This prominent scientist says life is meaningless… and he’s serious |314|

Fun fact... Carrol's wife is the author of a book on self and ego and has done LSD.
Listen what she says here:


Interesting eh? Brain activity is damped and consciousness is expanded, @Bernardo Kastrup would very much agree with her ... :D
I wonder if Sean has tried LSD too...guess he didn't, otherwise it went wasted :)

ETA: I posted the YT link at the right minute, but the forum deletes the time parameter. Jump to 14':00" to get to the interesting part.
You know, I thought that although almost all of what she said fits in to the materialist paradigm, I had the feeling that in private conversation (or maybe interviewed by Alex!) she might go a lot further - particularly relating to her brief comment about death.

David
 
I don't see how anyone, even someone completely on Team Materialism, could hear that interview and not cringe by how Sean was debating.

"Life is short, I don't have time to look into all that nonsense" is probably the dumbest thing anybody can say, on either side of the fence.

I do feel one motivation present involves marketing and "what's hot". The fact he's debated Eben Alexander is indicative of this. Eben's views of an afterlife are very popular right now. Naturally, a demographic must exist to counter it; and if Eben's made millions (as Sean laments), perhaps he feels that he, too, can make millions by pitching himself as the opposition. This is how the media skeptic industry actually works.

There is also a tendency for these people to feign the position that topics like NDEs are neither relevant nor interesting. They bank on the tendency for laypeople to take an authority figure's words about what the facts are, and to not do any research, while at the same time attempting to take the topic in question and drive a spear through it. As an example, Sean includes a chapter in his book about how there is no afterlife--trying to become an authority on the topic of an afterlife, without addressing the existence of a counter-movement.

It's all about games / power / manipulation... and money.
 
like who?

Not sure if he fits that particular bill, but mentioned that this guy might make an interesting guest recently in the Dr. Bernard Kastrup show thread (just having finished listening to it yesterday). Just repeating info from that post, but: his name is James P. Carse and he is an author and former professor of history and literature of religion. From his Wikipedia page, it says he's a critic of New Atheism, and that 'He does not believe in any God, but describes himself as religious "in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all."' Again, he may have no view/opinion on parapsychology specifically, so that line of inquiry may not necessarily pertain/be central, but he may well make for a good guest in general (in the same vein of Dr. Kastrup's show).

Anyway, he authored the interesting sounding book (have yet to read it) Finite and Infinite Games, which delineates between games that are "played to win" (finite games) and those that are "played to be played" (infinite games...which he suggests religious views/myths offer). Its central thesis very much reminded me of Dr. Kastrup's emphasis on moving "beyond the constraints of the game" we have forced upon us/find ourselves embroiled in and accept (wittingly or unwittingly). Constraints, as it were, that Dr. Carroll forcefully demonstrates in his interview (which I must admit I quite enjoyed, and thought you handled it pretty impressively...one of the better jobs debating/challenging him that I've come across, actually).

Carse has a few great lectures worth checking out on YouTube (with some overlap between them, but each largely standing on their own):



And here is a much shorter clip where he touches on "the religious case against belief":

 
Perhaps we could co-opt his multiverse beliefs? I mean what's the difference in believing that "there's a natural realm and a supernatural realm and never the twain shall meet...except in rare circumstances" and the Multiverse belief where there are essentially infinite realms we can never meet (except possibly through rare unknown methods)?

Just came across something about this:

The Possibility of a Paraverse

Another reason why the concept of a multiverse is not scientifically solid is that it has no explanatory value. If the other universes in a multiverse are isolated from our own, the idea of a multiverse is worthless for explaining any of the phenomena in our universe. We also cannot explain the fine-tuning of our universe by imagining the existence of many other universes. This is mainly because of the simple fact that the probability of success on any one random trial is not increased by increasing the number of trials (for example, you don't increase your chance of winning the lottery with any particular lottery ticket if you buy lots of tickets). So a multiverse would not make it more likely that our particular universe would have been so fine-tuned by chance. The chance of our universe having suitable characteristics by pure chance does not increase by even 1 percent if there are an infinite number of universes. See here for a fuller explanation of why the multiverse idea is not suitable for explaining cosmic fine-tuning.

The idea of a multiverse (as typically imagined) is therefore metaphysical and useless. But is there some leaner and more parsimonious concept we might formulate involving some other universe – perhaps some concept that might be of some explanatory value? It seems there is. Let us imagine what I may call the paraverse.

The term paraverse is formed from the end of the word “universe” and from the prefix “para,” which means “beside” or “to the side of.” We can define a paraverse as some hypothetical realm of existence that is in some sense connected to our universe in a way that allows information and causes to flow between our universe and this other realm of existence.
The two main differences between the multiverse concept and the paraverse concept are as follows:
  1. The multiverse concept postulates many other universes, while the paraverse concept postulates only a single other realm of existence.
  2. The multiverse idea typically postulates universes that are completely isolated from each other, without communication or interaction between any two of the universes; but conversely the paraverse concept says there may indeed be interaction or communication between our universe and some other realm of existence, with perhaps causes and effects sometimes flowing between the two.
 
"in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all."' Again, he may have no view/opinion on parapsychology specifically...
I bet you're right... I'm willing to bet he has not view/opinion on consciousness either... or whether there's any connection between extended consciousness realms and spiritual experiences. I just don't know where we'd go with this guy.
 
His most recent blog post. Apropos:

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/05/12/big-picture-part-five-thinking/

M:I grant you that, when I am feeling some particular sensation, it is inevitably accompanied by some particular thing happening in my brain — a “neural correlate of consciousness.” What I deny is that one of my subjective experiences simply is such an occurrence in my brain. There’s more to it than that. I also have a feeling of what it is liketo have that experience.

P: What I’m suggesting is that the statement “I have a feeling…” is simply a way of talking about those signals appearing in your brain. There is one way of talking that speaks a vocabulary of neurons and synapses and so forth, and another way that speaks of people and their experiences. And there is a map between these ways: when the neurons do a certain thing, the person feels a certain way. And that’s all there is.

M: Except that it’s manifestly not all there is! Because if it were, I wouldn’t have any conscious experiences at all. Atoms don’t have experiences. You can give a functionalexplanation of what’s going on, which will correctly account for how I actually behave, but such an explanation will always leave out the subjective aspect.

P: Why? I’m not “leaving out” the subjective aspect, I’m suggesting that all of this talk of our inner experiences is a very useful way of bundling up the collective behavior of a complex collection of atoms. Individual atoms don’t have experiences, but macroscopic agglomerations of them might very well, without invoking any additional ingredients.

M: No they won’t. No matter how many non-feeling atoms you pile together, they will never start having experiences.

P: Yes they will.

M: No they won’t.

P: Yes they will.

:D
 

But this would then require an explanation for why a certain arrangement of atoms would have a singular experience while other atoms don't. As Nagel notes in Mind & Cosmos:

If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, expect for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental. That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted of of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic.

So it's not just that we can describe things in two ways, it's that these are two manifestly different ways. While taking a dual-aspect approach might avoid the question of Dualism, it leaves open the question of which -mind or matter - is more fundamental.

Let's assume Idealism is false so consciousness isn't solely fundamental, though not all physicists would agree*.

You can say both are equally fundamental or come from some third "stuff" but that still opens the doors it seems Carroll wants to keep close (for those interested -> see Pauli's Neutral Monism or David Bohm Implicate Order to name two physicists.)

Taking the approach that it's just matter...If we say the conscious experience reduces to matter, but don't have an explanation of how to take the qualitative 1st person and put it in terms of the third person quantitative....then as per Nagel why would we think this assertion of materialism is true? In fact this inability to give even a sketch as to how to solve this problem is why we have a "Hard Problem" in the first place++.

Even if were willing to accept feeling is something matter manages via a something-from-nothing miracle there still remains the question of Intentionality and Rationality. (See Fodor's Trinity.)


Of course there are issues with the question of what is matter which have been noted up-thread - Does it move back and forth in time? Does it have inherent spatial character/coordinates at any given time? Does it move randomly of its own volition at a certain particle level?

*Amit Goswami, Ulrich Morhroff, & Richard Conn Henry come to mind.

++For more on this those interested can check out Clifton's Empirical Cast Against Materialism.
 
But this would then require an explanation for why a certain arrangement of atoms would have a singular experience while other atoms don't. As Nagel notes in Mind & Cosmos:



So it's not just that we can describe things in two ways, it's that these are two manifestly different ways. While taking a dual-aspect approach might avoid the question of Dualism, it leaves open the question of which -mind or matter - is more fundamental.

Let's assume Idealism is false so consciousness isn't solely fundamental, though not all physicists would agree*.

You can say both are equally fundamental or come from some third "stuff" but that still opens the doors it seems Carroll wants to keep close (for those interested -> see Pauli's Neutral Monism or David Bohm Implicate Order to name two physicists.)

Taking the approach that it's just matter...If we say the conscious experience reduces to matter, but don't have an explanation of how to take the qualitative 1st person and put it in terms of the third person quantitative....then as per Nagel why would we think this assertion of materialism is true? In fact this inability to give even a sketch as to how to solve this problem is why we have a "Hard Problem" in the first place++.

Even if were willing to accept feeling is something matter manages via a something-from-nothing miracle there still remains the question of Intentionality and Rationality. (See Fodor's Trinity.)


Of course there are issues with the question of what is matter which have been noted up-thread - Does it move back and forth in time? Does it have inherent spatial character/coordinates at any given time? Does it move randomly of its own volition at a certain particle level?

*Amit Goswami, Ulrich Morhroff, & Richard Conn Henry come to mind.

++For more on this those interested can check out Clifton's Empirical Cast Against Materialism.

Yep. If I were a materialist, I would have to concede that there is some wonder in the material.
 
But this would then require an explanation for why a certain arrangement of atoms would have a singular experience while other atoms don't. As Nagel notes in Mind & Cosmos:

If emergence is the whole truth, it implies that mental states are present in the organism as a whole, or its central nervous system, without any grounding in the elements that constitute the organism, expect for the physical character of those elements that permits them to be arranged in the complex form that, according to the higher-level theory, connects the physical with the mental.That such a purely physical elements, when combined in a certain way, should necessarily produce a state of the whole that is not constituted of of the properties and relations of the physical parts still seems like magic even if the higher-order psychophysical dependencies are quite systematic.

This seems to assume that the concsciousness must either be derived from the specific properties of matter that we have already mapped out or that it must be completely separate. And it may be the case. But it seems to me that we should also ask whether might not have other properties, in addition to those modelled as physical laws. Again, this might not be the case, but it seems to me it deserves as strong an investigation as the other two options!

The magic comment doesn't really add anything substantive. It applies to whatever the nature of consciousness actually is. It's a declaration of amazement, not a logical argument, imo.

So it's not just that we can describe things in two ways, it's that these are two manifestly different ways. While taking a dual-aspect approach might avoid the question of Dualism, it leaves open the question of which -mind or matter - is more fundamental.

And of course there's another option: whether they are simply different sides of the same coin.

Taking the approach that it's just matter...If we say the conscious experience reduces to matter, but don't have an explanation of how to take the qualitative 1st person and put it in terms of the third person quantitative....then as per Nagel why would we think this assertion of materialism is true? In fact this inability to give even a sketch as to how to solve this problem is why we have a "Hard Problem" in the first place++.

You're making the same argument that some people make against psi: if we haven't figured out the mechanism, why assume it is true? This kind of argument only works if we're taking "assume it is true" as equating to "believe it to 100% certainty". But that's not how we should, imo, approach these questions. Certainty is an unreasonable and unobtainable goal. We look rather at the evidence supporting one position or the other.

As I've said before, what you have is some very strong correlations between manipulating matter in various ways with a direct impact on mental states. There are all sorts of predictions we can make and test.

Now, there is evidence of the alternative hypothesis too: in particular parapsychology. But I will argue (and I can support it I believe), the quality of that evidence is - for now at least - not nearly as strong. Again, this may change at some point. So I think we can say there are arguments in favour of both positions, to varying degrees of confidence.

Even if were willing to accept feeling is something matter manages via a something-from-nothing miracle there still remains the question of Intentionality and Rationality. (See Fodor's Trinity.)

On something from nothing no matter what our metaphysical viewpoint I think we have to accept that either:
  • something came from nothing, or
  • something has always existed.
Whether its matter that either came from nothing or already existed, consciousness or something else, I'm not sure how we would justify viewing one option as more or less miraculous than the others. The issue applies equally across metaphysics.

Of course there are issues with the question of what is matter which have been noted up-thread - Does it move back and forth in time? Does it have inherent spatial character/coordinates at any given time? Does it move randomly of its own volition at a certain particle level?

*Amit Goswami, Ulrich Morhroff, & Richard Conn Henry come to mind.

++For more on this those interested can check out Clifton's Empirical Cast Against Materialism.

Yep, lots of issues to figure out - course that applies across the board too! That's the problem with a lot of these arguments, if we accept them against one view, we often have to accept them for all the other views too. And they often seem to imply that a burden of proof of certainty is what we should be aiming at. But that's not very practical.
 
His most recent blog post. Apropos:
Reading your excerpt, I would say he is totally in the materialist camp - and would not make much of a contribution!

I think Sci's people in the middle ground must be very few. I mean there are plenty of people who simply haven't given the matter much thought - but that is a different matter.

David
 
I nearly didn't bother listening to the episode. A few years ago, this would have been very compelling listening for me, really trying to get to the fundaments of the issue, hearing the arguments of two warring camps on the survival / non-survival issue, or the mind equals brain vs mind is distinct camps. However, over the years of hearing these discussions (most of them through Skeptiko), and looking a little further into the topics, I have now decided that the Sean Carrol's of the world are really not worth listening to. Do not misunderstand me. His intellect is obviously profound, his abilities in his field are clearly highly praiseworthy, but it is his Materialist Faith and priestly arrogance which causes me such offence.

Unfortunately, much as I had wanted to believe earlier on that we were all of us really just trying to get at the truth, regardless of which camp we found ourselves leaning towards (and I had been in the other camp, incorrectly or misguidedly believing that this was what the data forced me to accept), I have over time come to a different conclusion. The truth is not the goal.

The Sean Carrol's of the world have built a holy dogma out of materialist science (simple materialism - the science has nothing to do with it). They are the faithful, the guardians of the truth. Any data which assails their holy dogma, or undermines in any way their positions as wardens and high priests of the church of materialism must be quickly cast asunder. However, the data is robust, which presents the priests with a problem, or at least it would, if they dared to really look. But it is unholy, and would be a sin to immerse oneself in such blasphemous material. So in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that might begin to pop up and threaten their careers and minds, they do their best to avoid any thorough or direct looking at the data.

They always "Claim" to have seen "Enough" data to convince them that there is no compelling evidence for the survival of mind beyond brain, but when pressed, they always squirm and admit they have not really engaged with the data. Yet they do not understand that this is the very height of unscientific thinking or truth seeking behaviour. There is no such thing as "Enough" data, only valid or invalid data.

As William James said, in order to prove not all crows are black, I don't need to prove ALL crows are white, I simply need to find ONE white crow. Sean Carrol is saying "no, one is not enough". If you present the white crow to him, he will claim it is really black under the surface, and that maybe it just had a fright, or got too close to a bunch of paintballers using white paintballs, or that it was deliberately painted in order to get at James Randi's special box of monopoly money, or "oh dear, I have something in my eye, I can't see" etc etc. It is the same thing when we hear the religious faithful defend historical beliefs about biblical history that there is evidence to doubt. Intellectual dishonesty and cognitive dissonance everywhere.

Surely if people who are looking to see whether white crows exist report they have found one, we should be eager to really investigate? Shouldn't we? As truth seekers? Unless the white crow somehow threatens your Black Crows religion (and I don't mean the band lol).

The high levels of intellectual dishonesty in Sean Carrol's arguments and general demeanour are impossible to ignore. I just hate that the consequences of his need to be a censor and warden of the truth can and clearly do have horrific long term consequences for everyone his seeming authority can excerpt influenceupon. Whether we live in a materialist universe and are biological robots or not is so fundamentally important to how we live, what we do with our lives, how we treat others and what we aim for with our lives that to get it wrong is an impossibly huge tragedy.

Dishonestly and knowingly misleading someone on this topic, having such fundamental importance and influence over how we shape and live our ENTIRE lives, I might even say is so grave a crime as to be ranked with all of the worst crimes in human society.

I am not saying that is what is happening here (knowing agenda driven dishonesty), but clearly something is deeply wrong, and it does have grave consequences for us all on a planetary and an individual level. (Woah, as I write this, I didn't expect my thoughts would get this heavy, but I guess this really is what I feel is happening, and that there is a case to be made for the severely damaging consequences of the faith based science of the high priests of Materialism, how frightening).

P.S. I am only half way through the podcast lol
 
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Just finished listening. I should have waited for the analysis before writing the above. But remarkably I think what I was getting at in a round about big picture type way, was the same things.

I loved your analysis Alex, absolutely brilliant, and thought the point scoring was not only a bit of fun, but an ingenious tool to really sift the wheat from the chaff of Sean Carrol's tactics.

The final point I thought was powerfully poignant, and to lead on from my earlier post, it adds rocket fuel to the fire of my frustration, exasperation and raw anger, that the published works and utterances of irresponsible scientists (pseudo scientists) and religious materialists like Sean Carrol really do influence the way society organises (or might reorganise) it's way of life, it's values, it's priorities and the consequences of those choices.

On a points scale, I think I got pretty much everything you said. Like you, I was a little unsure about Schroedinger and Carrol's dismissive confidence shook my own somewhat, but knew I had read over the years that he was in favour of an interpretation of the universe in which consciousness was a fundamental and powerful factor of the universe, and certainly cannot be relegated to the background of our investigations, but may well be the very ground upon which it is all built.

Also loved your point about Buddha, Conficius and Plato. I knew it was absolute bullshit when he tried to present their stances as being somehow or in any way supportive of his materialist garbage, and here I had no doubt whatsoever about it. No need to change the batteries in my bullshit alarm, that baby went off LOUD and CLEAR, but again it irks me that many will not have the confidence or knowledge I do about these topics, and are being swayed by this stuff.

I am glad I continued to the end of the show, I nearly gave up at halfway, but your analysis was wonderfully sharp and on point. Thanks again.
 
I wanted quickly to post an excerpt from an article today on the daily grail website. I thought it was quite pertinent to the overarching issue of blinkered science and blinkered scientists.

The article is about UFO sightings etc. I am interested in UFO's, though really am less confident in the research than in consciousness research and NDE studies. I post it here however, as it really and rather wonderfully illustrates the way in which a group of scientific fundamentalists can for the longest time deny compelling evidence which contradicts their beliefs about the nature of reality, and they can do this for the longest time on the weakest of foundations, simply because they exert a great deal of influence in the scientific community (high priests of science) and are unwilling to wrestle with an ugly fact, that challenges their beautiful theories. Here it is:

"Consider, for example, the eye-witness reports a few hundred years ago of an obviously ridiculous 'phenomenon': that rocks fell from the sky. For a very long time these reports of meteorite falls were dismissed as fanciful, or at the very best a confused sighting of some other phenomenon. It wasn't until a confluence of factors around 1800 - ranging from influential publications to bizarre meteor showers - that opinion began to shift towards the belief that rocks did indeed fall from the sky.

One of those incidents was the 'Wold Newton Meteorite' fall in England in 1795, near the home of magistrate Major Edward Topham. Topham was acutely aware of the controversial nature of such incidents at that time, and thus “as a magistrate, I took [the witnesses] accounts upon oath”. Topham had some choice words for those who chose to dismiss these reports. “I mean not to enter into any literary warfare with those sceptics, who think it much easier to doubt every word of this account than to believe such an event could take place,” he remarked. “There is no shorter way of disposing of any thing than to deny or disbelieve it”.

Once the reality of meteorite falls became established, the historian Eusebius Salverte pointed out that scientists' failure to recognise the truth of the matter for so long was borne out of "a predetermination to see nothing, or to deny what we had seen."

I like that this was about meteorites, something I think none of us would now question, but for the longest time was condemned as absurd, and unworthy of acknowledgement by the scientific high priests.

Read it in it's entirety at www.dailygrail.com

P.S. If anyone knows how I can use the bold, italic, or quote tools on the forum, please let me know how. I used to know, but seem to have forgotten.
 
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P.S. If anyone knows how I can use the bold, italic, or quote tools on the forum, please let me know how. I used to know, but seem to have forgotten.

If you're using the reply box (i.e. have clicked "Reply" to an existing message), all the tools are at the top of the reply box: bold, italic, underline, indent and outdent, smilies, insert picture, etc. The post you're replying to should already be quoted. Otherwise, you can quote stuff by including it in hand-typed <QUOTE>...</QUOTE> tags, remembering to replace the left and right chevrons with left and right square brackets. You can edit stuff between the tags if you want to trim it.

Just highlight the text you want and then click the appropriate tool.

If you're writing a fresh post, again, the tools are at the top of the box.
 
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