Hangzhou Lovin’

I really dislike writing titles for my posts

So I was gonna buy a new Chinese english electronic dictionary, but then I realised I was a freaking genius and Web 2.0 master so I just used the super power of the W3. First I go the google translation page, or this online chinese dicitonary, then I go over to this page which will produce the voice of a sexy chinese female saying anything I want. Try this one out from Nelly’s hot song, “it’s getting hot in here”!

我：这里越来越热（很热）
就都脱衣服吧
她：我好热，我要脱衣服！

ok, so why not another philosophy post, just cause i can download music and i downloaded some spacey shit. The older i get the more intricle durgs to themusic making do seem.

So what we will talk about today, is why I am an atheist, not cause I want to force my atheist agenda on y’all but that it is a good topic that goes into a lot of tings. First of all, I fell that atheism is not a beleif system, but a lack of a belief system. For example, you can say christians are atheists about Zues. So there are many reasons that I am atheist, reasons that have popped up at different times in my life, I think if I go in a vaguelly chronilogical order that will be best.

My memory of when I realised there was no god is very distinct. It is actually one of the few really strong memories I have about a significant change in my way of seeing the world from my childhood that I actually have. I can’t remember when I stopped believing in Santa or the Easter Bunny. It happened when I was studying for a biology test. I was trying to get the concept of osmosis through my head. I couldn’t see how the particles would just move by themselves. There had to be something making them move. But then all of a sudden it hit me, that it was just random movements working. The system was set up to be stupid. Once I figured this out I remember thinking to myself, there is no need for god. Things just work themselves out. It was this understanding of the power of basically random, non thinking process, and that most of our universe is controlled by these types of process that showed me that god was superflous and unneccessary and probably fake. So I never got laid in highshcool and thought about osmosis alot maybe the too are connected.

So this is basically a rejection of god from a scientific standpoint. I think this is the best reason for rejecting god. If you take the claim that there is a god seriously, that is when people say they believe in god they are making a statement about the world, this statement does not hold up to modern scientific evidence. Pre-enlightenment theories about god are mostly pretty rational. I am particularly sympathetic to pagan religions with lots of gods. If you don’t really know how the world works, then things like diesease and lightenin bolts annd earthquakes will seem like they come from gods. Given the evidence they have It isn’t really that bad a hyposthesis that there are all these crazy jealous gods running around.

But the fact is we have evidence now. We know how diesease, lightening and earthquakes are caused. Basically everything earthly has been explained enough so we know that there was no neccessity for god to be involved. When we get the the heavens we know how stars where formed, We know the size of the universe is basically beyond comprehension and we are very close to understanding how the universe itself started. And all this has been done without the need to use a supreme being as a cause, let alone an anthropomorphic god.

The only evidence we have for god are religous texts and the testimony of people who have had religous experiences. I’m going to dismiss religous texts without much argument. There are alot of them and none of them are the same, there is no reason to privilidge one above the other, and the claims all of them make about the world are demenstrablyt false. Why should I should I believe the bible and not the epics of gilgamesh? As for the testimony of people who have had religous experiences, there has been much reasearch done on the reliability of witnesses and it is incredibaly lacking espeicially when somebody has something to benifit from staying to a particular story line. Look into UFO abduction stories or tales of satanic abuse. The evidence for these kinds of stories is equal to the evidence for different kinds of religous experience.

Even if I myself were to have a religous or spritual experience, i would hope it would not change my mind on being an atheist. The human mind is very able to create it’s own reality and it is not to be trusted, espeicially when someone is under great stress or has been fed a lot of propaganda. Personnel terstimony about religous about religous experience would not be accepted as evidence in a court or a laboratory. There is no reason we should accept them when we are trying to figure out the meaning of life.

Souls afterlife reincarnation

After asserting the scientific argument against the existence of god, what a religous person will through up a metaphysical argument. That is they will try to argue that you can’t see god as part of a scientific world view, spirtuality is somehow disconnected from the world of science. If they took to much philosophy in school they will pull out some shit about wittgenstenian language games. Or they will say they aren’t “religous”, they are just “spirtual.”

All these arguments are bullshit. All religions or talk about spirtuality clearly make claims about the world that can be verified. They make claims about what will happen to people who follow the religion. They make claims about how the spirtual world interacts with the real world. The fact is these claims cannot be backed up by the facts. If someone says they are just spirtual ask them how this spirtuality interacts with the world. How does it have consequences on how someone acts. Either they will say some stupid superstitious shit, obviously false, or they will say some nice sounding truism that has no impact on how the world is or how we should act like, “every living thing in the world is connected somehow.”

To make this point a little clearer, I need to elucidate what a scientific world view is. Sience is a systematic way of making observations about the world. That is all, it’s about. So if there were things like mircales in the world, they would not be outside of science, science would simply try to explain them . The fact is that there never has been evidence for miricles.

This brings us to another facet of my atheism. Even if there were a god, I see no reason why I should worship him or do what he commands. What could possibly give him the moral authority to command me? Your parents created you, yet they should have no moral authority over you when you are an adult.

i understand that this kind of reasoning is probably baffeling to believers. That is because for many of y’all you philisophically see morality as coming directly from god or some kind of spirtuality. This is probably the hardest objection for athiests to overcome, because in order to do that it seems like we have to come up with a whole other philosphy of morality. I’m not really sure I have that quite down yet but I am not worried by this. First of all, like in all other matters, there is not evidence that god has anything to do with morality. That is if you are talking about a descriptive morality instead of a presecriptive morality.

It is fairly clear that all societes past and present have had morality, a morality that has had some consistent charecterstics. The most basic being the concept that harming other people is bad. These societies have had vastly different theologies and some of the most moral (as measured by societal measures of how they treat the poor and unfortunate) have been the most unreligous (modern europe and to some degree the modern U.S.). Being moral is an intrinsic in being human, it is not intrinsic in being religous.

To be honest I find the claim that one needs to have his morality validated by religion to be childish and inhumane. I guess some people need that extra boost to do good beside a basic feeling of compassion toward their fellow man. I should put this together better in the future.

The last reason why people believe in religions is political. They believe something because not to believe it would mean a change in the power structures of their lives. An extreme example of this is the amish, who chose to reject education and technology in order to keep a certain order to their lives. But this type of thinking constantly comes up in debates about the existence of god and is a pain in the ass. Intelligent design is largy this about politics of education for example.

One last thing I want to see is fuck agnostics. Make up your fucking mind. Both atheists and religous people have clearly stated positions and there is loads of evidence for you to deside on. Agonstics are pussies.

the war on Chirstmas.

Jesus, I need to get out of this fucking country.

Ha, Iowa

don’t read this unless you like rambling passages about philosophy of mind

ok, so i can’t sleep, so here i smy basic philosoph on the hard problem of consciousness. Ok so there are two problems that i think peopl ehave looked at the wrong way, these are the humonculus problem and the zombie problem.

I’ll start with the zombie problem. To put it briefly, the zombie problem states that conciousness is a special part of reality because it is possible that there could be zombies who are functionally the same as normal people but experience none of the mental life of a normal preson. The problem with this is that when you get down to fine behavior, ie brain states, this gets a little ridicolus. Because people stop just being a black box, you have brain states that directly coincide with concious states. So in order to claim that there is a difference between concious people and zombies you must claim that there is something special about conciousness, that it is it’s own kind of special logical thing.

What i want to claim is that zombies are a logical impossiblity. That is that anything which has the physical manifistaion of human conciosness, a working brain. The reason for this is that the only explainable thing about consioucness is it’s logical structure. Like when you call something green what you are actually taking about is it’s logical place in your preception and how that relates to your understanding of that relationsip in english. It all gets a little complicated because it gets mixed up with emperisicm and philosphy of language. so to put it bluntly without any real justification, our percieved conciosness is just the logical structure that our mind takes.

This makes sense about when thinking about simple shit like the shape of a triangle, but what about something like color. How is this simply a logical structure. Color seems like a primal quality, but one that seem totally aribitary. It seems like three is no reason for green to be green or for red to be red, and it is easy to imagine another person who has the colors all mixed up. However, if you look at the neurological processing you see that it is a very complicated process. there is a reason there are primary and secondary colors and why colors have the dimensions of hue and brightness that they do. These relations are simply to complx to be grasped in the mind like a simple geometric shape like the triangle. Furthermore, there are people who’s perception of color is different than normal people, those who are colorblind. The fact that their conscious preception is affected in regular ways that follow the logic of visual processing in the brain is more evidence that perceptions are logical processing.

I’m not really sure how logically sound this is, i make a big jump from perception mirrors neurolgical processing (exactly) to perception is neurlogical processing. but in my gut i feel it’s right, because the only alternative would be to posit some new kind of existence that solely only in consciousness and this just dosn’t make sense.

So the other problem is why do we percieve consciousness in the first place? why do colors and sounds and other sense impressions have such a raw quality that we want to give special meaning to. The reason for this is that, there is a humunculus in our brains, (and i don’t mean the sense or motor ones). This is come by by a solution to the problem of the humonculus.

This was presented in some book by daniel dennet I read. it basically goes like this. In order for consciouness to be there, you need somebody to be looking at the consiousness, that is you need a little man in your brain looking at all your sense impressions. Dennet said the problem with this was that this hits an infinte regression problem, because every humonculous will need to have another homunculous in it’s head in order for it to work.

But this is just not true, there only be need one humunculus. And that is the systems in our brain that run our attention, short term memory systems and other processes that are essential to conciousness. These are seperate from our sense organs and there only has to be one level of consciousness for them to work. How this works I have no idea, but there certianly is a unity of consciousness in humans and it is up to neuroscience to figure out.

I’d also like to point out something that pisses me off. People always say they did something uncousciously when in fact the just did it and didn’t remeber it or didn’t need to access their memory to do it. The classic example of this is when you get home after driving from somewhere and you can’t remember any part of the drive. This dosn’t mean that you were unconcious of the drive when you were doing it, but merely that you didn’t store it to short term memory. The same thing when people het so good at a skill that the say they can do it unconciously. No you do it conciously you just don’t need to access your memory to do it so you don’t notice it as much.

well i’m sure no one understood that, but i’m being an insomniac tonight. next up in my philosphy: my metaphysics, philosophy of language, why i’m an atheist and ethics.

I’m in the news

via jamie who was begging for this link like a Dan Washburn wannabe

Man everything in america is too sweet, you can’t get a drink in the store that’s not sweet unless it’s bottled water, and who want’s to drink bottled water when i already live someplace i can suck the sweet stuff right out of the tap.

And what’s up with all the “asian” restuarants I see. What the fuck is asian food? Is there european style food? Shit’s ridiculous if I want some dim sum I’ll go to a cantonese place, if i want sushi i’ll go to a japanese place, if i want pad thai I’ll go to a pad thai place. But guess what, I never want Handrolled curry lemongrass wasabi wantons with thai nut suace infused with sichuan peppercorm, cause that would taste like shit. Plus those places are so full of yuppies.

I hate yuppies, partly because i secretly envy them, but mostly cause they have such shitty taste and spend so much money. I went out with my folks to this Vietnamese/french place in chincago that was stinking of yuppies. The food wasn’t that bad, the problem was that it was neither vietnamese nor french, it was fucking “asian” wich pissed me off. For one thing they didn’t have one vietnames style curry on the menu, which is fucking ridicoulus, plus they didn’t even serve french bread which is what real vietnamese do. And their rice noodles where weak. But i could tell all the fucking yuppies in there thought they were back in saigon in 1946 talking about how great their shares of Michelin were doing.

Fuck, it’s like bubble tea. Which in china is 12-25 cents and is just something you have to warm you up in the morning, while here in the US it’s fucking 5 dollars a cup and all these scednster girls go crazy over it. You should never spend more then 5 dollars a drink unless it has alcohol in it. And that is the lesson of today.

Plus some good sites

Freeware links, muchos useful

the best vacation story ever

So the rebpub’s are now arguing with that Nixon pulled out of vietnam too early? And the press reports this with a straight face?

I’m only watching the colbert report for my news from now on

MY WOMAN

35 year old Woman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United StatesLooking For: Men for a pen pal

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