Comments

  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    In particular, atheists often attack the most crude arguments for theism as opposed to being open to more in depth analysis. — Jack Cummins
    Given that the overwhelming majority of the religious worship "the most crude" forms of theism, we atheists (or, in my case, antitheists) don't bother wasting our efforts on arguing against a "God" so devoid of distinctions by this "in-depth analysis" that no one (including theologians and philosophers) persecutes or kills or martyrs themselves in the name of ... "the ground of being".

    When someone says they don't believe in God, the reasonable next question is: "What do you mean by God?" — Tom Storm
    Well, I don't believe in magic, and what I mean by magic is "God" (i.e. whatever is impossible magic=god "makes" possible :sparkle:).

    a return to earlier thinkers — Tom Storm
    Maybe, but not a return to earlier believers ... who are still the vast majority of God-worshippers (e.g. Abrahamic theists who believe in "miracles", etc). After all, nobody prays to "being itself" – what would be the point of that?

    ... deep roots, going back to the early Church Fathers who wrote extensively about the nature of God
    You have to go back a millennia or more before the derivative logos of "God" to the ancient Hebrews, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, etc (just in the West) for the existential mythos of "God". The Church Fathers were apologists-come-lately even in the recorded history (of histories) theist religion.
  • What is faith
    The claim “atheists live by faith too” trades on a confusion about what faith means. Atheists acknowledge basic assumptions but generally would treat these as provisional and open to revision, not sacred truths. Foundational beliefs like causality are not equivalent to teleological or theistic explanations, because they don’t posit an agent or a purpose we must subscribe to without evidence. — Tom Storm
    :100: :up:
  • More Sophisticated, Philosophical Accounts of God
    ↪Tom Storm
    Westerners worship "the God of Abraham", for instance, rather than a "more sophisticated" god of the philosophers (e.g. "the ground of being", or "being itself", or "the one", or "the unmoved mover"). Arguments against the latter "god" (absolute) are far less consequential culturally and existentially, it seems to me, than arguments against the former "God" (creator).
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    ↪PoeticUniverse
    :up:
  • Could we function without consciousness?
    ↪T Clark
    :up: :up:
  • What is faith
    ↪kindred
    Read the OP and the rest (almost all) of this thread. The predominant context within which "faith" has been discussed so far is religious.
  • What is faith
    What about faith in oneself ... — kindred
    What about it? That's nothing to do with the thread topic and mere equivocation.

    Some theists attempt an equivocation fallacy by equating faith in God with faith in things like air travel. — Tom Storm
    :up: :up:
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    ↪Darkneos
    Your obstinate dismissals without argument, sir, are now dismissed by me without (further) argument. Hopefully, someone much more thoughtful than you will offer credible counters to my arguments.
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    ↪180 Proof's ironic fairy tale of acausal (random) fluctuations as the First Cause ... — Gnomon
    And another strawman. :roll:

    Pay attention, troll ...
    Planck scale pre-spacetime (vacuum) consists of random – a-causal – fluctuations (events), ergo NO 'first cause' — 180 Proof
    ... just as there is no edge to a sphere, no beginning of a circle (or Möbius loop) and NO 'first' random vacuum fluctuation. — 180 Proof
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    Suffering is [a fact] though it is a personal thing. — Darkneos
    Yes, "a personal" objective fact like every physical or cognitive disability; therefore, suffering-focused ethics (i.e. non-reciprocally preventing and reducing disvalues) is objective to the degree it consists of normative interventions (like e.g. preventive medicine (re: biology), public health regulation (re: biochemistry) or environmental protection (re: ecology)) in matters of fact which are the afflictions, vulnerabilties & dysfunctions – fragility – specific to each living species.

    addendum to
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/980498
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    ↪praxis
    :smirk:
  • Property Dualism
    ↪flannel jesus
    :up:

    spontaneously assembles itself — Wayfarer
    Red herring.

    Wayf, you're not one of those evolution-deniers who mischaracterize natural selection as "a process of random chance", are you?

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis
  • Property Dualism
    The reason I go this route is, of course, that the particles we are made of are indistinguishable from any other particles in the universe. So what is in us that makes us conscious must be in all the other particles. — Patterner
    Hasty generalization & compositional fallacies. :eyes:

    What "makes us conscious" is the (rarified) arrangements of our constituent "particles" into generative cognitive systems embedded-enactive within eco-systems of other generative systems. Afaik, all extant evidence warrants that 'consciousness' is an emergent activity (or process) of complex biological systems and not a fundamental (quantum) property like charge, spin, etc.
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    ↪Darkneos
    So you believe that there isn't any aspect of suffering that is a fact of the human condition (i.e. hominin species)?
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    If the universe was "born" in a Big Bang, don't you think it's reasonable to determine its paternity? — Gnomon
    :roll:
    Planck scale pre-spacetime (vacuum) consists of random – a-causal – fluctuations (events), ergo no "first cause"; spacetimes (nonrandom event-patterns (e.g. universes)) do emerge rarely as it's reasonable to expect (re: law of very large numbers ... of random events), etc. A god-fairytale (e.g. "prime mover", "enformer / programmer", etc) is not needed and does not explain anything – even in principle; it just begs the question as a woo-of-the-gaps appeal to ignorance. — 180 Proof
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    Everything on that list is subjective feelings — Darkneos
    Nonsense. Human facticity is not "subjective". Being raped or starved, for example, are not merely "subjective feelings" just like loss of sustanence, lack of shelter, lack of sleep, ... lack of hygiene, ... lack of safety .... injury, ill-health, disability ... maladaptive habits ... those vulnerabilities (afflictions) are facts of suffering.
  • Property Dualism
    ↪Patterner
    Semantics.
  • What is faith
    What is faith? (OP)

    IME, "faith" is a path (bias/habit à la Žižek's 'ideology') of least cognitive effort:

    1. (worldview) folk belief – fantasy – that impossible things (can) happen (e.g. supernaturals, spirits, superstitions, magic).

    2. (religion) unconditional obedience (devotion, self-sacrifices) to hearsay accounts (e.g. myths, rituals, laws) about a deity (i.e. an "absolute" authority).
  • Property Dualism
    No, they are not proto-conscious. One of their properties is proto-consciousness, which means they have subjective experience. — Patterner
    :roll:
  • Pathetic Arguments for Objective Morality...
    ↪DifferentiatingEgg
    "Divine command theory" (defeated by Plato's Euthyphro dilemma, etc).
  • Property Dualism
    zombie kitten — bert1
    In fiction ...
  • What caused the Big Bang, in your opinion?
    ↪T Clark
    :100: :up:
  • Property Dualism
    ↪Patterner
    Seems like a (grandiose) composition fallacy to me: atoms which constitute strawberries do not themselves in any way taste, smell or feel like strawberry, for example ... just as particles of (any) X are not "proto-conscious". To me it makes more sense – is more parsimonious – to conceive of property dualism as a descriptive-modeling complementarity of – bodily & mental (kinetic & affective) ways of talking about – the exhibited / manifest predicate(s) of any concrete object (or system). E.g. 'a bowl of strawberries' exhibit kinetic properties but not affective properties and is adequately described without affective properties; by contrast, 'a kitten' exhibits both bodily (such as chasing string, meowing/purring) & mental (such as instincts, playfulness) properties, so that describing 'a kitten' without both manifest properties is inadequate.

    There is something it is like to be a human.
    Insofar as "like" denotes a comparison, a human being cannot say what "it is like to be human" because s/he has never been – can not be – in fact, anything other than a human being. One / unique data point, no comparisons (i.e. subjectivity, first-person ephemera).
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    these pleasures are extras — Vera Mont
    Yes, and they are consistent with, or not excluded by, what Epicurus (or disutilitarianism) says about pleasure as a moral concept and practice.

    Suffering is a subjective ... — Philosophim
    Which of the following are only "subjective" (experiences) and not objective, or disvalues (i.e. defects) shared by all h. sapiens w i t h o u t exception (and therefore are knowable facts of our species):

    re: Some of h. sapiens' defects (which are self-evident as per e.g. P. Foot, M. Nussbaum): vulnerabilities to

    - deprivation (of e.g. sustanence, shelter, sleep, touch, esteem, care, health, hygiene, trust, safety, etc)

    - dysfunction (i.e. injury, ill-health, disability)

    - helplessness (i.e. trapped, confined, or fear-terror of being vulnerable)

    - stupidity (i.e. maladaptive habits (e.g. mimetic violence, lose-lose preferences, etc))

    - betrayal (i.e. trust-hazards)

    - bereavement (i.e. losing loved ones & close friends), etc ...

    ... in effect, any involuntary decrease, irreparable loss or final elimination of human agency.     — 180 Proof

    also, my reply to you (2024) ...
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/903818

    Why assume that "AI" (i.e. AGI) has to "reference" our morality anyway and not instead develop its own (that might or might not be human-compatible)?
    — 180 Proof

    What you're saying is that morality is purely subjective.     — Philosophim
    This is precisely the opposite of what I've said. Maybe this old post clarifies my meaning ...

    Excerpts from from a recent [2024] thread Understanding ethics in the case of Artificial Intelligence ...

    I suspect we will probably have to wait for 'AGI' to decide for itself whether or not to self-impose moral norms and/or legal constraints and what kind of ethics and/or laws it may create for itself – superceding human ethics & legal theories? – if it decides it needs them in order to 'optimally function' within (or without) human civilization.
    — 180 Proof

    My point is that the 'AGI', not humans, will decide whether or not to impose on itself and abide by (some theory of) moral norms, or codes of conduct; besides, its 'sense of responsibility' may or may not be consistent with human responsibility. How or why 'AGI' decides whatever it decides will be done so for its own reasons which humans might or might not be intelligent enough to either grasp or accept.— 180 Proof     — 180 Proof
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    My amateur[pseudo] philosophical thesis postulates ... Energy (negative entropy) — Gnomon
    :rofl: :lol: :sweat: :smirk: :roll: :chin: :sad:
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    Are those meanings the same in ancient Greek and modern English? — Vera Mont
    Close enough for this discussion.

    I think Epicurus had a wider vocabulary of pleasures, or pleasurable experiences, than can be accessed via drugs.
    I don't follow you, Vera. I referred to pleasure as a concept, not particular instances or "experiences" (and "accessed via drugs" has nothing to do with Epicurus – check the three links I provided for clarification in the context of my response).
  • "Substance" in Philosophical Discourse
    Substance dualism does not deny a medium of interaction. The medium is the third element ... — Metaphysician Undercover
    If so, what is it? (i.e.bad hoc substance(s) like e.g. aether? phlogiston? divine will?) Btw, "the third element" means something other than – more than – "substancce dualism". Multiply(ing) entities beyond necessity (Ockham). :roll:
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    We have no objective morality that AI can reference, therefore ... — Philosophim
    1. What do you mean here by "morality"?

    2. In what way does suffering-focused ethics fail to be "objective" (even though, like the fact Earth is round, there is (still) not universal consensus)?

    3. Why assume that "AI" (i.e. AGI) has to "reference" our morality anyway and not instead develop its own (that might or might not be human-compatible)?

    I don't think human purpose is a problem to be solved. — Vera Mont
    :100:

    pleasure is simple and fleeting; happiness is sustained and complex
    In the Epicurean (or disutilitarian) sense, "pleasure" is synonymous with aponia and "happiness" with ataraxia (i.e. eudaimonia) such that "pleasure" is the means to the end "happiness". I agree they are not equivalent, as you suggest, but in this sense they do seem correlated strongly.
  • "Substance" in Philosophical Discourse
    ↪Janus
    :up: :up:
  • "Substance" in Philosophical Discourse
    ↪T Clark
    :up:

    ↪Metaphysician Undercover
    It's less inconsistent and more parsimonious, it seems to me, to conceive of "physical" and "mental" as two properties – ways of describing / modeling – substance than positing them as "two substances" (which do not share a medium by which to interact with one another). Property dualism, for example, does not have "substance dualism's" interaction problem.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_dualism#Arguments_against_dualism
  • "Substance" in Philosophical Discourse
    ↪Wayfarer
    You've omitted Spinoza from your survey of "shiting meanings"; what do you think of his (post-Aristotlean/post-Cartesian) conception of substance?

    e.g.
    https://medium.com/thedialogues/spinoza-on-why-there-can-only-be-one-substance-f86842057158

    https://iep.utm.edu/substanc/#H3
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    There was no “beginning” in the absolute sense. The universe is a creative advance into novelty. It has always been becoming. — PoeticUniverse
    :cool: ... just as there is no edge to a sphere, no beginning of a circle (or Möbius loop) and no first random vacuum fluctuation.
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    The only way computing could bring about a utopian - or at least, reasonable - arrangement for humans is if it were genuinely intelligent and took over control of the economic and political organization of society. But it won't bring about our downfall, either: we're doing that ourselves. — Vera Mont
    :up: :up:

    ↪180 Proof I don’t think those posts hold any water, especially given how ai is lately. — Darkneos
    Okay, you didn't read the posts or the thread.
  • Do you think AI is going to be our downfall?
    ↪Darkneos
    Imho, "Skynet" is more likely to save us from our worst selves as a species – a much more complex and interesting problem to solve even for its higher order of intelligence – than enslave & terminate us. :nerd:

    Consider these recent posts from a topic-related thread:

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/964651

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/965021
  • What caused the Big Bang, in your opinion?
    ↪jkop
    :up:
  • Autonomous Government + Voluntary Taxation
    ↪T Clark
    :up:
  • Making meaning
    ↪Sam26
    :up:.
  • PROCESS COSMOLOGY --- a worldview for our time
    ↪Gnomon
    More of your typical run-on non sequiturs and ad hominems pathetically failing to deflect from my straightforward criticisms (of your "enformer"-of-the-gaps pseudo-scientistic woo-woo sermons) which you cannot invalidate or counter soundly. You're smugly satisfied that you already have The Answer (à la your "Meta-Physics" "personal belief-system" "worldview") but as all of us, except you (a poor Dunning-Kruger kid :sweat:), are aware: for years you've been Answering the wrong (or pseudo) question(s). :lol:

    Anyway, like most of your critics, Gnomon, I'm just an elliptical orbits kinda guy (Copernican) and apparently you're an epicycles kinda guy (Ptolemyan) who hasn't yet groked the cosmological memo. Maybe you can't. Well, I aim to find out which it is. Gnōthi Seauton, man. :victory: :cool:

    ↪PoeticUniverse
    :fire:
  • Making meaning
    For me, meaning is semantic (i.e. contextual) and purpose is pragmatic (i.e. functional), thereby not synonymous or necessarily dependent on each other.
  • What caused the Big Bang, in your opinion?
    ↪an-salad

    As for me - It's not clear the big bang was caused at all. — T Clark
    :up:

    ↪MoK
    :up:
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