What's the difference between "Reddit" atheism and regular old atheism?
What's the difference between "Reddit" atheism and regular old atheism?
Inspired by some of the discussion in this thread. I don't think it's appropriate place for that discussion there, but hey why not have a separate thread for it
If I think religion is not good in general, am I Reddit and cringe and basically Richard Dawkins?
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i am a militant agnostic. i don't know if there is a god, and neither do you. its crazy to me to fully believe in any specific spiritual lore without like direct personal experience, like maybe there is 'a god' but maybe its completely inhuman and incomprehensible, maybe its a giant fish, maybe its mind is composed of the EM activity of stars, idfk why people assume our language or our thought could capture something like that, if it even exists. believing that there is Definitely No God or Anything Else Humans Don't/Can't Understand seems epistemologically invalid. like yeah, i'm not going to decide how to live my life based on some bronze age account of some Sky Warlord who wants me to sacrifice my children and cut off parts of my penis and beat my slaves and never do anything thats Too Fun, idfk why people would assume bronze age patriarchical slave-owning mysoginists would have the FInal Say on stuff like that, but i'm also not going to just assume that reality is completely pointless and that we are all meaningless meat computers waiting for our homeostatic processes to fizzle out. I agree with 'materialism' in the sense that i think there are parts of reality that are outside my personal mind, but strict physicalist realism is metaphysically and existentially and semiotically barren as an ideology, why should i care if i or anyone else has healthcare/rights/life if our existence is pointless nonsense, lifeless particles knocking into each other deterministically, human consciousness an evolutionary spandrel, an information-processing fluke that only makes us suffer from our knowledge of the universe's meaninglessness. I have to believe that there might possibly be some reason for me to keep collecting new experiences or i would simply stop. i have to believe that , under better conditions such as communism, humans could spend more time on the questions and ideas that matter on a more fundamental level, instead of constantly struggling just to physically survive, and that there might be semiotically interesting paradigms to discover. i have to believe that conscious experience matters, or should matter, to me, that there really is something that differentiates living thinking beings from lifeless particles and the unconscious information processing of a calculator. otherwise there is nothing to distinguish humanity from a cancerous growth or mold, if 'nothing' is the beginning and the end i'd rather just cut out the middleman and get back to it and save myself and everyone else a whole heck of a lot of trouble and misery.
but i'm also not going to just assume that reality is completely pointless and that we are all meaningless meat computers waiting for our homeostatic processes to fizzle out
Lack of belief in gods doesn't mean you have to forego every subjective thing. You're mixing up atheism and nihilism. I can subjectively enjoy my existence while understanding that it's a weird fluke of matter the fact that I have consciousness. And since I enjoy my life and I don't wanna lose it, I think it's morally good that other people who happen to have consciousness too can enjoy their lives. That's my two cents. I can simultaneously be a physical materialist and accept that subjectivity and morality exist.
i don't think i'm confusing anything, for further clarification i am specifically arguing that reductivist physicalist realism - the belief that all of reality including consciousness can be 'reduced to' or entirely explained in terms of our current understanding of physics or a trivially modified version of it - a relatively common belief among 'reddit atheists' (see 'love is just chemicals' trope, 'meat computer' ideas, etc.) - entirely precludes the possibility of any kind of subjectivity whatsoever as an inherent logical consequence of its base assumptions. A mostly unmodified version of our current understanding of physics or information processing has no explanation for things like 'subjectivity' or 'consciousness' at a fundamental level, and therefore any worldview that would explain such phenomena in terms of physics will necessarily fail to account for, or erroneously posit the lack of existence of, such characteristics ('consciousness is an illusion'). kind of like the difficulty of finding a coherent way to unify quantum physics and 'macro' physics into a single 'theory of everything', the ideas in use are more or less incompatible - you can't really 'reduce' a thrown baseball and explain it purely in terms of quantum physics without losing important information, even though quantum physics is smaller scale/more 'fundamental' to macro phenomena.
the belief that all of reality including consciousness can be 'reduced to' or entirely explained in terms of our current understanding of physics or a trivially modified version of it [...] entirely precludes the possibility of any kind of subjectivity whatsoever
I don't agree with that. I don't see what's impossible about understanding consciousness as an emergent property of matter in the same way that many individual ants collectively bring feats that you can't explain looking at a single ant. The fact that we haven't gotten there just yet doesn't mean it can't be done, or that biology is completely independent from physics and/or psychology completely independent from biology. I just don't see how from "we don't understand consciousness" it follows "therefore it can't possibly be explained with physics in the way we understand physics".
I don't agree with that. I don't see what's impossible about understanding consciousness as an emergent property of matter in the same way that many individual ants collectively bring feats that you can't explain looking at a single ant.
the problem is that every ant in the ant colony is ostensibly a purely physical phenomena (at least, we usually do not concern ourselves with the ant's subjective experience as much as their information processing capabilities - we watch their movement, monitor pheromones and chemical signals, note the structure and changes to their nest, etc., all very physical and mutually compatible ideas), whereas something like the concept of subjectivity is entirely incompatible with our ideas about physics. you can do 'information processing' without subjectivity very efficiently, as with any calculator or computer, so subjectivity seems entirely superfluous in the sense of a purely physical explanation.
The fact that we haven't gotten there just yet doesn't mean it can't be done, or that biology is completely independent from physics and/or psychology completely independent from biology.
you have to prove something is true before you believe it, assuming 'we will figure it out later with no significant modifications to our theory' is intellectual laziness/unsound epistemology. no one is saying that biology is completely independent from physics or that psychology is completely independent from biology, i am only saying that our understanding of such topics are far from a unified 'theory of everything' and are therefore incomplete in a non-trivial way at best, and fundamentally flawed or incorrect at worst. obviously the subjective component of human consciousness is somehow related to brain function, we can prove and accept this empirically without any kind of metaphysical claims or assumptions tacked on. obviously physics isn't completely BS, it helps us solve a lot of problems. but at the same time, we cannot fully explain (i.e. reduce, hence why i am arguing against 'reductivist physicalist realism' and not non-reductivist versions of physicalist realism such as the one you seem to espouse) psychology in terms of atoms and their locations and velocities and mass without losing information. the fact that you believe in 'emergent processes' itself means you are likely not a 'reductivist' physicalist realist like i am arguing against.
I just don't see how from "we don't understand consciousness" it follows "therefore it can't possibly be explained with physics in the way we understand physics".
usually when a theory fails to account for a phenomena, it is assumed to be flawed or incomplete somehow, and the significant explanatory gap for subjectivity in physics and information processing (what information processing algorithm produces a first-person experience? is there a fundamental particle or wave of subjectivity, a 'subjectron'?) would seem to imply a non-trivial incompleteness or flaw.
I agree with basically all you've said, I just want to point out that "physics can't explain this, so we probably have an incomplete version of it" doesn't point towards the existence of the supernatural. This comes up in a conversation about atheism, so I don't see how this is any different than the "god of the holes"
I agree with basically all you've said, I just want to point out that "physics can't explain this, so we probably have an incomplete version of it" doesn't point towards the existence of the supernatural. This comes up in a conversation about atheism, so I don't see how this is any different than the "god of the holes"