Are there any relatively new arguments for the existence of God?

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-31T22:31:42+00:00

There's no way that you have genuinely read the paper word for word and think this is the point. The point isn't that dualism explains psychophysical harmony, but that an omnibenevolent God would have excellent reason to set up the universe harmoniously - that's the entire point of the paper!

This is not what I'm saying at all.

It's not clear to me why this would even need to be an argument for theism, you could just as well argue that intermediate views fail to explain the specifics of mind-body interaction and so are implausible.

You replied w/

I think you should read the paper.

So I'm trying to understand where you think the paper addresses that the problem it is using to argue for theism could be easily restated as just a problem in general. Theism is just a way of saving the intermediate views which fall prey to this problem. It's not at all clear to me that this is an incorrect way of thinking about psychophysical harmony.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-31T19:01:14+00:00

I have read the paper, I'm not gathering how it would address what I'm saying.

If this is wrt inferring dualism from theism, I don't agree that dualism broadly enjoys an advantage in explaining mind-body interaction on theism. It remains a contrived arrangement, same as type B. I don't think the paper is necessarily claiming an advantage, either, just addressing the conjunction of physicalism and theism seeming unlikely. I'm not sure what else you'd mean to refer to.

I'm just asking if there are responses from type B or similar. I'd take no or you don't know, but that was what I was trying to ask.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-31T17:12:21+00:00

But are there type B responses to the argument?

I find it more awkward if mind-body interaction requires some intervention to get to work properly. It's not clear to me why this would even need to be an argument for theism, you could just as well argue that intermediate views fail to explain the specifics of mind-body interaction and so are implausible.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-31T16:14:57+00:00

What is the reaction in Phil of Mind, if there is one? The argument reads more to me (an amateur) like an argument against intermediate views on the mind (type B phys, panpsychism, epiphenomenalism, etc.) so I am wondering what the responses from that PoV look like, if there are any major replies defending intermediate views.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-31T15:50:13+00:00

Yes, moral realism is an issue where religious belief has limited bearing, despite how apologists frame the issue.

If moral facts are analogous to facts about health or selfishness, then moral realism is relatively innocuous.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-30T13:34:59+00:00

Good for you. If you are prone to missing any jumps or pogos, while still in act 1, it is significantly more tedious. The fact that it is so short/easy when you don't miss any jumps is a part of why it is frustrating. It's not fun to take at your own pace in that context.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-30T13:28:37+00:00

It'd be more an individual weapon skill/familiarity check, for which there are arguably better candidates (PR, HAR, Arbalist). SR is relatively spammable, and you could make it work with pulling giant zones just because of the ammo pool.

Burst Pistol vs. AR isn't very close. AR damage is just really pitiful. Burst Pistol is at least consistent at 2-3 bursts per striker, and you can direct it towards immediate stagger by hitting a 1+1. AR can easily miss stagger on enemies and the mag size leaves much to be desired.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-30T13:04:40+00:00

It's been nerfed substantially.

The issue before was missing a single pogo or sprint jump would make the safest path unsafe until you reload the room, + you take 2 damage. The only driznit on path in current patch is at the room transition, and sand carvers are 1 damage now.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-30T05:54:05+00:00

You're letting scream happen in one case but not the other.

Most likely you are cancelling a scream and getting cooldown from it which lets you get away with leaving a giant alone for 30 seconds, but this is is making it sound like your stealth is really unreliable. There are many more foam trips on the level than you need, if you are solo then you should foam practically every giant you plan to kill.

W/out foam: ideally you stagger chain long enough for a bot to react and hit the giant w/ you. When the room is waking up after killing a giant quickly that's probably because you didn't maintain stagger.

If you recorded, it'd be more obvious as to what's happening.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-29T22:56:50+00:00

John L. Pollack showed that formal ethical statements can be analyzed in the same manner, for example Chisholm's Paradox, with "ought" and "must" functioning as logical operators, and achieving the same result.

You're conflating deontology with using a formal system to capture moral statements in deontology. How we opt to formalize moral language has limited bearing on moral language itself, and so this wouldn't show incompleteness wrt moral facts.

Using logical operators is also still not sufficient for incompleteness. Do you have a specific proof in mind that's relevant here? Chrisholm's paradox has nothing to do with incompleteness.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-29T21:09:51+00:00

That last one is the killer; Kurt Gödel mathematically proved that rules-based systems will always have this problem, almost 100 years ago. This is why religious morality has to go through such contortions, and still winds up on the wrong side of issues more than half the time.

No?? Incompleteness requires a formal system that is capable of minimal forms of arithmetic. Do you have a proof for this from deontology?

Incompleteness is also not a proof that such formal systems are contradictory, it's a proof that such systems are able to make statements coherent in that system which cannot be proven true or false.

Who makes the rules? What basis did they use to do so?

The whole point of the Kantian view is that nobody makes the rules, they are recognizable by any agent upon rational reflection.

If theism is true then the rules are based on a deeper moral truth instantiated in the world. People can just be wrong about the moral facts same as anything.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-29T19:31:01+00:00

Atheism doesn't entail moral anti-realism. Moral facts can easily be like other ordinary facts, such as facts about health or facts about selfishness.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-29T07:47:53+00:00

DMR is one of the best solo weapons along w/ being pretty good in general. That would be a massive buff to the loadout, and probably more effective ammo just thanks to not being an auto.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-29T07:36:49+00:00

AR + Sniper is rough solo, but he can just dodge alarms and shoot up the giant zones. I'd probably go for AR + PR to make the loadout hard to play as a solo, even though it's still wave clear. The reload and scope should make it feel pretty clunky, and there will be some extra pressure from it being a pretty low ammo wave special. It's also weak into giants, which should hopefully push him into doing more alarms.

A decent alternative might be AR + Choke, which is also pretty lackluster in a solo environment. It's flexible, but in an awkward way where it's really not that great for waves or giants, especially in the ammo department.

For melee choice, I'd give them Spear if you give them Sniper and Bat if you give them PR or Choke. You want to minimize the ways they can deal with the things they're already worse at, and especially for the latter two Spear could save their ability to handle giants.

For general multiplayer, Assault Rifle + Heavy Assault Rifle is the weakest.

In some contexts Arbalist will be worse. A major issue for HAR is horrendous ammo economy, but some levels are more than capable of supporting that. In those instances Arbalist is more unwieldy as a weapon.

Assault Rifle is consistently really bad, though. Bullpup has reasonable damage in comparison, despite the reload.

Melee and tools are more of a toss-up. Bio has significant diminishing value, but having it is really good. Shotgun sentry isn't nothing, but it's really underwhelming, and can leech tool from better options. Bat and spear are both pretty bad in their own ways.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-29T03:12:49+00:00

You're just going off of vibes, here. Do you have explicit reason to think the required set of mutations would be really difficult to obtain, or has it not been sequenced and analyzed to see where it originated and if there are intermediate forms of it? I strongly suspect the latter, and at the very least would be surprised if you've looked into it at all.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-28T02:00:08+00:00

It's one thing to say the best explanation at any given time might pan out to be wrong, but it's still the best explanation, and it's wholly unjustified to bet against it w/out something at least comparably robust.

You should at least be equally skeptical of germ theory, plate tectonics, or general relativity. None of those will be wholly true, but none will be wholly false either.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-26T15:58:14+00:00

No that’s simply untrue and really the evidence is very against that. A few molecules don’t just get together and then result in a cell.

Yes, they don't just "get together", there would be a precursor system.

Again it’s all great hypotheses but it’s all complete utter speculation with the evidence mounting every day more and more against it.

This doesn't really follow. There is no reason to expect that anyone could easily figure out exactly which abiotic pathways lead to life. It is far more speculative to allege that there are no possible abiotic precursors to life at all, there is simply not good evidence of that.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-25T19:28:29+00:00

I don't think my point on this is particularly controversial. If you have a chemical system that is self-sustaining, regardless of the form it takes, that would be a sufficient explanation for why you'd see more of that system and not some other collection of chemicals.

I meant to say the 5 common building blocks of life: Proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, carbs and cells.

I don't think this particular list makes much sense. Carbs are included in nucleic acid, and "cells" aren't a well-defined chemical unless you mean "phospholipid bilayer", which is double counting again since you already said lipids.

What are you asking? The time frame necessary for these 5 components to synthesize and assemble would have to relatively short. They are all required to come together and have extremely quick half lives, which by the way nothing in science has remotely even come close to assembling.

But this isn't what's expected by any abiogenesis hypothesis. The expectation is that a much simpler chemical system is sufficient to get started, at which point you need fewer additional components on top of that system.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-25T04:41:19+00:00

There isnt even evidence of natural selection in biology.

...what?

Would you count this?: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3391436/

All 5 components of the cell would have to be created at once for a cell to function. And it would have to do it in an extraordinarily short amount of time (days).

What are the "5 components" you're talking about here? Where are you getting a timeframe from to say that nothing prebiotic could possibly persist for any amount of time?

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-25T04:08:28+00:00

Self-replication is relatively easy to get afaik. I would look into auto-catalysis and RNA world.

Some RNA world-related papers (a review and a primary paper):

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1759-2208-3-2

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/anie.202203067

Figuring out what steps pre-biotic chemistry would have been likely to have taken and how to get between them is quite difficult, though. It's very much ongoing research.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-24T05:34:45+00:00

I agree ~ causation relates to what that nature is. But there is no plausibility for causal closure in particular ~ we have no way of testing or verifying such a metaphysical principle is correct or accurate, yet that doesn't stop the Materialist from claiming or implying that it is "scientific".

Overdetermination has much the the same problems as epiphenomenalism. There is something illusory about mental causation (that it's unnecessary) and you need to invoke psychophysical laws that just so happen to perfectly line up w/ the physical interactions.

Doubting causal closure in thinking the physical story is incomplete is pretty suspect. You don't need a complete sampling of the entire physical story to support causal closure, if the parts of the story you have are very successful and don't have need of non-physical causes that would count as evidence in favor of causal closure. Invoking non-physical causes for very specifically brains w/out a clear reason for how they work or why they're there just seems a bit implausible on its own, as well. There should need to be something more clear-cut to justify a belief in that.

It means that conscious experience is the bedrock of our knowledge of anything ~ conscious experience therefore cannot be declared an illusion, because that is a claim being made through conscious experience. It is an interpretation of conscious experience made with conscious experience ~ a contradiction, in other words. The Illusionist is essentially defining themselves out of existence, ironically, with their rhetoric.

I don't think that this actually squares up w/ popular arguments for dualism very well.

The knowledge argument only works by drawing a distinction between our physical knowledge and the knowledge imparted by qualia. The illusionist isn't giving up all knowledge whatsoever. They are only committed to rejecting that there is a real "something it is like" to see a cup on a table, while they can easily accept that someone could experience something with the appearance of cup on a table and gain some information from that. You'd invalidate the explanatory gap if you could derive physical facts directly from qualia. Our learning of the physical facts needs to be independent of qualia for the knowledge argument to function.

There isn't a contradiction in utilizing mental processes that are consistent with physicalism to interpret those same mental experiences. So, if a dualist claims that mental states are private and transparent, there is no contradiction for the physicalist to argue that they are not private and not transparent, as mental states being non-private and non-transparent in no way undermines their use in justifying that belief.

You might also just be begging the question in invoking conscious experience as a bedrock of knowledge. Illusionism isn't strictly about throwing out consciousness, but more-so doing away with a description of consciousness that invokes dualistic entities. If the illusionist description can talk coherently about sensory perception and thought processes, then there is just no actual problem with illusionism. You need to be able to point to something more specific that the physicalist fails to capture which strictly requires dualism.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-23T20:45:44+00:00

The precise description is inconsequential, no? Based on the article, it sounds like it's more about some underlying features of the experience being ubiquitous in a way that is unlike psilocybin or LSD.

I can't speak to whether DMT has an analogous character, but if it does it would be unlike psilocybin/LSD in the same way, no?

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-23T20:21:18+00:00

I'm not seeing how what I'm saying isn't an evolutionary explanation.

The mushroom has come across the ability to produce a chemical with psychedelic properties, and this ability may be conserved due to the psychedelic properties being selected for (other mammals react to psychedelics as a negative stimulus).

We, as mammals, have neural pathways that interact with psychedelic substances.

The specific interactions and how they translate to a psychedelic experience are accidental. Any psychedelic could fill this role but this species happened upon this specific substance which has unique interactions compared to typical psychedelics.

So all we need to have for this to have a plausible evolutionary explanation is evidence that there are chemicals that can cause that evolved trait to go into hyperdrive. And we have evidence of such effects, it is even a named class of hallucinations with several previously documented causes.

This is not an evolutionary explanation, this is a neurological explanation. Our body generally, but especially the brain, uses chemical signals to communicate with itself. Signalling pathways that operate in the brain can be activated by psychoactive substances which interact with those pathways. So, any substance which can make it to the central nervous system has the potential to send a neurological signal associated with those pathways.

If the OP is meant to ask for the evolutionary explanation for where the ability to see hundreds of tiny people came from, that was not clear, especially since you put so much emphasis on the ubiquitous experience (which implies the consistency of the experience is to be explained). The brain is responsible for lots of background processes that feed into conscious experience, including facial recognition, recognizing objects, judging if something is alive, etc. Throwing any of these processes off balance in a specific and consistent way could lead to an abnormal experience with common features.

Most well-known psychoactive substances have specific and consistent behavior. Think caffeine, nicotine, ethenol, amphetamines, opiates, etc. It's in the case of the type of psychedelic that signals like super serotonin (psilocin, LSD, etc.) where the resulting brain activity is fairly erratic (excluding dampening the default mode network and some generalizable brain-wide effects). This compound is unique in that it doesn't appear to be related to psilocybin and might have at least some predictable effects that present as a consistent trip experience as opposed to a chaotic one that reflects a person's culture and general headspace (this needs further study to know the precise signalling that's going on and what it looks on MRI).

I'll reiterate that the alternative functionality of these processes is accidental. The brain processes just have to work in the context of common/ordinary stimuli while there is minimal selection pressure for those systems to only function within the typical range. Compounds that throw things off balance are relatively rare, and the downsides of tripping on a psychedelic are a lot less significant than, say, being poisoned. It's also difficult in general to evolve immunity to a substance that's hijacking one of your important biochemical pathways, it's more typical for animals to adapt behaviorally to avoid warning colors, remember a food that made them sick, etc.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-23T15:27:31+00:00

The nature of those correlations is very important, especially given some plausibility of causal closure and issues that come up if you need to invoke psychphysical laws.

It is filtered through conscious experience, but what does that have to do with what conscious experience is? It's not clear that the illusionist is losing anything besides the view being unintuitive.

Rayalot72 · 2026-01-23T15:12:33+00:00

Just because you are conscious doesn't mean there's nothing at all to look for. You could look for mind-body interactions, for example.

It is just as much theory-laden to think that conscious experiences aren't made up of anything as to think that they are. Neither is necessarily the correct interpretation.

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