Personality Basins

One of the more depressing things of the AI boom is watching engineers and “atheists” get hoodwinked by mystic gibberish like this blog. There is nothing here but astrology: even Myers-Briggs is more scientific.

I think 30% of atheists bothered to think carefully about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and recognized Pastafarianism as a funny commentary on epistemic uncertainty. The remaining 70% said “heh, stoopid Christians believe in a spaghetti monster!” and took it as confirmation of their tribe’s superiority.

Personally I've always found, ironically, some of my most ardent atheist friends to essentially treat the topic with a level of intensity you might expect from a religious evangelist. Often there's also a level of religious fervor they carry over to politics as well.

I don't really care what other peoples religion/non-religion is anymore than what type of underwear they prefer, and yet...

We already know that our science can simply not explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after the Big Bang, which is just established science.

There is nothing more "negatively religious" than believing that nothing caused that primal explosion of all that is. Unfortunately, they then proceed to throw out the positive aspects of some religious teachings concerning, e.g., compassionate concern for our fellow human beings.

Regardless, religion is a personal thing; forcing any beliefs on others is always a problem and must be prevented. We are all free to choose our attitudes and behaviors. Behaviors that harm others, however, must -- in a just system -- be dealt with by the society, for the benefit of the whole, irrespective of belief system of perpetrator or victim. Using compassion to make such decisions is always the best way, for varying values of compassion.

> We already know that our science can simply not explain/understand what happened in the first 10e-33s after the Big Bang, which is just established science.

Yet. There's a very big difference in "I don't know," vs. "I know that no one can ever know."

Absolutely. I actually know that (know that I don't know, but that my not knowing doesn't mean that no other person can know), but modern science will not be the source of such explanations.

Those explanations can only be accessed once we understand that the universe itself is queryable (that is our joint purpose here, us and our expansive environment together) and that a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent such that we gain access to it.

You could say that a person must learn of the challenge, accept the challenge, and then pass all the tests, thereby gaining access.

> once we understand that the universe itself is queryable

We do understand that. "What happens when I push a rock off a cliff?" is a query to the universe. The universe's response is observable when the experiment is executed and the rock is pushed.

> a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent

I have no need for this hypothesis. We can query the universe at any time simply by observing it, proposing a falsifiable explanation for what is observed, and acting within it to test our explanations.

There are deeper queries than "What happens when I push a rock off a height?" The science and math of Newton's laws of motion is enough for that, especially if combined with some materials science.

I didn't say that you "needed" anything, but the fact remains that if you want to calculate the trajectory of something traveling at a significant percent of light speed, you will need some higher maths. Such calculations require advancing one's mind, as do other queries. But, no, none of that is necessary to find out what happens when a person's cat pushes something off the countertop.

No observation was even feasible for Einstein to formulate GR or Feynman to formulate QED, so if all that matters to you is what you see, that's your choice; I wish you well.

I thought it would be obvious that my simple example was only illustrative. I'm not actually suggesting we discuss high school physics.

> No observation was even feasible for Einstein to formulate GR

Einstein made many observations about the real world to formulate his theories, e.g. Mercury's orbit, the relativity of motion, the inability to distinguish between different forms of acceleration.

> if all that matters to you is what you see, that's your choice

To be clear, in this discussion about what science can explain/understand, I'm advocating for the scientific method as the sole means through which objective truth can be verified, not the sense of sight.

When you mentioned a Creator being whose intent could be known and aligned with, my reply was a reference to a Laplace quote I thought you'd recognize. I apologize if it seemed personal. I only meant to say that we can and do query the universe to discover explanations for how it works without ever assuming the existence of gods or their supposed intentions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace#I_had_no_...

I agree that the scientific method is the best approach towards finding objective truth (which is of course precisely what it is designed to do). The problem is placing objective truth above all other truths. It annihilates subjectivity, which is possibly the most crucial element of being human. And of course formal science has limitations on the truths that it can reveal in its own system (the uncertainty principle) and on a practical level every known scientific theory, no matter how successful, breaks down at some level (see quantum gravity).

All of which is to say that my stance is: embrace science but accept its limitations.