This distinction between discovery and creation is actually very relevant to mathematicism. I hold that there isn't really a strong distinction between discovery and creation in the first place, when it comes to purely ideal things at least, discovering or creating mathematical or fictional or otherwise purely abstract things. Both creation and discovery of such things are the product of exploring an abstract space of possibilities. And if mathematicism like Tegmark's is correct, than that abstract space is actually a real space in a sense -- all those possible abstract constructs that could be invented already existed waiting to be discovered. Every story or song or image that is possible already "exists" in abstract sense, waiting for someone to find it worth writing down or recording or whatever; in much the same way that every number already "exists" in an abstract sense even if nobody's ever need to count exactly that many things or whatever so no human has ever used that number.

Less troublesome terms, ones that don't introduce Kant's more subtle and unique transcendental, are immanent and speculative — jamalrob

Do you think "speculative" is really applicable to the moral aspect of the position I'm against? To my ear that sounds specifically about what might be real or true, not what might be moral or good.

So, you're basically against those things which most differentiate humans from animals? — Wayfarer

That's a really cynical way of looking at it. Humans are a kind of animal, in any case, and I don't think this thing I'm against is nearly the most distinguishing feature of them. That I'll touch on in later essays on metaphilosophy and the philosophies of mind and will (and the application of it in the form of criticism, the opposite of fideism in the sense I mean it, is the very reason for rejecting transcendentalism in the sense I mean it).

Thanks again. I've just made minor edits to the essay to make sure I don't say "transcendental", only "transcendent" or "transcendentalism", except in "transcendental realism" where it sounds like it's not a problem, and my nonce term (still hoping for a more established alternative) "transcendental moralism" in analogy to that.

I also slightly tweaked the first paragraph to delay mention of Kant, hoping to make it seem less about him:

I am against something that I will call "transcendentalism" for lack of a better term. "Transcendent" in general means "going beyond", and the word has many different senses in philosophy and other fields, but the sense that I'm using here is as the antonym for "phenomenal" or "experiential", so this sense of "transcendent" means "beyond experience" or "beyond appearances". Half of the kind of transcendentalism that I am against is what Immanuel Kant called "transcendental realism", which he also opposed, in contrast to what he called "empirical realism"; where "empirical", while etymologically meaning "experiential" in general, today usually means more to do with the experience of something seeming true or false, as via sight, sound, etc. But I am also opposed to what we might call "transcendental moralism", in contrast to what I would call "hedonic moralism", where "hedonic" means relating to pleasure and pain, the experience of something seeming good or bad. In short, I am opposed to views of reality that hold it to be something transcending empirical observation (seeing, hearing, touching, etc), and views of morality that hold it to be something transcending hedonic flourishing (feeling pleasures and not pains). — The Codex Quaerentis: Against Transcendentalism

Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking Wayfarer for, so that helps a lot.

Do you think I should rename the position that I'm against (and the essay about it) something like "transcendentism" instead of "transcendentalism", or would just making sure to use "transcendent" and not "transcendental" in the text of the essay suffice?

They would say something more like "it is possible for means to invalidate ends" and there would be an implied "because of the consequences — ZhouBoTong

This bit seems confused on two fronts, and I wonder if you misspoke.

For means to invalidate ends sounds like it's saying that some ends have to be given up on because they would require unacceptable means. I imagine you meant the other way around: ends can invalidate means. That's basically what I meant by "they can falsify them": a means can be shown bad because of it leading to bad ends. But a means can't be shown good for it leading to good ends, as it's sometimes possible to achieve good ends by bad means, but that doesn't make those bad means therefore good.

The part about the implied "because of the consequences" seems redundant because "ends" and "consequences" are basically synonyms.

Tegmark reduces everything that exists to only the ideal. What can be more ideal than pure math? — Douglas Alan

To me, math is real and it is not ideas. — Douglas Alan

These two statements seem to be in contradiction.

To me, math is real, and all ideas are reducible to math upon sufficient analysis.

All of math would exist even if there were never any intelligent beings to discover it. — Douglas Alan

I agree completely.

To be honest, idealism doesn't really make any sense to me. Not unless we were to stipulate a form where the fundamental building blocks of physical existence are phenomenal or proto-phenomenal, and everything that's "physical" arises directly from that. — Douglas Alan

That's exactly what I think. Everything is informational, formal, of a kind amenable to being described and worked with mathematically. All physical processes are interactions, signals being passed, between informational objects, which are defined entirely in terms of their function, which is to say how they map inputs to outputs (which become the inputs of other things). Being the recipient of such a signal, having informational input, is proto-phenomenal experience, so all physical things have such proto-phenomenal experience, and those experiences are ontologically the same events as the empirical properties they are experiences of, just seen from a different perspective, first person instead of third person. Proper consciousness like humans have, access consciousness, and intelligence, etc, are just particular kinds of complex, reflexive functions, physical functions like everything else, but like all physical things, made up of these informational functions, with their proto-phenomenal experiences, at the bottom. The phenomenal, the physical, the mathematical, is all the same stuff on my view.

The distinction is fundamental to Kant. — Wayfarer

I'm asking you to show me where he says that, because I don't remember seeing that distinction (between transcendent and transcendental) anywhere that I've studied Kant, and it sounds prima facie ludicrous just from the common senses of those words. You gave me in response a quote that only mentions "transcendental", not "transcendent"; and the only Google result for any philosophical distinction between them I can find is a different article on the same blog you linked earlier (which makes me suspicious that you're getting your opinions from some insular Kant fandom).

Sorry, no, that was unclear on my part. Yes, Kant used the term 'transcendent' to mean 'beyond the scope of empiricism'. — Wayfarer

Sorry, that just made what you're saying less clear, because I can't tell if you're answering "yes" or "no" to my question.

This is the basis of his basic argument, that there is a sense in which the mind 'creates' or 'constructs' experience on the basis of faculties which are not themselves amenable to empirical observation. That is the key point at issue here. — Wayfarer

That is not the key point at issue in this essay, and it doesn't go against the thesis of this essay either. When Kant talks about these a priori conditions of experience, he is still talking about experience, what kinds of experiences are possible or necessary, which is all fine in my book, and I talk about that later in the literal book. He affirms that nothing can be said about things that are completely beyond all experience, too. (Though he seems to put more emphasis than me on "but they're still really out there", whereas I say there's no point talking about things we can't talk about, and so discard them; they seem to be his way of hanging on to objectivity, and I also hang on to objectivity, but I don't think you need to posit something we can't say anything more about to do that.)

Anyway, all of this comparison of me to Kant and quibbling over what exactly Kant's position is is largely besides the point. I barely mention Kant at all, and the point of this essay isn't to argue against him, or really to say anything about him. It's to argue against making claims about things, real or moral, which can have no experiential import. "Transcendentalism" is just the best name I can think of for that, and the most familiarity I have with philosophical use of that term in this sense is Kant's critique of "transcendental realism".

This is like your comments on Against Fideism all over again. I'm not setting out to argue against just any old thing called "transcendentalism", but to argue against a specific thing, the best name for which I'm aware of is "transcendentalism". If you can think of a better name for that thing, I'm open to considering it.

That quote doesn't mention "transcendent". You're saying Kant distinguishes between "transcendent" and "transcendental", but the quote only mentions "transcendental".

that 'the empirical' is what is evident in experience, and the transcendental is what is beyond it — Wayfarer

Are you saying that that is what Kant is saying? Because that is also what I am saying. Your phrasing is unclear, and that blog post doesn't really clear anything up.

What I said was you’re misrepresenting transcendental idealism, in that you don’t convey an understanding of what Kant means by ‘transcendental’ which he distinguishes from ‘the transcendent’. Kant means by 'transcendental' analysis of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge itself. He opposed the term 'transcendental' to 'transcendent', the latter meaning "that which goes beyond" (transcends) any possible knowledge of a human being (which is the only meaning you address). For him 'transcendental' meant knowledge about our cognitive faculties in respect of how knowledge of objects is possible a priori. "I call all knowledge transcendental if it is occupied, not with objects, but with the way that we can possibly know objects even before we experience them." — Wayfarer

I don't say anything at all about transcendental idealism, just that Kant juxtaposes transcendental things with empirical things, and that's the particular sense of the word "transcendental" I mean. I also say that he's against transcendental realism, and for empirical realism, which he is. He is also for transcendental idealism and against empirical idealism, true, but I'm not talking about either of those things at this point, just transcendental realism (vs empiricial realism) and a moral analogue thereof (vs hedonism). I do talk about Kantian categories in later essays, but that's not the focus here.

Can you cite anything about this supposed distinction between "transcendent" and "transcendental" in Kant's usage?

You explicitly say, they have value only insofar as 'they make the individual feel good', but reject any sense in which they can be said to be truly good in their own right. Which is the exact meaning of ‘subjectivism’, isn't it? — Wayfarer

On my account, people feeling good is good in its own right; it is objectively good for people to feel good. So the whole of my morality is not subjective, except to the same extent that empiricism is likewise subjective, which in a sense both are but in another sense neither is. You were comparing the subjectivity of hedonic value judgement to the objectivity of empirical fact judgement, though; I'm saying that they are the same, maybe "subjective" inasmuch as they depend on experience which is a subjective thing, but still possibly "objective" in the sense of there being some unbiased answer that can be discerned from those experiences.

In that passage I am denying there is any sense to something being good or bad in a way independent of whether it (loosely speaking) feels good or bad to anyone, in the same way that I deny that there is any sense to something being true or false in a way independent of whether it (loosely speaking) looks true or false to anyone. I'm saying that whatever it objectively real or objectively moral, is so in virtue of the impact it has on experiences.

So long as the only alternative isn't A Hard Place this sounds fine to me.

:up: :clap:

I haven't been watching most of this thread until a page or so ago, so have anybody linked this yet? It pretty much covers all the bases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism

Atheism is, in the broadest sense, an absence of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2][3][4] Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist.[5][6] In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[1][2][7][8]

What you're saying about your beliefs doesn't sound like anything contradicting either Plato or Tegmark.

Sorry I don't have a reference like that handy, but searching for Hyperuranion might be a good place to start.

Edit: that Wikipedia link actually gives a handy reference to Phaedrus 247b-c:

But of the heaven which is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. — Phaedrus

EVERYONE is an agnostic. — Frank Apisa

Now who's telling people what they really are?

Someone who thinks they know that God does or doesn't exist is not an agnostic. Hard agnostics (who think knowledge about God is impossible) may think all such claims to knowledge are wrong, but nevertheless it's the claim to knowledge or lack thereof that makes someone agnostic or not.

Abstention from judgement would be 2 but not 3. They're soft atheists. If they abstain from judgement from lack of knowledge, they're also agnostics. You can be both.

Okay Humpty Dumpty, you use words to mean whatever you want them to mean and the rest of us will come to some kind of mutual agreement about that so we can actually communicate meaningfully with each other.

Thanks for the feedback, but I think perhaps you read a bit too quickly and are seeing what you expect rather than what I say. I'm not objecting to Kant's transcendental idealism, but to what Kant called transcendental realism, which he also objected to. Kant equated transcendental idealism with empiricial realism (reality is what we experience, and we have only ideas of what may transcend experience), and likewise equated transcendental realism with empirical idealism (reality is beyond experience, and our experiences are just our ideas about it). He supported the former and opposed the latter, as do I.

Thereby 'subjectivizing' it. Compare this note on Adorno's criticism of the way in which modern societies 'subjectivize' moral principles. — Wayfarer

I'm very much not arguing for moral subjectivism, any more than I am arguing for factual subjectivism; the very next essay is all about opposing both of those. As I said in this essay, I see hedonic experience as the moral analogue of empirical experience, the way to ground (objective) claims about morality in the way that empirical experience grounds claims about reality. Experience of any kind is in a way "subjective", being that it is subjects that do the experiencing, but that applies every bit as much to empiricism as to hedonism: empirical experiences are subjective experiences just as much as hedonic experiences are, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a common, objective truth to be found in either of them.

Also, how is that really any different than the two-party system that we have in the US, when push comes to shove? Each of our two major political parties can be viewed as a coalition of a bunch of what would hypothetically have been separate parties if we had a different electoral system, but then if those parties would have had to band together into coalitions to try to secure power, I don't see how that would necessarily avoid doing just what we have now: say, a coalition of economically liberal, big-business, military, and socially conservative interests, and another coalition of socially liberal, different-big-businesses, environmentalist, minority, socialist, etc interests?

Beliefs are subjective. I'm interested in propositions. — David Mo

If you want to exclude all talk about beliefs, knowledge, etc, and just talk about the possible facts of the matter, then there are only two options:

God exists.
God does not exist.

If you want to talk about someone who's not sure which of those is true, then you're talking about beliefs and knowledge toward those propositions. Let's call those propositions G and ~G, and the belief function B(). We can then have:

B(G)
~B(G)
B(~G)
~B(~G)

The first of those is theism, belief in the existence of God.

The second is soft atheism, non-belief in the existence of God, what you're calling "non-theism".

The third is hard atheism, belief in the non-existence of God, what you're insisting is the only atheism, which is a subset of the second.

So far as I'm aware nobody cares to talk about or name the last one, non-belief in the non-existence of God.

Agnosticism is something else entirely: it's claims about knowledge. Which then requires another dimension, as I described before.

What do you call a person who neither claims nor denies that God exists? I don't see it on your list — David Mo

That would be a kind of soft atheist. Probably also at least a soft agnostic, maybe even a hard agnostic too.

Plato does think they are actually existing, but in some different realm from the physical things that exist in space and time, sometimes half-jokingly called "Plato's heaven". In contrast, mathematicism like Tegmark's essentially says that "Plato's heaven" is all that exists, and space and time as we know them are features of the mathematical structure (in that "heaven") of which we are a part. So there's not the realm of space and time that we experience and then separately the realm of ideas: there's just the ideas, and space and time and everything in them that we experience (including ourselves) are ideas.

I don't disagree with any of that, my point that simply splitting the two mainstream parties each in half would not be a stable situation (because first-past-the-post electoral systems naturally gravitate toward two-party systems; two parties, or parties at all, are not codified anywhere in US law, it just happens that way as an unintended side-effect). And I expect, and I think the moneyed interests expect, that the halves of those parties not on their side would see much more popular support, resulting in the new two-party balance being much more in favor of the common people than the oligarchs, for which reason they (who have the power to control such decisions) would not let that happen. I would like to see that happen, but I don't expect it.

Pobody's nerfect.

(Trite sound bites in response to genuine pleas for compassion or understanding are bad, m'kay, but also automatic villainizing of people is worse, so it's true that nobody's perfect and people deserve understanding for their faults and wrongdoing, but those who've been wronged deserve understanding for their pain even more, and dismissing them with a trite sound bad is the wrong way to balance those conflicting claims to humanity).

Okay, then here are some ideas. Give them names. (I'll give you mine too).

Those who affirm the existence of god. (theists)
Those who don't affirm the existence of god. (soft atheists)
Those who deny the existence of god (hard atheists), a subset of the previous group.

And orthogonal to all of those (for 3x3=9 groups total):

Those who think they know whether god exists. (gnostics)
Those who don't think they know whether god exists. (soft agnostics)
Those who think it can't be known whether god exists. (hard agnostics), a subset of the previous group.

Yep. That's why consequentialism is wrong. Ends can't justify means. (But they can falsify them).

I feel like I saw it in some kind of popular science publication. I don't think I was even aware of arXiv yet back then, if it even existed. But my memory of that time is pretty fuzzy now, so I could be wrong about all of this.

You can add to these the cites for the 2003 paper Parallel Universes, which is perhaps the first publication where he broached the idea (the "mathematical universe" would be what he calls "Level IV universe" in that paper): — SophistiCat

Weird, I could swear that that paper was from 2002 or earlier, as I clearly remember referencing it in a college paper I wrote in early 2002.

I actually have a degree in Philosophy — Douglas Alan

Welcome to the club. :-) You should post in this poll thread if you haven't already. (Also I could use some more educated eyes of at this project if you have some time).

The mystery of why the contingent facts are what they are reduces simply to which world we happen to be located in. And there's no mystery in that. — Douglas Alan

Okay, it wasn't clear that that's what you meant before. Sounded more like you just didn't understand modal realism (which you clearly do, now).

We're just going to have to disagree on this. For me, it's a Moorean fact that real phenomenal consciousness cannot arise from nothing but pure math. — Douglas Alan

I'm guessing you're referring to something like the Open Question Argument here? I'm a big fan of that line of argument in its original use but I've never heard that applied to the topic of phenomenal consciousness before, only moral semantics. I don't see how it could clearly apply to the topic of phenomenal consciousness either. Moral questions are asking a different kind of thing to which no descriptive fact can be an answer, so giving a descriptive answer to a question of prescription is a non-sequitur that just leaves open the original question entirely. ("Is it good to save people from torture?" - "It decreases their suffering." - "And is that good?") I don't see how something like that applies to phenomenal consciousness. I'm guessing you're thinking something along the lines of how no functional account of the objective behavior of a thing can tell us anything about whether it has a subjective experience; that is a point I've made here over and over again, and used as a crucial part of an argument for panpsychism. But just because an account of function doesn't account for experience doesn't necessarily require there to be, for example, something non-physical to have the experience, or something non-mathematical in this case.

Here's a very loose argument (I'm winding down for bed and therefore lazy) for why mathematicism actually meshes better with the existence of phenomenal consciousness than a more conventional kind of physicalism: mathematical stuff is easily understood as mental stuff, as ideas in the mind. (Your comparison to Platonism below makes this clear). If the physical world is made up of math, and human minds are instantiated in physical structures, it's much less weird that those physical structures should be able to do mental things, given that they're actually made of mental stuff to begin with. In the stricter, less dualistic terms that I would prefer to think of it, if everything is informational at its base, of a kind akin to what thoughts are composed of, so physical structures are informational structures, physical processes are informational processes, then it really shouldn't seem so weird that some of those informational processes should constitute thought processes as we're familiar with them. It would be weird if only human brains had anything mind-like about them when everything was made up out of the same mind-stuff... but panpsychism gets around that, by saying yeah, everything is kinda mind-like, everything has something like the phenomenal consciousness that we do, some kind of subjective experience or another, most of it radically less complex and interesting than ours, but the more like us they are in function, the more like ours is their subjective experience too.

I tried to explain MUH to him after the talk, I was having a hard time until I described it as "radical Platonism". — Douglas Alan

"Mathematicism" seems to be the usual term used in philosophy circles, so maybe that would get more people's comprehension. And IMO it's more Pythagorean than Platonic, though I've heard it described as "radical Platonism" too. But I don't like that: I'm strongly anti-Platonist, as he separates the ideal from the physical, and debases the physical as not living up to the ideal, while I don't see mathematicism (whether ancient Pythagorean or modern Tegmarkian) as doing that. It's much like how I'm strongly anti-dualist but partial to something like (a more Berkeleyan, not Platonic) idealism, because it doesn't say that the mental is something apart from the physical, but that the physical is subsumed within the mental; likewise, mathematicism, unlike Platonism, doesn't separate the mathematical or ideal from the physical, but subsumes the physical within it.

I don’t know about the drama behind this thread, but I think it does touch on an interesting philosophical topic. I think that the term “disability” inherently connotes negativity, undesirablility, and that if someone has a condition that they don’t dislike, even if other people would commonly call that condition a disability, it’s actually not, if they’re happier being that way than otherwise. A condition is only a disability (or for that matter a disease) if it is unwanted.

Also important to keep clear are the differences between saying someone has an undesirable condition, and saying that that person is undesirable. Like, I wouldn’t want to have [inset any manner of misfortune], but that doesn’t mean that I have any criticism of the people that do, that means I have sympathy for their plight. And if they don’t consider their condition something undesirable, and my pity is misplaced, then my bad, more power to you if you’ve got that going on by choice.

I’m a mathematicist (what Tegmark’s MUH is a form of) and a modal realist and a physicalist and a panpsychist, myself. As I understand modal realism, it doesn’t so much imply that everything is necessary, because necessary means true at all possible worlds, and just because all possible worlds exist doesn’t mean anything in particular is true at each of them. The same distinction extends to the other mathematical structures of a mathematical multiverse; in fact I like to draw an analogy between the two and say that just as in modal realism “actual” is indexical (the only thing that makes this world the actual world is it’s the one we’re in), likewise “concrete” is indexical (the only thing that makes this mathematical structure “concrete reality” is that it’s the one we’re part of).

I also think that the mathematical nature of the universe lends itself very nicely to a panpsychist view of phenomenal consciousness. If everything is mathematics then everything is basically information signals moving between mathematical functions, in a way very similar to Whitehead’s process philosophy’s ontology, and on the account of physicalist panpsychists like Strawson, to be phenomenally conscious is just to be on the receiving end of a physical interaction, which is a lot easier to take in if those interactions are already being seen as just transmissions of information. Mathematical structures are very “mind-like” in a loose way, much more than the conventional lay view of physical structures as being made of little bits of dumb rock.

MUH is not incompatible with physicalism (it just reframes what physical things are), and if physicalism is compatible with phenomenal consciousness (which it is; philosophers like Galen Strawson actually argue panpsychism about phenomenal consciousness is entailed by physicalism) and MUH encapsulates a physical world then it also encapsulates phenomenal consciousness.

Why would MUH prima facie be incompatible with phenomenal consciousness?

:up: :clap: :100:

What the people actually want is a libertarian-conservative party and a socialist-progressive party. It would be great if that was what we had because then the compromise would be moderate libertarian socialism. But the big business, especially military industrial interests would hate that, as they would lose all their power, so they have to promise people those things respectively and then deliver on nothing but their own self-interest. If they split in four like suggested, the Trump Republicans and “centrist” Democrats would die completely because our electoral structure naturally gravitates towards two parties.

Bear in mind that depleting the trusts for Medicare or SS doesn’t mean that there is no more money to fund them. Both are meant to be funded on an ongoing basis by payments from working people. The trusts were set up because of the Baby Boom and the expectation that there would be fewer working people than retired people when the Boomers retired, so money would have to be set aside in advance. The trusts are supposed to run out of money as the Boomers die off and the number of working and retired people equalizes again.

In the academic world it is understood that an atheist is one who denies that god exists — David Mo

Having been through the academic world: nope. An atheist is just someone who doesn't affirm that god exists. People who deny that god exists are, obviously, a subset of that.

The mess has been made by certain associations of atheists who claim that they have no beliefs and therefore should not justify their position. This is absurd. Believe it or not, affirm it or not, in a rational debate your position must be reasoned. — David Mo

Careful. Under critical rationalism (the correct rationalism, which underlies science), one only needs to justify claims to others, not one's own opinions. To demand that nobody hold a claim without reason is to demand that they accept the contrary claim without reason. To not ask anyone to accept any claims without reasons to back them up is simultaneously to allow anyone to hold any opinion of their own without demanding they present reasons to back it up.

My question exactly.

That’s not what scientism is. Scientism is the combination of that position and the position that discerning facts about the world is all there is to do, reducing everything to (natural or physical) science.

I agree that the scientific method (properly construed) is the best way of telling facts about the world, but there are a whole bunch of fields that are not in the business of trying to do that. Mathematics, much of linguistics, all of the arts, philosophy, and what I would call the ethical sciences, or ethics more generally; never mind all of the trades...

We are all agnostics. — Frank Apisa

Apparently you don't know what "agnostic" means either. This is fun </sarcasm>.

What does "theism" mean, Pf? — Frank Apisa

Belief in God (or gods).

Oh, is that the dichotomy you think exists.

Well I do not. — Frank Apisa

Well the principle of bivalence disagrees.

What about...either you are a theist...or you are not a theist — Frank Apisa

That is literally what I said.

Some of the people who are not theists use the descriptor atheist...and some use the descriptor agnostic? — Frank Apisa

Sure. But how people choose to describe themselves has nothing to do with the actual categories of possibilities. Someone can choose to call themselves a "freethinker" or a "bright" or a "humanist" or a "skeptic" or something else instead, and maybe they are also those things, but if they don't believe in God then they are also atheists.

everyone who lacks a "belief" in gods...is an atheist
— Frank Apisa

No...some of us are agnostics. I wouldn't be an atheist on a bet. — Frank Apisa

You're literally arguing against yourself here. You quoted yourself and then argued against it.

You ought really to learn how to write that sentence coherently. — Frank Apisa

You really ought to learn how to read.

Babies are not born atheists... — Frank Apisa

Yes they are.

everyone who lacks a "belief" in gods...is an atheist — Frank Apisa

That's what words mean.

In any case...I am no more an atheist because I lack a "belief" that gods exist... — Frank Apisa

Yes you are. That's what words mean.

You can also be an agnostic. They're not mutually exclusive.

...than I am a theist because I lack a "belief" that gods do not exist. — Frank Apisa

That's because that's not what "theism" means.

You're either a theist or not. Not-theists are atheists.

If atheism were false and theism were true, sure. Like I said:

If your dispute is just that theism is not a false belief and so not something to be outgrown, just say that. — Pfhorrest