Tomorrow, Sunday, at 1:00 in the Roseville Library, I’ll be giving a talk on “There Are No Ghosts in Your Brain: Materialist Explanations for the Mind and Religious Belief”. Come on down and argue with me!
Now I have to get back to polishing this talk up. I suppose no more than ten powerpoint slides of equations is the limit? (Nah, not really—there’s no math in this talk at all. A few pretty pictures, though…).
By the way, if you listened to the Horgan/Myers Show, there was an unfortunate characterization of atheist organizations as groups of people congratulating one another on how much smarter they are than those crazy theists. As you can see, we actually do have issues of substance to discuss, and it actually helps to talk about them in an explicitly non-supernatural way.
And as everyone knows, the backslapping chatter about our plans for world domination are confined to the business meeting.
How about a recording/podcast, Please?
Bother – wrong Roseville
No math? You just talked yourself right out of a sale!
Have someone record it and post it on your video sharing site of choice if you can, please. :)
There’s a pretty good piece in the LAT today. A (Christian) reporter who’s been covering religion for the past decade comes to realize that mainstream organized religion is a manipulative and scary con trick.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-me-lostfaith21jul21,1,910972.story?page=1&coll=la-headlines-frontpage
Congratulations on being so smart! I’m really smart too!
I think Horgan talks too much, though. I’d love to see you on bloggingheads with Robert Wright sometime.
Well, I’m a member of the ‘People who Hate People’ party, so I don’t have time to go to your self-serving back-slapping cosy little atheist meetings.
(Thanks Bill Hicks.)
I would have thought that the only ghosts that exist would be in your brain. They are certainly not outside.
When we are told that we have brains, we take this to mean that there is this computer-like thing we have access to which does certain amounts of work for us. However, the truth is far more simple and much more unacceptable. Our brains are us. We exist as this chunk of slightly spongy gray stuff between our ears. We feel like we are disembodied, that we are beyond ourselves. We feel that we have this extra phantasm, this soul which simply occupies this hunk of flesh. This mortal coil, which when shuffled off, dreams may come. We find it easier to accept the oneness of a plethora of different and unrelated things within the entire universe than to accept obvious oneness within ourselves. That we may be inexplicably bound to our bodies and our brains is almost acceptable, but that we ARE these things seems an oddity on par with the belief that one is a jelly doughnut. It must seem just as easy to occupy this human body as it would be to occupy a baked good. We view ourselves as this ‘other’ thing. The truth is that, I, as I know myself, am but a concept within the nervous system of this primate.
“…how much smarter they are than those crazy theists”.
This seems to conflate intelligence with sanity. It’s not that we’re necessarily smarter, but rather that we aren’t so crazy.
No one touch my back, please.
Christian Burnham – Thanks so much for the link to the LA Times story. That is powerful stuff.
Thanks inkadu. Maybe PZ can ‘frontpage’ it. It’s an interesting article.
In a nice contrast to the LA Times story, there is a front page story in Canada’s National Post newspaper called “Ditching God”, about the rise of “out” atheists. The next time someone talks about “framing”, this is another piece that can be pointed to — no one would be writing these articles if it weren’t for the “New Atheist” movement.
I will admit, however, that I found these kind of passages worrisome:
I for one don’t want an “atheist church basement”, just as I don’t want a “not collecting stamps club” or a “don’t play hockey team”. Atheism (or, perhaps more accurately, rationalism) is a way of approaching the world, but I don’t see it as a meaningful basis for social grouping, and especially not as a replacement for religion — that would make it far more of an affirmative position, rather than a mere negative.
Rationalism IS an affirmative position.
What about the ex-Mormons mentioned in Lobdell’s LA Times article? Surely they have a reason to band together since they are shunned by the rest of the community. Surely they can find solace in the fact that there are others who share their beliefs (or if you prefer, non-beliefs.)
I have been Searching for an organization that speaks about truth and spirituality without invoking the word God. Science partially fills this void, but it artfully dodges around the human issues that I care about. I envy Christians their sense of community and loving, where people of all types get together at least once a week to celebrate their faith.
I imagine the “community of atheists” will be short lived. The only reason to make a big deal about atheism is because it is a minority position, often held in contradiction to the rest of society. Once it’s the de facto standard, any idiot can join.
The reason you don’t find atheists gathering to discuss spirituality (at least the Pharyngula brand of don’t-believe-in-non-material-reality atheists, not the just-don’t-believe-in-capital-g-God atheists), #16, is because we disbelieve the entire shtick. There is no spirituality if you don’t believe in the spirit; you will not find a group of Buddhists meeting to discuss Cain and Abel, either.
For that matter, if you want “atheist spirituality,” see Buddhism.
More to the point, PZ – can we expect to see you posting your power-point presentation on Pharyngula?
I think MNAtheists will be recording it — check their site in the future.
Sure, but there are more meaningful ways for a non-believer to have a sense of community that gathering with others only because they too are non-believers.
All good points.
Buddhism focuses too much on the idea of suffering for me, but some of its core beliefs are ones I do find appealing. I understand that I’m in a odd place, trying to find a “spiritual” place when in the strictest sense, I don’t believe in non-material things. I also know that there are other ways to have a community other than religion and that’s what I’m looking for.
PZ, I look forward to the podcast/transcript of your upcoming talk. :)
“PZ, I look forward to the podcast/transcript of your upcoming talk. :)”
Nyeah, nyeah! I get to see it live!
Too bad, PZ, that I have left Minnesota; I would die to hear you.
I’ll be there! I only live 10 minutes from the library, after all. I couldn’t miss this.
This has been done before–there was an “Order of Militant Atheists” established in the USSR that flopped very quickly.
When I hear the word “spirituality” I reach for my sick-bag.
oh, fun! talkin about some Searle? Chinese Room and all? Turing and strong AI? I really need to revisit some of these arguments… they exasperated me too much in my first study of them… Searle came to talk at my school, I found him insufferable.
I’m somewhat with Alice on this one, insofar as I hear a whole lot of talk about spirituality outside of religion, but it generally doesn’t make sense. NMSO, I’m probably going to regret asking this, because in my experience the question tends to invite many words with little meaning, but what do you mean by “spirituality”? Most importantly, if you really do take a rational position, why are you interested in something that you feel ought to have “spirit” in its name?
Tulse:
Philosophically, you have a point. However, there may be pragmatic reasons for such gatherings. With the prevalence of religious indoctrination, atheism is decidedly a nondefault position, and one which may have uncomfortable social consequences. I’ve been fairly lucky to live where religious discrimination is pretty mild and have not been socially integrated enough anywhere, much less at a church, to be pressured into believing. Others who reject religion may need somewhere to meet with the like minded, especially if they’ve lost social support from believers.
They may need the affirmative position that it’s acceptable not to believe.
No, no — no Searle or Turing. I’m coming at it from the perspective of a neurobiologist, with first a very shallow primer in basic neurophys to show that the materialist research program has made a great deal of progress, and in the last half, as an evo guy to discuss various reasons why many people might think there is a ghost in the machine.
Oh, all right, if you’re going to focus on your… focus… heh. I’m a philosophy lady, m’self.
Oh, pshaw. Most social gouping is arbitrary anyway. It doesn’t have to be “meaningful” to be fruitful or enjoyable. A shared lack of faith is just as good an excuse an any other to get together with people and do something that interests you.
I hope you’ll do some talking about the scientific definition of ‘nature’, and why ghosts would be machines too if they existed.
Very true, but what puzzles me is the seeming attempt to essentially mimic the form of a religious group but without the actual religion. It seems rather reactive to me, like atheists want their own cool club that will be better than that stupid religion club.
That said, if people find some benefit in being with others who are atheists, more power to them.
I can see the contingent and arbitrary, and yes, reactive, part of atheistic groupings in the face of discrimination and exclusion, but it seems to me there are more reasons.
I don’t think empirical rationality is as much affirmative as accepting, but there is a close connection to skepticism which can be affirmative. Meanwhile skepticism doesn’t necessarily deal with what I used to call spirituality for lack of a better term, but essentially describe appreciation of beauty in nature and art and the awe of “getting it” when models work. Maybe you don’t need special groupings in the future, but today much of this discussion and sharing takes place in environments that are skewed towards mysticism.
In Sweden the most active social grouping organizing atheists doesn’t seem definable by atheism, but by humanism in the larger sense. Humanisterna ( the Swedish Humanist Association) have become more active in the social debate of late.
Btw, their latest suggestion threw me a bit, partly because it seems I still have to get rid of lingering adolescent idealism (people grow up late nowadays – very late :-), partly because american or international debates have different context. They are questioning the necessity of laws concerning religious freedom!
The context is that the laws for freedom of speech, freedom of organization, et cetera are robust enough. Apparently Humanisterna see no problem with the state – my guess is that it is defined in law as independent (secular) which would explain why we have no special laws separating state and religion as I suspect. (I have to get to the bottom of this now.)
So Humanisterna wants to deflate the special status that superfluous religious laws lend to religion. If it works it would be nice, though perhaps not the usual method among secular nations.
While I don’t see much of a reaction unfortunately, the christians who spoke up were as non-sequitur and whiny as we are used to see. (‘They are making us second level citizens!’ ‘History gives us special status.’ Et cetera.)
Oh, and I learned that Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA is one of the spokespersons.
I can see the contingent and arbitrary, and yes, reactive, part of atheistic groupings in the face of discrimination and exclusion, but it seems to me there are more reasons.
I don’t think empirical rationality is as much affirmative as accepting, but there is a close connection to skepticism which can be affirmative. Meanwhile skepticism doesn’t necessarily deal with what I used to call spirituality for lack of a better term, but essentially describe appreciation of beauty in nature and art and the awe of “getting it” when models work. Maybe you don’t need special groupings in the future, but today much of this discussion and sharing takes place in environments that are skewed towards mysticism.
In Sweden the most active social grouping organizing atheists doesn’t seem definable by atheism, but by humanism in the larger sense. Humanisterna ( the Swedish Humanist Association) have become more active in the social debate of late.
Btw, their latest suggestion threw me a bit, partly because it seems I still have to get rid of lingering adolescent idealism (people grow up late nowadays – very late :-), partly because american or international debates have different context. They are questioning the necessity of laws concerning religious freedom!
The context is that the laws for freedom of speech, freedom of organization, et cetera are robust enough. Apparently Humanisterna see no problem with the state – my guess is that it is defined in law as independent (secular) which would explain why we have no special laws separating state and religion as I suspect. (I have to get to the bottom of this now.)
So Humanisterna wants to deflate the special status that superfluous religious laws lend to religion. If it works it would be nice, though perhaps not the usual method among secular nations.
While I don’t see much of a reaction unfortunately, the christians who spoke up were as non-sequitur and whiny as we are used to see. (‘They are making us second level citizens!’ ‘History gives us special status.’ Et cetera.)
Oh, and I learned that Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA is one of the spokespersons.
To answer wrg’s question about what I mean by “spirituality”… I gave it some thought (and it might prove to be inadequate.) I think of it as an exploration of feelings. Spirituality is about forming a bond with other people through communication as well as with the world through a greater understanding.
Spirituality = intangible connections, ones that exist in my memory and possibly in other’s whom I share special moments with.
self-serving positivism is never a good idea.
how about ‘there are PROBABLY no ghosts in your brain’… for the love of mithra you don’t know what you don’t know. to paraphrase doctor doctor doctor dembski, I am skeptical of skepticism about skeptical claims of skeptitude made skeptically by skeptics in a skeptical fashion, skeptically. or some kind of ignorant shit like that. who knows, perhaps the world is all in my head. You can’t prove it is not, and to try to is just chasing farts in the wind. stick to the logical machinery that we know works please PZ.
it seems that simply refuting other positive claims (like ol’ deepak, moses, Unitarian Universalists, et al) is much more consistent than making a positive claims about absences of effects, yourself. Descartes I’m sure could have contrived some empirically equivalent ‘ghost in your brain’ that is undetectable, at this day and age. Doesn’t mean it exists, and maybe i should have listened to the debate, but Sweet Allah on Acid in a Shit-storm: some moron will immediately claim that the soul or ghosts or whatever are too sublime or ephemeral to be measured by mere mortal tools and you can’t say shit to that.. Sure it is fairies in the garden and teapots in orbit, but you end up defending a claim that it is indefensible. Stick to Probably and you will be on solid ground.
We’ve been around this block a few times, but here goes:
Then they are ‘probably’ too sublime and ephemeral to AFFECT THE BRAIN. Who cares about ghosts in the brain that don’t have the strength to tweak an ion channel?
windy perhaps you just cannot appreciate the sublimity of the tweakin’. if you could but see the fine threads on the emperor’s robe…
maybe they use ‘infinite wavelength inputs’ ala dumbski. also known as the Woo-Wave.
it is much more stable ground to counter the positive claims made by vitalists and the other creobots than to go running around wielding the sword of positivism and making equally anti-empirical claims. i hope you understand the difference between ‘ghosts do not exist’ and ‘ghosts, if they exist, have no measurable effects’, even though i think we agree which is the more probable explanation.
Baratos:
Of course, both its establishment and dissolution were by government fiat; Stalin shut it down in the late thirties, when he switched from suppressing the church to supporting it.
But any scientific statement of nonexistence–ghosts, magnetic monopoles, pigs with wings comes with a “well, it might exist and have no measurable effects” disclaimer. Rather than just making that disclaimer explicit when religious/supernatural concepts are in question, I think it’d be more useful to teach people that it should always be assumed, explicit or not.
Ghosts do not exist in the same sense that thirty-foot beavers do not exist.
so, ‘measurable effects’ has multiple sources of meaning. perhaps you aren’t measuring the right thing. you need a fifth dimension ruler. or perhaps there are no effects at all. of course the obvious question is, ‘Why should we care’. and we probably agree that we shouldn’t. but we are the choir. jesus that sounds like framing…
But…. why even bother with this positivism? it is obviously and profoundly more effective to attack fallacious arguments without venturing into uncertainty yourself.
so, with regards to the disclaimer, i agree with you completely. but i don’t think everyone does. there are myriad would-be-shamans out there dreaming up empirically equivalent hypotheses to the mechanistic explanations discovered by science. i don’t, personally, see the benefit of stooping to their level by making such pronounced assertions as ‘ghosts don’t exist’. i say, ‘show me the money’. you and i both know that they can’t, and there are many other logical and rhetorical tools available to attack claims that they do instead of resorting to this tactic (PZ, i love ya, but this is a weak link).
Empiricists such as scientists are living in a world characterized by these uncertainties. The trick is to know the size of them with enough certainty. For example, how unlikely a thirty-foot beaver is.
Empiricists such as scientists are living in a world characterized by these uncertainties. The trick is to know the size of them with enough certainty. For example, how unlikely a thirty-foot beaver is.
You are missing something here: the “ghost” that is the subject of this post and PZ’s talk is not any immaterial spirit like Casper the Ghost or the Holy Ghost, but the ghost in the machine, the immaterial mind that is supposedly pulling the strings of our material brain. “I have an immaterial mind that has no effect on my brain” does not make any sense.
Michelle: That’s supposedly the general consensus amongst philosophers, yes.
(BTW, science is no more empiricist than it is rationalist, at least in the more developed areas – what in particle physics or cosmology is given in experience?)
Isn’t that begging the question, since experiments does the experience in place of our senses? Very few experimental observations relies on human senses, nor do they need to to meet experimental requirements. Or is the philosophical requirement that they need to be done with or on humans – if not, why not?
But if it isn’t empiricist, I would like to hear a better description. Observationalist?
Isn’t that begging the question, since experiments does the experience in place of our senses? Very few experimental observations relies on human senses, nor do they need to to meet experimental requirements. Or is the philosophical requirement that they need to be done with or on humans – if not, why not?
But if it isn’t empiricist, I would like to hear a better description. Observationalist?
WANTED: Theory-independent observational language.
Please apply here. Thanks.
Erasmus:
Surely stable observations are both necessary and sufficient. The goal of theories are to describe observations, and it seems to work well enough. “Theory independence” and “infinite regress” are unsupported concerns AFAIK.
(I’m reminded of QG which assumable is background independent since GR is. String theorists use initial manifolds as scaffolding to get solutions, so are perturbatively background independent so far. (They aspire to be non-perturbatively background independent because it is more powerful.) The more idealistic physicists complain because it isn’t according to The Dogma, but it works.)
Erasmus:
Surely stable observations are both necessary and sufficient. The goal of theories are to describe observations, and it seems to work well enough. “Theory independence” and “infinite regress” are unsupported concerns AFAIK.
(I’m reminded of QG which assumable is background independent since GR is. String theorists use initial manifolds as scaffolding to get solutions, so are perturbatively background independent so far. (They aspire to be non-perturbatively background independent because it is more powerful.) The more idealistic physicists complain because it isn’t according to The Dogma, but it works.)