Atheism and Nihilism

Atheism does not imply nihilism. Nihilism does not imply atheism. The two are distinct, but there is a popular perception that the two are tethered together. Why does this perception arise?

The first reason would be the historical one, which is that in Christendom morality was rooted in theism, so a rejection of God implies a rejection of morality. This is less interesting, since I wonder why the perception arises still today. You can say that it is a holdover from the past, or you can say that the perception only arises among those who still root their morality in their theism, but I think there is an epistemological reason.

We do not need a God for true, objective morality to exist. Perhaps it is just there. Perhaps moral imperatives are just natural facts. Yet, if we reject God on the basis that it does not satisfy the intellect to believe on such scant evidence, would we not also have to reject any kind of external morality for the same reason? It is the standpoint of doubt that causes trepidation: if your doubt causes you to reject this picture of reality, what else is missing from your picture?

Art, Possibility, and the World

Every so often you will think of some work of art that you like, and then you will imagine another, then you imagine the whole gamut of different works between those two, and then you will image all the art outside of them. You swell up contemplating the sheer possibility that art allows for: poetry, books, movies, video games, comics, painting, what have you.

When you contemplating all the possibility, for a brief moment you will feel as though you have found a meaning of life. You will feel as though art is something that you could live for: both consumption and creation.

In these moments, remind yourself that art is only capable of reflecting the world, not transcending the world. Perhaps you say it is unfair to expect it to do otherwise, or perhaps you think it is meaningless to talk of transcending the world, all the same place the limitation on art and you (if your experience is the same as mine) will find the feeling of having found something worth living for evaporate.

I say two things. The first is that art only reflects what is in the world, so why live our earthly lives for shadows when we can also live for the genuine articles? Take them both, why exclude one? The second is that it is the concept of infinite possibility that gets our heart pounding.

Worth

There are times when you find yourself passionately motivated to do something, but you find yourself intellectually doubting its worth. That is, you know that your emotions and your will are what cause you to find something worth your time or not, but you also develop an intellectual picture of yourself and your goals and what kind of things you value. You may find yourself feeling that something is worthwhile, but uncertain if it fits in with the rest of your desires and values. It is the intellect that moderates once the emotions have had their say.

In such a situation you have three options. First, reject the thing that captivated you, you were captivated only in a moment of weakness. Perhaps this is true in some cases, but more often than not it would seem to me that this is direction chosen by someone who does not want to see that their nature is more complex than their initially thought. Second, accept that perhaps your nature is more complex than you thought, but choose not to feed into those impulses. Choose to live up to the image of yourself you already have by refusing to indulge any additional desires or impulses until they atrophy as much as possible. This seems to be a noble choice, it takes responsibility for shaping one's own nature insofar as such a thing is possible, but it also seems potentially stifling and could turn someone into a caricature of a human being if they starve too many dimensions of their nature. Third, accept that your nature is more complex than you thought, and change your life to reflect that. This can be a dangerous option, as there are often parts of our nature we do not want to see influencing us, but can also be fulfilling if we find some deep desire that we had previously been neglecting to indulge.

The first option seems dishonest, and is essentially self-deception. I personally do not respect it. The other two we should alternate between on a case-by-case basis, depending upon the extent to which social norms, personal standards, and expediency in attaining other goals drives us to expand or not expand our list of goals, desires, and loves.

Sometimes, though, you cannot shake the feeling that the thing you really want to do might turn out to be a colossal waste of time. In my case at the moment, I have spent the last month dreaming up a Batman story that, according to my (very) early estimation would be around 252000 words at completion. That is a long ass time, that is a lot of effort, that is something that is very likely to not be finished. And even if I do finish it, it's a Batman story, it ain't getting published. At best it entertains people online. Having considered the certainty that the best I can hope for is creating something that maybe people like online, I still feel compelled to try it.

If nothing else, it will be the most ambitious project added to my list of abandoned projects. Or, who knows, maybe I'll follow through.

Sacrifice of Time and the Importance of Variation Revisited

In July of 2009 I wrote two blogs entitled Sacrifice of Time and The Importance of Variation. Sacrifice of Time used sacrifices as a metaphor for the fact that every activity we want to do in life requires that we give up moments of our lives that can never be retrieved or respent. The Importance of Variation comments that excessive free time makes it impossible to spend our moments productively because we always feel as though there is always more moments we can spend and therefore there is no urgency that compels us to expend energy right now.

That was over three years ago. At that time I had almost unlimited free time. At this point I tend to feel as though I get only wisps of free time here and there (I feel that way, but of course a busier man would say that I have plenty of free time. To try to look at it objectively, I am probably not that occupied at all, compared to the rest of productive society), which caused me to think back to these blogs. They seem all the more true when seen from the other side.

Whereas boredom defined my existence back then, it has all but been erased from my existence now. There is always more to be done than time to do it in. It is always a scramble to cobble free minutes together to put toward some goal or project I have. For the first time I can experience the resentment that people tend to feel when someone has wasted or is wasting their time. For the first time the Sacrifice of Time carries urgency for me; when I have to choose what to spend my free time on, I am aware of the fact that I am spending moments that I will never get back and moments that can only be spent on one thing.

I find that the danger in such a situation is diversity in desire. Desire itself is not the problem, in fact, desire is very much the thing keeping you alive. Rather it is diversity in desire, wanting too many things that have to compete for the same moments to be a part of your life. Pursuing one goal allows you to chase with all your energy and focus; pursuing two allows you to chase your primary goal with most of your energy while refreshing yourself chasing after the other; any more than that and you begin spreading yourself so thin that all you are doing is being interested in various hobbies. You never reach any kind of height.

The other danger is the danger of obligation and responsibility. When one has the structure of obligation to dictate most of the time you spend in a given week, it becomes tempting to just give up doing anything difficult with one's free time. You drift and allow obligation to make its demands upon you, the rest of your time is spent escaping challenge. This is very tempting, but unsatisfying, at least initially; I imagine it does not take very long to quiet that impulse that compels you to try to accomplish something outside of your obligations.

In a way, though, I suppose this was just a long way of explaining why I only had two blogs posted in October.

A Speculative Moment

Note: this is what I call Philosophical Fiction. It's speculation, it is fun, but it is not to be taken as a sincere search for the way things are, just a fun contemplation on the way things might be.

If there is a meaning to life, I do not think that it would be a meaning for us. We create hammers for a purpose so they have a purpose for us, but not for themselves. Computers are created to serve certain purposes for us, but they themselves have nothing to aspire to. Likewise, given the lack of a clear meaning for our lives, I should think that if there is a meaning to life it is not for us, not something that we aspire to, but something that we fulfill simply in the course of doing what we naturally do.

And if there should be a meaning to life, I would think that it lies in our diversity of experience and natures. Life produces a multitude of unique characters. Life can be thought of as a kind of arthouse, producing unique natures.

I think that the most persuasive theodicy I have ever encountered is the Irenaean theodicy. Making pain a part of the design is more effective than making pain a flaw in the design since the former does not force us to imagine an incompetent designer.

Religion, Even if True, May Not Be so Important

One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.

-C. S. Lewis

Meh....

-Comment Sections Everywhere

Suppose we were to be contacted by angels tomorrow. Spiritual beings would manifest themselves in physical form, call a press conference, and reveal the mysteries of the universe. They would tell us that religious claims (or at least some religious claims) were correct. There is a God. And they would consent to all manner of rigorous scientific examination to show that their bodies were composed of matter that could not be accounted for by the known universe, and then they would toss out some mind-blowing version of the Ontological Argument that made God's existence indisputable.

What would the world look like?

Over a year ago, I argued that it may be necessary for God - if there is a God - to obscure himself in order to keep the mundane realities of everyday life looking necessary for human beings. I still, for the most part, agree with what I wrote there: if God appeared in all his glory he would shatter our ability to be concerned about our own lives. However, if God himself did not appear, but his presence became a fact on par with any scientific hypothesis that we regularly rely upon, what would the world look like?

And my answer would be, not very different.

After the initial shock of having God's existence proven, we would have to realign our thinking a bit. The atheism movement would fragment between those who would become theists and those who would redefine atheism on moral grounds. The perceived enmity between science and religion would fade. But then, what?

Our lives are busy, our situations diverse, and our mental power limited. Most people will spend most of their time not particularly worried about God; they may give God a portion of their time and energy but they will also give a portion to family, work, sex, entertainment, sports, finances, maintenance, and personal hygiene. Even those we might consider intellectuals or reflective people will have to devote their mental energies to economics, chemistry, political science, cultural criticism, and the proper implementation of web standards. Indeed, even if God were a fact, he would be a fact that a great many people find useless given their own, limited projects. God will hardly capture everyone's heart simply because he has claimed territory in everyone's mind.

Human nature is diverse. Even if we remove the question of God's existence, not all human beings will react to God's existence the same way. Frankly, a lot of people don't spend a lot of time worried about God or spiritual matters at all. God occupies a place in nearly every person's mind, we all have moments where theistic questions seem significant to us, but for many of us these moments are fleeting. We have an entire life to live, only some of us are so inclined to grow obsessed over this one aspect of life.

In Praise of William James, with Constant Reference to Myself

When I heard of William James' paper The Will to Believe I thought to myself, "well, that sounds like something my perspectivist ass could gush all over," and it was! I did a quick read through of an HTML copy I found through Google tonight, I will probably have to read through it a few more times. Thus far it seems the paper can help my vocabulary immensely, serve as a recurring source of inspiration, and help to keep my focus aligned by comparing my approaches to his. He did differ from me in important areas, the chief one I am thinking of being when he most strongly endorsed his pragmatism.

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo [the beginning point] of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem [the end result]. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.

James clarifies that he has not given up on the quest or hope of truth. I, on the other hand, basically have. I am here talking of a kind of privileged truth: statements that are qualitatively better than all other statements that can be made on the relevant subject. Instead I rely on Geography of Thought, the idea that there are a collection of statements that can be made on a subject that all derive a legitimacy from the initial axioms and preferences that lend them comprehensibility. That is, James is willing to think according to his preferences and therefore is able to conceive of progress in thought, whereas I continue to fixate on the arbitrariness of my preferences and therefore cannot imagine our thoughts getting better, only different.

It should be noted, though, that James's thought approached human history in a far more active way than mine does. He was a psychologist, it is essential that he be able to say that his theories and ideas are in some way advancing the human condition. I, on the other hand, have chosen to stay nestled safely in my philosophical corner trying to understand the framework of propositions and human claims to knowledge. If I were to one day step into a science, I too would need a standpoint from which I could say that my scientific work were advancing human knowledge; for the moment, though, I can happily point out the futility of setting up any method of reasoning as being absolutely better than any other method.

Most impressive, though, was his argument endorsing religious belief. I have mostly made an implied argument for the justification of religious belief: that rationality depends on the context of an Epistemic Lens, and therefore under some Epistemic Lenses theism will be rational and under some it will be irrational. James's argument is far more detailed, but, on the face, I think it could also be characterized as providing an example of how theism looks through different lenses. He himself makes it clear that his argument is not coercive for a non-believer, his argument serves merely to justify the belief without condemning the lack thereof as it relies on what he calls the passional nature, which I would say is roughly equivalent to what I call love or preference, which differs in different men.

I aim to post another blog unpacking his main argument at a later time.

One Cannot Just Pick What to Believe

If I see red, then I see red. No matter how much I insist that I see blue, I know that it is red. The data is readily available, and even if I say, "I am looking at a blue expanse," I will know that I am lying. If it is my will that the expanse be blue, I will continue to see red, and I will know that I am lying if I say otherwise. Even if it is critical to the preservation of the species that the expanse be blue, I will continue to see red. I cannot deny it.

We can not deny what we know to be true. This must be recognized before you can understand how Epistemic Lenses work. Someone might suppose that Epistemic Lenses are a kind of epistemological anarchy; indeed there is chaos and anarchy in them, but they are not chaos through and through. I cannot look at a red point in the visual field and honestly say that I see blue. Rather, Lenses recognize that there is a disconnect between perception and reality, and in that disconnect we have no facts to appeal to that tell us how to interpret empirical data, let alone how to make ethical, aesthetic, or religious judgments. The data itself comes from outside of us, it is beyond our control and we know that we are lying if we misrepresent it. The framework, though, the axioms and the preferences (the intuitions and the loves) do not come from out there and for that reason we are free to intuit and to love as our nature dictates.

The Desire for Completion

Sometimes when you speak you begin wanting to get detailed, but when you begin getting detailed it becomes difficult to know when to stop detailing. We want what we say to have completion, we want it to touch on all of the relevant points.

Which means we have to make the subject smaller so as to be able to comment on all of it. We abstract away an enclosed system so that we can name all of its parts and their relations. In so doing, though, sometimes it will begin to look that we have created a fiction that is too simple to exist.

Those who are comfortable making abstract systems to detail - in hopes that they accurately paint a picture of some facet of reality that aid in understanding - can write essays and books.

Those who are not, just make remarks.

A More Detailed Explanation of Belief Substance

In my last blog, I wrote about what I called the "substance of belief," which I characterized as the ability for a belief to move the believer. I mentioned as examples a person who claims to believe in equality but then consistently displays racist or sexist behavior and a person who believes that he is in sin, believes that hell is horrifying, and believes that his sin warrants hell. When I had someone read that blog, they said to me, "that's not a lack of belief - that's just hypocrisy."

Rereading my blog I see where my error lied. My examples painted a narrow picture, both examples are also examples of hypocrisy, so it would be easy to suppose that I was only talking about the fact that people claim to believe one thing but live as though that belief never factored into their practical reasoning. What I really mean to say is that all beliefs have a measurable dimension - what I have arbitrarily dubbed "substance" - that shows the extent to which the believer's life is impacted by the belief.

This dimension of substance allows us to distinguish beliefs based on the influence they hold over the believer. Not merely in the case of hypocrisy, but also in the case of moral beliefs, scientific beliefs, entertaining beliefs, and what have you. I shall try to draw out this concept in greater detail now.

Binary: Believed or ~Believed
Continuum 1: Nearness of Subject Matter [Near - Far]
Continuum 2: Influence over Believer's Life (Substance) [Substantial - Insubstantial]

Because I am here concerned only with beliefs, all of these categories assume a positive belief. So for the Binary listed above, I will not be dealing with ~Believed cases.

Distant Facts

Continuum 1: Far
Continuum 2: Insubstantial

In this category I would put nearly the entirety of objective facts about the world. Not all of them, of course, and the exact proportions would vary from person to person, but every person is completely unaffected by whether or not they acknowledge the truth of most true facts about the world. Park Rangers do not change their behavior based on the latest research on the evolution of Norse Mythology; MMA fighters lead the same lives whether they believe Robin Hood was a historical or a fictional figure; almost everyone you know will behave in the same way no matter what they believe about Quantum Physics; and the fact that light can not escape a black hole does not enter into anyone's consideration of how they should spend their weekend.

Frankly, most information, even true information, just does not matter. So any beliefs pertaining to these facts will barely influence the believer's life. For that reason, I say that these beliefs lack substance, but I also qualify this by saying that there is no reason for these beliefs to have substance.

Near Facts/Beliefs

Continuum 1: Near
Continuum 2: Substantial

Of course, facts pertaining to human biology or facts pertaining to human relationships or historical facts can matter a great deal. Maybe the theory of evolution gives you a new appreciation for yourself and your species or maybe it causes you to feel worthless - either way you will behave at least a little differently. Whether or not you and your cousin get along will determine what you get her for her birthday. The fact that a neighboring country once occupied your country will probably affect your political behavior. These facts have substance because people behave differently depending on what they believe.

Included in this category are our loves, which can not possibly be distant from us, and all that make up our framework/vantage points.

Insincerity

Continuum 1: Near
Continuum 2: Insubstantial

Included here are all those examples I included in my last blog: cases where someone claims to believe something that should affect them greatly, but then does not actually enter into their practical reasoning. People who claim to believe in hell, but then do nothing to avoid it. People who claim to believe that health is the most important thing in life, but then eat junk food and smoke regularly. People who claim that they believe in seizing the day, but then actively maintain a blog.

How do we determine when a belief should affect the believer? The believer is the the measure. The believer's claimed beliefs about his own values determines this. So if someone says, "I believe in putting health first," or says, "I think religion is very important," then we can say that his beliefs regarding health and theology should affect him greatly.

If his behavior does not correspond with his beliefs, we can say that some of his beliefs must lack substance, and we can say that in these cases this is indicative of insincerity.

Beloved Details

Continuum 1: Far
Continuum 2: Substantial


Sometimes you encounter someone who really cares about some seemingly obscure fact or the proper observance of some seemingly inessential custom or rule. Now sometimes this makes sense in the larger context of their vantage point, in which case you just note that people are indeed diverse and their value systems are likewise diverse. Other times, though, you will find that someone really cares about the truth of some belief, but they can not really tell you why it matters. Maybe they even acknowledge that there is no great reason for some given belief to be put on a pedestal, but they put it there anyway.

For example, anyone who makes sure you know the exact shade of green that the woman Kirk fucked in episode 85 of the original Star Trek, or anyone who makes sure that you know that their jacket is authentic leather, or anyone who will not let you forget that time they escaped from a rampaging bear in the woods. Even in their own worldview, these people probably can acknowledge how inconsequential these details are, and yet they love them. The man with the authentic leather jacket probably knows that no one's life will be affected by the authenticity of their cowskin, but they derive joy from the fact, which alters their behavior insofar as they set aside time or resources to enjoy these beliefs or to enhance the facts of the world so as to further enjoy their corresponding beliefs.