What if the Theory of Evolution is Right? (Part I)
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[COMMENT DELETED]
“Our apprehension is limited to just two of God’s infinite attributes, but these both conform to the logic of the whole. ‘The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order of things’. Cause and effect are linked rigidly and irreversibly as the processes of reason. Thus, in the vastness of Spinoza’s infinite universe, cause and effect become part of a greater logical necessity. Our world of extension is logically determined, its chain of cause and effect are logically necessary, irreversible, and undividable (no different from the necessarily sequence of logic which takes place in the mind). In just the same way, finite things proceed necessarily from infinite substance. Yet they remain part of Deus sive Natura (God or Nature)” Spinoza’s Life and Works p21 Paul Stathern.
NB. finite things proceed necessarily from infinite substance.
Obviously Einstein was aware of this when he made the statement “I believe in Spinoza's God”
pawnwhacker wrote:
He said: "Yes, here it's hot and sunny weather. I want the winter to come and soften the temperature...It is not enough to snow in parts of the country where I am in, but it's kind of cold. It's snowing in your country ? So we are in the extreme: here very hot and very cold there!
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My response: Acabei de voltar da Sibéria onde há muito frio e neve. Agora eu sou quente. Há sempre o xadrez! E discutir com pessoas estúpidas nos fóruns .
xadrez means chess
I told him we are having nice weather and enjoying friendly games of chess and intelligent conversation in the forums. Something like that.
Agora estamos em locais quentes e tendo bons jogos de xadrez e conversas! É bom conversar contigo!
In english: Now we are in warm places and having good games of chess and conversations! It's good to talk with you!
ProfessorProfesesen wrote:
Lola messaged me and said she has been blocked.
Gee, I wonder why. As a freethinker, I prefer not to block anyone. But when they become nothing but a troll, again and again...well, there you have it.
Don't worry, though. Unlike Spike, when I block someone it isn't forever and ever. Just a "cooling off" period in the dunking chair.
If Lola or you don't like my methods, then start your own thread. Good luck on that one. I started a Frankenstein monster, keeps me up at nights and the pay is lousy.
Royal-Prince: Agora estamos em locais quentes e tendo bons jogos de xadrez e conversas! É bom conversar contigo!
Me: Também é bom falar com você, meu amigo. Talvez um dia, um jogo de xadrez?
pawnwhacker wrote:
Royal-Prince: Agora estamos em locais quentes e tendo bons jogos de xadrez e conversas! É bom conversar contigo!
Me: Também é bom falar com você, meu amigo. Talvez um dia, um jogo de xadrez?
Com certeza! Jamos jogar sim, meu amigo. Penso que perderei, pois seu rating é maior que o meu, mas aceito. Quando você quiser, vamos jogar!
Muito bom! Já me desafiou. Vamos jogar para se divertir. Sem classificação para se preocupar.
Combinado! Um jogo entre amigos. Vamos lá!
Obrigado! Nós começamos.
Fim
Das Ende
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vége
Akhir
Край
結束
النهاية
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Slutet
The_Ghostess_Lola wrote:
(#3315) I wasn't sure what you meant.
And that's exactly what I'm talking about. Of course, you don't know what I meant. It's 'cuz you probably don't have much. IOW's, it sounds like you can't relate....you know, you just don't get it ?
No, I don't know what YOU mean because 1. you don't usually mean what is commonly understood by others. 2. You use numbers when spelling worlds. 3. You typically present your argument from a 'feeling' perspective vice an academic one. I personally can accommodate all three, but I am a big fan of letters.
If you would like to have an intelligent conversation it is worthwhile to spend a few lines of text and define what the subject actually is. If you don't want to have a discussion and would rather just call everyone retards based on your own airy-fairy definition of EI then you can go f* yourself.
How am I doing on EI scale now?
Mar 2, 2015
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#3232
On Einstein: Einstein gave up belief in a personal, theistic God--you know, the sort you pray to, the sort you worship, the sort who performs miracles, the sort who has a divine plan, the sort who watches over you, the sort who quite possibly punishes you--at age twelve. He never went back to belief in such a God but found it silly and primitive. But he was still a very reverent man. He had an unfortunate tendency to use the word "God" in a metaphorical way when talking about the regularities of nature, which misleads some people.
The Spinozan God in which Einstein said he believed--if he could be said to believe in God at all--hardly counts as God at all. Spinoza took the whole of being, together with all of its attributes, and gave that the label "God." As someone else noted, that may be thought of as pantheism. It got Spinoza excommunicated.
Einstein cared about nature and its comprehensibility by man, and he cared about human beings. His caring about human beings, like mine but unlike many other people's--including many religious believers'--was universal: everybody counts. (This was also John Stuart Mill's kind of caring about other human beings--even though utilitarian ethics is sometimes reviled for being based on consequences rather than on humanity, it is based on the fundamental value judgment that everybody's welfare matters, not just that of this or that social group.) He had a rather mystical view of the universe--but no belief in a personal, theistic God.
Mar 2, 2015
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#3233
On Damasio, Spinoza, and mind/body dualism: I haven't read Damasio's book, but from the review, it sounds as though Damasio presents the case for consciousness's arising evolutionarily through the workings of the brain--which is fine, I accept that--but thinks that that somehow addresses the mind/body problem, when it doesn't. It also sounds as though he (or the reviewer) thinks that Spinoza somehow corrected Descartes's dualistic error, when he didn't, except in that he gave up *substance dualism*. The dualism is still there, though: there is something that it is like to feel pain, to feel joy, to feel at all, to be aware, to think--and that just isn't explained by saying that thoughts and feelings arise in the brain or are generated by our physiological responses to stimuli (both internal and external), which I'm sure they do. The best one can do, I think, is to accept as a brute fact that brains do, in fact, give rise to conscious awareness, including consciously-experienced feelings.
I once tried to read Spinoza's Ethics. Spinoza is renowned for having tried to write in a very mathematical fashion, giving definitions and axioms and then deriving theorems from them; but I couldn't for the life of me understand his definitions or axioms or how his theorems followed from them. There was a certain lack of precision to his wording and reasoning--at least, in the translation I tried to read.
Mar 2, 2015
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#3234
As to The_Ghostess_Lola: It is possible that I will change my mind at some later time, but for the moment, I am no longer going to reply to her. It is one thing for her genuinely not to understand how it is possible to be a nonbeliever in God or an afterlife and to be a rational thinker (as I hope I am) who claims that we ought not believe in them without good reason but nevertheless to fervently hope that there is an afterlife, as I do; it is another for her to insist that I am lying about it. For someone who claims emotional intelligence, such a level of disrespect is shocking. And there's no point in saying anything to someone who simply refuses to believe that you mean what you say and would rather conclude that you were an inveterate liar.
Mar 2, 2015
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#3235
(Now she will undoubtedly think that I am avoiding having to face the psychological truth, or some such. In her worldview, there is no room for the coexistence of rational thought and emotion, or for being a caring human being in the living of one's life while being a rational thinker in the formation of one's beliefs; in her worldview, it is just a lie to claim such coexistence. I have no confidence at all that she will realize that I really mean what I say.)
Mar 2, 2015
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#3236
Royale-Prince wrote: MindWalk replies in red:
MindWalk: The Fox sisters wasn't just fraud. This is what happened: the two sisters had mediunity, but at some point they started to ask for money and try to do things out of their capacity. Then both lost the mediunity and become to do frauds. A true start and a fake end. You are free to believe that, but I don't know why you would. Wikipedia has this nice summation: "The Fox sisters were three sisters from New York who played an important role in the creation of Spiritualism: Leah (1814–1890), Margaret (also called Maggie) (1833–1893) and Kate (also called catherine) Fox (1837–1892).The two younger sisters used "rappings" to convince their much older sister and others that they were communicating with spirits. Their older sister then took charge of them and managed their careers for some time. They all enjoyed success as mediums for many years.
"In 1888, Margaret and Kate confessed that their rappings had been a hoax and publicly demonstrated their method. Margaret attempted to recant her confession the next year, but their reputation was ruined and in less than five years they were all dead, with Margaret and Kate dying in abject poverty.Spiritualism continued as if the confessions of the Fox sisters had never happened." Do you notice that last sentence? This is typical of paranormal phenomena: People go on believing in them *even after they are confessed to be fraudulent*. (And notice: they showed *how* they had committed the fraud. They didn't just say they had.)
The sisters was never used by Allan Kardec, even because, as you saw, they was American and him French. He just mentioned they as an example of real mediunity, in the beggining.
But you have all the others... So what against them? Nothing.
As you can see, proves are everywhere and everytime. Honestly, if you are really "desperately to believe", you have already more than enough to do it... You know, when I was much younger, I looked into all sorts of things like that. None of the ones I looked at turned out to have any strong evidence in their favor. It's like Edgar Cayce. When enough of them turn out to be fraudulent (or, at best, simply mistaken) and when none of them have solid reason to think them true, you start thinking maybe none of them are actually true. And when you start thinking that, you're probably right.
But I would love for there to be clearly demonstrable cases of various exotic phenomena, like precognition or psychokinesis and so on. I would. I really, really would! I simply find that such investigation as I have done--together with some understanding of physical law and of how brains work--makes it seem exceedingly unlikely that such things really have happened.
If you don't insist on a high enough standard of evidence for extraordinary claims, though--if you're not sufficiently skeptical--then yes, it will seem that "proofs are all around you." It will seem that way for alien visitation and for a 9/11 conspiracy theory and for the existence of witches (by which I do not mean the Church of Wicca) and for telepathy and for the Loch Ness monster and for crystal power and for faith healing and for all manner of exotic claim. If you do not have a well-calibrated implausibility detector--sure, "proofs are all around you."
But I now believe that maybe most part of people here, in fact, are included in St. Augustine sentence:
"For those who wants to believe, any single word is enough. For those who don't want to, no word will be enough". And yet, that just isn't true. The demand for evidence has to be proportioned to the improbability of the claim, so that very unlikely ones require very strong evidence, but as long as a claim is testable at all, it is not true that no evidence will be enough. (Of course, the "no word will be enough" might be true, since we require really good evidence and not just people's words.)
Mar 2, 2015
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#3237
ProfessorProfesesen wrote: MindWalk replies: This was an interesting post.
pawnwhacker wrote:
ProfessorProfesesen wrote:
I don't think you want find the 'Truth', whatever that is. It is more about holding your ground. To assert yourself, your being. In that struggle you find yourself when you are opposed. That is your truth, your being. It is certainly true that we all defend our worldviews. We have arrived at them over time, and we're hardly going to amend them very much all at once, just because somebody says X or says Y. So, yes, there is an inertia of belief that we all have to be aware of. We insist upon good reason if we're to change our minds. However, rational thinkers do change their minds upon the presentation of sufficiently strong evidence. (I am near that point on the metaphysical and not merely epistemological nature of quantum indeterminacy, but am not there yet, for a few reasons. But I also do not insist that this or that view of quantum indeterminacy *really is correct*.)
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Are you speaking in general or about me in particular? It would help if you could clarify this statement.
Life is about living. Or what we might call survival. That means ensuring that the life we have, the body, our organism doesn't die. Yes.
But life is complicated. It is not just physical. We live in the world that is physical + language (1). Yes, although language is partly part of the physical world (strokes of a pen on paper, pixels on a screen, compression waves in the air) and partly an abstraction that we mentally process. The second part of it is part of the physical/mental duality of the existence of beings like us, who are physical beings but also mental experiencers.
For instance, if someone says, I am going to kill you. Even though it is not physical, it does have an impact. Sure. We hear the words and process the information and are mentally affected--and we may be physically affected, as our heart rates may increase.
Growing up, our survival depends a great deal on fitting in. Or getting along with our family and the society. We have to accept their rules. That's true. We also have to decide which rules make sense and which ones do not, which ones we want to flout, which ones we can flout with impunity or at least with a tolerably small price, and so on.
Religion can seem to be not about living, or freedom. It is as if it doesn't celebrate difference.
This can feel suffocating, unreasonable, and feel like the religious people don't want you to live. I am not sure what you have in mind by these last two sentences. Are you referring to the sort of religious morality that tells you, "Don't do this and don't do that," where those rules go beyond "Do not kill other people" to "Do not swear" or "Do not have premarital sex" or "Do not lust in your heart"?
But Being is living. To live is to assert ourselves. To overcome everything that doesn't wish us to exist. That sounds like self-defense. I'm a pacifist, but I do not go so far as to deny the right to self-defense. Or do you have more in mind? Like, perhaps, that in living, you want to live your life *as you wish to live it* and to "overcome" everything that gets in the way of your doing so?
This struggle doesn't have to be physical. It can be verbal. Our parents have a huge impact on our identity (2). Who we are and what we can do. True.
As we grow up, we feel we have to overcome their authority. So the struggle. Again, true. We want to exercise personal autonomy rather than being constrained by what our parents dictate.
We have to find something 'real', or 'truth', something that cannot be denied, and believe in that. And live for that. It isn't entirely clear to me what you mean here. We certainly do strive to find what matters most to us, yes; we certainly do try to make sense of the world around us and of our lives within it, yes. That isn't quite the same as learning what facts are true about the world, the way scientists do, although we can make that part of our search for truth and meaningfulness. Note that bifurcation: truth vs. meaningfulness. There's what we realize is true about the world; and there's what we find meaningful in living our lives. They're not the same things.
Then their (the parents, the many authorities, the govt, etc) authority no longer counts. Only the 'truth' counts.
This 'truth' becomes our ground. And we hold on to it. I think I'd like to know what you mean by "truth" here.
The more they speak the more we oppose. That may be how it tends to work, but we have to be careful not to rebel against ideas just because of who propounds them and instead to rebel against them because they merit our rebellion. And in that we find ourself. That we too deserve to exist. We find our existence. Our being. It is not entirely clear what you mean by this. Do you mean that you ultimately generate a sense of "who you are" and "what your place in the world is" by this process? It seems to me that this is ultimately more closely related to meaningfulness than to truth about the world.
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(1) For the idea that we live in language, there is scientific basis to it, called Relational Frame Theory. However, it isn't clear to me that that militates in any way against their being truths about the world, or against their being knowable truths about the world, or against their being epistemically appropriate and epistemically inappropriate ways of forming beliefs about the world.
(2) The struggle can be Oedipal as well. I think I'll forgo comment on Freudian theory, except to note that it was one of Sir Karl Popper's three paradigmatic examples of a metaphysical (unfalsifiable) rather than scientific (falsifiable) theory (the other two being astrology and Marxism).
Mar 2, 2015
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#3238
Has anyone else noticed that the logout time for writing posts has decreased markedly? Sometimes I finish writing a post and then find that I have been logged out, even if it's a relatively short post (for me, at least). That never used to happen.
Yes. Over the past few days, I lost several lengthy posts because I hit the submit button and had not saved the material first. I suspect that you've had the same sad experience. 
Mar 2, 2015
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#3240
MindWalk wrote:
As to The_Ghostess_Lola: It is possible that I will change my mind at some later time, but for the moment, I am no longer going to reply to her. It is one thing for her genuinely not to understand how it is possible to be a nonbeliever in God or an afterlife and to be a rational thinker (as I hope I am) who claims that we ought not believe in them without good reason but nevertheless to fervently hope that there is an afterlife, as I do; it is another for her to insist that I am lying about it. For someone who claims emotional intelligence, such a level of disrespect is shocking. And there's no point in saying anything to someone who simply refuses to believe that you mean what you say and would rather conclude that you were an inveterate liar.
Even though I dislike Lola calling you a liar, I think I understand where she is coming from.
I think in your personal life you have everything you need, more or less. So that you don't need god. I mean either way it wouldn't make any difference. More importantly I doubt if you want to SEEK god, or go through the discipline neccesary to come close to knowing what it is all about. (Zen meditation, prayers, ascetism etc)
And I think this is what Lola was sensing, that in the end, you don't really care. Perhaps Lola mistook your intellectual curiosity as something more?
If I am wrong, my apologies. But I'd like to know how you feel about god, rather than think....