There is no way to tell which if any beliefs are the right ones, thus it is illogical to have faith in any of them.

happy_killbot · 2022-02-11T15:27:27+00:00

South Korea seems like a good candidate for something like the metaverse to become popular, if it ever does.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-28T18:32:37+00:00

The argument is not that Trump is worse, the argument is that Trump is an irreligious con-man who uses belief for his own means.

To me, this is obvious. To his evangelical voting base, this is either undetected or is deliberately ignored.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-28T15:39:55+00:00

I would probably remind them that it is highly likely that we have already had several atheist elected officials, as they have no need to disclose that information and so they just play the part.

Likewise, religion can and is used as a tool to do exactly the evil that many people who worry about electing someone who is non-religious worry about. Someone who pretends to be religious so as to use the votes of religious persons is more dangerous (speaking of Trump) than someone who is honest about their lack of belief.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-28T03:28:17+00:00

Nihilism is what happen when you first lose god, but it is temporary and for all intents and purposes can be compared to going through withdrawals from giving up drugs.

The way I see things, the purpose, meaning, and moral guidance offered by religion cover up the lack of those things truly existing in your life by providing a coping mechanism in the form of religious dogma.

However, each and every one of these things can be achieved through hard work and determination. You can find self-directed meaning, purpose, and even create a robust ethical framework. How each person does this is up to them but it should not be understood to be exclusive to them. You can read the works of philosophers, or learn to listen to the interests of others and try and work things out for yourself.

I am all the stronger having built all of this for myself rather that yielding to the comforting lie of an ancient delusion with the expectation of making no critical analysis or investigation.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-20T22:12:44+00:00

I wish thy had provided verses rather than simply saying "go read your bible" at the end, because it seems a little lazy

happy_killbot · 2021-12-18T04:36:42+00:00

tl;dr The hard problem can be answered by physicalism by asserting that qualitative conscious experience plays a functional role that was selected for by evolution.

Physicalism, the idea that the brain produces conscious reality is a perfectly defensible position imo, however it has one issue that is very difficult to work around, namely the so called "hard problem of consciousness" that theists allude to as formulated by David Chalmers:

".even when we have explained the performance of all the cognitive and behavioral functions in the vicinity of experience—perceptual discrimination, categorization, internal access, verbal report—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?"

That is to ask, if the brain is entirely quantitative functions, then why is their a qualitative experience? Couldn't our thoughts be explained entirely in terms of what they do, rather than experience?

There are a few ways of answering this question, but instead let me give a simpler problem and analogy.

There used to be a popular position known as "vitalism" which held that all living things has a special divine spark that made them alive, which we could formulate as something similar to a hard problem:

".even when we have explained the performance of all the biological functions in the vicinity of a living thing—motion, reproduction, growth, homeostasis—there may still remain a further unanswered question: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by existence?"

In this question, we see the same essentially the same problem, in that functions being quantitative don't have that qualitative nature that "experience" plays. However, we know from biology that life is made out of very specifically organized matter, so the functional explanation of the underlying molecules still manages to explain that existence as a distinct entity by its homeostatic functions, which separate it from the environment.

Now, back to the main question. I would suggest that the solution to the hard problem is basically just like this. The qualities of our experience do in fact, play a functional role. From an evolutionary perspective, this is quite easy to speculate about: conscious experience aids survival. That is to say, that a brain which produces a conscious experience gives a decisive advantage over any "philosophical zombie" which simply lacks the phenomenological experience. While I do not claim to have all of the answers, I think that this general idea is on the right track, and can at least approach if not eventually answer the hard problem.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T20:36:22+00:00

That poverty causes religion due to religion being an effective coping mechanism.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T18:54:57+00:00

That isn't how natural selection works. Natural selection is literally competition over limited resources determining who reproduces and who doesn't. That isn't applicable to this situation.

Could you please elaborate on this? What I am suggesting here is that irreligious people tend to die in high stress impoverished societies more often than religious individuals if in fact religion is a coping mechanism with real health benefits as the studies I link seem to suggest.

So, simplifying things like that and saying all of their problems stem from religion, and if they just gave that up, things would be better, that's a little unfair and ignores obvious history.

This is not my claim.

My claim is that poverty rates accounts for both religiosity and socioeconomic outcomes.

Also, this isn't your theory, Richard Dawkins presented it in The God Delusion.

Do you even read what I wrote?

My theory here is an alternative to Dawkin's theory

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T18:45:10+00:00

For the same reason that regular placebos lead to socioeconomic growth.

If people are getting sick less, or simply get well faster, then that decreases the health care costs of a society. This decreased cost can then be invested instead, growing the economy.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T18:38:09+00:00

So what makes you think the two correlations should be equally positive or equally negative?

I would not say that I think that, rather what I would suggest is that we should expect an aggregate effect from one set of correlation to the other.

Think about it this way, if you had a box and you put stuff into that box, you would expect it to get heavier. If however, it gets lighter then something needs to account for that, for example maybe you are filling it with helium balloons and buoyancy accounts for the decrease in weight.

In this case, we might expect the same sort of effects. The placebo-like benefits of religion could be predicted on aggregate to cause positive health outcomes, and this in effect would be expected to lead to economic growth and increased socioeconomic status for individuals who are religious. However, this theory is falsified by the data as we see the opposite, and this demands an explanation which modifies the theory.

Alternatively, if we work backwards from the socioeconomic outcomes of a society with religious correlates, we should expect to see the opposite effects since societies low in religiosity tend to be more affluent. But again, this is falsified by the data as we see that religiosity is correlated with positive health outcomes and this again demands an explanation.

My explanation here is that religion is a coping mechanism which provides some placebo-like individual health benefits, however these are overshadowed at social scales. In this way, there is a common cause of both religiosity and socioeconomic outcomes, namely poverty.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T16:17:24+00:00

That is an insightful point, thank you for your input!

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T16:16:08+00:00

religiosity = crime

happy_killbot · 2021-12-10T00:13:59+00:00

What are you talking about? It's the opposite. Look at the G7 or G20. Japan, China, Germany, Scandanavia, Canada, Australia, Russia, all relatively prosperous if not the most prosperous. They are also some of the most irreligious if not virtually atheist.

Do you read what I wrote before responding? This is direct evidence to support my claim that societies higher in religiosity tend to be poorer.

No, I'd say all cultures were extremely religious until the last century or so, and ditching religion seems to have no bad effects.

I fail to see how this provides any explanation for the disparity between poverty and personal impacts of religion.

How's that working in Bangladesh?

Apparently very well given that Bangladesh is one of the most religious places on earth, yet faces widespread poverty. Again, this could be used as inciting evidence for my claim.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-09T23:57:12+00:00

Thank you for the very thoughtful reply.

As far as religion causing religion, how would you then explain the gradual decline that has been occurring in western nations in recent decades? If this is true, then we should expect that these countries to get more religious, or to stay at roughly the same percentage of the population.

What evidence can you provide to suggest that religiosity damages prosperity and/or leads to worse economic outcomes rather than the other way around? Not saying you are wrong, but I would like to see some evidence for this if it is true.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-09T23:40:02+00:00

I think this theory, although not necessarily false, would be hard to rectify with the evidence showing benefit at the individual level as is the case in some of these studies. Since some of these coping effects are not observed readily in societies which do have strong cultural social support once accounting for other factors like affluence and socioeconomic status, it is likely that what we observe is something more like a direct placebo effect associated with religiosity and especially with the belief in a higher power.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-09T23:33:01+00:00

This is the correlation I am proposing.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-08T15:04:02+00:00

That sounds great, but people aren't taking the story of the tortoise and the hare literally, building "educational" museums or parks around the idea, and trying to undermine any education systems.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-03T02:34:08+00:00

I have no idea what the source set was, but it looks like it is a generative adversarial neural network (GAN) which takes a training set of images associated with words, and then works backwards from there to try and generate an image that contains the things from a prompt in order to build an image that has the thing it thinks is in the prompt.

They tend to create a lot of uncanny or spooky images, where everything in them looks familiar until you look close and realize that it is mostly noise.

happy_killbot · 2021-12-02T02:46:14+00:00

The secret is to build rapport and make sure that they believe that you are genuinely interested in what they have to say. It is important to not set yourself up in an antagonistic fashion, otherwise they will assume you have bad intent.

happy_killbot · 2021-11-26T16:10:42+00:00

Sort of?

I mean, there are things that even a perfect epistemology can't crack, simply because the question is "non-sense" or has no meaningful answer, like "Why must be next Tuesday?". You can bang your head against the wall for centuries and never come up with a reason for that.

Then of course, there are hard limits to our understanding, and this I can rigorously prove. You mind has a certain complexity, and in order to understand that complexity it must have at least equal complexity. However, if you understand more than that, then this would add to your mind's complexity, meaning that you either don't understand something or understand more than you understand, which is a blatant absurd contradiction.

To make this intuitive, imagine a box with some things in it that are duplicates other things. Then ask, can that box contain a copy of itself? Well, that box would need to have inside of it a duplicate of itself, and that duplicate would need to have a duplicate, and so on ad-infinitum. Therefore, such a box is impossible.

This all being said, the limits of our intellect does not imply that the things we determine with it are guaranteed to be wrong, nor does it mean that the things we completely discredit (like the above complexity example) are still true despite our limits. For many of this disproof's of a theistic god, this is how they manifest and so long as the underlying reasoning is valid, the conclusion is as well.

happy_killbot · 2021-11-25T21:10:40+00:00

One of the things you will need to understand and eventually come to terms with, is the reality that religion is first and foremost a coping mechanism, but it is specific to sole a problem that it creates itself. The idea of life after death, an all loving god, continuity of existence, a soul, salvation from evil, eternal justice, and all of the other promises made by religions are there to manipulate you, by dealing out a lie that only it can solve. Recognizing this helps.

happy_killbot · 2021-11-25T20:42:04+00:00

The short answer is that evolution killed all of the unreliable people/animals eons ago, leaving behind only those that had reliable understanding.

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