It’s hard to imagine a more irrational, utterly non-empirical (sorry, anti-empirical) faith than scientism:
1. Out of utter nothingness, stuff happened (or to put it more crudely, as the foundational catechism of this supernaturalist religion, “sh*t happens). Out of pure chaos, order arises. As Richard Dawkins put it, in a purely chance based random occurrence, order happens.
Ok, so maybe 1 in a quadrillion changes against it, something orderly occurs.
AND IT KEEPS OCCURING. What keeps it in place?
“The laws of nature.”
What do you mean, ‘laws of nature?”
“Oh, that’s the phrase we use to describe the orderly occurrences, and in particular, our mathematical measurements, of the orderly occurrences that we observe.”
Can you say “tautology?”
Ok, so these end up with all these brilliantly lit stars and red suns and all that?
Oh no, there’s no light or color anywhere, that’s just a construction of our brains?
And how do these brains end up creating this experience of light and color and sound and so on?
Well, according to philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, not only do we not have any idea how purely material brains create experience, we don’t have any idea how to have an idea on how purely material brains create experience……”So much for the philosophy of mind,” he concludes.
Ok, let’s go on. Nowadays, despite the alleged overcoming of the “elan vital” some time around 1840, there seems to be increasing agreement that we can’t explain life in purely material terms.
Oh no, we have that covered.
Really/. You can explain how life emerges?
Absolutely.
Well, how?
Through emergence.
I’m sorry, what?
Yes, we have a wonderful theory. It even covers the laws of nature. How did they emerge? By means of a complex set of equations related to complexity and chaos theory. It explains everything:
Order emerges from nothingness
Life emerges
Sentience emerges
Emotion emerges
Rationality emerges
Self awareness emerges.
Ok, so things emerge by means of emergence. I’m not sure how different that is from the Catholic catechism where we celebrate Christ bringing all things into being; well, no, Christ, rather than being a “belief” (philosophers nowadays seem to think even the mystics were like early versions of Ryle, trying to come up with rational analyses of how the world works), was referring to an experience; well actually, referring to a particular gnostic apprehension of the cosmos which does not seem even remotely accessible to modern philosophers.
But anyway, it seems that one of the areas where religions and science might meet is in your vaunted science of parapsychology. I understand as long as 15 or possibly 25 years ago, the psi researchers had conducted a sufficient number of experiments - well over 1000 - that met all the criteria that skeptics had been asking for since the late 1800s.
Scientist/“philosopher” - yes that’s true. By 1996, every request we had EVER made was met. Perfect methodology, statistics, replication, effect size, etc. That could have been a good meeting place. Except for one thing.
Sane person: “oh, really, what is that?”
Scientist philosopher: we were never even remotely sincere about our requests. We have been terrified of psi since scientists started offering valid proof for it back in the late 1800s. WE were absolutely committed, much like the most extreme fundamentalists, to the creed that psi is impossible (it violates the laws of nature!). So we simply changed tactics. Experiments conducted in the last 25 years continue to be as good or better than those in most areas of physics, biology, etc. So we just say, “We don’t care if you’ve met all the criteria we set out. We have new ones. You have to do BETTER than any other science.” And if they do, we’ll just find a new excuse. And in fact, one of the high priests of scientism has one. Arthur Reber, in a response to an American Psychological Association article summarizing decades of valid psi research, replied, in essence, “I didn’t even bother to read the article” (yep, the APA actually published this). “I don’t have to because we know psi violates the laws of nature. Therefore ANY scientific experiment of any kind, no matter how large the effect size, no matter how often it’s replicated, has to be wrong.”
****
If you think about it, if you resort strictly to the third person method of most science, you wouldn’t even have evidence that the unvierse as we experience it exists. A psychiatrist once said to Huston Smith, the writer on world religions, that from a strict DSM point of view, scientism would qualify as a delusional disorder.
And that’s an insult to people with delusional disorders!
Yes, we'll never had an adequate scientific explanation. But making "God did it" an explanation is simply ridiculous. For example, which god? Allah, the Christian god; shall we defer to Greek or American Indian mythology?We say that "our" god did it, and then make up all kinds of (baseless) doctrines to show how and why our god is what he is.
So, our universe will continue, for me, to be completely inexplicable. But I'm not going to explain the unexplainable by "making up stuff" and bending my knee to one or the other of the many gods humans have concocted over the millenia.
I know far better than to say anything about "God" in a scientifically oriented substack.
Notice what just happened - I said nothing about god - simply questioned scientism. You made a baseless assumption.
People complain about "God of the gaps," the attempt to fill in God where science has not found the cause. I fully agree with the complaint.
What I'm critiquing which neoteny keeps unwittingly affirming, is materialism of the gaps. Let me explain my definition of materialism/physicalism: "We have no idea what the pure physical stuff we posit as the foundation of the universe IS but we know absolutely with no possibility of any doubt, that it's NOT alive, conscious, intelligent or sentient or aware in any way."
In other words, pure nihilism.
So when it comes to how did the universe come to be?
Nihilism did it.
Why is there order?
Nihilism did it.
How did life emerge?
Nihilism did it.
How did emotion, sensory qualia rationality, self awareness, etc emerge?
Nihilism did it.
Nihilism of the gaps. Neoteny can't see that every comment he makes is simply 'nihilism of the gaps.
In fact, as long as you provide ANY "explanation" (as opposed to a description of processes, which is where science of the modern era shines), you're simply using nihilism of the gaps without realizing it.
I don't care at all, in fact, I care less than zero, about talking about "god."
In fact, I'll ask you the same question Neoteny keeps avoiding:
What do we have evidence for that exists outside of the awareness within which our entire experience of the universe appears? (you might want to check his responses to see how many ways one can respond without addressing the question)
My goodness, someone here who believes in thinking.
Physicist Paul Davies created a storm of protest when he wrote a NY Times op ed on the inevitable place of faith in science.
People like Hawking, Dawkins and the rest - despite what they might say to defend themselves - act as if laws of nature are discovered through empirical observation.
Worse, the pure conceptual abstractions of gravity, magnetism, etc are taken also as empirical observations, when they as well as "laws" are quantified abstractions from direct sensory observation.
I would estimate, when I've had the chance to have in person conversation on this, it usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes to make this clear.
Online, I would say, when someone is willing to think about it, it's generally about 6 months of nearly daily conversations before they get it.
But usually, they give up after 4 or 5 exchanges. I think next year I may collect about 25 of the most common mindless responses. "The only difference between you and me is I believe in one less God than you do." (that is, you don't believe in Zeus, but you do cling to your irrational faith in God. well, I let go of that too."
Or, "Maybe science can't explain it, but I'm not going to sully my good brain by clinging to some ridiculous supernatural entity as an explanation."
David Bentley Hart has a wonderful introductory chapter about the new atheists in "The Experience of God." He says he would LOVE to have a conversation about God with any atheist would who like to talk with him. The trouble is, atheists almost never are actually talking about God, but rather, a demi urge, a separate creature, a phenomenon amongst other phenomena.
And when you try to tell them that, they mumble about how science not only completely won against theology, but has no need for philosophy any more. "Shut up and calculate." the physicists exclaim, not knowing they have just made a philosophic statement!
I get lots of Dawkins clips on TikTok....I don't think I've ever seen a single video that doesn't have at least one epistemic error....meanwhile, he mocks ALL religious people (which includes me) for idiocy....oh the irony of the cult of scientism/atheism!
> I would estimate, when I've had the chance to have in person conversation on this, it usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes to make this clear.
Have you ever managed to get one of these people to realize their error? I don't think I have, and I've had literally thousands of such conversations......science is a hell of a drug!
> I think next year I may collect about 25 of the most common mindless responses.
I've thought of the same....I might use it to train a custom scientist/atheist AI model. Having a distribution of the memes their reality is based upon seems like it could come in handy some day.
> He says he would LOVE to have a conversation about God with any atheist would who like to talk with him. The trouble is, atheists almost never are actually talking about God, but rather, a demi urge, a separate creature, a phenomenon amongst other phenomena.
They also dodge every hard question and resort to insults, shifting the burden of proof, etc.....it really makes me question what humans beings *are*, because they seem almost indistinguishable from an LLM that cannot admit it is wrong.
If you think about it: is it not EXTREMELY weird that this phenomenon is so widespread and ubiquitous, but it almost never gets written about? Instead, it's always conspiracy theorists and (strawman) Trump supporters. It is the common every day Normie that causes most of the problems in the world, because there are so many of them, and they hold almost all positions of power.
Yes, I almost always find, IN PERSON< that people do change their views.
On line it’s much harder. Did you see how people responding me read all kinds of things into my words that weren’t there?
In person you can right away say, “Oh, I see. That’s very interesting and I appreciate your point, but here’s what i actually meant.” On line you can go on for weeks and try to clarify but because it’s not in real time, people pull back into their habitual subconscious defense mechanisms and interpretations.
But I have had a lot of success online too. Here’s the key - if you talk to an anti religious person as a religious person, you’re done from the start. You have to meet people from where they are. And I’m NOT saying I always do this well. Here’s an example:
There’s a “naturalism” facebook group. Most of the people are rock solid physicalists, atheists, etc even though the group leader is open minded about consciousness (though eh still is pretty down on religion).
Anyway, I joined and asked, a simple question: “What does ‘physical’ mean?” (Or course, I mean philosophically, not the stuff we touch and see and feel all around us)
Nothing but vitriolic attacks for the first several months (including from an esteemed philosophy professor from a notable philosophy department)
So I had an idea, I simply announced in my next post, “From here on, I am speaking as an atheist and a physicalist.”
Within about 30 minutes, that very same philosopher professor came to my defense against another attacker and said, “Well, you know, Don has a point. Nobody in the physicalist world has ever come close to a reasonable, working definition of what “physical” means.
And for the next month or two, I had marvelous conversations with EVERYONE in teh group.
You just have to find the key to give people permission to let down their defenses. Neoteny was an unusual case, You can smell the fear pouring out from each phrase. And in a case like that, it’s not likely you can shift the needle even a bit. But there’s lots of possibilities.
My favorite was a STEM student, a young and quite brilliant man. He was a thoroughgoing agnostic, though he was a member of idealist Bernardo Kastrup’s online forum so I suppose he was already more open than most.
I pointed out that “laws of nature” don’t explain anything and he was aghast and mystified at first.
But I kept aspiring to find ways to join with his way of viewing things. And he stuck with it for 6 months. Then one day he wrote and said, “I got it. It’s SO obvious I can’t imagine I haven’t seen it all along.”
Same thing happened to me. I had an intuition of this in 1970, when I was 17. It wasn’t until 1987, when I read a book about the foundations of science, when I suddenly saw as clearly as can be that the laws of nature don’t explain anything and like my friend, the STEM student, found it so difficult to think back and imagine what it was that kept me from seeing it.
By the way, the key is meditation. I’m really being unfair with Neotony, because he’s trying to “think” about the question, and all along I’m pointing him toward a contemplative view which I imagine is quite alien to his entire education. I see a series of videos (probably dozens, hundreds) leading people through teh entire scientific process, from the earliest formulation of a hypothesis, to the setting up of methodology, lit review, statistical analyses and so on, but engaging with this in a contemplative manner.
Physicist Arthur Zajonc has been doing this in schools for decades but as far as I know, none of this is available online. This is what needs to be done as a starting point.
Ya that's the double irony: if science's fan base *actually understood science*, we wouldn't have to have these conversations in the first place!!
I think there is something really valuable here: if we could get BOTH the science crowd AND the religious crowd to realize they are both hallucinating, I think humanity could get this planet back on track! Good luck getting either to even consider the idea though lol
> So I had an idea, I simply announced in my next post, “From here on, I am speaking as an atheist and a physicalist.”
> Within about 30 minutes, that very same philosopher professor came to my defense against another attacker and said, “Well, you know, Don has a point. Nobody in the physicalist world has ever come close to a reasonable, working definition of what “physical” means.
This seems to surreal to be true, but it wouldn't surprise me....I am going to try this trick sometime!
I too used to be a young confident pro-science/engineering materialist, who laughed at "theists" (not knowing I was hallucinating).
Human consciousness consisting of ~75% (who knows lol) seems like one of the best kept secrets going...yet another reason I am skeptical of science.
I think part of what helps is my work as a clinical psychologist. I worked with well over a thousand individuals going through various kinds of psychotic/delusional disorders, so it’s too far from that talking with fundamaterialists!
Not to brag, but I bet I've talked to *easily* 10x that over the many, many years of my internet "trolling".....and, I believe that the patient having zero realization that they are being studied is also advantageous in many ways.
See Nick Lane's various videos on YouTube. It's not that we know in *exact detail* how Life emerged (on Earth), but we have some ideas about the process which aren't obviously wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWVAyAnrhXU
"The various papers you link are highly speculative."
Braitenberg's book isn't speculative: it is (was) based on his & other researchers' studies on various critters' brains.
The "Life" paper necessarily has some speculative aspects, but supports its arguments with non-speculative analysis of physical phenomena.
Same applies to the linked video: talking about a process not directly observable is necessarily speculative to some extent, but also supported by physical, chemical, geological, & biological research.
"Note also that an "explanation" has no requirement to be a correct explanation."
So true. But to the extent it is correct, it adds to our knowledge of those subjects & has *some* explanatory power.
> Braitenberg's book isn't speculative: it is (was) based on his & other researchers' studies on various critters' brains.
Do they make any assertions of fact?
Do they understand how consciousness works, at least (say) 75%?
> The "Life" paper necessarily has some speculative aspects, but supports its arguments with non-speculative analysis of physical phenomena.
Arguments/propositions are fine, but let's acknowledge that they are that.
> but also supported by physical, chemical, geological, & biological research.
Sure, but that does not guarantee they are correct. Just making that explicit.
> But to the extent it is correct, it adds to our knowledge of those subjects & has *some* explanatory power.
To what extent is it correct, of the whole, in percentage terms?
A naive person (extremely common among science's fan base) might have interpreted you providing those links above in response to the questions as being some sort of a proof of science's knowledge. It wasn't too long ago that posting potentially misinformative information online was considered a big deal.
There are some, yes. For example *Vehicles* starts with the description of *decussation* which is widely prevalent in living beings.
"Arguments/propositions are fine, but let's acknowledge that they are that."
Yes, they're arguments/propositions, some of the retail tools of scientific practice.
"does not guarantee they are correct"
Correctness is possible in mathematics. Scientific theories are always contingent: there's always the possibility of some scientific theory turning out not being *entirely* correct. (The classic example being Newtonian mechanics, where mass is constant vs. Einstein's special relativity, where mass is the function of speed once close to the speed of light).
"To what extent is it correct, of the whole, in percentage terms?"
No one can answer this question.
"as being some sort of a proof of science's knowledge"
I wanted to point to publications which provide *some* scientific knowledge about those questions.
Let's make it explicit: what science has are some theories, and it is not known the degree to which they are correct (which could, due to the level of uncertainty, include them being ~backwards) - do you disagree?
"it is not known the degree to which they are correct"
They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*. Newtonian mechanics was entirely correct as long as we haven't encountered phenomena where relativistic effects appear; once we acquired data (measured phenomena) which falsified the predictions made by Newtonian mechanics, we understood that Newtonian mechanics isn't *entirely* correct.
Yet we still teach Newtonian mechanics to engineering students: Newtonian mechanics is correct to a high degree in the environment for which engineers make designs.
> They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*.
This is scientism, not science. Also: you have no way of knowing how all scientists behave.
> Newtonian mechanics was entirely correct as long as
What is the precise meaning of "entirely" in this context?
> once we acquired data (measured phenomena) which falsified the predictions made by Newtonian mechanics, we understood that Newtonian mechanics isn't *entirely* correct.
So, deterministic physical reality changes does it?
> No, our knowledge of deterministic physical reality changed.
Above you said:
"They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*. Newtonian mechanics WAS entirely correct...."
Di you mean to say "was BELIEVED TO BE correct"? Because belief of what is is different than what actually is, it just tends to not appear that way, and lost of people are Naive Realists.
Have you studied or conducted research? None of these links are remotely relevant to the point.
First of all, i didn’t say ANYTHING questioning knowledge of process.
Scientism is using process as an explanation.
Do you understand why Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg wrote an article with the title: “Does Science Explain Everything? Anything?”
(And concluded, “no”)
Look up Sir Arthur Eddington’s explanation, in his lectures on “What is Life” of how science works.
When I was conducting research on mindfulness in the treatment of pain, and I had verbal descriptions of people’s experience, what do you think the first thing was that I had to do in order to make this “scientific”?
I had to turn those experiences into numbers.
Now, carefully, think for a second.
Where do those numbers come from?
They come from descriptions of experience.
Now, think a bit longer, really take your time - and ask yourself:
Do those numbers, based on descriptions of experience, explain experience?
Because that’s what you’re saying.
If you don’t realize how irrational that claim is, I’m not sure what else I can say.
To use laws, or processes, which have been converted into numbers, to EXPLAIN anything is like saying:
Why do apples fall?
Because of gravity.
What is gravity?
It’s an abstract model, made up of purely quantitative facts, which we derived from observing apples falling.
Ok, I radically oversimplified this, but I did it to inspire you to really stop and think. I mean, bring to mind everything presented in those videos, and then do a general overview of any scientific experiment you can think of and you’ll realize there’s not one that doesn’t ultimately fit in the description of quantitative abstraction from qualitative experience.
This is why people who claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness don’t understand the hard problem. It’s simple:
We all start from experience.
Science, which is a method created by several geniuses, unique in the history of humanity (which is why I spent all those grueling years in grad school mastering the method), extracts a certain quite limited quantitative facts from experience to help us to have a very limited control and capacity for prediction.
Period.
What I, as a scientist, find most objectionable about the religious faith of scientism is it is so profoundly anti scientific. It makes the beautiful, elegant method of science, one of the great achievements of humanity, into a dull, insipid, absurd, impossible irrational creed that blocks all genuine inquiry. Without this superstitious nonsense, we wouldnt’ have wasted decades with investigations into genetic causation of unproductive sideshows on neural determinism and might have made genuine process in understanding consciousness.
As Planck quite wisely observed, genuine science proceeds funeral by funeral.
"None of these links are remotely relevant to the point."
I'm sorry to hear that.
"research on mindfulness in the treatment of pain"
Interesting. Here's an excerpt from Antonio R. Damasio's *Decartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain*:
Certain neurological conditions involve intense and frequent pain. One example is trigeminal neuralgia, also known as *tic douloureux*. The term neuralgia stands for pain with a neural origin, and the term trigeminal refers to the trigeminal nerve, the nerve which supplies face tissues and which ferries signals from the face to the brain. Trigeminal neuralgia affects the face, generally on one side and in one sector, for instance the cheek. Suddenly an innocent act such as touching the skin or an even more innocent breeze caressing the same skin may trigger a sudden excruciating pain. People afflicted complain of the sensation of knives' stabbing their flesh, of pins sticking in their skin and bone. Their whole lives may become focused on the pain; they can do or think of nothing else while the jabbing lasts, and the jabbing may come on frequently. Their bodies close in a tight, defensive coil.
For patients in whom the neuralgia is resistant to all available medication, the condition is classified as intractable or refractory. In such cases, neurosurgery can come to the rescue and offer the possibility of relief with a surgical intervention. One modality of treatment attempted in the past was prefrontal leucotomy. The results of this intervention illustrate better than any other fact the distinction between pain itself, that is, the perception of a certain class of sensory signals, and suffering, that is, the feeling that comes from perceiving the emotional reaction to that perception.
Consider the following episode, which I witnessed personally, when I was training with Almeida Lima, the neurosurgeon who had helped Egas Moniz develop cerebral angiography and prefrontal leucotomy and in fact had performed the first such operation. Lima, who was not only a skillful surgeon but a compassionate man, had been using a modified leucotomy for the management of intractable pain and was convinced the procedure was justifiable in desperate cases. He wanted me to see an example of the problem from the very beginning.
I vividly recall the particular patient, sitting in bed waiting for the operation. He was crouched in profound suffering, almost immo bile, afraid of triggering further pain. Two days after the operation, when Lima and I visited on rounds, he was a different person. He looked relaxed, like anyone else, and was happily absorbed in a game of cards with a companion in his hospital room. Lima asked him about the pain. The man looked up and said cheerfully: "Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you." Clearly, what the operation seemed to have done, then, was abolish the emotional reaction that is part of what we call pain. It had ended the man's suffering. His facial expression, his voice, and his deportment were those one associates with pleasant states, not pain. But the operation seemed to have done little to the image of local alteration in the body region supplied by the trigeminal nerve, and that is why the patient stated that the pains were the same. While the brain could no longer engender suffering, it was still making "images of pain," that is, processing normally the somatosensory mapping of a pain landscape. In addition to what it may tell us about the mechanisms of pain, this example reveals the separation between the image of an entity (the state of biological tissue which equals a pain image) and the image of a body state which qualifies the entity image by dint of juxtaposition in time.
----
I found this story fascinating: here are two aspects of pain experience -- one of the 'physical' sensation, which remained in place, & the other is the gruelling 'mental' experience, which was successfully detached from the former by neurosurgical intervention.
Sigh. Can you read this again and see how everything I wrote applies to this.
What, essentially, has Damasio told us?
Has he said one thing about something purely 'physical"? Do you know what "physical" means when scientists are talking it as the foundation of everything in the universe? It's not a thing you see or touch or feel. It's a totally abstract unfindable article of faith. it has no meaning. It means, if anything, "something the nature of which we have no idea, which we can never detect empirically, ,and yet we have utter mindless confidence that it is mindless, unconscious, nonliving, and non intelligent."
What has Damasio talked about? Phenomena appearing in Consciousness. period.
And yet he is utterly deluded into thinking he is talking about some "stuff" that is in complete conflict with the idea of real life, consciousness, etc. This is complete psychotic level denial - and I'm not just throwing words around. If you study the psychiatric literature on levels of detail, you'll see precise definitions of psychotic levels of denial.
None of this can be addressed in a primarily intellectual manner. None of these problems are primarily philosophic but represent deep psychological attachments and fears which are clung to out of a desperate need to affirm one's identity according to various intellectual beliefs.
Now, you're going to respond, once again, to nothing I've written but out of your own preconceptions.
Try something different.
READ Damasio's words and try to find one example of empirical evidence of something outside Awareness. By definition, it can't be done (and I am not talking about a solipsistic personal awareness, simply awareness) but in searching as hard as you can, with as much energy as possible, you may catch a glimpse of what some of the most renowned scientists around the world (including recent nobel prize winners) are doing when they're questioning the philosophic foundations of science that have been taken for granted the past several centuries.
You can start with your last paragraph: substitute "subconscious sensation" for "physical sensation" and substitute "conscious level" experience for mental experience, and you'll see you're talking about different levels of consciousness rather than a dualistic physical/mental reality.
I'm inclined to see you as ignoring what I wrote, but maybe - I hope - I'm wrong.
really, TRY this deep thinking before responding. Set your alarm for 20 minutes - that's not so much, right? I've spent more than 50 years and I think quite accurately estimate a minimum of 25,000 conversations since 1997 on this. I've given presentations on this at philosophy conferences and spent several years putting together 2 of the 18 chapters of a book related to this - those 2 chapters dealing with these issues directly.
You can take just 20 minutes to try hard to grasp what kinds of subconscious beliefs are guiding your thinking and daring to question them.
"None of this can be addressed in a primarily intellectual manner."
Yet Almeida Lima, the neurosurgeon, was able to improve on the patient's sorry state by detaching the two phenomena from each other, thereby sparing the patient of terrible suffering.
"substitute "subconscious sensation" for "physical sensation""
But the patient's 'physical' sensation of pain wasn't subconscious even after the surgery: he reported "the pains are the same".
"Learning, defined as a change in behaviour evoked by experience, has hitherto been investigated almost exclusively in multicellular neural organisms. Evidence for learning in non-neural multicellular organisms is scant, and only a few unequivocal reports of learning have been described in single-celled organisms. Here we demonstrate habituation, an unmistakable form of learning, in the non-neural organism Physarum polycephalum. In our experiment, using chemotaxis as the behavioural output and quinine or caffeine as the stimulus, we showed that P. polycephalum learnt to ignore quinine or caffeine when the stimuli were repeated, but responded again when the stimulus was withheld for a certain time."
Apparently even critters which have no neurons can have *experience*, which changes their behaviour.
"I detached the two phenomena (painful injury and the brain) thereby sparing the patient of terrible suffering."
Good for you.
In Lima's case, he effected the detachment by making surgical incision(s) in the frontal lobe, thereby detaching the two kinds of sensations from each other -- not the trigeminal nerve's signal from the brain.
In Lima's case, he effected the detachment by making surgical incision(s) in the frontal lobe, thereby detaching the two kinds of sensations from each other -- not the trigeminal nerve's signal from the brain.
There is nothing in what you wrote that addresses what our minds can know of that is outside the Awareness in which the universe appears. Look at what is actually here rather than avoiding it by means of labels. Look.
And by the way as predicted (unfortunately) you completely ignored every point I made and simply forged ahead thus supporting - and ultimately proving - everything I wrote.
See if you can come up with something that actually addresses what I write. If you keep writing from within the same mental framework it's going to get rather tiresome to keep saying the same thing in different language.
Maybe I'll just keep quoting the last comment as it seems to cover everything you have written.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced.[2][3] Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte)[1] or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).[4]
Ignoring the part where you're wrong about the descriptions you make of the scientific theories, I can still show that a scientific theory is superior to religious doctrine. This theory will have specific testable explanations and predictions. Every scientific theory contains its own criteria for dismissal and is never regarded as an absolute truth. The scientific endeavor is a constant quest to falsify every existing theory so that it can be substituted for one that fits reality better. This heavily contrasts with the dogmatism of religion and the uncritical acceptance of doctrines that are typically immutable and not subjected to empirical testing or revision based on new evidence.
> I can still show that a scientific theory is superior to religious doctrine.
That would depend on the task at hand. Science is excellent at understanding the physical realm, but then it is also excellent at putting advanced technology into the hands of the masses that can destroy that real (see: climate change, contamination of water sources, etc).
> Every scientific theory contains its own criteria for dismissal and is never regarded as an absolute truth.
Your scriptures saying something does not necessarily cause all scientists to become perfectly rational - I encounter scientists presenting theory as fact *regularly*.
> The scientific endeavor is a constant quest to falsify every existing theory so that it can be substituted for one that fits reality better.
See above.
> This heavily contrasts with the dogmatism of religion and the uncritical acceptance of doctrines that are typically immutable and not subjected to empirical testing or revision based on new evidence.
You are describing a strawman &/or (necessarily) your subconscious, sub-perceptual model of "religion". Are many religious people silly? Sure are! Are many scientists and science fans also silly? Sure are!
You're shifting the conversation from the system to the individual. The scientific framework promotes inquiry, understanding, and attachment to reality. It may still produce some silly people. The religious framework promotes dogmatism, escapism, and subservience. It may still produce some good people.
Religious beliefs are not irrational, but necessary to human society, because humans as a group have an ineradicable religious streak. When not channeled into religion this impulse simply resurfaces in another, usually deleterious, form such as dialectical materialism or climate fanaticism. Human nature doesn’t change, at least over the time scale of human history (a few hundred thousand years). Those who have thought deeply about the problem going back thousands of years conclude that religion is essential to human society. If it addresses, and is indeed the product of, a deep human need while helping to preserve society then it is not irrational.
I think perhaps you are mixing up the use of religion with the content of religion, the function and the beliefs. Humans need beliefs about what is moral, the world and their place in it, etc. that is true I think, and it is not irrational to want that. Any individual belief may be irrational to hold, however, as might be the manner in which we compare those beliefs. As you rightly point out, climate fanaticism is a religion which people cling to, but the content is bad: lots of doctrine that cannot be challenged and is seemingly impervious to evidence, with ends that always seem to boil down to "kill all humans". It is rational to want a religion, a world view that gives meaning and fills the religion shaped hole in our lives, but manner in which its content is created, transmitted and retained is irrational.
Note: the implication of this is that there are rational religions people hold, in that the doctrine is held up to scrutiny and carefully thought out, at least so far as any belief about anything is carefully thought out. I am not so optimistic about the high level of rationality of humans in general. :D
To be fair, Bryan is saying that particular religious beliefs (doctrines) are irrational. I maintain that religion as a phenomenon is not irrational since it inheres in humankind and must be considered “a feature, not a bug.” We are talking past each other. But even if “religion” as a whole is not fully rational, so what? Humans aren’t fully rational and never will be. Plainly, rationality cannot displace religion. Neither is a substitute for the other. (Moreover the Aristotelian conception of Christianity insists that religion is founded on reason.) Rational / scientific thought (e.g., cosmology, medicine, physics, econometrics) offers reliable answers to many questions but few of the most fundamental ones.
“But even if “religion” as a whole is not fully rational, so what? “
Irrational doctrine that drives people to irrational behaviors would seem to be the answer to so what. Leaving a carve out for irrational beliefs that one bases morality and value judgements upon is rather a problem. That isn’t to say one has to expect humans to be fully rational, but that religious beliefs/doctrine are held to a much lower bar than anything else. That’s why eg climate cultists function as a religion, a while accepted and unchallengeable belief set that determines morality and virtue around it.
3. Because the big bang created time and space, this something exists outside of time and space
4. This make this being incredibly powerful.
5. Now at this point you can stop and declare yourself agnostic, there was a force that created the universe but we don't know much about it.
Perfectly rational.
You may also continue on to
6. Is it likely that this force communicated with his creation?
If you answer yes, then certainly this would be written down. And the all powerful force would not want his message to disappear forever so it must be in one of the world's existing religions.
So then you can take your pick of the religions.
The counter to this..... all of these mathematically impossible things happened randomly... is not logical.
3 doesn’t seem super obvious, as it’s not clear the Big Bang created time and space. Nor is it clear that such things can be created.
Also you switched from calling it “something” to “being” in 4. This might seem minor, but the term “being” implies agency of some sort. Which is the basis for your argument in 6.
There’s no reason to accept 1. It isn’t at all philosophically necessary that the universe mustn’t emerge ex nihilo. Moreover, there’s no reason why, if you do accept the axiom of everything having a cause, it would t also apply to the deity itself, leaving you right back where you started. And no, saying God is ‘outside nature’ doesn’t help you because you’re positing a logical axiom, not a physical one (in our physical universe things do in fact emerge from nothing, e.g. Casimir effects) and God is not exempt from the laws of logic. And if God existed forever, then it’s simpler to posit that the universe in some form (or multiverse as the case may be) existed forever.
If nothing existed, then there is no something. That is the definition of nothing. Saying "in our universe" is immediately conceding there is something and the comparison fails.
And we do not return to where we start. Positing that there is an immense force beyond our understanding is a very important fact. God is not bound by logic as we understand it.
"6. Is it likely that this force communicated with his creation?"
Let's say we're in a computer simulation. In a sense, the part of god would be played by whoever produced the simulation (maybe as banal as a little kid who was given a sort of "sim universe" computer game and, after choosing laws and initial conditions, let 'er rip). Would that person really care about any such communication? I doubt it.
If there was an option in Sim City the lets the population know you exist and are helping the city, which gives them a big moral and productivity boost, I think most people would click it.
Especially when you can see the little bits worship you on screen.
I don't think the average person would much give a damn if a bunch of digital bits started to worship them. Many folks might laugh and think it's hilarious. However, some folks with certain personality traits might want to communicate--and those traits are far from worthy of emulating. I'd suggest finding and watching the episode of the original Twilight Zone "The Little People" (S3, EP28), and you'll get the idea.
He is a huge fan of Alex Epstein’s *Fossil Future*, which is anti-catastrophist, and pro-fossil fuels. And his recent book *Don’t Be a Feminist* has many essays criticizing wokeness.
> Just admit that neither of us knows. It's that easy.
From many years of observing atheist and science types: it seems like the opposite of easy for any of them....and if they do do it, it is rarely done without psychological aversion to some degree (they seem not fond of admitting they don't know...if they can even realize it that is).
I know some people who claim to have received direct revelations while standing in the presence of a deity. I myself have not, nor have I seen evidence that what they claim happened to them did indeed happen to them, so it would be irrational of me to accept their claims as to that deity's opinions as fact.
However, I suppose it would not be irrational of them to accept those supposed opinions as fact based on what they experienced.
I have no way to determine whether their experiences were genuine or not. Or if so, whether there were unknown components to those experiences that might explain them in other ways than made rational sense to them at the time (e.g. drug-induced psychosis or whatever).
I neither believe nor disbelieve that which can't be proven or disproven.
You have the ability to measure the nature of your mind with this level of accuracy do you? How do you do it? Or were you just describing how it seems?
I'm not going to even pretend that I understand your question. I'm assuming we might have to get into some DesCartes, Hume, Kant, etc. and it's been a little while since I've boned up on that stuff. Have a nice day.
> I neither believe nor disbelieve that which can't be proven or disproven.
I happen to have a hobby of talking to atheists on the internet, and this is a very common claim (another common claim they make is that ALL atheist are this way, as if belonging to a group that has certain defined beliefs/principles causes one to somehow cognitively inherit those principles). However, very often if not usually, they slip up and make implicit or explicit assertions ("There is no God", "X can exist without God", etc) that demonstrate that their read on their own mind is not accurate.
Now you can tell me that this doesn't count or something along those lines.
The claim that "there is no God" is not rational. It's something that we not only don't know, but CAN'T know. It's not testable/falsifiable, if for no other reason than that if there IS a god, it could interfere with my tests, hide the evidence, etc. to make sure that I never found it.
Of course, I haven't made any claim to be rational myself, so you have no way of knowing whether I believe that there's a god or not. Suffice it to say that even if I believe there is a god, I don't believe that god expects me to proselytize on behalf of my belief. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
> The claim that "there is no God" is not rational. It's something that we not only don't know, but CAN'T know.
It cannot be proved as false, but it could turn out to be true (or, there could be some evidence that it is maybe true, but then each individual is biased as to what constitutes "evidence").
Regardless: lots of scientists and atheists make the claim that there's no God, or that there is NO evidence.
> Of course, I haven't made any claim to be rational myself, so you have no way of knowing whether I believe that there's a god or not.
Your conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. I could go through your post history and find examples of you speaking revealingly on the matter (watch out for those claims of nonexistence ("you have no way of knowing")!).
> Suffice it to say that even if I believe there is a god, I don't believe that god expects me to proselytize on behalf of my belief. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
Indeed.
But you've kind of avoided my point above entirely....was this an accident?
It's not that the material costs of embracing irrational belief systems are always low; some people make very high sacrifices to spread their religious views (values like martyrdom, crusading, evangelism, and elevated natalism being oriented towards sacrificing personal happiness for the wider propagation of the religion).
Successful religions become widespread precisely because true believers are motivated by such propagative values being a part of the belief system. Such religions also succeed because they incorporate other kinds of norms favored by cultural selection, notably norms that happen to be more closely aligned with the innate psychological needs of individuals and/or with the material interests of institutions that invest in belief propagation. While successful religions can't offer a rational explanation for their world-views or a rational justification for their norms (which does impair their persuasiveness among people who do sharply focus their rational faculties on important philosophical questions), they do offer norms that are more culturally competitive in other respects.
Indeed, a rational ethics must take into account man's innate psychological needs too, so cultural selection is capable of favoring equivalent values even in the absence of rational justifications for them. For some traditional values (especially those emerging in a free society), there is at least a presumption in favor of the value's utility in promoting the happiness of most people. Where irrational traditions become suspect is when the propagative or institutional advantages are driving the cultural selection of a norm at the expense of individual happiness, or when a particular individual has unusual personality traits that imply abnormal requirements for optimizing their pursuit of happiness.
It's also worth noting that many people who think of themselves as secular may still embrace irrational values in much the same manner; there are more than a few secular intellectual cults with congregations at our universities that function very much like quasi-religions; their self-sacrificing evangelism, etc. is clearly recognizable even a supernatural imaginary friend is missing from their belief system.
Religion is not _supposed_ to be rational. Faith is defined as unreasoned, unconditional trust and acceptance.
Being religious can be rational. A true, valid religion gives its adherents many benefits, not least a systematic guide to right action. Most people have neither the time, the interest, nor the brainpower to reason their way to every decision on first principles.
Religion also provides a framework for dealing with the important points of life, birth, maturity, marriage and children, and death.
With all due respect, this statement shows almost 0 knowledge of the philosophy of religion, and the actual arguments that theists give for the existence of God. I realize theistic philosophers like Feser and Koons weren’t as active back then, but there was still a great deal of literature you should have engaged before asserting that religious belief is irrational.
If a physicists or hard scientist has a criticism of religion, I'll listen. For economists, who insist on so much dogma despite evidence staring them in the face, to criticize it is really quite rich. Compared to the neoclassical economics, the Nicene Creed is a model of rationality. At least it doesn't demand I believe in things I see not happening, right now.
Excellent! As the physicist Richard Feynman said, "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." When you ask a religious person a difficult question, they invariably respond, "You just have to have faith." Faith: a five-letter dirty word that is used as a club to short-circuit honest inquiry which might lead to actual truth being uncovered.
I don't care if people want to believe in some imaginary sky creature(s), but I DO take exception when they act all smug and morally superior. Never forget, when the Germans savaged their way across Europe in WWII, they wore belt buckles emblazoned with "Gott Mit Uns". Religion is a tool for rationalizing slaughter.
It's not only the case that people have religious beliefs because such beliefs have low cost; people have religious beliefs also because they provide benefits.
"There is a tendency among rationalists to view “beliefs” as mental objects whose exclusive function is to represent reality from which it follows that beliefs should be evaluated solely according to their veracity and evidential basis. But on the other hand, it could be argued that “beliefs” are for *doing* and that, therefore, it often makes more sense to ask what is it that those beliefs do in practice."
Obviously “religion” as a general term isn’t true, as there are many contradictory religions. It is also kind of meaningless to argue against “religion” in general, because what exactly are you arguing against? Any given argument may be valid against one religion but not another. We all agree that much of what comes under that umbrella is nonsense (though maybe we disagree about which bits). But materialism also doesn’t explain much of life experience, including some very specific experiences I have had, so I will also have to reject pure materialism. What is left is a search for truth that is greater than just “science,” and is obligated to include at least a bit of “religion,” maybe one religion, but certainly not all of religion.
It was briefly mentioned that secular religious practices are taking the place of traditional religions. This is both for fellowship and for superstitions. If you study the real reason for the tradition of separation of church and state you can justify a rewarding of that tradition or even a rewording of the First Amendment in light of the changing beliefs. The deeper understanding of the Separation of Church and State is that it has nothing to do with God. Buddhists don’t believe in God, but the tradition of Separation of Church and State would not let that group have a shortcut to power. The tradition of Separation has to do with shortcuts that groups which have beliefs, can use to get the power of the state on their side. The shortcut is the respectability in what philosophers refer to as unfalsifiability: the quality of a fact or belief where even the opponents agree it is not capable of being proved false. “Inequality is bad.” That is unfalsifiable. “Murder is bad” is not an unfalsifiable fact. It can be falsified. It can be argued that murder might be good for society. Logic and history can be used to show that it is not, however. The point is, there are both unfalsifiable and falsifiable facts. One can be argued in a deliberative body. The other cannot. The one that cannot be proved false can either be:
• never considered or
• if allowed consideration it is self-enacting.
It is the "never considered" option that the Separation of Church and State is about. So the re-wording of the First Amendment should have the word unfalsifiable in there in some way. Not the word religion.
It’s hard to imagine a more irrational, utterly non-empirical (sorry, anti-empirical) faith than scientism:
1. Out of utter nothingness, stuff happened (or to put it more crudely, as the foundational catechism of this supernaturalist religion, “sh*t happens). Out of pure chaos, order arises. As Richard Dawkins put it, in a purely chance based random occurrence, order happens.
Ok, so maybe 1 in a quadrillion changes against it, something orderly occurs.
AND IT KEEPS OCCURING. What keeps it in place?
“The laws of nature.”
What do you mean, ‘laws of nature?”
“Oh, that’s the phrase we use to describe the orderly occurrences, and in particular, our mathematical measurements, of the orderly occurrences that we observe.”
Can you say “tautology?”
Ok, so these end up with all these brilliantly lit stars and red suns and all that?
Oh no, there’s no light or color anywhere, that’s just a construction of our brains?
And how do these brains end up creating this experience of light and color and sound and so on?
Well, according to philosopher of mind Jerry Fodor, not only do we not have any idea how purely material brains create experience, we don’t have any idea how to have an idea on how purely material brains create experience……”So much for the philosophy of mind,” he concludes.
Ok, let’s go on. Nowadays, despite the alleged overcoming of the “elan vital” some time around 1840, there seems to be increasing agreement that we can’t explain life in purely material terms.
Oh no, we have that covered.
Really/. You can explain how life emerges?
Absolutely.
Well, how?
Through emergence.
I’m sorry, what?
Yes, we have a wonderful theory. It even covers the laws of nature. How did they emerge? By means of a complex set of equations related to complexity and chaos theory. It explains everything:
Order emerges from nothingness
Life emerges
Sentience emerges
Emotion emerges
Rationality emerges
Self awareness emerges.
Ok, so things emerge by means of emergence. I’m not sure how different that is from the Catholic catechism where we celebrate Christ bringing all things into being; well, no, Christ, rather than being a “belief” (philosophers nowadays seem to think even the mystics were like early versions of Ryle, trying to come up with rational analyses of how the world works), was referring to an experience; well actually, referring to a particular gnostic apprehension of the cosmos which does not seem even remotely accessible to modern philosophers.
But anyway, it seems that one of the areas where religions and science might meet is in your vaunted science of parapsychology. I understand as long as 15 or possibly 25 years ago, the psi researchers had conducted a sufficient number of experiments - well over 1000 - that met all the criteria that skeptics had been asking for since the late 1800s.
Scientist/“philosopher” - yes that’s true. By 1996, every request we had EVER made was met. Perfect methodology, statistics, replication, effect size, etc. That could have been a good meeting place. Except for one thing.
Sane person: “oh, really, what is that?”
Scientist philosopher: we were never even remotely sincere about our requests. We have been terrified of psi since scientists started offering valid proof for it back in the late 1800s. WE were absolutely committed, much like the most extreme fundamentalists, to the creed that psi is impossible (it violates the laws of nature!). So we simply changed tactics. Experiments conducted in the last 25 years continue to be as good or better than those in most areas of physics, biology, etc. So we just say, “We don’t care if you’ve met all the criteria we set out. We have new ones. You have to do BETTER than any other science.” And if they do, we’ll just find a new excuse. And in fact, one of the high priests of scientism has one. Arthur Reber, in a response to an American Psychological Association article summarizing decades of valid psi research, replied, in essence, “I didn’t even bother to read the article” (yep, the APA actually published this). “I don’t have to because we know psi violates the laws of nature. Therefore ANY scientific experiment of any kind, no matter how large the effect size, no matter how often it’s replicated, has to be wrong.”
****
If you think about it, if you resort strictly to the third person method of most science, you wouldn’t even have evidence that the unvierse as we experience it exists. A psychiatrist once said to Huston Smith, the writer on world religions, that from a strict DSM point of view, scientism would qualify as a delusional disorder.
And that’s an insult to people with delusional disorders!
Yes, we'll never had an adequate scientific explanation. But making "God did it" an explanation is simply ridiculous. For example, which god? Allah, the Christian god; shall we defer to Greek or American Indian mythology?We say that "our" god did it, and then make up all kinds of (baseless) doctrines to show how and why our god is what he is.
So, our universe will continue, for me, to be completely inexplicable. But I'm not going to explain the unexplainable by "making up stuff" and bending my knee to one or the other of the many gods humans have concocted over the millenia.
I know far better than to say anything about "God" in a scientifically oriented substack.
Notice what just happened - I said nothing about god - simply questioned scientism. You made a baseless assumption.
People complain about "God of the gaps," the attempt to fill in God where science has not found the cause. I fully agree with the complaint.
What I'm critiquing which neoteny keeps unwittingly affirming, is materialism of the gaps. Let me explain my definition of materialism/physicalism: "We have no idea what the pure physical stuff we posit as the foundation of the universe IS but we know absolutely with no possibility of any doubt, that it's NOT alive, conscious, intelligent or sentient or aware in any way."
In other words, pure nihilism.
So when it comes to how did the universe come to be?
Nihilism did it.
Why is there order?
Nihilism did it.
How did life emerge?
Nihilism did it.
How did emotion, sensory qualia rationality, self awareness, etc emerge?
Nihilism did it.
Nihilism of the gaps. Neoteny can't see that every comment he makes is simply 'nihilism of the gaps.
In fact, as long as you provide ANY "explanation" (as opposed to a description of processes, which is where science of the modern era shines), you're simply using nihilism of the gaps without realizing it.
I don't care at all, in fact, I care less than zero, about talking about "god."
In fact, I'll ask you the same question Neoteny keeps avoiding:
What do we have evidence for that exists outside of the awareness within which our entire experience of the universe appears? (you might want to check his responses to see how many ways one can respond without addressing the question)
> What I'm critiquing which neoteny keeps unwittingly affirming, is materialism of the gaps.
Faith comes in many forms, and education in science seems to intensify the phenomenon!
My goodness, someone here who believes in thinking.
Physicist Paul Davies created a storm of protest when he wrote a NY Times op ed on the inevitable place of faith in science.
People like Hawking, Dawkins and the rest - despite what they might say to defend themselves - act as if laws of nature are discovered through empirical observation.
Worse, the pure conceptual abstractions of gravity, magnetism, etc are taken also as empirical observations, when they as well as "laws" are quantified abstractions from direct sensory observation.
I would estimate, when I've had the chance to have in person conversation on this, it usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes to make this clear.
Online, I would say, when someone is willing to think about it, it's generally about 6 months of nearly daily conversations before they get it.
But usually, they give up after 4 or 5 exchanges. I think next year I may collect about 25 of the most common mindless responses. "The only difference between you and me is I believe in one less God than you do." (that is, you don't believe in Zeus, but you do cling to your irrational faith in God. well, I let go of that too."
Or, "Maybe science can't explain it, but I'm not going to sully my good brain by clinging to some ridiculous supernatural entity as an explanation."
David Bentley Hart has a wonderful introductory chapter about the new atheists in "The Experience of God." He says he would LOVE to have a conversation about God with any atheist would who like to talk with him. The trouble is, atheists almost never are actually talking about God, but rather, a demi urge, a separate creature, a phenomenon amongst other phenomena.
And when you try to tell them that, they mumble about how science not only completely won against theology, but has no need for philosophy any more. "Shut up and calculate." the physicists exclaim, not knowing they have just made a philosophic statement!
> People like Hawking, Dawkins and the rest
I get lots of Dawkins clips on TikTok....I don't think I've ever seen a single video that doesn't have at least one epistemic error....meanwhile, he mocks ALL religious people (which includes me) for idiocy....oh the irony of the cult of scientism/atheism!
> I would estimate, when I've had the chance to have in person conversation on this, it usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes to make this clear.
Have you ever managed to get one of these people to realize their error? I don't think I have, and I've had literally thousands of such conversations......science is a hell of a drug!
> I think next year I may collect about 25 of the most common mindless responses.
I've thought of the same....I might use it to train a custom scientist/atheist AI model. Having a distribution of the memes their reality is based upon seems like it could come in handy some day.
> He says he would LOVE to have a conversation about God with any atheist would who like to talk with him. The trouble is, atheists almost never are actually talking about God, but rather, a demi urge, a separate creature, a phenomenon amongst other phenomena.
They also dodge every hard question and resort to insults, shifting the burden of proof, etc.....it really makes me question what humans beings *are*, because they seem almost indistinguishable from an LLM that cannot admit it is wrong.
If you think about it: is it not EXTREMELY weird that this phenomenon is so widespread and ubiquitous, but it almost never gets written about? Instead, it's always conspiracy theorists and (strawman) Trump supporters. It is the common every day Normie that causes most of the problems in the world, because there are so many of them, and they hold almost all positions of power.
To take your question:
Yes, I almost always find, IN PERSON< that people do change their views.
On line it’s much harder. Did you see how people responding me read all kinds of things into my words that weren’t there?
In person you can right away say, “Oh, I see. That’s very interesting and I appreciate your point, but here’s what i actually meant.” On line you can go on for weeks and try to clarify but because it’s not in real time, people pull back into their habitual subconscious defense mechanisms and interpretations.
But I have had a lot of success online too. Here’s the key - if you talk to an anti religious person as a religious person, you’re done from the start. You have to meet people from where they are. And I’m NOT saying I always do this well. Here’s an example:
There’s a “naturalism” facebook group. Most of the people are rock solid physicalists, atheists, etc even though the group leader is open minded about consciousness (though eh still is pretty down on religion).
Anyway, I joined and asked, a simple question: “What does ‘physical’ mean?” (Or course, I mean philosophically, not the stuff we touch and see and feel all around us)
Nothing but vitriolic attacks for the first several months (including from an esteemed philosophy professor from a notable philosophy department)
So I had an idea, I simply announced in my next post, “From here on, I am speaking as an atheist and a physicalist.”
Within about 30 minutes, that very same philosopher professor came to my defense against another attacker and said, “Well, you know, Don has a point. Nobody in the physicalist world has ever come close to a reasonable, working definition of what “physical” means.
And for the next month or two, I had marvelous conversations with EVERYONE in teh group.
You just have to find the key to give people permission to let down their defenses. Neoteny was an unusual case, You can smell the fear pouring out from each phrase. And in a case like that, it’s not likely you can shift the needle even a bit. But there’s lots of possibilities.
My favorite was a STEM student, a young and quite brilliant man. He was a thoroughgoing agnostic, though he was a member of idealist Bernardo Kastrup’s online forum so I suppose he was already more open than most.
I pointed out that “laws of nature” don’t explain anything and he was aghast and mystified at first.
But I kept aspiring to find ways to join with his way of viewing things. And he stuck with it for 6 months. Then one day he wrote and said, “I got it. It’s SO obvious I can’t imagine I haven’t seen it all along.”
Same thing happened to me. I had an intuition of this in 1970, when I was 17. It wasn’t until 1987, when I read a book about the foundations of science, when I suddenly saw as clearly as can be that the laws of nature don’t explain anything and like my friend, the STEM student, found it so difficult to think back and imagine what it was that kept me from seeing it.
By the way, the key is meditation. I’m really being unfair with Neotony, because he’s trying to “think” about the question, and all along I’m pointing him toward a contemplative view which I imagine is quite alien to his entire education. I see a series of videos (probably dozens, hundreds) leading people through teh entire scientific process, from the earliest formulation of a hypothesis, to the setting up of methodology, lit review, statistical analyses and so on, but engaging with this in a contemplative manner.
Physicist Arthur Zajonc has been doing this in schools for decades but as far as I know, none of this is available online. This is what needs to be done as a starting point.
Ya that's the double irony: if science's fan base *actually understood science*, we wouldn't have to have these conversations in the first place!!
I think there is something really valuable here: if we could get BOTH the science crowd AND the religious crowd to realize they are both hallucinating, I think humanity could get this planet back on track! Good luck getting either to even consider the idea though lol
> So I had an idea, I simply announced in my next post, “From here on, I am speaking as an atheist and a physicalist.”
> Within about 30 minutes, that very same philosopher professor came to my defense against another attacker and said, “Well, you know, Don has a point. Nobody in the physicalist world has ever come close to a reasonable, working definition of what “physical” means.
This seems to surreal to be true, but it wouldn't surprise me....I am going to try this trick sometime!
I too used to be a young confident pro-science/engineering materialist, who laughed at "theists" (not knowing I was hallucinating).
Human consciousness consisting of ~75% (who knows lol) seems like one of the best kept secrets going...yet another reason I am skeptical of science.
I think part of what helps is my work as a clinical psychologist. I worked with well over a thousand individuals going through various kinds of psychotic/delusional disorders, so it’s too far from that talking with fundamaterialists!
Not to brag, but I bet I've talked to *easily* 10x that over the many, many years of my internet "trolling".....and, I believe that the patient having zero realization that they are being studied is also advantageous in many ways.
> But I'm not going to explain the unexplainable by "making up stuff"
What about this:
"But making "God did it" an explanation is simply ridiculous."
"do we not have any idea how purely material brains create experience"
See Valentino Braitenberg's *Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology*.
"we can’t explain life in purely material terms"
See the paper titled *Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics*: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0895717794901880
"You can explain how life emerges?"
See Nick Lane's various videos on YouTube. It's not that we know in *exact detail* how Life emerged (on Earth), but we have some ideas about the process which aren't obviously wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWVAyAnrhXU
A problem:
The various papers you link are highly speculative. (See my comment in this thread on motte-and-bailey fallacy).
Note also that an "explanation" has no requirement to be a correct explanation.
See also this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
"The various papers you link are highly speculative."
Braitenberg's book isn't speculative: it is (was) based on his & other researchers' studies on various critters' brains.
The "Life" paper necessarily has some speculative aspects, but supports its arguments with non-speculative analysis of physical phenomena.
Same applies to the linked video: talking about a process not directly observable is necessarily speculative to some extent, but also supported by physical, chemical, geological, & biological research.
"Note also that an "explanation" has no requirement to be a correct explanation."
So true. But to the extent it is correct, it adds to our knowledge of those subjects & has *some* explanatory power.
> Braitenberg's book isn't speculative: it is (was) based on his & other researchers' studies on various critters' brains.
Do they make any assertions of fact?
Do they understand how consciousness works, at least (say) 75%?
> The "Life" paper necessarily has some speculative aspects, but supports its arguments with non-speculative analysis of physical phenomena.
Arguments/propositions are fine, but let's acknowledge that they are that.
> but also supported by physical, chemical, geological, & biological research.
Sure, but that does not guarantee they are correct. Just making that explicit.
> But to the extent it is correct, it adds to our knowledge of those subjects & has *some* explanatory power.
To what extent is it correct, of the whole, in percentage terms?
A naive person (extremely common among science's fan base) might have interpreted you providing those links above in response to the questions as being some sort of a proof of science's knowledge. It wasn't too long ago that posting potentially misinformative information online was considered a big deal.
"Do they make any assertions of fact?"
There are some, yes. For example *Vehicles* starts with the description of *decussation* which is widely prevalent in living beings.
"Arguments/propositions are fine, but let's acknowledge that they are that."
Yes, they're arguments/propositions, some of the retail tools of scientific practice.
"does not guarantee they are correct"
Correctness is possible in mathematics. Scientific theories are always contingent: there's always the possibility of some scientific theory turning out not being *entirely* correct. (The classic example being Newtonian mechanics, where mass is constant vs. Einstein's special relativity, where mass is the function of speed once close to the speed of light).
"To what extent is it correct, of the whole, in percentage terms?"
No one can answer this question.
"as being some sort of a proof of science's knowledge"
I wanted to point to publications which provide *some* scientific knowledge about those questions.
Let's make it explicit: what science has are some theories, and it is not known the degree to which they are correct (which could, due to the level of uncertainty, include them being ~backwards) - do you disagree?
"it is not known the degree to which they are correct"
They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*. Newtonian mechanics was entirely correct as long as we haven't encountered phenomena where relativistic effects appear; once we acquired data (measured phenomena) which falsified the predictions made by Newtonian mechanics, we understood that Newtonian mechanics isn't *entirely* correct.
Yet we still teach Newtonian mechanics to engineering students: Newtonian mechanics is correct to a high degree in the environment for which engineers make designs.
> They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*.
This is scientism, not science. Also: you have no way of knowing how all scientists behave.
> Newtonian mechanics was entirely correct as long as
What is the precise meaning of "entirely" in this context?
> once we acquired data (measured phenomena) which falsified the predictions made by Newtonian mechanics, we understood that Newtonian mechanics isn't *entirely* correct.
So, deterministic physical reality changes does it?
"This is scientism, not science."
How so?
"you have no way of knowing how all scientists behave"
Why should I know how all scientists behave?
"What is the precise meaning of "entirely" in this context?"
We had no knowledge of any phenomena which would have falsified Newtonian mechanics' predictions.
"deterministic physical reality changes"
No, our knowledge of deterministic physical reality changed.
> Why should I know how all scientists behave?
"They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*. "
This is the stated goal of science, but "are treated" refers to the actions of scientists, and you have no way of knowing how all scientists behave.
> We had no knowledge of any phenomena which would have falsified Newtonian mechanics' predictions.
Do you believe that what humans believe is necessarily correct?
Have you encountered this idea before?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption
> No, our knowledge of deterministic physical reality changed.
Above you said:
"They're treated as correct until they're *falsified*. Newtonian mechanics WAS entirely correct...."
Di you mean to say "was BELIEVED TO BE correct"? Because belief of what is is different than what actually is, it just tends to not appear that way, and lost of people are Naive Realists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Na%C3%AFve_realism_(psychology)
Have you studied or conducted research? None of these links are remotely relevant to the point.
First of all, i didn’t say ANYTHING questioning knowledge of process.
Scientism is using process as an explanation.
Do you understand why Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg wrote an article with the title: “Does Science Explain Everything? Anything?”
(And concluded, “no”)
Look up Sir Arthur Eddington’s explanation, in his lectures on “What is Life” of how science works.
When I was conducting research on mindfulness in the treatment of pain, and I had verbal descriptions of people’s experience, what do you think the first thing was that I had to do in order to make this “scientific”?
I had to turn those experiences into numbers.
Now, carefully, think for a second.
Where do those numbers come from?
They come from descriptions of experience.
Now, think a bit longer, really take your time - and ask yourself:
Do those numbers, based on descriptions of experience, explain experience?
Because that’s what you’re saying.
If you don’t realize how irrational that claim is, I’m not sure what else I can say.
To use laws, or processes, which have been converted into numbers, to EXPLAIN anything is like saying:
Why do apples fall?
Because of gravity.
What is gravity?
It’s an abstract model, made up of purely quantitative facts, which we derived from observing apples falling.
Ok, I radically oversimplified this, but I did it to inspire you to really stop and think. I mean, bring to mind everything presented in those videos, and then do a general overview of any scientific experiment you can think of and you’ll realize there’s not one that doesn’t ultimately fit in the description of quantitative abstraction from qualitative experience.
This is why people who claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness don’t understand the hard problem. It’s simple:
We all start from experience.
Science, which is a method created by several geniuses, unique in the history of humanity (which is why I spent all those grueling years in grad school mastering the method), extracts a certain quite limited quantitative facts from experience to help us to have a very limited control and capacity for prediction.
Period.
What I, as a scientist, find most objectionable about the religious faith of scientism is it is so profoundly anti scientific. It makes the beautiful, elegant method of science, one of the great achievements of humanity, into a dull, insipid, absurd, impossible irrational creed that blocks all genuine inquiry. Without this superstitious nonsense, we wouldnt’ have wasted decades with investigations into genetic causation of unproductive sideshows on neural determinism and might have made genuine process in understanding consciousness.
As Planck quite wisely observed, genuine science proceeds funeral by funeral.
"None of these links are remotely relevant to the point."
I'm sorry to hear that.
"research on mindfulness in the treatment of pain"
Interesting. Here's an excerpt from Antonio R. Damasio's *Decartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain*:
Certain neurological conditions involve intense and frequent pain. One example is trigeminal neuralgia, also known as *tic douloureux*. The term neuralgia stands for pain with a neural origin, and the term trigeminal refers to the trigeminal nerve, the nerve which supplies face tissues and which ferries signals from the face to the brain. Trigeminal neuralgia affects the face, generally on one side and in one sector, for instance the cheek. Suddenly an innocent act such as touching the skin or an even more innocent breeze caressing the same skin may trigger a sudden excruciating pain. People afflicted complain of the sensation of knives' stabbing their flesh, of pins sticking in their skin and bone. Their whole lives may become focused on the pain; they can do or think of nothing else while the jabbing lasts, and the jabbing may come on frequently. Their bodies close in a tight, defensive coil.
For patients in whom the neuralgia is resistant to all available medication, the condition is classified as intractable or refractory. In such cases, neurosurgery can come to the rescue and offer the possibility of relief with a surgical intervention. One modality of treatment attempted in the past was prefrontal leucotomy. The results of this intervention illustrate better than any other fact the distinction between pain itself, that is, the perception of a certain class of sensory signals, and suffering, that is, the feeling that comes from perceiving the emotional reaction to that perception.
Consider the following episode, which I witnessed personally, when I was training with Almeida Lima, the neurosurgeon who had helped Egas Moniz develop cerebral angiography and prefrontal leucotomy and in fact had performed the first such operation. Lima, who was not only a skillful surgeon but a compassionate man, had been using a modified leucotomy for the management of intractable pain and was convinced the procedure was justifiable in desperate cases. He wanted me to see an example of the problem from the very beginning.
I vividly recall the particular patient, sitting in bed waiting for the operation. He was crouched in profound suffering, almost immo bile, afraid of triggering further pain. Two days after the operation, when Lima and I visited on rounds, he was a different person. He looked relaxed, like anyone else, and was happily absorbed in a game of cards with a companion in his hospital room. Lima asked him about the pain. The man looked up and said cheerfully: "Oh, the pains are the same, but I feel fine now, thank you." Clearly, what the operation seemed to have done, then, was abolish the emotional reaction that is part of what we call pain. It had ended the man's suffering. His facial expression, his voice, and his deportment were those one associates with pleasant states, not pain. But the operation seemed to have done little to the image of local alteration in the body region supplied by the trigeminal nerve, and that is why the patient stated that the pains were the same. While the brain could no longer engender suffering, it was still making "images of pain," that is, processing normally the somatosensory mapping of a pain landscape. In addition to what it may tell us about the mechanisms of pain, this example reveals the separation between the image of an entity (the state of biological tissue which equals a pain image) and the image of a body state which qualifies the entity image by dint of juxtaposition in time.
----
I found this story fascinating: here are two aspects of pain experience -- one of the 'physical' sensation, which remained in place, & the other is the gruelling 'mental' experience, which was successfully detached from the former by neurosurgical intervention.
Sigh. Can you read this again and see how everything I wrote applies to this.
What, essentially, has Damasio told us?
Has he said one thing about something purely 'physical"? Do you know what "physical" means when scientists are talking it as the foundation of everything in the universe? It's not a thing you see or touch or feel. It's a totally abstract unfindable article of faith. it has no meaning. It means, if anything, "something the nature of which we have no idea, which we can never detect empirically, ,and yet we have utter mindless confidence that it is mindless, unconscious, nonliving, and non intelligent."
What has Damasio talked about? Phenomena appearing in Consciousness. period.
And yet he is utterly deluded into thinking he is talking about some "stuff" that is in complete conflict with the idea of real life, consciousness, etc. This is complete psychotic level denial - and I'm not just throwing words around. If you study the psychiatric literature on levels of detail, you'll see precise definitions of psychotic levels of denial.
None of this can be addressed in a primarily intellectual manner. None of these problems are primarily philosophic but represent deep psychological attachments and fears which are clung to out of a desperate need to affirm one's identity according to various intellectual beliefs.
Now, you're going to respond, once again, to nothing I've written but out of your own preconceptions.
Try something different.
READ Damasio's words and try to find one example of empirical evidence of something outside Awareness. By definition, it can't be done (and I am not talking about a solipsistic personal awareness, simply awareness) but in searching as hard as you can, with as much energy as possible, you may catch a glimpse of what some of the most renowned scientists around the world (including recent nobel prize winners) are doing when they're questioning the philosophic foundations of science that have been taken for granted the past several centuries.
You can start with your last paragraph: substitute "subconscious sensation" for "physical sensation" and substitute "conscious level" experience for mental experience, and you'll see you're talking about different levels of consciousness rather than a dualistic physical/mental reality.
I'm inclined to see you as ignoring what I wrote, but maybe - I hope - I'm wrong.
really, TRY this deep thinking before responding. Set your alarm for 20 minutes - that's not so much, right? I've spent more than 50 years and I think quite accurately estimate a minimum of 25,000 conversations since 1997 on this. I've given presentations on this at philosophy conferences and spent several years putting together 2 of the 18 chapters of a book related to this - those 2 chapters dealing with these issues directly.
You can take just 20 minutes to try hard to grasp what kinds of subconscious beliefs are guiding your thinking and daring to question them.
if you will, if you dare.
"None of this can be addressed in a primarily intellectual manner."
Yet Almeida Lima, the neurosurgeon, was able to improve on the patient's sorry state by detaching the two phenomena from each other, thereby sparing the patient of terrible suffering.
"substitute "subconscious sensation" for "physical sensation""
But the patient's 'physical' sensation of pain wasn't subconscious even after the surgery: he reported "the pains are the same".
I did research on mindfulness and physical pain. How does this work?
Non reactive attention closes the "gate" between the brain and spinal cord that sends messages from the injury to the brain.
I detached the two phenomena (painful injury and the brain) thereby sparing the patient of terrible suffering.
Which part of that occurred outside Awareness (the Awareness within which the entire universe appears to us)?
"outside Awareness (the Awareness within which the entire universe appears to us)?"
That's an interesting problem.
There's this paper: *Habituation in non-neural organisms: evidence from slime moulds*. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2016.0446
From the abstract:
"Learning, defined as a change in behaviour evoked by experience, has hitherto been investigated almost exclusively in multicellular neural organisms. Evidence for learning in non-neural multicellular organisms is scant, and only a few unequivocal reports of learning have been described in single-celled organisms. Here we demonstrate habituation, an unmistakable form of learning, in the non-neural organism Physarum polycephalum. In our experiment, using chemotaxis as the behavioural output and quinine or caffeine as the stimulus, we showed that P. polycephalum learnt to ignore quinine or caffeine when the stimuli were repeated, but responded again when the stimulus was withheld for a certain time."
Apparently even critters which have no neurons can have *experience*, which changes their behaviour.
That is not related to the question on Awareness. What is outside Awareness within which the entire universe appears?
"That is not related to the question on Awareness."
Sure it is: the 1st sentence has the word 'experience' in it.
Experience appears within Awareness.
"I detached the two phenomena (painful injury and the brain) thereby sparing the patient of terrible suffering."
Good for you.
In Lima's case, he effected the detachment by making surgical incision(s) in the frontal lobe, thereby detaching the two kinds of sensations from each other -- not the trigeminal nerve's signal from the brain.
Don Salmon
24 mins ago
I did research on mindfulness and physical pain. How does this work?
Non reactive attention closes the "gate" between the brain and spinal cord that sends messages from the injury to the brain.
I detached the two phenomena (painful injury and the brain) thereby sparing the patient of terrible suffering.
Which part of that occurred outside Awareness (the Awareness within which the entire universe appears to us)?
Good for you.
In Lima's case, he effected the detachment by making surgical incision(s) in the frontal lobe, thereby detaching the two kinds of sensations from each other -- not the trigeminal nerve's signal from the brain.
There is nothing in what you wrote that addresses what our minds can know of that is outside the Awareness in which the universe appears. Look at what is actually here rather than avoiding it by means of labels. Look.
And by the way as predicted (unfortunately) you completely ignored every point I made and simply forged ahead thus supporting - and ultimately proving - everything I wrote.
See if you can come up with something that actually addresses what I write. If you keep writing from within the same mental framework it's going to get rather tiresome to keep saying the same thing in different language.
Maybe I'll just keep quoting the last comment as it seems to cover everything you have written.
> Can you say “tautology?”
The author of the essay is implicitly (and I suspect: cognitively) relying on tautologies as well....I wonder if they even realize!
See also (with respect to scientism):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey").[1] The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, insists that only the more modest position is being advanced.[2][3] Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte)[1] or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).[4]
Ignoring the part where you're wrong about the descriptions you make of the scientific theories, I can still show that a scientific theory is superior to religious doctrine. This theory will have specific testable explanations and predictions. Every scientific theory contains its own criteria for dismissal and is never regarded as an absolute truth. The scientific endeavor is a constant quest to falsify every existing theory so that it can be substituted for one that fits reality better. This heavily contrasts with the dogmatism of religion and the uncritical acceptance of doctrines that are typically immutable and not subjected to empirical testing or revision based on new evidence.
> I can still show that a scientific theory is superior to religious doctrine.
That would depend on the task at hand. Science is excellent at understanding the physical realm, but then it is also excellent at putting advanced technology into the hands of the masses that can destroy that real (see: climate change, contamination of water sources, etc).
> Every scientific theory contains its own criteria for dismissal and is never regarded as an absolute truth.
Your scriptures saying something does not necessarily cause all scientists to become perfectly rational - I encounter scientists presenting theory as fact *regularly*.
> The scientific endeavor is a constant quest to falsify every existing theory so that it can be substituted for one that fits reality better.
See above.
> This heavily contrasts with the dogmatism of religion and the uncritical acceptance of doctrines that are typically immutable and not subjected to empirical testing or revision based on new evidence.
You are describing a strawman &/or (necessarily) your subconscious, sub-perceptual model of "religion". Are many religious people silly? Sure are! Are many scientists and science fans also silly? Sure are!
You're shifting the conversation from the system to the individual. The scientific framework promotes inquiry, understanding, and attachment to reality. It may still produce some silly people. The religious framework promotes dogmatism, escapism, and subservience. It may still produce some good people.
> You're shifting the conversation from the system to the individual.
The system is composed of individuals, so when you make a claim about the system you are also making a claim about all the individuals within it.
> The scientific framework promotes inquiry, understanding, and attachment to reality.
Scientific scripture, sure, but the behavior of scientists is a part of science.
> It may still produce some silly people.
It DOES produce silly people, and you have no way of knowing what percentage are this way....yet you speak as if you do.
> The religious framework
There is not just one religious framework - LOOK HOW BAD YOU ARE AT THINKING!
> promotes dogmatism, escapism, and subservience.
The culture of science seems to somehow produce the same, because I run across people like you every day.
> It may still produce some good people.
So too with science. Which of the two is most net beneficial would make for a good conversation.
>> The scientific endeavor is a constant quest to falsify every existing theory so that it can be substituted for one that fits reality better."
> This comment show me you know nothing about how science works in the real world.
This is funny, because that wasn't my comment, I quoted it so I could note the problem with it.
> Almost no scientist work on falsification or reproduction of results.
It isn't possible for you to know this.
Religious beliefs are not irrational, but necessary to human society, because humans as a group have an ineradicable religious streak. When not channeled into religion this impulse simply resurfaces in another, usually deleterious, form such as dialectical materialism or climate fanaticism. Human nature doesn’t change, at least over the time scale of human history (a few hundred thousand years). Those who have thought deeply about the problem going back thousands of years conclude that religion is essential to human society. If it addresses, and is indeed the product of, a deep human need while helping to preserve society then it is not irrational.
I think perhaps you are mixing up the use of religion with the content of religion, the function and the beliefs. Humans need beliefs about what is moral, the world and their place in it, etc. that is true I think, and it is not irrational to want that. Any individual belief may be irrational to hold, however, as might be the manner in which we compare those beliefs. As you rightly point out, climate fanaticism is a religion which people cling to, but the content is bad: lots of doctrine that cannot be challenged and is seemingly impervious to evidence, with ends that always seem to boil down to "kill all humans". It is rational to want a religion, a world view that gives meaning and fills the religion shaped hole in our lives, but manner in which its content is created, transmitted and retained is irrational.
Note: the implication of this is that there are rational religions people hold, in that the doctrine is held up to scrutiny and carefully thought out, at least so far as any belief about anything is carefully thought out. I am not so optimistic about the high level of rationality of humans in general. :D
To be fair, Bryan is saying that particular religious beliefs (doctrines) are irrational. I maintain that religion as a phenomenon is not irrational since it inheres in humankind and must be considered “a feature, not a bug.” We are talking past each other. But even if “religion” as a whole is not fully rational, so what? Humans aren’t fully rational and never will be. Plainly, rationality cannot displace religion. Neither is a substitute for the other. (Moreover the Aristotelian conception of Christianity insists that religion is founded on reason.) Rational / scientific thought (e.g., cosmology, medicine, physics, econometrics) offers reliable answers to many questions but few of the most fundamental ones.
“But even if “religion” as a whole is not fully rational, so what? “
Irrational doctrine that drives people to irrational behaviors would seem to be the answer to so what. Leaving a carve out for irrational beliefs that one bases morality and value judgements upon is rather a problem. That isn’t to say one has to expect humans to be fully rational, but that religious beliefs/doctrine are held to a much lower bar than anything else. That’s why eg climate cultists function as a religion, a while accepted and unchallengeable belief set that determines morality and virtue around it.
It is actually very rational.
1. Nothing cannot cause something
Therefore
2.Something caused the big bang.
and
3. Because the big bang created time and space, this something exists outside of time and space
4. This make this being incredibly powerful.
5. Now at this point you can stop and declare yourself agnostic, there was a force that created the universe but we don't know much about it.
Perfectly rational.
You may also continue on to
6. Is it likely that this force communicated with his creation?
If you answer yes, then certainly this would be written down. And the all powerful force would not want his message to disappear forever so it must be in one of the world's existing religions.
So then you can take your pick of the religions.
The counter to this..... all of these mathematically impossible things happened randomly... is not logical.
3 doesn’t seem super obvious, as it’s not clear the Big Bang created time and space. Nor is it clear that such things can be created.
Also you switched from calling it “something” to “being” in 4. This might seem minor, but the term “being” implies agency of some sort. Which is the basis for your argument in 6.
There’s no reason to accept 1. It isn’t at all philosophically necessary that the universe mustn’t emerge ex nihilo. Moreover, there’s no reason why, if you do accept the axiom of everything having a cause, it would t also apply to the deity itself, leaving you right back where you started. And no, saying God is ‘outside nature’ doesn’t help you because you’re positing a logical axiom, not a physical one (in our physical universe things do in fact emerge from nothing, e.g. Casimir effects) and God is not exempt from the laws of logic. And if God existed forever, then it’s simpler to posit that the universe in some form (or multiverse as the case may be) existed forever.
> There’s no reason
Present your proof please.
> And if God existed forever, then it’s simpler to posit that the universe in some form (or multiverse as the case may be) existed forever.
Simpler does not guaranteed correctness.
Of course there is a reason to accept 1.
If nothing existed, then there is no something. That is the definition of nothing. Saying "in our universe" is immediately conceding there is something and the comparison fails.
And we do not return to where we start. Positing that there is an immense force beyond our understanding is a very important fact. God is not bound by logic as we understand it.
"6. Is it likely that this force communicated with his creation?"
Let's say we're in a computer simulation. In a sense, the part of god would be played by whoever produced the simulation (maybe as banal as a little kid who was given a sort of "sim universe" computer game and, after choosing laws and initial conditions, let 'er rip). Would that person really care about any such communication? I doubt it.
Really?
If there was an option in Sim City the lets the population know you exist and are helping the city, which gives them a big moral and productivity boost, I think most people would click it.
Especially when you can see the little bits worship you on screen.
I don't think the average person would much give a damn if a bunch of digital bits started to worship them. Many folks might laugh and think it's hilarious. However, some folks with certain personality traits might want to communicate--and those traits are far from worthy of emulating. I'd suggest finding and watching the episode of the original Twilight Zone "The Little People" (S3, EP28), and you'll get the idea.
I’m curious as to Bryan’s 2024 take on the fundamental irrationality of two modern leftist secular religions:
“Global warming is an existential risk and will destroy the planet unless we stop using fossil fuels”
“Woke oppressor/oppressed theory is correct and justifies any actions by the oppressed against their oppressors”
He is a huge fan of Alex Epstein’s *Fossil Future*, which is anti-catastrophist, and pro-fossil fuels. And his recent book *Don’t Be a Feminist* has many essays criticizing wokeness.
Yes, I’m familiar with Bryan’s policy positions here. My question is whether he would consider wokeism and AGWC- belief to be secular religions.
Not sure exactly, but I know he has said that in contemporary America wokeness is far more strident and evangelical than traditional religion.
The link to the *rational irrationality* papers doesn't work for me. I'm very interested in them, though.
We can agree to disagree, you know. Just admit that neither of us knows. It's that easy.
> Just admit that neither of us knows. It's that easy.
From many years of observing atheist and science types: it seems like the opposite of easy for any of them....and if they do do it, it is rarely done without psychological aversion to some degree (they seem not fond of admitting they don't know...if they can even realize it that is).
If someone asserts that something is "irrational", then it might be helpful to explain what "irrational" is supposed to mean.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/rationality-a-libertarian-viewpoint?utm_source=publication-search
I know some people who claim to have received direct revelations while standing in the presence of a deity. I myself have not, nor have I seen evidence that what they claim happened to them did indeed happen to them, so it would be irrational of me to accept their claims as to that deity's opinions as fact.
However, I suppose it would not be irrational of them to accept those supposed opinions as fact based on what they experienced.
Do you believe it is a fact that their experiences were not genuine?
I have no way to determine whether their experiences were genuine or not. Or if so, whether there were unknown components to those experiences that might explain them in other ways than made rational sense to them at the time (e.g. drug-induced psychosis or whatever).
I neither believe nor disbelieve that which can't be proven or disproven.
You have the ability to measure the nature of your mind with this level of accuracy do you? How do you do it? Or were you just describing how it seems?
I'm not going to even pretend that I understand your question. I'm assuming we might have to get into some DesCartes, Hume, Kant, etc. and it's been a little while since I've boned up on that stuff. Have a nice day.
> I neither believe nor disbelieve that which can't be proven or disproven.
I happen to have a hobby of talking to atheists on the internet, and this is a very common claim (another common claim they make is that ALL atheist are this way, as if belonging to a group that has certain defined beliefs/principles causes one to somehow cognitively inherit those principles). However, very often if not usually, they slip up and make implicit or explicit assertions ("There is no God", "X can exist without God", etc) that demonstrate that their read on their own mind is not accurate.
Now you can tell me that this doesn't count or something along those lines.
The claim that "there is no God" is not rational. It's something that we not only don't know, but CAN'T know. It's not testable/falsifiable, if for no other reason than that if there IS a god, it could interfere with my tests, hide the evidence, etc. to make sure that I never found it.
Of course, I haven't made any claim to be rational myself, so you have no way of knowing whether I believe that there's a god or not. Suffice it to say that even if I believe there is a god, I don't believe that god expects me to proselytize on behalf of my belief. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
> The claim that "there is no God" is not rational. It's something that we not only don't know, but CAN'T know.
It cannot be proved as false, but it could turn out to be true (or, there could be some evidence that it is maybe true, but then each individual is biased as to what constitutes "evidence").
Regardless: lots of scientists and atheists make the claim that there's no God, or that there is NO evidence.
> Of course, I haven't made any claim to be rational myself, so you have no way of knowing whether I believe that there's a god or not.
Your conclusion does not logically follow from the premise. I could go through your post history and find examples of you speaking revealingly on the matter (watch out for those claims of nonexistence ("you have no way of knowing")!).
> Suffice it to say that even if I believe there is a god, I don't believe that god expects me to proselytize on behalf of my belief. But that's just me. Your mileage may vary.
Indeed.
But you've kind of avoided my point above entirely....was this an accident?
Not so much an accident as not having any idea what your point is. Have a nice evening.
You were hallucinating.
It's not that the material costs of embracing irrational belief systems are always low; some people make very high sacrifices to spread their religious views (values like martyrdom, crusading, evangelism, and elevated natalism being oriented towards sacrificing personal happiness for the wider propagation of the religion).
Successful religions become widespread precisely because true believers are motivated by such propagative values being a part of the belief system. Such religions also succeed because they incorporate other kinds of norms favored by cultural selection, notably norms that happen to be more closely aligned with the innate psychological needs of individuals and/or with the material interests of institutions that invest in belief propagation. While successful religions can't offer a rational explanation for their world-views or a rational justification for their norms (which does impair their persuasiveness among people who do sharply focus their rational faculties on important philosophical questions), they do offer norms that are more culturally competitive in other respects.
Indeed, a rational ethics must take into account man's innate psychological needs too, so cultural selection is capable of favoring equivalent values even in the absence of rational justifications for them. For some traditional values (especially those emerging in a free society), there is at least a presumption in favor of the value's utility in promoting the happiness of most people. Where irrational traditions become suspect is when the propagative or institutional advantages are driving the cultural selection of a norm at the expense of individual happiness, or when a particular individual has unusual personality traits that imply abnormal requirements for optimizing their pursuit of happiness.
It's also worth noting that many people who think of themselves as secular may still embrace irrational values in much the same manner; there are more than a few secular intellectual cults with congregations at our universities that function very much like quasi-religions; their self-sacrificing evangelism, etc. is clearly recognizable even a supernatural imaginary friend is missing from their belief system.
Religion is not _supposed_ to be rational. Faith is defined as unreasoned, unconditional trust and acceptance.
Being religious can be rational. A true, valid religion gives its adherents many benefits, not least a systematic guide to right action. Most people have neither the time, the interest, nor the brainpower to reason their way to every decision on first principles.
Religion also provides a framework for dealing with the important points of life, birth, maturity, marriage and children, and death.
With all due respect, this statement shows almost 0 knowledge of the philosophy of religion, and the actual arguments that theists give for the existence of God. I realize theistic philosophers like Feser and Koons weren’t as active back then, but there was still a great deal of literature you should have engaged before asserting that religious belief is irrational.
If a physicists or hard scientist has a criticism of religion, I'll listen. For economists, who insist on so much dogma despite evidence staring them in the face, to criticize it is really quite rich. Compared to the neoclassical economics, the Nicene Creed is a model of rationality. At least it doesn't demand I believe in things I see not happening, right now.
Excellent! As the physicist Richard Feynman said, "I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned." When you ask a religious person a difficult question, they invariably respond, "You just have to have faith." Faith: a five-letter dirty word that is used as a club to short-circuit honest inquiry which might lead to actual truth being uncovered.
I don't care if people want to believe in some imaginary sky creature(s), but I DO take exception when they act all smug and morally superior. Never forget, when the Germans savaged their way across Europe in WWII, they wore belt buckles emblazoned with "Gott Mit Uns". Religion is a tool for rationalizing slaughter.
It's not only the case that people have religious beliefs because such beliefs have low cost; people have religious beliefs also because they provide benefits.
"There is a tendency among rationalists to view “beliefs” as mental objects whose exclusive function is to represent reality from which it follows that beliefs should be evaluated solely according to their veracity and evidential basis. But on the other hand, it could be argued that “beliefs” are for *doing* and that, therefore, it often makes more sense to ask what is it that those beliefs do in practice."
https://triangulation.substack.com/i/48429047/epistemic-and-instrumental-rationality
Obviously “religion” as a general term isn’t true, as there are many contradictory religions. It is also kind of meaningless to argue against “religion” in general, because what exactly are you arguing against? Any given argument may be valid against one religion but not another. We all agree that much of what comes under that umbrella is nonsense (though maybe we disagree about which bits). But materialism also doesn’t explain much of life experience, including some very specific experiences I have had, so I will also have to reject pure materialism. What is left is a search for truth that is greater than just “science,” and is obligated to include at least a bit of “religion,” maybe one religion, but certainly not all of religion.
It was briefly mentioned that secular religious practices are taking the place of traditional religions. This is both for fellowship and for superstitions. If you study the real reason for the tradition of separation of church and state you can justify a rewarding of that tradition or even a rewording of the First Amendment in light of the changing beliefs. The deeper understanding of the Separation of Church and State is that it has nothing to do with God. Buddhists don’t believe in God, but the tradition of Separation of Church and State would not let that group have a shortcut to power. The tradition of Separation has to do with shortcuts that groups which have beliefs, can use to get the power of the state on their side. The shortcut is the respectability in what philosophers refer to as unfalsifiability: the quality of a fact or belief where even the opponents agree it is not capable of being proved false. “Inequality is bad.” That is unfalsifiable. “Murder is bad” is not an unfalsifiable fact. It can be falsified. It can be argued that murder might be good for society. Logic and history can be used to show that it is not, however. The point is, there are both unfalsifiable and falsifiable facts. One can be argued in a deliberative body. The other cannot. The one that cannot be proved false can either be:
• never considered or
• if allowed consideration it is self-enacting.
It is the "never considered" option that the Separation of Church and State is about. So the re-wording of the First Amendment should have the word unfalsifiable in there in some way. Not the word religion.