Why Did You Choose Atheism?

Religion and Secularism
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I like the idea of Jesus being the embodiment of our human condition.
Struggles between our Flesh and our Spirit.
Mistakes and Sins and Failure and so on.

The stations of the cross and Jesus’s Passion represent a metaphorical guide outlining the various psychological stages we ourselves need to process through, in order to redeem ourselves from our worst crises.

The facing up to our failures, accepting responsibility, burning on the cross of our own making, letting that part of you die. Be true, take it like a human and reawaken into a new day with new insights and commitments, living with a dignity and awareness you didn’t know before. The hurts and scares don’t go away, but they turn into talismans of sorts.

With a slight twist Jesus’ story serves the same function for people who are suddenly faced with unspeakable loss, not of their own making.

That to me is what Jesus is all about and why he’s had such a lasting hold on us - he represents the good side of us. I can see why many can’t live without Jesus in their lives, but I wish they could understand why and how many others such as myself can live with Jesus simply as soul-brother, a historical composite of the quiet wise gentle generous healers who have existed throughout our human history.

1 Like
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You do realize that those articles were written by non-Christians who are understandably biased? Give me an article by a honest skeptic who is open hearted and presents the truth with no biases behind them and I’ll take you seriously.

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[quote=“lightking01, post:62, topic:8245, full:true”]

You do realize that those articles were written by non-Christians who are understandably biased? Give me an article by a honest skeptic who is open hearted and presents the truth with no biases behind them and I’ll take you seriously.

No, you won’t. If anyone says something you do not agree with, you will see it as biased, regardless if it is founded on an unbiased viewpoint

The problem is that you begin by assuming a God exists and that it is up to Atheists to prove God doesn’t exist, which they do not need to do at all.

Atheists don’t choose to become Atheist. They just believe that in the absence of any proof, there is no reason to choose to be Theist.

But make no mistake about it, Atheists don’t need a God to be in awe of the majesty of the universe. I just don’t think all this needs a motivated Agency. Evolution has proven to apply to everything, not just to living things but to all natural self-organizing patterns.

Wanna see self-organizing patterns? The mathematical geometry of nature?

Mathematics is not the language of Humans. It is the language of Logic, an abstract guiding equation that can be described and organized via symbolic mathematics such as human maths.

The manifestation of potential Higgs bosons was only mathematically predicted. There existed no record of ever having observed a Higgs boson.

In Cern it was the “applied mathematics” of controlling certain natural forces to spontaneously create the form of a Higgs boson pattern at very small scales.

It took the Collider, but by setting all the controls in a certain mathematical pattern, the Higgs boson, would appear and show us it’s naturally self-forming pattern for just an instant.

When we speak of “cell-memory”. is this the ability of cells to produce extremely small patterns , which may occasionally happen or at every instant in time, if we look deep enough.

Existence is a pattern, a chronology of patterns, from the extremely subtle abstract Implicated form, to gross expression in Explicated form as Reality (David Bohm).

Reality consists of sets of patterns with various densities, starting with fractals and showing up in all naturally self-forming universal geometries such as atoms and spiral galaxies. Even subatomic particles are patterns arranged in a specific size and density.

Wave functions shape the geometric arrangement and expressed (observable form) of complex patterns of size and density.and densities.

Watch:

It’s interesting why you as theist are so materialistic.

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You continue to use words that you don’t understand. If I’m wrong, you should be able to explain what you mean by this.

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You want articles that support what you believe and only what you believe, written by apologists. Those are the most bias people on the planet.

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How does a living human achieve a state of “no biases” - How about starting with recognizing one’s own biases.

Would you claim that you yourself are free of bias?

I like to consider myself an honest 360° skeptic, with the scars to prove it. I have open heartedly searched out the truth to the best of my ability no matter where it takes me. Fortunately, I’ve found a wonderful consistency and I’ve also found comfort in the realities of Earth’s evolution and her living biosphere and what that has taught me about our own selves.

Have at it:

Earth Centrist. Why it matters to me.

Missing Key to Stephen Gould’s “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”

Who Says Understanding Earth’s Evolution is Irrelevant?

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[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:48, topic:8245”]

I don’t see how referring to that dynamic as a hallucination helps us along - and I believe that’s the problem with Seth being too lazy to find and coin an altogether different and more appropriate word for his story telling.

I think you are missing that Seth is not talking about what’s out there, but what is inside your skull, a 3 lb blob of fatty tissue connected by neurons to sensors that are the actual observers and that blob is constantly guessing as to what the incoming data represents of the outside reality.

Your brain has no direct access to the exterior reality, except via you sensory organs.
For your brain there is no reality other than a compound set of memories. It literally has to hallucinate and create an internal image of what the incoming data represents.
Your brain can only make a best guess of what the senses are transmitting. **
** Your brain initially is creating an expectation of what the senses are observing.

This is why Seth posits that YOU (your brain) creates your reality from the inside out, and is the reason why everyone has their own unique experience of what they are watching, or hearing, or tasting.

Consider the camera you have that recorded the scene correctly, whereas your brain selected to see only that was associated with your aesthetical memories.

Your brain was engaged in a controlled hallucination of just the beauty of the scene, whereas the camera recorded the sober reality, which actually reigned in your hallucination as to the actual reality of the scene.

Don’t think of the term “controlled hallucination” as a clinical condition.
An “uncontrolled hallucination” is the clinical condition that requires intervention.

Directly quoted from Seth.;

" In the story I’m going to tell you, our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, are kinds of controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies."

RAZ: I love this idea of a controlled hallucination. Is that what we experience? Is that how we experience the world - that it’s a controlled hallucination? We’re just, essentially, hallucinating all the time?

SETH: I love this phrase. I wish I could take credit for it, but I can’t. But I love the phrase because it points out that everything that we perceive - consciously or unconsciously, but let’s talk about consciousness for now - is a construction of the brain. I mean, it’s easy to think that we open our eyes and objective reality is revealed to us through the windows of our eyes.

RAZ: Yeah.

SETH: And what conscious perception is is basically just somebody sitting inside our skull, looking out there, and they see a red table, or they see a person, or they see a tree, or…

…more…

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What makes you think the definition has anything to do with a “who”? Or even a “thing”? You/we think in those terms because we’re “who’s” and “things” but that shouldn’t constrain the definition. Sort of like if you ask a dolphin to define god it’s say, well it’s this fish with really amazing flippers. And then let’s say okay we agree it’s your great thingy. So what - that has nothing to do with any religion.

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I agree, cuthbertj. If Jesus actually lived, he wasn’t white (I’m caucasian, but I’m going by location, so I sort of contradicting what you’re saying, but I do agree with you). He was dark complected with brown eyes and dark curly hair, given where he lived. Most Xians portray him as white with blue eyes and straight light brown hair. If he actually lived, he was not white, given the location the story takes place. The thing is, most of the story is astrotheology though.

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BINGO, thanks for reminding of why I don’t trust Seth and why I have a tough time with his framing of the situation.

When it comes to dealing with our physical world, our minds doesn’t create our reality! We “register” the reality as best we can. Consider neuroscience, it shows us that our senses and neurons and brains are all about mapping accurate reflections of the various sensory inputs, then condensing all that information into a awareness. Calling that process a hallucination is a travesty, because it automatically calls into question the reality of the thing being observed.

Once we get into mind of mind thinking, human social thinking, then the hallucination metaphor might be valid, but that’s not the part I’m concerned with.

I think the brain isn’t given near enough credit. Hundreds of millions of years in the making, it’s about transmitting information and weaving together conclusions, based on the sensory information received along with our background knowledge. That should be understood and not mystified.

Instead we have tons of lazy thinkers, believing we can pretend reality isn’t really what it is. Hoffman and so forth. Which again brings me to the bottom line need for more clarity, we need a better explicit appreciation for the Human Mindscape ~ Physical Reality divide.

Seth is an excellent example of how great minds are still constrained by our fundamental Christian self obsessing origins. " Seth posits that YOU (your mind) creates your reality from the inside out" I mean from my side of the fence that seems like the height of oblivious arrogance. Creates? Indeed.

I like to think this also brings us back around to that biological truism that, we can’t understand an organism without understanding its environment, exactly because creatures are inextricably connected to the physical reality we find ourselves within. No matter how we happen to be perceiving it.

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[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:70, topic:8245”]

Calling that process a hallucination is a travesty, because it automatically calls into question the reality of the thing being observed.

And how do you know that what you see is real. it is real for you, but is it real for everyone else?

What you experience may not exist. Inside the strange truth of reality

Some researchers even contend that the live-stream movie in my head bears no resemblance whatsoever to reality.

In some senses, it is obvious that subjective experience isn’t the whole story. Humans, unlike bees, don’t normally see ultraviolet light; we can’t sense Earth’s magnetic field, unlike turtles, worms and wolves; are deaf to high and low pitch noises that other animals can hear; and have a relatively weak sense of smell.

In fact, most of what you “see” is an illusion. Our eyes aren’t all-seeing, but capture fleeting glimpses of the outside world between rapid movements called saccades. During these, we are effectively blind because the brain doesn’t process the information that comes in when they happen.

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Did we evolve to see reality as it exists? No, says cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman.

Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman hypothesizes we evolved to experience a collective delusion — not objective reality.

  • Donald Hoffman theorizes experiencing reality is disadvantageous to evolutionary fitness.

Remember he chess board illusion?. That is a perfect example of the brain not able to see reality, for a good reason.

  • His hypothesis calls for ditching the objectivity of matter and space-time and replacing them with a mathematical theory of consciousness.

Max Tegmark is not alone in his proposition that the universe and everything in it are mathematical patterns of varying densities.

  • If correct, it could help us progress such intractable questions as the mind-body problem and the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Did we evolve to see reality as it exists? No, says cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman. - Big Think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYp5XuGYqqY

Not everything is what it seems. We all may see some very fundamental shapes and patterns, but every animal sees the world just a little differently. No brain is exactly alike and renders its own interpretation of reality.

That’s why Seth: “when we agree on our controlled hallucination, we call that reality”.

Something just came to mind. When we look at at airplane propellers. sometimes it seems that they are turning backward, slowly. The wagon-wheel effect.

The eye sees everything, but the brain is unable to process information that fast and has to skip .

While these aberrations may seem trivial, they really are not. It demonstrates how the brain tries to make a best guess of the incoming data. Sometimes it just cannot keep up and reality becomes distorted.

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Just listen to those words and what they conjure in the imagination. Then that dangling open ending, hey boys and girls what you experience may not be there. Ain’t we having fun now, our religion were right, we get to make it up, what ever we want, and it’s all good daddio.

It’s more like crazy making. dressed up as profundity, all the while ignoring the physical reality that brought about this human body and mind.

Why isn’t the constancy of physical reality ever brought up in these talks - or please share someone that does discuss the conundrum between us living within a rigid physically reality and our minds having to process incoming input to hopefully, as accurately as possible, represent that reality to our mind.

The analogy flashing in my mind right now is listening to all those folks who go on and on about colonizing Mars, all the while ignoring the developing situation here on Earth and how that’s going to impact our grand projects. As though the two have nothing to do with each other.

Evolution building creatures based on how well they survived, which in large part had/has to do with how well they can assess their physical situation, protect themselves from dangers then to find and take advantage of benefits. These creatures were embedded in real world situations to navigate. (To embed the concept of “hallucinating our sense of reality” is a travesty that has led to all sorts of delusional thinking, as reviews of comments below Hoffman’s flood of talks and videos attest to.)

Creature senses have been evolved to, as accurately as possible, represent the real world, so that our actions benefit our survival. Human aren’t God’s special creatures, we are amazing wonders, but we are still just flesh and bone and the product of the same evolutionary process, not of wishful thinking.

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Baloney says serious consideration of the issue:

Index

Cc’s Students’ Study Guide for The Case Against Reality .

(a non-scholar’s “scholarly” effort)

I intend to be a witness for a fact based Deep Time,

Evolutionary perspective on our Human Mind ~ Physical Reality interface.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Donald Hoffman Playing Basketball in Zero-Gravity ,

a critical review of, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid The Truth From Our Eyes, by Donald Hoffman, ©2019, W.W.Norton Company

(Titles are linked)

(1.01) The Prelude, Prof Donald Hoffman Playing Basketball In Zero-Gravity

(1.02) Chapter 10a, Community: Network of Conscious Agents (1/3)

(1.03) Chapter 10b, Community: Network of Conscious Agents (2/3)

(1.04) Chapter 10c, Community: Network of Hoffmanian Conscious Agents (3/3)

(1.05) Chapter 1, Mystery: The Scalpel That Split Consciousness

(1.06) Chapter 2, Beauty: Siren of the Gene

(1.07) Chapter 3, Reality: Capers of the Unseen Sun

(1.08) Chapter 4, Sensory: Fitness beats Truth

(1.09) Chapter 5, Illusory: The Bluff of the Desktop

(1.10) Chapter 6, Gravity: Spacetime is Doomed

(1.11) Chapter 7, Virtuality: Inflating a Holoworld

(1.12) Chapter 8, Polychromy: Mutations of an Interface

(1.13) Chapter 9, Scrutiny: You Get What You Need, in Both Life and Business

(1.14) Appendix, Precisely: The Right to Be (Foolish)

Hoffman/Prakash’s Objects of Consciousness , Objections and Replies

Frontiers in Psychology - June 17, 2014

(2.01) 4/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, (conclusion)

(2.02) 1/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, questions + replies (1-12)

(2.03) 2/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, questions + replies (13-17)

(2.04) 3/4_Hoffman, Objects of Consciousness, questions + replies (18-21)

(3.01) Diary - But, wait! There’s more. Ten Learned Responses :

“ Probing the interface theory of perception: Reply to commentaries , by Donald D. Hoffman, Manish Singh & Chetan Prakash"

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review . volume 22, pages1551–1576(2015)

Abstract

We propose that selection favors nonveridical perceptions that are tuned to fitness. Current textbooks assert, to the contrary, that perception is useful because, in the normal case, it is veridical. Intuition, both lay and expert, clearly sides with the textbooks. We thus expected that some commentators would reject our proposal and provide counterarguments that could stimulate a productive debate. … (HSP)

(3.02) Barton Anderson - Where does fitness fit in theories of perception?

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0748-5

(3.03) Jonathan Cohen - Perceptual representation, veridicality, and the interface theory of perception.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0782-3

(3.04) Shimon Edelman - Varieties of perceptual truth and their possible evolutionary roots.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0741-z

(3.05) Jacob Feldman - Bayesian inference and “truth”: a comment on Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0795-y

(3.06) Chris Fields - Reverse engineering the world: a commentary on Hoffman, Singh, and Prakash, “The interface theory of perception”.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0742-y

(3.07) Jan Koenderink - Esse est Percipi & Verum est Factum.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0754-7

(3.08) Rainer Mausfeld - Notions such as “truth” or “correspondence to the objective world” play no role in explanatory accounts of perception.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0763-6

(3.09) Brian P. McLaughlin and E. J. Green - Are icons sense data ?

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0780-5

(3.10) Zygmunt Pizlo - Philosophizing cannot substitute for experimentation: comment on Hoffman, Singh & Prakash.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0760-9

(3.11) Matthew Schlesinger - Interface theory of perception leaves me hungry for more.

doi:10.3758/s13423-014-0776-

Student Resources - Background info:

(4.01) Rainer Mausfeld : ‘Truth’ has no role in explanatory accounts of perception.

(4.02) Paul Mealing : considers Hoffman’s "Objects of Consciousness.”

(4.03) The Case For Reality : Because Apparently Someone Needs to Make One

(4.04) Sabine Hossenfelder : in Defense of Scientific Realism and Physical Reality

(4.05) “Emergence” - A Handy Summary and Resources

(4.06) Physical Origins of Mind: Dr. Siegel , Allen Institute Brain Science, Tononi, Koch .

(4.07) Can you trust Frontiers in Psychology research papers ? Student Resource

(4.08) Critical Thinking Skills - In Defense of Reality - A Student Resource

(4.09) Philo+Sophia - Love of Wisdom - A Student Resource

(5.01) Summary,

explaining why I’ve pursued this project.

Dr. Mark Solms deftly demystifies Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of Consciousness, while incidentally highlighting why Hoffman’s “Conscious Agents” are luftgeschäft.

(6.01) Dr. Mark Solms demystifies Chalmers’ “Hard Problem” of Consciousness.

(6.02) The Other Side of Mark Solms PhD, farmer, vintner, humanitarian.

(6.03) Students’ Resource: A representative cross-section of Dr. Mark Solms’ scientific publications.

(reprinted with the express permission of the author. :wink: .)

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I don’t have time to review videos, or CC’s long list of links right now, but generally, here’s my take

Philosophically, any surviving living creature needs to match its senses to some degree to whatever it is surviving in, otherwise, we would need to redefine what survival means. At some degree of matching, if we fall below some threshold, it starts to become a “brain in a vat” argument. I don’t think there is enough evidence for that.

What Write4U is bringing in, through his sources, is that there are sounds, colors, waves, and forces that we now (through evidence) know to exist. We don’t sense these directly, but with fairly simple instruments, we can navigate them, detect them, even react to them. We evolved for millions of years without knowing any of this. More complex instruments are detecting time bending and long-term effects on our mental and physical health.

So, you’re both right

1 Like
76

No doubt.

Only real difference is that one originates from a very egocentric, ego-shackled Abrahamic outlook on the creation around it.
Mine, comes from an Earth Centrist, evolutionary, materialist perspective.

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Don’t expect you to.

Simply pointing out that when I disparage the profiteer and intellectual fraudster Donald Hoffman, I’ve got my reasons and I can explain them in detail and defend them to anyone willing to challenge my assessment.

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Reality discussion moved to “Mind the Mind” in Philosophy.

See you there… :sunglasses:

1 Like
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[quote=“citizenschallengev4, post:77, topic:8245”]

Don’t expect you to.

Simply pointing out that when I disparage the profiteer and intellectual fraudster Donald Hoffman, I’ve got my reasons and I can explain them in detail and defend them to anyone willing to challenge my assessment.

The panel consisted of 5 people , pretty much in agreement. Are you proposing all these scientists are frauds?

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Moved to Mind the Mind