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A reasonable question, and an important one, but not one I really want to discuss right now tbh.
I think it's not too relevant to the point that we have a lot of evidence there's not a heaven with jesus and angels and the happy souls of all the do-gooders that we didn't have a thousand years ago. Whether there's something non-mechanistic going on with the universe - important, tied up in why people are so attracted to things like Christianity, but still doesn't prove Christianity true.
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
I agree there's a lot to think about there. But the materialist narrative isn't at all dishonest, I think it's clear how an honest and discerning person would come to believe that, even if wrong. It's very easy to be horrifically wrong without being dishonest.
...This is best demonstrated in words other than my own. From a link in the Cryonics discussion:
At one point, maybe in the late 1700s, it might be argued that the above was not a lie but only an untested theory. But then we tested it, at considerable length, and very thoroughly falsified it. Neither living things in general, nor man very much in particular, attain the status of "mechanisms: clockworks that can be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will", much less "usurping the role of God".
When such theories are falsified, and their proponents decline to update but rather ignore the evidence or begin stacking epicycles, that is dishonesty, or at least a level of foolishness indistinguishable from it. We all laugh at the Flat Earthers and the Sovereign Citizens who have rendered themselves impervious to evidence. But "I think, therefore I am": there is no evidence more immediate and more readily available than the existence of the Willful Self, which prominent Materialists consistently agree cannot exist as it evidently does.
You claim:
...But in fact the evidence you describe does not exist. We have significantly more and better evidence for a historical Jesus now than we did a thousand years ago, contrary to the predictions of the majority of a previous generation of materialists. We have exactly the same amount of evidence that he was the Son of God, that God exists, that people have souls that we did a thousand years ago. Depending on how one counts it, we have slightly more evidence that the souls of do-gooders are happy than we did a thousand years ago, at least from a strictly materialist frame, given that "religion is a plague to be cured" has largely given way to "we need to figure out how to generate the benefits of religion without the drawbacks". The old-school materialists didn't recognize any benefits to religion. The new-school materialists don't admit to how much of their edifice is built on falsified claims.
Again with this shit. Because humanity hasn't solved all its problems and answered all questions, it has actually stagnated for centuries. Millennia!
Natural selection is very much evidence against god that didn't exist a 1000 years ago. People used the inexplicable miracle of life as evidence for god right up until it was explicable. Of course an implication directly leads to its contrapositive, not the negation, but I'd say the negation is usually implied in a Bayesian sense. Of course, Bayes himself is a lot more recent than a 1000 years.
Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul. As people learn to measure and control your every impulse and emotion by manipulating your brain, you'll continue to shift the goalposts as long as they haven't solved the hard problem. (Which religion doesn't either of course. One the most beautiful aspects of materialism is that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer where religion pretends to knowledge it doesn't have or goes for "it is unknowable", a statement with an impossible burden of proof that has been shown wrong on innumerable topics time over time.)
Edit: and mormonism and scientology among others are new evidence against Jesus being the son of god. Any new cult with nonsense supernatural claims taken just as seriously as the old ones is evidence against the old ones being true by giving more data on the patters of how such beliefs form.
Humanity has not solved any of its actual problems. Not a single one. We still get sick, we still die, we still covet and lust and hate exactly the way we did at the dawn of history. People predicted otherwise, and were proven wrong. The specific ways their claims have been falsified provides solid evidence that this will not change in the foreseeable future.
"Stagnation" implies a lack of necessary growth, but "growth" in this sense is pretty clearly not possible.
It's evidence against a specific theory of God. It is not evidence against a God in the general case, or even against most specific cases. It does nothing at all to address a Simulationist theory, for example. Further, Materialism can't do better even by its own terms: everything we've learned about the mechanisms of the universe say that the universe shouldn't exist the way it evidently does, which is why we have people positing unfalsifiables like infinite universes.
Which aspects of the mind have been explained and controlled by physics and chemistry, in the sense you mean here? Do you recognize that previous generations of Materialists have claimed far, far more control than they actually had?
They've been trying to do that for three hundred years, and to date no shifting of the goal-posts has been necessary. I see no evidence that greater control over individuals or the public is available now than was in the 1600s or 1400s or under Alexander the Great. Deterministic control over individuals or groups does not seem possible at all, even in principle, and the feasibility of such control is one of the basic predictions of the Materialistic thesis.
This is by no means an obscure question. Disney can't get people to watch their movies. If brain-manipulation through measurement and control of brain impulses worked, they are one of the groups I'd expect to be really good at using it. They aren't, which is fairly good evidence that it doesn't.
My religion, at least, doesn't require me to reject the readily-observable reality of free will, which is the base of my argument here. You can directly observe yourself making choices moment-to-moment. Materialism says that can't actually be what's really happening, and makes specific predictions as to why and how to prove it. Those predictions have been falsified every time they've been tested. Materialism ignores the falsifications and simply pretends such control exists, as you yourself demonstrate above.
I'm given to understand that reason demonstrates that a number of things are unknowable in principle. Materialism absolutely pretends to knowledge it does not possess, and has a long, very public history of doing so.
I grew up in a church with the understanding that Evolution was probably real. I can't be doing a "God of the Gaps", because I was born on this side of the purported gap. You seem to want to hold me to the predictions of previous generations of Christians, who made their arguments before I was born, and honestly, I don't think this is an unreasonable position to take. What is unreasonable is for you to object to being likewise held accountable for the arguments made by previous generations of Materialists, and it seems to me that my side has shifted the goalposts a whole lot less than yours.
No, they aren't. The existence of innumerable false religions was already priced-in; the invention of additional novel false religions provides no significant additional evidence, because such novel false religions are (or should be) expected. On the other hand, Materialists have been both predicting and actively working to bring about the end of Christianity for hundreds of years now, and yet Christianity persists despite Materialist predictions to the contrary. To the extent that those predictions have been falsified, it seems that this persistence should be at least weak evidence. And indeed, as I noted above, Materialist attitudes toward Christianity have shifted considerably over my lifetime. The hardcore attitude that Christianity is pure net-negative has weakened considerably, due, I think, to the evidence piling up against such assertions.
Materialism is an ideology like all previous ideologies, not a breakthrough or a new paradigm. All that is required to observe it deforming over time is a moderately-good memory.
We get sick much less often and die much later than ever. Hate is hard to measure but death by violence is also rarer than ever. Coveting and lusting are possibly as popular as ever but much less clearly bad. Theft and rape are both, again, rarer than ever. As in that previous post, you're just going on about how the lack of perfect solutions means everything is exactly the same as centuries ago.
I didn't make any claims about how strong the evidence is in any of the cases, just that it's there and newer than a fucking millennium. It also goes the other way, every religious person expressing a personal experience of miracle is also new evidence in favor of there being a god. I think the overall evidence is absurdly in favor of there not being one, but it's even more absurd to claim this question has stayed unchanged in centuries. And by simple statistics, for e.g. novel false religions to not be evidence against christianity, a lack of such would also have to not be evidence for it. Would you honestly not take "novel false religions stopped popping up after the spread of christianity" as evidence for it?
For the mind, we can insert electrodes into to the brain to make the housed consciousness go through various experiences. We can affect it much more strongly in predictable ways with various chemicals, for which we know which specific receptors they bind to. We have numerous studies of various forms of brain damage to see how they affect the conscious experience. None of these are things that would have made any sense a 1000 years ago. And yet you claim they don't impact our understanding of consciousness any because Disney hasn't invented mind control rays, again the insane binary worldview.
And again, from simple statistics, the only way these things aren't evidence against a soul is if their negation also wouldn't be evidence for a soul. If drugs or brain damage could affect your motor control but not your conscious experience, for example, you'd also have to not count that as evidence for a soul separate from the body.
Free will is either perfectly compatible - just because my brain is deterministic doesn't mean it doesn't go through a choice-making algorithm, which is what I'm experiencing - or it is currently unfalsifiable, requiring probably impossible cloning technology or time travel.
Lastly and most importantly, I don't want to hold you to previous generations of christians or care much for the many stupid views other materialists, past or present, hold. I fact quite the opposite, I want you to acknowledge that you are vastly different from the christians of a thousand years ago, and your belief system and worldview are different from theirs, because it has been informed by an entire millennium of new evidence. Materialism can be both a breakthrough and a ideology like many others, they're not really exclusive. But unlike yours it doesn't particularly view deforming its ideology as a bad thing.
The term "much" seems underspecified, given that illness and death remain two of the numerous universal human experiences which have remained absolutely stable throughout all of recorded human history. Clearly, you are aware that all humans experience sickness and death, and fear these things, just as they always have. Just as clearly, I am aware that life expectancy has increased and that we now have penicillin, so what is the disconnect here?
I am claiming that the core of the human experience, the ends we desire and the logic by which we pursue them, have not been changed in any meaningful way, even as the tools we employ in that pursuit have changed radically. As evidence to support this thesis, I point to the numerous ways in which the important features of a human life, things like being born, growing, learning, being part of a family, making friends, using language, using tools, managing conflict, working, fighting, pursuing virtue, dealing with vice, experiencing love, becoming a couple, sex, having and raising children, and so on, have not changed in their essential character despite the means by which they are conducted changing very significantly.
For further evidence, I point to insightful writings of centuries or millennia past about the human experience, and point out that if our technology really had changed us in a fundamental way, we should expect these writings to lose their relevance over time, which they have not. When Socrates tells us that “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable”, we understand what he means and why he is correct, and it is for the same reasons that he was correct when he first spoke the words, despite the fact that he had no knowledge of steroids or CrossFit or nutritional science. Steroids and CrossFit and nutritional science are changeable means to an unchanged end: health and fitness. Conversations about these subjects written in 400 BC remain both intelligible and immediately relevant to our current context. And so it is, I contend, with every other major sphere of human life.
Could these ends change? Maybe. If you could in fact upload people into a computer such that they no longer had a physical body or any of the experiences that went along with it, then the closest an EM might get would be a purely metaphorical understanding. But of course, EMs remain science fiction, and seem likely to continue to remain science fiction for the indefinite future.
I disagree that they are less bad. Coveting helped drive humans to genocide within the last hundred years. Lust remains exactly as bad as it ever was; ask anyone who's had their spouse cheat on them, or talk to people who feel that ubiquitous porn has made their life worse.
I strongly doubt this is true in specific numbers, and in any case both theft and rape remain serious issues that we have to actively manage and be concerned about. We are nowhere near Yudkowski's "Three Worlds Collide", where people even had a concept of rape as a bad thing is seen as an embarrassing secret. And again, Materialists explicitly predicted that the problem of theft and rape, and a number of other problems besides, could be solved in an absolute sense, not merely managed as it has been throughout all of human history.
No, I'm pointing out that actual solutions were predicted, and those solutions have not manifested. If I promise to build you a mansion, take your money and then hand you a picture of a mansion, or a cheap one-person tent, or erect a painted cardboard façade on the house you already own, none of these constitute fulfillment of my original claim.
The quote that started this discussion:
That phrase is an explicit claim about the history of Materialism. I am pointing out that this claim, and the ideological construct that generated it, is straightforwardly false. If you want to claim that progress exists, you have to engage with the historical record of how things were in the past, and compare them to how they are now. Evaluating previous claims and predictions is part of that process.
I think I understand why you would claim this. You're working from a Bayesian perspective, where everything is evidence, no matter how weak. I do not think that this methodology can possibly be applied with sufficient rigor to deliver meaningful results. Further, I think that the reasoning behind it is badly mistaken about how reason itself works. To put it very simply, human reason is neither mathematical nor even deterministic, and there is no way to rigorously calculate a prior such that the assumptions of Bayesian reasoning can truly be relied upon.
Sufficiently weak "evidence" stops being evidence at all in any meaningful sense. If I tell you that I have experienced a miracle, the honest and reasonable response is "I don't believe you," not "this updates my prior that miracles exist .00001%". The later implies that you have actually moved toward believing in miracles in some meaningful, quantifiable sense, which I very strongly do not believe is the case. It seems to me that framing "priors" in decimal notation is a form of deceit, both to others and to oneself, because it inescapably involves concealing the actual process of reasoning behind a simulation of objectivity and rigor. It's textbook manipulation of procedural outcomes, to put it in the vernacular of the Culture War.
In any case, no, I do not think that additional claims of miracles results in accumulating evidence of miracles happening now, nor does the absence of observed miracles in the present provide accumulating evidence that miracles in the past did not exist. Likewise, no new religions would not be evidence that Christianity is correct, and neither are new religions evidence that Christianity is incorrect, even leaving aside the fact that the Bible itself repeatedly predicts new false religions will arise in its authors' future.
Claims of miracles gives evidence that miracles exist, and absence of observed miracles gives evidence that they don't, but fairly rapidly, the value of additional data points drops to zero. Likewise, Scientology and Mormonism do not provide additional evidence that Christianity is false, because the million other religions and cults and movements prior to them have already provided all the evidence for that proposition that we can meaningfully use.
And this is the core of my argument: What we know, we've known for a long, long time. That many religions are false is a fact thousands of years old. Likewise the idea that no God exists. Neither is a modern discovery, and no novel evidence has been discovered to support them any better than they were supported two thousand years previously. "We can't explain this phenomenon, therefore God" was not a better argument in the past and a worse argument now, it was exactly as good an argument in the past as it is now, because the additional surface detail our growing technology provides does not actually change the basic question. We did not know where we came from before, and we don't know where we came from now, and the unanswerable questions are of a highly-similar character.
On the other hand, "We can use novel tech to solve the human condition" is a novel claim. Materialism, at least in its modern form, is novel as well. It has made specific claims, and those claims should be evaluated on their merits.
That the brain was the seat of consciousness is attested to by the use of decapitation for execution as far back as one cares to look. Likewise, the idea that physical stimuli affect the mind is likewise ancient beyond reckoning, as it is directly observable from one's personal experience. Likewise, use of physical substances and stimuli to induce predictable altered states of consciousness are so old that we have no idea when they started: Alcohol and other psychoactive substances, music and rituals being examples of this technology from prehistoric times.
Electrodes in the brain were supposed to deliver something more: they were supposed to "reducing man, and indeed all living things, to the status of mechanisms: clockworks that could be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will". They haven't done that. There's no evidence they're capable of doing that, Transhumanist claims and sci-fi fantasies to the contrary. That failure is significant, given the confidence and significance of the predictions and promises that preceded it.
A thousand years ago, I'm pretty confident that people understood that smashing someone's brain killed them, and that smashing it a little fucked them up and then usually killed them; survivable trepanation dates back to well before writing, and the same procedure being used in an attempt to cure madness is thousands of years old. We have elaborated on that model extensively, but extensive elaboration is not an entirely new model. We can specify forms of damage they could not. We can identify forms of damage that they had no way of seeing. We cannot actually do psycho-surgery in any meaningful sense, as the advocates of lobotomies claimed in the past, and the advocates of medical "transition" claim in the present.
Literal mind control is what Materialism has spent centuries promising. It is not my fault that they made absurd promises that they could not possibly make good on, any more than it is your fault that faith healers claim to miraculously cure illness through prayer. You yourself claimed that "Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul." I'm pointing out that no meaningful explanation or control over the mind has actually been demonstrated. Not only does Disney not have mind-control rays, they can't reliably make movies that most people in their host society enjoy. That is an absurdly low bar to pass for the claim both Materialists generally and you specifically have made, and it still can't be cleared.
This is not an "insanely binary worldview". It is close to the bare minimum for such statements to have any meaning at all. Entertainment is likewise older than writing, and the purported pinnacle of entertainment technology, benefiting from all the advances we've supposedly made in unlocking the secrets of the mind, still produces bombs and stinkers, "martyrs of pies and relics of the bum". Despite the progress of technology, the fundamentals of entertainment, like all other fields of human endeavor, have not perceptibly changed in any way. Art from two thousand years ago is still competitive with art produced yesterday. If Progress worked the way Materialists claim it does, this should not be the case, and yet it is.
I'm pretty sure (specific kinds of) drugs and brain damage can in fact affect my motor control but not my conscious experience, if I'm understanding your use of the terms correctly, and I do not count this as evidence of a soul separate from the body. Why would I? The soul, if it exists, is metaphysical. Why would you expect it to have physical properties and interactions? Likewise, the thesis of God I'm familiar with from Christianity is roughly similar to the Sim programmer in Simulationist theories. There is strong support for reasoning that such a being cannot be investigated the way you investigate gravity or combustion or other properties of the physical universe.
I think that God and the Soul are reasonable hypotheses, given the available evidence. I do not think that either can be proven in any meaningful sense, but then I don't think "proof", in the sense of a deterministic process that forces a mind to draw specific conclusions, exists at all. I think there are good reasons to believe in God and the soul, even from a materialist perspective: adopting such beliefs on an axiomatic basis is clearly quite adaptive for humans, and usually result in good outcomes under a normative value set, while abandoning them has resulted in widespread bad outcomes under that same normative value set. Being possessed of neither a Materialist perspective nor a normative value set, I think they're about the best ideas there are, but different values and different axioms will give different results; we each are free to choose as we will.
Both of the branches you've described seem unfalsifiable, at least under present conditions and perhaps under any conditions at all. Proving determinism means reducing the brain to actual clockwork, directly and arbitrarily manipulable. Materialists claimed that they could figure out how to do this, and in fact have repeatedly claimed that they had figured out how to do this, to the point that they fooled our society at large into believing them and significantly altering society to exploit these purported capabilities. The fact remains that they cannot, and they have made no significant progress toward achieving this capability at all. We are exactly where we've been since at least the invention of writing: individual humans think and choose just as they always have, with chaotic yet weakly predictable consequences resulting.
The first part is a subjective view. I could say that most parents expecting to see all their children to reach adulthood is a meaningful change to the human condition that's less than a century old, or that steroids trade health for fitness in a way the two couldn't be meaningfully opposed in Socrates' time, but we'll likely never agree on what counts as meaningful. I think merely massively improving the human condition counts for a lot. You do also mix this with measurable aspects, as in the linked post, where you are just factually wrong.
I could argue that coveting built most of our modern prosperity and lust is why most of us are even around, by looking at the evolutionary basis for these feelings. That they have negative effects as well doesn't say what the total sign is.
I continue to not care about what outlandish predictions past materialists made which failed to materialize. It is not an ideology that requires unity of thought among its adherents, I can evaluate individual predictions under my own materialist framework. No form of materialism I respect has promised mind control rays. It's still unclear to me what your problem with the quoted original passage is. The importance is obviously subjective, but evolution by natural selection very much explains the cause of human impulses in a way unavailable before.
I agree that framing Bayesian priors in exact percentages is generally disingenuous, but that doesn't make the entire approach so. Enough people I know and respect claiming miracles would make me significantly question my understanding of the world. A non-negligible part of the internet ratsphere turning catholic mildly made me do so, my understanding of internet rationalists a lot more than my understanding of religion though.
I have no idea how decapitation is supposed to show that the brain is the seat of consciousness over the heart, for example. Trepanation being used for mental illnesses is a much better example. But I do think there's a significant difference between using alcohol as a black box and knowing it's one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GABAA_receptor_positive_allosteric_modulator, knowing the chemical actions by which it inhibits neuron activity and knowing that your altered conscious state is caused by inhibited neuron activity. Yes, going from this to explaining how being drunk makes you feel is a very long way, but I think it's a step in the right direction and I still don't care if some people claimed they could make the entire journey in a couple of decades or whatever.
Plenty of people on this board often complain about the deleterious effect of the superstimulus that is modern entertainment, so presumably they would vehemently disagree with your assessment. I think modern disney is mostly a massive tangle of principal-agent problems.
For the soul, I mean a metaphysical answer to the hard problem. I think most religious peoples conception of a soul fits this description. So zero drugs affecting your conscious experience would be evidence for a soul. As is, many drugs do affect it, so it does in fact have physical properties and interactions.
Yes, compatibilism is equally currently unfalsifiable as any test would have to prove one version of free will over the other. I'm just saying it's a perfectly coherent model of why I experience free will, so this experience in no way contradicts materialism.
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