Why Atheists Don’t Really Exist

[blü 2]

The realm of physics, mathematics and logic, is human consciousness, of which they are emergent phenomena.

I recognize consciousness as one of the possible conditions of a working brain.

The realm of physics is the world external to the self, the natural world.

I agree that mathematics and formal logic are manipulations of concepts rather than things with objective existence.

I take 'emergent' to refer to new qualities emerging from unforeseen arrangements of the possible biological elements. Is that what you mean?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I recognize consciousness as one of the possible conditions of a working brain.

The realm of physics is the world external to the self, the natural world.

I agree that mathematics and formal logic are manipulations of concepts rather than things with objective existence.

I take 'emergent' to refer to new qualities emerging from unforeseen arrangements of the possible biological elements. Is that what you mean?

You can't see or point to physics. It is a non-real abstract concept in your brain just like God.

The problem is that you take your own abstract concepts for granted and complain when others do that.

 

[blü 2]

This morning I observed the head of a dragon in the clouds passing overhead. Was it real?

Taking your statement at face value, the cloud was real, but the resemblance to a head of a dragon was not the head of a real dragon, but the association of the shape of the cloud with a similar image in your brain. In other words, even had a classical firebreathing dragon with objective existence been possible, no such dragon was involved.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Taking your statement at face value, the cloud was real, but the resemblance to a head of a dragon was not the head of a real dragon, but the association of the shape of the cloud with a similar image in your brain. In other words, even had a classical firebreathing dragon with objective existence been possible, no such dragon was involved.

You in effect: The cloud is real, physical and natural.
Okay, how do you see that?

 

[RestlessSoul]

Yeah, in formal terms science could also be done as a form of phenomenology, coherence and pragmatic without this insistence on in effect metaphysics, ontology and realism.

There are those scientists who believe like Einstein and Hawking, that the purpose of science is to offer a full description of the universe and it’s workings. There are others, utilitarians and instrumentalists, who think this is an unnecessary diversion, and still others, often those working in the counterintuitive arena of QM, who consider it impossible.

‘Shut up and calculate’ is a phrase that’s been attributed to both David Mermin and Richard Feynman; it’s intention may or may not have been ironic, but it’s implication is “forget underlying fundamental reality, focus on making predictions.”
A common rejoinder (don’t know who coined this one), is “shut up and contemplate.”

 

[blü 2]

You in effect: The cloud is real, physical and natural.
Okay, how do you see that?

With my eyes, since with me it's an axiom that my senses are capable of informing me of the equally axiomatic world external to my self.

How do you see clouds, trees, street names, oncoming cars, your computer keyboard and so on?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

With my eyes, since with me it's an axiom that my senses are capable of informing me of the equally axiomatic world external to my self.

How do you see clouds, trees, street names, oncoming cars, your computer keyboard and so on?

But I don't see axioms.
Here is an axiom to end all axioms and definitions: When I define a word to act as an axiom in my brain, that makes it a fact outside my brain.
Will you accept that as how to do it?

 

[RestlessSoul]

I recognize consciousness as one of the possible conditions of a working brain.

The realm of physics is the world external to the self, the natural world.

I agree that mathematics and formal logic are manipulations of concepts rather than things with objective existence.

I take 'emergent' to refer to new qualities emerging from unforeseen arrangements of the possible biological elements. Is that what you mean?

That aspects of consciousness register as electromagnetic impulses in the brain, does not infer that they originate their; it doesn't answer the question of which has priority, the thought or the electromagnetic impulse. Nor does it explain why physical processes are accompanied by the sensation of experience.

Physics is a discipline, a natural philosophy, developed by humans to further understanding of an objective world they can only ever experience subjectively. Physics itself is a conception of human thought, though it's intended subject matter may not be.

I mean emergent as in emerging from. In this case, science, mathematics, reason and logic, are dependent on consciousness, and not the other way round. Roger Penrose disagrees; he has argued that mathematics exists independently of the human mind, as a kind of Platonic ideal which is nevertheless fundamentally real. Something intrinsic to the fabric universe, like time and space. There are other scientists and philosophers who make similar arguments for consciousness. David Chalmers is one.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

That aspects of consciousness register as electromagnetic impulses in the brain, does not infer that they originate their; it doesn't answer the question of which has priority, the thought or the electromagnetic impulse. Nor does it explain why physical processes are accompanied by the sensation of experience.

Physics is a discipline, a natural philosophy, developed by humans to further understanding of an objective world they can only ever experience subjectively. Physics itself is a conception of human thought, though it's intended subject matter may not be.

I mean emergent as in emerging from. In this case, science, mathematics, reason and logic, are dependent on consciousness, and not the other way round. Roger Penrose disagrees; he has argued that mathematics exists independently of the human mind, as a kind of Platonic ideal which is nevertheless fundamentally real. Something intrinsic to the fabric universe, like time and space. There are other scientists and philosophers who make similar arguments for consciousness. David Chalmers is one.

Well, I can get as far with physicalism as to emergent from, but not reducible to.
Here is a fun one. I was once in a debate with a scientist, who claimed that when I am wrong, there is an actual ontological physical property of being wrong in my brain. But he couldn't explain how he confirmed that with science, but none the less it was an objective fact.

 

[RestlessSoul]

With my eyes, since with me it's an axiom that my senses are capable of informing me of the equally axiomatic world external to my self.

How do you see clouds, trees, street names, oncoming cars, your computer keyboard and so on?

I consider it axiomatic that my mind interprets information picked up by my senses, to provide me with a symbolic model of the world external to me, which is realistic enough to enable me to navigate it. I have other axioms; that my senses are capable of registering only a fraction of the information all around me; and that the separation of my internal and external worlds is an illusion.

What we see as clouds and dragons and birds and rain, trees and rivers and fields, are waves in space, particles flickering in and out of existence, fluctuations in a field. The alchemist mind, it seems, constructs the former from the latter.

 

[blü 2]

That aspects of consciousness register as electromagnetic impulses in the brain, does not infer that they originate their;

Yes it does. There is no other credible possibility, whether we look at the brainwaves of humans or birds or elsewhere. They're the product of the constant biochemical / bioelectrical interactions in working brains. There's nothing magic about them.

it doesn't answer the question of which has priority, the thought or the electromagnetic impulse. Nor does it explain why physical processes are accompanied by the sensation of experience.

Yes it does. It's those biochemical / bioelectrical interactions that constitute thought. Why else are they there, do you say?

Physics is a discipline, a natural philosophy, developed by humans to further understanding of an objective world they can only ever experience subjectively.

That's true. It's part of scientific method to maximize objectivity, but perfection isn't possible. Even the choice of subject, the ordering of priorities, the devising of the experimental regime, involve subjective decisions. But the task being defined, the answer will be as objective as possible, and good enough to put rovers on Mars, vaccines for Covid in your metabolism, the Higgs boson's reality in your physics book, and so on.

Physics itself is a conception of human thought, though it's intended subject matter may not be.

Indeed.

I mean emergent as in emerging from. In this case, science, mathematics, reason and logic, are dependent on consciousness, and not the other way round.

Well, you certainly have to be conscious to engage in them personally. But consciousness is simply a particular condition of the working brain, in contrast to unconsciousness, sleep, malfunction, death and so on.

Have you read up on how anesthetics work? Research on the subject got serious in the 1940s, but the important breakthroughs have come in the last ten years.

Roger Penrose disagrees; he has argued that mathematics exists independently of the human mind, as a kind of Platonic ideal which is nevertheless fundamentally real.

Yes, I know. For someone so genuinely clever, he can be remarkably dumb.

Something intrinsic to the fabric universe, like time and space.

No, once again I disagree with Penrose. If there were no humans there'd be no numbers. Or maybe crows would still be counting to three intuitively, but essentially there'd be no mathematical concepts. You can't even count anything without your own subjective input, first choosing WHAT to count, and then choosing the FIELD in which to count it ─ how many pigs in that barn, trees in that park, 'e's in this post?

There are other scientists and philosophers who make similar arguments for consciousness. David Chalmers is one.

I tried to read him once some years ago, but it's all too silly. too woo.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Yes it does. There is no other credible possibility, whether we look at the brainwaves of humans or birds or elsewhere. They're the product of the constant biochemical / bioelectrical interactions in working brains. There's nothing magic about them.

Yes it does. It's those biochemical / bioelectrical interactions that constitute thought. Why else are they there, do you say?

That's true. It's part of scientific method to maximize objectivity, but perfection isn't possible. Even the choice of subject, the ordering of priorities, the devising of the experimental regime, involve subjective decisions. But the task being defined, the answer will be as objective as possible, and good enough to put rovers on Mars, vaccines for Covid in your metabolism, the Higgs boson's reality in your physics book, and so on.

Indeed.

Well, you certainly have to be conscious to engage in them personally. But consciousness is simply a particular condition of the working brain, in contrast to unconsciousness, sleep, malfunction, death and so on.

Have you read up on how anesthetics work? Research on the subject got serious in the 1940s, but the important breakthroughs have come in the last ten years.

Yes, I know. For someone so genuinely clever, he can be remarkably dumb.

No, once again I disagree with Penrose. If there were no humans there'd be no numbers. Or maybe crows would still be counting to three intuitively, but essentially there'd be no mathematical concepts. You can't even count anything without your own subjective input, first choosing WHAT to count, and then choosing the FIELD in which to count it ─ how many pigs in that barn, trees in that park, 'e's in this post?

I tried to read him once some years ago, but it's all too silly. too woo.

It’s my contention that when you claim consciousness is reducible entirely to chemical and electromagnetic activity in the brain, you are conflating correlation with causation. I’m not arguing that human consciousness does not require a brain, just as human life requires a heart and lungs. I’m saying there is no compelling case for the naive materialist argument that the one is entirely reducible to the other. Or that we can ever aspire to a full account of objective reality, without acquiring a full account of consciousness as both a metaphysical and materialist phenomenon.

 

[ChristineM]

That reality is defined by measurement and observation, is a peculiarly human concept.

Funnily enough we are human

 

[lukethethird]

Well. that was not the point. How should we organize society without religion?

By making neutral laws that do not discriminate between the religious and the non religious alike, nor race, nor sex, nor any way we can come up with that divides people. There is no such thing as freedom of religion without freedom from religion.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

By making neutral laws that do not discriminate between the religious and the non religious alike, nor race, nor sex, nor any way we can come up with that divides people. There is no such thing as freedom of religion without freedom from religion.

And that is not all of a society. What about the rest?

 

[blü 2]

It’s my contention that when you claim consciousness is reducible entirely to chemical and electromagnetic activity in the brain, you are conflating correlation with causation. I’m not arguing that human consciousness does not require a brain, just as human life requires a heart and lungs. I’m saying there is no compelling case for the naive materialist argument that the one is entirely reducible to the other. Or that we can ever aspire to a full account of objective reality, without acquiring a full account of consciousness as both a metaphysical and materialist phenomenon.

What I don't claim is that we have an explanation in perfect reductionist terms ─ since we haven't. That's a work in progress. We do however have extremely strong evidence, and growing stronger by the week, that the brain and its functions are explicable in materialist terms and that the idea of a consciousness for which the brain is merely a receiving device has no support from examinable evidence, and no coherent falsifiable theory of what consciousness is instead.

 

[blü 2]

The problem is that there is no truth that you can point to. It is a cognitive abstract like God.
I have no evidence for truth or God. Both are particular viewpoints.
You can't test truth or false, because you can't observe either.

As I've said before (and more than once) I used the "correspondence" definition of "truth" ─ that truth is a quality of statements, and that a statement is true to the extent that it accurately reflects / corresponds with objective reality. Likewise a "fact" is a true statement about a real state of affairs.

This has the advantage ─ or if you're a theologian, the very annoying drawback ─ of making truth objectively testable. Is your car a grey 1956 Trabant? Let's look at your car and see. Whereas "God answers prayers" leads only to the question, "What real entity do you intend to denote when you says 'God'?" ─ and if we don't have a clear answer to that, no answer to the question itself that relates to reality is possible.

 

[Valjean]

At

Can you clarify that?

Atheism is an absence of a belief. There's no method to it, no technique, no analysis. There's nothing, no facts or evidence or body of knowledge to analyze.
In essence, atheism is based on nothing but pure reason. There's no methodology, except perhaps logic, to analyze nothing.

 

[Bird123]

This certainly isn't true for me. When real trouble comes, *I* try to help.

When I hear people say stuff like this, or "there are no atheists in foxholes," I think it says more about them than about atheists. I hear what they're saying as "I'm so stuck in my own assumptions that I can't even relate to the viewpoints of people who don't share them"

You try to help? Are you talking about help others with trouble or help yourself solve the trouble?

Sometimes trouble can seem impossible to fix. Do you seek help elsewhere? Is your belief that God does not exist so strong that you are not even open to the possibility God exists? Is pride involved? Could you have trouble so bad that you would pray for God's help even though you believed God did not exist? Isn't this the basis of those statements about atheists?

Well, God does exist. Believing whether God exists or not has never ever been what it is all about. With this in mind, make any free choice you wish. I'll be happy with it. In time, everyone bumps into God again. Unlike religion, you are going to like God.

As for sharing your view, God gave everyone a different view to guaranty mankind a larger view than any one person could have. Yes, indeed. Share your view and that which is special about you with others. The interaction of all leads to the learning for all even though each might be learning different things. Each learns what they need.

That's what I see. It's very clear!!

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

You try to help? Are you talking about help others with trouble or help yourself solve the trouble?

Either. When I'm in trouble, I may also ask others for help (i.e. actual people capable of helping).

Sometimes trouble can seem impossible to fix. Do you seek help elsewhere?

From other people, sure.

Is your belief that God does not exist so strong that you are not even open to the possibility God exists?

For all intents and purposes, yes.

Is pride involved?

No, but some of it probably comes down to a sense of fairness and justice. There's probably no better way to get me mad than preying on vulnerable people.

Could you have trouble so bad that you would pray for God's help even though you believed God did not exist? Isn't this the basis of those statements about atheists?

I've been through a fair bit myself and watched loved ones go through a fair bit as well, but I've never felt any urge to pray to any gods.

That being said, I'm sure that there are some atheists who have tried praying in desperate times, but this isn't the flex for your religion you seem to think it is.

Well, God does exist. Believing whether God exists or not has never ever been what it is all about. With this in mind, make any free choice you wish. I'll be happy with it. In time, everyone bumps into God again. Unlike religion, you are going to like God.

As for sharing your view, God gave everyone a different view to guaranty mankind a larger view than any one person could have. Yes, indeed. Share your view and that which is special about you with others. The interaction of all leads to the learning for all even though each might be learning different things. Each learns what they need.

That's what I see. It's very clear!!

So much for empathy, eh?