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Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe.

No. But what of it? The question is not whether human experience is significant to the universe (what would it even mean for something to be significant to the universe? The universe is not a conscious being able to perceive significance), is whether it's significant to humans. Which it pretty obviously is, since human experience might be a vanishingly small fraction of the universe, but it's the totality of, well, itself. Humans are the ones who decide how humans behave, so who or what but humans should be the judge of human significance? (I would also question whether the end of human existence is really the same as never having existed in the first place. From an eternalist perspective, which in my understanding is perfectly compatible with godless metaphysics, then the universe has always about to be affected by humans, and will forever have been affected by humans. If Joe Smith dies today, the statement "Joe Smith is alive the 16th of August 2023 CE is still forever true.)

If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.

And if they live five more years and then die? Does it still not matter? You can do plenty of stuff in five years. Human life may be short, but it's not zero; the way I saw it put somewhere, "the difference betwee zero and one is as reat as that between one and infinity". You are drawing a dichotomy in which either something has infinite value or it has none at all. It might make no difference to the galaxy of Andromeda, but... why should the kidney donor and the doctors care more about the perspective of the galaxy of Andromeda than that of the kidney receiver? (Why should they care less abut Andromeda, you may say. Well, it happens that they do, with or without the permission of gods and philosophers, and they can't help but do so. There's good practical, material reasons for that -- see below.)

Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for?

What indeed? They were for feeling good. By that standard you should never enjoy vacations because eventually you return to work, never eat good food because eventually it's going to run out, never enjoy spending time with older loved ones who will die before you, etc. And yet people do enjoy these things. As a matter of fact about human psychology, eternity has never been a prerequisite for enjoyment. This whole argument starts from an assumption that happiness and human endeavours and whatnot are only worth experiencing if they last forever. This is not an assumption that everyone shares.

What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science.

Which science? The science I found suggests that moral intuitions derive pretty logically from game theory and our evolutionary history, and are in fact very useful in order to put a society together. It's absolutey not an accident that parents love their children and that people dislike murderers (with all the imperfection you'd expect from a soul that runs on warm gristle). Will a cool pseudoNietzsche Free Spirit defector in a society of blithe cooperators end up maximizing their own hedonic pleasure? Groups of cooperators tend to be much stronger and lasting than lonely defectors. Plus, you and I are built out of the same goop, crawled out of the same pond and climbed down the same tree, so our fundamental moral drives are not likely to diverge much, barring actual pathology, which is not cured by prayer. We have moral instincts jury-rigged by evolution that are not easily discarded (even the Nazis had to put in effort to avoid pitying their victims), and we have self-interested reasons to use them. If you ask me, that's more than enough reason to at least attempt to behave morally. Deities seem to me wholly superfluous, much like they're superfluous to explain the shape of continents once you have plate tectonics. Perhaps you might think that an atheist who behaves well out of fear of punishment is not Really being moral, but...

I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.

... If you really only care about children or spouses or siblings or close friends or favorite artworks or landscapes or foodstuffs or pastimes or whatever because you're threatened into compliance, I don't see what makes you different from the hypothetical Nietzschean Ubermensch who behaves well because it's in their long-term self-interest. But I doubt that's the case. If God Almighty showed up and said to every being in the universe I reward only good pebblesorters, I don't care about this moral stuff, would you then behave like the "thinking atheist" you describe?

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response, I hope I managed to be at least a bit worthy of it.

I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.

I agree that humans can enjoy things and be motivated to enjoy things in the face of annihilation of the human race and a lack of objective judgment. I agree that humans will help others if it means they feel good. My disagreement is that things like the motivation to pursue the betterment of humanity and the amelioration of suffering and a general non-hedonic existence is greatly diminished in the atheist framework.

But maybe we should look at concrete examples. Let’s say two humans are deciding how to go about their career as doctors.

  • Theo believes that his conduct as a doctor will be judged by a powerful and important and loving Person. Theo believes this Person’s opinion of him is more important than any human being he knows. Theo loves this Person because this Person gave his life for him. As a result, Theo ignores the temptation to overcharge and over-medicate, he ignores the temptation to see too many patients to acquire money. The hospital’s management is upset with him; his coworkers are enjoying life more than him. But Theo believes that the Great Person is doubly proud of him for withstanding social pressure.

  • Athena believes that her conduct is never judged except by other people who are only privy to how she presents herself publicly. Athena believes that life is about enjoyment, that she will die and never live again, and that feeling good is the most important thing. She overcharges patients, she over-medicates, and she rushes appointments. She loves the praise she gets from her manager. If she ever feels guilty, she goes on social media and signals her virtue as a feminist doctor, and instantly she feels better. She knows that she can feel less guilty more effectively by ignoring the substance and focusing on appearances. A lot of people suffer because of her, but she can hide this from her mind easily, as the other people around her do.

We would certainly agree that Theo is greater than Athena here. I bet our disagreement solely lies in my description of Athena. I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something. But I think my description is accurate for a “thinking atheist” who has plotted out all the consequences of her belief system. Theo has also plotted out the consequences of his belief system, and it leads to morality and a qualitatively different happiness predicated on human affection in the face of suffering. Perhaps there’s someone similar to Athena — let’s call him Athanasius — who believes that he must behave morally to better humanity. That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism. Athanasius is willing a new belief into existence in the same way Theo does. I would then just say that Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.

I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.

Thanks. I'm enjoying this opportunity to have a little debate; I'm always worried I come off as too hostile.

That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism.

Well, of course it wouldn't. But the thing is, the nihilism and hedonism you attribute to the "thinking atheist" do not follow either. Per se, atheism comports precisely one belief: that there is no god, for commonly used definitions of "god". Any other belief, assumption, axiom, or statement has to be added on top of that -- and then you can be Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, or Peter Singer. If your worldview is formed of atheism alone (as opposed to having atheism as a component), then you end up with no beliefs about values and ethics at all, and that is not the same as having the belief "Nothing has value" or "I should act only for my own pleasure" (which, in turn, are not the same as each other). Those are no less additional assumptions than "I should care about other people's wellbeing"; pure atheism does not favor the former two over the last one.

Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.

Perhaps so. If you asked me to develop the most motivating belief system I can, I'd come up with some variety of pantheism in which all conscious beings are actually the same, like in that The Egg short story (and actually I'm doing something like that in a scifi setting I've been working on), but then I'm far from an expert in philosophy or psychology. At any rate, as I argued in other posts, I'd be wary of taking up false beliefs because they are expedient. Much like naive hedonism and naive act utilitarianism, it ends up undermining itself.

I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something.

Not only that, but also your theist is not doing nearly as much thinking as you demand from a "thinking atheist". You describe a simplistic (and only slightly less contradictory) version of Christianity. That's not a belief born from dwelling on the nature of God and trying to arrive at the truth assuming there's God - it's just motivationmaxxing, no more enlightened than an "unthinking" atheist who sticks his fingers into his ears and goes "la la la, can't hear you, secular morality is worth following because it just is!".

I mean, I might just agree. Why shouldn’t we motivationmax? If we admit all three characters are making leaps then we might as well judge which one has the superior leap. Which athlete is motivated to leap the highest? Now we just have to ask who has the most satisfying “why”. Is it the person who believes humanity should be maximized as an article of faith, or a person who believes there is a greatest possible being to conceive who has decided that humanity ought to be maximized as an article of faith and who judged you. Which one is, well, better for maximizing humanity? I vote against the mere “humanity maximizer” because there is no judgement apart from social standard and self-guilt, which is inferior to judgment from the perfect being.

there is no judgement apart from social standard and self-guilt, which is inferior to judgment from the perfect being.

There is no real judgment from the perfect being here, though. What we're looking at is anticipated judgment from an imagined perfect being, which is not the real thing.

At this point you might as well skip the middleman of convincing yourself that there is a God and he will judge you even though he does love you because he sacrificed himself to himself and still remained alive etc etc... There is too much doublethink overhead to be reliable. Speaking of athletes, they go for every advantage they can get away with and I haven't ever heard of religion being recommended as doping. Instead what gets emphasized is Willpower. Internal motivation and internal judgement. As long as you're hacking your reward function, why bother building up fragile constructions of divinity rather than hardcode "do good thing = good"?

Contrary to the Bible hiding from God is a lot easier than hiding from yourself, and judgment is quite immediate instead of being promised ~60 years later.

If you’re anticipating the judgment of an imagined perfect Being, that is phenomenologically the same as anticipating the judgment of a perfect being. Provided that you actually buy into it, of course.

Re: athletics, there’s probably nothing more “animalistically” motivating than college athletics. As in, the motivations are very primitive. Money, women, war. It’s the least civilized thing we still do in civilization. The problem is that the rest of civilized life actually requires effort in motivation. Certainly morality requires this. It also happens to be the case that student athletes are more religious than non-athletes. Probably because the stress reduction of belief allows more focus on the sport.

The question is not whether human experience is significant to the universe [...] i[t']s whether it's significant to humans.

On that subject, I like how the final paragraphs of Last and First Men put it (mild spoilers for a 90-years old philosophical fanta-evolutionary anthropology novel):

Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them. But man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills. He is greater than those bright blind companies. For though in them there is incalculable potentiality, in him there is achievement, small, but actual. Too soon, seemingly, he comes to his end. But when he is done he will not be nothing, not as though he had never been; for he is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things.

Man was winged hopefully. He had in him to go further than this short flight, now ending. He proposed even that he should become the Flower of All Things, and that he should learn to be the All-Knowing, the All-Admiring. Instead, he is to be destroyed. He is only a fledgling caught in a bush-fire. He is very small, very simple, very little capable of insight. His knowledge of the great orb of things is but a fledgling's knowledge. His admiration is a nestling's admiration for the things kindly to his own small nature. He delights only in food and the food-announcing call. The music of the spheres passes over him, through him, and is not heard.

Yet it has used him. And now it uses his destruction. Great, and terrible, and very beautiful is the Whole; and for man the best is that the Whole should use him.

But does it really use him? Is the beauty of the Whole really enhanced by our agony? And is the Whole really beautiful? And what is beauty? Throughout all his existence man has been striving to hear the music of the spheres, and has seemed to himself once and again to catch some phrase of it, or even a hint of the whole form of it. Yet he can never be sure that he has truly heard it, nor even that there is any such perfect music at all to be heard. Inevitably so, for if it exists, it is not for him in his littleness.

But one thing is certain. Man himself, at the very least, is music, a brave theme that makes music also of its vast accompaniment, its matrix of storms and stars. Man himself in his degree is eternally a beauty in the eternal form of things. It is very good to have been man. And so we may go forward together with laughter in our hearts, and peace, thankful for the past, and for our own courage. For we shall make after all a fair conclusion to this brief music that is man.