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paisleyd

The Origins of Religion: How Supernatural Beliefs Evolved - 0 views

  • specifically, why such beliefs even exist in the first place.
  • how early humans interacted with their natural environment
  • All of a sudden, you see the grasses in front of you rustling. What do you do? Do you stop and think about what might be causing the rustling (the wind or a lion, for example), or do you immediately take some kind of action?
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  • People who took their time got selected out,
  • hypersensitive agency-detecting device, or HADD,
  • facilitated the rapid decision-making process that humans had to go through when they heard a rustling in the grass. (Lions act of their own accord. Better run.)
  • HADD may have planted the seeds for religious thought.
  • humans started attributing agency to things that really didn't have agency at all.
  • tendency to explain the natural world through the existence of beings with supernatural powers — things like gods, ancestral spirits, goblins and fairies — formed the basis for religious beliefs, according to many cognitive scientists.
  • They started attributing meaning to the actions of things that weren't really acting of their own accord.
  • they started anticipating what other beings' actions might be and planning their own actions accordingly.
  • "You might think that raindrops aren't agents," Clark said. "They can't act of their own accord. They just fall.
  • enabled them to discern other people's positive and negative intentions
  • thereby increasing their own chances of survival.
  • attributing purpose to the actions of nonactors, like raindrops, ToM took a turn toward the supernatural.
  • Theory of Mind
  • refer to HADD and ToM as the "god faculty,"
  • human beings haven't evolved past this way of thinking and making decisions,
    • paisleyd
       
      We are still in the same evolutionary mind set of daily survival so it makes sense that attributing emotion and reasoning onto things around us has not changed either.
  • "You can be educated out of some of these beliefs, but you can't be educated out of these cognitive faculties. We all have a hyperactive agency-detecting device. We all have a theory of mind."
  • a trait that stuck around because the people who possessed it were better able to survive and pass on their genes.
  • Religion may have naturally sprung up from this need to keep everybody on the same page,
  • Humans' predisposition to attribute intention to just about everything (e.g., volcanic eruptions, lunar eclipses, thunderstorms) isn't necessarily the reason religion came about,
Javier E

Olga Tokarczuk Takes the Supernatural Seriously - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • The Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s latest novel, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, is also a bildungsroman, following the education of a young man. But in contrast with Northanger Abbey, The Empusium charts the opposite trajectory: What if a person could instead be taught to see the world as an unreasonable place, dominated by the supernatural or mystical?
  • The book challenges the supremacy of the “rational” that has held sway since the Enlightenment, painting a picture of a world that is illogical, fantastical, and often simply unexplainable.
  • her own work has consistently incorporated supernatural elements, through characters such as the Jewish mystic Jacob Frank in The Books of Jacob and the devoted astrologer Janina Duszejko in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Her oeuvre is marked by a dedication to the strange and the unbelievable.
catbclark

When Things Happen That You Can't Explain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • When Things Happen That You Can’t Explain
  • People believe what they believe for a range of reasons, but one of the most puzzling — at least for those who have not had events like these — is an explanation from personal experience. Such moments have cherished roles in conversion narratives, of course.
  • Sometimes people have remarkable experiences, and then tuck them away as events they can’t explain.
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  • But just having a strange and powerful experience doesn’t determine what you believe.
  • What makes the difference between conviction and startled curiosity?
  • I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself.
Javier E

Faith vs. Facts - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • a broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures.
  • People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set
  • Even what they count as evidence is different
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  • And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude.
  • On what grounds do scholars make such claims?
  • the very language people use changes when they talk about religious beings, and the changes mean that they think about their realness differently.
  • to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is alive” signals that you know that other people might not think so. It also asserts reverence and piety
  • We seem to regard religious beliefs and factual beliefs with what the philosopher Neil Van Leeuwen calls different “cognitive attitudes.”
  • when people consider the truth of a religious belief, what the belief does for their lives matters more than, well, the facts.
  • It’s the young kids who seem skeptical when researchers ask them about gods and ancestors, and the adults who seem clear and firm. It seems that supernatural ideas do things for adults they do not yet do for children.
  • religious and factual beliefs play different roles in interpreting the same events. Religious beliefs explain why, rather than how
  • people’s reliance on supernatural explanations increases as they age.
  • We evaluate religious beliefs more with our sense of destiny, purpose and the way we think the world should be
  • people don’t use rational, instrumental reasoning when they deal with religious beliefs
  • sacred values are immune to the normal cost-benefit trade-offs that govern other dimensions of our lives.
  • The danger point seems to be when people feel themselves to be completely fused with a group defined by its sacred value.
  • One of the interesting things about sacred values, however, is that they are both general (“I am a true Christian”) and particular (“I believe that abortion is murder”)
  • It is possible that this is the key to effective negotiation, because the ambiguity allows the sacred value to be reframed without losing its essential truth
  • these new ideas about religious belief should shape the way people negotiate about ownership of the land, just as they should shape the way we think about climate change deniers and vaccine avoiders. People aren’t dumb in not recognizing the facts. They are using a reasoning process that responds to moral arguments more than scientific ones, and we should understand that when we engage.
criscimagnael

Understanding Science: An overview - 0 views

  • Science is, in one sense, our knowledge of all that — all the stuff that is in the universe
  • But just as importantly, science is also a reliable process by which we learn about all that stuff in the universe. However, science is different from many other ways of learning because of the way it is done. Science relies on testing ideas with evidence gathered from the natural world.
  • Science helps satisfy the natural curiosity with which we are all born: why is the sky blue, how did the leopard get its spots, what is a solar eclipse? With science, we can answer such questions without resorting to magical explanations.
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  • Without science, the modern world would not be modern at all, and we still have much to learn.
  • does not deal with supernatural explanations.
  • it is a path to understanding.
  • all science relies on testing ideas by figuring out what expectations are generated by an idea and making observations to find out whether those expectations hold true.
  • Accepted scientific ideas are reliable because they have been subjected to rigorous testing,
  • It relies on a system of checks and balances, which helps ensure that science moves in the direction of greater accuracy and understanding. This system is facilitated by diversity within the scientific community, which offers a broad range of perspectives on scientific ideas.
anonymous

Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
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  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
Duncan H

Living in the Material World - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • on a visit to the Academy of Sciences in Almaty some years ago I was presented with a souvenir meant to assure me that Central Asia was indeed still producing philosophy worthy of note. It was a collectively authored book entitled “The Development of Materialist Dialectics in Kazakhstan,” and I still display it proudly on my shelf. Its rough binding and paper bespeak economic hardship. It is packed with the traces of ideas, yet everything about the book announces its materiality.I had arrived in the Kazakh capital 1994, just in time to encounter the last of a dying breed: the philosopher as party functionary (they are all by now retired, dead or defenestrated, or have simply given up on what they learned in school). The book, written by committee, was a collection of official talking points, and what passed for conversation there was something much closer to recitation.
  • The philosophical meaning of materialism may in the final analysis be traced back to a religious view of the world. On this view, to focus on the material side of existence is to turn away from the eternal and divine. Here, the category of the material is assimilated to that of sin or evil.
  • Yet in fact this feature of Marxist philosophical classification is one that, with some variations, continues to be shared by all philosophers, even in the West, even today
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  • materialism is not the greedy desire for material goods, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is material;
  • idealism is not the aspiration toward lofty and laudable goals, but rather the belief that the fundamental reality of the world is mental or idea-like. English-speaking philosophers today tend to speak of “physicalism” or “naturalism” rather than materialism (perhaps to avoid confusion with the Wall Street sense of the term). At the same time, Anglo-American historians of philosophy continue to find the distinction between materialism and idealism a useful one in our attempts at categorizing past schools of thought. Democritus and La Mettrie were materialists; Hobbes was pretty close. Berkeley and Kant were idealists; Leibniz may have been.
  • And it was these paradoxes that led the Irish philosopher to conclude that talk of matter was but a case of multiplying entities beyond necessity. For Berkeley, all we can know are ideas, and for this reason it made sense to suppose that the world itself consists in ideas.
  • Soviet and Western Marxists alike, by stark contrast, and before them the French “vulgar” (i.e., non-dialectical) materialists of the 18th century, saw and see the material world as the base and cause of all mental activity, as both bringing ideas into existence, and also determining the form and character of a society’s ideas in accordance with the state of its technology, its methods of resource extraction and its organization of labor. So here to focus on the material is not to become distracted from the true source of being, but rather to zero right in on it.
  • one great problem with the concept of materialism is that it says very little in itself. What is required in addition is an elaboration of what a given thinker takes matter, or ideas, to be. It may not be just the Marxist aftertaste, but also the fact that the old common-sense idea about matter as brute, given stuff has turned out to have so little to do with the way the physical world actually is, that has led Anglo-American philosophers to prefer to associate themselves with the “physical” or the “natural” rather than with the material.  Reality, they want to say, is just what is natural, while everything else is in turn “supernatural” (this distinction has its clarity going for it, but it also seems uncomfortably close to tautology). Not every philosopher has a solid grasp of subatomic physics, but most know enough to grasp that, even if reality is eventually exhaustively accounted for through an enumeration of the kinds of particles and a few basic forces, this reality will still look nothing like what your average person-in-the-street takes reality to be.
  • The 18th-century idealist philosopher George Berkeley strongly believed that matter was only a fiction contrived by philosophers in the first place, for which the real people had no need. For Berkeley, there was never anything common-sensical about matter. We did not need to arrive at the era of atom-splitting and wave-particle duality, then, in order for the paradoxes inherent in matter to make themselves known (is it infinitely divisible or isn’t it?
  • Central to this performance was the concept of  “materialism.” The entire history of philosophy, in fact, was portrayed in Soviet historiography as a series of matches between the materialist home-team and its “idealist” opponents, beginning roughly with Democritus (good) and Plato (bad), and culminating in the opposition between official party philosophy and logical positivism, the latter of which was portrayed as a shrouded variety of idealism. Thus from the “Short Philosophical Dictionary,” published in Moscow in 1951, we learn that the school of logical empiricism represented by Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath and others, “is a form of subjective idealism, characteristic of degenerating bourgeois philosophy in the epoch of the decline of capitalism.”Now the Soviet usage of this pair of terms appears to fly in the face of our ordinary, non-philosophical understanding of them (that, for example,  Wall Street values are “materialist,” while the Occupy movement is “idealist”). One might have thought that the communists should be flinging the “materialist” label at their capitalist enemies, rather than claiming it for themselves. One might also have thought that the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent failed project of building a workers’ utopia was nothing if not idealistic.
  • Consider money. Though it might sometimes be represented by bank notes or coins, money is an immaterial thing par excellence, and to seek to acquire it is to move on the plane of ideas. Of course, money can also be converted into material things, yet it seems simplistic to suppose that we want money only in order to convert it into the material things we really want, since even these material things aren’t just material either: they are symbolically dense artifacts, and they convey to others certain ideas about their owners. This, principally, is why their owners want them, which is to say that materialists (in the everyday sense) are trading in ideas just as much as anyone else.
  • In the end no one really cares about stuff itself. Material acquisitions — even, or perhaps especially, material acquisitions of things like Rolls Royces and Rolexes — are maneuvers within a universe of materially instantiated ideas. This is human reality, and it is within this reality that mystics, scientists, and philosophers alike are constrained to pursue their various ends, no matter what they might take the ultimate nature of the external world to be.
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    A very interesting article on the contrast between materialism and idealism.
Emily Horwitz

Will Science Someday Rule Out the Possibility of God? | Physics vs. God | LiveScience - 0 views

  • Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science. 
  • good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.
  • Psychology research suggests that belief in the supernatural acts as societal glue and motivates people to follow the rules; further, belief in the afterlife helps people grieve and staves off fears of death.
julia rhodes

Atheist vs. Atheist? | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • After all, individuals who lack belief in a deity are, at least in their unbelief, essentially the same, right? But there’s a subtle—yet crucial—difference in degrees of incredulity that can meaningfully distinguish one’s person’s atheism from another’s. So if there’s an atheist in your life (or you’re one yourself), you might wish to consider just what sort of atheist they (or you) represent.
  • The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality (2007). Its author, the prominent French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, makes the distinction between the “dogmatic atheist” and the “non-dogmatic atheist.”
  • For the assuredness of their atheism borders on an arrogance comparable to that of their fundamentalist-believing counterparts. In their outspoken conviction, they’re quite prepared to go on record declaring the non-existence of any supernatural being. Which is to say, their claim is not expressed as an opinion but as undeniable fact.
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  • As compared to dogmatic atheists, non-dogmatic disbelievers go only one (modest) step beyond the undecided agnostic. It’s accurate to say that neither the non-dogmatic atheist nor the agnostic holds any faith in the existence of a god. But the more tolerant (or less “doctrinaire”) atheist—unlike the agnostic, who prefers to remain non-committal—is still ready to take a stand on the matter, asserting (though as an opinion): “I believe that no god (and certainly not God in the traditional sense)  exists.”
  • But even though they strive to keep an open mind on all things—for they’re oriented toward the world empirically and governed by facts rather than faith— non-dogmatic atheists simply can’t find any compelling evidence for a (monotheistic or biblical) god's existence.
  • To them, all that humans are able to know for sure exists in the realm of the relative. Anything beyond that points to the insoluble mysteries of the universe—which even today’s scientists recognize may be forever beyond their ever-more-precise instruments of knowing.
  • Coming full circle, if scientists in general—and physicists in particular—can’t ever be absolutely certain about Absolutes, how much more difficult must it be for metaphysicists to attain such certitude? To answer my own question: very difficult, indeed!
Javier E

Did Zeus Exist? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • This set me thinking about why we are so certain that Zeus never existed. Of course, we are in no position to say that he did.  But are we really in a position to say that he didn’t?
  • there were “epiphanies” that could “indicate not merely a visible or audible epiphany (whether in the light of day or through a dream . . .) but also any clear expression of a god’s favor such as weather conditions hampering an enemy, a miraculous escape, or a cure;
  • Why did belief in the gods persist in spite of critical challenges? What evidence seemed decisive to the ancient Greeks? 
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  • what the Greeks saw as experiences of divine actions in their lives. ”The greatest evidence for the existence of gods is that piety works . . . the converse is that impiety leads to disaster,
  • There were also rituals, associated with the many cults of specific gods, that for some worshippers “created a sense of contact with the divine. One knows that the gods exist because one feels their presence during the drama of the mysteries or the elation of the choral dance.
  • as this civilization developed the critical tools of historiography and philosophy, Zeus’s reality remained widely unquestioned. 
  • how can we be so sure that the Greeks lived in the same sort of world as we do?  What decisive reason do we have for thinking that for them divinity was not a widely and deeply experienced fact of life?
  • shouldn’t we hold a merely agnostic position on Zeus and the other Greek gods, taking seriously the possibility that they existed but holding that we have good reason neither to assert nor deny their existence?
  • We may well think that our world contains little or no evidence of the supernatural.  But that is no reason to think the same was true of the Greek world.
  • I’m inclined to say that an atheistic denial of Zeus is ungrounded.  There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks.  We have no reason to make this assumption.
Javier E

New Statesman - The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now - 0 views

  • Art & Design Books Film Ideas Music & Performance TV & Radio Food & Drink Blog Return to: Home | Culture | Books The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now By George Levine Reviewed by Terry Eagleton - 22 June 2011 82 comments Print version Email a friend Listen RSS Misunderstanding what it means to be secular.
  • Societies become truly secular not when they dispense with religion but when they are no longer greatly agitated by it. It is when religious faith ceases to be a vital part of the public sphere
  • Christianity is certainly other-worldly, and so is any reasonably sensitive soul who has been reading the newspapers. The Christian gospel looks to a future transformation of the appalling mess we see around us into a community of justice and friendship, a change so deep-seated and indescribable as to make Lenin look like a Lib Dem.“This [world] is our home," Levine comments. If he really feels at home in this crucifying set-up, one might humbly suggest that he shouldn't. Christians and political radicals certainly don't.
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  • he suspects that Christian faith is other-worldly in the sense of despising material things. Material reality, in his view, is what art celebrates but religion does not. This is to forget that Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit. It is also to misunderstand the doctrine of Creation
  • Adam Phillips writes suggestively of human helplessness as opposed to the sense of protectedness that religious faith supposedly brings us, without noticing that the signifier of God for the New Testament is the tortured and executed corpse of a suspected political criminal.
  • None of these writers points out that if Christianity is true, then it is all up with us. We would then have to face the deeply disagreeable truth that the only authentic life is one that springs from a self-dispossession so extreme that it is probably beyond our power.
  • What exactly," he enquires, "does the invocation of some supernatural being add?" A Christian might reply that it adds the obligations to give up everything one has, including one's life, if necessary, for the sake of others. And this, to say the least, is highly inconvenient.
  • The Christian paradigm of love, by contrast, is the love of strangers and enemies, not of those we find agreeable. Civilised notions such as mutual sympathy, more's the pity, won't deliver us the world we need.
  • Secularisation is a lot harder than people tend to imagine. The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.
  • If Friedrich Nietzsche was the first sincere atheist, it is because he saw that the Almighty is exceedingly good at disguising Himself as something else, and that much so-called secularisation is accordingly bogus.
  • Postmodernism is perhaps best seen as Nietzsche shorn of the metaphysical baggage. Whereas modernism is still haunted by a God-shaped absence, postmodern culture is too young to remember a time when men and women were anguished by the fading spectres of truth, reality, nature, value, meaning, foundations and the like. For postmodern theory, there never was any truth or meaning in the first place
  • Postmodernism is properly secular, but it pays an immense price for this coming of age - if coming of age it is. It means shelving all the other big questions, too, as hopelessly passé. It also involves the grave error of imagining that all faith or passionate conviction is inci­piently dogmatic. It is not only religious belief to which postmodernism is allergic, but belief as such. Advanced capitalism sees no need for the stuff. It is both politically divisive and commercially unnecessary.
julia rhodes

Q&A: Why It's Sometimes Rational to Be Irrational - Wired Science - 0 views

  • I think it’s safe to claim that magical thinking emerges from basic underlying cognitive mechanisms — shortcuts that we take, biases, heuristics.
  • A more controversial claim, which is very possible, is that magical thinking is an exaptation. An exaptation is some adaptation that emerged as a byproduct of something else, but became so useful that evolution started to select for aspects of that in addition to the initial thing.
  • Some people have argued that belief in god probably emerged from dualism, anthropomorphism and teleological reasoning. But then it became such a useful idea on its own that now we’re evolving to have a stronger belief in god, because belief in god is evolutionarily adaptive.
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  • There are a lot of dangers to magical thinking.
  • It can lead to fatalism if you think your life is completely controlled by supernatural forces.
  • But if used carefully, magical thinking can have benefits, such as a sense of control or a sense of meaning in life. So I take this somewhat paradoxical stance of using irrationality rationally.
  • eling lucky is irrational because the charm or wish itself isn’t lucky. But feeling lucky gives you a sense of control, which increases your confidence and increases your performance in various challenges. So it’s rational to hold onto that irrational belief, on some level, because it can benefit you — even if the charm can’t.
Javier E

Belief Is the Least Part of Faith - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Why do people believe in God? What is our evidence that there is an invisible agent who has a real impact on our lives? How can those people be so confident?
  • These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions.
  • The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.
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  • that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.
  • secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.
  • In fact, you can argue that religious belief as we now conceptualize it is an entirely modern phenomenon. As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, “to believe” meant something like “to hold dear.” Smith, who died in 2000, once wrote: “The affirmation ‘I believe in God’ used to mean: ‘Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to Him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusting His mercy.’ Today the statement may be taken by some as meaning: ‘Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is yes.’ ”
  • If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.
Emilio Ergueta

Atheist In A Foxhole | Issue 105 | Philosophy Now - 0 views

  • David Rönnegard asks how a committed atheist confronted with death might find consolation.
  • Faith is not a virtue I hold. In particular, I disbelieve claims to knowledge about God’s existence or will. As an atheist and a Humanist, my approach to life has been grounded on rational thought and empirical evidence. I consider death to be the end of our conscious existence, and that any meaning that life may have resides with man.
  • Public reflecting on life is often done in fear of, but seldom in the face of, death. I am in the privileged but unenviable position of doing the latter.
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  • Having never had an inclination towards the supernatural, religion has never appeared to me as either credible or a source of comfort. News of looming death has not encouraged me to grasp for false consolation, though consolation is sorely needed. Rather, my obsession with death has hitherto been soothed by Socrates’ description of philosophy as the process by which one comes to accept one’s own death.
  • Existentialism emphasizes the subjective nature of being; that is, the essence of what it is like to be us. It gets us closer to considering what it is we value, which is central to shaping a meaningful life for ourselves as we pursue those values.
Javier E

Journeys in Alterity: Living According to a Story: A Reflection on Faith - 0 views

  • While I’ve not given up on religion in general or Catholicism in particular, I have said farewell to a specific conception of God, namely God as explanation, and in so doing have joined hands with the atheists and agnostics, if not for the whole of life’s journey, at least for a section of the walk. To clarify, I continue to call God creator and savior, but for me God is not the solution to riddle or a formula. God’s not an answer to scientific inquiry or the end result of metaphysical speculation. God is wholly other than all these lines of human reasoning, all these constructions fashioned to explain the world. My need for God is not the need of a student seeking to explain a mathematical theorem, or the need of an ethicist looking for a basis for good behavior, or someone searching for the last piece to a grand puzzle. The divine isn’t the intellectual rope that ties the whole system together.
  • I find it unwise to hold on to God as an explanation, for sooner or later, what I use God to explain will likely be revealed to have a different basis. If I believe in God because God explains this, that, and the other thing, then I can be almost sure to have a belief that’s not long for this world.
  • What is left of my faith when I have forsaken this idea of God? Having fled from the crumbling ruins of the unmoved mover and the uncaused cause, where do I go in search of the sacred? What conception of the divine lies ahead of me, having kicked the dust from my feet and departed the cities of certainty and supernatural explanation? In short, why do I still believe?
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  • I continue to believe, to walk the paths of faith, because I believe a story and continue to choose to believe that story. More precisely, I believe in a grand sacred history that has been given embodiment in a plurality of diverse narratives, epistles, and other sacred writings. I interpret these writings in ways literal and figurative and in ways between. While I don’t look to the books of the New Testament for a historical transcript of the life of Christ, I cling to the hope that they reveal a Divine Person and give flesh and blood anew to impossible events, namely the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Ascension. On the one hand, my choice to believe the truth of these writings—writings that don’t perfectly add up, to be sure—is a decision to believe that an underlying thematic truth speaks through incredible, fantastical tales told to me by mostly unknown strangers, and passed down to me by figures holy and insidious, self-giving and power-hungry, saintly and vicious. On the other hand, I find some of those who have told and retold these stories, particularly the early Christian martyrs, to be credible witnesses. Those who have given their lives for Christ did so not merely in defiance of their murders, but as an act of witness embraced in the hope that their enemies would become their brothers and sisters. That kind of love strikes me as the height of love. And it’s been known to work wonders.
  • What does my faith give me? It gives me a love story. Not a story that explains love, but a story that gives birth to—and directs my heart, mind, and very being to—the fullest expression and fulfillment of love. It is a story that means everything if it means anything at all. It is a story about what it means to be human and what it means to be divine, both of which tell of what it means to love. My religion tells a love story about a humble God who reveals and who gives humanity, through the sacraments and other gifts, the grace to respond in faith, hope, and most importantly love. In this sacred romance, faith and hope are not ends in themselves, or even eternal things, but the temporal means to an eternal end. That end is love. According to this story, there is no need for faith or hope in heaven, and so you will not find them there. What you will find, if there is anything after death to find or a paradise to find it, is love.
  • My faith doesn’t free me from these unsettling possibilities. It doesn’t whisk me away from the battlefield like a protective Aphrodite. Instead, it fills me with fear and trembling and places me in the hopeless situation of not knowing what I love when I love my God. Yet I would not choose to be anywhere else. I’ve no interest in certainty, gnosis, or other false comforts. Nor do I wish to close the book of faith and place it on the bookshelf, unread, ignored and unlived. I intend to live according to a story I love, to share it with those I love, and to allow it to guide my steps and convert my soul, even though I journey to who knows where. And I intend as well to incline an ear to the voice of alterity, to reasons and rhymes that might expose my faith to its undoing.
Javier E

No word of a lie: scientists rate the world's biggest peddlers of bull | Science | The ... - 0 views

  • scientists claim to have identified the most common practitioners of the ignoble art. Their study of 40,000 teenagers reveals that boys; those from privileged backgrounds; and North Americans in particular, top the charts as the worst offenders.
  • Jerrim analysed data gathered by the OECD to assess how well 15-year-olds around the globe have mastered key academic subjects.
  • For one of the questions, the teenagers must rate how familiar they are with 16 mathematical concepts ranging from polygons and vectors to quadratic functions and congruent figures. Hidden among the bona fide terms are three fakes: proper numbers, subjective scaling and declarative functions
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  • Jerrim took the students’ responses to the three fake concepts to draw up a “bullshit scale”, which he then used to compare different groups, such as boys and girls, high and low socioeconomic status, and the regions where people lived.
  • “Boys are bigger bullshitters than girls, children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds tend to bullshit more than those from lower ones, and North Americans bullshit the most,” Jerrim said. Those who ranked highest on the scale tended to see themselves as more self-confident, more persevering, and more popular at school, than those further down the scale.
  • academics have devised a Bullshit Receptivity scale, which showed that believers in the supernatural may be more receptive to bullshit, and proposed an “ease of passing bullshit hypothesis”, which posits that people are more likely to commit the offence when they believe they can get away with it.
  • “People are social animals and we desire feelings of connection, belonging, and inclusion, so we try to participate when it is critical to build and maintain these relationships,” he said. “Such situations sometimes require us to talk about things we really know nothing about, and what comes out is bullshit.”
  • Jerrim said a major question is whether, and when, the art is beneficial. “Everyone gets a question in a job interview that they cannot answer. If you’re an effective bullshitter, it might help you get your foot in the door,” he said. “It might also help with academic grant proposals.”
Javier E

Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it's more likely than not | Technolo... - 3 views

  • Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence
  • Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.
  • If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,
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  • At the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them.
  • “Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality,” said Musk. “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”
  • “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.
  • If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. As Terrile puts it: “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?”
  • Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like a pixelated video game. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said
  • “Is it logically possible that we are in a simulation? Yes. Are we probably in a simulation? I would say no,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT.
  • “In order to make the argument in the first place, we need to know what the fundamental laws of physics are where the simulations are being made. And if we are in a simulation then we have no clue what the laws of physics are. What I teach at MIT would be the simulated laws of physics,”
  • Terrile believes that recognizing that we are probably living in a simulation is as game-changing as Copernicus realizing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “It was such a profound idea that it wasn’t even thought of as an assumption,”
  • That we might be in a simulation is, Terrile argues, a simpler explanation for our existence than the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness. The simulation hypothesis also accounts for peculiarities in quantum mechanics, particularly the measurement problem, whereby things only become defined when they are observed.
  • “For decades it’s been a problem. Scientists have bent over backwards to eliminate the idea that we need a conscious observer. Maybe the real solution is you do need a conscious entity like a conscious player of a video game,
  • How can the hypothesis be put to the test
  • scientists can look for hallmarks of simulation. “Suppose someone is simulating our universe – it would be very tempting to cut corners in ways that makes the simulation cheaper to run. You could look for evidence of that in an experiment,” said Tegmark
  • First, it provides a scientific basis for some kind of afterlife or larger domain of reality above our world. “You don’t need a miracle, faith or anything special to believe it. It comes naturally out of the laws of physics,”
  • it means we will soon have the same ability to create our own simulations. “We will have the power of mind and matter to be able to create whatever we want and occupy those worlds.”
sandrine_h

Perspectives: Why humanity needs a God of creativity | New Scientist - 0 views

  • So the unfolding of the universe – biotic, and perhaps abiotic too – appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen
  • then reason, the Enlightenment’s highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.
  • Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of “God”. From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share. And from it we can, if we are wise, find means to avert wars of civilisations, the ravages of global warming, and the potential disaster of peak oil.
knudsenlu

The History of Dice Reflects Beliefs in Fate and Chance - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Dice, in their standard six-sided form, seem like the simplest kind of device—almost a classic embodiment of chance. But a new study of more than 100 examples from the last 2,000 years or so unearthed in the Netherlands shows that they have not always looked exactly the way they do now. What’s more, the shifts in dice’s appearance may reflect people’s changing sense of what exactly is behind a roll—fate, or probability.
  • Did it matter to game players that these dice were not fair? “We don’t know for sure,” Eerkens says. The way Romans wrote about dice falls suggests they were regarded as signs of supernatural favor or of a player’s fortune, however. The archaeologist Ellen Swift, in her book Roman Artifacts and Society, writes that high rolls had associations of benevolence and felicity, and that rolling three sixes at the same time seems to have been called a Venus. “Dice potentially played an important role in conceptualizing divine action in the world,” she writes.
  • At the same time, dice tend to get smaller, perhaps to make them easier to hide, as gambling was not favored by the increasingly powerful religious authorities. Some of the study’s dice from this era, in fact, were found all together in a small hole in a garbage heap, including one cheater’s die with an extra three. Could it be someone saw the light and forswore dice?
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  • . In the 17th century, even Galileo writes about why, in a game with three dice, the number 10 should come up more than the number 9. It’s an observation that one would only be able to detect after thousands of rolls, but the reason behind it involves how many combinations of numbers can add up to each different option.
  • All these changes in dice come about, says Eerkens, “as different astronomers are coming up with new ideas about the world, and mathematicians are starting to understand numbers and probability.” Which came first: Did people begin to intuitively understand what true chance felt like, and adjusted dice accordingly, or did it trickle out from what would eventually become known as the scientific community?
  • And it does make you wonder: Would you know that fair dice should fall equally on each side, or that in a three-dice game, it’s better to bet on 10 than nine, if someone hadn’t told you?
manhefnawi

If You've Ever Seen a Ghost, Science May Explain Why | Mental Floss - 0 views

  • Despite all the reports of ghost sightings (28 percent of Americans report having ghostly encounters), there’s zero evidence to support the presence of supernatural beings among us. Science may not prove the existence of ghosts, but it can help explain why people think they see ghosts in the first place.
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