The point is, nihilism doesn't work as a daily worldview because it basically means we can't do anything.
Think about it. If the reality you and I occupy is different, or at least not similar, how to we interact? I point to an object, and you ask me "what object, my subjective experience doesn't inlcude such an object."
Then we throw them in the loony bin when they start seeing things no one else does. So...I guess the moral here is that the only true nihilists are schizophrenics?
I kid. The point I'm probably not making very well, since I'm a bit drunk, is that nobody really applies Nihilism on a daily basis, that much is obvious. So it seems a bit hypocritical to use it to shut down arguments when the need suits you.
Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.Tie one on for me! If you're drunk, this could be my chance :)
I didn't think anyone was suggesting using Nihilism on a daily basis (I don't think that's even consistent with Christianity), nor do I think anyone used it as a way to shut down the conversation. It's just that after debating this for so many pages, we don't seem to have any other way out. You cant know what I know, and perhaps even vice versa.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Sometimes. There are plenty of examples where even a strictly dominant strategy will lead to objectively suboptimal results for all involved. Game theory is a tool, but it makes a pretty disastrous lifestyle.
Also, we should really start enforcing a licensing exam to use Occam's Razor. Some people around here are likely to chop their fingers off the way they're swinging it around.
@deathjavu: Even if you don't assume the universe's objectivity as a basic premise, there is a defense for it. If the universe doesn't exist at all, nothing that we think we do matters (we might as well do anything). If it is irrational and doesn't follow any basic logic, then nothing we do matters because it won't affect what happens next. If it is objective and rational, than acting rationally will provide the maximum benefit. Acting irrationally is never superior to acting rationally. The problem is that you have to think rationally to prove that, but a person/machine who truly thinks and acts randomly will eventually (by pure chance) act rationally, at which point he will keep acting rationally because of its superiority. Anyone who claims to be nihilist yet doesn't act rationally is just being stubborn.
@Pykrete: The results for other people don't matter. The results for you are what matters, and sticking with what logically appears to be the best strategy usually works out best.
This signature is a lie.![]()
Do elaborate on the misuse of the razor yourself, rather than accusing people of misuse and linking a lengthy wikipedia article with multiple disputed variations on misuse, which itself links multiple sources that may or may not be terribly credible. I have no idea what/which argument you're making or who that's addressed to.
I mean, I could have linked the entire Less Wrong sequence and said that was my argument, but that'd be a dick move since it's hundreds of pages. It'd basically be saying "I don't want to argue anymore, here's an arbitrary wall I'm throwing at you that you have to climb and I won't continue until you do."
Not to mention the idea is clearly to send someone there to develop arguments to use against themselves.
edited 4th Aug '11 9:28:27 AM by deathjavu
Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.Here's the short version of the most common misuse of Occasm's Razor: "It's the simplest explanation, therefore it must be the correct one." What the Razor really says is that "an explanation the requires unnecessary complications is more likely to be incorrect."
The differences:
Misuse:
- simplest
- must be
- correct
Actual Razor:
- requires
- unnecessary complications
- more likely to be
- incorrect
edited 4th Aug '11 9:21:44 AM by Madrugada
Oh I'm aware of several potential misuses, but I'm curious as to which ones he's accusing us of and whom he's accusing, in which posts. His initial statement is definitely an accusation of some sort (the way some people etc.), but it's vague enough as to be meaningless.
For instance, I very clearly specified that interpretations are either more correct or less correct, and that simplicity factor is dependent on the necessity, i.e. what explanations or predictions a theory has and whether they match reality.
edited 4th Aug '11 9:27:46 AM by deathjavu
Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.I don't understand why people think of it like "Science vs Religion". When it comes to Christianity, both fit together rather well I would say.
It might not fit the way you want, but it does fit none the less.
The biggest grindings occur on the subject of our origins.
Creationism: God, a being of unimaginable power who is omnipresent and omnipotent, created everything in six days because He wanted it to be so. The universe is no more than 10,000 years old.
Big Bang Theory: An explosion of unimaginable force started the universe, in which galaxies and stars formed. Over a period of billions of years, the Earth formed and gravity collapsed it into a sphere. Much later, it became habitable. Now Macro Evolution comes into play. Living beings arose from nonliving materials, and eventually more complex things came forward until humans were created.
From human logic alone, each of these seem unlikely. A God who created everything? Impossible, some say.
However,on the other hand, you must realize the flaws of the opposing theory as well. The principle the big bang theory works on is that if you wait long enough, eventually something will happen.
The problem is that from our observations and empiracle science, things must have already happened in order for Law of Probability to take place. For a dye to land on 5 it must first be manufactured. Furthermore, you can observe that the longer something exists the more it degrades, which is opposed to Macro Evolution which states things get better on their own as time goes on.
So either way it's a very gray subject. This causes faith to play a large role. This is where Creationism seems to have an advantage.
You must put your faith in one of them: Big Bang/Evolution, or Creationism. The thing about Creationism is that it's attached to Christianity, a religion. A religion that talks about a God who cares about you and has a purpose for our each of our lives. A God that is almighty and omnipotent yet still cares for us like a father. A God willing to bring us home if we let Him.
But if you choose Evolution, then what? Live out the rest of your days, realizing that all will remain of you is a skeleton after you die? Your life ultimately having no real purpose?
I cannot speak for you, but I choose to believe in Christianity and Creationism.
Way to hit on every single argument we've already covered, particularly the "materialists must have no purpose in life LOL." :/
Threadhopping in a thread as touchy and expansive as this is kind of annoying, it makes people repeat themselves endlessly which grinds any actual discussions to a halt.
Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.Would you mind clarifying these "emergent consequences"?
As for the example, I would not consider erranous. After all, macro evolution basically states that through mutations one thing changes into another over long periods of time. A superior being would not emerge from such a process because as I pointed out, things decay over time, not improve.
Such powerful, higher intelligence beings would not arise from a nigh-impossible random event, much less arise from a non living substance. Abiotic things simply do not becoming organic, no matter how much time there is.
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You're forgetting one tiny problem.
The tiny problem all creationists who wrongly cite the laws of thermodynamics miss.
Things tend towards entropy in a closed system, this is true. if earth were a closed system,. things would tend towers less and less complexity.
However, we have a gigantic , nay, supergigantic ball of nuclear energy constantly feeding energy in to the planet. Its called the SUN. As long as the sun exists and pumps energy into the planet, entropy is staved off by the constant influx of fresh energy. Further, abiotic my possibly become biotic given enough energetic reaction between the right chemical compounds. The thing is, even if uit occurs, its such a low chance that reproducing it could take as long as the original spark took. Its only statistically inevitable given the timeframes of energy being poured onto earth or other earthlike planets and the sheer size of the universe.
edited 5th Aug '11 4:42:03 PM by Midgetsnowman
What's the argument here, that creationism is wrong? I would say that literal "Young-Earth" creationism is stupidity. However, I have yet to have an atheist present a good argument to me that a god could not have caused the universe using scientific methods as we currently understand them, or, for that matter, a good argument that no gods exist. Just as I have yet to have a good argument presented to me that the god or gods of some religion or another are real.
I am now known as Flyboy.And there science, in my opinion, has upper position. Basic of science is that something is true, untill someone proofs it wrong. A single "You are wrong" causes the entire set up to be restudied and adjusted untill it can once again claim to be true.
Religion, on the other hand, sets up that it is true and anything else is false and any argument against it is false, if it doesn't rely on religious text.
Note
Wikipedia's article on evolution
is excellent. If you want an accurate account much less likely to contain errors than what I'm about to write, read that - but it is quite long. The other good place to look is the Talk Origins archive
.
Evolution is something that happens to a population of organisms - it doesn't make sense to talk about an individual organism 'getting better'. There are several mechanisms for a population to change. Some traits of organisms will affect how well an organism survives and reproduces, which will mean they're likely to be over- or under- represented in the next generation of organisms compared to others - this is natural selection. The consequences of random sampling can also change the relative proportions of organisms with traits, even if neither gives a relative advantage in survival and reproduction - this is genetic drift. The impact of another population of organisms can also cause evolution. The traits arise initially by mutation. Large changes follow from a lot of mutations which have spread through a population.
I'm trying to explain by this that evolution does not require any organism to 'get better on its own'. Most mutations will make an well-adapted organism worse-adapted or simply be neutral to its survival and reproduction. Additionally, each organism will indeed slowly get 'worse', i.e. accumulating injuries and aging. A population of organisms is not analogous to a single machine, though, and the population can become better-adapted, or just different, without any organisms becoming more than slightly and temporarily 'better'.
'Better' and 'worse' are in quotes because there's nothing normative about evolution. Although we sometimes talk about organisms in these terms, all we mean is that they are statistically more or less likely to contribute organisms to the next generation.
The big bang theory describes the way the universe changed from an earlier state when it was much smaller, hotter and denser. It is not really analogous to an explosion, and that metaphor could be pretty confusing. I'm not very well-qualified to speak about Big Bang models, so I point at Wikipedia
and especially Talk Origins
. We don't know how the universe started - though there are lots of hypotheses, but they are very hard to test and we can't yet claim any good knowledge about the very beginning of the universe.
The formation of stars, galaxies and eventually the Earth is quite complicated but we have a fair idea of some of the mechanisms involved. It might be worth mentioning more about this in a description of Big Bang cosmology. (See Wikipedia again).
I'm guessing that you mean that evolution could not occur without abiogenesis already occuring. This is true. We don't know exactly how abiogenesis happened, because sadly the few rocks from the right time are not good at preserving much information, but we have quite a few plausible hypotheses. See Wikipedia
again. It may be that none of these are true. The fact that we don't yet know the details of abiogenesis does not mean that Young Earth Creationism should be accepted without a strong scientific case for it.
But if you choose Evolution, then what? Live out the rest of your days, realizing that all will remain of you is a skeleton after you die? Your life ultimately having no real purpose?
It might be that a question is underdetermined by the available evidence. (Some epistemologists argue that everything in science is underdetermined by just the evidence and we have to use other considerations to accept or reject any individual hypotheses). In that case, though, to track truth, we must admit that the question is underdetermined, not pick one way or another because one of them seems nice, or is attached to an existing institution.
Additionally, your presentation of people who accept that evolution occurs as having 'no real purpose' is seriously erroneous. Evolution does not have any impact on our 'purpose'. Somebody who accepts our understanding of evolution as being true may have all sorts of views on 'purpose'. Empirically, we can note that many countries have largely atheistic populations, or at least populations who accept evolution and common descent as being true regardless of their religion, and the people there are extremely happy.
You'll pick what you believe, but everyone, no matter the side, has to prepare for the possibility that you could be wrong.
It also looks like you think there's a chance that you could persuade someone else to change their views in favour of creationism, since you're posting in this thread. What would be different about a scientific argument?
Absolutely agreed that everyone must be prepared to admit they could be wrong. We (humans) are, unfortunately, not good at noticing when we're wrong, and updating our beliefs to follow. They're not remotely perfect, but our scientific methods do help us avoid this. Still, scientists have certainly accepted conclusions which are now known to be flawed, and often, this was not even because the evidence at the time was compelling and we were just missing something. Even so: I think we can say that our scientific understanding gradually gets closer to 'the truth'. (Philosophers have realised that our idea of truth is a bit complicated but I'm not really competent to discuss that. Have a look in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy if interested!)
Since we're talking about evolution: * The broad picture of evolution can be said to be true with pretty extreme confidence, even if many of the details of which mechanisms are important, and the history of how it happened in practice, aren't known so confidently.
Avatar source◊On that last point, it's also worth noting that religion being some sort of beacon of unchanging "trueness" isn't accurate at all.
The change often just doesn't take the form of someone running a religious experiment, repeating it and getting the religious community to sign off on the change.
Often it takes the form of a schism, with a group of people leaving to form their own sect (or religion, if the change is drastic enough). Though this is not the only way religion deals with change.
On a more subtle level, religion's attitudes tend to change as the members of the religion change attitudes about certain things. This can meet resistance if particular parts of dogma/scripture are hard to argue against and it's not uncommon for some members at a religion to look at something changing and scoff "They're doing it wrong!" Sometimes, though, changing attitudes and discoveries are considered "part of the process" and even the religious structure can be reasonable with this. Science and Catholicism probably being a decent example, with Catholicism generally being receptive or at least neutral to many discovers (neutral on evolution for the most part, until recently where it's quite a bit more receptive). St Augustine was also trying to play nice with science
from as early as 4th century CE.
Another less subtle, but perhaps less visible aspect of religious change is evaluating authenticity of things like authorship or historical likeliness. Some things are hard to prove historically, others not so much hence why people have researching things like the historical accuracy of the Bible
and have shown history at odds with some events in the Bible. Something even theologians have acknowledged throughout times.
Finally, the question of authorship can surface if evidence and comparisons of work challenge authenticity of canon. The Pauline epistles
being a great example, considering what was thought to be the work of one is likely not the case. One generally does not get kicked out of a Church for acknowledging that of this books/letters where probably not written by who they where classically attributed to.
edited 6th Aug '11 11:57:19 AM by Justice4243
Justice is a joy to the godly, but it terrifies evildoers.Proverbs21:15 FimFiction account.Hmm, I guess you are right, it is ideal. I guess better worded version would "Once someone gives proof of false and other people manage to replicate the result, premise is restudied and adjusted". it took quite a time to readjust our understanding on how solar system works, but in general when sience is proven wrong it (usualy) lowers its head, admits it's wrong and adjusts its opinion to better suit our understanding.
I’d say trying to establish a well entrenched scientific belief is incorrect or flawed has been no cake walk historically. Take for example this quote from The Other Wiki’s Occam’s Razor
page:
In hindsight, one can argue that it is simpler to consider DNA as the carrier of genetic information, because it uses a smaller number of building blocks (four nitrogenous bases). However, during the time that proteins were the favored genetic medium, it seemed like a more complex hypothesis to confer genetic information in DNA rather than proteins. One can also argue (also in hindsight) for atomic building blocks for matter, because it provides a simpler explanation for the observed reversibility of both mixing and chemical reactions as simple separation and re-arrangements of the atomic building blocks. However, at the time, the atomic theory was considered more complex because it inferred the existence of invisible particles which had not been directly detected. Ernst Mach and the logical positivists rejected the atomic theory of John Dalton, until the reality of atoms was more evident in Brownian motion, as explained by Albert Einstein.
In the same way, hindsight argues that postulating the aether is more complex than transmission of light through a vacuum. However, at the time, all known waves propagated through a physical medium, and it seemed simpler to postulate the existence of a medium rather than theorize about wave propagation without a medium. Likewise, Newton's idea of light particles seemed simpler than Young's idea of waves, so many favored it; however in this case, as it turned out, neither the wave- nor the particle-explanation alone suffices, since light behaves like waves as well as like particles (wave–particle duality).
Three axioms presupposed by the scientific method are realism (the existence of objective reality), the existence of natural laws, and the constancy of natural law. Rather than depend on provability of these axioms, science depends on the fact that they have not been objectively falsified. Occam’s razor and parsimony support, but do not prove these general axioms of science. The general principle of science is that theories (or models) of natural law must be consistent with repeatable experimental observations. This ultimate arbiter (selection criterion) rests upon the axioms mentioned above.
There are many examples where Occam’s razor would have picked the wrong theory given the available data.
This is jus t a specific look at how proving a conflicting theory to commonly held scientific theories meets resistance. There are other’s I’m sure. And scientists don’t always play as nicely with each other as people tend to imagine
.
"It was very hard to see what was wrong with what he was saying," Susskind said, "and even harder to get Hawking to see what was wrong."
The arguments apparently got very heated. Herman Verlinde, another physicist on the panel, described how there would often be silences when it was clear that Hawking had some thoughts on whatever was under discussion; these often ended when Hawking said "rubbish." "When Hawking says 'rubbish,'" he said, "you've lost the argument."
I’m not disagreeing with your statement. If anything, it’s probably correct once a new theory makes it through the gauntlet of opposing views (assuming they exist).
It might be said that scientists do all their arguing BEFORE a theory becomes accepted and therefore more visibly public, while religious groups do their arguing after the theory is more public. So the public gets an earful of the religious squabbles while scientist gets to keep most their angry shouting behind closed doors.
Justice is a joy to the godly, but it terrifies evildoers.Proverbs21:15 FimFiction account."You must put your faith in one of them: Big Bang/Evolution, or Creationism. The thing about Creationism is that it's attached to Christianity, a religion. A religion that talks about a God who cares about you and has a purpose for our each of our lives. A God that is almighty and omnipotent yet still cares for us like a father. A God willing to bring us home if we let Him.
But if you choose Evolution, then what? Live out the rest of your days, realizing that all will remain of you is a skeleton after you die? Your life ultimately having no real purpose?"
False dichotomy. There is absolutely nothing to prevent one from having faith in a loving God and at the same time choosing to believe that Evolution has occurred due to Natural Selection. I think you are confusing science with Strict Materialism.
Although you do have to choose between Natural Selection and Creationism. Please recognize that all theistic Christians do not accept Creationism, or reject the scientific theory of Evolution.
"On that last point, it's also worth noting that religion being some sort of beacon of unchanging "trueness" isn't accurate at all."
That's correct. But I did mention that Organized Religion (and other conservative cultural institutions) act to slow down social change. They are deliberately set up to change more slowly that other sources of change (like science).
"(We've had at least one person on this board who left their religion (for atheistic, Less Wrong-style transhumanism)"
Yes, and his presence on this board is sorely missed.
"I’d say trying to establish a well entrenched scientific belief is incorrect or flawed has been no cake walk historically."
That's not only true, but historically there have been cases where the scientific community resisted new, empirically supported theories for reasons that seem to have had little to do with science itself, and more to do with personal or cultural prejudice. Stephen J. Gould described many of these. So the overlap between Religion and Science is greater than many would admit.
In spite of all the above, though, I stick by the position that Science and Religion belong to "different magesteria".
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.

A conclusion that something is more correct than something else is knowledge, is it not? If no knowledge (I assume we mean "objective knowledge" here) is possible regarding the true nature of God (my position), then Nihilism would seem to be the only option we have.
The phrase "subjective model of reality" doesn't make any sense to me. Subjective judgements are not about what exists, they are about how someone relates to an experience. As someone else said, they are inherently individualistic and fluid. You cant test subjective judgements and change them to come closer to some pre-determined criteria of correctness (although you can refine them to become more authentic and sincere).
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.