Do you guys believe in god?

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People who are intellectually serious about god need to first understand consciousness. You need one before you can have the other.

Trying to understand the concept of god with knowing the "self" is like a caveman wanting to visit the moon. It's never going to happen.

^^

I think what's maybe the bright dividing line is reductive materialism and naive realism on one side, absolute idealism in its various forms on the other. Reductive materialism requires strong emergence of some kind (which Michael Levin might be pushing back from neurons to gap junctions now) and absolute idealism takes consciousness as a prior.

What's tricky is that you have a lot of ways in which people are examining idealism now to where the frameworks give back something that looks and feels like physicalism and Darwinian evolution by natural selection (something Donald Hoffman is really adamant has to be given back - along with QM, GR, Yang-Mills, etc.).

Idealism is a projection though?

Can you unpack that a little more? Ie. projected by what?

I mean't in the context you mentioned



People examining idealism is a projection of what they perceive is idealism (sorry I was trying to tie this back to consciousness)

Okay, I had to ask because a lot of people instinctively assume that idealism means that individual humans are projecting reality (ie. Bishop Berkeley).

I think the absolute idealism that people are talking about is that matter is primarily mental in nature. Donald Hoffman would talk about our need to reduce information for the sake of attaining fitness payouts (ie. both staying alive and winning fitness races against other humans) to which the fitness organism is the one who sees the least truth and the most fitness payouts as the one who sees only fitness payouts will leave those that see truth in the dust. His idea as well is that we're dealing, on one level, with granular conscious agents that stack to form larger agents - something like functionalism with multiple realizability and realizability on different levels without those levels having direct contact with one another (ie. feeling autonomy or that lower levels are like subconscious processes). He'd also suggest that what we see is so reduced that it approximates something like virtual reality, which gets garbage collected when we're not looking at a given thing, but what's getting garbage collected is our trimmed-down UI rather than the actual objects that are reduced and represented. The closest analogy I can think of to reify that, although it could be wrong, would be like saying that there's no actual quantum collapse but rather we 'hallucinate' collapse and what collapses is our UI.

Bernardo Kastrup's a bit trickier to pin down on this, he'd declare himself an absolute idealist also but his primary idea seems to be that embodied minds are 'altars', akin to multiple personality disorder fragmentation, but which are fragmented from a larger environment. I don't remember how he gets to nature or Darwinian evolution by natural selection, I'm less familiar with his focus on that than Donald Hoffman's focus.

Someone else who has an interesting take on this is Andres Gomez Emilsson. He had a lengthy video a while back where he was shooting down most of the answers to the 'hard problem' from the physicalist, panpsychist, and ideaist positions and ultimately he seems to have come to a position similar to Kastrup in that the combination problem is a problem of combining minds but rather the problem of segmenting or breaking them up. Andres actually takes an interesting perspective - ie. he declares himself a physicalist but also idealist, and that plays on my intuition that physicalism is nothing more than saying you require sufficient causation rather than it holding any strong claim as to what that sufficient causation is based in.

Last but not least, and this is on more neutral and properly scientific grounds, is Michael Levin's work on xenobots, his claim that gap junctions in cells share internal metadata, he's also been able to manipulate what he's called a bioelectric template in embryos to add eyes to different parts of frogs and it seems like knowing everything that's required all the way down is less important than being able to pull on the structures in certain ways to suggest to add an extra eye and from there it seems like certain cells will lead the process, the others follow, and the know-how already in the cells takes care of the rest. I bring him up because he's making really big inroads on the question of consciousness and it seems at least like, with cells and exchange of information, it's a fractal process and many different and almost distinct levels of intelligence happening to bring larger organisms together.

I think the idea of a Neoplatonist deity - whether it's just one Source or whether it's the claim of twelve divisions (ie. Elohim) from one larger, I've heard both and I'm not sure what to make of them, but in that frame it seems like the suggestion is that these given hyperagents are rendering everything, it's just hard to tell 'into what'.

One of the bigger challenges as well with sorting this out is that if you really zoom out - there's the transcendent media issue that Forrest Landry brings up (ie. comparing the omniscient, imminent, and transcendent) where, for example, if these were one or thirteen quantum supercomputers running in the same system, taking Neil DeGrasse Tyson's metaphor - some grade school alien science project where adult IQ is in the thousands and childhood IQ only in the upper hundreds - it could still all be going on in a physical system and we'd have no clue because if we were conscious software in some sense we'd have to be extremely creative at finding the specifications of the hardware we were on because we'd have no direct experience of it.

Also maybe one more clarifier - I don't know, necessarily, that top down (as suggested from NDE experiences) necessarily excludes both top-down and bottom-up (bottom-up such as the kind of assembly Hoffman talks about). One channel I like a lot just for what kinds of divergent thinkers get thrown together is Curt Jaimungal's 'Theories of Everything'. A couple relevant 'theolocution' discussions he's had with people I've mentioned above were Bernardo Kastrup with John Vervaeke and Donald Hoffman with Joscha Bach. He also had a really good one recently where he brought together Michael Levin, Karl Friston, and Chris Fields (Karl Friston has the Markov blankets idea for disequilibrium systems and metabolism of free energy) and a lot of his ideas play very closely to what Michael Levin is finding.

autistics come from a wide variety of religions (or lack thereof).

just like neurotypicals come from a wide variety of religions.

i find it hard to imagine that autism would affect someone's religion.

exception: maybe some autistics would it more necessary than neurotypicals to have a large support group to belong to, by virtue of religious beliefs, because autistics tend to have fewer friends than neurotypicals otherwise.

exception: maybe some autistics are so deluded by the social rejection that they received that they refuse to believe in religion or deities.

i do not believe in god.

when i was in college, some baptists had the nerve to tell me that "it is 'lying' for you to ask me to call you 'he' instead of 'she' ". (UCSD 2006 civil and electrical engineers plural).

2012 equal employment opportunity commission

when they thought they were right, it was like "incite a riot".

when it turned out they were homophobic, not even an e-mail apology. there were a lot of them, too.

The 10% of your salary as tiding isn't exactly all that attractive either. I know that catholics and anglicans don't generally apply pressure to donate but I find those who give most tend to push their weight around in church

Let's start with this. the metaphysical view associates reality to ideas in the mind rather than to material objects (agreed). It lays emphasis on the mental or spiritual components of experience, and renounces the notion of material existence.

But....consciousness is a product of the physical world. Infact I would argue that the conscious (and even unconscious mind) is entirely a mental reconstruction of our material world. Infact the way our perception works is to create a virtual (mental) reconstruction of the material realm. We interact with the material world using our sensory perception and this is recorded in our memory as schemas of sensory perception,

If you deprive a person of sensory experience in their environment then their idea of consciousness is limited or perhaps even non-existent.

This has ramification for the idea of heaven. People who believe that they will experience bliss from some type of eden in heaven (muslim men believe they will have virgins waiting for them as a reward in heaven) are assuming their bodies will travel with them. Of course that's not going to happen. Everything we perceive about life after death assumes we will remain connected to our bodies but that's not going to happen as our bodies vanish after death. You can't experience a memory of a experience when you are no longer connected to your brain as a radar to relay sensory signals. Therefore every religion's explanation of afterlife is wrong. It's so obvious.

Hinduism and buddhism are philosophies and they are a little more logical when it comes to death. However, hinduism assumes there is a thread that connects your soul over every life you ever lived. Transmigration of the soul assumes that the soul is immutable and continuous. This seems a little far fetched. Buddhism differs in that there is destruction of the self after death. The soul returns to buddha nature. But then buddhism talks about birth and re-birth which falls into the same trap as hinduism assuming a continuity across many lifetimes.

Ironically a fictional concept - that of that of the Jedi in star wars is most likely to reflect reality (at least more than human created religion or philosophy which is self-centric) . Life is like a force of energy and all that happens in death is that life force simply returns to the universe which is made up of the force. Hindus, Buddhists and to some extent animists also believe that all life is connected. I like to think the Gaia concept where planets are centres of force/energy and that the earth is like our mother. But all matter might be connected with life. After all, our bodies are star dust.

Exactly. No child is born believing in a god. Gods are just cultural memes. No god is going to appear or take any action any more than a cat is going to spontaneously receive a cheezeburger from nowhere.

I wasn't raised in a religious household, but i guess i still got influenced by the culture i live in. That and life experience.

Nailed it. Religions are a sort of mind virus that propagates from family and peers to children. Very few question the actual religion/sect that they have caught. Why would they - their friends and family all share the same brain washing from birth. Muslim children tend to become Muslims, Christians to Christians, Hindus to Hindus etc. Each believes theirs is the one true religion / sect.

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Plenty of people below the poverty line go to church

Besides there are many religions:. Buddhism, Muslim, Christian, sikh

Online church or religious gathering (especially since coronavirus)

If we're sticking with a Bishop Berkeley interpretation and saying that only this is idealism properly understood then I'll work with your definition (for the sake of shared understanding) that Kastrup, Hoffman, etc. are talking about something else and calling it absolute idealism. That something else is saying that matter, or the world we're composed out of, is ultimately mental but that it's either one of two things: 1) projections of a larger / higher mind or b) granular construction of small elements of mind into either larger aggregates or interlaced into conscious beings existing in an environment that they do not experience as being themselves but rather 'other' (I think both of them angle more in this direction although it seems like Kastrup has a foot in both). It's effectively a mental physicalism in that it has sufficient causation and gives you all the 'great taste' of a reductive materialist world with fewer calories. With that if you catch me using the term 'absolute idealism' I'm meaning this more modern context. There are other people playing with similar or adjacent frames, Hoffman and Kastrup are just the quickest examples that come to mind.


The current debate in research of this kind is over what the physical world actually might be if strong emergence doesn't provide a satisfactory explanation for the arrival of rich conscious experience (rejecting extra-special or convoluted ways to multiply by zero and not get zero as a result) as well as noting a lot of edge case phenomena with consciousness that suggest consciousness as humans experience it might have a more indirect relationship to matter (ie. keeping somewhat separate questions like whether atoms have some minimal awareness here at least - although that gets touched on in other ways).

Another problem - if spacetime is emergent, if the particles of the standard model are just vibrations in fields, you can ask whether matter has any unique causal power. We experience it persuasively but that works only as far as no contradictions come up and when contradictions do come up (like Einstein's contradictions to Newton) then it can be said one had an effective theory that worked okay at a local level but that the fundamentals of the thing are deeper and so the goal is to consider whether it gets us farther to allow consciousness to be farther back in the equation rather than sitting on neurons or being created by them somehow. This is also somewhat a problem for panpsychism because it's acting as if subatomic particles are autonomous enough to be uniquely conscious. I'm not sure what people like Goff, Strawson, Rovelli, or Tononi would say on that one - in a way I think IIT (Integrated Information Theory) might go so functionalist that it doesn't make a strong argument one way or another to which it might be safe from at least that angle.


Good for them.

AprilR,quote:
Yes. I believe in God more than i believe in people.

^^^ Probably the safest bet ^^^^^

I believe in God and faith in Him has literally brought me through my life's hardest experiences in one piece, so I owe Him a lot. I used to be Roman Catholic, now I'm Reformed Christian.