aaa
11mo ago
The fact that it “knows” as much factual information as it does is simply remarkable
There's enough parameters in there that it isn't that surprising. In a way, however, it's a sign of overfitting.
aaa
10mo ago
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms.
I think I should remind you that Dante was not, in fact, a theologian. He never claimed that his work was theological in nature and was not received as such. It was meant as entertainment: it's original title was "Comedy" and large chunks of the book are spent on trivial political diatribes where Dante "wins" the argument by portraying himself as the Yes Chad and his political opponents as crying soyjaks tortured by devils.
Just to underline how much his views did not reflect the official views of contemporary Christianity it's worth remembering that one of his other books, De Monarchia, was declared heretical shortly after his death, burned on the stake and 200 years later it was entered in the very first edition of the Index where it stayed until the late 1800s.
He wasn't held in especially high regards in literary circles either, he did have his own small fan club but generally intellectuals considered Boccaccio and Petrarca to be the better (vulgar) italian authors. His contemporary fame is mostly due to being rediscovered, at the end of the 1800s, as part of the founding myth for the italian language.
On the topic of the Church having softened on the topic of hell... probably. However consider that the idea of Purgatory was very prevalent throughout the middle ages and I suspect most people expected to get that, rather than hell, for their minor infractions. If that wasn't the case it would be hard to explain all the money they made off of indulgences.
Furthermore the concept of universal reconciliation (in some form) isn't alien to old christian theology, Origen (~200AD) being the early example. You can find more examples by reading the history of Apokatastasis. I like Eriugena's version, the theological big crunch: you can use it to make a transhumanist version where we all get eternal life through being part of a LLM.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational.
I'd say that the idea of infinite punishments (or rewards) being dished out for finite transgressions is psychotic and possibly betrays the fact that nobody ever truly believed it. As Borges puts it:
There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the exception of mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of death. What is divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know oneself immortal. I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all profess belief in immortality, but the veneration paid to the first century of life is proof that they truly believe only in those hundred years, for they destine all the rest, throughout eternity, to rewarding or punishing what one did when alive
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children.
I think you should seriously consider the possibility that people used to do those things because of the immediate material rewards that they entailed and they don't do them anymore (as much) because the calculus has changed. It's likely that "be responsible" is just an easy cudgel to reach and beat people over the head with when they are not doing what you want them to do.
aaa
10mo ago
The bible is vague on a lot of things, so early theologians filled in by borrowing from greek philosophy, mystery cults, etc. The idea that an infinitely good god will eventually save everyone, and therefore that hell is temporary (i.e. apokatastasis), is not that far fetched (certainly less so than a hierarchy of angels, or the trinity) and thus it circulated, pretty much for all of the history of christianity.
Eriugena's version is explained in his book de divisione naturae and it's a very abstract philosophical theory where creation starts in god as ideas (he thinks platonic forms) which eventually become material. Because god has to be the ultimate form of all aristotelian causes he's also the ultimate final cause so everything returns to him through an inverse process.
aaa
10mo ago
We used to have to commit things to memory to remember them, then we invented writing to do the remembering for us. Just like we don't need to use our minds to remember, by using AI we can also offload the process of hallucination to a computer.
aaa
10mo ago
If you’re raised in a culture that is absolutely convinced that the Eucharist is literal actually the Body and Blood, you will believe it.
I didn't. I was raised in a culture that was monolithically christian (at least nominally) and I always took it as a metaphor until I was explained that it was actually meant to be taken literally (transubstantiation) and it seemed... idiotic? That was the first crack for me.
aaa
10mo ago
Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?
America was going through its mini great awakening with a christian evangelical president when 9/11 happened, to which the Bush responded by starting his own holy war in the middle east. It seemed like religious fanatics would just keep ruining everyone's day forever and atheism looked very good by comparison. A few books were published about the topic, somewhat coincidentally and it sort of picked up steam on the internet, especially the nascent youtube.
The label "New Atheism" is mostly just a press label, like IDW, it doesn't really denote anything in particular. If you read arguments about atheism from the late 1600s almost everything is already there (minus evolution and geology).
And then the evangelical awakening died out, McCain lost to Obama (who acknowledged atheism in his inauguration speech) and there was no reason for the movement anymore. What remained ended up being the first victim of SJWs in 2012. Then gamergate happened and people from new atheism either became sjws or anti-sjw (the "skeptics"). The anti-sjw side of atheism doesn't really have a home in american politics (it can't be with the democrats but it also can't be republican because it would alienate the reliable evangelical voter base); when tech platforms (twitter and youtube in particular) moved to do politically biased content moderation (mid 2017 and 2018) the atheistic side of anit-sjw was essentially wiped out.
I think atheism is due for a comeback, this decade, because of all the dissident right people who are adopting orthodoxy/sedevacantism to own the libs.
While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.
Boy, you're opening a huge can of worms here...
aaa
10mo ago
It's so depressing to me when I see this happen: "I used to enjoy X but now that I espouse ideology A I see how misguided my enjoyment was and can no longer experience it". Their brain has literally been attacked by a parasite that is eating away their personality, how sad. Like a psychological version of Alzheimer. I hope it never happens to me.
aaa
10mo ago
It's amazing to me how much sway the aristotelian unmoved mover god has on a religion that clearly describes a moving, changing god. In genesis god has human emotions, moves around and even shows up at the door of Abraham, on earth. In other words he behaves more like Odin (or rather Baal) than like god-the-philosophical-entity. And even if you discount genesis (and much of the old testament) as analogical writing and superstitions of simple people, how can it be that Jesus is god and also that god is unmoved, unchanging, simple, etc?
For problems with cosmological arguments see Sobel, Logic and Theism, chapter 5.
aaa
10mo ago
You lose a lot of the persuasive power of the argument if you admit that there are things (Jesus Christ) that appear to be moving but do not in fact count as "moving" for the argument. The observation that there are some things that move falls away, as far as I am concerned everything could be like Jesus and actually be motionless.
The problem with those biblical quotes is that there is a colloquial meaning to change and a philosophical one, cosmological arguments only work with the latter but those quotes in context point to the former.
aaa
10mo ago
Let's say that all that argumentation fails. There still seem to be reasons that it might be a sensible thing to adhere to, even if you think it's relatively unlikely. Pascal's wager is formidable, for one.
Pascal's wager is terrible because infinite rewards break game theory.
Suppose I ask you to give me $10 and in exchange I will reward you with $10000. Should you take this wager? To answer this question you could estimate the probability p that I'm telling the truth and calculate the expected value of the wager: 10000p - 10(1-p). If it is positive you should pay, if it isn't you shouldn't. It's unlikely that you will be able to prove that p=0 but it also doesn't matter, as long as you estimate it to be low enough that all you need to know.
But suppose I promise you an infinite reward for your $10. The condition is now ∞p - 10(1-p) > 0 which is always true if p > 0. So, as long as you can't call me a liar certainly you have to enter the wager. What's worse this is independent of the entry price. As long as I ask for a finite price, no matter how large, you have to pay it.
What does this mean? Either we should reject all wagers that involve infinite rewards (because otherwise we would have to take all of them) or, if we choose not to, we are lucky that there are multiple incompatible religion. Because taking one religion's wager means rejecting many other and some of the other will have infinite punishments for rejecting them all of the wagers are undecidable and we are free to choose whichever we want or reject all of them.
aaa
10mo ago
Also I wanted to point out how bizarre the entry about the wager in the pensées is: it ends with a note that, if this argument (the wager) isn't enough to convince you to believe you should then go to mass every day and the monotonous repetition of the liturgy will make you as stupid as a beast and then you will be able to believe. It seems unexplicably blasphemous to me.
aaa
10mo ago
I think you can reconcile any religion with modern science, but I also think you are going to have some serious work to do.
For example, for christianity, the pain points would be:
- original sin/early genesis and evolution
- soul and thermodynamics/neurology
- lack of evidence for angels and demons compared to the medieval way of conceiving them, demonic possessions especially
- angelology being largely based on a forgery (de coelesti hierarchia)
- transubstantiation/consubstantiation and atomism
- lack of evidence for some of jesus miracles
- the lack of contemporary miracles (or poor evidence for them) compared to biblical times some you can discard as medieval superstitions that don't really matter (even ardently religious people don't believe them anymore), others not so much. You have to have an explanation for original sin, I think.
Other religions would have different pain points.
Somewhere along the way, yes, a religion implies some unmoved mover (or a pantheon of them?).
Ironically I think the unmoved mover argument is very hard to reconcile with modern science, however it's more of a christian thing and even there it doesn't really matter.
aaa
10mo ago
I’m merely pointing out that the specific argument “the Prime Mover argument is wrong because even a Prime Mover would need a mover” is a bad argument
Yes, you are right about this. I've just been thinking about this for a while and latched on to your message to write it down since you also said: "You’re rejecting Christians’ conception of God out of hand, but then acting like you actually refuted their argument". The argument has other problems, though.
aaa
10mo ago
A true believer should allow life to happen to them, because the outcomes are determined by the omni-potent God.
This position was historically held by quietists and you can read the general principles in the papal encyclical condemning them as heretical: https://www.papalencyclicals.net/Innoc11/i11coel.htm
aaa
10mo ago
Think about it from the perspective of someone who is already religious: you are already prepared to believe on faith that the gospels are a historical account. Many miracles would have only a few witnesses, so it is not surprising that they would not be recorded by historians (there probably were many false accounts of miracolous healers at the time and it would get lost among the fakes). But some of them are so huge and public that they couldn't escape notice.
As far as I am concerned I only believe (1) and partially (6) of that list with any certainty. There's too much conjecture in this part of history, if this standard of proof was applied uniformly we would believe in the existence of the philosopher stone too.
aaa
10mo ago
I think the comparison with Newton, assuming you are referring to Newton's works in physics and optics, is unwarranted because him and Pseudo-dyonisius stand on opposite sides of an epistemological divide. Pre modern intellectual work was primarily about interpreting and finding truth within a canon of works of authors in the antiquity. We don't care who wrote Newton's Principia because they stand on the strength of their argument and of empirical evidence. You can't say the same thing about De Coelesti Hierarchia because it doesn't make any argument it just states some facts that have been revealed to the author through divine revelation.
When all of your arguments are appeals to authority, who the author is becomes extermely important. Are you really going to believe some anonymous guy that tells you they received divine revelation when they are also pretending to be a mythical character that lived 500 years earlier?
aaa
9mo ago
The problem with singling out Jesus as special (or as some kind of flesh robot remotely piloted by god) is that these are heretical (the former would be a kind of Docetism the latter similar to Apollinarianism), Jesus is supposed to be real god and real man.
The problem with making "motion" have a special meaning is that the argument is generally taken to proceed from self evident, observable properties of the universe and making "motion" be some metaphysical property would take that away. I'd argue that the distinction between per se and per accidens already does that but whatever.
Predestination is a whole other can of whorms with the free will problem, the soteriology problems, etc.
aaa
9mo ago
also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).
With respect to software there are large path dependence effects: large software companies already in the area attract high quality talent which means there's a larger pool of high quality talent to hire from for new companies and that the possibility of an acquisition exit exists, which in turn means VC is less risky and the system feeds back into itself. We'll have to see if the pandemic and the high crime has finally broken the spell.
It would be interesting to see how big of a difference remains when you take out the effects of the software industry.
aaa
9mo ago
You say you yearn for the monastic lifestyle yet you do not even attempt practicing the most basic of the ascetic practices: control over your internal feelings. Stop experiencing envy and resentment, just stop. Then maybe you will learn to enjoy watching a thonged ass for what it is rather than tormenting yourself over the philosophies you have constructed around it.
aaa
9mo ago
You are trying to imagine a first hand raising but there wouldn't be a first hand, hands would just start raising backwards in time infinitely. These arguments about the impossibility of infinite are weird, we know of logicaly consistent definitions of infinte that are extremely counterintuitive (a segment can be divided by two indefinitely, there are as many even numbers as there are numbers). You can't just say "I can't imagine" and expect to be done with it. Maybe the problem is with the infinite, maybe the problem is your imagination.
aaa
9mo ago
The argument of @OracleOutlook is (usually) an argument by necessity, "it is logically impossible that god does not exist because..."
aaa
9mo ago
Small golf-cart like cars exists in europe, for example this brand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_(marque)
If we had golf cart cities, it would be pretty easy to add secure storage compartments into them. And, I'll be honest, I don't feel that my car is that secure when I park it in Seattle. In fact, a golf cart might be superior since when I get robbed I won't have to replace my auto glass.
The general problem is that they are so light that thieves just take the whole thing.
aaa
9mo ago
So you are making the argument from contingency not from motion? I don't think it matters much, I still think the dismissal of infinites in these types of arguments lack rigor: they were formulated during a period of time where the principle of non-existence of actual infinity was commonly accepted, but this is not the case anymore. Mathematics rutinely deals with actual infinity in a way that is consistent, so you have to justify why this particular actual infinity is impossible.
Sure. The point I was trying to make is that it has to fit with its surrounding.
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