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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29423 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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If Thiel is worried about a one-world state, I find it rather strange that he has worked closely with the US national security / intelligence apparatus, which out of all currently existing political entities is probably the one that is most likely to bring about a one-world state and indeed is constantly working to extend Washington DC's domination to every corner of a planet. Not that I think that the US national security / intelligence apparatus has any serious chance of bringing about a one-world state, but it's more likely to do it than any other political entity I can think of. Does Thiel think that he can get on this giant tiger's back and steer its direction?

As for science and atheism being incompatible, it really depends on what Thiel means by atheism. Science is certainly not incompatible with rejection of organized religions like Christianity and Islam. But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.

I wish I could see a full transcript, it's hard to come to any conclusions without one.

But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.

I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).

Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics. If your conscious mind can interact with the real world, then whatever it is must couple to the matter in your brain. I am not saying that the obvious approach of accelerating conscious beings to near the speed of light and having them hit each other would necessarily yield results, but it also seems premature to say that it would not. After all, a few centuries ago, we had no idea how life worked on a physics basis either, and today we have a pretty good picture.

In short, one of the following must be true. Either the qualia proponents make no falsifiable predictions, in which case their claims are completely orthogonal to science, or they make falsifiable predictions, in which case these predictions can be tested and incorporated into a materialist view of the world. If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

And the theologians will go "Hi, glad to see you, and it only took you eight centuries to catch up with us!" 😁

Depends on whether souls, angels and demons end up coming from an existing theological practice.

I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).

So, do you deny that the hard problem exists and is indeed a problem? Because from a straightforward logical point of view, it's one of the most impossible gaps for materialism to cover. How do we perceive or think at all, if we're fully material?

Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics.

There is even less reason to think that "souls" or a non-material substrate is in reach of our physics. Also, even if we could find a definitive physical cause for consciousness, that still would not mean materialism is true! As David Bentley Hart says...

One of the deep prejudices that the age of mechanism instilled in our culture, and that infects our religious and materialist fundamentalisms alike, is a version of the so-called genetic fallacy: to wit, the mistake of thinking that to have described a thing’s material history or physical origins is to have explained that thing exhaustively. We tend to presume that if one can discover the temporally prior physical causes of some object—the world, an organism, a behavior, a religion, a mental event, an experience, or anything else—one has thereby eliminated all other possible causal explanations of that object. But this is a principle that is true only if materialism is true, and materialism is true only if this principle is true, and logical circles should not set the rules for our thinking.

Paging @FCfromSSC if he wants to go more deeply into the arguments against materialism. Here is an example of him arguing about free will, for instance.

So, do you deny that the hard problem exists and is indeed a problem? Because from a straightforward logical point of view, it's one of the most impossible gaps for materialism to cover. How do we perceive or think at all, if we're fully material?

Excuse my ignorance of the subject, but why should perception or thinking be impossible for a material creature?

For a purely material creature. Because perception and thinking are non-material things.

Are they? Why? What makes them so? Base matter seems sufficient for perception and thinking. I'm not saying there is no non-material aspect to life, but the "things" you named...seem doable by material means.

Materialist explanations are sufficient to explain how an entity can react to the environment and think, but it is not clear that they can explain subjective experience.

Imagination works fundamentally unconstrained from physical reality, for a start. We can 'imagine' and see things like numbers, that have basically no real physical basis, and change the world from them. The list goes on and on.

If you're genuinely curious about this, I recommend the book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.

Neuroscience doesn’t cover qualia. The hard problem is that there is no known mechanism for material reality to interact with or produce subjective thought and experience. To produce specific neural patterns, yes, but not to produce subjective experience.

Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist. Humans clearly do have subjective experience and we have no idea how that might relate to electricity produced by bags of salty water (cells). The fact that altering the cells changes the subjective experience still doesn’t tell you the mechanism by which one produces the other.

If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.

I think you are confusing empiricism and materialism. If angels exist then materialism - the idea that physical particles and waves are the only phenomena in the universe - is wrong. You might or might not be able to make empirical predictions about how angels and ‘spiritual matter’ behaves, but that is not materialism or physics. And there is no guarantee that spirit would be amenable to this approach - ‘social science’ has broadly failed because human behaviour at scale is not a phenomenon that yields well to empiricism, being non-consistent over both time and space.

Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist.

I think there's a symmetry here. One side just declares a problem to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me" and the other declares it not to exist without any convincing argument other than "it seems so to me". (I'm with the eliminativists, btw.)

Granted, but it does seem so to me. I observe that my consciousness exists, and that nobody can tell me how this is so. 'It's just a property of complex systems' seems like a non-answer to me, spoken in a very confident tone of voice, and being entirely too vague to be useful. How do complex systems produce this property? Does it only happen if those patterns are in a meat brain? Are AIs conscious? PCs observing themselves via their antivirus software? Rocks?

It's like Sophism. Yes, we cannot prove that the world exists. But it seems to me that it does. Likewise the assertion that humans beings don't have free will, to which I can only note that for all intents and purposes I seem to. Assertions to the contrary seem essentially to be faith-based to shore up a particular conceptual model and don't really help at all to make sense of the world. Even the people who claim to have become enlightened by discovering that their own ego doesn't exist just act just like everybody else, right down to the sexual harrassment scandals. At least if we discovered that the entirety of human consciousness was powered by fairy farts we might be able to get somewhere new with that.

Science is naturalist, rather than materialist. To a naturalist, the existence of non-material entities or phenomena does not invalidate science. There might still be laws that govern those entities; independently of our ability to learn those laws.

Science appears materialistic because of a desire for parsimony and the extraordinary success of materialist theories. But the principles of science do not depend on a materialist world.

Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.

I don’t know, I think the risks of global totalitarian government are way, way higher if China becomes the premier global power.

I’ll just go ahead and stake out the position which is that the US actually does respect the rights of its citizens more than basically any country in the world (maybe Switzerland or the Nordics are better?) and certainly more than china or any of their allies. In addition to that the us really does try and encourage its allies to democratize. Places like South Korea, are imperfect, but far better than what they were earlier in my lifetime. The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way, but imo that should be viewed as more of an exception than a rule.

I also believe that the us national security / intelligence apparatus is mostly well intentioned / a good thing. Are they perfect, no, but it seems like they are pretty good at answering the elected president’s political appointees.

Most germanic european countries are very conformist societies where state force is used against those who buck the trend. They're just not enforcing the values that people who complain about 'conformity' tend to dislike, they're enforcing a different set.

If there's a country where the average person has more freedom than the US, it's probably some Latin American country where the government has to pick and choose what it uses its state capacity on.

The whole experience in Iraq (reasonably), makes people suspicious of Americas ability to influence other countries in a positive way

Even Iraq is probably better off than it was under Saddam. Certainly better off than it would have been under his sons. Afghanistan not so much.

How so? Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

It's hard to find an equivalent country to look at path of development, Syria is obvious but Syria wouldn't look like it does today absent the Iraq war. Probably Iran is the downside estimate assuming poor governance and continued isolation, and Iran is about as well off as Iraq without the atrocities.

Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.

Why not? Are we supposed to assume that the Americans were the predominant factor of the Arab Spring, and that no such equivalent could or would have happened absent the US invasion of Iraq?

The reason Iraq had less Iranian influence circa 2000 under Saddam was because Iran under Saddam was a roughly 1/3rd Sunni religious minority suppression state artificially holding down the 2/3rd Shia majority. That 1/3rd is a larger fraction than the Syrian state, which was roughly 3/4th Sunni and 1/4th everything else, but it was still a distinct religious minority with deep, deep sectarian grievances that were not only perpetuated, but grown, by the dictatorship's sectarian tendencies and subversion of civil society dynamics that might have created a bond. We know what was liable to happen when the suppression apparatus faltered, which is to say sectarian revenge, and we know this was liable to happen both if the state was compromised by an external invasion (US invasion of Iraq), or by a popular uprising supported by neighbors (Syrian civil war).

Saddam's Iraq was a country surrounded by neighbors who would happily have fueled a Syrian-scale-plus civil war if Saddam faced an Arab Spring-esque Shia uprising. This includes many of the the real-history states who supported the civil war that followed the American invasion, including- or especially- Iran. As much as Americans like to think they dominate other people's considerations, Iran's proxy-and-WMD pursuit up to 2003 were always first and foremost for use against Iraq, and the Iranian Revolutionaries long saw themselves as the eventual liberators / protectors of the regional Shia. Nor would many of Iraq's neighbors- who saw Iraq as a main security threat- have hesitated to drag it down a peg and build their own influence.

Unless you posit that Iran and Iraq, two arch-enemies who not only aimed but used WMD programs against eachother, were on the outbreak of a kumbiyah moment had the US not invaded Iraq, Iraq was a tender box primed for a half million (or far more) casualties if / when the Saddam regime hit a popular uprising. Iran had been preparing to support Shia groups for decades, and would not have stood by quietly.

Yeah you'd think he'd defect to the Russians or something then. The worry about the UN creating a one world government seems incredibly naive for someone as plugged in as him. The idea of the UN being more than a discussion forum and aid distribution force of the great powers is fanciful.

...Unless he knows something we don't.

Of course going off priors we'll discover some drug habits instead.

If Thiel is worried about a one-world state,

Naw dog, all states are one-world states, at least so far. He's worried about a one-state world.

Not true; Singapore is a Star Alliance state

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