Why I am an athiest

@Olivier5,

Where is it? How much does it weigh? What's it made of?

@FBM,

It must be made of information. Its weight would be expressed in bites. Billions and billions of terabites and yottabites. Something like the Matrix. :-)

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

How many grams does a poem weight?

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

"weigh"

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

How much does a byte weigh? What's it made of? Is it an entity?

1 Reply

@FBM,

Byte... Weigh... Sorry, I'm French.

All you ever wanted to know about bytes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

So the self is a byte? A collection of bytes? Where is it/are they? Is an infant born with it/them, or does s/he acquire them gradually? Does it/do they last a lifetime? Is it/Are they deleted in amnesia or death? If so, wouldn't that be deleting the self? Why a byte and not a bit? Bytes are composed of bits, after all.

1 Reply

@FBM,

Quote:

So the self is a byte? A collection of bytes?

Well yes, billions and billions of terabytes and stuff, like a gigantic computer creating scores of instant representations of various places, stories and worlds.

A computer includes an operating system, which creates a virtual space where different programmes will run. This OS takes a certain amount of code to write and memory to run. Conscience is such a space, only much more complex. Like if Excel could talk to and collaborate with Word and Paint to finish a project. With cameras too... :-)

Quote:

Is an infant born with it/them, or does s/he acquire them gradually?

Babies are born with a sense of self, I believe.

Quote:

Is it/Are they deleted in amnesia or death? If so, wouldn't that be deleting the self?

Yes of course. Death is the end of it.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

I doubt all of that, including the part about babies being born with a sense of self.

Anyway, the exercise wasn't to discover what the self is/was. It was to demonstrate that one can doubt the existence and nature of the self in a perfectly rational way. Any student of Philosophy knows that the self has been reportedly doubted by various people at least going back 2,500 years (Siddhartha Gautama).

So, if you or anyone else try to use that as evidence for the claim that I have beliefs, it won't work.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Whereabouts in France are you?

0 Replies

@FBM,

Quote:

Any student of Philosophy knows that the self has been doubted by various people at least going back 2,500 years

The point you fail to graps is who is doing the DOUBTING? How could a non-self doubt or believe anything really?

Each and everyone of these students and persons are selves, and are talking as selves, and sign their dissertations and books as Mr. or Ms. so and so. And they don't disolve into thin air just because they doubt they own existence, and don't actually doubt themselves that much when you tell them they are wrong, or try and steal their pudding, or step on their toes....

Makes for funny debates but forgive me f I don't take what non-existing people tell me too seriously.

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

Quote:

“Man has no individual i. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small "i"s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, "i". And each time his i is different. just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man's name is legion.”

G.I. Gurdjieff

What sees this, you may ask. Opinions differ. Some say "a higher self" very different in nature to what we normally call "self". Others say that such observations indicate a "holistic consciousness" which is not located in a specific physiological system. And less esoteric commentators argue that "self" is merely a linguistic marker within communicative behavior (aka "languaging"). The grammar of the language is a set of perceptual spectacles which processes "the world" in terms of actors and agents. i.e. Language functions as a substrate Kant's perceptual a priori, and includes concepts like "causality" which have no place in modern physics.

Lay concepts of "self" may have no more validity than religious concepts of "man created in God's image". Because we are stuck with "ego language" it is almost impossible to converse about these metalogical ideas which attempt to transcend the status of "individuals".

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

The point you fail to graps is who is doing the DOUBTING? How could a non-self doubt or believe anything really?

Each and everyone of these students and persons are selves, and are talking as selves, and sign their dissertations and books as Mr. or Ms. so and so. And they don't disolve into thin air just because they doubt they own existence, and don't actually doubt themselves that much when you tell them they are wrong, or try and steal their pudding, or step on their toes....

Makes for funny debates but forgive me f I don't take what non-existing people tell me too seriously.

Where did I claim to know that selves don't exist? Your argument quickly slips into infinite regression, and it's also begging the question. If you're not familiar with those fallacies, I'll link you to objective explanations for them.

What is there about a human being that endures identically throughout that being's lifetime such that we can say the same entity was born, lived and died?

You're also missing the point. The point isn't really about selves, remember? It's about whether or not I believe anything. I'm demonstrating to you how I am skeptical about the existence of the self as it's conventionally defined, a topic you introduced.

1 Reply

@gungasnake,

gungasnake wrote:

There actually are flavors of junk science which are relatively harmless. Evolution is not one of those. Evolution was the main philosophical corner stone of Nazism, Communism, and the various eugenics movements of the last 150 years. Evolution is a flavor of junk science with upwards of 200,000,000 dead bodies lying around to its credit, that's why it matters that we get rid of it.

Surely, it could well be that the ideas of evolution are harmless but the negative and selfish emotions of those with the power to influence societies appropriate those ideas to further their selfish hunger for power. Any alternative to the ideas of evolution unless more plausible could be used in the same way by those with the power over others and would also be less plausible. If all things are equal then plausibility trumps less plausible alternatives until that state of affairs changes.... wouldn't you say?

0 Replies

@FBM,

Quote:

Your argument quickly slips into infinite regression

By now you must have got the contradiction inherent to your logic (not to mine - I am only bringing that up): anyone saying he may not exist, or his conscience may be an illusion, or his self may be a epiphenomenon, is saying: "I have no clue who is speaking here, and I probably do not exist anyway, but will say what I have to say nevertheless". Nobody should listen to non-existing dudes and epiphenomena, really.

Quote:

What is there about a human being that endures identically throughout that being's lifetime such that we can say the same entity was born, lived and died?

Why would you make it a requirement that it remained invariant, always???? Nothing does ever. Everything changes, including you.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

a) Where did I say that I don't exist? Not having or being a self in the conventional sense does not entail non-existence of a human being, as far as I can tell.

b) It is conventionally held that the same person is born, lives his or her life, then dies. That person's identity remains constant throughout. What is there about the human being that remains constant throughout?

And I have to reiterate, since you seem to be ignoring it, the original point was not about the existence of the self, but my alleged belief in it. I have said and demonstrated that I neither believe it exists nor believe that it doesn't exist.

QED.

1 Reply

@fresco,

Quote:

Man's name is legion.

Which is exactly what I am saying, except that this legion has 1) an parliament to examine and talk things through, called a conscience; 2) some capacity to come to a collective conclusion and say: "I decide this" or "I say this".

Just saying that mental spaces/selves are made of several parts don't make them go away. Pretty much everything is made of several parts...

0 Replies

@FBM,

Quote:

a) Where did I say that I don't exist? Not having or being a self in the conventional sense does not entail non-existence of a human being

What is the conventional sense of the concept of self? What is a human being? What "is" in such a "being". What says "I am"? Whatever that is, I call it a self. Hence you are a self by my definition, since you say "I am". It may be an "unconventional" self if you need it to be, but it still is speaking and therefore it exists...

Quote:

b) It is conventionally held that the same person is born, lives his or her life, then dies.

It is likewise conventionally assumed that the Seine river is the same river everyday, while of course the water that composes it changes all the time.

Our body is in a state of permanent flux. Yet it is conventionally assumed that we have such a thing as a body.

It is generally assumed that the universe is the same everyday, though of course it changes all the time.

So what exactly remains the same, or invariant in all these cases? Not much really, a general shape. A form, e.g. information, at best. But information doesn't weigh much, right?

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

You're still missing the point of this derail. You tried to assert that I had beliefs. You cited examples. I chose one of them and demonstrated that I don't have that belief. The argument about whether or not people have or are selves is just an example that has turned into a derail.

I don't believe one way or the other about it. You're still confusing doubt with the assertion of non-existence. I pointed out that there's a difference between doubting self-hood and doubting existence. I pointed out rational reasons to be skeptical about self-hood just to demonstrate how such a skeptical approach could lead to a suspension of judgement on the issue.

Please at least scan this: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pyrrho/

1 Reply

@FBM,

Quote:

You're still missing the point of this derail. You tried to assert that I had beliefs. You cited examples. I chose one of them and demonstrated that I don't have that belief. The argument about whether or not people have or are selves is just an example that has turned into a derail.

I don't believe one way or the other about it. You're still confusing doubt with the assertion of non-existence. I pointed out that there's a difference between doubting self-hood and doubting existence. I pointed out rational reasons to be skeptical about self-hood just to demonstrate how such a skeptical approach could lead to a suspension of judgement on the issue.

• You believe you exist, including as a mental entity, if flickering and changing.
• You believe in petri dishes, labs and science bringing some sort of credibility and certainty. Therefore you believe in reason and observation to exist, and to be usefully pursued by some mental entity who can observe and reason.
• You believe that you are transparent to yourself, i.e. you can state in all sincerity: “I hold no belief”. You think you can explore the totality of that entity that you call “you” and make sure there’s no belief anywhere in there. (this IMO is a most unwise belief to hold; we are largely opaque to ourselves)
• You believe you can change that entity that you are, by sheer will, e.g. you can chose to “jettison your beliefs”, hence you believe that this thing called “you” is an agent having mastery and control over itself.
• And of course, you believe you don’t have beliefs.

QED

2 Replies

Why I am an athiest

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know