How many here are atheists?

[Caleb]

So I thought about the possibility of God as a platonic form of consciousness. Are we soap bubbles? You could certainly think of it that way, but that just takes me back to defining away the meaning of God. That definition of God would be static and unable to act on our world. It would merely define what is possible for us to achieve. If anything, it encourages me all the more to follow my nature which is to survive as long as possible and to explore and seek answers. In fact, to go to my grave peacefully feeling that the answers wait for me after death and God is going to care for me would deny my nature as a conscious being. It would be to choose chaos over order. It would place me among those many lifeforms that were closer to ceasing than living, inferior and therefore not selected for survival. It would be to take the very nature of consciousness that makes it so special in a universe consisting of such disorder and discard it as meaningless.

I think this needs a little more development, because I see this as more perspective than anything. If believing that there is no God maximizes your freedom, then that's well and good for you. I find it to be the opposite for me. Here's why.

It occurred to me while I was doing a little reading of Hume (of all people), that I tend to internalize my beliefs more than most people. Hume of course is aware that there is a certain level at which he cannot internalize skepticism for instance. And the more that I look around me, even within Christianity, the more I see people who don't internalize their beliefs. They may believe one way, but they don't act it out, they don't make that belief part of who they are. It's like an intellectual acknowledgement more than something that affects them to the core of their very being.

Try as I might, I can't be that way. I seem to instinctually internalize my beliefs so much that not having a belief paralyzes me. I could never be a philosophical skeptic, at least, I could never be a philosophical skeptic and get on with my life.

It's like the search for meaning. For morality. Probably I've done more reading than it was good for me to do. A guy with my temperament doesn't need to read Sartre. Or Nietzsche. Because I don't think you can ever look at morality or meaning the same after that. A lot of people are fine with grasping at a few premises, or even one, to draw their conclusions, but I'm not comfortable with ethical propositions being premises, in part because I know that accepting them as premises leads to the certain conclusion that they are baseless. Whereas if I push the premise onto God, then the problem becomes ontological. In other words, the foundation can exist. God can exist, he can be ontologically real, and if so, the ethical foundation can be real. Whereas if the premise is stuck on the ethical propositions, there is no sense in which they can be real. They are just propositions, and in a sense and from my perspective meaningless propositions. They are only given meaning by common (or even near unanimous) consent, which I cannot ever see as real. It doesn't matter how many people agree on something, that doesn't make it real.

So for me, there can only be freedom in God. My experience of God I might describe as saying, "He taught me who I am." And knowing who I am gives me the freedom to become who I am. I don't intend to lay back and say, "hey, no need to ask, God'll let me in on the secrets once I kick the bucket." Nope. I'm entirely too inquisitive for that. But seeing in myself and others the image of God, the mark of divinity that says that I am something, that you are something, that I have objective value and meaning, THAT empowers me. Far more than the thought that I am an overdeveloped chain of carbon, whose fate is determined and whose values are ultimately meaningless. If you catch my drift.

[dalebert]

If believing that there is no God maximizes your freedom, then that's well and good for you. I find it to be the opposite for me. Here's why.

Before I even read the rest of your post, and I'm going to, I have to respond to this one statement. It was so jarring. My belief in God has nothing to do with what I want. What matters to me is getting at the truth regardless of what I want or what effect the belief is going to have on my life. My bias has been to believe and that's the bias most people have. Long before I became an atheist, even before I became agnostic, I had rejected biblical notions of God of a petty and vengeful god for a more spiritual one of God as a loving figure. I didn't stop believing out of some pragmatic notion of gaining more freedom. If that petty and vengeful god really existed, I would hate him, but it would make more sense to be obedient to his laws out of pragmatism. Denying reality is simply not pragmatic.

It seems people are starting with a desired belief system and then going back and trying to find reasons to believe in it. It's not surprising considering that people invented notions of gods with human traits and over time as our culture has developed, there have been attempts at refining those notions by people who can no longer suspend disbelief in bearded guy on a cloud. But what I've always tried to do, both with religion and politics, is realize that just because an idea has been passed down from ancient and primitive cultures for a long time, doesn't mean it makes sense. I have no choice but to look at all my beliefs with the full set of tools that my mind provides me. I have to recognize my biases for what they are and reject them in coming to an objective conclusion.

You seem hungry for purpose but you should recognize that as a want, a bias. Look for purpose in reality. Belief in something that's not real doesn't create purpose. It's merely a delusion. I believe delusions are always harmful in the long run. A deluded belief that government police can protect us has a very short term benefit in making us feel better, but it causes us to become lax in taking measures that will really work. A rabbit that does not fear death and flee a predator is not much different than the rock you describe. It's already closer to death than life. A human who believes it's hunky-dorey to die because a better life awaits him is closer to death than life. He's devolving into a lump of decaying flesh and teaching his progeny to do the same. A human who is trying to make the most of this life and learn as much as he can and expand his mind and doing everything within his power to push back death and teaching his children the same is the source of the humans who will evolve into higher forms of life that will hopefully one day explore the universe in ways we can't even yet imagine. It might even be our generation.

And here's my thought. Even if God exists and I'm mistaken, I don't believe he would put me on this Earth and instill in me an instinctive and even intellectual fear of death that didn't have some purpose. I also don't think he would punish me for lack of belief. In that, I know we don't have to debate. I have every reason to make the most of this life right here and now. That seems very purposeful to me. To what purpose? Maybe we'll expand our minds enough to understand some day or maybe that's simply an axiom that must be accepted.

[dalebert]

Order isn't just life. No. Life is ordered, sure. But it's not just life. The planets, the stars, the galaxies, the clusters of galaxies, this is all order too.

No, not really. I think life is order. Those planets are not doing anything to cause them to persist and reproduce and therefore, there is no particular reason why some of those planets would become more abundant than others and lead to new kinds of planets forming that never existed before without order. I think I have a more stringent definition of order than you. For me, it's a fundamental difference. My definition is not aesthetics. Oh, that's a pretty planet but over there is just a bunch of loose matter floating in space. When the planet takes on some kind of characteristic that causes it to consume energy in order to protect itself from destruction and propagate, then I'll call it order. It might be becoming less entropic, but only in a passive way because a sun nearby is adding energy to it. The Earth itself is not orderly. The living things on it consuming energy to persist are.

Now we're getting at what I was talking about in terms of where does each individual fall in this big game of reproduction, death and selection, and evolution. That cell is orderly. It has developed characteristics, extremely unlikely characteristics that become likely in a large enough and old enough universe, that cause it to persist and propagate. They're just things like chemical reactions that allow it to use energy to replicate itself and survive. That's order to me. Because once you have a little bit of that, the odds of more elaborate forms of life forming from it become exponentially more likely. This is the notion of order consuming energy and creating more disorder in the universe in order to continue its own existence and avoid destruction.

I do actually believe in a collective unconscious. Surprising? This is some comfort to me on the subject of death. I don't believe in it in terms of some unseen energy connecting all beings. There's something even more fundamental than that. That consciousness you speak of does seem to be a particular trait of order, of the tendency to persist, of life. Trying to put landmarks on it is a bit arbitrary and subjective, like when did some elaborate chemical reactions become instincts? When did instincts become decision making? Etc. However, there is something fundamental that all life seems to share and that gets expanded and passed down to the next generation. There is genetic variation in a single species, but on some level, I kind of see all lizards as being fundamentally similar. They are born with knowledge (instincts) that is in their DNA so to some extent each lizard is a reincarnation of the lizards before it. Occasionally something new is "learned", some adaptation happens which works well and therefore is propagated more effectively than those without it, and it gets passed on. I think Native Americans understood this on some intuitive level with their notions of spirits of animals that connected them all. Each animal is seen (I'm no expert, btw, so don't quote me) as a physical manifestation of a kind of persistent spirit of that animal species- the wolf spirit for instance, which will play a part in the fantasy novel I'm writing.

To some extent this is true with people too. Even though we ourselves and our experiences are far more elaborate, we are also able to pass things down to the next generation in a much more effective way with communication, teaching our children, language, history, etc. We're outgrowing our biological limitations already. We're developing an infrastructure of knowledge that persists from one generation to the next outside of the limitations of our DNA. We're much better at persistence, at order, than lizards. We'll soon make another exponential leap even more critical than the leap from instinct to thought when we dramatically extend our own lifespans and leave behind DNA altogether. It's just a stepping stone to a higher consciousness. We won't have to make new versions of ourselves and die. We'll just have to be willing to change dramatically and leave our old selves behind.

Each of us has a place in that bigger picture, but it's that big picture that really matters. It takes a little bit of letting go of your ego, but if you're looking for evidence of purpose, there is plenty of it. One of the few things that people and many animals will instinctively give up their lives for is to protect their children! A parent understands on some instinctive level that their child is their own life continued, that their child dying is much much worse than their own death. So on a fundamental level, I see each and every person as the same,almost as a reincarnation and continuation of previous generations of people, in terms of the nature of consciousness. As long as the human race goes on, none of us is really dead. And that's true to some extent for every living thing.

When I talk about letting go of your ego, I mean that you have to realize that you, as you are right now, are not meant to go on forever. That would be very limiting. You either have to pass on what you have learned to the next generation, or be willing to change dramatically and let go of the old you for a new and very different you. It happens all the time. It's natural. I have a few memories of the five year-old me, but not much. That "Dale" is dead. He passed something on to this "Dale" but my mind sifted through all those experiences and kept what it thought mattered.

To me, the universe did not exist before 40 years ago. I have no sense of consciousness before then. If I think back, the beginning of time was my earliest blurry memories as a toddler. And yet, I kind of feel like I existed all that time. First I was born with some really elaborate DNA that took billions of years to develop. Then, as I learned more about the universe, knowledge that previous generations accumulated, I began to feel as if I have existed for all time. In a way, by being part of a long line of evolution, I have existed since the first cell began to consume nutrients in the water around it to reproduce. In the same way, a lot of me will go on in future generations, hopefully the best parts, and so my consciousness will not end with my death, but it will change, and to resist that change is to choose stagnation and true death.

This is me trying to find purpose in reality rather than trying to manufacture purpose out of desires and delusions. When you think about it, the universe is a pretty amazing place, and we're pretty amazing ourselves. It's not depressing at all to me. In my world view, death is change, and while we fear it instinctively, and that fear has a purpose, when we understand why that fear exists, we can cope with it and use it on an intellectual level. In my world view, "God", though I am reluctant to use that term, is the destination; not the starting place.

[Caleb]

Before I even read the rest of your post, and I'm going to, I have to respond to this one statement. It was so jarring. My belief in God has nothing to do with what I want. What matters to me is getting at the truth regardless of what I want or what effect the belief is going to have on my life.

Well, I'm not trying to threaten you in some sort of Pascalian wager type of way. I like to think that I have a fondness for truth as well. I'm sure you realize that I don't believe in an authoritarian God who punishes either. I also have a healthy dose of skepticism in regards to what can and can't be discerned to be truth fundamentally, in absolute terms. So there is a point at which our beliefs are choices. And we choose those beliefs because they harmonize with what we ... what? Observe? yes. Feel? yes. Hope? yes. Experience. yes. All of it. It's a package deal. For me, God is the synthesis of all of it. You might say that my experience of God is a brain tumor. That's actually a pretty objective claim -  I could go to the doctor and prove or disprove it at once. If I were going to challenge someone like me, I might say, "your experience of God was imposed upon you by your subconscious. It knew that in order to internalize your belief of God it needed to be a legitimate belief, you needed to actually believe it. So your subconscious created your experience to deceive you into a desired belief." That might be a more sophisticated argument, but it's also surely one that I've thought of. I don't believe it. I also know that, all my life, I have perceived meaning and purpose and morality as objective. It's not so much a matter of what I want, so much as what is.

And yes, I think that for most people hope does enter into the picture. Even for atheists. Let me give you an example.  Almost without exception, if you ask a theist, "do you think belief in God makes people better people" he will say "yes, certainly."  On the other hand, if you ask an atheist, "Do you think belief in God makes people better" he will almost universally say, "no, without a doubt not."  Eliminating wishful/fearful thinking from humanity without going overcompensating is certainly a challenge. Should I adopt the stance that I must not believe anything that I think is positive or good? That seems like serious overcompensation. Should I treat bad news to a lower standard of evidence? That seems fatalistic.

On the other hand, there's a certain viewpoint that says that when a certain proposition is such that it can lend meaning, purpose, morality, etc. to human lives, that is a good reason to believe it is so. Not in a mathematical proof sort of way. Just that for the wishes and urges that I have, there is usually a real life ontologically real thing that satisfies it. I am hungry, there is food. I am thirsty, there is water. I get horny, there is sex. Some theologians have spoken of the "god-sized hole in our heart." If it is quenched with God, then that is evidence that God is. Not, like I said, evidence in a definitive way. I've never found that particular line of thought particularly convincing in an "aha! that settles it" sort of way, just that it's another thought that lends itself to God.

I rather think that the theist is more aware of all the factors that contribute to his belief than the atheist is. At least as a general rule, and among intelligent people. That's because there are tons of people who have tried to break down the "psychology of belief". To my knowledge, there hasn't been much effort to break down the "psychology of disbelief"; although I think Jung started to, but nothing along the lines of Freud's work against belief. And I think that is unfortunate, because I think there's as much psychology to disbelief as to belief.

[Caleb]

Order isn't just life. No. Life is ordered, sure. But it's not just life. The planets, the stars, the galaxies, the clusters of galaxies, this is all order too.

No, not really. I think life is order. Those planets are not doing anything to cause them to persist and reproduce and therefore, there is no particular reason why some of those planets would become more abundant than others and lead to new kinds of planets forming that never existed before without order. I think I have a more stringent definition of order than you. For me, it's a fundamental difference. My definition is not aesthetics. Oh, that's a pretty planet but over there is just a bunch of loose matter floating in space. When the planet takes on some kind of characteristic that causes it to consume energy in order to protect itself from destruction and propagate, then I'll call it order. It might be becoming less entropic, but only in a passive way because a sun nearby is adding energy to it. The Earth itself is not orderly. The living things on it consuming energy to persist are.

I don't want to be challenging, but this seems rather arbitrary to me. "I shall define order only in such a way that I can explain it. I can see that a sort of Darwinian selection mechanism [I emphasize the word] explains order among life (at least to some extent), all other order I deny, and the problem goes away." Not so much though, because your worldview loses a great deal of its explanatory power when so restricted. Surely the 2nd law isn't only applicable to life? I rather think it holds true in a universe devoid of life, and life utilizes the physics. Surely it isn't only you and me and our lizard friends that are contributing to entropy in this big universe of ours.

Now we're getting at what I was talking about in terms of where does each individual fall in this big game of reproduction, death and selection, and evolution. That cell is orderly. It has developed characteristics, extremely unlikely characteristics that become likely in a large enough and old enough universe, that cause it to persist and propagate. They're just things like chemical reactions that allow it to use energy to replicate itself and survive. That's order to me. Because once you have a little bit of that, the odds of more elaborate forms of life forming from it become exponentially more likely. This is the notion of order consuming energy and creating more disorder in the universe in order to continue its own existence and avoid destruction.

I still think you're begging the question here. "Ok, so once all these little unfeeling bits got together and formed subjective awareness, it is only reasonable that they would propagate." And I'm over here going, "ah, ah, ah! Let's not go on quite yet." There's still the tiny problem, "HOW did unfeeling bits of matter ever develop subjective awareness in the first place?" It's a severe metaphysical problem called "the world knot", (the biggest one there is, in my opinion) and I'm not going to let you gloss over it. At least, I'm not going to let you in the sense of I'm not going to believe what you say until you tackle it to my satisfaction. It's the other side of the "ghost in the machine" conundrum that faces dualists, but its not really a separate problem, it's the same one, it just affects materialism differently than it affects dualism. We think of life in its most fundamental form as being tiny. Hell, I can't even see a cell, so it's tiny. Insignificant. But the bridge between me and a tiny cell is nothing compared to the gulf that exists between matter that is "dead" (doesn't feel a damn thing) and matter that is "alive" - (aware of its surroundings.) And pushing that gigantic gulf onto a tiny little cell doesn't make the gulf any less gigantic.

I do actually believe in a collective unconscious. Surprising? This is some comfort to me on the subject of death. I don't believe in it in terms of some unseen energy connecting all beings. There's something even more fundamental than that. That consciousness you speak of does seem to be a particular trait of order, of the tendency to persist, of life. Trying to put landmarks on it is a bit arbitrary and subjective, like when did some elaborate chemical reactions become instincts? When did instincts become decision making?

You've got the chicken and the egg problem here, plus more I think. Which came first, order or life? You want to define "order" by saying that life has it and so life propagates it. But then you seem to predicate the life on the order. And I don't think you've really defined the collective unconscious that you're talking about. You're trying to say, I think, if I understand you, that consciousness is a "tendency", in other words "consciousness itself isn't an inherent part of the universe, but the tendency to consciousness is inherent." But how? I mean, is it a law of nature? Like gravity. (Because if so, I think even that needs explanation, but that might have to be another little essay.) What is a "tendency" anyway? Water tends to seek its own level. But that "tendency", that's not an ontological reality, "tendency" is our observation of the water, and there's usually something more fundamental about it. (I will give that sometimes chance creates a feeling of "tendency" where none exists.) But where there is "tendency" usually there is some law or explanation, which is the heart of the matter that I feel is being glossed over here.

Etc. However, there is something fundamental that all life seems to share and that gets expanded and passed down to the next generation. There is genetic variation in a single species, but on some level, I kind of see all lizards as being fundamentally similar. They are born with knowledge (instincts) that is in their DNA so to some extent each lizard is a reincarnation of the lizards before it. Occasionally something new is "learned", some adaptation happens which works well and therefore is propagated more effectively than those without it, and it gets passed on. I think Native Americans understood this on some intuitive level with their notions of spirits of animals that connected them all. Each animal is seen (I'm no expert, btw, so don't quote me) as a physical manifestation of a kind of persistent spirit of that animal species- the wolf spirit for instance, which will play a part in the fantasy novel I'm writing.

I agree with you here. I find instinct amazing too. Don't forget that I'm the Jung fanatic, so I love the concept of a collective unconscious. I don't see how all of it can be passed onto dna, though. I mean, dna can give us hereditary traits. It tells the cell which proteins to "grab" to make, and how to construct the proteins. But how does that impart knowledge? You share something like 98.7% of your dna with a chimp (don't quote me on that, I didn't google search it I just pulled it out of thin air). But you don't share 98.7% of your behavior with a chimp. I'm not understanding how proteins can give this "instinct" or known knowledge or behavior, other than that obviously in order to act a being must have existence. So obviously, by creating him the dna gives him an opportunity to act, but how does it set his behaviors?

We'll soon make another exponential leap even more critical than the leap from instinct to thought when we dramatically extend our own lifespans and leave behind DNA altogether. It's just a stepping stone to a higher consciousness. We won't have to make new versions of ourselves and die. We'll just have to be willing to change dramatically and leave our old selves behind.

With all due respect, this isn't going to happen. You've got the big world knot gulf to hurdle first. Don't get me wrong, I think it can be done, but it has to be a bottom up process, and for all that I'm not sure that it is worth it to do. Who knows what horrors might be unleashed? It's kind of like introducing a virus to a new culture? How will life adapt? We might drive ourselves and all other life to extinction by such an unwise attempt at immortality.

When I talk about letting go of your ego, I mean that you have to realize that you, as you are right now, are not meant to go on forever. That would be very limiting. You either have to pass on what you have learned to the next generation, or be willing to change dramatically and let go of the old you for a new and very different you. It happens all the time. It's natural. I have a few memories of the five year-old me, but not much. That "Dale" is dead. He passed something on to this "Dale" but my mind sifted through all those experiences and kept what it thought mattered.

In some respects, you die every moment, and a new you emerges. That is really a fundamental part of what I believe in the process perspective. But it seems to me that I'm the one that is more comfortable with death. I'm not trying to evade it. I think my life can have meaning. When I see people talk about creating machines to live in so as to achieve "biological immortality" --- well, that sort of thing doesn't appeal to me. I think it's the atheist attempt to procure by your own effort what is, ultimately, unachievable in this life. As Jesus said, "In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." This life is a grain, like you say. But until we change, we are stagnant.

To me, the universe did not exist before 40 years ago. I have no sense of consciousness before then. If I think back, the beginning of time was my earliest blurry memories as a toddler. And yet, I kind of feel like I existed all that time. First I was born with some really elaborate DNA that took billions of years to develop. Then, as I learned more about the universe, knowledge that previous generations accumulated, I began to feel as if I have existed for all time. In a way, by being part of a long line of evolution, I have existed since the first cell began to consume nutrients in the water around it to reproduce. In the same way, a lot of me will go on in future generations, hopefully the best parts, and so my consciousness will not end with my death, but it will change, and to resist that change is to choose stagnation and true death.

This is a way of viewing it that I just don't share. I'm trying to be generous, but this is the ultimate perspective that I rejected so long ago as ... well, I don't know what adjective I want to use. But "meaningless" comes close. To say that "In a way I live on and have always been here" to me seems like saying, "I haven't always been here and I'm not going to be here much longer either." It seems like a way of dressing up death and meaninglessness in a nice set of fancy Sunday clothes, but ultimately it doesn't change the reality one bit. Now, if it gives you comfort to view things this way, like I say, well and good. But this is a lot of what I talk about when I say that I can't internalize such beliefs. For me, I have to actually believe it, and a belief that I know is not really ontologically true is ... well, it's just not something I can be a part of in any meaningful way.

This is me trying to find purpose in reality rather than trying to manufacture purpose out of desires and delusions. When you think about it, the universe is a pretty amazing place, and we're pretty amazing ourselves. It's not depressing at all to me. In my world view, death is change, and while we fear it instinctively, and that fear has a purpose, when we understand why that fear exists, we can cope with it and use it on an intellectual level. In my world view, "God", though I am reluctant to use that term, is the destination; not the starting place.

Once again, I'm trying to be generous. But in a way, this is conceptually to me like trying to assert that death is life, that pain is pleasure, that extinction is the passageway to something greater. It's a nice thought, but it just isn't true, at least without some ontologically real foundation. Premises aren't real except in the mind of the one who conceptualizes them. So when you decide to make a premise, a thought, an idea, as the starting point, you are left with the certainty that it isn't real. I'm not saying this very well. But it doesn't have a foundation. It's like love. If you say, "Love is a supreme value, I shall value it above all else." Ok, that's nice for you. But even if you get together with 7 billion of your closest friends and all of you take a vote that "love is the supreme value", ok, that's nice too. But there's no foundation, because love is a concept, not a thing. So someone can come along and say, "Hate is the supreme value" and he's as right as you are. When you make the premise something that is ontologically real you're on a different sort of ground; "this table is the absolute", well the table can actually exist. It has "being". It's not just a concept. (Of course, you have a concept of it, but it is more than just a concept.) That's where I'm trying to talk about values earlier, because if values are just a concept, then they are meaningless. But if they are real because of their foundation in something ontologically real, then they are objective. I sense them as objective, and thus believe in a foundation for them.

[Tunga]

When I talk about letting go of your ego, I mean that you have to realize that you, as you are right now, are not meant to go on forever.

In some respects, you die every moment,

Yada Yada Yada.

Caleb. Count how many times you use the word I in one of your posts.

Thats your ego talking.

It only spouts what you feed it.

You can talk about defeating it but your human wants remain in your every breath.

It doesn't have to be a bad thing.

It can be used to to good.

Just don't get used to it.

[dalebert]

Well, I'm not trying to threaten you in some sort of Pascalian wager type of way.

I don't know how that relates to what I said. I was just jarred by this notion you seemed to have for some reason that I think I'm freer by not believing in God as if that was my motivation. I was just pointing out that I did not have a need to stop believing in God for that reason. I think it must be based in the notion that a lot of theists have about atheists, that without a God there is no objective morality so if they just convince themselves God doesn't exist, they can then sin a lot. But that jarred me because you know me better than that, and I tried to explain that any notion of God that I've actually believed in since I was old enough to think for myself didn't impose any bizarre rules on me anyway so there's just no such motivation there. Not believing doesn't make me feel freer. I will admit that it makes life seem more purposeful to me. The idea of dying and going to heaven has not resonated well with me for some time because it seems kind of meaningless, that we struggle throughout this life on Earth and then we're just happy for all eternity after that. Boring, meaningless, purposeless are some words that come to mind.

Almost without exception, if you ask a theist, "do you think belief in God makes people better people" he will say "yes, certainly."  On the other hand, if you ask an atheist, "Do you think belief in God makes people better" he will almost universally say, "no, without a doubt not."

And that would be a sensible answer for both of them if that's what they really believe to be the truth. It makes perfect sense to me that I would consider someone better off for believing the truth than a delusion. If I honestly believed in God, I would feel like a con man going around and convincing people it doesn't exist.

Eliminating wishful/fearful thinking from humanity without going overcompensating is certainly a challenge. Should I adopt the stance that I must not believe anything that I think is positive or good? That seems like serious overcompensation. Should I treat bad news to a lower standard of evidence? That seems fatalistic.

Where is all this negativity you're responding to? It's not coming from me. If anything, I figure people see me as overly optimistic. I believe in a collective unconscious. I believe we're evolving into god-like beings and in fact that it is our destiny. I just got back from a party where I scoffed at people worried about over population and limited resources. I was like "You do realize that we're going to outgrow the need for these resources LONG before we risk depleting them? We won't need to find real estate on other planets because by then, we'll be creating all the real estate we need out of microchips." Did my post about the nature of individuals in the big scheme of nature come across as bad news? I didn't think so.

Some theologians have spoken of the "god-sized hole in our heart." If it is quenched with God, then that is evidence that God is.

Or maybe it's a purpose-sized hole and we fill it with God because that's all we've ever known. People support the AMOG for the same reason, because we have to have something, right? And they don't realize that something can be voluntary government because we've all been so indoctrinated to the AMOG. Now, I realize that we can be biased toward a certain view and that view can still be correct. However, when we're trying to come to conclusions, and knowing that bias is a big factor, we should be aware of it. Think of this. You must realize that nearly every notion of gods by primitive man was concocted by man. Almost every god looked mostly human. There are people still to this day, quite a few, that believe literally, that God crafted man in his own image. That's right. The being that created the universe had eyes and opposable thumbs, things that have no purpose until a material world exists and even then, only for a creature that isn't all knowing (eyes) and all powerful (hands). So these early gods were clearly not the creators of man, but the other way around. Gods were created in our image. Of course I realize that your view of God is not nearly so simplistic as that, but you still seem to cling to some notions out of indoctrination, and by that I mean the human characteristics that you seem so sure that God has. However, after some extended conversations with you, I'm not sure why you call yourself Christian. The Christian beliefs seem quite a bit more specific than what you seem to believe. I mean, there's a point when your beliefs become liberal enough that they just bare little to no resemblance to the Christian religion. Even the label of "Christian" seems bizarre on you and I can only think that it's comfortable because you grew up in a Christian environment (the U.S.).

To my knowledge, there hasn't been much effort to break down the "psychology of disbelief"; although I think Jung started to, but nothing along the lines of Freud's work against belief. And I think that is because I think there's as much psychology to disbelief as to belief.

I'll take a real quick stab at it. I think it stems from a kind of rebelliousness or individuality. And this is a good rebelliousness IMO. It's an expression of growth. I think mankind invented gods in trying to explain things and in an attempt to find answers. That's ok. It was wrong, but we make lots of mistakes on the way to finding the right answers. So does nature. It's called natural selection. Belief may have even served some sort of purpose for a while. If there are genes that lend to belief in god(s), and some scientists think so, and other genes related to being skeptical, and if the skeptics are right, then they can almost be viewed as a good mutation that will lead to them surviving better than the believers- being selected for survival. Now I don't know if it's genes really. It seems more likely to me that it's part of the evolution of our knowledge. Recall what I said about how we've already exceeded the limitations of our biology and how we pass information down to the next generation. It's a much faster process than evolving genetically. Every now and then, some human will do something that seems bizarre and risky, even unnatural to most of the others, but those are the ones that lead to new discoveries and expansions of our boundaries. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have been born with wings." But we're all flying now, aren't we? We're flying because a few crazy people weren't content to keep their fat asses on the ground where they "belonged". They broke trends. They thought outside the box. The correlations between theism and authoritarian government seem to abound in my mind. The similarities are overt. There are these needs that we have and in our desperation we try to fill those needs in a knee jerk manner with AMOGs and with gods, but I think we're just about ready to find something better to fulfill those needs; something that makes a lot more sense.

[dalebert]

I still think you're begging the question here. "Ok, so once all these little unfeeling bits got together and formed subjective awareness, it is only reasonable that they would propagate." And I'm over here going, "ah, ah, ah! Let's not go on quite yet." There's still the tiny problem, "HOW did unfeeling bits of matter ever develop subjective awareness in the first place?"

No, that's exactly backwards. It's the propagation that comes first. In a vast universe, an extremely unlikely pattern is bound to eventually emerge with some trait that causes that particular pattern to persist, the most likely being a tendency to duplicate itself. Any pattern with a trait that lends to persistence of that particular pattern gives that pattern a priority over the random nature of the matter around it. Call it life or order or don't. It doesn't really matter. It's an argument of semantics. That is the beginnings of evolution. A virus is ridiculously simple. It's just a bit of DNA that replicates itself faster than it tends to die off. Now imagine a change happens in one of those billions or trillions of viruses. Case 1: The change does not lend itself particularly to persistence or replication. That virus dies off while the others continue replicating. Case 2: the change does lend itself to persistence or replication. Maybe the new virus is able to withstand a higher temperature. Those viruses will tend to replicate and persist better than their ancestors. In a very long time, traits that are effective for continuing a pattern cause that pattern to dominate. Patterns are what I'm talking about here. That's why it seems orderly to me. Order as I am using the word here, is a pattern that persists. Once you have these patterns that start off with some degree of persistence and then because they can now persist over long periods of time instead of just being passive victims of their environment, they have endless opportunities to change and randomly (at first) discover even better means of persistence and propagation, i.e. become even more elaborate patterns, which seems like a demonstration of order. You could call matter compressed into a somewhat even spherical shape a very simple pattern, I suppose, but it just doesn't seem very orderly by comparison to a repeating self-replicating and persistent pattern that lends itself to ever more elaborate patterns over time.

Instinct and then consciousness seem inevitable to me once those first difficult steps are taken. Why? Because they are so adaptive for survival. The very first inklings of instinct would be incredibly effective for persistence. A cell wall would protect the DNA inside from a number of changes in the environment. A string of cells that flagellates and moves the pattern around expands opportunities for nutrients and opportunities for mutation. A reflex against heat might be the very first inklings of instinct that would develop into more elaborate instincts in future generations. The first inklings of consciousness would allow a pattern (safe to call it a life form at this point?) to persist even more effectively. Some inklings of thought and a life form is so much better equipped to avoid threats, find sustenance, reproduce more.

This is what I mean by order explains itself. It's actually counterintuitive to imagine an old and vast universe where orderly and increasingly complicated patterns wouldn't eventually emerge and become dominant to the randomness around them. Reflex, instinct, and consciousness, if they are in fact possible to exist according to the laws of math, chemistry, physics, etc., seem absolutely destined to emerge.

"consciousness itself isn't an inherent part of the universe, but the tendency to consciousness is inherent."

Yes, exactly. That's what I just explained.

I don't see how all of it can be passed onto dna, though. I mean, dna can give us hereditary traits. It tells the cell which proteins to "grab" to make, and how to construct the proteins. But how does that impart knowledge?

Oh, absolutely it does. It's readily apparent in animals. Spiders are born with all the knowledge they'll ever need to build webs and catch insects. However, it's only part of it in higher animals, particularly so with humans. Our DNA gives us an incredible receptiveness to things like language in our early years, but so much of what defines us is our culture and our accumulation of knowledge that exists completely outside of our biology and this will simply become more so as we expand our knowledge and our own minds. If you look at biological natural selection, it's a very crude and slow process. It's a shotgun solution. Bang! Trillions of replications happen, some mutations, lots of deaths, a few survivors. Bang! More replications, some mutations, etc. It's actually not random but it is a rather brute force and clumsy means of progression. When we build new more complicated patterns than our current consciousnesses, our crude biological bodies will be obsolete. Our progression from that point will much faster and more purposeful as we invent our own descendants, each markedly superior to their ancestors and containing all of their ancestors knowledge and even much of their consciousness. Consciousness is the key combined with an accumulation of knowledge over many generations to reach that exponential leap forward in evolution.

Who knows what horrors might be unleashed? It's kind of like introducing a virus to a new culture? How will life adapt? We might drive ourselves and all other life to extinction by such an unwise attempt at immortality.

Every time a new technology is being discovered, there are the doom sayers. With electricity- Frankenstein. With nuclear power- Godzilla. With cloning- The 8th Day. And yes, there will be problems and mistakes along the way, but they'll just have to be dealt with. Stagnation is death. The next most logical step for our consciousness is to replicate our brain functioning artificially. I don't see how that's going to unleash horrible things upon the world. Eventually, unless we kill ourselves off in the very near future, it will happen. It's our destiny. It's inevitable. Those too cowardly to take the risks will be left behind by the bold and daring. Some will go early, and many will go late as their fears are assuaged. They'll become the next stage of mankind leaving the deeply stubborn to live out their brief biological existence with their butts planted firmly on the ground where they've convinced themselves that they belong.

But it seems to me that I'm the one that is more comfortable with death. I'm not trying to evade it.

So you've come to terms with the idea that when your physical body dies, that's the end of your personal consciousness? If you say that you believe your consciousness will continue in some after you die, then it sounds like you are trying to evade it, just very ineffectively.

When I see people talk about creating machines to live in so as to achieve "biological immortality" --- well, that sort of thing doesn't appeal to me. I think it's the atheist attempt to procure by your own effort what is, ultimately, unachievable in this life. As Jesus said, "In all truth I tell you, unless a wheat grain falls into the earth and dies, it remains only a single grain; but if it dies it yields a rich harvest. Anyone who loves his life loses it; anyone who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life."

See this is truly disturbing to me. This goes completely contrary to the nature of life. Every single life form on this planet is here because of ancestors who fought tooth and nail to persist. We wouldn't be here if our ancestors just lay down and died peacefully. Again, this is what separates life from rocks- a motivation to persist. This is a philosophy of death.

Now, if it gives you comfort to view things this way, like I say, well and good. But this is a lot of what I talk about when I say that I can't internalize such beliefs. For me, I have to actually believe it, and a belief that I know is not really ontologically true is ... well, it's just not something I can be a part of in any meaningful way.

There is some comfort in it, yes. I have no awareness of my personal consciousness existing forever before 40 years ago. During that vast period of time, I was not suffering under the horrible realization that I did not exist! How could I? It means I can internalize the notion of not existing for a very long period of time because its happened before. And so it follows that there will likely be a very long period of time after my lifespan that I will not personally experience. Even if I manage to persist for thousands of years, that's still just a blink of an eye in the vastness of time. I do not expect to personally experience the rest of the unimaginably long life of the universe. I will not be suffering after the end of my physical existence any more than before it began.

Once again, I'm trying to be generous. But in a way, this is conceptually to me like trying to assert that death is life, that pain is pleasure, that extinction is the passageway to something greater. It's a nice thought, but it just isn't true, at least without some ontologically real foundation. Premises aren't real except in the mind of the one who conceptualizes them. So when you decide to make a premise, a thought, an idea, as the starting point, you are left with the certainty that it isn't real.

There is evidence for what I'm talking about. I am basing my views on real experiences and somewhat common knowledge that I can describe in ways that others can understand. For instance, we should all be able to relate to the lack of experience of trillions of years of the universe's existence. I have that concept and we can all talk about that. And once again, we go back to the question of how does God resolve any of that for you? You insist that you believe in God and yet you can't describe what you believe in. If you believe in God because you can't make sense of the universe otherwise, how do you make sense of God? We almost seem to go in a circle and end up in the same place from two directions. I see evidence of purpose in the existence of life in the universe and I just accept that I don't fully understand it. You see purpose in God but admit you don't fully understand God. How are you any further along than me at answering any of these questions about purpose due to a belief in God? If God can "just exist" and you're content with that, why can't objective morality "Just exist" and can't you find comfort in that?

[Caleb]

Dale, I see that you just posted. This post will be a little behind the times, since it was written offline, but oh well.

I was just jarred by this notion you seemed to have for some reason that I think I'm freer by not believing in God as if that was my motivation. I was just pointing out that I did not have a need to stop believing in God for that reason. I think it must be based in the notion that a lot of theists have about atheists, that without a God there is no objective morality so if they just convince themselves God doesn't exist, they can then sin a lot.

I'm offline composing this, so I don't have an exact recollection of what you said that I was responding to. You said something along the lines of that you felt that disbelief gave you a stronger inclination to look for answers and avoid death as long as possible, and that you felt that if you were to believe in God and take the approach of just laying back and waiting for death on the assumption that God would answer it all after death, that would make you less free, and more dependent on God. Like I said, this is not an exact quote, it's just my memory of what you had said, so if I get it wrong, please forgive me. I wasn't finding fault with you. I was just saying that I think a person could feel the same way, and only come at it from a theistic rather than an atheistic perspective, and which one accorded him more freedom would likely depend on his temperament. That's all. I wasn't judging your beliefs as making you more or less free, just trying to respond to what you said.

As for the idea that, "if there is no God, that means I can sin a lot ..." well, that idea has its proponents, that's for sure. I think Dostoevsky had Ivan Karamazov express the idea that if God doesn't exist, then everything is permitted. Sartre, in particular, believed that this summed up his existentialism quite nicely. For me, it isn't so much whether atheists can be good people, as on what basis can anyone make moral judgments? It's hard to find an objective ethical system within a materialist metaphysics. Well, not just "hard", ultimately impossible. So as a Christian, I believe that you have a conscience that is within you, and just because you reject the idea of God, that doesn't mean that you will reject your conscience. You can't reject your conscience. It's part of you, regardless of whether it has any proper metaphysical foundation that you can find. If anything, my hypothesis is that an atheist who is attuned to conscience (as I believe you to be,) is likely to be more morally sensitive than his theistic counterpart. The reason for this supposition is that a theist has a ready made understanding of his conscience that can tend to make him take it for granted, whereas an atheist who cares about such matters will experience such conscience, but without a ready made theory of how it can be, he is likely to be more reflective and introspective on it, and less likely to take it for granted. But, I want to draw the distinction here: being morally sensitive to a conscience which, from my perspective is your inheritance from your Maker, is not to say that atheism gives one a firmer metaphysical foundation for one's ethics. There, I think the contrary is true: a foundation is difficult to find, and in a sense makes it impossible to justifiably draw universal moral judgments within a system that presumes these ethical boundaries as premises.

But that jarred me because you know me better than that, and I tried to explain that any notion of God that I've actually believed in since I was old enough to think for myself didn't impose any bizarre rules on me anyway so there's just no such motivation there. Not believing doesn't make me feel freer. I will admit that it makes life seem more purposeful to me. The idea of dying and going to heaven has not resonated well with me for some time because it seems kind of meaningless, that we struggle throughout this life on Earth and then we're just happy for all eternity after that. Boring, meaningless, purposeless are some words that come to mind.

I'm not so sure that it's all "and they lived happily ever after" after death. I think that's sort of a simplistic way of viewing it that unfortunately has been propagated by religious systems. But in the whole, I think its understandable. Most people aren't philosophers. Any religious system needs to meet the needs of everyone in its fold, and so simplistic ideas often make their way in as a sort of soft philosophy for the masses. I'm trying to figure out, exactly, what I believe about the afterlife. I sort of see it as another progression, another opportunity for growth. Another layer of the onion, that presumably I will eventually break through to another level. Then another level. At my own pace, and in my own unique way, and I'm sure with it's own challenges and difficulties.

Where is all this negativity you're responding to? It's not coming from me. If anything, I figure people see me as overly optimistic. I believe in a collective unconscious. I believe we're evolving into god-like beings and in fact that it is our destiny. I just got back from a party where I scoffed at people worried about over population and limited resources. I was like "You do realize that we're going to outgrow the need for these resources LONG before we risk depleting them? We won't need to find real estate on other planets because by then, we'll be creating all the real estate we need out of microchips." Did my post about the nature of individuals in the big scheme of nature come across as bad news? I didn't think so.

No. It's not coming from you. I'm just musing about how a person could, if he so desired, compensate for wishful/fearful thinking, and I'm not sure that he can, because all the methods of doing so are themselves biased, only the other way. It's overcompensation. I think the only approach is to approach the evidence as you would any other evidence, with the awareness that, like all humans, you carry a certain emotional investment in the answer with you. But there just isn't any way to formulate a precise way to counteract the human factor in our deliberations.

Or maybe it's a purpose-sized hole and we fill it with God because that's all we've ever known. People support the AMOG for the same reason, because we have to have something, right? And they don't realize that something can be voluntary mafia because we've all been so indoctrinated to the AMOG. Now, I realize that we can be biased toward a certain view and that view can still be correct. However, when we're trying to come to conclusions, and knowing that bias is a big factor, we should be aware of it.

Possibly. And I'm in the reluctant position of having to defend an argument that even I don't find particularly convincing. I suppose we ought to take it with a grain of salt. But not utterly dismiss it. Because it occurs to me that "purpose" is itself merely a concept, whereas hopefully there would be something more ... concrete? ... behind the purpose. I doubt my hunger would be satisfied by the thought of food.

Think of this. You must realize that nearly every notion of gods by primitive man was concocted by man. Almost every god looked mostly human. There are people still to this day, quite a few, that believe literally, that God crafted man in his own image. That's right. The being that created the universe had eyes and opposable thumbs, things that have no purpose until a material world exists and even then, only for a creature that isn't all knowing (eyes) and all powerful (hands). So these early gods were clearly not the creators of man, but the other way around. Gods were created in our image. Of course I realize that your view of God is not nearly so simplistic as that, but you still seem to cling to some notions out of indoctrination, and by that I mean the human characteristics that you seem so sure that God has.

There's a Catholic philosopher named Chesterton who did a book called the Everlasting Man, and he sort of took on this idea that man's concept of God has progressed from the simple to the more sophisticated. And I think Hislop did something a little similar in his overview of the Hindu system. And the actual reality of man's worship is quite a bit different than that. It's more of a curve. Like a beginning of sophistication, then a progression to more juvenile conceptions of God(s), then a return to greater sophistication.

However, after some extended conversations with you, I'm not sure why you call yourself Christian. The Christian beliefs seem quite a bit more specific than what you seem to believe. I mean, there's a point when your beliefs become liberal enough that they just bare little to no resemblance to the Christian religion. Even the label of "Christian" seems bizarre on you and I can only think that it's comfortable because you grew up in a Christian environment (the U.S.).

Well, there's several things here. First, I would dispute your idea that Christianity as received today is necessarily Christianity as it has always been. It doesn't take too much reading of, say, Augustine, or Origen to realize that the gigantic Doctors of the faith weren't quite as Orthodox as we tend to think of Christianity being today. One of the other things that Chesterton said was that he set out to find a unique place for himself in theology, and at the end was surprised by his Orthodoxy. In other words, sometimes our heretical ideas aren't quite so heretical as we might think. There's a lot of wiggle room within Christianity for divergence of opinion. If we don't think so, I suggest that it is only our familiarization with the peculiar American versions of fundamental Christianity that blur the reality.

Second, there's the thought of what the very word means. Christian. A Marxist is one who follows the teachings of Karl Marx. A Platonist follows Plato. Why shouldn't a Christian mean someone who follows the teachings of Christ? If the teachings of Christ be the measure of who is, and who isn't, Christian, then the whole of the doctrinal system of Christianity falls on its feet and our concern becomes the ethical teaching which flow from it. A Christian is one who hears Jesus' words and does them, not the one who says, "Lord, Lord, I did this and that in your name," but who refuses the substance of what Jesus taught.

Third, I think that Christianity is more about a set of core truths than about a set of doctrine. The secondary and tertiary doctrines are put forth to substantiate the core truth, but I see no need to take them literally as such. I posted on this a long time ago. http://nhunderground.com/forum/index.php?topic=2358.0   Pardon the formatting, the post has survived a couple moves to different servers.

I apologize if I seemed to be implying that you were taking a negative approach. If I thought that was the case, I would have stopped discussing with you a long time ago. I like your approach, mostly, but I tend to think that your approach is going to hit the same brick walls that nearly all philosophies tend to hit - the time honored big time metaphysical questions that have confounded the greatest minds since the dawn of time.

[dalebert]

I'm going to argue my point for objective morality without God. It makes sense that if consciousness is destined to be discovered by natural selection because it's just so damned useful for persistence, morality is also destined to be discovered for the same reason. In that sense, it also kind of falls in line with my own notion of platonic forms.

You talked about water flowing into the shape of its container. That's kind of how my notion of natural selection works. It's not random. It's so not random that it at least seems purposeful. Math and physics define what is possible in terms of patterns that can form, according to obeying gravity and to how different chemical bonds can form or not, etc. Natural selection is discovering these limitations (containers) in a very slow and crude fashion that accelerates as persistent patterns generate more complex and more useful ones.

Morality, like conscience, certainly appears to be emergent, even destined to be. Look at the brutality of much of the animal kingdom. With a few exceptions, the more simple the creature, the more brutal and less moral it seems to be. The insect world is incredibly brutal, filled with cannibalism. Black widows are born into a world of cannibalism and the babies who are most effective at it are the ones who survive and go on to reproduce! I learned that from Menno on the trip from FL. An alligator lays eggs and then forgets about them. If it comes across its own young later, it's likely to eat them. So at first glance, brutality seems to be the norm in nature. We were born out of it and over time, morality emerged. There does not appear to be an objective morality established in the sense of a starting place. Brutality has it's place as a step on the path to bigger and better things that are destined to be discovered because they're just so damned useful.

I suspect it's a little jarring for you when I use the term "persistent patterns" in that it sounds so technical and I'm trying to talk about purpose. Well just keep in mind that I am trying to explain it as technically as possible in order to convey how sensible and believable it is to me, how it seems sort of intuitively obvious that this is how the universe appears to work based on all the information I have. It's my own way of internalizing my beliefs as you put it. But make no mistake. The universe and all the life in it is absofuckinglutely amazing to me. The truth is that what I've already seen evidence of in terms of what's possible, all the life on Earth and all the scientific discoveries we've made, I can't even begin to get an inkling off what remains in the realm of possibility that we have yet to discover.

I had an amusing thought while writing this. What if some super advanced alien race is observing us right now. They're first thought might be that we're just fumbling around violently with no communication. Heck, there are no telepathic energy patterns traversing via quantum fields so they must not be communicating. Then some industrious individual gets this notion to pay a little more attention to some of the sounds we're making and suddenly they're a little more fascinated and impressed with us, kind of like when we discovered bees are communicating by "dancing". Perhaps a similar realization happens when they realize I'm tapping out patterns on a keyboard that others can read from the Internet. It may be as difficult for them to make sense of as it is for us to make sense of bee dancing because it's such a crude form of communication by contrast. They may be looking at our current notions of morality the same way.

[Puke]

Christ! Are you people writing a novel?

[dalebert]

Christ! Are you people writing a novel?

Now that you mention it, I'm practicing for material that will be refined and placed in the Anarchy In Your Head book. 

[Tunga]

After a couple of days of not working; the Anarchist in your butt usually convinces the brain fart in your head of the most important order of things.

As they tend to go.

To shit.

[Caleb]

Dale, I am aware of your post on objective morality, but I'm going to put that off for now. I'm not sure, exactly, how I want to address it, except to note that it's a version of the utilitarian perspective, that I don't find particularly convincing, but I'm also not sure that it's a line I want to go down right now, as here I really think that there is nothing to be gained, and quite a bit to lose. So this post will focus on the post you gave last night.

No, that's exactly backwards. It's the propagation that comes first. In a vast universe, an extremely unlikely pattern is bound to eventually emerge with some trait that causes that particular pattern to persist, the most likely being a tendency to duplicate itself. Any pattern with a trait that lends to persistence of that particular pattern gives that pattern a priority over the random nature of the matter around it. Call it life or order or don't. It doesn't really matter. It's an argument of semantics....Instinct and then consciousness seem inevitable to me once those first difficult steps are taken. Why? Because they are so adaptive for survival. The very first inklings of instinct would be incredibly effective for persistence.

Ok, I'm not going to go down the semantics game, hopefully to your relief I just want to focus on the substance of what you said. Ok, so here's where I think I misunderstood you. In my mind, I had your system creating the "life" (or whatever you want to call it) first, and then the replication. Whereas you are saying that you view it as the replication coming first, and then consciousness being "naturally selected" over time ... am I right? See here's the thing. You say "once those first difficult steps are taken" (I'm assuming you are referring to the monumental task of creating a self-replicating machine, even one that as of yet doesn't have "consciousness") "instinct and consciousness seem inevitable." See, I just think that's very ... what's the word? Mainly that you are underestimating the problem. Because from my viewpoint, for as monumental as the task of creating a self-replicating machine is, it is nothing compared to the task of endowing unfeeling matter with feeling. It's like saying that not-A is A. That unfeeling matter feels. It's a contradiction in terms, really. I think you maybe realize this. Maybe? Because later on you say, "if they are in fact possible to exist according to the laws of math, chemistry, physics, etc., seem absolutely destined to emerge."

See, from my perspective that question just keeps coming up. You've got this little machine made out of unfeeling chunks of cellular "meat", and it's replicating, but ... how does it "select" consciousness? I mean, consciousness is self-awareness. It's "feeling". It's the nature of the stuff itself. Sure, a gene can mutate, but that gene just grabs another protein. It just grabs another bit of unfeeling matter. The problem doesn't go away. The problem is within the nature of your premises, because you're starting from the concept that these little bits of matter aren't aware, and it somehow emerges. But to get there, you have to say that the little bits of matter somehow are aware. But they're not. The problem can't go away with a just so story. How does any combination of unfeeling material create subjective awareness? How does the unfeeling thing feel? That problem is way bigger than the replication problem, which is itself fairly unsurmountable. But that's a design argument, which I'm trying really, really hard to avoid making, because I feel it would sidetrack us from your discussion of what you think happened. So let's grant that somehow this machine starts replicating. I still don't see how unaware material becomes aware. This, to me, and I'm trying to avoid any unfavorable remarks, but I think that the imagery here is necessary: this to me is materialism's magic trick. It's also addressing the question "what is a thought?" but I'll get to that in a second.


Ok, on to the DNA, because I don't think you really addressed this question. This was a question of instinct, and how DNA imparts instinct. I made the comment that I didn't see how DNA could be the necessary agent of instinct. The reason I gave for this is the nature of how DNA works. It's basically just a bunch of codified instructions for construction of the cell. It uses four chemical "letters" which symbolize different amino acid bases, and based on the particular coding, the cell will grab a particular amino acid, and use it to construct a particular protein sequence. So, don't get me wrong. DNA is amazing. I mean, it boggles my mind. But, in the end, it's a blueprint. It constructs a very specific thing. It constructs protein. And I just don't see the mechanism by which instinct could possibly be codified here. Strands of protein don't have unique behaviors associated with them, and all of us are made up of pretty much the same base, just with a different construction. So from my perspective, I don't see that DNA is the responsible agent for instinct. And this is a "how" question. But you didn't answer the how question. You just begged the question. Your argument went like this:

Oh, absolutely it does. It's readily apparent in animals. Spiders are born with all the knowledge they'll ever need to build webs and catch insects.

So the argument, if I can construct it, went like this:

Premise 1:  DNA is the agent behind instinct
Premise 2:  I can observe instinct in newly hatched spiders.
Conclusion: The spiders must have their instinctual behavior coded in their DNA.

The conclusion DOES follow from the premises. But I was challenging premise 1, so you can't beg it. You need to defend Premise 1 by showing how the DNA codes for instinct. Because this doesn't seem possible to me, given what DNA is and how it works.

Which is just about as good a time as any to introduce the concept of "thought". What is "thought"? I'm going to put instinct in the category of "thought", not that it's exactly the same as every other category of thought, but that it has the same nature. I think you want to be very careful about trying to tie instinct into DNA, as if in some way the material automatically produces the thought. Because that is going to have implications for how you view other thought processes. And I think you're going to trap yourself in a universe of determinism.

Every time a new technology is being discovered, there are the doom sayers. With electricity- Frankenstein. With nuclear power- Godzilla. With cloning- The 8th Day. And yes, there will be problems and mistakes along the way, but they'll just have to be dealt with. Stagnation is death. The next most logical step for our consciousness is to replicate our brain functioning artificially. I don't see how that's going to unleash horrible things upon the world.

It could unleash horrible things upon the world because we don't know what form the new life will take. Our experience shows that some carbon based life is benign and cooperative, and some is parasitic and predatory. To create a new form of life with superior survival skills might mean the doom for other agents that are less fit for survival. Since you are talking about creating "mannish" type life, it seems reasonable to conclude that human life, in direct competition with the new life, might be endangered. Sometimes the doomsday people have been right. There were people who warned that nuclear technology might be used as a frightening weapon. The people of Heroshima can be forgiven, I suppose, for agreeing with the doomsday prophets?

So you've come to terms with the idea that when your physical body dies, that's the end of your personal consciousness? If you say that you believe your consciousness will continue in some after you die, then it sounds like you are trying to evade it, just very ineffectively.

This is more begging the question, Dale. If there is life after death, then it isn't a delusion.

See this is truly disturbing to me. This goes completely contrary to the nature of life. Every single life form on this planet is here because of ancestors who fought tooth and nail to persist. We wouldn't be here if our ancestors just lay down and died peacefully. Again, this is what separates life from rocks- a motivation to persist. This is a philosophy of death

I am not in any hurry to die. I like to say that I plan on living to be 120. But I can't live forever. Not in this world, anyway. Put yourself in a harddrive if you want, but you can't guarantee some guy won't come by with a magnet. And you can pretty much guarantee that there will be an equipment malfunction anyway at some point. And aren't you jumping the gun? I mean, you can't even download your mind into a comparable biological unit. What makes you think that you are going to be able to translate your essence into a completely different form? If you want to survive, the next logical step would be to learn how to transfer your essence into younger human clones, not some Deep Blue contraption.

If God can "just exist" and you're content with that, why can't objective morality "Just exist" and can't you find comfort in that?

I've already addressed this. But let's imagine a scenario in which you are in a universe bubble. You are the only person in the universe bubble. There is nothing else that you are aware of, but you feel this feeling of being loved. Love must have a subject and an object. So if you were convinced that there was no one else, that you were the only thing in the universe, you would have no logical alternative but to view that feeling of being loved as an illusion. You couldn't simply assume it as a premise, because concepts must have ontological foundation. Concepts without any foundation cannot be premises. Love. Purpose. Meaning. These are human abstractions of something that must be rooted in something real. To not root them in something real is to use the word without any meaning. It's like you haven't said anything. They are just dangling in the air, but the subject and the object is not there. A table is real. You are real. The earth is real. The word here is "ontology", what has being?

[Russell Kanning]

Christ! Are you people writing a novel?

I know Caleb's posts are getting longer that the quotes from Christ in the Bible.