Gah. I agree with the assertion that qualia and personhood is not provable, and yet disagree to the point of ridicule the conclusion there is a Creator. Your priors are your own, and your weighting of inconclusive evidence and observations-consistent-with-multiple-hypotheses is up to you, so I don’t actually begrudge you your beliefs.
But I’ll quote Asimov at you:
when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Now, if you’d remained agnostic on things you can’t prove (or even define well enough to make them falsifiable), I’d be fully with you. But choosing the gnostic stance on one topic cannot give reason to choose that for another. Especially when there are so many conflicting forms of that belief to choose from.
Likewise, if you’d taken the extra-agnostic position that “if there are no tests nor impacts on future experiences, it’s not a real question” on either of these topics, I’d absolutely support you. The response to both is Mu. It’s an incoherent question, not an unknown answer.
The other approach that can shed light on the gnostic forms of these answers (whether yes or no) is “so what”? There is a chain of reasoning through empathy that does imply different actions and self-evaluations of moral behavior if one believes other humans are similar to oneself. There may be no truth to it, but there is consequence, and there may be multiple paths to this consequence to make it preferred, leading (improperly, but conveniently) to accepting the proposition. I like to be nice to people, and it is easier to explain and maintain my self-image if I assume they have feelings. It’s much less clear what changes about your justification for actions and your self-perception if you believe in a generic God/Creator, but don’t ALSO believe in a specific God’s-eye preference system.
TL;DR: It is not my post’s “conclusion” that there is a creator, any more than it is that there is human personhood. It is just what I believe. I think those who believe in personhood of humans but not personhood of abstract processes are justified in doing so based on their systems of meaning.
What happened was I tried to personify the unknown processes of my world, and instantly I developed a strong relationship. You could say it is one-sided, but I would say it is no more one sided than our conversation right now. I choose to interpret what I guess to be a primate elsewhere hitting keys on a keyboard then clicking “Send” as them interacting with me.
Similarly, if I model my social and material conditions (this is actually a fairly convincing definition of “God” for me, though I go even further with this!) as having a relationship with me, I find it much more meaningful to engage in self-referential thinking and achieve desirable thought patterns. Questions I constantly ask myself are, “If God is testing me right now, what would the test be and would I pass?” and “If my whole life is predestined, in what way would I expect to act in this situation were I not aware of this predestiny?”
Maybe I am one of those people who benefit a lot from overthinking.
———
I agree with you that there is no creator, by your definition of “creator”. But I contend that if you can believe this post had an author (a mind behind it), you can also believe that a more complex result has a mind behind it.
I am not here to spread theism. I am here to get across exactly the “motte” you are singling out, for its own sake. The experience of me being a theist is here because of how personally meaningful it is.
The Asimov quote presumes that ontology must be about material, which is exactly the bias I want to make more clear. The world is flat in some context, it is spherical in some context, it is elliptical in some context. The choice of context is subjective. There is an “objective answer” to this relative to the most valued systems of physics, but that is the extent of objectivity.
What I want to point out in this post and all my replies is how much we presume our own values, to the point that they are invisible. Really, I think you are a person because my values demand it of me. Once I interpreted cosmic process as a person, I could never unsee it. I anticipate this is how abolitionists felt the first time they considered a “savage non-person human” a person for the first time.
Also, to be clear, when I say “gnostic” I really mean “I know as best as I can”. Really, if we use YOUR definitions, I would probably say that you should best think of this post as saying I am agnostic about everything. I want to really hammer in that I am coming at this from the angle of subjective idealism.
I’m not sure you are engaging with my charge of false equivalence. The fact that I cannot (and don’t try to) prove that you exist as an independent thinking/feeling thing, but many people do believe that and I don’t publicly disagree very often is NOT the same weight or reasoning as the fact that I cannot (and don’t try to) prove that the universe had a conscious/planning Creator, but many people do believe that and I DO sometimes publicly disagree.
Neither one gives any hints as to the other. Both are pretty common, both are unjustified, but one has consequences I like (increase in empathy and caring behavior), the other has either NO consequences (aka “who cares about that asshole?”), or consequences I dislike (violent enforcement of beliefs justified by a “higher power” that that jerks seem to have special access to).
I think I’m bowing out now. Feel free to respond, clarify, and rebut—I’ll gladly read and try to learn, but I don’t intend to respond further.
I am not using one to hint at the other. I believe this mischaracterizes my post. If there is one word to describe my goal, it would be empathy. If I am allowed to use a term, theory of mind.
What I am doing is saying, the ontological warrant for believing in personhood is much closer to the ontological warrant for believing in God than you might think. Someone who wants to believe in a specific organized religion’s God is going to need a lot more warrants, but it seems that the biggest hurdle in believing in a theistic religion is in fact the theism part.
I am not trying to convert anyone (in fact I think “conversion” is impossible by reason and is in fact mostly just changing someone’s semantics). I am trying to detail a topic that I have thought a lot about, which is how allowing myself to treat more non-humans as persons was only an extension of my existing faith in personhood.
Regarding consequences, I consider that a separate issue from reality and truth. All consequences mean to me is how urgent a question is, not how good an answer is. I hold all sorts of beliefs, some more convenient or useful than others, but they do come from the deepest fiber of my being.
What I want you to consider, if you seek to understand, is this thought experiment:
Imagine if every time someone used the word “ghost” they were talking exactly about post-bereavement hallucinations. She says “Ghosts are real”, and upon examination this means exactly “Post-bereavement hallucinations are a meaningful part of my mind’s limited subjective experience”, whether or not she would agree with you if you put it in those exact terms. Is her statement “Ghosts are real” true or false? I would say it is obviously true. If you say it is false, it is because you insist on interpreting her statement in a naive literalist way relative to your own definitions of her words, instead of using an empathetic critical lens to figure out what she means.
This is exactly the sense I mean when I say “People are real” and “God is real”. These statements are among the most true beliefs to me, which is why I call my belief in God gnostic theist.
(The famous Sam Harris / Jordan Peterson “debate” has Sam criticizing Jordan’s views using this exact example, but I think he missed the point by assuming that people’s words mean what he thinks they mean.)
By your definition I suppose I am not gnostic theist and am in fact agnostic theist, but then we could just say I am agnostic about everything. But the key thing I want to communicate is that there is knowledge in my worldview, and by knowledge I mean a deep experience of truth. You can call it something else, but I call it knowledge.
______
I am glad for your replies so far. Best wishes to you, stranger.
Information about my faith, if you are curious:
I happen to consider myself a follower of the Way of Jesus, roughly a Calvinist trinitarian who is much less into Paul than most American Christians. Some people, atheist and Christian, disagree with the label “Christian” as applied to me. Others strongly agree with it, and would rather I use that instead of my more vague self-identification.
There is a lot of diversity of thought in what it actually “means” that the Christ rose on the third day. For me, it is sorta like “Christ” “rose” on the “third day”, which is heretical to some and the proper parsing to others.
I never really try to convert people to my exact beliefs, because people have their own good reasons for not believing what I believe. I want to make it clearer what underpins people’s beliefs, and how it is actually very similar to what others believe.
The people I talk to most about the nature of belief is other Christians, since to a lot of people the meaning of the sentence “There exists a God” is so obvious they can’t even imagine how someone could think otherwise. It is in fact the same nature of question as, for example, “There exists a black person”. Once someone experiences the personhood of a human with African ancestry, it is so obvious that it becomes transparent.
Imagine if every time someone used the word “ghost” they were talking exactly about post-bereavement hallucinations. She says “Ghosts are real”, and upon examination this means exactly “Post-bereavement hallucinations are a meaningful part of my mind’s limited subjective experience”, whether or not she would agree with you if you put it in those exact terms. Is her statement “Ghosts are real” true or false? I would say it is obviously true. If you say it is false, it is because you insist on interpreting her statement in a naive literalist way relative to your own definitions of her words, instead of using an empathetic critical lens to figure out what she means
Well… You could use different words for literal truth, metaphorical truth, useful fictions, personal mythology, etc, etc.
“Ghosts are real” is literally true. She is literally experiencing post-bereavement hallucinations as a meaning part of her mind’s limited subjective experience.
Gah. I agree with the assertion that qualia and personhood is not provable, and yet disagree to the point of ridicule the conclusion there is a Creator. Your priors are your own, and your weighting of inconclusive evidence and observations-consistent-with-multiple-hypotheses is up to you, so I don’t actually begrudge you your beliefs.
But I’ll quote Asimov at you:
Now, if you’d remained agnostic on things you can’t prove (or even define well enough to make them falsifiable), I’d be fully with you. But choosing the gnostic stance on one topic cannot give reason to choose that for another. Especially when there are so many conflicting forms of that belief to choose from.
Likewise, if you’d taken the extra-agnostic position that “if there are no tests nor impacts on future experiences, it’s not a real question” on either of these topics, I’d absolutely support you. The response to both is Mu. It’s an incoherent question, not an unknown answer.
The other approach that can shed light on the gnostic forms of these answers (whether yes or no) is “so what”? There is a chain of reasoning through empathy that does imply different actions and self-evaluations of moral behavior if one believes other humans are similar to oneself. There may be no truth to it, but there is consequence, and there may be multiple paths to this consequence to make it preferred, leading (improperly, but conveniently) to accepting the proposition. I like to be nice to people, and it is easier to explain and maintain my self-image if I assume they have feelings. It’s much less clear what changes about your justification for actions and your self-perception if you believe in a generic God/Creator, but don’t ALSO believe in a specific God’s-eye preference system.
TL;DR: It is not my post’s “conclusion” that there is a creator, any more than it is that there is human personhood. It is just what I believe. I think those who believe in personhood of humans but not personhood of abstract processes are justified in doing so based on their systems of meaning.
What happened was I tried to personify the unknown processes of my world, and instantly I developed a strong relationship. You could say it is one-sided, but I would say it is no more one sided than our conversation right now. I choose to interpret what I guess to be a primate elsewhere hitting keys on a keyboard then clicking “Send” as them interacting with me.
Similarly, if I model my social and material conditions (this is actually a fairly convincing definition of “God” for me, though I go even further with this!) as having a relationship with me, I find it much more meaningful to engage in self-referential thinking and achieve desirable thought patterns. Questions I constantly ask myself are, “If God is testing me right now, what would the test be and would I pass?” and “If my whole life is predestined, in what way would I expect to act in this situation were I not aware of this predestiny?”
Maybe I am one of those people who benefit a lot from overthinking.
———
I agree with you that there is no creator, by your definition of “creator”. But I contend that if you can believe this post had an author (a mind behind it), you can also believe that a more complex result has a mind behind it.
I am not here to spread theism. I am here to get across exactly the “motte” you are singling out, for its own sake. The experience of me being a theist is here because of how personally meaningful it is.
The Asimov quote presumes that ontology must be about material, which is exactly the bias I want to make more clear. The world is flat in some context, it is spherical in some context, it is elliptical in some context. The choice of context is subjective. There is an “objective answer” to this relative to the most valued systems of physics, but that is the extent of objectivity.
What I want to point out in this post and all my replies is how much we presume our own values, to the point that they are invisible. Really, I think you are a person because my values demand it of me. Once I interpreted cosmic process as a person, I could never unsee it. I anticipate this is how abolitionists felt the first time they considered a “savage non-person human” a person for the first time.
Also, to be clear, when I say “gnostic” I really mean “I know as best as I can”. Really, if we use YOUR definitions, I would probably say that you should best think of this post as saying I am agnostic about everything. I want to really hammer in that I am coming at this from the angle of subjective idealism.
I’m not sure you are engaging with my charge of false equivalence. The fact that I cannot (and don’t try to) prove that you exist as an independent thinking/feeling thing, but many people do believe that and I don’t publicly disagree very often is NOT the same weight or reasoning as the fact that I cannot (and don’t try to) prove that the universe had a conscious/planning Creator, but many people do believe that and I DO sometimes publicly disagree.
Neither one gives any hints as to the other. Both are pretty common, both are unjustified, but one has consequences I like (increase in empathy and caring behavior), the other has either NO consequences (aka “who cares about that asshole?”), or consequences I dislike (violent enforcement of beliefs justified by a “higher power” that that jerks seem to have special access to).
I think I’m bowing out now. Feel free to respond, clarify, and rebut—I’ll gladly read and try to learn, but I don’t intend to respond further.
I am not using one to hint at the other. I believe this mischaracterizes my post. If there is one word to describe my goal, it would be empathy. If I am allowed to use a term, theory of mind.
What I am doing is saying, the ontological warrant for believing in personhood is much closer to the ontological warrant for believing in God than you might think. Someone who wants to believe in a specific organized religion’s God is going to need a lot more warrants, but it seems that the biggest hurdle in believing in a theistic religion is in fact the theism part.
I am not trying to convert anyone (in fact I think “conversion” is impossible by reason and is in fact mostly just changing someone’s semantics). I am trying to detail a topic that I have thought a lot about, which is how allowing myself to treat more non-humans as persons was only an extension of my existing faith in personhood.
Regarding consequences, I consider that a separate issue from reality and truth. All consequences mean to me is how urgent a question is, not how good an answer is. I hold all sorts of beliefs, some more convenient or useful than others, but they do come from the deepest fiber of my being.
What I want you to consider, if you seek to understand, is this thought experiment:
Imagine if every time someone used the word “ghost” they were talking exactly about post-bereavement hallucinations. She says “Ghosts are real”, and upon examination this means exactly “Post-bereavement hallucinations are a meaningful part of my mind’s limited subjective experience”, whether or not she would agree with you if you put it in those exact terms. Is her statement “Ghosts are real” true or false? I would say it is obviously true. If you say it is false, it is because you insist on interpreting her statement in a naive literalist way relative to your own definitions of her words, instead of using an empathetic critical lens to figure out what she means.
This is exactly the sense I mean when I say “People are real” and “God is real”. These statements are among the most true beliefs to me, which is why I call my belief in God gnostic theist.
(The famous Sam Harris / Jordan Peterson “debate” has Sam criticizing Jordan’s views using this exact example, but I think he missed the point by assuming that people’s words mean what he thinks they mean.)
By your definition I suppose I am not gnostic theist and am in fact agnostic theist, but then we could just say I am agnostic about everything. But the key thing I want to communicate is that there is knowledge in my worldview, and by knowledge I mean a deep experience of truth. You can call it something else, but I call it knowledge.
______
I am glad for your replies so far. Best wishes to you, stranger.
Information about my faith, if you are curious:
I happen to consider myself a follower of the Way of Jesus, roughly a Calvinist trinitarian who is much less into Paul than most American Christians. Some people, atheist and Christian, disagree with the label “Christian” as applied to me. Others strongly agree with it, and would rather I use that instead of my more vague self-identification.
There is a lot of diversity of thought in what it actually “means” that the Christ rose on the third day. For me, it is sorta like “Christ” “rose” on the “third day”, which is heretical to some and the proper parsing to others.
I never really try to convert people to my exact beliefs, because people have their own good reasons for not believing what I believe. I want to make it clearer what underpins people’s beliefs, and how it is actually very similar to what others believe.
The people I talk to most about the nature of belief is other Christians, since to a lot of people the meaning of the sentence “There exists a God” is so obvious they can’t even imagine how someone could think otherwise. It is in fact the same nature of question as, for example, “There exists a black person”. Once someone experiences the personhood of a human with African ancestry, it is so obvious that it becomes transparent.
Well… You could use different words for literal truth, metaphorical truth, useful fictions, personal mythology, etc, etc.
“Ghosts are real” is literally true. She is literally experiencing post-bereavement hallucinations as a meaning part of her mind’s limited subjective experience.