Category: Religion, Myth, and Theology

(FB 1545400555 Timestamp) UM NO. HERE IS WHERE THEISM COMES FROM: CONFLICT AVOIDANCE AND COOPERATIVE DISCOUNTS —“Atheism can only be tenable if consciousness can be explained.”— Carl Onni A declaration not an observation. I can explain consciousness, the demand for mindfulness absent life in the band(tribe), and the means by which gods provide that mindfulness. —“But since consciousness can not be explained by a materialist paradigm; theism is tenable and atheism untenable.”— Carl Consciousness can be explained scientifically and it’s not even complicated. Within a few decades we’ll be able to both explain it biologically, and reproduce it mechanically. Sympathy/Empathy between conscious creatures is limited to shared sensations. Shared sensations and language in particular, overstate the equality of our experiences. Theism and Atheism are choices of decision models, just like theology, philosophy, history, law, and science are choices of decision models. It’s that each of these models places greater demands on our intuition or greater demands on our knowledge and reason. in other words, it’s just a question of neural economics. Particularly because the solipsism-autism (female-male) cognitive spectrum burdens us with either greater intuition (female) or greater reason (male). —“Clarification: mere matter can never explain consciousness. Because consciousness is made up of a completely different category of things (qualia) than the material (matter)”— Carl The experience of changes in state between neurological connections and the accompanying responses from our reward systems are rather easy to explain. The fact that due to informational sparseness required for our continuous forecasting (humans) rather than continuous experiencing (apes, crows, dogs ) – our mental models are inverted where chimps are almost always experiencing the present and humans vary from partly experiencing the present to entirely experiencing the forecast (model, imagination). In other words, consciousness is made of actions (verbs) and material is made of objects (nouns), and so the comparison of the two is a sophism of conflating a constant category with a continuous category. In other words, we run, we experience consciousness. They are actions. Actinos transform state they are not a state. So like most philosophical questions this one is rather dimwitted. Like I say regularly – there are no difficult philosophical questions that are not errors in grammar. If sentences are stated in operational grammar then these philosophical questions are immediately shown to be simply malformed equations. –“There is a fundamental categorical separation between them. That separation negates the explanatory value of any scientific understanding of consciousness.”– Carl Yes, continuous actions vs static states. The fact that the continuously recursive neural processing – the ‘light of the christmas tree lights’ that make up your brain – takes time to decay preserves state from millisecond to millisecond, provides you with persistence of vision across a series of changes is rather simple – and your ability to introspect on those changes is not possible because it would require a separate memory to do so. But it’s literally no more complicated than what occurs when watching a video at x frames per second. –“It will always miss the mark so to speak. Even if the “phenomenon” of consciousness where to be described perfectly down to the quark level.”— We well can explain it down to the quark level. Which is why we know we have some degree of free will: neural economy requires we assemble experience from a combination of sensory inputs and fragmentary memory. And our rather fragmentary memory is necessary in order to reduce costs sufficiently to produce speech continuously and recursively in real time. —“Some “thing” would be missing. That thing would be qualia.”— Nothing is missing other than training in how to avoid sophisms in language, how to avoid sophisms in philosophy and theology, and the general construction of brain regions and reward systems, and the general problem of solving problems with bayesian networks. In other words, any sufficiently advanced understanding appears like magic to the ignorant. There is no magic here. There is nothing supernatural here. The brain is a rather understandable object at present with the caveat that we will spend the rest of the century if not longer exploring its nuances. None of which, so far, have been more complex than we imagined in the 1950’s. We all need models in order to calculate action amidst complex social orders. We can create models with the people we have: family, band, clan, tribe, nation, man; or we can create models of imaginary families, bands, clans, tribes, nations. There is some value in using imaginary pack leaders, parents, friends, families, bands, clans, tribes, and nations, because we can idealize them and therefore neither fear judgment nor judge, fear grudges, nor begrudge, fear offense, nor be offended. By circumventing fear of judgement, grudge or offense we can relax and role play truthfully with these imaginary individuals. We can idolize them and use them as role models to calculate actions with others who also use them as role models to calculate actions with you. This is how we use imaginary pack leaders, parents, friends, families etc. With men more likely to use a pack leader and women more likely to use the consensus of the herd. FOr this very reason women are more susceptible to idealizations then men are. It is impossible to calculate the herd without models. it is rather easy to calculate using a pack leader. It’s really that simple. No. Really. It’s THAT SIMPLE. We are still carrying the intuition that evolved with us: male packs and female herds held by males. Everything else is narrative attempts to compensate for those differences and many others between the super-predators that we are.