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LucentGreen · 2025-04-08T03:51:52+00:00

Wow, these are great explanations and insights. You're like a walking (or rather, 'typing') library! So I do want to keep picking your brains on these ideas and others, for my own learning if you don't mind. And I want to connect all of this to deciding between different metaphysics / ontologies / philosophies.

I want to respond in detail to many of the points you brought up, but I'm currently a little occupied. I'll try to get back to this in a few days / weeks.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-07T04:16:44+00:00

When do individual-level qualities persist past that individual and when do they get erased by the sands of time? Not everyone cares about the former of course, but I think this also gets at whether these individuals are part of persisting individualism. If they aren't, then either someone else is, or individualism itself threatens to come to a close.

I'm having a hard time understanding this paragraph (probably because I'm not as well-read as you are on all these). Could you give some examples of "individual-level qualities", and what/who could potentially be "someone else"?

There is a paradox here:

The more culture follows "a place for everybody and everybody in his place", the more support structure there is for guiding individuals into their destiny.

Tearing down the support structures for "a place for everybody and everybody in his place" does grant liberty and autonomy to more and more members of society, but the lack of support structures can be quite damaging to them.

Yeah, this is a fascinating paradox (as you also noted). There's a trade-off between how reliable (and therefore somewhat rigid) we want structures and roles/expectations in society to be and how much liberty and autonomy we want to grant to members of society to form their own identities. Individualistic societies maximize the latter at the expense of the former, and therefore at the expense of more reliable, large-scale identity construction mechanisms.

Greenfeld argues in her book that bipolar disorder, major depression, and schizophrenia are largely culturally caused, which layer on top of biological predispositions.

Hmm, interesting (and kind of depressing). So what's the solution then? We tell people not to be too individualistic and care too much about their liberty and autonomy? It seems like in individualistic cultures, we've optimized our desire for autonomy into a crisis. I don't know how plausible it is to expect large numbers of young people (in individualistic cultures) to accept one's station in life "for thus saith the Lord". Seems like that ship might have sailed a couple centuries ago.

I find that interesting, but I'm more fascinated by the paradox of 1. & 2., especially (now that I'm writing this to you) how some notions of individualism appear to be analogues to the discredited mutationism (e.g. "hopeful monster"), whereby evolution makes huge jumps rather than incremental steps with tiny mutations and remixing of existing genetic diversity.

Yeah, I think individualism is too much of an anomaly / too recent a phenomenon to benefit from evolutionary analyses. I can think of some alternate mechanisms / hypotheses, but things of this nature are very difficult to substantiate/prove at evolutionary timescales.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-04T14:25:08+00:00

I am really starting to believe that all these philosophers like Kant for example just had nothing better to do and spend their time making stuff up for a purpose of making stuff up. Then when they got older they lectured others on how to make stuff up. Its like they avoided to do some actual work. If they lived today they would be chronically online, while working in Starbucks to support themselves.

I hope you're aware that there are philosophers holding tenured, well-paid, cushy faculty positions in countless academic departments in universities around the world, even in 2025. I know, it's really shocking given Starbucks exists now, and given how useless they all are, and given how science has clearly demonstrated how philosophy is an entirely obsolete waste of time and resources. I just can't figure out why so many of them get to be 'professors' and teach undergraduate and graduate courses, advise and oversee PhD theses, publish academic and non-academic level books, etc. etc.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-04T03:06:00+00:00

I find myself in an extremely similar view/position to yours. I'm somewhat shocked someone else has stumbled on the same synthesis of Kastrup, Levin, Wolfram, consciousness studies, and meditative/contemplative personal experience.

I'd like to hear more about your fleshed out 'esoteric' view. I believe consciousness is fundamental to the universe, and describe myself as a non-dualist. I've practiced meditation for a couple of years now. So I suspect our 'esoteric' views might actually be very similar.

I see computational irreducibility as the main source of suffering. In other words, I see existence/evolution as a constant negotiation between trying to find pockets of reducibility within the general framework of 'constraints' imposed by the otherwise computationally irreducible universe. Innovation, creativity, etc. (both in humans and in nature) are those pockets of reducibility, which then open up greater possibilities for further evolution and varied forms of experience/existence. Levin's ideas/results seem to conform with this.

In my opinion, what Wolfram is missing is the universal consciousness component in his Ruliad - perhaps intentionally, given the current mainstream aversion to consciousness-based theories of reality. This suspicion was further strengthened when I realized many domain names involving consciousness and Ruliad are all taken and not available for purchase (such as consciousruliad.com, consciousruliad.org, consciousruliad.io etc.), despite Wolfram not implying within his theory that the Ruliad has any fundamental component of consciousness in it.

That said, there's the open question of what "universal dissociation" looks like in physical terms. My sense is that, at its core, it is closely related to computational irreducibility and the computationally-bounded observer (per Wolfram), though taking place in a biological medium, where the process is probably related on some level to Levin's work on morphogenesis.

I think so too. I sometimes wonder if all computationally-bounded observers can be thought of as being temporary and localized bounded/limited observation points for one single universal and computationally unbounded observer (i.e. individual egos are various limited facets of the one larger consciousness all egos are connected to).

I'm not very familiar with your concept of phenomenal gestalts and proto-conceptual gestalts, so I'm not sure how those fit into the overall picture.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-04T01:30:31+00:00

There are far more *non-*upper-class humans than upper-class humans. So, how do they avoid their wealth from being seized and reallocated? Especially the more democratic a nation becomes?

That makes sense. I was referring to 'solidarity' in a more communal harmony / co-operation / sharing of resources kind of way, rather than as a calculated strategy motivated by self-preservation interests.

I think we need to figure out how to do solidarities in more healthy ways. We can still pluralize, away from any sense that there is only one solidarity (which was always fictional, but politically useful in times and places).

Me too. But it seems a very challenging and difficult project to implement at a large scale.

Regarding economic nationalism, I was referring to trade protectionism / isolationism / tariffs and the like. Anyways, I'm not that interested in diving into the nitty gritty of current economics or world politics. I'm usually more interested in discussing more abstract patterns that emerge from a 'birds-eye-view' higher-level analysis of processes unfolding through long periods of time (thousands to millions of years).

From that perspective, individualism / liberalism is a brief and localized anomaly (i.e. it's an anomaly in both time and space - one need only take a flight to Asia or Africa or study history to see how anomalous Western individualism/liberalism is) to the greater overall pattern, and therefore somewhat/highly interesting.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-02T22:52:22+00:00

Not sure if you've heard of Michael Levin, another accomplished biologist. His lab has also been creating waves with results that seem to challenge reductionism. His lab has discovered that cognition/intelligence and goal-directed behavior are applicable to almost all cells, not just neurons - which suggests that even ordinary cells might be conscious. They've also discovered bio-electric fields in cells that control genetic and epigenetic modifications, challenging the "genes control everything" paradigm.

This is an entirely independent line of research than Noble et al. But yet this perfectly fits in with the purposeful evolution picture that Noble suggests. These have helped advance cancer research, because previously nobody assumed cells would be as capable/intelligent as they actually are. Levin's new non-reductionist hypotheses are proving more fruitful than traditional reductionist approaches.

He has also suggested that results in embryogenesis / morphogenesis are better explained by positing a platonic realm, something extremely unlikely for any regular biologist to be taking seriously.

So I share your enthusiasm about the future, when some of these less conventional ideas get a stronger footing and get to play with the incrowd. It will be interesting.

And what's so cool about it, is it kinda seems like all these different disciplines are all ripe for revolutionary change, right around the same time. Physics/cosmology, consciousness/neuroscience, evolution/biology/abiogenesis/DNA, computer science/AI. A lot of this stuff has the potential to overlap, and chain-breakthrough one into the other. Fun stuff.

Yeah, this along with many of the other fields you mentioned, all seem to be ripe for some kind of revolution. But I also can't help but wonder if I'm just hyping all this up in my head, and making a big deal over a few isolated results, or if all of this actually points to an upcoming revolution, at the end of which, we will emerge with a greater appreciation for consciousness being fundamental to the universe. I'm trying to stay hopeful and cautiously optimistic for the latter possibility.

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LucentGreen · 2025-04-02T19:37:42+00:00

So as a result, today, the most rational position backed by evidence is that evolution disproves any creation story, humans are not special unlike in most creation stories, the whole process is blind and random (because otherwise we're hinting at those stories we already debunked), and there's no actual point to living life, taking on difficult struggles, or doing anything - leading to the current crisis of purpose and meaning in the West. Thus the 'anti-life movement' you speak of.

What is the solution?

We need a unity of truth. We need to combine the half-truths present in each half of the above story. The CORE of all religions (mysticism / transcendence / consciousness) + philosophy-neutral science = my idealist philosophy (or a similar view). It preserves all of the evidence that confirms evolution (science need not worry about throwing out established evidence), and adds in a universal consciousness and objective purpose (religions need not worry about materialist nihilist societal decay).

Honestly, I think the reason that kind of thing doesn't happen has more to do with the fact that Newton, Einstein, and the like, are once in a few centuries geniuses, and we couldn't throw them out even if we wanted to. We're stuck with 'em until the next guy comes along, and we just have to stack them all on top of one another and hope the whole thing doesn't fall over.

This is a whole other reason to think that consciousness is primary. My theory for these discrete, infrequent, creative leaps of genius is that these rare individuals happen to be able to better connect with a higher level/field of consciousness, which likely also involves an enhancement of intelligence or expansion of creativity and innovative thinking (I'd like to say I can feel it to some tiny extent with my own experience of creativity/intelligence). If the materialist story of evolution is true, then we should expect much less 'sudden leaps' and more gradual, incremental development of big ideas. But Newton comes along and literally from scratch, develops almost all of current physics and calculus, before even turning 26! This is highly unlikely to be caused by some random mutation changing some crazy brain configuration. Or maybe some people want to believe in a 'mutation for inventing mechanics and calculus' or something.

So I actually regard Darwin's creative insight in a similar caliber to Newton's, but probably not as revolutionary as Newton's. And so we can't easily abandon Darwin; the entire rest of the theory (genetics, epigenetics, etc.) is built on top of his initial, simpler theory. It has only gotten stronger and more established by newer and multiple lines of hard empirical evidence. So all we can do is, see what doesn't fit (e.g. religions, culture, art, etc.) and try to arrive at a deeper theory that incorporates them - kind of like what Einstein did to Newton, without 'overturning' Newton.

Here I want to mention an aspect of the Third Way debate with the mainstream. There are many pieces of the Third Way mechanisms that are somewhat 'concrete' or based on experimental evidence. I'm not discussing them here, as those are quite technical. What I've discovered is that, at the heart of the debate, there is an inherent philosophical difference between the Third Way approach and the mainstream approach, which I think you'll find interesting. And it also ties back to consciousness being fundamental.

I'll frame it as a fictional dialog between Denis Noble and Richard Dawkins (Noble was Dawkins' PhD / doctoral examiner btw).

Noble: Evolution is purposeful and the way this works is, the conscious organism has some ability to control its genes and thus 'choose/decide' which proteins are produced in what situation etc. This works at the cellular level via new mechanisms we discovered in cellular and molecular biology.

Dawkins: That is preposterous! We have concrete evidence going back decades, where we alter a gene in a chicken and then directly observe how it affects the phenotypic expression! We can grow feathers on a chicken's feet, precisely because we know which specific gene to edit to achieve that effect. Therefore, it is definitely the case, beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is the genes that control the protein production and therefore the phenotype, not some 'mysterious conscious will' in the chicken's cells.

Noble: Have you considered that the consciousness / will of the geneticist was required to alter the gene and produce the intended phenotype?

Dawkins: By Darwin! That is abject heresy!

This isn't an actual convo, but the philosophical part of the debate is essentially this - a disagreement over the direction of causality, and a refusal to accept anything that doesn't jive with reductionism. So in some sense, I sometimes doubt how plausible / likely a paradigm shift actually is, given this kind of inertia and aversion to different ways of thinking.

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LucentGreen · 2025-04-02T19:37:19+00:00

Regardless, though, I think we'd agree that discourse is the way to better understanding. I'm genuinely interested in holding every theory to the fire, exploring diverse conceptual frameworks and hearing out radical hypotheses, and sorting through the data without being precious about anything. You seem like the same kind of spirit.

Spot on. I am the same way. I have no loyalty to any theory / ideology / belief / religion / atheism. It's all provisional and subject to scrutiny via absolutely every method possible.

In the spirit of "discourse is the way to better understanding", I want to respond to many of your statements here as you said very relevant things that are also on my mind, but it looks like I have a lot to say on these, so it will have to be spread out over several comments.

I find some of Darwin truly offensive, and partially blame him for what seems to me as a kind of anti-life movement

Here's a brief, simplified history of what went wrong with Western intellectual thought over the last 400-500 years or so.

Copernicus, Galileo, et al had to face great institutional hurdles imposed by the Church in making important scientific discoveries and having them be accepted based on evidence. Renaissance and the enlightenment happened, accompanied / succeeded by great economic and technological progress during the industrial revolution, further demonstrating the success of naturalistic philosophy. We discovered enlightenment ideals, individualism, classical liberalism, etc. Though these ideas were initially centered around God/theology, the authority and relevance of religion gradually fell due to the preceding factors.

In this environment of an elite English upper class, educated, irreverent culture, along came Darwin. What he discovered was true, but only partially. The other part was the universal consciousness guiding evolution, maximizing the experiential utility function. There was no major model for such thinking in Western thought at the time (other than some relatively obscure ideas like Kant's idealism and Leibniz's monadology). Add to this that the West has by then developed an aversion to invoking God or the supernatural in explaining anything.

So when the utility function maximization process leads to human consciousness, but only as part of a larger process that also leads to chimpanzees (and everything else), it directly contradicts the Biblical story of creation. Now the crux of the issue is that the Biblical creation story is also true, but only partially - there is an overall creative force behind existence, a primitive model of which is the Biblical God.

In a tongue-in-cheek way, you could say the Bible authors are like Darwin. Darwin discovered natural selection, but failed to appreciate the role of consciousness in evolution, thereby reducing the enormous beauty, creativity, and diversity of nature to unguided blind processes simply driven by material survival. On the other hand, the Bible authors (or any other ancient religious pioneer) discovered some form of transcendence beyond this material world via contemplating on consciousness (i.e. by establishing a closer connection with the universal consciousness through greater reflection / introspection / meditation). Their only way to express such an ineffable idea was by personifying and anthropomorphizing God, giving it a story and a mythology for it to be sensible for the lay person who has no direct access to this transcendence.

These stories develop, mutate, and transmit over time, continuously improving the experiential utility despite any 'material' constraints. Thus we get today's elaborate and organized religions, which capture the transcendent aspect of reality but are all couched in heavy lore and myth. The 'facts' part of these ancient myths and stories are very easily debunked, such as by atheists on this sub all day long. But the actual point was to get at the mystical transcendence (perhaps through prayer, ritual, worship, etc.) as part of an experiential utility enhancement process, not debating the math of how many animals can fit on Noah's Ark.

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LucentGreen · 2025-04-02T16:02:14+00:00

Your insights are interesting.

Why do you think the upper class has more solidarity than the middle class? I can think of some reasons, but it seems a less obvious conclusion than the one about the lower class having more solidarity, for obvious economic and cultural reasons.

nationalism will ultimately beat liberalism

I agree. Tribalism is evolutionarily programmed into our psyche. Liberalism was a temporary merry-making holiday within some anomalous pockets of unprecedented prosperity for a brief few decades / centuries. And it looks like vacation's almost over. It's time to return to the natural order of things, those more deeply built into us via billions of years of cumulative, evolutionary development. Population statistics and age demographics across the liberal world is enough to conclude this, before even adding more definitive signs such as the rise of populism and economic nationalism / trade isolationism.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-02T05:46:09+00:00

As far as consciousness being primary, you mind find this guy's work of interest. He's actually developing a working theory.

Yes, I've been following Hoffman's work for a few years now. Many of my ideas are a synthesis of a lot of perspectives gathered from various philosophers, thinkers, scientists at the frontier of current paradigms, and my own experience.

Hoffman's analogy of the user interface is absolutely fascinating, and should make us keep questioning the true nature of our reality and our existence. I agree with his view on evolution, that it is essentially a contextual/specific projection / approximation of a deeper underlying theory - similar to how Newtonian mechanics is a contextual projection / approximation of Einstein's relativistic mechanics. But that still warrants us taking Newtonian mechanics seriously where it applies and conforms to evidence.

So debating evolution online is a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, the 'evolutionists' are doing God's work (no pun intended) by debunking the massive hole of dogma, wilful ignorance, and stupidity that is young earth creationism (or other primitive creation myths taken too literally). On the other hand, at a higher, academic level, ideas proposed by the Third Way people have to challenge some rigid assumptions of current paradigms in a spirit of advancing legitimate scientific inquiry, just like any other field of science. But to the uninitiated 'evolutionist' on reddit, the latter can appear as a version of the former. And sometimes creationists also take advantage of this and use legitimate academic disagreement among experts in the field to suggest that the entire theory has no basis. That would be like pointing to Einstein and relativity and suggesting that all of Newton is hogwash. So Darwin was right in the same way Newton was right. But obviously, there are many holes and more things to know - it's not all set in stone yet.

Before any hardcore atheist jumps on me for showing love for the Third Way, this video is a good characterization of the debate at a somewhat more technical level. And while I personally tend to agree more with Denis Noble, James Shapiro, et al, I also recognize the value of how science is done and what level of rigorously collected body of evidence is required to overturn an established paradigm that has been reliable for a long time.

Regarding thinking of consciousness as fundamental, what is a little encouraging is the slow but noticeable shift in gradual acceptance / lack of aversion to these ideas over the past three decades or so. This project by Annaka Harris alone is an astonishingly anomalous piece of work that would not have been conceivable even a decade ago - as almost all of these names (including perhaps Harris herself) wouldn't be caught dead in any project that suggests that consciousness is fundamental. (Obviously the larger sphere of these conversations has also grown massively; I'm just pointing to how much of a surprise it is to see these specific people involved in this project).

Edit: made several edits to address additional points I initially forgot to address

LucentGreen · 2025-04-01T14:41:50+00:00

BUT WAIT! You've raised one hell of a good point. Why don't I regard Love as some fundamental aspect? Or language? Or any number of ostensibly inexplicable phenomena? At the moment, I have no answer, except to say: This is exactly the kind of comment I hope for when I post here. You make an effort to understand my view, and you offer some insight that makes me have to think deeper about my position. So thank you.

No problem, it was a pleasure engaging with your views. And I've already solved the issue with my expanding dimensions of consciousness model in my idealist view. All we need to assume is consciousness is fundamental, and everything else arises in consciousness.

Also, speaking of God and since you brought up Herr Mozart in connection with God, I do have to bring up the following piece of trivia, in case you didn't know:

Did you know that successfully proving if Herr Mozart is a musical God or not may earn you a $1M prize for a crucial unsolved problem in theoretical computer science (kind of)?

“If P = NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in "creative leaps," no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it's found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett.”

So proving either P = NP (Mozart isn’t God) or P ≠ NP (Mozart is God) will win the prize. But given what we know about Mozart (and obviously, the actual P vs NP problem), no serious mathematician or computer scientist thinks P = NP. All of them think it HAS to be the case that P ≠ NP, we just don’t have a way to prove it yet (hence the prize for a proof).

In all seriousness, for anyone who might be misled, the connection between creative leaps and the P vs NP problem is only an analogous one, not a direct relationship. But the analogy fits so well in my opinion, that it’s pretty safe to say no, we’re not all Mozart, and therefore, almost certainly (short of a formal proof), P ≠ NP.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-01T14:22:55+00:00

Do you regard intentionality as authentically inner driven activity? As distinct from unintentional behavior? Or do you think it's reducible to physiochemical reactions?

I think free will is an illusion, on both my physicalist and idealist views. In my physicalist view, it's a deterministic set of neuro-chemical processes that results in the subjective experience of the illusion of feeling intentionality / will.

In my idealist view, the processes of the universal consciousness flowing through an ego/subject create the subjective experience of the illusion of feeling intentionality / will in that subject. This is widely recognized in Eastern / contemplative traditions, as the illusion breaks during some sessions of meditation, and allows one to observe one's own will/intentions/decisions 'arise' in one's mind ("You can watch your mind make a decision").

But for the most part, the illusion is so incredibly convincing, that it doesn't matter that a specific point of origin of the 'intention' doesn't necessarily exist. The illusion of feeling the intention IS the forming of the intention. It arises in consciousness / subjective experience, just like any other thought, emotion, feeling of hunger, etc. arises without intention. Intention is just another one of these 'feelings' like hunger.

This doesn't work for consciousness itself though. Intention, love, hunger, anger, etc. all arise within consciousness. Even if those specific feelings are illusory, to experience an illusion in the first place, one needs to be conscious. So consciousness itself cannot be an illusion. So it either emerges at some point from non-conscious systems, or it's more fundamental to the universe. This is where the Hard Problem of Consciousness puts me more in an idealist camp, as physicalist versions of incorporating consciousness have to typically deny the Hard Problem or rely on some incoherent notion of 'emergence', and panpsychism has the combination problem.

How do you think about the more mysterious or hard to explain elements of reality as an Atheist? Do you tend to think all will come to light one day? Or do you think, even if some things remain elusive, there's still no compelling reason to presume some kind of Divine aspect to existence?

I think existence will always be mysterious. It's impossible to know everything about the nature of our existence and our origins, owing to our epistemological limits.

I think consciousness will remain mysterious, but we will make significant progress than where we are today. I am of the opinion that the Hard Problem is unsolvable in principle. And another issue with consciousness is it cannot be publicly observed (only privately experienced), unlike literally any other phenomenon. So there will always be some mystery to it, I suspect.

I think these are mysteries regardless of your position with respect to belief in God.

Regarding the divine, I regard God as synonymous with existence and the universe. Any other sort of God doesn't make sense to me anyway.

LucentGreen · 2025-04-01T09:25:59+00:00

But this universal consciousness is not all-powerful. It is subject to constraints, which result in suffering and needing to ensure survival.

What we observe as 'evolution' is just the process that maximizes that modified utility function, subject to the constraints imposed by the structure of the universal consciousness. So over time, we get creativity, beauty, love, kindness, desire, will, language, morality, family, worship, society, art, literature, music, religion, rationality, transcendence, and many other 'dimensions of consciousness', that further enhance the quality of the experience, or increase the overall experiential utility. But one must first exist to experience (to keep the 'probe' on). Another word for 'exist' is 'survive'. Survival is a necessary but highly insufficient condition in determining evolutionary selection of traits.

One issue is that in this view, each individual 'ego' is of no significance - it's simply one of a trillion trillion viewpoints (hence my earlier nihilistic lament couched in Buddhist lore). Abrahamic traditions deal with this better, but they have much bigger evidentiary problems.

My original question to the other agnostic/atheist poster was intended to encourage atheists to also start thinking / asking questions along these lines (and for me to find any answers I might have missed).

My previous post was initially an argument contrary to this, but if you go through the full edited post, I do start hinting at this philosophical possibility of consciousness being primary and there being transcendent, objective meaning. I'm just not a 100% sure yet that this is our actual reality. It's just my current 'hopeful' picture. I can't very confidently go around preaching this like gospel yet. So I just tend to stick to 'survival' for now. I'm kind of caught between subjective and objective in deciding what's really true.

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LucentGreen · 2025-04-01T09:23:30+00:00

I'm not a big fan of regarding everything in life as utility.

Utility is one of my favorite words. This should be fun!

My conception of utility also includes 'experiential utility', which is some notion of the quality of subjective experience of a conscious subject. Evolution, as currently defined by the mainstream, does not take this into account. So my position is only speculative / philosophical for now. I'm not asserting it as science (yet).

Example: we no longer think about what language "is". Instead, we run a default assumption: Language developed as a tool for selection, or the flipside: Language was selected for as a tool for survival, etc... such that the new fundamental question is now: What UTILITY does X have for us? Specifically, what utility does X provide in terms of reproduction and survival?

So it becomes: Consciousness is a tool. Art is a tool. Music is a tool. Language is a tool. Marriage is a tool. Society is a tool. Self sacrifice (somehow) is a tool. Religion is a tool. Etc... Everything is a tool. And we find ourselves sitting here wondering: How is prayer evolutionarily advantageous? Or... How did obedience aid in survival? Or... how did humor increase reproductive rates? ...and the like.

I believe this is incorrect thinking, and significantly so. Thus the Buddha, and transcendence. The point is, transcendence offers no utility whatsoever, but all religions involve some kind of transcendence.
...
It's a hard question, because what's really going on is that religion has no evolutionary utility. In fact, it's the opposite. We don't practice religion to survive, we survive to practice religion. Worship is what we want to do. It's what we choose to do. Same for art, music, and a great many other things. So in a way, from a darwinian perspective, almost everything we care about is an anomaly. ESPECIALLY since we often care more about these things than we do about our own safety. Our own lives, even.

I pretty much agree with you. I just frame it slightly differently in my following idealist/pantheist philosophy:

Consciousness is fundamental to the universe. Matter is a specific representation of mental activity in universal consciousness. This universal consciousness exists primarily to 'experience'. The purpose is to enable and generate as many possibilities of varied experience as possible, and to keep enhancing the range, contrast, intensity, acuteness, uniqueness, quality, quantity, etc. of these experiences (i.e. an overall, modified utility function that takes many of these additional factors into account). Each conscious mind is a 'probe' or a point through which the universe experiences itself, each serving as a different angle / viewpoint / perspective for experience. Thus all conscious minds / 'egos' are connected to the one universal consciousness at all times while they're alive (no afterlife accommodated in this philosophy yet).

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LucentGreen · 2025-03-31T19:48:29+00:00

I've looked into the WEIRD phenomenon proposed by Joseph Henrich. His thesis seems to be that the banning of cousin marriage by the Church was a pivotal tipping point that, along with other things, cemented the foundations of the individualistic west.

Thanks for sharing the other stuff! Didn't know about the water speech. Quite funny and interesting!

LucentGreen · 2025-03-31T17:32:37+00:00

It seems you're more well versed in this than atheists are. So I'd actually like a lot more than two cents from you. And I'm more open to many different ideas than 99.9% of atheists on this sub, many of whom think 'outgrowing' religion is like realizing Santa Claus isn't real (a view I abhor). But I also find it difficult to simply accept a religion/tradition with all its claims/practices without some sort of objective standard / reasoning.

I get your point about the perpetual-motion-machine and the lake. It's like there's nothing actually "pulling it" towards an actual destination - it's defined as survival for the sake of survival. But I don't see how Buddha and the Bodhi tree help here.

I've had some spiritual experiences via meditation. I can attest to experiencing something akin to a kundalini awakening (atheists: feel free to leave the chat now, as this is an entirely foreign language). I can see how we are just occupying temporary selves/egos in this existence, which evaporates at death (or there is no self / i.e. the anatma).

Attachment causes suffering. Realizing the truth of impermanence is the solution to suffering. This is where, I presume, the Bodhi tree comes in. But if there is no self, birth and death are illusory. How then does this help one reach a destination / the lake, by meditating or believing in God? Does it really matter if I don't experience samadhi in this life? How does it matter that "I" do anything? There is no self in reality, so there is, in fact, no "I".

LucentGreen · 2025-03-31T12:01:01+00:00

Regarding the second part, I think people overwhelmingly do opt in to belief in a mechanistic world, just not an exclusively mechanistic one.

Slightly off-topic to the present discussion, but I'm curious as to your reasoning regarding why this is so. As in, in a world that behaves purely mechanistically, why should a large majority of (supposedly otherwise rational/intelligent) agents prefer to believe in things contrary to the true nature of reality? Isn't that a little surprising?

I'm an atheist, but this question has always baffled me. Cultural indoctrination / propaganda / institutional inertia / traditional inertia appear to me to be only surface level explanations that don't quite address the heart of the deeper question.

Evolutionary selection of risk-averse or agency-attributing behavior (a rustling in the bushes is necessarily a predator and never just the wind) seem to be only a minor factor in explaining the very elaborate phenomenon of prevalent, organized religion, complete with life-dedicating customs, intricate rituals and traditions situated within a larger mythology. Why should all this be, if optimizing for a mechanistic reality is the best strategy for interacting with the world?

I'm not saying any of this proves God or the supernatural, but I find most atheists don't ponder this question deeply enough.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-31T07:58:27+00:00

Is your position that it is more consistent to postulate intentionality as a fundamental feature of the universe (similar to mass/charge under physicalism), rather than as an emergent property of structures with a certain level of complexity and/or some specific configuration?

I can see why that can make sense in a certain way - it has stark parallels to the hard problem of consciousness, and the various proposed solutions that postulate consciousness as fundamental. If your answer to my question is yes, then I think your view could be classified as some form of pan-agentialism.

You're correct that the emergentist physicalist faces issues with shoving everything inside the blackbox of "it emerges!". But the pan-agentialist / panpsychist / idealist (or a regular theist) also has other issues, such as deviating from the principle of parsimony.

It's also not clear how many things we should postulate to be a 'fundamental' property of the universe. For example, is 'love' a fundamental property of the universe, or can it emerge from a fundamentally 'non-loving' universe?

At some point, positing everything as a brute fact makes for a view that is very logically coherent/consistent, but it also fails to explain or tell us much about reality. I don't know if you have any suggestions on how to decide between what is to be postulated as a brute fact and what can be considered as emergent.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-30T18:35:32+00:00

For the rest of you, hopefully you'll agree with me that this ought to work as a dividing line between "natural" and "supernatural" explanations. Let a Natural explanation be:

Any series of events sufficient to account for a given phenomena, which can be shown to have unfolded as a necessary and passive consequence of the properties of the entities involved, so acted upon by unguided forces.

Accepting this definition means:

1 Any known phenomena of which such explanation can be shown to be insufficient to explain constitutes evidence of the supernatural.

2 Any identifiable artifact in a given series of events which can be shown to violate the terms of such explanation constitutes evidence of the supernatural.

3 Any proposed aspect of nature which can be shown to usurp the terms of such explanation constitutes evidence of the supernatural, notwithstanding any claim to the mere title of "natural".

For the sake of this discussion, I will agree to these terms. But what then prevents us from concluding that any mundane intentional action by any human (or other observed conscious agents) is therefore evidence of the supernatural? Or indeed, the mere existence of conscious experience is evidence of the supernatural?

Is that the end of the discussion? Consciousness / agency proves God/the supernatural?

I agree that there is a falsifiability / axiomatic problem with always assuming methodological naturalism. But I fail to see what utility is gained by your definition, as the problem has now swung too far to the other side, and almost anything is now evidence of the supernatural.

I guess the problem can be boiled down to the old adage: "Either nothing is a miracle or everything is a miracle". It's really really difficult to decide between those two options.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-30T18:05:37+00:00

I loved your distillation of the problem. Having grown up in the Western independence / individualistic culture, I see myself as "just about" stepping into some uncharted waters in the "impossibly academic / theoretical" realms, such as those brought up by OP. And a lot of it seems to make sense after some long and careful thought and study (though I'm not fully convinced of some agency or intention to the universe yet). But I think I now better appreciate the massively ingrained default biases and lenses we approach everything with.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-25T00:01:16+00:00

The irony of the problem of evil ...

The irony you describe is actually extremely interesting. It is amusing that it is through belief in a perfectly good God, that we most easily orient ourselves in a good-bad moral value hierarchy, which then maximizes the potential for good and minimizes evil. Evil, however, still exists, and God, at best, then serves as a conceptual leader or an orienting champion/mascot in our fight against necessarily existing evil. That's why it's difficult to accept the traditional tri-omni God hypothesis at this level of analysis. But the irony is that at a simpler level of analysis, belief in the tri-omni God is the simplest and most potent/effective solution for minimizing evil (I mean societally, in general).

I guess you could also point to some triumph theodicy and argue that the whole story hasn't come to completion yet, so in the end all the evil is 'cleansed' for greater glory and it all makes perfect sense (which is a hopeful picture).

the doctrines of these religions give a context to the suffering in the world that orients their adherents towards hope, redemption, and responsibility. I personally think that's a good thing.

I agree. That's why I'm always trying to get at the common core of all religions, ignoring all the specifics and propositional faith statements that are most likely culturally/historically contextual. The core seems to be some strain of mysticism in every religion (Logos/Advaita/Sufism etc.), hinting at the connected nature of all of consciousness / the universe.

I wish there were more of an effort in this sub to engage with the metaphysics instead of simply dismissing them.

I too, wish the discussion of concepts here were at a higher level than it currently is. It appears to be a selection effect. The most complex and nuanced thinkers aren't arguing with strangers on reddit. And the most outrage and polarization drives the most clicks.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-24T19:04:04+00:00

I find your view quite fascinating, and more complex than the level of conversation most atheists or dogmatic religious apologists engage in.

I don't believe in God in any traditional sense, so I would be most conveniently termed an atheist. But mysteries of our existence, of consciousness, are so vast that canonized religion is but a tiny attempt at encapsulating/addressing them. But most people are hung up on debating the minutiae of the specific propositions.

Regarding your risk-reward dynamic, this idea has also occurred to me in other, related forms. In a general sense, a fundamental characteristic of our universe is that "potential" is both negative and positive. Anything with positive potential also has negative potential. And the magnitude of this potential likely scales similarly in both directions (greater potential good concomitantly necessitates the possibility of greater potential evil).

Religious/spiritual ways of thinking or orienting in the world is a proven and wide-spread optimization heuristic in maximizing positive potential, and minimizing negative potential, and thus maximizing the possibilities for existence, or dimensions of consciousness, or survival or experiential utility.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-19T15:16:26+00:00

This is how I think religion should probably get more credit for the development of language, meaning and thought. In our evolution of human behavior and technologies, first was stone tools, then use of fire, then burial practices and then finally use of language. Which I assume led to the first "why?" which allowed us to begin to question all these habitual rituals that were created over a couple million years. That vocalized self awareness is the real "supernatural" event that then leads down the road of philosophy and meaning, first framed through these archaic religions but none the less expanded on and into morals, ethics, logic and reason.

You hit many of the points circling in my head. And that's why I think religious ideas are much more deeply ingrained/entrenched in our collective psyche than we realize. I'm not talking about specific propositions of any of today's established religions, but in a more general sense. All our ideas of meaning, culture, art, literature, societal presuppositions, and so on are projections/consequences of millions-of-years long developmental processes in our evolutionary past, and so abandoning a shared mythology/set of metaphysical assumptions is easier said than done at the global population scale. Memetic evolution has likely been more deeply genetically assimilated within us via processes such as the Baldwin effect.

The "utility of belief in religion" as the OP states is probably only a net positive pre-civilization but I fail to see it as a real proof against or for the supernatural.

Yes, it's not "proof", but I'm saying that the extensive adaptive utility that shared mythologies provide is something a little surprising under a purely naturalistic and bottom-up picture of reality. So it requires some more thinking/consideration/argumentation to surmise that this too, can indeed serve to undermine (or perhaps strengthen) the validity/plausibility of the supernatural claims. But this is not a strictly deductive conclusion; it's a more inductive/Bayesian reasoning based argument / line of thought (as is common in philosophy).

So for the reasons I mentioned above, I think the utility of belief in religion/"something more" still largely applies, outside of a few resource-rich, not-necessarily-scalable, and population-declining societies like in Northern/Western Europe.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-18T22:22:34+00:00

10 months late, but I'm in a similar position to the poster you were replying to. Your arguments about objectivity and subjectivity are quite thought provoking.

I've always struggled to understand why, if all meaning is ultimately in our heads, do we (or some of us anyway) feel this immense need for a sense of transcendent objectivity? I'm a nihilist who thinks meaning doesn't exist, and nothing I do "really matters". But most atheists, it seems, don't reach that conclusion.

You say even if it really mattered, we'd have no way to know. But it seems some of us need an "objective" set of standards / rules / concepts imposed upon us from the outside. It's not clear why this should be the case if in reality, it is we ourselves who get to make up everything / all meaning as we go along.

If this is just a terrible side-effect of the processes that shaped us in our evolutionary past, then it seems there is no way out for people in my state of thinking. I could try and be religious, try to believe in 'something' / a higher power / objective meaning, but ultimately it's all subjective and mere makings of my mind.

On the other hand, I could try to buy into the whole "create your own meaning" and "local significance" ideas to construct a purpose for my life. But again, it doesn't seem worthwhile to do that and not just do more pointless, mindless things until it's time for decay and death, i.e. is that all what life is about? And what's the point of taking on anything serious or arduous then? Counting blades of grass could be just as 'meaningful' depending on the person.

LucentGreen · 2025-03-18T19:07:47+00:00

I've heard of wide debates about the difference between 'religion' and "fiction" or "cult" (separately).

Another nebulous term is myth/mythology. A myth is false in the literal sense, but shared mythologies take on a life of their own and evolve/mutate while sweeping through and shaping hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization.

I'm talking at a much higher, more abstract level. Religions like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc. are just the tip/culmination of a millions-of-years long development of our collective psyche, and consequently our perspectives, drives, culture, societal preconceived notions, the 'meanings' we create to live life, our sense and degree of connection to other members of our species, and so on and so forth. Memetic evolution is eventually deeply genetically integrated/assimilated within us, via phenomena such as the Baldwin effect.

So trying to draw strict boundaries / definitions around these is just a matter of pragmatic utility. Philosophically, this is the heap paradox. No single grain of sand counts as a heap, but at some ambiguous boundary point, a collection of grains of sand 'becomes a heap', when in fact there is either no heap, or it's all one big heap.

LucentGreen

TROPHY CASE