The question is really in the title: How can people be fully atheistic, yet believe in intangibles such as 'the soul'? While I understand there is no true logical contradiction, it has always struck me as incongruous.
I was listening to atheist advocate Sam Harris's book A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion when he explained his belief that consciousness is irreducible to physicality of the brain. To have this staunch atheistic neuroscientist explain how he felt science was fundamentally incapable of unraveling the mysteries of sentience... well, I guess I was a little jealous (an emotion I've never been good at dealing with).
I have felt my own stance as an "agnostic deist" needed -as an effort to make it more defensible- to add "strict physicalist" to it. Yet, here was a famous atheist explaining his essential dualism... well, I guess I felt gypped.
I am a true physicalist -don't get me wrong- thus I don't know how modern 'atheists' can buy into 'spiritualism.'
Again, while I understand there isn't a logical contradiction, it strikes me as incongruous.
An atheist is one who affirms that the omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creator of the universe does not exist. Surely this does not require one to assert that no nonphysical things exist, or even make the latter more likely by more than an epsilon. I don't see the incongruity.
I also think you might be overstating Sam's position. I haven't read Waking Up myself yet, but Sam has previously said that we should be extremely reluctant to draw metaphysical conclusions about consciousness from our experience thereof. Would you mind quoting the passages that gave you this impression?
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
"As should be clear from the preceding chapters, unlike many scientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned."
"I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Perhaps consciousness presents an impasse of this sort. In any case, the task of explaining consciousness in physical terms bears little resemblance to other successful explanations in the history of science. The analogies that scientists and philosophers marshal here are invariably misleading...
No one has described a set of unconscious events whose sufficiency as a cause of consciousness would make sense in this way. Any attempt to understand consciousness in terms of brain activity merely correlates a person’s ability to report an experience (demonstrating that he was aware of it) with specific states of his brain. While such correlations can amount to fascinating neuroscience, they bring us no closer to explaining the emergence of consciousness itself...
Might a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains. Nothing about human behavior or language or culture demonstrates that it is mediated by consciousness, apart from the fact that we simply know that it is—a truth that someone can appreciate in himself directly and in others by analogy.
Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness itself and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood in neurophysiological terms. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object: Its color, contours, apparent motion, and location in space arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus, when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of the ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is at least intelligible—because synchronous activity seems just the sort of thing that could explain the unity of a percept.
This work suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the contents of consciousness can often be made sense of in terms of their underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why such phenomena should be experienced in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full...This is not to say that our understanding of the mind won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There may be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like? Can human minds be duplicated? Neuroscience may one day answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience. It follows, therefore, that rigorous introspection—“spirituality” in the widest sense of the term—is an indispensable part of understanding the nature of the mind."
Agnosticism and skepticism about the origin and reducibility of consciousness is, it seems to me, an entirely reasonable position that is not at odds with atheism in any degree.
Since the thread topic doesn't seem to have much meat on it, if I were to diverge from it slightly and take up arms "against" Harris by saying a word in favor of physicalism, it would be that in his moments of skepticism he appears to be wholeheartedly embracing a fallacy that all too often ensnares people: "can't now, therefore won't ever." Reading stuff like this, I'm often reminded of Descartes' extensive (and ultimately totally erroneous) musings on the human circulatory system that serve as an appendix to his Meditations on First Philosophy, and his subsequent arguments with William Harvey.
I was also struck by this sentence: "Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains." I imagine a pre-industrial person looking at a car and saying "There is nothing about this car, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might be powered by burning something -- apart from the heat coming out of the front and the smoke coming out of the back," and I laugh.
This is just what an immature science looks like -- and though it is immature, a betting man (or other species of Bayesian rationalist), upon seeing correlates of consciousness in the physical brain, certainly should not move any of his chips from "physical brain" to "nonphysical component." My money says that the dualist on the mind/brain will look as much the fool as Descartes on the heart before the century is done.
Atheism isn't the disbelief in metaphysics, it's the disbelief in a god/gods.
Also, many people in call themselves Atheists when they really mean Agnostic, which is where a lot of the confusion comes from. There was a study released on this just recently that had a lot of US Atheists saying that they believe in some kind of god... which by technical definition doesn't work.
So, people here would classify agnostic Dualism as "an entirely reasonable position," while agnostic deism is to "privilege the hypothesis?" I guess that's one of the things I'm angsty about...
But, this thread wasn't created to bash Sam Harris's agnostic-anything. I made it in a simple attempt to better understand the worldview of atheists who would also classify themselves as 'spiritual,' and was using Sam Harris as an example.
I was also struck by this sentence: "Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains." I imagine a pre-industrial person looking at a car and saying "There is nothing about this car, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might be powered by burning something -- apart from the heat coming out of the front and the smoke coming out of the back," and I laugh.
Interestingly enough, he addresses this: "Some readers may think that I’ve stacked the deck against the sciences of the mind by comparing consciousness to a phenomenon as easily understood as fluidity. Surely science has dispelled far greater mysteries. What, for instance, is the difference between a living system and a dead one? Insofar as questions about consciousness itself can be kept off the table, it seems that the difference is now reasonably clear to us. And yet, as late as 1932, the Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane (father of J. B. S. Haldane) wrote: 'What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the . . . recovery from disease and injuries? Simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduction. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of reproducing itself indefinitely often.'
Scarcely twenty years passed before our imaginations were duly stretched. Much work in biology remains to be done, but anyone who entertains it at this point is simply ignorant about the nature of living systems. The jury is no longer out on questions of this kind, and more than half a century has passed since the earth’s creatures required an élan vital to propagate themselves or to recover from injury. Is my skepticism that we will arrive at a physical explanation of consciousness analogous to Haldane’s doubt about the feasibility of explaining life in terms of processes that are not themselves alive? It wouldn’t seem so. To say that a system is alive is very much like saying that it is fluid, because life is a matter of what systems do with respect to their environment. Like fluidity, life is defined according to external criteria. Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might be “alive.” It might, however, be conscious."
Again, while I understand there isn't a logical contradiction, it strikes me as incongruous.
Clearly not, because while you say you understand, the fact that you think it's incongruous shows you don't actually believe that answer.
Why does it strike you as incongruous? Atheism, contrary to popular belief, isn't some sort of rational bastion. Someone can be an atheist and firmly believe in all sorts of stupid things. The lack of belief in a deity doesn't mean that lack of belief was arrived at from any kind of logical standpoint, so there really isn't any reason for presuming an Atheist would be more rational or logical than anyone else.
Why does it strike you as incongruous? Atheism, contrary to popular belief, isn't some sort of rational bastion. Someone can be an atheist and firmly believe in all sorts of stupid things. The lack of belief in a deity doesn't mean that lack of belief was arrived at from any kind of logical standpoint, so there really isn't any reason for presuming an Atheist would be more rational or logical than anyone else.
While you say you don't think I understand, it sounds like you're agreeing with me if you're comparing spiritual atheists to ones that "firmly believe in all sorts of stupid things."
Again, I understand they can exist, my problem is I feel those that arrived at this belief wasn't "arrived at [it] from any kind of logical standpoint."
Since I'm not sure to what extent this feeling of mine is justified, I was hoping someone might explain how it isn't. Thus, I could weigh their words, and -subsequently- weigh my own views.
Again, I understand they can exist, my problem is I feel those that arrived at this belief wasn't "arrived at [it] from any kind of logical standpoint."
Since I'm not sure to what extent this feeling of mine is justified, I was hoping someone might explain how it isn't. Thus, I could weigh their words, and -subsequently- weigh my own views.
I think the real question is, why does anybody believe these things? You're starting with a false presumption: that atheists shouldn't believe in any metaphysics because they don't believe in one specific kind of metaphysics.
But that's not a presumption we would make of anything else. We don't ask, if a New Yorker isn't a Yankees fan, how could they be a Mets fan? If they don't like Baseball, how could they like Football? If they're not Catholic, how are they Mormon? We don't ask these questions because they're different things.
So, people here would classify agnostic Dualism as "an entirely reasonable position," while agnostic deism is to "privilege the hypothesis?" I guess that's one of the things I'm angsty about...
- By "people here" you mean me?
- What about that makes you angsty? Surely you must realize that propositions about the origin of the universe and propositions about a specific phenomenon within the universe are classes of things that are different enough from each other that we might reasonably evaluate them differently.
- The position of Sam's that I judged to be reasonable was this one: "unlike many scientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned."
If Sam truly has developed a view that is consistent with both physicalism and dualism, then for as long as we are uncertain about those two outcomes, basic Bayesian reasoning tells us that Sam's view is ceteris paribus more likely to be true than an alternative worldview that depends on either outcome specifically. It's not privileging the hypothesis when you have a reason for promoting that specific hypothesis.
That being said, the more I hear of Sam's affirmative defenses of dualism, the less reasonable I find them to be. In fact, I confess myself a bit disappointed in Sam at the moment, though I must keep in mind that I'm only seeing those portions of his view that you're pasting here.
This, for example, is a very bad argument:
Quote from Harris »
Is my skepticism that we will arrive at a physical explanation of consciousness analogous to Haldane’s doubt about the feasibility of explaining life in terms of processes that are not themselves alive? It wouldn’t seem so. To say that a system is alive is very much like saying that it is fluid, because life is a matter of what systems do with respect to their environment. Like fluidity, life is defined according to external criteria. Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might be “alive.” It might, however, be conscious.
This argument misses the forest for the trees. Sam applies 20-20 hindsight about life to the question, forgetting the fact that J. S. Haldane didn't have the knowledge Sam does. Life to Haldane was just like consciousness to Sam -- he couldn't possibly conceive of any external, physical explanation for it and his hypothesis was that life was just a kind of internal, irreducible essence that stuck to living things. Then people figured out cellular mitosis and that was that. Theories of irreducible, internal life essences are now cautionary tales to fools who would be overly confident about nonphysical explanations. Sam isn't breaking the analogy by distinguishing between internal and external criteria -- he's reinforcing it. What Sam is calling the "external criteria" for life is the end result of a mature science reducing a problem to physicality.
I am amazed Sam can't see this, because these are some of the same sorts of arguments his opponents used against him after he published The Moral Landscape, and he certainly recognized their flaws then.
But perhaps more to the point, this doesn't address my central objection. When Sam says "Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains.", I basically read him as saying "there's no evidence for consciousness in the physical brain, except all the evidence." If correlations between conscious events and physical ones don't count as evidence that consciousness is physical, then we're basically abandoning the idea that rational epistemics is applicable to consciousness at all.
I guess the consensus is: "Those that do are being dumb, but lots of people are dumb about stuff, so why are you specifically picking on them for being dumb about it?"
Which is too much inline with the view point I had going in to argue with. So... Yeah... NVM then...
@Taylor
I don't agree. Harris is not being spiritualist, he is being skeptical. He does not say that the mind might have a spiritual essence or substance, he says that a purely physical mechanical explanation might not suffice. He is more saying that he doubts there is ANY explanation for all the components and features of consciousness, along the lines that existence itself is essentially impossible to fully explain. I would disagree somewhat, as with quantum mechanics recent applications to biology we are getting closer to understanding some of the weirder parts of life and consciousness is high on the list of things that are being investigated as having a potential quantum mechanics component.
He does not say that the mind might have a spiritual essence or substance, he says that a purely physical mechanical explanation might not suffice.
I think you're misunderstanding what is being meant by "agnostic-dualist."
Specifically, I think -based on this statement- you don't understand the difference between a physicalist and a dualist.
Anyway, the subtitle to his book is "A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."
So.... yeah....
But, even regardless of that, whether you want to classify what he is talking about as "true spiritism" or not (and you may or may not) isn't really the point; the "purely physical mechanical explanation might not suffice" bit is.
@Taylor
Spirituality has more than one meaning. One of the key meanings is to do with purpose, religious or personal, and from what I know this is the sense of which Harris's book is concerned with. Regardless, given that he has reserved judgement, you can't really fault him for exploring possibilities that are normally dismissed by like minded people (i.e. scientifically minded atheists).
Also, many people in call themselves Atheists when they really mean Agnostic, which is where a lot of the confusion comes from.
No, atheism and agnosticism answer different questions.
Atheism and theism answer the question of whether you believe in the existence of one or more gods. Agnosticism and Gnosticism answer the question of whether you know (or claim to know) the answer to a particular question.
Knowledge is a subset of belief. We do not wait to have all of the information before we believe something to be true or false, and we cannot know something to be true or false without believing that.
You can be an agnostic atheist "I don't believe the claim that a god exists, but I am not certain." You can be a a Gnostic atheist "I know that no gods exist." You can be an agnostic theist "I believe in a god, but I am not certain; I take it on faith." And you can be a Gnostic theist "I know that a god exists."
... Yes, but that isn't why we are talking about. If someone believes in a god, they're not an atheist. Which is why I said, in the very next line of the post you quoted. These people call themselves atheists but they are agnostic theists.
While I would agree that anyone believing in a god is by definition not an atheist, I've never actually heard of anyone claiming to be an atheist who also believes in the existence of a god and I'd like to see this sudy you're talking about. The sentence you're referring to also has no connection to the sentence I quoted.
While I would agree that anyone believing in a god is by definition not an atheist, I've never actually heard of anyone claiming to be an atheist who also believes in the existence of a god and I'd like to see this sudy you're talking about. The sentence you're referring to also has no connection to the sentence I quoted.
What? It was part of the same thought, and I'm pretty clear what I'm referring to:
There was a study released on this just recently that had a lot of US Atheists saying that they believe in some kind of god... which by technical definition doesn't work.
I was specifically talking about 'atheists' who believe in some kind of god. It's not like the second sentence was 'Apples are tasty', it's pretty clearly a direct continuation of the thought from the first sentence.
@Jay13x
I don't think there's any study accurate enough to assess fairly and comprehensively something as difficult to find out and even more difficult to ensure honesty about as deeply held beliefs. Studies comparing the behaviour of thinking of atheists to religious people are always going to be a little sketchy due to this data collection problem. I'm sure there's all sorts of people who call themselves something they're not. It doesn't seem very relevant as Harris is clearly an atheist of sorts.
@Jay13x
I don't think there's any study accurate enough to assess fairly and comprehensively something as difficult to find out and even more difficult to ensure honesty about as deeply held beliefs. Studies comparing the behaviour of thinking of atheists to religious people are always going to be a little sketchy due to this data collection problem. I'm sure there's all sorts of people who call themselves something they're not. It doesn't very relevant as Harris is clearly an atheist of sorts.
Am I being pranked? I'm kind of serious here, because I don't understand what is happening.
I was taking about a survey. About what people say they believe and how they identify themselves. There is no more accurate way of determining what people believe than by asking them. If someone says that they're both an atheist and believe in a god, they don't understand what the term means. Which was my entire point.
I wasn't responding to Sam Harris - who I think writes pseudo-intellectual drivel - I was pointing out the inherent illogical or at least lack of understanding of what terms mean.
... to which Lithl responded to me as if I didn't understand what the terms mean.
it's pretty clearly a direct continuation of the thought from the first sentence.
Not when I read your post. You start by claiming that people say atheist when they mean agnostic (despite the fact that the two labels cover different things, and in fact most atheists are both), and then move on to talking about a study where people are contradicting themselves by professing atheism despite belief in a god.
As for the study, you've got 2% of atheists saying they're absolutely certain a god exists and 3% saying they are fairly certain a god exists, in a sample size with a 4% margin of error.
@Jay13x
I was just noting that any broad statements ab out what atheists believe is bound to be somewhat inaccurate. And also that people who call them themselves atheists aren't really relevant but people who actually are atheists.
it's pretty clearly a direct continuation of the thought from the first sentence.
Not when I read your post. You start by claiming that people say atheist when they mean agnostic (despite the fact that the two labels cover different things, and in fact most atheists are both), and then move on to talking about a study where people are contradicting themselves by professing atheism despite belief in a god.
No, I don't claim that at all. I said many people say atheist when they mean agnostic, at least as far as the point of the topic (Atheists who believe in metaphysics) goes. Many is a vague non-descript 'less than all' word. Then I mention the study where people say they're atheist when they mean agnostic, to illustrate the point.
As for the study, you've got 2% of atheists saying they're absolutely certain a god exists and 3% saying they are fairly certain a god exists, in a sample size with a 4% margin of error.
First of all, it's a poll not a study - I realize I misspoke when vaguely referencing something I had vaguely recalled from a while back.
Second of all, it's 8% of self-described atheists who believe in some sort of god or universal deity. The 2% and 3% are subsets of that data.
Finally, we're not actually in disagreement, so I'm not really sure why we're arguing. You misunderstood my point, is all, and then I got confused trying to figure out what exactly we're talking about.
Second of all, it's 8% of self-described atheists who believe in some sort of god or universal deity. The 2% and 3% are subsets of that data.
2% believe in a god and are absolutely certain
3% believe in a god and are fairly certain
2% believe in a god and are not at all certain
1% don't know or choose "other"
92% don't believe.
That's not the same thing as "8% believe" at all, especially when we're taking about values below the margin for error.
Religion does not have the monopoly on spirituality. To me, saying it's incongruous for an atheist to be spiritual is like saying it's incongruous for people wearing shoes to be spiritual.
In fact, I didn't become spiritual until I became an atheist. Everyone's definition of spiritualism is different but for me, it relates to my awe and appreciation for the human experience and the world around us. When I was religious, that appreciation was strangled and replaced by dogma so it was pretty liberating to leave the church behind so I could fully appreciate the wondrous universe in which we live.
I was listening to atheist advocate Sam Harris's book A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion when he explained his belief that consciousness is irreducible to physicality of the brain. To have this staunch atheistic neuroscientist explain how he felt science was fundamentally incapable of unraveling the mysteries of sentience... well, I guess I was a little jealous (an emotion I've never been good at dealing with).
I have felt my own stance as an "agnostic deist" needed -as an effort to make it more defensible- to add "strict physicalist" to it. Yet, here was a famous atheist explaining his essential dualism... well, I guess I felt gypped.
I am a true physicalist -don't get me wrong- thus I don't know how modern 'atheists' can buy into 'spiritualism.'
Again, while I understand there isn't a logical contradiction, it strikes me as incongruous.
I also think you might be overstating Sam's position. I haven't read Waking Up myself yet, but Sam has previously said that we should be extremely reluctant to draw metaphysical conclusions about consciousness from our experience thereof. Would you mind quoting the passages that gave you this impression?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
"I am sympathetic with those who, like the philosopher Colin McGinn and the psychologist Steven Pinker, have suggested that perhaps the emergence of consciousness is simply incomprehensible in human terms. Every chain of explanation must end somewhere—generally with a brute fact that neglects to explain itself. Perhaps consciousness presents an impasse of this sort. In any case, the task of explaining consciousness in physical terms bears little resemblance to other successful explanations in the history of science. The analogies that scientists and philosophers marshal here are invariably misleading...
No one has described a set of unconscious events whose sufficiency as a cause of consciousness would make sense in this way. Any attempt to understand consciousness in terms of brain activity merely correlates a person’s ability to report an experience (demonstrating that he was aware of it) with specific states of his brain. While such correlations can amount to fascinating neuroscience, they bring us no closer to explaining the emergence of consciousness itself...
Might a mature neuroscience nevertheless offer a proper explanation of consciousness in terms of its underlying brain processes? Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains. Nothing about human behavior or language or culture demonstrates that it is mediated by consciousness, apart from the fact that we simply know that it is—a truth that someone can appreciate in himself directly and in others by analogy.
Here is where the distinction between studying consciousness itself and studying its contents becomes paramount. It is easy to see how the contents of consciousness might be understood in neurophysiological terms. Consider, for instance, our experience of seeing an object: Its color, contours, apparent motion, and location in space arise in consciousness as a seamless unity, even though this information is processed by many separate systems in the brain. Thus, when a golfer prepares to hit a shot, he does not first see the ball’s roundness, then its whiteness, and only then its position on the tee. Rather, he enjoys a unified perception of the ball. Many neuroscientists believe that this phenomenon of “binding” can be explained by disparate groups of neurons firing in synchrony. Whether or not this theory is true, it is at least intelligible—because synchronous activity seems just the sort of thing that could explain the unity of a percept.
This work suggests, as many other findings in neuroscience do, that the contents of consciousness can often be made sense of in terms of their underlying neurophysiology. However, when we ask why such phenomena should be experienced in the first place, we are returned to the mystery of consciousness in full...This is not to say that our understanding of the mind won’t change in surprising ways through our study of the brain. There may be no limit to how a maturing neuroscience might reshape our beliefs about the nature of conscious experience. Are we unconscious during sleep or merely unable to remember what sleep is like? Can human minds be duplicated? Neuroscience may one day answer such questions—and the answers might well surprise us. But the reality of consciousness appears irreducible. Only consciousness can know itself—and directly, through first-person experience. It follows, therefore, that rigorous introspection—“spirituality” in the widest sense of the term—is an indispensable part of understanding the nature of the mind."
-Sam Harris, Waking Up
Since the thread topic doesn't seem to have much meat on it, if I were to diverge from it slightly and take up arms "against" Harris by saying a word in favor of physicalism, it would be that in his moments of skepticism he appears to be wholeheartedly embracing a fallacy that all too often ensnares people: "can't now, therefore won't ever." Reading stuff like this, I'm often reminded of Descartes' extensive (and ultimately totally erroneous) musings on the human circulatory system that serve as an appendix to his Meditations on First Philosophy, and his subsequent arguments with William Harvey.
I was also struck by this sentence: "Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains." I imagine a pre-industrial person looking at a car and saying "There is nothing about this car, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might be powered by burning something -- apart from the heat coming out of the front and the smoke coming out of the back," and I laugh.
This is just what an immature science looks like -- and though it is immature, a betting man (or other species of Bayesian rationalist), upon seeing correlates of consciousness in the physical brain, certainly should not move any of his chips from "physical brain" to "nonphysical component." My money says that the dualist on the mind/brain will look as much the fool as Descartes on the heart before the century is done.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Also, many people in call themselves Atheists when they really mean Agnostic, which is where a lot of the confusion comes from. There was a study released on this just recently that had a lot of US Atheists saying that they believe in some kind of god... which by technical definition doesn't work.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
But, this thread wasn't created to bash Sam Harris's agnostic-anything. I made it in a simple attempt to better understand the worldview of atheists who would also classify themselves as 'spiritual,' and was using Sam Harris as an example.
Interestingly enough, he addresses this:
"Some readers may think that I’ve stacked the deck against the sciences of the mind by comparing consciousness to a phenomenon as easily understood as fluidity. Surely science has dispelled far greater mysteries. What, for instance, is the difference between a living system and a dead one? Insofar as questions about consciousness itself can be kept off the table, it seems that the difference is now reasonably clear to us. And yet, as late as 1932, the Scottish physiologist J. S. Haldane (father of J. B. S. Haldane) wrote: 'What intelligible account can the mechanistic theory of life give of the . . . recovery from disease and injuries? Simply none at all, except that these phenomena are so complex and strange that as yet we cannot understand them. It is exactly the same with the closely related phenomena of reproduction. We cannot by any stretch of the imagination conceive a delicate and complex mechanism which is capable, like a living organism, of reproducing itself indefinitely often.'
Scarcely twenty years passed before our imaginations were duly stretched. Much work in biology remains to be done, but anyone who entertains it at this point is simply ignorant about the nature of living systems. The jury is no longer out on questions of this kind, and more than half a century has passed since the earth’s creatures required an élan vital to propagate themselves or to recover from injury. Is my skepticism that we will arrive at a physical explanation of consciousness analogous to Haldane’s doubt about the feasibility of explaining life in terms of processes that are not themselves alive? It wouldn’t seem so. To say that a system is alive is very much like saying that it is fluid, because life is a matter of what systems do with respect to their environment. Like fluidity, life is defined according to external criteria. Consciousness is not (and, I think, cannot be). We would never have occasion to say of something that does not eat, excrete, grow, or reproduce that it might be “alive.” It might, however, be conscious."
I know
Why does it strike you as incongruous? Atheism, contrary to popular belief, isn't some sort of rational bastion. Someone can be an atheist and firmly believe in all sorts of stupid things. The lack of belief in a deity doesn't mean that lack of belief was arrived at from any kind of logical standpoint, so there really isn't any reason for presuming an Atheist would be more rational or logical than anyone else.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
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Again, I understand they can exist, my problem is I feel those that arrived at this belief wasn't "arrived at [it] from any kind of logical standpoint."
Since I'm not sure to what extent this feeling of mine is justified, I was hoping someone might explain how it isn't. Thus, I could weigh their words, and -subsequently- weigh my own views.
But that's not a presumption we would make of anything else. We don't ask, if a New Yorker isn't a Yankees fan, how could they be a Mets fan? If they don't like Baseball, how could they like Football? If they're not Catholic, how are they Mormon? We don't ask these questions because they're different things.
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- By "people here" you mean me?
- What about that makes you angsty? Surely you must realize that propositions about the origin of the universe and propositions about a specific phenomenon within the universe are classes of things that are different enough from each other that we might reasonably evaluate them differently.
- The position of Sam's that I judged to be reasonable was this one: "unlike many scientists and philosophers, I remain agnostic on the question of how consciousness is related to the physical world. There are good reasons to believe that it is an emergent property of brain activity, just as the rest of the human mind is. But we know nothing about how such a miracle of emergence might occur. And if consciousness were irreducible—or even separable from the brain in a way that would give comfort to Saint Augustine—my worldview would not be overturned."
If Sam truly has developed a view that is consistent with both physicalism and dualism, then for as long as we are uncertain about those two outcomes, basic Bayesian reasoning tells us that Sam's view is ceteris paribus more likely to be true than an alternative worldview that depends on either outcome specifically. It's not privileging the hypothesis when you have a reason for promoting that specific hypothesis.
That being said, the more I hear of Sam's affirmative defenses of dualism, the less reasonable I find them to be. In fact, I confess myself a bit disappointed in Sam at the moment, though I must keep in mind that I'm only seeing those portions of his view that you're pasting here.
This, for example, is a very bad argument:
This argument misses the forest for the trees. Sam applies 20-20 hindsight about life to the question, forgetting the fact that J. S. Haldane didn't have the knowledge Sam does. Life to Haldane was just like consciousness to Sam -- he couldn't possibly conceive of any external, physical explanation for it and his hypothesis was that life was just a kind of internal, irreducible essence that stuck to living things. Then people figured out cellular mitosis and that was that. Theories of irreducible, internal life essences are now cautionary tales to fools who would be overly confident about nonphysical explanations. Sam isn't breaking the analogy by distinguishing between internal and external criteria -- he's reinforcing it. What Sam is calling the "external criteria" for life is the end result of a mature science reducing a problem to physicality.
I am amazed Sam can't see this, because these are some of the same sorts of arguments his opponents used against him after he published The Moral Landscape, and he certainly recognized their flaws then.
But perhaps more to the point, this doesn't address my central objection. When Sam says "Again, there is nothing about a brain, studied at any scale, that even suggests that it might harbor consciousness—apart from the fact that we experience consciousness directly and have correlated many of its contents, or lack thereof, with processes in our brains.", I basically read him as saying "there's no evidence for consciousness in the physical brain, except all the evidence." If correlations between conscious events and physical ones don't count as evidence that consciousness is physical, then we're basically abandoning the idea that rational epistemics is applicable to consciousness at all.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Which is too much inline with the view point I had going in to argue with. So... Yeah... NVM then...
I don't agree. Harris is not being spiritualist, he is being skeptical. He does not say that the mind might have a spiritual essence or substance, he says that a purely physical mechanical explanation might not suffice. He is more saying that he doubts there is ANY explanation for all the components and features of consciousness, along the lines that existence itself is essentially impossible to fully explain. I would disagree somewhat, as with quantum mechanics recent applications to biology we are getting closer to understanding some of the weirder parts of life and consciousness is high on the list of things that are being investigated as having a potential quantum mechanics component.
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Specifically, I think -based on this statement- you don't understand the difference between a physicalist and a dualist.
Recommended reading:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/
Anyway, the subtitle to his book is "A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."
So.... yeah....
But, even regardless of that, whether you want to classify what he is talking about as "true spiritism" or not (and you may or may not) isn't really the point; the "purely physical mechanical explanation might not suffice" bit is.
Spirituality has more than one meaning. One of the key meanings is to do with purpose, religious or personal, and from what I know this is the sense of which Harris's book is concerned with. Regardless, given that he has reserved judgement, you can't really fault him for exploring possibilities that are normally dismissed by like minded people (i.e. scientifically minded atheists).
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Atheism and theism answer the question of whether you believe in the existence of one or more gods. Agnosticism and Gnosticism answer the question of whether you know (or claim to know) the answer to a particular question.
Knowledge is a subset of belief. We do not wait to have all of the information before we believe something to be true or false, and we cannot know something to be true or false without believing that.
You can be an agnostic atheist "I don't believe the claim that a god exists, but I am not certain." You can be a a Gnostic atheist "I know that no gods exist." You can be an agnostic theist "I believe in a god, but I am not certain; I take it on faith." And you can be a Gnostic theist "I know that a god exists."
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I was specifically talking about 'atheists' who believe in some kind of god. It's not like the second sentence was 'Apples are tasty', it's pretty clearly a direct continuation of the thought from the first sentence.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/05/7-facts-about-atheists/
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I don't think there's any study accurate enough to assess fairly and comprehensively something as difficult to find out and even more difficult to ensure honesty about as deeply held beliefs. Studies comparing the behaviour of thinking of atheists to religious people are always going to be a little sketchy due to this data collection problem. I'm sure there's all sorts of people who call themselves something they're not. It doesn't seem very relevant as Harris is clearly an atheist of sorts.
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I was taking about a survey. About what people say they believe and how they identify themselves. There is no more accurate way of determining what people believe than by asking them. If someone says that they're both an atheist and believe in a god, they don't understand what the term means. Which was my entire point.
I wasn't responding to Sam Harris - who I think writes pseudo-intellectual drivel - I was pointing out the inherent illogical or at least lack of understanding of what terms mean.
... to which Lithl responded to me as if I didn't understand what the terms mean.
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As for the study, you've got 2% of atheists saying they're absolutely certain a god exists and 3% saying they are fairly certain a god exists, in a sample size with a 4% margin of error.
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I was just noting that any broad statements ab out what atheists believe is bound to be somewhat inaccurate. And also that people who call them themselves atheists aren't really relevant but people who actually are atheists.
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First of all, it's a poll not a study - I realize I misspoke when vaguely referencing something I had vaguely recalled from a while back.
Second of all, it's 8% of self-described atheists who believe in some sort of god or universal deity. The 2% and 3% are subsets of that data.
Finally, we're not actually in disagreement, so I'm not really sure why we're arguing. You misunderstood my point, is all, and then I got confused trying to figure out what exactly we're talking about.
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3% believe in a god and are fairly certain
2% believe in a god and are not at all certain
1% don't know or choose "other"
92% don't believe.
That's not the same thing as "8% believe" at all, especially when we're taking about values below the margin for error.
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In fact, I didn't become spiritual until I became an atheist. Everyone's definition of spiritualism is different but for me, it relates to my awe and appreciation for the human experience and the world around us. When I was religious, that appreciation was strangled and replaced by dogma so it was pretty liberating to leave the church behind so I could fully appreciate the wondrous universe in which we live.
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