If light had a conscious perception of time, it wouldn't even notice the brief time of our universe's existence.

A classic standoff is the freedom vs equality debate. It is a matter of taste/values/preference as to whether one sees freedom as more important than equality. If one fins oneself arguing over a political measure it can save a lot of time if one first tries to ascertain what values are driving the two sides. If they are different, it's a waste of time discussing it. — andrewk

It's only a waste of time if the discussion is about pitching these values against each other. One could argue that you could do a normal dialectic about freedom vs equality to try and find the position that is for the best of the people. A value-driven discussion based on what values the singular perspective of each candidate has is pointless, but politicians should have a discussion about what is best for the people. This, of course rarely, if ever, happens. They appeal to those with similar values to be elected, often falling further down into becoming demagogs.

But a true political discussion about what is best for the population should be a philosophical dialectic that reaches the most rational and best solution for the people. Doing that could pitch the freedom vs equality into a dialectic to reach the best balance between them. As it stands, almost all ideological ideas fall apart at the extreme end and most attempts through a demagog to balance them only reach a chaotic form that is neither balanced or optimal for any party.

A proper discussion between two political standpoints or values is possible if people detach emotion from these subjects.

I feel as though that when it comes to matters like the establishing meaning in life, that those issues have become a matter of 'taste'. That is to say, the issue has degraded or has been subjugated into a matter of preference. We don't talk about it because it's for us to decide what gives us meaning in life.

So, if we accept this now common notion that meaning is derived from tastes and preferences, which ought not to be disputed, then what? — Wallows

There's overwhelming logical rationality to the conclusion that an objective meaning of life doesn't exist. So that leaves automatically the subject of life's meaning to the subjective.

What we can talk about is a group of meaningful meaning-of-life-subjects without judging them to not have meaning, since we cannot collectively decide on the value. But we could gather a set of the most common valued meanings in people's lives and draw a framework on what seems meaningful to people within the context of the zeitgeist. Also transitioning and listing valued meanings throughout history might be an interesting framework for driving forces people have through their lives.

Let's say we pinpoint some of these that could be considered very common:
- Finding love
- Have children
- Finding comfort in a balanced life
- Pleasures of social life

And so on.

We could try and find common denominators to these common meanings. Like, "feeling good" or "understanding life".

In essence, there are interesting things to be found within this topic as long as it's handled through the lens of subjective perspective and a statistical point of view rather than trying to find an objective meaning of life or a meaning that is external to the subject.

Yes by energy I mean the life force if you want of the human being. The soul being a certain form of energy it can't be destroyed or created but only transferred. Reincarnation could be possible (the transfer of energy from one body to another hence life after death). — Paul24

This is not an argument for reincarnation. You say that our energy is our life force, it's not, it's just energy, as any other. It has no consciousness and no information about our identity is passed on through it. Your argument fails within the first sentence since your premise isn't true, it's a misunderstanding of what energy is.

Further, you draw the conclusion that because you believe that energy is the soul, therefore the soul is being transformed after death. This is false since your first premise about energy being the soul is false.

Then you conclude that reincarnation could be possible because the soul, which is energy is transferred. This conclusion is based on two false premises.

You need true premises in order to conclude something to be true or even inductive. Energy is not the soul. You need to prove that there is a soul first, just saying energy is the soul is like saying energy is an apple, therefore we become an apple when we die. There is no connection since you conclude energy to be the soul based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what energy is.

Establishing the premise that energy is conservative and that the soul is a certain form of energy, could it be possible that life really do exist after death. — Paul24

No. This is a misunderstanding of how energy works. If you use your body energy to slide your palms together, the energy becomes heat energy and this energy is not part of your consciousness. Why would then the energy of the human body become a life after death? There is no support of this conclusion. The energy that leaves the body after death is just heat that disperses into the environment.

I do tend to answer yes to the question. — Paul24

Why? You haven't put forth an argument that is deductively solid so why answer yes when nothing supports it? I would like you to do a proper argument for this conclusion and if it isn't holding together you shouldn't answer yes to the question. Otherwise, it's not philosophy but spirituality and religion.

Hitler is probably the ultimate example of someone making and living their own meaning in a large way. He had a whole ideology, architecture, music,gained power, boosted his ego. But it was all a dangerous fantasy. — Andrew4Handel

It was a corruption of Nietzsche's ideas. And it's an unnecessarily loaded question fallacy that muddies the argument of creating your own meaning in life. He was a lunatic with too much power, I fail to see how it relates to the broader aspect of finding meaning in life. Also, I could argue that there isn't clear that he followed his own meaning, he might not have even thought of his life in the sense of "meaning" or "purpose" but just following his power-hungry nature and urge to be in control.

On the " make your own meaning" idea you have no grounds to criticize anyone's meaning making however destructive and murderous. — Andrew4Handel

Yes you can. You are mixing together "meaning in life" with morality and ethics. We can discuss ethics and criticise someone's ethics and morality, it has nothing to do with meaning in life.

This is one other reasons i think the claim to make you own meaning is a triviality. It is like a platitude but it doesn't explore what the consequences of the claim would be. — Andrew4Handel

Creating your own meaning in life gives you a reason to exist in your life. It has nothing to do with ethics and morality, it has to do with giving a sense of balance and foundation for your life. If the reaction is to dispute this in order to try and find an objective meaning, based on confusing it with discussions about ethics and morality, that is a fallacy. They are not the same thing. There's also nothing that prevents there to be a discussion about a person's meaning in life. It's a foundation that many therapists and clinical psychologists can use in order to balance a person who's clearly in a bad place.

If someone has a meaning in life that is clearly dangerous to others and/or themselves, it can absolutely be challenged. But it seems you are making the argument that when encountering this, it's about applying a universal objective meaning that can override this person's own meaning. But that is not what it's about. Just as therapists and clinical psychologists work with dangerous ideas and sense of meaning, they work with balancing values of life in order to change the dangerous meaning of life into something that isn't destructive to the self or others.

You can't use a loaded question or slippery slope fallacy to dispute this. Just because you find your own meaning in life, it doesn't mean it opens the door to dangerous ideas. If you already have a damaged moral and is dangerous to others and yourself, THAT is what defines your actions, not the meaning you create out of it. You are using the notion that the meaning itself comes before corrupted morals when instead the created meaning is the result of that corrupted moral.

Hitler didn't create meaning and followed it and therefore did horrible things. The corrupted morals came before the meaning. I think you are confusing "meaning of life" with ethics and even so, it has nothing to do with any objective meaning.

The argument is essentially simple:
- Objective meaning doesn't exist (no rational argument proves there to be one).
- Without a sense of meaning, you have no sense of purpose.
- Without purpose, you become indifferent to living (and suicide becomes an option).
Meaning and purpose must then be created in order to have a solid foundation for living.

This has nothing to do with ethics and morals, it's a point about living a balanced life. It's an idea about how to navigate a pointless world. You can corrupt yourself with religious rules to feel a sense of purpose and meaning, but for those who are rational and doesn't accept fairy tales as a foundation for life, they need another set of guidelines. Because there is no objective meaning, there has to be a sense of meaning, in order to give life a sense of purpose. You find something to live for.

So if this is about finding something to live for in a meaningless universe, it cannot be countered with "it's false because of some people becoming morally dangerous". There is no link between these two and ethics has nothing to do with how to handle the topic of meaning in life. A bad, morally currupted person is not an argument against personal meaning in life.

The biological process of renewal of cells does not erase the information of the previous cells. It's essentially a copy. If you use the Ship of Theseus thought experiment, it describes how damaged parts get replaced with new parts. That's not how the body works. When a cell gets replaced it's essentially a perfect copy with healed parts. This process gets slower and worse over the course of a life and that's why we get old.

There is also nothing that says we are the same person over a period of time. We are constantly changing, based on the genetic makeup and our experiences that change our neurological makeup. But that doesn't mean it's metaphorical. Our body has a genetic blueprint that is informing our cells to renew cells according to what is established, so even if we renew all our cells, it's not happening in an instant and it's not replaced by anything new, only copies based on solid specifications. These specifications can be modified in order to adapt, like when we get a tan because our body needs to build up protection against UV light.

However, the neurological makeup does not change just because the cells change. The connections that make up the memories we have are still there and it's the neurological connections that create our consciousness, not cells. So even if our cells go through a process of dying and copying, the neurons stay in the formation that is necessary for our consciousness. The reason people start forgetting or having problems at an older age is that the neurons start to disintegrate when information becomes harder to process. Nourishment to the brain and the paths where information takes between neurons start to break down, new paths are harder to create, especially if there are little external stimuli.

It's an interesting theory and it's right in a sense but fundamentally it's wrong. — Jordan B Peterson

This is why Peterson has weak arguments. He frequently push things like "it's fundamentally wrong" while at the same time point out that "he is right in a sense". He muddies his arguments into a complete mess and that's why people compare him to Deepak Chopra. He is a brilliant psychologist, but the biggest problem is that he is an apologist and he muddies his own points by combining utter nonsense with findings that are truly scientific. That's why people have a hard time knowing whether what he says is based on science or his own ideological beliefs. Like when he pointed out that there are no real atheists since a true atheist is a murderer like in Dostoyevsky's writings. Utter bullshit. I've spent many hours listening to him but also listening to criticism against him and analyses of his rhetoric. It's dangerous to not have a critical mind while listening to him since he pushes his own personal ideas and convictions into areas of science, mixing them together so that those who aren't skeptics fall right into accepting his ideas. For a person who regularly warns about the mechanics of totalitarian states and their ways of manipulation, he uses similar mechanics to sell his books. It becomes clear that he isn't the brightest in the room when he gets pitched against other intellectuals in a discussion.

Today I would like to discuss with you a very delicate but interesting subject that has been on everybody's mind since the beginning of mankind. The purpose of life. So I wanted to ask you this. What is the purpose of life? I tend to agree with the premise that there is a purpose to every form of life from microscopic beings to macroscopic ones. This brings me to my second question: should life exist without purpose? Let me explain a little bit. Life is a cycle and everything in it contributes in order to maintain the universal order of things. Can life exist without purpose? I do not think so but I'm open for debate. — StreetlightX

@Paul24:

There is no purpose to life. It's the consequence of billions after billions of random dead matter clashing together into chemical reactions until organic matter developed. Later, that organic matter developed simple functions that would guide it into existing with least resistance to the environment. From that, the evolutionary process continued this process over the course of billions of years and the organic matter developed into larger and more complex beings.

There is no purpose to this, it's simply a process, like how beech rocks form shapes after millions of years of water crashing into them, their form does not have a purpose, it's just a result of matter over time.

The premise that there is a purpose to life is not a premise that can be used in a reasonable argument because it has no truth-value. If the conclusion is that there is purpose to life and the premise is that there is purpose to life, that is a fallacy.

Therefore, the question of whether or not life should exist without purpose becomes a non-question since a purpose hasn't been proven to exist in the first place.

A universal order is not equal to the process of evolutionary cycles. The universe will continue indifferent to our planet being blown up or not, since it has no agent of will. It doesn't care, it can't care, it's a dead place of matter without consciousness.

You can't think about the purpose of life when you haven't proven there to be one in the first place. So far, thousands of years of philosophy have not been able to prove there to be any purpose. All reasonable arguments tend to come to the same conclusion; there is none. The notion that there is a purpose is born out of a religious legacy that fails to present a logical argument for that purpose and instead only requires faith.

So the philosophical discussion is at a standstill since everyone is still debating if there is any purpose or not. It's an irrelevant question when so little points to there being any purpose or meaning at all. The question that should be discussed is rather; how should we live and find meaning in our lives when there is no objective or universal purpose or meaning to our lives? That doesn't mean finding a universal meaning, it means finding a purpose that is meaningful to ourselves as humans.

My personal sense of meaning is a pursuit of knowledge in order to find control over the uncontrollable universe. It's not a universal meaning, it's not something that has any purpose outside of my own values as a person. It is meaningful to me as a person and that's the limit of any kind of meaning and purpose in life.

There is the value problem in meaning. Hitler seemed to have a lot of meaning and purpose in his life to the point he controlled a large army and several countries. How can one persons meaning be superior to another if we just have to make our own meaning?

Somehow Hitler needed an alternative source of meaning , purpose and satisfaction. — Andrew4Handel

Why are you putting one person's meaning against another? Hitler might have felt a sense of meaning for himself, but why should that be set to a standard meaning for all?

To find your own meaning of life requires you to find it for yourself. It's not about finding a meaning that applies to all others. That is objective meaning and it doesn't exist, neither as a grand meaning nor a found meaning for all.

Evolution seeks to explain characteristics or attributes we have in terms of evolutionary usefulness. These are expected to determine some or all of our characteristics.
There would be no point in the theory if it didn't meaningfully explain anything. — Andrew4Handel

I think that a definition of the word "meaning" would be needed because I don't see any meaning in evolution. As I said, it's a function that, as you said, explain the characteristics or attributes of usefulness. The process and function of the evolutionary changes over time is just what it is, there is no further meaning to it.

What I mean is that when we talk about "objective meaning", that meaning is essentially transcending beyond the simple function or characteristics of something. The "meaning of life" means that there is some meaning to all our existence beyond just existing or having life. If the "meaning" of a flower is to be yellow, that is not really a meaning, it's a function or a characteristic, it has no real value and is just what it is, it's yellow, no meaning. Same goes for evolution, the evolutionary process has no meaning, it is a function, it is a process, but it is what it is.

Objective meaning means that there is a reason for our existence, beyond of just existing. In terms of a God creating us, could maybe mean that we have a meaning for that Gods plan that we don't know about. But any rational person who wants to create a logical and reasonable argument for the meaning of life would not find one since it demands proving there's a God that has a meaning set out for us. Without any specific meaning to life, there is none and we simply just are.

That's why all arguments for a "meaning of life" falls flat every time since it requires there to be an agent of that meaning to apply it to our life. If there is no agent of meaning, there is no meaning. The argument for a "meaning of life" is infected by religion and its fallacies in reasoning.

There is no objective meaning.

I think evolution is a claim of objective meaning where evolutionary theorist seek to explain life from a fixed or lawful paradigm. — Andrew4Handel

Evolution is just the function of our existence. It's the form we have in the universe, just as a star convert hydrogen into helium and later dies, the evolution of biological entities on earth goes through evolutionary steps to further change its function in the environment. There's no meaning to this, it's only a function. It also has no meaning just because scientists came to this conclusion, the scientific evidence points to it, it simply is. What is the meaning of a function? What is the meaning of the sun's ability to transform hydrogen into helium? Detach your own existence from the universe and you realize it has no objective meaning. People get clouded in our human sense of existing and it shrouds our ability to think beyond ourselves. We are nothing more than matter able to think about ourselves as matter, all meaning is our invention, objective meaning is non-existent.

Got to go. The corpse is waiting. — Bitter Crank

Not to be blunt or insensitive, but that's a very meta framing of your "nothing has objective meaning"-comment. :sweat:

The question is, if there was an objective meaning of life, what would it be? Please entertain the question instead of rejecting it outright. — matt

How can I entertain a question that is essentially impossible to answer? I can answer with what I might think is a subjective meaning of life, a meaning that I personally think is worthwhile in life, but answering what is an objective meaning of life is a pointless question when there isn't any objective meaning.

To entertain the question, you must first accept that there is an objective meaning of life, but something we don't know. But as soon as you try and make a rational argument for doing so, the question falls apart into absurdity.

So how can we answer a question that is pointless? It becomes trivial nonsense without philosophical weight. The true question that can be discussed would be... can there be any objective meaning? And so far we've had thousands of years of philosophers failing to find there to be any.

Say there is a 50/50 chance of some event occurring. How does that probability factor affect whether or not the universe is deterministic? — Josh Alfred

What event has a 50/50 chance that is purely random? If you flip a coin, all the parameters of flipping the coin determine the outcome. Just because you as a human cannot perceive all the reasons for the outcome, doesn't mean its 50/50

The only place where there's a 50/50 chance is down at a quantum level, but there are no scientific theories that determine that the quantum level has any impact on large scale events being randomized. The randomness at a quantum level has an almost infinite non-effect on anything at larger scales. As soon as it scales up, the outcomes become determined by preceding events. The quantum randomness seems to be related to how matter and energy become defined, not outcomes of events in time.

So there is nothing that can really be defined as a 50/50 chance and therefore there aren't any randomness to affect the nature of determinism.

However, we run into interesting questions if we start using things like the ANU quantum generator
http://qrng.anu.edu.au/index.php
If you choose based on the outcome of quantum generation, you are essentially deciding based on pure randomness. But then again, the choice to do so is deterministic, the choice on how to do something, to do something and so on is still deterministic. And further on, the numbers that come up are defined by a computer choosing the randomness, so the determinism is still in place. The computer chooses a set of numbers, why not double that set? Use half a set? So it becomes, even at this level, hard to determine if it's dislocated from determinism or if it's an illusion of being free of determinism.

But it's intriguing to roll a quantum dice for the choices you make during a day. If you use that dice for all the choices during a day, you are essentially still following determinism in which two choices you have to choose by, but hacking determinism in which outcome that happens.

But it's still not hacking determinism into splitting the universal determinism, even though it's the grandest illusion of bypassing it for us humans.

In determinism, everything is essentially luck.

But to be able to reward, we need to measure the amount of work that led up to the achievement. If you win the lottery, that's just pure luck based on the right time and place. But putting ten years of work into something, giving up pleasures and comforting sloth in order to reach a goal and then reach it, it is essentially also a form of luck by looking at the deterministic reasons for ending up at that goal, the genetics, the family you were born into, upbringing, the ability to go to school, get higher education, the makeup of your psychology/IQ, how that is utilized, being in the right time and place to be able to start working towards that goal etc. and then reach that goal.

The difference between the lottery ticket and that achievement is the level of work, the level of suffering in order to reach the goal. So in a sense, being rewarded should be measured according to how much suffering you went through. Suffering, not in the way of torture-like pain, hardship and so on (but in cases of them, yes), but how much you choose to give up in order to reach a goal. Even though that choice is determined, as always in determinism, it's the closest I can think of to measure when and when not to be awarded and praised for an achievement.

Example: Someone gives up having a family, gives up the pleasures of a balanced stable life (according to common norms), in order to invent something that makes a difference to the world. That is an achievement worth praise.
But if someone doesn't put effort into something, ends up with little to no effort outside of just normal evolution of events over that course of time, that is not something worthy of praise.

What would it be?

Would it be about achieving goals? Making progress morally and spiritually? Doing the will of a deity. Fulfilling an inbuilt teleology?
Hedonism? — Andrew4Handel

It cannot be, because there isn't any objective meaning. No argument can support any meaning of life without being biased to our own existence. We measure the meaning of life, based upon our own existence as humans, which makes the argument flawed. If we cannot present an objective meaning of life towards another lifeform, such as another form of intelligent life in the universe with another set of parameters for the meaning of life, then we cannot have an objective meaning. We can present an objective meaning of life, so long as it incorporates every possible life form in the universe, which makes it impossible for us to present it, as we are bound to the existence of being humans. Whenever you try to deduce the argument for an objective meaning of life, you will run into the answer that there isn't any objective meaning of life. If you create a subjective meaning of life, that is a set of maxims of your own, but never objective. Objective means it has been and will always be something, but since life wasn't created with any meaning in mind, but instead evolved out of dead matter evolving into organic matter through chemical processes, there is no objective meaning.

We exist and all notions of the mystery of our existence that fuels our sense of there being an objective meaning to our existence is false and based on lacking knowledge about how life evolved. The "hunt" for objective meaning is futile and out of desperation when faced with the meaningless nature of our existence. I would abandon all attempts at finding objective meaning and instead find a meaning that we invent for ourselves. If we are meaningless, we are free to create meaning, to create a reason for existing. If we can't create meaning, then we might as well kill ourselves. Trying to find an objective meaning of life is a distraction from either giving up life or creating meaning. But it's tempting to try and find an objective meaning. People tend to want an authority to govern them, it's a well-known function in psychology about how people behave. So most people want to find an external solid truth that can govern them and the idea of having no meaning, having nothing that guides us, frightens most people to death. But it's futile, there isn't any objective meaning, we simply are and that's it. The meaning needs to be created and if that's scary, it doesn't mean hiding from it makes it less true.

I think the most important test is EQ. Emotional Quota — Mattiesse

This has been a notion for many years but it's simplified and overused by people not knowledgable in psychology. It's like the Jung personality spectrum that some companies use when hiring, but most psychologists call bullshit methods. EQ has been abandoned as a spectrum of measurement because it's not measurable in any practical way. It also puts extroverts in an advantage over introverts, even though extroverts only excels at tasks that need social skills, when introverts excel at higher cognitive work and even leadership roles as strategists.

If you want a better working method for calculating a persons cognitive and behavioral function, use the Big-five measurement. It's what most psychologists use today to determine the personality and cognitive performance of a person. Combine it with an IQ measurement of that person and you get a pretty solid sum of that person's capabilities and weaknesses.

Is it speed, memory, adapting?

Is being average put you at odds with accomplishment in intellectual work?

Does mental illness have anything to do with intelligence?

What's the difference between 100, 120, and 140 IQ in practice? — Drek

IQ measures the ability to function in problem-solving. It also measures the ability to adapt. You can have low IQ and learn a lot of information, but not know how to utilize that information, only to recite. You can have a low IQ and learn repeating tasks and be an expert on it but not how to adapt when things change.

IQ can define what occupations you can handle. If there's a lot of repetition, a lot of "using stored information" and repeating mechanical tasks, you can have a very low IQ and still perform. Many with very low IQ even excels at these tasks since higher IQs might need other stimuli to function properly.
If you have a high IQ, you are best at jobs which features a lot of adapting situations. Where you need to use the knowledge that you have and connect the dots into a new form. That's why successful engineers and scientists rarely have low IQ, since their success comes out of learning the properties of something and solving the problem of how it works or what something is. You can't do that by repeating tasks and just storing information. Same goes for creative people who are successful; they know how to create something out of the information and inspirations they have.

So, to answer your questions. Being average is only at odds with the highest performance of intellectual work. Meaning the highest form of science, engineering etc. There are some good things about having an average IQ though (meaning around 100 - 110). At the most extreme ends of the spectrum, there are problems in balancing ideas. At the lower end, most run into the Dunning Kruger effect, in which they aren't intelligent enough to understand that they aren't intelligent, meaning they think they are smart when they aren't. At the high end of the spectrum (125-200), there are so few who challenge their intelligence that they can easily win any argument by rationalizing their point of view without any valid counter-arguments. This means that because they cannot be challenged by others, they tend to lack in challenging themselves and only present arguments in support of their own opinion or hypothesis. The lack of external challenge makes them bad at challenging themselves (there's a psychology term for this that I've forgotten at the time of writing).
So having an average IQ isn't the worst thing, it might even be beneficial in some forms, especially dialectics. I would argue that a good, high, but balanced IQ is around 110-125 for our modern age. Most occupations are moving into fields that require much higher cognitive functions. Which means there will be a problem for the lower end of IQs down the road.

Mental illness has nothing to do with intelligence. A rain man-kind of person might be superhuman in math calculations but cannot use that ability for anything.

Here's a graph of occupations in relation to IQ levels.
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx

Antinatalism is the belief that birth should be morally wrong because it involves bringing into being a creature capable of suffering and that will suffer without its consent and that automatically makes it wrong no matter how much pleasure that creature experiences (because you have no right to create another human when THEY will be the ones to bear the consequences of your choices). — khaled

Antinatalism is like when you take a philosophical conviction and stand by its extreme form without challenging it. It's utilitarianism taken to the extreme in which any kind of human existence becomes irrelevant and the idea itself becomes absurd. It's the kind of idea that proves philosophical ideas to be flawed as a singular system or end in itself, and that a philosophical idea needs to evolve and change through dialectics rather than be the final answer to everything.

Is this fact evidence of our metaphorical nature? — Pelle

No, it's a misunderstanding of the actual biological science behind how our cells work.

And be careful taking everything Peterson says as any kind of truths. He's notorious for having argumentative flaws and fallacies. He has great insight into psychology, but he tends to move into philosophy with arguments that fall apart when picked apart.

Sure, Communism sought to destroy religion and commit genocide on an unimaginable scale, because it was religious in nature. Is the sort of absurd position people advocate — Inis

Are you saying that the mechanics of making Lenin and Stalin into deity-like figures, following hard doctrines and mantras to make enemies of those who think differently from the regime, isn’t religious in its mechanics? I hope you understand what it is I’m talking about here. Religious mechanics aren’t confined to faith in the supernatural, the mechanics are the mechanics of manipulation and humans ability to stick to answers when in positions of having no other answers.

You mention irrationality. If you know anything about the history of science, you will know that the big-bang was discovered by a Catholic priest, and that the entire atheist theoretical physics community sought to deny it. Let's not forget that Newton was deeply religious and according to the French, Lamarck discovered evolution, and was religious — Inis

This is in no way a counter argument to what I said. You take a section of history and decisions of people as an argument against the points I made. This is just a fallacy.

All in all, he presents a grotesque image of religion and he doesn't seem to be completely off the mark and that scares me. — TheMadFool

Why does that scare you? Because you are religious? Or because you fear the consequences of religion in our world? I think the latter has already been established throughout all of mankind's history.

For anyone who dives into the mechanics of religion, both in society and in terms of human psychology will agree with most of what he says. The last stand of religion against rational ideas is that it holds people under moral guidance that atheism doesn't have, which is only a true statement for apologists, not atheists. I seem to remember a study that showed that the number of crimes in more atheistic communities is less than in religious ones.

Religion is a very attractive source of answers about life and I would argue that if you aren't a person who's generally thinking about life and the world in any rational ways, you tend to lean against anything mystical and fantastical as your source of truth. In the end, it skews perception and there's a high risk of people taking advantage of this to fit their agendas. If you are susceptible to even accepting fantasy as truth you will most likely be very susceptible to manipulation, therefore any type of manipulation is easier done through the process of religious belief. Even in totalitarian societies that weren't built on a religious foundation, like Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, the mechanics of those societies are very much religious in nature.

Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong? — VoidDetector

People invent explanations when they can't explain things. Science and logical reasoning is a rather modern method and falsifiability was included in the scientific method as late as the first part of 1900's.

Humans have always been pattern-seeking animals who like to connect dots however possible to grasp what they don't know. If you don't have a method to exclude your own biases while trying to explain something you will most certainly include your own guesses and delusions into that explanation.

Nietzche's sister corrupted his unfinished work into a Nazi-supporting form.

The only way to get rid of beliefs is to train yourself to be a constant skeptic about your own ideas and convictions. You can't erase a specific belief, it's a set of mind that challenge all ideas and through that focus on the rational and logical reasoning rather than cognitive biases.

An important question though: does the ability to be skeptical about your own and others ideas require a certain level of IQ? Or a certain Big Five makeup? If so, it might be impossible for some people to be skeptical and instead jump between different sets of biases and beliefs rather than challenging them, regardless of motivation.

I would say so. Memory is nothing magical, it's a physical process of a biological mind that is interpreting data as it is playing back data. A computer that is playing back memory does it with perfect data recovery, but a human mind is scrambling everything and mixing it together with other memories. It's basically not a tool for playing back information, but playing back identity and the aspects of a human intellect. Memory is playing back data and mixing it with new information in order to further the development of that human intellect.

Compared to animals, who remember things as both memories and instinct, we have a far more advanced form of memory which is forming how we behave. We can interpret memory and make choices based on it. But it's still mixed with emotion that is changing how we remember things, which means we have memories to be able to function through our intellect, not just remember because we can. We remember something, just like other animals, but we can interpret it to change behavior in order to change outcomes in natural situations.

This means that we don't have memories to be able to record history and remember the actual truth about something, but to evolve behavior within a life instead of within lifetimes through changed instincts. The basic difference between us humans and other animals is that we have the ability to change within a life and not between generations. Biologically, it seems that we are the first species to be able to change before generational shifts or biological shifts. We control the biology of ourselves with how we adapt to reality.

Memory as we define it seems to be pretty simply defined through biology, but corrupted by our ways of interpreting it as more magical and mysterious than it actually is. If we observe ourselves as a species through the lens of us being just another animal on this planet, we might more clearly see how our abilities as an animal are working. I think it's arrogant to believe that we are more advanced than we actually are, thinking our intelligence is the product of something mystical rather than accepting that the byproduct of our intelligence is trying to wrap our heads around that we are intelligent. Is the ouroboros of our intelligence.

The problem with memory is that we have other memories that are influencing our interpretation of the memory we want to decipher.

No memory is without a context of another memory, thus, all memory is not factual, but abstract and based on our interpretation before we speak it as fact. Memory is a false truth about past events and actual truths that gets corrupted by emotion and biological processes as a veil in front of the real truth.

Memory defines us as a person but is merely an illusion of the actual truth about us.

To add
Have you ever seen random chaos suddenly form into a shape that you perceive as order? So, is it then unreasonable to conclude that random events, chaos and entropy may at a certain point in a long period of time, evolve into something that resembles order? Can this order then continue to arrange into further order going through more chaos? This is exactly how life formed, this is how evolution brought our intelligence. If you have almost an infinite amount of time and you let chaos unfold through that time, something will form. Especially if there's causality involved. A time glass with sand will have pure chaos and random order for each rock falling through, but at the center they might go through one at a time, like if there was order to the stream.

Chaos and entropy as the cause for our existence and our perceived beauty of our existence is only unthinkable for those that cannot accept it. Science points to it being the truth, so why shoehorn in other explanations that have no reasonable or logical foundation just because it's hard to grasp the idea?

In engineering, a lot of designs have been shifting towards using random iterations based on thousands of trial and errors out of a purpose. Jet engines have been engineered for maximum performance not by designing it intentionally, but by setting a goal for maximum performance and letting random algorithms design it instead, in many iterations over a period of time. The final design can look super weird, but also not something that a human could ever design by pure thought. This is part of my own argument against any kind of designer or intelligence behind our existence. If science points to chaos as the creator of all that we know and engineering benefiting from the concept of randomness, then nothing points to intelligent design or intentionally designing anything would yield the result we perceive as beauty around us. It doesn't argue against a creator creating a simulation in which we popped into existence by pure luck in that creators experiment vial through random events, but that would then not be intentional and therefor, that creator might not even know we are here in their simulation. Therefor us as a result as intentional design does not become valid.

I have yet to see any counter argument to my argument about randomness as source of existence proving there are no intentional creator, other than assumptions based on subjective emotions and perception, both by individual and through us as a species. I think a lot of people don't even try to look past their own existence, they are stuck within their own perception so hard that they can't view things outside it and it's limiting the arguments to self-deluded assumptions instead of logic.

1.The beauty of the universe is improbable under atheism
2.The beauty of the universe is not improbable under theism.
3.If we have two hypotheses and some evidence is not improbable under the first hypothesis but is improbable under the second, then that evidence counts as evidence for the first hypothesis.
4.Therefore, the beauty in the universe counts as evidence for God’s existence (1,2,3 Modus Ponens) — Empedocles

You are right about the objections to this argument and I don't think you can counter it with "there also seems to be an objective quality" or "Furthermore, if beauty were completely subjective, it would be meaningless to describe something as beautiful."
You are trying to validate your invalid premiss with assuming there is objective quality or beauty because otherwise we can't have quality. There are so many flaws in this argument because you assume things based on your opinion and therefor trying to justify the conclusion of the original argument as true.

You assume that there is an objective beauty and because of this there must be a designer of the universe since beauty like this cannot be without it. There's nothing to back this conclusion at all. You ignore the psychology science of how we perceive the universe and that us humans are pattern seeking animals who perceive the world through senses that in turn gets processed by our brain with a type of biological algorithm that fills in the blanks. This means that we perceive balance, symmetry and so on as harmony and harmony in turn gives the notion of beauty. Our emotions are based upon survival instincts we evolved through the necessity to guard ourselves from complex dangers and guide our intellect while outsmarting preys or evading predators. What we perceive as beauty is rather just a byproduct of all these processes in our brain which change our chemistry within our body.
Therefor, you can't point to the universe having beauty as an objective statement since it's subjective, not for you as an individual, but through our perception as a species.

Further, we might perceive a specific thing as dull, grey, formless pile of shit with the senses that we have. If we actually look at a pile of manure, smell it's foul smell, see it's dull colors, the appalling concept of what it is etc. we point to it not being a thing of beauty. But if we weren't limited to the senses that we have, if we would see frequencies of light we normally don't see, like infrared, ultraviolet, gamma, radio etc; if we could smell more nuances of the complexities within that pile of shit, we might perceive it as the most beautiful thing we've ever seen. But our senses and our brains processing is limiting us from that, together with the programmed instincts that tells us that shit is not to be preceived as beauty.

Just as we could mix together two compounds of chemicals that react to each other with sparks and colors, like fireworks, it doesn't mean it is beautiful outside of human preception. A dog doesn't find fireworks to be anything other than pure terror.

In essence, you can't claim truth to a conclusion about a designer for the universe based on the perception through human emotions. In order to do that, you need to place humans as intrinsically valuable within the universe and there's nothing that points to us being valuable in the context of the scale of our universe. We are a fraction of existence within this universe and it can't give two cents about our existence. To put ourselves and mankind on that pedestal in front of the entire universe in order to claim what is beautiful or not, is a foolish point of view.

To elaborate further, our perception of our existence in the universe is coming from within the system that it perceives. We evolved emotions and perception to perceive life and value it based off our emotions.

Water could not be anything else than water in order to put context into what water is. We are humans that perceive ourselves, we see value in us because we cannot see value outside of ourselves since we are humans and not anything else. The only thing that could put a value on us would be another species that could perceive mankind objectively in context of the entire universe.

Beauty is an illusion. We can't deny beauty, but we can't use it for objective facts and truths since it is subjective, not to the individual, but to our species way of perceiving the world and universe around us. If we didn't perceive things like symmetry as beautiful, we would view the world as rather ugly.

However you try and turn this argument, it all comes down to the values that mankind puts on things in the universe and those values doesn't prove a single thing.

Well, why not? Why shouldn't a cause happen after the event? — Banno

So far we know that the universe is deterministic, our known universe has a set axis of time. However, it seem to be based on the properties of probability. The larger the object or space, the more probable the consequences of causes becomes. The smaller you go, down to the quantum level, the less probable it gets. Now, by "large objects" I don't mean suns and galaxies, but even ourselves. You need to go down to extreme small scales before the quantum behaviour breaks down things.

But here lies a contradiction of sorts. If the universe is deterministic, how do we know that the quantum randomness aren't causes in a chain reaction of events? If you could predict every particle in the universe, that would mean you could predict all outcomes of all movements and states, but because you cannot predict quantum level events, since they are random, how then do we know that the consequences aren't affected by randomization on the quantum level?

If a large object in space, say, an astroid, speeds through space, it gets attracted and accelerated in different directions throughout it's journey, changing it's path slightly but so much that further down the line it's changed course by millions of light years. If random events on a quantum level change that asteroid's trajectory by a margin that is almost not measurable, it would still have changed the location billions of light years of travel later.

Now, I'm pulling hypotheses from educated guess work here since I'm not a theoretical physicist. Maybe the quantum level is random but cannot change the deterministic nature of the larger world since the only way for it to truly change the course of the asteroid is by expanding the randomness into observation, into levels of probability in which the randomness becomes so high in probable conclusions that it won't change the trajectory. Maybe the randomness and low probability of the quantum level through the process of going from 0% probable to 99,999999999999999999999999% (infinite decimals) probable, is part of how causality and entropy works and therefor the deterministic universe is still solid. If the randomness on the quantum level cannot effect movement of mass, it won't move particles of mass, but only charge their state.

So, as said, hypothetical guess-work here. I still don't know enough of things like Higgs fields and particles and there's also that little thing called unification theory that we haven't solved. However, while it's chaos on the quantum level it doesn't effect us on the larger scale. The general laws of the universe starts breaking down at a quantum level, but the laws prevents things to move backwards in time on any scale larger. I mean, we could also talk about the state of light, in which the speed of light makes only us experience light. Light in itself does not have a concept of time, since it's the speed of light, so at the start of it's journey it has already reached it's destination at the same in "it's own perspective". Because everything else is slower than the speed of light, we witness things going slower, but if you were speeding at the speed of light, you would be at the start and end of the destination at the same time, since time stops at that speed and would have been like that since the dawn of our universal laws.

Both at the quantum level and at the speed of light or at the maximum gravitational force exceeding lights speed, things break down and our laws of the universe cease to work in the way we perceive it. The big question is; if we had the means, could we make us perceive things outside of the perception we are slaves under now? Or are we forced to only understand as far as our perception goes? Even if we prove things like tachyons, would we fully understand them? Or would all the data get scrambled into a mess since we have no framework existing in our universe to even explain the basics of them?
If we live on a scale, at a slower speed than light and under normal gravitational conditions, the probability of events going against the laws of the universe are 99,9999% with infinite decimals. If there was a slim chance of a consequence causing a cause, that seem to never be, because infinitely unlikely that it will happen. It's that mind boggling thing in math where there is a chance of something, but a version of "infinite" makes it infinitely unlikely, even if it is likely.

But I'd rather point to a theoretical physicist on all of this, I can barely calculate basic math :sweat:

Yet :wink:

And it doesn't mean the cosmological argument is invalid, it's just not an argument for the existence of god, but an argument that is very interesting for scientists. How do we tackle this mystery of what started the deterministic universe, the mind blowing conclusion of the argument is more interesting than any kind of claim that it proves the existence of god.

you - I/others disagree with the cosmological argument therefor you are unreasonable
me - that fails - i hold to my premise — Rank Amateur

The cosmological argument does not have any valid conclusion in favour of the existence of god. It's not about disagreement, there's no logical conclusion, case closed. What you write here just points to you ignoring the inconsistencies about the argument in support of a god. Nothing binds the conclusion of the cosmological argument to the conclusion that god exists, that's just a wild connection with no basis in logic. The first mover is not god, there's nothing to bind those together, case closed (and has been for a long time).

This has not been able to be done in a few hundred years, and not from lack of effort. So you have quite a task ahead of you.
— Rank Amateur

If, as you state, you are a believe in reason, this last part should give you pause. — Rank Amateur

The argument has ben flawed for a few hundred years, it's not that it hasn't been able to be disproved, it's not proven anything else than a "first mover" to begin with. Attributing the cosmological argument to anything more than what it is, is ignoring the hundreds of years it hasn't been able to prove anything of what theists propose. If it hade been able to prove the existence of god through logic, it would have been a done deal. It's like saying that the cosmological argument proved the existence of god, but people are just too stupid to realize it. No, people just don't see the logic behind combining that conclusion with the notion that any god exist and theists haven't provided any answer to combine the conclusion of the argument the the conclusion that god exists. It's nonsense really.

In order to do so, you will need to prove with fact or reason that the premise are wrong or the conclusion does not follow. — Rank Amateur

You seem to miss the fact that no atheist is disapproving the conclusion of the first mover based on the logic and evidence at hand. It's the assertion that the "first mover" and "god" is the same thing that isn't proven. It's like me saying that the cosmological argument proves that the teapot in space created everything in the first place, that the teapot is the first mover. There is nothing to bind the concept of god to the "first mover" of the cosmological argument so there is nothing to disprove. No one is arguing against the first mover since we don't have enough data to disprove that logic, but saying "it is god" is a claim with no facts to back it up.

You cannot attach one argument and combine it to another conclusion just because you want to. The claim that god exists has nothing to do with the conclusion of the cosmological argument.

In what way is the "first mover", the initial cause of all causality, "god"? Explain that before claiming the cosmological argument to prove any existence of god. I see no correlation between the conclusion of god existing with the actual conclusion of there being a "first mover". There isn't any correlation here, please point it out.

Religions basically do give answers how to live, what is good and what is bad. And religions rely on deities for this. Is this logic so difficult to understand? — ssu

Like morals about slavery and such? Religion is just a vessel for basic morals and ethics established long before the religions you give credit for these. You also assume that morals cannot be established by non-religious people, which is a prejudice against any kind of moral system that doesn't rely on religious belief.

This is the usual "atheists are immoral" argument that fails over and over.

They try to find and do find objective truths. Not normative statements. (In philosophy, normative statements make claims about how things should or ought to be, how to value them, which things are good or bad, and which actions are right or wrong.) — ssu

You are dividing the two, too definitively. Right and wrong can be asserted through what is true about human psychology but I agree philosophy is key to figuring out morals. However none of these has anything to do with god or religion, which claims moral truths without foundation for those claims. Philosophy and science try to find a foundation that is valid instead, which is more rational than claims based on belief in a system just because of the belief itself.

I know a flat earther who is an atheist. — DingoJones

Then, that person is not an atheist. Not in the sense of following evidence and logic to the truth. Sure, in the sense of denying the existence of a god, but being a flat-earther has nothing to do with being an atheist. Atheism doesn't have to do with belief, which means it demands proof, which means it cares for truth. The foundation of atheism becomes pretty clear.

Aquinas would not approve of your interpretation.

The cosmological argument, that I am referencing, has a conclusion that there is a non- contingent or necessary being - whose existence in not contingent on anything, and whose existence is necessary for everything - me and Aquinas, millions of others, call this being God. — Rank Amateur

Aquinas is dead and didn't go through both the renaissance nor the enlightenment period. It's still making a claim that the first cause, the one necessary for everything we know, is "god". There is nothing about the god that exists within any of our definitions that can be asserted to being that first cause of everything. Making that connection is projecting your own ideas about god on top of an abstract concept of the first mover in a deterministic universe. That is not an argument with any validity and any claim that it proves the existence of god is a failure to understand the difference between a true conclusion and a conclusion that is converted into a cognitive bias.

A "first mover" is not god by any definition we have, it's only proof that there has too be something at the beginning of cause and effect... nothing more... nothing less.... any claim otherwise is not supported by logic or reason. This is why the cosmological argument hasn't been able to prove the existence of god. If it had, the argument would have been over. But theists doesn't care about this, they just demand this argument to have a valid conclusion, which is delusional.

I think you have missed my point. Science is objective, it explains how the World is, not how it should be. Ethics is subjective. We can agree or disagree in ethics, and we can make our case by trying to reason it. This I understand totally. But when you make the argument that your reasoning on a scientific basis, for me that is different. Too many times people fall into this trap: that they argue their subjective, normative views are somehow deductible from science and hence superior to others. — ssu

I don't see any logic here? You are mixing subjective ethics into the argument about the existence for god? I attribute atheism to have a foundation close to the process of science, meaning that it demands evidence for any claims about life, the world and universe. That is not a claim, it's a demand for proving claims. Demanding proof for a claim is not a claim in itself.

Are our ethics indeed invented by the necessity of survival? Really?

Perhaps we had those basic morals and ethics for the survival of our family and clan, but typically not for anyone else. Typically animals and packs of animals have their owb territories and defend them out of necessity of survival. Our own species has been the most successfull in basically turning everythin in the World (except the deep oceans) to our own territory. And most likely our species wasn't at all benevolent and peaceful with all the other hominid relatives of ours that are now extinct. The idea of getting rid of your competitors is totally logical for survival. Science indeed can show this kind of behaviour even in other animals. Yet I see it far from being a basis for ethics. — ssu

I would suggest looking into the findings about how we humans evolved. There is theories in psychology and sociology about how groups of people function, that we have problems to function as a group when we reach over 12 people in a group. This is where people started to get rid of competitors, when we started doing crimes against the group to survive or become better off than others in the group. This is also my point; that when we grew larger than 12, those smaller groups, we needed systems to govern society and that is were our morals and ethics came to be. That these morals and ethics were corrupted by those in power is a later historical entry.

Of course. And science basically does the similar thing on a broader level: it explains how everything has ended up as it as and as we can now observe from our surroundings. Similarly, it doesn't give validity to our normative ideas on what to do. — ssu

You mean that neuroscience, psychology, socialogy and sciences that investigate current states does not find truths based in evidence of the present? You mean that Einstein's theoretical physics were false? Since things like gravitational waves wasn't proved until this year? Science is more than experiments proving, it's also about logic proving. Mathematical logic in line of Russel has to do with a logic that can be drawn on a whiteboard and still be as valid as experimental proof since the logic itself is solid. 2 + 2 is 4; if you demand evidence of it, you ignore the logic of that math and that math is as basic as nature itself.

I believe the cosmological argument is a reasonable argument. — Rank Amateur

The cosmological argument only points to a first cause of the line of consequences in a deterministic universe, it does not point to a god. Asserting that the first cause is god is a wild conclusion that does not care for the conclusion of the actual argument. The actual argument only points to a first cause that we don't know about and it is valid in the sense that it points to that unknown, no atheist would deny that. However, theists points to this unknown and say it's god. That is not the definition of god that theists in other cases describe god as, hence, the argument does not support theists claims of a god. The argument is only valid as pointer to the unknown start of events for the universe, nothing more, nothing less. We haven't proved this first cause or how it happened, which doesn't mean it's god or anything like it. The argument is a good one, just not for any kind of god, which is an assertion dislocated from the argument and a claim by theists that does not have any relation to the argument or line of thinking about determinism.