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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28503 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:

Catholicism tells us that the wine and bread are LITERALLY the blood and body of christ. It is not compatible with science.

On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.

Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.

Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.

Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...

In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.

Matches catch fire because of phosphorus—“safety matches” have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body’s chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the “molecular currency”. It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.

If a match stops working, so do you. You can’t change just one thing.

The surface-level rules, “Matches catch fire when struck,” and “Humans need air to breathe,” are not obviously connected. It took centuries to discover the connection, and even then, it still seems like some distant fact learned in school, relevant only to a few specialists. It is all too easy to imagine a world where one surface rule holds, and the other doesn’t; to suppress our credence in one belief, but not the other. But that is imagination, not reality. If your map breaks into four pieces for easy storage, it doesn’t mean the territory is also broken into disconnected parts. Our minds store different surface-level rules in different compartments, but this does not reflect any division in the laws that govern Nature.

We can take the lesson further. Phosphorus derives its behavior from even deeper laws, electrodynamics and chromodynamics. “Phosphorus” is merely our word for electrons and quarks arranged a certain way. You cannot change the chemical properties of phosphorus without changing the laws governing electrons and quarks.

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:

So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario? Nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.

The better a scientist is, and the more curiosity they have about the natural world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.

And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval. Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.

Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that physicists and mathematicians are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.

But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?

As the Dreaded Jim famously said:

The fundamental realization of the Dark Enlightenment is that all men are not created equal, not individual men, nor the various groups and categories of men, nor are women equal to men, that these beliefs and others like them are religious beliefs, that society is just as religious as ever it was, with an official state religion of progressivism, but this is a new religion, an evil religion, and, if you are a Christian, a demonic religion.

The Dark Enlightenment does not propose that leftism went wrong four years ago, or ten years ago, but that it was fundamentally and terribly wrong a couple of centuries ago, and we have been heading to hell in a handbasket ever since at a rapidly increasing rate – that the enlightenment was dangerously optimistic about humans, human nature, and the state, that it is another good news religion, telling us what we wish to hear, but about this world instead of the next.

If authority required me to believe in Leprechauns, and to get along with people that it was important to get along with required me to believe in Leprechauns, I would probably believe in leprechauns, though not in the way that I believe in rabbits, but I can see people not being equal, whereas I cannot see leprechauns not existing.

And:

If we only count religions that officially admit to being supernatural, pretty obviously religion is declining. If, however, we define religion more broadly, then religion is increasing by leaps and bounds.

If authority assures you that leprechauns exist and that authority can see them, it does not take much faith to believe, since you cannot see leprechauns not existing. If, however, authority assures you that all humans are equal, or that all groups and categories of human are equal, it takes outstanding and extraordinary faith, since every day you see individuals, groups, and categories being strikingly and obviously unequal, for reasons cultural, genetic, and hormonal.

Further, belief in the flying spaghetti monster not only does no harm, but is apt to inculcate the accumulated wisdom of the ages, inculcating prudent and virtuous behavior, whereas belief in equality tends to inculcate bad behavior, as illustrated by the inability of “Occupy” to operate an urban campsite.

The atheist/religious believer inferential gap is always huge, and especially difficult to bridge in rationalist forums. As someone who went from a materialist to one of the faithful, let's see if I can explain why statements like:

Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.

tend to rub me the wrong way. More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.

What most rationalists (with the noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense. Many modern philosophers argue that any description of life itself can't be formulated via materialism means, without resorting to an appeal to some higher organizational, metaphysical structure.

Historically the scientific materialist worldview has of course revealed much about the natural world, primarily through demythologizing our place in it. Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.

While a ScientistTM may just scoff at the importance of meaning or purpose and say "Who cares, my science still gives me Truth," well, unfortunately that assertion is becoming more and more false by the day. L.P. Koch gives a decent summary in The Death of Science, but you can read about the phenomenon of our scientific apparatus falling apart all over the place. You've got the joke field of 'consciousness studies', the deep issues in quantum physics, the shocking revelation that our cosmic model is completely wrong via the James Webb space telescope, et cetera. Or just look at the fiasco of the Covid-19 response.

All of this to say, when people nowadays talk about religion having a comeback, what they often mean on a deeper level is that the Enlightenment myth, first posed by Descartes, is failing. Starting with the existentialists in the mid-20th century, this understanding is now percolated through to the masses with the help of the Internet and other mass communication technology. It's increasingly clear that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the 19th century, again while granting us great power, is a framework that only goes so far; crucially this framework does not and cannot touch on the deeper questions of human meaning, other than giving us a destructive, nihilistic hedonism.

Ultimately the rationalist Enlightenment has been a Faustian bargain for humanity - we've gained unfathomable power over the natural world compared to our ancestors, but we have lost our souls in the process.

Okay, but let's say I agree that meaning is "important" to human beings and necessary for human happiness and flourishing.

It does not follow that religion, any religion, is true. It just means that religious belief might make people happier.

This is not dissimilar to the argument some people have made here, that religion is good for society and therefore we should promote it regardless of whether it's true. We'd be better off if everyone was Christian, so go to church even if you don't actually believe in God.

That might work for some people, but it would not work for me. I won't claim I couldn't or wouldn't pretend if my life or livelihood depended on it, but otherwise, I just don't believe in God, I don't believe in supernatural or metaphysical explanations for anything, and therefore I am not going to subscribe to your newsletter (metaphorically speaking).

Will humanity be sadder and find less meaning if religion goes away? Maybe so! But your argument still looks a lot like "Therefore we should all pretend to believe even if we don't, because we'll be better off that way."

I think the most compelling and scariest element of H.P. Lovecraft's supernatural yet profoundly atheistic mythos was not the unspeakable Elder Gods (who were not really "gods"), but that the underlying theme of all his works was that humans are an accident and the universe fundamentally does not care about us. We have no higher purpose or meaning, and if we all got wiped out in an asteroid strike tomorrow, no one would notice or care.

This is (minus the Elder Gods) basically what I believe. And I acknowledge that for some people, that can seem pretty scary and nihilistic. For me, it just is, and I find plenty of meaning in my life while acknowledging that I'm just an infinitesimal blip in the here and now. Sure, it would be nice to believe there is an omnipotent deity who loves each one of us individually and promises an eternal afterlife, but I can't force myself to believe this because it would be nice. Maybe instrumentally we should try to convince the proles to believe this, but to me, that seems awfully cynical and more likely to just end up in the same bad place religion often does.

I think this attitude probably above all proves the basic fact that the Enlightenment effort failed. This failure was despite the fact of the promulgation of the ability to manipulate our environment with its ideals, as in, we as human beings were made one with the environment that we were supposed to study (the ‘phenomenological’ world, as Kant would express) and hence the idea of conscious experience (the ‘noumenon’ representing qualitative experience, the ‘self’) was somehow shifted into the categories of the empirical world; we began to see our conscious-experience as just another ‘thing’ we should study with the mind instead of it being a top-down observer which had to enter into that world of materiality to understand it.

And consequently, as we were skeptical of that empirical, phenomenological world, we were skeptical of our own conceptions of uniqueness—we began to collapse that luster of what experience really meant as a liberated agentic ‘force’ which could impact reality as mere dumb things couldn’t, we made the sharpness of the edges of the conscious mind in comparison to the dullness of the mundane things around us analogous to those mundane things, just with added processes hitherto unknown that were compossible with those mundane things, and were probably just another mundane thing that we hadn’t categorized yet. Hence we stopped thinking of people as having ‘souls’, but just being flesh-automatons piloted by electricity. Lovecraft, or other fictional views of the world in this stead, just espouse the same basic idea of life inherently having no pattern, no uniqueness, that if we were all swept away tomorrow it wouldn’t matter—and yet this was seen as something that should be accepted unflinchingly! As just an extrapolation of the inevitable axiom of the Enlightenment project, to seek truth wherever it was, even as this truth hurt to look at.

And yet that ignores the fact that the methodology of this conclusion might be faulty on its own terms, for if we are to assume human flourishing as related to social norms is also a fact of life, a fact as true as the fact that we have evolved from single-celled organisms billions of years ago, then we aren’t to flinch from that, either. If we are to assume that the idea of the pursuit of truth is worthwhile because it pursues some ‘good’, with this good being expressed in terms of human flourishing (since the idea of ‘there’s no pattern in this world, we are alone’ would be antithetical to the idea of formulating the pursuit of truth in any way beyond a utilitarian mode), then that also would carry for those social norms being good for the same goal. For if we are to abstract truths from their ‘metaphysical’ qualities as the materialist extrapolation of the Enlightenment project says we should do, then there is no difference between these two facts after all, and if one (the pursuit of flourishing) even supersedes the fact of pursuing truth that could diminish the flourishing of the first, then we must necessarily choose the former—since, as said, the only motivation towards pursuing truth whatsoever would be to maximize the pursuit of flourishing to begin with. The latter is embedded in the former, not the other way around.

And yet, again, this is only something brought up if the Enlightenment project’s conclusions are bought on their own terms for the sake of argument. There are reasons to even reject the conclusion that materialism is well-founded, especially from the skepticism that regarded us as believing in materialism in the first place (due to being skepticism of our own skepticism, for instance—a ‘critique of pure reason’, if you will). Not to mention the fact that if the truths of this reality and the evolution of our subsequent conscious minds would be based on the materialistic framework, then accepting the naturalistic model of the world because our conscious minds (operating on a process of materialistic accidents) would similarly be irrational. Our conscious minds in totality, as a thing-in-itself, should be ‘beyond’ the phenomenology expressed and filtered through that consciously-reflected sense experience; to attempt to understand our conscious minds through that world would be an instance of relative self-reference, which could cause loads of paradoxes due to circularity and things like that.

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