Parable of the Big G

There once was a religion called Esotericism of the Big G which claimed that God was loving and merciful (on account of the fact that we exist, which is pretty awesome) and wants us all to reach eternal salvation. Knowing that humans are a stiff necked bunch of idiots, G People claimed that God wanted to make salvation attainable by all, and so all a person needs to do to get salvation is to know and "believe in" the 50th decimal place of Big G, the gravitational constant. After all, Big G is accessible to all and pervades the whole known universe. Unfortunately, as you know, measuring the gravitational constant to 50 decimal places is currently impossible - the best we can do is about 6 or maybe 7. Esoterics of the Big G said, though, that once we had the ability to measure G to this accuracy but the technology was taken from us by God because a few rogue loop quantum gravity theorists suggested that Big G was not equal at all size scales, and this angered God so much that as punishment we were struck ignorant. Why there would be any such rogue theorists in a time when The Truth about the universe was probably known was called a mystery and generally chalked up to the cantankerous trouble making spirit of Mankind.

This did not, however, solve the problem of what to believe the 50th Decimal of Big G was. Luckily, hundreds of Schools of the Big G arose with mechanisms and arguments and doctrine speaking to this value. Some schools thought that God must definitely use SI units (because they are standard and "elegant") and attempted to find G by long meditation and fasting, which was also the technique of other groups who were sure that God measured Big G in parsecs and solar masses on account of the fact that He is a cosmic being. Some groups agreed with both of these groups, but felt it should be in base 3, rather than base 10, because God, being a triune being who probably doesn't have hands, would count that way. Some groups pointed out that since there were only 10 (or 3 or 8 or 16) possible values of the Holy Digit and one must be right, this proved the Mercy of God and the Truth of The Esotericism of Big G. Others claimed to have read the digit out of their hearts in a process of deep introspection, but they usually didn't agree on what it was. Everyone took all the argument, noise and commotion as evidence that they were on the right track, however - only idiots would argue over something that wasn't true.

And some people thought that if God's Plan was to save everyone out of Love, then asking them about the value of the 50th Decimal of G is a pretty stupid way to do it because He constructed people without the apparatus to know it, and since the God of Big G cannot be stupid, the Esotericism seemed quite unlikely. These people were also heartened by the fact that modern physical theories indicated that G did not have a 50th decimal point in any meaningful way, that gravitation was an emergent phenomenon of particle physics and so its standard deviation made the idea of a 50th decimal value non-meaningful.

This is interesting

From Atheist to Catholic ‘Unshakable’ Rationalist Blogged Her Way Into the Church

Was there ever an aha moment that finally made you abandon atheism?

Several, but one in particular actually shocked me.

I asked myself two questions: What is information? And: Can information ever come from a non-intelligent source?

It was a shocking moment for me because I had to confront the fact that DNA is information. If I remained an atheist, I would have to believe that all the intricate, detailed, complex information contained in DNA comes out of nowhere and nothing.

But I also knew that idea did not make sense. After all, I don’t look at billboards — which contain much simpler information than DNA — and think that wind and erosion created them. That wouldn’t be rational. Suddenly, I found that I was a very discomfited atheist.

How can people get this so wrong? In reality the vast majority of complex, information bearing systems are of natural rather than designed origin. The billboard is the exception to the rule: consciousnesses actually are very amateurish at creating things compared to natural, iterative processes (and a very long time). The whole notion that information derives from minds exclusively is completely backwards and readily explicable as a psychological bias in humans towards explaining things in human terms.

The Pope Gets It

"The first and greatest priority is God himself, that God who is too easily pushed to the edges of our lives, focused on "doing," especially through "techno-science," and on "enjoyment-consumption." That God is even expressly negated by an evolutionist "metaphysics" that reduces everything to nature, to matter-energy, to chance (random mutations) and to necessity (natural selection), or more often is said to be unknowable according to the principle that "latet omne verum," all truth is hidden, as a result of the restriction of the horizons of our reason to that which can be experienced and measured, according to the view now prevalent. That God, finally, who has been proclaimed "dead," with the assertion of nihilism and the resulting collapse of all certainty."

(as explicated by Camillo Ruini here).

Of course I believe that it is the morally and personally courageous thing to do to admit that "(nearly) all truth is hidden" and that meaning is a slippery fish indeed in the universe we live in. I believe real moral courage lies in admitting our uncertainty about even morality, our own nature, the nature of the universe, and the nature of meaning.

Is the Immaterial immaterial?

It occurs to me (perhaps to you also) that we're skipping the question of material reality and immaterial reality. If we don't understand or address what are our presuppositions about the immaterial world, hashing out the mind question won't get us far. Some questions to discuss might be:
(1) What distinguishes material from non-material?

(2) Could anything be wholly immaterial?

Subjects to include in the discussion should include:

(a) The uncaused-cause
(b) ordinary matter
(c) Light
(d) Energy
(e) Gravitational Force
(f) Dark Matter
(g) Dark energy
(h) Abstractions

I think if we are to consider ourselves future Doctors of the Philosophy of Physics, we might as well give this a shot.

What Is a Mind?

Short version: mind is a computational phenomenon subserved by a material object with properties allowing computations to be performed.

Long Version:

I cannot fully specify what a mind is, since it has a subjective component. However, I can say with confidence that nothing else in the cosmos has ever been scientifically observed which we would call a "mind" which does not have a material substrate which is capable of computation. In other words, the most we can say about mind is that it appears, in every credibly observed case, to require a material substrate with certain properties. Similarly, no example of an object without these properties has ever been observed to have a mind. Healthy, living brains appear to have minds. Rocks or the void of space do not.

What are these properties? The substrates of mind always at least have structure which represents a transformation of some "input" condition into an "output" condition. This is not sufficient for mind, but appears to be necessary. Transistors, for instance, meet this property, since they represent their input as an output, but so far transistors do not subserve anything we recognize as a mind. Neurons, however, also have this property - they convert the state of their dendrites into a temporally precise output voltage spike - and neurons, arranged together in different forms, appear to be correlated with the phenomenon of mind. Few neurons, put together simply, produce simple minds or mind-like things. C. elegans, an organism with around 300 neurons, is capable of responding semi-intelligently to stimuli in a way which might charitably be associated with a mind. Dogs, whose brains are orders of magnitude more complex in both organization and the essential properties of their neurons, are capable of a wide range of behaviors and appear to maintain a strong internal representation of themselves. Chimpanzees, whose brains resemble our own except with much smaller frontal areas, have a variety of frankly uncanny similarities to humans.

The correlation between mind and brain is not merely a static property of either object. Brain damage selectively damages parts of the mind corresponding to its location in the brain. Blind-sight, a condition resulting from the destruction of the visual cortex, destroys the ability to consciously see while leaving the ability to plan visuo-motor actions and answer simple questions about a visual scene intact. Brain damage can selectively remove the ability to see motion, detect meaning of facial expressions, to speak (but not to write), to write (but not to speak), to recognize objects, to name objects, to draw objects, to move particular parts of the body, or to think particular kinds of thoughts. Drugs which change the dynamics of neural networks cause changes in the state of the hosted mind from simple feelings of dread or euphoria to utterly disassociated states, to vivid and elaborate hallucinations. The destruction of a brain always results in the death, as far as scientific observation is concerned, of the mind associated with that brain.

Furthermore, changes in the mind are reflected in changes in the brain. Concentration or meditation produces changes in the oscillatory character of brain waves. Stimuli presented to experimental animals produces clear "associated activity" in the relevant brain areas. Emotional states, recognition of objects, mathematical reasoning -- all of these things produce effects which are predictable and measurable in the living brain.

Short version: mind is a computational phenomenon subserved by a material object with properties allowing computations to be performed.

Relevance: Minds are very specific kinds of things made out of very specific arrangements of material objects which encode lots of information. There is no particular reason to associate the "uncaused cause" with this kind of phenomenon. Mind is no more or less noteworthy objectively than the marine ecosystem or the concept of "all possible games of Go". There are many complex phenomenon on earth - what makes mind a uniquely reasonable one to associate with the "enabling condition of existence?"

I, and neuroscience at large, hypothesizes that all mind needs to exist is the right material substrate in the right state. This is a simple and elegant theory in that it assumes nothing more than the scant laws of physics. We need no new phenomenology to explain mind. In order for us to make progress, Charles needs to demonstrate a credible reason to hypothesize a non-material component to mind or to anything at all.

Possible to Converge on a definition?

What is a mind? Go.

Let me summarize...

Vincent,
First let me applaud your conciseness. Now I will pare down your words until they are comically straw-like so I may blow them away...

Ahem.

Logic of paragraph 1:
Arguing about something makes it almost certainly untrue.

Logic of paragraph 2&3:
People disagree about what is Christianity; they can't all be right; probably none of them are right.

pp4:
I am either too smart or too dumb for religion.

pp5:
I do actually believe in the concept of Justice (of some kind) as evidenced here. Otherwise I would have no interest in having Charles perform an off-topic exercise, behind which is no meaning to us, as neither of us has ever seriously argued that we believe in those religions or wish to do so. A better exercise would have been to have Charles attempt to argue from my position.

pp6:
I am so dull or stubborn (or both?) that my best argument for Christianity can be applied to any religion and can have no particular evidence or falsifiability.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Vincent, Imagine that we were arguing about the existence of 'dark matter'. Imagine that you didn't think that it was there and I did. (I'm not actually convinced... but that is beside the point) What arguments would you give for its existence? You would probably go the ol' 'Kepler's Law' route. Kepler's Law works for planets, why not for Galaxies? Now that is a good question! One can now argue that it must work for Galaxies, and one can argue that it need not. (or that it need not be the whole picture) But the two can have an argument because they are talking about the same thing and they have found the point of divergence. In my hypothesis, I presumed you to be a reasonable person capable of this kind of discussion. I assumed that you know the Bible pretty well from years of instruction. That you've had experience with the Church. I know that if all of these things are true, that it is a sad state of affairs if the best you can say is " the best argument for Christianity is if God magically zaps you with the knowledge of its truthfulness" That might be the way that some unsophisticated person ends the argument of Christianity, but that statement itself is no argument. At this point bringing up other religions or doctrinal squabbles within Christianity are red herrings. I am asking you, JVT, what you think the best argument for Christianity might be.

Charles suggested in the comments that I construct my best argument for Christianity as a kind of rhetorical exercise. The fact that the question of Christianity's veracity is something we can reasonably discuss is great evidence against it when leaned against its own claims. As I have stated before, the primary issues I have with Christianity lay on the Ignorance/Knowledge axis rather than the Sin/Salvation axis (an axis, I should point out, we cannot even begin to discuss unless we establish the Ignorance/Knowledge axis - what good is saying "I am sinful and in need of Salvation" if we cannot put our finger out what those words really mean?).

It is the way that Christianity tries to sweep Ignorance/Knowledge under the existential rug which leaves me unable to take it seriously. Of course, the Church has addressed some of these Ignorance/Knowledge questions (quite voluminously, in fact) but to no satisfactory temporal conclusion - starting from immediately after the death of Jesus until this very day, Christendom has never once had a unified conception of his nature, the Church, Sin, Death, Judgement, Salvation, morality, practicality, eschatology, etc. This is most recently and spectacularly demonstrated by the Protestant Reformation and religious movements like Mormonism, New Age, the Doukabours, Bahai and countless others. But Christendom's Cacophony is not new - the Heresy's of the early church are just as numerous and mystifying - Sabellianism, Docetism, Monophysitism, Adoptionism, Nestorianism, Apollinarianism, Arianism, Donatism, Pelagianism, Gnosticism, Manicheanism and others. Not even the Gospels present an entirely consistent or unified view of the nature of Christ and his mission and its relation to our nature and duty, even if we restrict our attention to those canonized ones - if we expand our attention to Gospels not included in the Bible, we see at least that from very, very early on the nature of Christ was confused and the subject to much debate. Conflicts about the nature of Jesus, God, his mission, the Church, have caused a lot of strife, death, and certainly damaged the credibility of the supposed mission of the Church (whatever it might be) throughout the ages. That Christ said very little of these many issues, never said to an Apostle "grab a pen and write what I am about to say about the Trinity down because it will save us a lot of trouble in the future" is extremely bizarre. You would have to be a superhuman to make sense of all of the arguments about Christianity and Jesus did very little to resolve the issue despite the fact that it was (and is) well within his power to do so.

And there is no reason to stop at Christianity - the "People of the Book" cannot even agree on the nature of God the Father and his desires about the world - a very strange state of affairs for a group of people whom routinely claim to speak to God and hear Him speak to them.

This brings me to a point - I am not here arguing against Christianity per se - I am here arguing against a mode of thinking which is credulous enough to believe Christianity and a thousand other things. Chesterton said that when you believe in nothing you will believe in anything, and that may be true of the unprincipled non-believer. I am not that person, however. I believe that the universe has a consistent form, or that we may as well at least assume it does, and that we can know it at least partly, and at great effort, and that effort has revealed a Universe of great beauty and simplicity. One in which there is as little room for Christianity as there is for Hinduism or Islam or Mormonism.

I'd be willing to engage in a defense of Christianity as a kind of lark, but only if Charles will agree to defend Hinduism, a beautiful and highly credible (at least by non-rational standards) religious tradition, or Buddhism or Bahai or Mormonism or Thor Worship.

For the record, the only argument I can imagine being a good one for Christianity in the context of my worldview is "I have received Divine Revelation about the nature of myself and the world and God which informs me directly that the claims made by the Bible and the Church are true." Even the Chruch, with its emphasis on faith and revelation, basically asserts in the end that this is the only real way for a person to know that Christianity is true.

Put words in my mouth.

I would like to propose an experiment:

Hypothesis: You and I are both reasonable people; We are both decently informed. We come to the table with different predispositions and we come to different conclusions about reality. Our differences at times seem vast; at other times, minute. If we start with the same info, but reach different conclusions we may be able to identify specific parts of the information that we interpret differently. This might give us something fruitful to discuss.

Experiment: Thus, I propose that you, JVT, seriously make the best argument that you think I (or anyone) could possibly make for Christianity.

what do you think?

Relevant to Our Interests: Bart Ehrman on Fresh Air

Biblical Scholar and UNC Professor Bart Erhman was on Fresh Air last night discussing his new book: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). The whole interview is very interesting, and while it is clear that Erham takes a secular perspective on the Gospel, he can hardly be said to be sniping or have a bone to pick. Erhman was a devout Evangelical Christian and biblical fundamentalist before his academic study of the Bible led him to abandon that belief and other factors in his life eventually led him to agnosticism. Particularly relevant to us here is the section of the interview in which he describes his unfounded fears that abandoning religion would lead him into a life of meaningless indulgence and vice. It did not.

This is relevant to my point of view because I cannot imagine a loving God creating a system in which particular beliefs are needed to avoid damnation and also in which a rational, faithful and diligent scholar could be led astray by intellectual honesty, curiousity, and scholarship. Obviously Erham could be wrong in his conclusions - that is besides the point. He reached them in good faith. That he would be punished for that good faith seems inconsistent with the described structure of Christianity. The combination of this internal inconsistency and the simplicity and power of a materialist worldview to describe what I see around me (and the many confusing, mysterious and odd results of trying to describe the cosmos in Christian terms), Christianity seems like a poor hypothesis to base my life around.

Link to the show.