Genocide in all possible worlds

Kalika again!

This is seriously out of context, but I can´t help quoting it anyway, LOL. From liberal atheist Richard Carrier´s blog. 

>>>So the question really comes down to: what if, in the unusual exception case, detente is for some reason not rationally possible? Imagine, e.g., ants can only survive by eating people (that isn’t the case and would not plausibly ever be, but that’s why these conflict-states are extremely bizarre and thus will always be extremely rare, and thus operate like “life boat” scenarios as I mention in my new article, where moral rules will change because the conditions have changed). What do we do then? If detente is truly impossible (e.g. no arrangement can be made whereby ants eat only our natural-course dead and thus no net harm results) then we’re back to total war.

>>>In that outcome-state, the only rational recourse is to genocide the opposition. That this is a “possible moral outcome” in absurdly extreme conditions will be used by genociders to justify just any genocide—by the conflation fallacy that if genocide is ever right, it is right whenever they say it is, e.g. irrational false beliefs will then form by which genocide appears to be the only rationally correct move, which is why genocide in practice always requires extremely bizarre false beliefs about people and the world. But the error there is that any pro-genocide camp is always going to be ignorant or irrational and thus wrong. Israelis don’t need to eat live, screaming Gazans to stay alive. Israelis aren’t sentient brain-eating zombies or desperate vampires who can’t survive on banked blood.

>>>This is obvious when realized in any artistic medium. “Nuking the site from orbit” is obviously the morally correct move in Aliens, but just as obviously not the morally correct move in Enemy Mine, while it is ambiguous only for want of information or explored alternatives in Phase IV and Transcendence. But apes don’t have these kinds of intolerable conflicts. All ape conflicts are fabricated by ignorance or irrationality, and thus always rationally best resolved by just being reasonable (witness: the entire plot of WarGames).

Ahem

 

Ahem...four things.

One: the Middle East (where the Bible originated) is also in Asia. 

Two: the apologists probably aren´t lying. They are just mathematically illiterate, confusing absolute numbers with percentages.

Three: Your apologia for mass immigration is ridiculous. And culturally illiterate. Tell that to the "Asians"!

Four: What´s up with the bad attitude for the past three postings or so? 

Is Christianity exploding in Asia? A critical thinking test

Walk and block

 

Overheard on the interwebs: there is a conspiracy theory that not only do viruses don´t cause disease, they don´t actually exist at all?!

Eh?

On the strange idea that viruses don´t exist 

Robot apocalypse

 

Written 12 years ago, so I suppose we still have some time to find the kill switch. Here is a somewhat disturbing argument from the essay:

>>>Searle’s argument is arguably scientifically illiterate, as a different thought experiment will demonstrate: according to the theory of relativity, a scientist with an advanced brain scanner, one that has a resolution capable of discerning even a single synaptic firing event, who flies toward a person (a person who is talking about themselves and thus clearly conscious) at near the speed of light, will see that person’s brain operate at a vastly slower speed, easily trillions of times slower than normal (as a thought experiment, there is no limit to how much the scientist can slow the observed brain, all he has to do is get nearer the speed of light). 

>>>In result, that scientist will see consciousness as a serial sequence of one single processing event after another. Any such sequence can be reproduced with a system of Turing machines.

Let´s hope the Turing machine can somehow disprove Einstein´s theories! 

Ten years to the robot apocalypse

Cosmic disassociation

 

- No, we only exist inside your mind,
muh-hah-hah!

Since the AI mentioned Idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup (and quite charitably) in a previous blog post, here is a atheist-materialist polemic against the same c/o Richard Carrier. Who considers Kastrup´s speculations to be quite insane. Good luck with this material! 

Bernardo Kastrup´s attempt to bootstrap Idealism

Betrayed by the Jew?

 

Richard Carrier argues that Judas Iscariot was a purely mythological character. Which I think is pretty obvious. For instance, Judas means "The Jew"! Or "the Judahite", if you identify with some other Jewish faction. "Judas Iscariot" could be translated as "The Jew Who Kills". Co-incidence? Many of his actions are based on Bible prophecy. And the story doesn´t make any sense anyway. Although I suppose *that* could be taken as evidence for it being true, LOL.  

Did Judas exist?

The mystery of the mosaic

 

Credit: LancerEvolution

Evidence for Roman exploration and conquest in the New World? Probably not, but the topic is fascinating. 

The first link goes to a short piece by Richard Carrier, discussing whether art from Pompeii shows pineapples, an American fruit which (probably) shouldn´t have been known to the Romans. He reaches the conclusion that it´s another delicacy altogether.

I already blogged about the content in the second link (see third link!), but here we go again. The "Roman mosaic" with the South American parrot is with outmost probability a forgery. So nah, the first Italian to reach the Americas probably was a certain Columbus, after all...  

The weird fruit mystery

Mystery of the macaw mosaic - a (not so) Roman riddle

The mystery of the macaw

The dance of god

 

Some crazy shit from Richard Carrier´s blog. Makes me wonder if Shaivism or Buddhism could be true?! The dance of God...or just samsara as per usual? 

>>>This universe is 99.99999 percent composed of lethal radiation-filled vacuum, and 99.99999 percent of all the material in the universe comprises stars and black holes on which nothing can ever live, and 99.99999 percent of all other material in the universe (all planets, moons, clouds, asteroids) is barren of life or even outright inhospitable to life. In other words, the universe we observe is extraordinarily inhospitable to life. Even what tiny inconsequential bits of it are at all hospitable are extremely inefficient at producing life—at all, but far more so intelligent life. 

>>>One way or another, a universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain life. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that’s not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life—in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the comparably microscopic speck of area that sustains life (it would literally be smaller than a single proton). 

>>>It’s exceedingly difficult to imagine a universe less conducive to life than that—indeed, that’s about as close to being completely incapable of producing life as any random universe can be expected to be, other than of course being completely incapable of producing life.

20 Questions

The moral craft

 

This was in my pipeline, but I´m not sure where it´s from, except that it´s Richard Carrier (again). Be that as it may, here goes!

>>>Ultimately, Brierley’s naivety (echoed by all the Christians he quotes and references in this same chapter making the same naive assertions) fails to grasp that he is operating from a false dichotomy throughout, one he endorses with the words of another Christian radio interviewee: “morality is something we discover like archaeologists, not something we build like architects” (p. 62). In fact it’s both. And it is terminally naive to not realize that. If you get hung up on thinking it has to be one or the other, you’ll never realize the truth: morality is just one more craft tool in the human arsenal, no different from agriculture, surgery, diplomacy, pedagogy, business administration—and indeed, even architecture. 

>>>In all of these domains of craft knowledge, we are inventing things—tools, procedures, standards and practices. Yet at the same time we are also discovering truths when we invent these things and test them out: we are discovering, by hypothesis and experiment, the most effective ways to grow food, perform surgeries, maintain a healthy international peace, teach skills, run businesses—and build bridges and offices and homes. So there is a truth we are gradually discovering in all these domains—but it’s one that is fully entailed by the causal properties of reality. 

>>>The same is true of morality, which is just a behavioral tool for social and personal contentment. Ergo, the moral system that most effectively obtains social and personal contentment is simply for that very reason the true one—as in, there is no other alternative tool we should be adopting instead, once we accept that our primary goal is social and personal contentment. And as I’ve already pointed out, factual reasons that this should indeed be our principal goal are abundant. 

>>>Which all means that even if God himself told us to adopt some other moral system, one that was less effective at optimizing social and personal contentment—one that led to dissatisfying, dysfunctional minds and societies instead—we would have no reason whatever to agree with him. Which means his claim that we ought to would simply be false. 

>>>And this is in fact why the entire Western world has abandoned every actual Biblical morality (radical pacifism is actually immoral; criminalizing blasphemy and sexuality, immoral; endorsing the entire Torah law code, immoral; subordinating women, immoral; slavery, immoral; condemning or executing gay people, immoral). Those moralities, we found, are simply dysfunctional. And we have extensively proved that empirically, acorss countless sad lessons of history.

Kolmogorov Complexity

 

This is frankly above my pay grade. Except the following sentence: "And we already saw an informed prior doesn’t get a prior for God any bigger than an atom on a flea’s ass." Dude! 

But sure, the second essay is somewhat easier than the first one. Carrier (yes, it´s him again) reaches the conclusion that the prior probability of God being real is three million to one against. Nothing an infinite being can´t handle! Or no?

Crank Bayesians: Swinburne & Unwin

Crank Bayesians: William Lane Craig edition

Axiom

 

- Shit, it´s Bigfoot! Nobody will believe us!!
- Don´t worry, human, I´m a purely naturalist entity...

Richard Carrier on the attack again. I suppose I should have held this over until "Materialist Monday" (LOL), but here goes. 

Main thesis: naturalism (materialism) is not a dogma or prior axiom, but the empirical *result* of centuries of science. So *today*, we can say with a high degree of confidence that ontological naturalism is true. Nor is it unfalsifiable. The baseline of any scientific proposition is whether or not it´s based on publicly available data (regardless of their alleged ontological status). And no such data has ever been proven to be supernatural. And yes, the naturalism of science really is ontological, not just "methodological". As I long argued myself. "But Huston, science is scientism". 

Here are the pertinent paragraphs: 

>>>Dawes then rightly argues that this means scientists and historians are really, for all their hemming and hawing, actually de facto metaphysical naturalists. They aren’t really just “methodological” naturalists; saying they are is more of a soft way to avoid having to anger their believing peers; or for believers working at secular universities to avoid getting fired for being a kook or denounced as atheists by their believing peers. 

(...)

>>>Hence, “It follows that if” their arguments “were generally accepted as sound arguments, the existence of spiritual beings would become part of our science.” Ergo, the only reason such entities haven’t become part of our science is that there aren’t sound arguments for them. 

>>>I would suggest this is a harsher thing to admit to, uncomfortable for any ardent believer, and awkward even for the secularist—for admitting it would offend too many friends and peers, and plunge them into endless arguments with what are really, honestly, cranks; an exercise most professionals would rightly prefer to avoid as a waste of their time. 

>>>So to avoid this blowup, they invent nonsense about “Oh, don’t worry, I’m just a methodological naturalist.” Just to quiet the kooks down.

Personally, I might be just a tad bit kookish myself, so make of this material what you wish. 

Naturalism is not an axiom of the sciences, but a conclusion of them

The mind is a process

 

An old Richard Carrier extravaganza from 2018. Some excerpts, not necessarily germane to the main argument:

>>>For example, we now know we are not conscious of spans of time smaller than about a twentieth of a second. Which is why movies work: we don’t see the individual cells flicker by, one after the other, because they fly past at 24 frames per second, so we only perceive a continuous moving picture. That means if you “zoom in” to a thirtieth of a second, during that whole span of time, consciousness doesn’t exist. It only exists as an event extended over time—a time span longer than 33 milliseconds. A thing that doesn’t even exist except over a span of time? That’s a process. No process, no thought. No thought, no mind.

>>>For example, for some people, we know red doesn’t look red. It looks green. And they don’t know the difference. They are qualia inverted: people with genes for both versions of color blindness (a statistical inevitability) will have their red cones wired to their green circuits, and vice versa (see Martine Nida-Rümelin, “Pseudonormal Vision: An Actual Case of Qualia Inversion?” in Philosophical Studies 82.2 (May 1996): 145-57). But because they will only ever have heard us call green things red, they don’t know they are actually experiencing a different color than we are when we both say we are seeing “red.”

The mind is a process, not an object

Our Musk predicament

 

Atheist activista Richard Carrier isn´t terribly impressed by Elon Musk. I also link to a critical Substack essay by Sam Harris (yes, *that* Sam Harris), who was apparently a friend of Musk´s until the COVID pandemic. Finally, Musk´s biographer Seth Abramson claims that the man´s IQ is in the 100 - 110 range (i.e. average Normie). 

This may or may not be relevant somehow, but personally I´m more interested in whether or not Tesla and SpaceX make "legit" products, Musk´s connections to several US administrations, and the real purpose of DOGE. 

Make of this material what ye wish.  

Lessons from Elon Musk

The trouble with Elon

Elon Musk has no intellectual achievements

That dismal Bible science

 

- Nah, I just look like Jesus,
I´m actually an Epicurean!

Atheist polemicist extraordinaire Richard Carrier argues against a peculiar chart (perhaps wrongly attributed to Hugh Ross) which "proves" that the Bible is scientific, more scientific in fact than the ancient Greeks and Romans. I´ve probably seen the chart, or a version thereof, but always associated it with the Jehovah´s Witnesses! That "blood is life" thing...

To repeat myself, Carrier disagrees and here we are!

Science Then: The Bible vs. The Greek Edition

The miracle of science

 

Richard Carrier on the war path against Muslim claims that the Quran somehow "predicted" modern science. It didn´t, of course. At best, it might have copied scraps of Graeco-Roman science known in the Middle East at the time. Most of the time, it was simply wrong. Note the claim that Epicurus got more things right than Mohammad, yet Epicurus was a (de facto) atheist who didn´t claim divine inspiration!  

Predicting modern science: Epicurus vs Muhammad

Cosmology and the Quran

Did the Quran predict the speed of light?

Behold the Theostoa

 

"I´m just the sum total of
interacting parts with no purpose!"

Richard Carrier´s take on the difference between the natural and the supernatural. Somewhat different from the standard accounts, if you read it to the end... 

Defining naturalism: the definitive account

Persuasion and learning

 

A hard-hitting polemic against (mostly fundamentalist) Christianity by Richard Carrier. Think theodicy, morality, slavery, and so on. Even references YouTube personality Matt Dillahunty. 

What Carrier is saying struck me some time ago: since most modern Western Christians (including theologically conservative ones) agree with the atheists that God must be omnibenevolent if he is "all-good", they can´t really win the argument. It´s not hard for an atheist to demonstrate that the Biblical God *isn´t* omnibenevolent. Why believe in such a god, then?

It might be harder to use this rhetorical strategy against very traditionalist Christian groups, or against Muslims or Hindus, who presumably don´t believe that God´s "all-goodness" entails 100% constant benevolence. If they believe in an "all-good" god at all. Note, btw, that the only person in the Bible who claims that all-good means omnibenevolent is Satan! (When he tempts Jesus in the desert.) 

But in a modern world in which nobody wants to be a martyr, and everyone prefers the prosperity gospel to righteous suffering, the Carrier-Dillahunty strategy presumably works very well indeed!      

A simple thought experiment

Idealist from the Paleozoic?

 

Richard Carrier on the war path...again! This time against an unrepentant Idealist philosopher, Bernardo Kastrup. Carrier defends physicalism. That he considers Idealism to be more or less cray-cray is obvious from the following paragraph: 

>>>There is a reason 52% of all philosophers are physicalists and that this becomes 68% of all philosophers when you exclude delusional theists. But Idealism is still the least likely alternative. There are theisms more likely; and those are pretty damn unlikely. 

>>>Yet nontheist alternatives do even better still—nonetheist nonnaturalisms (like Taoism) outperform theism; and nonphysicalist naturalisms (like emergent qualia dualism) outperform those. So Idealism is right up there with “Faerie Abductions” or “Lizard People Secretly Rule the Earth.”

Still, it´s an interesting essay, to be sure.  

Bernardo Kastrup´s attempt to bootstrap idealism 

Weird and bizarre

 

If evolution is true, why are there still tuataras?

Richard Carrier´s criticism of sociobiology a.k.a. evolutionary psychology. 

Note the connections he makes to the replication crisis in science, which seems to affect the field of psychology in particular. This fact alone may invalidate most of "EvoPsych", since many of the phenomena it´s trying to explain might not even exist! 

The author also points out that most psychological tests are made on US college students, despite the fact that they (surprise) aren´t representative of the world population, being raised in a society that´s "WEIRD" (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic). In fact, college students today are obviously not very representative of American society either. (Jokingly, we could say that they are more queer than weird.) 

I was also surprised to learn that teddy bears are considered female-gendered toys in the US. Always saw them as unisex or even male-gendered...       

is 90% of all EvoPsych false?

Why are there still monkeys?

 

Krishna and Darwin dancing with
 a chimpanzee (an ape, I know)

Just have to quote this from Richard Carrier´s essay "Is 90% of all EvoPsych false?" (published at his blog in 2015). This is...hysterical! 

>>>Worse, this paper, in attempting to defend EvoPsych, actually cites the pseudoscientific “gendered toys” papers as if these were an example of good science, when in fact they are precisely the kind of pseudoscience critics are attacking as inane.

>>>In Gerianne Alexander & Melissa Hines, “Sex Differences in Response to Children’s Toys in Nonhuman Primates,” Evolution & Human Behavior 23.6 (1 November 2002) and Janice Hassett et al., “Sex Differences in Rhesus Monkey Toy Preferences Parallel Those of Children,” Hormones & Behavior 54.3 (August 2008), they claimed even monkeys showed the same sex difference in toy choice as 21st century American children: girls play with Dolls, Cooking Pots, and Teddy Bears, boys play with Trucks, Police Cars, and Balls. In the first study, more specifically: a ball, a police car, a soft doll, a cooking pot, a picture book and a stuffed dog (in the second study, wheeled toys and plush toys)—not one of which would be meaningful to a monkey, of any gender. 

>>>Never mind that monkeys don’t know what trucks and cars and dolls and pots are or do, that trucks and cars and cooking pots didn’t exist in the ancient environment we evolved in, that human boys play with dolls as often as girls (I never went anywhere without my G.I. Joe, whom I also dressed; today, kids play with Action Figures, as did I), and that the Teddy Bear was originally a boy’s toy. Culture is seriously confounding here, and the thesis illogical. 

>>>It is impossible that monkeys evolved to have a cognitive preference for cooking pots or police cars. To even presume so is pseudoscience. (And why are we studying monkeys, our most distant primate ancestors, when we actually have sex-difference studies of tool use and play in our much closer cousins the Chimpanzees? Oh, right, because those results don´t support the sexist assumptions of these researches…though, of course, humans still aren’t Chimpanzees, either.)

Those were some damn smart monkeys, for sure! :D