How many here are atheists?

[dalebert]

I think I just shit myself.
    does that make me God?

It makes you the god of your shit since you created it.

"I began with nothing but my own poo..."
- Poopen Von Schnergenberger

[dalebert]

Deep thoughts to resume soon. For now, a break for a little levity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k39LUxiZW5Y

[Vitruvian]

For now, a break for a little levity.

A little more couldn't hurt...

[Nathan.Halcyon]

god of your shit

That's an interesting way to look at creationism, and seems far more plausible than the orthodox myth, where in we are the bacterium devouring god's divine bowel movement. It also follows then that god kept the best for himself, and left us this shitty world to live in and consume. It's not too unbelievable. God created us in his image, after all, and just look at how many websites there are devoted to poop. Moving on, if god is going to consume this world with his divine wrath (hunger?), what does that make god? Finally, if this is so, what evidence do we have to believe that the heaven god has in store for his true believers won't be more of the same old shit? As if we didn't already have enough shit to deal with.

Okay, I'm going to cap the beer, and go to bed now.

[Jacobus]

Caleb, could you go into some detail regarding neuroscientists' attempts to correlate subjective experience with brain activity?

Now, the fact that there is a correlation at all is unsurprising to me and I don't think should weigh in favor of materialism.  Of course there is some relationship / interaction between our physical bodies and what we experience.

But what I am more interested in (and playing devel's advocate for) is the ability to reproduce certain states of mind in the lab.  For example, one can use meditation to arouse certain sensibilities and experiences.  The materialist claims these are just byproducts of the chemical / electrical activity in certain parts of the brain.  To back this up, he claims that if you stimulate the brain so, the subject experiences the same thing.  Taking some drugs does the same thing.

So if the "enlightenment" experience can be reproduced by drugs or external stimulus, how can it possibly be said to be transcendent?  What can one learn through such experiences? 

Personally, what I am most concerned with is this: is meditation a technique I should use to help acquire wisdom and possibly enlightenment?  How should I interpret experiences I have while meditating? 

[dalebert]

Remote-controlled rats

The researchers first threaded three wires as narrow as human hairs into each rats brain and attached them to a microprocessor slung on the rats back like a backpack. Two wires served to deliver electrical cues—one each to the brain cells associated with the rats left and right whiskers, respectively. A third wire doled out rewards to a separate area of the brain. Then a member of the scientific team, using a laptop computer, remotely stimulated the microprocessor to send an electrical signal through one cue wire or the other. The rat "felt" a touch to the corresponding set of whiskers, as though it had come in contact with an obstacle.

If the rat responded by turning in the desired direction, the controller encouraged the animal with a brief electrical pulse to its brain's reward center. The rat would feel a sensation of pleasure.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=PpfjmzZ4NTw

And from the other direction
Robot rat brain

A robot controlled by a simulated rat brain has proved itself to be a remarkable mimic of rodent behaviour in series of classic animal experiments.

The robot's biologically-inspired control software uses a functional model of "place cells". These are neurons in an area of the brain called the hippocampus that help real rats to map their environment. They fire when an animal is in a familiar location.

[Jacobus]

An interesting experiment, but I'm not sure how enlightening it is.  Is it really a surprise that rats respond to rewards?

The crux of it is that I don't think any such experiment can override the experience of "will".  Yes, I expect that if someone did to me what they did to the rat, they could modify my behaviors.  But I would still be able to experience choosing even if only for the reason of "hey it feels good when I do this".  If I decided, I could resist choosing the reward. 

For me, it is the process of decision with respect to subjective experience that is important, not the observed behavior in response to stimuli.  However, I think a scientific model can really only treat the latter.   

[Pat McCotter]

Caleb, could you go into some detail regarding neuroscientists' attempts to correlate subjective experience with brain activity?

This reminded me of the book I read. Exactly what Damasio was getting at.

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
by Antonio Damasio

As you read this, at some level you're aware that you're reading, thanks to a standard human feature commonly referred to as consciousness. What is it--a spiritual phenomenon, an evolutionary tool, a neurological side effect? The best scientists love to tackle big, meaningful questions like this, and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio jumps right in with The Feeling of What Happens, a poetic examination of interior life through lenses of research, medical cases, philosophical analysis, and unashamed introspection. Damasio's perspective is, fortunately, becoming increasingly common in the scientific community; despite all the protestations of old-guard behaviorists, subjective consciousness is a plain fact to most of us and the demand for new methods of inquiry is finally being met.
These new methods are not without rigor, though. Damasio and his colleagues examine patients with disruptions and interruptions in consciousness and take deep insights from these tragic lives while offering greater comfort and meaning to the sufferers. His thesis, that our sense of self arises from our need to map relations between self and others, is firmly rooted in medical and evolutionary research but stands up well to self-examination. His examples from the weird world of neurology are unsettling yet deeply humanizing--real people with serious problems spring to life in the pages, but they are never reduced to their deficits. The Feeling of What Happens captures the spirit of discovery as it plunges deeper than ever into the darkest waters yet.

Tackling a great complex of questions that poets, artists and philosophers have contemplated for generations, Damasio (Descartes' Error) examines current neurological knowledge of human consciousness. Significantly, in key passages he evokes T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare and William James. In Eliot's words, consciousness is "music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all." It, like Hamlet, begins with the question "Who's there?" And Damasio holds that there is, as James thought, a "stream of" consciousness that utilizes every part of the brain. Consciousness, argues Damasio, is linked to emotion, to our feelings for the images we perceive. There are in fact several kinds of consciousness, he says: the proto-self, which exists in the mind's constant monitoring of the body's state, of which we are unaware; a core consciousness that perceives the world 500 milliseconds after the fact; and the extended consciousness of memory, reason and language. Different from wakefulness and attention, consciousness can exist without language, reason or memory: for example, an amnesiac has consciousness. But when core consciousness fails, all else fails with it. More important for Damasio's argument, emotion and consciousness tend to be present or absent together. At the height of consciousness, above reason and creativity, Damasio places conscience, a word that preceded conciousness by many centuries. The author's plain language and careful redefinition of key points make this difficult subject accessible for the general reader. In a book that cuts through the old nature vs. nurture argument as well as conventional ideas of identity and possibly even of soul, it's clear, though he may not say so, that Damasio is still on the side of the angels.

[dalebert]

An interesting experiment, but I'm not sure how enlightening it is.  Is it really a surprise that rats respond to rewards?

Not a surprise to me, no. Just interesting to note that the "reward" is a zap of current directly into the rat's brain that has no benefit to the rat in any objective sense and demonstrating that there is this factor in decision making that resides in your brain and that we are figuring out just as we would take apart a carburetor and figure out how it works, only certainly much more complex. That part of its brain traditionally rewards it for doing things that help it survive- eat, drink, have sex, and we hacked it.

The crux of it is that I don't think any such experiment can override the experience of "will".  Yes, I expect that if someone did to me what they did to the rat, they could modify my behaviors.  But I would still be able to experience choosing even if only for the reason of "hey it feels good when I do this".  If I decided, I could resist choosing the reward.

Of course we experience will, but what is it? Why do I have a "will" to survive? Because I am the descendent of the things that did survive because they have a tendency to survive and were selected over things that did not. I would be surprised if a bunch of stuph that tends to die was predominant over things that tend to survive.

It seems to me that I am making decisions based on weighing a number of factors. Something just feeling good is a factor which seems biologically encoded into me. It's important that sex feel good because it has benefits to the survival of my species, and arguably not just for reproduction. Can I choose to not do something that feels good? Of course! But if I do, it seems to me that I always have a reason, another factor weighing into the decision. Programmers are already simulating this. It's called fuzzy logic. We used to program computers in a very binary fashion, yes or no, do this or do that depending on a very objectively measurable factor. Fuzzy logic takes a number of different factors, assigns them weight and applies them to a complex algorithm. I feel as if this is what I'm doing all the time. Even if I decide to do something purely for the purpose of proving free will, then that's a factor in my choice. It's JUST a factor with weight. I would not, for instance, be very likely to chop my arm off just to prove the existence of free will. Well I'm a bad example because I wouldn't try to prove free will without even knowing what it is. I doubt Caleb would chop his arm off to prove he can make a choice that doesn't have a purpose, but even if he did, the factor with considerable weight would be his desire to convince me free will exists, and then we can start to examine why he has that desire. Do we choose what we desire? I tried awfully hard to not desire other men for some time.

Ryan says we must have free will because the universe isn't strictly deterministic. So is free will an element of randomness in decision-making? OK, but that doesn't sound particularly meaningful or even useful to me. Why should I want my decisions to have a random nature about them? How does that factor into anything I should care about?

I like to think that all my choices are purposeful and not random. I really don't know what free will is and I've yet to hear an explanation of what it is that would make me care. I do see a powerful desire for it to be from people who also don't seem to know what it is really; just that they want it to be. It seems grounded in wanting an excuse to punish people for making bad decisions, but I don't believe in that whether free will exists or not. I don't believe in anyone's right to punish others because I recognize that we're all imperfect and that no one has the perfect judgment to decide for other people. I don't see free will changing my attitude about that.

It seems I make bad decisions sometimes. There are two scenarios in such a case. Either I have finite knowledge and a messy organic brain and make what I think is a good decision at the time that turns out not to be. In that case, I can nail down why I chose something and it seems like I weighed some factors and make a decision in a very deterministic fashion. The next time I make a decision, I might choose better, and in that case I realize I have more information from experience that is now being factored in. In another case, I seem subject to influences that cause me to choose something that does not seem like a good decision and yet I do it anyway. I seem subject to factors that I have little to no control over like procrastinating because I'm physically or mentally tired. Could I overcome those in a certain situation? Of course, but then we're talking about more factors that are weighed into my decision. If my house is on fire, that factor of self-preservation will have significant and overwhelming weight in the decision of whether to drag my tired ass out of bed and get out of the house. That seems like a sort of decision-making calculation that I would expect to evolve from the natural selection process. If free will might make me sit in the house and die for no particular reason, that's not a comforting thought.

I'd like to expand my knowledge and make better decisions in a more consistent manner. Is free will involved in that? Don't know what it is. Don't see why I should care.

[Caleb]

Caleb, could you go into some detail regarding neuroscientists' attempts to correlate subjective experience with brain activity?

Process philosophy is, at the heart of it, a modified form of dual aspect theory (think Spinoza here), so I'm not of the opinion that there is a "ghost in the machine"; that sort of thinking gets you all sorts of philisophical problems, (although ontological dualism may ultimately have fewer problems than eliminative materialism.)

Essentially, where I'm coming from is the idea that thinking matter is precisely that: thinking matter. It's not unthinking matter that is employing a fancy algorithm. It's not unthinking matter that has been programmed to respond in a certain way that simulates certain behaviors. It thinks because that is its nature. Pan-experientialism (one of the three `P's' of process philosophy) asserts that all matter is essentially thinking matter. I'll leave the question of why rocks don't think to another discussion.

So if you poke around with thinking matter, it's going to respond to the stimulus. Or it has the option of responding anyway. Some of what we do is actual reflex, but it's hard to tell the difference just by looking. When the doctor taps your knee, your knee responds. You can also move your knee in the same way, but one is your decision, the other is a reflex. Poke around in a brain, and what you'll get will be surprising. They can map out some things, but these are just approximate maps because they move around from person to person.  You have to understand that you are a compound person. You are made up of a colony of interacting, living cells. So sometimes they have their own individual responses to stimulus that you cannot control.

Integrating the findings of neuroscience with process philosophy is quite a task. And one that I don't think I am up to. There's a guy named ... Stoney? ... who I think is trying to do so. But there doesn't have to just be one scientific theory that would incorporate the fundamental ontological assumptions of process philosophy. So right now, there's a whole body of data that is relatively new to the scene, and the job of philosophers of science will be to integrate that into a coherent philosophy. I haven't really formed any conclusions, myself, at this time as to "how" the brain is organized. I imagine that learning that will be instructive for anyone who wants to actually create a really self-aware AI bot. For right now, I am tending to tentatively go with Karl Pribram's scientific theory on how the brain is specifically structured, but I don't think anything is authoritative at the moment. Sorry I can't help more.

Now, the fact that there is a correlation at all is unsurprising to me and I don't think should weigh in favor of materialism.  Of course there is some relationship / interaction between our physical bodies and what we experience.

Any worldview that doesn't acknowledge that our mind and bodies seem deeply connected won't have much explanatory power. I mean,  you bop me on the head, and I get knocked unconscious. That's why I like the dual aspect approach way better than the dualistic approach.

But what I am more interested in (and playing devel's advocate for) is the ability to reproduce certain states of mind in the lab.  For example, one can use meditation to arouse certain sensibilities and experiences.  The materialist claims these are just byproducts of the chemical / electrical activity in certain parts of the brain.  To back this up, he claims that if you stimulate the brain so, the subject experiences the same thing.  Taking some drugs does the same thing.

Yep. All these cells respond to stimulus on an individual, as well as a collective basis.

So if the "enlightenment" experience can be reproduced by drugs or external stimulus, how can it possibly be said to be transcendent?  What can one learn through such experiences? 

Well, I don't think it is transcendent. I'm not sure what you mean by transcendent, but I think that an enlightenment experience is a bad reason to meditate. Not that it isn't tempting. I wish I could draw you a diagram of what I mean, here. Have you seen those books of flip cartoons. Each page has a drawing that is slightly modified from the page before it, and when you flip the pages of the book, you see a moving cartoon. Ok, this is just an analogy, don't take it too literally, but our life is sort of like that. We experience change on a grand scale. We can't ever stop and take a break from that. Even when you lie perfectly still, the universe around you is changing. Each moment is different from the moment that preceded it. It may be much the same, but there will be changes, and these changes create a completely different reality. But these past moments aren't lost. They are still a part of you. And not just the past moment that is uniquely yours, on some level you can access all of this past, because it is literally existent. But this is both good and bad. Good, because it allows you to unify your experience. But bad because you cannot shut yourself out from the rest of the world, which experiences can tend to dominate you. So, for me, meditating is grounding myself. It's not isolating myself, it is fully experiencing that life which is, but also doing so while remaining aware of me, that I am a real and independent part of this universe, and trying to isolate which factors outside of me are trying to influence me. (I use the word "trying to influence me", but this is just exaggerated speech. I don't think there is any intent, just that as life goes on, there are influences that exist that I am not aware of unless I pay attention to them.) So in this sense, meditation isn't about a transcendent experience. I meditate for the opposite reason that Buddhists meditate. I'm not trying to lose myself in Nirvana, I'm trying to unify myself, strengthen the parts of me into a collective unity, and at the same time fully experience "not Caleb". I'm not clearing my mind, I'm trying to take everything in. I'm not rejecting thoughts, I'm embracing them (although for my meditations, I always try to reject words and think strictly in terms of symbols.)

Personally, what I am most concerned with is this: is meditation a technique I should use to help acquire wisdom and possibly enlightenment?  How should I interpret experiences I have while meditating? 

I don't know. It can be scary. And I don't myself ever feel particularly "enlightened" although I have Buddhists friends who do (and they always tell me that I'm doing it wrong.)    In my experience, though, the symbols tend to interpret themselves (particularly once you familiarize yourself with a few basic archetypes.)

[Caleb]

I really don't know what free will is and I've yet to hear an explanation of what it is that would make me care. I do see a powerful desire for it to be from people who also don't seem to know what it is really; just that they want it to be. It seems grounded in wanting an excuse to punish people for making bad decisions, but I don't believe in that whether free will exists or not.

I will get to the rest of what you said later. But, this just kind of smacked me upside the head. Is that really how you see my motivation? That I want to believe in free will so I can punish people? I can't imagine anything less like me if I tried.

[dalebert]

I will get to the rest of what you said later. But, this just kind of smacked me upside the head. Is that really how you see my motivation? That I want to believe in free will so I can punish people? I can't imagine anything less like me if I tried.

No, definitely not. I was speaking generally and I should have said that. If I allow myself to speculate a little wildly, I would venture a guess that your belief in this ambiguous free will is tied to belief in an ambiguous god, the belief in one somehow acting as a foundation for the other belief. Debating either subject is a bit like wrestling with a giant amoeba. Sometimes I feel like if I can just get you define something clearly, then we might quickly realize that it's nothing but an argument of semantics. As I said earlier, if one defines "God" in broad enough terms, as being the universe and all of its laws or something, then the only thing I might debate is their use of the word "god" to describe that.

[Caleb]

No, definitely not. I was speaking generally and I should have said that. If I allow myself to speculate a little wildly, I would venture a guess that your belief in this ambiguous free will is tied to belief in an ambiguous god, the belief in one somehow acting as a foundation for the other belief. Debating either subject is a bit like wrestling with a giant amoeba. Sometimes I feel like if I can just get you define something clearly, then we might quickly realize that it's nothing but an argument of semantics. As I said earlier, if one defines "God" in broad enough terms, as being the universe and all of its laws or something, then the only thing I might debate is their use of the word "god" to describe that.

I cannot define God because of His nature; I make no apologies about that. I understand the desire to have a working definition. "Define your terms" is sort of a philosophical mantra. But the nature of the subject here, and human limitation, renders this an impossibility.

Freedom, free will, personal autonomy, on the other hand, need not be so ambiguous. The problem here is sorting through all the multiple layers that arise due to our interactions and finding the "me" and separating it from "not me". That's a challenge, certainly, but not an insurmountable one, and it's helped by the fact that we do it intuitively all the time. I'll give you an example. You said, "I tried awfully hard to not desire other men for some time." By your very language construction, you showed awareness of the difference between "Dale" and not Dale. Dale is the "I", we use the word all the time. Other constraints press upon you, are part of you, perhaps, but are not you, because at the top, uniting all your parts, is a Decider. The buck stops there, and that is the "I" that you identify with. This is somewhat of a hit and run post, but I wanted to post something, because there's an idea I've been playing around with today. What if we attempted to completely avoid the word "I"? Would our sentences have the same meaning? I've been thinking about that today. Every time I thought a thought that had the word "I" in it, I tried to rephrase it to eliminate the "I". The sentence that immediately precedes this one is particularly difficult. 

[Vitruvian]

I cannot define God because of His nature; I make no apologies about that. I understand the desire to have a working definition. "Define your terms" is sort of a philosophical mantra. But the nature of the subject here, and human limitation, renders this an impossibility.

You call yourself a Christian, Caleb. 

• Do you believe that God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh? 
• Do you believe that God created man in his image, and woman from man's rib? 
• Do you believe that a talking serpent convinced Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that God banished them both from the Garden of Eden?
• Do you believe that God caused a great flood to punish the wicked, but admonished Noah and his family to build an ark, which would carry them safely to land? 
• Do you believe that God brought the Ten Plagues onto Egypt, that the pharaoh might free the Hebrews? 
• Do you believe that Jesus was the sole begotten son of God? 
• Do you believe that Jesus performed miracles during his life and that, after his execution, he appeared before his followers? 
• Do you believe that Jesus, after spiriting all the Christians away to heaven, will return to Earth at some point in the future to judge mankind?
  

The predicates of these questions, claims contained within the Bible, are part and parcel of Christianity.  What say you?

[Caleb]

 

I'm not sure even how to respond to those ideas, Vitruvian. I want to dignify it with some sort of comment, but I don't think there's possibly a way to do so. You've sort of set up this litmus test for Christianity, a litmus test which incidentally isn't even really core Christianity. I mean, I think only one of your items is traditionally thought of as a Christian fundamental. You could do better:

1:  Our World has been created by a good, loving, wise, purposive God.

2:  God loves each of us and desires that we treat each other with compassion and justice.

3:  Our world is essentially good, despite being currently filled with evil.

4:  God continues to work in the world, especially through human beings, to foster good and overcome evil.

5:  God's love, concern for justice, and purpose, having already been expressed through a series of prophets and sages, were revealed in a decisive way through Jesus of Nazareth.

6:  The divine purpose, thus revealed, is to overcome evil by bringing about a reign of God on earth, in which the present subjugation of life to demonic values (lies, ugliness, hate, indifference, etc) will be replaced by a mode of life based on divine principles (truth, beauty, goodness, justice, compassion, etc).

7:  Salvation can be enjoyed here and now, at least in a partial way, through direct experience of and empowerment by God as Holy Spirit, and by the faith that, no matter what, our lives have ultimate meaning, because nothing can separate us from the love of God.

8: The divine purpose is also to bring about an even more complete salvation in a life beyond bodily death.

even this would be a better formulation of Christianity:

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.

And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;
he descended into hell;
the third day he rose again from the dead;
he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic Church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.
AMEN.

or you could say this is Christianity, and be far more accurate:

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees they got together and, to put him to the test, one of them put a further question, 'Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?' Jesus said to him, 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets too.'