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many religious interpretations of "living" is that it's magic and beyond the grasp of science. it basically boils down to if you believe that life is an inheren

many religious interpretations of "living" is that it's magic and beyond the grasp of science. it basically boils down to if you believe that life is an inherent property of matter or if you believe that some magic entity makes things live. i know there's a huge gradient in between for most people, but at least for me, i think that might be the root cause (besides a gazillion other reasons) of being an atheist.

visarga 3y ago
Not only religious minds, but modern philosophers too, hold onto dualism - David Chalmers and his "hard problem" of consciousness is a case in point. Here, "hard" signifies what science can't touch, suggesting a distinct domain. Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance. I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run. Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  Dualism does not necessarily entail theism or atheism. David Chalmers is an atheist [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0BjA8mvU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0BjA8mvU4
  - Kbelicius 3y ago
    I believe that GP was talking about dualism in the philosophy of mind context. In that context dualism basically means that there is a mind and a brain and that in some sense those are two radically different kinds of things.
- Lambdanaut 3y ago
  Yes. The burden is proof is supposed to be on the person making a claim that breaks the known pattern. We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data. If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences. This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes. There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience. Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely. Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object. A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught. It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others. The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found. The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based. The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.
  - the_gipsy 3y ago
    > We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data. If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.
    - soco 3y ago
      And is this such an issue? Does the world have to be a fancy lights show in order to be palatable? Isn't there enough wonder in the galaxies and the specks of dust, do we really to invent the almighty to make humans feel... special? because I guess that's what it all is, fragile egos can't take being anything less than The Chosen. Which explains also religious wars - this town is not big enough for two chosen.
- ImHereToVote 3y ago
  I find the phrasing of the hard problem very strange. It's fairly obvious to anyone that has done a bit of meditation, that consciousness is simply attention to autonomous actions that your brain performs i.e. the compilation and discrimination of data from disparate systems. If you stop being attentive you start performing actions less consciously. This aligns fairly closely to what happens when we train ANN's utilizing attention based learning. We see that new emergent capabilities arise. We simply haven't built attention based multimodal training courses yet. I hope we never will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning)
- Scarblac 3y ago
  > panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness What I find hard about that is that it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete -- mine is distinct from yours. I'm also probably the main consciousness in my body (or I wouldn't be able to type this). But "everything" isn't discrete. If the sea is conscious, what about every individual liter of water in it? What about every drop? If the drops end up in my body, does it still have consciousness?
  - brookst 3y ago
    I’m not a proponent of this theory, but I don’t see why it’s unreasonable that if the ocean has some sliver of consciousness, then the water in your body has about 1 / 10^-17 that much.
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    Panpsychism posits that every atom harbors some non-zero level of consciousness, and that by arranging bits of consciousness in certain ways, you can amplify it's effect. Its important to consider that consciousness is likely a scale, with different beings experiencing different levels and types of consciousness.
  - InSteady 3y ago
    >it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete It may seem that way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. After all, our brains do an incredible amount of filtering and modulating to deliver our conscious experience such as it is, unified and discrete. If it is as fundamental as the panpsychists believe (and I don't count myself firmly among them, but I have to entertain the possibility), it seems possible, if not likely, that there is a good deal of fuzziness and overlap in and among systems of consciousness.
- felipeerias 3y ago
  Another example has to do with what we could call the “hard problem” of existence itself: why does the universe exist, and why this universe in particular? Plenty of theories have been proposed. Maybe the universe expands and contracts again and again, each time with slightly different cosmological constants. Or maybe there are infinite universes and, unsurprisingly, we happen to exist in the one which was suited to our existence. Or maybe everything is just one giant simulation. What I find fascinating is that, once you remove the culture-specific veneer, these questions and our tentative answers are part of the same pursuit that centuries ago would have taken the shape of philosophy or theology.
  - akomtu 3y ago
    The universe might not exist objectively, but it gains existence only in our eyes. For example, natural numbers is an abstraction that has no meaning by itself, but each number can be interpreted as a state of the "game of life" and a sequence of numbers - as an evolution of that game. This meaning is a fiction that arises when abstract number are seen thru our consciousness. When the same numbers are seen thru another consciousness, the game of chess is brought into existence. So the universe might be such an abstraction that could be anything, but only when its seen thru a particular consciousness, it appears as the universe we know. Taking this idea further, the entire game of life is still too complex, so smaller consciousnesses filter that complex reality into smaller realities and so on.
    - felipeerias 3y ago
      As the story goes, Dr. Samuel Johnson challenged the claim that all of reality was just an illusion by kicking a rock while proclaiming "I refute it thus."
- Shorel 3y ago
  > The magic element is simply evolution. I can't agree with that. Maybe our brains are not big enough, or complex enough yet to really understand what is going on with such complex systems. Evolution may be the mechanism these complex systems exist, but it doesn't explain how they work. Even the simplest artificial evolutionary algorithms have created integrated circuits with features we can not understand or explain. And part of the reason is physical properties of materials, and quantum stuff. The evolutionary algorithm doesn't understand those things, just puts them in some working configuration by chance. Anyway, my point is that we can't also use evolution as a catch-all explanation. Complex things are complex, and they require proper understanding, an engineering understanding, not just the handwaving arguments of philosophers. About consciousness: hardest problem ever. I don't think we will be able to understand it, because we have it and it becomes a kind of strange loop.
  - namero999 3y ago
    It's fairly easy to "understand it" if we don't try to explain it away. Look, no matter what you hold as true, you reach a point where you have to pick your ontological primitive. An as such, you can't "explain it away". It will be your given of nature, in function of which you'll explain everything else. Failing to do so will put you in an infinite regress of finding lower-level explanation forever, which in turn would explain precisely nothing. Even hardcore materialists do this epistemic step: the quantum foam is the given of existence, made out of nothing else other than itself, and whose excitations give rise to the fundamental particles. So, given that we are already committed to such epistemic step, what would be the problem of choosing another ontological primitive and see how we fare? What is the logical argument by which consciousness ought not to be chosen as an ontological primitive?
- The5thElephant 3y ago
  I don't think panpsychism is really a religious stance, it's just a logical solution to the problem of qualia. It certainly isn't testable and there are a lot of people who come to views that are loosely called panpsychism through less rigorous and more spiritual routes, but I would suggest those are quite different and shouldn't dilute the core reasoning behind panpsychism.
- namero999 3y ago
  The hard problem, in essence, deals with the question of how qualities emerge from quantities. Until we have explained this, then holding materialism is religious. That is, assuming as true something that we have no access to, no explanation for, and no reasons to believe it. I am not sure why you think that panpsychism would be a religious stance? What's religious about assuming that the only _given_ of existence is in fact fundamental? And I'm not even arguing for panpsychism here, since I don't find it tenable. But at least it's not materialism, which I would argue is the maximum form of abstraction and therefore religious in nature.
zvmaz 3y ago
Whether we know what "living" is or whether we solve the hard problem of consciousness is logically distinct from atheism (or theism, for that matter). Unless you think that our ignorance justifies theism, in which case you commit to a logical fallacy.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  If you have the concept of a soul or spirit as a metaphysical thing, you can nicely sidestep the question of what constitutes a living being by simply saying "the things that are alive are exactly those that have a soul". Not all theistic belief systems do this (I don't think Christianity has a widespread belief that plants have a soul, for one example), and believing in a God indeed does not prevent you from questioning the physical world with a scientific mindset. And even many atheists believe in souls (you don't need to believe in a God to believe in the metaphysical after all). But still, the two concepts aren't entirely orthogonal. Certain religious worldviews are mutually exclusive with certain interpretations on life. And if your interpretation of life conflicts with the locally prevalent religion that might cause you to become an atheist.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Uh, this seems like a turtles all the way down problem as faith has just pushed the problem over to this nebulous soul thingy that has no strict definition or means of identification. How do you falsify what a soul is or isn't?
jklinger410 3y ago
If you are looking to the divine to describe every mystery then you belong with the religious folk.
Scarblac 3y ago
Being an atheist doesn't need a "root cause". Believing in something needs reasons, the absence of belief is the default.
- Fidelix 3y ago
  That would be better described as agnosticism. In practice, people who identify as atheists - such as Dawkins - affirm that there is no god. That's a belief.
  - tshaddox 3y ago
    But it’s a belief about epistemology, not a bunch of specific affirmations about the thousands of deities and mythical creatures that humans have proposed. The agnosticism/atheism dichotomy is pretty silly once you think in terms of epistemology, particularly if you believe in fallibilism or even philosophical skepticism.
  - neuromanser 3y ago
    Agnostic - I don't know if there's a God. Atheist - I don't think there's a God. Is that wrong?
  - Scarblac 3y ago
    Only religious people care about distinctions between agnosticism and atheism. Religious people can't even agree on what this God concept is supposed to be, but they can make fine distinctions in the ways people don't share their belief in it.
- Galaxeblaffer 3y ago
  of course atheism doesn't need a root cause, but you can still justify this default by trying to dive down into why it actually is the default and to me personally when i boil the whole thing down this is sort of the root of why.

visarga 3y ago

Not only religious minds, but modern philosophers too, hold onto dualism - David Chalmers and his "hard problem" of consciousness is a case in point. Here, "hard" signifies what science can't touch, suggesting a distinct domain. Likewise, philosophers such as Giulio Tononi with his Integrated Information Theory are edging towards panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness. This, too, is a somewhat religious stance. I personally see no hard problem and believe only certain systems harbor consciousness. The magic element is simply evolution. Evolution, an open-ended optimizer, crafted everything in a singular run. Consciousness exists to safeguard the body and ensure self reproduction, it is the inner optimization loop, the outer one being evolution. That's the link I see between them, they work together and each one is creating/supporting the other.

zvmaz 3y ago
Dualism does not necessarily entail theism or atheism. David Chalmers is an atheist [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0BjA8mvU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0BjA8mvU4
- Kbelicius 3y ago
  I believe that GP was talking about dualism in the philosophy of mind context. In that context dualism basically means that there is a mind and a brain and that in some sense those are two radically different kinds of things.
Lambdanaut 3y ago
Yes. The burden is proof is supposed to be on the person making a claim that breaks the known pattern. We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data. If we are to accept that we ourselves have experiences, which we must lest we go down a fun pathway to madness (that I highly recommend for those excited by the prospect of existential crises), then there is no reason to accept that "lower" life forms do not also have experiences. This chain of reasoning follows down, down, down, into what we may think to be simpler and simpler experiences of being. Down to the insects, and then the microbes. There comes a point where whether something is alive or not becomes more about its ability to create cogent copies of itself, which certainly does not feel like a requirement of having an experience. Beyond that lies the Earth, the wind, the rain, the basic elements our ancestors have respected and reverred for millenia in societies that did not invent the patriarchal dichotomy between subject and object that teaches us the unfounded "fact" that there are some things called "objects" which have no experience of reality, that we the "subjects" may control entirely. Get deeper into intuitive practices, and one may have experiences of interacting with so called "objects" in ways that suggest a deep union between subject and object. A union that precludes the separation our hectic monkey minds have been taught. It is as if every particle of this universe is "alive" in its own writhing way, at different scales. All feeling the subtle vibrations of others. The burden of proof is on those that say that consciousness "stops" at some point and the entity becomes an object, yet a mechanism has never been found. The belief in fully unconscious objects, is then, faith based. The "hard" problem of consciousness is only a problem when you want it to be.
- the_gipsy 3y ago
  > We can think of consciousness in it's most simple terms as an experience of any number of bits of data. If you interpret the word that way, it becomes completely uninteresting and, as you explore, makes us no different from some germ or collection of molecules.
  - soco 3y ago
    And is this such an issue? Does the world have to be a fancy lights show in order to be palatable? Isn't there enough wonder in the galaxies and the specks of dust, do we really to invent the almighty to make humans feel... special? because I guess that's what it all is, fragile egos can't take being anything less than The Chosen. Which explains also religious wars - this town is not big enough for two chosen.
ImHereToVote 3y ago
I find the phrasing of the hard problem very strange. It's fairly obvious to anyone that has done a bit of meditation, that consciousness is simply attention to autonomous actions that your brain performs i.e. the compilation and discrimination of data from disparate systems. If you stop being attentive you start performing actions less consciously. This aligns fairly closely to what happens when we train ANN's utilizing attention based learning. We see that new emergent capabilities arise. We simply haven't built attention based multimodal training courses yet. I hope we never will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_(machine_learning)
Scarblac 3y ago
> panpsychism, the idea that everything possesses a shred of consciousness What I find hard about that is that it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete -- mine is distinct from yours. I'm also probably the main consciousness in my body (or I wouldn't be able to type this). But "everything" isn't discrete. If the sea is conscious, what about every individual liter of water in it? What about every drop? If the drops end up in my body, does it still have consciousness?
- brookst 3y ago
  I’m not a proponent of this theory, but I don’t see why it’s unreasonable that if the ocean has some sliver of consciousness, then the water in your body has about 1 / 10^-17 that much.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Panpsychism posits that every atom harbors some non-zero level of consciousness, and that by arranging bits of consciousness in certain ways, you can amplify it's effect. Its important to consider that consciousness is likely a scale, with different beings experiencing different levels and types of consciousness.
- InSteady 3y ago
  >it would seem that consciousnesses are discrete It may seem that way, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is that way. After all, our brains do an incredible amount of filtering and modulating to deliver our conscious experience such as it is, unified and discrete. If it is as fundamental as the panpsychists believe (and I don't count myself firmly among them, but I have to entertain the possibility), it seems possible, if not likely, that there is a good deal of fuzziness and overlap in and among systems of consciousness.
felipeerias 3y ago
Another example has to do with what we could call the “hard problem” of existence itself: why does the universe exist, and why this universe in particular? Plenty of theories have been proposed. Maybe the universe expands and contracts again and again, each time with slightly different cosmological constants. Or maybe there are infinite universes and, unsurprisingly, we happen to exist in the one which was suited to our existence. Or maybe everything is just one giant simulation. What I find fascinating is that, once you remove the culture-specific veneer, these questions and our tentative answers are part of the same pursuit that centuries ago would have taken the shape of philosophy or theology.
- akomtu 3y ago
  The universe might not exist objectively, but it gains existence only in our eyes. For example, natural numbers is an abstraction that has no meaning by itself, but each number can be interpreted as a state of the "game of life" and a sequence of numbers - as an evolution of that game. This meaning is a fiction that arises when abstract number are seen thru our consciousness. When the same numbers are seen thru another consciousness, the game of chess is brought into existence. So the universe might be such an abstraction that could be anything, but only when its seen thru a particular consciousness, it appears as the universe we know. Taking this idea further, the entire game of life is still too complex, so smaller consciousnesses filter that complex reality into smaller realities and so on.
  - felipeerias 3y ago
    As the story goes, Dr. Samuel Johnson challenged the claim that all of reality was just an illusion by kicking a rock while proclaiming "I refute it thus."
Shorel 3y ago
> The magic element is simply evolution. I can't agree with that. Maybe our brains are not big enough, or complex enough yet to really understand what is going on with such complex systems. Evolution may be the mechanism these complex systems exist, but it doesn't explain how they work. Even the simplest artificial evolutionary algorithms have created integrated circuits with features we can not understand or explain. And part of the reason is physical properties of materials, and quantum stuff. The evolutionary algorithm doesn't understand those things, just puts them in some working configuration by chance. Anyway, my point is that we can't also use evolution as a catch-all explanation. Complex things are complex, and they require proper understanding, an engineering understanding, not just the handwaving arguments of philosophers. About consciousness: hardest problem ever. I don't think we will be able to understand it, because we have it and it becomes a kind of strange loop.
- namero999 3y ago
  It's fairly easy to "understand it" if we don't try to explain it away. Look, no matter what you hold as true, you reach a point where you have to pick your ontological primitive. An as such, you can't "explain it away". It will be your given of nature, in function of which you'll explain everything else. Failing to do so will put you in an infinite regress of finding lower-level explanation forever, which in turn would explain precisely nothing. Even hardcore materialists do this epistemic step: the quantum foam is the given of existence, made out of nothing else other than itself, and whose excitations give rise to the fundamental particles. So, given that we are already committed to such epistemic step, what would be the problem of choosing another ontological primitive and see how we fare? What is the logical argument by which consciousness ought not to be chosen as an ontological primitive?
The5thElephant 3y ago
I don't think panpsychism is really a religious stance, it's just a logical solution to the problem of qualia. It certainly isn't testable and there are a lot of people who come to views that are loosely called panpsychism through less rigorous and more spiritual routes, but I would suggest those are quite different and shouldn't dilute the core reasoning behind panpsychism.
namero999 3y ago
The hard problem, in essence, deals with the question of how qualities emerge from quantities. Until we have explained this, then holding materialism is religious. That is, assuming as true something that we have no access to, no explanation for, and no reasons to believe it. I am not sure why you think that panpsychism would be a religious stance? What's religious about assuming that the only _given_ of existence is in fact fundamental? And I'm not even arguing for panpsychism here, since I don't find it tenable. But at least it's not materialism, which I would argue is the maximum form of abstraction and therefore religious in nature.

zvmaz 3y ago

Whether we know what "living" is or whether we solve the hard problem of consciousness is logically distinct from atheism (or theism, for that matter). Unless you think that our ignorance justifies theism, in which case you commit to a logical fallacy.

wongarsu 3y ago
If you have the concept of a soul or spirit as a metaphysical thing, you can nicely sidestep the question of what constitutes a living being by simply saying "the things that are alive are exactly those that have a soul". Not all theistic belief systems do this (I don't think Christianity has a widespread belief that plants have a soul, for one example), and believing in a God indeed does not prevent you from questioning the physical world with a scientific mindset. And even many atheists believe in souls (you don't need to believe in a God to believe in the metaphysical after all). But still, the two concepts aren't entirely orthogonal. Certain religious worldviews are mutually exclusive with certain interpretations on life. And if your interpretation of life conflicts with the locally prevalent religion that might cause you to become an atheist.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Uh, this seems like a turtles all the way down problem as faith has just pushed the problem over to this nebulous soul thingy that has no strict definition or means of identification. How do you falsify what a soul is or isn't?

jklinger410 3y ago

If you are looking to the divine to describe every mystery then you belong with the religious folk.

Scarblac 3y ago

Being an atheist doesn't need a "root cause". Believing in something needs reasons, the absence of belief is the default.

Fidelix 3y ago
That would be better described as agnosticism. In practice, people who identify as atheists - such as Dawkins - affirm that there is no god. That's a belief.
- tshaddox 3y ago
  But it’s a belief about epistemology, not a bunch of specific affirmations about the thousands of deities and mythical creatures that humans have proposed. The agnosticism/atheism dichotomy is pretty silly once you think in terms of epistemology, particularly if you believe in fallibilism or even philosophical skepticism.
- neuromanser 3y ago
  Agnostic - I don't know if there's a God. Atheist - I don't think there's a God. Is that wrong?
- Scarblac 3y ago
  Only religious people care about distinctions between agnosticism and atheism. Religious people can't even agree on what this God concept is supposed to be, but they can make fine distinctions in the ways people don't share their belief in it.
Galaxeblaffer 3y ago
of course atheism doesn't need a root cause, but you can still justify this default by trying to dive down into why it actually is the default and to me personally when i boil the whole thing down this is sort of the root of why.