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Religious scholars met with Anthropic

160 points · 416 comments · bookofjoe

  1. Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
    Only humans can have morality. If you do not feel pain, you cannot empathize with pain if you cannot die, you cannot emphasize with the loss of life.

    Just stop this already.

    You’re all imagining that Spock was the main character of Star Trek, but it was in fact, the emotional living Captain Kirk, who was the main star.

    1. sigmar · · focus · HN ↗
      So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.

      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...

      1. Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
        It doesn’t make sense to me either, which is why I didn’t write that. You missed the empathy part as most people do.

        There is still something in those people who cannot feel pain, and that’s the empathy. How can a GPU and software ever have a human empathy if it has never been human?

        1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
          Your difficulty is that you didn&#x27;t take into account that human itself is as far as we know just a physical process.
          1. svnt · · focus · HN ↗
            Citation needed. If what you are actually saying is successful empirical science only produces empirical observations about physical processes, you are willingly wearing blinders.
            1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
              Its on you if you want to show something magical exists in human brains. Show us all if you believe so.
              1. svnt · · focus · HN ↗
                It seems pretty clearly structured to be on each person to explore experientially and explain it to themselves.

                But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.

                In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.

                1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
                  Equally well I see people who really have no idea about the expressive power and ambit of current mathematics and physics eg they probably think its just arithmetic, not knowing the power of a Turing computer for instance. Just as often also I see people simply expressing belief in something &quot;beyond&quot; without any evidence. I am not subservient to anything other than the basic common sense of requiring evidence for out there claims.
                  1. svnt · · focus · HN ↗
                    Have you read William James&#x2F;Starbuck, and how do you interpret that?
                    1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
                      I can&#x27;t find anything about Starbuck. Link me to whatever you think that is.
                  2. svnt · · focus · HN ↗
                    I can’t seem to reply to your comment deeper in the chain.

                    Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck&#x27;s questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:

                    1) Against &quot;medical materialism&quot;: a belief&#x27;s origins don&#x27;t settle its value. If Paul&#x27;s vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist&#x27;s own conviction.

                    2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don&#x27;t bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness&#x27;s claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.

                    3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a &quot;wider self&quot; through which religious experiences come, which James calls the &quot;more.&quot;

                    4) &quot;The Will to Believe&quot; (1896): Clifford&#x27;s rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.

                    Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.

              2. Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
                Your use of the word &quot;magical&quot; is demeaning. The fact that our consciousness could actually exists in a non-material state is a theory.

                <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedebrief.org&#x2F;new-theory-suggests-consciousness-may-come-from-a-hidden-wave-in-the-brain-not-neurons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedebrief.org&#x2F;new-theory-suggests-consciousness-may...

                1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
                  ...

                  I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are &quot;magical&quot; or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.

          2. Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
            &gt; as far as we know

            The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest &quot;thing&quot;. You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.

            1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
              Unfortunately every time the supernaturalist tried to argue something, he has been knocked down and disproven by materialism throughout centuries of history. Its on you as to which side of the bet you want to be on. Even concepts that seemed unresolvable with endless circles of purely philosophical arguments such as the atomic theory became proven after new data and physical experiment. Consciousness today seems just as unresolvable as atomic theory was to the ancient Greeks.

              At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?

              If you think physical sciences don&#x27;t have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don&#x27;t even know what to say.

              1. Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
                I am not a supernaturalist. I would consider myself a non-dualist.

                I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.

                This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:

                <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scienceabc.com&#x2F;pure-sciences&#x2F;can-the-area-of-a-circle-ever-be-exactly-determined-since-pi-goes-on-forever" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.scienceabc.com&#x2F;pure-sciences&#x2F;can-the-area-of-a-c...

                &quot;Nothing Is Ever Precise

                We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. &quot;

                Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.

                My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.

                1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
                  Quantum theory is definitely not amaterial, it is a very real and physically proven theory that has been needed to create things like electronics. Obviously QM is still being worked upon and could be supplanted by another theory or corrected.

                  Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.

                  Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.

                  1. Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
                    &gt; Quantum theory is definitely not amaterial,

                    I did not say that.

                    &gt; Of course I know pi to as many digits I want.

                    But it never ends. Why are you ignoring that?

                    &gt; Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model,

                    I do not.

                    1. hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
                      All the representations I listed are never ending.
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