A believer in God is an easy target. Can you find a deep belief in something that you are holding and go through the same steps you outlined above for Stephanie?
It turns out to be hard to be clear and specific about the basic concepts of materialism, like time, space, matter and energy.
All I asked Stephanie to do is ground her term “God”. Terms like “space” are easily groundable in hundreds of ways.
For example for “space”: I can use my eyes to estimate the distance between people standing in a field. If the people then seem to be trying their hardest to run toward each other, I expect to observe a minimum amount of time before I’ll see their distances hit near-zero, proportional to the distance apart they are.
If tomorrow there were no space, one way I could distinguish that alternate reality from current reality is by observing the above grounding getting falsified.
Naively defining space as the gaps between stuff produces as much clarity and conviction as defining god as a warm fuzzy feeling. Which could conceivably go missing.
Yes “a warm fuzzy feeling triggered by me thinking of the word ‘God’” could be a valid grounding of “God”; in fact Stephanie’s character probably might ground it that way, since she’s intentionally written as a character who merely possesses belief in belief in God.
Then you have two problems. One of the is that the warm fuzzy feeling definition of God is a perfectly good grounding. The other is that large tracts of science and maths can’t be grounded in sensation. How do you ground imaginary numbers or infinity or the interior of an event horizon?
It turns out to be hard to be clear and specific about the basic concepts of materialism, like time, space, matter and energy.
All I asked Stephanie to do is ground her term “God”. Terms like “space” are easily groundable in hundreds of ways.
For example for “space”: I can use my eyes to estimate the distance between people standing in a field. If the people then seem to be trying their hardest to run toward each other, I expect to observe a minimum amount of time before I’ll see their distances hit near-zero, proportional to the distance apart they are.
If tomorrow there were no space, one way I could distinguish that alternate reality from current reality is by observing the above grounding getting falsified.
Naively defining space as the gaps between stuff produces as much clarity and conviction as defining god as a warm fuzzy feeling. Which could conceivably go missing.
Yes “a warm fuzzy feeling triggered by me thinking of the word ‘God’” could be a valid grounding of “God”; in fact Stephanie’s character probably might ground it that way, since she’s intentionally written as a character who merely possesses belief in belief in God.
So whats superior about your epistemology?
Stephanie suffers from belief-in-belief (which she wrongly thinks is just an ordinary belief with an external referent) and I don’t
Are you sure? You seem to believe in materialism, without being able to give proper explanations of space, time, matter and energy.
I did give a valid grounding of “space”.
That would depend on the meaning of “grounding”.
I define “grounding” in How Specificity Works
Then you have two problems. One of the is that the warm fuzzy feeling definition of God is a perfectly good grounding. The other is that large tracts of science and maths can’t be grounded in sensation. How do you ground imaginary numbers or infinity or the interior of an event horizon?
I’d refer you to https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Highly_Advanced_Epistemology_101_for_Beginners
I’ve read it.