So if the assumption that cause and effect holds universally is correct, we have the result that there must be a first cause and that the first cause itself must be uncaused. Causality appears to be a feature of time - everything in time appears to have a cause - so for something to be uncaused, it seems it would have to be external to time. — Devans99

What Aquinus regurgitated was that there must either be a first cause or an infinite regress of causes. The failure of his logic was to suddenly shout "And this we call God" at the end like some kind of theological Tourette's syndrome.

"The inflationary model of the Big Bang theory posits a permanent and expanding metastable scalar field that, at any given point, has some finite probability of locally and spontaneously collapsing into a hot vacuum capable of polarising the fermionic field to create great quantities of matter.

And this we call God!"

I wonder, in light if all that, why atheism seems to be seen (on some parts of the internet at least) as associated with the right. I wonder if it’s entirely because of a segment of YouTubers who bill themselves as “rational skeptics” and initially mostly did content on atheism and against religion and other woo, but then a decade or so ago (circa gamergate?) turned to anti-feminism and then by association more and more anti-left topics. — Pfhorrest

I'm not sure I'm familiar with it. I know that the left here is very decentred, with everyone being a Nazi to someone else. The socialist, largely atheist left is mired in probably accurate accusations of anti-Semitism, which appears to be rooted in its long-term anti-Israeli stance. A friend of mine was part of Stop the War and was considering quitting because of its open-door policy to anti-Semitic Arabs.

Feminism is being repositioned from left- to right-wing because of its widespread transphobia and edginess about speaking out against misogyny in Muslim cultures. Feminism used to be correlated with other political modernisms such as communism, socialism and atheism, I don't know if it still is. And, of course, to trans-exclusionary feminists, trans women are a hostile and oppressive takeover of female domain and safe spaces, a reassertion of male primacy.

In the UK, nationalism, racism and xenophobia, that unholy trinity, is overwhelmingly a correlate of post-industrial socio-economic deprivation, not religion, especially in the North. These areas tend to have a dominant non-devout, anti-multicultural white demographic and boy are they motivated now. Being English working class is also a strong correlate of right-wing views.

Do you know of any real data with which to answer that question? — Pfhorrest

Obviously this kind of data is going to be sprawling.

One is the historic exit poll data from US elections, which shows that the predominant religious demographic in the US tends to vote to the right. In correlation, people who identify themselves as more conservative vote more to the right also. Naturally religious persons outside of the mainstream (such as Catholics and Jews in the US) will tend to vote for the more liberal candidate, as they would not benefit much from voting for someone who is apt to represent specifically the interests of another religion. If you are not dominant, liberal is the best option.

For data, see Pew Research, which regularly polls the faith of voters, and any news site that publishes exit poll breakdowns such as CNN, then clear your browser history and take a shower.

Support for Trump in 2016 was found to be correlated to sexism, racism, and nationalism:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229432

The theocracies of the world are by far the most totalitarian, the most bigoted, have the worst human rights records, etc., etc.: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan under Taliban rule are the worst examples of Abrahamic religions but I'd lump in any country that deifies a person (e.g. North Korea). I'm assuming I do not need to cite these, or the paedophile protectionism of the Vatican.

Academic media are full of evidence of correlation between religion and regressive, right-wing views. You can get a better picture by performing your own e.g. Google Scholar search, but here's a sample. I've provided links to preprints where available rather than traditional citations for your ease.

The relationship between racism and religiosity depends on other factors. Christian humanitarians, for instance, are less likely to be racist than your average atheist due to normalising exposure to peoples of different ethnicities. But on home turf the picture can be different. Religiosity is found a significant correlate of racism in the US, for instance:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bart_Duriez/publication/233099707_The_relation_between_religion_and_racism_The_role_of_post-critical_beliefs/links/09e4150d89392095ad000000/The-relation-between-religion-and-racism-The-role-of-post-critical-beliefs.pdf

Interestingly, religiosity in the UK is found to be a positive correlate of Islamophobia but a negative one of racism.

Peek, Lowe & Williams (1991) find a correlation between religiosity and sexism in the General Social Surveys of 1985 and 1988, with the most sexist being fundamentalists and the least sexist being non-literalists among religious people (men and women).

http://www.academia.edu/download/33102080/Gender_and_Gods_Word.pdf

Laythe, Finkle, Bringle & Kirkpatrick (2002) found that religious fundamentalism was a reliable predictor of homophobia, which is unsurprisingly when the thing they are fundamentalist about is itself homophobic:

http://www.academia.edu/download/47632048/RF1.pdf

The relationship between religion and nationalism is particularly sprawling and complicated by the fact that nationalism itself is a greater predictor of intolerance and human rights abuses. Reiffer's qualitative survey in 2016 found that the greater the religious influence on nationalism, the more prone it was to violate human rights:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.853.1492&rep=rep1&type=pdf

It's worth noting that religion is found to be a centre around which nationalism can be forged, rather than a direct cause of nationalism, relying on a dominant local religion.

That aside, while I've seen this sort of thing before in journalism and academia, personal experience has shaped my judgement more than anything else. In the UK, the correlation between religion and conservativism, religion and age, religion and xenophobia, etc. is an everyday stimulus. Anglicans have persistently supported the Conservative party for decades, as cited here:

https://religionmediacentre.org.uk/factsheets/how-faith-communities-vote-in-uk-elections/

and here:

https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/cmsfiles/archive/files/Reports/Voting%20and%20Values%20in%20Britain%2012.pdf

It took Blair's right-wing uprising within the left-wing party to briefly change that. Again, Muslims (a minority religion) vote for what is nominally the more liberal, progressive Labour party, though since we haven't had a left-wing government since the '70s, I'm not sure on what basis. Wishful thinking, I suppose.

Do you know of any real data with which to answer that question? — Pfhorrest

I have seen some, yes. When I put my PC back together I will dig it out.

I have always thought this myself, but I have noticed on the internet a tendency for some people, seemingly younger than me and probably you, to associate atheism with the right wing instead. — Pfhorrest

The Hitler/Stalin thing, I guess. I don't see much difference between religious and political ideologues. It's not belief in the imaginary that hurts, it's using that to rationalise a suspension of empathy... conformity to an external ethical system that was never designed to be fair.

I'm trying to understand. You said that "change in temporal position" is only a length and "not something an object does." So is an object's change in spatial position, or its motion, at different times also "not something an object does"? — Luke

Yes. We might colloquially say that a ruler goes from one end to another, but nothing is really going anywhere: it just occupies that space. It is a spatial distance. Likewise in 4D, we don't need something to "go" in order to have the concept of temporal distance. A 4D object just occupies a 4D space. The "change" in position between two points on it is just a consideration of its geometry, e.g. what is the change in gradient from point A to point B? What is the change in in altitude between the foot and the summit? Likewise what is the change in position between time t and t'?

Should your children's bakery be considered some form of theft because of that? — Marchesk

Did you really think I'd be pro-inheritance with that viewpoint?

If you are a peasant, then you farm land. And so, from who have you or your family stolen the land? — ssu

Eh? You think peasants owned the land they farmed? What?

It can, can't it? — Luke

It can, yes, e.g. the distance travelled by a hiker. But does that necessitate a hiker in order to have some concept of distance? No. So does something need to change temporal location in order for us to have a concept of duration?

Nationality has some importance. It is important to acknowledge that local customs when travelling differ from those you are used to at home, for instance. I can't think of similar differences between race and ethnicity that one has to be mindful of beyond those arising out of prejudice against people on the basis if those characteristics. (E.g. it is good to be mindful of the racism a black American might have endured.) This goes for all protected characteristics really.

The obvious missing characteristic is gender, something I would encourage my surgeon to be mindful of, something that definitely impacts who I am, and again something to be mindful of when dealing with people who might be victimised on the basis of it. That aside, I see no reason to be interested in it.

Religion is different. It hugely impacts who people are, how they think, what they can learn, and how they treat others. It is itself a viewpoint and that is important to be aware of in the same way as a person's political ideology. If I am voting for someone, if they are Christian they are unlikely to be upfront about which way they'd vote on, e.g. family planning and abortion, science funding, school funding, human rights, and even military action, and these are things I need to know about.

As an example from my country, Tony Blair was a very devout Christian whose appreciation of facts was, at best, glancing, which manifested itself in a stunning economy with truth. He had no scruples about the indiscriminate killing of people of different ethnicity, religion and nationality for little or no reason. He funded schools to specifically teach children that science is a lie. These are behaviours that one must have assessed as risks before voting for someone whose religion dictated a) a limit to which facts could be absorbed and b) which religion was favoured by an imaginary supernatural deity, and unfortunately we did not make that assessment.

That is not to say being a Christian makes you a bloodthirsty tell-tale looking to brainwash our children. Nonetheless there exists a correlation between religiosity and right-wing politics (which are contra to egalitarian, progressive ideals), and a negative one between religiosity and IQ, so if I am to give the power to bomb countries and fund education to a Christian, I want to know how devout they are: are they a wishy-washy, liberal, I-won't-let-it-interfere-with-my-job Tim Farron type, or a lying, crusading, backward Tony Blair type. Not because I tend to think of them as having different value, but because the Blair end of the scale tend to think of others (e.g. atheists, Muslims, foreigners, women, etc.) as having lesser value.

Doesn't the interval of time represent some change of temporal location? — Luke

Does a distance represent some change in spatial location? It's the same thing.

I don't see what difference it would make to my arguments, but I'm happy to discuss them. — Luke

Just that, in relativity, an object is said to be moving through time. This is a feature of relativity, though, not eternalism generally. The kinematics in relativity are complex in practise, but basically amount to rotations in 4D instead of accelerations. Everything has the same 4D velocity: the speed of light. A body at rest is moving forward through time at this speed. When it is accelerated, its velocity is rotated away from the temporal direction (called time dilation) toward a spatial direction.

One of the complications is that, if you imagine two observers moving with respect to one another, the velocity of Observer B as seen by Observer A is the change of 4D position seen by Observer A with respect to the change in 4D position of Observer B as seen by Observer B. Graphically it makes a lot if sense but it can make your head spin.

From which pious innocent saints was land stolen from first? Or is this an original sin that you are talking about? — ssu

I don't see any religious element to my response.

From which pious innocent saints was land stolen from first? Or is this an original sin that you are talking about?

And from who have you stolen your wealth, Kenosha Kid? — ssu

I am one of the multitude who must labour for others in order to provide for my family. I am a peasant :)

But there's no going back. It just goes from thieving bastard to either offspring or another thieving bastard. It's still theft. — Kenosha Kid

Or a rich bastard obvs.

You're still thinking in the mindset of people whose finest accomplishment was defecating in holes surrounded by wooden barriers. It's easy to take something, sure. I can snatch a hat off a professional wrestler in a casual setting. Keeping it however, especially from others who would do the same, is a whole nother ballgame. — Outlander

But there's no going back. It just goes from thieving bastard to either offspring or another thieving bastard. It's still theft.

More like people started congregating in permanent villages, giving rise to the city state. Once people have permanent digs, ownership becomes more meaningful, as does the division of labor, money, accounting, governments and so on. — Marchesk

The precise history will depend on the place you're talking about. Here in England, land was seized by force by Roman forces and distributed among Roman officers and favoured locals. In the Americas, land was seized by force by European states and distributed between them, and sub-distributed via various means.

I think you'll find that generally means of survival are seized by force and force alone.

A "change" in temporal position, as referred to by myself, meant nothing more than an interval of time over which we can consider different positions of the same object, i.e. it is a length of a section of the 4D object. It is not something the object does in classical kinematics.

However, in relativistic kinematics, an object does have a velocity in the temporal direction and so can be thought of, at any given time, as changing temporal position in a reference frame with respect to temporal position in its own rest frame. This is true at all times and requires no particular 'now'. Nor does motion completely depend on it, since photons have no temporal velocity and yet move pretty nippily.

We have been discussing the former, but happy to discuss the latter, or QM. Since both relativity and QM necessarily approach classical kinematics at low speeds/macroscopic scales, they all give the same result in the end.

Silliness factor too high. Moving to lounge. — Baden

Numbers don't lie. — TheMadFool

No, but people who find information in them that isn't there in order to back up a desired conclusion do. This thread is so far from being reasonable and yet so clearly ends-oriented that it's difficult to buy that it's just the rational incompetence of a sexist old fool rather than bona fide and barely disguised misogyny.

The population to consider is all females and if the fraction of them who won Nobel prizes is less than the fraction of men who bagged a Nobel then, it seems I'm forced to conclude men as more intelligent with the caveat that winning Nobels is a good measure of intelligence. — TheMadFool

So being a genius female lawyer would not increase the average IQ of women because there's no Nobel prize for it? Dude, seriously! You've anchored yourself to an extremely silly point and you're going to drown out of sheer stubbornness. Of COURSE the number of female scientists impacts the number of female Nobel laureates.

The percentage probabilities don't make men intelligent as such but only shows which gender has more brains. — TheMadFool

So you're actually agreeing that if there had never been a female scientist, their lack of Nobel prizes would show they were less intelligent?

I believe the actual number of men and women in science doesn't matter. What's important is the percentage of men and women who win Nobel prizes. — TheMadFool

Wow! So if there were no female scientists, the fact that none could win Nobel prizes would make men more intelligent?

You know you can edit your posts? — Pfhorrest

Aye, but this phone is really crap. I can hit the edit button a hundred times and nothing happening.

Perhaps if you consider the fact that if everything has a cause then our experiences in the moral dimension should also have a cause, you'll get an idea of how one particular kind of causality, one based on morality - can belong to the much larger set of all causal relations. — TheMadFool

I have that idea, the analogy is fit for that purpose. What I want to know is the sorts of things preserved to ensure causality in the moral dimension, i.e. the particulars of this instance of the axiom of causality.

I gave one possible example of what I mean: personal harm. If the sum total of harm I receive over all of my lifetimes is 112 H, then it is expected I caused 112 H of harm across those lifetimes. Without something conserved, those laws are meaningless, because they are conservation laws. That is why it is only analogous to the axiom as presented.

I hate this phone. That's what I meant by it being more collaborative.

Actually solo Nobel-prizes have become more rare. What usually happens is that some specific field gets a Nobel and there simply isn't a Newton or an Einstein that hasn't got the peers that "on whose shoulders they stood". So very likely it's more than one. Besides, seldom people publish scientific breakthrough articles just by their name, but have others that have participated in it. — ssu

Yeah that's what I meant by it bei

:up:

What's shameful looking at that is that no woman has won the Nobel prize for physics solo, which means that even when women are doing great research, they're not doing their own great research. It's unlikely to change because science is ever more collaborative and still male-dominated.

On which...

In general, men are smarter than women — TheMadFool

No, it appears far more men are in science than women, which is already known. I taught physics at a department that had one of the highest percentages of female undergraduates in the UK. At that level, there's no obvious difference in intelligence.

That said:

1. Is there a theory of intelligence that explains these statistics? — TheMadFool

Not theory, but experiment. Helen Fisher studied extremes of intelligence and found that there were more male geniuses. And more male idiots.

Personally I wouldn't trade my present condition with that of, say, a galaxy. I'm just finishing some appricot jam, not the best I've ever done, but better than hydrogen and helium still... — Olivier5

I'm screaming out some tunes at the recording studio to no obvious purpose :)

All this talk about human lives being meaningless because of the vastness and indiference of the universe is just wrong footed in my opinion. I don't see how the meaning of our lives depends in any way on whether this universe is large or small, its stars hot or cold or whatever.

Astronomers study the universe for very human reasons: it's an interesting job if you can get it. — Olivier5

Absolutely! As the editor of New Scientist once said: "We think science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can *&!# off!" :rofl:

But none of that makes an iota of difference to the fact that we're a fleeting fizz at a tiny dot in a mundane part of a giant cosmos. It's an artefact of our biology that our word revolves around us. But it is great being a fizz, so make the most it :)

And that is exactly what I am saying: one cannot logically use reason to dismiss reason, but one can use it to explain how useful and beautiful it is. — Olivier5

Agreed, with the caveat that beauty is not a property of a thing but a feature of our interaction with it. My point was just that scientists are not "dismissing" reason by understanding it as emergent behaviour any more than non-materialist philosophers who describe it as immaterial. In fact, I'd say scientists would be taking it far more seriously. The immaterial world is a vague dumping ground for things not yet understood, which is back to what I said before: if someone had a meaningful non-materialist explanation for consciousness, that would be something to consider. But it seems to me the root if the conflict is not incompatible descriptions of consciousness but rather a matter of taste: "Out of bounds, science!"

What I am trying to say is: a scientific theory cannot contradict itself and still be worthy of the name "scientific". — Olivier5

Ahhhhh okay, sorry. Sure! Science is a mode of reason.

Firstly, thank you for taking the time to try and clarify this matter for me. — Luke

No worries Luke. I'm glad we persevered even when our tempers strained.

I think that my argument is really more to do with the change in time that underpins motion. I don't understand what difference there is between the change in time found in Eternalism and the temporal passage of Presentism. — Luke

Kinematics holds in eternalism and presentism. That is, it doesn't care how you conceive of a change in time, whether it's a length or an evolving 'now'. Eternalism is more general and complete insofar as it both allows for and does not require motion forward in time to have motion in space. Presentism has a more tenuous position because it does need such a thing, be it a spotlight or whatever.

I find presentism rather contradictory. Motion by definition requires at least the possibility of past and future times to make sense. I also think that the intuitive underpinnings of presentism are an illusion. Processing data takes time. We may well feel like 'now' is a state of the universe, but right 'now' we are dealing with data over intervals of time regarding subjects' states over much larger intervals of time.

That's one point of view. I go with Omar Khayyam instead: the stars and planets are less wise than you are. — Olivier5

The stars are hotter than I am, so what?

But surely if it's irrational and illogical, it's not science either — Olivier5

I don't think that makes sense. If reason and logic are emergent phenomena, than their modes are reasonable and logical. It doesn't become unreasonable or illogical by lieu of how it emerged.

A house made of bricks is not unhousable just because it is made of bricks.

What seems impressive to me is how any scientist would think that human rationality can be dismissed as mere noise or an "epiphenomenon", without dismissing the whole of science, a product of human rationality, as mere noise or an "epiphenomenon" as well. Logic, anyone? — Olivier5

It is not the scientist's view that explaining something is the same as dismissing it. A non-materialist may well, due to prejudice against material systems, think it "dismissed", but naturally a materialist would not. As Richard Feynman said, understanding something on another level only increases its beauty.

But the other part of this is interesting, albeit not limited to considerations of consciousness. A scientist may well accept that a human life is a pretty meaningless accident in the scheme of things, and that all human life is a blip in an ambivalent universe. On that scale, I usually find that either scientists would agree that their endeavours are as meaningless as anything else they might fill their time with, or else yield to poetics about the universe being able to learn about itself. This both overshadows and undermines any difficulty a scientist might have in justifying their particular specialisation of emergent material behaviour.

In other words, a correct scientific (human) theory about the human mind must assume that the human mind is capable of producing correct scientific theories... — Olivier5

This wouldn't be science. A theory cannot be proven and is not considered correct; it is considered fit or unfit. The criterion is empirical validation. If it is not testable, it is not scientific.

There could be sighted creatures without visual cortexes, at least that seems possible. So even if you just meant by "mental imagery" "whatever goes on in the visual cortex", you still do not have something that need always be involved in sight — jkg20

I wasn't posing an example that involved sight generally. The example was more specific. This is starting to feel a little like sophistry tbh.

Well, since your definition of a scientific question is one with a scientific answer, that becomes almost tautologous. I presume you meant to say something substantial, but what the substance is I cannot figure out unless you fill out what you mean by the phrase "a scientific answer". — jkg20

A scientific answer is an answer the requires, in principle, only understanding consistent with current or future established empirically-verified scientific models of reality. I'm anticipating the question "What is a scientific model in this context?" whose answer will yield another "What is a scientific X in this context?".

Just so I don't have to reread the thread from page 1 can you define what you take the phrase "a scientific answer" to mean? Can scientific questions have non scientific answers as well as scientific ones? E.g. take the question "Why am I asking you these questions?" Under one way guessing at what you mean by "scientific answer" you might mean by a scientific answer one that is steeped in physiology, neurology, cogntive science etc etc. On the other hand there is the answer "Because I am generally curious about what you might mean". The latter would seem to be a non scientific answer, although that rests on assumptions about what you mean by "a scientific answer", but in all cases it seems to be a perfectly respectable one for all that, and it is also, as it happens, true. — jkg20

Yes, I don't mean an answer that needs a particle accelerator and complex of fizzing beakers and tubes. "How was the Earth created?" is a scientific question with a scientific answer. Most of that answer is historical, that is: given the known physical laws involved, we reverse-engineer similar possible histories that led to the Earth's formation. "Why did I crash the car?" is, I would guess, a scientific question, with more emphasis on the historical than on the laws of physics.

The "why did I...?" questions are likely going to depend on scientific understanding of mental states in order to have scientific answers, if they do indeed have scientific answers. Likewise "Because I am generally curious about what you might mean". This wouldn't be an additional answer, just a way of answering at a higher level. I would want to know why you are generally curious. Not everyone will take up the point. What is the different between you and others? Again, it will take us to history, cognition, neurology, etc.

I do remember once being amongst a relatively high number of people who bandied around terms like "mental imagery" and "visual experience" as if they were pervasive elements of sight, and then someone pointed out to me that my use of those terms was theory laden, and the theory with which it was laden was not common sense and was based on presumptions not evidence. — jkg20

It was probably an incorrect use of terminology on my part (I'm not a cognitive neuroscientist). I just meant whatever the visual cortex does. No spooky "third eye" nonsense intended or anything like that.

Advocating for the acknowledgment of death should never override moral principles. We are, after all, highly advanced creatures that depend on a shared/common language in order to be considered a member of society. — Abdul

It's not about overriding your own moral values, but the morals of others. Living inauthentically is being how others want you to be instead of being who you want to be. Part of that includes external moral values. Unless you're some kind of moral Zelig whose personal moral values always happen to coincide with the local laws and customs, there will be some discord between what you want to be/do and what others want you to be/do. If someone knew they were going to die tomorrow, that would effect their priorities.

That said, the wording of your answer hints of moral idealism, in which case you'll have an irreconcilable view.

If it weren't, it'd be so easy that both/either:
A. Everyone would do it.
B. Wouldn't need mentioning — Abdul

That wasn't the question. I'm asking you about the nature of the "suffering" in the title of this thread.

You are assuming that this is a hypothetical scenario and that I am simply pretending that a spirit exists to prove a point, while all along knowing that it does not exist — BBQueue

Unless you are L. Ron Hubbard risen again, no I am not. It was for completeness that I pointed that a religion does not need an original believer. Your belief, hypothetical or otherwise, is irrelevant to this point.

What does a gradient have to do with motion? It's just an assumption that there is motion in the gradient. — Luke

It is the definition of velocity in kinematics. If position depends on time, position has a gradient with respect to time in the exact same way altitude has a gradient with respect to radius (and angle, for non-isotropic mountains :) ). In eternalism, position does depend on time, et voila: motion.

Surely that must be false. Moral questions, for instance, are not scientific but still meaningfull. — Olivier5

So they context of that was questions formulated into a mutually-comprehensible schema, such as phenomonology, that made both philosophical and scientific sense. Without doubt you can form moral questions without possible scientific answers outside such a schema.

Surely you've read Catch-22. If you're crazy, you can get out of flying more bombing missions. But if you don't want to fly any more bombing missions that shows you're sane! — fishfry

:up: My first thought too.

Isn't such a "propagator" being implicitly assumed when you talk about deriving motion from the geometry? — Luke

No, not at all, as per the mountain example. You don't need a hiker to have a gradient. You don't need a temporal hiker to have a gradient either.