Materialist Monday

 

If you like your atheism raw, here is Carrier´s attack on the rather notorious Old Testament prophet Ezekiel...

Prophecy and History: Some Pointers

A confession

 

Credit: Manish Prabhuni

From Carrier´s previously linked article. This was funny. Hear hear, ye "agnostic" atheists!  

>>>But this does go both ways. An atheist can try to believe nothing, to “suspend belief” in everything, but that’s actually impossible in practice—you have to make decisions, and your every decision hinges on assuming some thing is true that you were pretending five minutes ago you were “suspending” belief in. So atheists can be stupid too. It’s a human folly, not a distinctly supernaturalist one.

Stupid games

 

Most improbable explanation? 

Richard Carrier on the war path again. Well, I disagree. But good luck with this material! 

Christians vs atheists: What are we actually arguing about?

Full spectrum bullshit?

 

Credit: Skalle-Per Hedenhös (sic)

Richard Carrier on the attack...again. An atheist-materialist take on consciousness, et cetera. 

Note the claim that some robots and smart cars may be (somewhat) conscious. Insects, on the other hand, aren´t conscious. Neither are octopi. Fish probably aren´t either: "They aren´t really alive, they´re just less dead". And if you´re not conscious, you can´t really feel anything either. So ants don´t feel anything when we dispose of them them using poison. The tuna didn´t feel anything when it was hooked and killed. Pigs do feel and experience things, but since they aren´t self-aware, their lives have no actual value to them. Like pigs to the slaughter! Human babies are more advanced than pigs (this is a veiled polemic against Peter Singer, methinks).

The "existential" consequences of the above are...interesting. So entire *civilizations* can be created simply on the basis of subconscious computation by non-sentient life-forms? I´m thinking of social insects such as ants, termites and honeybees. Where does that leave us in a wholly materialist universe? Note also that robots could (presumably) be made fully self-conscious. Finally, note that consciousness requires "modeling", which seems to imply that consciousness can only ever be "indirectly realist". Are ants direct realists?

OK, here is the link: 

Distinguishing Awareness, Intelligence and Consciousness 

The Middle Kingdom

 

Is there *some* hope, after all? I just rediscovered these blog posts from 2021.

A sea of errors

The Roman industrial revolution

Curiosity killed Schrödinger´s cat

 

Why haven´t we been told this before? Seriously.

Is God Needed to Collapse the Wave Function?

Geezus was a myth, I say

 

Credit: Planet Peterson/YouTube

An intemperate attack by Richard Carrier on some dude. In case anybody is still interested in the Mythicist scene.

Ken Dark on the historicity of Jesus

See also here:

Lower than the angels

The Galilee of Nations

 

Some ultra-skeptical atheists and other critics of Christianity have long claimed that Nazareth didn´t even exist at the time of Jesus. However, recent archeological excavations there and elsewhere in Galilee confirm that it did indeed exist. Not only that. Nazareth - while small - was relatively prosperous for its day. And it was only a two hour walk from a "real" town, Sepphoris. Richard Carrier (himself an atheist) has the receipts. 

Since Carrier is a mythicist, he doesn´t believe that Jesus hailed from Nazareth. Indeed, Jesus didn´t hail from anywhere! Carrier believes that Jesus was originally placed at Capernaum by Christian writers making up his story. However, the supposed prophecy that the Messiah will be called "Nazarene" (or some such term) was later interpreted as a reference to Nazareth being his home town (an exegesis which is impossible on various grammatical grounds).  

Interesting, I suppose. 

The Historicity of Nazareth

Collapsing Schrödinger

 

Richard Carrier on Schrödinger´s Cat and the collapse of the wave function. Interesting. It´s from the commentary section to his essay about God and information, which I linked to previously (and now link to again). 

>>>Sort of? There are a lot of assumptions in there. My answer could only apply to some specific examples of things some people say about that, not all. And you were a bit vague about exactly what you are talking about.

>>>But I think what you mean to ask is regarding the popular lore that, like Bumblebees Can’t Fly, quantum events require a mind “to observe them” to collapse them, therefore God must exist to collapse the wave function before humans did. That’s two confusions in one.

>>>First, humans can collapse a wave function into the past. People who think this popcorn nonsense don’t realize physics at that scale is time invariant, and that block theory is the standard physics of time now. So even if you needed a “mental” observer to collapse all wave functions, we could be that observer. It doesn’t matter that the function collapses in both time directions at once. Which means, yes, QM entails we could have caused the Big Bang in this obscure sense.

>>>But more relevant to your question, the idea that minds are needed at all is popcorn physics. In actual physics anything that disturbs a quantum state is an observer—a stick, a star, an atom. “Observer” is just figurative for “anything that produces an observation,” which need never be a mind.

>>>Consider the example of Schrödinger’s Cat. That was an example Schrödinger invented to make fun of people adopting this popcorn view, yet ironically—turning him in his grave—it now keeps getting used to sell the popcorn view he was making fun of, and even attributes it to him, when he was it’s most infamous opponent.

>>>In that experiment, a cat is in a box, with a detector that breaks a vial of cyanide when the atomic nucleus of a nearby unstable atom decays. The “joke” is that if you need an “observer” then the whole cat is somehow both alive and dead until you open the box. Schrödinger’s point was that this is stupid and therefore obviously false.

>>>He was right.

>>>First, the cat is an observer. It has a mind. It knows whether it’s dead or alive. So we don’t have to open the box for “its” wave function to collapse.

>>>But more importantly, per Schrödinger’s point: the detector of the atomic decay is also an observer. By sticking that object in the box, you have poked a stick into the quantum system that itself will collapse it. So the cat doesn’t even have to be in the box. There is no state of the box being simultaneously full of cyanide or not. Because the detector is collapsing the wave function all the time just by being there.

>>>In fact, the walls of the box, the air in the box. It’s all a bunch of sticks poking the radioisotope in the eye. They are all observers.

>>>To get an actual state of some volume being “both” cyanide and not cyanide, you would need to create something like a Bose-Einstein state of the transition phase of Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Carbon into molecular cyanide, where it’s somewhere between free nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen and molecularly bound HCN (cyanide). That is so exceedingly difficult to do it may even be impossible. But there are simpler systems we can do it with. It’s just that you have to keep the BE glob perfectly balanced so nothing, absolutely nothing, shakes or comes into contact with it, because almost any interaction with it collapses the state.

>>>This is what it means to say that anything is an observer. “Observer” here does not mean “mind.” It means any physical interaction with the balanced state large enough to knock the state off balance and thus into some more definite state. It’s just that in experimental physics, it’s usually humans poking the sticks in, hence “observer” stuck as the rubric, even though it doesn’t mean what ordinary people mean by that word.

>>>But when no minds existed, plenty of sticks did. So quantum collapse routinely happened all over the place. Indeed, the Big Bang may itself be the first example of that happening, a balanced quantum state too unstable to stick around collapsed under its own weight and exploded. It was its own stick.

Is God needed for "laws" and "information"?

Bumblebee information

 

The AI´s view of a "an argumentative bumblebee"

Richard Carrier is angry at something. Again. Well, I´m not convinced. This time either. Consciousness is entirely physical (argues Carrier) and something really can come out of nothing without a cause. Here is a paragraph:

>>>You can see this with picking up and rolling ever larger dice. The larger the die, the more bits of information it can spontaneously create (without intelligent intervention). Each die, unrolled, contains all possible information states for that die; and twenty-sided dice have more informational states than six-sided dice. Hence any randomizer, like a die, already contains all the information it would take to describe all of its possible states. When I roll that die, one state among them is selected, and so we say we now have actual information. But it was not created intelligently. To the contrary, it was created randomly. 

>>>So an infinitely sided die (like an unbounded nothing-state could be) starts with infinite potential information, and thus the first Big Bang (if ever there was a “first” one) could contain any amount of randomly realized information. No intelligence is required for that because no intelligent selection of all possible states is being made. The selection is necessarily random and thus by definition not intelligent.

An "unbounded nothing-state" would be an "infinitely sided die". Ooookay. Yeah, if the unbounded nothing-state is the One of Plotinus, maybe. Or the Tao. Not otherwise. 

And that´s that.  

Is God needed for "information" and "laws"?

Unidentified Flapping Objects

 

Some skeptical articles on UFO observations penned by Richard Carrier. I linked to the second one before, but not to the first one. 

I saw a UFO

UFOs are not that remarkable

How (not) to use Pseudo-AI

 

- Rest in peace, Brother ChatGPT,
may you reach nirvana!

Is literally *everything* I ever published on this blog c/o ChatGPT or Gemini just bollocks? Richard Carrier thinks so. Here is his latest blistering attack on "AI" chatbots. 

How to use Pseudo-AI

Pseudo-rationality indeed

 

Cornucopian hedonistic pseudo-feminist atheist Richard Carrier goes to Nashville to debate "Christian Nationalists". May or may not be interesting. Note Carrier´s strange idealism: conservatives are conservative because they literally can´t think straight. Nah, that´s not the reason. And why are cornucopian hedonistic pseudo-feminist atheists the way they are, I wonder? 

How Pseudo-Rationality Grounds Conservative Worldviews

If even hobbits could build advanced civilization, so could women

Potential infinities

OK, this stuff made my head spin. I know Carrier is an atheist-materialist, but I´m still tempted to say: Amen! Therefore God. 

How all math is real

The real AI apocalypse

 

This funny picture from a
previous post comes in handy here!

The last warning about the AI hype and its attendant bubble? TL/DR: Not funny. At all. I´m almost tempted to ask the AI to comment this!  

AI is Garbage and a Bubble (Please Learn This)

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