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I still love Kierkegaard

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Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#131

Post by cgmg »

visarga wrote: post #97
interfixus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the OP, and you just about summed it up. If I wish to ascertain the current status of the universe and the human ways of interacting with it, then any day, give me physics, math, brainscans, and controlled experimentation rather than longwinded twaddle from some dude believing his random personal ramplings to be somehow normative.

I prefer reinforcement learning to mind-body philosophy. I think RL has more clear and concise concepts that can be tested and has the potential to create intelligence, something philosophy can't do. I replace the word "consciousness" with "agent" and the word "emotion" with "value function", "sensing" with "neural network based representation" then suddenly so many mind-body debates become easier to grasp. "Reasonin…

> Why aren't we p-zombies one might ask? Because we are agents in the world and not being good agents means death, so we have to feel to exist.

> P-zombies don't fear death. Even if one existed, it would not have the drive to protect itself and it would be damaged or destroyed soon enough.

You missed the point, like many others who think they can 'explain away' consciousness in a 4-paragraph post on an internet forum.

What you described is a difference in external behavior (eating, death avoidance, reproduction, etc). That is not what the problem of consciousness is about, and it's a dead giveaway that you don't understand the issue you're pontificating on.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#132

Post by cgmg »

jmcqk6 wrote: post #127
Ascetik wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Traditional Catholic here, former seminarian in a traditional seminary. >How can someone reject Christianity when they haven't done the due diligence of looking at __primary sources__ for the Christian position? Intellectual laziness. They just repeat what they see on reddit or sound-bytes they've heard from others who have no idea what they're talking about. If they want to know what Christianity truly teaches have…

>Intellectual laziness. They just repeat what they see on reddit or sound-bytes they've heard from others who have no idea what they're talking about. Wow that's incredibly judgemental from someone claiming to be a christian. I see you've learned the lessons from those books well and are applying them in your daily life.

Is he wrong?

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#133

Post by visarga »

goatlover wrote: post #120
visarga wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer reinforcement learning to mind-body philosophy. I think RL has more clear and concise concepts that can be tested and has the potential to create intelligence, something philosophy can't do. I replace the word "consciousness" with "agent" and the word "emotion" with "value function", "sensing" with "neural network based representation" then suddenly so many mind-body debates become easier to grasp. "Reasonin…

Replacing terms doesn't make the problem go away, nor does providing a possible evolutionary reason. You're advocating a behaviorist approach, which Chalmers and everyone else has been aware of for half a century or more. And you misunderstand the p-zombie argument. It's functionally and behaviorally equivalent, because it's physically identical. Of course it would seek to avoid death as all life forms do.

The behaviorist approach is good enough to beat us at Go today. I'd say it's not the same as what philosophers rejected 50 years ago. On the other hand, the "hard problem" is just dualism in disguise. It's declaring something "hard", thus "special" and apart from the physical world that can be studied and understood.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#134

Post by visarga »

cgmg wrote: post #131
visarga wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer reinforcement learning to mind-body philosophy. I think RL has more clear and concise concepts that can be tested and has the potential to create intelligence, something philosophy can't do. I replace the word "consciousness" with "agent" and the word "emotion" with "value function", "sensing" with "neural network based representation" then suddenly so many mind-body debates become easier to grasp. "Reasonin…

> Why aren't we p-zombies one might ask? Because we are agents in the world and not being good agents means death, so we have to feel to exist. > P-zombies don't fear death. Even if one existed, it would not have the drive to protect itself and it would be damaged or destroyed soon enough. You missed the point, like many others who think they can 'explain away' consciousness in a 4-paragraph post on an internet forum…

External and internal are united - if you fail externally, you're dead 'internally' too. You try to separate consciousness from the external world and study it under a microscope (metaphorically), and that's wrong. The agent is part of the world, it can never be anything outside, it can never be understood on its own. By labeling my argument as "behaviorism" and rejecting it because of it's "external" argument, then you ignore the very source of experiences that create consciousness. Then we hear people searching for the "neural correlates of consciousness" like it's a kind of brain secretion that just needs to be found - it's the external world that correlates with consciousness, when you're an AI agent or a brain. Every sensation, every reward and the body itself come from the world, the structure of experiences encountered in the external world creates the contents of consciousness, and yet we search for its explanation just in our brains.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#135

Post by coldtea »

basedfahayek wrote: post #106
jmcqk6 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was raised in one of those places where Old Testament beliefs are still championed and they believe in a literal bible. They absolutely believe as I described it, though they would not connect those beliefs together like I did. There are millions of Christians like this in the US alone, let alone the rest of the world. I'm not sure what you're trying to push with your interpretation of christianity, but it's certai…

You are correct. This notion that Christians don’t “really” believe in God is the latest marketing gimmick of a desperate Church. It’s sad, really. All four of my grandparents would be deeply upset by it. It’s hard to imagine who Augustine wrote his Confessions to or on whose behalf Galileo was killed, if all these people were just talking about metaphors.

Historically, people have been killed for way less than metaphors.

If you built a power structure on top of a religion, or if you think that preserving respect to certain ideas leads to a more harmonious society in general, you can very easily prosecute people that undermine them, whether you believe them as real or not.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#136

Post by coldtea »

basedfahayek wrote: post #105
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "more complex". That's the high school kind of "religion is absurd" reaction, and is a naive literal reading that even the people of the bible era were above. The key is that there are no "rules that he himself also put in place" etc. (as he doesn't exist and even if he did it wouldn't matter). The rules were formed by people (obviously) and codify societal practices and philosophies towards morality and r…

No, this isn’t a Jordan Peterson video. Christians really believe that there really is a God.

No, this isn't some provincial US fundamentalist town.

Christian refers to billions of people through 2 millennia, and their approach to religion and belief is far more nuanced than what stupid fundamentalists (which is a newish invention) have.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#137

Post by charcoal23 »

mmyyyy wrote: post #128
charcoal23 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the view of the atonement as presented in fundamentalist / evangelical circles. Reduced to snarky absurdity, but the theology is itself absurd. Perhaps this is different than your own experience or reading, but it doesn't make this experience less valid. Considering this is the dominant form of Christianity in the US, I think it's safe to say the snarky statement above accurately describes Christianity as how…

Indeed as I said earlier part of the problem is the kind of theology that is taught especially in the US. I never said it was an invalid experience but only said that it cannot be a representation of Christianity - for one to get that they would need to look into works by Christian authors throughout the years. I'm sorry to hear you were personally negatively affected by the Church. Btw Orthodox is a big umbrella, I'…

I would strongly disagree with you. Christianity can and should be measured by the behavior of its believers. The behavior is the one and only metric we have regarding the efficacy of the faith, since the supernatural claims are something we can neither prove nor disprove.

Christianity is supposed to remake people into something better. Paul had a concept of the "new man" in Christ. If Christians are no better than the secular population, and if the Christian leadership are just as prone (if not more so) to being corrupted by power and money as secular leadership, then it becomes obvious Christianity does not work. Or at least, does not work for the majority of its adherents. There are truly holy women and men out there, but, it's quite clear these are outliers and not representative.

In my personal experience, and in looking at history, it's quite clear Christians are the same, or worse, in most observable behavior as their secular counterparts. Though I'm shouldn't single out Christians. Any faith, which aspires to personal transformation, falls short. I was briefly involved in the American Zen Buddhist community, and then I discovered the faults and greed of the so-called zen masters. If "enlightenment" doesn't free someone from the desire for money, for temporal power, for sexually abusing members, then what good is it? Islam also falls short in many, many ways.

You can certainly believe in whatever you want. I'm sorry you feel harassed about it. But religion is as much a lived experience as it is a product of philosophers and theologians. For many of us, it was an unpleasant experience which no theologian can redeem. And for many others, they see religion used as a lever for power and an excuse for cruelty. When you feel criticized, keep those things in mind. The criticism is not directed at you personally, but is rather a reflection of the person, and their own experiences, making the criticisms.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#138

Post by theoh »

mirimir wrote: post #123
theoh wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, religion is, at least, a form of seeing meaning in things, which is the same category of activity as magical thinking.

It's seeing agency in things, and reality overall, I think.

You mean this idea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection

There's another aspect to proto-religion which has to do with power rather than agency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana#Pre-animism

All this is speculative, AFAIK.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#139

Post by basedfahayek »

coldtea wrote: post #136
basedfahayek wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this isn’t a Jordan Peterson video. Christians really believe that there really is a God.

No, this isn't some provincial US fundamentalist town. Christian refers to billions of people through 2 millennia, and their approach to religion and belief is far more nuanced than what stupid fundamentalists (which is a newish invention) have.

When was the last time you went to church?

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#140

Post by lurcio »

bambax wrote: post #4

> Kierkegaard’s greatest illustration of this is his retelling of the story of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling (1843). Abraham is often held up as a paradigm of faith because he trusted God so much he was prepared to sacrifice his only son on his command. Kierkegaard makes us realize that Abraham acted on faith not because he obeyed a difficult order but because lifting the knife over his son defied all moral…

Abrams experience foreshadowed Christ he continued to be led by God, even to the offering of his only (God given) son, still faithful to Gods promise to him.

The 'twist' is that to establish the new covenant, God provided the sacrifice and that Christ wasn't a victim, but had the power -> No man takes my life, but I lay it down...etc etc

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