Fear of death.

Science deals with approximations that change over time, so there is no risk ever in being proven wrong. Because proving things wrong is part of the process! There is often no capital-T truth for all time declared.

This is about right - there are falsifiable claims (IE theory X says Y should happen and if Y doesn't happen then theory X is wrong) and then there's "Well we've tested this 1,000,000 times and it's been right every time, it's safe to build stuff around it"

People don't give religion this leeway. They say it is wrong because it should be the capital-T truth and the flaws in doctrine are all examples why the whole thing is irrelevant.

Religion doesn't claim it though - it is the truth but it is not susceptible to disproof.

no, cause i don't want to explain speciation and cladistics and tell you all about the voyage of the beagle

anyway that's inductive reasoning my friend, not deductive

xpost to contenderizer

it would be as much of a rabbit hole w/r/t consciousness as getting into the hows and whys of computer programming

ftr:

darwin developed his theory (at least in part) by looking at animals and noticing that they were well-adapted to the peculiarities of their environments.

in studying the evolution of biological forms, we look at the fossil record not just for changes in anatomy, but for evidence of changes in environment that might have something to do with those changes in anatomy.

that's all i said in the post you freaked at, and it's all true.

anyway that's inductive reasoning my friend, not deductive

come on, you're splitting hairs now. the incident of the first fire is inductively used to generate a conclusion about fires in general. the general conclusion is deductively to generate a theory about the second fire. there's no point in getting hung up in silly minutia like this.

no, cause i don't want to explain speciation and cladistics and tell you all about the voyage of the beagle

the conceit of this is breathtaking. there's been no need in the discussion to go into speciation and cladistics. but we can talk about whatever you want, if you want.

but see, you're saying things that aren't true!

darwin developed his theory by noticing similarities, not differences, and a lot of the differences he found - tortoise shells, for example, on the different galapagos islands - didn't correlate to environmental factors, finches beaks' aside

similarly in california we observe very different salamanders in the north and south of california but very similar salamanders in the northern coast and northern inland forests, which we explain by nothing the existence of an ancient ocean in the central valley which once connected the populations on the northern coast and northern inland, and a historically inhospitable hot and dry range that separated northern and southern salamanders

all of this is based in patterns of coloration and markings on different species of salamanders and not on adaptations to different environment

anyway i don't feel like i'm getting caught up silly minutiae here, do you?

i think we need to bring the discussion back to how we can cheat death by storing engrams on dried coconuts.

the problem w/ that thinking is that the process of evolution is not clear to us nor does it have a beginning and end

it does not shape biological systems to their environment, because the environment can change much more rapidly than animals can

going back a while, the process does not have to be clear to us, or have a beginning and end, for us to speculate productively about its mechanics. it's not a field of complete mystery.

and we understand, when we speak of evolution, that both the gene pool and the environment are in constant flux. to say that biology "shapes itself" to environment in response the pressure exerted by natural selection, we're not suggesting that a perfect balance has or can be struck. we're simply describing general workings of the mechanism. i don't pretend i'm putting forth an ironclad argument when i suggest that conscious awareness likely provides (or provided) some survival or reproductive advantage, some competitive improvement that was selected for in the human population. it's just a speculation, a hypothesis that i know will be all but impossible to test.

Getting sued by a robot for pouring hot oatmeal on its head was where I realized this thread got really intense.

ok i get what you're saying contenderizer

i feel like what keeps happening on this endless merry-go-round of a thread is that i keep saying "wiggle room for magic!" and people come back at me w/ unconnected bits of *unimpeachable science* (computers, evolution, EEGs) on which they hang the "no room for magic!" argument, via this tricky slight of hand of "we can explain x w/o magic which we then extend to y by drawing analogies between x and y"

i guess for my part i always get really sad when i look at comments boxes on articles about stuff like higgs bosons and evolutions because they are full of deep thinkers who seem to enjoy worrying and harassing people for their engagement w/ the magical, immanent, sublime, etc aspects of life

and i always think "jeez, how sad, why would anybody want to pick on these people like that, much less use poor paraphrases of what they saw on discovery channel last week to tear them down"

see that's an argument by analogy too though

i feel like what keeps happening on this endless merry-go-round of a thread is that i keep saying "wiggle room for magic!" and people come back at me w/ unconnected bits of *unimpeachable science* (computers, evolution, EEGs) on which they hang the "no room for magic!" argument, via this tricky slight of hand of "we can explain x w/o magic which we then extend to y by drawing analogies between x and y"

yeah, i like that. and i see why were at cross purposes. i'm not trying to shoot down magic, though i'm more likely to cling to what sounds "science-y" than to leap off after the mystical.

fwiw, i think there's an almost ridiculous amount of room for magic and the unknown in most things. science does a good job of backing up its claims, which inclines certain people to sneer at anything spiritual or magical, but as someone (ledge?) was saying upthread, science can't claim to know anything about what it doesn't directly measure. to say that a molecule has this mass or size does nothing to deny its possession of a soul.

i'm about 60/40 on consciousness being data processing rather than straight-up magic, but no more than that...

i will tell you what, i'm definitely more comfortable splitting hairs on science than on magic

i'm glad nobody's asked me yet what i think consciousness is, or what this screen is that i seem to feel everything around me projected on to (my "me") if it's not just a handy illusion created by a busy computer in our heads

i would have to throw up my hands and say "... magic?"

you are all robots and i pour oatmeal on all of yous

I know people baulk at the term 'magic' but you're right, it absolutely is. And it's the lens through which we see everything. I suppose that's how we so easily overlook it, it's so familiar, so transparent. It's so easy to look through we forget it's there at all.

While we're in the market for tortured analogies.

felt like i crossed a hurdle of maturity when i moved from asking "why are these scientists, philosphers and other intelligent people i respect not die-hard atheists?" to "why are these scientists, philosphers and other intelligent people i respect not die-hard atheists?"

if you know what i mean

and not to call anybody immature, maybe i just mean a hurdle of understanding

If you really meant to repeat the same question then I really don't know what you mean!

one quasi-magical way to think around the brain-as-computer thing is to conceive of life as nothing more than the urge towards. the urge to move towards food, light, warmth, reproductive opportunity, love, god, whatever, etc. the life urge = the towards-ness urge.

if we break it down that way, then the little ameoba-animal doesn't have to be a soulless machine "gathering data about its environment", it can instead be a little guy who knows nothing but a desire to be towards the light. though he's got no language or even thought, really, it's like the light is a shining happy face and he's all set when he's pointed at it, in the slough when he's not.

that model makes conscious awareness inseparable from life, no matter how simple the life. life is happy when it's getting what it's supposed to be towards, unhappy when it isn't, and everything else is just elaboration on that. doesn't seem that much less reasonable than the gradually self-aware computer model.

i just mean i moved from "what's a matter with these people" to "what might they possibly know that i don't?"

it's kind of like that mark twain joke - i'm not sure how it happened, but somehow my father got much smarter when i moved from my 20s into my 30s

i'm still a die-hard atheist yo!

both of my parents are "scientists" and so are many of my grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc

i was raised in a deeply religious family, though there was never any sort of fundamentalism at play, and they adhere to a fantastically vague and pluralistic religion in the first place

i was always fascinated that they could be scientists and still entertain these very vague and "magical" notions, but as i've gotten older, it's seemed less superstitious and more self-evident

there's this article about an anthropologist asking otherwise rational evangelicals why they had a personal relationship with Jesus. It turned out it was because they were literally hearing his voice. so she figured out the reason.

LOL

xps: i've found it increasingly easy to square a perception of a sort of open-ended, non-doctrinal "magic" with my fundamentally materialist atheism as i've aged. the world is the world, and that parts of it that science covers are clearly highly scientific. the rest is or at least can be something else.

magic isn't the right word though, not for me. it's too heavily coded. "the whole of things" works better, as it puts its arms around both what can be nailed down and what can't.

weird part is that i still consider myself an atheist. i feel i'd be lying if i said i wasn't. it's important to me.

at the same time, if you ask me whether or not i believe in god, then i feel i have to say i do. even Jesus. yes.

i should find the doublethink troubling, but i don't. at all. but i don't hear anyone in my head. feel kind of ripped off, tbh.

i jokingly tell people im a "spiritual materialist"--in that i dont believe in any religion or God or benevolent spirit but i dont think any of this shit is real either.

lol

you have to practice to hear jesus.

here's article for more info:
http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=54818

you have to practice to hear jesus.

i heard that lady on NPR talking to Terry Gross. While I scoff at this 'talking to God' idea a bit, Terry Gross needs to expend a bit more effort in not making her scoffing so obvious on the air.

that's a really interesting article.

personally, i've found that it's remarkably easy to cultivate faith, to create and nurture seemingly productive relationships with spiritual entities (or forces or states or w/e). you just have to devote yourself to it and not hold back. being an atheist, i found myself standing half outside belief even as i poured energy into it, but that proved to be a much smaller barrier than i expected.

the big eventual obstacle for me was that my faith was a solitary practice, so it waned as my interests shifted to other things. still, useful lesson. you can make yourself believe stuff just by deciding to, and the stuff you've decided to believe in will eventually come to seem as real and powerful as you need it to be.

i think a lot of my belief in god comes from "holy rolling" ;-)

but seriously i feel ... something ... as strongly, and at least as often, as i feel my fear of death or my atheism.

now pardon as i reason from analogy

a lot of times it occurs to me that the universe is probably cyclical, and that when i die i'll just come back, and next time i'll experience ledge, and then maybe the next cycle i'll experience contenderizer, and then the time after that my dog, and then maybe a rock, or a plant, etc etc, which handily solves the solipsism problem. and i feel this w/ all the seriousness that i feel when i'm in my "i'm going to die!" phase.

other times i figure there's no reason to think the subjective experience of dying might not be much deeper than we experience. who's to say it's like falling asleep? what if it's like falling into a black hole? what if it's like the tibetan book of the dead? what if ledge and contenderizer and philip and i, we're all just like finger puppets that have forgetten we're part of the same hand maaaaan.

and other times i figure who's to say i'm not a recent epiphenomenon on a nearby layer of the 10-brane?

i meant to say "much deeper than what we imagine"

a (very smart) religious friend told me once that doubt is a very important component of faith (it's meaningless without it). if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

in any case, what I liked about what he said is that it implies the converse: to be an atheist or a materialist implies that vacillation as well, that doubt. as Emerson says, “There is the incoming or the receding of God: that is all we can affirm; and we can show neither how nor why." (sorry im quoting all over the place lately)

]we're all just like finger puppets that have forgetten we're part of the same hand maaaaan.

love this one so much! you have to have a table handy so you can make the fingertips look all isolated before you go for the big reveal. ideally they would have little hats, too.

and just to add: that "double bind" of faith/doubt isn't pathological as far as I'm concerned, but kinda the productive power of religious or spiritual or mystical thinking.

oh wow i like that ryan!

one thing i always forget is that the physical science of mind is very new. it really makes you wonder what our beliefs will look like from the same distance in perspective that cern has on democritus, or caek on galileo.

if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

i don't know. all i know is that i found within myself, during a period of terrible despair, a willingness to sort of "talk to the universe". in talking to the universe, i chose - very consciously - a thing/person/god that i would talk to, a divinity that made sense to me and that i could relate to. it made me very happy to do this, though it didn't really change my fundamental sense of the nature of reality. it's not like i suddenly saw some burning truth in the center of the void. rather, i found value in extending myself into the void and being open to whatever might be in there willing to answer back. i knew that whatever i might imagine i "heard" (felt, really), could be me as easily as gee-oh-dee god, but i didn't care. it felt good to open up to something larger than myself.

over time, i've flexed this capacity or willingness in various ways. i believe totally in what i am doing and what i am communicating with, but that doesn't prevent me from not believing in anything (i still don't), and i remain certain that my belief is something that i am creating. it doesn't have anything to do with the world outside me. it hasn't just "happened to me", like a headache or love at first sight. it's more like an inernal fire that i can stoke if i want to. and while i definitely get something out of feeding it, i don't always need or want to. it's weird, really.

it's spiritual and in a sense even "religious" because i say it is, and who can tell me different?

that sounds like a very cool experience. the closest i've ever come to something like that is a certain belief that everything is gonna be "OK" -- even if the worst happens.

yeah that sounds like it would be reassuring in tough moments.

i was going to post something strikingly intelligent on this thread but then i watched the clip of dug and my brain melted onto the floor.

also you can imagine the capacity for religious imagination as an adaptive property. all other things being equal, it's probably a bit easier to procreate when you aren't consumed with existential despair.

magic isn't the right word though, not for me. it's too heavily coded. "the whole of things" works better, as it puts its arms around both what can be nailed down and what can't.

― contenderizer, Friday, July 13, 2012 6:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think 'magic' is a terrible word that connotes deception and fakery. The first compound that comes to mind is 'magic trick'. Plus i think alot of what is described as magic is simply logical, physical stuff that is just beyond the reach of modern science. Give it a few hundred more years. The rest of what is described as magic is the impenetrable layer of real abstraction that we mostly ignore on a day to day basis.

Show an iPhone to Benjamin Franklin and he'd be convinced you were allies of Satan.

a (very smart) religious friend told me once that doubt is a very important component of faith (it's meaningless without it). if you're just believing because you "decided to" i think that's actually something I'd want to distinguish from a spiritual or religious belief. in fact the whole "deciding to" gives certainty the lie, no?

If simply deciding something made it a lie then what of deciding to be an atheist?

Doubt's importance is likely overstated to give your atheist friends some evidence that you aren't a complete moron even though you believe in God.

For me the point of using the word 'magic' is to shock people (me included) out of complacency. Consciousness is wonderful, extraordinary, mysterious, and although it's not supernatural by any means, it's still beyond the common conception of 'natural' pushed by most materialists & scientists.

just because it's beyond full comprehension at present doesn't mean it's beyond "the common conception of 'natural.'" weather patterns were beyond comprehension a few centuries ago, as was the relationship of the sun, moon, and earth.