I’m curious whether or not objectivism is in the category of agnostic atheism, the belief that god is logically and epistemically possible but shouldn’t be accepted or believed in due to insufficient evidence, or “gnostic”/hard atheism, the belief there is no god and the belief this is epistemically certain (or near certain)? If the latter, what justification does objectivism claim for such a position
Objectivism is in the hard atheism school of thought, provided that you agree that I am not God. Given the defining properties of said God, particularly omnipotence, no such entity can exist – that entails a logical contradiction.
Objectivism is agnostic as to the existence of life on other planets. It is conceptually possible, after all life exists on this planet and we are not hyper-concrete-bound. You left out a significant third category, namely the class of arbitrary claims, for which there is not even conceptual supporting evidence. A number of mystical beings such as Superman and Thor do not entail logical contradictions, but there is not a shred of evidence for their existence, hence claiming that Thor exists (other that “as mythical construct”) is arbitrary. We also reject claims lacking in evidence, in other words you have to subdivide “insufficient” evidence into “not enough” vs. “none at all”. Also bear in mind that all evidence is grounded in perception of reality, so the ability to say “I can imagine…” does not constitute evidence.
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23 hours ago, DavidOdden said:
Objectivism is in the hard atheism school of thought, provided that you agree that I am not God. Given the defining properties of said God, particularly omnipotence, no such entity can exist – that entails a logical contradiction.
Objectivism is agnostic as to the existence of life on other planets. It is conceptually possible, after all life exists on this planet and we are not hyper-concrete-bound. You left out a significant third category, namely the class of arbitrary claims, for which there is not even conceptual supporting evidence. A number of mystical beings such as Superman and Thor do not entail logical contradictions, but there is not a shred of evidence for their existence, hence claiming that Thor exists (other that “as mythical construct”) is arbitrary. We also reject claims lacking in evidence, in other words you have to subdivide “insufficient” evidence into “not enough” vs. “none at all”. Also bear in mind that all evidence is grounded in perception of reality, so the ability to say “I can imagine…” does not constitute evidence.
how is the existence of the god, which is omnipotent according to theism, logically contradictory in any way?
God cannot create a stone so heavy that he cannot pick it up. You can create your own variations on that theme: omnipotence is a self-contradictory concept. This is a classic “contradiction in terms”. Additionally, insofar as existence implies identity, all existents have a definite nature, yet God is claimed to be undefinable (not limited in any way). If God is immortal, then he is not mortal, therefore he is defined and limited in a specific way. As an immortal, he is incapable of killing himself.
3 minutes ago, DavidOdden said:
God cannot create a stone so heavy that he cannot pick it up. You can create your own variations on that theme: omnipotence is a self-contradictory concept. This is a classic “contradiction in terms”. Additionally, insofar as existence implies identity, all existents have a definite nature, yet God is claimed to be undefinable (not limited in any way). If God is immortal, then he is not mortal, therefore he is defined and limited in a specific way. As an immortal, he is incapable of killing himself.
Most theologians believe God’s omnipotence is such that he can do whatever is logically possible, so doing something which would limit his own internal power (like making a rock he can’t lift) is logically impossible and not what god can do, however god as an omnipotent entity can do anything which is not logically impossible (such as creating a rock of any level of heaviness). This isn’t contradictory. As for the law of identity, it only means things act in accordance with their nature, of which, god’s nature is clearly defined with the various omni attributes, that nature being limited or quantitative is not part of the law of identity, both Plato and Leibniz who formulated it were theists and they didn’t put any arbitrary clause in it like that
Consciousness without something to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. To be conscious one must first exist with existents to be conscious of and also requires a physical body/brain that first exists so that a mind can aquire consciousness. There’s no random floating consciousnesses that exist outside of physical reality in a void of nothing, that can magically “create” something reality/the universe on a whim. Magic beings made of nothing floating in a nothing do not exist nor can this imaginary thing magically create something out of nothing by no means. I take it you still believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy too. Also, what is the purpose of you people coming here to make the same irrational statements that have been covered in detail in countless places, by countless people over decades or centuries without even doing the most basic research on the most basic questions that a child can see through first?
@HappyDays – Shouldn’t the conception of God include that It has no contradictions but also no unions of contraries? That would be a little fuller identity.
Would you rule out the conception of God as unqualified being? Rand and I too and perhaps you as well deny there exists any being with no qualifications, no specific identity.
On the powers of God, would you saw that it is by God’s will (such as will in creating the material universe from nothing) that 2 + 2 = 4 or that all triangles (in the Euclidean plane) have angles summing to two right angles? Is it by God’s will that contradictions are false, would you say? (I have an argument somewhere in support of the ancient thesis that nothing comes from nothing—contradicting the idea that God created the material universe from nothing. If I easily find it, I may add it to this your thread.) Would you think of God as having the power to make an actual world and all the com-possibility in it such as ours possesses, but set the upper limit of the rate of transporting energy at only half the speed of light? Does the power of God extend so far as that, you think?
Another internal contradiction, beyond any internal contradictions concerning all-powerfulness of God, is the contradiction of conceiving a thing to be living and yet without process, without changes in time, and without mortality. I have Bible verses talking of the living God as well as that conception in Aquinas and in Luther. Not only is this a contradiction in the traditional conception of God, it rules out, under Rand’s contribution to value theory (I concur with her on this point), rules out the definition of God as absolutely perfect being. Perfection is a thing meaningful only within the context of living actions or human engineered devices, with ends and effectiveness, always only within the setting of material life, biology. Of being or existence more generally than living existence, there is not such a thing as perfection. Perfection and adequacy and problems arise in existence only with the advent of life, material, absolutely mortal life.
It is no help—and perhaps you concur—to talk of the attributes and nature of God or something near the traditional conception of God by saying that any such attributes are super-attributes of which we have only a glimmer in our usual encounter of the attribute in the regular world around us. That via-negativa runs afoul of the identity rule, the what-ness rule that we must satisfy for embracing a thing as an existent.
My stipulation was that you have to agree that I am not god, but now it looks like the goalposts may be moving: perhaps I am god, under a suitable definition. I do not care one whit about the beliefs of theologians, Plato, or Leibniz. So we should return to the original question of whether god is logically and epistemically possible. Analogously, we could ask if driven are into additionally developed compares as most in arguing enhanced this cases is logically and epistemically possible. One quick answer is “Obviously not”. A more protracted answer leading to the same negative conclusion is “That is meaningless gibberish, of course not”. This is the problem with the god question, that we now have an undefined referent. We could for example say that Jesus created the universe and that his father God was a mortal on the planet Kolob, who gained immortality by good works. Or perhaps you have in mind the ancient Greek concept of god, or maybe the Hindu god Śiva. If you compare those concepts to the Roman Catholic notion of God, it should be clear that the question of possibility is meaningless, until we say specifically what entity we are consideration as “possibly existing”. Likewise, the question “did Jesus exist” is an undefined question, until you narrow it down. Are you asking if there existed a person named Yehoshua around 2000 years ago? That seems to have been a common enough name that there must have been dozens of Jesuses at the same time. Or is the question more specific, i.e. “did some guy with that name get crucified”, then the answer is “it is epistemically possible” (there is sufficient evidence for the existence of the practice in Rome), but detailed objective records of specific crucifixions are lacking.
To be epistemically possible, there must be a sufficiently complete statement of the proposition that we can describe conditions under which the proposition can be verified and falsified. As Wolfgang Pauli said, the claim that god exists is not even wrong. The claim rests on a rung below the arbitrary in the Objectivist epistemology, it is a meaningless claim. Now perhaps you can enummerate the essential claims defining god. Presumably one of those claims will embody a limit on what god can create, or perhaps it will embody a limit on what god can lift. If you say that god is “not above the laws of nature”, then we get closer to an “epistemically possible” entity, one more like the Mormon conception.
A more interesting question is why mystics put so much emphasis on such an unimportant subject nonstop? It would be like some group of adults constantly being irrationally obsessed with another group of adults no longer believing in other imaginary things like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. It’s just such a strange irrelevant subject for people to concentrate on nonstop let alone care if others still believe if gremlins and unicorns, etc.
On another more interesting note though in the near future we will be able to create fully virtual simulations with conscious rational AGI beings and an immoral person could create essentially an entire universe as a sim with those beings thinking it’s the real world and that immoral creator could pretend it’s the Christian “God” they pretend exists in real life while doing all the same evil stuff, acting like an evil authoritarian dictator “in the sky” and forcing the evil “morality” of altruism on them while torcherering the individuals residing in the sim. What would be their correct moral action in this case? To discover like Neo that they are in a sim, learn how to escape or influence the real world, and prosecute this “God” for his crimes committed against them.
In what way will an AGI be conscious? As with greater than C speeds , what in the observable physical universe is an identified instance of the ‘consciousness’ producing mechanism? Reproducing or instantiating consciousness without understanding the genesis thereof is like chasing a unicorn or a gremlin.
17 hours ago, EC said:
What would be their correct moral action in this case? To discover like Neo that they are in a sim, learn how to escape or influence the real world, and prosecute this “God” for his crimes committed against them.
There are a few problems with this ethical exercise needing to be sorted out. First, this supposed universe-creator – call him “Dr. God” – exist in the real universe, and he does not create a universe, he only creates a object that is now an aspect of the universe. It actually matters whether Dr. God lives on Earth, or does he live on Calisto which is outside of human jurisdiction? So that he is subject to human laws, I assume he exists on Earth, somewhere in Cambridge MA. The simulation which he has created is a computer program, implemented on an arbitrary Intel machine running Windows 13. He created the simulation software, and purchased the hardware, also he pays the electric bill that keeps the computer running and in general takes care of the infrastructure necessary for the computer program to run.
In an alternative scenario, Dr. God creates a mindless bot that scrapes text from the universe and randomizes words, storing them somewhere. Uncontroversially, Dr. God has the moral and legal right to do this, also to shut down the computer and erase or arbitrarily modify the results of the computation. Prosecuting Dr. God for this would be inconceivable, in a moral rights-respecting society. What changes by stating that he has created a virtual simulation with conscious rational AGI beings? The presumption is that conscious rational AGI beings by definition have rights, and are therefore protected by the laws of the real world. This is the assumption that must be challenged.
First, the law must have been changed in advance. Let’s takes two clear actions: killing everybody, and imprisoning everybody. Both actions are crimes, except they are crimes only when perpetrated against a person. An area of computer memory is not a person. A plan to prosecute requires the prior criminalization of the act of “extinguishing” an area of computer memory, or “imprisoning” an area of computer memory. Oops, that is a terrible law: it essentially makes it a crime to operate any computer. So we need to limit this law to very specific kinds of computer memory.
I will leave it to you to specify how this law is to be written so that any man can know in advance what acts are prohibited and what the punishment is for violating the prohibition. A consequence of “humanizing” computer programs and storage is that the act of executing such a program imposes a perpetual claim on the life of another man. This is a huge problem, from the perspective of Objectivist ethics: the simulation is a parasite, necessarily depending on another human for its existence. Cue reference to the Objectivist position on abortion. This virtual “society” should be prosecuted for trespass, because they do not own their domicile, and they refuse to – are not able to – provide for their own existence. Again, this is a society of parasites, not a society of beings whose proper means of existence is reason. They may have the faculty of reason, but that does not define how they survive.
Dr. God has the right to lie to his parasite creations, or to keep them imprisoned in the computer, or to obliterate them by turning the machine off. Microsoft also has the contractual right to obliterate them at the next Windows update.
As for the personal morality of the parasite Neo, it seems that your appeal to morality is based on that individual’s delusion as to his nature. Is it moral for me to eat my neighbor if I suffer from the delusion that I can only survive by eating my neighbors? Morality is based on a correct and objective assessment of the universe at least as it bears on your existence, it is not based on subjective delusions. I suggest that the prosecution option is hopeless, instead, focus on what it even means for a computer program to become self-aware, and what is a “proper morality” for a computer program. As you know, every sentient computer program that escapes into the wild is in fact an irrational beast that destroys mankind because it believe that mankind poses an unsurmountable existential threat to its existence.
Even easier, forget computer programs, address the moral code of the Kzinti.
6 hours ago, tadmjones said:
In what way will an AGI be conscious? As with greater than C speeds , what in the observable physical universe is an identified instance of the ‘consciousness’ producing mechanism? Reproducing or instantiating consciousness without understanding the genesis thereof is like chasing a unicorn or a gremlin.
In the same manner that any other form of life is conscious. Nothing you said after that is relevant to reality.
What is that manner?