Why I am not an atheist.

[Audie]

I appreciate that advice. I really do. Coming from you an all. <s>

John

The suggestions are entirely sincere.

But won't be easy to follow.
You have a LOT of study to do, and I
have a (strong) feeling you are going at it
all wrong.
A., looking to confirm your ideas,
B. Looking in all the wrong places.

 

[John D. Brey]

You are still talking about proving science.
And saying Dennett plus countless other
scientists are intellectually dishonest.

I got you the first time. I realize that "proof" and "proving" is probably not the best language to use. But that doesn't stop me from using the terms on the fly since the belief that technical precision in language will lead to technical precision in understanding is illusory:

The view that precision of science and of scientific language depends upon the precision of its terms is certainly very plausible, but it is none the less, I believe, a mere prejudice. The precision of a language depends, rather, just upon the fact that it takes care not to burden its terms with the task of being precise.

Sir Karl Popper.​

I don't load down dumb asses, my words, with burdens I've learned long ago they're ill-equipped to carry; particularly on the long, winding, slender, paths, near the summit of the ideas I hope to arrive at with all my bones, thoughts, (and duffel-bags) intact.

The last time I stood on the Matterhorn gazing down on the silly souls below, I left dead donkey's strewn along the path to the summit. I stood there, alone, solitary, gazing, as Lucretius implied I would, down on the battles taking place far beneath me, and experienced something like an epicurean nirvana (if I might mix metaphors and cultures):

And again, do you think it at all strange if a man returning from divine contemplation's to the petty miseries of men cuts a sorry figure and appears most ridiculous, if, while still blinking through the gloom, and before he has become sufficiently accustomed to the environing darkness, he is compelled in courtrooms or religion forums to contend about the shadows of justice or the images that cast the shadows and to wrangle in debate about the notions of these things in the minds of those who have never seen justice itself?

Plato, Republic, book vii, 517,d.

Nothing is more blissful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way of life, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. O minds of mortals, blighted by your blindness! Amid what deep darkness and daunting dangers life’s little day is passed!

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things.
​

John

 

[Audie]

I got you the first time. I realize that "proof" and "proving" is probably not the best language to use. But that doesn't stop me from using the terms on the fly since the belief that technical precision in language will lead to technical precision in understanding is illusory:

The view that precision of science and of scientific language depends upon the precision of its terms is certainly very plausible, but it is none the less, I believe, a mere prejudice. The precision of a language depends, rather, just upon the fact that it takes care not to burden its terms with the task of being precise.

Sir Karl Popper.​

John

Keep on doing it. It does nothing but
bring you discredit. I'm not on your side.

I just don't like people spreading foolishness.

And your charge of intellectual dishonesty is, well, I will skip
the adjectives.

 

[Treasure Hunter]

The great kabbalists went further by realizing that in the same sense that God can't know what exists in the other side of the duality produced by something less than absolutely perfect, by the same token God can know himself without that mirror to see what he looks like from the vantage point of something other than himself.

I’m guessing you meant that “God can’t know himself without...”

Where this goes in the hands of a true kabbalist is that God is the first to desire the fruit of "knowledge," and most probably the first to eat from that tree (even if in the guise of ha-adam).

Thanks for this articulation John .

Similarly, it is our desire to know God which causes us to break the covenant with our current version of God, or our current version of the good, and eat the forbidden fruit.

 

[John D. Brey]

Keep on doing it. It does nothing but
bring you discredit. I'm not on your side.

I just don't like people spreading foolishness.

And your charge of intellectual dishonesty is, well, I will skip
the adjectives.

Are you familiar with the psychological term "projection"?



John

 

[John D. Brey]

I’m guessing you meant that “God can’t know himself without...”

Thanks for catching that. I was able to correct it before the time to do so expired.



John

 

[John D. Brey]

Similarly, it is our desire to know God which causes us to break the covenant with our current version of God, or our current version of the good, and eat the forbidden fruit.

Absolutely. All law is subject to interpretation. President Trump tried to get Vice President Pence to understand that: reject the electoral count and let the legal minds decide if you were able to do it after you did it. <s>


John

 

[Audie]

Are you familiar with the psychological term "projection"?



John

Have you heard one called
"Too clever by one half"?

 

[John D. Brey]

Have you heard one called
"Too clever by one half"?

I resemble that statement, or rather, I mean[t], "resent."



John

 

[ratiocinator]

If we concede that life exists, and believe that God doesn't, the latter belief tends to imply that the remarkable qualities we observe in living organisms are both "natural" and that they evolved naturally, without in any way breaking the so-called laws of nature.

Enter a true paradox like how can inert material become or be alive? Or how can you get replication if it appears to require processes that to all scientific examination (so far), are irreducibly complex?

Enter the beloved tautology: The existence of life from natural processes guarantees that natural processes are the source of life.

Since the tautology is always true, not according to a truth-criteria, but merely by stating something in a manner that can't be false, tautologies have become the bed-mates of those who can't distinguish their metaphysical beliefs from their scientific facts.

God might not exist such that if he doesn't there seemingly must be a natural explanation for paradoxes like how inert material becomes living material. But moving from the belief that God doesn't exist, to the necessity of natural processes creating life, and then using that tautology backwards, so that since natural processes can create life you don't need a God, is the circular thinking that circumscribes even very brilliant men like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and say the Pope, or those who make the same mistake when they present tautological proofs for the existence of God.

Rather trite god of the gaps argument. God is not, and cannot be (at least without a proper testable and falsifiable hypothesis) an explanation for anything - it's just giving up and saying "this is difficult to understand, it must be magic".

The existence of an unknown does not make your favourite superstition about it any more believable.

 

[ratiocinator]

And yet, ironically, later in the book he concedes, with other materialists, that the human mind indeed transcends the laws of physics.

Oh, do give me a quote for that - preferably in context this time.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species, us. The differences between autonomous human agents and the other assemblages of nature are visible not just from an anthropocentric perspective but also from the most objective standpoints (the plural is important) achievable. Human freedom is real---as real as language, music, and money----so it can be studied objectively from a no-nonsense, scientific point of view. . . Human freedom is younger than the species. Its most important features are only several thousand years old--- an eyeblink in evolutionary history---but in that short time it has transformed the planet in ways that are as salient as such great biological transitions as the creation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere and the creation of multicellular life.

Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves, p. 305.

That doesn't support your assertion. Do you want another go or will you concede that (yet again) you've blatantly misrepresented Dennett?

 

[ratiocinator]

Dennett's entire hypothesis in the book is that ok, human intelligence isn't natural; it's clearly supernatural, since nature has no explanation for it. So, what he decides to do, to place man's supernatural intelligence back into a materialistic or naturalistic way of thinking, is to say that man's supernatural freedom from nature itself evolved. Freedom from the laws of nature, laws that take billions of years to design complexity and functionality, isn't really unnatural since it itself, it's supernaturalness, evolved. . . That's a tautology: human intelligence isn't like all other assemblages of nature that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years therefore it must have evolved to be unlike anything else that evolved. It evolved, naturally, to be supernatural. It evolved not to have required evolution for it to have evolved.

This is clearly and simply false. I can only conclude that you either haven't really read the book (just quote mined it), didn't understand it, or are deliberately misrepresenting it.

Dennett's whole take (across his may books on the subject) on human intelligence, conciousness, and (compatibilist) freedom is that it's entirely natural - "a bag of tricks". He also frequently address its direct connection to our evolutionary ancestors and that it isn't fundamentally different.

See for instance, this article:

“One of the deepest and most penetrating of errors about consciousness is the idea that it is something that divides the universe in two, that there are the things that have it and the things that don’t and it’s this utterly amazing, nearly magical property,” says Dennett. “They’re wondering about whether some almost impossible-to-define extra-phenomenon, some interior glow or something is going on...and I think they’re just wrong.”
​

and

“As we build up in complexity from bacteria through to starfish to birds and mammals and us it seems to me the most important threshold is actually us, that we have the bigger and more impressive bag of tricks than any other species. But that doesn’t mean that we have this utterly different phenomenon that happens in our heads and it doesn’t happen in any other heads.”
[my emphasis]​

 

[Audie]

I resemble that statement, or rather, I mean[t], "resent."



John

Ha.

 

[Audie]

This is clearly and simply false. I can only conclude that you either haven't really read the book (just quote mined it), didn't understand it, or are deliberately misrepresenting it.

Dennett's whole take (across his may books on the subject) on human intelligence, conciousness, and (compatibilist) freedom is that it's entirely natural - "a bag of tricks". He also frequently address its direct connection to our evolutionary ancestors and that it isn't fundamentally different.

See for instance, this article:

“One of the deepest and most penetrating of errors about consciousness is the idea that it is something that divides the universe in two, that there are the things that have it and the things that don’t and it’s this utterly amazing, nearly magical property,” says Dennett. “They’re wondering about whether some almost impossible-to-define extra-phenomenon, some interior glow or something is going on...and I think they’re just wrong.”
​

and

“As we build up in complexity from bacteria through to starfish to birds and mammals and us it seems to me the most important threshold is actually us, that we have the bigger and more impressive bag of tricks than any other species. But that doesn’t mean that we have this utterly different phenomenon that happens in our heads and it doesn’t happen in any other heads.”
[my emphasis]​

I have to wonder what our friend is doing.
Hard to doubt his sincerity.

I think, its in part that he is somehow so
sure he is right that the most extreme sort of
confirmation bias takes ahold, whatever
is read goes through a converter until
it says what was sought.

Also, there is this, maybe related.

He has reported studying evolution for
decades, yet has remained unaware of some
of the most utterly basic concepts, notably
"Proof" in science.

Its puzzling.

 

[ratiocinator]

Its puzzling.

It is indeed. I've seen many people who disagree with Dennett (and by no means all for religious reasons) but this is the first time I've come across somebody who so obviously and profoundly disagrees with him and yet continually quotes him and claims agreement.

 

[Audie]

It is indeed. I've seen many people who disagree with Dennett (and by no means all for religious reasons) but this is the first time I've come across somebody who so obviously and profoundly disagrees with him and yet continually quotes him and claims agreement.

Its that converter. I've seen it elsewhere.

 

[John D. Brey]

Rather trite god of the gaps argument. God is not, and cannot be (at least without a proper testable and falsifiable hypothesis) an explanation for anything - it's just giving up and saying "this is difficult to understand, it must be magic".

The existence of an unknown does not make your favourite superstition about it any more believable.

In my opinion we're on the same sheet of music so long as you apply your sound reasoning fairly and equally. We need to dispense with magic and metaphysics.

For instance, after Dennett notes the paradox that to have replication requires that you have a particular number of base pairs, and to have that many base pairs requires replication, he then does just what you poo poo above, move into magic and metaphysics. He gives a hypothesis, no doubt, but it's tautological and metaphysical.

Noam Chomsky is the only scientist I've seen deal with the issue of irreducible complexity in the manner I'm suggesting: don't cover it up with metaphysics or magic. When asked about such things he asked his interlocutors if they thought man was himself just a natural assemblage of evolutionary phenomena? When they concurred, he said then perhaps there are mysteries, antinomies, and paradoxes that will forever evade man's understanding since he, man, is just a biological machine afterall.

Chomsky asked his audience if they weren't accepting the metaphysical proposition that man is the measure, and measurer of all things, when they suppose he can, or must be able to, figure everything out.



John

 

[ratiocinator]

In my opinion we're on the same sheet of music so long as you apply your sound reasoning fairly and equally. We need to dispense with magic and metaphysics.

But you haven't actually addressed my point at all. All we have is something we don't (as yet) understand, so we either carry on with doing the science or we give up and say "it must be magic". And it's not as if there is nothing to go on at all, since we have the evidence in DNA that Dennett mentioned in the paragraph I quoted, and the fact that once we have replicators with inheritance and variation we can have the known and understood phenomenon of natural selection.

Every single thing we now have solid scientific evidence for today, started off as an unknown.

There is no valid argument from "here is something we don't understand" to goddidit.

 

[John D. Brey]

This is clearly and simply false. I can only conclude that you either haven't really read the book (just quote mined it), didn't understand it, or are deliberately misrepresenting it.

Dennett's whole take (across his may books on the subject) on human intelligence, conciousness, and (compatibilist) freedom is that it's entirely natural - "a bag of tricks". He also frequently address its direct connection to our evolutionary ancestors and that it isn't fundamentally different.

See for instance, this article:

“One of the deepest and most penetrating of errors about consciousness is the idea that it is something that divides the universe in two, that there are the things that have it and the things that don’t and it’s this utterly amazing, nearly magical property,” says Dennett. “They’re wondering about whether some almost impossible-to-define extra-phenomenon, some interior glow or something is going on...and I think they’re just wrong.”
​

and

“As we build up in complexity from bacteria through to starfish to birds and mammals and us it seems to me the most important threshold is actually us, that we have the bigger and more impressive bag of tricks than any other species. But that doesn’t mean that we have this utterly different phenomenon that happens in our heads and it doesn’t happen in any other heads.”
[my emphasis]​

I get what Dennett is saying, as I get what you're saying. But what I'm saying is that Dennett is using his foundational hypothesis, sentience is natural, there is no God, and wrapping it in tautological arguments that use the foundational truth as the truth-criteria for the argumentation.

In the quotation I gave he concedes that going from horse an buggy to space shuttles in all of 150 years is not something nature is capable of doing. Therefore what he calls "freedom," which he admits belongs to only one species, is freedom from the very contingencies, and rules, that have lorded over natural evolutionary processes for aeons and aeons time without end.

Man appears on the cusp of creating artificial intelligence, intelligent machines, that will change the nature of our understanding of reality in ways that are literally unfathomable.




John

 

[ratiocinator]

In the quotation I gave he concedes that going from horse an buggy to space shuttles in all of 150 years is not something nature is capable of doing.

Except he clearly isn't saying that. Something new (at least to this planet) arising is not the same as saying nature is incapable of it. There have been multiple innovations in evolutionary history and there is literally nothing to suggest that any of them were not natural.