• In total there are 2 users online :: 1 registered, 0 hidden and 1 guest (based on users active over the past 60 minutes)
    Most users ever online was 742 on Tue Mar 19, 2024 2:59 am

Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Engage in conversations about worldwide religions, cults, philosophy, atheism, freethought, critical thinking, and skepticism in this forum.
Forum rules
Do not promote books in this forum. Instead, promote your books in either Authors: Tell us about your FICTION book! or Authors: Tell us about your NON-FICTION book!.

All other Community Rules apply in this and all other forums.
User avatar
Flann 5
Nutty for Books
Posts: 1580
Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 8:53 pm
10
Location: Dublin
Has thanked: 831 times
Been thanked: 705 times

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

Interbane wrote:Is this difficulty to do with the way things work, or with your ability to understand how they work? I can see perfectly well how intelligence can arise from blind physical forces.
That's really your faith Interbane. There's an assumption there as ant has pointed out.
Chance not intelligence creates codes and so forth.
I was just responding to your pschoanalysis of theists. You talk about cracks but there's a chasm between living and non living matter.
It's incapable of anything close to a thought let alone an Einstein. But all you need is time it seems.
User avatar
ant

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 5935
Joined: Thu Jun 02, 2011 12:04 pm
12
Has thanked: 1371 times
Been thanked: 969 times

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

Which book do you want to start with? What we're talking about here is the larger portion of an entire worldview.
an entire world view based on what, a web of belief?

do you want to break this down for us all and tell us which theoretical statements in your web of belief are tied to assumptions and which are not?
and as discovery continues within the context of scientific methodology (you haven't been clear on which method is the best) how future changes will impact the center of your web of belief.

or are you going to assume every assumption that changes will not rock the center of the web?
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

ant wrote:an entire world view based on what, a web of belief?

do you want to break this down for us all and tell us which theoretical statements in your web of belief are tied to assumptions and which are not?
Yes, my worldview is a web of belief. Every point in my worldview is tied to one assumption or another. I will start, and give you a couple of initial assumptions required for my worldview, then you need to do the same for your worldview. Agreed? Or is this a one way discussion?

The first assumption is that my senses are giving me accurate information about the world. I trust them, I assume what I see is what there is. Another assumption is that inductive reasoning can lead to mostly true conclusions, as long as the sample size is large enough.

Your turn, list a few of your assumptions. I'm not going to have a conversation with a sniper ant.
Flann wrote:That's really your faith Interbane. There's an assumption there as ant has pointed out.
There are assumptions behind all knowledge Flann. Just because there is an assumption used in the construction of a worldview does not mean the worldview is false, or that it isn't justified. We can go deeper here if you wish, and talk about what it means for something to be justified.

My comment wasn't faith. It is a conclusion based on a great deal of evidence and reasoning. I can't give you all this information, because it's taken years to accrue. But you're certainly welcome to examine it, and determine if I was justified in being persuaded by the information. I can take a picture of my bookshelf at home, and we can pick a book to start with.
Flann wrote:You talk about cracks but there's a chasm between living and non living matter.
That is simply false. There is deep debate regarding the boundary problem of life vs non-life. Read the first paragraph of this article:

https://molbio.mgh.harvard.edu/szostakw ... 2_JBSD.pdf
Chance not intelligence creates codes and so forth.
Intelligence creates codes. Chance alone does not. You truly don't understand my worldview Flann. You are attacking what you don't understand. I'm serious about discussing various books that build an understanding of evolution, as well as some that give guidance on understanding abiogenesis.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
User avatar
johnson1010
Tenured Professor
Posts: 3564
Joined: Mon Mar 23, 2009 9:35 pm
14
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 1280 times
Been thanked: 1128 times

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

This is important, so think about it for a minute. Even if you don't agree with this picture of the world you need to digest what i'm about to say because you are arguing against the wrong part of evolution.

It is not about chance.

mutations do occur through random chance. That is not the important part. That is'nt what has led to humans and whales and squid.

what's important is natural selection. Really take a minute to think about this so at the least you will be battling the important part of the theory of evolution rather than the un-important part.

Random mutations happen and they change an organism ever so slightly. What determines whether that change persists is whether the change was helpful or hurtful in passing on that animal's genes. THAT's the natural selection part. THAT is the "designer". The selection process where an animal tries to survive in the wild and either lives or dies. That's the part that shapes how a lineage changes over time.

It is not at all random that stronger beaks are better at cracking shells than weak beaks.

People who understand evolution absolutely do not say that you can rattle a bag of magnets and create a conscious mind. It isn't about throwing out a zillion random iterations from pure chaos to hope one lands on a fully formed animal.

Instead, every little tiny change that was successful is held onto. And the next little change that is helpful in passing on genes doesn't attach to a blank slate, it has the luxury of building off of what has already been retained through natural selection.

If you bring up random chance again, having read this post then you really are not interested in addressing the actual content of what evolution is about.
In the absence of God, I found Man.
-Guillermo Del Torro

Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
User avatar
lehelvandor
Freshman
Posts: 213
Joined: Sat Nov 01, 2014 2:09 pm
9
Location: Cambridge, UK
Has thanked: 24 times
Been thanked: 104 times
Contact:

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

Indeed was just typing when above turned up... so excuse tiptoeing in here but was about to object to the way in which chance was used (incl. bag of magnets analogy) to denote the way in which matter organised itself into something clever (literally) - and this is leaving out a vast set of factors that actually (both in theory, accumulated evidence so far and in experimental practice) played key roles...
Even in AI, you can randomly hook up some artificial neurons to each other - but see what happens in even the simplest artificial neural networks. It may seem random, as there is no deterministic way of arriving at the values that characterise their connections once training took place. Actually, the mere presentation of the stimuli and the desired outputs makes the connections develop in certain ways and it ends up "learning" stuff.
This is a very simple example, we can bring in similarly some corners of genetic algorithms - where the huge difference between random mutations and selection based on "best survival skills" in a particular "environment" is shown with exact mathematical rigour...
If we now take a big jump to the recent experimental findings confirming a few years older theory about consciousness being created essentially by a cluster of connected cells that organise the different sensory experiences and memories, then one could say that the above mechanisms yielding a special cluster of cells may produce something that for aeons was considered something beyond the material brain.
User avatar
Flann 5
Nutty for Books
Posts: 1580
Joined: Tue Jul 16, 2013 8:53 pm
10
Location: Dublin
Has thanked: 831 times
Been thanked: 705 times

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

lehelvandor wrote:If we now take a big jump to the recent experimental findings confirming a few years older theory about consciousness being created essentially by a cluster of connected cells that organise the different sensory experiences and memories, then one could say that the above mechanisms yielding a special cluster of cells may produce something that for aeons was considered something beyond the material brain.
Is there not something essentially different between machines and living things, Lehel?
Life itself. What is it? What's the essential difference in an animal say, a second before and a second after it dies?

Here's an article I found by Stephen L Talbott titled; The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings.

Is it all just biological mechanisms? Talbott is a theist.
I think our worldviews impact how we see and interpret nature.
http://www.natureinstitute.org/txt/st/m ... nome_5.htm
Last edited by Flann 5 on Fri Nov 21, 2014 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
lehelvandor
Freshman
Posts: 213
Joined: Sat Nov 01, 2014 2:09 pm
9
Location: Cambridge, UK
Has thanked: 24 times
Been thanked: 104 times
Contact:

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

Machines and living things are useful to compare in this context. The mentioned small cluster of cells in the brain (claustrum) that, with stimulation, can stop/resume consciousness work as a switchboard. Dragged in artificial neurons purely to show that often something we experience at macro level as 'beyond the material' can at micro level, in both biology and AI, consist of and work with very simple things.
If we can disrupt consciousness with a few tiny electrodes upsetting a relatively tiny cluster of cells that merely connect sensory and memory information (some made the analogy of a conductor in front of an orchestra), then it could be seen as just another biological mechanism poked with a toothpick.
However, this then inevitably opens the vast area of how one defines life, and yikes, how one defines intelligence - and whether the delimitation line between living and not living can be crossed by non-biological machines.
User avatar
Movie Nerd
Intelligent
Posts: 560
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2014 9:36 am
9
Location: Virginia
Has thanked: 30 times
Been thanked: 178 times

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

lehelvandor wrote:Machines and living things are useful to compare in this context. The mentioned small cluster of cells in the brain (claustrum) that, with stimulation, can stop/resume consciousness work as a switchboard. Dragged in artificial neurons purely to show that often something we experience at macro level as 'beyond the material' can at micro level, in both biology and AI, consist of and work with very simple things.
If we can disrupt consciousness with a few tiny electrodes upsetting a relatively tiny cluster of cells that merely connect sensory and memory information (some made the analogy of a conductor in front of an orchestra), then it could be seen as just another biological mechanism poked with a toothpick.
However, this then inevitably opens the vast area of how one defines life, and yikes, how one defines intelligence - and whether the delimitation line between living and not living can be crossed by non-biological machines.
So then, how do diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's come into play? As viruses? Not nitpicking or claiming to disagree with you, just curious.
I am just your typical movie nerd, postcard collector and aspiring writer.
User avatar
Interbane

1G - SILVER CONTRIBUTOR
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 7203
Joined: Sat Oct 09, 2004 12:59 am
19
Location: Da U.P.
Has thanked: 1105 times
Been thanked: 2166 times
United States of America

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

Flann wrote:Life itself. What is it? What's the essential difference in an animal say, a second before and a second after it dies?
Most of the time, death is a state that is not reached until a few minutes after necessary biological functions cease. It is the reason CPR can "bring people back from the dead". Can you clarify what you mean when you use the word "essential"? Are you referring to an essence that is distinguished? Or do you mean it in another way?

There are parallels of the death of an organism and that of a computer. In some cases, a computer will have a "heart attack", where the power supply sends out freak voltage and fries many circuits. The computer cannot be brought back to life.

From Flann's link: IF YOU TRY TO DESCRIBE THE LIVING PROCESSES of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expressionlink, signaling cascadeslink, and mitoticlink cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces”. You should expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is no viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist”. The previous article in this series reminded one reader of “some misty Shroud of Turin playing the pan flute and dancing with the fauns on the meadow”.

In both camps, we see the interplay of biological causation as going far beyond our understanding in aggregate. To the mystic, this is synonymous with the realm of the supernatural. To me, it merely means my brain is limited. Yes, these things are amazingly complex, and evoke feelings of wonder an awe. The world is infinitely more complex than I could hope to understand.

But I do not see the realm beyond my understanding as supernatural. I see it as my own ignorance. I've made progress into the territory of my ignorance, step by step every day of my life, and the journey has always turned up a naturalistic landscape. Whenever we zoom in on any particular detail of biology, it turns out to be naturalistic. Whenever we examine the interplay of biological mechanisms, they turn out to be naturalistic. Yet when we attempt to understand it all together, our brains simply fail. Not because there is supernaturalism to biology, but because we are incapable of understanding that much information all at once. A living breathing human is a causal orchestra so supremely complex and elegant that the human mind will never come close to full understanding.

We're not designed to understand the way the world works in a truthful manner. We're designed to understand the world in ways that help us survive. The two goals lead to different styles of thinking. I was at a gas station, and the woman in front of me asked if a certain type of scratch-off lottery ticket was lucky today. There are many people who have this faulty understanding of probability. It's representative of how our brains aren't configured to understand how things work. We must outsource our understanding to method, it is the only way.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” - Douglas Adams
User avatar
Chris OConnor

1A - OWNER
BookTalk.org Hall of Fame
Posts: 17016
Joined: Sun May 05, 2002 2:43 pm
21
Location: Florida
Has thanked: 3507 times
Been thanked: 1310 times
Gender:
Contact:
United States of America

Re: Faith closes the mind. It is pure idol worship.

Unread post

Interbane wrote:But I do not see the realm beyond my understanding as supernatural. I see it as my own ignorance. I've made progress into the territory of my ignorance, step by step every day of my life, and the journey has always turned up a naturalistic landscape.

Whenever we zoom in on any particular detail of biology, it turns out to be naturalistic. Whenever we examine the interplay of biological mechanisms, they turn out to be naturalistic. Yet when we attempt to understand it all together, our brains simply fail. Not because there is supernaturalism to biology, but because we are incapable of understanding that much information all at once. A living breathing human is a causal orchestra so supremely complex and elegant that the human mind will never come close to full understanding.

We're not designed to understand the way the world works in a truthful manner. We're designed to understand the world in ways that help us survive. The two goals lead to different styles of thinking. I was at a gas station, and the woman in front of me asked if a certain type of scratch-off lottery ticket was lucky today. There are many people who have this faulty understanding of probability. It's representative of how our brains aren't configured to understand how things work. We must outsource our understanding to method, it is the only way.
:adore:
Post Reply

Return to “Religion & Philosophy”