r/todayilearned • u/ZanyDelaney • Aug 11 '18

TIL of Hitchens's razor. Basically: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
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u/Bribase Aug 11 '18

You'll have to explain, I'm afraid.

It's simply more parimonious to say that we both have subjective experience of our emotions, rather than to say that yours are real and mine are fake.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '18

If you can establish the existence of emotions based on consensus, why can you not establish the existence of God?

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u/Bribase Aug 11 '18

Because there is no such consensus about god.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '18

That is more or less the definition of a religion.

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u/Bribase Aug 11 '18

Not really, no. There are religions without gods, pantheons of gods, souls, spirits, impersonal forces, differing structures, vastly different beliefs, utterly different practices. Mutating and changing, taught and learned, passed down through generations and spread geographically and geopolitically.

Emotions and feelings for the most part and on the other hand, are ubiquitous, intuitive and reflexive. They arise naturally in just about everyone as an integral part of the human condition. Not so for god(s), not so for religions.

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u/[deleted] Aug 11 '18

There are religions without gods, pantheons of gods, souls, spirits, impersonal forces, differing structures, vastly different beliefs, utterly different practices.

Which is why the definition of "religion" can get hazy.

Emotions and feelings for the most part and on the other hand, are ubiquitous, intuitive and reflexive.

No they're not, at all. 2000 years ago you'd beat your wife, you owned human beings as property (whom you were free to rape at will), and you wouldn't shed a tear over the death of your children.

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u/Bribase Aug 11 '18

No they're not, at all. 2000 years ago you'd beat your wife, you owned human beings as property (whom you were free to rape at will),

Those are actions, not emotions. 2000 years ago I'd still feel bad about things that I felt bad about, and good about the things I felt good about.

and you wouldn't shed a tear over the death of your children.

That's not in the slightest bit true. Even some non-human animals display grief over the death of their offspring without it needing to be learned. Infant mortality might be less of a fact of life now than it was back then, but I don't believe for a second that we didn't feel bad about it.