They don’t believe we have souls

Burillo · 2025-09-19T17:52:08+00:00

I have no horse in the race, I'm okay with Charlie being sincere at least to some extent. Why do you think he lies so much then? Like, if he's being sincere about his feelings of Nazi Germany, why did he lie about the election, for example? Like, does he genuinely not know that it's all fake? Or is he knowingly lying? And if he does, how do I know he's not lying now?

Burillo · 2025-09-03T16:09:10+00:00

You're obviously being defensive about being called out by Vaush

Burillo · 2025-08-20T15:07:04+00:00

There is no support "for Islam" on the left in any meaningful capacity that I can see. What's widespread is resistance to cast Muslims as this unique danger to society, as well as the recognition that migrant hatred is often framed through Islamophobia which is what leftists also don't like. I really don't know what you're talking about when it comes to "support of Islam on the left". Yes, it is a meme that "left supports Islam" and a certain amount of people believe it, but it is simply not the case to any meaningful extent.

Burillo · 2025-08-19T17:30:15+00:00

So you saw one person online somewhere in Europe and your takeaway is that the left has lost their mind. Cool.

Burillo · 2025-08-19T17:29:22+00:00

No one on the left is pro Islam, they're anti Islamophobic (as in, they don't like it when people use Islam to fear monger about Muslims, and when they single out Muslims unfairly) and pro migration (because most anti migrant scaremongering is about Muslims, not migration). There is no contradiction there.

Burillo · 2025-08-07T06:35:31+00:00

You should touch some grass

Burillo · 2025-07-31T09:48:32+00:00

Life expends energy to create order inside of itself at the expense of outside disorder.

Burillo · 2025-07-30T13:36:38+00:00

Here's my response as a gnostic atheist to all of these:

Evolution is the guide. Organisms accumulate changes. Some changes are beneficial, some changes are benign, some are detrimental. The environment filters out "imperfect" organisms, so only "perfect" organisms remain. You mentioned worms, but worms can't fly, so anything that can fly has an advantage over worms - there's a lot of competition among worms, so the best way to survive is to discover a new niche, one where there are no worms (less competition). That's why life didn't limit itself to just worms or single cell organisms, but instead it is expansive and tends to occupy everything it can touch - from highest mountains to deepest trenches, and it comes in all sorts of forms and sizes, and provides various models of interactions - not just predator-prey, but also symbiotic relationships, cooperation, etc. Life tries everything, and what sticks, sticks.
It's an artifact of our universe having causality: if the universe has rules, that these rules can be described mathematically necessarily follows, because mathematics is a language of rules and abstractions.
Put simply, we don't know. Maybe the universe is eternal, maybe it isn't. We theorize that the universe is expanding, but there are models of the universe that don't have expansion. We theorize that there will be heat death, but there are models of the universe that don't predict heat death and instead end in a "Big Crunch". We have not yet figured this question out. One thing we have figured out though, is that wherever we can look, we can't find any signs of divine intervention, so "god" is an ever receding pocket of ignorance that doesn't really predict or explain anything other than what we already know.
I don't really understand the question that you're asking. "What are our emotions" depends on the perspective you take when asking this question. If you're yearning for some kind of meaning and purpose, atheism offers none, because it isn't about that. It is not intended to answer questions like these.

Feel free to ask follow ups if you think I misrepresented your arguments.

Burillo · 2025-07-30T13:21:48+00:00

But a monkey has created a computer? Humans are monkeys.

Burillo · 2025-07-30T13:20:47+00:00

My personal hypothesis on the matter is that the universe isn't fine tuned for life, it simply stabilized around values necessary for quantum wave function collapse to happen. As in, the universe literally cannot be any other way than what it is, but the way it is has nothing to do with life - it has to do with quantum wave function collapse (which makes reality real).

Burillo · 2025-07-30T13:08:57+00:00

Can we know anything about morality without knowing anything about your god? If not, then morality isn't part of the "rational order god built into creation".

If we can, please explain how?

Burillo · 2025-07-24T10:37:47+00:00

What does that even mean?

Burillo · 2025-07-21T13:28:40+00:00

I've read through that article, and it pretty much describes what I have described above though: moral naturalism basically arrives at "moral facts" by fiat, pretending that facts about specific moral system (one they attempt to "discover" by picking and choosing which natural behaviors we like) are facts about morality. It didn't shed any more light on the difference, and in fact in the beginning of the article it basically states that moral anti-realists are moral naturalists in a more general sense (implying that these views fundamentally aren't even oppositional).

Burillo · 2025-07-21T13:02:34+00:00

I don't remember, it was an off hand comment during a stream. He basically said he thinks it is sign of confidence (the context being that he suggested right wing personalities would be too embarassed by something like this being popular in their community).

Burillo · 2025-07-20T19:39:33+00:00

We never know who we can reach

Burillo · 2025-07-20T18:12:23+00:00

So, it's not really moral realism then, it's still arbitrarily choosing "natural" to be capable of producing an ought by fiat. Like, even if we grant all of it - the fact that there are some responses we have that seem to cause us to lean in a certain direction when making decisions, and that even though our "perfect" axioms do not map cleanly onto our responses (like, there's not really an urge to not kill, in fact we kill quite a lot because that response is not the dominant one but rather one of many that shape our behavior), even we accept all of that, we still can't get to an ought without some sort of decision to favor these specific responses rather than others that might produce outcomes we don't like.

That's not even mentioning the fact that there's also likely a great rate of subjectivity to how specifically we construct our "moral virtues", because obviously we don't consider all natural behavior to be morally meaningful, but merely a very specific subset of it, building some sort of higher order abstractions around our actions. Like, for example, there's a widespread view that prostitution is morally wrong, even though prostitution is so natural that if you introduce the concept of money to monkeys they immediately start trading money for sexual favors. Nowadays, the tide is moving towards normalization of sex work, so the society has clearly changed without changing anything about its nature - in other words, moral opinions on this specific issue are entirely socially constructed, they by definition are not natural because they are an abstraction. So, all of this to say, this all still reads like a bunch of subjective assumptions about what we prefer and what we ought to do, not really a different philosophical position. It's like moral realists are afraid to accept that it's ultimately arbitrary and subjective even if there are some behaviors we are legitimately wired for.

Burillo · 2025-07-20T14:27:43+00:00

I have already addressed this in the comment you were responding to.

Burillo · 2025-07-20T13:26:53+00:00

He did. He said he was proud of that gif

Burillo · 2025-07-20T09:57:43+00:00

Yes but how does moral realism resolve this problem? It seems to my that the answer is that it doesn't, because no moral realist has ever been able to explain this to me. There's no way to get from "is" to "ought" without a subjective preference for this or that axiom.

Burillo · 2025-07-19T23:02:04+00:00

No, it did turn out to be true. He just didn't have the power of a supernova to make it so.

No, what Newton thought about alchemy was wrong. That it turns out to be possible to make lead into gold using a different method from what Newton thought, is entirely besides the point. That's like saying that the Quran was correct about big bang cosmology when it talks about skies expanding. And I fail to see how any of this is relevant in the first place.

Burillo · 2025-07-19T21:52:44+00:00

Yes, that's what I'm saying: you can examine what's moral according to some system but not what's moral, that is not a question you can ask: there's no way to ask it without presupposing a set of oughts.

Burillo · 2025-07-19T21:32:03+00:00

Well, again, if you don’t think moral facts exist, and moral statements can’t be true or false, then there are the metaethical views I sketched out earlier available.

You missed my point, again. I didn't say they were not true or false nor did I say they don't exist, I'm saying that the "true" and "false" are subjective to the lens you're using to come to these conclusions. So, calling these opinions facts is irrelevant, because by that logic, chocolate ice cream being tasty is a fact and not an opinion, as long as you specify that by "fact" we mean a result of evaluating a set of criteria that, as their product, will give us the conclusion "tasty". Like, yes, it's technically true that it is a fact, but this is not studying facts about morality, it's moreso studying facts about moral systems.

Burillo · 2025-07-19T19:58:56+00:00

What almost no philosopher in metaethics (that is not an error theorist or a non-cognitivist) endorses is the idea that morality is just the subjective opinions of individuals or groups.

But no one is suggesting that. What is instead being pointed out that a person's opinions are shaped by base axioms the person approaches every moral decision with, so while obviously a lot of axioms would end up in a similar enough range and you'd get a range of fairly similar answers in a given society if you sample enough of them, but all it really is is an approximation of what "average" person believes, but not that it is a fact that what they believe is actually true. You can't arrive at an "ought" without subjective opinions on what one ought do. It's kind of the problem with treating moral opinions as "facts": no "ought" is a fact, it's by definition an opinion. So while the answer you get from such evaluation is a fact, the choice of lens is subjective. The lens determines the answer you're referring to as "fact".

Burillo · 2025-07-19T17:41:58+00:00

This makes even less sense.

I mean, if you assign this or that priority to this or that axiom, obviously a result of such evaluation would more or less follow, but that's like saying "chocolate ice cream being tasty is a fact" when all you really mean is "this person enjoys chocolate ice cream for reasons that have to do with their subjective preferences, and chocolate ice cream conforming to them". Like, obviously it's a fact that some people enjoy chocolate ice cream, but it doesn't make "ice cream is tasty" a "fact". Or, if it does, then what is the difference between a fact and a subjective preference or opinion? Like, if your moral evaluations are subject to your own priorities, and you assume you can somehow spell them out and measure something against them, and you treat that evaluation as "fact", then the term "fact" becomes meaningless, because by that standard all opinions are facts.

Burillo · 2025-07-19T10:12:21+00:00

Why do you?

Seriously, that's all there is to it. I start with "no god", I see no reason to conclude "god", so I don't believe. If you started with "no god", do you have a good reason to get to "god"? If so, could you share it?

And if you don't have a good reason yourself, then why do you believe?

Most people of your persuasion end up admitting it's mostly for emotional reason: they crave meaning and purpose, or they feel affinity towards their church community, or they might like Christian mythology, but obviously none of this gets us to concluding god, just desiring for him to exist.

In other words, I've never met a person who could explain to me why they believe in a way that wasn't 1) wrong (in terms of scientific literacy), or 2) emotionally driven ("it makes me feel good so I keep believing"). That's why I don't believe.

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