Naturalism, take 2

[mindstalk]

Apart from some childhood animism (apologizing to doors I kicked, mercy-killing my breakfast sausages) and fear of an unnamed but Zeus-like thunder god ("to whom it may concern, if you're going to strike my house, could you please wait until my parents get home so I'm not out on the street by myself?"), I've always been an atheist. (I think atheist and agnostic overlap a lot, but called myself agnostic once out of cowardince on a school bus, and was promptly shamed out of that.)  Or "godless", to be more general.  But over the years many debates, over atheism and religion, over libertarianism, over AI, made me realize that this was only one of two key issues, and possibly the less important one.  Many an atheist will try to argue the impossibility of God, which I think is a crock, since I can easily imagine us being in some big comptuer simulation.  The Christian deity is tres unlikely, but a Deistic Creator, while uninformative, is certainly possible.  Heck, a meddling Creator is equally possible.

No, what my view of science really doesn't leave room for is the soul[1], in the sense of an immaterial immortal thingy with a free will somehow neither fully caused nor random.  And what I came to realize is that for many godless people, while they would deny a belief in a soul if asked outright, their stated beliefs on other issues revealed a hollow shape where a soul should be.  Their network of concepts on free will, inherent human dignity or specialness, human rights, and the possibility (or not, usually not) of AI, or of subservient AI, strongly resembles the network of a Christian, with the God and soul concepts deleted but no other big changes.  Similarly, many people who deny Creationism, or even God, maintain an effective belief in a Great Chain of Being progressing up to humans, to the ongoing frustration of evolutionary biologists.  The causal concepts have been deleted, but the network of resulting concepts has not been reorganized or regenerated to account for the change.

So that's why I mentioned http://naturalism.org a couple of days ago: it's a growing collection of essays written by people who seem to have my worldview, a fully naturalistic one where there is no soul, humans are just animals and computational devices, and free will is a feeling we have, not a cause unto itself.  Like Epicureanism, except that Epicurus flinched and made up some atomic swerves to provide a handwavy basis for free will.

[1] Between the ages of 8-10 was a big time for me.  I got exposed to quantum, relativity, evolution, DNA mechanisms, and neuroscience, particularly all the weird things that various types of brain damage can do.  Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The Brain of PBS and Richard Restak, Richard Feynman on Nova followed by The Dancing Wu Li Masters and The Cosmic Code, all in a casually atheist household where my economist father told me "mathematics is the language of science" and science was Good.  And that's just the books I remember or have on my shelves, not counting forgotten library books on biology, or the kid's science magazines.  No wonder I'm such a materialist.

Comments

Re: "In Special Circumstances, all thoughts are permitted."

[dogofjustice.livejournal.com]

(Split into two posts due to excessive length.)

Don't know that I'm convinced naturalism reduces fitness, or that it predicts that it does. There's also fitness in some general sense vs. fitness for humans; fictional AIs tend to be naturalist, I think.

Okay, I "predicts" too loosely; my thinking was that this sort of analysis pretty much must be performed with a naturalistic mindset. In any case, the argument is that believing in naturalism encourages one to choose to optimize a utility function significantly more distant from the evolutionary optimum than otherwise. There are exceptions (e.g. Patri Friedman), but statistically naturalists do have less kids than, say, Catholics or Muslims. There are of course all kinds of major confounding variables like wealth and educational level; but then, it actually doesn't matter precisely why naturalists have less kids on average, only that it happens. Thus naturalism is very dependent on lateral transmission, which is difficult, especially when other memes are developing more defenses against it. I remember a guy speaking against "secular humanism" back in my churchgoing days.

Geoffrey Miller (http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#miller) has written about this from a different angle.

Epicureanism did decently but wasn't dominant, and then Theodosius stomped on everything.

Hmm, I really should shore up my background in philosophy to avoid spending too much time reinventing wheels in the future. I didn't know anything about Epicureanism until looking it up just now, despite it being such an important predecessor to my own thinking.

Also I'm suspicious in general of anything which treats Africans as a coherent population, because they're supposed to be the most genetically diverse population, which is what evolutionary theory would predict.

Most discussion of Africans in the US is referring specifically to the subset of West Africans which were involved in the slave trade, a more genetically homogeneous population.

There certainly is a lot of diversity within Africa; consider the polar opposite running capabilities of West and East Africans, or the contrast between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, for starters. That said, consider the Eurasian east-west axis of cultural transmission that Jared Diamond discusses in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Because of that axis, most populations in Europe and Asia have had millennia to genetically adapt to the basic parameters of Eurasian civilization. Sub-Saharan African populations all missed out on this. Thanks to the diversity you mention, it isn't too surprising that a few of those populations, e.g. the Tutsi, may have turned out somewhat adapted anyway. But the average level of adaptation to Eurasian civilization is lower.

Now, I don't blame sub-Saharan Africans for this accident of geography; hence my democratic transhumanist philosophy. If they want kids who are genetically better adapted to Eurasian civilization than they are, I believe we should ensure they can get them.

Re: "In Special Circumstances, all thoughts are permitted."

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Which basic parameters are those? Africa's had agriculture for a good long time, and northwestern Europe got it later than other places, obviously. They skipped the Bronze Age but had iron relatively timely; AFAIK they didn't have literacy but then neither did most of Europe AFAIK, though the Romans may have been pretty literate. Organized societies they did have: kingdoms in the area of Mali in West Africa impressed Arabic and European visitors through the 15th century in scale and peacefulness, before slave trade, ivory trade, and cattle plagues really ruined things.

It's been a few years, but I read Basil Davidson, and R. Oliver's _A Short History of Africa_, and got an eye-opening view of African history, vs. my prior "bunch of tribes in jungle who got enslaved". And this is serious history, not excessively Afrophillic "Egyptians invented electric light bulbs". An intuition that African civilization had less selection on a millennia scale for IQ or co-operation than France or Germany or Scotland, say, seems harder to support after learning more about Africa.

Re: "In Special Circumstances, all thoughts are permitted."

[dogofjustice.livejournal.com]

AFAIK they didn't have literacy but then neither did most of Europe AFAIK, though the Romans may have been pretty literate.

This may be the key parameter. A distinguishing characteristic of Judaism is that it has essentially required literacy. The average IQ gap between European Jews and other Europeans is roughly as large as that between Europeans and African-Americans.

I will try to take a look at _A Short History of Africa_.