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I've found the necessary condition of assuming atheism in a lot of cog.sci discussions can become a kind of "the floor is lava," constraint, where it seems like a game where you can reason about these things credibly so long as you don't fall into a deist trap.

Hopping from island to island of logical consistency is fun and drives material innovation, which even perhaps provides a kind of moral teleology you can backfit to political problems - but viewed from outside, it can seem like a bit of a game.

It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI, maybe a question for Google's Vatican office (if there were one)?

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I have had extensive conversations with a theologian, my father (he has a doctorate in theology). I finally decided that I don’t have to change his mind, he has faith and that’s all there is to it. He’s well read, believes in science, evolution, etc. However, he accepts that there is an all powerful god so practically no argument can change that belief.

With respect to cognition, when I asked him about the possibility that computer thought might be indistinguishable from human or at least higher level animal thought some day, his reply was that such would be a kind of an illusion of consciousness but that “real” consciousness is by definition not a mechanical thing and only possible in a living organism.

I feel like most religious people are like my father in that they have unexamined categories that allow religious ideas to coexist with modern science in their personal metaphysics.

I love my father so we simply don’t talk about religion (or politics) anymore.

How did a perfectly reasonable conversation and disagreement cause you to decide that you can't talk to him about religion anymore?

Because you can reach a perfectly amicable point where you realize that one person's belief is a decision - you understand their arguments, they understand yours, but nothing that either of you say will change the other person's mind. We tend to think that people think through the options and go for the most salient one, but sometimes they say, "I'm going to believe this" and then they do. In that case, you'd have to unseat their will to change their mind.

You can also reach a point where, as you said, they’re not fanatical or cut off from science and objectivity, they just have a lens through which they view it all. It’s a tough life, and a belief in a higher purpose or underlying cause must be very comforting to some, and if they can still accept reality as it exists, what’s the harm? If they’re not out to convert you, or argue that Earth is 6000 years old, then there are probably better things to discuss than their faith.

it also exposes confirmation/cognitive biases apparently even if you don't even know you had one or still deny it

Maybe approach the discussion as not requiring the outcome of one person convincing another but simply gaining a deeper understanding of each other to increase intimacy.

It's like trying to change prior probability of one, using Bayesian updates. You can try it, but it is pointless and causes frustration.

It works other way around too. You can't Bayesian update prior probability in (0, 1) range into 0 or 1.

> he has faith

Like you

> he accepts that there is (not) an all powerful god so practically no argument can change that belief

Like you.

Atheist is a belief system. Inflexible and closed-minded.

Is not way around that. You can't take a position and at the same time claim to be open to all positions. Any change of side requiere some extraordinary event.

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If God build the brain, part of the "materials" and "formula" are OUTSIDE our reality. How can a Super Mario Bros character build a human-like brain if in his realm not exist biologic material, and their natural laws are a snapshot of the full ones?

Its interesting how some react to the idea, as if it were a insult. Is not. The problem is not be self-aware of it.

Yes, I've heard this argument before (from my father), but I don't buy it. First, I'm not, perhaps, what you are claiming, a close minded inflexible atheist. I am perfectly willing to consider claims backed by evidence. So far, most religious claims don't seem to persuade me, the gods I've heard of don't seem to be consistent with what I observe in the real world.

The idea of an omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient perfect god seems quite fantastic. Where is the evidence? I've seen with my own eyes manuscripts in a museum describing dragons and there have been many such descriptions over centuries[1], but would you believe that I had one in my back yard? What would it take for you to believe that I had one there? You might want to see it, for example, but I have to say that it's invisible. Well, you might ask me how I know its there if nobody can see it. Would you simply believe me if I said that I know it's there because I can talk to it in my head and that sometimes it even answers my wishes (but not always). I think that fantastic claims like the dragon in my backyard can reasonably be dismissed until there is solid evidence.

Perhaps I don't believe in your God, but you likely don't believe is a hundred others that humans have believed in either. I simply don't believe in one hundred and one. However, I am open to the possibility of an explanation for the universe's big questions, I just haven't seen it yet.

[1] https://www.genesispark.com/exhibits/evidence/historical/dra...

What would be interesting to me is whether someone working from the faith presumption might yield useful ideas for what we're concluding from a material view. Ethically in particular.

It's not so much discussing whether (a given) religion is true, but what the consequences of a religious premise may be, and whether they provide useful tools. We've been studying it for millennia, surely there is something helpful in there. If we necessarily exclude it, asking what the consequences of that negative definition are is also worth considering.

There are things we believe today that mean persons have political rights, but personhood itself is a pretty rough consensus with some big ethical arguments around the edges (animals, cells, chimeras, corporations, lab specimens, bladerunners, etc.) Does it suffer, should it, and how might that change us if it does, or doesn't?

Of course we can sound these things out for ourselves, but the silliness around consciousness studies seemed rooted in that very effort, and to me its worth asking if it's an artifact of the constraints we've imposed.

The interesting question is, what is it about consciousness that gives rise to religious beliefs?

It's not "unexamined" (I'm referring to why intelligent people maintain religious belief). It's more about where one stands on the chicken-or-the-egg question. Did God endow us with consciousness, or does consciousness endow us with this temptation to believe, which is itself a form of qualia, one that's untethered from anything external (i.e. the sky being blue because of wavelengths of light).

There must be a reason why humans are burdened by this but my dog and cat are not.

Oddly, it would be interesting why evolution would select for a tendency toward having beliefs. If dogs and cats had "it," but were simply unburdened by needing to reconcile it with their facility to act through others (language), it could be seen to exist in them.

Fish returning to spawning grounds could be an expression of belief, just as ritual fighting among deer during the rut, bees doing mating dances, etc. There is an underlying urge to continue life, and rituals for efficient, relatively non-destructive sorting for collective survival emerge across species.

That our sorting uses our unique facility (language) kind of makes sense.

> It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI,

Best I can do, is this guy. Paper in the middle of the page, not without a lot of controversy

http://www.ctmu.net/

also on a side note, in my opinion all AI will inherently be bad and psychopathic. You got Teslas killing about one person a week, evil laughing Echo's, microsoft chatbots going full racist/pro-Hitler, AI creating flash crashes, etc, etc. When ever I read an article framing AI positively, I am aware that they are aware that they know this and preemptively dictate a counternarrative.

It would be really interesting to read a theologians view of AI, maybe a question for Google's Vatican office (if there were one)?

The problem with that view is that when you dig into it, it’s always a permutation of, “God did it,” or “Because God said so.” There isn’t much to work with there, and you can use it to justify literally anything at all because it’s free from the constraints of logic. You could equally argue that a machine can never have a soul, and no consciousness, or that god could just decree it does, and who’s to really say otherwise? There is no there, there.

They're implying that when you involve God you'll also pick up the Roman Catholic catechism. The real problem with trying to bring religion in to these debates comes from trying to pick the religion! Nonspecific God is actually the same as atheism for the reason you point out - you can't make any prior statements about what God will do, which is the same as not being able to make any prior statements about what Nature will do. Physicists have historically interchanged God and Nature (casually, they aren't trying to say anything) when they're talking, and it works for this reason.

Exactly. At the end of the day science is all about “How” although some scientists being human, understandably do sometimes wade into the “Why” end of it. Science is great at delving into how something works, without bothering with a “why” and nowhere is that better expressed than in Langrangian formulations.

When people try to inject Why into science, they’re missing the point, and the same is true of trying to inject How into religion.

It's also possible that there is a meaningful "why." From the perspective of mystical traditions, apparently physical reality is an expression of God's mind. Why God is having this particular dream can then be answered meaningfully, by entering into direct gnosis -- because you are, after all, Him.

The hard part is testing this objectively. In a lucid dream, you might understand why the Dreamer is generating this particular setup, but until you can demonstrate it to the satisfaction of others in the dream, it's not very useful to them.

It’s possible that there is a god or something similar, but it’s not possible, as you say, to test it (at least not in the foreseeable future) in a meaningful way. We just don’t know, and have no way or knowing. Anyone can float a view from dreaming gods, through gnostic concepts, to simulated reality, and we have no evidence for or against and no real hope of finding such evidence.

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