Well then, we would have agreed that trees, at least, were physical; this is a big step. We could then try and explore why you think that trees are physical. The word “material” might pop up, but I personally consider this too limiting; light, gravity and processes, and even spacetime itself, surely fall into the same bracket (but there, again, is scope for disagreement). We might find some entity which you ultimately don’t think the ‘p’ word applies to, even if I were to provide experimental support for it being the sum of several parts each of which you did label thus.
Physicalism is the position my brain tends towards after 32 years of operation, starting from a belief that some things are ‘physical’ and working through combinations of those things even unto things which others call ‘mental’ or ‘metaphysical’. It is a position, an output, an overall judgement, a working conclusion, an opinion, a belief. I would hope that I could not be more candid, even if your (unverifiable!) position/opinion/output is that my words are meaningless.
I too, must leave this discussion for a while. I will leave you with a question to ponder. Is your thesis above stated a scientific (as I suggest) or philosophical assertion?
[QUOTE=SentientMeat]
By disagreeing that “god” is a synonym for “existence”. If it were, then it would also be a verb, eg. “I think therefore I god”, “There gods no integer greater than 2 for which x, y, and z such that x[sup]n[/sup] + y[sup]n[/sup] = n[sup]n[/sup] ” or “The universe has always godded”.
I think therefore I am was created by someone who believed that it proved the existance of God. However, I didn’t say God was a synonym for exist, I said it was a synonym for ‘existance’. You can find little problems with my semantics all you want, but it is meaningless, you are just trying to create a limitation on something that then makes it easy to disprove.
Like existance
How is talking to you different from talking to the weather? You are merely a confluence of atoms. Out of the multitude of possible configurations that atoms can take on, you were one of the possibilities.
The rest is the same old shit we’ve been back and forth about. It really rests at the above. How are you distinguishable from a rock in any way other than the way in which you transfer energy? Just because you transfer energy differently, doesn’t mean you are conscious.
Your world view requires me to adopt your particular definitions for words, which I feel are arbitrarily limited. I’m not trying to supply you with a stable definition of anything, only question your rigid definitions that you base a belief structure on. I think they are flawed.
Does every word need a very stable definition? Can words not have a fluid definition that changes with perspective. I am not arguing that ALL words have this, but I think that words have varying degrees of stability vs amorphousness. The word God is both very specific, as well as being very fluid. The only way to define God is with every word that has ever been spoken or thought, and will ever be spoken or thought, anywhere ever, in addition to the effect those words had on physical structures and the manipulation of that energy. This is why I think the word atheist is silly. It depends upon an arbitrarily limited definition of God, which is why Jews consider defining God as blasphemy, as God’s fundamental nature is always different from whatever perspective one is viewing it.
Now, I will not deny that your science knowledge stretches my ability to communicate with you, there are however certain fundamentals that I am capable of addressing. The way I am using singularity is as “The only thing that exists”. Your definition is different from any definition of singularity that I have ever heard before this. The definition I am using is Monistic, I am not married to the word, I am attempting to relate the concept. Either you understand the underlying concept despite the fracture in our particular vocabularies, or you do not.
Since SentientMeat is away for today, I’ll have a go at fielding this one. The difference between talking to him (or me!) and talking to the weather is the same difference between a page of printed text on paper and a big ink smear on paper. Both may be arrangements of ink on a page, even exactly the same quantity of ink, but the arrangement is important.
What purpose does the word “merely” have in your statement?
Maybe it does!
A block of glass underground doesn’t do a lot. A block of glass in the forest projects rainbows occasionally when the sun hits it from certain angles. A lens of glass in the desert creates hot spots when the sun hits it. A lens of glass in the forest - FIRE! All are arrangements of physical entities, but to use a certain favourite word of yours, there’s “magic” in one of the arrangements. Why can there not be a consciousness-creating “magic” in the extremely complicated arrangement of matter within our skulls?
I disagree with the assessment that no one uses them as I use them. In different circles people have different things that they understand that I say, and different problems understanding other things. I am challenging preconceived notions of words. Many people act in a dogmatic fashion, yet would tell you they are not in fact religious, I am challenging this idea by telling them they are fact religious, that they are engaging in groupthink, and pointing out what group I believe they belong to. I find it funny that I can engage in a thread where there are ten atheists gangbanging me, and yet have them keep telling me “We don’t act in groups, we don’t act in groups!”, people are saying one thing and acting a completely different way.
It is much easier to identify for someone what an Invisible Pink Unicorn is, therefore it is easier to dismiss. For instance, the idea of a bearded God in the sky is a lot easier to dismiss as its quite specific. However, the word “God” while quite specific is not so easily defined, so what is it they are dismissing the belief in exactly if they do not know what the word means?
Would you propose that there is a specific definition for God that suits all people on this planet who happen to believe in God? One that by its specific nature is then possible to prove or disprove? In the case of the invisible pink unicorn it is easy to relegate to the realm of the imaginary because it has different functions from that of God. God may or may not be purely conceptual, but part of the question of God, at least for me, is about where the delineation between that which is imagined, and that which is manifested exists, or at least where we decide to set it. God is a much more overarching concept than an Invisible Pink Unicorn, and the entire example of the Invisible Pink Unicorn is designed to beat a person into submission by deriding their beliefs, and has no sense of rigor applied to it, it’s merely an appeal to emotion, an appeal designed to make the person confronted with the concept of the IPU too flustered to make a whole lot of sense. It’s tactical and not rigorous. A common tactic used is to lure people into the ‘commonly accepted’ academic language, where people will tell you that it’s ‘the way people speak and use words, it’s the common usage’ even though everyone knows that academics don’t actually speak the common language that the average person speaks at all, so this too is a misnomer.
The atheist argument cannot be based on rational ground, it is purely tactical and an attempt to trap an unwitting person who just wanted to talk about their beliefs and make sense of the world, into a rigid defintion that the atheists may then tear apart at will. A common atheist tactic is bullying a person into believing that they are intellectually inferior to the group of atheists, while atheist intelligence is not above or below average, atheists sell the intelligence of the group as being above average, as they take pride in the results of standardized tests derived by the secular religion to quantify intelligence.
I may be exposing you to knew ways of viewing a word, but I am certainly not stretching the definitions of these words. I am referring to religion as any attempt by a group to control the focus of the consciousness of the culture in which they reside. People can have a religious devotion to a particular baseball team, and if you asked whether or not the Packalope had a religious devotion to his team, he probably would not deny it. However, a big part of the atheist’s persona is that they have to be opposed to religion, and above its base forms of tactics, when in fact they are not. They are every bit as mechanical and repetitive and stuck in a particular dogmatic worldview as the most fundamentalist religionist on the planet.
Matt I simply do not accept a definition of consciousness that is that anthropomorphized. To me consciousness is the experience of form. All of your examples have form to be experienced, and it is a confluence of the two aspects that create “Consciousness”. It’s all about relationship. To put it more succinctly, the piece of glass in the ground is God’s thought. The image of the glass in your mind is YOUR thought, and your ability to understand the overall god mind is what determines your ability to see things objectively, or whether or not you are trapped in your subjective interpretation. You do not seem to be spouting the same strict physicalism that SentientMeat is spouting. I think he is merely the inverse of the spiritualist that thinks we need to “Shuffle off this mortal coil”, and finds no value whatsoever in Materialism. While I find SentientMeat more palatable because he is not worshipping death, I also find it irritating because it appears that he has just dismissed the harder questions because he can’t easily categorize it within his (admittedly impressive) ability to categorize and cross-reference.
I am not out here to convert atheists into believers. I actually do not want people to believe anything, only to re-evaluate atheism as a strict statement of belief. Agnosticism is rational, disbelief is rational, but to say definitively “There is no God” is anti-skeptical, as it is largely based off of a limited semantic understanding and a desire for others to be limited in the same way.
Erek
(If none of this applies to you, then I am not talking ABOUT you, therefore you have no need to respond with anything about my broad brush, I am only applying this to the people to whom I am actually describing.
matt I do think there are things that seperate the different forms into different types, but I am not willing to say that a rock has no process by which it experiences things, as I simply do not know whether it does or not. What we deem as consciousness are particular material manifestations of the movement of energy, but all energy is moving, and there is always some kind of order to the way it moves. The universe is perfectly ordered, what is chaotic is simply that which is beyond our perception and capacity to understand the order.
So, what I am arguing is that you and the rock are a part of the corpus of God, helping God to experience itself.
I’m in no position to comment on any of this. For a start, I don’t understand it.
You make declarative statements. People are going to agree or disagree with them, whether you wish to convert people or not. And that’s the way it should be!
In your Pit thread about people scoffing at the knowledge of the past, I asked you whether you apply any value judgements to your concepts. I ask again. Consider your statement “The universe is perfectly ordered, what is chaotic is simply that which is beyond our perception and capacity to understand the order.” that is a declarative statement. Can you justify it? Can you evaluate it? If I were to offer the alternative statement “the universe is entirely disordered, what appears to be order is merely our own filters and prejudices superimposed upon chaos”, is it any less valid? How do you, mswas, judge?
I assert that they know just what it means: some sentient entity with significant power(s) to control the universe, up to (but not necessarily to) the actual creation of the same.
The fact that you can come up with some schema where you interchange the word “god” with the word “existence” simply means that you are using the jargon of your belief system to misinterpret what they are denying. When you step outside your small coterie of believers, it behooves you to use common expressions rather than railing at other people for failing to recognize your jargon.
As an analogy: I worked at a shop where the phrase “led down the primrose path” was shortened to the verbed form “primrosed” which then took on a noun form “primrose” meaning a logical error. Now, we could discuss primroses all day, but it would have been illogical for us to attack everyone who ever declared “I like primroses” because they were “foolishly” declaring a love for logical errors. It would have been equally illogical for us to declare that other people “did not understand” every meaning of “primrose.” Frankly, that is what you are doing with the word “god.” You may have any number of like-minded persons who share your view of what god may be, but when you are outside your group, it is illogical (at best) to claim that atheists do not even understand what they are denying, simply because you have invented a new meaning for the word that they have long used (along with the theists by whom they are surrounded) to mean a sentient being with significant powers in the universe.
If you want god to mean existence, have at it, but do not accuse other people of error because your idiolect is uses it in a separate way.
You started this thread, in Great Debates no less. Either you actually want to debate your subject or you are witnessing. If you want to debate your ideas with others, then you need to explain them in concrete enough terms that they are open to attack. If you deliberately keep your ideas nebulous or refuse to justify them, true, you cannot be attacked. But equally true, your discussion can only be held with those already agree with you, or with yourself.
I claim that your statement “The universe is perfectly ordered, what is chaotic is simply that which is beyond our perception and capacity to understand the order”may be as irrational and anti-skeptical as the statement “there is no God”. That’s possibly because I’m misunderstanding your use of the words “chaotic” and “ordered”, or using the nasty atheist trick of forcing my own meanings upon them. I don’t wish to do that, so could you give an example of something in the universe that we currently perceive as chaotic, and something that we perceive as ordered?
No it wasn’t; Descartes only believed that it proved the existence of Descartes. He used other creations entirely when discussing God.
It is not a little problem: it obscures your communication as surely as if you were speaking Chinese. You are asserting a definition I disagree with. Simply repeating yourself does not disprove anything I say.
Then God is merely an imaginary friend for adults. Glad we agree. (Also, minor irritating quibble: please, the word is existence.)
Because I talk back. Using language is a crucial distinction between arrangements of matter we call “conscious” and ones we don’t (except for ludicrous panpsychics, of course.)
No, I am amazingly, wondrously, upliftingly, a confluence of atoms.
So? Should you love your mother any less simply because she only happens to have given birth to you?
ie. your eminently faecal wordplay.
In me, sensory input is sorted into different levels of accessible memory. In rocks, that doesn’t happen.
Agreed, which is why “energy transfer” isn’t very important in cognitive science (whereas the role of memory and language is).
I’m not asking you to agree with it, I’m trying to get you to understand it and not misrepresent it.
Well, if you’re just questioning definitions and not really arguing anything of substance, you would spend your time more profitably by compiling and distributing your own personal dictionary to be used solely for the purpose of communicating with you.
For useful communication, yes. (Note that in this sentence, the word “yes” has not been arbitrarily changed to mean “no”.)
Very well, I hereby speak the word “God” to mean “supernatural entity”, and the word “theism” to mean belief therein. Hence, using the convention that the prefix a- means “not”, I hereby define myself as an atheist.
Then you would surely be a silly old non-believer in faeries, yes?
Thanks for the compliment, but I’d suggest it is not my knowledge but your ability to communicate which stretches your ability to communicate with me.
Any dictionary holds a reference to “singularity”, the mathematical physics term (“term” meaning “word”, not “period of office”). The context of our discussion regarding the universe could not have been more clear (“clear” meaning “concise and intelligible”, not “Operating Thetan Level 3 in Scientology”). I had hoped that such clarification was unnecessary so long as neither of us were being wilfully obtuse (“obtuse” meaning “deliberately and annoyingly feigning confusion”, not “greater than 90 degrees in angle”).
Given that this is the first time the word “Monistic” has appeared here or elsewhere in our discussion, I understand completely. I didn’t deny that the universe was singular, I just said that it is not a singularity (although it contains singularities). My thoroughly monistic position is that there is nothing except the universe, and the universe is physical.
You are just petulant because they don’t accept your God=existence nonsense.
Then yet again you mischaracterise atheists.
Ask away with your hard questions, and I’ll categorise as best I can. I do not dismiss them - you simply find my answers unsatisfactory, and all I can do is repeat them.
No atheist I know of, including myself, is definitive in the way you suggest.
Philosophical assertion, IMO. It would be a scientific thesis only if it predicted specific phenomena consequent of it and it alone. Since all such future phenomena could be given a theistic, panpsychic or who-knows-what interpretation, that particular quote from a past post of mine cannot be said to be scientific by default.
Indeed, like I always say, I can’t really think of any future evidence which would convince me I was wrong (ie. which would falsify that thesis): any truly weird nonsense would have me tending towards the simulation scenario, with the simulation apparatus still being physical.
I appreciate how you put things here Tom and I think you hit the nail on the head. People do use words differently but when engaged in any serious discussion or debate it’s impoortant to strive and understand what a words mean to others and express what it means to you clearly. If it turns out you’re discussing two different things then make that understood and forgo pages of banter.
I’ve noticed that some atheists or agnostics seem ready almost eager to assume anyone who discusses God and/or Jesus must hold certain traditional Christian beliefs for which they’ve already prepared certain arguements. I don’t think they should assume , but I feel it is my responsibility to let them know right up front that I don’t hold traditional Christian beliefs. Certainly in a discussion about God it’s not unreasonable for anyone to assume the common understanding that you described above.
My own understanding of the word God has changed quite a bit over the years, even within the last few. I think it’s my responsibility to express those differences when entering a discussion that revolves around God since my beliefs vary from the “norm”
That is true. However, the course correction from Jesus or Ha-Shem to some sentient entity with significant power(s) to control the universe is one that takes just a moment to make. (And, of course, some atheists, just as some believers, will be so bound up in their definition(s) that no discussion is possible.) However, that is rather different than inventing an entirely new meaning for a word, then declaring that everyone who takes issue with the common meaning is wrong for not recognizing one’s idiosyncratic meaning.