Asian parents love to compare the heights of kids and adults alike by laying their hands flat across the tops of their heads. I am Asian, and want to be a parent. (My wife and I are trying.) Read this as a wish fulfillment story; or as a roundabout description...
Or, to say less with more: The belief in the personhood of an entity, human or otherwise, is analogous to the “religious” belief of non-human minds beyond or encompassing our own. All sections below, disjointed and scattered as they are, try to show what I mean. I have a relationship...
“Do you love the sunrise?” Beautiful stories. Perfect lies. Goal: a new esthetic for words. I write, play piano, and make low-spec indie games. Having lurked rationalist spaces for many years and promoted its values to friends, I now wish to speak directly with rationalists about the many questions on...
Asian parents love to compare the heights of kids and adults alike by laying their hands flat across the tops of their heads. I am Asian, and want to be a parent. (My wife and I are trying.)
Read this as a wish fulfillment story; or as a roundabout description of the emergence of truth and lies from abstraction, fiction becoming fact, epistemology and ontology lying to you or others; or as a religious proof text of the futility of human knowledge.
In most cases, two objects cannot be "literally" the same length if we look to the smallest measurable units of the current age. What is the likelihood that if we zoom in... (read 968 more words →)
Nature and the laws of physics generate my world, roughly by affecting things that affect my neurochemistry.
And God is all the affecters outside of my comprehension.
I suppose there are a variety of words I could use, but in practice they would be synonyms for God. Because what I am talking about, and who I have a relationship with, is the processes that created the world I know. It might be that “The Laws of Physics” is a perfectly good way to refer to the being with whom I have a relationship, but how about I just call him “God”? One syllable, and what a wonderful syllable it is!
But also, Nature and the Laws of Physics are not good descriptions by what I mean by God. These things are still within my comprehension, and my world. When I talk about God, I am only talking about what which shall always be outside my world. You can call this God in the gaps, except the gaps are the infinite expanse of unknowables outside my tiny, finite knowledge.
I think it is pretty much the latter. Just as I identify with thinking you are a person, I identify with thinking that the processes that resulted in the world I shall ever know are God.
You added more meaning by interpretation. All the power to you. But it is your power, not mine. I wrote according to my intentions, and you may interpret according to yours, or you may try reading with a critical lens that looks at what I mean.
Point to where in the post where I suggest one should believe in all unverifiable things. Rather, the post notes that one can. Personhood is one of those unverifiable things that are fairly free to believe in, even though one could adopt a mechanical materialist description of humans instead.
I agree that people have different ontological warrants for believing different things. For me, believing in God is similar... (read more)
Using a frame needs no faith. I can think fluently with a Marxist, feminist, fascist, libertarian, materialist, dualist, or environmental lens if I wanted to. The faith is in seeing the ontological justification for something, and believing it. (I adopt the Marxist lens a surprising amount of the time; I find its usefulness increases the more generalized its analysis is.)
“Everything is connected” is useful in the exact same sense that “This braindead human is a person” is useful. Besides the fact that it facilitates a relationship, an emotional experience beyond satisfying material utility, it explains a primal feeling deep in my gut, and corresponds with one of the most profound experiences in... (read more)
I am not arguing for any specific version. In fact, I know multiple gods. I have prayed to Athena, and had a close relationship with her. I do not consider her a theistic creator God though. More like what Christians call an angel.
There is no burden of proof because I am not trying to propose an argument. I am discussing the ontological warrants surrounding believing in personhood, which is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable thing. The only real standard for believing in personhood is “seeing” it in someone, the same way I now “see” God. You have no need to believe in a god or in angels and demons. You seem to have... (read more)
You are interpreting “God exists” as a material claim, when I am claiming that there is a person, a mind. These are unfalsifiable and unverifiable. Parse “God exists” the way you would parse “humans are people”.
If you insisted on not recognizing the personhood of the processes that caused your knowable world, you could always have a reason to leave them unpersoned. (We can already see this with the moving goal posts for AI.) I am sure something could happen that would make you convinced those processes are sentient, but even then you are not forced to believe in personhood, ever. Human slaves begged for their lives and argued for their personhood, and... (read more)
"Ghosts are real" is literally true. She is literally experiencing post-bereavement hallucinations as a meaning part of her mind’s limited subjective experience.
If by "famously difficult" you mean "literally impossible", then I agree with this comment.
I admit there is provocation in my use of "religious belief". This is on purpose.
I think a lot of rationalists dismiss the role that faith plays in every single worldview, and wrongly consider themselves to have an “objective view” of the world. If you rely on your five senses, have a human brain, prefer pleasure over pain, and do not speak every possible language extant or extinct or hypothetical, you are biased and have a limited subjective impression of the world.
Or, to say less with more: The belief in the personhood of an entity, human or otherwise, is analogous to the “religious” belief of non-human minds beyond or encompassing our own.
All sections below, disjointed and scattered as they are, try to show what I mean.
I have a relationship with God, the creator of the world.
After thirteen years of agnostic atheism, I now best describe my position as gnostic theism. The big idea that changed my mind is that my belief in personhood comes from faith alone. It is an unfalsifiable and unverifiable belief, by my epistemic standards.
Exploring my own mind through psychedelics and religious studies makes it obvious to me now that... (read 1575 more words →)
Technology and charity help alleviate pain, which redirects suffering. The ultimate goal is that one can be in pain and not suffer.
As the adage goes, pain is inevitable but suffering is a choice. The choices we make are determined by our programming and training as machines, so this is impugns not those who suffer.
Most worldviews thrive off the suffering interpretation. You see it everywhere when this pattern is pointed out. Some people suffer from envy, others from disgust. Yet one can feel envy and disgust without suffering. The transparency of "I have these negative emotions, therefore I am suffering" is... (read 532 more words →)
Goal: a new esthetic for words.
I write, play piano, and make low-spec indie games.
Having lurked rationalist spaces for many years and promoted its values to friends, I now wish to speak directly with rationalists about the many questions on my mind.
