# Anyone on here particularly religious?



## Hollowway

I'm wondering if people who are fairly religious feel that those that worship a different god are going to be saved or not. In other words, most Christian religions believe that you have to accept Jesus as your savior, otherwise you will go to Hell. Yet, don't find most average church goers telling their Jewish, Muslim, a Buddhist friends that they should convert before it's too late. Nor do I see those other religions doing the same.

So my question is, is it just a matter of believing that they will be going to Hell, and there's no point in proselytizing, or is there a belief that everyone is praying to the same god, just through different channels?


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## Explorer

I'm not religious, but one of the reasons I started thinking seriously about truth claims made by various faiths was the serious hate-on my evangelical christian family members had towards catholics. "The Frozen Chosen" was one slightly kinder epithet they would level at those "heathen catholics."

I think it's a matter of degrees, where people express their antipathy based on the current situation. Young-earth creationists get into arguments with old-earth creationists, but both unite against those who don't believe in creationism. 

Similarly, you have various faiths decrying others in private, but uniting in public.

I had one evangelical christian coworker, now gone, who was constantly making a special effort to get jewish coworkers to visit her church. The jewish coworkers later told me that evangelicals constantly "witness" to them, with their targets feeling like there must be some bonus points attached to getting jews to accept Jeebus.


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## Hollowway

Yeah, I know some people who are very matter of fact about others going to hell, and then others who seem to not be as vocal about it. So I'm never really sure what is going on behind the scenes.


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## Spaced Out Ace

I don't know that I'm "particularly religious" -- whatever that means -- but I am Christian. Not a good one, mind you, but one none the less. Anyways, I don't care what others believe or do as long as they aren't bombing people, mutilating people, or waging holy jihad on others.


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## auxioluck

I spent most of my life as an agnostic while I studied religions over the course of over 10 years. I began identifying as Hindu about 4 years ago. I don't believe anyone needs to believe in anything, nor do I think anyone is going to some terrible afterlife for not following a certain idea or deity. Every religion/ideology speaks to everyone a different way, and I will not judge anyone on what they worship (or don't) as long as it helps them be a better person.

My personal opinion in regards to engaging people that are firmly rooted in their beliefs is this: don't discuss it with someone unless you know they are willing to have an intelligent, open conversation about it. Sadly, those people are increasingly rare. But as soon as you feel that someone isn't going to budge, don't push the issue. All you will typically get is scripture quoted, and the conversation is usually over by that point. I have my own opinions about how many aspects of Christianity (and other religions) rely on indoctrination (see: brainwashing) of youth. It still makes me sad to see how many people were never given the choice as children to believe what they wanted, and now spend their adult lives in a non-inquisitive, unquestioning state.

I find more and more people on social media who label themselves as some form of "warrior" for whatever deity they worship. These people are another type of animal, and should typically just be avoided entirely. But that can be said for any religious extremist, regardless of faith.

After all these years, the only response I still have in regards to people that firmly believe they will go to Hell if they don't worship a certain deity is: Fear is a powerful tool (see: childhood indoctrination).


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## Explorer

I think most people who want to find an excuse to act badly towards others will search for the cause or faith which validates those desires. 

As an example, Hinduism doesn't require belief in reincarnation, but enough Hindus have acted to treat Dalits as less than human that one can't reasonably claim Hinduism hasn't led to oppression. It's still happening, because enough of the Hindus keep ostracism going.

Now, it's telling that you rarely hear about the racism espoused by the gentle Ba'hai. That's because the teachings don't give as much cover to such desires. I think it was Seth Andrews who accurately noted, "If you have a problem with your religion's fundamentalists, you probably have a problem with your religion's fundamentals." Jainism and Ba'hai-ism don't provide that kind of cover.

So, there are definitely nice people in the various faiths, and the slow process of such people changing a bloodthirsty deity's edicts by instead substituting their own, less violent ideas is what leads to certain christians rejecting their god's endorsement of correct slavery, or to certain muslims rejecting their god's death penalty for unbelievers.

My own view is that the violent ones use the non-fundamentalists as camouflage and plausible deniability.


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## chopeth

Religion is a cancer. Everything would be better if science filled that gap in our lives. I hate to see people worshiping a piece of carved wood (except for instruments, hehe) while they look down on you for not believing in their fantasy tales.


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## Dcm81

Shia and Sunni......speaks for itself I think.


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## vilk

can we count existential nihilism? I meet every week by myself at the church of my apartment and get wasted in reverence of the meaninglessness of human existence


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## TedEH

I was thinking about it the other day because of a conversation that came up- but more and more I'm reminded that there was a point where being a person of some faith was the default, and "atheist" was a sort of dirty word, whereas my own generation and younger seem to be flipping that view around in the sense that I assume most people below my age are atheist by default (maybe that's just wishful thinking). My grandmother made a comment the other day that surprised me, something along the lines of "I think some part of me has always been a bit atheist". Caught me off guard because I never thought of her as a faithful person in the first place, but of course she's from a very different generation.

Honestly, I try to be respectful of people's religion, but the whole thing baffles (and almost sort of scares me) that anyone actually believes any of this stuff. For a long time I assumed that the majority of people who identified as religious were either just saying so to be part of the social group, or because their family said that was the case, to maintain tradition, and they took the "beliefs" as metaphor, etc. I didn't think anyone actually BELIEVED any of it, because how could anyone? I understand that at some point there was nothing to fill the gaps in our understanding of the world, but we haven't had that excuse for quite a while now- I struggle to understand how faith continues to be a thing in modern times when everyone and everything is connected and accessible.


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## bostjan

My father was raised Lutheran, but was never particularly religious, aside from making it clear that he believed in an afterlife. My mother, on the other hand, has gone through a lot of different religious phases. I was raised baptist at a very strict school, but the things we were taught in school certainly didn't represent the baptist doctrine very well.

I guess what I am getting at is that everyone's beliefs are a little different, as their religious dogma is taught to them and then develops on its own.

We were taught a rather inconsistent view, as a matter of a sort of sanctioned stance on other religions. The people at the school were very friendly toward other religions, like Judaism and Hinduism, yet combative toward Catholicism and Lutheranism- especially Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, though. I got the feeling that the general reason for this attitude was that Catholics would be more difficult to convert to Protestantism (which is actually statistically untrue). So, if they thought you were an easy target to convert, you were a friend, and if you were a difficult target to convert, you were an enemy. If you were busy out there converting people to another religion, you earned bonus spite.

Nowadays, I hold firmly a belief in no religions. I think that religions were invented by people early in the age of antiquity in order to control the herd by threat of torture in the afterlife by a vengeful supernatural being. I think that in later antiquity, there was a movement to offer a reward instead of punishment with newer religions, but that, in the end, that simply made followers of these "newer" religions more violent and unstable, as people inevitably mix the dogma they are taught with their own personal internal psychosis er, umm, beliefs. This deep into the modern era, the big religions are vestigial. They are no longer useful for controlling society, but, like a tonsil or appendix, they can still become infected and be used to cause irritation and danger.


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## KnightBrolaire

chopeth said:


> Religion is a cancer. Everything would be better if science filled that gap in our lives. I hate to see people worshiping a piece of carved wood (except for instruments, hehe) while they look down on you for not believing in their fantasy tales.


The only problem with that is that there are already zealots in science who are trying to twist science to their devices. Look at the infamous saturated fat study done by Ancel Keys, which shows a very strong upward trend/correlation between intake of saturated fats and prevalence of heart disease (the data was trimmed to remove outliers and to preserve the r value, which is a big no-no). Granted, he also worked on the 7 countries study which is one of the leading longitudinal studies on the subject, and the source of a lot of great data. Keys himself wasn't the problem, but people who tried to be reductive and simplify what the study said into "fat= bad". Thus began the dark times of the low-fat crusade. There are countless other examples of people manipulating their data so that they can keep getting funding, so they can get awards, or because they were paid to do so. Science works best when the scientific method/proper statistical analysis is rigorously applied. The data itself isn't the problem but the interpretation of it (just like the bible in christianity). Interpretation is the key problem in both aspects imo. Personally I find the bible to be a hilarious work of fiction right alongside the mormon bible, but clearly my opinion isn't shared by the numerous people that take them literally as the word of god/their prophets. People make fun of scientology but is a magical space alien any less far-fetched than a magical omniscient,omnipotent being that created a planet and its ecosystem in 7 days?


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## vilk

^since this is now a religion thread and someone said Scientology, here is a little known factoid:

*Wicca* was first released to the public in 1954, the same year as Scientology. People think that Wicca is an ancient European religion or something like that, but it was just made up by a dude who happened to be into European traditions and folklore, around the same time that Scientology was made up by a guy who was into science fiction stories.

People act like Scientology is the dumbest thing on the planet that only an empty-headed rube could buy into, so I find it funny that Wicca isn't usually treated with the same degree of cynicism, considering they are both 100% fabricated by published writers (of the same respective "genre") only 60 years ago.


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## KnightBrolaire

vilk said:


> ^since this is now a religion thread and someone said Scientology, here is a little known factoid:
> 
> *Wicca* was first released to the public in 1954, the same year as Scientology. People think that Wicca is an ancient European religion or something like that, but it was just made up by a dude who happened to be into European traditions and folklore, around the same time that Scientology was made up by a guy who was into science fiction stories.
> 
> People act like Scientology is the dumbest thing on the planet that only an empty-headed rube could buy into, so I find it funny that Wicca isn't usually treated with the same degree of cynicism, considering they are both 100% fabricated by published writers (of the same respective "genre") only 60 years ago.


I think the reason wicca gets away with it is because it attempts to hearken back to pagan traditions, so that gives it a bit more legitimacy than scientology with it's pseudoscience gobbledigook. That'd be the only reason I can see it not being treated the same way as scientology.


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## vilk

KnightBrolaire said:


> I think the reason wicca gets away with it is because it attempts to hearken back to pagan traditions, so that gives it a bit more legitimacy than scientology with it's pseudoscience gobbledigook. That'd be the only reason I can see it not being treated the same way as scientology.



Why is pseudo-pagan any more gobbledigook than pseudo-science? 

I get what you're saying though: Wicca appeals to people _aesthetically._ Actually, historians often argue that the aesthetics of Buddhism is one of the main reasons that it took off in the far East.


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## TedEH

KnightBrolaire said:


> wicca gets away with it


Does it though? It's made fun of a bit less, but I don't think very many people take it seriously from the outside. I hate to say it, but the only people I know of who have ever made any "serious" claims about Wicca obviously chose it for aesthetic purposes, not because of any rational deliberation about the real world around them. 

Edit: Maybe as an exception, in some cases, I've seen it picked up by some people who claimed to be "spiritual", but mostly just believed in a hodge-podge of spiritual nonsense mashed together irrespective of origin that they find all over the place. I have a friend or two with developmental/psychological issues who latch onto this sort of "spirituality" to explain/justify their experiences.


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## vilk

I've personally met more than a few people who seem to think that Wicca is pre-Christian religious belief system. They obviously had interest in it only for aesthetics, though I doubt they'd admit it, but I feel the vast majority of people, myself included until recently, don't know that it parallels Scientology with regards to origin.


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## bostjan

Wicca has been around just a tad bit longer than Scientology, but, mainly, it doesn't have as much visibility. I hear people often making fun of both, though.


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## Explorer

chopeth said:


> Religion is a cancer. Everything would be better if science filled that gap in our lives. I hate to see people worshiping a piece of carved wood (except for instruments, hehe) while they look down on you for not believing in their fantasy tales.





KnightBrolaire said:


> The only problem with that is that there are already zealots in science who are trying to twist science to their devices. ...Science works best when the scientific method/proper statistical analysis is rigorously applied. The data itself isn't the problem but the interpretation of it (just like the bible in christianity). Interpretation is the key problem in both aspects imo.


Even if some try to twist science to their own ends, the scientific method has corrective measures built into it which, over time, eliminate the impact of zealots. 

The core pillars of empiricism and evidence are what separate science from most religions except for Temple Satanism. 

Without evidence and replicability, you get *only* interpretation as a tool for debate, as shown by the numerous flavors of christianity, islam and so on.


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## bostjan

I've *never* heard of anyone strapping a bomb to himself and yelling "praise science!" before blowing himself up in a crowded area.
Science, in it's proper form, doesn't even attempt to explain matters that cannot been observed nor measured. Therefore, science does not interfere fundamentally with religion, as long as religion tries to stick to supernatural stuff and philosophical questions. As soon as a religion states that the Earth is flat, or that insects have four legs, or that geese are a type of fish, then religion oversteps its bounds and ends up, almost always, being proven wrong.

Generally, science is open to correction and augmentation (in fact, encourages it), whereas religion is closed.

Science versus religion shouldn't even be a thing. They are two completely different sorts of things that should in no way ever interfere with one another anyway.


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## TedEH

bostjan said:


> They are two completely different sorts of things that should in no way ever interfere with one another anyway.


Not really though. Religion and science both serve the purpose of giving you a source to build an understanding of the world from. They're both the mechanism through which we try to fill the gaps in our knowledge of everything.



bostjan said:


> as long as religion tries to stick to supernatural stuff and philosophical questions


Except that it doesn't. And those things are only supernatural or philosophical because science hasn't closed that gap yet. A god pulling a fireball across the sky exists to explain something that eventually science gives us the truth about. A god creating the earth in 7 days exists to explain things science hasn't always had the answer for.


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## vilk

Something I find unusual:

1. Many if not most varieties of Christianity believe that God had his hand in the creation of the Bible. If you raise up points about how the Bible was written by men who never even knew Jesus, voted on by councils of people who were working to fulfill a political agenda, that there are other gospels written but left out of the Bible, etc, they will say that God created the ultimate Bible through divine intervention. 

2. But if that's the case, then why are they always defending the stuff that's written in there with alternate translations? You talk about how rich people are bound for hell because it'd be easier to fit a camel through a needle, and someone will quickly tell you that camel is a mistranslation of rope and that actually it's only just kinda tough for rich people to go to heaven. Or that eye of a needle is ancient slang for a kind of Jewish architecture that is a narrow passageway. If that's the "real meaning", then how come God f///ed it up when he was guiding our hand in making the Bible?

It seems like logically you have to pick one or the other, but I frequently see Christian apologists picking both.


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## KnightBrolaire

vilk said:


> Something I find unusual:
> 
> 1. Many if not most varieties of Christianity believe that God had his hand in the creation of the Bible. If you raise up points about how the Bible was written by men who never even knew Jesus, voted on by councils of people who were working to fulfill a political agenda, that there are other gospels written but left out of the Bible, etc, they will say that God created the ultimate Bible through divine intervention.
> 
> 2. But if that's the case, then why are they always defending the stuff that's written in there with alternate translations? You talk about how rich people are bound for hell because it'd be easier to fit a camel through a needle, and someone will quickly tell you that camel is a mistranslation of rope and that actually it's only just kinda tough for rich people to go to heaven. Or that eye of a needle is ancient slang for a kind of Jewish architecture that is a narrow passageway. If that's the "real meaning", then how come God f///ed it up when he was guiding our hand in making the Bible?
> 
> It seems like logically you have to pick one or the other, but I frequently see Christian apologists picking both.


it's easier to keep building on top of a shaky foundation and reinforcing illogical ideas than to actually consider that it's just a collection of writings made by humans and not their omniscient omnipotent god.


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## BenjaminW

I was born and baptized as a Lutheran. My mom's side of my family was Catholic and my dad's was Protestant and Christian Science. Eventually my dad became a Catholic and we started going to church almost every Sunday but that pretty much stopped once my brother stopped being an altar server when he graduated from 8th grade. I've thought about being atheist or agnostic but I would probably consider myself maybe between agnostic and moderately Catholic to put it that way, I guess.


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## Konfyouzd

I think the second thing but not everyone else does. I'm also not religious but from the outside looking in the "all praying to the same thing through different channels" thing is what appears to going on. It's like everyone thanks the universe in their culture's own special way, which in some cases may involve damning everyone else.


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## El Caco

I kind of subscribe to some kind of Simulation Hypothesis. If we are living in a simulation then the possibility exists that all beliefs can be true, it doesn't mean that is the outcome. We could also simply end up as dead code or even be deleted or perhaps revived on a new server that might be similar or heavenly or hellish. Who knows. Because I don't know what comes next I don't worry about it, I just want to live healthy forever or until I'm sick of here.

More recently I've been interested in Neopaganism. I thought it would be cool to have a old Slavic belief but the Croat beliefs are kind of too made up at this point for my liking and without more research I'm not sure if any of them are anything but made up and probably not very accurate to what people believe before Christianity.


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## chopeth

Explorer said:


> Even if some try to twist science to their own ends, the scientific method has corrective measures built into it which, over time, eliminate the impact of zealots.
> 
> The core pillars of empiricism and evidence are what separate science from most religions except for Temple Satanism.
> 
> Without evidence and replicability, you get *only* interpretation as a tool for debate, as shown by the numerous flavors of christianity, islam and so on.



I was going to answer science is an approach and method rather than a ultimate truth thing but it was remarked several times after my post. Real Science, the one you could consider structured curiosity is the only valuable (and provisional) answer. The rest (religions) is bullshit.


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## El Caco

vilk said:


> Something I find unusual:
> 
> 1. Many if not most varieties of Christianity believe that God had his hand in the creation of the Bible. If you raise up points about how the Bible was written by men who never even knew Jesus, voted on by councils of people who were working to fulfill a political agenda, that there are other gospels written but left out of the Bible, etc, they will say that God created the ultimate Bible through divine intervention.
> 
> 2. But if that's the case, then why are they always defending the stuff that's written in there with alternate translations? You talk about how rich people are bound for hell because it'd be easier to fit a camel through a needle, and someone will quickly tell you that camel is a mistranslation of rope and that actually it's only just kinda tough for rich people to go to heaven. Or that eye of a needle is ancient slang for a kind of Jewish architecture that is a narrow passageway. If that's the "real meaning", then how come God f///ed it up when he was guiding our hand in making the Bible?
> 
> It seems like logically you have to pick one or the other, but I frequently see Christian apologists picking both.


As someone who once studied the Bible and religion seriously as I trained to become a preacher I can say is those issues you raised are some of the least of the concerns in the Bible. Try bringing up the contradictions or polytheism in the Old Testament. The funny thing about many is when you bring up these things they see it as a test of their faith and choose to believe even if they find something that is hard to accept. Ultimately they ignore it and I've seen various approaches from saying "smarter men than you or I have been studying the Bible for centuries and if it was an issue they would have mentioned it" to simply asking someone they respect as more inspired for reassurance.

Here is the problem as I see it with the Abrahamic religions, they all have the same flawed foundation. Out of the 3 if I have to pick a favourite, it is Islam and I think it would be cool if it was real, it certainly makes more sense than the other two and I prefer some of the teachings but it is based on the same flawed foundation.

Then of course we have the issue of these all being so far removed from the original beliefs with no hope of ever getting back that there is no way the faiths today are genuine even if one of them was real. For starters there is the total bastardisation of what Idolatry is. Today it only concerns the worship of false Gods or Idols but back in the day it was understood that any image of anything in heaven or earth was Idolatry, worship was not a factor. That would make TV's Idolatry and photos. I have actually come across religious people who understand and agree with this, one explanation I have come across that allows photos and regular TV is that it is okay to capture God's creation but not okay to create an image yourself. Sounds like BS to me. But once upon a time the idea of creating a likeness being wrong was widely accepted so in religious excavations dating to those times it is normal to not find any likeness and only find patterns in art and decorative design.

My biggest problem with religion is the believers. I have met very few people (less than a hands worth) I would describe as Godly, the greatest of those was Mormon which I find pretty bloody humorous. Outside of those I find religious people to be the most horrible people of all, most don't understand the concept of love at all. Many are horribly judgemental and intolerant justify this by claiming God's righteous judgement or the concept that Saints will judge. Others pretty much claim a free pass to anything by saying their faith provides them forgiveness. But it isn't limited to Christianity, you can't even say anything negative about one of the religions without being branded and potentially destroyed, then you have the many people who have done wrong to me or ripped me off. Most recent of those was a Muslim who left town without paying me. A funny thing about him was one night we had a conversation on Islam and he mentioned the Virgins in heaven, I can't for a moment fathom how having that many wives is any kind of heavenly concept. And what makes them virgins? Do you tear their hymen every time? They can pretend they are perpetual virgins but I don't buy it, even if you got 72 that's 72 virgin roots who then become 72 wives, who really wants that many wives?


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## marcwormjim

I think a more interesting topic is "Is anyone in this tonewood community/echo chamber of BKP prescription _not _given to indulging in religious reasoning or action?" _E.g., _though generally identifying as an irreligious dandy, I'm aware that my presumptions concerning the toilet I'm typing this from effectively disposing my bloody stools are - nonetheless - fallacious, ritualistic hopes.

My pedantic non-point is that "particularly religious" can describe any instance of anyone believing what they prefer to be true.


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## TedEH

BenjaminW said:


> I've thought about being atheist





El Caco said:


> I thought it would be cool


Some of the ways people word things in this thread kinda baffle me.
I mean, choosing a world view isn't about just picking one and running with it- it's supposed to be a question of what you think is true. You're not supposed to change world views like you change your shirt because it went out of style.

Like "I considered being an Atheist" makes no sense to me. Or saying "this religion looks cool, maybe I'll try that one". It's not the title you should be debating, it's whether or not you think that religion is the truth. If the answer to that question is a plain ol' no, then that's not your religion. The statement shouldn't be "I considered this religion" it should be "I considered whether or not these values represent reality".


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## bostjan

TedEH said:


> Not really though. Religion and science both serve the purpose of giving you a source to build an understanding of the world from. They're both the mechanism through which we try to fill the gaps in our knowledge of everything.
> 
> 
> Except that it doesn't. And those things are only supernatural or philosophical because science hasn't closed that gap yet. A god pulling a fireball across the sky exists to explain something that eventually science gives us the truth about. A god creating the earth in 7 days exists to explain things science hasn't always had the answer for.



I wasn't very clear. I mean that religion tries to answer questions that science can never begin to answer:

Q. What happens when you die?
Science: As circulation and nerve functions seize, tissue become swollen with gas, and when the gas escapes the tissues, fluids tend to leak out of cells and organ networks. As the immune system shuts down, the body begins to break down, starting with the eyes and softer tissues and ending with cartilage and bone. We know this from observing and recording people after they died.
Religion: If you believed in religion, your intangible internal entity separates from your physical body and travels to a place no one alive can know anything about to be with a cosmic being that is all powerful but completely indectable to life on Earth. We know this because it was written down by some crazed person a very long time ago.

Q. Is there a god?
Science: What do you mean "god?" Maybe you should ask religion that question- I don't feel comfortable without a firm definition of what you are asking.
Religion: Yes, but only the one(s) religion says. All other answers are false.

Q. How can I become better at sports.
Science: Proper diet and exercise, along with gratuitous amounts of training to hone in the skills involved in that particular activity will prepare you better for a career doing such.
Religion: Pray to the god of the correct religion and have faith that (s)he will answer.

Q. How does a hair drier work?
Science: As electricity flows through an imperfect conductor, energy as electrical potential is lost to energy as heat. By directing the flow of air through the source of that heat, a warm current is created. That warm current has a low partial pressure for water, which causes water in hair and on skin to evaporate much more quickly, and the flow of air carries the water vapours away so that the process continues at a high rate.
Religion: I dunno, ask science.
Crazy religion:


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## TedEH

bostjan said:


> I mean that religion tries to answer questions that science can never begin to answer:


I still disagree though. Religion definitely tries to answer things that are subjective, opinion, etc., regarding things like morality, values, behavior, etc., that don't fit the domain of science, but it absolutely tries to answer things that science already has an answer for, or that does have an answer that's possible to find via science. You've even given examples yourself of questions that both try to answer, and give opposing answers to. It can be justified away if you try hard enough, but there's a lot of overlap in what the two try to accomplish.



bostjan said:


> Religion: I dunno, ask science.


Except religion never says "dunno, ask science", it just says "because God said so". Or sometimes says something that entirely contradicts what science says. There are some people of faith who would allow for that "dunno, maybe science knows" approach, but just as many don't. I can just as easily pick some questions that both try to answer, and that provide conflicting answers:

How was the world/universe/etc. started?
Where do humans come from?
How old is the planet?
What should be done if someone gets sick?
What causes people to behave a certain way?

It would be nice to be able to say that religion stays outside of things that are in the domain of science, but it's just not true. What about cases where people refuse treatment for an illness because "it's part of the plan"? What about people who use spirituality to explain away their psychological issues/hallucinations/etc. instead of getting help? What about people who flat out deny that the world is round, or that it's older than their holy text claims, or that evolution doesn't exist, etc?


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## TedEH

Here's another odd question:

Why do so few people deny the existence of "souls"? It's just as nebulous/undefined/unverifiable as any other spiritual/religious concept. It seems to me that if you deny religion, deny gods, deny spirituality, then "souls" should just be the next thing on that list of things that don't seem to reflect reality, right?


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## vilk

TedEH said:


> Here's another odd question:
> 
> Why do so few people deny the existence of "souls"? It's just as nebulous/undefined/unverifiable as any other spiritual/religious concept. It seems to me that if you deny religion, deny gods, deny spirituality, then "souls" should just be the next thing on that list of things that don't seem to reflect reality, right?



I think we can chock that up to ghost stories. For some reason, people just really really want to believe in ghosts. I super don't get that.

Even on this forum, check the "strange things that happened to you thread" there's this guy who said he's got ghosts because the suction cup fell down in his shower...


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## TedEH

I had an ex who was (probably still is?) really into ghost hunting. And by ghost hunting I mean looking at poorly shot photos and deciding that dust and lens flares are actually spirits. I got dragged out to a ghost hunt once and it was so ridiculous- homemade gadgets that did literally nothing, everything that was aesthetically creepy was "haunted" because of course it was. And they were so condescending about having "a skeptic" in the room, as if I was the one being irrational.


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## BenjaminW

TedEH said:


> Like "I considered being an Atheist" makes no sense to me.


I'll admit. I did drift off to being atheist a few times and I did start listening to guys like Richard Dawkins and The Amazing Atheist on YouTube but when I look back at it now, I do think it was just me being some edgy kid who was mad at the world. Hope that clears things up for you.


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## bostjan

TedEH said:


> I still disagree though. Religion definitely tries to answer things that are subjective, opinion, etc., regarding things like morality, values, behavior, etc., that don't fit the domain of science, but it absolutely tries to answer things that science already has an answer for, or that does have an answer that's possible to find via science. You've even given examples yourself of questions that both try to answer, and give opposing answers to. It can be justified away if you try hard enough, but there's a lot of overlap in what the two try to accomplish.
> 
> 
> Except religion never says "dunno, ask science", it just says "because God said so". Or sometimes says something that entirely contradicts what science says. There are some people of faith who would allow for that "dunno, maybe science knows" approach, but just as many don't. I can just as easily pick some questions that both try to answer, and that provide conflicting answers:
> 
> How was the world/universe/etc. started?
> Where do humans come from?
> How old is the planet?
> What should be done if someone gets sick?
> What causes people to behave a certain way?
> 
> It would be nice to be able to say that religion stays outside of things that are in the domain of science, but it's just not true. What about cases where people refuse treatment for an illness because "it's part of the plan"? What about people who use spirituality to explain away their psychological issues/hallucinations/etc. instead of getting help? What about people who flat out deny that the world is round, or that it's older than their holy text claims, or that evolution doesn't exist, etc?



It's easy in this day and age to forget that a great deal of the science that existed prior to the Renaissance was collected by monks and clergy-members who had really nothing better to do at the time when the common people were struggling to not starve every winter.

I think where we are getting deep into the intricacies of dogmas and superstitions within religion. I know what you are saying, and I'm not saying that you're wrong, but, if you trim the fat off of a religion, you get rid of pretty much all of the examples you mention.

For all of the Bible's shortcomings in logic, it doesn't say anywhere that the Earth is 5000 years old (that's what some pragmatic people "interpreted"), nor that evolution is false (the theory of evolution did not exist at the time, and therefore there is no mention of it, nor it's pretenses).

The same goes for science: Science doesn't state a conjecture for how time started, only models of what happened at t=x where x is before now. The big bang theory doesn't give any information at all into what happened before the big bang, for example. What should be done if someone gets sick is another one where science only has "IF ... THEN ... ELSE ..." to say.

As for "where do humans come from?" Well, clearly science has something to say. Some religions do, as well, and some do not. But again, things can be taken with a grain of salt or not. If the Bible states that humans came from nothing, literally a few days after the Earth was created, and then a single man and a single woman bred to populate the Earth in all of it's diversity, yet their firstborn children ran into other people, clearly it's not simply a matter of archaeology and science to drudge up problems with the story. 

I don't believe in any of those religions, but to say that religion and science necessarily contradict one another is, in my opinion, a misguided conclusion, since, science is really confined to knowledge about things we can observe and measure in some way, and religion, at its core, is supposed to answer deep philosophical questions that have no observable answers.


----------



## StevenC

vilk said:


> can we count existential nihilism? I meet every week by myself at the church of my apartment and get wasted in reverence of the meaninglessness of human existence



Ah, you're just one of those a la carte existential nihilists. I bask in the meaninglessness of human existence every moment of every day.


----------



## TedEH

bostjan said:


> to say that religion and science necessarily contradict one another is, in my opinion, a misguided conclusion


I suppose I see it as not necessarily that the two contradict each other in the sense that you've described it, more that religion just sort of contradicts reality, and science is a tool to try to measure reality. It would be one thing to say that faith just amounts to filling in some gaps with our best guesses- which I think is what some people see it as, and likely how a lot of aspects of it started, but in practice that's not really what's happening anymore. Science has closed so many of those gaps, clearly demonstrating that religious interpretations of the world aren't reliable. It's my opinion that we have more than enough evidence to conclude that religion does not reflect reality, there is no God, spirits, ghosts, souls, etc, but yet people still take it as truth without a good reason to believe those things.



bostjan said:


> religion, at its core, is supposed to answer deep philosophical questions that have no observable answers


Until we figure out how to observe those answers, or deem the questions meaningless or unanswerable.


----------



## bostjan

TedEH said:


> I suppose I see it as not necessarily that the two contradict each other in the sense that you've described it, more that religion just sort of contradicts reality, and science is a tool to try to measure reality. It would be one thing to say that faith just amounts to filling in some gaps with our best guesses- which I think is what some people see it as, and likely how a lot of aspects of it started, but in practice that's not really what's happening anymore. Science has closed so many of those gaps, clearly demonstrating that religious interpretations of the world aren't reliable. It's my opinion that we have more than enough evidence to conclude that religion does not reflect reality, there is no God, spirits, ghosts, souls, etc, but yet people still take it as truth without a good reason to believe those things.
> 
> 
> Until we figure out how to observe those answers, or deem the questions meaningless or unanswerable.



Not every religion is as crazy as every other, though. I think religious philosophies come about due to people's ponderous observations of reality through the lens devoid of evidence-based criticism, and it catches on through some sort of resonance with other people's similar observations. One the philosophy of a religion is established, it almost always drifts over time as the religion goes through some phases. At it's core, though, the concept of existence of god or lack thereof is a totally unfalsifiable principle, in that there is no way to actively prove nor disprove it, based off of evidence alone, due to the simple nature of an undetectable being being undetectable. The logical arguments are going to have to rely on philosophy or on pure rhetoric.

Which leads to my favourite atheist philosophical question: "What if there is a god, and he exists, but you will never interact with him in any way during this life or any afterlife that may or may not exist?"


----------



## TedEH

bostjan said:


> Which leads to my favourite atheist philosophical question: "What if there is a god, and he exists, but you will never interact with him in any way during this life or any afterlife that may or may not exist?"


I guess the counter-question would be: if something is undetectable and can't be described and interacts with nothing and has no impact, does it really meaningfully "exist"?

It's the same as the whole simulation idea- you can't prove we're NOT in a simulation. But no rational person actually believes we live in the matrix. I know one guy in the thread said he did sort of believe this, but (sorry, not sorry) that's not rational.

It comes down, I think, to how someone resolves not knowing something. Atheism seems to be ok with the unknown, where religion has to have an answer, even if there's no grounded basis for that answer. Is it a fear thing maybe?


----------



## bostjan

TedEH said:


> I guess the counter-question would be: if something is undetectable and can't be described and interacts with nothing and has no impact, does it really meaningfully "exist"?



Exactly.



TedEH said:


> It's the same as the whole simulation idea- you can't prove we're NOT in a simulation. But no rational person actually believes we live in the matrix. I know one guy in the thread said he did sort of believe this, but (sorry, not sorry) that's not rational.
> 
> It comes down, I think, to how someone resolves not knowing something. Atheism seems to be ok with the unknown, where religion has to have an answer, even if there's no grounded basis for that answer. Is it a fear thing maybe?



Ultimately, none of it matters.

The only reason any of those stories matter to anyone is because of superstitions passed from generation to generation at young ages.

Objectively, if somebody returned as a reanimated undead and wants everyone's souls after those people devote their lives to him, and this somebody is going to trigger the end of the world, with beasts with seven horns and rivers turning to blood, am I reading the Bible or the script for the next Hellraiser movie?


----------



## cwhitey2

Personally I hate the concept of organized religion, specifically Christianity. I was raised Methodist and went to church/Sunday school for 15 years. 


Going for 15 years made me forget religion exists. 

I literally feel like the super crazy religious people are so focused on their beliefs and the beliefs others, that they totally forget to _live.
_
I feel so many people waste sooo much on believing in something no one can prove.

...at the end of the day science can back a lot of the things it claims... Religion Sally cannot imo.


----------



## cwhitey2

Personally I hate the concept of organized religion, specifically Christianity. I was raised Methodist and went to church/Sunday school for 15 years. 


Going for 15 years made me forget religion exists. 

I literally feel like the super crazy religious people are so focused on their beliefs and the beliefs others, that they totally forget to _live.
_
I feel so many people waste sooo much on believing in something no one can prove.

...at the end of the day science can back a lot of the things it claims... Religion Sally cannot imo.


----------



## Science_Penguin

Hollowway said:


> I'm wondering if people who are fairly religious feel that those that worship a different god are going to be saved or not. In other words, most Christian religions believe that you have to accept Jesus as your savior, otherwise you will go to Hell. Yet, don't find most average church goers telling their Jewish, Muslim, a Buddhist friends that they should convert before it's too late. Nor do I see those other religions doing the same.
> 
> So my question is, is it just a matter of believing that they will be going to Hell, and there's no point in proselytizing, or is there a belief that everyone is praying to the same god, just through different channels?



Depends who you ask.

My Dad was told flat-out by his old Bible school teacher "Don't bother making friends with any Jews, cause they're going to hell!"

A Christian friend of mine once told me that non-believers won't necessarily burn eternally in Hell, but instead wind up in Purgatory- AKA a nice enough afterlife fitting for good people, but you'll have to go through it knowing you can never truly get closer to God (see also Dante's Inferno, first circle)

As for how I was raised, I think my family always preferred to believe that Jesus already saved everyone and as long as you're not unforgivably evil (which only an all-seeing all-knowing deity would be able to judge- and that's the reason we never liked telling people they're going to Hell) there's a spot in Heaven for you.

If you were to ask me today, I'd just shrug and say "I don't fuckin' know... your guess is quite literally as good as mine."


----------



## Explorer

bostjan said:


> For all of the Bible's shortcomings in logic, it doesn't say anywhere that the Earth is 5000 years old (that's what some pragmatic people "interpreted"), nor that evolution is false (the theory of evolution did not exist at the time, and therefore there is no mention of it, nor it's pretenses).
> 
> I don't believe in any of those religions, but to say that religion and science necessarily contradict one another is, in my opinion, a misguided conclusion, since, science is really confined to knowledge about things we can observe and measure in some way, and religion, at its core, is supposed to answer deep philosophical questions that have no observable answers.


Hmm.

Sorry, but the bible does make claims about observable reality, and gets them wrong.

Here's one... "All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest." 

Insects have six legs. The bible even acknowledges that it's counting the hopping legs in that count, as shown in the quote. 

You can claim that religion *should* keep away from reality claims, but it doesn't, and never really has. Religion has had to retreat from some reality claims due to its failures in that realm, but its adherents continually try to gain the respectability of actually having evidence for their beliefs. 

You may look nearby and see a topic regarding the Ark Park as an easy example of millions being spent to try to make reality claims, instrad of sticking to what you say religion is supposed to do.


----------



## El Caco

TedEH said:


> Some of the ways people word things in this thread kinda baffle me.
> I mean, choosing a world view isn't about just picking one and running with it- it's supposed to be a question of what you think is true. You're not supposed to change world views like you change your shirt because it went out of style.
> 
> Like "I considered being an Atheist" makes no sense to me. Or saying "this religion looks cool, maybe I'll try that one". It's not the title you should be debating, it's whether or not you think that religion is the truth. If the answer to that question is a plain ol' no, then that's not your religion. The statement shouldn't be "I considered this religion" it should be "I considered whether or not these values represent reality".


Since this one is directed at me I'll reply to it before I read through the rest of the thread.

I understand why you think this way. Your response to me is distorted by your beliefs and bias as is mine. I already said I have a belief, I subscribe to Simulation Hypothesis. The thing about the idea of this being a simulation (which I'm a strong believer of) is as far as beliefs go the idea of simulation is pretty much the most twisted rabbit hole you can jump down. The possibilities are unlimited and you simply can't know what is real and what is not. Our reality is nothing more than perception and the things we perceive can be deliberately made to deceive us. What I do know is it doesn't matter if this is a simulation or not, everything we perceive is simply an interpretation of electrical signals. If you believe in the reality that we perceive then you still believe that your brain interprets signals, those signals tell you your eyes are seeing something or your ears are hearing something but your brain doesn't need to be in an organic body, you believe it because that is what your brain tells you to believe. So simulation theory or Christianity or some other religion, we all believe in an interpretation of electrical signals or more simply code. Another thing our brain tells us is what we remember and it turns out that our brain is really bad at it, we make convictions on eye witness statements when there is science to suggest eye witness accounts are very unreliable, peoples memories can't be trusted when compared to recorded evidence. So we already know that our brains lie. But there is plenty of scientific evidence to show that the way we interpret stuff is a lie. That said if this is a simulation there is no way to know if anything is true. Like I said, twisted rabbit hole.

But lets imagine for a second that this perceived reality that we are stuck in for now is somewhat reliable. By saying I believe in simulation theory I am admitting I believe in creation, at least that the simulation is created, we are created. That also means whoever created us are pretty much God/s to us. Maybe they want to be known, maybe they do not. Maybe they have died, maybe they are alive and care, maybe they don't care, maybe this is all just an experiment to test the ideas about their own origins. Perhaps they created us in their own image to do just that. 

Believing in Simulation does not mean that all human religion is false, it actually means that religions could have been given to us, it also presents the option of multiple outcomes. It can also mean every religion can be "true" and you are judged by your beliefs. It also means that your life may simply be a small part of a larger test and no one cares about you, when you die you die.

As a student of religion I know that even the Bible teaches that there were many Gods and even presents them as in Battle with each other with nations belonging to each God. I also know that modern religions are a load of crap, at least that's what I believe. Religions may or may not be real but I like the idea of origins and as far as religions go Neopaganism especially Slavic Neopaganism is about as good as it gets and as in line with my beliefs as any can be. It isn't a religion that dictates a bull shit man made and corrupt moral code that one must follow for either a reward or penalty. It is simply a belief system that explains the things man observes. The season and so on. Slavic Neopaganism is built on the idea of believing in the combination of science, magic and faith. The Faith simply provides an explanation for things that are observed by men. The science part doesn't need explaining but historically revolved around nature and how to live. The magic refers to the idea that our thoughts are powerful, man can influence others to his will for example and this is thought of as magic. Magic basically means being strong of mind and will and thinking positive thoughts but it could be extended to believing in the power of prayer. Just think of it as the power of positive thought.

Compared to these ideas modern religions suck. And here's the thing, I already believe in the power of positive thought, I already believe in science and in my opinion choosing to adopt traditions based on ancestry and potentially pass on some of the myths that were told to me as a child is far less ridiculous than adopting some type of corrupt moral code because of a religion that any rational thinking person should know is false and evil.

I can't begin to tell you how hard it is to talk to people, to go on facebook or social media. It seems most of the world is very weak minded. People think and believe what they are told to believe. The worlds morals are ridiculously diverse and constantly changing. I've even seen comments on here in the last few days and I just have to bite my tongue when terrible horrible judgements being made based on current social principles that are very different to those that were popular just a short time ago. And being familiar with the numbers and both sides of the debate I can't begin to express how disturbing it is to see people vilify other humans so easily based on ignorance.

I'm half German and half Croatian but I was born and raised in Australia and I have never left this country. I can not believe in Christianity largely because I have read and studied the Bible. I know the Bible speaks of multiple Gods and I know that the Old Testament is primarily concerned with Israel and the God of Israel. It is pretty clear that those are his people and he is their God. The other nations had their own Gods. And if I think the Bible supports the mythology that came before, I think it is my right to pick a side. I'm not sure if I can pick both, Germanic Gods and Slavic Gods are very similar anyway and it would seem that they really did have a common root. But if I think the mythology is cool and offers a cool explanation for things I'm not hurting anyone and they are good beliefs to have, they do not tell me to do evil, they do not dictate a man made moral code to me that a child can perceive as wrong. They allow me to do what I know and believe is right, they allow me to walk my path without guilt. They allow me to be stronger.

Choosing a belief is far more powerful than the faith most people have. It means some type of consideration is involved, some type of logical thought process. My wife tells me that humans once had 8 limbs and Zeus split them into man and woman and they spend their lives looking for their other half. That right there actually makes sense, if I want to believe it what is wrong with that? It explains some things to me. It explains why my wife and I are perfect. Why we compliment each other so well. Why we are both so fucked up in the same way and why we can accept that. Why we have common thoughts, why we think the world is so wrong and messed up. And guess what? I can believe in Zeus because the Bible talks about other Gods. Hey if people who claim to believe in the Bible don't want to accept that it is their choice, at least I'm not denying something anyone can read for themselves just because it isn't popular to believe now. 

So I believe we are living in a simulation. That means I believe we are created. I don't know if our creator/s has/have been revealed for all I know they could be walking among us as avatars, again religious texts seem to say this happens. I know each of us has the freedom to choose what to believe and although my beliefs at this point are limited I think my process is more sound than the process of most other religious people.

Finally knowing that religion has been used for a long time to control people and that people like to be told what to do and think, I think there is something in that. Unfortunately the religion of greed and capitalism rules at the moment. Perhaps if a religion opposed most of what I think is wrong with the world I could get behind it in a hope of making the world a better place. For now i just want to be nomadic, travel, experience, learn and believe whatever I want to believe, live and let live if possible.


----------



## El Caco

TedEH said:


> I still disagree though. Religion definitely tries to answer things that are subjective, opinion, etc., regarding things like morality, values, behavior, etc., that don't fit the domain of science, but it absolutely tries to answer things that science already has an answer for, or that does have an answer that's possible to find via science. You've even given examples yourself of questions that both try to answer, and give opposing answers to. It can be justified away if you try hard enough, but there's a lot of overlap in what the two try to accomplish.
> 
> 
> Except religion never says "dunno, ask science", it just says "because God said so". Or sometimes says something that entirely contradicts what science says. There are some people of faith who would allow for that "dunno, maybe science knows" approach, but just as many don't. I can just as easily pick some questions that both try to answer, and that provide conflicting answers:
> 
> How was the world/universe/etc. started?
> Where do humans come from?
> How old is the planet?
> What should be done if someone gets sick?
> What causes people to behave a certain way?
> 
> It would be nice to be able to say that religion stays outside of things that are in the domain of science, but it's just not true. What about cases where people refuse treatment for an illness because "it's part of the plan"? What about people who use spirituality to explain away their psychological issues/hallucinations/etc. instead of getting help? What about people who flat out deny that the world is round, or that it's older than their holy text claims, or that evolution doesn't exist, etc?


This could turn into me multiposting for a bit as I read and reply to various posts. 

Science is as much of a religion as any other. It is based on the idea that observable events are reliable, that scientific process is reliable. But if we are living in a simulation anything can be a lie. Science needs this reality to be consistent. But if this is a simulation then it can be changed and updated at any time just like the games and programs and simulations we deal with now. Also anything can be a lie and presented to us to cause a reaction or belief.

So as much as I believe in science it's just another faith that is capable of being completely unreliable and we have no idea if it is reliable or not. We can simply choose to have faith.


----------



## El Caco

TedEH said:


> Here's another odd question:
> 
> Why do so few people deny the existence of "souls"? It's just as nebulous/undefined/unverifiable as any other spiritual/religious concept. It seems to me that if you deny religion, deny gods, deny spirituality, then "souls" should just be the next thing on that list of things that don't seem to reflect reality, right?



As pointed out religion often tried to explain otherwise unexplained things. How do you think a person who perceives an out of body experience might explain it? Considering a lot of religions seem to condemn such an experience it's more common for non religious people to discuss things like this. Of course it isn't limited to this. Perhaps nothing strange has ever happened to you, perhaps you have never had a vision that accurately predicts the future. Perhaps you have never had a warning that has either helped you if you accepted it or you realised after the fact you should have acted on. Perhaps you never had an unspoken shared thought or conversation with someone. For people who believe they have experienced these things explanations are often attempted and you have the forming of religious concepts by people who don't identify with world religions.



TedEH said:


> I guess the counter-question would be: if something is undetectable and can't be described and interacts with nothing and has no impact, does it really meaningfully "exist"?
> 
> It's the same as the whole simulation idea- you can't prove we're NOT in a simulation. But no rational person actually believes we live in the matrix. I know one guy in the thread said he did sort of believe this, but (sorry, not sorry) that's not rational.
> 
> It comes down, I think, to how someone resolves not knowing something. Atheism seems to be ok with the unknown, where religion has to have an answer, even if there's no grounded basis for that answer. Is it a fear thing maybe?



Why isn't it rational? Really?

Provide other options for consideration please.
Either
1. Humans give up on creating simulated life or human life ends before the creation of simulated life.
or
2. Humans succeed at creating simulated life.
2A. Humans create simulated life different to their own.
2B. Humans reach a point where they create a simulation of their own existence.

Here's the thing. If humans ever reach the point where they are capable of recreating their own existence then it is irrational to imagine that this is the first time it has happened, it is far more likely that we are actually inside of a simulation and potentially multiple simulations deep. If we can do it, it stands to reason that it could have been done already. If it could have been done already then it is irrational to think we were the first. But even if we are only able to create some other kind of existence, a universe unlike our own but still with evolving lifeforms either similar or different to ours, the same process of thought still exists that if we can do it then perhaps it has already been done and we are created, a kind of simulation.

Perhaps you should research the subject a bit more and see what science thinks about it before writing it off. I'm sure any rational person will understand the idea is not irrational at all. The problem lies with the implications. If we are living in a simulation we can only test for it if is is a simple simulation. In an advanced simulation we can't be sure any evidence we find is accurate. So maybe science can find evidence that we are in a simulation and some think science may have done this but perhaps science can't help us due to the type of simulation.

Here's some more food for thought. Religious beliefs support the idea. If you think the Matrix is a modern concept you are mistaken. The idea of this world being a lie, a corrupt creation created by a created entity is not new. You'll find it predates Christianity. 

Everything you perceive is simply the interpretation of electrical signals and that is if you accept this reality. Your brain tells you what to believe, you believe it is in your head, you believe you have eyes that see things in this world you perceive but your entire reality is based on what your brains says is real and your brain does not need to be in your organic body for you to believe that, you could just as well be on a server or somewhere else.

Now if you believe in science and are rational you would know that human perception is extremely limited. We are dumb, too dumb to be able to comprehend all there is. We can only sense a small part of the reality we believe in and even with science there is so much beyond our knowing. Science has for a long time tried to study and understand our environment using what we think are reliable processes based on our understanding at the time and today we believe science is better than ever and a lot of previous beliefs have been changed. I'm sure you are familiar with the half life of knowledge or half life of fact. You can be sure we we learn more that again changes many of the things we believe now. What will those things be?

How about some fun? Read the original text for John (Bible). Now just imagine the author had some type of revealed truth or understanding about this being a simulation and the underlying code. Now try and imagine how such a person might write it in the language of the day to people who are living almost 2000 years before PC's. I know that one is a stretch but it's fun.


----------



## HeavyMetal4Ever

If you try hard enough, you can believe anything.


----------



## TedEH

El Caco said:


> Perhaps you should research the subject a bit more and see what science thinks about it before writing it off.


I find it really funny that you keep comparing this simulation thing to video games, cause that's what I do for a living: I'm a game programmer. As in, I create simulations of "people".

And I can't possibly disagree more with everything you've said.



El Caco said:


> If we can do it, it stands to reason that it could have been done already.


There is currently no reason to believe we can simulate actual life on that level. We care barely define what the word "life" means, or what grants anything that property, let alone being anywhere close to simulating it. And even if we could, it doesn't "stand to reason" that just because something is possible (which, again, it's probably not) then that means it is currently happening.



El Caco said:


> Your response to me is distorted by your beliefs and bias as is mine.


I think you missed the point of my comment that you quoted. When a person takes on something as their religion, my point is that they should do so because they believe it to be the truth, not because "it's possible" or "it's aesthetically pleasing" or "that's what I was told so, meh". If you don't believe something to be actually, literally, true, then it shouldn't be described as "your beliefs".

Take this line:


El Caco said:


> It can also mean every religion can be "true"


I'm talking about the difference between true and "true"-with-the-quotes-on-it. The whole "believing something makes it true in some form" idea is not new to me. I fully understand the idea that something can be "true" for one person and "false" for another, but on some level there is an objective reality- and that's the only one that meaningfully counts. If you carry a belief that you don't actually think reflects objective reality, then you don't reaaaally believe it, do you?


----------



## Edika

El Caco said:


> As pointed out religion often tried to explain otherwise unexplained things. How do you think a person who perceives an out of body experience might explain it? Considering a lot of religions seem to condemn such an experience it's more common for non religious people to discuss things like this. Of course it isn't limited to this. Perhaps nothing strange has ever happened to you, perhaps you have never had a vision that accurately predicts the future. Perhaps you have never had a warning that has either helped you if you accepted it or you realised after the fact you should have acted on. Perhaps you never had an unspoken shared thought or conversation with someone. For people who believe they have experienced these things explanations are often attempted and you have the forming of religious concepts by people who don't identify with world religions.



I hear that a lot, that science is another religion, that our observation and interpretation filtered through our minds are being biased and incorrect. There is some truth to that but it is the outlook of someone that never have seriously been involved in scientific research or even studied the history and evolution of science or, to be blunt and a bit contrarian, people who never even bothered with science in school and erased all traces of it from their minds.

Early on scientists have understood the limitation of our senses and personal biases. This is the reason why we're using instruments, to capture that which escapes our senses. Be it from wavelengths our senses can't process, time intervals too short for our perception, particles too small to observe with the naked eye etc etc etc. This in combination to conferences, peer reviewed journals and repetition/replication of experiments are there to ensure that the final outcome of research is objective as possible with the least amount of bias. Of course imagination is required to form the initial hypothesis but rigorous testing and experiments will classify something as a plausible theory. Which can be thrown out the window or enriched with the introduction of new hypothesis, experiments and data.

So it is far from a religions outlook as anything can be and it is the most of objective way if we want to get answers and provide solutions. That doesn't mean mistakes do not happen or that some people jump to bandwagons without reading research and seeing the data. Some times data is misinterpreted on purpose or again due to human error. Continuous questioning of the information provided will eventually sort this out but the scale of time and the level of restructuring is on a whole other level than whatever religions tend to preach.

If you want to treat the current reality as a simulation as a though experiment then of course you can. Having absolutely no tangible data that this happens and that there is no indication that of the existence of a spontaneous change in conditions or the laws of physics then I'd guess the probability of that specific mindset is rather flawed.

In short I disagree with that specific notion of your arguments.


----------



## bostjan

Explorer said:


> Hmm.
> 
> Sorry, but the bible does make claims about observable reality, and gets them wrong.
> 
> Here's one... "All flying insects that walk on all fours are to be detestable to you. There are, however, some winged creatures that walk on all fours that you may eat: those that have jointed legs for hopping on the ground. Of these you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper. But all other winged creatures that have four legs you are to detest."
> 
> Insects have six legs. The bible even acknowledges that it's counting the hopping legs in that count, as shown in the quote.
> 
> You can claim that religion *should* keep away from reality claims, but it doesn't, and never really has. Religion has had to retreat from some reality claims due to its failures in that realm, but its adherents continually try to gain the respectability of actually having evidence for their beliefs.
> 
> You may look nearby and see a topic regarding the Ark Park as an easy example of millions being spent to try to make reality claims, instrad of sticking to what you say religion is supposed to do.



I already brought up the four legged insect thing.



bostjan said:


> I've *never* heard of anyone strapping a bomb to himself and yelling "praise science!" before blowing himself up in a crowded area.
> Science, in it's proper form, doesn't even attempt to explain matters that cannot been observed nor measured. Therefore, science does not interfere fundamentally with religion, as long as religion tries to stick to supernatural stuff and philosophical questions. As soon as a religion states that the Earth is flat, or that insects have four legs, or that geese are a type of fish, then religion oversteps its bounds and ends up, almost always, being proven wrong.
> 
> Generally, science is open to correction and augmentation (in fact, encourages it), whereas religion is closed.
> 
> Science versus religion shouldn't even be a thing. They are two completely different sorts of things that should in no way ever interfere with one another anyway.



I mean, we are really saying pretty much the same thing. My point is that not every religion holds the Bible to be literally true.

Coming back to dogma versus religious values thing, keep in mind that Christians are supposed to follow Christ's teachings, yet the Bible is only ~3% Jesus' words. [24674 red letter words in the "Red Letter Edition" of the KJV, versus 783137 total words in that same edition]

That means that even in the most sacred of the most sacred texts, ~90% of the content is historical background and annotated discussion about the core of the religion.

Next, you have every weird little quirk that has nothing to do with the Bible, like condemning dancing, playing poker, or being a democrat, none of which are mentioned in negative light in the Bible. So, I'd say some Christian denominations are probably only 1% Christian religion, and 99% added dogma from preachers.

But.. that's just Christianity. What about Judaism, which has about the same amount of Moses' teachings, and the rest is rules and regulations set in place by Rabbis? What about Islam, which has the Quran, and then 10x as much literature in Fatwas and so forth, imposed by Imams?

But I guess you're right, the religion itself is not just the core values, but the core values plus all of the other nonsense added.


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## TedEH

I feel as though anyone who is actually religious is probably going to avoid posting anything in this thread, given the clear atheist leaning the discussion has taken. So, probably not going to get the perspective the OP seemed to want in the first place.


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## marcwormjim

OP has appointed me to interpret his will via biweekly sermons - How DARE you presume to know the unknowable! Don't bother digging yourself deeper into _nis_ by asking me how I know what's unknowable - It's beyond all but a few special people, of which I am included. No; we're not special in that special olympics way.


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## El Caco

TedEH said:


> I find it really funny that you keep comparing this simulation thing to video games, cause that's what I do for a living: I'm a game programmer. As in, I create simulations of "people".
> 
> And I can't possibly disagree more with everything you've said.


That's not researching what science thinks of simulation theory. Comparing current game simulation is ridiculous, you are no where near the forefront of AI and we all know the technology does not yet exist but again experts are predicting we are not that far away from being able to simulate the human mind. 

If you disagree with every thing I said then you are simply an unreasonable person. Because some of the things I have said are simply irrefutable fact.



TedEH said:


> There is currently no reason to believe we can simulate actual life on that level. We care barely define what the word "life" means, or what grants anything that property, let alone being anywhere close to simulating it. And even if we could, it doesn't "stand to reason" that just because something is possible (which, again, it's probably not) then that means it is currently happening.


Well you should let all the people heavily invested in advancing towards that end know that they are wasting a lot of money and resources. Clearly a lot of people think you are wrong. Of course at this point we are no where near understanding the technology involved in accomplishing such a task but you don't get there by saying it is impossible and giving up. You work in steps. AI and creating an artificial brain are the first steps.



TedEH said:


> I'm talking about the difference between true and "true"-with-the-quotes-on-it.


You don't seem to understand what those quotes represent. The true in this case would mean that everyone gets a result based on their belief, it would therefore be true only for those that believe, those that believe something else would receive their truth. That could be heaven or hell or anything. I don't believe that but it's possible, if it's all just code it can be inserted into any simulation.

I'm getting the impression you're just not capable of understanding this thought progression and too narrow minded to accept that very intelligent people both accept the possibility of this and are invested in trying to find evidence. Like I said, look it up, people are actually investing in research based on this concept.

Now I might have adopted it like some kind of religious belief but generally speaking the idea that we are living in a simulation is a hypothesis and people are interested in investigating it further. I simply believe that it is the best explanation we have for our existence and the best fit for so many things I have encountered. And like I said there is nothing new about the idea that we are living in a type of Matrix that was created by a created being. That religious belief predates Christianity. Then you have the bible itself that says humans were created in Gods image. The varying explanations I have heard over the years for that belief have been interesting but what if its true? What if humans created a simulation with simulated humans? Of course the other religion I mentioned believes this creation is a corrupt creation (a lie and not real but a prison of sorts) that was created by a created being against the will of the original creator. That belief has many branches like most religions do but there is a belief that the real creator has provided us a way to ascend from this "matrix" or whatever you want to call it.

So if you want to believe that anyone who has ever believed such a concept is irrational that is your right but it doesn't change the possibility that if we are living in something like a simulation then science is just as much a matter of faith as any other religion.



TedEH said:


> I think you missed the point of my comment that you quoted.


Nope. My reply was accurate. You have preconceptions and bias. Everyone does.

The difference is I understand what you said. You have not understood what I have said. Some people believe for no good reason at all, they simply have faith. It might be the faith of their parents, it might be popular faith. It might be a church they went to that just felt right. It might be brainwashing, in a lot of cases it is brainwashing. Some of us choose our beliefs. We know we don't have all the answers and we already have set beliefs, from there we make assumptions based on evidence and until proven otherwise we suspect that is true. 



Edika said:


> I hear that a lot, that science is another religion, that our observation and interpretation filtered through our minds are being biased and incorrect. There is some truth to that but it is the outlook of someone that never have seriously been involved in scientific research or even studied the history and evolution of science or, to be blunt and a bit contrarian, people who never even bothered with science in school and erased all traces of it from their minds. Snip for fit


You're wrong. From the first paragraph you have misunderstood the concept. It means everything that follows is pointless. 

Lets back up. You can't prove that you, me and all history wasn't created just a short time ago. Here's the problem with simulations, gods, creation. There is no way of knowing if things are not being altered, there is no way of knowing what is real or not. Do you realise that religious people believe in omnipotent beings? A god that can create at a thought or word, or destroy. How much easier is change? And the scientist simply discounts these things as fairy tales and simply trusts all the evidence all the while the religious person is saying "the deceiver who has power over the Earth planted that stuff for you to find and believe that". There is no way science can prove them wrong, if there is such a powerful deceiver he can give you evidence to believe whatever he wants to believe.

Of course I don't believe in the Bible like that. I mean there is a whole book about the omniscient God who makes a bet with that deceiver and loses the bet but in the process he allows the deceiver to torture his servant and kill a whole bunch of innocent people (his family). Of course God made it up to him by giving him a new family and new stuff, yay! A muslim explained to me that their purpose (those who died) was simply so Job could learn a lesson, WTF? Yeah I don't believe that. 

But it doesn't change the possibility of a reality where the rules that you need for your beliefs to work are wrong. And maybe we are created and maybe our creators sometimes walk among us, maybe they can change whatever they want. And if it is some type of code maybe they can change it as they will. They could have you believe whatever they want just like in a game of sims but so much more advanced. And if they chose you might never be aware of any change. History could be changed and you would believe whatever you have been programmed to believe. A creation can be started at any point and created as if it has a history even if it is brand new. Of course those in it would believe they had always been there. 

I mean people don't have an issue with believing in the concept of parallel universes. The idea of up to an infinite number of realities with every possible event. Is the idea that at some point humans create a complex simulation containing evolving life a possibility in any of those realities? If that is possible is it possible that they can create many simulations running different scenarios? if that is possible is it possible that those who write it can reset it or change the experiments according to their needs?

If we are created for a purpose your needs or feelings might be irrelevant except for being an important part of the simulation, experiment or whatever purpose we were created for.

In regards to the concept of our false perceptions and the limitations of our brains you have misunderstood why I brought that up. I understand good science and I understand why our limitations are not a factor for consideration in regards to good scientific practice. I wasn't making any connection there. That had more to do with evidence of false perception. But it really comes back to the fact that all we are is electrical signals we believe the interpretation of those signals but you can't really test anything or know anything. If you believe in science you believe in how our brains work. If you believe in how our brains work you must accept that the reality you perceive is just that, perception based on the electrical signals you believe. From there you must accept the possibility that none of this is real. That is why it is important to understand we already know our brains make mistakes in perception. So once again science relies on a belief system. Absolutely nothing is provable. Ultimately we all have beliefs and act based on those.


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## marcwormjim

Edit: forgot Holloway made this thread. Hope he's getting more than morbid entertainment out of it.


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## TedEH

El Caco said:


> I'm getting the impression you're just not capable of understanding this thought progression and too narrow minded to accept that very intelligent people both accept the possibility of this and are invested in trying to find evidence. Like I said, look it up, people are actually investing in research based on this concept.


Thank you for basically just calling me stupid for disagreeing with you. You don't have to be an expert "at the forefront of AI" to know that we're nowhere close to having software that simulates life. I have enough of an understanding of how software works to know that the tools at our disposal are not up to that task. If you're one of those experts saying we're close to a model of life, then this would be a great opportunity to share that wisdom with us. Otherwise, I think you've put too much faith in the experts (see what I did there?).

And again, I think you still miss my point. There is a huge difference between acknowledging something as a possibility and accepting it as an objective fact. Is it possible that the whole observable universe is just a simulation? Sure, it's just as possible as that we were created by the Gods described by religion. And I don't think either is the case, for the same reasons. A large point of atheism (for me, anyway), or lack of faith in whatever, is that if something can't be proven or unproven, then you can't accept it as a reflection of any objective truth, even if it's possible or likely. As in, there's a big difference between "I think we MIGHT be in a simulation" compared to "I think we ARE in a simulation", or to go a step farther "We ARE in a simulation".



El Caco said:


> Well you should let all the people heavily invested in advancing towards that end know that they are wasting a lot of money and resources.


Absolutely. 99.9% of what anyone ever does is a waste of time, resources, etc. if you approach it from the right point of view. I'm all for people pursuing knowledge for whatever reason. I'm not religious but that doesn't mean I don't think there's value in studying religion, or religious texts, or whatever associated history goes with it. Learn all the things. But wait until you've ACTUALLY learned something before stating it as true, that's all I would ask.


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## bostjan

There is no such thing as wasted time, only regretted choices.

The idea that all things end up destroyed at the end of the universe or that everything you learned in life is gone when you die or even passed onto some intangible representation of yourself on a spiritual plane places simply too much importance on the final moments of the universe or the final moments of your life. Each moment is equally important, except this moment now, which is far more important than the rest of eternity because it is in play. The thought that the existence of the universe is some sort of game or something where there is a score at the end is laughable.

First, we need to acknowledge that no matter who you are, your existence came into being at some arbitrary point in time and that your existence ends at some arbitrary point not long after. Second, you need to understand and internalize that that first fact is okay. Third, no matter what you do in life, it will impact other people, but probably not leave any impact on future cultures once this culture is outdated. Fourth, you need to understand and internalize that that fact is also okay. If you want to fight against any of these, you can feel free to come up with whatever religion makes you feel best about it. That's okay, too, unless you make it not okay by being an asshole to everyone else over your religion.


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## narad

El Caco said:


> That's not researching what science thinks of simulation theory. Comparing current game simulation is ridiculous, you are no where near the forefront of AI and we all know the technology does not yet exist but again _experts are predicting we are not that far away from being able to simulate the human mind. _



Uh...no. That's laughable really -- I don't know what you meant by "not that far", but in other words, we are nowhere close.


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## El Caco

TedEH said:


> Thank you for basically just calling me stupid for disagreeing with you.


That's the pot calling the kettle black now isn't it. Remember when you called me irrational along with anyone else who thinks we are living in a simulation.

And yet here you are still not understanding the point I have tried to make but still think I missed your point.


TedEH said:


> we're nowhere close to having software that simulates life


How is that relevant? Refer back to the theory. It doesn't matter when it happens, all that matters is the possibility it could happen at some point. If there is any chance that at some point in the distant future humans are capable of simulating their existence then chances are it has already happened and we are actually in a simulation.

Why do you need me to share the current state of technology with you or the experts opinions of how far away technology is from being powerful enough to simulate a human brain? You can see the current state of AI as it was widely broadcast recently. You can also read expert opinion on how close our technology is to having the processing power to simulate a brain and when they suspect we are likely to reach the processing power required.



TedEH said:


> And again, I think you still miss my point. There is a huge difference between acknowledging something as a possibility and accepting it as an objective fact.


Again no. Again you have missed mine. You can't prove anything is fact. Your facts are based on your faith. You have chosen to believe something. We all choose to believe things. You believe in this thing you call reality, you can't prove that we are not in a simulation. You can't prove that your reality hasn't been altered by what we might call gods or supernatural forces. You can't prove there isn't a devil that leaves fake evidence or deceives you into believing lies. Your safe place is your perceived facts. If they are challenged you believe the people who think so must be irrational or dumb. Like it or not your safe place is as much a faith as theirs. And if you want to simply ignore a possibility because you do not like it, then you don't understand science. Because the idea of Simulation is not supernatural, it is not magic, it is something that can be understood by science. The problem is the existence of the idea means our science has a potential point of failure if we are actually living in a simulation. That is because at any time what we perceive as reality can be altered by things outside of our simulation. Remember in science we must remove outside influence that might alter the result.



TedEH said:


> But wait until you've ACTUALLY learned something before stating it as true, that's all I would ask.


I have. It really is pretty arrogant of you to assume that I have not. You have no idea what I have learned or experienced. Despite appearances I have not shared much with you here. I'm not here trying to defend my beliefs, that would be silly. I'm arguing an idea, a concept. 

You said that believing in Simulation is irrational. My argument has been it is no more irrational than your beliefs. I don't need to share my reasons for believing it. The only thing to understand is that your faith is based on something you can't prove and is just as irrational as any other belief.

You also challenged the idea of people choosing beliefs and I tried to explain this. It is tied in with what I just said above. We all choose to believe something. Some of us use some kind of perceived logical reasoning, others not so much. I tried to explain the logical process of how I might choose certain beliefs. Of course this is founded on existing beliefs, beliefs I don't feel I need to explain and are not the point of the conversation. Perhaps you feel that by challenging my foundation beliefs you are invalidating my argument. But you can't challenge my foundation beliefs because you don't know why I believe and I'm not going to allow this to derail to that as it is irrelevant. 

The difference you don't seem able to perceive is I know everyone has beliefs that can't be proven. Everyone acts on faith. You don't seem capable of accepting this. The foundation you choose is the one that makes the most logical sense for you based on the evidence you have been presented, as do I.


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## El Caco

narad said:


> Uh...no. That's laughable really -- I don't know what you meant by "not that far", but in other words, we are nowhere close.


How far do you think we are from Exascale computing and then from Zettascale computing?

Do you know what has already been achieved in brain simulation?


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## narad

El Caco said:


> How far do you think we are from Exascale computing and then from Zettascale computing?



I'm not sure, computer hardware is not something I care much about. But hypothetically let's say we have an infinitely powerful computer -- we don't know what algorithm to run on that computer that would simulate human consciousness.



El Caco said:


> Do you know what has already been achieved in brain simulation?



Yep. But creating AI through simulation of the human brain is not a very respected endeavor in the field of AI. It's misguided. But simulation theory itself doesn't attract serious merit either - it's more of a cute thought puzzle.


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## TedEH

El Caco said:


> My argument has been it is no more irrational than your beliefs.


Except that it's not though. I've made no claims regarding what's outside of the observable universe. In fact I've made no claims of belief at all. I at no point said anything other than that I think some things are untrue- and admitted that those are not objective truths either. I've stated no beliefs about anything that can't be observed, and stated that I'm comfortable with not knowing everything. I make zero attempt to reconcile anything unobservable, let alone unprovable, whereas your claims fall outside of that.

Lets put it another way:
If you believe something simply because you can't prove otherwise, then why pick that one specific thing that can't be proven, when there's limitless things that can't be proven to chose from? You can't prove there is no God, but you don't believe in God? You can't prove that more than one consciousness exists - what if your experience is unique, and the existence of other minds is an illusion? What if we're all actually dogs in hibernation taking some kind of hallucinogenic drugs and the observable universe is actually just a really elaborate bad trip?

Here's a good one:
If this is a simulation, then how does our computer tech here have anything to do with what would be needed to simulate us? It doesn't matter if we're close to simulating brains, because that tech isn't real, it's part of the simulation as well.



El Caco said:


> Do you know what has already been achieved in brain simulation?


Lets also not assume that a brain simulation = life simulation. A brain is one thing that happens to be alive, it is not life itself.


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## bostjan

I have to say that this is the first time I've witnessed a religious debate online between a simulation theorist and a skeptic.

I guess the broader point is that we have some diverse religious representatives on the board, but it is highly unlikely that most of them will comment, unless they are atheist.


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## vilk

the bigger question is whether or not he's a simulation theorist only inside the simulation or if he's a multi-simulation theorist who could be in a simulation in a simulation (in a simulation...)


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## TedEH

^ To be fair, I think he covered that part already.


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## IGC

Nope, not particularly religious here.


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## El Caco

TedEH said:


> Lets also not assume that a brain simulation = life simulation. A brain is one thing that happens to be alive, it is not life itself.



It's an important step. 

But I'm ready to call quits on this convo with you. Your first sentence says to me you don't seem to understand what I'm saying and I'm repeating myself. Maybe it's my fault, perhaps I have written it poorly. It's possible because at this point I haven't slept for 32 hours, I had something that needed to be finished and I was posting while procrastinating last night because I was so tired. I finished it now but I'll wait until tonight to go to sleep. I'm tired now and I couldn't be bothered.

Think I'll go watch Hart of Dixie with the wife.


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## TedEH

El Caco said:


> But I'm ready to call quits on this convo with you.


I don't think we misunderstand eachother so much as just disagree on fundamental points. Approaching things from entirely different angles. There's nothing that says we have to agree on anything.


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## NateFalcon

Great stuff!! Lol...religious based debates ALWAYS end up like this...real deep thinkers that end up rambling nonsense


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## marcwormjim

Easy to throw around insults within _your own simulation._


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## chopeth

It's not only a matter of spirituality and life conception.

There are countries, like mine where the church is a huge political and economical party. Thankfully, many of you live in communities where religion is taken to a second place in your modern and prosper states, where it should be but in my place the church is against science and development, medical, against the woman liberation, they foster unveiled hate against the different, the gays and lesbians in their churches and in the television channels. 

They are a huge economic power. In my country it is a real shame, they get a lot of money from the government while some poor starve with the crisis, and they pay their debts, marching against political parties that are too much on the liberal side. They helped the fascist traitors of the republic and originated the Civil War in my country.

Just for a final and bizarre matter. They can register what propierties they consider possession of the church from a few years ago. They are stealing all old buildings in my place, just as an example, the MOSQUE of Cordoba 900 AD was "bought" by them for 30€, they changed the name to the Cathedral of Cordoba and get a lot of money from tickets to visit it.

I repeat it again. Religion is a cancer, and the church is the last phase of methastasis in this nauseating disease.


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## Explorer

To start, I'm going to make a clear demarcation between *justified* belief and *unjustified* belief:

I'm pretty sure that tomorrow, the earth will continue to revolve as it has previously. The previous evidence of it happening over a long period justifies thinking it will likely happen again, barring some large disaster. It is a *justified* belief.

A long time ago, someone here claimed that through power of will, he could turn his guitar into a unicorn. We asked for evidence, but the clown only presented verbal justifications. If he believed in that mental transmutation of guitar-to-unicorn, it was unsupported by actual evidence and was an *unjustified* belief.

Now, let's look at how someone tries to argue that *all* belief is equally unjustified, regardless of the observable evidence supporting the justified beliefs and the complete lack of evidence for the unjustified beliefs.


El Caco said:


> You can't prove anything is fact. Your facts are based on your faith. You have chosen to believe something. We all choose to believe things. You believe in this thing you call reality, you can't prove that we are not in a simulation. You can't prove that your reality hasn't been altered by what we might call gods or supernatural forces. You can't prove there isn't a devil that leaves fake evidence or deceives you into believing lies.


There is just as much evidence for leprechauns being involved in all chemical processes as there is for this universe to be a simulation, that is, none. You can make up all kinds of speculations, but without actual observable evidence, you fail to meet the burden of proof for your hypotheses.

You seem to have forgotten, when attempting to display your erudition, that one cannot prove a negative. The burden of proof lays with the one making a positive claim.

Gravity, to give an example of the opposite, evidence-based approach, is an observable phenomenon even if a person claims not to believe in it.


El Caco said:


> Your safe place is your perceived facts. If they are challenged you believe the people who think so must be irrational or dumb. Like it or not your safe place is as much a faith as theirs. And if you want to simply ignore a possibility because you do not like it, then you don't understand science.


In order to challenge someone from a firm position, one needs evidence. Those who want to challenge the best evidence without presenting evidence of their own, and think they will be successful, are indeed irrational and dumb.

An idle speculation with no evidence supporting it can be safely ignored. It's clear that you do not understand science.


El Caco said:


> Because the idea of Simulation is not supernatural, it is not magic, it is something that can be understood by science.


Again, evidence is needed before postulating an explanation. You're putting the cart before the horse.


El Caco said:


> The problem is the existence of the idea means our science has a potential point of failure if we are actually living in a simulation. That is because at any time what we perceive as reality can be altered by things outside of our simulation. Remember in science we must remove outside influence that might alter the result.


If there is hard evidence of reality being altered outside of the claimed simulation, please present it.

Einstein claimed that mass bends space, and that light would follow the curve of such bends. Experiment proved him correct, as unbelievable as his hypothesis was. Evidence... such a low bar, yet apparently too high for some claims.


El Caco said:


> I'm arguing an idea, a concept. You said that believing in Simulation is irrational. My argument has been it is no more irrational than your beliefs. I don't need to share my reasons for believing it. The only thing to understand is that your faith is based on something you can't prove and is just as irrational as any other belief.


But again, evidence is provably observable, and is a firm foundation for understanding the cosmos.

You, on the other hand, are arguing that ideas without evidence should be given as much credence as ideas with evidence. That's irrational.


El Caco said:


> You also challenged the idea of people choosing beliefs and I tried to explain this. It is tied in with what I just said above. We all choose to believe something. Some of us use some kind of perceived logical reasoning, others not so much. I tried to explain the logical process of how I might choose certain beliefs.


Without evidence, it's irrational and illogical to choose unjustified beliefs.


El Caco said:


> ...(Y)ou can't challenge my foundation beliefs because you don't know why I believe and I'm not going to allow this to derail to that as it is irrelevant.


I *can* challenge your claim about reality because there's no evidence for it. You're making a positive claim, so the burden of proof is on you.


El Caco said:


> The difference you don't seem able to perceive is I know everyone has beliefs that can't be proven. Everyone acts on faith. You don't seem capable of accepting this. The foundation you choose is the one that makes the most logical sense for you based on the evidence you have been presented, as do I.


You haven't given *any* objective evidence. Again, low bar is too high for you.

----



El Caco said:


> How far do you think we are from Exascale computing and then from Zettascale computing? Do you know what has already been achieved in brain simulation?





TedEH said:


> Let's also not assume that a brain simulation = life simulation. A brain is one thing that happens to be alive, it is not life itself.


TedEH correctly points out that there is a difference between simulated intelligence and *synthetic* intelligence. It doesn't matter how much processing power you toss at simulated intelligence, as it is not a matter of *more* simulation of thinking, but of creation of an actual thinking entity.

It's always interesting to speculate in the absence of evidence, but not understanding the difference between simulating a decision tree process and creating a synthetic intelligence is problematic when attempting to make a knowledge claim.

----

Incidentally, I posted a few years ago about having built a Hieronymus Engine, powered initially by two D-cell batteries, which created an energy field preventing any deity from granting prayers, including prayers requesting regrowth of amputated limbs. It also prevented paranormal powers from functioning. The engine was designed to just start the process, and the field has become self-sustaining and impenetrable by any and all supernatural/paranormal means. This is why no one manages to produce hard evidence for such phenomena.


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## marcwormjim

This thread is an ugly, ugly thing.

I almost want to facetiously defend El Caca's universe simulation-dogma just to swat the dilettante posters using horrendous folk-logic below the junior college 101-level to shoot fish in barrels. I've seen so many euphemisms for the concept of _plausibility _in the thread, yet no instance of the word - Just the cheapest ego boosts of lurkers waiting to call delusional people stupid in their own stupid way.


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## narad

marcwormjim said:


> This thread is an ugly, ugly thing.
> 
> I almost want to facetiously defend El Caca's universe simulation-dogma just to swat the dilettante posters using horrendous folk-logic below the junior college 101-level to shoot fish in barrels. I've seen so many euphemisms for the concept of _plausibility _in the thread, yet no instance of the word - Just the cheapest ego boosts of lurkers waiting to call delusional people stupid in their own stupid way.



Well this post certainly didn't make the thread any less ugly.


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## marcwormjim

I have my mom's face


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## Explorer

marcwormjim said:


> I almost want to facetiously defend El Caca's universe simulation-dogma just to swat the dilettante posters using horrendous folk-logic below the junior college 101-level to shoot fish in barrels. I've seen so many euphemisms for the concept of _plausibility _in the thread, yet no instance of the word - Just the cheapest ego boosts of lurkers waiting to call delusional people stupid in their own stupid way.


If anyone, including me, is using bad logic to make a case, why not raise the level of discourse by pointing it out? There's nothing to be gained by saying you *could* swat at people but won't, especially if you have already done so.

Ironically enough, you've managed to indulge in two P-words yourself, both meaning the same thing: praeteritio and paralipsis. Well done.


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## bostjan

1. People aren't wearing enough hats. 
2. Matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this "soul" does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

I'm Christian, and just to try to explain what that means to me, to give a different perspective: I'm not "religious"... in fact I hate the term. Religion is simply a lifestyle, a set of rules to follow. "Do this, don't do that, pay this much money, give to this charity, cut your hair like this, wear these clothes, don't watch those movies, don't listen to this music... or else you'll anger the gods!!!"... etc. it really is kinda tribal and primiative thinking. That's not what I feel I have, though from the outside I understand how people would tend to view it that way, unfortunately I am a creature of habit and get stuck in cycles sometimes, and it totally looks like a system of religion. I was not born into it, rather I was a non believer for the better part of my life. I viewed scientific theories as solid truth and shunned any notion of a religion or a god.

The way I would describe what I currently have is a relationship with Christ. He is my leader, boss, father, lord... however you wanna call it. I pray to him, he talks to me, and guides me in the things I should do, not like a booming voice from the clouds or something like that, but in the spirit. The way this came to be was that I was at a really low point in life about 7 years ago. Suicidal, angry at several of the closest people in my life, drinking, flipping through porn and crap on my laptop. Day after day, I just hated myself. I was just about ready to do something regrettable, but one day just for the heck of it I was driving home from work and shut off my radio, got real and sincere, started talking out loud to God. I said stuff like "where are you, show me something, a sign, are you even real, can you fix my life like these people on tv say, make something appear... etc." the next day on my drive home from work I felt the spirit of the Lord come over me. It didn't scare me, I knew immediately what it was, it was the most incredible powerful and loving feeling I have ever felt. The Lord spoke to me, in the spirit, he said that he knows every pain I have ever been through, he has been with me from the very beginning of my life, he knows every person on this planet and all their struggles too, and that he is here to help. 

I was so blown away at what I had felt, I went into my appartment, tears streaming down my face, bawling like a baby and laughing too, out of pure joy at what had just come over me. I felt surrounded by a pure and holy presence. But it changed my life and my views in literally about 45 seconds. Made me re-question everything I thought I knew. I got into the Bible and started reading it and accepting it as truth. I think this is called a spiritual awakening. Look up Brian Welch from Korn, see some of his videos on YouTube. I may not have the fame and money like that guy, but I can totally understand what he felt. I feel like he had a similar experience, as well as many, many other people over the world. This isn't a logical thing, it's not something I can explain to someone else, in any way that they can just figure it out.

Now back to the original question of the thread, as for the other religions, I simply do not know. All I can say is I was changed by my own personal encounter, when I didn't believe in any gods, I called out randomly to a god, and Christ answered, not any others.

It's not about rules of any kind. It is a living relationship. That's why I won't bash on anyone about anything they do, but simply tell them about what has happened to me.


----------



## marcwormjim

Explorer said:


> Ironically enough, you've managed to indulge in two P-words yourself, both meaning the same thing: praeteritio and paralipsis. Well done.



Forgive my lack of eagerness to contend with such Harry Potter spells.


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## narad

Where'd El Caco run off to? I don't care if anyone believes in the simulation, but trying to appeal to science to argue unscientific things is a bit of a pet peeve. Or at least trying to shoot down Ted by arguing that "experts" believe this stuff -- would like to hear more about these experts. And note, Elon Musk is not an AI expert.


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## zappatton2

Great article with regards to the whole "life as a simulation" idea;
http://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation/


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## marcwormjim

It's preaching to the choir, though. Anyone who subscribes to a universe-transcending claim _that doesn't predict any consequences toward confirming or falsifying tself _can rationalize any new development or argument as actually being in-line with their narrative - The delusion requires only semantic ingenuity to sustain itself.

I mean, _of course _the universe-simulation would provide us with reasons to doubt its existence - It wouldn't be a convincing simulation, otherwise. By the same token, if you're limited to using the constraints of the simulation to test the nature of the simulation, then any results within the simulation would necessarily only serve to reinforce the laws of physics the simulation in built upon.

Etc. I've skimmed enough wiki and tvtropes pages to have attained a mastery of esoteric whatever. I can even italicize: _rectum cum bustis._


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## marcwormjim

_Penis._


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## TedEH

DistinguishedPapyrus said:


> Religion is simply a lifestyle


Except that it's not though. I made a comment earlier in the thread about how I've heard people define "religion" as being a lifestyle or a metaphor, but you've just said yourself that you feel like you have some kind of actual relationship with your faith, which completely contradicts the "not religious" thing. That IS religion. That IS faith. You can't just redefine religion and expect everyone to follow - words have no meaning if everyone redefines them for themselves.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

TedEH said:


> Except that it's not though. I made a comment earlier in the thread about how I've heard people define "religion" as being a lifestyle or a metaphor, but you've just said yourself that you feel like you have some kind of actual relationship with your faith, which completely contradicts the "not religious" thing. That IS religion. That IS faith. You can't just redefine religion and expect everyone to follow - words have no meaning if everyone redefines them for themselves.



Sorry but I didn't read the other posts in the thread, just the first post, then wrote my reply. I did go back and read yours and several others though. What I was trying to explain is that there's a difference in faith and religion. Faith is a trust in something you cannot prove, or do not have tangible evidence for. Religion is a system of things done to try to be pleasing to God. For instance, things were so bad back around the time of Christ that these groups called the Pharisees -the religious leaders at the time - had many many rules they followed to seem religious. They would count the number of steps they were allowed to take on the sabbath days, they would weigh out the herbs they would collect for their offerings, they wore a strictly regulated wardrobe, they brought out bells and trumpets to call crowds around themselves to watch them make offerings or charitable donations so the people would see them and be in awe. These were the main ones who persecuted Christ and his followers.


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## TedEH

DistinguishedPapyrus said:


> What I was trying to explain is that there's a difference in faith and religion.


These are personal definitions you've come up with for yourself, but are not really the accepted standard meanings of those things. Religion is, in general conversation without otherwise specifying in context, accepted to mean faith or worship or following of a higher power or something of importance. If you believe in a God, that makes you religious- and to state otherwise clouds the colloquial meaning of the word. The part that makes you religious is not the rules or the lifestyle, it's the faith behind them.

And that's the point I was trying to make- personal re-definitions of things like this cloud the real meaning of the words we use, making it that much harder to have a discussion centered around it. If nobody agrees on what a word means, that word is meaningless.

That also goes back to my comment a while ago about the difficulty in reporting stats regarding beliefs. Nobody uses the same words or definitions for things- lots of people call themselves religious just because they go through the motions, or because that's what their family traditionally labels themselves, but have no actual faith. Then you have people who say they aren't religious but still believe in something.


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## marcwormjim

And they all vote.


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## vilk

TedEH said:


> These are personal definitions you've come up with for yourself, but are not really the accepted standard meanings of those things. Religion is, in general conversation without otherwise specifying in context, accepted to mean faith or worship or following of a higher power or something of importance. If you believe in a God, that makes you religious- and to state otherwise clouds the colloquial meaning of the word. The part that makes you religious is not the rules or the lifestyle, it's the faith behind them.
> 
> And that's the point I was trying to make- personal re-definitions of things like this cloud the real meaning of the words we use, making it that much harder to have a discussion centered around it. If nobody agrees on what a word means, that word is meaningless.
> 
> That also goes back to my comment a while ago about the difficulty in reporting stats regarding beliefs. Nobody uses the same words or definitions for things- lots of people call themselves religious just because they go through the motions, or because that's what their family traditionally labels themselves, but have no actual faith. Then you have people who say they aren't religious but still believe in something.




Well said. In conversations about people who claim to believe in "God" when they are pantheists who just believe in the natural universe, I've a few times given this analogy (which admittedly is not perfect). You know, people who say "God is just the cosmic force of the universe, man" or "I don't believe in a bearded dude in the sky, but God is just the mystery of nature"

_My favorite soda is Pepsi-cola...
...Only the Pepsi-cola that I like doesn't have kola nut flavor, it isn't dark colored, and it tastes like grapefruit.
If I walk up to you and tell you "My favorite drink is Pepsi-cola", will you understand that I like a light colored grapefruit flavored drink and not the classic pepsi-cola that everyone is familiar with? No, you wont. So what's the point in trying to tell people that I like Pepsi-cola instead of just telling them I like Squirt?
_

If you don't believe in a dude in the sky, then you don't believe in God. At least, you don't believe the same thing as 99.999% of other people who believe in God. So then what is the value in categorizing yourself along with them?


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## TedEH

Anyway, I don't mean to steer this into an anti-religion thread. The original point I guess was to see how one faith might see another faith, and I think the atheist view of most religions is pretty clear. We've also had an unexpected example of how a simulation theorist might reconcile the differences between faiths.

In that vein, semantics aside, maybe Papyrus is the closest to being on the original topic- as, if I'm reading what you said correctly, you maybe see each religion as only being different in the not-necessarily-faith-related bits? As in the rituals and rules might be different or superficial, as long as the core beliefs boil down to the same thing?


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## r33per

I'm a Christian. I was raised that way but made my own decision to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. It's not a ritual or a moral code to me but is the very reason I live. Labels are can be helpful and damaging. Unfortunately the word fundamentalist has been hijacked but that's who I am: I'm not militant nor overly preachy (I don't think...) but I firmly believe what the Bible says is Truth.

I was recently in Shanghai and visited the Jade Buddha Temple there. The sculptures and works of art in that place are beautiful, but their faith is so different to mine that it also made me sad because faith is also about eternal consequences, not just the structures of some moral or ethical codes in this life. And to me, only faith in Jesus can deal with what happens to us after we die.

Nonetheless, it was important to me to not disrespect their system of belief, as long as it does not compromise my own personal faith. A small example: I was ok with viewing the Buddha, but if any of the visit would have involved worship rites (e.g. burning insense, kneeling etc.) then I would not have taken part.

As for religious, that has different meanings to different people. Do I follow one of the world's main organised religions? Yes. Do I go to church each Sunday? Yes. Do I subject other people to my points of view against their will? No. Do I add my rules in addition to what God has already laid down in the Bible? I try not to, and stop doing so if/when that's pointed out to me.


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## TedEH

r33per said:


> but if any of the visit would have involved worship rites (e.g. burning insense, kneeling etc.) then I would not have taken part.


I think that part is very reasonable- and I usually would say the same thing, although for different reasons maybe. I don't attend any church or take part in any sort of religious ritual, even if I'm in a situation where it might be customary to do so. For example, I've had to go to things like baptisms, but I will not kneel or prey. Both because it goes against my personal values to act in what to me is a sort of submissive behavior to something I don't believe in, but also because I think performing an empty facsimile of another faiths ritual is disrespectful to that faith.



r33per said:


> faith is also about eternal consequences


So, to get back to the original question, does that mean to you that, for example, Buddhists should expect consequences for being of the wrong faith? Or someone like myself who has no faith?


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## vilk

Yeah dude. It makes him sad. Really just too bad about those eternal consequences, but what can ya do if you're born in China ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

To state this simply, but with deepest respect to everyone, by faith in Christ, I believe that He is the way. I do not believe in any other way.


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## vilk

"Any other way" to go to heaven, or "any other way" to not burn for eternity in the flaming pits of hell where spooky Devilman pokes you with a pitchfork, or both?


Sorry, but when I read things like that, even written with _deepest respect_, it sounds to me like "I think you're a bad person, but certainly I shouldn't be held accountable for my own opinion since after all I read it in a very popular book."


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## marcwormjim

Checking ss.org for new posts is idolatry.


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## bostjan

vilk said:


> "Any other way" to go to heaven, or "any other way" to not burn for eternity in the flaming pits of hell where spooky Devilman pokes you with a pitchfork, or both?
> 
> 
> Sorry, but when I read things like that, even written with _deepest respect_, it sounds to me like "I think you're a bad person, but certainly I shouldn't be held accountable for my own opinion since after all I read it in a very popular book."



Religion is so deeply ingrained in our culture and in most people's minds that they see it as the way to get to heaven or avoid hell, and view it as a personal choice. In these people's minds, I might go to heaven or go to hell when I die. Those who begin to question their own religion might begin to think of it as "did I choose the right answer," as if they are playing a game of roulette and the prize is heaven, but there is no such thing as heaven- it's all make believe, so this imaginary game of roulette has an imaginary prize, and so forth. It seems harmless on the surface, but it's really not, because people in general are violent nasty creatures willing to kill for the advantage in this imaginary game of roulette.

Think of the South Park episode where everyone was waiting at the golden gates of heaven to get in, and St. Peter comes out and says "Sorry folks, the correct answer was 'Mormon'..."


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## vilk

lol I believe they are all in hell and it's like the Director of Hell who tells them that the correct answer was Mormon and then it shoots to a scene in heaven where mormons are making crafts out of egg cartons


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## bostjan

vilk said:


> lol I believe they are all in hell and it's like the Director of Hell who tells them that the correct answer was Mormon and then it shoots to a scene in heaven where mormons are making crafts out of egg cartons



Ahh, yeah, now I remember it.

What I find the most interesting about the entire thing is that the concept of "hell" isn't even a Christian belief. There is mention of a lake of fire in Revelation, and mentions of Sheol in the OT, but neither of those are congruent with the popular imagery of hell.


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## vilk

Yeah, people imagine Hitler being prodded and poked by men wearing red spandex miles below the Earth's crust, but if we're going strictly by the Bible, Hitler is just a dead corpse that eventually someday when the Apocalypse happens will become reanimated but then NOT be taken up to heaven by Jesus.


--------------------------------

But the larger point I was trying to make is: if you believe that God sends non-believers to hell irrespective of their choices, actions, and life here on Earth, it means you think they are bad people. Or it means you believe God sends good people to hell. Religious indoctrination or being "ingrained" are surely excuses, but it doesn't change the fact of the matter. You can be polite or choose your words specifically to not say that I'm going to hell, but if you believe it you believe it and you believe it so quit trying to act like you shouldn't be judged for your own personal thoughts and feelings only just because someone else told you to think and feel them.

It's like if I were a raised a neo-Nazi and said to my buddy Morgan Goldstein "No offense Morgan, and I say this with the deepest respect, but Der Juden are a plague on society and everything wrong with this nation is orchestrated by them. That doesn't mean we can't be friends though!" and having the expectation that everyone just be cool with that like _c'mon man that's just the way I was brought up!_


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## r33per

TedEH said:


> So, to get back to the original question, does that mean to you that, for example, Buddhists should expect consequences for being of the wrong faith? Or someone like myself who has no faith?



In short, yes.

I believe this not because of a person is a follower of different faith or none, but because mankind's born condition makes us destined for an eternity of judgement, separated from God. The only "fix" for that is trust and faith in Jesus Christ i.e. His divine person, life, death, resurrection from the dead and the work that he accomplished here on earth. Why is this significant to me? I'll explain below. What follows is my understanding of the very core of the Christian faith and, whilst I do not indend to offend, it is an offensive message.

I believe that God is our creator, that we were thought of, considered, sculpted and molded by Him and have His very breath in our lungs. The Bible's account of our first days on earth is one of perfection and genuine peace. That all gets shattered when we decide to disobey the one "must not" command God (the "don't eat that fruit" one). At this point "sin" enters the world and we become subject to it's punishment: death. This also separates us from God - a holy God who deals with all that is unholy (sin) with judgement and punishment. It's not like it was a surprise: He said quite specifically to us "if you eat the fruit of that tree, you'll die".

As such, we are sinners - not because of what we do but because of what we are. It's like our core or our essence or something like that. We're all that way and have all done something that is unholy in God's sight and therefore subject to punishment. I believe that punishment is Hell. (As an aside, I do not believe in hell being a place where we're just tormented by a devil with a pitchfork: I believe hell is where the devil himself is also punished. He is the instigator of mankind's sin and hell is created for his judgement and punishment as well).

No amount of right-living can fix our relationship with God; no amount of religious observance can fix our relationship with God. The price of sin had to be paid and that was that the blood of an innocent be spilt as a sacrifice for all the people (see the Jewish Passover). No human could ever fulfil that requirement (we're all born with sin) and so God's plan was that His own son would be born as a man and - being sinless - therefore meets the requirements of the sacrifice required once and for all. Jesus is born to Mary, lives a sinless life and is crucified. There, he pays the price for all of our sin - a debt that we could never pay ourselves - and makes the mending of that relationship with God possible, the eternal consequence of which is the freedom from the judgement of Hell and an everlasting life with God.

The thing is that it requires a trust in Jesus and acceptance of this gift. Kinda like "don't eat that fruit or you'll die", God gives us the choice. With each choice their is a consequence: accept and live, reject (actively or passively) and die.

I do not send people to Heaven nor condemn them to Hell: only God has that authority. The only thing I know is that to believe is Jesus Christ is to have my relationship with God mended - or, in fact, made new - and that I have a certain hope for what follows this life. Conversely, that to reject Jesus - by an act of the will, by passive negligence or by by putting our trust in something other than him (from Buddha to finance to political systems to ourselves) - means death and punishment in Hell. I believe this because that's what I read in the Bible. And I believe that the Bible is God's word to us.


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## r33per

bostjan said:


> What I find the most interesting about the entire thing is that the concept of "hell" isn't even a Christian belief. There is mention of a lake of fire in Revelation, and mentions of Sheol in the OT, but neither of those are congruent with the popular imagery of hell.



I believe that it comes from the Valley of Gehenna


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## r33per

vilk said:


> But the larger point I was trying to make is: if you believe that God sends non-believers to hell irrespective of their choices, actions, and life here on Earth, it means you think they are bad people. Or it means you believe God sends good people to hell. Religious indoctrination or being "ingrained" are surely excuses, but it doesn't change the fact of the matter. You can be polite or choose your words specifically to not say that I'm going to hell, but if you believe it you believe it and you believe it so quit trying to act like you shouldn't be judged for your own personal thoughts and feelings only just because someone else told you to think and feel them.



Yeah, you're right: I do believe that good people will be in hell. I also believe that bad people will be saved from it. Why? Because I believe it is all fundamentally about what you do with Jesus Christ, not how you have lived. It's unfair and at the same time a very true equality: the offer is open to everyone at any point in their lives. It does not include based on past "goodness" nor exclude based on past "badness" - there is no means test.

And yeah, I was brought up Christian. I know loads of folk who were brought up Christian and rejected it, and others brought up athiest and made a desicion to trust in Jesus Christ. How we are brought up has a bearing, but perhaps not as significant as we might think - the Christian church continues to grow in hostile (to Christianity) environments like China, India, Khazakstan, North Korea and elsewhere.


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## bostjan

r33per said:


> I believe that it comes from the Valley of Gehenna



Right, well, like I said, according to the Bible, when people die, they die. On judgement day, everyone is restored back to life and judged by God (Jesus). Those who believed in him are devoured by God to augment his power, and those who did not are destroyed in a lake of fire. There is nothing about eternal suffering outside of simply being destroyed and no longer existing. A passing mention of a geographical location where it is hot and dry is hardly the same as the belief that non-believers will all be bound and tortured eternally by little red men with pitchforks and wings deep below the surface of the earth.

The modern concepts of heaven and hell are pagan ideas, and have no basis in the Bible, yet they have been assimilated so deeply into modern Christianity that they are base pillars of the religion.

Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with sourcing part of the religion from outside the holiest scripture, but, for a group who pride themselves so much on their holy text and take it so literally (speaking for protestant Christianity in general), it seems very odd to me.

Jesus' words in the Bible were all about love and forgiveness. Paul's words in the NT were all about judgement and punishment. When I was a kid, and I was deep inside of it, it seemed silly to me. Now, as an adult, it seems even more silly to me. How did the teachings of Jesus in the NT end up leading to the teachings of Paul in the NT? No rational outsider could read the NT and not notice the drastic paradigm shift between the gospels and the later epistles.

Most of my friends are "Christian," to varying degrees, although they all have vastly different beliefs about moral standards, about the afterlife, and about Jesus. It's because they were told slightly different versions of the same Bible stories as kids. If you grew up without outside influence of religion, and then hear these stories as an adult, you have an entirely different perspective.

Have you read through the Bible recently? I really think that it was the first time I sat down and read the entire thing front-to-back that I first started questioning the core of it all. You slog through the OT and all of the weird stuff that seems like such nonsense in it with the idea in mind that the NT is going to be the reward. You get to the gospels and there is so much great stuff in there, and it seems so much more full of wisdom than the later OT, but then there are the espistles where it kind of starts slipping into weird territory again, and then BAM - there is Revelations. And after Revelations, you are done, left reflecting on the frankly ridiculous prophesies of the apocalypse. My first inclination was that most of it just simply doesn't belong in there. So I researched why what's in there is in there, and it just quickly fell apart from there, for me.


----------



## Explorer

r33per said:


> It's unfair and at the same time a very true equality: the offer is open to everyone at any point in their lives. It does not include based on past "goodness" nor exclude based on past "badness" - there is no means test.


I do like this frank admission of the injustice of the christian god's blackmail scheme. Infants are held responsible for another person's actions (original sin) by yahweh, and if they die before being able to get in good with yahweh's kid, they're forever out of daddy's good graces.

It's not about a loving father, but a jealous, controlling father who insists on being approached in only one precise way.

----

What I personally find interesting is how many contortions are necessary in the apologetics (the special pleadings and defenses for religious dogmas/doctrines) in order to not drive off those outsiders who werent indoctrinated from childhood.

It's a hard sell to defend sending a disabled kid like Charlie Gard to hell just because yahweh unfairly stacked the deck against his ever learning about jesus.

It's also kind of strange, if first learning of the cosmic protection racket when an adult, to hear such strange justifications for thinking someone is supposed to be kind and loving: "Hey, neighbor! I've got a torture basement where I'm gonna torment those who don't praise me for having killed my kid! I'm the good guy, right? Think carefully before you answer! Oh... and did I mention that infants are fair game for torture?"

----

Keep in mind, a lot of this stuff isn't even in the bible. It's dogma which has developed outside of what some are claiming is yahweh's final word, as heavily edited and altered as it has been by human beings.


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## pondman

Everyone has a god, a lot of people just don't realise they have one.


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## marcwormjim

Bad pondman. Now my cat is crucifying the dog.


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## Explorer

pondman said:


> Everyone has a god, a lot of people just don't realise they have one.


Evidence, please!


----------



## TedEH

pondman said:


> Everyone has a god, a lot of people just don't realise they have one.


Care to elaborate?


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## marcwormjim

I think I see what he means. I mean, pondman is _our _god.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

vilk said:


> "Any other way" to go to heaven, or "any other way" to not burn for eternity in the flaming pits of hell where spooky Devilman pokes you with a pitchfork, or both?
> 
> 
> Sorry, but when I read things like that, even written with _deepest respect_, it sounds to me like "I think you're a bad person, but certainly I shouldn't be held accountable for my own opinion since after all I read it in a very popular book."





vilk said:


> But the larger point I was trying to make is: if you believe that God sends non-believers to hell irrespective of their choices, actions, and life here on Earth, it means you think they are bad people. Or it means you believe God sends good people to hell. Religious indoctrination or being "ingrained" are surely excuses, but it doesn't change the fact of the matter. You can be polite or choose your words specifically to not say that I'm going to hell, but if you believe it you believe it and you believe it so quit trying to act like you shouldn't be judged for your own personal thoughts and feelings only just because someone else told you to think and feel them.
> 
> It's like if I were a raised a neo-Nazi and said to my buddy Morgan Goldstein "No offense Morgan, and I say this with the deepest respect, but Der Juden are a plague on society and everything wrong with this nation is orchestrated by them. That doesn't mean we can't be friends though!" and having the expectation that everyone just be cool with that like _c'mon man that's just the way I was brought up!_





I read both these posts last night and this morning... or whenever you posted it, have been thinking of this alot today. Sorry if it came off that way, by "deepest respect" I meant it simply to say that I respect others peoples rights and beliefs. Trying to not make it seem like I look at everyone as good and bad. Honestly, I can be a dick sometimes, I don't mean to. This is certainly not a topic on which I would want to come off in that manner.


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## HeavyMetal4Ever

pondman said:


> Everyone has a god, a lot of people just don't realise they have one.



The real problems arise when people start taking them seriously.


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## lewis

With how science has developed it seems obvious to me that there IS a scientific answer for everything. Therefore there is no way this whole "God"/Son of God" BS is real. Coming back to life?

The Bible was a fictional book created to help people lead a good moral life (in the eyes of whoever wrote it)
In fact, the idea of "well I read it in a book so it must be true" is laughable.

I also like the idea of making your own luck, i.e if you work hard enough at something, you will be rewarded. Religious people however take all credit away from themselves and their own hard work and instead "thank God for giving me this"

The other issue I have is interpretation i.e :
"I read the Bible and it told me to kill 38 people who are left handed" for example.
Its now used as a scape goat to try and justify bad behavior.
The Science we do have really proves its all BS which is why alot of religious people hate the fact of Dinosaurs etc. 

And the Terror threat for example. How in any way are they any different in the name of religion, to any other BS that our History is littered with?. You had different churches causing all sorts of carnage over the years. So much barbaric BS and its not only limited to being a Muslim ffs.
My issue with it in a nutshell is how dated it all feels now. When people believed/created all this in those eras gone by, they also though the damn planet was flat FFS. We were an ignorant and quite honestly stupid race then (still stupid but for different reasons). How has some prehistoric ideal from these times, still a recognized thing all these eras later?

Pathetic. "I must pray because God will smite me"?
Also tying in religion and ghosts together makes me laugh.


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## vilk

wait, you're not saying that you believe in ghosts, right? The way you wrote it is ambiguous to me


----------



## lewis

vilk said:


> wait, you're not saying that you believe in ghosts, right? The way you wrote it is ambiguous to me


I think Ghosts and paranormal is just something completely separate that we have not found the scientific explanation for yet.

What I meant was religious people who say Ghosts are Angels, and or his ghost will now pass onto Heaven, and all that utter nonsense.
and light reflecting off dust particles in photos are "orbs" = Spirits wandering the earth because they have unfinished business before they go to heaven etc etc etc

All a complete load of nonsense and the 2 things should not be remotely linked imo


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## bostjan

If I turn into an orb-only-visible-to-cameras when I die, my unfinished business will be photobombing every poorly lit photo possible.


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## High Plains Drifter

I'm not going to pretend that I've read the Bible cover to cover... Haven't even read page one. 

As a kid, I was taught that as long as you truly believe in God, that you will go to Heaven ( Go Team Presbyterian!). But how the hell was I to have such convictions at such a young age? Gotta say that seemed ridiculous! Then... due to some scandal at our beloved church, parishioners disbanded and found other houses of worship. ( Team Evangelical now!). I guess that God was still God, Jesus was still good ol' Jesus, but now my new pastor wanted me to bring in my Pink Floyd and Kiss albums to be "evaluated and possibly disposed of". Wtf?? I mean... my dad's George Jones and Arlo Guthrie albums? Nope... Jesus was apparently cool with spousal abuse and littering but not if it meant plugging into an amplifier. So at that point my head was getting a little screwed up as plenty of contradicting and inconceivable aspects were filling my impressionable young mind. I'm extremely grateful that my parents weren't fanatical and in fact, I don't think that my dad was particularly resigned to any aspect of Christianity tbh. Makes sense as my moms parents were both quite religious and my dads parents were not. I will say that there were plenty of positive moments as well as some genuinely nice/ neighborly people that I met throughout my interactions with the church but I don't necessarily feel that there is any relevant connection between the two... idk. 

So the man that I am today feels that the entire mess can be interpreted however one would LIKE to interpret things... be it in regards to apparitions, the afterlife, the written word, historic timelines, etc, etc. What I beleive is that religion is about brainwashing from the standpoint of the church and it's about faith from the standpoint of the actual flock. I have always found it a bit difficult and far-fetched to be able to genuinely find solace from religion but if that's what works for you, then that's awesome. It's already been touched upon in this thread but religion really does appear to rely upon the vulnerability of human-beings. It seems to have been "designed" in a way that is quite foolproof imo... many translations, all kinds of denominations, varying criteria, and plenty of exceptions to fit whatever suits someone best... along with the premise that nothing has to be proven ( because again... Faith!). It utilizes ( or capitalizes upon) everything from guilt to glory in order to hypnotize the masses and that's just something that I can't genuinely support.


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## TedEH

High Plains Drifter said:


> "evaluated and possibly disposed of"


I think I posted about this once, but I have a friend who deals with some pretty severe mental illness who decided a while back that they needed some spiritual guidance and someone directed them to a church (I dunno what kind of church). The church convinced her that her problems would be solved by throwing out anything that didn't lead directly to Jesus. Clothes, music, all kinds of decorations in her home, etc. all gotten rid of. Inevitably, it solved zero of her problems, and she now felt worse because she lost a bunch of things she felt an attachment to. I don't doubt the church meant well, but it clearly did more harm than good in this case.


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## bostjan

To drive that point completely off the topic of the thread, I'll relate an amusing story.

1994, probably my favourite year of music- Soundgarden got some serious recognition, Dream Theater was kicking butt, Green Day became my #1 guilty pleasure, STP and Smashing Pumpkins were both pretty good and pushing the "grunge thing" in new directions that seemed to me to be more stimulating, and there seemed to be a cool new band on MTv every week. I was pretty involved in my church at the time, doing tons of volunteer work, and the church was happy to provide me with a work reference so I could get a paying job the following summer.

My youth pastor was a really cool guy. He was more interested in the personal faith rather than the greater organization of Christianity, but he reached out to the youth group to bring in their favourite CD's for him to critique the lyrics. It was the most entertaining youth group night ever, listening to all sorts of metal and rap, all with highly inappropriate lyrics for church.


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## High Plains Drifter

TedEH said:


> I think I posted about this once, but I have a friend who deals with some pretty severe mental illness who decided a while back that they needed some spiritual guidance and someone directed them to a church (I dunno what kind of church). The church convinced her that her problems would be solved by throwing out anything that didn't lead directly to Jesus. Clothes, music, all kinds of decorations in her home, etc. all gotten rid of. Inevitably, it solved zero of her problems, and she now felt worse because she lost a bunch of things she felt an attachment to. I don't doubt the church meant well, but it clearly did more harm than good in this case.



Exactly. I've witnessed enough instances to make me feel as if religion/ Christianity preys upon those that are lost, impressionable, guilt-ridden, mentally unstable, etc. The "Praise Him each and every day" mentality always seemed a bit excessive and dramatic to me as well. On the flip side, I realize that there are other reasons that people attend church services regularly... some reasons genuine, some maybe a bit more self-serving but if worshiping your proclaimed Savior is something that doesn't complicate your life and gives you some added strength or whatever, then I think that's great. In the small conservative town that I live in, I honestly believe that it's mostly about keeping up appearances and showing off your parenting skills by parading the kids around in their cute matching little outfits but whatever on that. For those that are there because worshiping God makes them feel good, then that's pretty cool. But if I'm somehow "below" you or "a bad seed" because I'm not there... well, that's just getting into the entire "sitting in judgment" thing that I do NOT find very healthy nor pure at heart. And I see a good deal of that too. It wasn't hard for me to wash my hands of all this as religion simply never found it's way into my heart. I guess personally, I'd rather have the piece of mind that I'm living my life in a respectful and humane manner and doing so as it relates to my own convictions... regardless of whether or not I will supposedly be judged worthy of an eternity in Heaven. Don't even get me started on things like "loved one's looking down from Heaven" or "purgatory" or any of that nonsense...ugh.


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## pondman

Explorer said:


> Evidence, please!



I'm not talking about a guy walking the clouds in a white robe with long flowing silver hair and beard.
Everyone has a passion no matter what it may be, good or bad. A trait that is followed religiously.


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## vilk

pondman said:


> I'm not talking about a guy walking the clouds in a white robe with long flowing silver hair and beard.
> Everyone has a passion no matter what it may be, good or bad. A trait that is followed religiously.



>insert my pepsi-squirt analogy again


It's like saying everyone has a beard since everyone has hair follicles.


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## Explorer

There's a lot of people who redefine words in order to bolster false or unsupported claims. The hope is that no one notices and calls it out. 

The best defense against such bad arguments is to call them out directly. 


pondman said:


> *Everyone has a god*, a lot of people just don't realise they have one.





Explorer said:


> Evidence, please!





pondman said:


> I'm not talking about a guy walking the clouds in a white robe with long flowing silver hair and beard.
> *Everyone has a passion* no matter what it may be, good or bad. A trait that is followed religiously.


You're saying "a passion" equals "a god." That's asinine. The two words have completely different definitions.

You then try to extend the definition of "religiously," meaning "as a regular, unchanging habit," to instead mean "as a matter of faith without evidence, rather than based on available evidence."

That's bullchit.

When you have to mislead to prove your point, you only prove you don't have a point.


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## lewis

can we just take a minute to think about those churches where people act like they are possessed and the preacher smacks the bitch out of them in the name of religion???

Like serious whack jobs 

also - 

HAHAHA Church of Jungle


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

TedEH said:


> Anyway, I don't mean to steer this into an anti-religion thread. The original point I guess was to see how one faith might see another faith, and I think the atheist view of most religions is pretty clear. We've also had an unexpected example of how a simulation theorist might reconcile the differences between faiths.
> 
> In that vein, semantics aside, maybe Papyrus is the closest to being on the original topic- as, if I'm reading what you said correctly, you maybe see each religion as only being different in the not-necessarily-faith-related bits? As in the rituals and rules might be different or superficial, as long as the core beliefs boil down to the same thing?



Agreed, and also I didn't mean to try to steer this into a pro-religious thread. Just that I'm pretty passionate about the topic and tend to find places to plug my stance in. I took a day or two off of here to clear my head and not be at the ready to throw out crap responses. I just wanna take this back to the original question without a pro and con type bias. Just giving what I have learned from a believers perspective. I don't claim to be an expert on the subject, but my background on the subject is this: I read the Bible daily, have been in various churches on a weekly basis for several years and listened to widely held beliefs from multiple pastors in the Christian religion on a weekly basis as well as having in depth study and conversation with other believers, and from on-line teachings and articles.

There is ALOT more to it, but in a nutshell:

From what I know, the 3 main religions of the world, Judiasim, Christianity and Islam, share a common Abrahamic origin. It is believed that there was a man named Abraham from whom all Jews trace their ancestory. Jews mainly follow the Old Testament of the Bible, and don't believe that Jesus was the messiah told about by the prophets. Christians are Jews who became followers of Jesus Christ when he came, believing that he is the messiah that was prophesied about who fulfilled the prophesy and the law. Christians now live under the New Covenant of the New Testament, written by the Apostles. Islam, though there is not a specific verse of geanology in the Bible that I'm aware of, is founded on separate teachings with a little similarity, from a man named Mohammad, whom it is commonly believed is the direct decendant of Ishmael, another one of Abrahams son's. Those teachings are found in the Quaran. These three religions share a belief in an eternal heaven and hell, but have different ways that lead there. It is not believed by either three that the others practice the correct way, nor unbelievers or other non-Abrahamic religions. It is believed that Christians and Jews pray to the same God, and Islam, a different god because of the greatly varying fundamentals of the teachings. It is not seen as a system of everyone going to the same place but through different channels.

Now about other religions, buddhists, Hindus, tribal cults... I really don't know jack.


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## vilk

You know that the OT is in the Quran though, right?

From a Religious Studies standpoint, Allah is absolutely the same God as in Christianity and Judaism. In fact, Arabic speaking Christians pray to Allah, as it's the Arabic word for God. It was the Angel Gabriel who came down and helped Mo out with his first revelation, same dude who came to Daniel in the Torah and Mary in the NT.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

Sorry, double post.


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## DistinguishedPapyrus

vilk said:


> You know that the OT is in the Quran though, right?
> 
> From a Religious Studies standpoint, Allah is absolutely the same God as in Christianity and Judaism. In fact, Arabic speaking Christians pray to Allah, as it's the Arabic word for God. It was the Angel Gabriel who came down and helped Mo out with his first revelation, same dude who came to Daniel in the Torah and Mary in the NT.



Yes, OT is in the Quran.

There's more to it though. You'd have to go into the teachings of the New Testament of the Bible and the "New Testament" (not sure exactly what it's called) of the Quran. Christians see God as unwavering in His word, and not of the character to offer various paths to heaven. The Bible prophesied of Christ in the OT, Christ was the Messiah who fulfilled the prophecy, Christ's teachings after OT times are quite different from Mohammad's, and there's debate on who the actual spirit was that spoke to Christ and to Mohammad. It is not generally accepted as the same being by either religion, at least not within the religion. It is Believed that Christ spoke directly to God, and Mohammad spoke to a different being than the God of the OT. Though I understand that it could be taken that way in a general religious study. They all claim heir to an ultimate god. The word Allah in that language must be seen in the context of the person speaking it.


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## Explorer

DistinguishedPapyrus said:


> (Yahweh/Allah) is not generally accepted as the same being by either religion, at least not within the religion. It is Believed that Christ spoke directly to God, and Mohammad spoke to a different being than the God of the OT.


You are mistaken about this. It is purely the christians who argue that the muslims are following the wrong deity, while muslims see jesus as a prophet (and not a deity) before muhammed.


DistinguishedPapyrus said:


> Though I understand that it could be taken that way in a general religious study. They all claim heir to an ultimate god. The word Allah in that language must be seen in the context of the person speaking it.


You're engaging in special pleading to give christianity a credibility beyond the others, without actual objective support.

Here's the funny thing: Judaism has a series of tests for the many wh have claimed to be the messiah, and jesus failed those tests. The jews knew and know those tests because they are part of their scriptures, and christians hilariously forged what they thought were sufficient proofs of the prophecies having been fulfilled... but the jews didn't accept the forgeries, and can still point at what hasn't been fulfilled yet.

Their own books from yahweh tell them that the prophecies must come true before accepting a messiah's claims, and the prophecies haven't. yahweh didn't say they might come true eventually, which is why the jews are right about jesus not having fulfilled those prophecies.

As things stand, you have different abrahamaic religions, and different sects within those religions, making claims about why the other religions are mistaken... but all those arguments fall back on the claim that their particular holy texts are the only ones from the *real* god, without any actual strong evidence that any such text *is*.

The fact that early christian texts got later altered, with stories embellished to make them sound better and more convincing, means there is no "divine" control to prevent such alterations. Mark 16:9-20 is a great example of such an added forgery.

There's quite a few errors and blatant contradictions in the christian bible, including the two mutually-exclusive nativity narratives, so there's no justification for claiming that it ahould be given any special credence as a factual narrative or as proof of a claim.


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## drgamble

There are several different sects of the Christian religion. My father was Catholic, my mother was Baptist, wonder why that didn't work out. Anyway, my wife was raised Jehovah's Witness. A lot of people think that JW are a cult because they don't believe in the trinity, don't vote, celebrate holidays, don't donate blood, etc. The thing is that a lot of it is based on the bible. The thing that most people don't know is that JW don't believe that they are going to heaven when they die. They hope that they will be resurrected to live on earth as God originally intended. To me, this is an interesting view of the afterlife. Most religions that I have been exposed to all believe in some type of heaven, when according to the bible the earth was created for man to live on for eternity.

Now as far as my view is, I am more of a science guy. I totally believe that we came about as a matter of chance. Whatever the statistics are in a random universe for life, somehow we are here. I'm not convinced by the bible, it was written by man. I don't know if the accounts portrayed are true or not. I do have my own moral compass, but I don't think that everyone should live the way I do. I have studied various religious texts and I do live my life by many of the principals that are present in religious texts. I think that many of the beliefs with respect to morality just mean being a good person. I really believe in free will, and as a result I would call myself a libertarian? I don't think that the government should restrict behavior that doesn't affect me personally. Take for instance gay marriage, I am a heterosexual male. I married a woman. Now if two men or two women want to get married, who am I to say that they shouldn't do that? Is my life perfect? Are my choices the best?

I have co-workers that are totally against gay couples adopting children. Most of these views are in the name of religion. The thing is, most of these guys have grown up in a family where mom and dad stayed married for 30+ years. They lived the life of the Clevers as far as I'm concerned. My parents separated when I was 3 years old and I was raised by my father which is rare considering that I was born in 1976 and til this day divorce and custody laws are heavily skewed toward woman. At the age of 27, my future wife at the time, and I took in my future sister and laws children because she had some issues. We raised these kids for 5 years. At the age of 27, with a 15 year old girl I had no idea what I was doing. Furthermore, at that age I had no idea what I was doing with a 5 year child who turned out to be autistic, epileptic, and mentally retarded. Knowing everything I know now, can I say that I am a better fit parent than a well adjusted gay couple? Were my parents better for me than a well adjusted gay couple? I don't know the answers to these questions because I haven't experienced that, but I would have to think that almost anyone is better than the alcoholic, abusive parents that I had growing up, and I can admit that I made a lot of mistakes as a 27 year raising children that were already grown.

We tried to raise the children in the church, ultimately they rejected all notions of the church and over 10 years later, none of them are particularly religious. My wife still studies with the JW, but I cannot bring myself to study any one religion any more. Most of the religions of the world are a lot like politics in the sense that they operate under the premise that the common man cannot understand everything and we need someone to tell us what it all means. I'm a lot more inquisitive than that and question just about everything. I am an avid reader and I try to learn as much as I can. I am a free thinker and I do not accept the interpretation of one or even several men as truth. I'm the type of guy that will raise a counter argument even if I don't believe in the argument that I am presenting. Consequently, because most of my co-workers are staunch conservatives, they believe me to be a liberal, even though I actually fall somewhere in the middle. 

The answer is that I'm not particularly religious, although I have been exposed to many religions. I do share a lot of the moral code that is promoted through religion, but I differentiate religion from law. The United States was founded on freedom. I don't think that my way of life is the only way that life should be lived. At the age of 40, I can admit that I have made many mistakes in my life, but it is the mistakes that make me who I am. I don't want to tell anyone else how to live their life. As long as a persons decisions don't affect me or anyone else, a person should be allowed to live their life as they see fit. 

As I said, I'm 40 years old, I have no children that I know of. My wife and I tried to have children, even going as far as spending large sums of money on In Vetro and looking into adoption. That being said, I would never agree with abortion in my personal life, but I would not want to restrict someone else from having the option. I would only caution them that they may regret the decision in the future because they may not be able to have children in the future. 

I just have to say that there are lot of people that are particularly religious that seem to want to tell the rest of us how to live. I don't believe it to be Christian or American. If what the Bible says is true, there is only one that can judge me. Do not judge me for my actions, I will be held accountable for my actions in this life. You live you life and I will live mine according to how I see things. I don't know how many different religions and sects there are in the world, but I would have to guess that the number is in the thousands. As imperfect humans, I doubt that there is one religion that has is all right, considering that there is probably no one alive that really understands the languages that the original Bible came from and can even understand how the Bible was canonized from the days of old. I think that there was a lot of stuff lost in translation. In the end, you have to decide how you are going to live your life and apply the basic principles from the Bible. Even if there is no such thing as a higher power, at the very least these things will make you a better person. 

That's some of my take on religion, I could go on for hours, but in the end it doesn't really matter because I encourage everyone to seek out their own answers. If you are truly religious, don't just take what someone else's interpretation as gospel, form your own opinion. In the old days, most people weren't educated. We needed people to interpret the Bible for us. We needed people to write laws for us. I think that with the Millenials, we are reaching an age where there are a lot more educated people that don't need people to interpret things for them. We have information at our fingertips, so much so that there is actually an information overload. These days, the problem isn't having the information, it's discerning fact from fiction. I have a feeling that religion is falling on the wayside. Then again, there are a lot of converts to Muslim and some of them are extremists. Overall, as science advances, I think that the number of religious people will plummet. Then again, is the fall of mankind the result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge?


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## vilk

There is an inverse correlation between access to education/information and religiosity. So long as we as a society do not begin to change our values so that being educated and having access to information are demeritorious, religiosity will continue to decline...

...but then again, more and more among the alt-right do I see people assert that to be educated is a demerit.


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## bostjan

This is great reading.

Religious debate is always filled with tons of interesting stuff, but, unfortunately, it is also usually filled with a lot of friction between the differences in people's attitudes...

Going back to the history thing with the "three main world religions..."

The biggest religion in the world, by far, is Christianity. 2.2 billion followers. Next up is Islam- 1.6 billion. So for every two Muslims, there are three Christians. There are a billion Hindus, 400 million Taoists, another 400 million pagans, 375 million Buddhists, 30 million Sikhs, 15 million followers of Spiritism, and then 14 million Jews worldwide. Judaism is far from being one of the three main world religions.

Anyway, the modern monotheistic religions pretty much all go back to the Vedas. Zorostrianism, which was a primary influence in Judaism and Islam, split from the Vedas, as did Hinduism. Christianity split from Judaism and Buddhism split from Hinduism and both of those became very different, but the roots all trace back to the same ancient teachings of "do this," and "don't do that" preached in across the middle east and India before written history ever existed.

More recently, Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, Jehova's Witnesses, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and mainstream protestantism are so far removed from each other that they could be considered separate religions. Shiites and Sunnis and other sects of Islam are deviating from each other more and more.

Even the fundamental religions, Zorostrianism, Vedic Religion, Paganism, etc, still exist, but are so different in their beliefs now, that they are almost unrecognizable in comparison to their ancient core beliefs.

Modern Christianity is so far removed from Christ's teachings in the gospel, that 80% or more of the teachings are not even traceable to Jesus, even in the most liberal interpretations.

But it's not just Christianity. I know anti-religious people go after Christianity the most, and are not far behind in attacking Islam, but those two combined are 4 times larger than the next largest religion, so they are wide targets to go after.

Next - how religious people are now versus before the information age:

Even if religious scholars tend to equivocate a lot on historical and religious topics, the general religious population does not. Most Christians believe that every word in the Bible in the infallible Word of God, even if priests, scholars, and monks don't see it the same way. The general Muslim populace tends to be more fundamental than the average Imam, etc....

Religions are still growing, despite growing more slowly than before the information age. But this growth may continue to slow to the point where it soon dips negative. I don't think the "blame" for this is solely on the internet. I think a lot of it has to do with how stupid and crazy a lot of religious people are getting. I think that every time Westboro Baptist Church pickets a funeral or every time a racist lady in an SUV gets on the news for harassing people over their apparent religion, it turns newcomers off of religion. 

Finally, the "Tree of Knowledge:"

I was just think about that this morning, incidentally, before anyone here mentioned it.

The story in the Book of Genesis, same as it is in the Pentateuch and in the Quran, is that God made Adam and then set a trap for him. Told Adam to do anything he wanted to do except eat the fruit of this one particular tree. I believe the fruit is a metaphor for a certain bit of information, but, whatever, this allegory works exactly the same either way. 

So, what is the point? Can God truly be this benevolent being if he sets someone up to fail? Mankind is certainly smart enough now to know that this sort of trap is abuse. You wouldn't do the same with a child. Lock the child in a room with a bunch of toys and also a bottle of poison that would kill them and then tell the child to play with whichever toys, but don't eat the poison. It's essentially the same situation, and it's not okay.

In fact, God in the OT is portrayed as a flat out jerk. He kills people, orders people to kill their own children, tortures the ever-loving crap out of one guy (as a test of that guy's devotion), and so on. None of this is okay. If God was a manager at a company, he would have been fired and locked away.

If you take the Bible literally, you should route for Satan. It's no joke. God wants you to follow Him, yield your soul to Him, die for Him, etc. Satan just wants to point out the inconsistencies in the scripture, and wants people to think for themselves. He wanted Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit because it was going to open their eyes to the real world. He wanted to get Jesus to abandon his doomed suicide mission. Satan doesn't preach to anyone, and never had widely-circulated books about himself. He doesn't want to take your soul - he just wants you to be an individual. He never tries to get people to kill each other - God does that. So yeah, I don't believe in Satan, but if I read the Bible literally, he's the side I'm routing for.


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## iamaom

bostjan said:


> If you take the Bible literally, you should route for Satan.


Well I guess you have to define what "literally" means, and which bible/translation you're taking literally. In Hebrew "satan" is simply a title that means "opposer" and is taken on by many different angels throughout the old testament who simply disagree with god. God allows them to carry out their acts because he wants to see what will happen, god being all knowing and seeing time as some sort of comic strip is a fairly modern invention.


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## will_shred

iamyouarehesheistheyareweare god

that's my religion. My beliefs are closer to Zen and Hinduism than anything else, but I don't carry any of the cultural baggage that those religions have attached to them, since I wasn't raised in any of those cultures.


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## vilk

so in other words you're atheist


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## will_shred

vilk said:


> so in other words you're atheist



No, because I don't deny the existence of spirit. I just think about it differently. All conscious beings share the same consciousness.


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## bostjan

will_shred said:


> No, because I don't deny the existence of spirit. I just think about it differently. All conscious beings share the same consciousness.


Except me.


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## vilk

will_shred said:


> No, because I don't deny the existence of spirit. I just think about it differently. All conscious beings share the same consciousness.



But that's different than believing in God.

Did you get to read my pepsi-squirt analogy?



me said:


> _My favorite soda is Pepsi-cola...
> ...Only the Pepsi-cola that I like doesn't have kola nut flavor, it isn't dark colored, and it tastes like grapefruit.
> If I walk up to you and tell you "My favorite drink is Pepsi-cola", will you understand that I like a light colored grapefruit flavored drink and not the classic pepsi-cola that everyone is familiar with? No, you wont. So what's the point in trying to tell people that I like Pepsi-cola instead of just telling them I like Squirt?_
> 
> 
> If you don't believe in a dude in the sky, then you don't believe in God. At least, you don't believe the same thing as 99.999% of other people who believe in God. So then what is the value in categorizing yourself along with them?



You see, it isn't that I don't understand _how_ one might find a way to explain how they could also fit into the category of "theist". What I'm questioning is: _Why would you do that?

_
I think I maybe just thought of another analogy. This is fresh so you guys let me know what you think.

_Candyists are people who believe that sugar tastes sweet, and that sweet tasting food is candy.
However, I believe that all food that we consume is ultimately is broken down into glucose--which is sugar, which powers our cells. Therefore, all food is candy.
Am I a Candyist? I mean, I do believe that sweets are candy. But then again, if I walked up to a Candyist and said "Hey would you like some candy?" and handed them a slice of bread certainly they'd say, "That's not candy."
If I tell people "I'm a Candyist", will they know that I think bread is candy? Nope, and in fact, they'll incorrectly assume that I think only sweets are candy. So then, why am I even telling people I'm a Candyist?


--------------------
_
As a separate point, it's my opinion that the difference between pantheism and atheism is nil. If literally everything is God, then the significance of the application of the word God is lost. It's like someone saying "Every food is my favorite food"--> I would say that person has no favorite food. In application there is no difference, as that person doesn't like any one food above the rest irrespective of whether you say that all foods are his favorite or that he has no favorite.


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## will_shred

I don't believe in the all powerful god of ego described by most monotheistic religions, but I think that there is a very real spiritual dimension to life.


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## lewis

whether we want to accept it or not, religion holds this planet back an amazing amount. And is the largest reason for war and murder
Even democide is done politically imo.
And instances of any one in a position politically abusing said position to do crime is the worst (i.e Priest molesting a child)


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## vilk

lewis said:


> religion [...] is the largest reason for war and murder



I know you've used the word "reason", but I think that most people would argue that religion is merely the excuse, or justification, but not the cause.

imo the largest reason for war and murder is acquisition of money and power by the elite and ultra-wealthy.


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## lewis

vilk said:


> I know you've used the word "reason", but I think that most people would argue that religion is merely the excuse, or justification, but not the cause.
> 
> imo the largest reason for war and murder is acquisition of money and power by the elite and ultra-wealthy.


I get that for sure but alot of peoples actions are even declared to be "in the name of" *insert god here*
etc.
I.e religion corrupted someones thought process.

Problem is its a very harmful and very powerful creation and always letting it off the hook by just saying its the excuse but not the cause for example, imo just allows it and anyone carrying our their BS to continue in this world.

Like there is so much conflicting talk about muslims for example. On 1 hand they are a peaceful people who would not hurt anyone and do NOT speak on behalf of terrorists who presumably do what you are saying, use it as their BS reason, but on the other hand we see muslim men treat their wives and women in general with a shockingly low level of respect. Dogs are treated better. And they are constantly trying to push their laws and beliefs onto the public in the UK.

In London there are posters that they have put up, that the Police are useless in dealing with, which say "you are now entering a Sharia law zone" which means they are policing the area themselves basically using their own beliefs and actions as "law" with no worry about what the ACTUAL law is. Mostly this is allowed to just go on. The police are genuinely scared of tackling these people in fear of the racism card.

ridiculous. I just cannot stand it. It divides races, cultures, whole countries. Its pathetic.
Anyones pre conceived conception about ANYONE these days stems from knowing what Religion they are first. Without it we would just get on with everyone without a 2nd thought. With it and we sub consciously judge everyone.

"He is Catholic?....oh we know what that means"
"He is a muslim?...oh no ISIS"
"He is a Jew?....



etc etc.


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## vilk

lewis said:


> on the other hand we see muslim men treat their wives and women in general with a shockingly low level of respect.



The same was true for Western society as well up until like 60 years ago. And we weren't Muslims.



lewis said:


> letting it off the hook by just saying its the excuse but not the cause for example, imo just allows it and anyone carrying our their BS to continue in this world



I am confused by this statement.

1. Who is letting terrorists, anti-humanists, etc, off the hook?
2. How does acknowledging that bad people use religion as an excuse enable bad people to use religion as an excuse?
3. If you're agreeing with me that it is an excuse and not the cause, doesn't suggesting otherwise, even in an attempt to prevent their BS from continuing, make you disingenuous?


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## lewis

vilk said:


> The same was true for Western society as well up until like 60 years ago. And we weren't Muslims.
> 
> 
> 
> I am confused by this statement.
> 
> 1. Who is letting terrorists, anti-humanists, etc, off the hook?
> 2. How does acknowledging that bad people use religion as an excuse enable bad people to use religion as an excuse?
> 3. If you're agreeing with me that it is an excuse and not the cause, doesn't suggesting otherwise, even in an attempt to prevent their BS from continuing, make you disingenuous?



Yeah exactly SIXTIES years ago. About time they stopped too isnt it?

and what I mean is,
in a nutshell religion is bad. It encourages people to do bad stuff in its name. The longer we allow it to continue by just targeting the effects of Religion to complain about, Rather than target Religion itself as the root cause, the longer this planet will be in a complete mess.

and to answer you, no one is letting terrorists off the hook, but the religion they and any criminal "represent" very much gets let of the hook and thats my point.


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## vilk

nvm


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## El Caco

narad said:


> Where'd El Caco run off to?


I don't have time for ss.org until after the end of this month and shouldn't have come here now. I accidentally clicked an ss.org link just now looking for a guitar I want to buy. Not that it matters because up to the post I am replying to there was nothing added to the thread worth replying to, from the beginning of the big long reply to me it was clear that he was unable to grasp what I was saying and therefore his reply is irrelevant. I didn't bother reading the rest because it is like a blind man telling you there are no stars because they can't see them and can't understand the concept you are trying to explain. That may be my fault for poor writing, I don't know because I really don't have time to read the thread again and I don't have time to read the last few pages of the thread either.

I was trying to explain a concept. A concept that nothing can be trusted because there is no way to prove any of this is real. If it isn't real then science and tests are irrelevant and meaningless. My point was that believing in such things requires faith that this is real. I believe that is no different to religion. On the other hand I have read science believes people like me who accept there is no way of knowing if this is real or not and people who believe this isn't real are suffering from mental illness.

I tried to explain how everything we all believe is simply the interpretation of information our brain receives and has stored. We believe we have eyes and hands and feet but there is no way for us to actually test if we are really more than just a brain and there is no way for us to actually know the form of our brain or where our brain is. 

If you can leave alone previously discussed simulation theories and just focus on this concept. There is a good chance we will create some kind of brain in the not too distant future, maybe in our lifetime even, possibly even in the next 10-20 years. The processing power will be there in the next few years at least. Now if we succeed in creating a self aware AI that is capable of learning and self development, if we create limits on that AI so that it believes it is something it is not and believes that it is in an environment we make up, we could potentially create an AI that believes in a lie and has no way of possibly knowing or testing for anything other than what we let it know or even tell it to believe and that could all be a complete lie. Perhaps we would even give it the power to reproduce, evolve and even create with limits in a way that is of our design. And we could do so in a way that it is not aware of our reality. It would be living in a simple artificial world that it believes is real with its own form of science that reinforces the belief in that world but is actually grounded in the belief in that world. The interesting thing for me would be if the future offspring of that AI could evolve to the point of conceiving the possibility that it might actually be AI and then create AI in an artificial reality created by the AI.

I'm sure if we ever got to that point of simulation the idea that we could be simulated ourselves would be more popular.

So contemplate this for a moment. Imagine that you were aware of this concept but not a believer, just that it is a concept you have understood since you were a child. Then imagine that events happened during your life that reinforced the idea that this is probably a sim and other people were aware of your thoughts but didn't share them. Then imagine you were with sceptics on a drive which no one was actually discussing or thinking about simulation at the time. Now imagine you saw something strange. Lets say a red car was coming from the opposite direction, lets say that car suddenly flashed 3 times and then disappeared. Imagine for a moment you thought you were seeing things so you simply asked the others "did you see that?". Imagine that they also shared the same feeling that they saw something and were afraid to say but you persisted they tell you what they saw, imagine the surprise of everyone including the sceptics when everyone claims they saw the same thing. Now imagine that this might be the first time the sceptics ever noticed something like this but throughout your life you have had many strange experiences like this. And imagine that the sceptics went on to start seeing other strange things and realising that they had seen strange things plenty of times but ignored them because it did not fit their reality, imagine that those sceptics aren't really sceptics anymore but don't know what to believe because they don't understand what they have seen. But most importantly imagine you have seen many things like this and shared these experiences with a variety of people. Imagine you had been presented with enough evidence to believe in something but imagine trying to explain these things to others who have never seen or experienced these things. 

Of course such a person is not much different from someone who thinks they have seen a miracle that confirms their religion. Of course I understand everything we believe is simply the interpretations of the computer that we call our brain and a brain can malfunction. That said I've had multiple tests and scans, I have no growths in my head, no abnormalities at all. No medical test has been able to find any explanation that might point to a malfunctioning or abnormal brain. I can say that I think I am rational enough to restrain myself when I write about things like this because if I shared everything I believe I have seen or experienced in a forum such as this people would be convinced I am crazy. And I don't need to prove anything to anyone and I don't need anyone to believe me. But that is why I think certain explanations better explain what I have experienced than others and it is why I am inclined to certain beliefs but don't claim an absolute belief.

Science can't explain some of the things I have seen or experienced. Trying to explain would just make me seem crazy. But I've had a few atheist friends who have become believers in a higher power or in something else simply because of what we have experienced together. And it isn't important to me that you believe, it isn't important to me that you even understand the concept I tried to share. I just wanted to try and explain the concept in an effort to try and help others understand why someone might choose their belief. It's what you might do when you don't have the answers and know you can't have the answers but you believe the popular beliefs are wrong. Then if you ever get to the point of believing your beliefs have influence then you might choose to think a certain way or believe certain things based on that belief. Think of that as an extension of the power of positive thinking.

I can't believe I just wasted time typing this out when I have so little time to get the stuff that I need done finished. As I said i can't read the rest of the thread and if you quote me or reply to me don't be surprised that I don't reply. I suspect this thread should be dead by next month or so long that it would be crazy for me to read through. I have been avoiding checking ss.org simply because I can't afford the distraction and I'm disappointed that I clicked a link to here without realising. As soon as I'm done being distracted now I'll log out to make sure it doesn't happen again because I'm very easily distracted.


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## marcwormjim

You sure had time for that.


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## narad

El Caco said:


> I don't have time for ss.org until after the end of this month and shouldn't have come here now. I accidentally clicked an ss.org link just now looking for a guitar I want to buy. Not that it matters because up to the post I am replying to there was nothing added to the thread worth replying to, from the beginning of the big long reply to me it was clear that he was unable to grasp what I was saying and therefore his reply is irrelevant. I didn't bother reading the rest because it is like a blind man telling you there are no stars because they can't see them and can't understand the concept you are trying to explain. That may be my fault for poor writing, I don't know because I really don't have time to read the thread again and I don't have time to read the last few pages of the thread either.



This is a sort of mass reply to all the weirdness of this argument, but I'm going to try to be brief on each because I feel in people's lengthy retorts you may be losing sight of some of the core criticisms:

1. We all understand the argument. In the quoted passage you're phrasing it in a very condescending way. It's a really simple idea, we've all seen the matrix, we can imagine going on more layer down.

2. Why take this belief? It buys you nothing: it is by its own definition unprovable (the way you're pitching it). And it's "turtles all the way down" so to speak -- eventually you get to base reality and need to grapple with existential questions there.

3. AI is no where close to doing this -- in fact, this is not even "AI". If you enroll in an AI PhD program, you don't simulate brains. And we don't even understand how the brain works, so it follows that there can be no estimate in how much computational power it would take to simulate it. I imagine we'll get there eventually, so I'll give this one a pass, but you'd be misinformed to argue that researchers believe this is coming soon.

4. As said, a brain is not the entirety of life as we know it. It doesn't follow that hey, once we can simulate a brain, naturally we can simulate something on a scale that is immeasurably larger (essentially inconceivably larger) than the brain.

5. You car disappearing example is simultaneously assuming this sort of absolute power to simulate, with a very contemporary computer programmer view of things going wrong. If you're simulating all the atoms in the universe, you don't botch up a car driving down the road. It doesn't make ANY sense. I feel like this is the most damning -- you're trying to use this theory to resolve inconsistencies between what you've observed and our current understanding of reality, but simulators capable of simulating the universe wouldn't be incompetent enough to be filling the world with "glitches".

6. Back to the idea of faith, now you're just playing semantics. Maybe some masters of our simulated world are changing my memories so that as we keep understanding more and more about this world, but from the perspective of mankind, in retrospect and as we are living it, the laws of the world as understood through science are repeatable and give way to making consistent predictions of our actions. If one were to define "proof", we would define it within our simulation, as it pertains to our world. If my believes are derived from that proof, that is not faith, because the concept of "faith" is defined with respect to the concept of "proof".

7. Followup, there is no need to be correct in science. At a time when all observable evidence and predictions supported a view of a flat earth, and one were to believe in a flat earth, that person is not exercising faith. If someone today denies all the evidence of a spherical earth, and chooses to instead believe in the flat earth, they are exercising faith. So your idea of faith/proof as on objective thing that sort of reality is aware of (but we might be because we're somewhere down the simulation rabbithole) isn't sound.


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## TedEH

^ Everything he said. All of it. +1000.

Also:


El Caco said:


> the computer that we call our brain


The brain is not a computer.


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## bostjan

Ok, there are a lot of little points, and no one is coming on here to debate pro-simulation theory anymore, sadly.

But, there is only one point that torpedoes the entire theory. There's no point to it.

If I had some crazy amount of high tech stuff to plug people into my simulation permanently, what would I gain from doing that? Nothing. In fact, it would cost me trillions of dollars to keep it going.

How do I know I have eyes? It's not because of faith, it's because I get neurological signals from my eyes to my brain. If there was something else sending the signals simulating an eye, then I would figure out that the signal was bullshit very quickly as soon as I trip over something I didn't see or reach for something that's not there.

It's so inconsistent, too. You keep arguing about how advanced our AI is, yet, according to your argument for Simulation Theory, there is no standalone AI here, just AI within a more advanced AI world of everything, so why would that world even necessitate standalone AI? If we are in an AI simulation, then it wouldn't take any work to make a super advanced AI, because we would already be in it. It's like making a robot that can build another robot in order to prove that the first robot exists. There is no logical progression there.


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## JSanta

narad said:


> This is a sort of mass reply to all the weirdness of this argument, but I'm going to try to be brief on each because I feel in people's lengthy retorts you may be losing sight of some of the core criticisms:
> 
> 1. We all understand the argument. In the quoted passage you're phrasing it in a very condescending way. It's a really simple idea, we've all seen the matrix, we can imagine going on more layer down.
> 
> 2. Why take this belief? It buys you nothing: it is by its own definition unprovable (the way you're pitching it). And it's "turtles all the way down" so to speak -- eventually you get to base reality and need to grapple with existential questions there.
> 
> 3. AI is no where close to doing this -- in fact, this is not even "AI". If you enroll in an AI PhD program, you don't simulate brains. And we don't even understand how the brain works, so it follows that there can be no estimate in how much computational power it would take to simulate it. I imagine we'll get there eventually, so I'll give this one a pass, but you'd be misinformed to argue that researchers believe this is coming soon.
> 
> 4. As said, a brain is not the entirety of life as we know it. It doesn't follow that hey, once we can simulate a brain, naturally we can simulate something on a scale that is immeasurably larger (essentially inconceivably larger) than the brain.
> 
> 5. You car disappearing example is simultaneously assuming this sort of absolute power to simulate, with a very contemporary computer programmer view of things going wrong. If you're simulating all the atoms in the universe, you don't botch up a car driving down the road. It doesn't make ANY sense. I feel like this is the most damning -- you're trying to use this theory to resolve inconsistencies between what you've observed and our current understanding of reality, but simulators capable of simulating the universe wouldn't be incompetent enough to be filling the world with "glitches".
> 
> 6. Back to the idea of faith, now you're just playing semantics. Maybe some masters of our simulated world are changing my memories so that as we keep understanding more and more about this world, but from the perspective of mankind, in retrospect and as we are living it, the laws of the world as understood through science are repeatable and give way to making consistent predictions of our actions. If one were to define "proof", we would define it within our simulation, as it pertains to our world. If my believes are derived from that proof, that is not faith, because the concept of "faith" is defined with respect to the concept of "proof".
> 
> 7. Followup, there is no need to be correct in science. At a time when all observable evidence and predictions supported a view of a flat earth, and one were to believe in a flat earth, that person is not exercising faith. If someone today denies all the evidence of a spherical earth, and chooses to instead believe in the flat earth, they are exercising faith. So your idea of faith/proof as on objective thing that sort of reality is aware of (but we might be because we're somewhere down the simulation rabbithole) isn't sound.



I want to add one piece to #3 specifically. I am almost finished with a doctorate in business intelligence, which in large parts studies machine learning and the automation of technological analytical tools to provide more insight into prescriptive and predictive analytics. The bottom line with artificial neural networks is that we have no where near the computing power available to us to actually mimic (digitally) the real neural network of the human brain. Highly sophisticated ANNs cannot even come close. Period. Bottom line, it's not even up for debate at this point. If we use the brain as a comparison with regards to sophistication, what we currently have available is no where near as powerful, we don't even really know what that means from a computational perspective yet.


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## narad

JSanta said:


> I want to add one piece to #3 specifically. I am almost finished with a doctorate in business intelligence,



Nice!


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## El Caco

I really don't have time at the moment to read what you guys have written and continue this, if I read it I'll be unable not to respond I'm sure. I already have an impossible deadline for the end of the month and now http://www.sevenstring.org/threads/why-are-you-sad-right-now.271770/page-21#post-4771376


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## feraledge

Threads like this make me proud to have been raised Jewish, because I had no hang ups at all when I was a kid and could look at "holy books" and say, "well that's a bunch of bullshit." 
I consider myself a "spiritual" anti-theist. 
I have no question in my mind that god does not exist. The stories we tell ourselves about the unknown were meant to be flowing, not stagnant or consequential, which is exactly what religion, primarily myths etched in stone, have created. Since I'm writing on the matter, I want to point out that the definition of god involves having power over reality here and now. Most indigenous "creators" don't technically qualify as a god. Being against religion and saying there is a "spirit" to life are in no way contradictory, it just means that life can have a connection without a cognizant and omnipresent creator or intention. 
Since we have to deal with people who believe their myths matter and wield them against other people, I couldn't be more anti-religion personally. 
Tell stories, doesn't impact other people. But gods have a tendency of really getting in everyone else's way. 
From a scientific perspective, I think what I consider 'spirit' is demonstrable, but you have to break out of the cult of the ego. Trees use mycelium to spread messages and pass nutrients to their kin and friends, even sustaining leaves on their branches after the body of the tree itself has died. Symbiosis gets very detailed and I've been fascinated enough about parasites that you have to wonder at the smallest details of interconnections between living beings that the idea of "self" becomes impossible. 
If the mind is the energy created by neurons firing and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then that energy is constantly going somewhere and its hard to imagine it's all just within us. 
I think there are perfectly secular ideas for what otherwise might just sound like New Age crap. But it's also easier to say that "I don't know" is an acceptable answer for what it might be and not, consequently, magical evidence that three Abrahamic religions could be right.


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## feraledge

vilk said:


> I know you've used the word "reason", but I think that most people would argue that religion is merely the excuse, or justification, but not the cause.
> 
> imo the largest reason for war and murder is acquisition of money and power by the elite and ultra-wealthy.


As a cultural materialist, this is an area of extensive study and analysis, the largest reason for war is control of resources. All of which currently translate to money and power, but historically speaking, not always the exact cause. 
And to clarify the point you were making that seems to have been overlooked: the justifications do matter, but that doesn't mean the stories we tell should be taken at face value. That's a trap a lot of people fall into: for example, people think you need to use the Bible to refute Christianity. To me, that's as ridiculous as thinking I need to use Mein Kampf to argue the Holocaust was bad. I'm not going to cite Fight Club to prove that it's a fictional story. 
We're social animals. You can boil our behavior down to a crude back-and-forth of ecology and biology, but, unless you're looking for it specifically, no one really speaks that way even if we're responding to the same stimuli. 
Just the same, Isis evokes a Caliphate on social media using oil money. Holy wars have always been about geopolitics, but ecologists historically don't make good cannon fodder.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> From a scientific perspective, I think what I consider 'spirit' is demonstrable, but you have to break out of the cult of the ego....
> If the mind is the energy created by neurons firing and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then that energy is constantly going somewhere and its hard to imagine it's all just within us.



It's backwards: your mind isn't energy -- it's created using (but not using up) energy, activating particular groups of neurons in particular ways. That energy lives on, but the neurons don't, so I don't see anything spiritual in thinking that the electricity that gives rise to individuals is shared and reused by others.


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## feraledge

narad said:


> It's backwards: your mind isn't energy -- it's created using (but not using up) energy, activating particular groups of neurons in particular ways. That energy lives on, but the neurons don't, so I don't see anything spiritual in thinking that the electricity that gives rise to individuals is shared and reused by others.


2am, I meant using. I'm not a fan of calling it electricity, but my point is that there is scientific backing for what people will call spirituality, a term with a lot of shit baggage. I'm not trying to say people are spiritual whether they like it or not. But no human is an island.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> 2am, I meant using. I'm not a fan of calling it electricity, but my point is that there is scientific backing for what people will call spirituality, a term with a lot of shit baggage. I'm not trying to say people are spiritual whether they like it or not. But no human is an island.



And I guess my point is that there's nothing of "you" in that energy, as it is a resource used by the system, not the system. That energy is reused, so we are all connected, but spirituality shouldn't be simply that. In fact it would be just as true if humans never existed, so we don't need to appeal to the soul or the supernatural to talk about it.

I mean, according the definitions of "spiritual" that google's throwing me, simply grounding it in science would prevent it from being spiritual (given we have no scientific support for the existence of a soul).


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## feraledge

narad said:


> And I guess my point is that there's nothing of "you" in that energy, as it is a resource used by the system, not the system. That energy is reused, so we are all connected, but spirituality shouldn't be simply that. In fact it would be just as true if humans never existed, so we don't need to appeal to the soul or the supernatural to talk about it.
> 
> I mean, according the definitions of "spiritual" that google's throwing me, simply grounding it in science would prevent it from being spiritual (given we have no scientific support for the existence of a soul).


Don't get me wrong, I'm not just trying to be diplomatic nor do I demand science make sense of my experience of the world. Science has as much of an uphill battle as religion does, particularly since Descartes set the table.
My point is that if you want to show, and science is incrementally and hesitantly accepting pieces of this, that there is connection between all life, there's scientific evidence of it: that energy bounces between everything. For you, it's neutral. For me, it's not.

The terms we're stuck with are shit. It makes it easier to pick this kind of god or not god dualism. I couldn't be more resolved in knowing there is no cognizant, omnipresent force in the world, but there's more to it than the sum of all parts. No chakras here.
But I have seen my dead brother many times. Other people have seen him and have see him interact with physical things in front of us. I can't really explain it, but I don't need to and it's zero evidence of a god. It could simply be residual energy with some consciousness lingering. But I think there's going to be a slow turn to realize that neurons matter more than simply the hardware of the brain. As the hive mind and function of the octopus become more understood, I think science could take steps into figuring out life about how life functions. I'm not holding my breath.
But I'm resolved in what I know and open that it was an uphill battle to get there, but around the third time I was warned about someone around me dying by a great horned owl, I had to question myself more than them. Over a dozen instances later, they haven't been wrong and they aren't the only ones carrying news for me.
Sounds woo-woo, I'm sure, but I don't really care about that. It is what it is and I don't feel I need to put more on it. Could just be energy. But it's there and whatever it is, doesn't need a god to exist nor a master plan.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> Don't get me wrong, I'm not just trying to be diplomatic nor do I demand science make sense of my experience of the world. Science has as much of an uphill battle as religion does, particularly since Descartes set the table.
> My point is that if you want to show, and science is incrementally and hesitantly accepting pieces of this, that there is connection between all life, there's scientific evidence of it: that energy bounces between everything. For you, it's neutral. For me, it's not.



Well I mean...science doesn't support this belief. What people have faith in is no bother to me, but there is simply no evidence to suggest that energy somehow becomes non-neutral by flowing through a brain (also, that doesn't seem to make sense because we're not reusing the same energy to do so, so if energy is tofu, it doesn't have long to acquire someone's flavor), that there is "residual energy" as such, that consciousness could be carried on that energy in any level, let alone reconstruct an entire body. 

And I can't think of any sense in which science is supporting some sort of connected life -- in terms of the building blocks of everything (energy/matter), we all share the same resources, but that isn't exactly cutting edge research. 

So I guess if you can't construct an argument of how science supports this, why try to bring science into it at all? Talking about "energy" in a vague sense is about as scientific as Buddhism.


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## TedEH

If we're going to talk about science, we can't keep using the word "energy" as if it's a thing - energy is not a "thing" or a soul, a spirit, it's simply the word that describes the capacity for something to do work.

It's one thing to say we're all "connected" because we breath the same air, or walk on the same ground, etc.- it's a nice sentiment, but there is no spiritual sharing of "energy" between people.


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## feraledge

Cool, a number of ethologists, biologists and ecologists are headed in a different direction. I'm pointing it out because they are scientists and they write of their struggles to show the complexity of life. Hunter-gatherers didn't have that problem. Things are what they are, but if you don't have those experiences then it's very hard to imagine the probability.
I think there's a very practical reason behind what people would consider religious phenomena, no god necessary. Your experiences are different, mine were too. But definitively asserting that it's all cut and dry, energy is energy, matter is matter, all but fosters a dualism where anything beyond that is defaulted in the god category. I think both sides get some right and some wrong.
If we were to accept scientific deduction as the only measure, it's good to be reminded that until recent decades scientists thought turtles were deaf, knew nothing about bat's echolocation, and didn't know that whales sang. Science expands only when a thesis is realized to be wrong.
And in the end, energy might be neutral. It may just be that the world is full of fauna and flora with varying degrees of cognizance and empathy. I'm not relying on that validation, as I've stated. But there are scientists exploring it.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> Cool, a number of ethologists, biologists and ecologists are headed in a different direction. I'm pointing it out because they are scientists and they write of their struggles to show the complexity of life. Hunter-gatherers didn't have that problem. Things are what they are, but if you don't have those experiences then it's very hard to imagine the probability.
> I think there's a very practical reason behind what people would consider religious phenomena, no god necessary. Your experiences are different, mine were too. But definitively asserting that it's all cut and dry, energy is energy, matter is matter, all but fosters a dualism where anything beyond that is defaulted in the god category. I think both sides get some right and some wrong.
> If we were to accept scientific deduction as the only measure, it's good to be reminded that until recent decades scientists thought turtles were deaf, knew nothing about bat's echolocation, and didn't know that whales sang. Science expands only when a thesis is realized to be wrong.
> And in the end, energy might be neutral. It may just be that the world is full of fauna and flora with varying degrees of cognizance and empathy. I'm not relying on that validation, as I've stated. But there are scientists exploring it.



You're conflating some things. Ethologists, biologists, and ecologists are not trying to track the flow off consciousness in energies between life forms. 

Yes, science is a process of constant refinement of knowledge, and within that system almost anything is possible, but current evidence makes some things a lot more probable than not. Things like turtles hearing, whales singing, and bats echolocating are on a different scale of plausibility than say... a person's spirit existing on in energy such that it is capable of being seen and interacting with the physical world. When you're flying around with hypotheses that are that devoid of hard evidence, you can pretty much put them there with Jesus is lord...reincarnation...divine miracles, etc. It's not scientific in any practical sense.


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## feraledge

narad said:


> You're conflating some things. Ethologists, biologists, and ecologists are not trying to track the flow off consciousness in energies between life forms.
> 
> Yes, science is a process of constant refinement of knowledge, and within that system almost anything is possible, but current evidence makes some things a lot more probable than not. Things like turtles hearing, whales singing, and bats echolocating are on a different scale of plausibility than say... a person's spirit existing on in energy such that it is capable of being seen and interacting with the physical world. When you're flying around with hypotheses that are that devoid of hard evidence, you can pretty much put them there with Jesus is lord...reincarnation...divine miracles, etc. It's not scientific in any practical sense.


But you're wrong: Peter Wohlben, Carl Safina, Sy Montgomery, Virginia Morell (science writer, not scientist, but her books follow biologists and ethologists who are studying this), just to name a few. This is something I actively study and from an anthropological perspective.
You're talking definitively as though I have no idea what I'm talking about. Science is a mode of inquiry not a cohesive set of conclusions or list of permissible questions.
My hypothesis is clearly a hypothesis: perhaps energy is not neutral. As I've said, even if it is, it's not end of the road for me by any stretch of the imagination.
My statement is that there's more to the connection between all life than biology can CURRENTLY explain. Doesn't mean it's not there and my direct experiences require no validation. But if you'd like, I'll let you know personally the next time a great horned owl warns that someone is going to die and I'll just keep you posted as/when news comes in.
I'm talking about personal experience. To conflate that with Jesus is laughable for me: a figure whose first record of existing is over 40 years after "he" supposedly died and in that telling he was a celestial being. I get why you would say that, but I'm not telling you about my own experiences, not something I've read in a book. I'm not expecting you or anyone to believe that sight unseen, but because you are, as I'm saying, dumping all this in the god category doesn't mean it is that simple. I'm saying it isn't.
Truly speaking, it shouldn't matter at all, but because religious people are destroying the world, it's important to understand the real phenomena that people attribute to the existence of their chosen god. If you just write it off and people have, as I have, indisputable and otherwise inexplicable experiences, then you push them back to god. This is a massive failure of prominent atheists. And that's coming from a militant atheist.


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## bostjan

feraledge said:


> Cool, a number of ethologists, biologists and ecologists are headed in a different direction. I'm pointing it out because they are scientists and they write of their struggles to show the complexity of life. Hunter-gatherers didn't have that problem. Things are what they are, but if you don't have those experiences then it's very hard to imagine the probability.
> I think there's a very practical reason behind what people would consider religious phenomena, no god necessary. Your experiences are different, mine were too. But definitively asserting that it's all cut and dry, energy is energy, matter is matter, all but fosters a dualism where anything beyond that is defaulted in the god category. I think both sides get some right and some wrong.
> If we were to accept scientific deduction as the only measure, it's good to be reminded that until recent decades scientists thought turtles were deaf, knew nothing about bat's echolocation, and didn't know that whales sang. Science expands only when a thesis is realized to be wrong.
> And in the end, energy might be neutral. It may just be that the world is full of fauna and flora with varying degrees of cognizance and empathy. I'm not relying on that validation, as I've stated. But there are scientists exploring it.





feraledge said:


> But you're wrong: Peter Wohlben, Carl Safina, Sy Montgomery, Virginia Morell (science writer, not scientist, but her books follow biologists and ethologists who are studying this), just to name a few. This is something I actively study and from an anthropological perspective.
> You're talking definitively as though I have no idea what I'm talking about. Science is a mode of inquiry not a cohesive set of conclusions or list of permissible questions.
> My hypothesis is clearly a hypothesis: perhaps energy is not neutral. As I've said, even if it is, it's not end of the road for me by any stretch of the imagination.
> My statement is that there's more to the connection between all life than biology can CURRENTLY explain. Doesn't mean it's not there and my direct experiences require no validation. But if you'd like, I'll let you know personally the next time a great horned owl warns that someone is going to die and I'll just keep you posted as/when news comes in.
> I'm talking about personal experience. To conflate that with Jesus is laughable for me: a figure whose first record of existing is over 40 years after "he" supposedly died and in that telling he was a celestial being. I get why you would say that, but I'm not telling you about my own experiences, not something I've read in a book. I'm not expecting you or anyone to believe that sight unseen, but because you are, as I'm saying, dumping all this in the god category doesn't mean it is that simple. I'm saying it isn't.
> Truly speaking, it shouldn't matter at all, but because religious people are destroying the world, it's important to understand the real phenomena that people attribute to the existence of their chosen god. If you just write it off and people have, as I have, indisputable and otherwise inexplicable experiences, then you push them back to god. This is a massive failure of prominent atheists. And that's coming from a militant atheist.



Take a look at what science is. It is knowledge. In a formal sense, it is knowledge based on repeatably observable facts. Pseudoscience is not knowledge that is wrong, no, it's just that which is passed off as knowledge based on observable fact that it not. Spiritualism that claims connections to science is always pseudoscience, because there are no repeatably observable facts.

A hypothesis is an educated guess as to the outcome of some measurable experiment. The term hypothesis has no place in a discussion about inobservable spiritual energy or the like.

Things like the claims that turtles were thought to be deaf, because they don't have ears are a little dubious. The more correct statement was that no one studied reptile hearing until after the 1950's, so scientists didn't know. Educators (religious ones, to boot) inferred from the lack of scientific discourse over reptilian hearing and the folk conjecture that turtles had no ears, that turtles were "deaf as a post."

I think that's a huge misstep, when it comes to lay people debating science. It's a series of false equivalencies that lead to weird places. It follows the logical form: <<Science says "X." Science used to not know about "Y." Not knowing about Y = Being wrong about Y. Being wrong about Y = Being wrong about everything. Therefore not X.>> But every time I hear someone say that Einstein's model of how things behave at comic scales and near the speed of light contradict's Newton's Laws of motion, I die a little on the inside.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> But you're wrong: Peter Wohlben, Carl Safina, Sy Montgomery, Virginia Morell (science writer, not scientist, but her books follow biologists and ethologists who are studying this), just to name a few. This is something I actively study and from an anthropological perspective.
> You're talking definitively as though I have no idea what I'm talking about. Science is a mode of inquiry not a cohesive set of conclusions or list of permissible questions.
> My hypothesis is clearly a hypothesis: perhaps energy is not neutral. As I've said, even if it is, it's not end of the road for me by any stretch of the imagination.



Your citations don't match your hypothesis. I'm not sure what you see in clonal colonies or smart octopuses that has any bearing on consciousness existing after death. It doesn't sound at all like these people are researching that, though it does sound like only about half are scientists.



feraledge said:


> My statement is that there's more to the connection between all life than biology can CURRENTLY explain.



Given that we're not wrapping up biological sciences any time soon, I feel that's a tautology. But I don't see any testable hypotheses in this area, like any open questions that science is trying to grapple with. Like I'm not ever thinking, "How does X happen?" with respect to consciousness and death / any sort of existence after death.



feraledge said:


> Truly speaking, it shouldn't matter at all, but because religious people are destroying the world, it's important to understand the real phenomena that people attribute to the existence of their chosen god. If you just write it off and people have, as I have, indisputable and otherwise inexplicable experiences, then you push them back to god. This is a massive failure of prominent atheists. And that's coming from a militant atheist.



From my perspective, you are religious! Because the definition of a deity can vary so much from a human-like figure to a general guiding consciousness, I group anyone that rejects overwhelming direct evidence to accept a faith-based belief in the supernatural as being religious. You might say your personal experience brings this into the realm of science, but my born-again Christian friend says the exact same things about her experiences, physically interacting with Jesus. As an evidence-based person, why would I take your owl-warnings as any more real as her Jesus-is-my-bff beliefs?


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## TedEH

feraledge said:


> I'm pointing it out because they are scientists and they write of their struggles to show the complexity of life.


I'd like to take a moment to point out that a person's title doesn't have any bearing on how close they are to any objective truth. Scientists are capable of doing science wrong. Things are not true because a scientist said so.


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## feraledge

narad said:


> Your citations don't match your hypothesis. I'm not sure what you see in clonal colonies or smart octopuses that has any bearing on consciousness existing after death. It doesn't sound at all like these people are researching that, though it does sound like only about half are scientists.


I guess your quick Googling is better than my research! Haha! 
My primary point here is that there is more to consciousness than matter and energy. Leaving the dead out of it, the mind of an octopus and hive mind are exceptionally relevant because the prevailing scientific thought is the uphill battle to show intent and cognition in other species, and given that, how it might function. In which case, all the aforementioned people are investigating that in varying degrees, but the results are telling. I'm more comfortable taking all of that a step farther and I acknowledge it. 
But the core of this, tied directly to the field of cognition, is that the currently accepted scientific understandings about complex ecological and biological relationships has a lot of room to grow.



narad said:


> From my perspective, you are religious! Because the definition of a deity can vary so much from a human-like figure to a general guiding consciousness, I group anyone that rejects overwhelming direct evidence to accept a faith-based belief in the supernatural as being religious. You might say your personal experience brings this into the realm of science, but my born-again Christian friend says the exact same things about her experiences, physically interacting with Jesus. As an evidence-based person, why would I take your owl-warnings as any more real as her Jesus-is-my-bff beliefs?


I think your self-assuredness is laughable. Religion too has a definition. Durkheim's is the standard: religion has a core of established and organized mythos and ethics which is worshipped through a church. I have and am talking about literally none of those things! I'm saying that there are things that science lacks an understanding of in this life and as long as those who want to use science as their sole refutation of what is perceived as "religious experience" are going to just bash things you have read versus things people experience. 
The problem, as I have acknowledged, is that personal experiences can sound crazy. I don't expect you to take my word, which is why I'm offering to document it in real time for you. Could be weeks, could be years, but it happens enough. Doesn't mean it will account to anything for you, but I'm not shivering in my assertions that they do happen and I'm hardly the only one. 

I don't think it's a stretch to presume our entire world views and perspectives are radically different. I'm typing this as I rub one of daughters' back who is sick and in between posts I foraged some sassafras root and elderberry to soothe her stomach and grabbed a bunch of chicken of the woods mushrooms for dinner, got yelled at by chipmunks and inspected by hoverflies, hung with some turtles for a minute. 
I'm not sweating your thinking on my experiences at all.


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## feraledge

TedEH said:


> I'd like to take a moment to point out that a person's title doesn't have any bearing on how close they are to any objective truth. Scientists are capable of doing science wrong. Things are not true because a scientist said so.


This is my favorite yet! Hahaha! When science becomes religion. And, yes, that hits on all of Durkheim's definition.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> I guess your quick Googling is better than my research! Haha!
> My primary point here is that there is more to consciousness than matter and energy.



Citation needed.


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## feraledge

narad said:


> Citation needed.


Finished an 11k word essay on perception last week, the essay on religion is likely on its way to being a book. How many citations you want? Unless your being facetious about what my stated intents are in what I've said here. In which case, have fun.


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## narad

feraledge said:


> Finished an 11k word essay on perception last week, the essay on religion is likely on its way to being a book. How many citations you want? Unless your being facetious about what my stated intents are in what I've said here. In which case, have fun.



Well they can't be _your_ citation -- but seriously, I think the majority view among scientists is that there need not be any additional mechanism besides matter and energy for consciousness (which doesn't take much off the table). Going further, people like me don't really see the need for much more than some neurons, chemicals, and electricity. So if you're going to lead out with such an assumption, that is your main point, then shouldn't you back it up? And back it up in proportion to the degree that is not being pursued by the scientific community? I mean, I know there's a climate change denier scientist here and there, but a citation from a few of them wouldn't convince me that there is much evidence to support their position.


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## feraledge

@narad always appreciate your dick mode. Thanks for the douche response. I'm a writer. I'm not talking about essays and books that are just my Facebook rants. You're asking for citations and when I started with a few, all of whom are following up the ethological and biological work that Darwin started, you immediately threw them out. So, yeah, why bother? I can provide citations and then you'll say they don't matter or aren't relevant. So fuck it. You want my research but you think my questions and experience are bullshit. Why bother?


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## narad

Dude, a name isn't a citation, and frankly I didn't see anything to suggest that those people were suggesting the need to appeal to the supernatural (to define here as "more than matter and energy"). Don't take a failure to support your point as an attack on my part. I at least went around to read what those people were about, and honestly sounded more like you were trying to shanghai their research into shared ecosystems and animal intelligence to bolster your own arguments about a supernatural consciousness, when the two are not connected. I already asked once to clarify this.

But on top of that I don't count pop-sci writers as scientists, or, to reference TedEH, _good_ scientists. Usually good scientists are leading departments at good universities and that if I wandered through the Cambridge neuroscience department taking a poll of how many people believe that we need more than matter and energy to explain consciousness, I know what the result would be.


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## TedEH

feraledge said:


> This is my favorite yet! Hahaha! When science becomes religion.


To be fair, I've never denied that science and religion have a lot in common. There is always a certain level of trust (belief, if you absolutely must use the word) that those who spend time studying a particular field are closer to the truth than one might have the time or capacity to get to themselves.

I won't speak for anyone else, but if I were to say I "believe in science" (I generally wouldn't word it that way), what I'm really saying is that given the sources of information available to me, science being one, religion being one, personal experience, anecdotes, etc., all being sources of information about the world, I put more trust in the scientific process than I do in the majority of other sources, and acknowledge that, just like everyone else, the best I can do is take the information I get and come to my own conclusion. The purpose of science is not to claim any absolute truth for one to believe in, but instead to give you a system to challenge the knowledge you already have.

But we don't receive information directly "from science", we get it from scientists. Someone has to do the work and propagate their interpretation of results. Scientists are just people, with opinions and biases and flaws, and every piece of scientific knowledge gets filtered through that human element at some point, even if that's your own personal "filter". If it were a perfect infallible system that uncovers objective truth, then there'd be no need for conversations like this in the first place.


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## marcwormjim

Bump.

Hey winners: Type about Jim Carey's recent antics. I don't care to debate anyone's epiphanies - I learn more reading than reacting.


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## Spaced Out Ace

marcwormjim said:


> Bump.
> 
> Hey winners: Type about Jim Carey's recent antics. I don't care to debate anyone's epiphanies - I learn more reading than reacting.


What antics? You mean his existential rant or whatever on the E! Channel?


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## ElRay

Hollowway said:


> ... is there a belief that everyone is praying to the same god, just through different channels?


Yes, it's called "Unitarianism/Universalism". In facat, in modern UU-ism, you don't even need to be religious (i.e. atheists are accepted) -- It's an organization of individuals that have a (mostly) common view of what society should be like. It can be very much like "The Frantics" Worships R Us:

​

But even within the group as a whole, there's a small sub-sect that believes you must believe in a higher-power and atheists should not be allowed into the organization.


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## Stuck_in_a_dream

As an atheist, I'm a non-believer in biblical "benevolent" deities, but this does not mean that I am an activist either. I do believe humans are better off without organized religions, but I don't think you can insult/debate people out of it. Proper education is the only way. Does this mean I automatically rule out a creator, not necessarily, but if a creator exists, it is not what any of the religious books had foretold. In that sense, if a creator does exist, this universe feels more like a lab experiment or a simulation of some sort than anything else.

As far as believing fantasies based on own experiences, I'd rather be more cautious, and less confident in my limited human perception. For example, our vision is relatively mediocre to other species (birds of prey), and our intelligence is not too special either compared to what can be possible (recent AI advances). What we perceive may be farthest from the truth, which IMHO can only be sought via Math & Physics. Our human intuition is completely useless when it comes to explaining why the universe behaves the way it does. The pillars of modern Physics (which explain Chemistry > Biology > everything else) are based on completely unintuitive ideas. Quantum Mechanics & Relativity have very little to do with our daily experience, yet these are our best tools to understand this universe.


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## marcwormjim

Stuck_in_a_dream said:


> What we perceive may be farthest from the truth, which IMHO can only be sought via Math & Physics. Our human intuition is completely useless when it comes to explaining why the universe behaves the way it does. The pillars of modern Physics (which explain Chemistry > Biology > everything else) are based on completely unintuitive ideas. Quantum Mechanics & Relativity have very little to do with our daily experience, yet these are our best tools to understand this universe.



Off-topic, but would you describe yourself as being inclined in any of the subjects you capitalized? I have no follow-up questions.


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## CrazyDean

Stuck_in_a_dream said:


> As an atheist, I'm a non-believer in biblical "benevolent" deities, but this does not mean that I am an activist either. I do believe humans are better off without organized religions, but I don't think you can insult/debate people out of it. Proper education is the only way. Does this mean I automatically rule out a creator, not necessarily, but if a creator exists, it is not what any of the religious books had foretold. In that sense, if a creator does exist, this universe feels more like a lab experiment or a simulation of some sort than anything else.
> 
> As far as believing fantasies based on own experiences, I'd rather be more cautious, and less confident in my limited human perception. For example, our vision is relatively mediocre to other species (birds of prey), and our intelligence is not too special either compared to what can be possible (recent AI advances). What we perceive may be farthest from the truth, which IMHO can only be sought via Math & Physics. Our human intuition is completely useless when it comes to explaining why the universe behaves the way it does. The pillars of modern Physics (which explain Chemistry > Biology > everything else) are based on completely unintuitive ideas. Quantum Mechanics & Relativity have very little to do with our daily experience, yet these are our best tools to understand this universe.



I'm actually impressed with how well you stated this.


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## bostjan

Stuck_in_a_dream said:


> ...and our intelligence is not too special either compared to what can be possible (recent AI advances). What we perceive may be farthest from the truth, which IMHO can only be sought via Math & Physics. Our human intuition is completely useless when it comes to explaining why the universe behaves the way it does. The pillars of modern Physics (which explain Chemistry > Biology > everything else) are based on completely unintuitive ideas. Quantum Mechanics & Relativity have very little to do with our daily experience, yet these are our best tools to understand this universe.



Advances in AI produced by humans as evidence contrary to the intelligence of humans? I disagree. I think advances in AI are examples of how intelligent humans can be.

Intuition based on the first guess might not be too accurate, when it comes to any new information. Intuition based off a series of clever problem solving scenarios, though, usually is, which is exactly how Relativity came about. Quantum theory was essentially developed out of several overlapping creative solutions to somewhat related problems - but still both theories and how well they have predicted things on the scale of physical size totally out of touch with what humans experience in everyday life, to me, just stand as a testament of how clever human beings can be.

The fact that humans can sit down and think rationally about a problem long enough to come up with such a surprising solution, and then to congregate the surprising solutions to complex problems into encompassing theories.


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## Stuck_in_a_dream

Well, AI is how I make my living during the day so I know a few tings about that. Humans (in their own form of intelligence) probably have no match in probably 50 light yrs radius, I give you that. But we are on the cusp of producing AI implementations that will surpass our own capabilities both in scale and sophistication. Yes, we can brag about it then to the chimps, but who cares , no one is watching or keeping the score. 

Recent advances in AI: Well, don't take my word for it, but what you hear about in the news, some of it is very real.
Examples: 
1. AI algorithms can be creative & imaginative, e.g. DeepDream, or the Facebook bots which came up with their own language to optimize communications between themselves. 

2. Vision, simple task for a human (the brainy part of it), but we got beat by ResNet in 2015. 

3. Games anyone? The Stockfish app on your phone will defeat Chess World champion like it's nothing, Stockfish is like 500 points higher than Magnus Carlsen, who is a mere 40-50 points ahead of 2nd in the world. Yes it's a different type of intelligence but when applied correctly, by future AI, will enable future machines to surpass human capabilities by light years. Sometimes it's the sheer scale of a simple application can outperform the wittiest of apes  

For a more human-like intelligence, Actually one of the devs who joined Google's Deep Mind a few weeks before Alpha Go's first victory (against the European champion) did his PhD research to develop a Chess engine (Giraffe) that learns how to play chess by analyzing (i.e. watching) previous games. It reached an IM (international master) level in 72 hours! You can probably download the code and run it on your computer, and test it yourself. 

4. Games (cont'd) Forget simple Atari games, where AI machines learned by observing how we play, and then beat us at it. Openai just developed a bot that beats humans at DOTA2, here: https://blog.openai.com/dota-2/

5. Google/Telsa: driveless cars, that was thought to be way ahead of us, not any more.

5. Language understanding, reasoning & inference: Still behind human levels, but making very fast strides. Comprehension understanding, question-answering is a heavily active area of research. Deep Neural network architectures performance is actually approaching human's in one of the tasks, see https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/

So, I'll give it another 5-10 years before we can see super-human level bots at our service, or maybe not


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## bostjan

Well, AI can be very effective at beating a human at a game when the rules are simple. As the rules get more and more complex, humans have a higher and higher rate of success against AI.

But, there is not really a strict definition of overall intelligence. AI has the possibility to contain pieces of intelligence implemented from all sorts of different people. So, a chess program that has been taught every trick in the "how to play chess" book can hold its own against a high level professional chess player. As we approach the complexity of real life, though, there are a lot more rules, and problems become better solved by intelligence that works at higher and higher levels. I'm simply not convinced that AI is as good at this sort of thing as people on this board continually tout. I've seen some AI programs that are supposedly coming up with their own speech patterns and conversation conceptions and their own languages, and while I am thoroughly impressed, it's nothing compared to what a human can do, presently.


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## Drew

bostjan said:


> Well, AI can be very effective at beating a human at a game when the rules are simple. As the rules get more and more complex, humans have a higher and higher rate of success against AI.
> 
> But, there is not really a strict definition of overall intelligence. AI has the possibility to contain pieces of intelligence implemented from all sorts of different people. So, a chess program that has been taught every trick in the "how to play chess" book can hold its own against a high level professional chess player. As we approach the complexity of real life, though, there are a lot more rules, and problems become better solved by intelligence that works at higher and higher levels. I'm simply not convinced that AI is as good at this sort of thing as people on this board continually tout. I've seen some AI programs that are supposedly coming up with their own speech patterns and conversation conceptions and their own languages, and while I am thoroughly impressed, it's nothing compared to what a human can do, presently.


Not to involve myself in this one, but two comments:

1) Computers have consistently outplayed chess grandmasters for some time now. We lost that fight.
2) Since I share relevant XKCD comics whenever the opportunity presents itself:






https://xkcd.com/1875/


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## narad

bostjan said:


> Well, AI can be very effective at beating a human at a game when the rules are simple. As the rules get more and more complex, humans have a higher and higher rate of success against AI.
> 
> But, there is not really a strict definition of overall intelligence. AI has the possibility to contain pieces of intelligence implemented from all sorts of different people. *So, a chess program that has been taught every trick in the "how to play chess" book can hold its own against a high level professional chess player. * As we approach the complexity of real life, though, there are a lot more rules, and problems become better solved by intelligence that works at higher and higher levels. I'm simply not convinced that AI is as good at this sort of thing as people on this board continually tout. I've seen some AI programs that are supposedly coming up with their own speech patterns and conversation conceptions and their own languages, and while I am thoroughly impressed, it's nothing compared to what a human can do, presently.



That's not how modern AI works though. There's no hand-coding of strategies in something like AlphaGo, and the more recent versions work not by watching human experts but rely more, if not entirely, on self-play. The strength of the model lies in its superhuman ability to score states of play, which is itself quite an abstract task. Old Chess programs could analyze the state of the board by counting pieces and other quick heuristics, and then did a lot of brute force search, well beyond what the human mind can explore, giving rise to intelligent behavior but driven by very un-human-like means. In contrast, it can be quite difficult to look at pro Go board early/mid-game and understand who has the advantage, and impossible to look very far ahead in Go's state-space.

Getting into "higher levels" of intelligence is just too messy to try, but at the minimum, you can't judge modern AI by old examples and old methodology. I'd feel the same way if I was looking to Deep Blue when thinking about what jobs are going to be replaced by AI.


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## TedEH

Stuck_in_a_dream said:


> 3. Games anyone?


I'm a game programmer as a profession, and I can say pretty confidently that game AI is not very smart. It's mostly smoke and mirrors- honestly I'd call a character in a game that "feels smart" to be more a reflection of the intelligence of the people who implemented it rather than any indication that it's actually intelligent in any way.

AI is, in my opinion (at least insofar as games are concerned, but other kinds of AI are probably similar), in a state of "cleverly implemented, but not actually smart". Even something like machine learning is not really what I'd call smart. It's all just rules pattern recognition. Computers have always been better than us at certain things, but they still don't "think" in any sense of the word. The follow instructions, and they follow them precisely. That's all computers do. The rest is human cleverness to make things look smart.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> AI is, in my opinion (at least insofar as games are concerned, but other kinds of AI are probably similar), in a state of "cleverly implemented, but not actually smart". Even something like machine learning is not really what I'd call smart. It's all just rules pattern recognition. Computers have always been better than us at certain things, but they still don't "think" in any sense of the word. The follow instructions, and they follow them precisely. That's all computers do. The rest is human cleverness to make things look smart.



I'm sorry, this is super wrong. Check this out:

https://deepmind.com/blog/agents-imagine-and-plan/

Planning, with delayed rewards, no specified rules, no instructions.

Or similarly, this (limited planning):


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## TedEH

narad said:


> no specified rules, no instructions.


It's a piece of software running this, and the problem of winning arcade games is still a simple one. The machine was trained with very specific inputs to solve a well defined problem. It's still more artificial than it is intelligent.

Software is nothing BUT rules and instructions. If you put enough rules and instructions together it starts to look like magic, but it's still rules and instructions at the lowest level. Machines don't think up solutions on their own- they have to be given specific rules and iterate until it finds a solution.

Edit:
And again, my comment was directed at mostly video games. Video game AI is a lot dumber than a lot of people think it is.


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## TedEH

The Montezuma video actually illustrates my point- they explicitly say in the description that there were at least 100 million iterations the game had to try to get to this point. The software didn't just pick up the game and immediately do this.

Edit: Sorry, I interpreted that wrong - they meant 100 million frames of video or something like that, not frames of reference, I think. But still thousands of iterations of gameplay, regardless.


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## narad

So what's a "rule" in the example of these games?

And yea, I agree that the AI put into video games is very dumb, but it's so far from state-of-the-art as to not be comparable at all. Really we shouldn't call these things by the same name. When you play video games you don't want to play against a good AI.

But you know in the above examples that, unlike game AI, it's actually able to play new levels it hasn't seen? It's not just brute-forcing some set of commands until it finds a solution, i.e., the sequence of keystrokes to solve a particular level. It generalizes. What is intelligence but the development of strategies and the ability to apply them effectively to new situations? I don't see the downside of how many iterations it took to train the model -- it has to build up a lot of stuff from scratch.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> So what's a "rule" in the example of these games?


A game is ALL rules. Input = particular movements. Hitting an enemy causes death (negative result). High scores are valuable. All of these are very clearly defined rules of an arcade game.



narad said:


> It's not just brute-forcing some set of commands until it finds a solution


It kind of is doing that, though. The initial training basically has to try out everything available to it, and establish patterns. The rest of the "intelligence" is just applying those patterns to the new input. Eventually it will fall on the pattern of "if (enemy) -> avoid it so you don't die". The pattern is complicated, but it is just a pattern. You wouldn't be able to take this same "intelligence" and apply it to any other situation. If you swapped out the game, or changed it's interface to the game, or drastically changed any of the rules of the game, then the training becomes useless and the program will no longer be any good at it without going through all the iterations again.


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## TedEH

And I know you'll say "but the article says it was given no rules to the game!" but that can only be partially true. The software doesn't need to know all of the rules to reach the end result, it just needs a goal, and feedback as to whether or not it's patterns are getting any closer to that goal. That goal is, in itself, a rule that the software is following.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> It kind of is doing that, though. The initial training basically has to try out everything available to it, and establish patterns. The rest of the "intelligence" is just applying those patterns to the new input. Eventually it will fall on the pattern of "if (enemy) -> avoid it so you don't die". The pattern is complicated, but it is just a pattern. You wouldn't be able to take this same "intelligence" and apply it to any other situation. *If you swapped out the game, or changed it's interface to the game, or drastically changed any of the rules of the game, then the training becomes useless and the program will no longer be any good at it without going through all the iterations again*.



Actually the models that are trained on all Atari games performs better on games that are similar to other games, as some of the representations and basic strategy ("patterns") is transferable across games. It doesn't need all iterations again. 

And when I play video games I also use "patterns" of "there's a guy, shoot him" / "duck, run away, don't get shot", etc. So I don't find the idea of having an interpretable pattern to be the sign of a lack of intelligence -- more that your strategies should be general and robust to simple variations in goal and environment. The brittlest patterns are, of course, the hard-coded rules of basic game AI, and why that is a poor example of the kind of more modern AI that is threatening jobs.


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## TedEH

Except that this isn't the "AI is taking our jobs" thread - cause I agree that technology is a threat to jobs - but this is the "we are living in a simulation" thread, which at one point was suggesting that AI is getting somewhere close to real, human-like decision making, consciousness, etc., which it's not.

I maintain that, as advanced as AI is, it still boils down to patterns, rules, and instructions. Computers are literally incapable of doing anything other than following the precise instructions we give them. The speed it happens at lends to the illusion of intelligence, but it's still an illusion, in the sense of comparing it to real intelligence.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> Except that this isn't the "AI is taking our jobs" thread - cause I agree that technology is a threat to jobs - but this is the "we are living in a simulation" thread, which at one point was suggesting that AI is getting somewhere close to real, human-like decision making, consciousness, etc., which it's not.



Fair enough -- I did get them confused since AI is not really the topic of either of them!



TedEH said:


> I maintain that, as advanced as AI is, it still boils down to patterns, rules, and instructions. Computers are literally incapable of doing anything other than following the precise instructions we give them. The speed it happens at lends to the illusion of intelligence, but it's still an illusion, in the sense of comparing it to real intelligence.



I think this is a false dichotomy. Discovering patterns is an important part to intelligence, be it in a machine or animal. Planning to accomplish a goal is an important part of intelligence. It doesn't matter if ultimately these are implemented as machine instructions or neurons firing -- they are abstract skills. These are precise instructions at the lowest level, but focusing on that is at the expense of appreciating what they're doing: learning complex and generalizable behavior from nothing but an environment, a goal, and exploration. This is already further along than basic life, so unless you don't accept evolution as the origin of human, I find it hard not to connect the dots.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> an important part to intelligence


I guess my point is that they're only really simulating a very small part of what I would consider to be the kind of intelligence that people and animals have. A machine doesn't understand, it doesn't feel, it doesn't reason, etc. People do those things on behalf of the machine, then provide it as the context to make the computer do something that looks like learning. The machine is learning on an abstract level, but it's not learning on a literal level, or a human level. If you equate the brain with an advance computer (I don't), then we've essentially been able to accomplish very rudimentary forms of only a small subset of what the brain-computer does. That's not to take anything away from the advances in AI that are happening, it's great progress, but to me it's not intelligent yet. Not really. Not in terms of what I understand intelligence to mean.



narad said:


> This is already further along than basic life,


I don't know what you mean by this. Very basic forms of life that are, on an abstract level, capable of less than our machine learning are not what I would call intelligent either.

To be fair, I will grant you that if you take the dictionary definition of intelligence, which is just to acquire and apply knowledge, then yes- I can agree with the things you've said on some level. Machines can do that. But the conversations we've had about AI on this forum have been centered around the idea of simulating the human/animal process of intelligence - trying to simulate not just the vague abstract application of knowledge, but to do so the way humans do it, which I think goes beyond the dictionary definition of intelligence. A human makes decisions based on an understanding of the question and the context surrounding the question. A machine makes decisions because previous iterations of the simulation have rewarded that branch of options a higher weighted chance of success than other options. I don't think those two things are really comparable.


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## narad

I feel like we're talking around each other because we're not working with the same definitions of things like...learning, and intelligence. And that's okay, because these are quite abstract and seem to have defied decades of attempts to adequately define and test them, by super smart guys.

But there still seems to be some fundamental misunderstanding of how some AI systems learn. Everything you've said makes it sound like we're feeding a lot of our prior information into the machine, that we've done the heavy-lifting (_"People do those things on behalf of the machine,* then provide it as the context to make the computer do something that looks like learning.*"_). What is the context in AlphaGo? What is the context in Montezuma's Revenge? Or in the block-moving game? What are human's giving them that is the result of human learning?

You brought up the millions of examples needed to train these systems, like it's some huge flaw. The human brain is the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution -- it takes a lot of exploration and a lot of failure to find what works and refine it. By the time we're us, we have tons of biases in our brain, and we have many years of failures in exploring our world before we ever touch a video game. 

In contrast, I find it pretty amazing that an AI can be given nothing but what is essentially a screen and a joystick and a goal, and learn to play the game, when reward is delayed for thousands of actions. After you've bungled around for several thousand moves and you somehow manage to get the key in the door, you have to somehow figure out which of those things you did were important to reaching this good state (and in the process, what your actions do, what a key and door and ladder and platform look like, that you can't drop from a high platform, that you need to get under a ladder before you climb up it, that you must predict where enemies are going to be in the future and maneuver around them), and be able to apply that same learned strategy to novel environments. As simulated environments and goals become more complex, the goals more difficult, we'll see behaviors that are increasingly closer to what we think of as human intelligence. 

But that idea of machine learning as like, "find a good path, give it a high score!" is a gross oversimplification of what is actually going on as far as I'm concerned. A lot of human strategy could be called the same, i.e., "Yea, basketball, just find a way to get the ball in the basket, then try to do all those things again." Do that 50,000 times across a variety of opponents, and give high scores to all the things you did that worked in particular situations and maybe you've become a great basketball player.


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## bostjan

narad said:


> *That's not how modern AI works though.* There's no hand-coding of strategies in something like AlphaGo, and the more recent versions work not by watching human experts but rely more, if not entirely, on self-play. The strength of the model lies in its superhuman ability to score states of play, which is itself quite an abstract task. Old Chess programs could analyze the state of the board by counting pieces and other quick heuristics, and then did a lot of brute force search, well beyond what the human mind can explore, giving rise to intelligent behavior but driven by very un-human-like means. In contrast, it can be quite difficult to look at pro Go board early/mid-game and understand who has the advantage, and impossible to look very far ahead in Go's state-space.
> 
> Getting into "higher levels" of intelligence is just too messy to try, but at the minimum, you can't judge modern AI by old examples and old methodology. I'd feel the same way if I was looking to Deep Blue when thinking about what jobs are going to be replaced by AI.



As complex as Go is to play, the rules are very simple. Chess has more complex rules than Go, but is still quite simple overall. Real life is uncharted territory, in that we don't even know all of the rules. Sure AI could be used to figure out what the rules are on its own, someday, maybe, but it is not there yet.

So a naughts-and-draughts AI consisting of eight lines of code can smoke anybody, because there is only one rule in effect dealing with how the game is won, and two additional rules in effect for playing. Chess AI intended to defeat a human player is going to use an opening book as well as preconceived end-game strategies.

I mean, we are saying the same thing, I think: 


bostjan said:


> Well, AI can be very effective at beating a human at a game when the rules are simple. As the rules get more and more complex, humans have a higher and higher rate of success against AI.



In other words, AI is potentially more effective at Go than it is at chess, and more effective at chess than it is at real life.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> I feel like we're talking around each other because we're not working with the same definitions of things like...learning, and intelligence. And that's okay, because these are quite abstract and seem to have defied decades of attempts to adequately define and test them, by super smart guys.


Agreed.



narad said:


> What is the context in AlphaGo?


What I mean by context is the set of goals/rules and the interface into the game- and the fact that we decided what those things are, not the machine. The machine didn't define it's own goals then work towards them. We told it win=good, fail=bad, high score=good, etc., and whatever other number of assumptions need to be strictly defined to support those things. If we had defined the opposite goal, we'd have a machine that's amazing at losing at games instead, but we had to provide those parameters. Human intelligence can interact with the world without a strictly defined interface- machines can't really do that. I mean that in the sense that if you disconnect that machine from that game, and put it in the middle of the basketball court, it's not going to be able to play that game. Even connecting it to a similar games has to be done via the right interface, you can't just hand it a mouse and keyboard, or open up Steam and say "have at it"- there needs to be something in between to say something like "look at this memory location for your high score", "count the length of time it took before losing as part of the success score", etc. It can't go "oh, this is also a game. I need to figure out how to win it". If you didn't specifically engineer it to move towards a goal, it wouldn't otherwise be trying to play the game, because it doesn't understand that concept. Computers don't have understanding and goals, they're engineered to work towards OUR goals based on OUR understanding.



narad said:


> In contrast, I find it pretty amazing that an AI


I think it's amazing too, I just don't think it's really "intelligence" as I understand it. There's still a long way to go, I think a much longer way than other people think.



narad said:


> But that idea of machine learning as like, "find a good path, give it a high score!" is a gross oversimplification of what is actually going on as far as I'm concerned.


I disagree. I think that's a very good way to put it. That's exactly what the "training" does. There's a lot of fancy math and cleverness that goes into weighing these scores, and balancing out which branches to explore next, but I've yet to come across anything that suggests it boils down to anything else.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> What I mean by context is the set of goals/rules and the interface into the game- and the fact that we decided what those things are, not the machine. The machine didn't define it's own goals then work towards them. We told it win=good, fail=bad, high score=good, etc., and whatever other number of assumptions need to be strictly defined to support those things. If we had defined the opposite goal, we'd have a machine that's amazing at losing at games instead, but we had to provide those parameters.



But I don't think of that as an important part of learning at all. You take a kid and put them down at a chess board, you don't ask them to come up with the game -- you explain the game, and the learning and the entire challenge of the game is discovering effective strategies. I think knowing what strategies are good, and knowing when to apply them is the essence of understanding the game. I'd argue AlphaGo has a better understanding of Go than grandmasters, especially early to mid-game.



TedEH said:


> omputers don't have understanding and goals, they're engineered to work towards OUR goals based on OUR understanding.



And how did we get OUR goals? Are you happy? Are you hungry? Do you want to have sex with someone? These are innate to us at this point, and all our subgoals are just derived from these biological goals. I don't see a huge difference between telling the machine that it should maximize score, and seeing it then learn behaviors that involve jumping over pits and avoiding enemies, vs. telling a human it should get a great job to have a happy life and seeing it study hard in school and doing some extra-curriculars.



TedEH said:


> I disagree. I think that's a very good way to put it. That's exactly what the "training" does. There's a lot of fancy math and cleverness that goes into weighing these scores, and balancing out which branches to explore next, but I've yet to come across anything that suggests it boils down to anything else.



And in humans there's a lot of fancy neurons and chemical receptors that go into strengthening these connections, which bias us towards behavior that has allowed us to achieve our rewards, but I've yet to come across anything that suggests it boils down to anything else. I actually think in this particular case the burden of proof is more on the side of "machine learning is fundamentally different from human learning", since we will never be able to say that they're fundamentally the same until we have a more thorough understanding of the human process.


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## narad

bostjan said:


> As complex as Go is to play, the rules are very simple. Chess has more complex rules than Go, but is still quite simple overall. Real life is uncharted territory, in that we don't even know all of the rules. Sure AI could be used to figure out what the rules are on its own, someday, maybe, but it is not there yet.
> 
> So a naughts-and-draughts AI consisting of eight lines of code can smoke anybody, because there is only one rule in effect dealing with how the game is won, and two additional rules in effect for playing. Chess AI intended to defeat a human player is going to use an opening book as well as preconceived end-game strategies.
> 
> I mean, we are saying the same thing, I think:
> 
> In other words, AI is potentially more effective at Go than it is at chess, and more effective at chess than it is at real life.



Yea, I mean it's not so dissimilar -- we agree that the worlds that machines are grounded in and that we are grounded in are separated by a great degree by the scale of rules and goals at play. I don't think of it so much in terms of rules, but the state-space, the number of choices I have at any one time, and the length of time/delay before I'm told whether or not that was a good move. But I guess my major point is that if we simulated the world, and simulated the biological goals that ultimately motivate us, together with millions of tweaks to the general architecture, that the framework that we have now is a pretty capable beast. 

Just as we are self-aware and a lot of neuroscience points to particular physiological design as maybe being necessary developments for this, motivated by an evolutionary need for it, I believe that a machine would also develop a sense of self-awareness if it had sufficiently complexity and this was advantageous to solving the types of problems it is being presented.

I don't expect human-level general AI anytime soon, but who does? Singularity nutjobs? What I do expect is increasingly rich simulated worlds and challenges posed to these agents until they are learning hierarchical subgoals and strategies for reaching them, with essentially no hand-holding besides placing it in an environment and giving it a measure of success. Similarly, the ability to pick up just about any game and perform well at it -- we're already seeing signs of this with the Atari games, where the only thing that changes game-to-game is the score, but racing games are racing games, etc., and what we have now is capable of transferring some of that knowledge.


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## bostjan

Good points, but in many-option scenarios, a true AI does not evaluate every option, it chooses an "ansatz" option and then tests and corrects. This first guess has to be programmed into the AI as an initial condition. How it corrects is based off of some rules programmed into the AI. So, a scenario with infinite rules and two options takes an infinite amount of time to run through one trial cycle, whereas a scenario with two rules and infinite options can still be completed by AI simply by choosing an option and evaluating the outcome quickly, then correcting. In other words, since the AI *has* to deal with all of the rules it is made aware exist, but *does not have* to deal with every option, the number of options is not as taxing as the number of rules in the scenario.

From a religious perspective, I don't see how not expecting human-level AI anytime soon does anything to further the idea that we are actually all living in AI.  To be honest, I haven't read all of the responses everyone posted, so I guess that's not what we are talking about anymore.


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## TedEH

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that machine learning isn't analogous to human learning at all, because on a very abstract level, there's clear parallels.



narad said:


> I don't expect human-level general AI anytime soon, but who does? Singularity nutjobs?


Based on some previous pages of this thread.... yes, I think that's exactly who expects that. 

I guess, to me, while these machines are getting closer to a very generic/abstract definition of intelligence, they aren't close at all to what I think of as intelligence. Our disagreement comes down mostly to just semantics.



narad said:


> I don't see a huge difference between telling the machine that it should maximize score, and seeing it then learn behaviors that involve jumping over pits and avoiding enemies, vs. telling a human it should get a great job to have a happy life and seeing it study hard in school and doing some extra-curriculars.


I see those as very different. I human understands what it's doing, a machine just follows instructions. It has no concept of a goal, just programming that guides it to our goals. If you tell a human they should do something, they evaluate the meaning of question and decide what to do. You don't "tell a computer what to do" in the same sense as a person, it doesn't interpret the question and make a decision, it's literally just a machine doing what it's programmed to do. Like if I ask a person a question- "what time is it?", a person has an understanding of "what is a question" "what is time" "what is being asked of me" and can make any number of decisions as to how to answer this. If you ask a computer "what time is it" - it doesn't understand the question. You instead have to abstract a function getTheCurrentTime() that defines a set of instructions that will lead it (hopefully) to the answer we're looking for. The computer doesn't know what time is, it doesn't know what a question is, and it didn't parse the request for meaning before executing it.

Even in the case of a script that gives the question as a string that needs to be tokenised and parsed for the question, it's still just a set of pre-defined rules defined by the programmer to decide what instruction belongs to what key word. There is no real "understanding" going on, on the part of the computer. Just like the engine of a car doesn't "know" what a road is, despite being able to travel on one analogous to a person walking on it (although much better at, to again continue the pattern of machines doing things better than us). That doesn't make the car smart, by any definition.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> I see those as very different. I human understands what it's doing, a machine just follows instructions.



There's a lot to reply to but it's time-consuming to come up with maybe the best reply. It's worth quickly pointing out though that one would have to basically solve all of philosophy of mind before being able to claim, with support, that humans understand <anything> and a computer that does <that thing> doesn't. You know, back to the Chinese room.


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## bostjan

narad said:


> There's a lot to reply to but it's time-consuming to come up with maybe the best reply. It's worth quickly pointing out though that one would have to basically solve all of philosophy of mind before being able to claim, with support, that humans understand <anything> and a computer that does <that thing> doesn't. You know, back to the Chinese room.



Maybe an AI could answer better. 

Understanding, by definition, is the ability to make inferences based on knowledge. I don't think there's really much of an interesting problem here, since artificial intelligence has not gotten to the point where it can make connections between the knowledge presented and information that others would consider unrelated, as a human does (inferences). It's not a process thing, it's an experience thing. Could AI get to that point? Absolutely. Is it there now? No.  I think it's pretty cut and dried at this point.


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## narad

bostjan said:


> Understanding, by definition, is the ability to make inferences based on knowledge. I don't think there's really much of an interesting problem here, since artificial intelligence has not gotten to the point where it can make connections between the knowledge presented and information that others would consider unrelated, as a human does (inferences). It's not a process thing, it's an experience thing. Could AI get to that point? Absolutely. Is it there now? No.  I think it's pretty cut and dried at this point.



If you take that definition I feel like we're already there. It's an invalid comparison really since AI is typically grounded in a single-task world, so there is no chance to make a connection across tasks, to give it the feel of human reasoning.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> It's worth quickly pointing out though that one would have to basically solve all of philosophy of mind before being able to claim, with support, that humans understand <anything> and a computer that does <that thing> doesn't.


I suppose it could be argued that in order to design a computer or piece of software that's analogous to a human thinking process, we'd need to solve those things anyway.



narad said:


> If you take that definition I feel like we're already there.


I suppose I make the distinction between what a machine "knows" and what the engineer who programmed it "knows" about the data it's operating on. Computers are all about abstractions on top of abstractions, where the machine doesn't really care about what the data it's working on really means. Like if I make a game, and give a character an integer to represent health, the knowledge of the literal value of the integer sort of belongs to the computer (in the sense that it knows there's an integer at a particular place in memory that will be requested and operated on at some point), but the knowledge of "this represents the character's health" is not owned by the machine, it's owned by the programmer. The programmer knows what it means, and tries to convey it through instructions. The computer doesn't really "know" anything. That same integer could be literally anything as far as the computer is concerned.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> I suppose I make the distinction between what a machine "knows" and what the engineer who programmed it "knows" about the data it's operating on. Computers are all about abstractions on top of abstractions, where the machine doesn't really care about what the data it's working on really means. Like if I make a game, and give a character an integer to represent health, the knowledge of the literal value of the integer sort of belongs to the computer (in the sense that it knows there's an integer at a particular place in memory that will be requested and operated on at some point), but the knowledge of "this represents the character's health" is not owned by the machine, it's owned by the programmer. The programmer knows what it means, and tries to convey it through instructions. The computer doesn't really "know" anything. That same integer could be literally anything as far as the computer is concerned.



But if you give it that integer and it some other number (representing whether a goal is reached), and it goes and makes all these actions and eventually is hopping around, grabbing keys, climbing ladders, dodging enemies, then something has internalized that that integer reaching 0 is very bad wrt it accomplishing its goal. So in the confines of the world in which it lives, it learns a very practical understanding of the semantics of that integer. Of course we need to provide that number to the machine, because we are the creator of that world -- where else is it going to come from?


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## TedEH

narad said:


> something has internalized that that integer reaching 0 is very bad wrt it accomplishing its goal


But it didn't internalize that, it was given that as a condition by the programmer.



narad said:


> where else is it going to come from?


From the programmer. IMO everything a computer does is just an expression of the programmer who made it do that.

Take something like a car. A car has no intelligence, it has no "knowledge". The car doesn't understand the road, it has no concept of acceleration. There is sort of knowledge embedded in the engineering of the machine, but it's an expression of those who built it. When you look at your speedometer, we sort of anthropomorphize the display and say it "knows" how fast you're going. But it doesn't. That display is just a reaction to an arbitrary input - a supplied voltage transformed into something that moves the needle. The system it gets that voltage from similarly doesn't "know" about the speedometer. The knowledge exists entirely in the engineer who said "if we do x math to determine speed, turn that into a signal, and supply that voltage to something that transforms the voltage into human-readable display, then we can tell how fast this car is going". The designer knows this. The mechanic knows this. The programmer knows this. The car has no knowledge. The computer has no knowledge. You could supply that same display with any voltage and it will still tell you "how fast you're going" because it doesn't know what that voltage is, it doesn't know what "speed" is.

I'm not saying that what the machine is doing isn't an expression of knowledge, but it's an arbitrary display of an engineers knowledge, not an intelligent display of the machine's understanding of anything.


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## narad

I feel like we're going in circles, but just to stick to your analogy, what about a self-driving car that has a camera in the driver's seat that takes images of the speedometer, and drives within speed limits, slows down when kids are playing on the side of the road, and otherwise learns drives to the destination, never being given a single integer representing that value? What information it has it received from the programmer regarding the speedometer?


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## bostjan

narad said:


> I feel like we're going in circles, but just to stick to your analogy, what about a self-driving car that has a camera in the driver's seat that takes images of the speedometer, and drives within speed limits, slows down when kids are playing on the side of the road, and otherwise learns drives to the destination, never being given a single integer representing that value? What information it has it received from the programmer regarding the speedometer?



It'd still have to be programmed on how to parse the visual information from the speedometer into some numerical value (most likely a positive integer). It'd have to be programmed on how to identify speed limit signage and parse that information into integer values. It'd also have to be programmed on how to identify "kids" "playing" and "on the side of the road" and parse those into some sort of actionable information before it would be able to react to observing such a thing.

A human typically already contains all of these subroutines from basic upbringing. Being a kid, at a young age, one learns what a "kid" is, what "playing" means, and, hopefully, is taught where "the side of the road" is and what sort of danger that presents. A human is taught how to read meters and numbers at a young age, and thus, is able to parse information from road signs and vehicle instruments.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> never being given a single integer representing that value


This wouldn't happen, that's not how it works. All of that information would just come from the software being fed streams of numbers. If you don't give it that data, it would never do any of those things. The camera used to detect obstacles? All it does is turn light into integers and feed it to the next stage, just like the previous example of the speedometer.



narad said:


> What information it has it received from the programmer regarding the speedometer?


Everything it "knows" comes from a programmer. A self driving car is still just a piece of software. It literally goes (if (somethingInTheWay()) evade()). Evasion would be a pattern given to it by a programmer. somethingInTheWay() is an pattern finding algorithm written by a programmer. Nothing a self-driving car does is it's own unique idea- it was programmed to do those things.


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## narad

bostjan said:


> It'd still have to be programmed on how to parse the visual information from the speedometer into some numerical value (most likely a positive integer). It'd have to be programmed on how to identify speed limit signage and parse that information into integer values. It'd also have to be programmed on how to identify "kids" "playing" and "on the side of the road" and parse those into some sort of actionable information before it would be able to react to observing such a thing.



^^ none of that stuff is programmed with modern DeepMind style DQN/Atari game solving. Pixels of screen + score (as an integer). There's still a hundreds of other things on the screen it needs to learn how to understand that are completely analogous to what the autonomous camera driver must do.



TedEH said:


> Everything it "knows" comes from a programmer. A self driving car is still just a piece of software. It literally goes (if (somethingInTheWay()) evade()). Evasion would be a pattern given to it by a programmer. somethingInTheWay() is an pattern finding algorithm written by a programmer. Nothing a self-driving car does is it's own unique idea- it was programmed to do those things.



I don't want to beat the dead horse here but that's not at all how a (modern) self-driving car works. There is no turnLeft() function etc. None of that stuff is explicitly programmed. There are sensors being fed to model, that model trained in simulation to optimize arriving at its destination. Most of these sensors are less like the integer, where one number has a clear semantics (to a human), and more like big matrices of floats that are completely incoherent to humans.


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## TedEH

^ I'm well aware that I've oversimplified it, but it's still driven by the knowledge of the engineers who trained it. They didn't just feed the car with "here's a view of the world, do what you will with it". There very well might be an explicit turnLeft() function or event. I'm certain there would be an interface along the lines of setAccelleration(), setBrakingStrength() etc., as well as something like detectObstacles(), etc. The car didn't learn or invent those functionalities on their own - while parts of the algorithms are sort of fluid because of the learning/training setup, the interface, definitions, and constraints these are being used in are explicitly provided.


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## bostjan

narad said:


> ^^ none of that stuff is programmed with modern DeepMind style DQN/Atari game solving. Pixels of screen + score (as an integer). There's still a hundreds of other things on the screen it needs to learn how to understand that are completely analogous to what the autonomous camera driver must do.



Is the example a self-driving car or a game?



narad said:


> I don't want to beat the dead horse here but that's not at all how a (modern) self-driving car works. There is no turnLeft() function etc. None of that stuff is explicitly programmed. There are sensors being fed to model, that model trained in simulation to optimize arriving at its destination. Most of these sensors are less like the integer, where one number has a clear semantics (to a human), and more like big matrices of floats that are completely incoherent to humans.



Actually, it is explicitly programmed. Keep in mind that self driving cars are on the cusp of existing at the moment.

A self driving car, as it works best in October 2017, is a car with a GPS and a set of sensors. Those sensors identify which objects are where on a 3D mapping of space around the car. Objects are identified by matching their shape into a library of preprogrammed shapes. One of the things that is still under some review is how to deal with shapes that are not in the library. There are tons of subroutines programmed into these cars to make sure that they are able to detect objects accurately enough to not run over pedestrians, etc. How a self-driving car would react to a plastic bag blowing across the street is still someone arguable, since none of the software for these things is finalized yet.


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## narad

bostjan said:


> A self driving car, as it works best in October 2017, is a car with a GPS and a set of sensors. Those sensors identify which objects are where on a 3D mapping of space around the car. Objects are identified by matching their shape into a library of preprogrammed shapes. One of the things that is still under some review is how to deal with shapes that are not in the library. There are tons of subroutines programmed into these cars to make sure that they are able to detect objects accurately enough to not run over pedestrians, etc. How a self-driving car would react to a plastic bag blowing across the street is still someone arguable, since none of the software for these things is finalized yet.



I don't know what to say really other than that doesn't fit at all with what I know about how self-driving cars work. I suppose some particular company's implementation may perhaps look like that, but research into autonomous vehicles isn't looking up shapes in a library of pre-programmed shapes, calling subroutines, etc.


----------



## bostjan

narad said:


> I don't know what to say really other than that doesn't fit at all with what I know about how self-driving cars work. I suppose some particular company's implementation may perhaps look like that, but research into autonomous vehicles isn't looking up shapes in a library of pre-programmed shapes, calling subroutines, etc.



Hmm. Care to share your knowledge of how these other companies do it, then? Because that's exactly how Google's system works. I didn't do the programming, but I built some of the sensors that were integrated into that design, so I've had a peek.


----------



## narad

Did you make your sensors prior to 2014? I mean, I'm not able to reveal some examples that I know in particular are not like that, but Nvidia does lots of press with its self-driving cars so there's plenty of videos and discussion of what's going on in the system. None of these subroutine-y things or library look-up things are going one there. And that's just part of the industry trend away from such things that are inherently more brittle than learning it end-to-end. MIT's DL for autonomous driving course also talks aall about this.


----------



## bostjan

Nvidia uses libraries to identify objects: https://developer.nvidia.com/driveworks


----------



## TedEH

narad said:


> I'm not able to reveal some examples that I know in particular are not like that


Unfortunately, it doesn't help the discussion to know things that you can't reveal.

I'm willing to admit that the kinds of "AI" I work on put me pretty far from any actual machine learning, so I don't have any kind of deep insider information on how close machine learning is to actual human thought processes, but I'm not convinced we're as close as joe-facebook-user thinks we are. I could be wrong, but my level of understanding of how computers work and how software gets made keeps me from being able to wrap my head around the idea that computers really "know" or "understand" anything.

My reference point being video games (and I'm sure anyone else who works in software would laugh at that as a reference point) makes me well aware of how much that goes on in a computer is about the illusion and experience of something happening, moreso than anything actually happening.


----------



## narad

But almost no videos games have AI in any meaningful way. If AI was video game AI, we wouldn't talk about AI replacing jobs, etc.



TedEH said:


> Unfortunately, it doesn't help the discussion to know things that you can't reveal.



I'm not asking you to. For instance, the Nvidia self-driving car, here:





> In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car. Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.



And that's a year ago. 



bostjan said:


> Nvidia uses libraries to identify objects: https://developer.nvidia.com/driveworks



Yes, Nvidia distributes libraries (not to be confused with matching an object to the closest thing in a library of shapes, not the same sense of the word) which are modularized versions of these components, but that's just part of Nvidia trying to branch out and market its in-house AI tech. Above is what I'm referring to (or any of there big 1-2 hour demo presentations they show at conferences).


----------



## bostjan

narad said:


> Yes, Nvidia distributes libraries (not to be confused with matching an object to the closest thing in a library of shapes, not the same sense of the word) which are modularized versions of these components, but that's just part of Nvidia trying to branch out and market its in-house AI tech. Above is what I'm referring to (or any of there big 1-2 hour demo presentations they show at conferences).



Nope, click the link and read the information on their page, and look at the photos. They clearly state and demonstrate that they use image recognition libraries.

EDIT: I guess the discussion here might as well end. You have a hardware developer and a software developer giving specifics and you are claiming secret special knowledge of something else, and you won't divulge what it is other than to say that everyone else is wrong. I think you are aware that it's highly frustrating to try to have a discussion once something reaches the "I know you're wrong, but I can't do anything to prove it" phase.


----------



## narad

Yes, they distribute image recognition libraries? I'm a bit lost as to why that's important? I'm trying to use the example of the car above to further this larger point that self-driving cars can learn their own representations of objects from sensor data. That objects and measurements need not be explicitly provided by the programmer. This is entirely evident from DeepMind's work but I'm here talking cars because cars were brought up.

Could someone use a modularized image recognition model - sure - that's just not here or there, since I'm not trying to make a claim about _all_ self-driving cars.


----------



## bostjan

This all spurred off from our disagreement over how AI works - whether things are hard-coded into it or not. You keep bringing up examples where nothing is hard-coded, but...those examples, upon further examination turn out to rely on a lot of hard-coded things. Why is it important? Because you said self-driving cars don't work this way or that way, and I provided and example that did, you provided a counter example, I did a five-second google search that took me to the official website that actually backed up my example of how it works. I posted a link to that website, but you still disagreed...

I mean, if you mis-spoke or something, or you're just shooting from the hip and turned out to be wrong, or even if this is just a misunderstanding due to communication (seems unliked from the past two pages of this thread clarifying these statements), then just move on. You don't even really have to acknowledge it - you could simply leave it alone, if you wanted to. I thought I was ready to move on from this thread, but I made the mistake of clicking on it again just to see you having the same argument with someone else as we were having months ago in another thread - I stay away from the thread a little bit, but you're still arguing this thing for pages and pages of the thread.... To what end, though? So I made the huge mistake of trying to get involved in this again, and you ask me why it's important to defend my observation (which I believe I am in a strong position to do so, logically, although, rightly, what _is_ the point, if it makes no difference to you anyway?!). I'll turn that question back the other way - why is it so important to you to be right about self-driving cars in this case, so important that you would argue with multiple other users across multiple threads over it?


----------



## TedEH

I get the impression we all agree roughly on how AI sort of "works", but have different interpretations of the implications of it. To me, and I hate using the "my own definition" route, but what AI does and how it works doesn't fit with what I understand real intelligence to be. I have no doubt that machine learning is a threat to jobs- but I have strong doubts that we're anywhere close to being in the matrix. That's all I really meant to get across.



narad said:


> But almost no videos games have AI in any meaningful way. If AI was video game AI, we wouldn't talk about AI replacing jobs, etc.


I get what you mean by that, but still disagree on some level- or on two levels rather. One is that when the discussion is about replacing jobs, the average person who doesn't know anything about hardware or software is unable to make this distinction, so they factor it in. "Games are so lifelike! We're getting close to being in the matrix! GlaDOS is going to take our jobs!" This is a large part of why I think the average person believes AI is farther than it really is. The second level is that I think games vs. machine learning simply abstract a different part of what we call intelligence. One abstracts the process of applying knowledge, as you've described, and the other abstracts interaction. I mean, realistically, you have yourself used early board-game playing software as an example- and that's a lot of time VERY comparable to what AI in games is doing today.


----------



## narad

bostjan said:


> This all spurred off from our disagreement over how AI works - whether things are hard-coded into it or not. You keep bringing up examples where nothing is hard-coded, but...those examples, upon further examination turn out to rely on a lot of hard-coded things. Why is it important? Because you said self-driving cars don't work this way or that way, and I provided and example that did, you provided a counter example, I did a five-second google search that took me to the official website that actually backed up my example of how it works. I posted a link to that website, but you still disagreed...



From Nvidia: "Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers." That means these things are not hard-coded. What is there to argue about? I post something that, I would say, is definitively in support of my position, and you bring up these other libraries or talk about some other cars. I don't care about other cars -- I care about the cutting edge autonomous car research, as that is the area most relevant to the big AI questions. If you post some self-driving car that has sub-routines, it doesn't make the above example car disappear. The bigger argument is whether it's possible, not whether it's necessary.

I don't think I mis-spoke at all, but I still feel there is a disconnect between the AI you describe and how deep reinforcement learning models (or many just end-to-end differentiable models) work. I mean, I feel bad about myself for not being able to make this point but: a system that has pixel input, a set of controls (not high-abstracted controls, keystroke controls), and a single integer it is trying to maximize -- that's not a lot of hand-coding, given that the AI is learning superhuman performance in a number of computer games. Google didn't buy DeepMind for half a billion because they coded up a bunch of subroutines and domain knowledge.


----------



## marcwormjim

This thread is filled with artificial intelligence.


----------



## TedEH

narad said:


> that's not a lot of hand-coding


I get the feeling you're taking the marketing type a bit too literally. I would be incredibly surprised if there's not a TON of context-specific software driving (pun slightly intended) these cars, both to direct the machine learning components and outside of the machine learning altogether.


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> I get the feeling you're taking the marketing type a bit too literally. I would be incredibly surprised if there's not a TON of context-specific software driving (pun slightly intended) these cars, both to direct the machine learning components and outside of the machine learning altogether.



Kind of putting me in a tough spot. If I present articles that describe the AI as the way I have proposed, it could always be argued I'm just taking it to literal. There'd be no way to prove my position.


----------



## TedEH

I guess I don't understand where your perspective comes from. If you're not a software or hardware guy, and are completely basing your conversation off of what you've read off of these articles, then yes, I think you're taking marketing text too literally. I'm taking the point of view that, given what I know about how software is made, lots of it is just smoke and mirrors, and public communication about what software really does tends to be.... exaggerated? Not quite accurate? You get the picture. If you're a software guy who works in something related to machine learning, or have some other kind of view into that world that we don't, then maybe you're on to something and we're way off the mark. But if that's not the case, then we're all just speculating on how we *think* AI works, and what the implications of that would be. I think Bostjan is probably in the best position of the three of us to really evaluate the state of the technology.


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> I guess I don't understand where your perspective comes from. If you're not a software or hardware guy, and are completely basing your conversation off of what you've read off of these articles, then yes, I think you're taking marketing text too literally. I'm taking the point of view that, given what I know about how software is made, lots of it is just smoke and mirrors, and public communication about what software really does tends to be.... exaggerated? Not quite accurate? You get the picture. If you're a software guy who works in something related to machine learning, or have some other kind of view into that world that we don't, then maybe you're on to something and we're way off the mark. But if that's not the case, then we're all just speculating on how we *think* AI works, and what the implications of that would be. I think Bostjan is probably in the best position of the three of us to really evaluate the state of the technology.



I don't know - I think what someone's background is important if they are taking the time to read the information that's available. An argument should stand on the points made. Just reading the deepmind research blog should be enough to convince you of how little information is encoded in these models (or read the DQN paper), and if course that particular Nvidia demo car.

I mean, I agree that hype is out there but these are research driven companies and if they were so explicit about the model conditions (as in the Nvidia car video description), and somehow were exaggerating, it would actually cause quite a controversy. It wouldn't be exaggeration or spin, it'd be dishonest.


----------



## TedEH

^ That doesn't address my point though. I still don't know where you're basing your viewpoint from. I have no context to put your words into other than you read some stuff on the internet. If you have zero software experience, then I think you're missing just how much what computers do is smoke and mirrors.



narad said:


> Just reading the deepmind research blog should be enough to convince you of how little information is encoded in these models


I disagree completely. You can't just take everything a company says at face value. Reading a company's public description of what their software does isn't going to tell you enough about the implementation to make the jump that they've literally created intelligence comparable to a human brain.

Interesting that this morning there's a bunch of articles circulating around claiming that scientists have proven simulation theory definitively wrong.


----------



## narad

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/05/06/self-driving-cars-3/



> For many of us, learning to drive is a rite of passage to adulthood. At first, you’re jittery and overly cautious, but as the miles pass you get better. You learn to understand the nuances, how the elements affect your trajectory and how to adjust.
> 
> A team of engineers from NVIDIA based in our New Jersey office — a former Bell Labs office that also happens to be the birthplace of the deep learning revolution currently sweeping the technology industry — decided that they would use deep learning to teach an autonomous car to drive. They used a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the entire processing pipeline needed to steer an automobile.
> 
> The project, called DAVE2, is part of an effort kicked off nine months ago at NVIDIA to build on the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle (DAVE) research to create a robust system for driving on public roads. We wanted to bypass the need to hardcode detection of specific features — such as lane markings, guardrails or other cars — and avoid creating a near infinite number of “if, then, else” statements, which is too impractical to code when trying to account for the randomness that occurs on the road.



That pretty much disproves Bostjan's whole rebuttal whining, and demonstrates that a model can learn a complex behavior without being given explicit knowledge of the obstacles in its environment, which is the main point of this 2-3 page back-and-forth (and took all of 5 seconds to Google). You can of course do things with explicit knowledge, but that's not the point. I bring up examples like this as a counterexample to the idea that this intelligent behavior is somehow the programmer's knowledge embedded into the system. 

If you don't trust the description, read the paper:
http://images.nvidia.com/content/te...2016/solutions/pdf/end-to-end-dl-using-px.pdf
I think the burden of proof is on the skeptic to find the untruth in a published scientific paper...

You know, you can lead a horse to water...


----------



## TedEH

The first sentence literally says they mapped the network to explicit steering commands.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> The first sentence literally says they mapped the network to explicit steering commands.



Yea...you kinda need to turn the steering wheel in order to drive...


----------



## TedEH

Yeah, but you said earlier that they didn't hardcode any of that - that the car "knew how to drive" and that there were no explicitly programmed functions attached to it.

I don't think anything in that paper negated my view of this all being human knowledge that the machine doesn't literally understand. A neural network was trained on very carefully selected inputs, with a specific interface, the feedback loop for the training very carefully crafted to get the desired result, and a bunch of very context-specific software to get the intended result out of it. Yes, it's impressive, but it's still just a pattern recognizer used cleverly to steer a car. A very complicated, advanced pattern recognizer, but just a pattern recognizer. That network is only a small part of the engineered system that makes up the driving of the car. The network still doesn't know what "steering" means, it just spits out a number that we've mapped to steering angle, based on the images it was trained to do that for. The network, along with the cameras and software etc., are still parts of an expression of human engineering and knowledge.


----------



## StevenC

Do you just want an AI to sprout up organically or something?


----------



## TedEH

To be more clear, this is why I pointed out the first line of your link:


narad said:


> I don't want to beat the dead horse here but that's not at all how a (modern) self-driving car works. There is no turnLeft() function etc.


But this is exactly what that car is doing. The network generates an angle, then explicitly calls a steering function- something like (SetTurnAngle(angleFromNetwork)) - or to put it another way, there is a turnLeft() function.


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> To be more clear, this is why I pointed out the first line of your link:
> 
> But this is exactly what that car is doing. The network generates an angle, then explicitly calls a steering function- something like (SetTurnAngle(angleFromNetwork)) - or to put it another way, there is a turnLeft() function.



That was a bad choice of name on my part because I intended it to be a higher order kind of command, like turn left on this road, not like set angle -1, -15,-45, -34, -20, -7, etc -- The model controls the most primitive command you can give to the car, not some high level thing that executes the act of making left turns or braking or 180s etc that you would tell a human driver


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> To be more clear, this is why I pointed out the first line of your link:
> 
> But this is exactly what that car is doing. The network generates an angle, then explicitly calls a steering function- something like (SetTurnAngle(angleFromNetwork)) - or to put it another way, there is a turnLeft() function.



That was a bad choice of name on my part because I intended it to be a higher order kind of command, like turn left on this road, not like set angle -1, -15,-45, -34, -20, -7, etc -- The model controls the most primitive command you can give to the car, not some high level thing that executes the act of making left turns or braking or 180s etc that you would tell a human driver


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## TedEH

My point was that the network is not literally driving the car in the same sense that you could say a person is driving the car - it's performing one (very impressive) function within a machine that drives a car. The idea that the network knows what it's doing is an illusion.


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> My point was that the network is not literally driving the car in the same sense that you could say a person is driving the car - it's performing one (very impressive) function within a machine that drives a car. The idea that the network knows what it's doing is an illusion.



I feel like there are actually 2 things going on here:
-- (1) that the programmer provides his learned knowledge to give the illusion of intelligence

-- (2) that the machine "knows" what it's doing.

To the first, I think the examples do a good job of arguing against this point. A camera or knowing that a steering wheel turns left or right aren't programmer expert knowledge - they're the atomic perceptual features the machine deals with and takes actions with. Was Johnny 5 not intelligence because he had cameras for eyes? And you can imagine that his model brain is controlling a set of actions which are controls in his joints similar to the left/right degree steering commands. And this applies readily to a lot of movie AI robots that I think everyone would agree had AI if they were not fantasy characters. That's an AI breakthrough that's really only hit a useful scale in the past 3-4 years. So you described AI earlier as basically being programmers putting in "if this then that" -- clearly this type of hard-coded knowledge is not how these systems work.

To the second, yea, I agree, but I don't see that as an issue, or it's not clear if it's an issue yet. If a model is trained to do one task, is it possible to "know" that it is doing the task? Doesn't knowledge of what a task is require the contrast of a different task? But if a machine can both drive a car and walk to the store and go bowling, I feel like then it does to some degree have some shared knowledge that it can apply as it focuses on any particular one. Driving the car requires some general navigation and representations of the path that are useful to walking around town, for instance. 

I believe that while the DeepMind Atari setup doesn't show this explicitly, that the performance improvements on certain games when trained on all games shows that useful transfer of skills is happening. If you can transfer skill between games, doesn't that imply to some extent that the model is able to apply useful strategy learned in one game to a new one, and to do so must "know" what it's doing in each task? 

The problem of having a more interesting example of this, and something closer to the kind of human intelligence you describe, is that it's difficult to ground an AI in multiple real-world tasks without it having a robot body and hands. It also takes a long time to train things involving robots since you're performing actions in real time and not simulated computer time.


----------



## bostjan

narad said:


> https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2016/05/06/self-driving-cars-3/
> 
> 
> 
> That pretty much disproves Bostjan's whole rebuttal whining, and demonstrates that a model can learn a complex behavior without being given explicit knowledge of the obstacles in its environment, which is the main point of this 2-3 page back-and-forth (and took all of 5 seconds to Google). You can of course do things with explicit knowledge, but that's not the point. I bring up examples like this as a counterexample to the idea that this intelligent behavior is somehow the programmer's knowledge embedded into the system.
> 
> If you don't trust the description, read the paper:
> http://images.nvidia.com/content/te...2016/solutions/pdf/end-to-end-dl-using-px.pdf
> I think the burden of proof is on the skeptic to find the untruth in a published scientific paper...
> 
> You know, you can lead a horse to water...



@narad Read your own links you post. Nothing there contradicts what I said. If you simply take to beating a dead horse and insulting me along the way, you might just undermine your own credibility in the argument, then maybe people won't even bother reading your links. 

Incidentally, I saw this article the other day and thought of this thread: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/artificial-intelligence-is-not-as-smart-as-you-or-elon-musk-think/

It's not too technical nor detailed, but it still kind of sums up a lot of the mentality around these sorts of threads.

Getting back to the religious and philosophical implications, storing data on every single atom in the universe would require a computational system larger than the entire universe. Why? Well, say one atom could store all of the quantum states, position, etc. of one atom. There would have to be one atom in the computer's memory banks for every one atom in the universe. Then you would need a very very powerful computer to calculate how those atoms would all interact with each other. The complexity of that computer is discussed here: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/9/e1701758.full

Anyway, to make a computer simulation of the universe, you'd need an infinitely large classical computer, or at least a quantum computer about three times the size of the actual universe. It'd be far more efficient to simply create an actual universe than to create a computer simulation of said universe.


----------



## narad

bostjan said:


> @narad Read your own links you post. Nothing there contradicts what I said. If you simply take to beating a dead horse and insulting me along the way, you might just undermine your own credibility in the argument, then maybe people won't even bother reading your links.



Of course it does. You said the Nvidia self-driving car I posted that learned representations for objects in the environment was using an image classification library, and 3D objects were being mapped to the most similar objects in a library, and were very adamant about it. While those _could_ be used, they weren't happening in the one I posted, with the point being that they are not necessary, i.e., that hard-coding these things ("cheating" by just inserting the programmer's knowledge) is not necessary.


----------



## bostjan

...but they still do just that. Maybe they don't _have to_, but they still do. I guess the reasons why they do are arguable to some extent.


----------



## TedEH

I think that you understand what you're talking about well enough, but just interpret it in a very different way. I don't think we'll ever agree on it. As far as I care, it's not "real" intelligence- I'm not convinced of it, and I don't think I could be, not with technology in it's current state.



narad said:


> To the second, yea, I agree, but I don't see that as an issue


And I think that's the core (or a large part) of our difference of opinion. I can't call a computer intelligent until it understands what it's doing on some level. It doesn't matter to me that it "contains knowledge" on an abstract level because everything does. Everything that has been engineered contains, uses, and expresses some level of knowledge, but we don't call those things intelligent unless it appears to be doing something that a human would have to think about. Writing something down means that the paper contains knowledge, but the paper is not intelligent. There is knowledge embedded in the engineering of a car, but a car is not intelligent. A speedometer on a bike contains or expresses the knowledge of how the radius of the wheel, time, speed, etc. are related to eachother, but we would not describe the bike as being intelligent. Machine learning is the same. It contains and expresses knowledge, but it doesn't understand it anymore than the piece of paper understands what you wrote on it.

I'm sure you disagree with all of that, and that's fine. It's not a meaningful disagreement.

At the end of the day.....
I think it's safe to say we're not in a simulation.


----------



## narad

bostjan said:


> ...but they still do just that. Maybe they don't _have to_, but they still do. I guess the reasons why they do are arguable to some extent.



Well I mean the first "goal" I had in participating in this thread was to cast off the misconception that modern AI is just tons of hand-written if this then that statements. I pointed to the DeepMind Atari work first, but moved to self-driving cars to follow TedEH's example, since there are examples of both which use deep reinforcement learning to discover what are essentially (1) the objects of an if-this clause, and (2) the actions to take in that circumstance to optimize the objective. The particular Nvidia car I pointed to didn't use hand-coded rules or image classifiers, etc., and you fired back that they did and I should read the webpage. So I hope you can understand my annoyance there. Any doubt is I think clarified in the paper/posts I linked to.

Regarding why some self-driving cars use libraries for various components, I think it boils down to how the system will ultimately be trained. If you're learning from example, then you're not so likely to see many people crossing the street or deer jumping into the road, etc., so there are only few instances of this to learn a representation from, -1 for deep RL self-driving for commercial purposes. On the flip side, systems that train in simulations have much more experience in all of these rare encounters, and so a lot of current self-drive research utilizes some simulated world training and some real-world training. The representations learned end-to-end tend to be much more robust to bad weather conditions and lack of road markings, etc., so +1 for deep RL when you have lots of data. When I say self-driving cars aren't using libraries or hand-coding, I'm referring to these most cutting-edge systems. 

It's also good to code in some failsafes (if "Person in front of you" -> "stop") so I can imagine that in there as a practical real world concern that's neither here nor there wrt the larger thread topic, but is important for company liability. However, the primary driving behavior is done without this.


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> I think that you understand what you're talking about well enough, but just interpret it in a very different way. I don't think we'll ever agree on it.



Yea, I'm happy to disagree on a philosophical point, just not a "how it works" sort of point.



TedEH said:


> A speedometer on a bike contains or expresses the knowledge of how the radius of the wheel, time, speed, etc. are related to eachother, but we would not describe the bike as being intelligent. Machine learning is the same. It contains and expresses knowledge, but it doesn't understand it anymore than the piece of paper understands what you wrote on it.



I still don't get the speedometer example. I mean, I understand how that contains knowledge, but say we have a camera on a dashboard, and we have lots of training data consisting of pairs of (5-sec video clip, speed label). I train a model, a blackbox which I provide with essentially no information pertaining to the task, to predict based on changes in pixels what the speed of the car is. Now the model has learned the knowledge that we otherwise had to put into the speedometer. If you keep broadening the definition of the task, then we'd be learning more and more of that knowledge that a programmer/engineer would have had to define in a previous method.

But anyway, probably not important we agree on that either after a few pages. I just still don't get it though.


----------



## Explorer

I don't think anyone has produced a true synthetic intelligence, compared to numerous simulated intelligence systems which are being given as examples. 

It's always interesting to see discussions wherein the latter is being proposed as an example of the former.


----------



## TedEH

narad said:


> I still don't get the speedometer example.


I just meant it as an example of something that makes a system appear to "know" something. A speedometer doesn't do anything more than react to a voltage, and that voltage could be anything. It just happens to be attached to more engineered stuff that supplies it a voltage that (hopefully) correlates to a good approximation of the speed you're going. But it might not. And the speedometer doesn't know any different. It's an example of where the "knowledge" in the system is just a clever design expressed by an engineer.



narad said:


> a blackbox which I provide with essentially no information pertaining to the task


I get that there are some machine learning tasks that have been done without providing the machine with very much information ahead of time, but I very much doubt this is the case for driving. I would be very surprised if there wasn't a bunch of image pre-processing going on outside of the machine learning, and a ton of pre-selected parameters that the machine is specifically looking for to help drive the simulation (pun slightly intended).



Explorer said:


> I don't think anyone has produced a true synthetic intelligence, compared to numerous simulated intelligence systems which are being given as examples.


I think this is more or less what I'm saying, just worded a bit better.


----------



## narad

TedEH said:


> I get that there are some machine learning tasks that have been done without providing the machine with very much information ahead of time, *but I very much doubt this is the case for driving*. I would be very surprised if there wasn't a bunch of image pre-processing going on outside of the machine learning, and a ton of pre-selected parameters that the machine is specifically looking for to help drive the simulation (pun slightly intended).



I don't mean to beat a dead horse but everything's in the paper. I mean, the whole point of the paper wrt existing work is "Hey, we can do this without pre-training individual modules for object detection / planning."


----------



## bostjan

narad said:


> I don't mean to beat a dead horse but everything's in the paper. I mean, the whole point of the paper wrt existing work is "Hey, we can do this without pre-training individual modules for object detection / planning."





paper said:


> With minimum training data from humans the system learns to drive...



"With minimum training" =/= "without pre-training."
Steering module =/= all modules
Lane detection =/= object detection and planning

I hate to make conjectures about your thought process, but it seems very clear at this point that you are misunderstanding some rather specific things as much more general things, or taking statements about "we use less of this and more advanced that" as "we didn't use this and made huge leaps and bounds with that." That's where I, personally, keep getting hung up and keep coming back into this thread.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> everything's in the paper


Not everything is in the paper. Enough is in the paper to explain the jist of the process, but a lot of implementation details are left out.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> Not everything is in the paper. Enough is in the paper to explain the jist of the process, but a lot of implementation details are left out.



Well literally not all model code goes into a paper, but you can't leave out details that contradict the story of the paper. That's dishonest to a degree that I think you should actually provide evidence for it, rather than assuming.


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## bostjan

Another quote from the paper:



> The normalizer is hard-coded and is not adjusted in the learning process.


Page 4, under network architecture.

This was the paper you posted to prove that there was _no hard-coding_, particularly in the image recognition system.

QED.


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## narad

bostjan said:


> "With minimum training" =/= "without pre-training."
> Steering module =/= all modules
> Lane detection =/= object detection and planning
> 
> I hate to make conjectures about your thought process, but it seems very clear at this point that you are misunderstanding some rather specific things as much more general things, or taking statements about "we use less of this and more advanced that" as "we didn't use this and made huge leaps and bounds with that." That's where I, personally, keep getting hung up and keep coming back into this thread.



Well it's the driving down the road that is the difficult part. Google maps and GPS can tell you how to get from A to B, so I don't think of that as being relevant. What's cool about this paper is that the model learns a representation of the road without being told explicitly what the road is. And that's due to the objective function. If you have some scenario where all sorts of objects hop on to the road and avoiding them is necessary to minimize the objective, then the network would learn a representation of those objects as well, without being told what they are or what shape they are, etc. This is what you see in the Atari games.



bostjan said:


> Another quote from the paper:
> 
> 
> Page 4, under network architecture.
> 
> This was the paper you posted to prove that there was _no hard-coding_, particularly in the image recognition system.
> 
> QED.



Hard-coding of if-elses or object detection. If you think image normalization is an intelligent process (or something that isn't done end-to-end in hundreds of other papers), then you're welcome to it.


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## bostjan

Image normalization is an intelligent process, if it is to be done automatically under arbitrary lighting conditions.

Also, I already posted the link to nvidia's site which proved that they used a library for object identification.

Driving down an empty road is not a trivial task, but identifying where the lanes of the road are is not even anywhere near as complex as actual neighbourhood driving- respecting other driver's space, avoiding squirrels and children, not running over sharp objects, and navigating from point A to point B, at the same time. I mean, frankly, it's not even apples and oranges, it's apples and earthquakes.


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## narad

Your library link was not relevant to this system, at all.

Sure, they are different tasks, but here is a car that can navigate the road without explicit training of that (which is actually a huge problem to getting autonomous cars out on the road), and then other in-simulation car systems navigate other cars while not being given explicit knowledge of those (besides negative rewards for crashing). You have to look at the state of the field and the individual contributions of different research groups, and then from that precipice decide whether you think this is possible end-to-end. I don't care what your stance is at that point, but I think it's a bit bizarre to take firm stances while not reading the literature.


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## bostjan

narad said:


> Your library link was not relevant to this system, at all.
> 
> Sure, they are different tasks, but here is a car that can navigate the road without explicit training of that (which is actually a huge problem to getting autonomous cars out on the road), and then other in-simulation car systems navigate other cars while not being given explicit knowledge of those (besides negative rewards for crashing). You have to look at the state of the field and the individual contributions of different research groups, and then from that precipice decide whether you think this is possible end-to-end. I don't care what your stance is at that point, *but I think it's a bit bizarre to take firm stances while not reading the literature*.



1. I read your paper. I quoted your paper back to you multiple times. I posted my own links to papers I read, and quoted those to you. Stop saying I don't read the literature, at this point you are insulting yourself as well as insulting me.
2. My library link is 100% relevant to this discussion. The paper you keep saying I didn't read is just about road and lane identification and steering controls. Why don't you start acting like you read your own link?
3. I don't care if you don't care what my stance is. Your stance is that you are somehow all-knowing in this field, where you are clearly misunderstanding some things you are posting, and you seem to think it makes you look cool to shit on bostjan. Yet I've made valid points and your response is to say that I'm "whining" (which didn't even make sense in context), or that I don't read things, yet you don't seem to be challenging specific things I've said.


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## narad

bostjan said:


> 1. I read your paper. I quoted your paper back to you multiple times. I posted my own links to papers I read, and quoted those to you. Stop saying I don't read the literature, at this point you are insulting yourself as well as insulting me.



That's not "the literature." When it comes to how much behavior you can learn without hand-coding things, it's not just a couple self-driving car papers. The deepmind papers are a great start. The fundamental learning paradigm of these papers and the way that self-driving cars can be trained (in simulation) are the same. I already discussed why this isn't done for self-driving systems that rely solely on example or real-world driving scenarios. At the end of the day, it's up to you to decide whether driving around grand theft auto avoiding cars and getting to a goal is sufficiently similar to driving a real car to the grocery store, as it pertains to exhibiting intelligent behavior.



bostjan said:


> 2. My library link is 100% relevant to this discussion. The paper you keep saying I didn't read is just about road and lane identification and steering controls. Why don't you start acting like you read your own link?



It was not at all relevant to that particular Nvidia car. That car does not use those libraries. End of discussion. You were free to bring it up, but trying to make it relevant to my post (with examples) was obviously wrong.



bostjan said:


> 3. I don't care if you don't care what my stance is. Your stance is that you are somehow all-knowing in this field, where you are clearly misunderstanding some things you are posting, and you seem to think it makes you look cool to shit on bostjan. Yet I've made valid points and your response is to say that I'm "whining" (which didn't even make sense in context), or that I don't read things, yet you don't seem to be challenging specific things I've said.



I guess you're so well-informed that you can properly assess my well-informedness. But you throw out your points like they are critical counter examples. Does the Nvidia system use image normalization? Sure. That doesn't affect my own assessment of what's being learned, because other systems have already learned such normalization. If that's too brittle for you, fine.

AI can be a weird thing to argue about. First we could find a system that doesn't use normalization. Then it would be about if it could avoid a kid running into the street. Then it wouldn't be AI until it could make an ethical decision about who it must runover when multiple people of all ages and social classes run into the street. Then it wouldn't be AI until it was emotionally distressed over the ethical decision. When you wind up arguing with always-right guys like you, this is how it goes. When really I was just trying to show some cool complex behavior without if-else rules, broaden some people's minds over how current AI works :-/


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## bostjan

narad said:


> It was not at all relevant to that particular Nvidia car. That car does not use those libraries. End of discussion. You were free to bring it up, but trying to make it relevant to my post (with examples) was obviously wrong.



I brought it up before you posted that example.





narad said:


> But you throw out your points like they are critical counter examples.



Funny, that's the way I thought _you _were coming off to _me_.  I mean, I agree that I have made counter-examples to your points, but, to be fair, my counterpoints specifically address your points. 

I guess the internet is a weird place to try to have a discussion. :/



narad said:


> AI can be a weird thing to argue about. First we could find a system that doesn't use normalization.



I mean, sure, but you kept beating that drum that no hand-coding of anything was being used in the example, when the second sentence of the very paper you posted as example admitted the opposite. In fact, I am certain that AI to do image normalization would be totally possible. It's not exactly a trivial task, but it's super easy compared to the things we are discussing here about driving a car.

Obviously, the point of disagreement here is how advanced these AI's are. They are advanced as hell. But they are not as advanced as you have stated on several posts. I think we've covered that. The paper you keep coming back to states that the AI can determine the outline of the road without any explicit coding telling it such. I don't see where anyone claimed AI could not do that.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> Then it wouldn't be AI until


I don't think anyone is saying this isn't AI. The distinction being made is that AI is not the same as "real" or "human" intelligence. It's impressive for sure, but it's IMO nowhere near truly understanding what it's doing or "learning".


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## narad

bostjan said:


> Obviously, the point of disagreement here is how advanced these AI's are. They are advanced as hell. But they are not as advanced as you have stated on several posts. I think we've covered that. The paper you keep coming back to states that the AI can determine the outline of the road without any explicit coding telling it such. I don't see where anyone claimed AI could not do that.



I think the point is that if it can determine the road without any explicit coding telling it such, can it not determine people, dogs, deer, etc.? This would run very counter to the opinions expressed earlier in this thread, that these need to be fed in, by hard-coding or by pre-training some object recognition system on labels ("this is a person" "this is a deer", etc.)

I mean, it is clear that this is the case when you extrapolate from the Atari game work and the ability of that system to do similar from similar input. You just need an objective function that rewards/penalizes something relevant to these objects ("hitting people is bad" or even "hitting people means cops come, and going to jail drastically slows estimated time to destination")

With regards to the second sentence of the paper that contradicts something I said, I'm not sure what you mean. I guess you mean this (third sentence)?: "With minimum training data from humans the system learns to drive in traffic on local roads with or without lane markings and on highways." Well its objective is derived from human steering so that's natural. That is a learning by example paper, where the model itself does not contain hand-coding. See deep reinforcement learning if you want to ditch the human.

But yea, I don't think we're close to human intelligence. But to the points expressed earlier -- that AI is mostly tricks to appear intelligent -- I strongly disagree. I don't see any indication that deep RL is so far removed from the process of human intelligence to be considered a qualitatively different type of thing. The biggest obstacles seem to be in training strong predictive models, such that if you're in a situation you can imagine your outcomes in the future based on the actions you take, and composing small actions into conceptually larger ones, so that an RL reward applies more to concepts than super tiny actions. And then grounding such an agent in a multitask world. But there are people working on all of these problems -- it seems one of scale.


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## bostjan

Determining: "Road/NOT Road" -> "Drive here/NOT Drive here" is not trivially developed into "This is an object that could potentially get in your way within a safe distance X, so slow down on approach."

Agree/Disagree?


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## narad

Disagree. The model has a functional representation of the road, so in the presence of this curve, align the steering wheel in this manner. This is not so different from the functional representation of a child, where in the presence of this object, reduce speed 20-30% (because this is what all humans are doing when this object enters the field of the camera / i.e., there is a strong association between this type of phenomena and the need to slow down in the objective function). 

It's not exhibiting the same rationale for reducing speed that you mention, but functionally it is equivalent (and would lead back to Chinese room talk to say that these are fundamentally different).


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## TedEH

narad said:


> rationale


I'm not sure I'd call any of the process "rationale" at all. It's not like the machine thinks to itself "oh no, there's something here, I should move out of the way" - it's just giving the result that best matches the pattern it was trained on. There's no reasoning involved. I imagine it would respond to any foreign shape the same way, regardless of whether or not it's safe or ok to drive over it.

I think it's safe to say we've strayed super far from the original topic though. Maybe time for a new thread? The AI thread? Edit: Maybe we should poke a mod to move this to it's own discussion.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> I'm not sure I'd call any of the process "rationale" at all. It's not like the machine thinks to itself "oh no, there's something here, I should move out of the way" - it's just giving the result that best matches the pattern it was trained on. There's no reasoning involved. I imagine it would respond to any foreign shape the same way, regardless of whether or not it's safe or ok to drive over it.



Well exactly -- I know you wouldn't call it a rationale. But ultimately if a machine makes all the same decisions of an informed human, on some complex task that we would require a chain of reasoning, then one has to consider that the function that the model has learned has an implicit understanding of the discrete logical steps that you would cite when making the same decision.

But ya, also in favor of a thread split.


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## Explorer

narad said:


> I don't think we're close to human intelligence. But to the points expressed earlier -- that AI is mostly tricks to appear intelligent -- I strongly disagree. I don't see any indication that deep RL is so far removed from the process of human intelligence to be considered a qualitatively different type of thing. The biggest obstacles seem to be in training strong predictive models, such that if you're in a situation you can imagine your outcomes in the future based on the actions you take, and composing small actions into conceptually larger ones, so that an RL reward applies more to concepts than super tiny actions. And then grounding such an agent in a multitask world. But there are people working on all of these problems -- it seems one of scale.


I'm not trying to pick on you, but as I noted earlier, deep RL to build a rule system is a way to build a *simulated* intelligence, not a synthetic intelligence. 

You see no indication that a rule system is different from a synthetic intelligence. Could you expand on how they are identical?


narad said:


> It's not exhibiting the same rationale for reducing speed that you mention, but functionally it is equivalent (and would lead back to Chinese room talk to say that these are fundamentally different).


The "Chinese room" system also is a rule-based system, and not a synthetic intelligence, right? Also, the "Chinese room" has never been proposed as an exqmple of synthetic intelligence.


narad said:


> Well exactly -- I know you wouldn't call it a rationale. But ultimately if a machine makes all the same decisions of an informed human, on some complex task that we would require a chain of reasoning, then one has to consider that the function that the model has learned has an implicit understanding of the discrete logical steps that you would cite when making the same decision.


No more so than the game Mousetrap understands its function.


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## marcwormjim

narad said:


> I don't think we're close to human intelligence.



Site motto right there.


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## narad

Explorer said:


> I'm not trying to pick on you, but as I noted earlier, deep RL to build a rule system is a way to build a *simulated* intelligence, not a synthetic intelligence.
> 
> You see no indication that a rule system is different from a synthetic intelligence. Could you expand on how they are identical?
> 
> The "Chinese room" system also is a rule-based system, and not a synthetic intelligence, right? Also, the "Chinese room" has never been proposed as an exqmple of synthetic intelligence.
> 
> No more so than the game Mousetrap understands its function.



I don't believe in this simulated vs. synthetic distinction, so I don't really know much to engage here. I think the best definitions of intelligence are functional ones, based on behaving optimally to achieve one's goal, and not ones that try to classify or put restrictions on how that intelligent behavior arises. 

So things like self-awareness and higher-order planning are, to me, things human intelligence evolved for the purpose of better achieving the long-term goal of sexual reproduction in a competitive environment. So when an intelligence "bottoms out" from following a simple strategy, no longer achieves its goals in a large population of similar intelligences exploring slightly different strategies, the right ones get promoted. Ultimately things like self-awareness arise.

So what someone might try to classify as a "less than"/simulated intelligence is imo just an intelligence that has not been situated in a world where it needed certain higher-order functions to succeed (or where such complexity could even be harmful toward achieving its goal). This is kind of subject to some caveats that the intelligence is somewhat biologically-inspired (i.e., reward-driven, complex representation learning/pattern matching) since that is the basis of our understanding of intelligence in our world.


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## Explorer

narad said:


> I don't believe in this simulated vs. synthetic distinction, so I don't really know much to engage here. I think the best definitions of intelligence are functional ones, based on behaving optimally to achieve one's goal, and not ones that try to classify or put restrictions on how that intelligent behavior arises.


It seems apparent, at least to me, that you have no meaningful explanation of how a rule-based simulated intelligence would then make the leap to synthetic intelligence/consciousness, and so you will instead argue there is no difference between a rule-based expert system and a synthetic intelligence/consciousness. That's very convenient when attempting to avoid admitting there is a vast qualitative difference, but ultimately fails in terms of doing honest intellectual inquiry. 


narad said:


> So things like self-awareness and higher-order planning are, to me, things human intelligence evolved for the purpose of better achieving the long-term goal of sexual reproduction in a competitive environment. So when an intelligence "bottoms out" from following a simple strategy, no longer achieves its goals in a large population of similar intelligences exploring slightly different strategies, the right ones get promoted. *Ultimately things like self-awareness arise.*


Ah. So, magically, a rule-based system suddenly gains self motivation, no explanation required. 

I'm dubious. Could you give an example of such having happened?


narad said:


> So what someone might try to classify as a "less than"/simulated intelligence is imo just an intelligence that has not been situated in a world where it needed certain higher-order functions to succeed (or where such complexity could even be harmful toward achieving its goal). This is kind of subject to some caveats that the intelligence is somewhat biologically-inspired (i.e., reward-driven, complex representation learning/pattern matching) since that is the basis of our understanding of intelligence in our world.


Self-motivation is a handy indicator for showing consciousness, whether natural or synthetic. What meaningful alternate indicator would you suggest?

Even though this is slightly out of my field, I'm going to suggest reading up on the deeper writings regarding synthetic intelligence/consciousness. It seems like you're positing a lot of magic steps and handwaving to paper over the gaps you want to claim don't exist.


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## narad

Explorer said:


> It seems apparent, at least to me, that you have no meaningful explanation of how a rule-based simulated intelligence would then make the leap to synthetic intelligence/consciousness, and so you will instead argue there is no difference between a rule-based expert system and a synthetic intelligence/consciousness. That's very convenient when attempting to avoid admitting there is a vast qualitative difference, but ultimately fails in terms of doing honest intellectual inquiry.
> 
> Ah. So, magically, a rule-based system suddenly gains self motivation, no explanation required.
> 
> I'm dubious. Could you give an example of such having happened?
> 
> Self-motivation is a handy indicator for showing consciousness, whether natural or synthetic. What meaningful alternate indicator would you suggest?
> 
> Even though this is slightly out of my field, I'm going to suggest reading up on the deeper writings regarding synthetic intelligence/consciousness. It seems like you're positing a lot of magic steps and handwaving to paper over the gaps you want to claim don't exist.



Well the biggest example of consciousness / self-awareness arising from a rule-based system is…you know…you. That your ancestors were nothing more than proteins operating in a very if-this-then-that world of basic chemical processes, and then — being subject to more difficult hurdles to reproduction for millions of years — you wound up a conscious entity. I don’t see how anyone can believe in evolution and yet not imagine a goal-driven need for development of consciousness, when we see the spectrum of both intelligence and self-awareness in the diversity of life in this world. I shouldn’t need to provide an explanation for consciousness arising anymore than I would have to explain having five fingers on a hand — it just worked.

I think it’s just the usual trap, of believing we are somehow qualitatively special or distinct from all the life around us.

And as much as five fingers seems to be a rather ideal number of fingers for the physical activities our ancestors performed, self-awareness, complex (/imaginative) planning, reasoning about the beliefs of others — all these are clearly required to interact successfully in a tribal society. Yet you want more than a plausible need for a skill (to the goal of sexual reproduction), combined with millions of years to evolve it?

Oh, and what are the deeper writings regarding synthetic intelligence/consciousness? I think my viewpoint is very aligned with a Dan Dennett perspective of things.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> I shouldn’t need to provide an explanation for consciousness arising anymore than I would have to explain having five fingers on a hand — it just worked.


What good is it to use something as an argument if you can't (or refuse to) provide an explanation of it when challenged? I've kinda stopped caring about this conversation a while back, and a fair amount of the science at this level goes over my head, but IMO if you can't explain something then you probably don't understand it yourself. And I think the sort of universal lack of understanding of consciousness is central enough to the conversation to warrant an explanation, if you really know so much about it. 

In other words "it just is" will never be a good argument for anything.


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## narad

TedEH said:


> What good is it to use something as an argument if you can't (or refuse to) provide an explanation of it when challenged?



I'm not sure you read me right. I explained _why --_ the how is evolution. I don't think anyone in the world understands the how of self-awareness to a significantly greater degree than that. 

At the same time, and as I tried to imply with my previous post, I'm not sure why you would expect anything more than that. We don't know the how of many things related to our physiology, yet most people are willing to accept that they arose via evolution in response to environmental conditions. Why is it hard for you to believe consciousness was the same way?

I'm not ducking out on the discussion but you seem to be expecting no less than the mysteries of the world revealed to you.


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## TedEH

narad said:


> I'm not ducking out on the discussion but you seem to be expecting no less than the mysteries of the world revealed to you.


I suppose it's a weird issue with debates about AI, cause a lot of people (not any of us necessarily) equate AI with these not-understood-at-all mysteries of the world. Like the suggestion that we're close to computers that are conscious- how can we claim to be close to simulating something that we know very little about?


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## bostjan

Necrobump for Stephen Hawking: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/new...ars-artificial-intelligence-takeover-13839799


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## narad

bostjan said:


> Necrobump for Stephen Hawking: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/new...ars-artificial-intelligence-takeover-13839799



He's got even more faith in this than I do! He actually stepped down from the sort of end-of-days talk a little after meeting with Demis Hassabis.


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