> when I’m asked “Do you believe in God?” the implicit question question is ‘Do you feel this magic man is part of your life and do you talk to him?’
I can imagine this is probably what most people believe, and I share your dismissal of both this idea, and the dismissals of it. It also seems like you still think there's _some_ unanswered…
> when I’m asked “Do you believe in God?” the implicit question question is ‘Do you feel this magic man is part of your life and do you talk to him?’
I can imagine this is probably what most people believe, and I share your dismissal of both this idea, and the dismissals of it. It also seems like you still think there's _some_ unanswered question, which is kind of important, although in your case, you seem content to shrug and say "i don't know, and we probably can't know." I think this is more sane than 99.9% of the writing on this topic, since it's clearly more qualified than 'i haven't thought about this at all'. You're perfectly willing to rule out both _some_ hypotheses (a loving god who intervenes in the world actively, and lets kids get murdered because of ... reasons), but you also seem open to the idea that it may be worth it to explore more here. So that's what i'll prod you to do here :)
I thank this idea of "nematodes to people is so massive, and thus we must be that far from god" is fundamentally wrong because of (pause for bong rip) turing completeness. Once you have the ability to create words and bind them to arbitrary symbols, i think you begin the first steps of a dance with the divine. To see why this is plausible, imagine what would happen if nematodes COULD use words and language. Then we could, very slowly, over very long periods of time use words to communicate with them, right? They could ask us questions, and we could do our damndest to answer them. The thing that makes this scenario implausible is that if paramecia had the ability to use language, they would be so wildly different that it's almost impossible to wrap our heads around.
If there's a being that has a brain the size of several galaxies, it should _still_ be able to communicate with me using words, if such a thing is important to it. Maybe its' answers would be like "this will only make sense if you have some context", but a sufficiently patient human could response "sure, i've got my entire life" - and a sufficiently motivated galaxy-brain should be able to come up with some pretty clever shorthand ways of saying, maybe not _the whole story_ but a helluva lot more than we could think up on our own. So, no, I don't think we should give ourselves short shrift. This isn't an anthropocentric perspective, it's an argument that turing complete languages are some powerful shit.
So, yes, i think we possibly _could_ understand a better answer to the question "does the word god, that many people use to mean many different things, actually point to something which does, in fact exist, and can be understood to have _at least some of_ the properties that people have ascribed to it?" - THIS feels like the more interesting question, not "do you hear a voice in your head that you believe is attached to some omnipotent benig.", but "does that word point to anythign real?"
And this is where your next line is great:
> Ultimately, at our level of technology, God is no more true or false than ‘democracy’ or FICO scores or oil futures, and look how many humans run around like agitated ants because of those concepts.
So if the word 'god' actually DOES point to something that is real, powerful, and complex, then, yeah, i'd expect most people would understand it the same way they understand their FICO scores or democracy. But that doesn't mean that any one individual couldn't, if they so wanted.
These examples are beautiful, btw, because they are clearly man-made. But what about, say, prime numbers? The moment you agree that there is no highest prime number, you've now transcended the faith of materialism, which is just as (if not MORE) deeply engrained than christianity in the modern mentality of the world. The idea that there is no highest prime number doesn't map onto any prediction you could make about the material world; at best you could say something about a computer set to prove such a thing would never succeed. But where does _that_ belief come from, unless you're open to the idea that ideas and concepts have some kind of existence which is prior to materialism. Then your questions about 'why these laws of physics' are trivially answerable by Max Tegmark's level 4 multiverse concept: the laws of physics are just an address describing your location in a mathematical structure that consists of all valid mathematical structures.
And lest we think this is all just jerking off, why are the jews still around? Why didn't they get wiped out like the elomites, the caannaites, and the bajillion other tribes that ran around with their own myths at the time? The jews say they are god's choesn people as a kind of humble answer to this question. But my take is that their faith embodies something like the idea of 'collecetive responsbility' - when they'd get smashed and conquered, instead of adopting the gods of the people who conquered them, or giving on their own god, they said "we must have done this ourselves by violating gods laws", and thus they _looked at what went wrong_ and then developed notions of justice and fairness that look explicitly designed to prevent, say, massive economic inequality because of debt. Exodus reads like a _progressive_ set of rules, as long as you view them from the perspective of people of that era. Where the hell did tha come from? My guess is that after they'd get carted off to slavery, people all realized that hey, we were being really shitty to each other just before we got invaided. Maybe we lost god's favor?
That attitude is the cultural equivalent of a human being who owners their shit, and takes responsibility for their own choices in live, and tries their best to live a good life rather than bitching and moaning about how they are a victim. That is a powerful, effective way of living. So if you ask me, 'why are the jews still alive', i woudl say "they used their faith as a survival tool, and if The tool works, there must be some truth to the beliefs that the tool requires its operator to maintain."
I feel like i live in a world dominated by adherents of the Church of the Little Red Hen. Try imaginign that in place of christianity - it isn't even that hard! Cultural hennists insist that the hen WAS real and DID bake break and if you live a good life and work hard, you too can partake of the everlasting bread of heaven. The ahennists point out that, look, we never see animals form coalitions to manufacture baked goods, or really, to form any coalitions at all! The whole story of the little red hen looks like it's made up to control people, and really, if you think very carefully, is a theinly veiled defense of both capitalism and financial inequality. Both of those perspectives are so childish they aren't worth the time - we need more people willing to go further, like your post does. Thank you.
> when I’m asked “Do you believe in God?” the implicit question question is ‘Do you feel this magic man is part of your life and do you talk to him?’
I can imagine this is probably what most people believe, and I share your dismissal of both this idea, and the dismissals of it. It also seems like you still think there's _some_ unanswered question, which is kind of important, although in your case, you seem content to shrug and say "i don't know, and we probably can't know." I think this is more sane than 99.9% of the writing on this topic, since it's clearly more qualified than 'i haven't thought about this at all'. You're perfectly willing to rule out both _some_ hypotheses (a loving god who intervenes in the world actively, and lets kids get murdered because of ... reasons), but you also seem open to the idea that it may be worth it to explore more here. So that's what i'll prod you to do here :)
I thank this idea of "nematodes to people is so massive, and thus we must be that far from god" is fundamentally wrong because of (pause for bong rip) turing completeness. Once you have the ability to create words and bind them to arbitrary symbols, i think you begin the first steps of a dance with the divine. To see why this is plausible, imagine what would happen if nematodes COULD use words and language. Then we could, very slowly, over very long periods of time use words to communicate with them, right? They could ask us questions, and we could do our damndest to answer them. The thing that makes this scenario implausible is that if paramecia had the ability to use language, they would be so wildly different that it's almost impossible to wrap our heads around.
If there's a being that has a brain the size of several galaxies, it should _still_ be able to communicate with me using words, if such a thing is important to it. Maybe its' answers would be like "this will only make sense if you have some context", but a sufficiently patient human could response "sure, i've got my entire life" - and a sufficiently motivated galaxy-brain should be able to come up with some pretty clever shorthand ways of saying, maybe not _the whole story_ but a helluva lot more than we could think up on our own. So, no, I don't think we should give ourselves short shrift. This isn't an anthropocentric perspective, it's an argument that turing complete languages are some powerful shit.
So, yes, i think we possibly _could_ understand a better answer to the question "does the word god, that many people use to mean many different things, actually point to something which does, in fact exist, and can be understood to have _at least some of_ the properties that people have ascribed to it?" - THIS feels like the more interesting question, not "do you hear a voice in your head that you believe is attached to some omnipotent benig.", but "does that word point to anythign real?"
And this is where your next line is great:
> Ultimately, at our level of technology, God is no more true or false than ‘democracy’ or FICO scores or oil futures, and look how many humans run around like agitated ants because of those concepts.
So if the word 'god' actually DOES point to something that is real, powerful, and complex, then, yeah, i'd expect most people would understand it the same way they understand their FICO scores or democracy. But that doesn't mean that any one individual couldn't, if they so wanted.
These examples are beautiful, btw, because they are clearly man-made. But what about, say, prime numbers? The moment you agree that there is no highest prime number, you've now transcended the faith of materialism, which is just as (if not MORE) deeply engrained than christianity in the modern mentality of the world. The idea that there is no highest prime number doesn't map onto any prediction you could make about the material world; at best you could say something about a computer set to prove such a thing would never succeed. But where does _that_ belief come from, unless you're open to the idea that ideas and concepts have some kind of existence which is prior to materialism. Then your questions about 'why these laws of physics' are trivially answerable by Max Tegmark's level 4 multiverse concept: the laws of physics are just an address describing your location in a mathematical structure that consists of all valid mathematical structures.
And lest we think this is all just jerking off, why are the jews still around? Why didn't they get wiped out like the elomites, the caannaites, and the bajillion other tribes that ran around with their own myths at the time? The jews say they are god's choesn people as a kind of humble answer to this question. But my take is that their faith embodies something like the idea of 'collecetive responsbility' - when they'd get smashed and conquered, instead of adopting the gods of the people who conquered them, or giving on their own god, they said "we must have done this ourselves by violating gods laws", and thus they _looked at what went wrong_ and then developed notions of justice and fairness that look explicitly designed to prevent, say, massive economic inequality because of debt. Exodus reads like a _progressive_ set of rules, as long as you view them from the perspective of people of that era. Where the hell did tha come from? My guess is that after they'd get carted off to slavery, people all realized that hey, we were being really shitty to each other just before we got invaided. Maybe we lost god's favor?
That attitude is the cultural equivalent of a human being who owners their shit, and takes responsibility for their own choices in live, and tries their best to live a good life rather than bitching and moaning about how they are a victim. That is a powerful, effective way of living. So if you ask me, 'why are the jews still alive', i woudl say "they used their faith as a survival tool, and if The tool works, there must be some truth to the beliefs that the tool requires its operator to maintain."
I feel like i live in a world dominated by adherents of the Church of the Little Red Hen. Try imaginign that in place of christianity - it isn't even that hard! Cultural hennists insist that the hen WAS real and DID bake break and if you live a good life and work hard, you too can partake of the everlasting bread of heaven. The ahennists point out that, look, we never see animals form coalitions to manufacture baked goods, or really, to form any coalitions at all! The whole story of the little red hen looks like it's made up to control people, and really, if you think very carefully, is a theinly veiled defense of both capitalism and financial inequality. Both of those perspectives are so childish they aren't worth the time - we need more people willing to go further, like your post does. Thank you.