I’m confused. Do you think you don’t actually have mental experiences?
Jakub Supeł
Karma: −32
Only a handful of Nazis believed in pagan religion. Most notable was Himmler. Hitler, afaik, considered it silly and distracting from the main cause.
Why do you think that “a god that deliberately and knowingly created a world like this is evil by normal moral standards”?
It would have conscious qualia.
Color is not a shape?
There is no such thing as ’green” in the physical universe (obviously). It has no explanatory power, it has no causal power, and there is no viable theory of how it can be produced by other things (e.g. by light of whatever wavelength, since my experience of light of that wavelength could be different than yours). Yet, we know that “green” exists. Therefore dualism.
Green is not a wavelength of light. Last time I checked, wavelength is measured in units of length, not in words. We might call light of wavelength 520nm “green” if we want, and we do BECAUSE we are conscious and we have the qualia of green whenever we see light of wavelength 520nm. But this is only a shorthand, a convention. For all I know, other people might see light of wavelength 520nm as red (i.e. what I describe as red, i.e. light of wavelength 700nm), but refer to it as green because there is no direct way to compare the qualia.
I’m not sure how the first two paragraphs are analogous to consciousness at all. Yes, the screen prints out numbers. These printed numbers are still mere physical entities. The screen doesn’t really produce the number Pi from the physical objects, it just manipulates the physical objects. Consciousness is not about manipulating physical objects, as two identical physical configurations could correspond to two distinct conscious experiences.
As for something being “green”, we can detect “green” with webcams and computers. My Gimp as a “anti-red eye filter” that can not only detect a kind of red and even its shape, and remove it. Being green is a very physical property of light, or of matter that emits/absorbs light. There is even less dualism in that than in my Pi example, or in any other kind of file (text, pictures, sound, movie, …) stored in a hard disk.
Haha, no. Strictly speaking, we cannot detect “green” with webcams or computers (such an expression is only a simplification). We can detect light of a particular wavelength with a camera and we can detect a particular value of the G channel with a computer. But that’s not the green color. The green color is what we see (and we can’t even be sure that we see the same color when we use the word “green”). Any equivalence between that and the state of a camera of disk memory is false.
Oh, so then the question should be “What would I think about these arguments if I hadn’t already committed myself to faith and I were an open-hearted truthseeker?”. Your claim is that:
1) such a person should consider arguments for the Christian faith to be good, on balance (otherwise “Christianity is greatly wounded”), and
2) such a person often would not consider arguments for the Christian faith to be good.Why do you believe (2)? That is, how can you know what a sincere seeker is going to think of any particular argument? Or, even worse, about all the arguments so that they can decide which theory is more probable on the balance?
I met unbelievers who found some arguments convincing and others who found them unconvincing, but there is no way for me to know if any of them were open-hearted truthseekers. If doctrine (1) is true, it’s just not an empirically verifiable doctrine, since there is no observation by means of which you could determine even your own sincerity, much less that of others.
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/is-gods-existence-evident-to-every-sincere-seeker
The thought patterns you cite are not universally demanded by religion. They might be demanded by some religious people sometimes, but they are by no means a universal feature of religion. So, as a never-religious atheist, your perception of religion does seem to be skewed. In my experience with religious people, I very rarely encounter the kind of attitudes you mentioned.
Why does objection 1 seem valid to you? Something like “Jesus rose from the dead” is not obviously false; it is in fact true and has good evidence of being true.
What’s wrong with not following epistemic rationality then if there are no moral truths? If there are no moral truths, it doesn’t matter whether you are rational or not; no option is better than the other.
The claim that religion is a separate magisterium that can neither be proven nor disproven is a big lie indeed. But it is not the lie of RELIGION per se. Some religious people believe it (perhaps more than in the past) while many others don’t. Just as some non-religious people believe it and some don’t.
Why would this question be relevant? Let’s say that the answer is “I would think that the arguments in favour of religion are stupid”. What is that supposed to prove?
Why do you consider religious faiths to be obviously untrue? “They would be child’s play for an unattached mind to relinquish, if the skepticism of a ten-year-old were applied without evasion.” Why do you consider the questions of a ten-year old to be unaswerable except through evasion? On the contrary, such questions are almost invariably easily answerable to anyone who has the slighest knowledge about philosophy of religion and the doctrine of their particular religion. I would be silly to be guided by the questions of a 10-year old instead of the answers of a 20- or 45-year old whose knowledge of the subject matter is non-negligible.
”a belief whose absurdity a fresh-eyed ten-year-old could see” Why would it matter if a belief seems absurd to a 10-year old? It would be fairly stupid to be guided by children’s opinions about an important subject.
“there is a mental state of “experiencing green”, which is a certain functional state of a mind”
Alright… now, how do you explain the fact that this state of the mind has the property that it cannot be accessed/observed by anyone except its owner (I hope you know what I mean by the “owner”), while the properties of the brain can be observed by anyone in principle? Doesn’t it mean that e.g. the image in the mind is not a brain process?