A Vestigial Mote
Well-Known Member
I get where you are coming from, I do. That thought and opinion are relative. I argue this myself all the time. My go-to example is the common house-fly. We humans think that human life is precious, however the house-fly would much rather encounter a dead human body than a live one. The fly's perspective is that he/she doesn't care, at all, about human life. The fly cares whether or not something is a prospective meal, and a warm, moist, nutritious place to lay eggs. Beyond this, it does not concern itself of the current or former welfare of the corpse lying before it.
But NONE of what you said gets at the true base that I argue we have ALL adopted, and that cannot rationally be denied. My stance is simply to call for more of the same, and deeper adherence to it. And that position is "adhere to the evidence" And by evidence, I am not talking about your intuition, your feelings, or your hopes and dreams - those are not the kinds of "evidence" to which I am referring. And this is exactly where I can definitively say that YOU have gone off the rails. All this talk between us, and NOT ONCE have you provided any useful evidence. Not once. And the huge error in judgment here is that YOU THINK YOU HAVE. That's the sad state of affairs we are looking at here. Somehow your mind has become completely warped as to what stands for evidence.
And the reason I state that we are all adherents to the "religion of evidence" is that we use it in proper ways CONSTANTLY, every day of our lives. Take learning to walk for example. When learning to walk, balance ends up being pretty key to properly mastering maintenance of the human gait. Having only two proper legs, humans must walk upright, and our walk ends up being (as some others have put it) more of a constant, graceful falling. Your mind helps you in this endeavor automatically, but basically what is going on is that the feedback of your senses is the "evidence" that your mind uses to determine what works and what doesn't. If you over-compensate for gravity pulling you in one direction or another, your mind takes note. Too much force from one foot, not enough from the other... try it a bit differently next time. And so, based on the evidence of your progressively more successful, intended stride, you learn to walk on two legs as well as you are able, or well enough that your walk is acceptable to you. Every minute movement you make with ANY amount of confidence can only be made at all deftly because you have EVIDENCE that what you are doing, the acts you are taking, the thoughts you are having, etc. works in the way you expect it to. You can move your arm to touch your nose, with your eyes closed, because you have previous evidence of the placement of your nose, you have prior evidence that your arms will obey your commands/thoughts and you have evidence that the precise length of your arms will line up to place your finger upon your nose at a very exacting set of coordinates in relative space. ALL OF THAT activity is BASED ON EVIDENCE. And that is what I propose that we adhere to. We strive to stick to the evidence, and strive to investigate and find the evidence when we have none for a proposition. And if, time after time after time we cannot find proper, compelling evidence for our proposition, then we admit that the proposition is not worth keeping in a "top of mind" space. We admit that we should not be trying to talk others into believing our proposition. We reserve our proposition for the only space in which it is even remotely warranted: OPINION.
