andrewducker | More on God

More on God

Nice quote I've just stolen from here, where the author is inspired by the Onion AV story about God to translate Brecht:

Someone asked Mr K. whether there was a God. Mr K. said: "I advise you to reflect whether your behaviour would change depending on the answer to this question. In case it wouldn't change we can drop the question. If it would change I can help you in that way that I say that you have decided already: You need a God."

I short, people invent the God's they need. They feel that there must be something, and so they assume there is. I think I'll pass.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I would beg to differ. If you changed your behaviour due to believing there was a god, it wouldn't mean you'd need a god, it would mean there _is_ a god, every bit as real to you as if they existed in corporeal form.

You behave based on your interpretation of your perception of the world. You have no way of knowing if something is an absolute truth or if your perception coincides with anyone elses. You merely react as if what you perceived was the truth.
Any behaviour is based on your interaction with things in the world, or rather your perception of those things in the world, be it by touch, sight, hearing or whatever. It doesn't matter if any of it is real, as real is a ridiculously fuzzy term (although everyone thinks it's the antithesis of fuzzy), by reacting to it you make it as real as real gets.

So if you act differently because you believe there is a god then there _is_ a god, pretty much tautologically.

If you hear them, the voices in your head are real.

Mike

Begging to differ right back - perception is not reality, and conflating the two is the biggest mistake people make. It may not make much difference some of the time, but hardheadedly saying "It's true in my world, so I'll act as if it's True" just causes strife, lack of understanding and general strife.

Just because I don't see the car that's about to hit me, doesn't mean I won't die, it just means I'll be happier standing in the road than I might otherwise be.

has anyone ever been hit and killed by a car they didn't see coming?

You (clearly) haven't.

And since you're the only person you have to assume you can speak for... you don't know that anyone else worth talking about has. Even if your mum was hit and killed by a car she didn't see coming; who's to say she's real.

So maybe you can't be killed by a car if you don't see it coming.

After all, you have no eveidence to the contrary.

Adam

You (clearly) haven't.

Prove it.

I think you've totally misunderstood what I was trying to say.
Of course you can be killed by a car you didn't see. If it hit you then you felt it. Even if you have no sense of touch you would probably still notice it hitting you by the changes to your other senses due to the collision (your vision changing as you flew into the air). If you had absolutely no sense that was affected by being hit by the car then I would argue that, to you, the car didn't exist. Then I would probably argue that you weren't the type of object that could have internal representation, a world view or perspective to build any subjective reality around. Of course it can still kill you, much as it could kill fungus growing on the road, much as it can crush a coke can, but that wasn't what I was trying to say.

What I was trying to say was that, apart from energy states and energy state transition, as the state of absolute reality and its vector of change, everything else is subjective. It might be shared, in some broad view that could be described in some subjective way. We all know what a tree is, for example, however, the view of the tree by another tree differs somewhat from ours, as it does for the insects that live on it, the bacteria growing on it and the birds that nest in it. The boundaries of each entity known as a tree probably become somewhat fuzzy between individuals. For instance, when would you say that a leaf stops being part of a tree? When it dies on the branch? When it leaves the branch? When it's stopped rotting on the ground? Sound like a stupid question? Then what do you define as human? Your entire body? The bacteria inside your body? Would you cease being human if you lost an arm? Your legs? Everything but your head?
If you stop to think "give me a minute and I'll figure it out" then you're only proving my point. It's subjective, any answer will do, they're all as good as each other as all the arguments are subjective too. The leaf might never leave the tree's ecosystem. It might die, rot and be re-absorbed by the tree. There's a brief moment of not being attached to the tree but don't you find your description that, that is when it is not part of the tree a little abstract. A little subjective perhaps.

Reality is subjective. At least the large subset of reality we've used during this entire discussion. There is a small, underlying subset, that could be considered objective, but many phycisists have long said that, that level of reality needs an observer too (not that I believe it for a second).

Mike

I don't believe that reality is subjective. I do believe that all we have access to is subjective views on objective reality. Does that get close enough for you?

To take the car thing one step further:

Let's say you don't see the car, but you do see me. I then pull you off of the road. You haven't been affected by the car directly. No sensory data will inform you of its existence. And yet you have still been affected by its existence.

Pretending that only things that directly affect your senses are all that exists means ignoring the vast web of cause and effect (if you want to seperate those two things) that exists a step away from you.

The thing is, I don't see any difference between being affected by two different causes if they affect you identically. If you told me about the car then that's a different effect to you just grabbing me out of the road. If you thought the car was going to hit me but it didn't, yet you acted as if it did and I knew no different than what you told me I'd be just as affected and changed with no relevance to if the car had hit me or not. The same with a belief in God. Essentially it doesn't matter if God exists or not, especially as so many concepts of God have him (whatever) not affecting people directly. There is no functional difference between someone believing in a non-existant God and a God who doesn't directly affect them. If I build a shrine and worship an idol there as a God and sacrafice people to it, what difference does it make if there is a God or not. A positivist view would say that the view of reality with a god in it and without a god in it would be equally valid (almost a small gods theory).

And to the car thing. If it affects me via you, that's still the car affecting me. I'm not saying that there wasn't a ball of energy with a certain projected vector of motion about to interact with another ball of energy and affect it heavily. What I am saying is that the whole facet of reality involving the words car, me, you, accident, fatality, pain, broken bones and anything else you mean when you write with words or in any way communicate or picture visually as a taxonomy of experience, is subjective. When you look out the window and point at the world, that is subjective. Not that it disappears when you turn your back, but that everything we think it is, is subjective.

If I build a shrine and worship an idol there as a God and sacrafice people to it, what difference does it make if there is a God or not.

None at all. However, if you believe that your worldview is specific to you, then you'll be a lot more openminded than someone who believes that their worldview is the Truth.

And to the car thing. If it affects me via you, that's still the car affecting me.

How do you know it did? The car didn't exist in your world, why would you believe that it exists in mine? If I just warn you "there's a car coming" and you reply "i cannot perceive the car, therefore it doesn't exist" and are then hit by the car, then you have been killed because you believed that your worldview was the only correct one.

Saying "I can't perceive it, therefore it doesn't exist" denies the possibility of future changes in your perception, errors in your perception, etc. It also denies the validity of other people's worldviews and of subjectivity. Certainly, two things affecting me now in identical ways are effectively identical now, but if I don't appreciate that they may affect me differently next time then I may be in for a nasty shock (or a nice one).

So, yes, our perceptions are all we have to go on, but to say "if we haven't perceived it it doesn't exist" or "I have perceived X, therefore X is the truth" is just asking for trouble.

Reality being subjective has nothing to do with knowing or not knowing or appreciating or not appreciating other people's world views. Your subjective reality includes your internal model of the world and your internal model of other people's internal models of how they perceive the world. It is all mediated by your senses and experiences and interactions with the world, which are subjective, and form your taxonomy and functional definitions of everything around you.
The way you react to a call of "car" or someone pushing you out of the road is based on how you view those experiences affecting you and your knowledge of the world around you, how can this not be subjective?

Yes, the majority of people would be able to understand the situation in a reasonably similar (subjectively speaking, because there is no objective similar) way. They would be able to understand the concept of broken bones and car wrecks, in some way based on experiences of their own. So that if you said "car wreck" they'd all remember a car wreck they were in or saw on TV or read about in the paper. All mediated by their perceptions, all subject to their experiences.
The same occurs with any taxonomy of day to day situations. Breaking down the world affecting us. Just because you can track the movement of the underlying world, which is the basis of your viewpoint, doesn't mean that car is somehow not a subjective term nor your mental image of a car nor your touching of a car nor any other interaction with it.
That the car might interact with you and break your leg is based in the underlying objective reality of energy states and energy state transitions, but everything above this level, everything we use for day to day behaviour by breaking the world down into pigeon holes we can deal with, is subjective.

I never said it wasn't subjective. All of our experiences definitely are.

but originally you said that because you believe there is a god then there _is_ a god. If you'd said because you believe there is a god then there might as well be a god then i'd have agreed with you.

And tell me the functional difference between one subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God and another subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God.

The first being some omnipotent force, the second being a collection of neurons in someone's head.
People define a lot of things as being God. The feeling that there's someone up there that loves them, the feeling they get when they see a beautiful day or a sky full of stars and wonder at the enormity of existence. How is this feeling any less God that an actual white bearded entity raining down thunderbolts (and/or love).

If you believe in a thing and project attributes onto it, then all you have done is taxonomise that thing into a pigeon hole. As this is what we do when we deal with experiences of cars and accidents how is it any different?

"And tell me the functional difference between one subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God and another subset of the universe's energy being in a given form and being called God."

Because if I call something a flower and you call it an anti-tank missile, when I say i love smelling flowers, there's confusion.

These people aren't claiming that there is a God in their heads, they're claiming that there is an outside force who affects the universe. They aren't after a semantic quibble, they're claiming a force which moves throughout the universe causing effects.

If they want to say "I get a funny feeling when I think of flowers, and I call that feeling God" then fine, but they are actually claiming that there is an external God who causes funny feelings in them, which is not the same thing.

It's the difference between me saying that "Metallica is pleasure." and "Metallica makes me feel good." One is a fairly objective fact, one is a statement that other people can (and do) argue about constantly.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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