The Deist Miasma Part III -- The Tenacity of Purpose

[peristaltor]

I started writing the Deist Miasma series with high hopes, but little else. I was missing something, a crucial piece of evidence (as opposed to suspicion) that may have finally surfaced. It's a preliminary study that requires some expansion, but it reinforced the niggling thoughts that started this series enough to motivate me to finish it.

Comments

[sunfell]

Ooh- that last blockquote nails it.

We are the universe's way of understanding itself.

The only thing I'd add would be the words 'one of'- after 'we are'- because we can't be the only conscious element around. We just don't have the finely tuned scientific equipment yet to demonstrate this fact.

I'd rather be a tiny bit a self-aware universe than some 'disgraced pale shadow' of a god-dropping.

[peristaltor]

. . . 'disgraced pale shadow' of a god-dropping.

Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, anyone? ;-)

[l33tminion]

We humans tells stories. We use these stories not just to entertain ourselves, but to instruct our children, to pass on information to others.

More than that, I think story-telling is a fundamental part of consciousness. And on every level, from vision (human eyes only have good resolution on a tiny part of the visual field at one time, but the brain translates visual data into a representation that seems to occupy the entire visual field and change smoothly over time) to memory (which tells a coherent story of one's life, despite intermittent storage and inadequate recall and the fact that even the best memories are patched together with so much confabulation that they're mostly fictional) to decision-making and problem solving (what-if stories) to social psychology (interactions with other people real and imagined). We tell stories just to be.

In my opinion, narrative continuity is also the only concept that adequately explains continuity of the self without requiring bizarre and unmeasured supernatural entities.

[peristaltor]

Exactly.

[mothwentbad]

Hmmm. The last blockquote sort of unnecessarily imposes an overarching "purpose" on humanity and their legacy just as much as the theistic hypothesis. It's based on a hopeful speculation of things which may yet come to pass rather than bald myths and self-flagellation, but if we minimize assumptions, humans are still just the solution of a system of PDEs, and the imposition of a "purpose" to our having evoled is still sort of post-hoc. At best, this "purpose" is a somewhat arbitrary direction that we could choose to embrace, but it's not clear whether there's anything more to the assertion that "we are the universe's way of understanding itself" than the author anthropomorphizing the universe.

[peristaltor]

Absolutely on target on all points. For me, at best the argument changes the direction of the faithful, giving them a reason to embrace a god-less existence.

tacit also pretty much just paraphrased Carl Sagan in his Cosmos series, but since I hadn't seen it since it aired I didn't recognize it.

[mothwentbad]

I'm not sure. Maybe it depends. When I was agnostic, I found "look at how beautiful and meaningful an atheist viewpoint can be" to be stooping to the same level of propaganda, bullshit, and overblown promises that religion was guilty of, and entirely missing the point - wanting to know what's actually going on, what's real, and what's not. Not only does the idea of converting to whatever viewpoint gives you the most warm fuzzies strike me as willfully self-deluding, but no atheistic account I have ever heard ever offered a suitable replacement for immortality and eternal bliss after death. "Atheism can make you happy" arguments always struck me as patronizing and dishonest. Sometimes I can feel the wonder that they express all the same, but it feels cheap and dirty to me to employ it as an argument unless you're going to be thorough enough to point out what you have to give up in the same speech.

But I don't have much experience with how other deconverts got to where they are. My reaction to the tactic might be uncommon.

[peristaltor]

I've never found beauty and solace in the god-less viewpoint myself, only (like you) emptiness. I have found, though, intrinsic and sublime beauty in the fact that the viewpoint is probably correct. The emptiness of meaning in our existence doesn't bother me any more than the fact that poop stinks. It's just another fact of life.

But that doesn't wash with the unwashed faithful. They need comfort as they stare into that void the future will bring. Believing the void to be filled with manna for dinner and gold like glass and fluffy clouds on which to recline with their lutes while they play for their long-dead grandparents helps them cope.

In the movie Flight from Death, the producers included some fascinating research. The control group was given a questionaire filled with banal questions. The test group's questionaire was subtly laced with references to the fact that someday, we all die. The two groups were then let alone in a room with just a few objects and given a mundane task. One task involved hanging a picture; the