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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Unfortunately, your beliefs are wrong. There's probably nothing I can do to convince you, except to say I have direct experiential evidence that I cannot square with nonexistence of god.

I did get to this point starting from agnostic materialism. Assume there are no souls. Assume there is nothing special about human brains. You're having an experience right now, how does that work? As far as I can tell, something to do with information processing... why would that be unique to human brains? What is it like to be a bat? Why unique to brains at all? What is it like to be a tree? What is it like to be an interconnected global financial system? Connect two or more "conscious" information systems, is the resulting system conscious? What if you connect ALL information systems?

What is it like to be a bat? Why unique to brains at all? What is it like to be a tree?

Impossible to know. We cannot ever know the experience of being any sort of thing other than our particular selves.

Connect two or more "conscious" information systems

The only known "conscious" information systems are human minds, and there's no real way to "connect" them — except imperfect channels like language — such as to form a "resulting system."

And none of this undermines materialism or points to the existence of any kind of higher power, nor any kind of afterlife.