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User ID: 2225
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9mo ago
Is your question more along the lines of "How do I figure out what parishes are near me?" or "How do I figure out which parishes are healthy and suitable for me?"
For the first question, if you are in the United States and are looking for an Eastern Orthodox parish, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops maintains a directory of all parishes here, and at least the larger jurisdictions maintain their own, which may or may not be more up to date (e.g. the OCA has one here). I imagine that your local Roman Catholic diocese will also have a directory.
For the second question, I can't speak at all for what Catholic parishes are or are not traditional, but every Orthodox church will use the same traditional Divine Liturgy, with differences mostly being minor cultural practices (e.g. which melodies are used for singing, whether people sit during part of the Liturgy or stand the whole time) and what language(s) are used. I converted to Orthodoxy not terribly long ago and have had a great experience in my local OCA mission parish (we use English). I'd recommend trying to find a church that serves Liturgy in a language you understand. It may be hard to tell without attending or poking around which parishes are healthy or not, so probably just try one that looks reasonable.
If you do decide to look into Orthodoxy, feel free to DM me if you feel like you need to ask someone random questions, There's lots of good resources available online (and in book form) but there's also a lot of weird/incorrect stuff online and sometimes it helps to ask a live person, even if it's only someone you barely, vaguely know from a niche internet forum.
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9mo ago
I recommend staying off of social media and away from any other places where people argue about things you care about in ways that you have a bad reaction to. Change your passwords, log out, delete your browser history if you have to. Yes, there are ways to try to deal with it (I think dark is giving good advice) but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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9mo ago
Not a lot (then again, it's such a huge field that only a small fraction shows up in a PhD in mathematical logic), but in all likelihood, more than just boolean algebra.
In addition to the propositional calculus (effectively a subset of boolean algebra and probably equivalent to the part you are expecting EE students to learn) I'd expect any advanced student in analytic philosophy to be familiar with the basics of first-order logic as well as modal logic (in fact most research in modal logic is done in philosophy departments because of how essential it is in quite a few areas -- c.f. Saul Kripke).
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8mo ago
Eros vs Venus, AGP, and MtF Trans
Apropos of the preamble to the latest ACX post. In part an evolution of / different angle on my previous post on the subject. (Tagging @zackmdavis as relevant to your interests.)
In the book The Four Loves, in the section on sexual love, C.S. Lewis draws a distinction between Eros and Venus. Eros is romantic love, or the state of "being in love"; Venus is sexual desire (one might say "lust", but without the connotation of immorality); as he writes, "I mean by Venus not what is sexual in some cryptic or rarefied sense [...] but in a perfectly obvious sense." Lewis is at pains to point out that the two are distinct (albeit closely connected) and that one can easily experience one without the other.
He allows that "to the evolutionist, Eros will be something that grows out of Venus" but points out that this is not, generally, "what happens within the consciousness of the individual." With Eros, the lover "is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned."
Conversely, that Venus can exist without any trace of Eros is almost too obvious (at least to most men) as to need mentioning.
Why is this relevant to the autogynephilia/trans/Blanchardianism controversy? Because AGP, framed as a fetish, is seen (by both sides) as being about (a misfiring of) Venus. This makes it disreputable, both in itself and especially as a motive for transition, but perhaps even more importantly this limited concept doesn't seem to fit with the introspective reports of many trans individuals, even those who admittedly have some element of AGP. Blanchardians tend to dismiss these reports as self-serving narratives (admittedly not without some justification, given the occasionally documented confabulations about historical femininity in MtF transitioners, and of course the obvious psychological pressure); anti-Blanchardians tend to take them as proof positive that the AGP->trans hypothesis is false. (Anne Lawrence, a Blanchardian, allows for some nuance with the "AGP as sexual orientation" framing, but this seems to be not quite right and is still a "Venus"-first explanation.)
My strong suspicion is that, while Venus-AGP is the most obvious (and, um, salacious) manifestation, the thing that mostly drives trans-feelings, and thus actual transition, is something of an Eros-AGP. This may or may not co-occur with Venus-AGP, and when it does, may either pre- or post- date it, and either may be the stronger -- just as in normal Eros and Venus.
Why do I think this? Because it is an explanation which seems to account better for reported experiences than the others on offer. "But I don't feel like I'm in love with being a woman, I feel like I am or should be a woman (in some deep sense)!" Yes... but this actually rhymes with an aspect of Eros! Lewis again:
Milton has expressed more when he fancies angelic creatures with bodies made of light who can achieve total interpenetration instead of our mere embraces. Charles Williams has said something of it in the words: "Love you? I am you."
And also, there is my own experience (as a sometime sufferer of AGP of both sorts): my first crush included the confusing and intense desire to be the girl I was crushing on. The purely sexual aspects of AGP -- the fetish part, what I'm calling Venus-AGP -- may be the most externally visible, but it seems likely to me that Eros-AGP, whether manifesting as an intense but nonsexual desire to be female or a sweetness and feeling of rightness in contemplation of oneself as such, as a much more powerful emotional experience, is more likely to lead to transition.
Again, this says little about which set of feelings precedes the other or of their causal relationship. I am pretty confident that they frequently feed each other, and that indulgence and encouragement strengthen them, which is why in many people they seem to intensify over time. (This is true of nearly every other mental and emotional disposition; it would be surprising if it were not the case.) Whether Eros-AGP is preceded by Venus-AGP or not; whether Venus-AGP is seen as important by the sufferer -- these things are maybe not so relevant. As strong as the urges of Venus are, it is Eros which is more powerful, which feels transcendent from the inside, which motivates truly extreme decisions. Perhaps in this case, too, it is the dominant proximate factor.
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8mo ago
Related and potentially even more controversial questions:
- To what extent does this analysis apply to homosexuality? Are there people who are "homoromantic" without being (significantly) sexually aroused by the same sex, or vice-versa?
- How about other fetishes? Are there many where an "Eros" aspect is reasonably common?
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8mo ago
I think there are potentially two things going on here that we should be careful not to conflate:
- The X is Good --> I Want to Be X pathway (a good pathway in many cases, by the way); it is my belief that this improperly and strongly activates in sexual matters in many trans people (as well as "trans-adjacent" people like me who ultimately decide that they just have some Issues to work through), leading to the Venus-AGP and Eros-AGP described above.
- The tendency to move from "I want to be X" to "I am already X", which is what you seem to be describing.
It might very well be the case that (2) is more prevalent among people who decide they are trans than among those who do not, but I doubt it is a strongly indicative characteristic in the same way as (1). A bunch of (2) is just in the cultural water (particularly in progressive circles); e.g. "if you have written anything, you are a writer [regardless of whether it is published or earns you a living]", referring to anyone who does some math in school as a "mathematician", etc. so I would be surprised if the tendency was that much stronger in trans individuals than in generic progressives.
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8mo ago
My surprise at seeing a The Last Battle reference here (what fraction of the commenters are familiar enough with it to recognize the reference, I wonder?) was quickly accompanied by confusion at how the analogy is supposed to work. Puzzle is a mostly-unwitting tool of Shift all along, not an independent conman who is superseded by a better one...
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8mo ago
I too am a member of this club. (Actually, although I quoted Lewis in my top level comment downthread, I'm not sure if I've actually quoted the others in my few Motte posts yet. It's only a matter of time, though.)
What struck me so strongly is that the reference was just dropped in with no explanation, as one might a Biblical or mythological allusion, or a reference to some other ubiquitous cultural touchstone. The implication that the readers would be expected to actually follow the reference absent a citation was... well, about the only place I'd be confident of that landing for most of the audience is in a Lewis society.
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8mo ago
LOL. I regret that I have but one upvote to give for this comment.
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8mo ago
If you like self-reference and logic (and who doesn't, really?) Gödel, Escher, Bach is a lot of fun.
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8mo ago
For some reason, every time I see the Friday Fun Thread, my brain insists on first abbreviating it to "FFT", then re-expanding "FFT" to "Fast Fourier Transform." Not that I get confused, it's just kind of there in the background.
Anyone else do something similar?
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8mo ago
Software, actually.
And yeah, the things that are usually written as initialisms are even worse for this.
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8mo ago
Is this about divorce (the relevant difference here is not actually moral but ontological; the official Catholic line being that divorce is impossible)? About economia in general? Something else? I don't think there are any major differences in moral teaching, so this has got to be about how the teaching is applied, but that comparison doesn't seem to come out with Catholicism-as-actually-practiced (as opposed to in theory) being notably stricter.
So I am kind of confused by this and would like you to elaborate.
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7mo ago
Maybe not the right place, maybe better for Sunday, but I'm not in a great mood. What is up with senior software engineering hiring? All the job postings seem to be premised on the idea that you don't learn any transferable skills in your career, only domain-specific ones. If you want a senior position doing X, you'd better have been doing X for multiple years already. I get that makes sense for principal-level jobs where the whole point is to hire a world expert on X, but a senior still has to ramp up as part of a team anyway. Surely this state of affairs is really suboptimal, given (I hear) how hard it is to find good people. Where are the companies hiring smart senior SWEs who have been doing X to do Y and just figuring on an extra bit of ramp-up?
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7mo ago
So is "you know someone who works there" pretty much the only way to signal general competence? I suppose the question, then, is: how does anyone get hired any other way even if their resume ticks all the boxes? If a resume doing X well doesn't signal general competence enough to be hired to do Y absent having someone on the inside who can vouch for you... then why would it be a sufficient signal to get hired to do X? (Maybe the answer is, it isn't, which is why the whole search process is terrible on both sides?)
Not going into too much detail to avoid self-doxxing but I was hired directly into a senior role from academia with no industry experience... I did have a personal recommendation then, and I guess I didn't give enough credit to how important that was for getting my foot in the door.
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6mo ago
I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, as someone who is a natural skeptic and also an Orthodox Christian. Consider this comment an IOU to get back to you with something of an essay in the near future.
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6mo ago
Essay now in progress, I'm up to about 1300 words already. It will definitely be a top level post.
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6mo ago
6 Rituals and Sacraments
Finally we come to what might be the main point of @TheDag's original question, which is that, frankly, rituals seem irrational. Why should one make the sign of the cross here, or bow there? Why does the priest pray the epiclesis ("Make this bread the Precious Body of Thy Christ")? Doesn't that all seem...well...superstitious? Definitely not reasonable? Like, what is it doing?
There are two easy answers, both of them wrong. The first is that it is, or is attempting to be, magic. That the sign of the cross wards off evil for no particular reason, like a vampire. That the priest pronouncing the magic words is what makes the Eucharist transform. That would, indeed, be superstition, and the Church is at pains to make clear that, while miracles may occur in such rituals (reliably do, in the case of the Sacraments), it is not the ritual that effects a miracle, nor that a failure to pronounce the proper words exactly or make the proper motions nullifies it. These rituals are not enacted to do magic or to attempt to manipulate God. (This may not be true of all religions and rituals, but it is true of Christianity.)
The other wrong answer is that rituals are there as a sort of human bonding experience, that the content is irrelevant and the impact purely social. This is, it seems, a common anthropological story, and it's true that there are a lot of purely social rituals in the world. But this is not the point of religious ritual, and if you are just seeking social bonding, you will miss something important.
The theology of sacraments in particular is a giant can of worms, so I'll leave that aside and focus on something smaller. In the course of the liturgy, the people will make the sign of the cross, bow, and (on weekdays and in Lent) make prostrations. Why? None of these is magic, and they seem... contingent, perhaps? Arbitrary? Why this ritual and not another, why now and not then?
To an extent there is something arbitrary about the specifics. But there is something more than that, and it comes down to symbolism. The sign of the cross is a symbol of prayer, and of faith in Christ (hence the sign of the cross), so for me it becomes prayer and an affirmation of that faith. Thus I make the sign of the cross during the litany to participate in the prayer, or even when I am alone, at home, to make a wordless prayer. Bowing is a sign of reverence; thus when I bow I not only display appropriate reverence, but orient my emotions and intentions toward reverence. That is, the point of the rituals is not how they affect God, but how they affect our attitude toward God and others.
When seen in this light, the rituals are not irrational behavior, but a deliberate way of orienting ourselves. And this is one reason they can be healing, because giving oneself the right attitudes influences everything else.
There's a part of the Liturgy, common in east and west, called the sursum corda, in which the following dialogue takes place between the priest and the people:
Priest: Lift up your hearts.
People: We lift them up to the Lord.
Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is meet and right (in the Byzantine rite, this sentence continues "...to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence and undivided." -- my understanding is that this is a later theological elaboration to the original rite)
Here there is a goal: to "lift up hearts" (i.e. to put oneself in a reverential and contemplative orientation to God), to give thanks to God, to worship God. And the means for that goal is this very call-and-response ritual that lays out the goal, and, as it says, this is appropriate ("meet and right"). The whole Liturgy is full of things like this -- the cherubic hymn with the words "[let us...] now lay aside all earthly cares", the litanies with "Let us pray to the Lord" -- "Lord have mercy".
Why does this work? That's a question about human psychology, and I don't know the answer, but it does, and in that light it's no less rational than talk therapy or being polite to dinner guests or any number of other things people do.
7 Final Thoughts
This turned out to be longer and more wide-ranging than I'd initially intended, and I'm sure will invite a lot of disagreement. I'm aware that I didn't do a lot of "prove this is rational/true" work above; even if that were possible to do to everyone's satisfaction, this essay is already long enough. I intend to interact with any comments in the same way -- to explain and lay out a way of thinking, not to argue that everyone else should accept it. I totally think they should, but, in line with my thoughts above, I don't believe that I've offered sufficient evidence to persuade most of you to become Christians, and I don't think that my words-on-a-screen could, unless you're most of the way there anyway.
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6mo ago
@TheDag @KingOfTheBailey @coffee_enjoyer I, um, wrote a long thing. It's up as a top level post (...and a reply because I ran out of characters) now.
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6mo ago
Hm, I see that I can't see it when logged out. I must somehow still be subject to a filter/delay for top-level posts. Well, hopefully it will get approved soon.
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6mo ago
I think some sort of filter, like the new-user filter for comments (maybe there is a stricter filter for top-levels?). I can see it when logged in but not otherwise, so I assume it will show up as soon as a mod gets around to approving it.
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6mo ago
For what it's worth, I don't disagree that there are other options that don't deny consciousness -- my "I'm a Christian because of the Hard Problem" line is certainly a simplification, and my reasons for being Christian in particular are not a clear-cut, single line of reasoning but a bunch of reasons, intuitions, and experiences, many of which could easily be criticized individually and some of which are not really communicable, that together point me in that direction. The Hard Problem of Consciousness (together with a deep-seated conviction that solipsism, the elephant in the room here, is false) is just the biggest piece.
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6mo ago
I have, of course, a lot of disagreements with this comment, but in the spirit of explaining things rather than re-waging the Great Internet Atheism-vs-Religion Wars (I was a teenager 20 years ago; I ought to know better now) I wanted to focus on two things that are a bit more meta-level and more relevant specifically to rationality.
All else being equal, a simple hypothesis or prior should be privileged over a more complex one when they are equally as good at explaining the evidence, or predicting the future. That is a basic consequence of probability theory, complexity needs to be justified.
There are two points to be made here. The first is that Occam's razor, the simplicity prior, and the particular formal version based on Kolmogorov complexity, are all assumptions, not inevitable consequences of logic. Probability theory tells you how to update your prior based on evidence (....if, somehow, you can know the probabilities of all your observations conditional on each of the potential hypotheses, which in this context is an unrealistically big ask); it can't tell you what your prior should be. A simplicity prior is not an unreasonable choice in many contexts, but it's (a) not actually practical for many things (do you know all possible hypotheses and their exact complexity?) and (b) it's not the only possible choice.
The second is that it seems likely to be impossible to even evaluate simplicity or conditional probabilities when you are dealing with radically different ontologies, and it's not at all clear that e.g. the claim that physics and the existing physical universe is the brute fact of reality is in any way simpler than the claim that a Person is. Certainly I'll grant that "the physical universe, but also God/supernatural/nonphysical stuff tacked on" is more complicated than pure materialism, but that's explicitly not what the alternative is.
An analogy for those who know about the demoscene: a long, intricate demo certainly looks more complicated than a random short clip on Youtube, but it is much simpler in an information-theory sense, being generated from a small executable. Given that we don't know any real equivalent of "the shortest possible code" for either a materialist or Theistic account of the reality, I don't think it's even in principal possible to judge the complexity of either.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a sign that our existing knowledge and theories are insufficient for the task of explaining everything
This misses the point. There are certainly many problems that, when substituted for "the Hard Problem of Consciousness" here, would make this statement a valid criticism. For instance, if someone tried to argue that the fact that science can't account for Abiogenesis is a knock-down argument against materialism, this would be a good point. The fact that we have no good idea how abiogenesis could occur is some evidence against its occurring by natural means, but in the future new evidence or a better understanding of chemistry might turn things around, just as biochemistry did for the properties of organic life as it is now.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness is another matter. The problem is not that current science can't explain it; the problem is that ontological materialism excludes consciousness (in the sense those of us talking about the Hard Problem mean) entirely. There's no way to get an "I", a first-person perspective, in a materialist ontology, any more than it's possible to get moral realism. And I don't know about you, but I'm quite a bit more certain that I exist than I am that the external world exists, let alone of any laws of physics or theories about what other things might or might not exist, simply for the reason I have direct, unmediated observation of the fact of my existence, which I don't have of physical things. Not to go full #DescartesWasRight here, but he's a lot more right about this than many people give him credit for.
To get at something of my frustration here, let me present a fictional dialogue between a normal person "Matt" and a person with a rather odd ontology, "Noah":
Noah: "The whole universe is just a number. Everything is just some digits or properties of this number. All is number!"
Matt: "But this rock isn't a number! It's not even the same sort of thing as a number! It's stuff, matter, not something abstract like a number."
Noah: "What do you mean? How do you know that stuff isn't just properties of a number. After all, you know that atoms can be counted, mass can be measured, positions can be located, as numbers. Numbers are everywhere. We can express everything about your rock as some numbers, and thus, of course, as digits in one Great Number which is the whole universe."
Matt: "Sure, numbers are useful for measuring things. But a rock isn't just its measurements -- it's made of stuff; it has actual existence."
Noah: "I don't know what you mean by 'actual existence', or 'stuff' or 'matter', and I don't think you do either. Sure, I'll grant that there are things about a rock that we don't know how to measure yet, so we don't fully know how it is part of the Great Number. But it's just a matter of time."
Matt: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"
Whenever I talk to materialists about consciousness, I feel just like Matt talking to Noah. If you actually don't get it, I don't know what to say to you.
And this leads into some final thoughts which are connected to both of these. The elephant in the room here, the simplest ontology that nobody wants no believe -- maybe that nobody can believe: Solipsism. Why believe in the existence of anything external to yourself at all? A universe with just one thing is simpler than any hypothesis other than one with nothing (not tenable for the obvious reason). It can easily account for all your putative observations (i.e. they are not actually observations of anything at all). And yet, despite the talk of Boltzmann brains, which is functionally the same thing (if you are just a brain in the void, why do you think your observations of the laws of physics have any meaning -- and thus why is the fact that QM may permit Boltzmann brains any evidence whatsoever about whether you might be one?), I don't think I've heard people insist that solipsism is the only rational position. Frankly, the reason I'm not a solipsist is not that I have a good argument that it's false; rather, I just can't believe it -- I have an arational certainty -- generously, direct apprehension of a truth -- that solipsism is false and I'm not the only thing that exists.
And if we aren't rationally required to be solipsists, well, isn't that giving the whole game away in terms of trying to evaluate ontologies with the same tools one uses for day-to-day reasoning about more bounded questions?
(A more complete version of this comment would relate this to questions about model uncertainty and why, practically, 10^-9 is no more a "real" credence level than 0 is, but this comment is far too long already.)
To be fair, the notions of simplicity at play here are two different ones, so Divine Simplicity is, while not entirely irrelevant, a bit beside the point.
Mere Christianity has a lot of good content, but if you end up finding it a bit simplistic in places, it's good to remember that it was originally a bunch of general-audience radio talks, so that kind of comes with the territory. As far as C.S. Lewis goes I recommend The Problem of Pain and Miracles for deeper treatments of their titular matters. They aren't perfect, but they are very good.
Lewis also has a number of good shorter essays (often adapted from talks) that are maybe not apologetics as such, but are also high quality and in the same vein. I remember finding "On Obstinacy in Belief" insightful, for instance. I can try to dig up a more complete list (I'll need to skim and remind myself from my collection) if you are interested.
Another poster has already recommended Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man by Chesterton, which are very good but have quite a different tone and approach (and are much less recent). Lewis is more philosophical but also chattier; Chesterton has a better prose style as well as much more of a flair for melodrama and wordplay -- he often presents his ideas in a way optimized for emotional and/or intellectual punch rather than for clarity or airtight logic. (That doesn't mean his ideas aren't good -- they usually are -- but it rubs some people the wrong way.)
On the flip side, I anti-recommend... most pop-apologetics, frankly, and that means most of the recent stuff. Pretty much all of it (that I've seen, at least, though I haven't been paying careful attention to the space) is more or less in Lewis's shadow and is either just dishonest or a worse version of Lewis.
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