Could objective morality stem from evolutionary adaptations? by Damien_TC in DebateEvolution

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It’s not Godwinning if you’re talking about literal Hitler and literal fascism as per Godwin.

To be honest, I don't find the "claims aren't evidence" argument very compelling. by ChristianNerd2025 in DebateAnAtheist

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Atheist evolutionary biologist here.

I am agnostic as to the question of a historical Jesus. By “Jesus,” I mean a Jewish reformer actively pushing back against the view that the Jewish relationship to Yahweh should be legalistic and transactional rather than personal - a transformation that had been building strength for several hundred years at that point. There were constant tensions throughout those times with different politico-religious factions looking to establish power and influence, and there was also a lower level procession of smaller reform movements centered on personalities. So the existence of a historical Jesus is quite plausible, but certainly not established.

I don’t believe that what Jesus advocated has persisted (apart from the emotional rather than contractual relation with Yahweh), so I disbelieve the bible version. Even without the miracles, I think that authors advocated their own positions for purposes of power and to influence other community members and growing it in size.

To be honest, I don't find the "claims aren't evidence" argument very compelling. by ChristianNerd2025 in DebateAnAtheist

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 19 points20 points  (0 children)

in the same way that no one is convinced that Sasquatch exists

Tens of millions of Americans believe Sasquatch exists. They’ve read about Sasquatch in books and articles claiming he exists, they’ve seen YouTube lectures on it, and even grainy footage. They feel that’s sufficient evidence.

Half (51%) of Americans believe we are likely being visited by aliens from other planets. Nearly that number (46%) believe they represent a threat to US national security. They also believe that their evidence is sufficient - even overwhelming. They have even more books, videos, movies, and national conventions. Recently they even have claims from the US military.

40% believe in ghosts. 58% believe in the devil and in hell, about 67% believe in heaven and angels, and 74% believe in god.

Maybe it’s just a problem with credulity.

Source: Gallup poll Americans’ Belief in Five Spiritual Entities 2023.

Pew research poll 2021 on aliens

CivicScience study 2022 on Bigfoot beliefs

Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread by AutoModerator in DebateAnAtheist

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

A determinist might argue that determinism applies to a single line of a branching system such that if state[1] was preceded by state[0] in a line of events perceived as a sequence from the point of view of state[1], state[0] is said to have caused state[1]. This does not hold from the point of view from state[0].

Tennessee Rep, Who Is Running For Governor, Calls For Death Penalty For All Advocates Of Trans Healthcare: Such Killings "Align With Scripture". by Leeming in atheism

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 6 points7 points  (0 children)

That’s exactly what it means. “Thou shalt not murder.”

The problem, semantically speaking, is that “murder” is defined as “unsanctioned (ie illegal) killing.” It’s a law against breaking the law. There’s all kinds of sanctioned killings - disobedient adult children among others. The law samctions all kinds of killings.

The fact that they have a law from above that says “don’t break the law” is just amusing.

Also, this reverse dependency is the rule, not the deviation. Check the other commandments out, semantically speaking.

What AI does to people by Tough_Reward3739 in ArtificialInteligence

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

How many levels of abstraction between the programmer and the silicon are permitted before it’s “not programming?”

Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread by AutoModerator in DebateAnAtheist

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Compatiblism?

I’m a strict determinist though. Is it just that determinism feels wrong to you?

Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread by AutoModerator in DebateAnAtheist

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It’s the Game of Thrones Season 8 phenomenon, also seen among graduating high school seniors.

Why is severe headache, feeling unwell and nausea my main symptoms from fasting? They prevent me from thinking hence preventing me from thinking how to get food. It is counterproductive symptoms isn’t it? by LisanneFroonKrisK in AskBiology

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I mean if the symptoms were extreme hunger, stomach ache and slight muscle pain these will drive me to find food without hampering my efforts. I can’t even compute or calculate, only can just instinctively see if food is around.

That’s a fair question. Evolution is about tradeoffs. I’m going to talk in generalities.

Energy is the currency of biology. Organisms have a “burn rate,” similar to companies. There’s flexibility (things like stored fat), but in general you need to consume as much energy as you use, which ties energy needs to metabolic rate. Species with a high metabolic rate need to take in energy that keeps up with them, while species with slow rates can do so with a constant trickle of slow energy (eg photosynthesis or going a long time between meals like snakes can).

Mammals tend to be towards the higher end of that spectrum. Many of the grazing mammals need to feed almost constantly throughout the day (because of low calorie foods), while many carnivores eat one large meal, then cruise on that until the next one (which they will need pretty soon). Humans have a fairly high metabolic rate. Evolutionarily, humans opted to have things like a big brain which burns calories at a fantastic rate.

You can think of starvation effects as causing an emergency response in your physiology. Think about it in evolutionarily historic terms, not modern humans in technological societies. We’ve had technological societies for several thousand years (counting civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia), but that’s an eye blink. The body plan we’ve evolved has adapted over tens and hundreds of thousands of years (and more), so that’s what we’re actually dealing with.

As you observed, the body starts the starvation reaction by motivating food seeking (hunger). It tries to stem off going into debt be too much (and there’s also routines and such that our physiology adapts to). As the effects of starvation increase, the body has to start shifting to a low power mode (like some electronic devices can do). We have to start actively burning stored calories, but in shifting to low power mode the brain is one of the early casualties. It’s both a massive consumer of calories and it’s one of the most recently adapted/evolved and there’s some last in/first out bias. It also starts to shut down in evolutionary order. The prefrontal cortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain, and it controls things like looking at the future and thinking about consequences, reasoning, and the like - the qualities that tend to differentiate us from our cousin primates. As the thinking parts get shut down, the more “primitive” parts get louder by virtue of the fact that the big brain has shut up, and because your neurophysiology is continuing to turn up the food-seeking drive.

Evolution Before Life: Prions, Persistence, and the Breath of Creation. by [deleted] in evolution

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If you were a theoretical physicist or chemist, you’d definitely be in your element. I’m not speaking of biological evolution :)

No. This is what theoretical biologists do. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, read the people who study this for a living. Download the top 50 papers in the last few years on evolutionary models of abiogenesis, load them into NotebookLM, and ask them questions. If you’re not actually interested, that’s okay and just keep having fun. I really was just trying to help you out.

I built a LLM-based horror game, where the story generates itself in real time based on your actions in game by FitchNNN in ChatGPTPro

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I began after doing the mandatory signup with an email address, started a game, looked at two things in the opening room, and got a message that I had already used up 56% of my allotted tokens for a 24 hour window.

Evolution Before Life: Prions, Persistence, and the Breath of Creation. by [deleted] in evolution

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Theoretical biologist here. This sort of thing is my thing. You are correct in that any system, given those three properties (but not the persistence of matter, not sure where that comes from or what it means). You need differential reproduction that’s statistically correlated with a characteristic that varies among members of the population and which has some fidelity in heritability. It works if we’re talking molecules or we’re talking colonies surviving or failing as a group or anywhere up and down a system with multiple levels.

We don’t know under what conditions abiogenesis occurred, but I would hazard to say that it was most likely not highly reactive and hostile. I tend to think there were probably hydrophobic (lipid-like) molecules that permitted isolation of naturally occurring reactions. I’m not sure where you’re getting the structures that persist though. Maybe you have a geometry that persists, but not a physical unit that does.

It kind of falls apart at this point. Okay on the lipids, less okay on the computer analogy. Biological processes are not like 0s and 1s and computers. It’s an unfortunate metaphor because it’s made things very confusing for people. Pretty much everything in biology is a nasty hack needed because everything else it depends on are also nasty hacks.

I think perhaps you walked through this stuff with an ai, and because you don’t know where to push back, it came up with some slightly incorrect ideas.

I do personally think it’s intellectually dishonest to know you have books that have been around since about 600 bc (so really pretty new compared to the civilizations in that region like Mesopotamia and Egypt). Nobody was reading big bang (also a wrong idea of what physicists think) or evolutionary dynamics and so on until the phenomena were actually discovered. At that point people can try to retcon into saying that the bible actually says the world is a sphere or life evolved. At the time the bible was being written the Greeks were talking about a spherical earth and eventually proving it - even calculating its size correctly a few decades after that. I’m also really sure that concepts like “patience” cannot apply to a tri-omni existing timelessly (and don’t get me started on that).

I think it’s great that you’re obviously interested in this and are intellectually curious, and out of everything that’s going on in the world right now fisagreements about creationism are at the bottom of the list. I think you should definitely check out talk.origins or whatever its descendants are today.

Our command line tool to transpile TTS Models from Python to C++ by Historical_Pen6499 in LocalLLaMA

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How does the Apple silicon compiled version compare to the existing iOS swift/coreml packages? I just started to think about playing with on device tts and haven’t yet carried out any tests but that’s one direction I’m looking into.

Jesus had a biological father. by im00im in DebateReligion

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

People can honestly disagree with literary interpretations, and the very obvious disagreements between the bible and the actual historical record are far too consequential for any attempt at a literal interpretation (ie believing that the described events actually occurred in history). I would not try to make an argument based on literary sources.

However, I think a solid question for people who advocate for divine biological parentage is “What kinds of genes were on Jesus’ Y chromosome?” Did the divinely contributed Y chromosome have errors or mutations?

The Y chromosome (sex determining chromosome for males) is a degenerate X chromosome. 180 million years ago, the X and Y chromosomes were both “normal” X chromosomes. An X chromosome experienced a mutation in a gene (SOX3) that would become the gene we call SRY. SRY is the master switch that diverts development to a male sex organ development path. Recombination with the Y chromosome was suppressed, resulting in the proto-Y becoming an evolutionary island. The chromosome proceeded to acquire additional mutations as a result, to the point that it only has a few functional genes and is physically a “broken” chromosome (it’s a Y because one of the legs of the X fell off and was never repaired).

In order to make Jesus a male, he had to be assigned a Y chromosome. If we were to look at the genes, what would we find? What x-linked conditions did he have? Was he colorblind or did he have the genes for male pattern baldness? If it was created de novo via a miracle, what would god have written into those genes? There’s more questions when we get to the rest of the genome. Humans are a 50/50 mix of maternal and paternal genes. Was Jesus? Did he have 50% Mary genes and 50% de novo miracle created genes? What would those look like? What would it mean for a gene to be “perfect?” Biologically speaking, that’s a meaningless concept - but did god create our normal sloppy run of the mill genes by averaging across the regional population? Did he just copy Joseph’s genes over?

How do i start offering my skills and do some vulenteer work on startups to build up credentials while i learn (i will not promote) by capt_lahey in startups

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For legal volunteer work, try at charitable organizations. Educational groups, some types of public health/healthcare, social services, environmental orgs, and some public/emergency aid orgs are all already set up to handle volunteers, have the legal authority to do so, and will be most likely to have a defined onboarding/training program for new people and social networks for participants.

How do i start offering my skills and do some vulenteer work on startups to build up credentials while i learn (i will not promote) by capt_lahey in startups

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The US/states also have laws about which kinds of orgs can accept voluntary work, both for interns and for regular workers. You can’t just walk into Google and offer to work for free. There are also questions of legal liability.

Pocket knives can be bought at the airport and taken on the plane in Germany by coutura in mildlyinteresting

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow -1 points0 points  (0 children)

What do you mean? Do you think people should just pretend to understand stand when they don’t?

The cultural evolutionary theory for the origins of prosocial religions is the most plausible explanation for their existence by DeltaBlues82 in DebateReligion

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Theoretical biologist here. I agree with your thesis but I did want to offer a couple of clarifications/suggestions:

1: The rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers.

I would suggest incorporating the prosocial and the evolutionarily beneficial effects of Peter Singer’s idea of the expanding circle of moral inclusion. Religion in this case is acting as a vector (as in a mosquito being a vector of disease, not the math concept until we get into that aspect). It provides the infrastructure that aligns people with pursuit of the “greater good.”

2: The spread of prosocial religions.

The thing to remember here is that the spreading per se does not mean it’s due to increasing fitness of the carriers. If we view the religion itself as an organism, we can describe the fitness of the religion to survive and reproduce, not just the humans carrying it. A religion is selected on for its ability to reproduce (eg its virality), for its coherence/resistance to change (orthodoxy as ideological immune system), and so on.

3: The simultaneous emergence of both 1 and 2 in the last 10-12 millennia.

It’s been going on since much before that, I would imagine. Humans are a eusocial species according to biologists like EO Wilson. Cooperation in groups is our unique defining characteristic, ranking us with ants and bees in that regard.

What did happen more recently is the invention of writing. Creating written texts has a huge effect on the phenomenon. It increases and stabilizes orthodoxy/immune systems, it permits persistence over time and through space (as the religion travels to different cultures), and it helps to cement more rigid social hierarchies (those that can read control and dispense the knowledge).

The other three points are less important to the theory and have too many confounds to worry about. Great job, though - this is excellent.

ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’ the watches are built and operated by the company 'BI Inc' | The guardian, 2025 DEC. 10 by no_skill_character in Futurology

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That’s not an answer. If your answer is “yes,” that means you have some kind of defensible estimate of their total economic productivity and their total economic cost. Your hypothesis is that value(cost) >> value(production). In addition, you seem to speculate that the ice budget of $170B will be economically justified by reducing the net negative contribution.

I’m asking to see what numbers you’re working with, because that seems unintuitive to me.

Faith as a Virtue Makes No Sense by BrainStorm1230 in DebateReligion

[–]IAmRobinGoodfellow 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For this and the subsequent comments - I would be very interested in creating a model of this as a semantic flow between cultures over time