How human language refutes atheism

[Coito ergo sum]

How human language refutes atheism

...by saying, "No, no, atheism, you are WRONG!"

Like that.

Atheism! I refute thee!

[hiyymer]

Causation

The monists believe that all movement of bodies is the result of a physical cause and that all causes trace back to the first cause, the Big Bang, which was not the result of knowledge, power and will, it just happened, it was unintentional, accidental, random, arbitrary.

The dualists believe that there are numerous causes and that each of us is the prime mover of all our ideas and actions. Our ideas are the results of our mind exercising its knowledge, power and will. For example, let's say you think the thought: "what would happen to time if I approached the speed of light?" When Einstein thought this, this thought was not the result of him blindly obeying physical causes, rather he was the prime mover in this idea. He had never encountered this idea before in any essay, but it was he himself that caused it.

The brain

The human brain, in the monists view, is no exception. It too is obeying physical laws. All outputs are the result on an input. Input stimuli, output action. So when a person utters the phrase: "I have dream that one day people will be judged not by the content of their character but by the color of their skin," that phrase is simply the result of the stimuli that person encountered. That person did not choose to utter that phrase he was just obeying physical laws, just as a rock obeys gravity when it falls down.

I think you make some good points although I often disagree with your choice of words and how you characterize what you call the "monist" view. In particular you seem to equate physical causation with randomness, when it is quite the opposite. I get the feeling that what you are trying to say is that the reality revealed by science is meaningless and nihilistic, and in that sense I agree with you. In the "monist" view what occurs follows prescribed laws of nature and is therefore deterministic, not random. In other words, if science were able to determine the exact initial state of every atom in a human body at one instant of time, then it could in principle predict the next state of that human body in the next instant of time by the physical laws of nature (including all the state of all the neurons in the brain). But it would take a supercomputer a billion years to make the determination. But if life is deterministic in that sense, then what we experience in our mind as "will" cannot actually exist, and nothing matters. You got that right. I share your frustration with people who use science as a weapon against religion, but refuse to acknowledge the implications of science for their own sense of self causation and will and power.

The experience of the agent in our mind and the feeling that it matters and we have power and free will and moral scruples all exist only in our conscious experience. Science denies that there are any agents. Science can study the mechanism of our experience which is created by our brain, but it can't experience our experience or tell us what it "should" be. We are all dualists in practice, because we live in our experience and that's the way our brain represents the world to us. It's not that there are monists and dualists. Reality is fully caused, but we don't live in reality. Our experience is irreconcilable with what really is. We can pick sides and delude ourselves in various ways, but we are just talking about two sides of the same coin. Physical phenomena at the most fundamental microscopic level are fully caused, but that is not the level we deal with to survive. We cannot scientifically rationally deconstruct an incomprehensibly complex living organism. Our brain presents it to us as an agent and we will experience it that way or perish. Give up the fight. The monists are your brothers and you are theirs. We're all in this thing together. Love your God, but realize it does not exist as the thing you experience, even though it represents something that really exists. And tell your monist friends that what really exists doesn't MATTER, other than for making better indoor plumbing and smarter smart bombs. We don't decide what we want. Life is irrational. Enjoy the ride.

[FBM]

I think you make some good points although I often disagree with your choice of words and how you characterize what you call the "monist" view. In particular you seem to equate physical causation with randomness, when it is quite the opposite. I get the feeling that what you are trying to say is that the reality revealed by science is meaningless and nihilistic, and in that sense I agree with you. In the "monist" view what occurs follows prescribed laws of nature and is therefore deterministic, not random. In other words, if science were able to determine the exact initial state of every atom in a human body at one instant of time, then it could in principle predict the next state of that human body in the next instant of time by the physical laws of nature (including all the state of all the neurons in the brain). But it would take a supercomputer a billion years to make the determination. But if life is deterministic in that sense, then what we experience in our mind as "will" cannot actually exist, and nothing matters. You got that right. I share your frustration with people who use science as a weapon against religion, but refuse to acknowledge the implications of science for their own sense of self causation and will and power.

The experience of the agent in our mind and the feeling that it matters and we have power and free will and moral scruples all exist only in our conscious experience. Science denies that there are any agents. Science can study the mechanism of our experience which is created by our brain, but it can't experience our experience or tell us what it "should" be. We are all dualists in practice, because we live in our experience and that's the way our brain represents the world to us. It's not that there are monists and dualists. Reality is fully caused, but we don't live in reality. Our experience is irreconcilable with what really is. We can pick sides and delude ourselves in various ways, but we are just talking about two sides of the same coin. Physical phenomena at the most fundamental microscopic level are fully caused, but that is not the level we deal with to survive. We cannot scientifically rationally deconstruct an incomprehensibly complex living organism. Our brain presents it to us as an agent and we will experience it that way or perish. Give up the fight. The monists are your brothers and you are theirs. We're all in this thing together. Love your God, but realize it does not exist as the thing you experience, even though it represents something that really exists. And tell your monist friends that what really exists doesn't MATTER, other than for making better indoor plumbing and smarter smart bombs. We don't decide what we want. Life is irrational. Enjoy the ride.

Damn.

[eXcommunicate]

Does this hairless ape ever respond to his/her threads?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Does this hairless ape ever respond to his/her threads?

Just a troll. Enjoy while you can, it will get tired and wander off before too much longer.

[Clinton Huxley]

I think Spinoza may be on to something. It's like a sieve. How do all the smaller particles now how to get to and exit via the holes at the bottom? It's magic!

[FBM]

Does this hairless ape ever respond to his/her threads?

Depends on how you define 'respond'. It reacts occasionally, but not in a coherent manner. Mostly just red herring offerings, evasions, tautologies, false dichotomies, etc. Standard reactions you get from people who've got nothing and cling desperately to it, convinced that they've outsmarted the greatest minds in history and have hit upon TEH ONE ULTIMATE IRREFUTABLE ANSWER that allows their fave feel-good god to exist.

[Clinton Huxley]

Eat some "First Cause" pie, scoff a large slice of "747 in a scrapyard" cake, wind up with some "Consciousness Coffee", feel queasy, vomit all over forum.

[Thinking Aloud]

Mmmmm. 747 Scrapyard Cake.

[klr]

Mmmmm. 747 Scrapyard Cake.

If it's a Quantas 747 with Rolls-Royce engines, you might be in luck.

[Clinton Huxley]

Mmmmm. 747 Scrapyard Cake.

If it's a Quantas 747 with Rolls-Royce engines, you might be in luck.

Mmmm...drizzled with oil. Yummy.

[spinoza99]

You don't understand language. Have a look at syntactical structures... we don't memorise word sequences or have a random word chain generator in our head, we consider full functions...
An example:
I went to the supermarket
If you analyse this sentence "I" is the subject "went" is the verb and "to the supermarket" is the object. "to" and "the" are grouped under the category of the object to which they correspond.

I'm still waiting for a good materialistic definition for how material can know something. A human can choose a correct sentence form a list of infinite incorrect sentences. Where is this knowledge located in space?

How do we learn this?

How does material learn?

He'd do well to start with evolution

I'm very skeptical that Natural Selection is responsible for language. Number one language can't possibly be encoded in the DNA because language is something you can't code. You have to code every instruction and every output. There are infinite outputs for a language, you can't code that. Number two this statement is wrong

It starts as stupid unconscious matter, where the programmings that prove beneficial survive rather than those which don't (though not 100%),

Not only do the beneficial codings survive but also the mediocre. You only need to pass on your genes, and the mediocre pass on their genes too. A human that does not speak can also pass on its genes. Second, you would need two humans to have the same mutation at the same time, moreover, the first step towards language was probably only a few words, so you really expect a language with a few words to confer an advantage?

then after a few billion billion tiny steps

Ok, let's look at the baby-steps hypothesis. I'll assume you mean a billion baby steps. Let's try to think of what the minimum odds are for one baby step, what has to happen in the DNA coding. Proteins are between 50 and 2000 amino acids long and there are 20 of them. It would be illogical to think that a protein could function with less than 50 amino acids since we have no evidence for that, but since we're so desperate to cling to atheism let's be dishonest and say that it's 30. Further, how precisely built are these protein? In Microbiology of the Cell, by Bruce Albert which is a standard Darwinist text he says:

Proteins are so precisely built that the change of
even a few atoms in one amino acid can sometimes disrupt the structure of the
whole molecule so severelv
that all function is lost

Unfortunately he doesn't give us many statistics or evidence so that we can evaluate that but he does give us one:

the amino acid sequence
of histone H4 from a
pea and from a cow differ at only 2 of the 102
positions.

That would mean that 100 of those amino acids mostly likely are necessary and can only be sequenced one way, but let's be dishonest and say that only 90 are necessary. What are the odds of forming a protein 90 amino acids long spontaneously? around one in 10^90. That's just one protein. That's how hard it is to do one baby step. There are about two million known proteins, though they all have different function, even if you imagine that a million protein sequences are available for a certain function, the odds are still one in 10^84. I've already stated numerous times in this forum that if each atom were to try to form a protein for every nanosecond in the history of our universe that would still only bring us to only 10^106 events.

Third, Natural Selection has to select for 20,000 proteins in the human body, as well as every single character trait. How are traits which are so far down on the list of hierarchy of vital traits ever to be shaped by Natural Selection?

Anyway, I'll add what Pinker wrote in "the Language Instinct" (which is a great, but at times demanding read about our innate language abilities) about the implausiblity of a random word generator in our head, like spinoza seems to think

No, I don't seem to think that, but that is a necessary consequence of monism/materialism.

In trying to fit such a superchain in a person's memory, one quickly runs out of brain."

Right, that's why we need an immaterial force that can manipulate the brain. Once you admit that an immaterial force can coordinate material, it's quite logical that since the universe is coordinated that it too is the result of a mind.

[Eriku]

He'd do well to start with evolution

I'm very skeptical that Natural Selection is responsible for language. Number one language can't possibly be encoded in the DNA because language is something you can't code. You have to code every instruction and every output. There are infinite outputs for a language, you can't code that. Number two this statement is wrong

I meant read up on evolution in general... it explains how things like "altruism" can arise, and consciousness is being worked on... someone earlier in this thread gave you an excellent paragraph on how our consciousnesses are an illusion... once you realise that a lot of things follow.

You THINK that you're seeing a whole monitor right now, but your high resolution viewing is limited to an area the size of your thumb nail if you hold your hand straight out in front of your face... The rest you "think" you see clearly, but as we all know we need to shift our gaze to actually get a good overview of what's going on in that little patch of "pixels". Now if that is true, why can't it be the case that there are a lot of short cuts taken with regards to giving rise to a "consciousness", that we can influence and fool people's consciousnesses, even alter them greatly through sensory deprivation, drugs or meditation... if that is the case then what's the problem? Randomness systematised by physical rules, after a while we get over a certain threshhold and consciousness arises and people start getting concepts and symbols and whatnot in their heads... That's all it is.

Not that this'll clear anything up for you, but whatever...

[Feck]

As for language coding in DNA ...strawman nobody said Language was coded for on Dna ... And it's certainly got nothing to do with random ..

Why are you so obsessed with random ? You need to check some proper evolutionary biology Yes not all genes are selected for ,some are not important at the time ,

For example if genes for say 'speech' were shared by a family group of hominids that were successful for other reasons then the 'speech' genes would become more common in the population without being selected for .

[spinoza99]

Eriku,
Do you deny that an immaterial force has the ability to coordinate the neurons in your brain? Do you believe all effects (including language) are the result of the movement and sequencing of bodies?

we can influence and fool people's consciousnesses, even alter them greatly through sensory deprivation, drugs or meditation... if that is the case then what's the problem?

I've said elsewhere that it's possible to write an alogrithm for manipulating the brain. If you know what neurons to fire in what order then you can manipulate the brain to manipulate the body. However, it takes knowledge to do this and knowledge is not located in a particle.