ELECTROGOD

Have we forgotten about Tron?

Koyaanisqatsi

Not quite. The atheist holds no beliefs regarding a god or gods.

A theist. Without the belief in a god or gods.

If by that you mean I am an "athiest evangelist," you'd have to first explain what that means.

There is no middle ground nor even "sides" to any discussion regarding an unsupported claim; there is only the fulfillment of the burden of proof inherent in the claim.

Atheists make no positive claims (except in trivial semantics "traps" theists usually enjoy laying; such as the one above where you state that the atheist "believes" that there is no god).

It isn't a positive claim to point out that somebody else has not met their burden of proof, which is ultimately (take extreme notice of the terminology), ultimately what any atheist is ever really saying regarding the question of a god's existence.

What is your evidence?

And since (again, take note), since that burden is almost exclusively met with vaguaries, fallacies and evasion attempts by the initial claimants, then it is not just proper, but correct to consider the claim without merit, and therefore no big thang to point that fact out to those who continue to pretend this isn't the case.

Especially when the claim is: The fictional creature from this collection of ancient cult mythology factually exists (i.e., is non fictional).

Ayone making such a claim had better damn well prove it. Until they do it is not incorrect in the slightest to consider such a claim void.

Until the evidence is presented to support the claim, the claim is unsupported. It's that simple.

This burden never shifts from the claimant, regardless of what other claims may or may not be on the table, so to speak, which is why it has always baffled me that some theists think that pointing out somebody else's burden of proof somehow alleviates their own.

But I digress...

Yeah, you do. Establish, as in provide the evidence; fulfill the burden of proof.

Of course it is! That's the very definition of the way the world of science works.

Perhaps you are confusing an irrational claim (i.e., fictional creatures from ancient mythology factually exist) with a scientific hypothesis (i.e., polar ice caps on a planet may mean life exists on that planet)?

A "teleevangelist" uses and manipulates basic human truths in order to maintain cult indoctrination, largely by preying upon the weaknesses and ignorance of otherwise productive and engaged human minds, in order to control those minds to the best of his or her ability according to cult dogma written by snakeoil salesmen thousands of years ago.

I would make a terrible "teleevangelist."

And what do you know, that's precisely what they had to do and did!

Irony...all over the floor...

Yes, it is, and as such, not an irrational claim of the order of the theist's.

Regardless, both still require evidence to support them, even if one of them has not been sufficiently supported yet either.

Well, then, not to kick this horse too many times, what is your evidence in support of this position?

More commonly referred to as "God?"

Your suspicions are not warranted.

Oh, great. Another pointless solipsist bent.

Sorry, I no longer have the patience to destroy solipsism yet again. Somebody else will have to take that one.

Have you stopped beating your wife?

I have not only "thought" about it, I have written some one thousand posts on the subject over and over and over again with each new person who argues at cross purposes to their own position over and over and over again.

If you don't accept that there is an "outside" then there is no purpose at all to even posit a deity, now is there?

It may have been, when it was first posed, probably some five thousand years ago, sure.

And who is it that first instilled such a need? Somebody else. Somebody in one's tribe way the f*ck back when told a story (i.e., spun a yarn) and then somebody else (or maybe the first storyteller, who knows?) saw the effect that story had and reallized that this effect--this basic human element--could be used to manipulate and control the herd.

That's the history lesson no one is ever told in Sunday School, yet that is the truth of the matter. A story was made up and told and then indoctrination techniques came into play and low and behold, great masses of people do as you tell them to do and think as you tell them to think and you do the hokey pokey and you turn yourself around, thats what it's all about.

Look it's very simple. I have no problems with somebody in the privacy of their own minds having whatever goddamned thoughts they want to have. Peace be with you, my brother! But start jabbering those thoughts and conniving others to believe as you tell them to believe and don't for one second pretend that I (or others like me), won't immediately call you to terms ("you" in the general sense).

That's it. You make a claim. You support that claim. If you can't and if the claim has any merit to it, sure, fine, kick it around a couple centuries if you like, but if you're going to ever try to act upon the veracity of that claim without ever supporting it, then you should expect someone to eventually reveal the old man hiding behind your curtain, yes?

Not uncommon in the slightest. What that has to do with the legitimacy of those attributions in the manner we are here discussing escapes me, but thanks for pointing it out.

Perhaps now it's all crystal clear, then?

Mad Kally

LOL, Koy rules!

ozero

Koy, sorry, but you've not hit anything I was addressing. You
want to prove that a god that you believe in doesn't exist. I live
in the south, surrounded by baptists. I don't have to go far
to find people who will try to prove to me that a god that they
do not believe in does exist. And you both use the same
methods. You've created some inane notion of what I was
talking about, jumped on a term, in this case "god" and ignored
everything else. I have no belief one way or the other. I don't
care what you believe. I can't send you to hell or promise you
heaven. Over a thousand posts and all saying the same thing?
I fully accept that extraordinary claims require extraordinary
proof, but you have not addressed any of MY (not your imagined
strawman ones) rather ordinary claims. I am not trying to
convince anyone about anything.
Sorry, but I have no time for you.

I asked some questions, got some good answers and leads
on where to follow up. The evidence is in the research being
done on brain-computer interfaces and where that's taking us.
Where it is taking us is as reasonable a discussion topic as
the existence of life on other planets. So is the question of
whether or not we are already there. And, if so, then what
might the ramifications be. I've already suggested that our
Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence probably will be fruitless.
It's a change in the equation, where it's not the lifetime of a
technical civilization, but the time that that civilization would
actually transmit anything outside its immediate surroundings.
I think there might be other effects and I think that only by
examining the hypothesis can one figure them out.

Answerer

Hehe, do God have a wave function? Sometimes, I wonder as well.

Koyaanisqatsi

ozero, all you're positing is just another variation on solipsism. "How would you tell?"

Worse, it's Matrix Redux.

If we take your scenario (from the OP), where we are so technologically advanced that we can generate the entire universe inside our brains as a means to allow intergalactic travel, then there would be no need to actually travel anywhere or do anything, right? Not to mention the "levels of superconductivity" nonsense; why not send the computer network into geostationary orbit?

How this relates to a "scientific probability of a god," however, escapes me, since all you're doing is labeling the computer network (and its programmers) "Like god to us," completely missing the fact that "god" is nothing more than a mythological creature from ancient cult fiction.

You then ask us to already accept this scenario--that we are all living "virtual" lives--and then finally asking us, "How would you tell?"

Aka, solipsism.

So my question to you (again) is, to what end? Fine, let's assume that we are all in tanks somewhere and a vast computer network is indeed generating everything in our brains to give us the appearance of living, breathing, peeing, burping, eating, getting cancer, etc., etc., etc. for the sake of argument. To what end?

We're still left without evidence to support such a claim, and no way to analyze the claim, because your setup includes the supposition that there would be no way for us to tell the "virtual world" from the "real world," right?

If you establish that there is already no way for anyone to tell the difference between the computer generated fantasy you posit and the real world it is supposedly based upon, then where can the discussion go from there?

Ok. We can't tell. According to your givens, we can't tell the difference. What now?

Because we can't tell the difference (based on your givens in the scenario) this somehow provides a "scientific probability of a god"?

If this computer network does not "reveal" itself to us at any time, then, again, what is the purpose of alluding to any kind of god at all here?

IMO, you have no time for me, because I have demonstrated the fallacies of your OP, such as this one:

It is "very unlikely" that a computer network capable of generating a facsimile of the entire universe (including you and I burping and peeing and so on) does not exist?

First, it's not a "being," it's a computer network.
Second, upon what do you base your contention that such a scenario is "very unlikely" to not exist?

Is that not a legitimate question to ask?

malpensante

i think ozero's assumption was that if the universe is infinite, then every possibility fits in it, and that since such a simulation of a physical universe is itself physically possible, then it would surely exist, if the universe is infinite.
as a matter of fact, i share not only this, but also other assumptions made by ozero. i do think all of this relates to the scientific tractability of god(s) if there exists god(s). first, let's tackle what i consider the most important intermediate question: how could we tell if we are autonomous agents thriving inside such a simulation?
a first step would be to ask if the task of generating the program is computationally possible. of course, i will have to make a lot of far-flung assumptions to claim that it is, but we are only talking about physical possibility.
david deutsch in his book "the fabric of reality" talks about a generalization of turing's principle in order to relate it to physical phenomena, so he translates the principle, which says (for abstract computers simulating physical objects):

there exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform

into this (for physical computers simulating each other):

it is possible to build a universal computer: a machine that can be programmed to perform any computation that any physical object can perform

and then into this (for virtual reality generators rendering each other):

it is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes that of every other physically possible virtual reality generator.

to conclude with the all-embracing form of turing's principle:

it is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every physically possible environment.

so, according to deutsch, turing's pple implies that the answer to the second question is yes. because there is no upper bound on the universality of the virtual generators that will actually be built somewhere in the multiverse (i take the assumption of the infinity of the universe to mean that we live in a multiverse, for more on this, see my thread in the philosophy section).

deutsch also discusses something that applies to the applicability of this to some scientific notion of some kind of god:
frank tipler discusses the end of the universe and comes up with the "omega point" theory, but his philosophical speculations on it distract his readers from the real scientifical plausibility of this theory. according to it, when the universe ends, just before it collapses in the big crunch, it is possible that intelligent autonomous agents (maybe human) will be there to set up an energy harvesting machine that will take advantage of a possible property of the universe's end: that it will consist of a series of violent contractios generating each time more chaotic energy, and which, if finely tuned, might yield an infinite number of contractions yielding infinite energy in a finite time just before the big crunch. if such a society persists, it will have an eternity to use every new outburst of energy to reset the energy harvesting set-up, which will require new knowledge, which will make them more intelligent, which, extrapolated to the infinity of omega point, might make this society "omniscient" in the sense that they will have all eternity to know all there is to know, "omnipotent" in the sense that the whole universe will be their personal computer or machine, and "omnibenevolent" because nothing could stop them from making the universal virtual generator and using it to "resucitate" all actual and possible people and give them the illusion of afterlife, which would then be indistinguishable from the afterlife.

all of which makes the possibility that we may live in such a simulation possible. now, to the first question, how could we tell that we are in such a simulation: in order to answer we must make clear another point about virtual reality generators (all of this comes from deutsch):

just as it is possible to confirm experimentally that a theory is false, but never that it is true, one can always prove that a virtual reality rendering is inaccurate, but never that it is accurate, for the accuracy of a rendering is defined as the closeness as far as is perceptible, of the rendered environment to the intended one, so accuracy depends not only on what the virtual reality user experiments, but on whatever he could possibly experience in it.
take deutsch's definition of virtual reality: any situation in which the user is given the experience of being in a specified environment, from this, he draws that science and thought itself are, in a general sense, acts of virtual reality rendering. richard dawkins has also said that mind is a virtual reality generator. virtual reality can even render physically impossible environments, as physically possible ones: the rendering of a plane flying trhu a mountain faster than the speed of light can also be considered as the rendering of a real, physically possible virtual reality generator in which you are experiencing the plane flying thru a mountain faster than light.

so, there are no experimental ways to prove this is a real or a simulated universe, but there are explanatory ways of saying it. according to the current understanding, it is still explanatorily more efficient to consider this as a real universe (or very likely, a real multiverse). although the anthropic pple does appear to be a challenge to this view.

ozero

Thanks, Malpensante, I'll have to read up on that, though I think
that it is a bit too far to the metaphysical for me at the moment.
I think that the current evidence for our local universe is that
it will not contract, but expand forever. That does not rule out
that there are other universes out there, though. I still think that
some day we'll see a bunch of highly blue-shifted galaxies at
the edge of our universe, meaning another universe is
encroaching on this one. My current thinking is that if we go
the mind-computer route, it will be quite understandable to
people of today. I'm not sure I'd easily understand the power
of the omnipotent demideities described.

To Koy: come back when you're done fighting your war with your
god(s). Or just come out of the closet and "Get down on yer
knees, son, and pray!!!" Your latent thiestic tendencies are
coming out: "it's not a "being," it's a computer network"
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, most people in this forum think
all "beings" are just "computer networks". I assume you think
we have a soul. something that heartless computer can not
have. Go for it. Pray to your god and get it over with.
Heck, maybe you'll even go to heaven or at least get to write
a book, "The Confessions of St. Koyaanisqatsi" or a Paulist gospel.

Koyaanisqatsi

ozero, come back when you are capable of actually addressing somebody's arguments and answering their legitimate questions regarding your OP.

Jobar

Keep it civil, ozero. If you feel that Koyaanisqatsi is not understanding your point, you may say so and explain why you think he's wrong. Personal references of the sort in your previous post will be severely frowned upon.