The death of AI (yet again)

So "I think, therefore I am not"? :)

Well according to materialism your thoughts are an illusion. :eek:

Perhaps the most profound illusion introspection foists on us is the notion that our thoughts are actually recorded anywhere in the brain at all in the form introspection reports. This has to be the profoundest illusion of all, because neuroscience has been able to show that networks of human brain cells are no more capable of representing facts about the world the way conscious introspection reports than are the neural ganglia of sea slugs! The real challenge for neuroscience is to explain how the brain stores information when it can’t do so in anything like the way introspection tells us it does—in sentences made up in a language of thought.

Has there ever been a crazier religion than materialist evangelism? :D

I do give credit to Alex Rosenberg for admitting materialism makes life completely worthless though.
 
Well according to materialism your thoughts are an illusion. :eek:



Has there ever been a crazier religion than materialist evangelism? :D

I can think of several crazier without even trying.

That said, I'm always interested how you continue to use "religion" as a perjorative term in this context, yet exhibit respect towards others' religions in different contexts.

It would be helpful if you could share your definition of religion.


I do give credit to Alex Rosenberg for admitting materialism makes life completely worthless though.

And now I'm going to need a definition of "worth", or at least an idea of some arbiter.
 
That said, I'm always interested how you continue to use "religion" as a perjorative term in this context, yet exhibit respect towards others' religions in different contexts.

Is it a pejorative? Just means brute facts taken on faith.

And now I'm going to need a definition of "worth", or at least an idea of some arbiter.

I think Alex Rosenberg goes into it pretty well in the above link - The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality.

Materialism makes every human accomplishment nothing more than arbitrary movements of atoms. Even the Enlightenment which "skeptics" seem to think of as a humanistic triumph:

The Zombie Enlightenment

Now according to the Myth, the hundred million odd souls populating Europe in the 18th century shuffled about in unconscious acquiescence to authority, each generation blindly repeating the chauvinisms of the generation prior. The Enlightenment institutionalized inquiry, the asking of questions, and the asking of questions, far from merely setting up ‘choice situations’ between assertions, makes cognitive incapacity explicit. The Enlightenment, in other words, institutionalized the erosion of traditional authority, thus ‘freeing’ individuals to pursue other possible answers. The great dividend of the Enlightenment was nothing less than autonomy, the personal, political, and material empowerment of the individual via knowledge. They were blind, but now they could see–or at least so they thought.

Postmodernism, on the other hand, arose out of the recognition that inquiry has no end, that the apparent rational verities of the Enlightenment were every bit as vulnerable to delegitimization (‘deconstruction’) as the verities of the tradition that it swept away. Enlightenment critique was universally applicable, every bit as toxic to successor as to traditional claims. Enlightenment reason, therefore, could not itself be the answer, a conviction that the increasingly profound technical rationalization of Western society only seemed to confirm. The cognitive autonomy promised by Kant and his contemporaries had proven too radical, missing the masses altogether, and stranding intellectuals in the humanities, at least, with relativistic guesses. The Enlightenment deconstruction of religious narrative—the ‘death of God’—was at once the deconstruction of all absolute narratives, all foundations. Autonomy had collapsed into anomie.

This is the Myth of the Enlightenment, at least in cartoon thumbnail.
 
Is it a pejorative? Just means brute facts taken on faith.

Under that definition, can you point to anyone who isn't religious?



Materialism makes every human accomplishment nothing more than arbitrary movements of atoms.

I'm not sure why you are underestimating the power and mystery of atoms. I guess that's your religion showing? ;)
 

OK, so, it's hard to take that article seriously, and I would hope that any sane, thoughtful human being would totally take it apart, as the first couple of commenters did. That said:

I do give credit to Alex Rosenberg for admitting materialism makes life completely worthless though.

I definitely don't. As I've made clear in previous threads, especially those involving Neil (whatever happened to that guy, anyhow? He was a boon to this forum), I don't think ethics need be predicated any more on immaterialism than they can be on materialism - and I would extend that to values and worth too. Even though I am definitely not a materialist, I do not believe that ethics, values and worth are predicated on immaterialism. Even if all that existed were matter (albeit that that is impossible, since self-evidently consciousness is immaterial), I would argue that ethics, value and worth - of the highest sort (OK, OK, maybe not the highest sort, a guy's gotta compromise) - were justifiable with what we had.
 
OK, so, it's hard to take that article seriously, and I would hope that any sane, thoughtful human being would totally take it apart, as the first couple of commenters did. That said:

How did they "take it apart"?

I definitely don't. As I've made clear in previous threads, especially those involving Neil (whatever happened to that guy, anyhow? He was a boon to this forum), I don't think ethics need be predicated any more on immaterialism than they can be on materialism - and I would extend that to values and worth too. Even though I am definitely not a materialist, I do not believe that ethics, values and worth are predicated on immaterialism. Even if all that existed were matter (albeit that that is impossible, since self-evidently consciousness is immaterial), I would argue that ethics, value and worth - of the highest sort (OK, OK, maybe not the highest sort, a guy's gotta compromise) - were justifiable with what we had.

Please make your case. Curious as to what argument you have here.
 
How did they "take it apart"?

Oh boy. You're making me reread them. (Slight correction, I meant the second two commenters - the first one was a request for info, not a critique).

OK, well, the first one points out (massively summarised) that even if morality is as Alex Rosenberg purports it to be - in some sense "unreal" or seemingly "unjustified" (my paraphrasings) - it doesn't make the practice or everyday belief in that morality any less "real" (again, my paraphrasing). Perhaps not such a killer blow as my comment might have implied, but at least a thoughtful materialist (?) who's pulling some things apart.

The second is way too long for me to get to summarise similarly, but how could you doubt that it was a critical pulling-apart with several introductory sentences of this nature?! "it is difficult to respond to an essay that by its own assertion could not have the meaning I attributed to it, was not produced for any purpose, and was not guided by any authorial intention. My initial impression was that the essay was in fact an entertaining and quite brilliant performative contradiction". I thought the comment was quite a clever exercise in asking, "If this essay is in fact true, then what does it say about itself?" Maybe, though, again, not as hard-hitting as my comment implied? If so, I apologise.

Please make your case. Curious as to what argument you have here.

Pretty sure we've been through this before, perhaps even more than once, but I'm too lazy to look up our past dialogues, so I'll share my view once again, and briefly (not that there is much to ramble on about anyway - it's a pretty simple view): to me, morality is inherent in the nature of conscious experience; we know what it feels like to hurt, and to be harmed, and to have our wills violated, and from an objective perspective (in the sense of going beyond our subjectivity, as well as being reasoned apart from our feelings), this leads a rational being to conclude that we ought not to subject others to hurt or harm or the like unless it's unavoidable, which, to me is a if not the core principle of morality. It doesn't matter whether there is a God or a spiritual realm, or whether we are simply biological robots - this natural inference/conclusion follows just the same simply because we are all conscious and have relatable experiences.
 
Oh, wait, that only covered morality, but I also mentioned value and worth. Similar reasoning applies: conscious experience is inherently valuable and worthy in-and-of-itself, for what it is, regardless of whether God or a spiritual realm exist - whether I feed the worms or ascend to the heavens when I die, my life, right now, right in this moment, has an intrinsic value independent of both. As of course does yours and everybody's.
 
Oh, wait, that only covered morality, but I also mentioned value and worth. Similar reasoning applies: conscious experience is inherently valuable and worthy in-and-of-itself, for what it is, regardless of whether God or a spiritual realm exist - whether I feed the worms or ascend to the heavens when I die, my life, right now, right in this moment, has an intrinsic value independent of both. As of course does yours and everybody's.

Oh I don't think the Good has anything to do with God, at least in terms of authorship/dictates. In fact I would say the idea that God decides morality to be logically flawed. (Our old thread about this.)

That said if there's no objective morality there's nothing but arbitrary preferences. Additionally there can be no such thing as inalienable rights. It's a complete disaster for any real humanism, one of the reasons (IIRC) James and Myers looked to the paranormal to stem the materialist tide.
 
So... you do believe in an objective morality? What do you think grounds/justifies (struggling to come up with the right word here) it?

There's no conversation about morality worth having without objective morals. Otherwise all anyone is discussing is preferences - which have no moral weight - or descriptions of what is without normative impetus of what should be (Hume's Is-Ought Problem).

However I do accept there is a curious thing going on here, just like looking for what grounds Reason - the ground cannot be known in a logical sense where it is proved.

That said, it's arguable due to Agrippa's Trilemma that it is only ever unverifiable (in the 'objective' view) gnosis that ends up being the arbiter of what one decides is Knowledge/Truth. I think Plato and Dante seem to suggest as much at the end of their long arguments (Republic/Symposium & Commedia respectively)?
 
That said, it's arguable due to Agrippa's Trilemma that it is only ever unverifiable (in the 'objective' view) gnosis that ends up being the arbiter of what one decides is Knowledge/Truth.

OK, so, not to put too fine a point on it, but you don't really have an explanation for the grounding/justification of objective morality; you just believe it is something that we somehow and inexplicably know?

One further question I'd like to put to you in that case is exactly how you define objective morality. I ask because, as I'm sure you'd agree, genuine moral dilemmas exist, in which the choice is difficult not because we consider it selfishly, but because the answer is non-obvious. Given this, "objective morality" cannot be totally deterministic in the sense of offering obviously necessary answers to all moral questions - wouldn't you agree? In which case, what exactly is its nature/role?
 
P.S. Sci, we may be derailing this thread. If you'd like to start a separate "objective morality" thread, I would be quite happy to move our conversation there.
 
OK, so, not to put too fine a point on it, but you don't really have an explanation for the grounding/justification of objective morality; you just believe it is something that we somehow and inexplicably know?

One further question I'd like to put to you in that case is exactly how you define objective morality. I ask because, as I'm sure you'd agree, genuine moral dilemmas exist, in which the choice is difficult not because we consider it selfishly, but because the answer is non-obvious. Given this, "objective morality" cannot be totally deterministic in the sense of offering obviously necessary answers to all moral questions - wouldn't you agree? In which case, what exactly is its nature/role?

Can you give me an example of a non-objective morality that is grounded/justified? If there's no kind of objective morality, there are no conversations about morality just preferences as "moral" as your favorite dessert.

Of course if you want a ground for morality you need a ground for logic, since it's only from logic the concept of ground is seen as a necessity.

As for defining objective morality, I'm not saying there are necessarily rules written into the universe about the right decision in a deterministic sense. NDEs talking about the importance of Love would be an indicator of a kind of objective morality.
 
Can you give me an example of a non-objective morality that is grounded/justified?

Well, I kind of already have. The grounding I gave in my earlier post is in one sense objective (don't harm people because of what we know harm to be), but in another sense, a person needs to use their own judgement in applying/extending it.

If there's no kind of objective morality, there are no conversations about morality just preferences as "moral" as your favorite dessert.

Well, it's hard to respond to that given that I do believe in objective morality "written into conscious experience", and can't imagine how it could be any other way.

NDEs talking about the importance of Love would be an indicator of a kind of objective morality.

OK, thanks for sharing your view. It's just curious to me that you think there needs to be some sort of grounding other than in conscious experience! I mean, when we experience love, isn't it (objectively) obvious that this is something that we should share with and contribute to the lives of others? What more grounding could we need??
 
Back
Top