you really don't want to know

Peter: This is the most succinct, well-thought-out presentation of the basic perspective of a non-believer that I have seen. It also manages to remain respectful to those who have faith and find deep personal meaning in it.

Jim: Perhaps, but it’s just so…DRY. And as such, my guess is that most “believers” that I’ve ever known would still take offense to various off-hand assertions contained therein. Anyway, I learned long ago that analyzing “logic” versus “belief” will only ever satisfy the logical party. Because even if your logic is pure and sound, and their belief is also pure and sound, you’re still speaking two different languages that usually can’t be cleanly translated. Lastly, this video may indeed be respectful of people’s faiths, but I find that, most often, the faithful I encounter aren’t expecting respect, they’re expecting deference.

Plus, good as this video is, it’s like watching Clerks on crack. The script may indeed be great, but christ on a crutch, slow it down a touch!

Robin: There is a reason why people say they have “faith” in God and not “proof”. I personally found the video extremely disrespectful to those who have faith – and the cartoon portrayals offensive. if you don’t believe in My God I’m okay with that. Not gonna condemn you, or think less of you or tell you you are going to hell. Invite you to church for sure but I certainly won’t take offense if you say no. Oh course if you do something crazy and make the national news I’m telling everyone you believed you were possessed by aliens.

Ben: Why should faith be respected?

Robin: Don’t have to respect my faith – but don’t disrespect me for it. I don’t disrespect you for your lack of it.

Ben: The two aren’t equivalent though, one is believing in something regardless of any evidence, the other is not believing in something for which there’s no evidence.

For example, if I have “faith” that Asian people are superior to White people, should I get mad if anybody treats that faith with a lack of respect?

Jim: In terms of “no evidence,” I’d like to get your opinion on something:

I’m part of no organized religion, don’t necessarily believe in any deity, and pretty much the only thing I can firmly say is that I believe that “the human spirit” exists and doesn’t just wink out of existence when we die. That last part, I’m willing to concede that I don’t have proof for (although I’m sure some would tell me that the fact I still talk to my dead parents — and feel their responses — is proof that they’re not gone. I don’t want your opinion on that part). But in terms of “proof” that there is indeed such a thing as “human spirit” (and I should say, I believe all living creatures have the same), all I have to offer is this: Life. Individuality.

I know that love and artistic talent and fear can all be explained by chemical reactions in the brain. I’ve heard it many times from the most dryly scientific atheists I’ve known. But the fact is that those chemical reactions are acting upon (or influencing) SOMEthing. That something is “me,” by which I do not mean my body, my brain, my heart. It’s the difference between the “brain” and the “mind.” I just think the word “spirit” is more adequately descriptive than the word “mind.”

Ben: “self”, “consciousness”, “free-will”, etc. are all things that don’t yet have a widely-agreed-upon scientific explanation. The best explanation I’ve heard so far is that free will is an illusion, and we’re basically meat computers.

Consciousness, the ability to think, analyze, dream, etc. have evolved as useful tools to model the present to helppredict the future. The better you can predict the future, the better your chances at survival.

Love, hunger, and the need to sleep are all drives acting inside the brain, and the brain creates symbols for them. The brain then allows the manipulation of those symbols to prepare for the manipulation of the environment to, eventually, stay alive and pass on the genes.

Jim: I guess that’s the thing: the “need” or “drive” to propagate the genes denotes a more basic-level desire to keep the species alive. Well, why does “desire” or “drive” exist if we’re just meat computers? Survival (e.g. of the species) is a concept that simply can’t exist without the concept of consciousness, and if consciousness is fact, then spirituality (at least, in the basic form to which I subscribe) is also fact.

Since you mentioned it, if science ever does come up with a viable explanation for “self”, “consciousness” or “free will”, I will certainly re-evaluate my beliefs.

Ben: Unless you think viruses have consciousness, evolution and passing genes on definitely does exist without consciousness. Viruses are able to replicate. Occasionally they mutate. Sometimes a mutation makes them better able to survive. They have no desire to survive, nor any drive, but those patterns keep replicating.

Someone studying viruses might anthropomorphize a virus and say “it doesn’t want to kill its host too quickly because that doesn’t allow it to incubate for long enough”, but it’s not really “desire”.

Humans seem a lot more complicated, but in the end it’s the same thing. Our big, fancy brains put labels on things like “desire” or “drive” but in the end it’s just behaviors and/or characteristics that have proven to be successful in passing on the genes.

Jim: I actually do believe that viruses have a form of (for lack of a better term) consciousness. And it’s not the “trees have feelings too” kinda stuff. I don’t anthropomorphize viruses any more than I do trees. But I see a very big difference between viruses propagating themselves and, say, Oxygen atoms attaching themselves to other atoms. One is physics. The other is a low-level inborn need to propagate and evolve. Again, one must be careful with the word “need,” because it’s easy to see it as anthropomorphism. It’s far, far more primitive than that. Do you see it differently?

EDIT: sorry, “physics” should be “chemistry.” Brain no workie.

Ben: I don’t see any distinction between the chemistry of water molecules coming together and the chemistry of strands of DNA being copied. One process is just a much more complex version of the other.

I don’t think viruses have any need to copy themselves, but instead that the ones that have that capability have ended up doing so.

Rocks don’t have any need to be hard, but the ones we see tend to be hard, because the non-hard ones erode away too quickly for us to notice them.

Jim: I’m not sure how human replication is an act intended to “pass along the genes,” but viral replication is not. Seems a convenient distinction. And saying that “rocks don’t choose to be hard” is a) again, just the end result of physics and chemistry, and b) an example of anthropomorphism (which, please note, I’ve been careful to avoid). I’m not saying that any old clump of physical matter has life.

Going back to the comparison of viral reproduction to Oxygen pairing with other elements, the difference seems kinda clear: one is just an element that’s been moved from one place to another, and the other is actually re-creating more of itself. Are viruses “alive?” I know that’s not a question with a clear-cut answer, but I’d be more inclined to compare a virus to a sperm or an ovum, than to an atom or molecule.

Robin: Ben – so are you nothing more than bunch of atoms thrown together, controlled by chemical impulses ; a soulless shell of a man who is one blip in the history of mankind – a species which exist for no reason other than to procreate until we are wiped out by disease, war or a giant meteor from the sky? [omitted some commentary that goes off in another direction]

Ben: Jim: there’s no fundamental distinction between hydrogen and oxygen combining to form water, a virus doing whatever it does to pass on its RNA/DNA, and humans having sex. It’s just levels of complexity. The only reason you can have an ‘act designed to do X’ in a human is that there’s enough complexity to create the brain, an organ which can create a plan. As a result, you can have an act designed to do X.

You see rocks that are hard, because soft rocks got eroded away. You see viruses that reproduce because the ones that didn’t died out. You see animals that mate and have offspring because the ones that didn’t died out.

Robin: exactly right, there is no soul, humans exist only as gene transmission machines, and genes are nothing more than nifty self-replication chemicals.

Jim: So, let me make sure I understand: “life” is simply a description of a particularly complex collection of non-sentient building blocks. Is that right? Or am I misunderstanding?

Ben: my view is that “life” is what we call a particular set of “things” that possess certain characteristics, one of the key ones being the ability to reproduce. Depending where you draw the line, life also might require growth, adapting to an environment, and responding to stimulus from that environment.

“Sentience” is an emergent property. When life becomes complex enough, it stops simply responding to stimulus in a simple, predictable way, and starts to be able to learn and make choices, and eventually to plan.

I’d call humans sentient and alive, bacteria alive but not sentient, and rocks neither sentient nor alive.

Peter: Wow, what a row this video has stirred. Don’t have time to respond to every right now but I wanted to hit a few important points.

[...]

Robin and Jim: regarding your (obviously) appalled reaction towards the materialism that Ben is laying out:

It is difficult to deny the physical reality of our world and our own bodies. There is plenty that science still doesn’t know about the exact workings of various pieces, but it’s basically undeniable that those pieces are more or less an accurate description of physical reality. Atoms, molecules, organic compounds, electrical neural pulses, etc. – an advanced alien might come down to Earth and laugh at our primitive understanding, but as far as we know, those are an accurate enough description and model of our natural world that we can inject genes into fish to make them glow in the dark, and we can shoot robots to planets tens of millions of miles away and drive them by remote control. If the Bible, the Vedas, or the Koran actually predicted anything with even 1/1000th the accuracy of, say, Newtonian physics, we’d never hear the end of it.

However, just because we are comprised of these things, does not mean that that is the end all and be all of existence. This is where my view departs from Ben’s.

I recognize that physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are all valuable pursuits that yield astoundingly useful models of how things work. But I also believe that we do not have any good explanation for why or how *order* arises in complex, dynamical systems. I acknowledge that to be an unexplained mystery, and I am not along. Many excellent scientists and mathematicians engaged in the study of complex systems acknowledge that this “organizing principle”, as it can be called, is not one that we have a scientific handle on. Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called it “Dynamic Quality”, and saw it as yin to the yang of “Static Quality”, or the nature of things to stay organized. (But I digress…)

I think it’s entirely reasonable for a person to acknowledge that we are comprised of atoms and molecules seeking local energy minima, while at the same time realizing that there is a spirit of goodness, organization, and love within all of us that is as-yet unexplained.

While I think that evolutionary biology explains why things organize the way they do, when they organize, I do not think that it provides any answers about *why* they organize in the first place. So, Ben, I think saying that “our purpose is to propagate more genes” is missing the point.

A similar analogy would be this: imagine a poem stored in your computer’s memory, and displayed on your screen. When I ask why a particular word follows another word, it is not useful to tell me “because the display routines are accessing this particular memory location, which then routes these electronic signals out to the video cable.” Rather, I am asking about the motivations of the poet choosing that word over any other.

Likewise, to say that humans are piles of cooperative eukaryotes seeking to replicate some DNA is an entirely accurate statement, but it is also entirely useless. There is clearly complexity and regimes of behavior above the level of explanation offered by the cellular model of reality.

And that’s the fundamental, Zen thing to realize here: there is a concrete physical reality that we all appear to share. That reality does not know about atoms, molecules, DNA, genes, organs, people, planets, stars, or anything. That reality just *is*. All of these other nouns we build on top of it arise from frameworks of understanding that are wired into our brains. The Neanderthal understands rocks, birds, trees, and the like. The modern physicists knows about gluons, quantum fields, and something called the Big Bang. A schoolchild in the year 3051 might have an entirely different cognitive model of reality, way more advanced than the smartest scientist today. These are all just models.

OK, I’ve gotta run now.. I’ll get back to the religion thing when I get back from dinner.

Jim: For what it’s worth, I’m definitely not appalled by Ben’s arguments…on the contrary, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this whole exchange.

In general, I try to walk back from pitting “belief” against “logic,” hence I tried to get down to brass tacks: what do I know? I know that I feel sentient. I know that I feel “alive,” whatever that means. I know that I FEEL, and that my feelings are mine and mine alone. These things signify that I have some kind of “essence” that I can call my own. I choose to call it my mind, or my spirit. I think I can reasonably say that my preference for the color blue is decidedly outside the realm of “plans that the complex organ in my head has devised to help me self-replicate.”

Ben’s assertions all sound reasonable until you go back to one of his earliest, most basic observations: “’self’, ‘consciousness’, ‘free-will’, etc. are all things that don’t yet have a widely-agreed-upon scientific explanation.” The problem is, this is a fact you can’t just shunt aside (or worse, build an argument from). Basically, it means that science hasn’t actually decided that self, consciousness, or free will are even valid aspects of nature. If they aren’t quantifiable, how [can] we be sure they’re not delusions? Well, if the jury is still out, then that means I have a “belief” that I have free will, and Ben has a contrary “belief” that I’m just a meat computer, acting on plans that this organism I call my body has devised for spreading my DNA. At which point, we’re both just dudes with “beliefs.” Feels good to level the playing field

So, being the get-down-to-brass-tacks kinda guy that I am, it seems to bring us back to the biggest, most important question ever posed:

Why?