Tag Archives: science and faith

Oct 5 2023

Eternal Hopes

In an earlier post, we looked at what it might be like to express our beliefs as hopes, at least those beliefs about which we cannot be certain.

We don’t have a complete understanding of reality since science is still incomplete, and yet we need to make choices about such things to guide our lives. We often treat these as firmly held beliefs based on rational thinking, but the reality is that we’re believing in things that we can’t know are true, yet we still expect with confidence to be the case. In other words, we hope these things are true.

We’ve looked at several examples of common beliefs to see what it looks like to express them as hopes, by comparing statements that could reasonably be made by atheists and Christians. These examples were the meaning of life and the hard problem of consciousness. In both cases, it seemed that expressing one’s beliefs about those topics as hope recognized the uncertainty that still exists. It also revealed a possible benefit in that such language may help defuse the often confrontational nature of conversations in these spaces.

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Sep 30 2023

To Be Open-Minded About Consciousness

One of the basic ideas of this blog is that our understanding of reality is still incomplete, so that even though we need to live according to some beliefs, it’s probably best to realize that they can be described as hopes instead of settled facts.

An example of this sort of limited knowledge is the challenge of understanding consciousness, and in particular, how it relates to material reality. In other words, is consciousness strictly a result of physical, material processes, or does it result from something outside of these?

Many believe that the material is all there is, that the brain (generally neuroscience) is sufficient for explaining everything we observe about the mind, including the nature of consciousness and self-awareness.

Others believe that there probably is something more than just physical substance involved, that even if the brain is necessary for everything we observe about the mind, the material brain is still not sufficient to explain everything.

Such views involve assertions about the relationship between the physical and immaterial aspects of reality, and perhaps whether immaterial things even exist. Of course, this is not the only place such questions have come up.

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Aug 25 2023

Hope in Mind

In the previous post, we looked at what it might be like to express our beliefs as hopes, at least those beliefs about which we cannot be certain.

We don’t have a complete understanding about the nature of reality – the meaning of life, the possibility of afterlife, the nature of human consciousness, and so on. As it stands right now, our best scientific, rational understanding of these topics is incomplete. Despite this uncertainty, we all make choices about these things in how we let them guide our lives, and we often treat these as firmly held beliefs.

The result is that we’re believing in things that we can’t know are true, but we still expect with confidence to be the case. In other words, we hope these things are true.

In the previous post, we looked at an example to see how this works. That example was about the meaning of life. For another example, consider the “hard problem” of consciousness. It is considered a hard problem because we still know so little about it and it is so different from all other physical things that the path to better understanding is not at all clear.

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Aug 3 2023

Hope

Earlier posts describe one of the key ideas on this blog, that we don’t know enough to be certain of metaphysical truths. That means we have to make a choice about what to believe, and that choice is going to have some level of uncertainty.

Another way of describing this uncertainty is to say that our beliefs about metaphysical truths are really hopes – they represent what we hope is true, such that we act in agreement with that hope.

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Jul 14 2023

Picturing the Unique Nature of Consciousness

In the previous essay, I discussed the possibility that the brain is necessary to consciousness but that it is not sufficient. In other words, that there seems to be something needed beyond our current understanding of the physical. History, however, shows that science has often been challenged with such paradigm shifts.

Sometimes metaphors can help us see beyond such biases and preconceptions, so in this essay we’ll consider a picture that may illustrate why consciousness is so unique, and why it’s too early to start limiting options for explaining it.

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Jun 5 2023

Human Identity and the Uncertainties of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently a hot topic that’s being talked about in many media outlets as it continues to roll out. It still remains to be seen whether this activity will begin to cool off, as often happens with new technologies, or truly start to transform society.

Even a brief look at the ways that AI is being used makes it clear that there are enormous possibilities for both good and evil. This is certainly true in the short term, because people will find both good and evil things to do with it like we do with virtually all new tools.

There are even greater uncertainties in the long term, however, when we will start to deal with things like Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which may be able to solve problems that humans cannot, and machine agency and consciousness, which will raise the possibility of AIs acting on their own in ways that may not be good for humanity.

A common theme across all these possibilities is the great uncertainty about what will happen. One of the sources of this uncertainty is the level of mystery in our understanding of how both machine and human intelligence works. It’s common to hear how current AI developers are surprised at the things that their creations are able to do. This uncertainty is mirrored by the amount that we still don’t understand about the human mind, which is often the primary model for designing these systems.

Consciousness, for example, still remains a great mystery even though all humans experience it. Despite this universal experience, and many different investigations, it still isn’t clear whether consciousness can be fully explained with strict materialism. This has resulted in a growing number of researchers proposing additions beyond the current materialist models that enable consciousness. They do this in ways that avoid having to resort to the supernatural, yet still point to something beyond the physical.

In other words, there seems to be a persistent metaphysical aspect to consciousness that has not yet been explained. Our lack of understanding of consciousness extends to its most fundamental nature, illustrating our lack of understanding of the nature of reality itself.

While such immaterial viewpoints are actively rejected by many researchers, it’s also well-known that there is a deep human need for the metaphysical, for transcendence. So while there is still this uncertainty regarding the mind, we need a story that allows us to remain human in this way, that allows us to accept the personal experience of self as something real and not just a tricky behavior of matter.

We need to keep open the possibility of a fundamental difference between humans and machines.

Apr 20 2023

Complex Motives

Discussions of the weakness of religion sometimes end up attempting to address God’s motives with questions that start with an observation about God’s character, then question that observation based on what is seen in the world.

These challenges often take the form of: “Why would a loving God allow…?” or something similar.

The idea being that the characteristic in question, in this case a loving nature, is incompatible with what we see in the world around us.

One of the common responses to this from Christians is essentially that God’s ways are unfathomable to us, so we should not expect to understand why some things happen. However, this approach is often rejected, being seen as something of a copout – avoiding the question altogether rather than addressing it.

However, note how reasonable this answer seems when talking about human behavior. It’s well known that we need to be careful when trying to understand someone else’s motives because there are so many factors we don’t know.

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Feb 23 2023

Seeing Confirmation Bias

Photographers often strive to find new ways of seeing the world. In a sense, this involves looking for new information, which is a healthy way to live. Unfortunately, we tend to avoid this due to our innate tendency for something called “confirmation bias”.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. –Wikipedia

Confirmation bias makes it harder for us to adopt new perspectives, perhaps even to learn new ideas, because we will tend to avoid information that could lead us to change existing beliefs.

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Jan 26 2023

Ways of Thinking

If there are limits to rational thinking, does that mean that there are limits to what we can know at all or just limits to what we can know rationally? In other words, are there ways of discovering and knowing things, perhaps even truths, other than rationally?

If so, we would need other ways of thinking that can still produce improved understanding. So then, if reasoning isn’t available, what other ways of thinking might be helpful?

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Jan 6 2023

The Science-Faith Debate

There is an ongoing debate about the relationship between science and faith. Many believe that they are incompatible, that they are at “war” with each other. Others contend that they have nothing to do with each other, an idea sometimes expressed by describing them as “non-overlapping magisteria” — the idea that they only apply to unrelated aspects of reality and human experience.

However, an underlying assumption with both views is that we understand the universe well enough to be certain about our assessments. However, what if this isn’t true? What if it’s better to take a more humble position and admit that we cannot make a clear enough assessment, and therefore need to continue exploring the issues?

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