Art appreciation, love, beauty, consciousness, these are all properties of matter.
The Paradox of Atheistic Art Appreciation
- Thread starter wynn
- Start date
It would all be invented by yourself. Or one copies the inventions of others: iow tradition. Ethics, aesthetics and most if not all politics are simply the invention of values in a materialist outlook. And if it is a determinist materialist outlook, then these values are inevitable. Nevertheless most people with this outlook act much of the time, when they are not thinking about this issue, as if they believe certain values in all those categories are true and objective.
You can see this also when they look down on non-materialists whom they should consider simply determined matter like themselves if they actually believed their asserted beliefs.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
No, all the most expensive buildings from the earliest Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies were dedicated to the spiritual realm.
The highest land in Athens and Rome were occupied by the Gods...the temples of Athena and Jupiter respectively.
The point being that until the VERY recent dawn of nihilism, spirituality played the most dominant role in the human psyche, and this was reflected in the architecture of all civilizations.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Yes, 'material' includes the energies known to science.
Of course, I believe there is no spiritual realm, so whatever religious people experience is also due to matter. Which means that matter can appear to some people as a God. I say that nature is surprising enough without bringing an additional concept into it.
Not sure you are getting the point. Any condescension towards non-materialists or sense of being somehow smarter or better is hallucination and hypocrisy. It's like a bowling ball feeling superior to a beach ball. In a determinst materialist universe there is no real agency. The opinions of individuals were already there in potentia in the Big Bang. One piece of shrapnel from that explosion thinking its trajectory is better than some other piece of shrapnels trajectory.
All talk of right and wrong ethically is also hallucination and hypocrisy for a materialist determinist. There are no objective values.
All talk of some piece of music being better than another - etc. in other creative realms - is also hallucination and hypocrisy.
So anytime you hear a materialist - especially a determinist which most are - speaking as if certain art forms are inherently better, as if some act is good and another is bad or any other statements with implicit or explicit assertions of objective values, the materialist is being hypocritical.
The materialt determinist can then say that it was determined that they did these things or had these beliefs, but they never seem to. I would love to hear one say
I have to believe that. I am matter that is compelled to have that opinion.
And since few scientists align themselves with such nihilism, they are not materialists according to your description.carcano said:
You select very carefully. The most expensive buildings in Athens and Rome were not occupied by the gods, the highest land in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies was was not dedicated to the spiritual realm.carcano said:
You once again mistake a crudely "utilitarian" and very shortsighted point of view for science.carcano said:
Your argument is nothing but a strawman - you imagine scientists and other atheists to be quite otherwise than as they are, and then observe of these imaginary people that they cannot appreciate art and remain consistent with the worldview you have assigned to them.
Not at all. They are properties of patterns employing matter as a substrate.spidergoat said:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
There are two definitions of "materialist":
- 1. "A person who is markedly more concerned with material things than with spiritual, intellectual, or cultural values."
- 2. "A person who advocates the philosophy that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena."
And I don't see why you have a problem with it. Science does not deny the reality of thought, feeling, motivation, instinct, reasoning, love, joy, sorrow, faith or foolishness. It merely identifies them as processes that take place within our central nervous system which, like everything else in the universe, is comprised of quarks, bosons and leptons--or matter and energy, if you like working at a higher level of decomposition.
Having a basic but ever-growing understanding of how things work does not make them any less wondrous, and certainly doesn't make them any less real.
You keep referring to science as "nihilism," and as the Linguistics Moderator I can't figure out why, after a thorough review of the definitions of the word.
- Definition 1. Science does not reject established laws and institutions, unless you're referring specifically to the era before the Reformation when Galileo discovered that the medieval church's model of a geocentric universe was incorrect. If you think that great leap forward qualifies science as nihilism then you have a lot of explaining to do.
- Definition 2. Science does not advocate anarchy, terrorism or revolution, unless you count revolutions in the way we think. Again, if you have a problem with that you need to make a better case for it.
- Definition 3. Science is not destructiveness. It has been used for that purpose in warfare, but so has practically everything else.
- Definition 4. Science does not deny all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth. Quite the contrary.
- Definition 5. Science does not repudiate all previous theories of morality or religious belief. Science merely helps us recognize metaphors for what they are, and teaches us that the stories behind them do not have to be literally true for them to be valuable guides to civilized behavior. Science does humanity a great favor by teaching us that our Stone Age legends are worth remembering even though they're not literally true. If it did not do that, then each time an old legend is proven untrue we would think that we are no longer bound by the particular principle of morality that it taught us. For example, there's a good chance that Jesus was not a real historic figure, and in any case he was surely conceived in the customary way and stayed dead once he died. Knowing that should not--and need not--in any way diminish the power of the lessons that we traditionally attribute to him.
No difference.
A very great difference, and directly relevant here, since it provides for the observed spiritual dimension in human affairs.spidergoat said:
Only some levels of pattern are normally termed "material". Recognition of pattern as entity prevents the common error of assigning "reality", or causal significance, to more or less arbitrarily selected levels of pattern uniquely; denying such significance to other levels without justifying the decision.
Ideas cause ideas, in a certain sense. On the other hand, bricks are merely patterns in a substrate of molecules - only in a certain sense can they be thought of as a cause of anything.
I'm sure most of the time they are just going along with the usual conventions of the English language. People don't bother to clarify their precise philosophical position whenever they want to discuss a simple thing like their appreciation of art.
In other words, sure, it is inconsistent for a materialist to assign some value to art beyond the material world, but I don't think many of them actually do that. If they do they aren't a materialist.
You are changing the argument a lot as we go along. At first this was about atheists, then materialists, and now determinists? Or rather we are now discussing this subset of atheists who are also materialists and determinists? These things don't follow necessarily one from the other, especially the determinism part. In fact science generally leans towards the non-deterministic viewpoint since quantum mechanics is non-deterministic.
In other words you have strayed pretty far from the OP.
The appeal to other ways of knowing. <-- The favored fallacy of Light Gigantic and Jan Ardena.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
* * * * NOTE FROM THE LINGUISTICS MODERATOR * * * *
No it does not! From Dictionary.com:
- Material: the substance or substances of which a thing is made or composed: "Stone is a durable material."
Energy is NOT a substance.
Please do not redefine words as you see fit, use discipline-specific jargon you learned in a philosophy class, or bring in agenda-driven redefinitions that you picked up in church. That is not the way to make your point.
I truly doubt this. Let's imagine I have a room full of scientists and we are discussing Rap music. I do not think they would be simply following the conventions of language. And they certainly would not be when discussing morals. If you shift the discussion to a more philosophical they will likely take the stance that taste is not objective. But to me this is parallel to a man generally asserting, when it is the topic at hand, that women and men are equals and women should be treated with respect, but when push comes to shove he can hit women or talk about them all as bitches that want to castrate men. (this is morally reprehensible in way the other hypocrisy is not, but the structure of the hypocrisy is the same)
I think the truth is they are compartmentalized. They do not work out their contradictions.
My experience is that most materialists are determinists. But I can remove that portion.
Again, I think they tend to go together. And as far as I can tell most atheists here are materialists and determinists, so it is relevent in context.
On the subatomic level it leans towards that. But at the level of humans and acts the probabilities are so astronomically small, the probabalistic nature of reality is considered moot in relation to our acts, beliefs, opinions.
I think I am on topic, because the OP is raising the issue of atheists not having certain 'fluffy, supernatural beliefs'. Certainly an atheist can believe in free will. But at that point they are running against science themselves - and the indeterminism of QM does not = free will. Certainly an atheist can believe in non-material entities, but again then one is running counter to most scientists and open to the same Occam's Razor arguments that get leveled at theism. Art appreciation including implicit or explicit objective values is one way an atheist can contradict his or her epistemology. The same is true around ethics. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Well, obviously you can, but this needs to be pointed out.
Certainly it is possible for an atheist to be consistent on all of these things. To be as rigidly lean - occam razor-wise - in all categories as they chide the theist for not being in relation to theism. But I have never met such a creature.
Are you one?
That isn't so, about the material universe (you can narrow it to "hard deterministic" material universe if you want to, but that leaves large areas of philosophical position for even the most materialistic of scientists to inhabit).doreen said:
You can get by with handwaving about "classical approximation" if you want to deny the apparent implications of chaos theory, but then you don't have a Big Bang.
No.doreen said:
Maybe the best - in my judgment the warmest and easiest to read - of the various explications of the problems with that kind of reduction of the complex world to its imaginary material bits behaving according to an imagined pattern or rule of thumb named "cause and effect", is Daniel Dennett's. But the long tradition includes recent contributions of people like Gregory Bateson (and his daughter Catherine), the Zen thinkers, even a couple of the ancient Greeks.
Gregory Bateson perhaps put it most succinctly when he pointed out that "miracles are a materialist's way of escaping from their materialism" - neatly identifying the materialists at the same time.
It's not only the believers in the ghosts who are in philosophical arrears - the believers in the machine have lost their footing as well.
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Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Since you supernaturalists comprise the overwhelming majority of the human race, you have control over the way our languages evolve. "Free will" is your concept and your terminology and since we are forced to live among you we speak your language in order to be understood.
A precise statement would be that we are programmed by our instincts to feel like we have free will. Only the tiny subset of atheists who are particle physicists with a minor in philosophy are aware that there is any controversy over the concept of free will, plus the few others of us who learn about these things on SciForums or similar venues.
So it is unreasonable to say that the average atheist is being inconsistent when he accepts the validity of free will, and it is ridiculous to say that he's being inconsistent when he adopts the vocabulary in his speech.
Most atheists are not scientists and so do not realize that free will is a fluffy supernatural belief. Provide the necessary science classes to the ones with the IQ to understand them (all atheists are not geniuses any more than all religionists are idiots) and they'll come around.
Provide those same courses to an equally bright religionist and he'll walk out in a huff insisting that science is wrong--that a supernatural universe does indeed exist and that its creatures and forces perturb the workings of the natural universe, and that's where free will comes from.
The point remains that people feel like they have free will so they don't lose a lot of sleep over it.
I don't know how many of our members you've managed to convince of that, but I'm not one of them. Especially since you haven't told us how a supernaturalist defines free will--unless I missed that post in which case I apologize.
Art appreciation is subjective. I'm most familiar with the art of music, and indeed there are a few basic components of music that are universal, such as harmonic intervals, but those are mathematical functions that cause our eardrums to vibrate in simple recurring patterns that can be deconstructed by the appropriate brain center. Most of the rest of music that is built upon those patterns is cultural, and people from different cultures do not necessarily appreciate each other's music... whether by "culture" we mean New Guinea vs. Paris or punk rock vs. harp concerto.
Literature has some basic universalities too, what Jung calls archetypes or what we would now describe as motifs hard-wired into our synapses by accidents of evolution and passed down through various genetic bottlenecks. Beyond that the same is true of literature as of music: subjective cultural preferences.
I'm not qualified to speak about painting, sculpture, dance, etc.
Huh??? Ethics are certainly subjective and cultural. Just ask a fundamentalist Muslim or an American Redneck whether it's ever permissible to kill someone who disagrees with him, and then pose the same question to a Swede.
There are a few ethical principles that are hard-wired into our brains as instincts, because like most apes Homo sapiens is a pack-social species that wouldn't have survived long without them. Unfortunately one of those instincts is that it actually is okay to kill members of another pack, because they're competitors for the scarce resources of a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Once we invented the technology of agriculture, which created a food surplus, we've had to overcome that one with culture, but some cultures have succeeded better than others.
You seem to assume that all atheists are scientists. Most of them have never heard of Occam's Razor or the Rule of Laplace, and very few have any understanding of quantum mechanics. Even the people you meet on SciForums may at least recognize the words and have had some exposure to the concepts, but not enough to integrate them into their lives. You can't criticize them for not living up to principles they don't even know.
And that majority of the atheist population does not criticize you for not living up to those principles either.
I've never made the claim that there is something beyond nature so your categorization is false, and rather convenient. Free Will is not my concept either. This is just random lumping.
Unless that person can make a case for this meaning anything, of course he or she is being inconsistent. That is if this person is the kind of person who demands of theists that all their hypotheses be supported by evidence or solid, irrefutable deduction. You can't blame atheists beliefs on others, which is what you seem to be doing here. And it is not theists' fault if the atheists confuse their qualia with reality.
Do you see the logic here? He is not being inconsistent because he is ignorant. This makes no sense.
I don't know how you define 'religionist' but if it is a synonym for a theist, you must know you are generalizing incorrectly.
Convince of what? That they should lose sleep over it? I am just pointing supporting the basic idea of this thread which is that atheists tend to believe in things that do not have scientific support and feel just fine about this. However they do expect theists to conform to an epistemology they themselves do not.
You seem to be arguing that they wouldn't if they were better educated. This supports my claim that they currently are inconsistent.
That does not matter. My beliefs do not change the inconsistencies or lack thereof of atheists.
And so are morals. But atheists, just like everybody else act and speak as if this were not the case.
I live with Swedes, I know them well. Of course they kill people for disagreeing with them. Not all of them, but such instances are in the papers every week.
No, I do not. I am, again, merely pointing out the inconsistencies. I understand your point that they probably do not realize they are being inconsistent. So? And the scientists are also inconsistent. It is a human trait, after all. But even when it is pointed out, it is rarely acknowledged. And those who say that ethics and aesthetics are subjective only, tend to think this means they believe this to be true. Sure it is their official belief when the topic is at that meta level. But they live differently.
It isn't.fraggle said:
That is, there are comprehensions of free will that maintain every one of its observed properties - including the key one of one's actions being under one's control, and not determined by some imagined chain of cause and effect from the dim past - without the smallest inconsistency in regard to scientific laws, theories, or principles.
Few modern atheists, at least among the public expounders, "demand" any such thing.doreen said:
The closest is to require, for serious consideration, that theists not contradict applicable deductive logic or fly in the face of solid evidence presented. And sometimes additionally, that if they choose to put faith in matters for which they have no evidence or reason, they be willing to accept the implications and consequences.
On forums such as these, they do.
And the point of this thread is that atheists also do this.
And, again, faith is a specific forumulation by certain Abrahamic monotheists. It is out of context with many theists and very few people base their beliefs solely on faith, regardless of their theism. This is a weird mental ideal created by theologians. Most people need to feel, rightly or wrongly, that a belief system is working for them. We can start another thread and look at issues related to this 'working' but when people assume that theists in general base their beliefs solely on faith it is very confused and flies in face of what should be rather evident. And to be clear, I am not saying that the truth of these beliefs should evident or one should agree they are making the correct decision or have the right priorities or epistemology.
I hope you will start a thread on 'soft determinism. I don't much room in either classical physics or QM for free will. Again, I'd be interested in seeing a thread.
I love Bateson, though more the books he wrote himself with the mostly hallucinated daughter. I found her books less interesting. but I don't think Bateson truly proposes free will. Mind and nature as stochastic processes leaves us with a random or probabilistic element tossed in with the more machinelike processes. I can't see where agency comes in. Prediction becomes probablistic, but control at any point in the system does not appear. Hell, I think one could argue there is less control. In the hard determinism all of your qualities absolutely lead to the next state - in conjuction with the environment. Toss in a random element and the domino now might or might not knock over the next one, but it certainly does not choose and to some slight degree doesn't cause with the same degree of certainty.
I also loved ZEN. But, there's hardly an analysis of free will.
yes, I do recognize that the mechanistic worldview is no longer dominant certainly in physics and to some degree in other disciplines. But I have not heard a solid case for free will anywhere in there either.
But, please, you've obviously thought about this. Start a thread on it in Phil or whereever you think best and I'll join in.