This part of my objection remains, even if the mere thought of noncognitivism sends you into convulsions of schoolyard insults.

Certainly, this is not a theory and it holds no value as far as knowledge goes. It is, as you say, a fantasy - a piece of fiction.

I hold that our universe should be explored from the senses and through falsification. It's a tested way that we know works. But it goes both ways, we shouldn't shut doors that aren't necessary to shut - we need merely ignore them.

I think it's often forgotten that "effective theories" often start from places *like* arguing from analogy. What if light were like a wave? Or what if it were like a particle?

So while you're right that such speculations in and of themselves are not "effective" (in the sense of being able to necessarily draw conclusions), they can still be both meaningful and useful. (Note: This doesn't mean that *ALL* such speculations lead to an effective theory.)

You're right that theological non-cognitivism is mostly deserving of ridicule.

By the way, there are no issues with saying "I don't think this analogy works" when working with such theories. "What if light were like a magnet?" You may not end up with the ability to model anything that reflects reality.

But again, this completely different from saying that you don't even understand what it means.

I think most scientific work starts with loose conjecture and goes from there. We don't, after all, observe working models in the wild and data doesn't magically fall into neat equations.

It's even important to do so and think outside the box. If we cling to paradigms, we might end up like we did with phlogiston, and use an outdated and outright misleading model for a hundred years longer than necessary.

Not that this has much bearing on my OP, which is just the result of fanciful thinking. I just think it is somewhat silly that I should deny that the idea of a "creator" is somehow possible or imaginable.

Fair enough. However, a key point is that ruminations that start with "what if" typically end up as nonsense even if they might occasionally not.

Scientists can go through numerous dud ideas before hitting on one that fits. Even the ones that fit typically go through numerous iterations before they work properly.

And of course, most people are not scientists or acting as scientists. The chance of some layman coming up with a solution to some meaning of life "what if" in some drunken late night discussion is less than random.

This is implicit from the non-cognitive position. You hold that terms can only define things existing in the universe, and terms applied to other things are not cognitively meaningful.

That means that
a) meaning must exist
b) the universe must exist
c) meaning originated with the universe, because if not the term meaning is itself meaningless.

Or in short, "the universe (somehow) made meaning". We as humans, are bits of the universe after all.

I don't disagree. But the upshot of this is that it is still important to remain open to such descriptions, and that shutting them down by pretending to be too stupid to understand is a really bad intellectual approach.

There's a lot of this that does start with something that seems too far off in the distance and partly (or sometimes mostly) ill-defined vague notions. But you have to start somewhere.

I don't think a scientist is likely to come up with some meaning of life "what if" anyway. But in terms of learning to think well, everyone should be open to this type of exploration. There are business adages about starting with 1000 ideas and sifting it down until you find the two or three great ideas in the bunch. You just need to be open to trying things and see where they lead.

Maybe a being created this universe, and it didn't create this universe, because in its parent universe, the law of non-contradiction does not hold (and it does hold).

Don't pretend you're too stupid to understand how to have a meaningful conversation about things to which the law of non-contradiction do not apply. We all know what "law," "of," "non-contradiction," "does," "not," and "apply" mean, or if we don't we can just grab a dictionary.

"A exists and does not exist" is not a contradictory statement. In case it isn't intuitive why: For it to be contradictory, you need to establish a rule that is broken.

In the future when you want to be sarcastic about people's understanding, you should take more care to use the terminology you are employing properly.

And yes, this is important. In physics for example, some phenomena can behave like two different things at once in certain models - those models do not contradict themselves nor some accepted universal principle.

This doesn't seem to have come up, so I'm not sure if this is a subject change or not. Ignore it if it is.

I've been discussing the Cosmological argument elsewhere and the sticking point was the question of whether or not it's possible to have an infinite regress. I'm currently in agreement with the conclusion that it isn't, that a chain of causal events must have a beginning, or you would never have an actual cause anywhere in there. I may not agree that the fist uncaused cause is 'god', but I think that there must have been one.

I'm not taking this position strongly, I'm just curious (and hoping this isn't too basic or extensively covered in the past) to see where you guys are with it.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "meaning must exist"...it feels like you are giving it some grand ontological status. I"m being pretty down to earth in my usage here, something like shared mental content that is conveyed through language. I also didn't say any restriction to in this universe. If physicsists proposes, for instance, a multiple worlds model, i have no problem with this. Presumably their model has some nontrivial component, it interacts with features (often blackholes) in some way that has some explanatory power, it has equations you can analyze, it is the starting point for a nontrivial conversation. These are features I claim are lacking from "beings create universes" which just sits there and doesn't do anything, with no further contextual integration with frameworks for understanding and so forth. Or at least nobody ITT has been able to take is anywhere else that I've seen. So no, I don't really follow most of your argument here.

Why do you think the bolded? It seems the point of an infinite regress is that you have infinitely many causes in there...why do you conclude zero?

Because every cause is actually an effect and you can't have something that is just a cause without also being an effect of the previous cause. Because it regresses infinitely, you can never get to an actual cause.

And, surely any chain of causation has to have a beginning?

I don't think this is quite right. Starting with the physics example, I assume you are referring to the so-called wave/particle duality, so that you might say "an electron is a wave and is not a wave". You are using that formulation to assert that this statement is not actually contradictory because in QM the behavior of electrons really does have both wavelike and non-wavelike characteristics.

The problem is that, even though this second statement is true, the first is not, depending on whether or not the copula is taken to be exhaustive, as it usually is. That is, if "is" means something like equality in algebra, then it really is contradictory to say that A is B and is also not-B, but that's not what is actually going on in QM. It's actually much more correct to say that "electrons are neither waves nor particles," but that both the "wave" and "particle" concepts, and their associated models, are oversimplifications from classical mechanics that partly capture the behavior of electrons, but not so much as to make it true that an electron is a wave in an exhaustive sense. The problem is that the phrasing "an electron is a wave" suggests that exhaustive sense, which is why "an electron is a wave and is not a wave" is a contradiction. Basically, there is a map/territory problem.

This isn't a question of there being some external rule to be broken, it's just a question of the foundations of logic and the concepts of identity and equality. The general formula A is B and A is not B is a contradiction given the most basic conceptual definitions of identity and equality. What makes the wave/particle duality non-contradictory is that it is, in fact, not actually a duality. The reason we describe it as such is an historical accident. The concepts of wave and particle in physics are not comprehensive and essential identities in the way that classical logic requires in order to function.

On the other hand, it has been argued that the real problem with formulations like "A exists and does not exist" is that existence isn't properly a predicate. That's a separate issue, but using the normal rules of logic "A is B and is not B" is contradictory. Examples from physics don't actually disprove that, instead they have to do with the limits of our logical (conceptual) formulations of empirical phenomena.

There's a lot embedded on what exactly you mean by "cause."

For example, to the best of our understanding, photon emission from an atom is purely random. There's no cause (nothing in particular that sets the emission into action), though there is a necessary antecedent condition (atom in an excited energy state).

It's not clear that we can say that the excited energy state is the "cause" of the photon emission without getting some unusual consequences. If we frame "cause" in this way, we end up with a type of disconnect between the cause and the outcome of the cause because you lose the sense of proximity between the cause and effect. Instead, you only get to know that the high energy state will eventually decay with a photon emission, but you don't know when and you don't have any reason for the particular when that happens.

This is even more pronounced in radioactive decay, where any particular molecule might not decay for thousands of years and you don't even need something like an excited energy state for it to happen. It just decays as one of its inherent properties.

No, I'm, not using that to assert that some "given statement" is not contradictory. That would make very little sense. Analogies are illustrations, not evidence. There are quite a few apparent contradictions in various physics models, but as I said - they're not really contradictions unless some rule has been broken.

What we tend to is apply our intuitive understanding of the world onto symbolic systems and languages. This is why, it for example, took 3000 years of mathematical history before the number 0 became mainstream.

I'm afraid re-reading didn't help me. I don't know how else to interpret your first two sentences as a reply to turd dust (I enjoyed typing his name). I take your word that what I got out of it is not what you meant, but then I'm not sure what you meant.

Saw your edit. I think this is basically agreeing with what I wrote when I said that "The concepts of wave and particle in physics are not comprehensive and essential identities in the way that classical logic requires in order to function."

If something along those lines is all you meant, that's fine by me. Maybe my explanation adds some clarity, or maybe not :P

Yes, what I meant what that for something to be contradictory there must be a rule that is contradicted. That rule must be established.

For example "A is true and not true" is intuitively contradictory, but it doesn't have to be. In computer programming you could for example do...

int foo;
foo=0;

if (a() && !a()) do_something();

int a() {
if (!foo) return(foo=1);
return(foo=0);
}

(And purists will have to excuse my C-code, it has been a long time). This is basically a snippet that the makes the value of A false when it returns true and true when it returns false.

Of course the suspicious will note that this is merely an artifact of the lack of precision in the term "true" and the term "and" (the variables are not checked simultaneously, but in order). But that's a decent lesson in the limitations of formal languages in itself.

I wouldn't say I was being particularly sarcastic; I was only trying to demonstrate the absurdity of dismissing out of hand non-cognitivist objections.

In any case, at this point I have no idea what you are trying to say. On its face, '"A exists and does not exist" is not a contradictory statement.' appears to be obviously false. I agree with Well Named's reply, and literally do not understand what you are attempting to say in your clarifications after that.

It's not difficult to understand: For there to be a contradiction, there has to be a ruleset, something that tells you that two statements contradict eachother at the same time. In your example that would be "A thing can not both exist and not exist at the same time". And it's not that I think this is some terrible intellectual travesty to assume, but in this debate we're squarely into the theory of non-cognitivism - and then I have to ask... how to do you know, what makes that claim meaningful. It certainly hasn't been shown because there is no known physical precision that can qualify as "the same time", you'll meet scales that are impossible to measure beyond.

An intellectual position resting on the claim that what is beyond our capacity to perceive is meaningless should not use what is beyond our capacity to perceive to disqualify statements - that makes no sense to me.

But yeah, tl;dr: Formal languages (and languages in general I suppose) rest on certain axioms, that they can describe truth / meaning are amongst those axioms. People need to work a bit harder than "it's out of this world, so it doesn't make meaning" when they're employing languages which at their core are axiomatic and unverifiable in our world anyway.

The real issue is just that the empiricist in me is peeved at the refusal to add the word "seemingly" to theological non-cognivitism.

Hilary Putnam once argued that the principle he would defend hardest against sceptics is a minimal principle of non contradiction that not all propositions are simultaneously true and not true, because some of them may be.

That sounds like an interesting read, do you have some decent links to about his work or some starter texts to recommend?