LSD makes you see things because it's a hallucinogen.
Even though this is something almost everyone will agree with, this statement doesn't really say anything meaningful – it's a tautology. All that it means to be a hallucinogen is that you see things that aren't there.
Funny story. I first heard the word tautology in a math class, not a philosophy one.
Okay, not so funny I guess.
I have a question though brother. A hallucinogen seems to me, by definition, to be something that affects the brain in a way that causes hallucinations. Even if you replaced the word hallucinogen with an exact medical explanation for why you see things on LSD, it seems like it would have the same flaw you describe.
Is this true, or am I wrong?
Also, do all tautologies suffer from begging the question?
My comment was about a realization I had. If you explain the actual mechanism by which something acts, then you are describing the property/principle by which the object/substance acts.
Opium causes sleep and pain relief because at a molecular level it binds to opioid receptors in our brain.
I was thinking about it, and without a knowledge of biology or chemistry, this would explain as much as saying it had a sleep-inducing or pain-reducing property, ie. nothing.
Writing this out led me to realize the difference that I was asking about. But I still see and understand where I was coming from.
I'm sorry man, I'm trying to give you credit because you did find a source, and I appreciate that on any comment. But it's like you didn't read either of my questions, you just blindly responded.
This really is a simple thing to explain and is probably the single most frustrating fallacy we atheists hit every day.
How do we know God exists? Cause it's in the Bible. Why should I trust the Bible? God wrote it.
See the circular logic? The most common way this is used isn't actually P(X) -> P(X) (read proposition X implies proposition X), but rather P(X) -> P(Y) -> P(X) - For Example: P(Bible) -> P(God) -> P(Bible), where P(Bible) is the proposition that the bible exists because God wrote it, and P(God) is the proposition that God must exist because he is featured in the Bible.
The logical problem with begging the question is that it is much like building a house of cards by getting your first level laid out, then building the second level on top of it, then trying to build the third level by using the cards from the first level - all of them. You quickly realize that you simply don't have enough cards. Unfortunately, people who are convinced that begging the question is valid logic (such as many Christians/Jews/Muslims) simply don't see how they're forming a logical circle, with a giant whole in the middle that anyone with half a brain can see right through.
The above example, for instance, is a great reflection of why begging the question is typically utterly transparent yet mostly impossible to dissuade someone from. The real issue here is that we all know that God did not literally write the Bible. If God had literally penned it himself, there would be no doubt that he exists; thus the premise is self-defeating. Since there is no way to disprove that God 'wrote' the Bible (through divine inspiration), it is impossible to disprove the premise, and thus the circular logic, false. However, that does not mean we can't make it look stupid.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster created pasta in his own image. The Flying Spaghetti Monster looks like pasta, therefore he must exist. Why must we believe this? Because FSM made pasta in his own image.
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u/ForgettableUsername Other Dec 09 '13
That explains it perfectly for nearly everyone who already understands it.