Dawkins' Atheist Bus

[Mr. Tea]

I think 'never' and 'existed' cover all eventualities quite well tbf. There's no specified limitation on which universes or outsides are covered and what constitutes existing.

Well you (I think it was you, anyway) said upthread that there's no reason God has to exist under the same dimensional constraints we exist under: presumably He can view the entire four-dimensional continuum of existence from any angle He likes, or all angles at once, just as we can view a two-dimensional image. In which case temporal terms like 'never' more or less lose all meaning for such a deity.

 

[Mr. Tea]

He says there is NO purpose to evolution.
He says that the ONLY higher purposes in the universe are to be found in human brains, not that human brains are the purpose of evolution.

Durr, when he says "There is no purpose to evolution" he OBVIOUSLY means "There is a higher purpose to evolution". Why do you have to be empirically literal? Are you some sort of DROOLING IMBECILE?!?!?!?!?

 

[jambo]

Maybe so but that is really nitpicking Tea, and more pertinently 'existence' still stands as a measure no? I think you know what 'cannot come into being and never existed' is intended to denote. Also this was with reference to agency as a possible property of the universe more than in the sense of divince action.

It's pretty irrelevant though I think.

 

[waffle]

Not necessarily, all it's saying is that anything that has evolved *in* the universe cannot have true agency

Where else could it evolve? Outside the universe, outside the material world? Then it would be a supernatural being, unless it can be argued that there is an 'outside' to the universe and that more matter resides there.

: agency could still exist within the universe if it were a property of a God which exists to some extent independently of the universe or a Spinozian radical immanence which somehow *is* the universe. Neither of which is a position I hold, of course.

It isn't a position that Spinoza held either: his God has no agency, has no free will or 'personality.' as free will would entail that one has the ability to be other that what one is, but as Spinoza's God is 'perfect' he cannot be other than what he is: everything that happens, past-present-future, necessarily happens. This is not to say that Spinoza's God has no will; rather it is the case that what God wills is what is necessarily the case. Good's will and what is the case coincide.

 

[nomadthethird]

As far as I can tell, what happened in this thread went like this:

People were talking about Dawkins and the stupid bus. Some people thought it was a good idea to have the ad on the bus; others didn't.

Waffles added a psychoanalytical critique of Dawkins performative atheism.

Mr. Tea hysterically responded and seemed to think Waffles was anti-atheism and pro-religion.

When others pointed out that this was not was Waffles was saying, Mr. Tea took a while then seemed to realize, ok, we're talking about teleology.

Then Waffles said something and people realized he was HMLT.

Then the torrents of ridiculous abuse started based on some fantasy of what everyone assumes HMLT must "be like" that had nothing to do with what he was saying.

Waffles defends himself and claims that others misunderstand him for various reasons.

It's all so boring and stupid.

 

[IdleRich]

Jambo and Poetix said some good stuff though.

 

[nomadthethird]

What about "intelligence" (high order neurological-cum-electrochemical processes) is especially resistant to the mechanistic determinism of the material world?

Nothing.

 

[nomadthethird]

I take it that the assumption that "purpose" depends on "higher purpose" is crypto-theological, a variant of "life without God has no meaning".

The word "higher" is just a modification. Purpose and "higher purpose" mean the same thing w/r/t teleology and the natural world--i.e. there is no kind of purpose, not a "low" or common one, not a "higher" or supernatural one.

 

[waffle]

Tea and Idlerich back yet again with further unprovoked slanderous abuse. No chance of them ever evolving?

Once again, that's a complete distortion of what he said:

It is not a distortion. You are incapable of comprehending a simple paragraph, along with that insane Tea 'drooling imbecile' (to quote himself).

He says there is NO purpose to evolution.

No he doesn't. He says that "life has NOTHING to do with the survival of the species", (you're confusing 'survival' with evolution) followed immediately by "If anything, it is the passing on of genes (which is a very different matter)". Then he says that "There is no higher purpose to evolution. The only higher purposes in the universe are to be found in evolved brains, such as our own when we have a conscious purpose to achieve some goal."

Gene replication is the purpose he posits for evolution, while the universe's 'higher purpose' is a function of human's 'evolved brains', which is what I clearly stated above, and in numerous previous posts.

Now would you ever do us a favour and piss off.

 

[nomadthethird]

Of course there are other apparent emergent phenomena in nature, but isn't agency on another order in that it becomes a self reflexive force in the universe?

No.

The fact that people think is just as contingent upon deterministic natural processes as anything. Your brain capacity itself is determined by the 13 pairs of genes that each of your parents donate to you in a particular combination. These genes severely limit your potential in all kinds of ways, on every level--the cellular level, the neurological level, the level of personality, the physical level. Any level.

Dreams are acetylcholine flowing onto receptors--if you cut off your acetylcholine flow, you'd stop dreaming. You'd also stop doing a lot of other things, since acetylcholine is pretty important. Thoughts are electrochemical impulses that are in large part determined by the stimuli you take in from your environment. Psychological processes are the "highest order" natural processes that humans experience, thoughts are not. The "I am", the ego, is an illusion produced by the psychological order of experience, which itself owes a lot to memory formation. Even psychological reality is contingent on natural processes, as evidenced by the way chemicals can arrest a serious psychological disorder or disease. Or by the way damage to certain parts of the brain can cause symptoms as severe as someone feeling they are not really "there", people feeling someone behind them (as when the amygdala is damaged or artificially stimulated) who is trying to pull them down, people who don't recognize faces, etc.

 

[poetix]

Human beings are part of the natural world, and have been known to behave purposefully. Some of what happens in the natural world happens for a purpose, to the extent that it is part of this purposeful behaviour. If you accept a wider (cybernetic) definition of purposiveness, then there are also other processes occurring in the natural world, apart from those in which human beings are involved, in which one configuration of matter exists "in order that" another should come about (that is, a representation ordains or "steers" a process of material organisation towards a goal with which it is correlated; this is not the same as the representation's being a complete set of causal antecedants for the realisation of that goal, so it's not straightforward determination). Micro-purposiveness of this sort has no relationship to any "higher" purpose, but is nevertheless not purposeless.

 

[nomadthethird]

Er, what? Just because people (thanks to language and other perfectly "natural" phenomenon) do things for a perceived *reason*, it does not follow that people's actions are not determined by natural processes/mechanisms.

 

[IdleRich]

"It is not a distortion. You are incapable of comprehending a simple paragraph"

Well someone is for sure.
Let's see. Jambo, you seem like a reasonable chap, likewise Poetix, in the highlighted paragraph below what is Dawkins explicitly saying?
Same questions to anyone else who is reading obviously; Mr Tea, Nomadologist etc

re the purpose of evolution
1. There isn't one
2. The purpose is gene replication
3. Neither of these/something else (feel free to state)

re higher purpose
1. The higher purpose of evolution is human brains
2. Although human brains can have a purpose they are categorically not the purpose of evolution (because there isn't one)
3. Neither of these/something else (feel free to state)

"If you read The Selfish Gene, you will find that the purpose of life certainly has NOTHING to do with the survival of the species. If anything, it is the passing on of genes (which is a very different matter), but in any case the language of purpose can mislead -- as it has misled you. Really there is NO purpose. It is simply that those genes that DO survive are the ones that we see, and whose manifestations we see, in the life that we see. That is all there is to it. There is no higher purpose to evolution. The only higher purposes in the universe are to be found in evolved brains, such as our own when we have a conscious purpose to achieve some goal. And our brains are so accustomed to this that they falsely -- as in your case -- ascribe purpose where it doesn't belong."

 

[jambo]

You are saying that you have no opinion on whether science will understand the way agency has arisen (assuming it has) sufficiently to show to us that it is not magic, but even if it does then this arousal (for want of a better word) will still appear as a miracle? It will be a miracle but not necessarily magic - are you making some distinction between magic and miraculous that I'm not getting?

I said that the subject of your question had nothing to do with what I had said.

I thought you were speculating that we might never understand it (that is the emergence of agency) in a way that made it cease to be magic.

I said that (whether or not science will come up with a good explanation of agency etc.) was outside the scope of what I was commenting on so it's a bit irritating to be asked to explain something I didn't say...

Here's what I said. Notice it's just a suspicion, I'm not proposing it as fact or theory, it's just my feeling ffs.

I suspect that when science comes up with a description of how agency/will (not simply intelligence) arises in the universe it will look a lot like a metaphysical or religious description just with rebranded metaphors

I linked to the wikipedia article on strong emergence right below there to illustrate the point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_emergence

I think something like that primarily differs from the idea of a miracle only in the ambience of metaphor. The difficulty modern scientifically minded people have in spotting when they have been seduced by their own metaphors is really the subject of this thread and amply illustrated by it

What's revealing of your bias here I think is that you have apparently read my suggestion that a theory of the emergence of agency would look rather like what we might describe as metaphysical or philosophical theory, as an accusation of future failure on the part of science, which it wasn't. I do have further reasons for thinking this and ideas about it but I don't really think it's that important an issue to get into wrt the broader discussion, which is why I didn't elucidate at length in the first place.

Also, a description of something is not the same as an understanding of it. We have descriptions of many things we have little or no understanding of.

 

[nomadthethird]

Why are you so sure "agency" even exists, let alone that science needs to "explain" why it exists, Jambo?

IdleRich, Dawkins talks about evolution as if humans are its ultimate expression, that humans are the masterpiece of evolution conceived as a process where higher and higher order operations are always the end result.

 

[IdleRich]

"Here's what I said. Notice it's just a suspicion, I'm not proposing it as fact or theory, it's just my feeling ffs."

No need to get sweaty I'm just asking you to clarify how the two sentences fitted together.

"IdleRich, Dawkins talks about evolution as if humans are its ultimate expression, that humans are the masterpiece of evolution conceived as a process where higher and higher order operations are always the end result."

But (although I've never heard him say anything like that), right now we're not talking about what Dawkins says in general, we are specifically talking about that quotation.

 

[nomadthethird]

That quotation is a perfect illustration of Waffles' point.

 

[IdleRich]

So, to answer my questions....

 

[nomadthethird]

Dawkins isn't the only scientific fundamentalist on earth, either. There are tons of them. And they're not doing atheism any big favors by presenting the belief in atheism-by-way-of-evolution as some sort of alternative lifestyle choice.

 

[Mr. Tea]

What about "intelligence" (high order neurological-cum-electrochemical processes) is especially resistant to the mechanistic determinism of the material world?

Nothing.

Roger Penrose would argue otherwise, but his books about it are so impenetrable only Reza Negarestani can understand them.