Are we living in the Matrix?

[Smart Turtle]

You are treating "not seeing the most fundamental layer" as if it implies "not being in contact with reality", but those are not the same claim.
Literally every example that you have given shows increasing levels of access to the same system, not a departure from it. None of those layers floats free from the underlying reality, they all depend on it and correspond to it.

A user interface is not designed to give you "access" to the underlying system. It is explicitly designed to hide the underlying system.

A blue folder icon on your desktop corresponds to a specific arrangement of magnetic charges on a hard drive. But moving the folder with your mouse does not give you "access" to quantum electrodynamics. The UI translates reality into an arbitrary, fabricated language (pixels and icons) so that you don't have to deal with the system.

 

[The Last Stand]

Someone (like Hoffman) would argue that your "deeper understanding" is simply a more complex interface.

For example

The Desktop Metaphor: If you click an icon on a computer, you see a file. If you right-click and look at "Properties," you see more data. If you open the code, you see more still.

The Trap: You might feel like you are getting closer to the "truth" of the computer, but you are still looking at pixels on a screen. You aren't seeing the flow of electrons through transistors or the literal silicon.

What drugs are you taking? And I’ve never seen The Matrix.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

A user interface is not designed to give you "access" to the underlying system. It is explicitly designed to hide the underlying system.

A blue folder icon on your desktop corresponds to a specific arrangement of magnetic charges on a hard drive. But moving the folder with your mouse does not give you "access" to quantum electrodynamics. The UI translates reality into an arbitrary, fabricated language (pixels and icons) so that you don't have to deal with the system.

One more reply that still does not get you where you want to go.
A user interface can (and should!) hide lower-level detail while still giving the user genuine access to the same underlying system. Concealment of one level != disconnection from reality. If I move a folder and the file is actually moved, then I am interacting with reality through an abstraction layer. Neither am I cut off from reality, nor am I manipulating a fantasy.
And "arbitrary" is doing some seriously dishonest work here. The pixels and icons are not arbitrary in the relevant sense. Convention-laden, yes, but they are lawfully mapped to real machine states and real causal consequences. If the mapping were indeed arbitrary in your sense, the system would simply not function. Clicking "save" would have no stable relation to storage. Dragging a folder would not consistently move anything. The whole example presupposes structured contact with reality.

Tell you what, stop with the examples for now, I'd like you to address the actual issue you keep skirting around.
Your position is not merely that we don't perceive the lowest-level processes, but that cognition gives us an interface rather than reality.
Now, my problem with this is that, in order to assert that, you need all of the following to be true:

• there is a reality behind the interface
• our cognition does not directly reveal that reality
• what we get instead is a simplified survival-display
• this display stands in some systematic relation to the underlying reality

In other words, your position is not modest skepticism, but a theory about reality and our relation to it. One little thing:

How exactly did you get that theory?​

If cognition does not reach reality, then you do not get to describe the relation between cognition and reality. You do not get to announce that perception is "only an interface", because "interface" is itself a relational concept - an interface is an interface to something. The moment you claim to know that relation, you are already relying on the very cognitive access that you are trying to deny.
Your position simultaneously demands that cognition does not give direct access to reality and that cognition successfully identifies how it relates to reality. Those cannot both be true.
Either cognition does give us genuine contact with reality, in which case your interface rhetoric is inflated and misleading and collapses into exaggeration... or cognition does not, in which case you have no basis whatsoever for any claim about reality, cognition, evolution, systems, interfaces, silicon, magnetic charges, or anything else behind appearances.
There is no such thing as a third option where you somehow know that knowledge is cut off from what it claims to know.
What you are doing is using cognition to step outside cognition and then announcing that cognition never reached reality in the first place. That is a self-defeating move the moment you state it.

 

[Atomic Ant]

stolen concept fallacy

Ooh, now do it with the peripatetic axiom!

edit: I wrote that to be punchy, but to explain for the lurker,

the peripatetic axiom comes from Aristotle, and was adopted by Aquinas (Aquinas boooo, Palamas yaaay). It is probably the most fundamental principle of empiricism. It is stated as: "Nothing exists in the intellect that was not first present in the senses."

There are a lot of people who are very devoted to, and even build their careers around empiricism, without ever once asking the question, "Which sense did you use to gather data on this axiom?" It wants to crib some other worldview in which people have access to statements like this, in order to argue against those worldviews it borrows from.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Ooh, now do it with the peripatetic axiom!

In its common form (nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses) it's too crude to be accurate, that's why I don't endorse it as stated. Taken literally, it opens the door to the idea that the mind is just a passive recorder of sensory input, and I do not co-sign that theory of how cognition works.
What I can give instead is a crash course on the role of perception in concept formation.

So, all knowledge begins with, but does not end at, sensory input. The senses provide the raw contact with reality. The mind then actively processes that input, by means of differentiation, integration, and concept formation.
That means two things at once: Nothing enters the mind without some basis in perception, and what the mind does with that input is not passive copying.

Take a simple example:

You see several different chairs, no two are identical, they have different sizes, shapes, and materials. Yet, you are able to form the concept "chair". That concept is not given by the senses directly, instead it is an integration. You group those percepts together based on their relevant similarities while omitting their specific measurements.
The structure is then that perception gives you concretes, and the mind forms concepts by integrating those concretes.
The key point is that concepts are not arbitrary labels or imposed "filters", rather they are ways of organizing real similarities that exist in the world, and that is why they work.

This more refined approach also answers common confusions that come from the peripatetic axiom. What I say means that every valid idea must ultimately be traceable back to perceptual evidence, even if it is several layers removed. But it does not mean that we only ever deal with raw sensations, nor does it mean that higher-level knowledge is detached from reality.
In a sense, a more refined version of the peripatetic axiom would be something like "Knowledge starts with perception, and is extended by active conceptual integration grounded in that perception", for it preserves what's true (no such thing as innate content floating free of experience) without collapsing the mind into a passive receiver.

 

[Smart Turtle]

Concealment of one level != disconnection from reality

If a government conceals "one level" of its operations from its citizens, the citizens’ shared understanding of the world is now based on incomplete data. Therefore, the concealment of one level does create a disconnection from reality for the people being concealed from. The "map" they are reading no longer matches the "territory."

• there is a reality behind the interface
• our cognition does not directly reveal that reality
• what we get instead is a simplified survival-display
• this display stands in some systematic relation to the underlying reality

In other words, your position is not modest skepticism, but a theory about reality and our relation to it. One little thing:

How exactly did you get that theory?​

I get it from The idea that I realized recently that people operate on different levels of consciousness, and that most of us do not experience "reality as it actually is.

These theories suggest human consciousness evolves through specific stages or "tiers" (often color-coded).

A person at an Egocentric level of consciousness perceives reality entirely as a struggle for dominance and survival.
A person at an Ethnocentric level perceives reality through the lens of their specific tribe, religion, or nation (us vs. them).
A person at a Worldcentric level perceives reality as an interconnected global system.

According to these theories, a person at a lower level cannot comprehend the reality of a person at a higher level. They are looking at the exact same world, but their consciousness filters it into an entirely different reality.

Another theory (Carlo Rovelli) This theory posits that the properties of the physical world do not exist absolutely, but only relative to the observer. The reality I interact with is relative to my interaction with it; the reality you interact with is relative to yours. There is no "view from nowhere." Reality is a web of interactions, and no two observers share the exact same state of reality.

 

[scrub]

No, people who say we are living in a simulation or the matrix go out of there way to denie anything spiritual or religious. Its just a cope to escape having to take responsibility for one's actions even after death.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

If a government conceals "one level" of its operations from its citizens, the citizens’ shared understanding of the world is now based on incomplete data. Therefore, the concealment of one level does create a disconnection from reality for the people being concealed from. The "map" they are reading no longer matches the "territory."

Another reply, another example that does not help your case.
If citizens are given incomplete information, they do not become "disconnected from reality". They become partially informed about reality. The territory doesn't disappear. The map is incomplete, not detached. You are again turning "not everything is known" into "what is known is not real", still as unjustified as ever.

The same goes for your "levels of consciousness"
Different people may interpret the same world differently, which is a variation in judgment and abstraction, not a variation in reality. An "egocentric" person, an "ethnocentric" person, and a "worldcentric" person are not inhabiting different realities. They are forming different conclusions about the same reality. Confusing those two is how you end up multiplying "realities" where there is only disagreement.

Carlo Rovelli

does not rescue this either. Saying that measurements are relative to interactions does not mean that reality itself is relative in the sense that you are using that word. It just means observations depend on conditions. That is a statement about how we measure, it is not a license to say that there is no objective structure being measured.

Now for the part you unfortunately still have not addressed. You are not making modest claims here.
"most people don't experience reality 'as it actually is'", "consciousness filters reality into different 'versions'", "there is no 'view from nowhere'"
Those are claims about reality and about the relation of cognition to reality.

How do you know any of that???​

If cognition does not reach reality, then you do not get to say what reality is like, you do not get to say how consciousness relates to reality, you do not get to say that reality is filtered into tiers, you do not get to say that observers generate different "realities".
Every single one of those claims goes beyond appearances, all of them rely on the very access that you are denying.
Like I said earlier, you are trying to hold both "cognition does not give access to reality" and "cognition successfully identifies how it relates to reality", which simply is contradictory.
Either cognition gives genuine contact with reality, in which case your filter/interface/tiers language is an overstatement of limitation, or cognition does not, in which case you have no basis whatsoever for anything you just said about consciousness, observers, physics, or reality at all.
There is no position where you can map the limits of knowledge while claiming knowledge cannot map anything beyond appearances.

 

[The Last Stand]

Reality is a web of interactions, and no two observers share the exact same state of reality.

It sounds like you are confusing reality with perception, or more specifically realism and idealism. Realism would better suit the concept of reality since that argument determines that whatever exists is just irrespective of interpretation or belief.

Idealism, which sounds like what you're driving at, is where whatever you THINK or believe would shape what exists.

Example:



This is a woman. Her name is Teresa Wright. She was an actress. That is the reality because that cannot be disputed. An idealist way to look at her would be that she was a dramatic, traditional woman based on her choice of clothing.

You cannot form an idea without knowing what would exist TO conjure up whatever you're creating/thinking.

 

[Atomic Ant]

@XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG I'm not sure we'd agree on metaphysics. I'm going a bit farther than that.

Rather than something like a chair, I would make use of a concept like the number 5. We surely would all agree that there are 5 chairs displayed in the picture. But, what is this "five" that's even being referred to here? "Five" is not a description of a collection of that number of chairs. It refers to some abstract multiplicity, which can be applied to any object at all.



This shape has something in common with the image of the chairs. Whatever that thing is, is the thing we call five. But the shape in this image is neither a chair nor is it even an image of multiple things.

One can try to say that "five" is construction of the human brain, but now you have the problem of -- whose brain? Is the five in my brain, the same as the five in yours? If it isn't, then we don't even agree on there being such a thing as five anymore. If it is, then we have to identify exactly what physics and chemistry it is that is encapsulating fiveness. I have very little expectation that neurologists are ever going to identify a chemical, or a neural activation pattern which contains the metaphysical essence of fiveness and is uniformly identical across all math-doing beings.

I think this all just gets a lot less ridiculous if you just bite the bullet and affirm transcendentals.

 

[Smart Turtle]

If citizens are given incomplete information, they do not become "disconnected from reality". They become partially informed about reality

Reality isn't just a pile of facts; it’s how those facts interact. For example, if you see a man holding a knife (Fact A) but don’t see that he is standing in a professional kitchen (Missing Context B), your "partial information" leads you to a "disconnection" from the reality of the situation (dinner prep vs. a threat).

I would suggest that you read about The Blind Men and the Elephant to have a better perspective: This classic parable illustrates the danger. Each man touches one part (trunk, tusk, tail) and is "partially informed." However, because they lack the full context, they conclude the elephant is a snake, a spear, or a rope. They are "informed" about the texture, but don't know the reality of the animal.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

I'm not sure we'd agree on metaphysics. I'm going a bit farther than that.

We do indeed disagree on metaphysics. I hope you don't take offense when I demolish your appeal to transcendence.

Rather than something like a chair, I would make use of a concept like the number 5. We surely would all agree that there are 5 chairs displayed in the picture. But, what is this "five" that's even being referred to here? "Five" is not a description of a collection of that number of chairs. It refers to some abstract multiplicity, which can be applied to any object at all.



This shape has something in common with the image of the chairs. Whatever that thing is, is the thing we call five. But the shape in this image is neither a chair nor is it even an image of multiple things.

One can try to say that "five" is construction of the human brain, but now you have the problem of -- whose brain? Is the five in my brain, the same as the five in yours? I have very little expectation that neurologists are ever going to identify a chemical, or a neural activation pattern which contains the metaphysical essence of fiveness and is uniformly identical across all math-doing beings.

Of course "five" is not a chair, nobody said it was. The question is not whether "five" is identical to any one concrete object, but whether its content requires a separately existing metaphysical universal. That simply does not follow.

When, for instance, I say that there are five chairs, I am not detecting some ghostly entity called "fiveness" hovering behind them. I am identifying a quantitative relationship among concretes. The fact that the same quantitative relationship can be found in chairs, sides of a pentagon, fingers on a hand, or days in a work week does not show that "five" exists in a separate realm. It does show that the number is an abstraction from reality, not a duplicate reality.
The pentagon example does not help your case. The pentagon and the chairs do indeed have something in common, namely cardinality. But "having something in common" is not the same thing as "participating in a transcendent object". It just means that the mind is able to isolate a real aspect from different concretes and retain it conceptually.
The "whose brain?" move also misses the point. If someone were to say "five is a construction of the human brain" in the crude subjectivist sense, then yes, that is a mess and you should bully that person until their reasoning improves. But the alternative is not Platonism. The alternative is that concepts are formed by minds in response to objective features of reality. That is, the concept is mental, but its basis is not. The same is true of "chair", "red", "distance", and "cause". There is no mystery here. Different people can form the same concept because they inhabit the same reality and can identify the same relationships within it.
Demanding that neurologists find "the metaphysical essence of fiveness" in the brain is just confused. The brain is not supposed to contain a tiny glowing five any more than it contains a tiny glowing chair or triangle. Neural activity is the physiological means of conceptual activity, not a little warehouse of metaphysical miniatures, although I concede this would make for a fun setting for a comedy story.

I think this all just gets a lot less ridiculous if you just bite the bullet and affirm transcendentals.

Affirming transcendentals is how you get more ridiculous, because it means that you have multiplied entities for no gain. Instead of explaining how we abstract from reality, you invent a second realm and then quietly pretend that this clarifies anything.
The clean alternative is simpler. "Five" names a real quantitative feature that can be instantiated by infinitely many different groups of structures. It does not name a separately existing object. Its objectivity comes from reality, not from transcendence.
The old Platonic temptation here is to treat universality as if it required a universal thing (it doesn't). All it requires is that reality contains similarities and relations that are stable enough to be abstracted and identified.

In case you still disagree, I'd like to get your thoughts on a specific question. Not "is five transcendent?" but rather: what is missing from abstractionism that you think only transcendence can supply?

 

[Not an Hero]

Nuh. They're be broken pixels in the sky if this were a simulation. Reality is just faggoted up and full of niggers.

 

[Otterly]

I often have dreams that are visually one thing, yet I understand on a deeper level that it’s just my brain trying to create visual depictions of a deeper truth or meaning. Sometimes these dreams are based in a kind of geometry. So yes, I can accept that our senses are the best we can do at interpreting input. If you’ve ever knocked yourself out or been hallucinating with fever you’ll have experienced that weird shit where you’re looking at things around you and they’re just shapes, then they snap back into using a label attached to them. Our brains create meaning, but that meaning is based on the reality of what the sense is picking up.
But children figure this out, at school age the will ponder if the way I see the sky is how the see the sky. We can’t know.
As for matrix theory, It always amazes me that people will write papers all day about living in a simulation or a matrix and never bear to accept that that means it has a Creator and that they’re arguing for the existence of God.
And then there’s the other thing that flows from the idea which is that they’re sort of arguing that consciousness can have action on the physical.

 

[Atomic Ant]

The alternative is that concepts are formed by minds in response to objective features of reality.

But now you've lost the ability to claim that my five and your five have anything to do with each other. I agree with all your other examples of fiveness, days in a week, fingers on a hand. But a 3 fingered man may simply come along, and confidently hold up his 3-fingered hand, and say "Here is my five". Where is your basis of reference to tell him otherwise?

I dont see how you're going to tell the 3-fingered man that your five is better than his five without taking for granted the existence of something whose essence exists nowhere in an empiricist's reality.

you have multiplied entities for no gain.

I think there is gain in it, in the form of justification for concepts like morality. There are scant few true atheists in the west, most of them go about their days appealing to these things without a second thought to justification, but if you put their feet to the fire their justification will usually contain something that smells Greek.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

You have collapsed two very different ideas into one.
When I say that concepts are formed by minds in response to reality, I do not mean that concepts are arbitrary or private. Rather, it means they are formed, as opposed to being invented without constraint (made the fuck up).

But now you've lost the ability to claim that my five and your five have anything to do with each other. I agree with all your other examples of fiveness, days in a week, fingers on a hand. But a 3 fingered man may simply come along, and confidently hold up his 3-fingered hand, and say "Here is my five". Where is your basis of reference to tell him otherwise?

I dont see how you're going to tell the 3-fingered man that your five is better than his five without taking for granted the existence of something whose essence exists nowhere in an empiricist's reality.

Your three-fingered man does not show what you think it shows. A strange commonality in this thread so far!
If that man holds up three fingers and calls it "five", he is not presenting an alternative but equally valid "five", he is making a mistake. The fact that we can identify it as a mistake in the first place already answers your question about a basis of reference.
The basis is not "my five vs your five", but the actual quantity.
Three is not five. That is not a matter of perspective, brain state, or preference. It is a matter of how many units there are. The concept "five" refers to a specific quantitative relationship. Misapplying the word does not create a new instance of that relationship.
That is, a disagreement, which your example shows, does not undermine objectivity. It does the opposite, it presupposes objectivity. You cannot call something wrong unless there is something it is wrong about.
The same point applies to your earlier concern about "whose brain". Different people can form the same concept because they are responding to the same features of reality. The concept is in the mind, what the concept refers to is not. That is why communication, correction, and agreement are possible in the first place.
Now on the morality point...

justification for concepts like morality. There are scant few true atheists in the west, most of them go about their days appealing to these things without a second thought to justification, but if you put their feet to the fire their justification will ultimately contain something like Platonism.

"Either arbitrary mental constructions or transcendent abstract entities" is a false dichotomy.
Appealing to a separate realm of "transcendentals" does not justify anything, it just relocates the problem. Much like OP, you still have to explain how you know these entities exist, how you identify their content, and why they should guide action. Simply asserting that there is a realm where "fiveness" or "goodness" or "faggotness" exists does not supply those answers. If anything, it just makes it harder to explain, because now you have detached the standard from the reality it's supposed to apply to.

The cleaner approach is the same as before.
Concepts, including moral ones, are formed in response to real features and relations in the world. Their validity depends on whether they correctly identify and integrate those features, not on whether they correspond to a separate metaphysical layer. So you don't get justification by multiplying entities. Just the opposite, you end up losing it, because you replace a checkable relation to reality with an uncheckable assertion about something beyond it.

In addition, you get minus points for sidestepping the question I asked you. In what you said, you did not identify any missing explanatory power. The three-fingered man is just an error case, not a gap in abstraction. The assertion that disagreement undermines objectivity actually presupposes a standard. And you jumped to morality without showing why abstraction can't ground it. None of that has answered my question.
To reiterate: What, specifically, does abstractionism fail to account for that requires transcendentals?

 

[Atomic Ant]

The fact that we can identify it as a mistake in the first place already answers your question about a basis of reference.

I can identify it as a mistake to you, only because you and I agree on what five is. The 3-fingered man though, doesn't. He says his five is fivier than ours. Who is right? Who adjudicates? I'd be happy to vote with you, but I dont think even a unanimous poll vote would prove what you want it to.

Appealing to a separate realm of "transcendentals" does not justify anything, it just relocates the problem. Much like OP, you still have to explain how you know these entities exist, how you identify their content, and why they should guide action. Simply asserting that there is a realm where "fiveness" or "goodness" or "faggotness" exists does not supply those answers.

I don't really think my personal viewpoint is relevant here, I could be a neoplatonist and make the same critique (though I have different critiques altogether for the neoplatonist), but I'm a Christian so if you make me take a positive position, they exist in the mind of God whose divine subjective opinion is isomorphic to their content.

The three-fingered man is just an error case, not a gap in abstraction. The assertion that disagreement undermines objectivity actually presupposes a standard. And you jumped to morality without showing why abstraction can't ground it. None of that has answered my question.
To reiterate: What, specifically, does abstractionism fail to account for that requires transcendentals?

I dont grant that an abstractionist system 1. gives you access to any shared reality, I dont think you can escape solipsism that way, or 2. that it gives you access to any objective universal content about a purely conceptual object like the number 5, such that you can claim 3-fingers is making any error at all. you can assert he is in error, he asserts you are in error, both assertons are equally grounded because his brain is doing its own version of concept mapping. If you want to identify why what his brain is doing is not a faithful reenactment of fiveness, under the assumption of a materialist world, then I think we have a difficult chemistry problem, grab the scalpel.

 

[dick brain]

Yes but not literally.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

It's good that you're making the strongest version of the claim. It still doesn't hold though.

I can identify it as a mistake to you, only because you and I agree on what five is. The 3-fingered man though, doesn't. He says his five is fivier than yours. Who is right? Who adjudicates? I'd be happy to vote with you, but I dont think even a unanimous poll vote would prove what you want it to.

The three-fingered man does not create symmetry. If he says "this is five" while holding up three fingers, the disagreement is not between two equally grounded assertions. It is one assertion about a quantity that matches what is there, and one that does not. The idea that both are "equally grounded" only works if you remove any reference to what is actually present. But the moment you look at the situation (count the units), the symmetry disappears.
So the question "who adjudicates?" is misplaced. It is not a vote, and it is not an authority. The adjudicator is the fact of the matter - how many units are there. If there are three, then "five" is wrong. Not "wrong relative to me", not "wrong relative to you", just wrong.
Your position requires treating a correct identification and a misidentification as epistemically equivalent. But if that were true, then the concept of error itself would collapse entirely. You could not distinguish counting correctly from counting incorrectly, measuring accurately from measuring inaccurately, or truth from falsity. And that collapse does not just affect "five". It takes everything with it, including the claims you are making right now.

solipsism

You say abstractionism can't escape it... but your own argument already presupposes that we are referring to the same objects, the same example, the same situation. If there were no shared reality, then there would be nothing to disagree about in the first place. The very act of disagreement presupposes a common referent.
Solipsism is not avoided by introducing transcendentals. It is avoided by recognizing that perception gives us contact with the same world, and that concepts are formed in response to that shared input.

they exist in the mind of God

Doesn't solve the problem you raised, it just moves it.
You still have to explain how you know the content of that mind, how you access it, and how you distinguish correct from incorrect interpretations of it.
If you say "because my cognition tells me", then you are back to relying on cognition. If you say "because of revelation or doctrine", then you still need a way to evaluate those claims... which again relies on cognition.
The same issue reappears: you are using cognition to validate a system that is supposed to ground cognition.

I dont grant that an abstractionist system 1. gives you access to any shared reality, I dont think you can escape solipsism that way, or 2. that it gives you access to any objective universal content about a purely conceptual object like the number 5, such that you can claim 3-fingers is making any error at all. you can assert he is in error, he asserts you are in error, both assertons are equally grounded.

You said abstractionism fails because it cannot give access to a shared reality and ground objective content like "five". But neither has been shown.
The three-fingered man is an example of error, not a failure of objectivity.
The appeal to solipsism contradicts the shared reference your argument depends on.
The appeal to transcendentals (or God) does not add explanatory power, it just kicks the can down the road.
So far, every example you've given either presupposes a shared reality or collapses the distinction between being right and being wrong, and that collapse would take your own argument with it.
So, again, what specifically does abstractionism fail to account for that requires transcendentals?

 

[dick brain]

As for matrix theory, It always amazes me that people will write papers all day about living in a simulation or a matrix and never bear to accept that that means it has a Creator and that they’re arguing for the existence of God.

Why does that amaze you? That sounds like the path of least resistence for reconciling a materialist worldview with the existence of phenomena that it fails to explain. It's a way of describing the same thing in different terms because it's easier and less intimidating to extend your current framework of understanding to encompass the exceptions than it is to throw the whole thing away and start over from nothing. And also because the existing terms carry a connotation you find disagreeable; it's precisely as absurd as fighting a war because you agree upon the existence of a monastic creator but disagree on what he's called.

Do you think God does not know that he is being worshipped in the images and pictures? If a worshipper should make a mistake, do you not think God will know his intent?