The demise of mundane SF
I posted yesterday on Suvudu about how mundane SF should be declared dead so we can get on with more important shit. I also take on atheists, as well as Kurzweil’s Singularity acolytes, so there’s something to piss off everyone. Have at it, folks.
August 23rd, 2009 at 4:46 pm
You do understand that’s an offensively naive understanding of atheism? That while there are atheists that naive, that by in large we come from a more epistemologically sophisticated place than the one that implies? ‘Cause really.
August 24th, 2009 at 8:59 am
‘Cause really what? I’m not following you, JMR. If it’s not YOUR viewpoint, then you can consider yourself excluded from my labeling.
Tell you what: instead of telling me how offended you are, tell me what you consider to be the difference between atheism and agnosticism–how *you* define the terms. Perhaps we’ll find less distance between our actual viewpoints than you seem to think. Or maybe you’ll find *I’m* not as epistemologically unsophisticated in my classifications as you might surmise.
August 24th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Hi David, let me try and explain without complete using up my lunch break. I’m not all that offended, but I am feeling my personal atheist consciousness more than I have in quite some time.
Let me just quote the part in question so I can have it right in front of me:
Like atheists—who look at the irrational certainty of believers and then commit the same error by saying that something could not, absolutely does NOT exist,
You indicate I could consider myself excluded from your labeling if I do not agree with your usage. I don’t think that’s actually supported by your text. You do not say “Like _those_ atheists” in your remarks, your phrasing supports your statement as a characterization of atheists in the generic. You should be careful with that, please. Atheists believe a lot of different things, and later in this comment I’m going to defend my particular flavor which I believe is the normal argument of atheism. Consider in the first case looking to people who accept the label of atheism to find a meaningful understanding of it. On the other hand, there are plenty of agnostics I would claim as atheists, so I’m not immune to an imperial urge.
My strain of atheism, which I believe is dominant in the atheist community at large applies to the god question the same rules of evidence I apply to other questions about the world: is there a reason to believe this claim? I assert there is no reason to believe any extant claim regarding divine entities. They are not well-evidenced, they are not explanatory. I hold that this argument is substantially correct for the knowledge base possessed by the global civilization of which I’m a part. I hold that there are no divine entities until there is some cause to believe in them. I’m not expecting cause to believe in them, but if something shifts the grounds of the argument then something shifts the grounds of the argument.
Skeptical empiricism ultimately requires us to be cautious about all knowledge, but to function we also need to hold beliefs about the state of the world. It is entirely proper to hold beliefs on questions that cannot be perfectly resolved on the basis of the preponderance of the evidence (or some other test appropriate to the stakes and ability to test) so long as one remains cognizant that all knowledge is subject to contingency and provisionality. (Exceptions depending on your exact philosophical position include: existence of a self, truth values in certain formal systems [which are then difficult to properly link to the empirical world] and experiential qualia.)
Usually when accusations of rigid certainty are leveled against atheists, folks are talking about the so-called ‘New Atheists’ with their strong public argumentation against supernaturalist positions in religion. So far as I know, none of the public front of New Atheism consists of ‘strong atheism’ merely contingent atheism that argues that under the present knowledge of our civilization it is correct for reasonable people to adopt the contigent and provisional belief that there are no divine entities.
Arguments between ‘old’ atheists and ‘New Atheists’ about this mostly relate to differences over how strong the combatants believe the arguments for atheism are, and over how obligated to accept the reasoned conclusions of provisional and contigent arguments other people should be. (Nobody in my line of sight is proposing coercion, let’s be clear. We’re talking about ‘obligated’ in the same sense we’d hope someone is ‘obligated’ to adjust a political position when pwned on the merits.)
There just aren’t a whole lot of atheists I’m aware of who believe in holding irrational certainty about the divine entities question. Most of us are pretty shaded on making excessive unsupported claims, but we do believe, and pretty reasonably, that it seems they are counter-indicated by the world in which we live. Not disproven, but I can’t disprove that I have a folding chair in my walk-in closet. I just recall never having owned one.
I’m sorry that this is so rambling and that I haven’t narrowly addressed the atheist/agnostic issue. Suffice it so say there are people with extraordinarily similar outlooks claiming one label or the other, but I’d be interested in seeing atheists in the public debate who profess an irrational and absolutist understanding of the question.
August 25th, 2009 at 9:44 am
hi Jason- thanks for taking the time to reply in such detail, and that is helpful.
I realize that–like any label–“atheism” can cover a lot of ground. Wikipedia says, for example, that “Atheism can be either the rejection of theism, or the position that deities do not exist.” I’m obviously talking about the latter here, and the reason why I’ll probably continue to use “atheism” as a shorthand for that is twofold:
–first, there’s no other term for it. Once you define “agnosticism” as the postulate that the truth of a given set of a metaphysical assertions is unknown (though not necessarily unknowable), one needs a word to define those who hold as an article of faith/belief that deities/such metaphysical constructs don’t exist. I submit the best word is atheism, regardless of what the New Atheists would like to claim. And I’d certainly be willing to amend my position to say “the more extreme types of atheism”, were it not for . . .
–second, those influential scientists who believe that a scientific view is incompatible with any and all belief in God, and who also go further espouse the very brand of atheism which you’re claiming is such a ridiculed, naive, oversimplified, fringe variety of atheism. It’s an overreaction on their part to the ID crowd, I suppose, but it’s still an overreaction . . and one that I personally believe to be just as dangerous as any kind of fundamentalism. To quote Stuart Hameroff (a co-theorist of Penrose) re his experience at a conference at the Salk Institute in 06:
” . . ..Other speakers and attendees were predominantly atheists, and harshly critical of the notion of spirituality. They included Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Patricia Churchland, Steven Weinberg (the least venal), Neil deGrasse Tyson and others who collectively vilified creationists and religious warriors. But the speakers also ragged on the notion of any purpose or meaning to existence, heaped ridicule on the very possibility of a God-like entity (and those who believed in such an entity), declared that scientists and philosophers should set society’s moral and ethical standards, and called for a billion dollar public relations campaign to convince the public God does not exist.”
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/skunk.htm
In fact, I’m not even that sure how far off from that your own views that is: I flat-out disagree, for example, with your assertion that theist claims are “counter-indicated by the world we live in” by definition. The world’s a pretty strange place, and I don’t think we understand the merest fraction of it yet. Arguably it’s a lot less well understood than the contents of your closet. Agnosticism is the only sensible option imho.
August 25th, 2009 at 10:43 am
Not being an adherent of compatibilism is not the same thing as being an article-of-faith atheist. If you’re on a jury and you’re arguing that you’ve met the test for guilt in whatever sort of process is involved, it does not require denying the possibility that reality might not conform to that truth value (guilt in whatever whatever) to argue that the evidence is sufficient that your fellow jurors should be persuaded to adopt the position that guilt is _indicated_ (to whatever strength is being tested in that legal process).
I’d love to see you actually pointing to some folks who take the position you’d started out sketching. I’m sure they are out there. I think you won’t find many of them in influential positions. Let’s take Bill Maher off the table right off, ’cause I just don’t trust him to know what he’s talking about.
It is perfectly fine that you aren’t persuaded to my flavor of atheism. I think the world combined with the best mechanisms we have for understanding it makes a reasonable persuasive case, but folks will see that differently.
I think it is easier for folks to dismiss these vocal atheism advocates if you believe they’ve abandoned the process of reason and become a faith-based religion themselves. However, I still don’t see it as indicated. It is possible to hold beliefs on the basis of _indication_ and not perfect knowledge. The basis of science is that we have no access to perfect knowledge after all!
That I believe that I, and the majority of the vocal atheist advocates are both A) right and B) not faith-based does not mean that we cannot be wrong. There might be some manner of deity. I just don’t think there is _cause_ to believe, and that in the absence of a cause to believe (and with the universe doing a reasonable job of looking non-designed) the default value should be to disbelieve pending some evidence to the contrary. Much as I feel about any given hypothetical object/proposition.
Please, do go and cite the existence of some folks in the “saying that something could not, absolutely does NOT exist” category. I think that’s the crux here. If you want to propose a belief for people that they do not profess you have to do the work of demonstrating that the belief is a necessary result/cause of what they do profess.
August 25th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Actually, I think Maher says it quite well:
“I’m not an atheist, though, because the belief that there is no God only mirrors the certitude of religion. . . I’m saying that doubt is the only appropriate response for human beings.”
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6010432.ece
As to your question, re-read the Hameroff quote. Look at the Wikipedia definition. Why is Wikipedia listing it as one of the two main ways to define atheism if it’s such a fringe viewpoint?
Also, back to my original question: how do you define agnosticism vs. atheism?
August 25th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I am not arguing that “the position that deities do not exist” is a fringe viewpoint within atheism. I am arguing that people, including myself, who hold that view do so within an understanding of the limits of knowledge that holds all knowledge imperfect, contingent, and provisional upon what evidence we have when we make the judgment. There is plenty of space between “current evidence militates against the god hypothesis, and should be persuasive” and “there are no deities, nor any possibility of deities, and this is an accessible a priori truth without contingency or potential for revision.”
How people understand that distinction is precisely why there’s confusion in the atheist/agnostic semantic space. Most atheists of my acquaintance would be classed as agnostics under a model that required professed beliefs to be held without doubt or reasonable awareness of the possibility of error. And yet, those same people understand themselves as atheists.
Maher is absolutely right that doubt is the only appropriate response for human beings. For everything. Radical skepticism is the root of all knowledge, because it tells us what we don’t know. It tells us how much we must doubt what we very much think we do know. We don’t know squat. But we still have to make declarative statements. We still have to sit on chairs that just might not be there. We’ve got really incredibly sophisticated and beautiful cognitive tools for handling these issues from science and philosophy. Every darned statement you make about the world after “I am” is subject to tremendous limits on certainty. This isn’t reason to actually operate on a cognitive model that refuses to choose between belief states.
It seems to me, in re-reading the quote you point to, that you’re requiring atheists to hold an article-of-faith type of belief in order to advocate their position publicly, and to attack the opposing positions. I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think the people being targeted in that quote would think that true. Very clearly there are people, including atheists like Julian Baggini who is really terribly interesting, who believe something akin to that regarding the necessary mandate for ‘angry advocacy atheism’. It is clearly a position in the debate. However, I think it is a crude oversimplification to assign a caricatured belief to people with whom you disagree merely because you belief it would be required to legitimately engage in the observed behavior/rhetoric.
Everybody in the debate is pretty interesting and sophisticated as a thinker. Do you really think they are making the mistake of choosing fundamentalism naively? Really? If you do think that in order to attack religious belief and advocate atheism that they must believe they know atheism to be true without doubt _ask_ some of them if they do. I bet they don’t profess that belief. If you think it necessary that they do make that argument. That would be a heck of an interesting one I think!
[I am pro-doubt for every statement or observation other than ‘I am’ just for the record. Evolution. How much I mass. Who was POTUS in 2007. I just think for most of these claims we have good ways of determining the ‘ought’ warrant for the belief state. We have much less access to Truth(tm).]
August 26th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
“Maher is absolutely right that doubt is the only appropriate response for human beings. For everything. Radical skepticism is the root of all knowledge, because it tells us what we don’t know. ” But using this criterion of radical doubt regarding every claim for which we lack direct or indirect evidence, I cannot say that subjective states of consciousness occur other than my own (of which I have direct and incorrigible experience). It is perfectly consistent for me to doubt the existence of other subjective states of consciousness. True, Jason gives every outward indication of having such states, but it just may be that the interactions of neural synapses that cause outward behavior in his case and others’ don’t involve consciousness. Where is the evidence – direct or indirect – that counters this claim? Therefore, I should espouse a pan-a-psychism about every entity other than my own brain/mind. Since this conclusion seems obviously absurd, perhaps we should question the epistemology that produces it.
August 27th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
To counter pan-a-psychism I would claim that while ones knowledge that others experience mental states is less absolute than knowledge that oneself experiences mental states, one has extremely good reason from multiple lines of evidence to believe:
A) That one experiences mental states because one is a member of a category of things similarly constituted to experience mental states.
B) That this category of things evidences certain behaviors common to oneself that appear linked to mental states and purport the existence of such states.
I find this adequate reason to (provisionally and contingently) believe in the mental states of others. I just don’t know for certain. But it seems the best bet by far. Even if I did not believe it to be well-indicated, substantial indication would be sufficient to make many classes of action arising from a belief in the lack of mental states in others morally hazardous.
August 27th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
But surely this begs the very question at stake, i.e., whether or not human beings (or all putatively sentient beings) are members of the same category of beings. I know that all human beings are a member of such a class. The point is that a verificationist criteria of knowledge cannot produce evidence of this common class membership if having subjective states of consciousness is an essential (necessary, defining) attribute of the class. As to the moral issue, would we want to give moral respect to “zombies”? I, of course, think it is morally reprehensible to torture other human beings but not if other human beings have no internal subjective state of pain, fear, etc.