I dont think that 'determinists' actually look at 'creation' as 'emergence', or that 'observers' are required to specify what fonstutes as 'an emergent structure'......but I may be wrong.

There seems to be something ethically special about sex.

This is a tautology. By use of the word 'ethically' you have already singled out the word 'sex' as 'a special relationship between people'. The origins of its status can clearly be traced to basic primate social behavior in which other (human) ethical considerations (honesty, theft) are inapplicable. Other human factors like language and the seeking of prediction and control, merely serve to embellish its 'natural' status.

Nice hunting ! Try also 'philosophy of neuroscience', which seems to result in attributing the 'hunt' itself to an epiphenomenon of neural functioning !

To All,
Thankyou for the responses on a thread I thought had been 'closed'.

I was asked what an atheist would see as 'quality' in a discussion about religion. A few example might be....
1. Discussion of the concept of 'creation' and whether it required 'an agent'
2. Discussion of the concept of 'morality' as either an evolutionary asset or a transcendent one.
3. Discussion of the nature of the process we call 'life', and the implications for religion of the developments in biotechnology.

Now it may be that the annals of this forum would yield examples of this type, but it seems to me, not recently. Instead, what I am seeing is 'poor quality' in which assumptions are made that a particular religious argument lays claim to 'the moral high ground'. Christianity seems to be the significant claimant here. (The Catch 22 caracature of the military padre comes to mind here). Nor do I find that the demands for 'logical argument' convincing when the Zeitgeist of the origins of religious thinking fail to be considered in the assertion of religious axioms.(The adage 'life was brutish and short' in past times seems to he ignored in that respect)

NB My mention of contextual factors above, like Zetgeist, implies that I do not concur with inclusion of 'continental,philosophy' in my 'rant'. Indeed, I think, for example, that Derrida's concepts of parergon and aporia can add significant depth to any philosophical,discussion.

And maybe I'm the aspiring butler !

I agree there is a traditional distinction between 'knowlege' and 'belief' but these pragmatically involve 'degree of confidence', rather than that more nebulous concept 'truth'.

An argument being suggested above is that 'belief' could be a whole modus vivendi equating to 'being', but that argument essentially rests on one modus claiming superiority (i.e 'correctness') over others which are demoted to mere 'belief systems'.

No. 'Being' implies continuity, whereas 'belief' implies segmentation. We might conceive of 'belief' as a statement about the current 'state of being' but those statements are ephemeral and promoted by shifting context.

Your last sentence is exactly what I have said regarding beliefs with observational correlates.

Sorry, you've lost me. 'Belief' is not 'a property'. Its a noun implying a state of mind characterized by confidence in an idea without sufficient observational evidence. Should that observational evidence be specified, and should that observation fail, then belief is logically undermined. The 'God/Satan' scenario already assumes these to be meaningful concepts, prior to belief statements about them. Their proposed relationship with each other might be part of that 'meaning', but 'belief' in such a relationship beyond 'a story' is a separate issue.

No. There is no 'logic' which undermines belief in 'God' unless that belief gives 'God' essential properties which can be empirically tested or observed and that test 'fails'. That is because 'logic' must assume 'truth' of chosen axioms and cannot evaluate that truth. (Godel's incompleteness theorem, although mathematical in intent, has been extrapolated to most general systems, such that the 'truth' of at least one axiom cannot be deduced from the system itself)

A mythical rose, by any other name, would smell just as phoney to atheists ! ...Indeed, in terms of Shakespeare milking....'A plague on all their fairy tale houses' !

But I suppose we are doomed to continue to suffer your futile trolling which has no more substance than its turgid 'anti-yahweh' moaning.

If by 'dimensions' you mean 'independent (orthogonal) factors', as in 'factor analysis', then that might make sense. However, whether you concur on that or not, I suggest you need to take care, for example, with your analysis of 'text' as '2-dimensional', because contrary to the religious viewpoint (set in stone), post modernists claim that text shifts its 'meaning' over time, even for its author.

To all.
This is NOT a thread aimed at tackling 'the problem' laid at the doors of traditional religions, other than by promoting of 'gnosticism' as the 'most enlightened' alternative religion. The fact that the mythology of gnosticism also involves a male (wise) female (fallen) dichotomy albeit at the 'spiritual level' rather than a 'bodily level' implies that their claims for moral superiority are dubious.

You application of 'societal function' to 'self' tends to be circular from the pov of 'self' as a social acquisition, constructed by a value laden communal language.
I can't make sense of your 'dimensions' analogy. Maybe you could rehash what you are saying in terms of 'nested domains' ....e.g. personal, group, societal, national etc ...in which different rule mechanisms operate ?

I mean that the mythology employed by gnostics uses logos as a key concept in a mystical sense generally denoting 'ultimate divine order' or 'absolute reason'. There is, of course, an element of 'word magic' associated with logos, which manitests in religions in various forms...''in the beginning was the word'...'holy writ'....'words as the currency of thought'....'the gift of thinking' as creativity...etc, which contribute to the vague semantic field in which esoteric cults like gnosticism dabble for their roots.

...but all tinged with myth !

"Jesus" is a red herring. Jews and moslems don't do Jesus!
I suggest gnostics want their cake (belief in a supremo aka 'God') and eat it (without any strings attached of 'rule following'). The anti-homophobia and anti-mysogeny of modern times serves their parasitic activities vis-a-vis the denigration of mainstream religions, without which the alternative mythology of gnosticism would be meaningless

A major societal function of religion is rationalize and regulate the sexual behavior we inherit as primates. This accounts for the 'sanctification' of male chauvinistic and polygamous tendencies.
Even those dissenting cults like gnosticism tend towards male-female dichotomy in their mythology ('logos' versus 'eros' being the Jungian subtext) even though those labels are more nebulous in their application with respect to biological gender, thereby conforming to modern pc trends.

...'logos' being your particular idiosyncratic myth.

On the basis that language is a defining characteristic of humans, it can be argued that all words, including 'God', 'reality' and 'knowlege' are by definition anthropocentric. A secondary shift to 'anthropomorphism' does not seem surprising.

Twaddle !
That's a bit of supercilious pomposity from someone who hasn't bothered to do much reading.

In particular, what you call 'reasoning' takes no account of the Zeigeist from which philosophical axioms emerge, or rely on for their semantic import. Nor do you seem to have the slightest idea about the limitations to classical logic emerging from say from Godels incompleteness theorem, or the QM departure from the 'law of the excluded middle'.

So not only does your remark underscore your own indolence, it feeds the troll whose idiosyncratic mythology puts 'reason' on a pedestal.

:grin: Mincing the fresh meat ?... but fails to lift the fetid word salad !

Googling 'Heidegger, and Panpsychism' suggests the jury is out on that.

Yes, the epistemological issue is one of priority. i.e Does 'philosophy' guide what we mean by 'scientific method' , or is 'scientific method' a function of 'brain mechanisms' which eliminative materialists might argue boils down to .physics and chemistry'.Dualists tend to reinforce the dichotomy, whereas pragmatists tend to ignore it.

Hmm...
The dichotomy suggested above between 'science' and 'philosophy' appears to be contradicted by developments in neuroscience, in which 'neurophilosophy' attempts to apply scientific findings to philosophical issues. Patricia Churchland, for example, using the principal of 'eliminative materialism', analysed issues of what we call 'free will' in terms of the neurological mechanisms involved in 'desire constraint'. Thus 'culpability' in the court room sense, becomes a function of the balance of neurological and hormonal processes and genetic dispositions. This approach makes no claim on the societal functionality of the concept of 'culpability', but does tend to indicate the liklihood of 'success' of sentencing responses.

Thanks for that Schopenhauer reterence.
You ask for an origin of 'bodily sensations', but from the pov that all perception is an 'interaction event' between 'organism' and 'environment' (Bohr et al), we might understand sensation as a bi-product of 'perturbation of structure of organism'. Maturana was the biologist/philosopher who developed the idea that 'cognition' was equivalent to 'the general life process' in which adaptatations to perturbations operated to maintain the integrity of the organism. Organisms were seen as emergent dynamic structures, far from equilibrium (Prigogine), which maintained themselves by 'successful' adaptation to perturbation. (BTW, the concept of DKS, ...dynamic kinetic stability.. has been used in developments in abiogenetic theory (Pross) as a counter principal to entropy increase) No doubt this 'systems view' of cognition can designate some components as subsystems which monitor adaptation. That 'monitoring' could be equivalent to what we call 'awareness'.

In your definition of this is an 'epistemological' issue, we might bear in mind Rorty's point that 'philosophy' per se has no epistemological authority outwith scientific advances.

The pov scenario tends to imply a dichotomy between 'observer' and 'observed' as self contained entities. I suggest that the 'interaction event' involves co-extension of observer and observed, i.e. 'thinger',and 'thing' are instantaneously co-established (In a Heideggarian sense of Dasein and present-at-hand.)

Indeed this could be the 'view from everywhere' !:wink:

I think 'what remains over time' is observer memory of the interaction event between 'observer' and 'observed'. What we call 'properties' are observer expectations with respect to the event.What we call 'conservation' of energy, charge etc is the repetition of prediction of aspects of the 'measurement' of events, thereby implying 'identity' of a single phenomenon.
Note that the fundamental level,of 'measurement' is 'nominal' (i.e. naming or asigning identity)

:grin: 'Existence is what is'...is a phrase that would have the 'E-Prime movement' rolling in the aisles since their philosophical mission statement was to proscribe the word 'is' !

If interested in 'existence', I invite you to visit or revisit my entry discussion ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5901/existence-is-relative-not-absolute

:smile:
These disputes about the viability of description of 'God' are of course grist to the mill for those who base their atheism on the potential social perniciousness of the concept.

You correct about your 'community of discourse', and that is why the OP 'atheism' issue is a straw man since atheists by definition are not members of those communities.

Atheists love to talk about God. But it's difficult for them, as there is no generally agreed description* of God. It's probably the case that there are as many conceptions of God as there are believers, but are there general beliefs about God that many or most of us share? Come on, let's help the atheists out, by giving them a description of God to play with.

Alas no! Atheists like me DO NOT 'love to talk 'God' which they consider to be a useless concept for them. Those atheists with a modicum of intelligence concede that 'gods' may be useful concepts for others, albeit as 'opiates' or sociological facilitators, but leave the matter of 'description' of such mythical entities in the hands of the users. Ironically, the consenus among 'intellectual believers' seems to be that 'description' is an oxymoron, to be replaced with that blanket term 'ineffability'.

What some (militant) atheists DO want to talk about is the potential social perniciousness of the usage of what they see as an opiate. To this end they may cite 'history' as supportive evidence, but in my opinion, it would be futile to argue on the basis of 'lack of existential evidence' since that 'evidence' lies in the eye of the beholder/believer.

I doubt whether life has 'meaning'. As Shakespeare put it...

“Life ... is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

IMO, The 'price' humans pay for their superior cognitive abilities (which allows them to 'steer' limited aspects of their lives), is the problem of 'ultimate goal direction' and the fear there is none. All religions cash in on this fear by inventing the nebulous possibility of 'transcendence', usually with strings attached.

More interesting (to me at least) are some of the more bizarre speculations of esotericists, like Gurdjieff, who claimed that 'the purpose of (most) human life was to act as a transducer of cosmic energy so that celestial bodies like the moon could evolve' !

I don't do barber shop banter, or court room adversarial charades. I do reference based philosophical exchange of ideas.
As for 'hot air' , I would suggest that anyone with over 180 posts in their first day of membership should have a good look at themselves in the mirror, and add 'Freudian Projection' to their neglected reading list.

To Bartricks

Judging by your current 'pseudo-logical' activity on other threads, I'll take your absence of answer here as a 'no'.
Where you got the idea that you are an authority on 'proper argument' in philosophy is therefore a mystery, since philosophical debate relies very much on reference to its historical development (in this case, Kant, Heidegger, Bohr, Rorty, Rovelli et al) for its import. But to use your own phrase..'you wouldn't and couldn't know that'.

I suggest there is some circular thinking going on here. For example, the assertion that..

We have minds and the superorganism that we're part of - communities, cities, states, nations - behave remarkably like individuals.

...
could amount to mere 'anthropmorphism', or the confusion of psychological mechanisms with sociological ones.
Argument 'by analogy' is of course attractive and often underpins what we mean by 'understanding', but it has its limitations. For example, looking at a neural network could be from the paradigm of 'logic circuitry', but there is a competing paradigm of a 'finite machine under going temporal state transitions'.

This is not to say that I am against the concept of 'panpsychism' but merely to advise caution aginst what consider might be 'evidence'.

:So you've read Rovelli ?

Sorry, but I find it difficult talking to someone who doesn't understand the circularities of their own 'naive realist' assumptions. So I leave you with my own 'tara' and Rovelli's point that 'things are merely repetitive observation events'.
Have fun!

No. Your point is that there is a 'final turtle' you call 'a simple thing'. Physicists would tend to disagree.

:smile:
Tara indeed !...and give my regards to the old lady who claimed 'it's turtles all the way down' !

Its a vacuous qustion because 'simplicity' and 'complexity' are defined relative to human needs. The more sophisicated issue is whether what we call 'explanation' is 'top down' or 'bottom up'. The fact that we operate in our short everyday lives as though 'things' have 'objective existence' works from a pragmatic pov, most of the time, but has no philosophical import.