Hating organised religions

[cycle tramp]

All religion is to some degree made up.

To some extent? Wholly made-up, surely. Or do you think those revelations from a burning bush or the appearance of an angel were the voice of god?

I'm going to spilt the difference here in that pantheons of gods were probably inspired, or reflections of early tribal groups - the elder (Zeus, Odin , or whomever) being the wisest, biggest beard and male (as males were more likely to survive into older age) the anti-elder (Hades, Loki, etc) being someone close to them, but who resented the respect that the group had for the elder, and various other tribal archetypes (including crone, mother and maiden) which encapsulate a number of virtues of humanity.
If the elder had a son then naturally they would be expected to become everything their father was, if not more (Hercules)
This early group of tribal characters echoed over and over again probably gave rise to one of the first inherited human memories.
Monotheism raised the importance of the male gender and reduced the importance of the female, thus number of the pantheon drop to two or three.

Everything is a reiteration of a reiteration. The idea that hell is beneath our comes from Hades, the idea god has a beard comes from both Greek and north European pantheons, the idea that God's son will return at the end of the world, is the same in Egyption mythology as it is norse legend.

If whatever belief makes you want to behave in a beneficial manner towards society or even nature, yeah, great, that fine- let's do it.
However the moment its used to annex countries or make people believe that they are better than other people , that's just uncool.

Ah, people say to me - ah, should you be celebrating Christmas if you feel like that? - to which my answer is, Hey - Christians stole the winter Solstice, damn straight I'm celebrating Christmas.

[Cugel]

Metaphysical: above or beyond the physical.

I’m not at all sure how thoughts, or ideas, or memes, or whatever you want to call them can be that, since they can only exist in our very physical brains, and be transmitted brain-to-brain by very physical means. One might argue, very convincingly in my estimation, that the experience we call “mind” is an emergent property of our vastly complex, and very much physical, brains.

The metaphysical is essentially an organised set of information (think of it as a pattern) which in turn can organise a physical substrate of some kind. It can also be stored and transmitted (on different physical substrates, to be sure) and these days the substrates can be other than human brains.

As AI evolves, it's becoming more likely that metaphysical entries will be able to do without human brains. After all, there's plenty genetic coding (metaphysical, the lot of it) for all sorts besides humans.

It's easily possible to imagine an environment in which metaphysical entities construct and run non-biological processes of many kinds. Basically, its only human hubris that imagines that its only we two-legs who can do thinking, organising and all of the other things that need pattern. The whole world does patterns. The human genome and all expressed by ot is in fact derived from a pattern we call genetics.

Metaphysical stuff is, then, bound inseparably with physical stuff. Having the two "physicals" is really just a way of recognising that there is pattern but also the medium in which it expresses; that there is information and what it constructs. The metaphysical can express in many different physical substrates (e.g. human brains, books and videos).

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Imagine we humans all die of weather but that over 100,000 years the cockroaches evolve a physicality able to process complex information like language. Some cockroach archaeologists dig up a somehow-preserved human library from 100,000 years ago. They derive a means to guess at and extract the semantics of, say, nuclear physics ........

No human being needed to allow the nuclear physics to once more construct a nuclear bomb (now made by cockroach tech) which then gets used to return the biosphere to GO. Damn those cockroach archaeologists and their blasted curiosity!

[jimlews]

I don't hate religions, organised or disorganized.
But I do dislike patriarchy and western religions are (probably) all patriarchal. I haven't surveyed them all.
Being invented by men, they have serious hang-ups about sex and repressive attitudes to women.
These church fathers tie themselves into hilarious knots when mansplaining the basic tenets of their faith.
For instance, because sex, in their view is "sinful", the mother of Christ had to be portrayed as a virgin.
She was, we are told, miraculously inseminated by God. But she was already married to a mortal man.
So adultery is OK for the supreme being but not for anyone else. A sort of metaphysical droit de seigneur.

I think it would have been much more consistent and believable if God had been female. Whoever heard
of a man giving birth ?! Absurd idea. A Goddess is a much more delightful prospect. And as everyone knows,
the male chromosome is the smallest of them all

[Nearholmer]

Metaphysical stuff is, then, bound inseparably with physical stuff

Indeed it is, because it is physical stuff. There is no “meta” about it, it’s an emanation of the physical.

If AI or cockroaches reach the level of complexity and interconnectedness where they begin to experience “mind” as an emergent property there will still be no “meta” about it, it will still be an emanation of the physical. For now, we are, so far as it possible to tell, probably the only things on the planet which experience mind, although there seem to be suggestions that maybe some other “big brain” animals such as dolphins, other great apes, octopuses etc might run us a close second.

Books, videos, etc are, BTW, physical data transport packets, thats all. The code which they contain is lifeless until it gets inside a mind. A book has no ideas; only a mind can have ideas.

[Cugel]

Metaphysical stuff is, then, bound inseparably with physical stuff

Indeed it is, because it is physical stuff. There is no “meta” about it, it’s an emanation of the physical.

If AI or cockroaches reach the level of complexity and interconnectedness where they begin to experience “mind” as an emergent property there will still be no “meta” about it, it will still be an emanation of the physical. For now, we are, so far as it possible to tell, probably the only things on the planet which experience mind, although there seem to be suggestions that maybe some other “big brain” animals such as dolphins, other great apes, octopuses etc might run us a close second.

Books, videos, etc are, BTW, physical data transport packets, thats all. The code which they contain is lifeless until it gets inside a mind. A book has no ideas; only a mind can have ideas.

Well yes.. But are you suggesting that the notion ( ) of metaphysics has no meaning or utility, in trying to understand things and why they behave as they do? If you prefer, call it "information".

Some suggest that if the physical is looked at closely enough (at the sub-atomic level) we are no longer looking at physical stuff in the way familiar to use but rather looking metaphysically (considering information) not about things with dimension (the physical) but at pure information. In other words, there is fundamentally nothing physical in the way we generally feel it as such but just a churn of information and its effects on other information.

We humans, then, really are just a substrate: a vast organisation of information able to interact in myriad ways with other vast organisations of information.

Oooo-er!

Some short-hand the above as: we and the rest of the universe may be just a computer program on a vast scale.

Others ask: what does it run on and who wrote it?

Herein lies a mystery. But that's the sublime for 'ee, eh!?

[Nearholmer]

TBH, I think that “metaphysical” as a term is unhelpful, because it carries too many historical connotations, and that the language of information-flow/transfer is better.

It makes it clear that information doesn’t just pop into being absent of physicality, it arises from, and operates on, physicality.

BTW, I am sympathetic to the idea that if one delves deeply enough into theoretical physics, it all dissolves into information, and I take a few lessons from my eldest nephew, who studied pure maths and theoretical physics to masters level, then surprised us all by deciding to take his PhD in philosophy.

[Cugel]

TBH, I think that “metaphysical” as a term is unhelpful, because it carries too many historical connotations, and that the language of information-flow/transfer is better.

It makes it clear that information doesn’t just pop into being absent of physicality, it arises from, and operates on, physicality.

BTW, I am sympathetic to the idea that if one delves deeply enough into theoretical physics, it all dissolves into information, and I take a few lessons from my eldest nephew, who studied pure maths and theoretical physics to masters level, then surprised us all by deciding to take his PhD in philosophy.

Yes, metaphysical used to mean mostly the ghosties in the sky or other unseen gods or "forces" (remarkably like very powerful humans) doing mysterious things behind a curtain opaque to human understanding. But the term has long been used in a much wider sense to differentiate the purely physical from the organisation of the physical, both in actuality but also in the schemas and taxonomies invented (like the sky ghosties) by humans to serve their various perspectives on the physical stuff and what happens in it.

Facts are metaphysical constructs, not the hard and fast things of reality imagined by many. Some of them are rather better as mediating reality (whatever that is) than others as one goes about assuming facts then acting on them and their suggested predictions. Most "science facts" are far better than "religious faith facts" if one wishes to live a practical and pragmatic life, for example. But not always. Some science-facts suggest some rather dangerous procedures, as you may have noticed. Some religious-facts may seem silly to a scientist yet they successfully govern a human believer form some form of bad behaviour to a better behaviour. (Sometimes the opposite, mind).

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Philosophy - often decried (and justifiably in many instances) as the mind-wanderings of the imaginative divorced from everyday life via their protected-from-consequences status or other. Also as the main technique employed by religious and ideological traditions to justify, mystify and otherwise big-up their strange schemas describing reality.

On the other hand, its often opined that the conclusions of various philosophies of the past often become today's commonplace assumptions - part of any cultural episteme dominating how everything else is viewed and understood. It's as well to have a history of philosophy (requiring a grasp of philosophical modes, language and constituent methodologies) in order to understand better where our episteme comes from, its strengths; and lacks and the ability to stand outside of one episteme to consider others.

The fact is that even the hard sciences, mathematics and other subject matter regarded by some as essentially objective truth were generated out of philosophical ponderings and their conclusions. The whole of science is very conformant to all manner of monotheistic assumptions about reality, for example.

So your eldest nephew sounds a very sensible chap to me. How better to search for the strengths, weaknesses and further opportunities of physics and maths than by examining the history and nature of the philosophies that generated them and still populate them with various often unrecognised assumptions that may have better (more productive of understanding and ability to predict) alternatives?

[drossall]

The fact is that even the hard sciences, mathematics and other subject matter regarded by some as essentially objective truth were generated out of philosophical ponderings and their conclusions. The whole of science is very conformant to all manner of monotheistic assumptions about reality, for example.

And some philosophical ponderings were generated out of science, as I have remarked before. For my physics degree, I did a year of history and philosophy of science as a subsidiary. That hardly makes me an expert, but the standout memory is what happened in and around the late Victorian era. Scientists thought that they had understood the major points about the workings of the world, confirming the then-popular picture of science reasoning its way from evidence to proof.

Then a whole load of new, radical evidence and ideas appeared, such as Michelson-Morley and relativity. This caused a wholesale loss of confidence because, if the reasoned deductions about the world could be shown to be wrong in important respects, how did science work and why could we place confidence in it? Hence the work of philosophers such as Kuhn (placing emphasis on theories being held provisionally until disproven) and Kuhn (on the scientific community sharing paradigms that were given up reluctantly as evidence for new models became increasingly overwhelming).

Of course, that hasn't stopped society still operating on a picture of science that was discredited almost 150 years ago