MoFo's Religion

So check this out, it'll probably help. Let's call the entire space of the picture "being." Thus existence is just a formatting of this Multiple into Ones (objects). Everything in a circle is One, but as the picture shows, the One isn't really there. It's just like a bunch of Multiples NAMED One. So, the One is an 'illusion.' Science is a (One) discourse in existence. It is totally within existence, but not all things (Ones, objects) in existance are subsumed by science, although most are, since science tries to formalize existence. Pizza, for example, can partially be understood by science, but of course there are other things that make up pizza like subjective tastes (also One -- one flavor, two flavors).

The supplement is merely that which 'groups' the One. Every One has a supplement, so everything line represents the supplement.

So you don't get existence for free. You have a supplement. The supplement is just on the edge of existence. It's a slicing of the Multiple into existences. The Multiple is still all there is. Like legos. You have six legos and you assemble them into a tower, but realy there are still six legos. This logic works all the way down for being.

You can give, like, six legos a different name, but they're still what they are, six multiple legos. The supplement acts like the proper name of objects, grouping them into Ones without actually doing anything to it to justify the grouping.

Human understanding begins in existence, but of course we can implicitly experience the Multiple: for example, something might taste sweet, then sweet-sour, then sweet-sour-bitter...

Like how unexperienced wine tasters taste One flavor but experienced wine tasters taste dozens.

Attachments

 

there are six legos

you first call them each by different names

then you call them all by one name

this is how objects are made

the name is supplement to existence

the name is also a thing

we don't need transcendent ideas or god to justify grouping the legos one way or another

it's that easy

Okay, but...what part of that links says what you said it did? Where's the physical model for free will? You said it was there, and I don't see it.

The fact that we have never observed any molecule in any experiment that exhibited choice about how to react, ever. We have never observed an object of any size that, when colliding with another, simply refuses to react to it in accordance with the physical laws we have codified. That's not just empirical evidence, it's a ton of empirical evidence.

The closest we've ever come to an exception is the famous "double slit" quantum experiment, where (I'm heavily simplifying) a particle was either traveling as a particle or a wave depending on whether or not we observed it beforehand. That's it. And even that has only led scientists to believe that such things may be random; it presents no mechanism for control.

Ugh, this is deeply discouraging. Amazingly, improbably, after all this back and forth, you still have no idea what the argument is about. Please take special note of this next paragraph:

Determinism says that whatever you did, you were going to do. That doesn't mean people don't change. Of course people change. It just means they were always going to change. Their habits were predetermined, and so were the changes they made later. If you thought about doing one thing, then did another, determinism says that you were always going to think about the one thing and then do the other. If someone says "but I almost chose the other way!," a determinist says "yes, and you were always going to almost choose the other thing." And they say this because they think your mind is just more physical matter, and therefore isn't special or magical and is governed by causality, the same as all other matter.

Even suggesting there is "evidence" against this idea suggests confusion. It's not possible to have hard evidence against this idea, because it's literally impossible to show that anyone could have made a different choice than they did.

No, determinism does not say we are ruled by instinct. It says our actions are predetermined. Whether someone makes a choice on a lark or by sitting and thinking about it for hours first makes no difference. The only idea is that, whatever you ended up doing, you were going to do.

Have you really been arguing against determinism this entire time thinking it's about people not being able to change and being ruled by instinct?

Really? What laws are those? Please tell me which law governs what happens when one molecule hits another, and why it doesn't apply inside your skull.

No, my empirical evidence is us never observing anything like you're talking about in any controlled setting, ever.

Nope. You keep trying to shift this question, and it's not going to work. Saying all molecules react to things is not the same thing as saying all molecules are identical. There are different types of molecules. But none of them get to decide whether or not to react to a force set upon it.

Here's a helpful analogy: if I say everything is subject to gravity, it's not a counterargument to say "I'm not subject to gravity because I'm way more complicated than something like a rock. We're made of different stuff." That would be nonsense, because both complicated and uncomplicated objects are all subject to gravity. As a physical law it makes no distinction based on complexity. The fact that you're made of different stuff doesn't mean the individual parts of that stuff gets to react differently to the physical laws of the universe.

So what you're positing is that there's some other physical law (which one?) that isn't like gravity, because a rock has to obey it and your brain doesn't. So what is this law, and why does your brain get special treatment from it? I've been asking this question for an entire week, and you can't give me an answer.

Okay, first off...that image is hilarious. I actu-laughed when I saw it. I think it was the "pizza" circle that did it. I showed it to my wife. So good job, even if nothing else comes from this.

Onto the stuffs:


So far, I'm pretty sure I'm with you. But in the sense of understanding what you mean and more or less agreeing with it.


Great analogy. I'm still with you, with the tiny caveat of wanting to clarify "you don't get existence for free." Being human means inevitably categorizing things, recognizing patterns, grouping things according to a sense of their "essence," etc., but I wonder why you would call this a "price." It's something we do, but that's about all we know for sure, yeah?

Got it.

Greg, Cornelius, etc.

UberLego.

It's also how cool towers are made.

Ruh-roh. We're losing the signal...

...and it's gone. Why is the name a "thing"? Isn't the underlying assumption that the mere idea of categorization is some kind of thing in and of itself? That concepts are as real as physical objects? If so, that seems like a leap. I don't think a materialist has to posit any kind of significance to our use of concepts. Just a smart animal trying to grapple with a whole lot of data points.

Of course we don't. But who suggested we did? I think I would've remembered an argument as insane and awesome as "this lego is called Cornelius, which proves there's a God."

Are you not arguing for free will here? Are you saying you want to transfer this logical structure onto, I dunno, morality or something?

Yeah exactly. It doesn't matter what the supplement is. It's different for pretty much every object. It has to be, why else would they be distinct objects?

The reason why I say "price" is because the materialist says that, 'in actuality,' everything is meaningless, formless, etc. Yet, as we come into the world in which we find ourselves, we get all kinds of forms, meanings, etc. How? From where? The materialist MUST explain this.

Deconstruction, for example, is the materialist move of decomposing the One into Multiple, but it never answers the question, how was it we ever experienced meaning that was NOT deconstructed? How is it that, despite your deconstructions, we continue to experience it, even if you've shown that our meaning really is, deep down, meaningless.

So we pay the 'price' of 'sacrificing' a Multiple for the SOLE TASK of counting the thing in question. It's like Christ paying for our sins. The sin in question is existence. Existence is an illusion. That's a sin. Existence is finitude, and Augustine said that all sins are derived from our finitude. So maybe there is Christian wisdom in this.

Still, in this way, God is a way of getting meaning for free. We dont have to pay anything. God stands outside, like the Fed, and just imposes meaning. The same is said for Plato. Being sacrifices nothing to get the One. The Ideas do all the work.

Again, it doesn't matter what processes we're talking about --- pattern recognition, optical illusion, bias, etc. -- the point is there is a supplement to every object.

When you talk about human beings EXISTING, it merely means we've woken up in the World that is already CUT UP. Multiples are the things that DO the cutting, and there are Multiples that do EVERY CUT. Why else would a Multiple be Multiple?

So the fact that we woke up in one cut is rather unextraordinary. It does make it rather hard for us to comprehent what DOES the cutting, since everything is already cut, but the materialist says it's just the Multiple we call supplement.

That's it, really. We get pizza and science, and I'm fine with that. All the beauty and truth is found when we want to break out of the cut in which we find ourselves. That's much more complicated.

DUDE, now I know we're singing the same song, because I haven't at all justified WHY THE NAME IS A THING.

Concepts are not what we're talking about though. They really aren't. Concepts are already One. One concept, two concepts... yep, they are definitely One. Same with names. Yoda is One name, so is Chris. It's just an analogy that I can make WITHIN existence. What the supplement is is not a concept or a name, though it is a name by analogy.

So, what is the supplement? The supplement is WHAT (a Multiple that) DESTROYS THE OBJECT, what reduces it to Multiple.

It is the 'realization' that the name is just a name, to make an analogy with name.

Now, I don't mean it's a bomb or a hammer. I just mean, the supplement is whatever OBJECT(S) make it possible to REALIZE that the object is just it's Multiples. The supplement is that which an Object cannot 'account' for. It is that within the object that the object cannot address in any way. That's why I say supplement lies at the edge of an object.

The object itself cannot 'address' the supplement, yet the supplement realizes the object as it is. Can you see yet how this is free will at its finest? There is this STUFF in (or around, or whatever) every object that the object is TOTALLY INDIFFERENT to. Whatever this STUFF is (and it's different for each object), that stuff is the space for its freedom?



What more do I need to say except that freedom is the freedom of an object to RENAME itself.

Do you instantly also see the political implications of this? How the proletariat are the unaccounted for class that 'renames' the regime of capitalism into a different object, namely, communism?

If an object is just a multiple with a proper name, then it cannot pronounce its own name without realizing that it is just a multiple.

When the object does pronounce its own name, the object is destroyed and, until it takes on a different name, is under the influence of no other object.

This space of movement is the space of Truth.

Science can destroy and rebuild itself. The process of science is one in which science discovers its own name, the Truth of its existence, becomes utterly multiple, and reconstitutes itself.

The same is said of will. Our self-reflexivity allows us to constantly pronounce the name of our will, constantly destroy it, throw it into the free space of the multiple, and reconstitute it.

Is anybody but Yoda and PN reading all this?

__________________
"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

Okay, but what about the stuff that science DOES explain....mainly the stuff that disproves things in the bible. Where does that come in?

I'm not sure how anyone can be expected to answer that if you don't outline what you think science has disproved in the Bible.

Profound Apologies Yodes, you walked into this one.

__________________
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.

Soz, been busy, and replying to this accurately needed me to dig into my bag of sci articles. I'll try and stay quantumly coherent ...

*EDIT* I think the conversation will go more smoothly if i put this bit first:

If you were to start with "The universe seems to be mainly deterministic" and to end with "and so free will is very possibly an illusion" I'd be totally with you

But...

The problem here is that your first principle is over-stated. It is contentious to insist that "all physical matter responds to cause and effect". Yet you assert it as a 100% fait accompli. Not only do scientific exceptions & doubts concerning your statement exist, but many could feasibly impinge on our human realm. To ignore the facts and inferences contained in these schools of science, without valid justification, would truly be to exhibit 'a level of skepticism of empirical data' etc.

To keep things compact, here are two brief examples:

(NB I'm linking to norty reproductions of New Sci articles here. I'd encourage interested parties to pay for the original content tho, as it's a great publication )

• The Landauer-Lloyd limit strongly suggests "a fundamental limit to the precision of physics" on a universal scale - a 'fuzziness' that applies to deterministic laws. It also counters known impediments to the possiblity of 'strong emergence' - IE as yet unknown "organising principles that come into play beyond a certain threshold of complexity". In combination, this apparent physics norm, and the latter theory, open new avenues of investigation into complex systems, such as the biological, and the quantum/classical threshhold. On the former they say, with some predictive strength, that complex amino acids couldn't be derived from the universal first principles as we understand them, but may be explained by 'emergent' laws. And on the quantum threshold, they posit a (as yet untestable) possibility that "the transition from quantum to classical might occur... at about 400 particles".
  
  
• Researchers Kofler and Brukner are among those investigating 'bigger Schrödinger cats' - IE nigh-'classical' physics objects exhibiting quantum behaviour. They have gone a step further by seemingly demonstrating that there is no quantum/classical threshold as such - IE "that what we perceive as classical reality can emerge gradually from quantum law" & "Reality is fundamentally quantum but looks classical to us".

I think these two alone are reasonable challenges to 100% assertions that "all physical matter responds to cause and effect". *EDIT* The 'fuzziness' of deterministic laws over deep time and the necessity of further laws to explain known phenomena are reasonable grounds for questioning assertions of their absolute primacy. And furthermore (on a perhaps dangerously new-age note ), surely a world where quantum effects can be observed macroscopically gives one pause for thought in terms of the classical/quantum boundary.

(PS you should stop saying 'particles' obey deterministic laws stringently, as you have elsewhere, as that's precisely the realm where things get a bit 'fuzzy' ).

---

There are aspects of the above studies & theories that I find dubious, but the fact is they are part of ongoing scientific investigation and have many testable elements. Ignoring their implications, at least without providing grounds for rebuttle, would be unwise. (And besides, I've got more if you don't like these ones )

Amongst the varied questions they evoke, my favourite is the one about whether quantum effects could feasibly be active in some way at a particulate level in the way consciousness is formed, adding an indeterministic spin to otherwise deterministic processes. I have no idea, but it seems difficult to preclude the possiblity. (And as we've mentioned on other free will threads, even if we had freedom to decide, but no freedom to act on said decisions, that would still constitute a form of free will).


But that's not what I'm doing. I'm talking about current theories, and reasonable extrapolations. As part of the process of 'falsifying' your first premise a touch

But now... onto the other stuff...



I was with you up until you said utility. A materliaist would struggle to claim objective morality exists, sure. But objective utility? In terms of the biological world, that's practically a building block of darwinistic thought etc.

Indeed . Although there are many areas of complexity-from-'simplicity' & 'survival against the odds' that could be marvelled at without immediately bring Anthropic Principles lolloping into view. Meteors etc have plastered many of God's creatures into the geological furniture - the very fact that biological life keeps dancing it's evolving dance is astounding enough. You could call it God, I could call it lucky-ish odds. (*SINGS* Let's call the whole thing off )

What's funny here is, by this logic, none of my logic is logic. You think I should believe all logic is instinct. So why are we even having this discussion? (PS you can't predicate my mid-argument reasoning with your pre-argument conclusion. Just coz you think I shouldn't believe in logic, doesn't mean I should )

As I've mentioned, there are logical reasons to marvel at existence in statistical / complexity terms. We could even apply them to the sunset if you like, layering in to the experience the added knowledge about the sun's staggering distance / vital role in our existence etc etc.

On the actual sensation of wonder, that's a different issue. As much as we've just mentioned Darwinistic 'utility', it's worth mentioning that is also embraces 'free rider' adaptions that might no longer play a role, or never played one at all. I've no idea if the sensation of wonder is a vestige of something that helped us survive in the past, a 'free rider' aspect of some other useful adaption, or whatever. Frankly it wasn't an argument I was making

This strikes me as an argument for another thread. You could call it "There is no reason to trust evolved thought". And I would respond to it

I'm going to do a 'will' here, as I'm not sure what you mean. So I'll just say...

'Meaning has many meanings'

Nope, but there are a lot of significant assumptions.

Not least of which being the one about 'conscience' having no potential role or importance in a 'materlialistic' world. One for the 'evolved thought' thread perhaps

__________________
Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Ah yes, famed theologian Joe Rogan.

99% of these arguments are going to merit the same response: not everything in the Bible is literal. Some of it is quite obviously not. When the Bible says His Word has "lighted" upon Israel in the Book of Isiah, it doesn't mean he put a giant light in the sky, either.

There are some good questions to ask about how to interpret the Bible, but in my experience almost all of the arguments trying to "disprove" it are really just people going way out of their way to interpret it in whatever way allows them to make it look most ridiculous.

And if it seems like Christians use "it's a metaphor" as a defense a lot, it's because skeptics like to interpret things in staggeringly literal ways in order to attack it a lot.

EDIT: I wanted to add something else. The idea that science has disproved the Bible is almost invariably based on something we didn't know then, that we do know now, which would indicate the Bible was just written by some dudes who were subject to the ignorance of their time. But that's not the case here. You didn't need any modern scientific advancements to know that elephants ate a lot of food, or that you couldn't fit a billion animals on a boat. This is not an example of some ancient story where sheer ignorance made it believable. It was never literally believable, even back then. Which means the people who believed it were not gullible; they either took it as metaphor, or they took it as a miracle.

Yoda - You claim that most Christians don't believe Hell as a place that it use to be depicted and that most Christians say the stories in the bible are metaphors, but you are in the minority. 2/3 out of everyone I've talked to believe Hell is where you go when you sin and it's full of fire and torment and that the stories in the bible are true. TRUE. When I was a kid I took them as metaphors, but I kept having people tell me, no, it really happened.

You basically try to disprove an argument, simply by stating that you know the argument exists. I can't believe you are saying that the story was never believable when a lot of people believe it. People back then are more gullible than they are now. I find it hilarious that their excuse for believing such a story is the same word you just used, Miracle. Try to sit down and talk to these people, I'm sure flimmaker can substitute for us.

Q: How Noah's Ark happen?
A: Miracle

Q: How can a fire bush talk to someone
A: Miracle

Q: How can someone part the sea?
A: Miracle

Q: How can someone raise someone else from the dead?
A: He's Jesus / Miracle


It seems to be the same answer for everything when in reality they don't have an answer. Science looks for answers and constantly changes their answers based on what we find. Religion says this happened, when it has been disproven, they say NOPE. This happened because it says so in this book a bunch of dude wrote in thousands of years ago. It's ignorance.

The Bible itself is a book with huge edits. How many scriptures did not go in? More than the ones that did and which ones didn't? The ones that id not jive with what the guys putting it together wanted it to say. So now we have a book that claims to speak the truth, with edits. Why not give everything to us and let us decide? Give us the whole "truth", not what certain people claim it to be. Control. I allude back to why it was all created in the beginning, but like I said before, it's quite different today, so don't try to debate about religion in our generation to that statement.

My favourite parts of the bible are when it either contradicts itself, or it doesn't explain itself. I understand the bible is NOT a scientific book trying to explain the mechanics of it all, but if that's the case, people need to stop preaching it as fact.

As for science disproving the bible....did we not already cover this? I don't want to go read about how old the earth is.

These are two statements thrown around A LOT, that I hear.

God is infallible. The Bible is the true word of God.

So if the bible is inaccurate, then God is fallible. Therefore....does he exist?

I want flim to answer....

Hell is something Catholics believe in, most anyway. Purgatory also!

Science can't explain everything (Multiple), but it can explain every object (One). It's even created a few objects in its time. Furthermore, science is always undergoing the process of revising its objects and therefore itself. So, at one point in time, that which science cannot explain might be explained at a future point in time or has already been explained in the past but is explained no longer.

If God comes in just where science ends, then God is equivalent to the Multiple, and that's pretty odd, because then God is just this indeterminate noise of differences from which we cut out different configurations of existence.

Like I said, there might be a beautiful religious analogy here, though it remains firmly on the level of poetry.

Well, first of all, I didn't say "most." My exact words were "I don't think it's a hugely rare idea," and it isn't, even by your own estimations. Also, my experience simply differs from yours; most of the Christians I knew didn't think so literally, or at least were more nuanced about it. I don't really care, for the purposes of this argument, whether or not this interpretation is believed by 15% of Christians or 85%. The point is the merit of the idea itself. The Bible is vague, so we don't know. Maybe that's why you can get all sorts of crazy interpretations: people are free to fill Hell in with their own ideas about sin, and those ideas aren't always very nice or very forgiving. Good thing they're not the ones who do the judging then, huh?

That said, you've made a number of arguments that basically amount to "well, here's what Christians I know said." But why? Do you think it poses a problem for the Bible itself if someone takes part of it literally? Do you think it poses a problem for me and whatever I'm saying if you grew up with people who preached a certain way to you? What relevance do you think this has? I don't wait for you to say The Usual Suspects is awesome and then tell you some story about some guy I knew who totally misunderstood it and says it sucks.

I'm not averse to hearing your experiences, mind you, but you present them as counterarguments, and I don't see why. Did I make an argument somewhere that Christians are uniformly awesome people, and then just forget?

Not at all. I said that it's not really finding contradictions in the Bible if you only find them by trying to deliberately misread it. If you decide to blithely take it completely literally, yeah, you'll find problems. You can make lots of things sound silly that way, because it's impossible to write about metaphysical things without analogies, parables, or symbolism.

People back then were ignorant of many things, which is not the same thing as being gullible. And what part can't you believe? Do you think people 2,000 years ago had no idea big animals ate lots of food? Or had no sense of how many animals could fit into a space? There's no scientific advance that makes these things seem more plausible now than they did then. It was always an incredible claim.

So your argument is...what? That God can't perform miracles? These are not separate claims, they are one claim: they are the claim that God performs miracles. It's not as if it's easy to believe He would perform one, but hard to believe He would perform 100. The Bible has miracles in it; ya' got me there. I don't deny it. I'm not sure what listing them has to do with anything. Either you find the idea that there's a God that performs miracles plausible, and they're all plausible, or you don't find it plausible, in which case you really only need one.

Science is for studying the physical world. But it has literally nothing to do with whether or not there's a God, and if so, what that God might be like. I'm not sure why you keep juxtaposing the two, as if they had any direct relationship.

The only way I can make sense of this is that you're simply describing the way religious thought can encourage people to become intellectually lazy. Which is entirely true. It carries that danger with it, even if you think it's true. And empiricism has its own pitfalls and dangers, too. But both are either true or false regardless of the certain types of vices they may lend themselves to.

Control to what end? You keep saying control, but there are any number of ways in which Christianity is ill-suited for controlling people, which I explained in my earlier response to the claim. It's sure used to control people, but not by the people who allegedly created it.

And I don't know what "don't try to debate about religion in our generation to that statement" means.

As literal fact? Yeah, absolutely, they do need to stop that. I agree completely. Not only because it's wrong and silly, but because apparently atheists will gladly use it to discredit the entire text, rather than the people taking it literally.

A perfectly logical argument...if you accept all the premises listed. Obviously, the point of dispute is whether or not the Bible is inaccurate.

I guess I answered this in the previous question.. But if rocks and I are so much alike, let's make them citizens and give them the right to vote.

__________________
It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

Understood. Which means a materialist believing in free will is at least a very sketchy proposition. You're just not sure it's literally impossible or completely contradictory. Doesn't bode much better for anyone trying to have it both ways, but I understand the scope of your criticism.

But it's not my premise. The argument is "if you believe these three things, there's a contradiction." If they hedge a little, okay, the argument changes a bit. I think it presents them with entirely different hurdles, but the degree to which they can bend on that proposition is the degree to which they can avoid contradicting themselves outright.

Which is just fine. Because then the conversation shifts towards what evidence they actually have for the belief, and that's really just out of the frying pan and into the fire.

A lot to take in here, but some observations:

1) I love that after all the stuff with will about how he's made of different stuff than rocks, and how silly claiming otherwise would sound to a scientist, the very first bit of text in the very first link says this:

"TAKE a bucketful of subatomic particles. Put them together one way, and you get a baby. Put them together another way and you'll get a rock."

Gee, how about that?

2) The things that may "kick in" at certain levels of complexity may be so, but it just barely rises to the level of hypothesis, let alone theory, let alone empirical evidence. And even then, it only posits an "organizing principle," which is more like an additional physical law, and not the absence of a physical law that is required to create the possibility of choice. Like every attempt to talk about free will scientifically, it focuses almost entirely on whether or not behavior is theoretically predictable, not predetermined. That's why he starts talking about bits and entropy and what kind of calculations are even feasible.

3) It cuts both ways, too: if someone says we could discover something next that makes X seem possible, I could say we'll discover something after that that makes X seem impossible again. It's kind of a futile exercise. The only way to defend will's specific position, then, which seems to be based on mere conjecture about what could maybe happen at some point, is to admit that you don't form your beliefs based on the weight of their evidence; you just sort of arbitrarily decide what feels right and if the evidence doesn't line up, you'll just say you're holding out for more evidence. It will have avoided literal contradiction at the expense of some other absurdity.

4) While the first link is great and fascinating (and I thank you for linking me to it), I don't think it adds to the conclusion we've already reached on this topic. We're still back where we started, talking about randomness and unpredictability, but nothing that implies choice.


Also, there's a bit of a catch 22 here, because free will can't be scientific, by definition. The only way to make it seem scientific/materialistic is to explain it scientifically. And if we can do that, that means we've found a cause and effect: a repeatable experiment that predicts an outcome. And once we've done that, we've disproven free will. QED. There's no way around it. That's why I keep saying that the question is as much a logical one as a scientific one.

I plead guilty on the terminology. Sometimes I say particles, sometimes molecules. There's no one good term for this, I'm really just looking for "very small element that reacts to other elements." Sometimes I even say "stuff" or "something" just to avoid confusion.

It sounds like "subatomic particles" is what I'm looking for, though. I believe that's the level where the basic blocks don't differ, they're just arranged differently, yeah? Regardless, please pardon me if I name the wrong Russian nesting doll.

We're not quite on the same page. I didn't say a materialist would struggle with utility; I said utility would be something they would have to demonstrate to sell an idea. Most of us will say "it's true" as a defense for arguing something, as if truth itself were intrinsically valuable and needs no added utility to be worth finding out and perpetuating. Which I believe. But in amoral, uncaring universe, truth has no inherent value. It is only valuable as a means to some other ends.

This is particularly relevant when talking to an atheist who's trying really, really hard to convince believers not to believe. The unstated assumption behind the entire argument is that they shouldn't believe in God because it isn't true, as if that's reason enough. But by abolishing the idea of God they abolish the idea that truth is valuable in and of itself, so they actually need to go further and explain why believing in God is both false and detrimental to some other ends that both parties believe is necessary. But they usually don't. The value of truth is assumed, even though its basis has already been discarded; it's an ideological vestige, sort of the way wonder may be an evolutionary one.

I wouldn't go that far. Anyone--materialist, Christian, Gaia-worshipper, whatever--can exhibit logic once they assume some ends. They can always say "in order to get X, you do Y." Whether or not they can say "we ought to be trying to get X" is the thorny part.

This just sort of goes in circles, doesn't it? Saying it's logical to feel wonder looking at the sunset because it's so grand and complex and important is just listing the things that make us experience wonder.

Right, it might just be a remnant that served some purpose then and doesn't now. I'm not saying there's no materialist explanation for wonder, I'm just saying there's no materialist explanation as to how it has any purpose beyond utility. Throw love into there, too. The difference is not that there's no materialistic reason to have love, the difference is that, to the materialist, it's just a high-level instinct and/or evolutionary trait, not a thing in and of itself that has any significance outside of merely experiencing it. Even though it absolutely feels like it must.

My thought has evolved enough that I know better than to start a fifth simultaneous argument. But it hasn't evolved enough that I can resist jumping in when it gets started by someone else. So the only question is whether or not you're going to inflict it on me.

Aye. But you know what I mean. We can define meaning however we want, but then, we can define "charismatic" so that dull people get included under it, too.

All a materialist can say to notions of duty or meaning or purpose is that they don't care if it doesn't exist in the religious/metaphysical sense, because they have some substitute that they're okay with. But I see no serious argument that there's an actual materialist equivalent. There's just your own neurons, choosing to care about X. They could have just as easily chosen to make Y the purpose of their entire life, and there would be no outside standard to mediate between them. Which means it's just another arbitrary choice. And I don't think there's any normal conception of purpose or meaning that is also arbitrary.

You know what I'm on about here. It's compatibilism, but with morality: conceding the idea that the thing doesn't exist, but then saying we can define it differently, then voila!--it does.

Ah, but again: I'm talking about whether or not these things have a higher meaning, or whether or not they're just incidental. I'm not saying they have no reason to evolve. I'm saying we have no reason to treat them like they're special, or mean anything rationally, or have any significance external to us.