Matthew Alper, Have Skeptics Lost Their Edge? |448|

The usefulness, as I see it, is in helping prevent polarisation in society. After all, people on all sides seem to abhor polarisation, at least paying lip-service to it. Trouble is, lots of people on all sides seem to attempt to combat polarisation by becoming... more polarised rather than less. Lots of us seem to be falling over trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

Perhaps the only escape from the situation is via a preparedness to remain truly skeptical/open. This is something that requires personal integrity and dedication to the truth -- which boils down to the realisation that the only truth we can have consists in the acceptance of our enormous ignorance. In other words, it relies on a capacity for humility.

I'm not holding my breath. Although I can see the utility in humility, it's devilishly hard to actually be humble; for anyone -- including yours truly.

Further to my previous post above, I've just discovered a recent conversation between Rick Archer and Donald Hoffman at Batgap (see video below). Hoffman emphasises the utility of humility in a fascinating discussion which one can only hope the likes of Alper will look at and at least consider. Like I say, I'm not holding my breath, but you never know...

 
Apparently, there's little evidence (outside the Quran and Hadith) that Muhammed did actually exist (unlike Jesus, for example, for whom there is a modicum of evidence outside biblical sources). Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn't, but everything that's said about him may be very largely a matter of faith rather than fact. Still, it's a fair point that it's poor thinking to compare Muhammed with Zeus.



The bit highlighted in red is disputed. Apparently, the "observer" needn't necessarily be represented by human consciousness -- see here. But I suppose Bishop Berkeley might have said that God is the ultimate consciousness, maintaining everything; the "quantum observer", far from being non-conscious, would be part of the omnipresent awareness/influence of a deity. I suppose Bernardo Kastrup might put it in terms of everything being in the non-self-reflective consciousness of M@L (Mind-At-Large). This would include all the inanimate "objects" (actually mental processes occurring in M@L) that we can perceive, as well as the self-reflective consciousnesses of living organisms -- which he sees as dissociated mental processes within M@L.

One interesting point about the reference I linked to is that it seems possible to vary the degree of influence of the quantum observer. IOW, it isn't always the case that either particles or waves can be detected. Sometimes, it's almost an "analogue" situation, where there's a range of effects from none, through some, to maximal, interference depending on the experimental conditions pertaining.
Apparently, there's little evidence (outside the Quran and Hadith) that Muhammed did actually exist (unlike Jesus, for example, for whom there is a modicum of evidence outside biblical sources). Perhaps he did and perhaps he didn't, but everything that's said about him may be very largely a matter of faith rather than fact. Still, it's a fair point that it's poor thinking to compare Muhammed with Zeus.



The bit highlighted in red is disputed. Apparently, the "observer" needn't necessarily be represented by human consciousness -- see here. But I suppose Bishop Berkeley might have said that God is the ultimate consciousness, maintaining everything; the "quantum observer", far from being non-conscious, would be part of the omnipresent awareness/influence of a deity. I suppose Bernardo Kastrup might put it in terms of everything being in the non-self-reflective consciousness of M@L (Mind-At-Large). This would include all the inanimate "objects" (actually mental processes occurring in M@L) that we can perceive, as well as the self-reflective consciousnesses of living organisms -- which he sees as dissociated mental processes within M@L.

One interesting point about the reference I linked to is that it seems possible to vary the degree of influence of the quantum observer. IOW, it isn't always the case that either particles or waves can be detected. Sometimes, it's almost an "analogue" situation, where there's a range of effects from none, through some, to maximal, interference depending on the experimental conditions pertaining.
That's a very interesting link. Not only does it appear that the degree of observation determines the degree of interference, but also that the degree of observation of the presumably non-conscious "observing" device itself affects that degree of interference, rather than any subsequent human observation of the data. Is there any bottom to this rabbit-hole?
 
Are skeptics getting boring? Yes which ones? The "pop tart" skeptics like this guy and science babe, and skeptical Cat etc. But real skeptics, that employ the method fairly and ethically? No they are not boring. In fact they might be keeping people sane
 
There is absolutely not a modicum of evidence of Jesus existing, that is an absurd statement
 
I definitely get the feeling ole Mr. Alper is a little too impressed with his book; actually, I might have had a similar reaction if I'd written it, since he wasn't an accomplished writer, sold a lot books unexpectedly, and so on. He reminds me of the lead character in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" who goes into a psychotic depression when he discovers his ideas are not only not unheard of but well-developed beyond his point of discovery. Alper is different from Pirsig's character in that he claims to have read a vast amount of science & philosophy, so his book appears to break new ground. What he does appear to have done is become supremely attached to the God part of the brain & its damn hard for him to let go. I sympathize with him; I still have to remind myself to keep an open mind because there is just too much out there & inside as well for anyone to consider themselves finished w/ learning. He may also share my PhD biology professor brother's attitude that God ought to prove he/she/it exists to us, that he/she/it ought to come to us, not the other way around. He's also fond of an extremely high standard of proof like Alper. I got a kick out of his assertion that the UFO material released in 2017 may just be their way of distracting us from what else they're up to. Maybe Alper is like my brother: Knowing all things, he understood nothing.
 
Thing is, on one level, I think Alpert is correct. Because we are self-reflectively aware and know that we will die, some degree of existential angst is unsurprising. That's quite probably a contributory factor to various human belief systems in which people can posit and believe in the eternal nature of human essence or soul. I feel reasonably sure that many people are believers for the very reason he states: they want to create for themselves some kind of assurance of personal eternality.

That said, just because some, or even many, people do that doesn't constitute proof that there's nothing to eternality, or more generally, what many think of as "spirituality". If one is prepared to look at such questions using the scientific method (which despite what Alpert asserts, goes on in a number of academic and other serious settings), the fact is, many of the bedrock assumptions of materialism are being tested.

He seems to me to be a naive realist, implicitly believing in the literal reality of what his senses tell him. For him, there really is a world out there that is exactly how it appears to be. The brain really is just a collection of material stuff arranged in a certain manner, out of which there really does emerge, in some as-yet unfathomable way, consciousness.

That's his free miracle: the one assumption he can't seem to truly question. Things are exactly and only what he perceives them to be, or what those in authority tell him he should perceive them to be (few of us are credentialled physicists and understand things in the same way they do at extreme scales -- either microscopic or macroscopic). The biggest thing he has going for him is that thinking in such a way is what enables us to engineer things that actually seem to work - everything from wheels to Hadron colliders. How could they all work in reliable and predictable ways unless what seems material is the basis for everything?

All over the place, in many different scientific areas, this largely received opinion is being questioned. The textbooks, however, continue to promulgate the view that the world is made of billiard balls that collide in various interesting ways even when the evidence mounts that correlation isn't causation. "Zombie science" as Jonathan Wells termed it in his book Zombie Science: More Icons of Evolution isn't just restricted to evolution: it permeates science as a whole.

Many of the people examining the tenets of materialism at the cutting edge, although they know it's questionable, still talk to the general public and even undergraduate and postgraduate students in terms of zombie science. It's good as dead, but still it walks around proclaiming it's alive and well. For whatever reason, though at least some scientists are aware of the limitations of the materialistic model of reality (and that's what in truth it is), it's a cultural imperative to tow the company line lest the scientific thought police get on your case and get you ostracised.

If materialists could at least accept in principle that materialism is just one way of modelling reality -- granted, a highly useful one in terms of empirical observations and engineering achievements -- and not necessarily reality itself, some kind of dialogue would be possible. But there are underlying ideological and metaphysical reasons why that isn't presently happening to any great extent, perhaps particularly (and somewhat ironically) in scientific areas quite far removed from physics. Many ardent materialists are quite often in the biological sciences, for example.

Either the universe is material, or materiality is an artifact of the way we perceive. The latter IMO is where Bernardo Kastrup and Donald Hoffman (amongst others) are coming from. If one's base assumption/free miracle is the former, then attempts to converse are unlikely to succeed, witness towards then end of the interview where Alpert, it seemed to me, was mostly positing as fact the very things that materialism asserts in order to prove itself. It's all very circular and it would be nice if there were some way to induce at least a scintilla of doubt.

Just getting a person like Alpert to at least intellectually understand and consider something like idealism, and how, if true, it could undermine his position, would be a major achievement. But for him it simply can't be so and so he won't really even consider the possibility. I have nothing personal against him, and in some respects his journey recapitulates my own, so I think I understand his take on things, but will he ever understand other viewpoints, or will he continue to kick the rock, like Samuel Johnson, thus refuting non-materialism?

Have to wait and see, but doesn't seem like there's much hope right now. My only plea would be for him to try to see materialism as a somewhat useful and successful model when it comes to adapting ourselves to reality as we perceive it, whilst retaining at least some skepticism/openness towards the possibility that appearances could be deceptive.
There's a brand of spirituality that teaches matter is "real." Le Hongzhi, who is the founder of Falun Dafa, teaches that conserving your virtue or white substance & eliminating karma or black substance & avoiding collecting more of it causes your mortal body molecular make-up to be gradually replaced by indestructible, high-energy matter. This is the Buddha School method of becoming an Immortal. If I understand him correctly, then altering our energetic make-up over a long period of time frees us from the cycle of birth, old age, illness, & death. So, is Le Hongzhi ultimately a "materialist" spiritual teacher?
 
There is absolutely not a modicum of evidence of Jesus existing, that is an absurd statement

I suggest you google "historical evidence that jesus lived" to see whether or not what you say is true. I said "modicum" rather than assert incontrovertible evidence because, like much historical evidence, it's open to a degree of doubt. Reportedly, most scholars, even those who are atheists, support the historicity of Jesus. Whether or not he was, and did, what the New Testament claims is a different matter, of course.
 
Matthew Alper said:
So I have people say, “When I die I’m going to be in heaven with my family.” So I’ll say like, “Okay, you’ll be in heaven. Let’s even assume that’s true. You’re going to go to heaven. Who you are is going to live forever. You, Joe, is going to be around for eternity.” But then I say, “But let me ask, what if Joe gets dementia, Alzheimer’s tomorrow, and then you die a year into it, where your last self didn’t know whether to go to the bathroom or eat an apple, you didn’t know the difference between the two. You didn’t remember the names of your own children, your wife, let alone your own self. So is Joe the demented going to be floating around in this eternal headspace for eternity, or do you have this idealized version that it’s you, Joe, now as you’re talking to me? ”

Dementia is due to an impaired brain. Now, if there is an afterlife, the self/soul would have to be an entirely distinct entity from the brain. Hence, the impaired brain would be an irrelevance to our cognitive abilities. Consider if one has on a pair of eyeglasses. The lenses might be cracked, hence affecting one's vision. But that has no implications for one's vision when we take the eyeglasses off.
Immediately after the above Matthew goes on to say:

Or maybe is it going to be Joe 10 years ago, or Joe when you were five? We’re all chameleons. We’re a thousand different people in our lifetimes based on our periods of life.


We might have a 1000 different pairs of eyeglasses we could wear, all affecting our vision in differing characteristic ways. But our unaided vision is unaffected and perhaps our vision is different from the vision from all of the eyeglasses.
The real self is that which makes one the same self from childhood to adulthood, the same self regardless of whether one is drunk or sober etc. I go into all this in more detail in a blog post.
 
"Material is dead." -Niche (fake quote I made up)
"God is dead." -Nietzsche (actual quote)

Niche: a hollowed out space in a rock.
Materialism: everything is made of dead empty rocks.
I put it at the beginning of a blog that I linked/copied from titled Death of Materialism.
very nice :) thx.



Yes the cultural war is happening and needs to happen. I'm glad others are fighting it. Suppose you have some trench warfare going on over here where two lines are not budging. You can keep sending men over the top into no-man's land to die or you can invade the weaker areas until they're surrounded. Engaging with hardcore skeptics is fighting in no-man's land with machine gun nests and barbed wire.
I get yr point :)

But what does victory look like? I guess we got a definition of victory from this discussion: victory is accredited classes and degrees in Psi.
more like co-opted by a hopelessly corrupt system.

I mean, I guess it could happen after the Vatican cleans up the"few bad apples " in it's organization.



Open question: can you systematize and institutionalize and make available to the masses something that is at its core a violation of the system?
I agree with your implied answer--- no :)
 
Maybe one way is to trap him...
I guess I'm wondering if this doesn't set us off on the wrong foot from the get-go. he has trapped himself. maybe we need to understand how / why rather than work on the " did they build Noah's Ark with nails" problem.
 
I suggest you google "historical evidence that jesus lived" to see whether or not what you say is true. I said "modicum" rather than assert incontrovertible evidence because, like much historical evidence, it's open to a degree of doubt. Reportedly, most scholars, even those who are atheists, support the historicity of Jesus. Whether or not he was, and did, what the New Testament claims is a different matter, of course.
I have been doing research on Jesus for over 10 years and from my research I'm almost sure Jesus is literally the sun.
 
Further to my previous post above, I've just discovered a recent conversation between Rick Archer and Donald Hoffman at Batgap (see video below). Hoffman emphasises the utility of humility in a fascinating discussion which one can only hope the likes of Alper will look at and at least consider. Like I say, I'm not holding my breath, but you never know...

Rick is on his game... Hoffman too!
 
I definitely get the feeling ole Mr. Alper is a little too impressed with his book; actually, I might have had a similar reaction if I'd written it, since he wasn't an accomplished writer, sold a lot books unexpectedly, and so on. He reminds me of the lead character in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" who goes into a psychotic depression when he discovers his ideas are not only not unheard of but well-developed beyond his point of discovery. Alper is different from Pirsig's character in that he claims to have read a vast amount of science & philosophy, so his book appears to break new ground. What he does appear to have done is become supremely attached to the God part of the brain & its damn hard for him to let go. I sympathize with him; I still have to remind myself to keep an open mind because there is just too much out there & inside as well for anyone to consider themselves finished w/ learning. He may also share my PhD biology professor brother's attitude that God ought to prove he/she/it exists to us, that he/she/it ought to come to us, not the other way around. He's also fond of an extremely high standard of proof like Alper. I got a kick out of his assertion that the UFO material released in 2017 may just be their way of distracting us from what else they're up to. Maybe Alper is like my brother: Knowing all things, he understood nothing.
nice. he also has an AOL email account and a science book he hasn't updated in 12 years... nuff said :)
 
I guess I'm wondering if this doesn't set us off on the wrong foot from the get-go. he has trapped himself. maybe we need to understand how / why rather than work on the " did they build Noah's Ark with nails" problem.
Well the problem is, he is trapped, but does he know it, and do his readers know it?

David
 
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I liked the show. Then I looked at his photo & thought, ah hell no, another Satan worshiper/atheist. I don't mind really, it's just that those people... take the totally opposite direction cause they don't like the direction things are going. The answer isn't the direct opposite, it's somewhere in the middle. (?) Maybe.

We're barely out of the trees so our understandings might be kind of limited. All kinds of possibilities. One thing is sure, we'll ALL know eventually.
 

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Mat the materialist says that consciousness is a sequence of members of a subset of the set of all possible brain configurations.
Mat says that when a particular sequence of this subset, consciousness, is present we experience the image of a brain and its' interactions. All the ideas, models, explanations, and images of brain are sequences of members of a subset of the subset consciousness. Thus brain the entire set is contained in a subset of a subset of itself.
Mat the materialist thinks idealists have some crazy ideas.
 
I liked the show. Then I looked at his photo & thought, ah hell no, another Satan worshiper/atheist. I don't mind really, it's just that those people... take the totally opposite direction cause they don't like the direction things are going. The answer isn't the direct opposite, it's somewhere in the middle. (?) Maybe.

We're barely out of the trees so our understandings might be kind of limited. All kinds of possibilities. One thing is sure, we'll ALL know eventually.
What makes him a "Satan worshipper"?
 
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