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

[schenker28.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the thoughts on the soul... I don't have a completely consistent, well-formed philosophy yet on such things, but I generally believe something similar -- I think.

I saw a book I liked quite a lot at Borders: "What is Thought", by Eric Baum, from MIT Press. There might not be anything new in there for you -- I think it just says that thought is an evolved computation device or something. It's written from an AI perspective so I enjoyed the topics as I skimmed through in the store. Also, a large part of his argument is about the utility of compact representations in thought, and as such he makes plenty of ties into metaphor/analogy.

[dogofjustice.livejournal.com]

A paradox of naturalism is that it predicts its own weakness as a meme. A naturalistic worldview considers ideas as having both truth value and functional value. Considering the space of all ideas, there does appear to be a correlation between the "truth value" of some bits inside these human computational devices, and the "functional value" of how much these bits are replicated in the next generation. It is hard to imagine how we got to where we currently are without such a correlation. But the idea of naturalism itself, despite being true, appears to decrease the fitness of the human computational devices containing its representation. Instead we have various illusions that limit the damage caused by having an incoherent worldview, while preventing too much deviation from normal reproductive behavior.

On a completely different note, what is your current view of Steve Sailer? I looked in the Gale archives and noticed a few of you discussing his article on New Orleans; you seemed the most willing to evaluate his writing strictly on truth value rather than automatically dismiss it due to its distastefulness. As far as I can tell, his perception of reality is usually accurate. I disagree with some of his practical recommendations (my preferences lean toward the democratic transhumanistic), but I think he's right about the likely consequences of excessive illegal immigration, etc. I am curious if you think differently, and if so, why. I'm also curious about the "unfortunate things about Steve Sailer himself" that Anne referred to, since I have donated money to him recently and would like to know if it would be incorrect to repeat that in the future.