is my worldview naturalistic?

[sophiaserpentia]

I've been flirting with the label of "Bright" (mostly as an act of self-defense, since i have come to consider religion a direct threat to my life, health, sanity, and well-being).

But i'm not sure that my views are actually 'naturalistic,' in the sense that they mean.

I do not believe in anything supernatural. I do feel very strongly though that there are things which rationality cannot explain. Rationality is a product of the human nervous system and therefore contains inherent limitations. To be a naturalist, is it necessary to believe that all natural processes can be rationally described?

Notable Brights like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett actively deny the existence of the mind, claiming that it is an illusion created by the brain's continual revision of an ongoing first-person narrative. Dennett's conclusion is based on the presumption that everything that occurs within our conscious mind MUST have a neural correlate.

This is not a presumption that i'm willing to concede. My theory that mind is a physical field is naturalistic and monistic (i deny the "mind/body duality") but not eliminative or deterministic. Supernatural? Close enough for government work?

My thoughts about god are pretty unconventional too. My attempts to describe god as "meaningfully nonexistent," as something that exists in the potential for things to happen or grow or as a result of the conscious explication of reality out of the holomovement, feel to me now, in retrospect, as somewhat desperate attempts to justify holding out for the possibility of any sort of transpersonal being in the light of serious questions that the idea of god is anything more than a hiccup of the human brain.

Pascal Boyer made a point which sticks with me. On page 158 of Religion Explained he points out that our understanding of god is primarily concerned with god's knowledge of and concern with human affairs. Thus it seems silly or irrelevant to ask whether god knows the state of every machine on Earth or what every insect is up to, or what god is made out of... and these questions seem silly because we think of god primarily in terms of god's relation to us, to other people, and to human society. I think it was this point that nailed the coffin shut, for me.

I don't want to deny the importance of faith or hope, or it's potential for transforming someone's life for the better. But is it necessary to have faith "in" something? Or, alternately, is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist? I have long thought that the whole idea of holding faith hostage to one set or another of poison memes is an intolerable cruelty.

Comments

[akaiyume.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of people who claim to be "naturalist" and call many things supernatural or natural have a very limited understanding of reality based largely on how easily something is perceived - as in the have a more concrete or materialist view as opposed to a grasp on the theoretical (nothing wrong with this, it is advantageous in certain situations and just a different form of cognition). I think that many of the most "religious" people are the same way - perhaps even more - and there are things that our science and symbols don't or can't currently explain, so "god" becomes a concrete, material explanation.

Think about the fact that matter=energy=constant. And about concepts which don't have a one to one correlate like synergy and emergence or the lack of deterministic type stuff in systems far from equilibrium, and other things covered in stuff like "chaos" theory. The science is there to point that form is only one manifestation and not (the only) absolute- as in everything is basically the same "stuff" just way differently organized. Even many people who can accept these things in theory can't seem to apply this knowledge to "everyday" thinking, and call these things "mystical" or "supernatural" when applied to the human realm, when it seems more outside of nature to expect strict determination and limited cause/effect correlation when it comes to humans. Most "rationality" rests on seeing things as a closed system, when the truth of the matter is that the systems "rational" thought sees as closed are subsytems which are open/interconnected to other subsystems which are all part of a larger system. So much of rational thought is highly irrational.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

I think they mean "materialistic". If they are rejecting all "supernatural" and mystical thought or experiences, then they are materialistic. Mystical experiences are natural.
And no, I don't think that fits you.

[azaz-al.livejournal.com]

"is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist?"

I think so. At least if you are like the kind of atheist who goes around mocking the stupidity and gullibility of everyone who isn't an atheist, which seems to fit most atheists I know.

[discoflamingo.livejournal.com]

I think you're far too open-minded to be a Bright.

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

Notable Brights like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett actively deny the existence of the mind,

I think it's a little strong to say that. I think they'll concede that when people talk about the mind they're talking about something. That is, "the mind is whatever we mean when we say 'mind'." I'd say their view is that the mind is due to nothing more than physical brain activity -- electrical signals along neurons, neurotransmitters, etc. -- and nothing additional is involved.

Perhaps it would be fair to say they deny the existence of any additional "mind substance"; that is, their metaphysics contains only the accepted entities of ordinary physics (known particles, known fields) and they think it is not necessary to enlarge it in any way to be able to explain, in principle, whatever is going on that people call the "mind".

[el-christador.livejournal.com]

Although I'd agree that "the mind does not exist" is not a bad way to get across their gist and certainly would convey more or less the right thing to people, as a sort of zero-th order approximation. Indeed, just the other day, I was thinking of writing an entry musing on something Dennett said and summarizing his viewpoint as "consciousness does not exist", which isn't quite right for the reason I gave above, but certainly gets one close.

of possible interest

[alobar.livejournal.com]

I thought you would enjoy this:
http://heron61.livejournal.com/419336.html

Not sure how (or if) it pertains to humans, but worth pondering.

[fuzzybutchkins.livejournal.com]

The generic noun form of bright is a tool to lay emphasis on the shared naturalistic worldview of a potentially large aggregate of persons. The term offers many individuals a means to step forward free of socially burdensome labels to speak more candidly and positively about their outlook.

Ugh. The idea of calling oneself a Bright just rubbed me the wrong way, and after reading this bit I figured out why. You want to talk about a "socially burdensome label", being a "bright" or "gifted" child, that most definitely qualifies. If I could find the slightest hint that these folks were attempting label reclaimation, it wouldn't bother me so much, but it just appears to me to be an attempt to assign a pretty name to secular, skeptial humanism.

[la-veuve-chibi.livejournal.com]

is it necessary to discard faith and hope utterly if one is an atheist?

Faith, I'd say yes, there must be no faith because faith is prejudice. No one would accept a scientific study in which someone declared "I'm going to prove this drug does this"--it's biased.

Hope, on the other hand, can be said to involve the unknown. I can say I *don't* know the true nature of the mind, and that I *hope* brain death doesn't involve what we know as the mind simply vanishing, and though I may prefer a certain answer to my question, I'm not assuming it's true. If I had faith that consciousness existed independently of the brain, I would be prejudicially rejecting the equally likely possibility that it didn't.

My icon sort of illustrates this idea of hope with acknowledgment of preference.

[pooperman.livejournal.com]

I think Dennet (I may be mistaken) regarded the "soul" and perhaps the "mind" as "the narrative center of gravity of the self". I like this kind of metaphor, since it brings to mind a sort of "meaningful nonexistence" of centers-of-gravity (they don't really exist, except as mathematical constructions, artifices, of arbitrarily-selected and isolated objects in a pretend-space that exists independently of those objects, which isn't really accurate either) and allows us to speak constructively about the phenomenon of man without losing ourselves in "what actually is". To quote Neils Bohr yet again:

"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature... Our task is not to penetrate into the essence of things, the meaning of which we don't know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature."

I think, in that way, we can embrace a nonexistence of mind while still using the concepts surrounding the term without fear of contradiction or counterclaims that our approach is self-defeating.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I perceive a false dichotomy (and implicit exclusion) in "naturalism" being opposed to "faith". It's possible to acknowledge the possibility, indeed: necessity, that our perceptions both exclude information from and, by the processes of filtering and abstraction, add patterns to reality without invoking faith in the religious sense.

Dennett's multiple drafts model doesn't, as I read it, have anything to say about faith as such; it's a description, an explanation, of the process of perception itself, not of the nature of that which is perceived. Consciousness defined as an emergent epiphenomenon of the mechanism of perception, which strikes me as a fair enough definition, and better (and probably more useful) than most.

As for the "Brights", their web site made me itch; I can appreciate what they're trying to do: to create a new frame, but I think they're trying too hard and, ultimately, being reactive to (and so defining themselves in terms of) the emergent theocracy.

Oh, and hello! I hope you don't mind my appearing here; I read a comment you posted to ginmar and, well, cheered really. I've been lurking here ever since.