I have already hinted at what I think the response ought to be. While eminently true, as a rhetorical strategy for convincing people who aren’t already on board with our programme, it’s borderline suicidal. The usual response from materialists is to say that an argument from consequences isn’t valid – if you don’t like the fact that X is just matter in motion, that doesn’t make it false.
#Scourge the invincible free#
Our actions are determined we have no free will. Everything is futile (there is no immortality). “If we are nothing but matter in motion, mere chemicals, then: Since the claims are all so similar to each other, I will address them collectively. To come to facilely gloomy conclusions based on materialism seems to be practically a cottage industry among Christian apologists and New Agers alike. How about materialism, the view that reality consists, at bottom, in the interplay of matter and energy? This, to my mind, is the biggie. What other fact questions might people regard in a perverse way? Moreover, sometimes the hard pills also come in chewable form. However, there is no need to turn every single truth into a hard pill. I believe I share a desire with most others here to seek truth naively, swallowing the hard pills when it becomes necessary. So why would I be surprised to hear a rationalist say something like this? Note that it is empirically indistinguishable from the more common view of “mankind confronted by a hostile universe.” This is the message of the present post: it is not only our knowledge that matters, but also our attitude to that knowledge. But the basic idea – that life and consciousness is a natural and possibly inevitable consequence of the way the universe works – is indisputably correct. What exactly is wrong with it? Sure, you can pick some trivial holes in it – life would not have arisen without the sun, for example, and Homo sapiens was not inevitable in any way. And yet, let’s consider this particular statement on its own. You will not find him the paragon of rationality, to put it mildly. This quote came from an ingenious and misguided man named Alan Watts. 
“We are not born into this world, but grow out of it for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
But allow me to quote another point of view on this question. Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American (November, 1995).Īm I posting that quote to disagree with it? No. “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” I think the following quote is preaching to the choir on a site like LW: Rather, they feel the wrong emotions about fact questions, usually because they haven’t worked out all the corollaries. The perverse-minded do not necessarily disagree with you about any fact questions. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it perverse-mindedness. There is, however, another type of cognitive phenomenon that I’ve come to consider particularly troublesome, because it militates against rationality in the irrationalist, and fights against contentment and curiousity in the rationalist. This website is devoted to the art of rationality, and as such, is a wonderful corrective to wrong facts and, more importantly, wrong procedures for finding out facts.
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