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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3636 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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After occasionally reading NHI/UAP posts on X and 4chan, and of course in here when it comes up, I’ve had a thought that I’ve not seen expressed.

The conventional take is that any disclosure will have earth shattering ramifications for the religions of the world. That evidence of NHI would result in people doubting their faith, their religious leaders, and their belief that humans have some primacy in the universe. Basically that it would have catastrophic results for religion.

I expect the exact opposite would happen. I expect that materialists, “Scientists”, the “IFL Science” crowd, debunkers, and Atheists would be the ones that will be least likely at accept a new paradigm.

Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics and they’re also quite used to a world where we have beliefs in opposition to the mainstream. I have no doubt that any NHI as a concept would be integrated into existing religion without all that much trouble.

As for the Science crowd, the existence of NHI would necessarily mean that the story they’ve defended for their entire lives is either wrong or incomplete. We’ve seen how that’s worked out on other topics recently. I expect no amount of evidence presented would ever be enough. I supposed that this would depend on exactly what is being disclosed and what beliefs are violated. Learning that FTL travel is possible would be quite different from the inter dimensional travel that’s been suggested lately. It would also depend on the exact mechanism of disclosure. If TPTB were to get the prestigious journals and community influencers on board first and in a systematic way, people would just get their normal software update so that’s they’re on the right side of The Current Thing. No different than if the Pope told us Catholics that NHI were fully in communion with the Church.

Long story short: I believe the conventional thinking that NHI would kill religion is severely outdated. Perhaps this was true at one time when religion was the dominant societal meme. No longer.

Religious people by definition are more open to metaphysics

No, by definition we have much stronger commitments to given metaphysical ideas. There’s a pretty big difference.

Eh, I find that most atheists are extremely implicitly committed to the a metaphysical ontology that is just, "Oops, I have the methodological constraints of science, and I've mistaken them for an actual metaphysical ontology." When you poke them on this, they don't clarify, "No, actually, I'm not making this extremely boneheaded mistake." They're still committed to it. They just get angry that you pointed it out.

I remember someone made the claim that something was only true to the extent it was useful. To this I replied that some math concepts were discovered long before they were useful in physics, and there are still many math concepts that we don't have an application for yet. Some of these might be applied in the future, but it's not impossible that some math concepts are never useful. Does that make a valid theorem as false as 2+2=fish?

I didn't get a response back but I have wondered since if it changed their mind at all.

Might be a definition issue. Obviously I don't know the specifics of that discussion, but the person might have meant "useful" as in the "all models are wrong, but some are useful" (i.e., "useful" in the sense that they can be used to build theorems on or make falsifiable hypotheses), rather than in the sense of "having practical applications". If so, I'd be tempted to agree.

He made it clear that useful meant, "measurably impacts my day to day life, all else is mental masturbation."

For example, most historical details were also considered false, regardless of how sure we are that they really happened.

Ah, nevermind, then. Thanks for the context.

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