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In case you missed it, here is the recent debate I had on creation vs. evolution. I'll be releasing it soon as an episode of @RealAtheology too.
Darwin to Jesus@darwintojesus
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Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
40.3K posts
Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
@SpeedWatkins
Engineer, Philosopher, Writer, and host of @RealAtheology. Ardent realist about everything except Theism and The Self. In my view, God and I are the problem. 🐳
Norfolk VA Katılım Mayıs 2021
2.4K Takip Edilen6.7K Takipçiler
@theliteralPSR That's fair about Premise (3), but I think the fallacy of composition is highly relevant in this particular context. What support is being given for (1)?
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@SpeedWatkins P3 is more questionable, we haven’t ruled out the possibility of a natural necessary object.
I don’t think the compositional fallacy is super relevant here. There is nothing about the nature of dependence that gets you independence as an emergent property from addition.
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It is an invalid inference from "each member of the set is dependent" to "the whole set is dependent." That's the fallacy of composition. Every silly goose in the flock has a mother (per accidens), but it does not follow that the flock also has a mother (per se).
Natural Theist@AleMartnezR1
1. A set of dependent things is itself dependent. 2. Anything dependent requires a cause outside itself 3. The universe is a set of dependent things. 4. Therefore, the universe requires a cause outside itself.
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@Pirroli_ It's an open question.
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@SpeedWatkins Not every inference from the parts to the whole commits the fallacy. For instance, if every brick of the wall is red, the whole wall is thus red. There's no fallacy here.
How would you determine whether the set is like the wall (not fallacious) or the flock (fallacious)?
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Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweetledi
Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweetledi
“In writing about the many books she loved, Virginia Woolf could be a good Johnsonian critic. On Joyce’s Ulysses, she is at her rare worst: snobbish, resentful, a touch frightened. And wrong, absolutely wrong. The Jesuit-trained James Joyce was erudite beyond measure and so gifted as to be almost the fusion of Dante and Shakespeare. That was his vaunting ambition. It was beyond reach.”
—Harold Bloom, Bright Book of Life
Bret van den Brink@BretVDB
Virginia Woolf’s diary entries on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. … I finished ‘Ulysses’ and think it is a misfire. Genius it has, I think; but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts.”
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It should be understood through a Gnostic lens: the kid has a divine spark, and the Judge’s dance is a metaphor for war's divinity. He is the archon, the corruption of the material world, who extracts every divine spark and forges a counterfeit. The book itself is a counterfeit.
Kristen Rudd@kristenrudd
About to start Blood Meridian for the first time. Give me all your best advice.
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"a religion of blood and heroic pessimism"
🎯
Syd Steyerhart@SydSteyerhart
America is a Gnostic nation and has always been. Gnosis is fundamentally a religion of blood and heroic pessimism, the eternally reincarnating god-man in an endless ocean of blood. That is why Christianity survived here. The exemplary of American Gnosticism is Cormac McCarthy.
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Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweetledi
Bro wake up. Awake from your dogmatic slumber. Causation is unknowable lol. Inductive reasoning has no basis in objective reality lmao
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Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweetledi
Daniel Dennett: "If I gave a prize to the best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin."
Not Newton. Not Einstein. Darwin.
In a 2015 documentary, philosopher Daniel Dennett makes a striking case for why Darwin's idea of natural selection is the single greatest intellectual achievement in human history.
His reasoning isn't just about biology.
Dennett argues that what makes Darwin's idea so extraordinary is what it unifies. Before Darwin, the world was split into two seemingly incompatible realms: the physical world of cause and matter, and the world of meaning, purpose, and consciousness. These felt like they belonged to different categories entirely. One explained by science, the other by something else.
Darwin's idea, Dennett says, is the backbone that bridges them:
"The Darwinian idea of natural selection unifies the world. It unifies the world of cause and matter and physics with the world of meaning and purpose consciousness. The whole spectrum of life depends on uniting the living with the non-living, the meaning with the non-meaning, the purposeful with the merely mechanical and merely physical."
That's not a small claim. It's a philosophical revolution disguised as a biology paper.
What Dennett is pointing to is that natural selection gives us a mechanism: a purely physical, purposeless process that generates purpose. Organisms don't need a designer to have goals. The appearance of design, the reality of meaning, emerges from the bottom up.
The best idea anyone ever had. No prize for second place.
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@weimsupremacist Qualia would (presumably) fall under the irreducibility thesis. I think qualia are irreducible, but some philosohers better than myself would disagree.
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@weimsupremacist I have been motivated by the causal exclusion argument: the conjunction of irreducibility, supervenience, causal closure/completeness, and causal exclusion entail that conscious mental states are not causally efficacious.
iep.utm.edu/mind-and-the-c…
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I wish I were more impressed with the argument from psychophysical harmony. Had I encountered it five or six years ago, as a card-carrying anti-reductionist, I probably would have been more impressed. Just another of the many (regrettable) ways reductionism has poisoned my mind.
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@weimsupremacist I doubt qualia exist, but I wouldn't say I know that it doesn't. The mind-body problem is much to sublime for that sort of confidence. If qualia does exist, then, my view implies that qualia is causally inert, so it might as well not exist. I eliminate it from my view.
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@SpeedWatkins So you reject the existence of qualia?
I’m trying really hard not to dismiss you a sophist, but I’m leaving that direction. Just plainly tell me what you believe.
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Benjamin Blake Speed Watkins 🇺🇸🇺🇦🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️ retweetledi
Today I respond to Matt Dillahunty’s recent response to me. Let’s talk about claims, evidence, and science, baby, let’s talk you and me…
youtu.be/LHVUeC3NI3A
YouTube
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@LatFilosof @LyingWrongAgain That's the route I end up taking too. It's an analytic truth that pain involves avoidance behavior, so we cannot imagine pain that does not involve avoidance behavior. If x didn't involv
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@SpeedWatkins @LyingWrongAgain I actually *cant* conceive it in other way. "Pain" is just what we named the experience that causes avoidance behavior, it could have had any other name. I left a long comment on one of Dustins videos, one of the first ones. Could maybe find it.
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@PhilipDBunn I have similar feelings, though, I also adore Wikipedia. Do I contradict myself? I contain multitudes.
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A lot of people responding things like "lol, do you have the same criticisms of the internet and spellcheck?" are surprised to learn the answer is yes, obviously.
Philip Bunn@PhilipDBunn
I genuinely do not believe that AI can make me a better writer. Not in the drafting, not in the editing, not in the conceiving or brainstorming, none of it. I crave human reviewers and editors. I embrace the virtue of doing things "inefficiently."
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@LatFilosof @LyingWrongAgain I think there is plausibility to it. It’s not obvious that there is a necessary connection between our experience of pain and avoidance behavior. This is the same intuition behind conceivability arguments, after all.
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@SpeedWatkins @LyingWrongAgain Yeah... that just makes no sense to me at all.
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@SpeedWatkins Mind? Don’t you mean “my matter and energy”?
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@LyingWrongAgain Imagine a scenario where experiences of pleasure cause us to shrink or run away, or where experiences of pain cause us to seek them out.
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@SpeedWatkins What is “psychophysical disharmony” (in theory)?
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