-value is assigned.
Within that category, I fully accept that probabilities can occur, that weighting can occur, etc. - that while things can be possible, that doesnât make them equal within that category.
I fully understand and I mostly agree. There may be specific things - thought experiments for example, that while directly have no worth, may have an indirect purpose, but given that there are infinite âpossibleâ things, I agree that contemplating specific things in that category would be a complete waste of time in most cases, except when there is a separate purpose and the thing is being contemplated for that reason (for example, the example of an invisible non-corporeal mermaid - thereâs no point contemplating it normally, but for the purpose of being an example, it suited)
It does sound like weâre mostly in agreement at least. I hope my clarifications as to my standpoints make it clearer that we do seem to be in agreement.
of course it is relevant, you made a fallacious claim, here it is:
Then when I explained why it was fallacious, you asserted you were not claiming it was true, and I asked if you believed the claim to be true when you made it? Well did you? As that is a textbook argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy.
I made no such claim.
yet you claimed:
Do you believe that claim is true?
Why?
Youâll need to quote it, and where you imagine I asserted (it) was not a claim. Only all I asserted was that disbelief is not a claim, which it is not of course.
Here is my assertion for context:
I made no assertion about the possibility, only that if the possibility is unknowable, then you cannot assert it is possible, and if you do I must withhold belief from that claim, and of course that disbelief is not itself a claim.
I never said that assertion was not a claim, only that disbelief of a claim is not itself a claim.
Clearly I meant it tells us nothing about whether something is possible.
I donât default to a claim in the absence of knowledge about its veracity, you of course are free to make such unevidenced assumptions. I must find them dubious. For example we donât know that a godless universe is impossible, so your rationale implies you default to the belief it is possible.
Itâs in your profile?
Can you demonstrate that anything exists other then the natural physical universe? If not then why would i believe it exists? This is common enough tactic in apologetics, that implies the lack of evidence from science for a deity is somehow indicative of the limitations of science, but it of course obvious that science quite demonstrably cannot examine what does not exist.
Or it doesnât exist, I need a reason to believe something exists. Give me the best one you have for believing a deity exists, and I will examine it.
That is always the case with imaginary things, they are not limited by objective reality. However existence must be part of objective reality, by definition.
Oh, what is that?
You keep using the word proof, but I have already said it is a misnomer is this context. However I need a reason to believe a claim, and I explained what this threshold is, I have never seen anything demonstrated that the supernatural exist or is possible, beyond bare claims, irrational arguments, and wishful thinking, this falls way short of my threshold for credulity. Though of course others are free to base credulity on just bare claims, irrational arguments, and wishful thinking, if they want.
Thus by your rationale it must be possible.
I donât believe this, as i cannot base belief on a bare claim, as it would inevitably lead to contradictory and therefore irrational beliefs.
No it isnât, not even close. A slippery slope fallacy claims a particular action will lead to a series of progressively more extreme and undesirable events, without sufficient evidence to support the causal chain. I have made no such claim?
I only asserted that the claim something exists, must start with the very first hurdle, by demonstrating it is possible. Something cannot exist if it is not possible, Iâd have thought this was beyond any rational objection.