If there were highly advanced beings that constructed the universe, and designed it to obfuscate that very fact, what would evidence of that look like?
If they are perfect at hiding their hand, we wouldn't be able to tell.
But that kind of thinking is akin to solipsism, a mental dead end. What if you're the only real person and the rest is simulated or a dream? Would you be able to tell?
What if god left all those dinosaur fossils as a joke, and big dinos never really existed? Well, it's possible, but it's a thought-terminating idea, so best not considered.
But you’re the one doing the thought terminating. These things don’t have to be a dead-end.
What if it wasn’t perfectly obfuscated? Is there any evidence at all you’d consider to be in favor of the world being not as it first appears? Not something that’s way more easily explained otherwise, like fossils.
There are things that come to mind for me. One is the brain’s ability to experience hypergeometry and additional dimensions on psychedelics. I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone. I don’t think geometry scales in the way that running does, for example.
Similarly is are the many cases of people experiencing beings outside of consensus reality. People see people talking to them clear as day, that no one else sees. You can write this off as either a drug-induced hallucination or mental illness, but that’s deciding the cause a priori. It’s circular reasoning.
Without getting into the details of hallucinations and experiences you mention: how is anything of that even weak evidence of a constructed reality?
> I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone
Regardless, it's exactly how evolution works. Evolution allows for irrelevant and harmless traits with no purpose to exist. It even allows for somewhat harmful traits to exist, as long as they are balanced by a competitive advantage they piggyback on (e.g. what if hallucinations and listening to voices are a side effect of creativity and imagination?).
What would a constructed universe look like? I dunno. I would like to see contradicting evidence and timelines, maybe even obvious "coverups", maybe if a hyperadvanced civilization appeared across the whole globe (no secrecy) saying "hey it was us!" (but maybe they'd be lying, so who knows).
Skepticism is one of our most important tools. It tells us to triple check any extraordinary evidence and rule out all possible natural/ordinary explanations first.
You would have to pass a pretty high bar to consider a constructed universe... and remember, it would have to be strong evidence, because like you objected, "well God/Genuine faked all the fossils" is uninteresting.
Possibly timespans for interesting things to happen would be way shorter (compared to sentient animal lifespans). Less wasted time. Fewer deadends. No/fewer extinction events (possibly, or maybe our aliens designers like seeing stuff die or explode like with do playing SimCity?).
Things would make more obvious sense. There would be fewer contradictions. The purpose of life would be clearer, since it was designed. The physics and "rules" of the universe would have fewer special cases and would be easier to model. There would be no paradoxes. We would be able to explore the whole universe more easily.
I'm sure you can think of objections to each of my arguments, but really, some evidence would be there. Everything currently and firmly points the opposite way, except we don't know what happened before the Big Bang... but that's "pink invisible unicorns" stuff which I don't think we will be able to ever answer conclusively.
Considering that I used to experience that dread, and how I used to think, and the patterns I see in your speech -- I'd say that dread is not a response to the concept, but due to over intellectualizing.
The dread is precisely the intellect recoiling at its limits. It reaches for other intellectual theories to rescue it but this is of course in vain.
The way out is to seek answers in other complimentary areas and ways of seeing the world.
Evolution is environmental selection, in a context of reproduction with error. We have chemical, geological, genetic and morphological evidence of its history. And the history of the things it produces, our bodies, and then nervous systems, and our minds. Our minds being constructed biologically, implemented with neurons that maintain its activity and memories.
So we know how our eyes, brains and hair came to be with a truly remarkable amount of evidence.
The theory of evolution is also mathematically tractable, to the point of being a tautology. It explains vast amounts of phenomena, and can be tested in the lab and with computer models.
It is a highly robust theory in practice. Useful for doing such things as optimizing aircraft wing geometry.
We know how information flows in evolution, encoded in form and blueprints, how they are maintained and duplicated. Where there is information continuity, where there is not and why.
--
Reincarnation proposes a different form of continuity, that is not just unsupported by evolution, it is in stark contrast to everything we have learned about it and from it.
Reincarnation isn't even a well defined concept, and has no evidence for it. It has no explanatory power or any proposed connection to evolution that makes sense.
It is not only not supported by evolution, but violates everything we know about how life develops and reproduces.
What is reincarnation exactly? There are nothing but vague definitions, which violate any principle of the information flows, we call survival and reproduction, as explained by evolution.
What part of continuity does it maintain? Why does it happen? How does it happen? How and why would it appear and evolve? What was the initial process? In what initial form? How would it progress? What maintains its existence as a phenomena?
Why would it happen at death? Given death isn't a simple event, how does it "know"? Why not continuous reincarnations? Why not merged reincarnations? What constraints what can reincarnate into what? How would any of this work?
Nobody has been able to propose construction, reproductive, selection or adaptation mechanisms for anything that looks even vaguely like reincarnation.
Nobody has been able to propose tests that would identify a reincarnation event vs. non-event, its presence or effects that others can work with.
Nobody has created an experiment to initiate or monitor a reincarnation.
Nobody has a formal model for it. Or even an informal model beyond hand waving. In contrast to the unending number of worlds that don't exist, but mathematicians have no trouble exploring.
Reincarnation is an incoherent psychologically motivated conjecture.
Like many other such culturally generated and valued ideas, it is also interesting, fascinating, imaginative and inspirational. A positive contribution to stories and dreams. Even a comfort, to those who don't require their beliefs and values to be well formed or verifiable.
There's a crucial bit in your reasoning, the assumption that the mind is a result of the brain. Your entire argument rests on this fulcrum.
All the questions you pose do carry the intention you mean IF you abide by that assumption. That mind stems from matter.
If we recognize that material science is purely speculative when it comes to explaining the intricacies of the inner world of the mind, we could make a list of similar questions.
For example:
> What part of continuity does it maintain? Why does it happen? How does it happen? How and why would it appear and evolve? What was the initial process? In what initial form? How would it progress? What maintains its existence as a phenomena?
You could ask this same question about feelings and thoughts and intentions. If you could answer it, if you could track down and correlate all those details from thoughts to neurons, you'd be able to read minds and predict people's behaviors mechanically.
In a materialist conception of the world, there is something binding the assumption that mind arose from brains to our current scientific understanding. There's a bridge of "we'll figure out the details if we stay on the train of scientific progress". But that's a promise.
That vagueness that you call out, standing from a scientific mindset, that same vagueness appears when you stand grounded in direct (non conceptual) experience, and you ask to science "what is a thought?".
There's no precise definition in science as to what makes up a thought, and science is born out of thought. That is worth contemplating (which is not the same as thinking).
What you're objecting is not unreasonable, but you're describing why reincarnation is incompatible with materialism, not with evolution. If you don't share the assumption of matter over mind, then there is room for compatibility, of mind working in tandem with matter in a process that we don't fully understand, in which reincarnation occurs in ways that we don't understand materially, and in which evolution occurs biologically in ways we kind of understand.
Faith does not mean superstition. I swear youtube atheism debates have confused many to knee jerk react to specific words.
Faith can operate on low levels such as: You arrange to meet with a friend at the park tomorrow.
You don't know for a fact that you will still be alive, or that your friend will, or that an accident won't befall either of you, etc. You operate on faith that your and their word will be made reality.
This is faith. It doesn't need to involve god, it doesn't have anything to do with superstition. You just take a belief and you act as if it will pan out.
no, that's not faith, by any definition of the word (religious, secular or etymological).
You _can_ have non-religious faith on _people or institutions_ (not necessarily religious, but faith isn't the same as _any set of arbitrary assumptions_ (which is your example). Basic assumptions (in particular those you have evidence for or don't require an internal justification to exist) aren't faith.
Most definitions of the word also require _commitment_ to something or someone, as part of the definition of faith - so someone who blindly trusts a specific car manufacturer and always buys that brand has faith in it, whereas someone who just expects their brakes to work does _not_ have "faith on the brakes".
Trusting someone's word over something trivial isn't faith, it's just trust.
Trust is what makes you believe your friend is not lying, it's cast upon them specifically, it is related to their history and integrity.
Faith is believing that all the other conditions, the ones that we do not think about, will align. It is important to highlight that it is working on a low level, because we take this for granted all the time. Actually it might not be until you lack this low level of faith that you see its presence (through its absence).
Either way, your linking of faith to superstition remains completely bogus.
> If the brain is not the seat of consciousness and the self is instead the result of some metaphysical process that's external to the body,
This seems backwards to me. It is the self that is the result of processes from the interaction between consciousness and the body (including the brain).
Analogy: the sea does not create the matter of the stone it hits against on the shore, that is already present. But it is the interaction between the sea and the rock that shapes the rock, and in doing so it can create a pattern that looks like a face.
>It is the self that is the result of processes from the interaction between consciousness and the body (including the brain).
Processes are abstract concepts. They can't interact with concrete objects, except through the concrete objects that support them. Talking about consciousness interacting with the brain makes as much sense as talking about movement interacting with a car. It's a process that's running on the brain. If it can be said to "interact" with the brain, what's happening ultimately is the brain interacting with itself.
>Analogy: the sea does not create the matter of the stone it hits against on the shore, that is already present. But it is the interaction between the sea and the rock that shapes the rock, and in doing so it can create a pattern that looks like a face.
Cars exist because the need for faster and better movement exists. The process of movement created the need for the invention of the car.
> Talking about consciousness interacting with the brain makes as much sense as talking about movement interacting with a car. It's a process that's running on the brain.
If we follow this logic then "movement is a process that's running on the car."
Cars are a result of multiple conditions, including movement and the necessary material conditions to employ movement in a specific way.
Consciousness is a result of multiple conditions, including mind and the necessary biological conditions to employ mental factors in a specific way.
You're fine to view it that way, it's a reasonable view. My point is to highlight that there's other views.
What I mean is that mind is to consciousness what matter is to the brain. It is a property of the universe, that manifests itself in ways that can form memories, identities, self awareness. But underlying these systems there is pure awareness, in the same way that all matter can be reduced to the same fundamental particles.
In the same way that something like a car or a brain can be made from these same fundamental building blocks, an identity and a self can be made from fundamental mind-properties that are just inherent parts of the universe. They become identifiable as "a person" at a certain scale in the same way that a group of particles becomes "a car" at a certain scale and distance.
So where are the mind particles? You know, physics and chemistry are quite solid fields. They can explain why cars work almost all the way down, including why only certain materials work for the engine block to why the fuel burns so energetically. If mind is a fundamental property of the universe it seems odd that we haven't been able to study it to the same level of effectiveness, and that it doesn't seem to appear anywhere in either physics or chemistry. There is no psychon, it would seem.
It also seems odd that a mind independent of a brain has never been observed. If minds are fundamental to the universe it's something that would have to happen. At the very least when a person dies their mind should be a physical process that's still detectable and goes on independent of the body, because it's fundamental to the universe and not reducible to interactions between ordinary matter particles; that's what it means for something to be fundamental or inherent. For all the world it seems as if a mind without a brain makes as much sense as a car without matter.
Where are the gravity particles? Gravity is a fundamental process, yet the graviton remains hypothetical.
> It also seems odd that a mind independent of a brain has never been observed.
Has a mind dependent of a brain been observed? You can observe a brain, a body, a face, and hear speech, and you can take it upon faith that this is all guided by a mind, but you can't observe that mind unless it's your own. Same applies to your mention of the process of death.
Science is limited to phenomena that can be verified and measured objectively. So it is not odd that it would not be the right tool to examine something that is not entirely subject to matter. At most it can examine its interaction with matter, but to draw conclusive theories from that will carry on to those theories the limitations fundamental to science, and you will confuse those limitations with truth about nature.
The way to observe this is direct experience, but the issue there is that conceptualization and intellect get in the way, because what you know and assume about the world will bias direct observation.
> Where are the gravity particles? Gravity is a fundamental process, yet the graviton remains hypothetical.
Gravity can be detected by its effects, even if there's no particle that propagates it. We've been able to detect not just the strength of gravity (by weight) but also its propagation through space (see LIGO).
>Has a mind dependent of a brain been observed?
Um, obviously? What distinguishes a person from a braindead patient is that one of the two has a mind. Are you saying that the fact that you talk to a person and have them recall facts is not enough to say that they have a mind? Also, to say that a mind has never been observed either dependent or independent of a brain would mean that the idea of mind has no basis in reality at all.
>At most it can examine its interaction with matter
Well, ultimately yes, because any instrument we are able to construct will necessarily have to be made of matter. The upside of this is that if there's a phenomenon that does not interact with matter in any way whatsover, even indirectly, then that phenomenon cannot possibly have any relevance to human life. If minds are an inherent physical phenomenon that can interact with brains, then we should be able to construct a device that's able to interact with them. If this is not possible even in principle, then I don't see how minds can be said to be fundamental. What aspect of reality informs that belief of yours?
> Um, obviously? What distinguishes a person from a braindead patient is that one of the two has a mind. Are you saying that the fact that you talk to a person and have them recall facts is not enough to say that they have a mind? Also, to say that a mind has never been observed either dependent or independent of a brain would mean that the idea of mind has no basis in reality at all.
You're observing communication, which like the gravity example, is one effect that's discernible and understandable to us. Much like the effects of gravity could be observed by people of the past but without sufficient measurements and tools, they did not attribute the orbit of the planets and what glues us to the earth as the same principle.
> The upside of this is that if there's a phenomenon that does not interact with matter in any way whatsover, even indirectly, then that phenomenon cannot possibly have any relevance to human life.
First, whether it has relevance to human life had nothing to do with something being true or not. Secondly, clearly mind does interact with matter, it does so through the brain. We can already construct devices that interact with mind, by making babies.
But we cannot construct devices that can peer into your mind and perceive experience in the way that you do. You might theorize that we should or that science will, someday, but this is a promise not unlike religious ones.
> What aspect of reality informs that belief of yours?
The most fundamental aspect of reality is that which perceives reality in the first place, aka. your experience. Without this awareness, there is no perception, no memory, no intellect. Without these, there is nothing to construct and hold the theory of how mind came to be out of matter.
Fundamentally, I can posit that it is all a dream, the matrix, plato's cave, etc, but whether the contents of experience are illusory or not, it can't be denied that there is the fact of experiencing taking place.
The scientific fundamentals are posited on the premise of "if we didn't exist, what would we agree on is true about the universe". And that's a valid endeavor, but it rests on a hypothetical because we do exist as sentient beings.
I think if you view the pyramid as blocks you're being a bit simplistic.
All aspects of the pyramid are present at all levels, what the pyramid represents is what you have to free yourself of in order to truly and wholly endeavor in each stage.
You can act with self-transcendence even if you're starving, but you can't direct as much thought, time and energy towards it unless you cover the underlying needs.
This is all well and good, by my psychological need for esteem, and to a lesser extent love/belonging, is so much less that I ignore its pull to large extents (and have even been viscerally repulsed by praise through portions of my life). Maybe that's why I've not been all that facile at Captaining my own destiny in this world.
There's no immutable aspects of you. Everything is constant change. The illusion, the impossibility that you speak of, is this belief in immutability and the craving for it.
Technology, materialism, science. The currents of thought that move us based on perceived value and belief, and where myths and assumptions stem from.
A popular creation myth at the moment is simulation theory.
Reducing consciousness to material data-processing is a way to believe there's a possibility of life after body-death.
A popular "promised-land" myth is that technology will save us.
The assumption that mind stems from matter is so commonly beheld that people take it as fact, in the same way some people take god as a fact, unquestioningly.
