God is a Delusion

I can't resist posting this interview with Dawkins from Salon.com It is the basis I suspect of a number of threads begun recently by various posters and it overlaps a number of different discussions, from Scientists being religious to social structures of memes and the threat of cultural devolution present in the Intelligent Design debate.

Here it is and I hope there is plenty to comment on afterward.

Oh and in response to what others here of late have written about *nature* and human intervention it appears from Dawkins conclusion that he is coming around to agree with my position on Human Selection replacing Natural Selection and for very much the same reasons.



The atheist
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains why God is a delusion, religion is a virus, and America has slipped back into the Dark Ages.
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By Gordy Slack
http://www.salon.com.../04/30/dawkins/
April 28, 2005 |

Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book.

Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker," "Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.

Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, "You, sir, are an ignorant bigot."

Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled "The Root of All Evil."

I met Dawkins in late March at the Atheist Alliance International annual conference in Los Angeles, where he presented the alliance's top honor, the Richard Dawkins Prize, to magicians Penn and Teller. During our conversation in my hotel room, Dawkins was as gracious as he was punctiliously dressed in a crisp white shirt and soft blazer.

Once again, evolution is under attack. Are there any questions at all about its validity?

It's often said that because evolution happened in the past, and we didn't see it happen, there is no direct evidence for it. That, of course, is nonsense. It's rather like a detective coming on the scene of a crime, obviously after the crime has been committed, and working out what must have happened by looking at the clues that remain. In the story of evolution, the clues are a billionfold.

There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.

British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." They've never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place. Of course there are plenty of gaps in the fossil record. There's nothing wrong with that. Why shouldn't there be? We're lucky to have fossils at all. But no fossils have been found in the wrong place, such as to disprove the fact of evolution. Evolution is a fact.


Still, so many people resist believing in evolution. Where does the resistance come from?

It comes, I'm sorry to say, from religion. And from bad religion. You won't find any opposition to the idea of evolution among sophisticated, educated theologians. It comes from an exceedingly retarded, primitive version of religion, which unfortunately is at present undergoing an epidemic in the United States. Not in Europe, not in Britain, but in the United States.

My American friends tell me that you are slipping towards a theocratic Dark Age. Which is very disagreeable for the very large number of educated, intelligent and right-thinking people in America. Unfortunately, at present, it's slightly outnumbered by the ignorant, uneducated people who voted Bush in.

But the broad direction of history is toward enlightenment, and so I think that what America is going through at the moment will prove to be a temporary reverse. I think there is great hope for the future. My advice would be, Don't despair, these things pass.


You delve into agnosticism in "The Ancestor's Tale." How does it differ from atheism?

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.


Believing in God is like believing in a teapot orbiting Mars?

Yes. For a long time it seemed clear to just about everybody that the beauty and elegance of the world seemed to be prima facie evidence for a divine creator. But the philosopher David Hume already realized three centuries ago that this was a bad argument. It leads to an infinite regression. You can't statistically explain improbable things like living creatures by saying that they must have been designed because you're still left to explain the designer, who must be, if anything, an even more statistically improbable and elegant thing. Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.


Those who embrace "intelligent design" -- the idea that living cells are too complex to have been created by nature alone -- say evolution isn't incompatible with the existence of God.

There is just no evidence for the existence of God. Evolution by natural selection is a process that works up from simple beginnings, and simple beginnings are easy to explain. The engineer or any other living thing is difficult to explain -- but it is explicable by evolution by natural selection. So the relevance of evolutionary biology to atheism is that evolutionary biology gives us the only known mechanism whereby the illusion of design, or apparent design, could ever come into the universe anywhere.


So why do we insist on believing in God?

From a biological point of view, there are lots of different theories about why we have this extraordinary predisposition to believe in supernatural things. One suggestion is that the child mind is, for very good Darwinian reasons, susceptible to infection the same way a computer is. In order to be useful, a computer has to be programmable, to obey whatever it's told to do. That automatically makes it vulnerable to computer viruses, which are programs that say, "Spread me, copy me, pass me on." Once a viral program gets started, there is nothing to stop it.

Similarly, the child brain is preprogrammed by natural selection to obey and believe what parents and other adults tell it. In general, it's a good thing that child brains should be susceptible to being taught what to do and what to believe by adults. But this necessarily carries the down side that bad ideas, useless ideas, waste of time ideas like rain dances and other religious customs, will also be passed down the generations. The child brain is very susceptible to this kind of infection. And it also spreads sideways by cross infection when a charismatic preacher goes around infecting new minds that were previously uninfected.


You've said that raising children in a religious tradition may even be a form of abuse.

What I think may be abuse is labeling children with religious labels like Catholic child and Muslim child. I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim of child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be abuse to talk about an atheist child.


You are working on a new book tentatively called "The God Delusion." Can you explain it?

A delusion is something that people believe in despite a total lack of evidence. Religion is scarcely distinguishable from childhood delusions like the "imaginary friend" and the bogeyman under the bed. Unfortunately, the God delusion possesses adults, and not just a minority of unfortunates in an asylum. The word "delusion" also carries negative connotations, and religion has plenty of those.


What are its negative connotations?

A delusion that encourages belief where there is no evidence is asking for trouble. Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle. Instead, disagreements are settled by other means which, in extreme cases, inevitably become violent. Scientists disagree among themselves but they never fight over their disagreements. They argue about evidence or go out and seek new evidence. Much the same is true of philosophers, historians and literary critics.

But you don't do that if you just know your holy book is the God-written truth and the other guy knows that his incompatible scripture is too. People brought up to believe in faith and private revelation cannot be persuaded by evidence to change their minds. No wonder religious zealots throughout history have resorted to torture and execution, to crusades and jihads, to holy wars and purges and pogroms, to the Inquisition and the burning of witches.


What are the dark sides of religion today?

Terrorism in the Middle East, militant Zionism, 9/11, the Northern Ireland "troubles," genocide, which turns out to be "credicide" in Yugoslavia, the subversion of American science education, oppression of women in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and the Roman Catholic Church, which thinks you can't be a valid priest without testicles.


Fifty years ago, philosophers like Bertrand Russell felt that the religious worldview would fade as science and reason emerged. Why hasn't it?

That trend toward enlightenment has indeed continued in Europe and Britain. It just has not continued in the U.S., and not in the Islamic world. We're seeing a rather unholy alliance between the burgeoning theocracy in the U.S. and its allies, the theocrats in the Islamic world. They are fighting the same battle: Christian on one side, Muslim on the other. The very large numbers of people in the United States and in Europe who don't subscribe to that worldview are caught in the middle.

Actually, holy alliance would be a better phrase. Bush and bin Laden are really on the same side: the side of faith and violence against the side of reason and discussion. Both have implacable faith that they are right and the other is evil. Each believes that when he dies he is going to heaven. Each believes that if he could kill the other, his path to paradise in the next world would be even swifter. The delusional "next world" is welcome to both of them. This world would be a much better place without either of them.


Does religion contribute to the violence of Islamic extremists? Christian extremists?

Of course it does. From the cradle, they are brought up to revere martyrs and to believe they have a fast track to heaven. With their mother's milk they imbibe hatred of heretics, apostates and followers of rival faiths.

I don't wish to suggest it is doctrinal disputes that are motivating the individual soldiers who are doing the killing. What I do suggest is that in places like Northern Ireland, religion was the only available label by which people could indulge in the human weakness for us-or-them wars. When a Protestant murders a Catholic or a Catholic murders a Protestant, they're not playing out doctrinal disagreements about transubstantiation.

What is going on is more like a vendetta. It was one of their lot's grandfathers who killed one of our lot's grandfathers, and so we're getting our revenge. The "their lot" and "our lot" is only defined by religion. In other parts of the world it might be defined by color, or by language, but in so many parts of the world it isn't, it's defined by religion. That's true of the conflicts among Croats and the Serbs and Bosnians -- that's all about religion as labels.

The grotesque massacres in India at the time of partition were between Hindus and Muslims. There was nothing else to distinguish them, they were racially the same. They only identified themselves as "us" and the others as "them" by the fact that some of them were Hindus and some of them were Muslims. That's what the Kashmir dispute is all about. So, yes, I would defend the view that religion is an extremely potent label for hostility. That has always been true and it continues to be true to this day.


How would we be better off without religion?

We'd all be freed to concentrate on the only life we are ever going to have. We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up. Be thankful that you have a life, and forsake your vain and presumptuous desire for a second one. The world would be a better place if we all had this positive attitude to life. It would also be a better place if morality was all about doing good to others and refraining from hurting them, rather than religion's morbid obsession with private sin and the evils of sexual enjoyment.


Are there environmental costs of a religious worldview?

There are many religious points of view where the conservation of the world is just as important as it is to scientists. But there are certain religious points of view where it is not. In those apocalyptic religions, people actually believe that because they read some dopey prophesy in the book of Revelation, the world is going to come to an end some time soon. People who believe that say, "We don't need to bother about conserving forests or anything else because the end of the world is coming anyway." A few decades ago one would simply have laughed at that. Today you can't laugh. These people are in power.


Unlike other accounts of the evolution of life, "The Ancestor's Tale" starts at the present and works back. Why did you decide to tell the story in reverse?

The most important reason is that if you tell the evolution story forwards and end up with humans, as it's humanly normal to do so because people are interested in themselves, it makes it look as though the whole of evolution were somehow aimed at humanity, which of course it wasn't. One could aim anywhere, like at kangaroos, butterflies or frogs. We're all contemporary culmination points, for the moment, in evolution.

If you go backward, however, no matter where you start in this huge tree of life, you always converge at the same point, which is the origin of life. So that was the main reason for structuring the book the way I did. It gave me a natural goal to head toward -- the origin of life -- no matter where I started from. Then I could legitimately start with humans, which people are interested in.

The idea of going back towards a particular goal called to my mind the notion of pilgrimage as a kind of literary device. So I very vaguely modeled the book on Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," where the pilgrims start off as a band of human pilgrims walking backward to discover our ancestors. We are successively joined by other pilgrims -- the chimpanzee pilgrims at 5 million years, then the gorilla pilgrims, then the orangutan pilgrims. Starting with humans, there are only about 39 such rendezvous points as you go back in time. It's a rather surprising fact. Rendezvous 39 is where we meet the bacteria pilgrims.


The idea that evolution could be "random" seems to frighten people. Is it random?

This is a spectacular misunderstanding. If it was random, then of course it couldn't possibly have given rise to the fantastically complicated and elegant forms that we see. Natural selection is the important force that drives evolution. Natural selection is about as non-random a force as you could possibly imagine. It can't work unless there is some sort of variation upon which to work. And the source of variation is mutation. Mutation is random only in the sense that it is not directed specifically toward improvement. It is natural selection that directs evolution toward improvement. Mutation is random in that it's not directed toward improvement.

The idea that evolution itself is a random process is a most extraordinary travesty. I wonder if it's deliberately put about maliciously or whether these people honestly believe such a preposterous absurdity. Of course evolution isn't random. It is driven by natural selection, which is a highly non-random force.


Is there an emotional side to the intellectual enterprise of exploring the story of life on Earth?

Yes, I strongly feel that. When you meet a scientist who calls himself or herself religious, you'll often find that that's what they mean. You often find that by "religious" they do not mean anything supernatural. They mean precisely the kind of emotional response to the natural world that you've described. Einstein had it very strongly. Unfortunately, he used the word "God" to describe it, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But Einstein had that feeling, I have that feeling, you'll find it in the writings of many scientists. It's a kind of quasi-religious feeling. And there are those who wish to call it religious and who therefore are annoyed when a scientist calls himself an atheist. They think, "No, you believe in this transcendental feeling, you can't be an atheist." That's a confusion of language.


Some scientists say that removing religion or God from their life would leave it meaningless, that it's God that gives meaning to life.

"Unweaving the Rainbow" specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades -- before we die forever -- in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That's the kind of privileged century in which we live. That's what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it's the only life I've got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.


[B]Humans may not be products of an intelligent designer but given genetic technologies, our descendants will be. What does this mean about the future of evolution? [/B]

It's an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force and became a design force. Already, for the past few centuries, maybe even millennia, agriculturalists have in a sense designed the evolution of domestic animals like pigs and cows and chickens. That's increasing and we're getting more technologically clever at that by manipulating not just the selection part of evolution but also the mutation part. That will be very different; one of the great features of biological evolution up to now is that there is no foresight.

In general, evolution is a blind process. That's why I called my book "The Blind Watchmaker." Evolution never looks to the future. It never governs what happens now on the basis on what will happen in the future in the way that human design undoubtedly does. But now it is possible to breed a new kind of pig, or chicken, which has such and such qualities. We may even have to pass that pig through a stage where it is actually less good at whatever we want to produce -- making long bacon racks or something -- but we can persist because we know it'll be worth it in the long run. That never happened in natural evolution; there was never a "let's temporarily get worse in order to get better, let's go down into the valley in order to get over to the other side and up onto the opposite mountain." So yes, I think it well may be that we're living in a time when evolution is suddenly starting to become intelligently designed.

salon.com

Salon's interviewer says,

Some scientists say that removing religion or God from their life would leave it meaningless, that it's God that gives meaning to life.

I never understood that way of thinking. What if you don't like the "meaning" god supposedly supplies for your life? And how do you reconcile this idea with the belief in hell? "I'm glad god condemned me to eternal punishment. Otherwise my life would lack meaning."

Yeah that question and reply caught my attention too Mark. It is however an accurate representation of what many bio-conservatives believe and as such how it motivates their political positions vis à vis scientific research and technological applications.

I think people dislike Dawkins because he's handsome.

BTW, I am surprised nobody has commented on the * Photoshopping* of Michelangelo's work yet. )

I think people dislike Dawkins because he's handsome.

Physically attractive men tend to earn more money and enjoy higher social status, especially if they are taller than average. Higher social status also gives your word more authority over the subordinate humans. Evolutionary psychologists explain this outcome by arguing that good looks and height make men seem more reproductively fit, and therefore worthy of dominance in the social hierarchy. If Dawkins is as "handsome" as you claim, he of all people should be able to figure out how to turn his fitness signals to his advantage in debates with creationists.

Lazarus Long It is however an accurate representation of what many bio-conservatives believe and as such how it motivates their political positions vis à vis scientific research and technological applications.

I'm not sure of the extent bio-conservatives (and conservatives in general) are against scientific research beyond stem cell research and cryonics. It seems there are other solutions such as brain-computer interfacing, nanotech, and AGI which they're not against. Since I like compromises and work-arounds, rather than playing time-wasting political games, I'm personally not attracted to biotechnology. I can understand the interest of cryonics for some, but beyond that, I think it's a waste.

This is my response to Dawkins on agnosticism.

http://www.imminst.o...219

Mind answers similarly, his post is below.

BTW, I am surprised nobody has commented on the * Photoshopping*  of Michelangelo's work yet.  )

Hehehe, I think it is great. Completely appropriate.

It seems there are other solutions such as brain-computer interfacing, nanotech, and AGI which they're not against.

That is because most of them, if not all, are not even aware of those solutions.

I wouldnt say appropriate, but it fits the theme of the thread,
However, I'm seeing alot of disrespect for religion or spirituality crop up on the boards lately.
I understand you guys think religion is a bad thing, in many ways it is, buts its not really anyones right to choose but the person it affects.
I suppose the question you must ask yourself, is even if "America is slipping into a Dark Age," would you force others to a belief not their own in order to avoid that?

(As well, the disrespect of that work of art, religous or not, is somewhat saddening.)

cosmos|

You delve into agnosticism in "The Ancestor's Tale." How does it differ from atheism?

It's said that the only rational stance is agnosticism because you can neither prove nor disprove the existence of the supernatural creator. I find that a weak position. It is true that you can't disprove anything but you can put a probability value on it. There's an infinite number of things that you can't disprove: unicorns, werewolves, and teapots in orbit around Mars. But we don't pay any heed to them unless there is some positive reason to think that they do exist.

This is a rather unconvincing argument. There are an infinite number of possible claims of an unfalsifiable nature, each claim should not be approached with atheistic (absolute) disbelief. If each claim is approached agnostically and no legitimate supporting evidence or reasoned argument is brought forth, there would be no reason to believe in the claim and no need to refute it. Applying a spectrum of belief, one may assign an infinitesimal belief in the unsubstantiated finite reviewed claims of the infinite non-falsifiable claims. The unreviewed remainder would not be assigned any degree of belief until/if additional reviews of those remaining claims take place. Should a provisional degree of belief be applied to all unfalsifiable claims, all such claims would be approached with that amount of provisional belief. On an individual basis, provisional beliefs can be changed for individual claims as required, in response to evidence or reasoned argument.

Cosmos, I think what would be important to know is how one’s rational distribution of efforts would differ among being non-atheistic, agnostic, and atheistic. If one doesn’t act any differently whether one’s agnostic or atheistic, then it’s more rational to identify with atheism. There’s nothing empirical about being agnostic, since it suggests one’s ignoring all evidence and not making any probabilistic judgments whatsoever. Furthermore, if something is real, then it isn’t supernatural. “Supernatural” is meaningless. Giving the benefit of the doubt, however, supposing one’s actions would in fact differ according to either agnosticism or atheism, my question would be, “How so?” If it’s, say, 2% probable that A, one still has to make a judgment and act either according to A or not-A.

I see your point with assigning infinitesimal belief to claims with zero evidence, but belief probabilities are a trivial matter (even assuming incessant calibration) compared with the actions taken in accordance with them. This sounds more like Dawkins’ point.

Interestingly enough, the men who chose the new pope did so in the Sistine Chapel, within sight of the original painting:



The colors in this image look bright, like the photo was taken after the painting's restoration.

Dawkins said:

We'd be free to exult in the privilege -- the remarkable good fortune -- that each one of us enjoys through having been being born. An astronomically overwhelming majority of the people who could be born never will be. You are one of the tiny minority whose number came up.

This is something I've been thinking about recently: billions and billions of human sperms and eggs, representing potential huiman beings, never unite and become human beings. It would seem that the fact that each of us is here in all our uniqueness and potential had far, far less likelihood of happening than for one of to win a large jackpot in the lottery. Comtemplating how unlikely my own conception and birth was seems almost as difficult as wrapping my mind around the concept of oblivion following death.

This is something I've been thinking about recently:  billions and billions of human sperms and eggs, representing potential huiman beings, never unite and become human beings.  It would seem that the fact that each of us is here in all our uniqueness and potential had far, far less likelihood of happening than for one of to win a large jackpot in the lottery.  Comtemplating how unlikely my own conception and birth was seems almost as difficult as wrapping my mind around the concept of oblivion following death.

Everyone learns this in school, yet for some reason christians still insist "We didn't get here through chance."

In fact, I have to wonder if the role of chance in natural human conception has something to do with bioconservatives' discomfort with reproductive technologies, which deliberately try to reduce the accidents in the process of making babies. I tell christians these days that the people conceived artificially have a better claim to a designed and purposeful origin than humans conceived naturally.

Nate:

Cosmos, I think what would be important to know is how one’s rational distribution of efforts would differ among being non-atheistic, agnostic, and atheistic. If one doesn’t act any differently whether one’s agnostic or atheistic, then it’s more rational to identify with atheism.

Labels like agnostic and atheist are vague and can sometimes be construed differently by different people. If we compartmentalize the two groupings, weak atheism and agnostic atheism are similar positions. Furthermore, there is another consideration in weak agnosticism which "is the belief that the existence or nonexistence of deities is currently unknown, but is not necessarily unknowable." These are words that attempt to describe the level of one's belief in said claim, and the likelyhood that the validity of the claim in question is knowable at some point. It becomes needlessly complicated trying to find words to describe one's positions with increasing accuracy. If I'm to elucidate my position, I'll take the time to explain it rather than attempt to distill it into a chain of words that inevitably require such an explanation.

I see your point with assigning infinitesimal belief to claims with zero evidence, but belief probabilities are a trivial matter (even assuming incessant calibration) compared with the actions taken in accordance with them. This sounds more like Dawkins’ point.

What if one's belief probabilities lean toward the existence of an involved God, one who favours certain actions over others with the associated reward or punishment? Even without certainty, you may expect that individual to act in accordance with this deity's favoured actions, perhaps more often then not.

Excuse the late response.

I wouldnt say appropriate, but it fits the theme of the thread,
However, I'm seeing alot of disrespect for religion or spirituality crop up on the boards lately.
I understand you guys think religion is a bad thing, in many ways it is, buts its not really anyones right to choose but the person it affects.
I suppose the question you must ask yourself, is even if "America is slipping into a Dark Age," would you force others to a belief not their own in order to avoid that?

I don't speak for all ImmInst forum members, but in answer to your question, no I would not.

Again, I point to a recent post I made in the religion forum.

(knite)

I wouldnt say appropriate, but it fits the theme of the thread,
However, I'm seeing alot of disrespect for religion or spirituality crop up on the boards lately.
I understand you guys think religion is a bad thing, in many ways it is, buts its not really anyones right to choose but the person it affects.
I suppose the question you must ask yourself, is even if "America is slipping into a Dark Age," would you force others to a belief not their own in order to avoid that?

Knite. You're point may be valid. However people of reason have been persecuted by religions since the dawn of time. They wouldn't let us bath in the dark ages, they burned us at the stake. They've held back mankind's progress for millennia. And even today religion directly threatens our lives by getting in the way of potentially lifesaving therapies. We take this very seriously.

This must stop.

To quote Robert Ingersoll
"I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men"

Cosmos, I think I understand what you’re saying.

I’m not trying to shove anything down your throat, but my main idea is that I don’t think Dawkins would disagree with you. Where you, as an individual, might be concerned with the nuances regarding deistic beliefs, someone else might outsource performing deistic belief calibrations because there isn’t a “positive reason” to allow one’s own action courses – as one perceives them – to be affected in any way by infinitesimal shifts within one’s belief system.

“So what if one’s actions represent an outright denial of unicorns?” is what I’m suggesting and what I think Dawkins is also suggesting. But what I think you’re saying is that it’s still of utmost importance to be intellectually precise even if increasingly more accuracy makes no difference to general outcomes beyond neurophysiological structures. While I agree, precision in the context of deistic debates might be pointless in the grand scheme of things, unless one’s career depends on it. If one’s career doesn’t depend on such precision, especially regarding the treatment of deistic entities, then one shall be unproductive if one’s waiting to act only when the actions can precisely represent a probabilistic judgment.

If you would like to take this further by suggesting probable costs for acting slightly incongruently with deistic judgments, then I’ll probably just have to listen and be enlightened.

Knite. You're point may be valid. However people of reason have been persecuted by religions since the dawn of time. They wouldn't let us bath in the dark ages, they burned us at the stake. They've held back mankind's progress for millennia. And even today religion directly threatens our lives by getting in the way of potentially lifesaving therapies. We take this very seriously.

This must stop.

To quote Robert Ingersoll
"I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men"

This is true, however, one must know where to draw the line, or you risk becoming exactly like them. I think many people here at imminst think everyone should think like them (ie be as scientific as possible) and all would be well. I think that would get rather dull, quickly. The differences between people and views and everything are necessary. Whats the point of living forever if nothing interesting happens.
Religion is not rational, but then niether is story-telling, art, or music, yet I would not want to live one more day without them.
However I agree that something needs to be done (I thought something HAD been done 230 years ago when we purposefully seperated church and state) to make sure these people cannot force their religion on us. The thing you shouldnt do is disrespect, disregard, or force religion in the same way it has forced the world for millenia. Then you have become nothing but another of the same, and many thousands of years down the line another of the same to fight against.

I'm not sure of the extent bio-conservatives (and conservatives in general) are against scientific research beyond stem cell research and cryonics. It seems there are other solutions such as brain-computer interfacing, nanotech, and AGI which they're not against. Since I like compromises and work-arounds, rather than playing time-wasting political games, I'm personally not attracted to biotechnology. I can understand the interest of cryonics for some, but beyond that, I think it's a waste.

Overall I do not agree with this assessment Nate. It is true that bioconservativism maintains more of a visceral animosity towards biological technologies (for various reason which will run too far away from the thread topic), but I also think that, when it is informed enough to ponder such issues, it opposes all technological paths which lead to the post-human. In Defense of Posthuman Dignity I am also for compromise, but only if my objectives can be accomplished by doing so. It also appears to me that most bioconservatives do not seem interested in compromise...

As far as the rest of your opinion goes, I can understand it, and I can respect it, but I once again disagree with it on a fundamental level. There are hot button issues within the overarching field of biotech, but many areas which may lead to ENS go unopposed. There is just to much gray area between treatment and enhancement, and the biocons are thus left defending a sort of technological Maginot line. Thus IMO, trying to separate the bio from info based paths to immortality (or SAI) because of perceived conservative opposition to specific technological solutions being pursued by the biological science is inappropriate. First, such a separation is probably infeasible. And second, compromise can (and will) be attained without the abandonment of an entire field of research.

I also found this post surprising because you are usually meticulous about logically connecting your premises to your conclusion. Yet in this cas it does not seem that your argument fully supports your conclusions (I'm not attacted to biotechnologies and I think they are a waste) By making these conclusions you are also making implicit assumptions about the nature and rate of technological progress which I would argue are unwarranted. IOW, your cost/benefit analysis regarding biotech is based on your assessment of pending success in other technological fields.

In this regard I do not share your optimism and I am actually coming to believe that this represents a significant difference in perspective between the biological scientist and the transhumanist philosopher. I agree in principle with the potential for transhuman intelligence and/or alterations to our cognitive substrate. All I disagree with the typical transhuman philosopher on is time frames. I am not entirely convinced concerning More's Law or Kurzweil's increasing rate of technological progress. I do not believe that any form of real AI will be formed within the next 30 years. And I definitely do not see SAi as "coming out of the box" for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps this difference in perspective is in large part due to a difference in underlying interests or concentrations. Perhaps my knowledge level in comp sci/AI programming is too deficient to comprehend the possibilities of accomplishing THist objectives in the near term via info tech.

Perhaps. Or perhaps my philosopher friends have taken inappropriate conceptual liberties and extropolated beyond what is rationally justifiable. Only time will tell, but I do wish all the AI programmers out there the best of luck. I'm just not willing to place faith in their pursuits.

Talk to you later

Don

Don, as I see it currently, there is a class of problems called The Human Condition. The outlook of biotechnology (when also factoring in the sub-domains that would matter most), for my taste, solves too few problems in this class. Some people say, “I shall achieve physical immortality or die trying.” That’s fine. I say, “I shall achieve ultraintelligence or die trying.” Either pathway potentially has huge negligence costs. But the former seems to have much more, including the costs of fairness and resources spent negotiating deregulations, along with fewer benefits.

Anyone know when "The God Delusion" book may come out?

I say, “I shall achieve ultraintelligence or die trying."

And I agree, "ultraintelligence" is also one of my higher order goals. But the attainment of ENS may make the attainment of ultraintelligence far more likely (for me )). Again, this really comes down to a personal assessement of the rate of progress in various technological fields, but I have never heard a convincing argument that AI or SAI will be here anytime soon.

I view biotech as the ripest low lying fruit and the development of AI as...(how do I put this politely?)...nascent.

Nate

Cosmos, I think I understand what you’re saying.

I’m not trying to shove anything down your throat, but my main idea is that I don’t think Dawkins would disagree with you. Where you, as an individual, might be concerned with the nuances regarding deistic beliefs, someone else might outsource performing deistic belief calibrations because there isn’t a “positive reason” to allow one’s own action courses – as one perceives them – to be affected in any way by infinitesimal shifts within one’s belief system.

“So what if one’s actions represent an outright denial of unicorns?” is what I’m suggesting and what I think Dawkins is also suggesting. But what I think you’re saying is that it’s still of utmost importance to be intellectually precise even if increasingly more accuracy makes no difference to general outcomes beyond neurophysiological structures. While I agree, precision in the context of deistic debates might be pointless in the grand scheme of things, unless one’s career depends on it. If one’s career doesn’t depend on such precision, especially regarding the treatment of deistic entities, then one shall be unproductive if one’s waiting to act only when the actions can precisely represent a probabilistic judgment.

If you would like to take this further by suggesting probable costs for acting slightly incongruently with deistic judgments, then I’ll probably just have to listen and be enlightened.

hhmm, I agree with you Nate that "precision in the context of deistic debates might be pointless". Yet at the same time I do believe that how one defines/nuances their answer to the question of God illuminates the system(s) by which they form their beliefs.

How Dawkins arrives at his position of Atheism is interesting because, while I do not disagree with any of his specific arguments (infinite regression is a classic and solid argument against the "God explanation"), it shows that his default position when contemplating a particular belief is disbelief (I'll get back to this). This is identical to how Michael Shermer approaches such matters.

A theory or proposition should be judged by its explanatory power. "God does not exist", just as "God does exist", has no true explanatory power. Therefore, it is a worthless proposition. Why would someone put forward a worthless proposition?

Cosmos

If each claim is approached agnostically and no legitimate supporting evidence or reasoned argument is brought forth, there would be no reason to believe in the claim and no need to refute it.

Exactly, that sums up what I am trying to argue nicely.
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The notion that I have been pondering as of late is that, by operating from a default position of disbelief, Dawkins and Shermer may sometimes be commiting what I consider to be "abuses of skepticism". And such abuses, I would argue, may be having a negative effect on how accurately they project the future and/or take into consideration transhuman possibilities. So yes, I think that the issue of how a hard core skeptic forms his beliefs is important.

Dawkins

It's an interesting thought that in some remote time in the future, people may look back on the 20th and 21st centuries as a watershed in evolution -- the time when evolution stopped being an undirected force and became a design force.

What Dawkins views as "some remote time in the future", many of us here view as within the next 50 years. How does one explain this dramatic difference in perspectives?

Note: This is an issue that I have been obsessed with for quite some time, as I value Dawkins perspective immensely, but have a hard time trying to reconcile his world view with my own.

Nate, a while back when we were discussing this exact same issue in regards to Dennett you stated that just because someone has a scientific world view this does not guarantee that they will embrace Transhumanist ideals/have a Transhuman world view. But of course in my mind, that only begs the question, why do they not embrace transhuman ideals? -- or put another way...why? Is the answer because all values are arbitrary? Perhaps. But isn't there also the possibility that they are committing errors in their conceptualization of future trends?

I actually got the courage to throw an email Dennett's way a while back, he told me tersely that he'd "weigh in" on transhumanism in a couple of years after his next book on religion comes out. I guess we'll just have to wait a while to hear it from him personally eh?

I also got a response from Dennett regarding Transhumanism:

I haven't paid it much attention. What little I've seen has taken good points and pushed them into dubious territory, but I haven't pursued them, or developed any critique. Maybe I should look more closely.
DCD

Interesting though. He told you that he was going to weight in at some point? That is slightly more commitment than I received from him in this email. I'm thinking maybe I will compile a list of prominient Transhuman philosophers for him to examine (Bostrom comes to mind)...I wonder who else would be appropriate...??

Perhaps Nate could contact him as well, our local transhumanist philosopher in an email exchange with Dennett. A few well written emails could peak his interest.

DonSpanton| Nate, a while back when we were discussing this exact same issue in regards to Dennett and you stated that just because someone has a scientific world view does not guarantee that they will embrace Transhumanist ideals. But of course in my mind, that only begs the question, why do they not embrace transhuman ideals? Is the answer because all values are arbitrary? Perhaps. But isn't there also the possibility that they are committing errors in their conceptualization of future trends?

I no longer hold the view that all values are arbitrary, since it isn’t possible for an arbitrary value to exist outside a cognitive structure that embraces rationality. At the moment, I’ll have to be vague about “embraces rationality,” but the main idea is that if an agent doesn’t presume rationality, the agent can’t be expected to not have “unreasonable values.”

Considering that, I still could do no better than guess why they commit errors in analyzing future trends. A lack of values maybe?

Thank you, Cosmos. I'm afraid before that, we may also consider that transhumanism is a vastly complicated subject, and they may just be reluctant to say anything until either they're fully prepared or it's too late to make a reputation-conserving splash.