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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28439 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.

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.

I agree it doesn't follow that a religion is true, necessarily. However my main claim is not that meaning is important, but that materialism is ultimately false. You haven't addressed that here.

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.

Perhaps I haven't fleshed out my argument enough, but my stance is in fact quite dissimilar from that argument. I do believe in God, and supernatural beings such as angels and demons. I think the whole 'psychological' argument from pro-religion types, while pointing to important considerations, is sadly quite flawed and does lead to self delusion.

However a related argument, the one that convinced me, is learning to trust experiential evidence or knowledge. Due to our upbringing in Enlightenment rationalism, we are trained to only trust a sort of consensus, 'objective' view. Or in other words we've learned to distrust and disbelieve any of our own experiential, or dare I say empirical, qualia in favor of only believing things that can be confirmed via repeated scientific experiments, or the consensus making machines of our society.

My point is that this 'objective' reality is, once truly dug into, false. The scientific materialist worldview is full of misconceptions and outright lies.

To put forth a bit more of an argument in favor of the supernatural, I'll quote from this article on angels and demons which, while a bit out there, makes an excellent point here:

Dumb matter, a ball rolling down a hill or a set of chemicals reacting in a vial, is going to behave the same way every time, no matter when or where you ask it to perform. You can set up an experiment in Chicago and expect to get the same results you got from the same experiment in a lab in Tennessee. The Conservation of Momentum, Acceleration Due to Gravity, The Second Law of Thermodynamics… these things just happen, and the matter involved in the experiment doesn’t have any mind or will to resist them and to act otherwise. There’s no intelligence in the ball to be able to say, “Hey, you know what? Not feeling it today. I’m tired of the whole F = ma thing. I don’t feel like rolling. Maybe tomorrow.”

The difference of course in our case is that the entire premise of the supernatural is that we are dealing with other sentient minds. Beings who can choose whether they’d like to act or not. By its very nature, The Supernatural needs to be approached more like Anthropology or Zoology instead of Physics or Chemistry. Just as you cannot count on a lion to react the same way to each and every passing zebra, so too are spirits likewise entities with personalities whose behavior is always non-formulaic. When you understand that, you see that the entire basis for the dismissal of such things from The Mainstream has no legs. For, in point of fact, “paranormal” things, just like zoological or anthropological things are reproducible.

They’re just not reproducible on demand.

Big difference.

Anyway, hope this clarifies things a bit. And I genuinely am happy you seem to be able to live with and find meaning in a nihilistic framework. I don't doubt that some, or even many people, can. That still doesn't mean that framework is true.

Scientific materialism is dominant because even the religious use it instrumentally to figure things out.

You could prove materialism false with one good demon.

“Not reproducible on demand” ah well so it’s not quite like a lion I can go observe in 30 minutes at the local zoo if I wanted to is it?

It’s more like Sagan’s garage dragon I guess. So real, so very hard to detect. Very reproducible, but very shy about observation.

Well no, not quite like a lion. They are beings of spirit, fundamentally different from us physical beings. And by many accounts much older and wilier.

Besides, there are plenty of people who have personal evidence of demons active in their lives. There are plenty of recordings of ghosts and strange phenomenon if yo know where to look. Again, the point is that scientific evidence requires reproducibility on demand.

Not actually true. We study things we are not able to reproduce all the time. Scientific experiments should be reproducible, but science is not only limited to experiments. Observational science and experimental science are both subsets of science and both can produce scientific evidence.

If astrophysicists detect some kind of pulse from deep space, that is evidence of some kind of phenomenon even if we can't reproduce it. They may look for other such incidences and may keep looking where it came from to see if it happens again, and certainly that will help gather information, but the initial incident and whatever recordings and so on were taken is still scientific evidence. It might not be enough to work out what caused it, but that isn't the same thing.

Recordings of ghosts are scientific evidence, for example. But just like with the pulse from deep space, one of the things the recording might be evidence for is equipment malfunction, or a hoax, or a poorly built camera or antenna, or yes, actual ghosts, or space aliens. That's why you then study the various proposed theories and try to gather more evidence (which does not have to be the same type of evidence), to discard or strengthen theories.

Even once we had a full understanding of ghosts, or black holes then we might be able to reproduce them, using some kind of technology but it certainly isn't a requirement. The power demands to reproduce a black hole might simply be too much for humanity to ever manage, even if we understood the mechanism 100% perfectly.

Reproducible experimental evidence is strong, because it shows that something works the same way under the same conditions, and then you can alter the conditions and see what changes, which gives you more accessible information, but it certainly isn't a requirement for science itself.

What you're missing is that observations are weak scientific evidence and have to be weighed. If you look outside and see the sun, and everyone else in your town can do the same, then even though blind people cannot see the sun, that is good evidence the sun exists as an observable entity. But if 99.99999% of people looked up and did not see the sun, then the observational evidence of the remaining tiny percentage has to be weighed against that. Is it a hallucination? Are they lying? Is it that they are mutants who can see a wavelength of light everyone else cannot? The fact that most people do not see the sun is ALSO scientific evidence.

<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>

Sure, sure. Conceded.

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