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i think things are getting tangled up here, so i decided to drop in.
trying to write this kind of thing out in a messageboard is always an interesting little exercise.
no doubt they usually are a bit dicey in terms of coherence and certainly have no relation to completeness at all....but tant pis, a little constraint exercise. let's go.
this business of "faith"----i see why filtherton would go here and it seems like the issue is the dismissal of the category in the name of "science" altogether.
but the fact that we call the assumption of continuity in say objects (or in phase-states) from one moment to another seems to follow from the reliance on pattern that enables perception to happen--so is more on the order of an assumption, one that requires no particular investment. like an after-image, say.
religious faith is not the same thing. it requires investment and so is an act.
you can say that continuity of objects etc. is also an act, but that'd be true only in special cases--like in the context of this thread because you are asked to think about it, or in a situation where experience is such that continuity canot be taken for granted.
actually the more i think about this the trickier it gets.
another way of looking at this: perception is the organization of information. this organization in humans typically is mediated by categories, by words.
so there's a loop implicit between the nature of the categories used and the data that these categories order.
that loop is the basis for assumptions of continuity.
and that kind of loop is central in enabling perception at all==if only because we operate in a time-flux and so are showered with data all the time and these loops enable data reduction, complexity reduction--which is a big deal--perception then is as much about data erasure/management/reduction as it is about apprehension.
so there is an intertwining of the nature of categories and information gathered from the world, the former shaping and limiting (and extending) the latter.
this seems a basic feature of coherent experience and follows from something of the nature of language mediation (something of..because for simplicity's sake, i'm only talking abut nouns)
metaphysics involves these same features of language, but the relation that frames them is basically different---if in the model above nouns enable continuity enables data reduction because nouns are the basis for our assumptions about stability of perceptual data (in general), it follows that this loop has to lean on the characteristics of nouns themselves--and so does metaphysics....so does religion---except that in the latter case, the way in which we organize the world via language is unhinged from experience at the perceptual level and projected outward onto the order of the cosmos/universe/big kfc that we all live in.
this would enable the fashioning of different orders of what i guess you'd call meta-loops.
loops that involve the organization of background conditions, say.
horizon ordering in another terminology.
it seems to me that these loops are just as powerful experientially as the immediate perception-level loops if you are inclined to not see them as mediating experience, but as elements of experience.
faith is a practice. it is the result of repetition. it is an outcome.
the curious characteristic of this outcome is that it is used to structure other variables in its terms--but then again so would any category on this order, a meta-category, a category that is about the second or third-order organization of experience, that kicks in when you move from immediate perceptual information to fitting that information into a sense of being-in-the-world. from this viewpoint, there is no difference between abstractions--no particular difference between religious faith and belief in science.
this because you can make yourself believe almost anything if you repeat it long enough.
pascal was right.
and if you repeat a frame long enough, aspects of experience that might contradict the frame would tend to be filtered out.
from this viewpoint, all perception is involved in self-confirming loops and nothing distinguishes one frame from another, so there is nothing from within the experience of a believer (in being-baptist or in being-spectator of science) that would contradict the organizating power of these meta-categories.
so you (we) make your (our) own experience non-falsifiable.
this may be little more than a long-winded repetition of filtherton's point.
but i'm having some fun trying to sort this out in a constrained space.
anyway....so there's nothing from inside experience mediated by the meta-frame of religious faith and that mediated by some abstraction called "science" and would make one more or less stupid than the other.
from this viewpoint, you could say the same thing about political viewpoints: if you assume that belief is a function of repetition, then there would be nothing from within, say, my experience and that of ustwo that would lead us to think that either of our political worldviews are stupider than the others. and this i mention simply because we are diametrically opposed on almost everything.
debates about frames happen at a different level.
you can find arguments concerning frame to be compelling, you can decide to alter yours, but it will still take a period of repetition to enact that decision.
things from here would get complicated again, so i'll shut up.
this is kinda fun tho.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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