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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:

“Inquir’st thou not what spirits

Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass

Farther, I would thou know, that these of sin

Were blameless; and if aught they merited,

It profits not, since baptism was not theirs,

The portal to thy faith. If they before

The Gospel liv’d, they serv’d not God aright;

And among such am I. For these defects,

And for no other evil, we are lost;

Only so far afflicted, that we live

Desiring without hope.”

Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.

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. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.

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. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.

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. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.

Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.

Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.

At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.

There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.

It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":

[...] Whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic program will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, grammè [written mark], or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.

(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)

It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:

[...] And this is how Freud already answers this boring Foucauldian reproach - before Foucault's time of course - that psychoanalysis is comparable to confession. You have to confess your blah blah. No, Freud says that psychoanalysis is much worse: in confession you are responsible for what you did, for what you know, you should tell everything. In psychoanalysis, you are responsible even for what you don't know and what you didn't do.

The problem that religions face regarding hell is that the adherent can pick whether or not to believe in it, and whether or not to go to church or believe in anything at all. Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior. As a method of ultimate deterrence it can’t be triumphed over by good deeds. Why? For too many reasons to list really, but the big ones are: doing good deeds for their own sake puts the focus on an action, whereas morality comes from focusing on the Good which is God, and there would be no need to focus on the Good if a simple ToDo list saves all eternal ills; not every person can immediately do good deeds, even if they are essentially on a perfect moral path given their past behavior, which could lead to people like alcoholics and the infirm to feel that they are damned until they are cured; it reduces a person‘s interest in all religion, if all Good can be received from a simple checklist, and Christianity is a religion designed to socialize morality communally within the fully human Christ.

If hell is perfect deterrence, a huge problem arises in how to condition a person into this deterrence who is not seriously religious. A serious Christian sees the options as heaven or hell, but someone less religious sees it as “non-hell and probably heaven” vs hell. In other words, they are deterred from buying into the deterrence. Why have a fear of hell, when I’ll have less fear if I don’t believe it at all? So in order to even buy into the punishment of hell, you need to first buy into religion generally; in the same way that first you need the boy to sign up for the Great War, and only later can you force him to walk through no man’s land at the battle of the Somme.

This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell. But in order for the magic of hell to work, you need to be always and perpetually saved from it by knowing the next moral action or step. And, in an ideal variant of Christianity, this is Christ — the socialized Good — and every step in your moral life would be his very steps on his path.

I am a big fan of hell, as an idea. It should be conceived of as not an additional thing to fear, but instead the One True Fear. So the kids today who are afraid that their zoomer haircut isn’t perm’d well enough, or that the Taylor Swift tickets are sold out — all of their petty fears would be sublimated to one great fear, the fear of evilness (which in Christian thought is eradicated from believing and imitating Christ).

Hell as a concept is ultimate punishment in the psychological sense; it is ultimate deterrence, so the point is to modify our present behavior.

My belief is the exact opposite of this. The whole reason hell's nature and existence is not obvious to everyone is so that it doesn't modify our present behavior.

I also find your focus on good deeds interesting. Good deeds accomplish nothing in the end, yes, but moral growth is what God wants, and moral growth leads to good deeds. I agree that hell is a deterrent, but that's not it's ultimate purpose. It is a fundamental necessity to satisfy the law of justice. We only know about it because knowledge of justice also aids in our moral growth and helps us to "grow up" spiritually. Also, we know that evil will always be punished, whether in this life or in the next. This helps us to rest assured that justice will be served, and focus on our own moral growth rather than chasing revenge or growing to resent God due to the success we see in wicked people.

This is very ironic, but hell is only for the believers. It is for the believers in the sense that the believers reap the full harvest of fearing hell.

I think it's more that believers are less harmed by fearing hell than nonbelievers, while the benefits of fearing hell are constant regardless of your level of belief. Doing good because you fear hell is the same as doing good for the reward. It's pretty much worthless and is not what God wants.

My belief is the exact opposite of this. The whole reason hell's nature and existence is not obvious to everyone is so that it doesn't modify our present behavior.

I really don't want to come across as unnecessarily combative (what would the point even be? Empirically, religious debate is people yelling at each other and not convincing anyone of anything), but holy shit, the sheer amount of mental gymnastics espousing this requires..

Doing good because you fear hell is the same as doing good for the reward. It's pretty much worthless and is not what God wants.

I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)

That, to put it bluntly, is an asshole move.

I don't expect you (or anyone else) to have a good answer, because that problem is fundamentally irreconcilable, at least until you zoom out and realize you're arguing about the properties of a nonexistent entity.

I think Christians have plot-holed themselves into a corner, if they hadn't shot for the moon and claimed a truly all-powerful creator, then they could at least claim that evil exists because of an inability to completely stamp it out, while also endorsing that believing and practising was still a net positive in expectation.

When people complain about utilitarians having to grapple with repugnant conclusions, none of the conclusions are as offensive as this is to any reasonable sensibilities.

It's akin to some bored kid setting up a terrarium, not feeding anything it, and then crucifying the starving survivors for the crime of cannibalism. It's all on you dog backwards.

Well you could start by figuring out my actual beliefs instead of telling me that the beliefs you've imagined I have are wrong. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as a Mormon, so keep in mind my beliefs aren't shared by the majority of Christianity.

I can't reconcile a omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity intentionally creating a hell in the first place, let alone building entities it knows with 100% certainty will end up there. (And if it doesn't know with 100% certainty, it's not omniscient is it?)

God is omnipotent compared to us but not literally omnipotent. He has to follow the rules. He can't change what 'good' is, and probably cannot create or destroy matter either. Most importantly, he cannot give us agency without allowing some of us to be evil. If we do not have agency then none of us can truly choose to be good, so having agency is more important than guaranteeing that we're all good.

I think Christians have plot-holed themselves into a corner, if they hadn't shot for the moon and claimed a truly all-powerful creator, then they could at least claim that evil exists because of an inability to completely stamp it out,

I think it's consistent to view God as all-powerful, but incapable of changing the fundamental rules of logic. Having been through quite a bit of physical pain in my life I remain unconvinced that natural evil exists or is very important anyways. I think if we were all hooked up to 5 gallons / s IVs of heroin, we would experience a temporary rate slowdown to 4 gallons / s as pain. We need some natural opposition in order to be able to recognize the good for what it is.

If God were Logically Omnipotent and could change the rules of logic, then yes, that would imply that he has chosen for 'evil' to exist. Still, I'm not sure that means he's not omnibenevolent. To remove evil would require changing the rules in ways we humans cannot possibly understand in our current forms. Would you choose to delete suffering altogether? Doing so would perhaps lead to vast consequences related to our ability to perceive joy at all. Magically recreate our ability to perceive joy, even though we've never experienced anything else, and I would wonder whether perhaps then a more fundamental rule of logic would be violated, and so on.

To be clear, I suspect we are already metaphorically in the 5 gallon / s IV scenario. Like I said I have experienced extreme pain, and even in the moments that it was worst, existence felt much happier and more pleasurable than nonexistence.

This is pretty esoteric at this point but I really do think there are satisfactory answers to the problem of theodicy.

I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, commonly known as a Mormon, so keep in mind my beliefs aren't shared by the majority of Christianity.

My apologies for assuming, but the majority of the Christians I've argued here with on-and-off for years were from more standard denomination.

That being said, I have no idea how anyone remains a Mormon when the overwhelming evidence of fraud in its very foundation exist. At least Catholics and Protestants make claims that were so far in the past they can't be trivially debunked.

God is omnipotent compared to us but not literally omnipotent. He has to follow the rules. He can't change what 'good' is, and probably cannot create or destroy matter either. Most importantly, he cannot give us agency without allowing some of us to be evil. If we do not have agency then none of us can truly choose to be good, so having agency is more important than guaranteeing that we're all good.

Sure, I can grant that it's still meaningful omnipotence even if God can't ignore the laws of logic.

That being said, I don't see how you can hold that a decrease in pleasure is pain, while not recognizing that it's possible to have diminished agency while still having agency.

Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.

It doesn't forgive the outright infinite amount of suffering consigning even a single person to hell does. That's the work of an asshole, or at least someone who doesn't claim to be benevolent. There are certainly people I'd consign to Hell myself, but I never claimed perfect benevolence as fact about myself.

I think if we were all hooked up to 5 gallons / s IVs of heroin, we would experience a temporary rate slowdown to 4 gallons / s as pain. We need some natural opposition in order to be able to recognize the good for what it is.

Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. This does not gel at all with a biological understanding of pain as a whole, since pain is a qualitatively different qualia, and not merely the absence of the sensation of pleasure.

The very existence of gradients of pleasure is sufficient to allow one to infer the opposite direction, and posit something that is outright negative pleasure, not merely no pleasure or a lesser yet positive level of it.

For an obvious proof, humans had never encountered negative numbers in their ancestral environment, and there is no single physical entity in the world that itself can be negative. It's only by interaction between entities that we can usefully build intuition of negatives. You can have 1 or 2 apples, not -1 apples, but you can use that concept to simplify the mathematics of things such as being indebted to provide someone an apple on demand. But at no point do you actually have less than zero apples.

Since humans have shown a distressing ability to invent untrue and useless concepts like souls on a regular basis, I think that even in some utopian environment where nobody ever felt outright pain, someone will inevitably invent the concept of "pain", if only as a plot point in their equivalent to a horror scifi novel.

That being said, I have no idea how anyone remains a Mormon when the overwhelming evidence of fraud in its very foundation exist. At least Catholics and Protestants make claims that were so far in the past they can't be trivially debunked.

Easy, I have overwhelming personal evidence of the truth of the church. Besides, I bet the vast majority of the "overwhelming evidence" you have in mind boils down to "well obviously that can't happen because God isn't real." There is some weird stuff in the church's past for sure but not nearly enough to outweigh my own experiences confirming the truth of the church's claims.

That being said, I don't see how you can hold that a decrease in pleasure is pain, while not recognizing that it's possible to have diminished agency while still having agency.

Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.

I'm going to assume you don't have "warp the rules of logic" in mind here, because IMO it's pretty futile to talk about the effects of that sort of change, except to say that they would be vast and we cannot possibly understand what would happen (since our understanding relies on logic). So the only two possibilities I can think of here are that either all choices are basically the same, or some choices are substantially better than others but all choices are good. The former I think removes agency entirely. Humans entirely lose the ability to make any difference at all. The latter definitely allows for evil IMO. If you are consistently choosing to bake cakes for your friends rather than saving orphans' lives, I think you are an evil person even though both choices are "good".

Separately, like I was saying, goodness is only valuable to the degree which it is a choice. Agency is valuable in its own right. So it's not clear to me why God would limit our agency (and thus our ability to be good) rather than allowing for both good and evil.

Maybe everyone could be good, but varying degrees of good, and trying to be better can be one's life's goal.

Can be and must be are two very different things. If people are forced to make being better their life's goal, they have no agency at all. If they are not forced to, and they choose not to, then they are evil.

It doesn't forgive the outright infinite amount of suffering consigning even a single person to hell does. That's the work of an asshole, or at least someone who doesn't claim to be benevolent. There are certainly people I'd consign to Hell myself, but I never claimed perfect benevolence as fact about myself.

Sure. I don't believe hell is literally infinite anyways.

Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. This does not gel at all with a biological understanding of pain as a whole, since pain is a qualitatively different qualia, and not merely the absence of the sensation of pleasure.

You've cherry-picked certain parts of biology in order to claim that the objective truth is on your side. I agree that pain is not simply an absence of pleasure, but my claim was not that it always was. What I said was that we would experience an absence of pleasure as pain. When I say "pain" I obviously don't mean "solely physical pain".

That said, brains have a remarkable ability to adapt to new baselines and ignore predictable stimuli. I am currently in a fairly large amount of pain--probably the equivalent of stubbing a few toes, if I had to guess, though my estimation is untrustworthy for reasons which will soon become clear. I do not notice this pain unless I think about it. It has remained at that constant state for years and now essentially feels like nothing to me.

On the flip side, pleasure seems to work the same way--we quickly gain tolerance to the strongest drugs. I think if someone were to remain on heroin or something for a long period of time (rather than experiencing the "down" when they come off their high) they would quickly stop noticing the high at all. Of course there would be plenty of neurological side effects, but basically what I'm saying is that if there was a magic button we could press to give ourselves a high, with no side effects at all (an impossibility I know), someone who kept it pressed all the time would be indistinguishable, both to themselves and to others, from someone who never pressed it. I think it would be fair to characterize the experience of someone addicted to hard drugs, but not currently on a high, as "pain".

Besides that, pain is simply not important. Getting broken up with hurt way more than crapping out liters of blood. The very worst pains which we as humans can experience have to do not with experiencing suffering, but with experiencing a loss of pleasure. Losing parents or a girlfriend or w/e only matters because those people were valuable sources of joy in the first place. I have not experienced any suffering due to my lack of a third parent, but I will suffer quite a bit if one of my parents dies, therefore deriving me of the joy which they would provide to me.

The very existence of gradients of pleasure is sufficient to allow one to infer the opposite direction, and posit something that is outright negative pleasure, not merely no pleasure or a lesser yet positive level of it.

Negative numbers still don't exist though. They only exist to the extent that they affect positive numbers. You can't have -1 sheep. At best you can have to work much longer to buy your first sheep, since you first need to pay off your debt before you get one. The minimum amount of sheep a person can own is 0.

Similarly, yes, I agree that negative pleasure exists, but it does so only inasmuch as it subtracts from existing pleasure. You could basically call it the absence of pleasure. I believe pain to be in this category. It does subtract pleasure, so it can certainly be called negative pleasure, but I don't believe it can subtract pleasure to below 0. I don't think any human can ever experience such agony that their existence is actually more painful than not.

Besides, I bet the vast majority of the "overwhelming evidence" you have in mind boils down to "well obviously that can't happen because God isn't real."

Sure, but even putting myself in the mindset of someone who had a propensity/desire to believe in some supernatural entity, the sheer degree of willful ignorance needed to become a Mormon would almost certainly make me opt for a denomination that had the kind fig leaf of being founded centuries or millenia ago, where these kinds of irregularities can be found.

Sadly, I don't expect to convince you of this, because of the robust memetic immune system your upbring has inculcated in you. (I'm assuming you were raised Mormon, feel free to correct me)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Smith

In 1835, Smith encouraged some Latter Day Saints in Kirtland to purchase rolls of ancient Egyptian papyri from a traveling exhibitor. He said they contained the writings of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph. Over the next several years, Smith dictated to scribes what he reported was a revelatory translation of one of these rolls, which was published in 1842 as the Book of Abraham.[292] The Book of Abraham speaks of the founding of the Abrahamic nation, astronomy, cosmology, lineage and priesthood, and gives another account of the creation story.[293]

The papyri associated with the Book of Abraham were thought to have been lost in the Great Chicago Fire, but several fragments were rediscovered in the 1960s. Egyptologists have subsequently determined them to be part of the Egyptian Book of Breathing with no connection to Abraham

https://www.mrm.org/sharing-with-mormons-joseph-smith-lie

Professional Egyptologists to whom the Alphabet and Grammar was submitted for examination were quick to point out that the material in Joseph Smith’s notebook bore no resemblance at all to any correct understanding of the ancient Egyptian language. As one of them, I. E. Edwards, put it, the whole work was, “largely a piece of imagination and lacking in any kind of scientific value.” He added that it reminded him of “the writings of psychic practitioners which are sometimes sent to me.” There were many similar verdicts, all confirming that the person responsible for what [William] Berrett had glowingly called “the first Egyptian grammar in America” could not possibly have understood the ancient Egyptian language.[

Once I again, I reiterate that I'm helpless to convince you, and I submit this primarily to convince impartial observers that I'm not talking out of my ass.

Negative numbers still don't exist though

Sure, doesn't mean they're not useful. Similarly, even our conceptions of "1 apple" aren't atomic, since the intentional separation of the apple from the environment from its environment is at least partially arbitrary. An apple is not an ontologically fundamental entity, to find truly discrete entities, one must dive down to the depths of Quantum Mechanics, such as "Planck time".

It does subtract pleasure, so it can certainly be called negative pleasure, but I don't believe it can subtract pleasure to below 0.

Sure, it can't literally delete the signal of pleasure, but it can produce states that are practically indistinguishable from only pure pain.

Someone getting their dick sucked while their teeth are being pulled out with pliers is getting some pleasure out of it, since the nerves in the penis don't give a shit what's happening to your teeth. But I think it's obvious that the situation is tantamount to someone experiencing a slightly less bad form of torture, or at least the person would be indifferent between the two.

Besides that, pain is simply not important. Getting broken up with hurt way more than crapping out liters of blood. The very worst pains which we as humans can experience have to do not with experiencing suffering, but with experiencing a loss of pleasure

I chose somatic pain because it's by far the best studied, and the one I'm most familiar with it. But unless you disagree that even more emotional kinds of pain don't bottom out in the firing patterns of neurons, the analogy stands tall.

Also, I'm happy for you if you're lucky enough not to have experienced bodily pain so fucking bad merely losing all of one's pleasure in life is getting off lightly.

Someone breaking up is certainly not as unhappy or in pain as another having their skin flayed off.

I can't say that even my worst breakup was anywhere near as bad as a bout of appendicitis in my childhood that had me curled up into a ball.

Sadly, I don't expect to convince you of this, because of the robust memetic immune system your upbring has inculcated in you.

The implication that the memetic immune system associated with my religion is responsible for my beliefs is flatly incorrect. By far the strongest "immune response" it supposedly taught me was to trust in the results of prayer above all else. This is not something which I believed, and honestly still not something which I can bring myself to believe most of the time, due to its obvious epistemic danger. Far more likely is that I'm simply biased to believe in what my parents taught me. Honestly I think I overcorrected for that though, and spent much longer reading philosophy textbooks, atheist arguments, etc. than I should have, fearing that my belief was purely a result of my upbringing rather than due to any connection to the truth.

Memetic immune systems are simply not that powerful, full stop. There is nobody alive, and no possible memetic immune system, which renders anyone with their mental faculties completely immune to the truth. At best you can claim that it takes longer to convince someone of the truth than it should.

The papyri associated with the Book of Abraham were thought to have been lost in the Great Chicago Fire, but several fragments were rediscovered in the 1960s. Egyptologists have subsequently determined them to be part of the Egyptian Book of Breathing with no connection to Abraham

I hope you have enough respect for me to realize that I have already heard and looked into these sorts of concerns far more than you have. Besides, it's not like it takes much research at all to hear of this sort of thing. The church itself published the results you mention (that the recovered papyri were part of the Book of Breathing) in church magazines very soon after the original report was released.

If you look into it more, the papyri which the Book of Abraham came from were actually pretty clearly not the ones which were recovered. The eyewitness accounts alone establish this, while simple deductive reasoning sufficiently confirms it. IIRC Smith had about 100 feet of papyrus, most of which he himself claimed to be unrelated to the Book of Abraham, and of which only about 2.5 feet has been recovered.

As far as the Alphabet and Grammar, the theory about it which I prefer is that it was an attempt to reverse-engineer the language post-translation. It seems pretty clear from contemporary accounts that the language was not actually used in the "translation". I put "translation" in quotes because at other times Smith simply wrote "translations" of things, such as rewriting certain chapters of the Bible, from whole cloth. In most cases (as with the Book of Mormon) the source material does not actually seem to have been used for most of the process. This of course sounds pretty absurd. All I can say is that it is obviously possible with God involved and I have seen sufficient evidence in my own life to convince me that these things must be true, whatever the actual explanation turns out to be.

Sure, doesn't mean they're not useful. Similarly, even our conceptions of "1 apple" aren't atomic, since the intentional separation of the apple from the environment from its environment is at least partially arbitrary. An apple is not an ontologically fundamental entity, to find truly discrete entities, one must dive down to the depths of Quantum Mechanics, such as "Planck time".

I think I was pretty clear in my position that negative numbers are useful. Your point about ontologically fundamental entities seems pretty irrelevant to me. There's no such thing as a negative Planck length either.

I chose somatic pain because it's by far the best studied, and the one I'm most familiar with it. But unless you disagree that even more emotional kinds of pain don't bottom out in the firing patterns of neurons, the analogy stands tall.

I feel like I've been pretty clear here and you're trying to sidestep me. I absolutely believe in biology, but your focus on your own limited understanding of neurons is muddying the water. You totally ignored everything I was saying about the pain that I experience, as well as the obvious tendency people have to grow tolerant to all forms of pain and pleasure. If your position is that pain is pain is pain, you are flat out wrong. The brain mediates all experiences quite heavily before our conscious minds perceive them, and can easily turn pain into pleasure or pleasure into pain. Heck, spicy food literally activates a pain receptor in the tongue and we experience that as a somewhat pleasurable experience.

Also, I'm happy for you if you're lucky enough not to have experienced bodily pain so bad merely losing all of one's pleasure in life is getting off lightly.

Yes. Me too. My assertion is that such pain does not exist.

Someone breaking up is certainly not as unhappy or in pain as another having their skin flayed off.

I disagree, as someone who has experienced more pain than that. I would rather have my skin flayed off a thousand times than go through what I went through again (at least as far as physical pain goes). I would rather go through what I went through a thousand times than go through that breakup again.

Sure, it can't literally delete the signal of pleasure, but it can produce states that are practically indistinguishable from only pure pain.

Someone getting their dick sucked while their teeth are being pulled out with pliers is getting some pleasure out of it, since the nerves in the penis don't give a poop what's happening to your teeth. But I think it's obvious that the situation is tantamount to someone experiencing a slightly less bad form of torture, or at least the person would be indifferent to the two.

Sure, and states indistinguishable from pure pain are what I would call 0. You are losing a vast amount of joy by being incapable of thought, appreciating the world around you, etc. and that's it. The pain itself is entirely irrelevant.

I can't say that even my worst breakup was anywhere near as bad as a bout of appendicitis in my childhood that had me curled up into a ball.

What I experienced was severe ulcerative colitis which lasted about 8 months. Appendicitis has basically the exact same symptoms as ulcerative colitis, to the point that people with ulcerative colitis often mistake appendicitis as another flare-up of their own symptoms. I don't know which is more painful in the moment, but given appendicitis is much shorter-term I would choose to experience that every time.

Would you honestly choose to break up with your partner rather than experience appendicitis again? If so, I simply think you're wrong and would be happier suffering through the appendicitis again. If not, you understand my point, which is that the vast majority of suffering stems from a loss of joy. The correct way to think about pain is to give it basically no importance, except inasmuch as it interferes with actually important things like your ability to hold down a job and experience life.

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