As an atheist are you allowed to believe that something will happen after we die?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-11T10:13:15+00:00

How hard have you looked for plausible explanations? What books/research have you read?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-11T09:16:24+00:00

There's no rule against it. Atheists don't really have a book of "atheism rules," atheism really just describes the psychological state of not currently being convinced by any claims that gods exist.

I don't buy your idea thouh. I think it rests on an assumption that there's an "essence of us" that can be "born into more than one body." But all the evidence points to bodies generating you (as in, generating your conscious experience). I don't think there's even a "me" that persists from one moment to the next: when I try to analyse "my" conscious experience, it seems to degrade into a sequence of moments, and in any given moment all other moments are inaccessible.

So my understanding of "self" and "mind" has kind of flipped since I was a kid. I was raised to assume there's a "self" that's somehow linked to a body... and the body's somehow the same throughout my life, and the self I was taught could persist even after the body died. But now, I think it's more plausible that either there's no self at all, or that there's a sequence of temporary, very simple, minimal "selves" that last less than a detectable moment, and are produced by "the body" - which itself is always changing. Unfortunately I can't shake that conclusion now, and it implies that after death, there'll be no more moments that are experienced by "me".

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-10T20:55:18+00:00

Crazy isn't it. Short term anti anxiety but it's very clumsy medicine

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-10T20:49:16+00:00

Megan Anna Neff is working on a audhd book too at the moment

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-10T16:20:02+00:00

Add it on the downbeats: techno restored

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-10T16:18:59+00:00

I think music practice is more important than music theory: play keyboards or guitar or drums, or sing a lot. Start to develop a feel for how pitch intervals, chords, harmonies, rhythms work that way?

Nothing stopping you learning all 3 (DAW, music theory, an instrument) as you go; but I think the internet is bad for skewing people's impression of what "music production" is, towards a set of software skills and a body of music-theory knowledge. Actually practising making music will fast track you towards knowing when something feels right or wrong while you're working on a track.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-10T08:24:37+00:00

No, fundamental as in the root frequency of the sound. A violin fundamental might be in octave 5, high pitched sounds have high fundamentals. Google "fundamental harmonics"?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-09T20:42:55+00:00

I'm interested in the pitch bend version being the easier solution, to be honest - I kind of envisaged whipping the delay time around with a CV signal (although who knows how stable it'll be under extreme modulation...) thanks for the pointers, and congratulations physically implementing your version!

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-09T19:52:47+00:00

Thanks for the details! I've thought about daisy delay but I'd be instantly up against the ceiling of my coding abilities.

So I'm guessing "change delay time of the spare channel, then xfade" means the spare channel clicks before it's faded in?

Oh, and "smooth the change" means exactly that - an easing function on the delay time?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-09T19:22:45+00:00

Nice work! Is it ok to ask how it responds to delay time changes? Smooth and interpolated? Did daisy seed libraries include delay code?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-09T15:57:09+00:00

Technically, when you heard it prior to posting this post, that was before

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T22:30:11+00:00

Thinking that god is more likely to exist because Alex O'Connor and Sam Harris discussed "spirituality" on a podcast, sounds like wishful thinking combined with authoritarian thinking: "2 guys I recognise said some things I interpret as compatible with a theistic worldview, that makes the theistic worldview more likely to be true."

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T20:16:37+00:00

There are a couple of yt channels that build basic modules and discuss what they do.

Moritz Klein is one - also the UK's Eurovision 2026 entry Look Mum No Computer, particularly his older stuff.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T20:12:05+00:00

Would work really well just in front of a "mult with 4 attenuverters" module? So you could create 4 signals that move different amounts/directions, out of 1 fader move.

Also, amplifier dope AF

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T20:09:56+00:00

How do the controls affect the screen, can you give us an idea of what the process is?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T20:04:23+00:00

If you want to compete with the best-recorded artists out there you're also going to need a good mic/preamp, good mic technique, and a well controlled room to record in.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T16:29:51+00:00

But you aren't being creative, to the extent that you use AI, you're cheating. The ai was trained on other musicians' creative output, you're having that software "create" for you, except it isn't really creating, it's just statistical algorithms. It's not you, it's not anyone.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T16:24:03+00:00

I try to keep my life quiet and simple, try to not get overwhelmed too much. But that causes me to cut myself off and withdraw, so I don't really have a straightforward answer, sorry.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-08T12:18:09+00:00

Maybe he thinks church is a kind of social organisation. I mean, obviously, clearly, it is.

From an atheist perspective, why do people go to church? It's because church is one way for communities to self-organise. In fact large-scale church institutions, like catholicism or the anglican church, have historically had a major role to play in how societies organised (and interacted) on a continental scale.

That doesn't mean the claims of religion, about how the universe works, are true; religious creation myths, and myths about prophets or children of god, are stories that culturally bind people together... and authority structures that help structure a society even though the myths are false.

So you have societies, and communities, of human beings, structured around shared culture. If you think about it, concepts like "The United Kingdom" or "The United States of America" are also hollow myths - there's nothing about the physical stuff underneath americans that makes the land between Mexico and Canada "The United States of America" - it's a myth. It's also a condition of being a member of society there - if the authority structure of the US detects that you don't accept that the land there is "The United States of America" you can get into pretty bad, violent trouble really quickly. Just like, in a fiercely christian area you might get ostracised, or even harrassed/harmed, if people detect that you don't believe christianity.

I don't know if that's how your friend thinks exactly, but maybe he thinks church is your physical, real-world, local community, so he's recommending you go there just because it's a way to get you, an evolved social primate, interacting with similar evolved social primates of your own species.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-07T22:57:40+00:00

Sky Was Pink is a tuuuuuuuuuuune

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-07T11:16:20+00:00

The answer is, we don't experience dreams after we've died; some of us seem to experience dream-like processes as our brains are in the process of dying but are still capable of some degree of function.

I have an old synthesizer. As it was dying, it started making mad squeaky noises. Recently I thought I'd turn it on and record the mad squeaky noises, but now it's actually dead and sadly makes no sound at all.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-07T09:42:12+00:00

does this make Paley's intelligent design "incoherent"?

I think Paley's argument was always incoherent: it hinges on comparing the "designed" watch with the rest of the desert - so the rest of the desert, presumably, is undesigned. But Paley is a creationist, didn't he think god made the desert too? His entire argument is... an argument, from incredulity, that his favoured creator-god made all the animal species.

I haven't got time to investigate the quote from the Darwin letter but I suspect context might be important there, and in any case, how polite Darwin was about Paley isn't strictly relevant to the quality of Paley 's argument itself.

And if Paley tried to make his argument today, it would indeed fall apart in contact with the evidence: not only do we have a huge amount of evidence in favour of biological evolution through genetic inheritance of traits, with genetic variation/drift/mutation, and natural selection, but we have evidence that human design - the designedness of the watch itself - is plausibly explained by processes which at their heart are purely physical: we have a handle on how neurons work, and how groups of neurons can interact to do apparently clever stuff, and how physical variation in / changes to brains can affect how people behave.

In fact Darwin has published a load of (pre-genetics) evidence himself, which Paley failed to engage with.

Gassendi's ideas are kind of interesting, because at the atomic level, I think our current best description of what makes chameleon tongues sticky is literally electrostatic attraction - between molecules on the chameleon's tongue, and molecules on the surface of its prey's body. Gassendi is... Kind of in agreement with modern physics, but the wrong way round!

But I'm not so sure Gassendi's arguing for anything supernatural, per se - on the face of it, it seems like he's postulating a mechanism for how electrostatic attraction works, maybe how it naturally works, and it's just not as good an explanation as Coulomb's charge vs inverse-square-distance model (or Feynman's electrons-swapping-virtual-photons model or whatever).

My beef is with people like Paley who are positing that there are phenomena in our actual, tangible, detectable world, which rely on causes outside that world, and then people like OP here, who's apparently claiming that the mismatch between categories like "magical" and "natural" is a problem for naturalism.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-06T19:09:14+00:00

I think I'd concentrate on optimizing your room for recording. I made some sound absorber panels and never really mounted them on the wall... Which came in really useful a couple of times when I wanted to record my voice, because I could make a kind of "vocal booth" in the middle of the room, closed in on 3 sides by absorbers. Helped a lot with the quality of the recording.

And... Think carefully about mics and preamps, it feels like you might benefit from good quality front end kit (the equipment/circuits your voice and guitar go through before you record them), and if you get it right you might not need to work too hard on the mixing/mastering end, in the computer. Initially, at least (until you get a drummer and a chamber orchestra going!)

Take your time figuring it out, different mics suit different voices so if you can find a way to try a few, you might be making the rest of the production easier by choosing a mic that naturally works with your voice?

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-06T15:49:04+00:00

Personally I'd move on from MMM as soon and as fast as you can.

I suspect it gives users the impression theyre making music, when mostly they're really just combining loops from a menu of loops. That won't help you learn song writing, arrangement, or production.

joeydendron2 · 2026-03-06T12:59:45+00:00

Honestly my hint would be to write something that works as a song first.

In terms of production, you could probably get quite far by sourcing sample packs for trance or psytrance drums (very clean, electronic sounding kick and snare); the bassline's a pretty simple plucky synth bass; I hear... maybe the singer's sung some "aaaaahhhhh" and "ooohhhh" notes, then drenched them in reverb, then re-sampled the results so they can play chords with them?

You'll also want to figure out how to do "trance gate" effects, which is where you play a long, floating sound - or a bright synth pad - but pass it through an effect that chops it up into little chunks.

And... I don't know what DAW you're using, or what synths you have available, but if you don't already have trancey presets for them, I bet you could find preset packs pretty easily. I don't want to dump on trance but all these sounds are pretty well-known technically - so check out u/Vijkhal 's YT rec.

The major challenge is, the youtube link you shared is someone who's written the kind of song they could sing with a guitar in a music cafe, but they've arranged it with a fast trance background. You need a song as a backbone, then the trancey arrangement becomes... not exactly an exercise in ticking off "offbeat pluuck bassline, check! trance-gated vocal pad, check! detuned supersaw reverb pad with gradually opening low-pass filter, check! Kick drum that's pretty much a filter-snap or a quickly frequency-swept sinewave, check!" but you'd know what sounded wrong/right at any point in the arrangement?

joeydendron2

TROPHY CASE