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Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

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Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#311

Post by badinfo »

bsanr2 wrote: post #70
badinfo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself. We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whe…

That doesn't really answer the question, and now I'm invested in the prospect of hearing one, too.

Sorry, I tried.

Hearing one of what?

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#312

Post by badinfo »

Bobylonian wrote: post #146
badinfo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We as a species may lack the mental faculties to truly understand the mechanisms by which life evolved the ability to analyze and reason about its surroundings and itself. We lack the scientific tools to properly differentiate or falsify "consciousness" from any other sufficiently complex phenomenon. We can't tell whether it's an emergent phenomenon arising out of a particular arrangement of energy and matter, or whe…

Why are you concentrating on individual animals, where herd behaviour of them can not be explained by behavior of individual. Same applies to people - there are enough of examples in history of groups of people believing in God and his plan and that belief has led to catastrophic consequences for tribes and even nations... For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet a…

I don't understand what you're trying to point out. That groups of things can have behaviors that lone individuals don't exhibit? Yes, that is true, whether at the atomic level or the cellular level or the family level or the population level or the species level or the ecosystem level... it's very fascinating, to be sure, but in what way does that prove or disprove any sort of god? It's just the same Watchmaker argument, i.e. that complexity requires a maker, which it arguably does not. Complex behaviors, even flock behaviors, can evolve from the sum of its constituent parts. A pinball machine with eight balls in play will react very different from one with a single ball or no balls, but nobody accuses the pinball machine of being sentient (or if they did, I'd really like to play that machine).

> For all I know nothing really matters - Sun can go Nova or Earth can be hit by a small planet and Life on earth can go extinct.

Yes, and? I wouldn't worry about it too much... you'll likely die from something far more banal, like plain old climate-change-driven political instability, North Korea, the next anti-vax movement, etc.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#313

Post by badinfo »

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #71
badinfo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the philosophical difference between your subjective experience of existence and a 90s-style power-on-self-test? "I am on. I can tell that I am on. I dunno what I think once I am off." Same could be said of man, machine, consciousness, whatever. What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around a wet rock, anthro…

Huh? Subjective experience is about whether the machine experiences the power-on-self-test, not about what it emits externally. Animals, machines or even rocks might all be conscious, but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means. >What's incomprehensible is the baseless belief that consciousness is some special state of existence unique to balding, violent apes floating around…

> but we simply don't know because it's impossible to ascertain through external means.

Yeah, exactly. We haven't developed a good enough Turing test -- for machines, people, or gods.

> What a ridiculous strawman.

I don't believe is a strawman as much as you think it is. A lot of arguments for consciousness derive from the desire for humans to be special, which is in turn derived from Abrahamic cosmology that places us directly beneath their God.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#314

Post by glial »

BreakfastB0b wrote: post #269
glial wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. He's reclaiming the term 'god'. Spinoza equated god with being or reality - all off it - not just gaps. He did not believe in a personal or interventionist god. "God, that is, Nature..."

Then why use the word “God” that already comes with so much baggage?

He thinks that our confused conversations about god, free will, freedom, causality, etc mostly stem from poor definitions of these terms. So to have a useful conversation and valid deductions, it's critical to have 'correct' definitions of these terms - including freedom, power, etc. He starts every section of Ethics with a list of definitions. He's not only making metaphysical claims, he's also trying to set humanity up for have better conversations and understandings about god, society, and ethical behavior (hence the title of the book "Ethics").

Here's a good quote, wherein he's criticizing people's conception of God as the 'first cause' -

    "So they will not cease to ask for the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the asylum of ignorance."
The quote makes pretty clear that he is explicitly rejecting the "God of the gaps".

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#315

Post by tootie »

slothtrop wrote: post #304
tootie wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think concepts like Spinoza's or Deism or people who declare themselves "not religious but spiritual" are just having trouble parting with the comfort of religion even though they know there's nothing there.

I don't think I would conflate things like Deism with spiritualism. You can apathetically believe there is a God of sorts and not be in the least spiritual.

I don't mean that they're equivalent, I mean that they're ways to avoid labelling yourself as an atheist when you're irreligious. They're like diet atheism. Something you can say to not feel completely alienated from religious culture.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#316

Post by ASalazarMX »

layer8 wrote: post #275
dsign wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So God is only confusing notation we are better off without.

The tension is that many people are actually better off with a notion of god in their inner life for their psychological wellbeing, but to avoid cognitive dissonance they also want everyone else to subscribe to the same notion, a conflict which makes society/culture worse off. I don’t think this can be fully resolved.

> many people are actually better off with a notion of god in their inner life for their psychological wellbeing

Much in the sense that lonely children are better off with an imaginary friend, but they're expected to outgrow that as they mature and become well adapted to their environment.

Keeping the imaginary friend trades one psychological issue for another.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#317

Post by libertine »

Claude_Shannon wrote: post #301
libertine wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people have is quite naive and distinct to the idea of God in the great Christian thinkers, such those mentioned by the comment. But that would mean people would need to drop their condescending sense of superiority over others... come on, don't take that away from people for in their eyes it's an easy win .

In defence, that is not the idea of God many people would grow up with. I'm a Pole, even during "religion" classes or in church during preparation to baptism, the idea of God they would try to show us WAS the "man in the clouds" one, not philosophical one.

You're baptized while you're a child, and the use of tales and short stories is pretty common for plenty of subjects when ever you want to teach children.

The main idea is to pass down moral values.

I can't speak for others but I find it very hard for people to hold on to the literal content of the bible with today's education. Some might believe in the man in the sky, others might stand by just doing what they think is the right thing to do in the framework that was passed on to them, others turn to it in very difficult times because there's nothing else to hold on to and that gives them hope/peace/comfort.

I say this as someone who had catholic upbringing, took those classes for baptism and first communion. Yet I don't consider myself a catholic, still it was part of the context where I grew up.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#318

Post by slothtrop »

tootie wrote: post #315
slothtrop wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I would conflate things like Deism with spiritualism. You can apathetically believe there is a God of sorts and not be in the least spiritual.

I don't mean that they're equivalent, I mean that they're ways to avoid labelling yourself as an atheist when you're irreligious. They're like diet atheism. Something you can say to not feel completely alienated from religious culture.

I've often said that being "agnostic" isn't a position on whether or not one believes in God. You can be agnostic theist, or agnostic atheist. But I no longer think that's accurate.

One reason people opt for it, which I find understandable, is owing to the popular connotations that atheism carries, not unlike theism. You can avoid having to explain "I'm not saying I know that God doesn't exist". But the qualifier is explicit. One needn't necessarily be certain whether they believe in a God or not and I don't think that's well represented by the term "atheist". By the same token I don't think Deism is anywhere near atheism-lite. It is explicit belief in a God with the caveat that it's irreligious.

I like the term "apatheism" because it also captures the way I feel about the question of whether God exists.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#319

Post by tomrod »

achillesheels wrote: post #299
tomrod wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Close your eyes. Touch the ground. You have now perceived a world independent of light.

Sir, we are experiencing light through our senses when we touch the ground. Are you familiar with how our bodies sample piezoelectrically?

Piezoelectricity is not photons. It may generate photons, but is not created by photons.

Re: Spinoza’s God: Einstein believed in it, but what was it?

#320

Post by mensetmanusman »

anders_p wrote: post #302
bserge wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, now where did this superdimensional plane come from, how was it formed? Or was it always there and always will be? That's what OP was saying I believe.

I have no idea where that substrate, or whatever, came from, or 'who' created it. I wasn't trying to answer that. I'm aware that my comment merely added an additional layer, between us and "the creator"/creation, (however you define that). My point was more, that I don't believe our universe is unique, as in "alone". But rather that it is just one of many. That some "God", or event, didn't create a single universe, p…

I like the thought experiment of exploring the entire universe with advanced space travel and finding no other life (statistically a zero chance if the universe isn’t anthropocentric).

But of course it’s unfortunately impossible to know due to space time limits.

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