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You're right, I'm giving this more attention than it's worth, but then again I do that for many things on The Motte.
Most people consider that the necessity of assigning blame or punishment hinges a great deal on whether a person could have possibly made a choice counterfactual to what was observed. Hence the exclusion from the death penalty of people who are insane, because they lack "choice" or even understanding. I don't, even if I endorse criminal justice for other reasons, such as an empirical reduction in crime by dissuading those who would commit it if there was no penalty. The "possibility" of there even being another choice is ruled out by the determinism of the universe, at least for all practical purposes, and the illusion persists only because we can't dispel it with with the tools available.
Of course.
If you still can't see what I'm pointing at, my claim is that those who stay after sober reflection and an accurate understanding of modern science have priors on the existence of God which, if not outright axiomatic, are close enough that I don't care to quibble. This is a fact of modernity, a scholarly monk in the 12th century certainly has less science available to choose a materialist alternative.
You are falsifying a view I do not hold, at least after I explained myself quite clearly.
I presume that this edit was too late for you to have read, so please address that now. What evidence could I, or any living assemblage of humans, with a budget of several billions or even a trillion at hand, muster to dissuade you? If you can't answer that, while I can, then there's no room for a double crux in the first place.
Rest assured I have exceedingly low expectations of changing your mind, or vice versa, I consider atheist debate on the Internet to be a moderately enjoyable pastime. All I seek from it are inconsistencies in my own worldview, not that I've spotted any today.
I don't care about the attention you're giving it. My complaint is that you seem to be looking for a soapbox to make points about religion without listening to or internalizing the counterpoints. It's fine for you to care deeply about this and disagree, but repetitively making the same points without even acknowledging your opponent's points (as I pointed out you did by equating his perspective of hell with the one you have in your head) is annoying.
As far as "impractical" purposes, again, I'm not sure the universe is fundamentally deterministic, given the nature of quantum mechanics. The only way to salvage [the illusion that free will is an illusion] is to basically say that people are not brains. "It wasn't actually you that made that decision, it was the atoms in your brain." This is extremely unsatisfying, considering that "you" are the atoms in your brain, and therefore, "you" can make decisions.
And now we get to the actual axioms. I can see why you'd believe this, or believe that moral objectivism is an illusion, but to me this is self-evidently false. People simply have objective value. If the world ceases to exist, something of value will be lost, even without people around to quantify that value.
I don't love the framing of this question. If an organization with billions of dollars devoted all its resources to persuading me of something, I would be very reticent to actually be persuaded, even if the evidence seemed convincing. Presumably it could find or manufacture very good evidence for either side. Besides, people and organizations can't always just produce evidence, especially evidence which may be of a deeply personal nature.
To be very clear, I'm not yet 100% sure that my church is true. For one thing, if I were 100% sure, I wouldn't be making some of the decisions I currently make, such as playing videogames, watching inappropriate TV shows, or wasting time on this forum. This is basically what I mean by "faith"--whatever the strength of beliefs you profess, your actions are what really determine the strength of your belief in God.
My church teaches a very simple way of coming to know the truth. Live morally, and God will give you more knowledge. Accountability is based on knowledge--you can't be blamed for decisions you don't understand--which is why you generally don't obtain knowledge until you're ready for it (until you are morally developed enough to receive it and act upon it). Were this pattern to break--were I to become much more moral than I am now, without a corresponding increase in both understanding and in tangible evidence of God' existence--I would consider that proof positive that I was wrong about religion.
I have also tested more scientific methods, including listing out all prayers, whether the prayed-for thing happened, and my probability estimate of whether it would have happened had I not prayed. These turned out strongly in prayer's favor, but I like the previous approach more--it feels more trustworthy to me. Even though I do track prayers, on the rare occasions when I don't get what I ask for I still often feel momentary doubts that God exists. This is a personal moral failing, but it should show you that my belief in God is not as strong as I would like it to be, or as you think it is. If enough prayers went unanswered for long enough I fear that that might also cause me to lose my faith.
Keeping in mind that God doesn't want to give you more knowledge than you're ready for, what would be enough evidence to convince you that I am right? I'm telling you, straight up, you don't want to be visited by an angel or witness any equivalent level of evidence. Morally it would not change you very much (you would still have the same weaknesses etc.), but it would make you far more accountable for all the bad moral decisions you make in life, and in particular you would actually go to Hell if you later convinced yourself it was a hallucination or something.
There is a path to be followed, and I'm confident that each step on that path provides enough evidence to justify testing out the next step. I'd encourage you to try that path out yourself, and I assure you that if that path ever fails for me then that will be evidence enough that the conclusions which the path points towards (religion etc.) are not correct.
I did no such thing in the first place.
Alright, you want a concrete example? Some people, or rather a lot of them, operating under a fundamentally flawed definition of choice, routinely suggest things like fat shaming or telling depressed people that lying in bed all day are "choices", and hence their decision is worthy of opprobrium. They don't do the same when the cause is less vague, because barring the odd idiot, nobody goes around telling a diabetic that they're at moral fault for not having a working pancreas, and they ought to will their glucose levels back to normal. A mechanistic understanding of a phenomenon often prevents that assignment of moral fault.
Given that I know that everything is mechanistic, that means that I don't go around blaming people for the same, at least in situations where the act of blaming isn't going to make things better.
The sense of choice is entirely an illusion, your every action is determined by the precise configuration of the universe before you made it, updating according to the laws of physics. You couldn't have done otherwise, nobody can.
Remember when I called it a useful social fiction? I think crime ought to be punished even though the actions of a given criminal were entirely contingent on the above, if in expectation punishing them would lead to lower crime.
Therein arises a malign prior.
Okay then. This conversation has gone well past a leisurely waste of time into outright futility. If no evidence that anyone can plausibly muster with enormous resources can convince you otherwise, then you're effectively immune to further evidence.
Jesus Christ. Good for you that you bothered, but I regretfully inform you that no end of RCTs on the effectiveness of prayer have only confirmed the null hypothesis.
Maple syrup on a shit sandwich. For the properties of God almost universally acknowledged by most Christian denominations, the omnipotence and omnibenevolence part, from his perspective it makes no fucking difference whether I was indoctrinated with vague evidence by a Church or woken up with a handie from an Angel. He knows with absolute certainty whether or not I'm going to Hell before creating me, and in the event that I do go to Hell, he's entirely responsible for it. No point fucking around, that's just sociopathic.
I'm going to call it here, at least it was good practise in the event that I have the misfortune to run into Mormon missionaries in the States.
Starting to look like you're not engaging in good faith here.
No, I don't, I want you to tell me what was wrong with my concrete example, which you said relied on "[divorcing] all the usual connotations of choice". I've been very clear about that and you've dodged the question twice now.
The example you gave doesn't have anything to do with knowing the result of a choice ahead of time anyways. It's just a mostly unrelated example of your perspective, which while valuable, has already been shared in this thread.
Your response had much more to do with your own conception of hell than with his, as I mentioned. If you disagree, please explain why rather than just saying "nuh-uh".
Not what I said, and you know it. You wanted that answer ("people who disagree with me are immune to the truth") so badly you refused to hear what I said as anything else. I don't think the hypothetical should ever convince anyone of anything--an institution whose goal is by definition to convince you of something regardless of the truth of the matter should not be trusted. In that situation the only rational course of action would be to commit to epistemic learned helplessness regarding any information such an organization presented to you.
Besides that, I did address the hypothetical in the spirit in which it was intended, and you ignored that. Meanwhile you didn't even try to respond to the same question turned on you.
Unless you actually think they'll sound anything like me (they don't), this sounds less like something you really believe and more like something you're just saying as a sort of quasi-insult. Nice one.
As I mentioned, this only applies if you don't consider your brain to be "you". The idea that "you would never have made a different choice" means choices do not exist is wrong. As I said, everyone will choose $100 over $1, but the choice is still a choice, and is fundamentally up to them (unless you define their neurons as not being "them").
Like I said at the beginning, agency is what gives moral virtue value. If anyone is created without the capacity for evil, they also lack the capacity for good. Supposing God does know where you're headed before you're created, as I've been arguing that still doesn't mean you were forced into making those decisions. You still have the capacity for evil and good, and you determine which you choose; that choice is just known beforehand. To deny you the right of existing and making those choices would be to deny you your agency.
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...I hesitated to do so before, but I'm going to offer this link; it might be relevant to your interests, as it parallels the current conversation fairly closely. Upon checking the upstream thread, I see that the conversation string was actually initiated by you and @self_made_human in the first place.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks, that was a pretty good discussion. I don't 100% agree (I think when it comes down to it there is a little more objective truth to which axioms should be adopted than you seem to imply) but definitely an enlightening read.
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