Richard Dawkins - Anti -Christ or Great Thinker?

Ogmor otm ppl who like to talk about free will always pretend they've been asked something about free will listen yacuncha can u fix my boiler or not

Thought experiment:

Scientists invent a working teleportation device. the device scans you, beeps three times, then instantaneously vaporizes your cells and within the same instant perfectly reconstitutes them in another location.

you walk into one teleportation portal with red walls, hear beep beep beep, and then your body is teleported to another portal with blue walls.

do you ever see the blue walls?

would you ever step foot into such a machine? if not, why not?

nah, because it wouldn't be me, obv

thought koan? what is the self controlling in self-control?

are instants a thing?

your self is destroying possible future selves obv

nah, because it wouldn't be me, obv

can you specify which question you are answering? also, do you believe in a materialist basis for consciousness? also, why is "it wouldn't be me" "obv" to you? are you the same person when you wake up as when you go to sleep?

I'm all for refilming The Prestige as a Star Trek prequel. So many dead Shatners.

lol ok i know yall are using "obv" as a rhetorical flourish but NOTHING IS OBVIOUS TO ME wrt these questions

thought experiment:

it is the year 2017 and someone asks 'you' to try a thought experiment, are you free to say yes? will it be worthwhile? how can either the person who began reading this post or the one who will finish reading it be sure?

are instants a thing?

― ogmor, Saturday, March 11, 2017 3:11 PM (three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

any interval of time shorter than the frequency at which your consciousness can process info (time it would take for light to travel a centimetre, say) would do (i think)

i remain not only unconvinced but also uninterested

it's more fun to write out that idea in thought experiment form than to explain it but i can do that too... maybe I'll wait until after someone less grumpy actually answers it though :)

xp- good for you

can you specify which question you are answering?

my answer was to step foot into the machine

i assume my cells are not reconstituted out of the same atoms but out of atoms somehow cobbled together in the second portal

and my concern would be that this reconstituted me, based on my blueprint, would not be me because it was not made of the exact same stuff

which isn't something i would assert as certain knowledge but enough to frighten me from using the machine

yes "obv" was rhetorical flim-flam :)

to the objection that all my bodily components are reconstituted of new stuff over time i would probably mumble something about "over time" being the difference from an instantaneous and total reconstitution

i feel like whatever "me" is, assuming it makes sense to talk of "me", which it does grammatically but i'm not at all sure it does beyond grammar, but still, if i wanted to get at some definition of "me" i think it would involve a unique and theoretically definable sequence of events in a theoretically mappable section of space/time and that the impossibility of two entities occupying the same bit of space/time simultaneously is basically what makes each entity a unique special snowflake, a "me" self-identified

I've posed this thought experiment to people who claim to have cavalier materialist conception of consciousness, and almost none of them say they would step in the machine! i see it as an unwillingness to put even the slightest bit of 'skin in the game' ("obvs" such a machine doesn't currently exist and likely never will--i think it defies the second law of thermodynamics by a Maxwell's demon-type argument--and certainly never will within their lifetime!) "revealing" they are full of shit and believe in the metaphysical conception of consciousness

i think my "specific bit of space-time" idea is an attempt to save a materialist conception whilst keeping me out of the machine

Could we get back to shitting Richard Dawkins head here, as is only right and proper?

I revived FREE WILL in the vague hope we could all drift over there and continue this wheel spinning in a thread that contains several more interesting takes on this subject than anything yet forwarded here (including myself in that assessment btw).

BUSTED

http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/5/58496/1588748-thread_police_badge.jpg

i had no choice but to keep posting in this one tbh

talking abt free will is beyond terrible but it's better than having to pay any attention whatever to dawkins

talking abt epicurus would be better than either tho

If you remember stepping into the red machine as you and coming out of the blue one as you then its you is my boiler fixed yet

yes """you""" remember

if i knew how to fix boilers i'd have enough money to be out on the lash of a saturday night

i see it as an unwillingness to put even the slightest bit of 'skin in the game'

It isn't. My consciousness is a process on the hardware, but my drive towards self-preservation isn't a drive to preserve the information, its a drive for continuity of my process. It doesn't matter so much to me if another Sanpaku forks off in some person replicator (particularly if distant), but it does matter to the continuity of me if my process is terminated.

oh shit your post reminds me i forgot there's another half to the Thought Experiment (sorry Aimless) (been a while since I've thought about this)

NOW what if you used the teleporter as a duplicator? so you stay looking at the red, while a perfect copy of you sees blue? inconceivable that you would get a 'bonus' consciousness, right?

i love when teleporters and time travel et al come into these discussions. even science is not immune to the allure of the fantastic. this is only natural, fantasies and lore being an inescapable part of all human culture.

Teleportation and time travel are part of the ramp to get lay folk thinking about the fallacy of individuality and the utterly mutable nature of "self" in the real world. Etc etc

http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/05/058c2cf99a1b07e689821d77a4e8e9d86ba2cd8f7e578670b75d77a1e081e8c8.jpg

(Only 12 people the rest are all paste, etc. wait who are those secret folks in the Torah or something who change the world but nobody notices?)

is this what you're thinking of? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzadikim_Nistarim

has anyone here read "The Swerve"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swerve:_How_the_World_Became_Modern

i have it, but it is difficult to read. he is really very evangelical about this superiority of science over superstition, and it frequently gets in the way of the writing. postulating the Renaissance-era discovery of some lost Latin philosophy by Epicurus and the formation of classical humanism, etc. i want to read this tho, because the writer has written a lot about Shakespeare and seems to be well researched, even if he is a bit too all-forgiving of this trip of the superiority of Latin Classical Western Civilization. in the intro he claims the Renaissance and English Humanism solved all of our problems, basically declining to even address the ravages of post-Renaissance techno-colonialism.

i have only gotten a few chapters in so far. the book hunter he writes about who discovered this Epicurus thing is an independently wealthy church-educated scribe. he used to work for the pope and later he retired and became a hipster. he wrote letters about how hypocritical other monks were, how they never did any real work. yet after his church gigs he lived the trust fund life, travelling around at a time when it was extremely costly to do so, looking for rare books, things that feed into his Latin Superiority complex. he found the Epicurus book in a monastery in Germany, where he lived for three years but declined to learn the language because it was barbaric compared to Latin. during one of his pro-humanism rants, Greenblatt sympathetically describes this independently wealth ex-secretary of the pope as a "layman".

still, there is a lot of interesting stuff in it. things about early book technology, how writings were erased, how some books may end up with multiple layers of text, containing hidden books. i didn't know exactly where to put this but he seems very much on the Rationalism tip.

Dawkins has been preaching from the pulpit for an autocracy in recent months. I am slightly surprised and saddened by this even though I shouldn't be. I stopped hating Dawkins about 10 years ago after the initial enthusiasm upon reading TGD was followed by a brief youthful misguided moral rebellion against him. It's hard to dislike a man who writes about nature with the lucidity of Dawkins.

Adam, see if you can hunt down a copy of a book called The Archimedes Codex. You might like it. It has masses of info about retrieving ancient mss from parchment that had been scraped and repurposed by monks ("palimpsests", to use the technical term, a word which has been badly abused by mobs of pedestrian writers in search of a cheap metaphor).

palimpsest is also fun to say though

Palimpsest is a total shibboleth

Ha, i just finished The Swerve. It's fine light reading. It's an intellectual history for a general audience, not sure addressing the "ravages of post-Renaissance techno-colonialism" really needed to be on the agenda for such a book or what it has to do with Lucretius when the particular line he's tracing ends in Montaigne and Bruno. I mean if you want to blame Lucretius for colonialism I'd be really interested to see that argument!

i was under the impression that the main theme of this book is that Latin philosophy fundamentally altered the world and we forever turned away from superstition into a post-religious Modernity. in the preface he mentions that popular artists render that shift with dramatic images saying "in the Americas, the truly fateful action was not the unfurling of a banner but the first time that an ill and infectious Spanish sailor, surrounded by wondering natives, sneezed or coughed." yet all you have to do is follow those Spanish sailors back home, where to their superiors they reported a continent full of violent cannibals, capitalizing on prejudice and rationally justifying the ensuing genocide of future expeditions.

it just seems funny to say "this stuff fundamentally changed the world" and then actually ignore what happened in the world

the main theme of this book is that Latin philosophy fundamentally altered the world and we forever turned away from superstition into a post-religious Modernity

would be down to read a book about this but it's mostly about how Lucretius was re-discovered and then, like, a few chapters on how his ideas were later received and disseminated by some important figures. and that's kinda...it. it's a very slight book.

Anyway, that author may consider Lucretius to be a Roman or "Latin" philosopher, but everything that Lucretius wrote was based directly on the observations of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. (flounces away)

remember this you cranky old ass hole ahaha @RichardDawkins pic.twitter.com/ZRGtNvsFoQ

— leon (@leyawn) September 13, 2014

Philosophers happily speak of “continental philosophy.” What science department would appoint a professor to teach “continental chemistry”? pic.twitter.com/4PO3bEwWsH

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) August 19, 2017

And it's not even the first time he's said this!

As always it's not that he's not otm it's that he's a dick

Philosophers' historic failure to anticipate Darwin is a severe indictment of philosophy. Happy Darwin Day!

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 12, 2014

All philosophy a footnote to Plato? I’m sincerely curious why Plato is so revered. What was he actually right about? I’m honestly ignorant.

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 22, 2015

Great thinker at work here.

"Whether it's immanence or transcendence". Just heard that gem on the BBC Sunday Morning Idiot Rally. What do those words actually MEAN?

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) March 24, 2013

The failure of anyone in the scientific community to anticipate Newton is a severe indictment of science? Uh, no.

The failure of medical science to anticipate Pasteur is a severe indictment of medical science? Uh, no.

The failure of physics to anticipate Einstein is a severe indictment of physics? Uh, no.

The failure of Richard Dawkins to understand when he is talking nonsense is a severe indictment of Richard Dawkins? BINGO!

historic failure to anticipate Darwin

what does this even mean? is he saying early science did not prophesy that a Darwin would come? is he saying there is nothing leading up to Darwin? that would be false as there are many precedents to Darwin and evolutionary theory and scientific biology in early science, in early philosophy, and in Eastern and Western traditions. or is purely this some sort of inter-departmental squabble that is impenetrable to anyone outside an Academic career path?