I always think apophatic concepts are best understood analogically. Load up a few different news sources for the best answer to your question here. — Noble Dust

So you're saying that the lack inherent in the human condition is freedom and freedom from suffering? (that's what I gather from the news, feel free to correct me). I guess my outlook on morality really does directly address that problem then...

This is certainly how religion itself often gets presented. I don't argue with you there at all. But the problem, for me, and probably the reason I'm bothering to slag on through this excruciating discussion, is that I think there's a huge miscommunication through religion, and, conversely, through the subsequent critiques of religion that follow. (My grammar there is deliberate, though maybe clunky. Re-read if necessary). Sure, religion itself in practice gives this incentive for moral behavior, but that's the exact opposite of what is meant within sacred teachings themselves. That's the irony. That's where a mystical approach to religion comes into play. What I always see in the classic "critique of Christianity from a former Christian" is this sheer obsession with hypocrisy. It's almost like there's an emotional wound there....hmmm...wonder if that impedes philosophical reason at all...

But, from a strictly philosophical perspective, it's only the ideas that hold water, right? We should be assessing the ideas themselves, not the failed practices, or psychologizing away the history of the religion.

I won't bother saying more here, I think I've already overstayed my welcome in this thread. — Noble Dust

I have a hard time knowing "what is meant within sacred teachings themselves". You seem to say that the true meaning of religion is altruism, but you haven't explained why. What makes one Christian teaching sacred and another not sacred?

I could say the same to you: "We could exhume and go through some arguments from each of your favorite atheistic philosophers, but unless any of them can use intuition and spiritual practice to substantiate or qualify the natural, my objections will always be the same: only proof, only proof, only proof..." — Noble Dust

Ah but there is little to no philosophy of atheism, certainly no brand to which I ascribe "belief". By criticizing and rejecting theological claims, I become a de-facto atheist. We could go through my favorite critics of theism and their criticisms, but they don't need to prove the natural (nature is self-evident) they just debunk claims of the supernatural.

But where do these concepts come from, within the history of thought? — Noble Dust

Which concepts? Empathy and common sense? You tell me...

Not to be trite, but have you tried out this line of reasoning on the political world stage? How might it go if it were presented, do you think? — Noble Dust

It works extremely persuasively. It's persuasive because it finds common wants and value between two negotiators and uses reason and logic to search for mutually beneficial means of cooperation.

Turns out comfort and freedom from suffering are extremely persuasive.

Oh? Show your work, please... — Noble Dust

You want me to show my work that meaning is only something that exists when a mind is around to interpret it?

You're the one that suggested things like comfort and freedom have no meaning (capital M) compared to "eternality"

" Anyway, what you're missing, and what I may have failed to adequately express is the teleology of "eternity". What meaning does anything at all have within the temporal? Don't talk to me about "finding 'my' happiness", or subjective truth vs. objective. Don't talk to me about my loved-ones' happiness. They'll most-likely live the 70-some years that I'll live, given luck. So? Do their lives have Meaning, capital M? How does meaning cohere within temporality? Does it? Does meaning cohere within eternality? Ask yourself this, don't just give me the stock fundamentalist-soft-atheist doorstep fodder."

Can you show your work?

I do not. — Noble Dust

So the idea that you're getting closer to the infinite by being altruistic doesn't please you? Why do you hold it as valuable to do so then?

How do you reckon morality to be something included within observation and reason? I'm pretty sure I brought this up before. — Noble Dust

And I've clarified it before too. Morality can use observation and reason as a tool to get better. Reason and observation aren't themselves morality.

This seems to be pure conjecture, or maybe pure experience, and I can only respond with my own experience. Which is that I disagree. My experiences of religious experience, sexual pleasure, and entertainment are all very distinctly categorizable, separate phenomenons within my set of experiences. — Noble Dust

I realize that your experience defines religion for you. That's the way of it. What's sacred to you is a matter of the various articles of faith which comprise your beliefs. How you experience it is how you experience it, and that's fine. I'm just here to lay down some reflective pylons to keep people from trampling the flowers as they begin to flail in inspiration of their own personal religious beliefs.

Again, you are thinking that computers are doing something that is mind-like. And so it is only a matter of time before that gets sufficiently scaled up that it approaches a real mind. But syntax can't generate semantics from syntactical data. Syntax has to be actually acting to constrain interpretive uncertainty. It has to be functioning as the sign by which a mind with a purpose is measuring something about the world. — apokrisis

I realize that traditional computation is not analagous to a mind, but normal computation is not what I'm suggesting might be able to make the matter-mind leap from arbitrary mechanical abstraction and transformation of data to semantic/meaningful/anticipatory interpretation of it.

For example, I say: think of a cat, and hypothetically connected neurons which store the associated syntactic data (memories/images of cats, experiences with cats, the label "cat", and all their associations) start firing, and somehow from the interplay of these recorded and associated data sets emerges a more meaningful interpretation, which represents thought in a conscious mind. I don't pretend to know how living minds work, but I'm willing to experimentally presume that their construction involves data storage mechanisms and complex regimes of continuous and internal data exchange, refinement, and external input/output.

You said that computation doesn't produce a steady-state system, and typically it doesn't. But does the mind produce a steady-state? I would say yes and no given the presumption that connected groups of neurons have persistence in some aspects of their structural networks (the neurons and connections approximating "cat" has somewhat coherent or permanent internal structure AFAIK), but parts of neuronal networks also exhibit growth and change overtime to such a degree that the dynamics of the entire system also change. When strictly doing computational work there's no benefits from erecting a steady state because the data exchanges we're looking to make are well defined and finite, but if we're looking to simulate, then a steady state of data interaction/processing is exactly what occurs. Simulated or artificial neural networks can be trained from various inputs to detect something specific by feeding it specific information/data (like image data or sound-wave data), and I presume this must be analogous to the way that the brain physically transforms stimulus into coherent data. The ongoing exchanges that occur over such an artificial network simulate approximate steady states.

We could train a single artificial neural network to recognize "cats" (by sound or image or something else), and I'm not suggesting that this artificial neural network would therefore be alive or conscious, but I am suggesting that this is the particular kind of state of affairs which forms the base unit of a greater intelligence which is not only able to identify cats, but associate meaning along with it. What I'm suggesting is that a sufficiently large collection of interconnected neural networks which could then be trained by visual, auditory, and other sensory apparatus (detecting the external world in real time) might be able to learn, behave, and communicate (within the allowable physical parameters defined by it's output apparatus) in many of the same ways that human minds presently do. It might require a grossly large or grossly compact computer to achieve this level of simulation, but once we achieve it we're going to be left with no choice but to consider it a mind.

Is the brain not just a wet computer which simulates our own minds?

A computer could be designed to simulate this kind of triadic relation. That is what neural networks do. But they are very clunky or grainy. And getting more biologically realistic is not about the number of circuits to be thrown at the modelling of the world - dealing with the graininess of the syntactic-level representation - but about the lightness of touch or sensitivity of the model's interaction with the world. And so again, it is about a relation founded on extreme material instability. — apokrisis

I still don't understand why life and mind needs to be built on fundamental material instability or it ain't life/mind. The mechanisms of biological life are very delicate, I get that. I get that life "seeks out" (read as: evolution exploited) material instability because materially unstable parts are easier to affect/manipulate, but as such material instability is a feature of biological life because biological life slowly evolved and overtime incorporated what was readily available to be incorporated: the materially unstable.

The main material instability in digital infrastructure is the switch like property of a memory cell. 99% of the complexity of computer operation is located in the complexity of the way these memory cells connect together. Yes a truly learning and sentient machine would behave in a deterministic fashion, but it would be unpredictable, it would demonstrate intelligence, communication, grasp of meaning, it could even have values of it's own if it were given biological imperatives. It's internal computations would involve unguided emergent complexity that we're incapable of deciphering. In short it would exhibit all the traits required to create the illusion of free-will, such as creativity. It might even think it's alive and claim to have continuous conscious perception.

I know why biological life needs extreme material instability, but do minds need it?

Do you see the problem here? We have no precedent whereby we can say that matter is capable of following rules. But Sam L. responded with the claim that matter follows the laws of gravity. That's why I pointed out the category error. The position being argued by VagabondSpectre, and apokrisis as well for that matter, is completely supported by this category error. Simply stated, the error is that existent material can interpret some fundamental laws, to structure itself in a self-organizing way. it is only through this error, that supporters of this position can avoid positing an active principle of "life", and vitalism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Matter follows a set of physical laws which govern it's behavior is another way of saying "there is consistency in the way matter behaves".

The way matter happens to behave allows it to combine into complex forms whose behavior is an amalgam of the behavior of it's more basic parts.


The basic rules are self-evident brute facts of reality. So when you say "existent material can interpret some fundamental laws", that's a more or less accurate way of saying that matter behaves with some consistency. (I.E: electrons will only exist in certain orbits around atomic nuclei, molecular bonds will only form between certain atomic structures, material texture is an expression of molecular structure (and pressure/temperature), gravitational forces are proportional to distance and mass, light can only be absorbed by substances at certain frequencies/light energy quanta, etc...)

When you have enough of these "rules" which "govern matter" (whether the laws are modeled from matter or matter is modeled from laws doesn't make any difference, we're inexorably trying to describe behavior we observe; laws bend to fit the behavior of matter, not the other way around; the "laws" are just our models.).

Perhaps you were not looking for an uncaused cause, but that's what you described. When you introduce "a basic set of simple and well defined rules", then you assume information which is outside of the "self-organizing" system. You avoid an uncaused cause by positing a set of rules. But by doing this, you have changed the description of the thing (life). It is no longer "self-organizing information", it is now described as a capacity to follow some rules. And since the rules must exist as some form of information, now your described thing (life) must have the capacity to interpret information.

Do you agree, that your self-organizing thing requires these two things for its existence, a set of rules, and the capacity to interpret rules? There is one other thing which I must add though, and that is the will to act. Rules and interpretations of rules do not create any organized structures without the will to act according to the rules. — Metaphysician Undercover

The basic rules of the system (physics) guide the apparent self-organization of the system. So it's not really "self-organizing" it's just that we're recognizing certain behaviors of certain arrangements of matter (which through basic rules) produce a pattern of interaction that exhibits more complex behavior as a whole than the bits following simple rules that comprise it.

All I need is a first cause, or a first state, and then complexity emerges from that:

The wave-function collapse is the single greatest philosophical/metaphysical issue arising out of modern physics. Ironic, considering how strongly positivists had hoped that physics would once and for all drive a stake through the heart of metaphysics. — Wayfarer

I'm no positivist prepper, but I would say I've got a few choice stakes laying around...

Like most things we'll probably all have to settle for an unsatisfactory middle; some things determined, some things not. Reality is a bullshitter.

In respectable times, if any of our intellectual children brought home a particle-wave, the look we would give them would be so stern that they would suddenly annihilate each-other and collapse into non-existence, as things of course should be :D

If 'the meaning' is in some sense fundamental then it seriously challenges physicalism - which is exactly why, I think, Apokrisis' style of semiotic analysis and the rest, has suddenly become such a big deal. — Wayfarer

Computers can translate one language into another without any actual understanding of language.

To a computer the data (a greek text in this example) is abstract (in fact it's meaningless because computers aren't alive) but it can still act on and compare that abstract data to other abstract data and achieve stunningly accurate translations. This would be like a human translating one language to another without having a single sweet clue what either languages mean, and relying purely on examples of known accurate translations (which are also not understood) to do it. It would be a mess of abstract and meaningless symbols.

If meaning exists anywhere, it would definitely be within written language, which exists as an abstract property of certain arrangements of matter. Light bouncing off of objects and entering our eyes contains data pertaining directly to it's source or the object it last bounced off of, but we need a complex brain to transform and arrange the data in a way that makes sense to our minds; it's meaning is something that conscious intelligence gets out of the data; the act of interpretation itself. A computer which can work somewhat objectively in translating languages or a camera which takes a picture and records light data are not aware of the meaning contained within the data they manipulate and store, but they somewhat objectively work with that data none the less in a way that retains meaning.

To me this implies that meaning is something contained within data, and it can only be gotten at by something which has the intelligence to consciously interpret it with some kind of intention rather than merely transforming the data. The way new data fits in to a the complex data structure of a mind I reckon has something to do with where meaning comes from. Cameras have no data structures capable of interpreting anything about the data they record in terms of meaning, and an unthinking translation program doesn't primarily fit new data into a complex (thinking) network, it primarily abstracts new deparate and discrete data packages from packages of old data and some relatively basic rules of operation.

I would say meaning is information which exists inside of a mind capable of perceiving it. In a way they're the same thing, but maybe that's like saying the shape of a raindrop is the same as gravity + aerodynamics.

Newtonian physics carries on working. Uncertainty inherent at the quantum scale collapses and gives way to classical particle behavior at the larger scales. It may be that the universe does behave in some fundamentally undetermined ways, but we have a hard time identifying them, we can never make sense them, and we can never prove hard indeterminacy experimentally. A probabilistic collapse of uncertainty in particle-waves isn't exactly indeterminism.

Nevertheless, I think any information whatsover must mean something, or bear meaning, or have meaning - otherwise, how is it information? 'Meaning' and 'information' aren’t synonyms, but they’re joined at the hip. — Wayfarer

I've been using the words information and data loosely because in a way that's what I'm interested in investigating.

When you look at a photograph on a computer screen, you're seeing a representation of data contained in light that came from the real world; the information conveyed by the image on your screen reflects real world data. How it actually gets that way though entails many transformations and what we might refer to as abstractions between the original existent data and the stored representation that reflects it. When I try to talk about "stored information" what I'm attempting to describe is material structure storing complex real-world information by abstracting it (transforming it via some consistent principle) from real world input into something less fleeting (something which can then be refined and acted upon).

I equivocate between information as an abstraction between physical states in a complex system because they are mathematically equivalent. The physical state of your computer monitor showing an image containing details of the real world is composed of an ordered grid of pixel positions with three associated numbers representing light intensity (RGB light). This grid of numbered triplets is itself composed of a long string of 1's and 0's. The string of 1's and 0's is an abstraction representing arrays of ordered memory cells where the 1's correspond to the "on" states and the 0's correspond to the "off" states.

It's a similar story from the business end of the camera (or digital scanner): data-bearing-light enters a lens which focuses it onto an array of light sensing elements which detect the various intensities of red, green, and blue light at given points on the array. These individual elements then deliver an electrical output that gets abstracted into a numeric value that represents the intensity of a given light at a given pixel position. These various numeric triplets are then stored in a particular order which creates the abstract matrix which constitutes the information that comprises your computer image. The state of a given memory array is a physical arrangement of matter which stores some kind of data in an abstract form (which can then be somehow recalled for later use).. This is the kind of data required for the complex hierarchies of networks of data that I'm interested in.

I've already said that these are two different issues - that the Comos itself might be indeterministic or vague "at base", and that life requires material indeterminism as the condition for being able to control material flows. — apokrisis

Unless hard material indeterminism is indeed what you're arguing for (switches of un-caused wobbliness) I would happily abandon my disagreement that indeterminism is a requisite for life (I can just substitute material indeterminism for material sensitivity). I prefer pseudo randomness if and when unpredictability need be incorporated into the mechanisms of life because it does the same job without added spookyness.

If so, then our remaining disagreement concerns the comparability of a hypothetical AI organism to familiar biological organisms. If not, then I'm still not grasping how or why material instability to the point of hard indeterminacy functions as a control path for the expression of stored data or is a necessary element in dissipative structures. I see material instability as being useful (but hard to design with because it is so dynamic) in the various mechanical processes of biological life, but there's no difference between a fundamentally sensitive/wobbly switch and a group of interconnected un-wobbly/unsensitive switches whose overall output is itself wobbly.

Your objection to my argument for a hypothetical AI organism as life might depend on whether or not you think hard indeterminism is required for life or the organization of dissipative structure/engines (which drive entropic flux?), so I'll wait for clarification on this before trying to go any further.

P.S I do think we more or less agree though that there is some sort of "informational-extra" which binds dissipative engines into a greater system which fuels all the mechanics of biological life, including the on-going maintenance, development, and reproduction of "the data" itself. It's precisely that informational extra that I too want to distinguish from all the other rudiments of life.

The way I'm usually referring to information is in the sense of physical data contained in particular arrangements and regimes of interaction between matter and energy. Meaning can be entirely abstract. I'm not interested in information as the thing being interpreted, but rather a given data structure/set as the thing doing the interpreting (of incoming information/data).

"Self"-organizing information might be slightly deceptive phrasing. I'm not looking for an un-caused cause. Complex structure and patterns can grow in size and complexity from a basic set of simple and well defined rules which cumulatively adds complexity the longer they exist. Complex states far into the progression of a given system depend on and can be informed by previous and less complex states of that system and it's inputs. It is specifically the function of data left-over from previous states/inputs informing (giving rise to apparent anticipation) the progression of the system toward more complex states of being which I would illustratively describe as "self-organizing".

I think this kind of thinking has had a disproportiantely large influence on post-Enlightenment thought. A lot of people still think like that - but Heisenberg (et al) showed that at the most fundamental level, it simply isn't so. Uncertainty and the probablistic nature of physics really does torpedo that. (That was subject of a lot of philosophical debate in the early 20th century by the likes of Arthur Eddington, Enst Cassirer, not to forget Heisenberg himself, and also Niels Bohr (who incorporated the ying-yang symbol into the family Coat of Arms.))

That is what allows for the element of creativity, of serendipity, of things that just happen for no apparent reason. Whereas Western culture seems to retain a belief that at bottom, what is real are 'bodies in motion' that are determined by physical forces. But physics itself has shown that really, in the memorable phrase by James Jeans, 'the universe is more like a great mind than a great machine'. — Wayfarer

I think that to us humans there will always be de facto indeterminacy primarily due to limits of measurability and the physical horizons of knowledge they imply. Heisenberg didn't prove indeterminacy, he proved uncertainty inherent in certain kinds of measurements.

If the true quantum realm cannot be physically accessed, then any of it's internal goings on might as well be their own separate universe, and all we see are the peculiar phenomenon that those goings on manifest as at larger scales and groupings of matter (I.E, particle-wave behavior and the collapse of it's wave-like properties).

Indeterminism is an epistemic reality of human knowledge, but not necessarily a property of the physical world.

But there is an advantage in a constraints-based view of ontology - it still leaves room for actual spontaneity or accident or creative indeterminism. You don't have to pretend the world is so buttoned-down that the unexpected is impossible. You can have atoms that quantumly decay "for no particular reason" other than that this is a constant and unsuppressed possibility. You can have an ontology that better matches the world as we actually observe it - and makes better logical sense once you think about it...

...See how hard you have to strain? Any randomness at the ground level has to be "psuedo". And then even that psuedo instability must be ironed out by levels and levels of determining mechanism...

...My ontology is much simpler. Life's trick is that it can construct the informational constraints to exploit actual material instability. There is a reason why life happens. It can semiotically add mechanical constraints to organise entropic flows. It can regulate because there is a fundamental chaos or indeterminism in want of regulation. — apokrisis

Where information begins to regulate chaos is the semiotic ground level (how that base dataset first emerges aside), but there's no difference in practice between "pseudo-randomness" and "actual randomness". Indeterminism as a property of a system is indistinguishable from looking at an open system without understanding the nature of the energy which flows into or out of it. Given that life is an open system, and that the dissipative structures to which you allude depend on an influx of energy (in order to resist the second law of thermodynamics), where does hard indeterminism actually benefit the model?

Dissipative structures and engines are great for modeling the energetic batteries of life which keep the complex structures in shape and interacting, but the self-organizing property of the data itself is what most fundamentally interests and astounds me. Dissipative engines and structures which hold back life from reaching states of thermodynamic equilibrium are required for it to perpetuate, but they aren't the fundamental processes I'm interested in. The electron transport train is what keeps life warm so to speak, but the self-organizing property of life's data goes beyond that to provide innovative direction well beyond mere random variance. True or pseudo randomness may be involved at some base levels, but as you say, tiers of informational networks constrain such uncertainty (or incorporate it at a base level) and refine it into something not random, but anticipatory.

Life as a dissipative system is a useful description that helps us understand why we don't breakdown in entropic heat-death, but it doesn't do a whole lot to help us understand the complex organizational structures (the data) which yes exploit disspitative engines, but then use the energy they get from them to expand and increase their own sophistication and anticipatory power.

...But my point is that this is not the same as being a semiotic organism riding the entropic gradients of the world to its own advantage....

...My semiotic argument is life = information plus flux. And so life can't be just information isolated from flux (as is the case with a computer that doesn't have to worry about its power supply because its humans take care of sorting out that)....

...Now you can still construct this kind of life in an artificial, purely informational, world. But it fails in what does seem a critical part of the proper biological definition. There is some kind of analogy going on, but also a critical gap in terms of ontology. Which is why all the artificial-life/artificial-mind sci-fi hype sounds so over-blown. It is unconvincing when AI folk can't themselves spot the gaping chasm between the circuitry they hope non-entropically to scale up and the need in fact to entropically scale down to literally harness the nanoscale organicism of the world....

...As I say, biological design can serve as an engineering inspiration for better computer architectures. But that does not mean technology is moving towards biological life. And if that was not certain before, it is now that we understand the basis of life in terms of biophysics and dissipative structure theory.... — apokrisis

If we boil this down, life is self-organizing information (and consumes energy to do it, and so requires abundance of fuel). If we forget about external power input as a part of AI as an organism, or we include power generation (and self-maintenance) as a function of a sufficiently advanced computer-AI organism, then it would also seem to fully qualify as a dissipative system. It's electron transport chains are much more uniform (where ours incorporate peculiarly designed (naturally evolved) bucket lines of diverse carriers), but the feat of informational self-organization which these electrons fuel is the same kind of complexity which I thrust as most central to the behavior of life.

Most of the complexity in such a computer AI organism is contained in the structure of it's data networks (and it's inputs/outputs), where the complexity of biological life is spread out across a diverse ladder of interacting parts (which can also be considered a part of/expression of data contained in DNA). Learning digital information networks are also physical structures which give rise to physical complexity that can rival the complexity found in nano-scale biological machinery. Even though it all exists materially as stored charges (what we abstract as bits), the connections and relationships between these parts can grow in complexity by more efficiently utilizing and ordering it's bits rather than by acquiring more of them (although more bits doesn't hurt).

We don't have an AI yet capable of taking control over it's own existence (in the way that biological life does as a means of perpetuation), but I think that chasm is shrinking faster than most people realize. Simulations aren't real in the sense that their products are abstract representations of real things, but what happens when the simulation looks back at you, starts asking questions of it's own, and starts thinking? It's not a simulated thought, it's that self same property of information/informational structure somehow giving rise to spontaneous anticipatory sophistication we typify as intelligence. It cannot be explained solely as a dissipative system or as the direct mechanisms through which information expresses (wobbly switches), it is rather a feature of the structure and content of the data itself, like a pattern which builds upon itself to achieve greater depths of complexity (and function).

What I'm interested in specifically is how the structure of information guides it's own development toward more sophisticated and anticipatory formats. Evolution through successive trial and error is a major help toward understanding where the DNA and other biological mechanisms of biological life get their anticipatory power, and it can perhaps be useful for understanding how a mind emerges from neurons (both biological and digital minds), but it doesn't quite shed any detail on what these regimes and structures actually look like.

What about the predictability of the moon's orbit around the earth?

At the Newtonian scale, how can indeterminacy be observed?

"But I am talking about life and mind as a semiotic process where the hardware isn't deterministic. In fact, it mustn't be deterministic if that determinism is what the information processing side of the equation is hoping to supply." — Apokrisis

I simply cannot get away from the idea that the material instability you describe (providing a mechanism for information to express through) is actually deterministic causation expressing itself in a complex way which only gives the appearance of indeterminacy.

The "wobbly switch" is an interesting concept, but I view them foremost as "sensitive switches". There is some unreliability in these switches (and in channels of data transmission/expression), but at the very least they have consistent rates of failure. Although the pseudo-randomness of these unreliable switches can be incorporated into the functions of the data directly, (innovating new data through trial and error for instance (a happy failure of a set of switches)) at some level these switches must have some degree of reliability, else their suitability as a causal mechanism would be nonexistent.

Computers already do account for some degree of unreliability or wobbliness in their switches. They mainly use redundancy in data as a means to check and reconstruct bits that get corrupted. In machine learning individual "simulated neuronal units" may exhibit apparent wobbliness owing to the complexity of it's interconnected triggers or owing to a psudeo-random property of the neuron itself which can be used to produce variation.

Biological life is mechanism all the way down (in scale) is something which I fundamentally agree with, but the further down we go, the more different the mechanisms become (from the overall organism) until we reach points of abstraction which then test the limits of observation.

At the top of the hierarchy of networks of interactions would be an organism like a human. As we zoom into the body, multi-cellular structure gives way to single cells and inter-cellular mechsnisms, which then gives way to intracellular mechanisms, then to the mechanisms of DNA and RNA, and then to the molecular and atomic world.

The physical laws of atomic and molecular systems are what governs the behavior large complex molecules such as DNA which forms the base unit of data in the semiotic exchange that you're identifying. We could seek to understand individual genetic molecules as complex and emergent behavior resulting from physical laws of it's sub-mechanisms, but that doesn't add anything to the semiotic description of life in the same way that individual physical switches in computer memory do not add to a similar description of a hypothetical learning (and sentient) machine.

Consider the hierarchy of mechanisms found in biological life: DNA is it's base unit and all it's other structures and processes are built upon it using DNA as a primary dynamic element (above it in scale). A human mind with it's interconnected neurons uses the neurons themselves as a base unit upon which conscious thoughts are produced (through layers of complex connections and hierarchical networks no doubt). In a hypothetical truly sentient and learning computer, the acting base-unit which gives rise to semiotic exchanges isn't the binary bit, it's specific clusters of connected bits which produce the dynamic "simulated neuron" where all relevant data to the functions of the AI are actually stored. Like the human mind and also DNA, sentient machines have a "base unit of data" (apply charity here) which although itself is composed of smaller bits and smaller mechanisms, does not carry any semiotic meaning from the interactions of elements beneath it's own scale. The complex hierarchy of biological life that is built upon DNA is by far more stunning and complex than human consciousness or a true AI (body and all), but minds composed of hierarchical networks and layers of interconnected data are directly analogous to the physical hierarchy of mechanisms found in biological life which stun us so profoundly, wobbliness included.

I'm not sure where this puts our disagreement (if we indeed have one). I suppose my main difficulty is assenting to indeterminism as a property of living systems for semantic/etymological/dogmatic reasons, but I also cannot escape the conclusion that a powerful enough AI built from code (code analogous to DNA, and to the structure of connections in the human brain) would be capable of doing everything that "life" can do, including growing, reproducing, and evolving. Specifically the self-organizing property of data is what most interests me. Natural selection from chaos is the easy answer, the hard answer has to do with the complex shape and nature of connections, relationships, and interactions between data expressing mechanisms which give rise to anticipatory systems of hierarchical networks.

The fulfillment of the lack inherent in the human condition, I'd say. — Noble Dust

What is the inherent lack in the human condition?

Check in with Aquinas, Tillich, Berdyaev, et. al., before you make that statement. Hell, even Whitehead, right? — Noble Dust

My point is that God and religion do not appropriately use reason to convince people to be moral. Offering someone eternal salvation as implicit incentive to behave morally, as religion is want to do, exploits their selfishness with a promise for which there is no reason to expect delivery. Humanism or social contract theory (generally, and as an example) don't make far out presumptions like heaven or hell or the existence of god in order to be persuasive, or to actually deliver on their earthly promises.

We could exhume and go through some arguments from each of your favorite theologians and religious philosophers, but unless any of them can use reason and logic to substantiate or quantify the supernatural, my objections will always be the same: no proof, no proof, no proof...

I guess I assumed atheism is a fundamental position for you, and so morality would stem from it. Is this not the case? If not, why do you spend such flatteringly large spaces of text responding to a clueless philosophical dilettante like myself? Because your atheism is passive, and not a fundamental element of your mode of thinking/interfacing w/the world (soft atheism)? But then, wouldn't you just not care? Your admonition earlier of "recommending" your form of atheism reeks to me of the fundamentalist forms of religion I'm all too familiar with. Perhaps I'm not quite the agnostic sheep you think me to be. — Noble Dust

Atheism is a fundamental lack of position. I cannot stress this enough.

My main goal in recommending atheism (recommending the discarding of fundamental positions on god) is to weaken the irrational foundation upholding antiquated and inequitable moral arguments. There are peripheral upshots, but that's the main one. For instance:

A preacher/pastor might argue: Without God, what reason is there to behave morally? If someone doesn't believe in God, what reason do they have to not rape my daughter? We can't trust them

What the above argument suggests is a complete lack of moral development based on empathy or common sense. It suggests that "God" and some accompanying lore and arbitrary specifics form a complete moral package which eliminates any need for rational thought as it pertains to genuine moral questions.

That said, atheism is not a fundamental position. It does mean that I don't have a fundamentally theistic position of any kind (the definition of atheism), and so outside of that I could be anything from a moral nihilist or relativist to a moral realist.

which suggests some sort of self-contained value system. What is that value system? It isn't observation and reason; those aren't value systems. Explain further. — Noble Dust

Actually the values are up for grabs per my description. First we agree on what values we want our morality to promote, and then we can construct rational arguments (including those based in observation) around those values.

If we don't share any of the same values, then we won't agree on what's moral. Luckily we both likely want to go on living, and in comfort, and also want other people in the world to go on living and also in comfort (or at least free from suffering). These are modest values admittedly, compared to eternal life in paradise for everyone (and avoiding eternal torture in hell) that is...

Now here, I can sing it with you a little bit. Only because I think these words are so vacuous and vague. Happiness? Freedom? Of course I want those things, I want them as much as my 9 year old niece does. Now, what exactly those things are becomes harder to define the closer you attempt to look, not unlike wave particle duality, for instance... — Noble Dust

Well these terms in a vacuum don't mean a whole lot, but once we get into real world examples they give way to tangible values. Happiness and freedom can be more precisely defined the more closely we look at examples of people without them. Like fundamental particles, observation collapses their wave property. Freedom to practice one's religion is an example of how this value takes physical shape in the real world. It's something whose effect we can measure.

First of all, your appeal to emotion here is amusing, if nothing else, given the totality of the rest of your position. Anyway, what you're missing, and what I may have failed to adequately express is the teleology of "eternity". What meaning does anything at all have within the temporal? Don't talk to me about "finding 'my' happiness", or subjective truth vs. objective. Don't talk to me about my loved-ones' happiness. They'll most-likely live the 70-some years that I'll live, given luck. So? Do their lives have Meaning, capital M? How does meaning cohere within temporality? Does it? Does meaning cohere within eternality? Ask yourself this, don't just give me the stock fundamentalist-soft-atheist doorstep fodder. — Noble Dust

I wasn't making an appeal to emotion, I was pointing out an implication of your own statements, and you've just reiterated it: to you everything is existentially meaningless (except altruism for some reason) because next to the infinite you view it has having infinitesimally small value. This includes the 70-some odd years of life that your loved ones will live.

The thing about meaning is that it only exists when something is around to interpret it. Me being the most relevant interpreter in this case (the meaning of my life) am luckily not infinite nor do I have access to the infinite. My life is filled with things of finite value, but I only know how to compare them to my life, which is also finite. When I weigh the value specific content in my life against the entirely of what is and has been (and hopefully will be) "my life", sometimes things prove to be highly worthwhile given they're not dwarfed by the infinite (which again, whatever it is or might be, I lack access to it and lack belief in it).

Altruism coheres meaning outside of the temporal. Is that philosophical enough for you? — Noble Dust

Absolutely not: spaghetti coheres monsters behind Uranus: butt how? (I realize the heights of my irreverence, but satire is the only form of poetry i know!).

I can't find any "coherence" here. Hedonism has to do with the flesh. So, the sort of "spiritual" hedonism you're speaking of (clearly not physical hedonism) can only be described as demonic within the realms of any classical teaching about spiritual realms (since you're speaking in those terms), (i.e."the holy" being a neutral, set apart experience that is equally demonic and divine). The problem is that spiritual altruism is not demonic in that sense; it's the opposite; it's divine. Altruism in it's pure form isn't demonic, so it can't be hedonistic; again, it's divine. In other words, you're talking about the spiritual realm in misused abstract terms. Altruism would only be hedonistic/demonic when it's used as a cloak; i.e. the examples I gave several pages ago... — Noble Dust

You don't think that the psychological comfort people get from thinking "they're closer to the infinite" counts as pleasure?

I really don't know where you're getting you're information about demons and holiness from though. Not from this world I reckon...

Does that vastness, does that ever-changing hierarchy influence how you respond to my posts on this forum? Since there is, of course, no ultimate value that renders all other values meaningless by comparison in your posts here, when debating philosophical matters. Surely such grandiose ideologies would not be expressed by one so deeply entrenched in reason and empirical evidence; surely one such philosopher would not take so much time to crush such a helpless continental philosopher as the one he fearlessly debates here. — Noble Dust

Sure my personal values influence how I respond to your posts, but I always try to let reason and accurate observation guide the content of what I do post. I do try to stick to the ideas as much as possible.

The brand of irreligion I preach isn't for everyone, sure. I advocate that people eschew superstitious beliefs in favor of beliefs grounded in observation and reason, morality included. Some people don't have the time or willingness to embark on that task though, so they can always just keep their religion and roll with the secular punches.

Try reframing this in a way that doesn't belittle the concepts you describe, and I'll think of a thoughtful response. — Noble Dust

O.K

I honestly believe that the main product which religion exports to it's consumers is psychological and emotional comfort, which comes in many forms. The emotional joy that a religious experience can bring is not too different from a sexual climax or a highly enjoyable piece of entertainment; the psychological comfort and reassurance it can bring is not to different from owning a gun with a legal permit (safety and moral absolution).

Irreligion doesn't offer eternal life or prepackaged moral beliefs, but it does keep a lot of the demonic brews on tap (which we all know taste the best).

Cheers!

I think that the biophysical discoveries of the past 15 years - the new and very unexpected detail we have about the molecular machinery of cells - really explains how life and computation are deeply different.

To sum that up, the reductionist view you just expressed hinges on the belief that the physics or hardware of the system is a collection of stable parts. Even it we are talking about circuits that can be switched, they stay in whatever state they were last left in. You can build up a hierarchy of complexity - such as the layers of microcode and instruction sets - because the hardware operates deterministically. It is fixed, which allows the software to flex. The hardware can support any programme without being the slightest bit bothered by anything the software is doing.

But biology is different in that life depends on physical instability. Counter-intuitively, life seeks out physical processes that are critical, or what used to be called at the edge of chaos. So if you take any protein or cellular component (apart from DNA with its unusual inertness), as a molecule it will be always on the edge of falling apart ... and then reforming. It will disassociate and get back together. The chemical milieu is adjusted so that the structural components are poised on that unstable edge. — apokrisis

The kind of computation to which I refer isn't just basic computation; "deep learning" is an example of the type of computation that I would compare to life because the organizational structure of it's data points (a structure which emerges as the machine learns on it's own) is well beyond the complexity threshold of appearing to operate non-deterministically.

What exactly does it mean for a system to behave non-deterministically? The idea that the same event playing out twice could have more than one possible outcome seems to be the gist, and I do understand that capacity for variance is necessary in the processes of life, but I have a hard time accepting what it means for the reductionist in me to assent to that description. I do understand the non-linearity of development in complex and chaotic systems. Events may still be pre-determined but they may not predicted in advance because each sequential material state in the system contains irreducible complexity, so it must be played out or simulated to actually see what happens. (like solving an overly-large equation piece by piece because it cannot be simplified).

Because so many parts of the system are poised to change, it has extraordinary sensitivity, and so it's range of possible outcomes from it's initial states is too vast to consciously reckon. The chaos and instability of simulated neural networks seem to achieve this.

So computers have stable hardware that the software can forget about and just crunch away. If you are equating the program with intelligent action, it is all happening in an entirely different world. That is why it needs biological creatures - us - to write the programmes and understand what they might be saying about the world. To the programmes, the world is immaterial. They never have to give a moment's thought to stopping the system of switches falling apart because they are not being fed by a flux of entropy.

Life is then information in control of radical physical instability. That is what it thrives on - physics that needs to be pointed in a direction by a sign, the molecules that function as messsges. It has to be that way as cellular components that were stable would not respond to the tiny nudges that signals can deliver. — apokrisis

In a way advanced machine learning such as "deep learning" learning simulates information in control of itself to a high degree. It's possible that we will indeed come up with the design for a learning machine which can become smart enough to take physical control over it's own existence (if we give it sufficient apparatus to do so). Analogies for physical instabilities, controlled by signals instead of chemical nudges, exist readily in the form of the emergent interconnected complexity in the physical network of memory cells (complex/dynamic memory cells themselves being composed of groups of two-state switches), and the complex ramifications that different states have upon various forms of output.

Again, with computation, more data, more detail, seems like a good thing. As you say, to model a physical process, the level of detail we need seems overwhelming. We feel handicapped because to get it right, we have to represent every atom, every event, every possibility. In principle, universal computation could do that, given infinite resources. So that is a comfort. But in practice, we worry that our representations are pretty sparse. So we can make machines that are somewhat alive, or somewhat intelligent. However to complete the job, we would have to keep adding who knows how many bits.

The point is that computation creates the expectation that more is better. However when it comes to cellular control over falling apart componentry, semiotics means that the need is to reduce and simplify. The organism wants to be organised by the simplest system of signals possible. So information needs to be erased. Learning is all about forgetting - reducing what needs to be known to get things done to the simplest habits or automatic routines. — apokrisis

With calculation and simulation, precision and accuracy (more data) are definitely important, but when it comes to the ergonomics of computer code, it's generally understood that less is more. We try to refine data structure and algorithms to where they achieve better results in shorter run-times. The struggle to write the fastest/most-robust/most secure program is a battle with complexity because there are so many different ways to achieve the same end result (hence the plethora of coding strategies). A smaller and simpler line of code which performs the same function as a larger complicated one is seen as more powerful and more desirable in every way.

When it comes to advanced machine learning, the way finite numbers of memory cells are linked together (and their content) causes the anticipatory strength of the overall AI to grow because the organization of the data itself is growing in complexity rather than a traditional bifurcating decision tree merely growing in size. In this way learning machines do actually simplify and intelligently organize data rather than just collect more of it.

This then connects to the third way biology is not like computation - and that is the way life and mind are forward modelling systems. Anticipatory in their processes. So a computer is input to output. Data arrives, gets crunched, and produces an output. But brains guess their input so as to be able to ignore what happens when it happens. That way anything surprising or novel is what will automatically pop out. In the same way, the genes are a memory that anticipates the world the organism will find itself in. Of course the genes only get it 99% right. Selection then acts to erase those individuals with faulty information. The variety is reduced so the gene pool gets better at anticipation. — apokrisis

So far we've only been able to design learning machines which can learn to perform very specific tasks, but the results of their learning make them better at those specific tasks than humans ever could be. They lack certain functions and apparatus that would be required for them to perceive the world around them as an on-going input and react to it as life would (try to survive and thrive mostly) but I think we will eventually get there.

If we built command and control pathways into machines for a sufficiently sophisticated learning AI (one which is capable of more broad learning) which gave it the ability to perceive, manipulate, and learn from the external environment directly, then hypothetically it could learn to become concerned with actually maintaining and expanding it's own existence in every detail.

So life is unlike the reductionist notion of machinery in seeking out unstable componentry (as that gives a system of signals something to control). And at the "software" or informational level, the goal is to create the simplest possible control routines. Information needs to be erased so that signal can be distinguished from noise. It is just the same as when we draw maps. The simpler the better. Just a few lines and critical landmarks to stand for the complexity of the world. — apokrisis

A hydraulic piston in a way represents instability; a slight addition of hydraulic fluid expresses itself as drastic change in the overall mechanism. Since there are only two states, this instability is easy for us to understand and make use of. We don't typically build machines out of highly dynamic parts (one's with many internal states and many effects/behaviors) because we're unable to design coherent functions around such complicating variables.

Machines which we build using mostly two-state parts with well defined effects are extraordinarily simple compared to those which seem to emerge on their own (using dynamic parts such as inter-connected memory cells with many states or strings of pairs of molecules which exhibit many different behaviors depending on their order). Even while I recognize the limits on comprehending such machines using a reductionist approach, I cannot help but assume these limitations are primarily owing to the strength of the human mind.

Yes, it does. Your analogy gets lumpier and lumpier the more you try to explain it. — Noble Dust

So I take it you're not agnostic then...

I don't see salvation as heaven vs. hell, I see it as actualization of personality and humanity. So there isn't greed involved. Greed signifies wanting too much of a good thing. The actualization of humanity doesn't fit that category. — Noble Dust

What is the actualization of humanity?

So atheistic beliefs don't exist then? — Noble Dust

Atheism is itself a lack of theistic beliefs. there's a difference between believing something exists, lacking a belief that something exists, and believing something does not exist. The simple analogy is designed to point this out.

The same role religion provides...funny...reminds me of my previous arguments. — Noble Dust

The difference being that religion doesn't tend to do ti via reason like humanism and social contract theory

[No, they have to be completely selfless, or they're nihilistic children, you say. - VagabondSpectre]

Certainly I never said that. — Noble Dust

Vagabond: I can work with greed and we can achieve the ends we want by agreeing to cooperate because it's more profitable. Capitalism alleges to do this, and humanist/theistic morality does it too.

Noble Dust: As I said, this idea of working together for my sake is nothing more than a child manipulating it's parents or her friends to get what she wants for herself. It's childish. That's why I bring up altruism. True altruism, or true unconditional lovelays itself down for the other. This concept doesn't avail itself of survival, or creature comforts, or whatever.

Atheism has nothing to do with my moral positions. -VagabondSpectre

How/Why? — Noble Dust

Because I don't base my moral system on God. Why is it necessary to have God in order to have morality?

You can judge the quality of a moral position by finding out how well it actually promotes the values it sets out to promote - VagabondSpectre

Can you (or we) do this if (us) humans are inherently selfish, as you describe them? — Noble Dust

Yes, observation and reason are how.

and freedom and happiness are the values I seek to promote for everyone and also myself. - VagabondSpectre

Why? — Noble Dust

Because happiness is the state that I want myself and others to be in, and freedom seems to be an essential way to get there. Freedom and happiness sum up the plethora of valuable things that life has to offer.

As to nihilism, I understand it as a belief that life is meaningless. So, the antithesis would be that life has meaning. The reason I bring up nihilism in this scenario is that life having meaning, to me, must be an ultimate meaning. If life having meaning means me, my loved ones, and everyone else having comforting lives and enjoying life until they die, then how is that real meaning? That, to me, is a temporal, unfulfilling excuse for meaning. It comes down to this: meaning and the infinite must be linked, in order for meaning to exist. Meaning has to point beyond the temporal in order to have any ontological and metaphysical content. Meaning can't exist temporally, or finitely. This is the gist of my argument about nihilism; to me your views on an altruistic life are what I would ironically call "soft-nihilism". It has no real meaningful content. — Noble Dust

I mean, it sounds like what you're saying is essentially that the well being of your loved one's is meaningless and unfulfilling to you.

It's meaningless because meaning can't exist temporally or finitely and is therefore unfulfilling.

But then, what's the point of altruism?

It seems like your altruism is yet another layer of greed which obscures your personal desire for some kind of spiritual connection with the infinite (whatever that might happen to be). Somehow altruism gets you there; it's an arbitrary means to the ultimate end of spiritual delight. Welcome to hedonism.

I suggested the possibility of a being who would lay down comfort for something higher: someone who does not make comfort their ultimate concern, contrary to what you describe. — Noble Dust

Define "something higher" or define "ultimate concern" and we might begin to speak the same language. If your "something higher" is an indescribable ineffable infinite force of love, truth and theosophical ecstasy, naturally that's your ultimate concern.

I have a vast and changing hierarchy of wants and values, but there is no ultimate value that renders all others meaningless by comparison. That's an effect reserved for only the most grandiose of ideologies.

For me, belief in God is so distant that it's outside of my observable universe X-)

I think the hardest part for a believer in understanding "the fence sitter" is the real pull of their belief in the first place; they need to take a position on God, for or against, which is the result of how impactful belief is in their own lives (for them, belief in God appears to be tied in importance to the belief that life is worth living, hence their perceived necessity to decide). This reaction comes from staunch hard-atheists too. Imagine my surprise when the Christian and the hard-atheist both gang up on me to tell me I'm lying to them or myself about the reality of my beliefs.

Accepting our own ignorance seems to be something widely and sorely needed these days...

I think 'intelligence' is about as fuzzy a term as 'life' or 'unnatural', 'intent' and 'consciousness' and we should avoid the terms. Apo has the right term. Semiotics is the difference between the data in DNA and the data in rocks. — noAxioms

The fact that data contained in DNA exists in an environment where it interacts in a complex network (and hierarchy of networks) of interactions (which form a coherent organism), and that this data relates or is pertinent/related to the behavior/internal function of this organism and it's environment is what makes the data different; it's what makes it relevant to consider from the perspective of semiotics in the first place...

I'm not wholly opposed to the use of a word like "unnatural", but it's only as meaningful as we define it, this word in particular because some of it's connotations are quite vague (including some moral normative connotations). "Not typically seen" is a fair enough start, but I do recommend to opt for words like uncanny, singular, peculiar, interesting, or even "cool", if only because they're less easily equivocated with possible alternate meanings. If these are indeed the meanings you intended, then they're not entirely central/helpful anyhow, but they have their time and place..

I wouldn't say a regular computer is alive, but a (true)artificial intelligence that exists within the environment of digital infrastructure (with inputs/outputs) I think would qualify.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the abstraction inherent in the semiotic approach versus reductionism as it applies to the study of complex systems. Here's what I mean (and if it makes sense):

I do hold that the general thrust of reductionism (the whole can be described by dissembling it down to it's simpler parts) should apply to even the most complex forms of life, but since the computational requirements for doing so are well beyond the limits of the human mind, we're forced into partially superficial analytical approaches. When we think of computer data as being a 1 or a 0, that is an abstraction of what it really is, which are physical states of sequentially positioned physical memory cells (it's an abstraction that loses no descriptive power though because there are only two states and their only behavior is to switch or be read in a query). It's impractical to build a program by thinking of the physical states of memory cells directly (just as it is impractical to write code in binary directly) and so we abstract basic chunks of binary code as functions or commands in computer language which increasingly becomes more abstract from what it really is: a massive network of two-state switches. The way we program is a compromise on perfection because to program in the base language directly (and therefore with optimal efficiency) would involve too many interacting parts to consciously chart and navigate; a programming language is therefore like an artistic strategy for creating a function..

This affliction seems rampant in our genetic science: the 4 base states of DNA (A-G-C-T) are beyond us as a comprehensible base unit of data, and so we're relegated to identifying "genetic markers" (very long ordered strings of the specific 4 base units) which we reckon are vaguely related to specific heritable traits like height and skin color (and everything else that is heritable and therefore the result of DNA). We see the 1's and 0's of DNA, but it's all gobbledygook until we zoom out and start identifying words whose direct physical effects we then mostly use statistics to guess at.

For now, the art of cataloguing genetic markers and seeing what physical traits correlate with their prevalence in specific organisms is the best we can do to decode the data contained in DNA. It's analogous to a strategy (of prediction), just like coding in a higher language without understanding how the pre-packaged commands actually work.

This seems to be a feature of trying to study any complex system. Take chess strategy as an example: there is an objectively best chess strategy for any given situation, but in order to actually discover or know it analytically would be beyond the computational limits of all human computers and human brains combined. Instead of confronting this irreducible complexity with a reductionist analytical approach, chess players reduce irreducible complexity into stratagems which fall short of perfection.

What I know about machine learning also seems to reflect this reality. We're able to program a machine that's capable of learning in a rudimentary sense, but the network of individual bits of data which emerges within that environment is too complex to itself be consciously understood on that most basic level (as the reductionist approach strives toward). It's only by approximating the behavior and flow of data within such networks as a whole that we can even begin to put together how these data bits actually interact and co-relate in meaningful ways.

I'm very interested to get to the bottom of how anticipatory networks are structured, but I'm worried at that depth the inherent complexity makes the bigger picture impossible to see.

That can't be right; if access to the closet was access to the knowledge about God, then you surely would have that access (assuming you have access to your own closet). So the analogy breaks down again (so my first sentence isn't evidence for God, it's just where your analogy breaks down). Unless the closet is locked? But it's your closet. So you lost the key, or something? It seems like maybe you have. — Noble Dust

The point of the analogy is that nobody has access to the closet (i make it my closet in the analogy so it makes sense in the real world; you don't have access to my closet. The analogy is for you, the reader). The analogy doesn't break down at all. God is not literally in my closet after all, it's a metaphor. My closet is a metaphor for wherever god can be found. You're going on about keys and closet ownership and are missing the entire point of the analogy. If you assent to agnosticism, then believing that there is or isn't a ball in my closet would be to make the same kind of claim that theists and hard-atheists make.

Atheism can also be presumptuous; presumptions aren't inherently bad, despite the word's negative connotation. It's more a question of which if any presumptions might be justified. — Noble Dust

My atheism entails no presumptions. I agnostically presume humans have no access to knowledge about God(s). I take no actual position either way as a result, which is de facto soft-atheism.

This is another analogical confusion; I wasn't equating a friend telling me about the ball to a friend telling me about God. The friend in this case would be something like the 5 proofs of God's existence or whatever, regardless of whether you happen to find any veracity in those proofs (I don't personally). — Noble Dust

"It would depend on how I came to the belief that a ball exists there. If a stranger said so, I may not believe. If someone I trust very much, like my best friend, said so, I may believe.". Whether or not your friends are the umpteen proofs of God or not doesn't change my retort. Your friends don't have access to knowledge about God. That's agnosticism.

If you're asking me personally, the idea of God becoming incarnate in the form of a man so as to impregnate the world with unconditional love, leading to a process of historical salvation of humanity would be a reason for God, as such, to be an ultimate concern. Or, if God is love, then love would be the ultimate concern here. — Noble Dust

So God is an ultimate concern because he offers salvation? Sure, but that seems greedy.

If everyone only obeys God in order to avoid hell and get into heaven then they're more hedonistic than yours truly.

What if I simply lack atheistic beliefs? I simply lack the belief that i lack belief in a god? — Noble Dust

You cannot lack atheistic beliefs because there's no such thing to lack. If you lack the beliefs of theists and hard-atheists then you're a soft-atheist.

You could lack atheistic lack of belief, which statistically would indicate you're a theist!

It's not, but historically, the secularism in a country like America is tied to the rise of scientific empiricism (vs. the conservative right and their adherence to literal interpretations of the Bible). So we have this false dichotomy of either evolution or creationism (which is already very passe). But the progressive left is tied in some way to this tension that existed; so much of the left's criticism of fundamentalist Christianity (fully justified) has to do with this tension of bad literal interpretations of scripture on the one hand, and, on the other, the only reliable retaliatory weapon...scientific evidence to the contrary. So now in 2017, I think we live in a political landscape where this ridiculous twilight zone fight between evolution and creationism is thankfully a thing of the past, but the implications still play out in a world where the progressive left is still unconsciously influenced by this implicitly materialist outlook that places scientific evidence above all. By the way, I do agree with you about these social justice movements going wild, regardless of whether we disagree about why.

Also, I'm not so sure the women's march on Washington would avail your claim that these movements are few in number. — Noble Dust

The regressive left doesn't really go after Christianity though, at least not very much these days. When politicians could openly question evolution and not get laughed off stage, there were leftists there to mock and ridicule them, but bible literalism is at an all time low. The new enemy is the colonial west, and the victims are everyone other than straight white males. Some atheists are a part of this movement, but I would wager most are not. Atheism is not political and not religious; it describes a lack of religious belief, and nothing necessary beyond that.

Modern regressives don't even use science or reason. All of their arguments hinge on the morality of "hurt feelings" and I've seen them openly attack science itself as an oppressive colonial force. "Decolonize it" they say. [throw all of it out the window]. Observe:



Hatred for trump and women's equality rearing it's head is emotional and political, but it's not science and it's not atheism.

But aren't these political platitudes so profoundly influenced by humanism? — Noble Dust

As you can see from the above video, no. Their political platitudes comes from their own distinctly emotional psychology of grievance wrapped up in political delusion and historical equivocation.

The university departments which produce these groups are not the science departments, they're sub departments within the arts. Women's studies, gender science, sociology (sociology is internally divided, but is somewhat afflicted) are where the theories generating these platitudes are formulated. They're quite unscientific.

So you're saying what if truth is a normal concern which doesn't involve the transcendence of reason? — Noble Dust

That's right. I'm interested in reasonable truth, not ultimate, divine and gilded truth. Reason is what I rely on to try and discover or approximate "truth", if I transcended reason, I would therefore be failing in that endeavor.

No, survival is just the mechanism of life itself. It is NOT life itself. Again, "No greater love has a man than this: to lay his life down for his friends." — Noble Dust

What's so great about great love?

Sure there are consequences for which I would sacrifice my life, but if we're not talking about altruism or sacrificing one's self for others because the pain of losing them would be to much to willingly endure, then the most important thing is life itself.

As I said, this idea of working together for my sake is nothing more than a child manipulating it's parents or her friends to get what she wants for herself. It's childish. That's why I bring up altruism. True altruism, or true unconditional love lays itself down for the other. This concept doesn't avail itself of survival, or creature comforts, or whatever. — Noble Dust

So you're an altruist then?

And so I bring up nihilism because I see this sort of selfish faux-altruism as a cloaked form of selfishness; so if this is the humanistic, or the agnostic, or the soft-atheistic version of the good life, it's just another form of selfishness, of brute survival cloaked in empirical reason and analytic observation, and so there's ample reason for me, given all this evidence, to just simply declare myself a nihilist and pursue a Dionysian life of whatever I happen to enjoy, until it wears thin and I find it the right time to end my own life. After all, I'm only using others to help me find my own cowardly creature comforts, for the sake of soaking in the precious last 40 years of my pointless, insignificant life. Ah the untold years I'll spend spewing asinine platitudes on philosophy forums before the end! — Noble Dust

Apparently anything short of altruism is nihilism. Right?

Cooperating to improve our lives through the use of reason is clearly the worst kind of childish selfishness at our disposal. I mean, why are we trying to improve our own lives through cooperation instead of altruistically dedicating ourselves to other people? We should all be walking barefoot in the streets offering to wash each-other's feet. Don't worry, God will provide. Yes I can see it now... We shall cast low all those false pretenders who behaved morally only because they wanted them and their family to live in a moral world (shameful greed!) and shame them for the naive selfish bastards they truly are. Those material driven foolish scientists with their machines and wealth production, it's all bad. We need to be giving wealth to the poor, not wasting time by producing more of it! Duhh~ Obviously!

Humans are selfish, and so things like social contract theory and humanism seek to offer rational paths toward moral behavior (don't steal, don't murder, etc...), effectually the same thing as moral altruism, and you object on the basis that they're doing the right thing for the wrong reasons... No, they have to be completely selfless, or they're nihilistic children, you say...

Atheism has nothing to do with my moral positions, but for what it's worth: morality is a mutually agreeable strategy/code of conduct which is designed to promote a world that we all want to live in (one with freedom and freedom from suffering). You can judge the quality of a moral position by finding out how well it actually promotes the values it sets out to promote, and freedom and happiness are the values I seek to promote for everyone and also myself. Apparently it's nihilism though, because I'm doing it for selfish reasons like getting to live in a desirable environment and abating guilt/sympathy for others... Instead of what reason? Pleasing God and getting into heaven? Being some completely selfless being who doesn't care about comfort at all? That resembles nihilism in my opinion.

(Remember, we can always escape this nihilism simply by dropping a T.V on our feet)

Dionysus was a God, and I'm sure he could turn water into wine, but here in the material world someone has got to make that wine, and if you want to drink it you've got to trade them something for their effort. You've got to contribute. You will find that trying to spend as much time behaving as Dionysus would is exactly what people are already up to, and they like it that way. That's the whole point of industry, and the aim of most invention.

The evils of embracing the material world is something that religion constantly drummed into my head as a child, but the more they listed off the glorious material delights this world has to offer, the more I realized denying the whole of them is highly regrettable.

All analogies break down, but it would depend on how I came to the belief that a ball exists there. If a stranger said so, I may not believe. If someone I trust very much, like my best friend, said so, I may believe. But I'm not sure what that does with your analogy. Unless "no access" includes the word of other people. But then, how would I have come to the belief at all? That's why I don't totally get it. It seems like it starts as formal logic and then turns into an analogy.

On top of that, I would rather spend my time studying different religions, trying to experience them, studying the history of religions, and trying to understand the history of thought, when it comes to discerning whether belief in God is a credible belief. Taking to hard rationalism or empiricism to answer the question of God seems like a misapplication of a human faculty. Ever-increasing layers of formal abstraction will surely lead you to a place that's safely far away from any possible experience or conception of a god or divinity, or the infinite. — Noble Dust

The analogy describes the agnostic perspective. Having access to my closet equates to actually having evidence or knowledge of god as opposed to being unable to get such information. You might not be agnostic, but I am. Even if a trusted friend told me god exists (oh how they do) since I believe they have no way of getting that kind of knowledge, I would not believe them.

Agnosticism entails a presumption about the state of the world, but believing that religious experience can offer experience of the infinite is just as presumptuous (more so in my opinion).

Adhering to materialism, rationalism, and empiricism is how I choose to answer questions about the state of the world. The point of abstraction in the analogy though is for benefit of the reader, not myself. It's an extremely simple analogy and uses extremely simple and uncontroversial terms to convey the point that as an atheist I do not actually possess any atheist beliefs, I simply lack theistic beliefs. I don't believe there is a ball in my closet, and I don't believe that there is no ball in my closet.

I don't see this is a valid reason, morally, to make it an ultimate concern. Perhaps Trump feels the same as you about this. — Noble Dust

So you don't think getting the things you want is an appropriate basis for your concerns? Ultimate or otherwise?

I still don't really know what ultimate concerns and ultimate fulfillment bereft of divine salvation actually looks like. "Certainty" is a poor replacement, which is why I cast a broad net and harvest the smaller fish...

What's your ultimate concern?

Also, How is "God" a proper moral basis for "ultimate concern"?

It's true that science doesn't offer that, as such. I wasn't making that argument, but maybe it seemed like I was. But there's a trend in popular culture and media to accept science with what the new atheists like to call "blind faith" when they're talking about Christians. In a sense I think we're living in a Dark Ages of the Internet, where technology (science being it's progenitor) and life are one fluid experience; the world is experienced as a technological world centered around "tech", in the same way that the world was experienced as a spiritual world centered around the church in the Middle Ages. Living in one of the most secular, progressive liberal cities in the world, I see every day this humanistic worldview alive and well, and it's relation to technology. There is absolutely a promise of ultimate fulfillment in this sort of popular view. Technology and it's accompanying opulence are a large enabler of this humanistic worldview. Agnosticism, hard or soft atheism, or whatever don't seem to matter in this view, because the god of humanism is the human person. The promise of ultimate fulfillment is the cleansing of the human race by way of the political legislation of social equality. It may sound hair-brained, but my critique of science taking on a religious character in popular culture is because of these observations of the type of epoch we're living in. — Noble Dust

Modern social justice gone wild movements are indeed not unlike religion and seem to offer fulfillment of a different kind, but they are relatively few in number, and technology or science is not their object of worship. It's their own amorphus concept of justice.

Humanism doesn't even really factor into it. These movements are dominated by politically charged platitudes rather than an actual exploration of moral normative values based on the somewhat universal human values (desire for life and freedom). Humanism is a moral tool for achieving it's own ends (promoting life and freedom, for instance) which seeks to exist on a rational plane; it need not be wielded as an act of Tillich's faith.

We are living in a new age, that's certain. Digital media brings digital religious media, and new religions. It changes old ones too. Humans transcending reason in acts of faith surrounding the object of their devotion is the ritual of a game we might never stop playing simply due to typical human psychology. I'm happy to have abnormal psychology if that is the case.

According to Tillich, everyone does. I tend to tentatively agree, although I haven't finished his book and I'm still mulling over the implications. I think I explained earlier his argument. — Noble Dust

Well Tillich supposed that the ultimate concern of skeptics is truth. I'm asking what if it's just a normal concern which doesn't involve the transcendence of reason? Tillich's interpretation of religion as an act of "faith" only seems to apply to religious minds.

I also don't think survival is of ultimate importance to anyone. — Noble Dust

But survival might as well be of ultimate importance to me because everything of importance to me exists in this world, so I need to be alive to get at it.

If the ends, if our ultimate concern, is always and only comfort, then I can't see anything other than pure nihilism being the case. Survival or comfort as the goal always leads to bloodshed. So, if survival or comfort is the goal, then bloodshed in the name of it is permissible. And so nihilism. — Noble Dust

How does survival and comfort as a goal always lead to bloodshed? Why can we not enter into some sort of common agreement in pursuit of mutual survival and comfort?

Seems pretty far from nihilism to me.

And I don't buy the idea that altruism, working together for our own survival and comfort, is the way to achieve peace, or a way to assign meaningful meaning to life that would sufficiently disprove the view as nihilistic. This is a classic bourgeois sentiment. Altruism as a way for individuals to find their own comfort or survival is still ultimately selfish. Altruism by definition means selfless concern for the well-being of others. "No greater love has a man than this: to lay his life down for his friends." — Noble Dust

Who said we needed altruism? I can work with greed and we can achieve the ends we want by agreeing to cooperate because it's more profitable. Capitalism alleges to do this, and humanist/theistic morality does it too.

Valuing comfort and survival isn't nihilistic, it just doesn't come come from the supreme value isle of human ideology.

The elimination of unfit members is natural selection in action. The species itself would die out if suicide was a general trait. My definition of life included persistence, so I have to disagree. Humanity as a whole is something that tends to persist. Humanity is an example of life. I also don't think there is intention involved, but you're free to apply that word to what a tulip does. — noAxioms

We're both operating fast and loose with the definition of life, so let's not forget that all I'm trying to do is compare and explore given examples of "life" to see what similarities there are rather than to qualify individual examples of life from the starting definition.

A human can be both alive and suicidal at the same time; they're not mutually exclusive, which is the minor point I tried to make.

No. If it can perpetuate without procreation (just be sufficiently immortal), it can be life. Perhaps creation of competitors is not in its best interest. Procreation is just one way to achieve this, and it is a far more efficient way to speed evolution, so that method tends to get selected over the more evolution-resistant method of immortality. It is harder (but certainly not impossible) to make improvements to an individual than to a species.
Yes, life tends to die. Something that is immortal needs a mechanism to ensure survival from major accidents, which are inevitable. There can be no single points of failure. — noAxioms

Here you're referencing life more as I view it. It's a whole, a thing, with continued existence. Procreation is an excellent way for these things to perpetuate their existence across generations, but procreation is an act of life rather than it's defining characteristic. A sterilized gerbil will never reproduce, but it most certainly can be considered alive.

They do record data readily. How else do we know the long term history of the planet? Ask the rocks. The information is stored nowhere else it seems. Their lack of USB port to download the information just means you need to learn their language if you want them to talk to you. — noAxioms

It has to do with the way the data is organized. The way data in the human brain is organized itself facilitates the mechanical extrapolation and development of consciousness. The way data contained in DNA is organized within the nucleus of a cell is what itself provides mechanical intelligent instruction to the rest of the cell.

Data leftover from the earth's geological history is like parts of story scattered and mixed about. It's there to be remarked upon by discerning minds, but it doesn't do anything otherwise. Data coiled into a strand of DNA and within a cell functions as an instructive data set for a greater machine with the uncanny ability to anticipate it's environment; very different from arbitrarily layered rock. There's more data in the universe than we will ever collect, but what's notable is that we collect data and assimilate into a peculiar kind of organizational structure which we then continuously employ and interact with.

We have not defined life. Banno says fire meets the requirement, and since 'unnatural' was found to not belong in my definition, I think fire is life, just a very trivial form. So there's the example of one not complex, and that lack of complexity is why most don't consider it life. — noAxioms

I'm not asking you to define life, I'm asking you to give me an example of anything which could plausibly be agreed to as life which also happens to be uncomplicated. I don't have a good answer as to why life needs to be complex, it just is. Maybe because simple things never do anything intelligent. I don't know, the answer is complex.

Which is why I'm happy to lay the statement's head in the guillotine and agree to pull the rope as soon as I can find even a single example of life which defies the description of "complex".

Fire is not life, it's a chemical reaction we call combustion. It doesn't anticipate it's environment, it consumes it as fuel. It doesn't display intelligence or behave in a manner conducive to it's survival. It chaotically consumes what is available to it and then is extinguished in a predictable manner.

If you really want to hinge your definition of life on "natural vs unnatural" go ahead, but try actually defining those two terms coherently and you'll see what I mean. The risk of equivocation is too constant with the term "unnatural".

If you don't agree, I think the claim of a requirement for a certain level of complexity needs to be defended. Fire doesn't seem to partake in natural selection, but nobody has listed that as a requirement. "Sufficient complexity to support natural selection"? That would add the need for data, which your definition had, and mine did not, and which fire seems not to have. — noAxioms

I would be very interested in associating natural selection with data recording (the relationship between the two notably giving rise to "complexity"), just so long as I can reconcile the idea with human and AI consciousness. Toward that end, perhaps this loop is adequate to describe the way DNA, and both human and AI intelligence learns:

I don't like the word 'intent'. I think bacteria intends to persist no more than does fire. — noAxioms

Here are some of the intelligent behaviors of single-cellular life pulled from wikipedia:

• The formation of biofilms requires joint decision by the whole colony.
• Under nutritional stress bacterial colonies can organise themselves in such a way so as to maximise nutrient availability.
• Bacteria reorganise themselves under antibiotic stress.
• Bacteria can swap genes (such as genes coding antibiotic resistance) between members of mixed species colonies.
• Individual cells of myxobacteria and cellular slime moulds coordinate to produce complex structures or move as multicellular entities.
• Populations of bacteria use quorum sensing to judge their own densities and change their behaviors accordingly. This occurs in the formation of biofilms, infectious disease processes, and the light organs of bobtail squid.
• For any bacterium to enter a host's cell, the cell must display receptors to which bacteria can adhere and be able to enter the cell. Some strains of E. coli are able to internalize themselves into a host's cell even without the presence of specific receptors as they bring their own receptor to which they then attach and enter the cell.
• Under rough circumstances, some bacteria transform into endospores to resist heat and dehydration.
• A huge array of microorganisms have the ability to overcome being recognized by the immune system as they change their surface antigens so that any defense mechanisms directed against previously present antigens are now useless with the newly expressed ones.

The panda is sufficiently perfected for its niche that adaptability is all but gone. It cannot transition faster than its environment is changing, and will likely only stick around in captivity as do so many other sufficiently cute creatures. Possibly not, since they don't seem to thrive well in captivity. A bird of paradise has the same problem — noAxioms

Many creatures go extinct instead of successfully reproducing long enough to change into something else (when pressures force change). Genepool's learn primarily or solely through trial and error it seems. When something works, variations upon it are then tested (reproduction), when something doesn't work, no variations upon it get tested by default (extinction).

OK. Is a computer virus an organism? Are there really 'parts' to it? I guess there are, just like there are parts to DNA that serve different function.
The only difference between a computer virus and a biological one is that the former is known to be an intelligently designed thing. That suggests that biological primitives might be as well. Biology seems to have a better than even chance of having fallen here from the cosmos rather than having originated here. If the former, perhaps it was engineered by (as opposed to evolved from) some non-biological predecessor, but then that just defers the origin question further back, asking how those predecessors came to be. Somewhere, something had to happen just by chance, given non-deistic assumptions. Even the ID community has backed off on the life thing. The teleological argument now puts the tunings of our universe at a far lower probability than the odds of life appearing naturally. — noAxioms

There are decidedly more differences between a biological virus and a computer virus. By comparison the computer virus is simple and easily understood. some of them might take a team of computer scientists to decipher (and therefore a team of them to make), but their behavior is predictable and within finite bounds. Biological viruses on the other hand already display microbial intelligence beyond the complexity of any computer virus that could possibly yet exist. A sophisticated enough computer virus however, sure, but our computers would need to be much more sophisticated to provide the necessary environment for it to thrive (it would need lots of computing power and space).

I don't think that anything suggests intelligent design though, even the fine tuning of our universe.

To be clear, I also had a similar experience with religious upbringing, and have doubted belief in God to the point of agnosticism, but not to the point of atheism. To label myself at the moment would be hard. But to be clear, I'm just extrapolating Tillich's argument here, and toying with it myself, and inserting some of my own opinions on faith vs. belief, vs. doubt, etc.

I struggle with relation to the infinite as well, but I personally can't shake the concept. Maybe it's just the religious upbringing. But I've never been anything close to a materialist or physicalist, so a concept like the infinite has remained on my horizons almost out of necessity. Not because I believe in it per se, but because it seems to need to exist metaphysically and teleologically. But I think what Tillich might be saying there is that ultimate concern encounters doubt when the infinite (God, the greatness of the nation, the totality of knowledge or certainty, the arc of scientific discovery) is encountered by the finite person. So the encounter of the finite person with the infinite, the thing categorically beyond the finite person, is what causes doubt. — Noble Dust

The label I wield for myself is "agnostic soft atheist". You're likely familiar with the way I use the term "agnostic" (I believe we don't have knowledge about god(s) or that such knowledge is impossible) but the term "atheist" is normally thought to mean "believes god does not exist", which is technically not true (although many [hard/strong/positive]atheists do hold such a belief). I simply lack belief in any god(s) without actually believing the inverse. I see no reason to accept anyone's claim that a particular god exists, but I don't then make presumptions about what must not exist as a result. Most self described atheists share this nuance:

Let the belief "a ball exists in my closet" be analogous to the belief "god exists".

Without any access to my closet whatsoever, are you willing to believe that there is indeed a ball there?

Would you be willing to believe that there is no ball in my closet?

If I were you, I would take no hard position either way. I would not believe there is a ball my closet, but I would also not believe there is no ball in my closet. This is soft-atheism. Agnosticism is it's rational progenitor. Hard-atheism, (the connotation that many erroneously apply to atheists at large) would be analogous to the belief that there is no ball in my closet.

I rest at ease knowing I have no access to God's equivalent of my closet. I recommend such a stance highly because it simplifies the overall scope of possible things to be concerned about in the first place, and I assume that belief either way would have no ramifications in some possible hereafter.

It sounds to me like your ultimate concern is certainty. Or knowledge, or power, which all seem to be connected. — Noble Dust

They reliably get me the things I tend to want.

Did you mean to say "It's Truth as an ultimate concern"? — Noble Dust

Sorry, I had to re-edit after realizing that I posted the wrong tab (which contained an unedited post). I was going to make the point that "truth" as an ultimate concern is a difficult comparison to make to belief in god or faith around religion because "truth" is a concern of all beliefs, including the religious.. I removed it though because I didn't think it was central to our discussion.

Not sure how faith can be a verb, but I guess I was more trying to point out that you were conflating belief and faith, which is a distinction I happen to agree with from Tillich. I suppose you don't accept that distinction though. — Noble Dust

I think the distinction is somewhat ethereal. Tillich's analysis applies readily to religion and religious belief (faith as a product of ultimate concern) because religion comes packaged with the promise of ultimate fulfillment, but science in particular does not. Religion creates it's own concern above and beyond what I believe is necessary in human psychology. If I have no reason to suspect that a heaven or hell exists, I feel no concern toward the possibility.

A scientists ultimate concern might be knowledge and certainty — Noble Dust

What if they have no ultimate concern?

Even here, it seems to me that all this is very important to you (I don't mean to put words in your mouth), which suggests to me that things like halting un-robust beliefs are ways to get to a deeper ultimate concern. — Noble Dust

Things are important to me, but what is of ultimate importance? Me being alive maybe (for now), but not science.

And so making the hunt for it your ultimate concern seems to me like means with no ends, and another way of pointing at a deeper ultimate concern. If the hunt is significant, then it must have a referent; a reason for significance. — Noble Dust

I often find myself using this thought experiment to demonstrate the kind of certainty I let in the door along with a complete existential basis for value: Imagine that you're holding a massive and heavy television. Now imagine dropping it squarely on your foot. The referent becomes a painful broken foot; something believably and intrinsically undesirable. A objective emerges: an unbroken foot; a lack of pain; comfort.

The ends are somewhat clear to me. And all of us exploit science in the same ways in order to achieve these ends.

I can't take full credit for "knowing" this song, You-tube brought me there after I searched and enjoyed "We'll Meet Again"...

...faith is uncertain in so far as the infinite to which it is related is received by a finite being. — Noble Dust

The problem in bold is that I don't understand how my faith and I might relate to "the infinite". I can recall the feeling of doubting god from my religious childhood, but my belief in god has long since been crushed under the feet of doubt and my developing empirical/epistemological standards.

The only way I can frame that is that the faith went away.

"If faith is understood as belief that something is true, doubt is incompatible with the act of faith. If faith is understood as being ultimately concerned, doubt is a necessary element in it. It is a consequence of the risk of faith." — Noble Dust

I understand that doubt is natural when someone is very concerned with the truth of something particular, but what happens when doubt wins and they discard that particular "truth" as a concern?

For me God has become a non-concern. I've rationalized it in hundreds of ways, example: if there is a God, he'll know what to do on my behalf, so I need not worry. (cheeky but effective).

"The despair about truth by the skeptic shows that truth is still his infinite passion. The cynical superiority over every concrete truth shows that truth is still taken seriously and that the impact of the question of ultimate concern is strongly felt. The skeptic, so long as he is a serious skeptic, is not without faith, even though it has no concrete content. " — Noble Dust

I over apply doubt but I don't suffocate in it. It's an attitude I apply rigorously, but I'm happy to yield before scattering my brains across the concrete. The trouble is it's not the robust concrete I contest.

The skepticism I employ is a way to test the robustness of new, existing, and competing "beliefs" out of a desire for "robust beliefs". Are robust beliefs my ultimate concern? Perhaps, but only because of the predictive power they offer. I want predictive power so I can more easily satisfy my immediate human wants and needs.

This is indeed great, but this seems to be exactly the point at which belief in science gets so confused with knowledge. Because the knowledge itself changes. Belief has to be strong to allow science to guide your thinking as the knowledge changes. — Noble Dust

Not all scientific knowledge changes. Some of it will be the same forever or the whole of it must come crashing down. Certain fundamental laws are so well established and understood that they simply will never be overturned. All future science must incorporate and expand our current understandings of those things which are undeniable realities.

Objects accelerate toward the earth at 9.81 (m/s^2) (around ground level) and we know the equation which describes that force (dependent upon the mass of the objects and the distance between them).

So we don't understand how gravity works, but any theory of gravity is going to need to offer some explanation of why the force of the earth's attraction on objects is what it is. It won't overturn or disprove the law of gravitational attraction, it will expand or explain it. The theories at the periphery of the established body of scientific knowledge do tend to change and sometimes frequently, but they are not well understood and established like some scientific facts.

You're confusing faith with belief here, within Tillich's dichotomy. So, the scientist who has the most understanding we would expect to have an "ultimate concern" in science. But are you saying that he does not in fact have that ultimate concern, or simply that he has less beliefs contained in his faith because of his scientific knowledge? — Noble Dust

It's that he has less beliefs, (and therefore less faith?), but you and Tillich are the one's suggesting that there is some ultimate concern to be "faith'd" on in the first place...

Is a shoemaker's ultimate concern shoes? Is his faith in his shoes his religion?

Why need a scientist draw ultimate fulfillment from science?

Does everyone have a faith defined by whatever it is that they happen to get the most "fulfillment" from?

Faith in religion (God, and an afterlife) as a source of ultimate fulfillment makes sense, but "faith" in cinema or math or science as a source of ultimate fulfillment makes far less sense.

I fill life with as many small things as possible because I've given up on one ultimate or infinite source in this life or any possible next lives. Doubt, for me, is a very practical attitude because I expose myself to as much as possible in search of fulfillment in the long run; it's a way to halt un-robust (and therefore unfulfilling) beliefs (and other things) at the door and provokes an identity check.

The hunt for fulfillment is itself my ultimate concern.

A creature that is anti-natal or commits suicide for no gain is not fit and is eliminated from the gene pool. Give me an example where it is the fit thing (with no gain to the 'tribe'). — noAxioms

I'm just pointing out that the intention to procreate or go on living is not present in all examples of life. These examples of life die, but they continue to crop up.

It is distinct from life. Something can be conscious but not be life (like an AI that doesn't perpetuate), or be life but not conscious (grass, bacteria). Mind you, I have that lax definition of consciousness, and consider all those things to be conscious, just not as much. — noAxioms

By "perpetuate" do you mean "reproduce/procreate"?

I don't view procreation as a necessary feature of all "life", although it is widely present because without it life tends to die. By "perpetuate" I originally meant that the ongoing interactions of complex internal structures are themselves what give rise to the on-going process we're referring to as "life". Procreation and replication is only one of many complex behaviors that "life" and it's parts seem to perform.

Whether or not consciousness is a form of life is secondary. The way that that DNA and human neurology both facilitate complex and enduring animated patterns of interacting matter seem eminently comparable.

Bad way to start a paragraph trying to work out what else might be life besides Earth biology. — noAxioms

I was intentionally referring to life on earth in this case. That said I'm quite willing to throw any hypothetical life form onto my wagon. Even conscious AI's who don't reproduce.

Life is not necessary for said complexity. Consciousness is not a factor at all. Data recording is closer to the mark, but rocks record data, and we've decided rocks are not life (or are at least far less life). — noAxioms

Rocks are hardly sensitive instruments, let's be honest. And they don't often find themselves organized in a structure where data can be readily recorded and then retrieved using them as a base unit. That said, I can imagine life existing in some form within a vast cloud of rocks floating in space which emerges from repeating patterns of rock collisions and their resulting gravitational fields. Start with a basic pattern that replicates, wait for emergent complexity, and when a complex enough system of rocks begins to anticipate it's environment, I'll call it life.

I think the complexity is perhaps relevant to consciousness, but not to life. It matters more how the data is used, and not so much how complex the mechanism is. Yes, Scientific American built a Turing machine from nothing but track levers thrown by passing trains. — noAxioms

Complexity is most certainly relevant to life. Can you fathom any form of life, real or hypothetical, whose internal workings could not be described as "complex"?

A Panda's DNA also anticipates almost zero long term change in the habitat, which is why they're so endangered during the current mass extinction event. Dinosaurs were also sufficiently perfected that they were too slow to respond to a similar event (the asteroid being one of them). — noAxioms

And yet a small percentage of Pandas may survive, and they may be forced to start living on more diverse diets. The genetic data resulting from the long history of panda ancestors eating other things will surely benefit them as they transition into alternative diets over individual lifetimes and over generations.

Sounds biological, exempting things that clearly are not 'organisms'. — noAxioms

I'm using the term organism in a particular sense; an organ (read: organized). A defined system of interacting and inter-dependent parts that cohere to form a whole (a defined boundary, not necessarily a full internal model)

Each of us has a faith which contains its requisite beliefs — Noble Dust

I'm skeptical of this claim.

I'm skeptical because I've made effort in life to over-apply doubt in hopes of eviscerating the requisite beliefs of faith. I cannot see that I have an ultimate concern beyond my own well-being, and faith characterized by offering "ultimate fulfillment" is not part of my personality.

If science was my faith a la Tillich, I would expect it to have ultimate fulfillment on offer, but It only seems to offer run of the mill fulfillment; the same kind you get if you build a house or sculpt some art. There are many scientific facts that we all tentatively accept as true without actually knowing ourselves (usually by appealing to authority) but the great thing about all scientific facts is that by definition they need to be testable and falsifiable; the deeper you get in to science the less you take on authority. Rather than transcending reason, scientific pursuit drags human psychology back down to a grounded level.

The scientist with the most scientific understanding, who we would expect to employ the most faith per science as a religious system, actually takes less on faith than anyone else.

There are definitely some sports where women can keep up. I don't think there is actually such a thing as a professional open water swimmer, but I believe most biathlons and triathlons are mixed gender.

The thing is, when and where you can find female athletes capable of competing alongside the top tier of their male counterparts, they already are competing...

Verily, whoever believes in Lord Science is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is already condemned because they have not believed in the name of Lord Science's One And Only Son. — Noble Dust

Are you saying that "belief in science" is incompatible with "belief in god"?

Are you a disbeliever in science then?

Compared to the epic throes of such sarcastic existential neediness, what alleviation of suffering could there ever be?

My point is that religious folk are happy to accept all the boons of science just as atheists are. It's not as if we've jumped ship to science because if we were so inclined we could have both.

That we're not inclined toward religion or religious belief is what loosely defines us as atheists in the first place though.

"Shit man, I was really enjoying this movie, but then I realized that it's gonna end eventually".

"Yea, totally... Without believing that it goes on forever, it's all stupid and meaningless".

"Pass the popcorn".

How about antibiotics then? Surely not requiring limb amputation or death alleviates suffering.

How about the combustion engine?

Electric heating?

Air conditioning?

Weather satellites?

If boredom is suffering, and using this forum alleviates it, then you can thank science for the design of the computer you use to do so!

Morphine for one thing, the strongest opiate of all!

What alleviation from suffering can science offer an atheist which it cannot and does not also offer to the religiously devout?

From my perspective (agnostic soft-atheist), religion would be more of an existential party drug than a medicine. A cherry on-top. I already live with uncertainty and acceptance of death, and maybe that's because I have low standards or because I live in a time filled with so many interesting things that life without after-life is consolation enough, so what reason is there to perform the mental gymnastics required to get a few boons from religion with all the extra burden?

Granted, if humans go back to shitting out their intestines in ditches from cholera, people will certainly be wanting their opium back, but are you so sure back to the ditches is where we're immediately headed?

When the blow holes were forced back to the ocean, gills never made a comeback.

What benefit accrues in extending the definition of 'life' to encompass artificial intelligence?

I don't see why we could not extend intelligence, consciousness or even personhood and the subsequent legal protections, to non-living things.

Meta might ask "But is a conscious computer really alive"; but my point it that the answer to this question is found not by locating an essence, but by deciding how we want to use the words associated with 'life'. — Banno

What benefit accrues? The validity of my own particular definition of course! *Badumptss*

Arbitrarily extending word use will accrue no benefit, but I'm more interested in exploring the similarities between things like DNA, connected neurons in the brain, and digital infrastructure. These (complex) systems play fundamental roles in producing what we already do (and would) refer to as life, and while we should not expect the real world to reflect human semantics at every turn ("What's the 'essence' of life?" is an extension of whatever we arbitrarily define life to be) we do have good reason to suspect certain similarities exist between them.

For now, the best description I can muster is that life is an organism composed of hierarchies and networks of individual interacting parts which together comprise a system capable of growing in organizational complexity and anticipatory strength. They're typified by such extreme complexity that classic reductionist approaches to understanding them yield slow and painful results owing to our inability to navigate and track the extreme magnitude of their diverse and diversely interacting parts.

The OP's question "what's the difference between a living cow and dead cow" isn't the most thought provoking, but it does reference something real. The easy answer is that it's brain is no longer able to regulate it's body (or vice versa) or produce it's conscious mind. The possibly insightful answer per the above would be: a cessation of complex and organized interactions between the interconnected neurons in it's brain which no longer produces a sophisticated and emergent "consciousness". A dead cell is a cell whose DNA and various other parts cease to perform the complex and organized set of interactions which once produced it's sophisticated and emergent behavior.

It's not saying a whole lot but it's a start. Exploring "anticipatory power" as a feature of various examples of life while taking into account the complex systems approach to describing them leads to the insight that recorded data plays a fundamental role in the mechanisms which produce that anticipatory power.

I would even go so far as to say that logically, in a world of changing states dependent on causation, predictive power can only come from data reflecting previous and present states which can then be used to extrapolate future states. It might not amount to much, but it seems everything we are want to label "life" does employ recorded data in some form as a necessary part of it's ability to self-organize, anticipate, and successfully navigate it's environment.

My examples of AI did not have self-perpetuation as a goal. The ones that did were not AI, but those I consider life if they include a mechanism to evade predation and change. A good virus has this capability since many virus detectors work with a fixed list of known viruses and look for them. A virus that changes on the fly, unpredictably, is much harder to eradicate. But is the change any sort of improvement? I don't think so. — noAxioms

Not all life has reproduction or self-perpetuation as a goal. Humans can be anti-natalist and also suicidal. Pretty much all standard life we observe does seem organized toward these ends, but that's only because forms of life which do not tend to die out.

All forms of life I can think of somehow record data and use it in their decision making processes, but they do not always make decisions conducive to survival. The virus that changes remains is harder to defeat (that's the improvement; survivability), the inferior viruses which didn't change have long since been dealt with by their host's immune system.

Yes, I think a fully functional AI is life, and counts as consciousness, but I have a lax definition of consciousness, so its no big feat. Without a definition, it is meaningless to posit if an AI has it. — noAxioms

An amoeba is alive but probably not "conscious". I suppose if we're to consider "consciousness" a form of or a part of life, it must be a different kind than simple forms of life such as bacteria or an unnecessary/optional feature of it. I'm inclined to say that human consciousness (and the goings on of the brain) is indeed a distinct form of life, much like a hypothetical AI.

In the hierarchy of biological life, DNA based life takes solid form at the cellular level, but in multi-cellular forms of life where individual cells are combined in complex systems (such as connected neurons in the human brain), the physical mechanism for sentience and a higher order of life is made possible. The question is: what does human consciousness, an AI, and an amoeba have in common? They all act per mechanisms which incorporate recorded data; it's the operant force behind their innovation and decision making.

I realize that a train track lever also records data (a single bit) and is clearly not life. However, a large and complex enough system of interconnected levers which record large amounts of data in hierarchical structures could in theory produce artificial intelligence, whether by design or emergent through properties inherent in the system. Where in between a single lever and an AI is the complexity or organizational threshold for "life"? I find it an interesting question.

Those all seem to be the means to achieve the persistence. If the persistence can be had without data storage, I think it would still be life. Would help if I could come up with an example. — noAxioms

I'm also looking for such an example, which is what has led me to attempt to defend my general thrust.

Pandas are sort of the opposite: perfected for a niche at the cost of almost any adaptability. Surprised they're still around given the recent hits to their environment. Score a few points for cuteness I think. — noAxioms

The DNA of the Panda anticipates a bamboo rich environment. The DNA itself cannot perceive changes to the pandas habitat immediately, but through natural selection alone it can overtime, and may come to anticipate a less bamboo rich environment.

It seems it is already living at that point, giving rise as to when matter transforms from a floating nutrient to actually part of the living thing. Without that distinction, I don't think we can answer this. With that distinction, we perhaps have a better clue as to what we want to define as life. What percentage of my body weight is actually living material, and how much of it is just stored liquid, food, and other material just being carried around, but not really part of me? I bet there's no clear answer to that. — noAxioms

I think I'm most comfortable with defining "life" as a kind of organism, a whole. A n outstretched strand of DNA surely is not alive; it's reduced to it's naked bits, but in a certain environment a greater structure emerges, and with astounding complexity behaves in the kind of ways which we intuitively like to call "unnatural".

Here's the process that I'm describing:



This might be a good candidate to help us approximate that "organizational or complexity threshold" I talked about earlier as it applies to single cellular life.

When in cynical doubt, add more cynicism. (Y)

Exploring the rhetorical question I asked really does shed light on why we have women only sports teams, but it's not universally true. Most sports are strength/endurance/speed-centric, and men have an unfair biological edge in those categories, just like how someone transitioning into a man (and receiving male hormones) continuing to compete against females would have an unfair advantage. It's the exact same dilemma as steroid use giving unfair advantages. When and where women are capable of competing with men in whatever sport, we actually already tend to support that because dominant female athletes are more epic IMHO than dominant male ones. Female NASCAR drivers are one such example. Nascar competition is about experience, intelligence, and reflexes. Many women have and are showing that they can compete on the highest level in this particular sport.

On some level we desire "fairness", or at least an "even match" because one-sided competition isn't fun to watch. Ancient olympic athletes used to get handicapped via weights tied to their wrists and ankles (IIRC) the more dominant they were so that victory would be within anyone's grasp and the competition would be closer and therefore more exciting.

Modern olympic games have preserved our desire for fairness, but they've lost the will to sacrifice it in pursuit of an "even match". Modern sports as a whole are based on the idea of meritocracy. The philosophy of every sports coach is "work hard and earn success based on that merit". This is why the idea of putting lead in Usain Bolt's shoe's in order to prevent him from predictably sweeping the show seems unconscionable.

To answer my own rhetorical question: "Which professional female athlete of which sport can compete with professional male athletes in the same sport?"

Some women do compete alongside male professional athletes in some sports, but the vast majority of sports tend to involve strength/endurance/speed as primary necessary skills, and male biology has an unfair advantage in those areas, especially at the extreme peaks of male and female physical condition.

We don't actually disallow women from invading men's leagues. They already have invaded some, and if and when a woman can make the cut for a professional team men's team in sports like soccer, football, basketball, or hockey, trust me, the franchises would relish it (my god how they would go nuts all clamoring to get her if she was prodigious). The cynical truth is that we don't disallow women from competing at the top levels alongside men. They can and do in sports where they are able. But we do disallow men from competing alongside women at the top levels of sports where they would have very clear unfair advantages.

I'm sure Serena Williams could get into an ATP tournament if she wanted to, but she would go from the number one rank to perhaps well below rank 1000.

It won't, if we defeat it.

Andrew also said that it can undermine Western values, and I agree with him, though from a slightly different angle, I imagine. — Thorongil

Plenty of stuff undermines western values. Being free to undermine values happens to be itself a western value...

We don't all of us oppose terrorism because terrorists undermine our values. We oppose it because we abhor violence and death. So when you say "if we defeat it" are you referring to terrorism or any ideology which undermines western values?

As far as can tell, all free-diving records are held by men. Unfortunately free diving is not much of a spectator sport so there are no leagues, although they do recognize records held by women and men separately because we want to know the female records in addition to the male ones.

Beryl Burton was a great cyclist, that's why they invited her to compete against men in le Grand Prix des Nations... Because she could...

Ronaldo's wife is not capable of playing professional soccer on the professional men's level. "kepee upee" isn't a sport. The women's U.S national soccer team could have a game against a high-school male soccer team, and they might lose.

Lynn Hill may have been the first to climb El Captain's nose, but would she be able to compete with the men in whatever Olympic rock climbing setup they go with in 2020?

The undeniable fact is that women who can compete at the top physical level of men in sports where physicality matters are incredibly rare. We need separate leagues and teams generally because it would not be fair to the vast majority of women if men started forcing them out of their top slots.

Female boxers getting knocked out on a daily basis by men who are in their same weight-class is to painful an experience to endure while waiting for the once in 50 years exception.

Point is, they can't.

Which professional female athlete of which sport can compete with professional male athletes in the same sport? If they could compete on that level, then they would or already are doing so.

Abolishing the separation between men's and women's sports teams would amount to men dominating the existent female teams and leagues and a very few exceptional outlying female athletes breaking into men's teams and being able to remain on their own team.