Religion is a subset of ideology, and ideology is a set of beliefs about how how the world is and how the world should be. Capitalism is an ideology. Communism is an ideology. Scientism is an ideology. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism and so on are religious ideologies.
The boundary between the two is weak. Communism and Scientism make metaphysical statements. Communism and Scientism generally state that there is no soul, there is no afterlife and there are no supernatural beings.
Capitalism believes that people, out of self interest (greed and selfishness), act in ways that create welfare for the majority. This is a radical belief, held by almost no one and no other belief system in history. It also believes in unlimited growth. The combination of these beliefs is going to wind up killing a few billion people.
But the worst religious belief is almost certainly “there is an afterlife, and only thru this religion can you achieve it. If you don’t worship this religion you will be tormented for eternity after death.”
This belief creates monsters. If there is only one way to avoid eternal torment, then ANYTHING is justified. This is one reason why Christianity and Islam have a history of atrocities. Charlemagne, a hero to most in the West, spent much of his life force-converting “pagans.” In one case he forced ten thousand Saxons to accept baptism, then immediately killed them all. Had they lived, after all, they could have gone to their priestly class and un-converted.
The mass burnings in the New World, primarily by Spain, were justified by the belief that burning pagans would let them get into Heaven. Sure, burning alive is one of the most horrible deaths possible, but what’s that compared to an eternity of torment? Burning someone alive to avoid Hell and get them into Heaven isn’t just not evil, it’s a truly good and moral act: to not burn them would be evil. If there’s something you can do to ensure you or someone else avoids eternal torment, it’s always justified.
This is the most extreme of “only my way is the good way” beliefs common in ideology. We’ll discuss this in more general terms later. It isn’t always wrong to say “some actions and beliefs and ideologies are good and others are evil”, it is always wrong to say “only this set of beliefs is right and all other sets of beliefs are wrong.”
The distinction is fine, but important. It’s also one that many moderns reject.
Oakchair
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth.” —CS Lewis
Someone presuming the ends are good is someone ready to commit any atrocity over and over and over again. After the first the sunk loss bias becomes a force of its own. Is it any surprise that people keep doubling down with more and more vitriol and utilitarianism? It’s either that or admit that perhaps they were not only wrong, conned but acted reprehensibly and are guilty of the horrors they’ve been projecting on all those “dumb, evil” others
Phaedrus
Can you describe the tenants of “scientism” and some examples of people espousing it?
Soredemos
Sometimes physicalists will make the active claim that souls and the afterlife don’t exist, but the softer, and more intellectually honest, position is to merely require evidence to believe in anything, and to say that disbelief should be the default. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, or indeed any evidence at all for a start. Believers really seem to hate this position, I presume because it’s hard to argue against. Often they’ll claim to not understand it, or assert anyone claiming it doesn’t really mean it.
That said, I’m also fine taking the ‘bold’position of actively asserting that they don’t exist, in the same way it’s ‘bold’ to dimiss a child having an invisible best friend.
Most people have a doxsastic skepticism about every religion other than their own. ‘Of course Muhammad didn’t fly to heaven on a pegasus; how absurd!’ they say, right before going to Mass to literally each the flesh of a guy who was his own father, and while sacrificed himself to himself to appease his own anger. It’s all just so goofy.
Ian Welsh
Scientism: https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/resources/what-is-scientism/
I may write an article on it as some point. There’s a bit more to it than in the article: for example, reductionism and emergent property is usually a part of it, as is a belief in progress. (All ideologies/religions have sects, with somewhat alternative beliefs, while accepting the overall thrust of the ideology. You can see that in the sub-varieties of capitalism: with the most recent varieties (New Deal capitalis and Post-war liberalism differing in important ways from neoliberalism, though all three also modify democracy, another ideology.)
Soredemos: I’ve always felt atheism is intellectually dishonest, which is why I’m agnostic.
Curt Kastens
Well if you do not obey belief is that most evil; I think it also needs to be poínted out that I think that there is a reason for the development of this form of psycplogiocal manipulation. It is because of the problem of ultimate authority.
There is no ultimate authority that can mediate disputes. Because of this a disagreement can be fought over for infinity. Do humans like harmonious relations? Do disagreements prevent the evolution of harmonious relationships?
Of course if a disagreement arises everyone wants in the end a harmoniouis relationship in which is resolved by the other side submiting to your side in the dispute. The threat of spending a eternity in hell after death is of course an attempt to psycologically enforce conformity, and with that unity.
In a war the side that is more unified has an advantage. But a true Republcian Soldier, and a true American will understand that his own side is just as capable of stupity, evil and insantiy as any other side. Therefore the true Republcan Soldier and the true American does not follow orders unless he/she is in agreement with them, with the benifit of doubt going to one supirior’s. Of course that means that a true Republic will be at a disadvantage in a war. It is one that the Republcan Soldier gladly accepts becuase he or she would undersand that the military defeat of one’s nation may be a defeat that is well deserved.
Oakchair
Can you describe the tenants of “scientism” and some examples of people espousing it?
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In Christianity a priest defines the infallible truth by interpreting the bible. Scientism is the same only different labels are used. The priest is “a scientist” and the bible is “the science.”
Eugenicists and the fascists of WW2 used scientism. “The science” showed some races were superior and that the inferior ones were spreading disease.
Examples of scientism usually don’t get as far reaching as religion, but rather have more specific and localized tenets.
Back in the early 00’s “the science” as interpreted by “the scientists” (who were paid by pharma companies) bestowed on society the unalterable truth that opioids were safe, effective, and non-addicting. People who pointed out that opioids were none of those were punished for being heretics or in scientism terms “anti-science” quacks.
If a group uses lots of insults, logical fallacies, hand waves inconvenient evidence, refuses to engage in discussion, and tries to cancel/punish those who don’t believe their “science” it is a major red flag they are using scientism.
Soredemos
@Ian Welsh
We’ve seen lots of scientism in the last few years with ‘believe science’. Horribly misguided; observing, hypothesizing, and testing are processes humans developed that have worth precisely because they aren’t built on belief. Turning Scientist Man into an infallible priest to be deferred to is an awful idea. Usually, too, people saying this haven’t actually kept up with the science (abundantly clear with covid, where the science is robust that it’s hugely dangerous, and also hasn’t magically disappeared just because Biden was elected), and more often than not these people are also big on ‘native ways of knowing’ as an alternative to evil white man imperialist science. So believe science, except when it’s woke not to.
That said, if by reductionism and emergent property you’re referring to the mind, sorry, but all the evidence is firmly on that side of the issue. Any other explanation has to explain why doing something to the physical organ that is the brain directly effects the mind, if the mind is wholly or partially elsewhere. We’re at the point where not only do we know what areas of the brain are directly linked to different types of thought, but can actually read certain brain activity and correctly deduce what someone is thinking at the time in some basic fashion. The most straightforward explanation is that the mind is an activity carried out by the brain, and just because we can’t explain all the details of how it works yet doesn’t make that not by far the most likely explanation.
Is that reductionist? Because I’d say that’s the nuanced, holistic explanation; that the mind is the result of myriad interactions in the brain (and probably also between the brain and other organs). The idea that it’s at least partially a magical ghost somewhere else is the real reductionist view, one that not only has no evidence, conceptually it raises more questions than it answers.
And yes, I know about the panpsychism crap. 1. Save us from philosophers playing at being scientists, and 2. essentially what it claims is that there’s some sort of consciousness particle, and if you get enough of them together in the right formation you get self-awareness. Which is basically just adding a step of unneeded complexity (while having no evidence). So a rock isn’t self-aware, or at least not very much, because it doesn’t have the awareness particles in the right shape and/or density, but a brain does. So you basically end up right back where you started.
Regarding atheism vs agnostisism, ‘I have no need for that hypothesis’, so I don’t utilize it. But even if a god did exist, it’s abundantly clear that it either never intervenes in the world, or does so vanishingly rarely, which in a practical sense means it doesn’t exist. It amounts to the same thing. We are in effect alone, whether we are literally or not.
Oakchair
if by reductionism and emergent property you’re referring to the mind, sorry, but all the evidence is firmly on that side
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I’d argue that we should include Quantum mechanics, Rupert Sheldrake, J.B. Rhine, Dean Radin and Diane Ferrari’s meta-analysis “Effects of consciousness”, the nearly 600 experimental RNG studies done by Helmult Schmidt, or Robert Jahn in “the evidence”.
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Any other explanation has to explain why doing something to the physical organ that is the brain directly effects the mind, if the mind is wholly or partially elsewhere.
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Replace the word Brain with Radio and the word mind with Radio station and you have one explanation right there.
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The most straightforward explanation is that the mind is an activity carried out by the brain
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What would count as an example of “the mind” not being an activity solely carried out by the brain? Let’s be scientific; what would falsify the reductionist theory of the mind?
Why do the results of “The double-slit experiment” and it’s subsequent “observer effect” not at the very least remove all confidence in the accuracy of the reductionist and materialistic views of the mind and universe?
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The most straightforward explanation…
…conceptually it raises more questions than it answers.
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In modern physics the simple, straightforward explanation that doesn’t raise more questions has been obsolete for around half a century. Quantum mechanics already replaced materialism and reductionism decades ago.
Soredemos
@Oakchair
Quantum Mechanics is materialism (or, again, perhaps a better term is physicalism). QM just adds another, smaller scale where things can get weird. It isn’t magic, like some people seem to want to treat it. QM is the science of interactions at the smallest scales, but uncertainty at that scale averages out at larger scales so it doesn’t matter. This is part of the big divide between QM and more classical physics, and the search for a grand unifying theory. Because the two realms exist in seeming isolation from each other; you can get away with simply ignoring QM at the larger scales.
I would argue you’re actually the one trying to be reductionist, by wanting to literally reduce everything to QM (again, quantum phenomenon averages out at larger scales. So for instance solid objects remain solid, even if they’re constantly fluctuating at the smallest scale, because the average is mathematically constant).
Again, to reiterate this, Quantum Mechanics isn’t magic. It’s just more physics.
There’s only one part of the brain, microtubules, that are thought to be small enough to possibly be subject to QM effects. There’s a ‘controversial’ (to be polite) hypothesis that tries to place consciousness here, but evidence is essentially non-existent. Even if any evidence of much of anything were found, it wouldn’t overrule all the evidence for larger scale effects, eg the interactions of entire clusters of neurons, or the effects of hormones on moods, etc.
Are you trying to claim something like quantum entanglement? QE is a cool thing where specific particles can behave the same way instantaneously regardless of distance. Its a fun gimmick to justify FTL communication in a sci-fi story. But there’s no evidence it exists beyond that level.
The radio analogy doesn’t work at all. Because a radio station is where activity originates, which is then transmitted out. Which is exactly what all the evidence says is happening with the brain. We can even pinpoint which ‘rooms’ in the ‘radio station’ are doing which activities (and more besides).
If you’re trying to argue that the mind is elsewhere and the brain merely a receiver (so those areas aren’t actually doing the mind activity, they’re just lighting up because they’re the parts receiving relevant mind activity) so when we change the brain we’re just disrupting the reception of the signal, again, not only no evidence, but also conceptually you’re just adding unneeded complexity and raising more questions than you’re actually answering.
Here, run through this example: there are people who take LSD, or similar, mess with their brain chemistry, and it noticeably changes their personalities, and they often insist it has changed them for the better. But if we say the real mind is stored elsewhere, what does this mean for them? Well, apparently they just broke the receiver in some way and the signal is now wrong. So, what, the real them is a worse personality and they’ll return to being an asshole when they die? That seems bleak, not beautiful.
But also, again, it has not a shred of evidence for this (and much evidence to the contrary), so I don’t find it something to seriously entertain or worry about.
This all just feels like a desperate rearguard attempt to salvage the idea of a soul.
“The mind isn’t the brain, the mind is elsewhere.”
“So a soul?”
“No, that would be mysticism. This is SCIENCE! Something something, Quantum Mechanics; the mind is elsewhere but uses the organ of the brain to operate the body like a puppet. SCIENCE.”
This is just the ghost in the machine repackaged.
bruce wilder
Most people imagine naively that religion or ideology is based on beliefs, but I think it might be truer to say that the foundation of religion/ideology is the absence of belief/faith. Most people simply don’t know what to believe. Most people do not have strong moral beliefs either. Certainty and self-confidence are potentially charismatic. The rest is history.
shagggz
There will always be a ghost in the machine, some process by which potentiality becomes actuality. You can’t nail it down. You can’t reconcile the top-down orderly Newtonian mechanics of galactic superclusters with the bottom-up randomness of the quantum foam. The glue that transcends and connects these polar opposites has properties of both and yet neither. You can call it psyche, soul, mind, vibes, volition, whatever. It is what it is.
Jan Wiklund
I am not convinced that this is the definition of religion, as differing from other ideologies. Émile Durkheim, for one, thought that the core of all religions is rites. The use of rites is to make people feel that they belong to a collective. I don’t think that is bad.
Oakchair
Quantum Mechanics is materialism
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We’re defining materialism as nothing exists except physical matter right?
When I say that QM and modern physics at the very least removes any confidence that materialism, and reductionism are true I’m not talking about the uncertainty of the location, spin etc. of particles. I’m talking about the measurement problem and the observer effect from the double-slit experiment. That physical reality is observer created.
This isn’t a view held by “some people” it’s a view held by Nobel prize winning physicists and mathematicians going back over half a century. Starting with John Von Neumann, Henry Strapp, and Eugene Wigner.
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This is part of the big divide between QM and more classical physics
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It’s not a divide so much as classical physics has been replaced because it has failed to make accurate predictions in experiments.
Any appeal to classical physics is a red flag because classical physics has been obsolete for almost a century.
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I would argue you’re actually the one trying to be reductionist, by wanting to literally reduce everything to QM
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The reductionist theory of the mind is that consciousness can be explained by breaking the physical brain down into small, simple physical functions and properties. We can make fallacious arguments all we want, but let’s not.
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The radio analogy
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The concept behind the radio analogy is that the “brain” is not entirely creating the mind. That in part the mind is received by the brain similar to how a radio works. Brain activity doesn’t invalidate this analogy in the same way that activity in the radio doesn’t invalidate the radio station.
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no evidence
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There’s whole books of evidence.
Start with
Rupert Sheldrake
Christopher David Carter
The hallmark of science is fallibility. So it’s a major red flag that scientism is being used when the question: what would falsify…? is dodged.
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you’re just adding complexity and raising more questions
No, This is SCIENCE!
This all just feels like a desperate
so I don’t find it something to seriously entertain
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All those statements are examples of scientism.
Ian Welsh
One can make a fairly good case that nothing exists except as a probability wave until something conscious perceives, and do so with perfectly good science.
Even freakier are experiments which show that causality can be backwards in time.
The whole clockwork thing, believed by most scientists and educated laymen for a few centuries turned out to be false.
Signifcant chunks of brain activity are essentially quantum level.
The genetics of my youth have proved to be wrong: environment can turn turn genetic traits on and off, and you can inherit those “settings” from your parents. (Lamarck laughs.)
One should be humble. A lot of the smartest people in the world have been wrong about very big things, including some of the greatest scientists. “God does not play dice” and all that.
And one should always remember that the scientific method answers “what” and sometimes “how”, but not “why?”
Purple Library Guy
I don’t want to talk about this quantum mechanics stuff. I’ll just say that almost everybody who talks about quantum mechanics doesn’t understand it, even the physicists (who mostly admit that straight out). But, not understood does not equal mystical.
On the question of atheism, which Mr. Welsh rudely and a touch self-righteously described as intellectually dishonest in a quick drive-by snark, I think we need to define terms. What are we saying you have to think in order to count as an atheist as opposed to an agnostic? I suppose if you say an atheist is someone who is 100.000% certain no religion is real, then you would have a case for accusing them of something, although I’m not clear that “intellectually dishonest” is applicable even there. “Mistaken in their certainty” I guess. But, I don’t think that’s a reasonable standard and I don’t think even most of the fairly strong/extreme atheists make that claim. To the contrary, even the likes of Richard Dawkins’ case revolve around the idea that the probability of religions being true is just very very small, equal to or smaller than the probability of lots of other things we don’t believe. If the criterion for being an atheist is just “I DON’T BELIEVE in any religion”, that’s a much lower bar. There’s lots of things I don’t in fact believe which I would agree there is a nonzero possibility of; I don’t believe the elections in Venezuela were rigged, but it IS theoretically possible. Even if the criterion for being an atheist is someone saying “I KNOW that religions are not real”, we then need to go to just what is meant by KNOWING something. The standard philosophical definition of knowing something is to hold a justified, true belief in that something (plus or minus a couple of weird corner cases people thought up, which can be handled by some sort of criterion that the justification has to have something to do with the belief being true). So, to know something we don’t have to have fully 100% evidence of it . . . otherwise you’d hardly ever be able to say anyone knew anything. Now, atheists do have justifications for their thinking religions are not real. IF they are in fact right, THEN they do in fact KNOW religions are not real. If they’re wrong, then they’re wrong, but there’s nothing inherently intellectually dishonest about being wrong.
So if we take my case, I’m an atheist. No, I won’t claim there is exactly 0.0000% chance of some religion being true (perhaps some religion nobody has yet described). But first, I think the chance is low enough for me not to worry about it and low enough that saying I’m on the fence, in between, or whatever is inappropriate. And second, I don’t BELIEVE religions are true. My internal psychological state is not one of doubt. If I say I’m an agnostic, I’m saying my feelings are feelings of doubt, where I feel as if there’s a solid chance of religions being real. But I DON’T feel that way. If I said I was an agnostic when that’s totally NOT how I feel, now THAT would be intellectually dishonest. What then would you have me call myself?
In similar spirit to Mr. Welsh, I COULD claim an agnostic is just an atheist covering their ass and/or lacking courage, but I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, they do actually feel doubt and so agnostic is an accurate description of their situation.
Soredemos
@Oakchair
Materialist as in only physical reality exists. Energy and matter. To be more specific is why I keep saying perhaps physicalist is a better term.
No, classical physics isn’t dead. Whenever someone does something like build a building or calculate orbital dynamics, they don’t engage at all with quantum physics. Because things at that scale are irrevant to the larger scales that humans exist in, because, again, quantum uncertantity averages out.
Rupert Sheldrake needs to stick to plants, a field he actually knows anything about. I’m not even sure who Christopher David Carter is; looking him up all I find that seems relevant is a book on near-death experiences? That’s your evidence? Much more likely just panicked neuron firing producing hallucinations.
@Ian Welsh
The waveform collapses and the superposition becomes definite when an interaction occurs. That interaction need not be a conscious observer (in fact it’s never going to be a conscious observer. It might be something from or initiated by such an entity, but a quantum particle doesn’t care about the nature of the originator of an interaction). I’m not sure where you ever got that idea from. That seems very close to Deepak Chopra’s ‘the moon doesn’t exist until a person looks at it’ nonsense.
Which I’m assuming isn’t what you’re saying, because that would be…very silly. And profoundly narcissistic.
Oakchair
The genetics of my youth have proved to be wrong:
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Also in this vein there is Quantum evolution.
Particles in DNA reside in a quantum state. They simultaneously exist in all possible positions. The result is that multiple evolutionary steps can occur at once since all these steps exist at the quantum level and only need a certain observation in order to become physical reality.
This explains jumps in evolution. There are examples of 10+ step biological processes where each beginning step applies no survival advantage, but all the steps together at the end increase survival.
The chance of these steps occurring by chance alone in multiple different biological processes with Darwin evolution are near-impossibly low.
Willy
I’m an agnostic, but I know enough about the Jesus (as told in Bibles) to see a distinct pattern within those teachings: that the more Christian faith one has the more one will peacefully focus on their own eternal reward while simultaneously letting go of power and control material needs, within their tiny little dust-speck of a material life. Seems a lot like Buddhism except with a couple extra plot twists.
But how often do you ever see that happening? Do you know anybody who’s sacrificed everything material (excepting staying alive), for the good of their eternal future? I don’t know about you, but the very few monks and nuns and priests I’m aware of are old. If that’s the reality, then the Christian afterlife would be like South Park Kenny dying to find the population of heaven a few thousand while the population of hell is Billions and Billions served.
Such a religion is hard for me to take seriously. If true, then what’s the point of a performance artist god creating such a fucked up universe? So he can compare it to his other, less fucked up universes?
The New Testament told Charlemagne exactly what to do and who exactly would be passing Gods earthly faith test. If the recorded history is accurate, then he could only possibly have been:
1. a meathead bully trying to rationalize his ridiculously-inflated sense self-importance, by using his idiotic take on religion, or
2. a faithless malignant narcissist addicted to the emotions he feels from exercising extreme power over others.
In either case, if heaven was real then Charlie would be ACCESS DENIED! And I’m not just making that up. This is twenty years of bible study talking. It’s in the scripture. Look under “sheep and goats” or any of the false prophetry sections.
Yet he’s a “hero to most in the West”? Enough to make me wanna kick in a stained-glass window.
As much of the current Christian religion stands today, if you’re a mediocre warboy then you’re unworthy of Valhalla, let alone the tiniest bit of silver mouth paint. Seems more like a great opportunity for psychopaths to brainwash losers and suckers into doing all the heavy lifting and risky fighting for their own warped pleasures.
Where Miller got Immortan Joe wrong was having him lead the charge in his grand kluge chariot, instead of issuing all orders from the luxurious comfort of his mountaintop country club. But I guess that wouldn’t have made for good film. Now I read the comments.
Purple Library Guy
@Oakchair: That evolution with quantum mojo stuff is not real science. That “lots of steps at once” thing is pretty much the same bullshit “intelligent design” guys always claimed, and it always got smacked down. I’m fairly sure it has been with deep sighs of annoyance that actual scientists have smacked this version down too.
Oakchair
No, classical physics isn’t dead.
Whenever someone does something like build a building
they don’t engage at all with quantum physics.
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In the sense that it’s predictions have failed to be accurate it is dead.
In the sense that it operates as a rule of thumb it is alive.
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Because things at that scale are irrevant
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Passing over calling evidence and science irrelevant, it’s contradictory to put forth a reductionist theory of the mind while simultaneously saying that what occurs at the reductionist level is irrelevant.
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Rupert Sheldrake needs to stick to plants, a field he actually knows anything about.
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Do you recognize how this is an own goal on your part?
Let me put it another way.
When will you be following your own advice?
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I’m not even sure who Christopher David Carter is;
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So maybe instead of being hostile because you don’t know the topic you could be humble.
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Much more likely just panicked neuron firing producing hallucinations.
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This insult didn’t distract me from your refusal to answer the questions.
Is the reason you keep skipping over the double-slit experiment because you have no idea what it is?
Earlier in the thread I described traits of scientism . Let’s relist them.
Insults
logical fallacies
refusal to engage (answer questions)
hand wave inconvenient evidence
wants to cancel non believers
Oakchair
That evolution with quantum mojo stuff is not real science.
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Oh… Should we reveal this fact to all the scientists studying and publishing about Quantum evolution? I don’t think they’d be too crushed to find out how fake their work is, but one never knows.
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That “lots of steps at once” thing is pretty much the same bullshit “intelligent design” guys always claimed,
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Please direct me to the Religions groups making statements that Quantum mechanics and modern physics is the same as God. That sounds like an interesting conversation thread to read.
And to be precise “lots of steps at once” is better phrased as- at the quantum level all steps exist and become physical reality under certain conditions/parameters of which one is being “observed”.
Christianity adopting quantum mechanics as proof of God reminds me of the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy “I refuse to prove that I exist”, says God, “for proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing.” “But”, says Man, “the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It proves you exist, and so therefore you don’t. QED.” “Oh dear”, says God, “I hadn’t thought of that”, and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.”
Willy
Intelligent Design.
I once encountered a raucous debate between a group of creationists, athiests, and agnostics, each projecting their own space-time constrained viewpoints onto the subject. The lone intelligent design advocate was flailing, constrained by the idea that intelligent design work always had to be done sequentially. So I decided to give him a hand.
I asked why a supreme being wouldn’t structure universal laws in such a way as to (over much time) achieve any intended result they would’ve known in advance, even in some wildly circuitous and flamboyant way ? That’d explain all the misfires, screwups and extinctions. You get to do that if you operate in a higher spiritual realm. You can reach in and monkey around with shit during any timeline that amuses you. Aren’t we talking about a being so supreme that they’re bored shitless from always knowing everything, everywhere, all the damned time? Wouldn’t you want to go into the performance art business using self-aware, free-will, creations, too?
The debate paused for a while. Then I heard a voice from the back say “whatever…” Then the raucousness continued. I had to tell the ID guy he was on his own.
Willy
How commies fucked up.
The biggest mistake Communism made was ignoring the fact that most humans need some kind of religion (I’m an agnostic I didn’t write the rules). Had Marx preached that Jesus was a Communist, would we now be going home to afternoons spent lazily surfing the web after easy mornings doing happy little robot management tasks for our happy little commune? Maybe I should let more dubious minds decide.
As it is now, with the corner commies painted our asses into, we’re gonna have to persuade a helluva lot of folks to not only give up their religion, but also to ignore all the Khmer, Holodomor, super long grocery lines, and Trotsky getting whacked screwups.
Pinker suggests we’re taking the long road towards that destination, that the need for religion naturally declines as material advancements increase. But he’s an asshole. There’s something about these positivity optimism creeps that makes them seem oblivious, that we might only be in a timeline lull in the dystopian action, and something really nasty could be just around the corner.
As I see it now, communism only has a future after the Big Hit Bottom. This could take years, with one possibility for speeding up the process being a catastrophic Trumpian wet bulb Project 2025 surveillance robot collapse so bad that China would be begged to step in. And even then, tens of millions would have to fully realize that an End Of Times Rapture wasn’t going to be happening.
mago
Oh boy.
A personal god? That’s a primitive belief.
However, there are realms beyond the human and animal realms that we perceive through the five senses and the sixth sense, consciousness.
There is relative truth and absolute truth.
Nothing exists from its own side. Compounded existence is composed of parts.
Thought is not a chemical or physical process.
An exploration of the logic and reasoning of the above claims lie far outside this comment format.
There’s a vast literature stretching back to antiquity.
Quantum physics is a Johnny come lately to the discourse, although it corroborates ancient wisdom.
Wasn’t going to say anything, but what the hell.
Not trying to convince or persuade, just tossing words into space.
By the way, in empty luminosity, which is the nature of mind, there is no arising, dwelling or ceasing.
Oops, one step over the line sweet Jesus.
Soredemos
The difference between me and someone like Sheldrake is that I 1. try to follow the actual science, and 2. haven’t turned my opinions into a productive career based on selling nonsense books.
I don’t even know what you imagine the insult to have been. My point was that the far simpler explanation for NDEs is chaotic brain activity.
shagggz
Regarding Christianity, I consider the Doukhobors the only legitimate extant claimants to the term, as they recognize the divinity of Christ but reject the/any Church as fundamentally illegitimate.
Regarding scientism, I’d say its defining characteristic is a lack of humility. It arrogates to itself an unwarranted level of certainty, elevating it from a method of skeptical inquiry into something more like a religion.
capelin
@Ian “Capitalism believes that people, out of self interest (greed and selfishness), act in ways that create welfare for the majority. This is a radical belief, held by almost no one and no other belief system in history. It also believes in unlimited growth.”
Smokin’ pull quote. I’ve never seen it encapsulated so succinctly.
@ shagggz Yes.
@PLG “There’s lots of things I don’t in fact believe which I would agree there is a nonzero possibility of; I don’t believe the elections in Venezuela were rigged, but it IS theoretically possible.”
Nicely analoged.
@Oakchair “No, classical physics isn’t dead. Whenever someone does something like build a building they don’t engage at all with quantum physics.
Reminds me of Utah Phillips; “I can take a rock, millions of years old, and drop it on your foot. Ha! The past didn’t go anywhere!”. Great album.
JR
PLG,
I always thought atheism was whether one believes in the existence of God or non-existence of God. Very different from religion though easy to conflate.
Feral Finster
Oh, very well then:
“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of. Let’s review a few cases.In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no.
In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no.
In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory.
Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra.
The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor-southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result-despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology-until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.”
n.b. Ian referenced “epigenetics”. “The science” in this area is far from settled, to say the least.
Ian Welsh
Feral Finster,
great comment. Are you OK with me elevating it into the post. First and last paragraph removed. If so, anonymous or Feral Finster or something else as author?
If you want to discuss it privately, email me at admin-at-ianwelsh-dot-net
bruce wilder
critical curiosity about mechanisms is not so easy to launch in a social milieu or to keep going.
I have often wondered if esoteric jargon, for example, isn’t meant to shut down communication
Purple Library Guy
Feral Finster’s thesis feels to me like it boils down to “If all or almost all the scientists agree about something, they must be wrong. It’s only scientists all the other scientists disagree with who might be right.” I think there’s a hole there somewhere. What’s the mechanism that causes something to stop being true as more scientists start believing it?
Willy
I want to know how “results that are verifiable by reference to the real world” are made to become a common wisdom which demolished the previous pernicious political consensus. Do they take out ads or something?
Feral Finster
@Ian: go buck wild, and attribute it as you like, unless you are offering me Greenies or something. I like Greenies.
@PLG: that isn’t the gist of the comment at all. Rather, the point is that truth is not subject to majority vote, not even if the voters are Qualified Scientists And Degreed Intellectuals.
In the 1930s, the Nazi regime produced an open letter denouncing relativity, signed by 100 german professors of physics, this back when germany wasn’t an international buttboi and all-around joke.
Einstein responded that all that was needed was one physicist who was correct.
Or, to give a personal example, years ago, I ran across a couple of medical school professors, one a professor of pulmonology, the other of cardiology. Both had impeccable academic credentials, fellowships, lectures, visiting professorships, etc..
Both insisted that smoking tobacco had no demonstrated link to cancer. Of course, it turned out later, that both were on The Tobacco Institute payroll.
Now, theirs was very much a minority opinion at the time (and, as it later came to light, the good professors knew full well that they were lying the entire time), but the point is that credentials also are no guarantee.
I always wished I had asked this dynamic duo why they whored themselves out like that. They had powers that were something out of science fiction, they could perform feats that would have been classified as “miracles” not so long ago, and it’s not like medical school professors live on starvation wages.
Gifts that few humans ever will have, and this is what they did with those gifts.
I doubt that they would have given me straight answers.
Soredemos
@JR
It’s just a lack of belief in a god. That’s the literal breakdown of the word.
However there are in practice different flavors of it that may take positions of varying intensity. Call simple lack of belief ‘soft atheism’. This is one theists really don’t like, and often claim they can’t understand, because it isn’t a claim about anything. It doesn’t say there is no god, that the speaker doesn’t believe there is no god, but just says the speaker doesn’t believe that there is one. These are two different claims. People whose mindset seems to comprehend only active beliefs can’t grasp a default state of just not believing.
Then there’s an active conviction that there is no god, call that one ‘strong atheism’.
There are other variants too, like igtheism, which doesn’t believe in a god firstly because it doesn’t know what a god even is supposed to be. I’m one of these, among other things. A lesser ‘spirit’, like a Japanese kami, okay, I get what we’re talking about here. It’s a magical ghost that inhabits trees, mountains, etc. I still don’t believe in it, but the concept is vaguely coherent.
A timeless, spaceless, disembodied mind that is outside the universe yet created the universe (let’s ignore as irrelevant to the issue of the concept all the even more bizarre specific religious claims about such a being, like how it cares deeply who you have sex with)? That isn’t coherent. It’s just gibberish. It is actually just special pleading magic (‘everything must have a beginning.’ ‘Who created god?’ ‘Well, no one; god is an exception because I say so.’). Gussying this up with Greek or Latin (‘He’s the logus, the word, the prime mover!’) doesn’t make it less stupid. It just makes the speaker pretentious.
I’ve never heard a definition of capital G God that wasn’t ultimately just poetic nothing.
shagggz
“Consensus science” is an oxymoron because it suggests a positive confirmation of knowledge implying conclusion when the reality of science is epistemologically inverted: science can only ever be a failure to disconfirm a hypothesis, and is always tentative. This is how induction works; you can never rule out the possibility of a proverbial “black swan” no matter how much “confirmation” you may seem to have.
The most convincing account of existence that bridges the gap between religion and science I’ve seen is the work of John Smart (yes, that’s really his name) called evo-devo universe theory.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576511003304
Purple Library Guy
I find there is one more thing I want to say about quantum mechanics. Yes, almost everyone doesn’t understand them, but scientists don’t understand them in a different WAY from most people. Scientists don’t understand WHY they work the way they do, and often seem to really, really wish they would stop giving results that are totally weird, counterintuitive and just seeming downright stupid.
So for scientists it’s stuff like come on, QM doesn’t really give RANDOM results at small scales? Surely if we do the right experiments, some kind of underlying order that feels more like causality will emerge? Then they do the experiments and it stubbornly stays random and they’re like ARGH, fine, whatever, it’s bloody random. Or, quantum entanglement doesn’t REALLY work like THAT, with NO connection between the particles, does it? They do the experiments and throw up their hands FINE, it bloody does. Why the HELL does it DO this stuff? Doesn’t make any bloody SENSE, dammit! I think it’s actually kind of a testament to the power of science that scientists are able to keep soldiering on and coaxing results out of a reality that frankly annoys a lot of them and they wish worked different from how it actually does. (This is overgeneralization of course–some of them seem to quite revel in the whole thing and are all come on, QM, do something ELSE bizarre!)
They DON’T worry about the kind of stuff a lot of amateur philosophers seem to, like does it mysteeeriously interact with consciousness or have metaphysical implications or whatever. Like, it is possible that there are quantum things going on in certain microtubules in the human brain, that maybe even have interactions with larger processes in some way. But at most, that might just mean the human brain has more computing power than some have estimated (Well, it probably does anyway, because a lot of people trying to calculate that seem to treat the variable strength of a neural connection like it represents the same thing as an on/off computer logic gate, when it’s pretty obvious it does not; a thing with a large number of possible values is not the same as a thing with two possible values, and the size of the difference will be something like exponential with the number of such connections). But it will NOT mean something that goes beyond the physical. Scientists don’t think QM is mystical, just weird and a pain in the ass.
StewartM
Feral Finster,
As an ex-scientist, I differ. Everything is consensus. And even things that are slam-dunk friggin’ obvious can be rejected by the consensus, if their findings run foul against some strongly held social belief, religious code, or political power. Science is never practiced in the abstract, but by living, breathing people who both have their own biases and also are subject to ‘persecution’ (if nothing else, against their careers) if they publish conclusions that challenge the status quo.
Alas, truth does not always win out, at least in the short run, in science.
Willy
I always wished I had asked this dynamic duo why they whored themselves out like that.
As if nobody has ever known a few whores (and not the good kind)? When pressed they’ll usually say they were “doing it for their children”. Just like Genghis Kahn or Magda Goebbels.
The laws of thermodynamics are “consensus science”. And so is AGW. I think the definitions are starting to get a little messed up around here with people confusing the realistic kind of “consensus science” with the irrational kind.
Is anybody smart enough to know how our theoretical “one physicist who was correct”, is able to persuade his peers into heading into that correct direction?
Soredemos
Apparently everyone has heard the phrase ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, yet few people digest what that actually means. Just because everything is ultimately composed of particles at the quantum level, doesn’t mean the quantum level has any impact on much at the larger scales we’re aware of. No one worries about a support pillar in a building suddenly disappearing because of quantum uncertantity. At even smaller scales, no one worries about the chains in a molecule randomly changing for no apparent reason (and even if a few did, it wouldn’t effect the substance as a whole because billions of other molecules would remain unaffected. Again, averages; the thing no one seems to want to engage with).
In fact not only do you not need to resort to accounting for things at the quantum level for most applications, trying to do so is likely counter-productive. It reminds me of the fallacy of most economists who believe you can understand the macro economy by just adding up all the microeconomic transactions. You can’t. To understand macroeconomics, you start at the level of macroeconomics. The micro doesn’t matter.
shagggz
@PLG,
The so-called scientists who are annoyed by empirical results not conforming to their narrow preconceptions show their religious orientation towards science. It is the ones who find the bizarre findings invigorating that are the true scientists, for they’ve truly internalized the tentative and open-ended nature of empirical inquiry. An opportunity for progress has presented itself!
What to us presents as randomness in the quantum foam, to me is suggestive of the multiversal infinity out there. Even the maximally-developed technological civilization of the aforesaid John Smart’s astrosociological theory, experiencing nigh-infinite subjective passage of time by situating themselves on the event horizon of a black hole to facilitate maximal spacetime compression, come to understand that they can’t “have it all.”
different clue
Here is an article about the emerging science of plant behavior, offered at NaCap. I am not sure how to use it to advance any of the points specifically at issue in this thread, but I think it may be of interest to at least several people here in that regard. Here is the link.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-plant-philosophy-says-about-plant-agency-and-intelligence
Purple Library Guy
@shagggz You’re not getting it. My point is that scientists deal with the results they got even though they don’t like them, which is a noble thing, not closed-mindedness. They soldier on with reality even when it’s kind of unsatisfactory. Everyone’s going to have some preferences, like maybe they wish QM was cosmic ooh-la-la instead of just being stuff reacting weirdly to being interacted with. But good scientists deal when those preferences turn out not to be how it is.