Sculptor1 wrote: ↑October 26th, 2022, 5:54 am
ernestm wrote: ↑October 25th, 2022, 6:14 pm
Sculptor1 wrote: ↑October 25th, 2022, 3:07 pm
heracleitos wrote: ↑October 25th, 2022, 11:40 am
Religion is a power of metaphysical origin from which you can benefit.
THe power of delusion is strong.
However, if you attack this power, it may also viciously turn on you.
Self abuse for those that cannot face the truth.
Similarly, you can use electricity to power an engine but you can also use it to electrocute yourself.
In both cases, the choice is yours, really.
IN your analogy there is no electricity and there is no engine. All you have is the chains on your imagination.
So I already wrote on this. While Rushdie has certainly been abused, his action in publishing a deliberately inflammatory book was also morally wrong, and the consequence is not surprising.
THis is the most idiotic victim blaming.
I suppose women all deserved to be raped too?
Below I offer a slightly new angle on the now rather tattered debate on Intelligent Design. To summarize the debate, in case you just want to adorn yourself with the tatters again, Kant is incorrectly credited for inventing the debate by observing that rational order implies a rational agent, and physical matter is rationally ordered, hence the universe probably has a rational agent at its origin.Kant did not invent it; the concept of an 'unmoved mover' dates back to Aristotle, ca. 400BC, later recast by Aquinas as the 'fifth proof of God' in 1485. William Paley actually coined the term 'intelligent design in 1802. Kant's distinction was in identifying the argument as an induction, not a proof, in his 1790 'Critique of Judgment.'
But that scarcely made a dent on the innumerable deaths caused by those agreeing or denying its truth, all the way from the Roman Empire to the USA's invasion of Iraq. WMDs were never found in Iraq, which was the invasion's first justification. Within six weeks of the invasion, the USA bombed Iraq's dams and power stations into the stone age. Between 450,000 and 600,000 died from illnesses such as cholera and typhoid during the decade of rebuilding, on top of the war's 288,000 violent deaths. That's six times more dead than Kurds killed by Hussein, voiding the second justification. The only remaining justification for an otherwise illegitimate war is Bush Jr. naming Hussein as 'Satan incarnate.' If a tribe of monkeys reduced itself to similar behavior, they'd kill themselves off fighting over a banana.
Since the debate was renewed during the last century, both sides STILL ignore that (a) Intelligent Design is an argument not a proof, because it is an induction not a deduction, and therefore can only be assessed by its likelihood; (b) the likelihood of the argument's truth INCREASES as scientific knowledge advances, because more of the rational order is known, whereas most wrongly think science 'replaces' the intelligent design argument; and (c) 'the burden of proof' is not on theists, a frequent current demand, but on any atheists who wish to argue with rational Christians, because free will is necessary to such theists, and therefore such theists have no interest in procuring any proof of God's existence at all.
Having repeated that several thousand times in various ways now, I am moving on to a more interesting question, which is, how much our own existence as a species is intentional. The general assumption is that someone who accepts that the argument for Intelligent Design is true must also believe that our own existence is the intended product. There is a discontinuity in that. There is nothing in the argument for Intelligent Design that requires the human race, as it is, to be the final intended result, and by all indications, we as a race have a long way to go before we could claim we deserve any such honor.
I realized the incredible extent of the discontinuity between our intelligence, and the intelligence that would be sought by any Creator within the scope of our current knowledge when learning about a software program in a Netflix documentary on chess. The documentary stated the program played itself a billion times without knowing that it was meant to win a checkmate. Then the games where it won by random chance were marked as wins, presumably in a neural network, after which it played to attain the same result.
I'm led to believe the documentary refers to Alpha Zero, a program developed by a company called Deepmind, and subsequently bought by Google. Google is keeping the details of the software's operation a proprietary secret. There is a also Leela chess zero, which doesn't work exactly as the documentary described, but is in the public domain, also uses a neural network, and produces generally similar results, although it doesn't win as often. The interesting thing about both programs is that they have produced winning combinations of chess moves that humans never imagined, totally revitalizing the game, for examples see
https://www.chess.com/terms/leela-chess-zero-engine
So I started thinking whether some 'universe creator' could work in the same way. This also opens the question whether such a creator would be conscious. With regards to the consciousness issue, personally I feel Nagel answered the question very well in 'what's it like to be a bat?"
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/iat ... el_bat.pdf
From his insights, one would have to say that the sensory input to any entity capable of creating the universe we now know is so different from ours that we CANNOT actually know whether the entity would possess consciousness as we understand it. The experience of existence to such an entity would have such different qualia leading to what we understand as pleasure or pain, even in the simplest possible manifestation of anything even closely representing the connections to our frontal cortex to our cerebellum, that it is totally beyond our comprehension to imagine what such a being would experience. How could we compare our own sensations derived from our tiny little bodies, and the experience of emotions from our memories and hormones, to something powerful enough to create the entire universe? It seems impossible to me.
On the intent of our creation, it seems to me we could just as much be the result of a failed attempt as anything else. I don't have any vested interest in the debate one way or other, so I'm not trying to win over anyone in persuasion, but I do come to a conclusion, derived from various observations on each side of the argument that are perhaps considered too rarely.
I do hear many naive objections to our existence being the product of intelligent design, such as the existence of pain, suffering, injustice, etc. It seems to me any thinking person should eventually realize that the product of free will would not be interesting to any supreme being if there were not reasons to question its purpose, and overall, I'd have to say Im pretty impressed by how much freedom we actually have considering how difficult it is for free will to exist at all.
It does also seem to me that it's not so unpredictable, given the size of the universe, that we evolved, and that an entity that created the universe would use evolution as a tool. All that is actually necessary is {1} the creation of life, and [2] the evolution of a species with something like opposable thumbs and a brain. It seems to me those are the two long poles, after which everything else would be rather predictable to an entity capable of creating the universe we now know.
It was 14 billion years before we showed up, and then after the creation of a species with opposable thumbs and a brain, we got to inventing the printing press and sharing ideas with remarkable speed. Therefore, if humanity is a product of intelligent design, the one thing one can be sure of is that the creating entity has a very different experience of time than us, perhaps able to 'zoom in' from billions of years to microseconds or something. Also, such a being would appear to need some kind of sensory perception of entropic complexity to find us in the enormous number of suns and planets necessary for life to evolve. So by our current understanding of physics, such an entity would need sensory perception of some kind of 'superdimension' in string theory in which the entropic complexity of life would stand out. So that goes back to Nagel's paper on 'what's it like to be a bat,' and why I don't think we can really understand the nature of 'experience' for such an entity.
But my last observation on it all is, I might as well be some kind of supercomputer myself, for the amount of presumptions people make about what I think. If there is an entity capable of understanding us, as well as creating the universe, then the only thing I feel reasonably certain about is that such an entity must have an incredible sense of humor to put up with us. Since the information era started, the data we have available has exploded, while we have notably regressed in quality of thought, amidst barrages of memes and slurs on social media. I could hardly rank my thought anywhere near the quality of Kant's, but I know enough to realize most people vastly overrate the value of their own opinions. So OK, that's the way things are. No one should really expect to be understood very well by other people in general, and I understand there is therefore a desire, however rational or irrational it may be, to think some entity exists which is capable of understanding us better than we are ourselves. It needn't be such a bad desire, but these days, an awful lot of people seem to prefer that we exist in a void of incomprehension bounded by little more than hatred and unjust vengeance.
In which case, you may enjoy thinking that parallel universes could also exist, created by an alpha zero algorithm in a similar bizarre structure as the ordered chaos of the universe in which we live. Some species out there in some kind of parallel world could actually deserve the love that the human race assumes for its own clans, yet too rarely practices between them.
Amidst the escalating memes and hostile slurs that could signify an imminent, ultimate, and final unleashing of the dogs of war, the alpha zero paradigm could become the only remaining consolation to our existence.
