Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Thomas II · 11-30-2006, 11:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spamandham

I don't think you appreciate the possibility that EVERYTHING you remember about that event could be manufactured by your mind and never actually happened. It is possible they called and told you about her death, and at that moment, the shower memory had not yet been planted in your head (because it never actually happened). That night as you slept, you had a dream about the phone call, and in your dream you "recalled" the shower event, including looking at the clock in the shower, asking what time she had died, etc., and then the next morning remembered the event with these new details invented by your brain added in.

I'm not trying to say this IS what happened, I'm just trying to get you to think, is there anything other than your own memory of the shower event that you can use to confirm it actually happened? Looking at a clock doesn't help, because that could easily just be part of a false memory. Remembering thinking about it when you got the call she had died doesn't help either, because that could also just be part of a false memory.

For example, did you tell someone about it before you received the phone call, did you write it down before you went to sleep etc.? If there is no way to confirm it actually happened other than your own memory of it, then maybe it never actually happened. Even if you told someone else about it, they may not remember exactly when you told them about it. If you told them the next day, then it's already too late. One dream cycle is all it takes to produce a false memory.

At any rate, I merely wanted to suggest it as a possibility, I'm not trying to convince you that's what happened. So I leave it to your discrtion to make that determination of whether or not the evidence precludes it.

I had no time to tell anyone immediately because I took the shower early in the morning and everyone else was sleeping at the time...I told my wife early that same morning...

Steve Schlicht · 12-01-2006, 04:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Thomas II

I had no time to tell anyone immediately because I took the shower early in the morning and everyone else was sleeping at the time...I told my wife early that same morning...

What do you think of my own anecdotal experiences, Thomas II?

Are you able to repeat the process, test it?

Steve

Albert Cipriani · 12-01-2006, 09:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Unbeatable

Unbeatable wrote well when he wrote:
The beauty of meaning derived from dogma, especially dogma that your brain is soaking in before you're capable of rational thought, is that you don't necessarily see all the seams from where people over the course of a few millennia have put the pieces together. Of course, if you're here, you were un/fortunate enough to see them in the end, and now you're faced with the task of replacing the old illusion with a new one. But now, you don't have the benefit of ignorance or passivity. You have to try to perform the magic trick and sit in the audience watching it at the same time. How does a person manage to do that?

I admire the expression of your thought more than your thought. Congratulations for impressing me.

Meaning may be a meaningless construct. That’s what you are arguing, whether you realize it or not. Maybe you are right. I think you are wrong. I’d like to discuss meaning but fear I’ll be accused again of derailing a thread. Should I start a new thread or is this the place for it? – Albert Cipriani the Traditional Catholic

Lógos Sokratikós · 12-01-2006, 03:06 PM

No, no, please, go ahead. Meaning is precisely what this thread is about. In a naturalist world, how do you derive meaning? How does it compare to religious views, east and west?

I think this is of paramount importance for people of all persuasions. That was my idea to begin with. And I'm glad you're on this thread, Albert. One thing you notice at funerals is that all your relatives and friends, no matter how different they are in their religious convictions... well, nobody gives a darn what the differences are. There are things and events in life where all that doesn't matter.

Albert Cipriani · 12-01-2006, 06:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

Please, go ahead. Meaning is precisely what this thread is about. In a naturalist world, how do you derive meaning?

Cool.

In a naturalist world, meaning is derived from correlations between facts. Facts, unrelated to any other facts, are just that, facts and nothing more meaningful. So the “quality” we’ve come to know and cherish as “meaning” is, in fact (pun intended), nothing more than a relative quantity of correlated facts. You might think of meaning as an emergent property of correlated facts in the same way wetness is an emergent property of a relative quantity of correlated hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

Ergo, we derive meaning by correlating facts. The more facts we can find relationships between, like so many pearls strung together in a necklace, the more meaningful our lives seem to us.

For example, if the fact of a woman means to a man the fact of potential sexual pleasure and nothing more, then women will not be meaningful to him. They will be functional to him, like a plastic spoon, not meaningful like a Swiss Army Knife. To such a man, coitus would be an elaborate way of scratching a peculiar itch, not the basis upon which to bond and construct a meaningful lifelong relationship.

So if you are tending toward nihilism because your life seems meaningless, you are tending toward death because your life is a scatter pattern of unconnected facts. You need to learn how to connect the dots in your life, correlate the facts of your existence, in order to experience the emergent quality of a meaningful life. So far so good? – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Thomas II · 12-01-2006, 09:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Schlicht

What do you think of my own anecdotal experiences, Thomas II?

Are you able to repeat the process, test it?

Steve

But you had a dream, didn't you? You were sleeping...
I was perfectly awake,taking a shower...

How am I going to test "the process"?

Three or four days ago I had a dream in which my mother appeared as a younger woman...Then I woke up, and the first thought I had was "What if she died?"...

But no, she is not dead. She was fine the last time I checked...

steamer · 12-01-2006, 11:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

Let's face it: There is no hope in atheism.

None in Christianity either, but we’ll get to that.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

Remember the song? "All we do, crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see. Dust in the wind- all we are is dust in the wind!" True and beautiful. Whoever wrote it got to an age of maturity. Wisdom doesn't come from serendipity.

My wife has a dog named Tippy. Tippy likes to be petted. Tippy doesn’t give two shits about whether her being petted effects anything outside that particular two minutes. If your claim is that wisdom comes from maturity, then I think Tippy would disagree. Wisdom comes from accepting things as they are. It is what it is. No more, no less.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

Whatever we do, nothing will remain. Whoever we save will surely die. An atheist fights to leave something in the world. A name, children. They will all die. They will all be forgotten.

You will almost surely die in the next 100 years. It never was the case that anything would matter to you after you died. You can imagine a future for your children so their future matters to you now. You lived in the past and you will be alive in the future but the only time you live is in the present. One of the biggest crimes of Christianity is that the only time Christians live, they live in fear that they might change their minds before they die.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

The pyramids remain. But they are existing on borrowed time, as the Spanish-language adage goes. When the sun spends its energy and vomits its last in pangs of death towards white-dwarf-ness, much before that, all humans have made, no matter how imposing and massive, will surely be gone, much before the Universe goes kaput.

You’ll be gone long before the pyramids. When you go, nothing at all will matter to you. All human glory is fleeting. If you imagine you live eternally, nothing you do will matter much either.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

And when the universe goes kaput, pagans' Nature, humanists' Humanity, everything the once vaingloried petty species Homo Sapiens ever cherished will be gone and meaingless in it's pathetic dramas they held so important. The stupid simians.

You forget that all the theists will be just as dead no matter what they imagine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

Why fight? Why care? In the end it means nothing in the atheists world. What is suffering? Secretions of minute amounts of chemicals into the blood, activation of certain brain centers, that's all. If someone ever had any pain, any so called "tragedy", so what?

It means nothing in the theist world either. If an atheist feels pain or empathizes with someone else suffering it isn’t different than a theist doing the same thing.. Pretending that we have an eternal life doesn’t change anything either that I can see.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

In the end, nothing really matters. In Naturalismland, a human is but a bag of chemicals born to die, whose death means nothing to the dead universe at large.

Again, it means nothing to someone imagining an eternal life either. Nothing really changes just because someone imagines it does.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

No hope in atheism.

Nor any hope in Christianity or any other form of theism I can think of. Imagining things gives imaginary hope. What good is imaginary hope?

If you die and go to heaven, you still have no purpose. A god doesn’t need you for anything; you’re just as useless as you ever were. We’re all useless on an eternal scale, but that doesn’t matter because the only time we ever live is in the present. Spend your life fearing your death and you only throw away the only life you’ll ever have.

They say a dog is a man’s best friend. I think one of the best things men can learn from dogs is how to live in the present which is the only time men ever live.

Myself, I only have one daughter, but I really can’t see why it shouldn’t be important for me to leave her the world at least as good as it was when I got here.

In my view humans have a good chance of surviving the death of our sun. All we have to do is find a younger sun. Eventually we will die, but when we do, so will all the gods we imagine.

Lógos Sokratikós · 12-02-2006, 07:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Albert Cipriani

Cool.

In a naturalist world, meaning is derived from correlations between facts. Facts, unrelated to any other facts, are just that, facts and nothing more meaningful. So the “quality” we’ve come to know and cherish as “meaning” is, in fact (pun intended), nothing more than a relative quantity of correlated facts. You might think of meaning as an emergent property of correlated facts in the same way wetness is an emergent property of a relative quantity of correlated hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

Ergo, we derive meaning by correlating facts. The more facts we can find relationships between, like so many pearls strung together in a necklace, the more meaningful our lives seem to us.

For example, if the fact of a woman means to a man the fact of potential sexual pleasure and nothing more, then women will not be meaningful to him. They will be functional to him, like a plastic spoon, not meaningful like a Swiss Army Knife. To such a man, coitus would be an elaborate way of scratching a peculiar itch, not the basis upon which to bond and construct a meaningful lifelong relationship.

So if you are tending toward nihilism because your life seems meaningless, you are tending toward death because your life is a scatter pattern of unconnected facts. You need to learn how to connect the dots in your life, correlate the facts of your existence, in order to experience the emergent quality of a meaningful life. So far so good? – Cheers, Albert the Traditional Catholic

Excellent! I agree 100% Meaning comes from us, in the sense that we realize the way things are connected and the we are the ones that connect them. Cool!

---
NOTE: Last edited by Alethias? That's what your post says. Odd.

steamer · 12-02-2006, 11:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lógos Sokratikós

Excellent! I agree 100% Meaning comes from us, in the sense that we realize the way things are connected and the we are the ones that connect them. Cool!

I agree. Kudos Albert.

Albert Cipriani · 12-03-2006, 07:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by steamer

I agree. Kudos Albert.

Great. There's more, of course. Let's take this as far as we can go. I'm going to a funeral over these next two days and am otherwise burried, timewise, but will take this as far as possible with you guys. Continuing now:

Let's fine-tune our terms: facts, knowledge, meaning, truth. The common denominator to them all is sensory inputs that we've correlated. Our brain is a pattern recognition machine very good at recognizing patterns. Patterns of what? Patterns of sensory data.

Merely recognizing sensory data is a fact. (E.g., baby sees an oval shapped object and hears cooing sounds).

Correlating one fact (sensory data) with another (cooing sounds) is knowledge: the baby knows that oval shapped objects make cooing sounds.

Making many more correlations associated with those two facts (milk-filled nipple, warmpth, rocking) is the methodology whereby the meaningful is derived: the baby feels the warm fuzzy of having a mother and avoids the cold sharp of being an orphan.

Finally, when the baby grow up enough to correlate a great many more facts into a a meaningful statement that has universal application (i.e. motherhood is good as opposed to my mother is good), it has derived truth.

What I am proposing is a continuum of correlations from facts to truth, with meaning being just shy of the truth. Because the nature of our brains is such that intellectual correlation and intellectual satisfaction are synonymous, the more correlations we make the happier more satisfied our lives are. It's that simple.

In such a paradeigm, a nihilist is one who simply is not complex. He is one who cannot or will not make correlations between facts to such an extent that his life is atomized, nothing but a series of disconnected facts. No warm fuzzies. A saint, on the other hand makes correlations between ALL the facts of his life with a providential God out of thin air, too many correlations, unjustifiable correlations one might say, but many more correlations than the average person and many many more correlations than the average nihilist.

Can we agree on this much? Cheers, Albert Cipriani the Traditional Catholic

Thread Tools	Search this Thread
Show Printable Version	Search this Thread: Advanced Search

12-01-2006, 03:06 PM	#144
Lógos Sokratikós Contributor Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: Virtually right here where you are Posts: 11,138	No, no, please, go ahead. Meaning is precisely what this thread is about. In a naturalist world, how do you derive meaning? How does it compare to religious views, east and west? I think this is of paramount importance for people of all persuasions. That was my idea to begin with. And I'm glad you're on this thread, Albert. One thing you notice at funerals is that all your relatives and friends, no matter how different they are in their religious convictions... well, nobody gives a darn what the differences are. There are things and events in life where all that doesn't matter.

Freethought & Rationalism Archive

The archives are read only.