"A person who is sensible enough to admit that they have no fu*#i*g clue what is going on in the universe.
Contrary to both a Theist (someone who sits in Church thinking they have shit figured out) and an Atheist (someone who sits at Starbucks thinking they have shit figured out)" — TWI

Yes, that's a good one. :smile: And, just for clarity, that puts me in a Church, which I find a little uncomfortable. I could go with a druid grove, if such are available options? :wink:

I like this version of an agnostic:
"Someone who finds his life meaningful enough to pursue; without admitting or dismissing a God, and tolerant enough to respect either ways as a possible answer.

But I prefer this one:

"A person who is sensible enough to admit that they have no fu*#i*g clue what is going on in the universe.
Contrary to both a Theist (someone who sits in Church thinking they have shit figured out) and an Atheist (someone who sits at Starbucks thinking they have shit figured out)"

But nouns aside, trying to describe what we imagine ultimate reality might or might not be we can't rely on oral or written words, they are just labels after all. But to me anyone being persuaded of anything is believing the persuader.

Anyone want to see me make a random selection from a continuous normal distribution under the same conditions?

Cash limit is 15 bucks only one dollar bills.


2 bucks.

So I put 2 in A and 4 in B. Once again they are the same event pulled from the same sample space at the same time.

I don't know why people keep making all these assumptions about the unknown domain, distribution, and selection methods when there are an uncountable number of ways to accomplish this task.

Now you are just using the Cartesian argument which I discussed in my other post. I thought that your 'trilemma argument' was a different argument from the classical argument from illusion (and by the way, you said previously you agreed with me that the argument is incoherent). — Fafner

It is incorrect, because I believe despite evidence that you are something even if I wasn't around. Of course, I believe I will die one day.
Now you take for granted that there is something. E.g. I exist :) But you have given no evidence. Further there is a problem with your notion of taking for granted. Let us say, I take for granted that there is a God. Now that is not evidence for a God, so why should the fact, that I take for granted that you exist, be evidence for your existence.
You still haven't given any evidence. It boils down to that I have no evidence, therefore you have evidence. Namely that when between P and non-P, non-P is wrong, then P is true. That is not how logic works.
You have made a naive realistic claim - "You know that you perceive something by perceiving it, how else?", but you have given no evidence.
#I know, that I perceive something by perceiving it.
#I know; that I don't perceive something by perceiving it, because I know, that I am a Boltzmann Brain.
#Either case is not knowledge.
You don't get the last one, do you?

To be an old school Skeptic means in some sense not to believe in knowledge, just like some people don't believe in the concept of a god/gods.
I use the word knowledge as an idea that some people believe in, but I don't believe in knowledge.
You don't seem to understand doubt.
I doubt that I am in the world, you know you are in.
I doubt that I am a Boltzmann Brain and I doubt that we are in a simulation.
But none of that is evidence for the fact that we have knowledge.

Does the above make sense? — Michael

That depends on what you mean by 'makes sense.' In lay terms when we talk about things not making sense, any number of theoretical analyses might be called for. It might not make sense because it's word salad, syntactically ill-formed, even if the semantic interpretation is recoverable ('Went the to store I'). It might not make sense because while syntactically well-formed and semantically interpretable, it conflicts with ingrained world knowledge ('the bus ate the children') or results in category errors ('blue is the smartest color').

As for as the intelligibility of your sentence, it doesn't seem to differ in kind from 'there is a cup and there isn't a cup.' Since this is a contradiction, whatever nonsensicality the agreement ascription has is likely reducible somehow to the nonsensicality of contradictions generally. What nonsensicality is that? It's syntactically and semantically well-formed, abut it conflicts not so much with world knowledge but with intensional or cross-world knowledge: due to the interpretation, any competent speaker will know that in any situation it expresses a falsehood. This is a kind of 'countersense' or 'absurdity,' but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the sentence as a linguistic object. It might never be appropriately assertable in canonical speech contexts, where the point is to assert something true, and it'll never be true.

Likewise, why would any competent speaker ever agree to a contradiction? To agree with a proposition is to count it true on the presupposition that someone else does as well. But why count true what your semantic competence should tell you can never be true? There is nothing wrong with the sentence, but saying it will pretty much always be a bad idea.

If you structure the sentence with 'agree' only taking scope over the first conjunct, I agree [there is a cup], and (but) there isn't a cup, then the result is a Moorean paradox, in the sense that it causes no contradiction but is systematically infelicitous to assert. That there is no semantic problem here can be seen from the fact that such things can be supposed, attributed to other people, attributed to oneself in the past, or put in antecedents of conditionals:

-Suppose I agree there's a cup, but there isn't one.
-You agree there is a cup, but there isn't one.
-I agreed there was a cup, but there wasn't one.
-If I agree there is a cup but there isn't one, then I'm wrong.

It's only when it's stated in the first person present that a problem arises:

#I agree there is a cup, but there isn't one.

This shows that the issue is a pragmatic one governing norms of assertion. You commit to believing what you assert, and agreement commits to belief. So you're stating there isn't a cup, which commits you to believing that, but then saying that you agree there is one, which entails you believe the opposite of what you just committed to. This problem doesn't arise in the other contexts above.