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The term "much" seems underspecified, given that illness and death remain two of the numerous universal human experiences which have remained absolutely stable throughout all of recorded human history. Clearly, you are aware that all humans experience sickness and death, and fear these things, just as they always have. Just as clearly, I am aware that life expectancy has increased and that we now have penicillin, so what is the disconnect here?
I am claiming that the core of the human experience, the ends we desire and the logic by which we pursue them, have not been changed in any meaningful way, even as the tools we employ in that pursuit have changed radically. As evidence to support this thesis, I point to the numerous ways in which the important features of a human life, things like being born, growing, learning, being part of a family, making friends, using language, using tools, managing conflict, working, fighting, pursuing virtue, dealing with vice, experiencing love, becoming a couple, sex, having and raising children, and so on, have not changed in their essential character despite the means by which they are conducted changing very significantly.
For further evidence, I point to insightful writings of centuries or millennia past about the human experience, and point out that if our technology really had changed us in a fundamental way, we should expect these writings to lose their relevance over time, which they have not. When Socrates tells us that “No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable”, we understand what he means and why he is correct, and it is for the same reasons that he was correct when he first spoke the words, despite the fact that he had no knowledge of steroids or CrossFit or nutritional science. Steroids and CrossFit and nutritional science are changeable means to an unchanged end: health and fitness. Conversations about these subjects written in 400 BC remain both intelligible and immediately relevant to our current context. And so it is, I contend, with every other major sphere of human life.
Could these ends change? Maybe. If you could in fact upload people into a computer such that they no longer had a physical body or any of the experiences that went along with it, then the closest an EM might get would be a purely metaphorical understanding. But of course, EMs remain science fiction, and seem likely to continue to remain science fiction for the indefinite future.
I disagree that they are less bad. Coveting helped drive humans to genocide within the last hundred years. Lust remains exactly as bad as it ever was; ask anyone who's had their spouse cheat on them, or talk to people who feel that ubiquitous porn has made their life worse.
I strongly doubt this is true in specific numbers, and in any case both theft and rape remain serious issues that we have to actively manage and be concerned about. We are nowhere near Yudkowski's "Three Worlds Collide", where people even had a concept of rape as a bad thing is seen as an embarrassing secret. And again, Materialists explicitly predicted that the problem of theft and rape, and a number of other problems besides, could be solved in an absolute sense, not merely managed as it has been throughout all of human history.
No, I'm pointing out that actual solutions were predicted, and those solutions have not manifested. If I promise to build you a mansion, take your money and then hand you a picture of a mansion, or a cheap one-person tent, or erect a painted cardboard façade on the house you already own, none of these constitute fulfillment of my original claim.
The quote that started this discussion:
That phrase is an explicit claim about the history of Materialism. I am pointing out that this claim, and the ideological construct that generated it, is straightforwardly false. If you want to claim that progress exists, you have to engage with the historical record of how things were in the past, and compare them to how they are now. Evaluating previous claims and predictions is part of that process.
I think I understand why you would claim this. You're working from a Bayesian perspective, where everything is evidence, no matter how weak. I do not think that this methodology can possibly be applied with sufficient rigor to deliver meaningful results. Further, I think that the reasoning behind it is badly mistaken about how reason itself works. To put it very simply, human reason is neither mathematical nor even deterministic, and there is no way to rigorously calculate a prior such that the assumptions of Bayesian reasoning can truly be relied upon.
Sufficiently weak "evidence" stops being evidence at all in any meaningful sense. If I tell you that I have experienced a miracle, the honest and reasonable response is "I don't believe you," not "this updates my prior that miracles exist .00001%". The later implies that you have actually moved toward believing in miracles in some meaningful, quantifiable sense, which I very strongly do not believe is the case. It seems to me that framing "priors" in decimal notation is a form of deceit, both to others and to oneself, because it inescapably involves concealing the actual process of reasoning behind a simulation of objectivity and rigor. It's textbook manipulation of procedural outcomes, to put it in the vernacular of the Culture War.
In any case, no, I do not think that additional claims of miracles results in accumulating evidence of miracles happening now, nor does the absence of observed miracles in the present provide accumulating evidence that miracles in the past did not exist. Likewise, no new religions would not be evidence that Christianity is correct, and neither are new religions evidence that Christianity is incorrect, even leaving aside the fact that the Bible itself repeatedly predicts new false religions will arise in its authors' future.
Claims of miracles gives evidence that miracles exist, and absence of observed miracles gives evidence that they don't, but fairly rapidly, the value of additional data points drops to zero. Likewise, Scientology and Mormonism do not provide additional evidence that Christianity is false, because the million other religions and cults and movements prior to them have already provided all the evidence for that proposition that we can meaningfully use.
And this is the core of my argument: What we know, we've known for a long, long time. That many religions are false is a fact thousands of years old. Likewise the idea that no God exists. Neither is a modern discovery, and no novel evidence has been discovered to support them any better than they were supported two thousand years previously. "We can't explain this phenomenon, therefore God" was not a better argument in the past and a worse argument now, it was exactly as good an argument in the past as it is now, because the additional surface detail our growing technology provides does not actually change the basic question. We did not know where we came from before, and we don't know where we came from now, and the unanswerable questions are of a highly-similar character.
On the other hand, "We can use novel tech to solve the human condition" is a novel claim. Materialism, at least in its modern form, is novel as well. It has made specific claims, and those claims should be evaluated on their merits.
That the brain was the seat of consciousness is attested to by the use of decapitation for execution as far back as one cares to look. Likewise, the idea that physical stimuli affect the mind is likewise ancient beyond reckoning, as it is directly observable from one's personal experience. Likewise, use of physical substances and stimuli to induce predictable altered states of consciousness are so old that we have no idea when they started: Alcohol and other psychoactive substances, music and rituals being examples of this technology from prehistoric times.
Electrodes in the brain were supposed to deliver something more: they were supposed to "reducing man, and indeed all living things, to the status of mechanisms: clockworks that could be rationally explained, understood and eventually manipulated at will". They haven't done that. There's no evidence they're capable of doing that, Transhumanist claims and sci-fi fantasies to the contrary. That failure is significant, given the confidence and significance of the predictions and promises that preceded it.
A thousand years ago, I'm pretty confident that people understood that smashing someone's brain killed them, and that smashing it a little fucked them up and then usually killed them; survivable trepanation dates back to well before writing, and the same procedure being used in an attempt to cure madness is thousands of years old. We have elaborated on that model extensively, but extensive elaboration is not an entirely new model. We can specify forms of damage they could not. We can identify forms of damage that they had no way of seeing. We cannot actually do psycho-surgery in any meaningful sense, as the advocates of lobotomies claimed in the past, and the advocates of medical "transition" claim in the present.
Literal mind control is what Materialism has spent centuries promising. It is not my fault that they made absurd promises that they could not possibly make good on, any more than it is your fault that faith healers claim to miraculously cure illness through prayer. You yourself claimed that "Every aspect of the mind that gets explained and controlled by physics and chemistry is evidence against the existence of a soul." I'm pointing out that no meaningful explanation or control over the mind has actually been demonstrated. Not only does Disney not have mind-control rays, they can't reliably make movies that most people in their host society enjoy. That is an absurdly low bar to pass for the claim both Materialists generally and you specifically have made, and it still can't be cleared.
This is not an "insanely binary worldview". It is close to the bare minimum for such statements to have any meaning at all. Entertainment is likewise older than writing, and the purported pinnacle of entertainment technology, benefiting from all the advances we've supposedly made in unlocking the secrets of the mind, still produces bombs and stinkers, "martyrs of pies and relics of the bum". Despite the progress of technology, the fundamentals of entertainment, like all other fields of human endeavor, have not perceptibly changed in any way. Art from two thousand years ago is still competitive with art produced yesterday. If Progress worked the way Materialists claim it does, this should not be the case, and yet it is.
I'm pretty sure (specific kinds of) drugs and brain damage can in fact affect my motor control but not my conscious experience, if I'm understanding your use of the terms correctly, and I do not count this as evidence of a soul separate from the body. Why would I? The soul, if it exists, is metaphysical. Why would you expect it to have physical properties and interactions? Likewise, the thesis of God I'm familiar with from Christianity is roughly similar to the Sim programmer in Simulationist theories. There is strong support for reasoning that such a being cannot be investigated the way you investigate gravity or combustion or other properties of the physical universe.
I think that God and the Soul are reasonable hypotheses, given the available evidence. I do not think that either can be proven in any meaningful sense, but then I don't think "proof", in the sense of a deterministic process that forces a mind to draw specific conclusions, exists at all. I think there are good reasons to believe in God and the soul, even from a materialist perspective: adopting such beliefs on an axiomatic basis is clearly quite adaptive for humans, and usually result in good outcomes under a normative value set, while abandoning them has resulted in widespread bad outcomes under that same normative value set. Being possessed of neither a Materialist perspective nor a normative value set, I think they're about the best ideas there are, but different values and different axioms will give different results; we each are free to choose as we will.
Both of the branches you've described seem unfalsifiable, at least under present conditions and perhaps under any conditions at all. Proving determinism means reducing the brain to actual clockwork, directly and arbitrarily manipulable. Materialists claimed that they could figure out how to do this, and in fact have repeatedly claimed that they had figured out how to do this, to the point that they fooled our society at large into believing them and significantly altering society to exploit these purported capabilities. The fact remains that they cannot, and they have made no significant progress toward achieving this capability at all. We are exactly where we've been since at least the invention of writing: individual humans think and choose just as they always have, with chaotic yet weakly predictable consequences resulting.
The first part is a subjective view. I could say that most parents expecting to see all their children to reach adulthood is a meaningful change to the human condition that's less than a century old, or that steroids trade health for fitness in a way the two couldn't be meaningfully opposed in Socrates' time, but we'll likely never agree on what counts as meaningful. I think merely massively improving the human condition counts for a lot. You do also mix this with measurable aspects, as in the linked post, where you are just factually wrong.
I could argue that coveting built most of our modern prosperity and lust is why most of us are even around, by looking at the evolutionary basis for these feelings. That they have negative effects as well doesn't say what the total sign is.
I continue to not care about what outlandish predictions past materialists made which failed to materialize. It is not an ideology that requires unity of thought among its adherents, I can evaluate individual predictions under my own materialist framework. No form of materialism I respect has promised mind control rays. It's still unclear to me what your problem with the quoted original passage is. The importance is obviously subjective, but evolution by natural selection very much explains the cause of human impulses in a way unavailable before.
I agree that framing Bayesian priors in exact percentages is generally disingenuous, but that doesn't make the entire approach so. Enough people I know and respect claiming miracles would make me significantly question my understanding of the world. A non-negligible part of the internet ratsphere turning catholic mildly made me do so, my understanding of internet rationalists a lot more than my understanding of religion though.
I have no idea how decapitation is supposed to show that the brain is the seat of consciousness over the heart, for example. Trepanation being used for mental illnesses is a much better example. But I do think there's a significant difference between using alcohol as a black box and knowing it's one of these https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GABAA_receptor_positive_allosteric_modulator, knowing the chemical actions by which it inhibits neuron activity and knowing that your altered conscious state is caused by inhibited neuron activity. Yes, going from this to explaining how being drunk makes you feel is a very long way, but I think it's a step in the right direction and I still don't care if some people claimed they could make the entire journey in a couple of decades or whatever.
Plenty of people on this board often complain about the deleterious effect of the superstimulus that is modern entertainment, so presumably they would vehemently disagree with your assessment. I think modern disney is mostly a massive tangle of principal-agent problems.
For the soul, I mean a metaphysical answer to the hard problem. I think most religious peoples conception of a soul fits this description. So zero drugs affecting your conscious experience would be evidence for a soul. As is, many drugs do affect it, so it does in fact have physical properties and interactions.
Yes, compatibilism is equally currently unfalsifiable as any test would have to prove one version of free will over the other. I'm just saying it's a perfectly coherent model of why I experience free will, so this experience in no way contradicts materialism.
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