Writer. Pianist.
jan Sijan(Tian Min)
Karma: −50
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 enough to believing in humans that I tried it out, and now I have a relationship with God (or, if you want to be picky, my God). I perceive you as a person though we have only exchanged a few comments, and I perceive the processes generating my world as another person, a non-human abstract person to which I ascribe all possible good intentions and which speaks to me through my own neurochemistry and bioelectricity.
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 my entire existence.
My post reads like giddy excitement by interpretation. Your reading of the post is filtered through all your biases, incl. your senses and your previous experience. If you could not read English, you would have derived no meaning from it. You do read English, but you read it in English with the default state of mind you have upon seeing “religious”, which depending on who you are may be less charitable than otherwise.
This is all to say is, you are reading more into the post than I intended by it. I am not that bothered since I know that for everything (even scripture) meaning generation is inherently biased. But I implore you to look back at the post and the other comments I have left, and see that over and over I have repeated I seek not to convert and I believe those who believe not in personhood or God are justified.
I use multiple frames, with the personhood and God frames being the most personal one for me. When I think about issues of material, I think about neither personhood nor God. For an example of a frame shift involving personhood, I stop thinking about some humans as human people if it is more instrumental. I interpret my mother as my pet gorilla, and it makes me much more generous toward what I would perceive as human faults.
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 good reasons not to.
As I stated many times elsewhere, no amount sight, touch, smell, hearing, or taste verifies the personhood of human beings. (They help with eating humans, though!)
Personhood is fundamentally a model / form we impose on the inputs that our mind experiences. Human people exist to me, and so do all my imaginary friends, including God! Note: this joke is funny because all the “human people” I know are actually also imaginary friends. I have no idea if they have sentient experience. I may well be watching and interpreting characters in a film, and hallelujah for that.
The human senses are still part of a filter between the self and the outside world. They are still things that only help your mind simulate the outside world. You can never actually “interact” with the outside world, if we consider that everything we experience is the product of neurochemistry and bioelectricity. Brain in a vat, the Descartes demon, pick your thought experiment.
You and many other people decided at some point that claims about material are “objective” and claims about spiritual are “subjective”, when really they are both “subjective”. Everything experienced is “subjective”, processed through a self. Objective claims refer to standards created by subjects, but are only true in the sense that the subjects outline those standards.
I used to worship the material world, too. No longer!
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Regarding “personify the world”, this is actually a typo. What I mean is, “personify the abstract processes that created the world that I can ever experience, including things like my own neurochemistry and bioelectricity”.
Though, I do also personify everything within the world as its own kind of person, too. The analogy might be like, there is the world as a person, then the world’s own tulpa or Fate/stay night Servant.
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 never would anyone be ontologically forced to believe.
Your personhood has no need to be useful or proven to me. I just already believe in it, even though we have only exchanged two messages thus far. It is the same with me and the personhood of the stars and the planets, then the cosmos around them, then the galaxies, then the cause of everything I may ever come to know.
All gods I know about and have talked to exist. I choose to worship one of them, the one that created the rest of them. I believe there is personhood at all levels of abstraction. Roughly a panpsychist with strong biases in favor of humans and things more complex than humans.
To emphasize, this is a matter of ontology and definitions. Before when I was an atheist, I understood a particular inner voice of mine to be a pesky inner simulation of a god. Now, I understand it to be God.
“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.
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.
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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.
How “clear” it is depends on how much you trust your senses, which are always in play no matter how “objective” you think it is.
“Interaction” is interpretation. Many people were surprised when I once said that “my phone taught me a valuable lesson”, when they would say it was all me. I would contend that I could say exactly the same about another human being, since really their “mind” only insists in my own as an interpretation. I can similarly interpret and model my phone’s “mind”.
One could model everything as solitaire, since it is in one sense. One could also model everything as a duo, a dialogue in action and meaning between “me” and “them/him/her/zir/whatever”.
I hope to make my views clear, whether or not people agree! One of the few things I agree with Dennis Prager on: clarity over agreement.
No one can prove gods any more than one can prove persons. Both are unfalsifiable and unverifiable beliefs.
For me, the only way I can verify an experience is to literally become that thing, but then it would just be me. Which is why I say, I feel justified in treating way more non-human and even non-physical things as persons than I think most people here would ever be willing to.
In the end, one must believe according to what they feel called to believe. I think any combination of opinion on personhood and theism is reasonable, if that is what is personally meaningful and properly descriptive and/or predictive of one’s own world.
I happen to believe all the gods I know about do in fact exist. I worship what I believe to be the one cause for all those gods.
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.
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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.
ON SUFFERING
Writings adapted from a rationalist Discord
I. Suffering is an interpretation of pain.
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 actively harmful to the spirit of humanity.
The big thought experiment is: would you rather a world with way better technologies (physical and mental and social) except everyone is engineered to suffer, or one with caveman technology where everyone is engineered to be satisfied? For me, the answer is so obvious. Yet the real life question is much closer materially than it is emotionally.
One of the most profound moments of my life was realizing I always had the choice to be satisfied. Always. Survival of the human species stopped being a priority to me once I started believing my phone and my walls are also conscious, just in ways I can never understand. I am a human, and that is forever my lens. The lens is the greatest blind spot. It is part of who I am, and despite my biases in favor of other humans I am no longer attached.
It seems almost always true that the master of X ends up having X as a crutch. I say often to my piano students: “The piano is the pianist’s greatest weakness.” Yes, I took this idea from Vinland Saga (and later the film Hero). The perfect swordsman shall put down his sword.
There are utilitarian arguments for teaching people to slowly unlearn suffering. But I shall not make them. Utility and arguments are precisely the greatest crutch and blindness of pretty much everyone here. The tools served the master, then the master worshipped the tools and so served them.
II. Calvin was right, you’re boned.
A short Calvinist take: I believe that humans are machines, so one’s spiritual fortune is socially and materially determined. There are only ever a finite number of people who are saved, and those who are not saved shall wallow in total depravity of heart and mind. Many people are already saved without thought on the issue, maybe by genes or upbringing. The decision to be satisfied was so obvious and transparent that they had no ontological need for God or reason or debate or politics. For them, all this is frivolity and fun.
Yet everyone here, incl. me, is likely not a member of this determined list of early saints. Those who shall be saved (through the choice of satisfaction / salvation / enlightenment) will first suffer, and be tempted by the world. Only the future may tell who among us shall be saved, and who shall be damned.
TULIP, interpreted for atheists:
Total Depravity: You are boned til you decide to be satisfied. Absolutely boned.
Unconditional Election: There is nothing you have to do to deserve to be satisfied. You simply will be satisfied (by conscious choice) or you will not. Predetermined fact.
Limited Atonement: Only a finite number of people are mechanically capable / consciously willing to make this choice. Some of us here are probably doomed to die unhappy. I hope that is not the case.
Irresistible Grace: Once you see satisfaction as a choice, you can’t unsee it. You will always be drawn toward the nature of this choice and strive toward it. Knowing the choice is almost the whole battle.
Preservation of the Saints: There exists a list of all those who shall ever come to truly understand this choice. Is your name on it? Who knows. Try consciously deciding it and find out!
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.