Thanks for the summary. This book might slot neatly in my bookshelf between Alain de Botton’s “Religion for Atheists” and Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Existential Physics”. Both of which I recommend for style, structure and humour, as well as intellectual substance/argumentation.
Enjoyable interview with Rosenberg! I’ll go through the provided list of pithy questions/answers where I think improvements might be made. (These are answers that I suspect a future community of metascientists will agree upon in their quest to found the function of science in general.)
Point 1: Instead of asserting “There is no God” I think they’ll assert that such beliefs must be banned from standard science since this would render it obsolete to the degree that such a being impacts our world, which is to say, violates systemic causality.
Point 2: “Physics” merely consists of modeling, so even when done well this is not conceptually the right sort of thing to found a metaphysical platform upon. Per point 1 an appropriate idea would be to reduce reality to “systemic causality”.
Point 3: On purpose or meaning, this reduces back to feeling good/bad, or sentience. The universe doesn’t have this though there is an associated physics of value (which still needs empirical determination). Evolution used this physics to create the conscious form of function (as described in my new post: https://eborg760.substack.com/p/post6-axiologically-founding-science)
Point 4: Freewill can be said to exist as a function of ignorance. This is to say that the more ignorant you are about the causal dynamics which force someone to do horrible things to you, the more “evil” you can effectively say they are. Removing that ignorance however changes such “evilness” to “badness”.
Point 5: On morality, in my next post I’ll reduce moral forms of creature back to two value based components of psychology. For now however they essentially reduce to care and the desire for respect.
I like this very much. I'm a Sapolsky-level determinist, so we disagree there, but I appreciate this post overall.
Thanks for the summary. This book might slot neatly in my bookshelf between Alain de Botton’s “Religion for Atheists” and Sabine Hossenfelder’s “Existential Physics”. Both of which I recommend for style, structure and humour, as well as intellectual substance/argumentation.
Thanks for sharing and looking forward to watching the full conversation! I wrote an article recently which also drew from the same book and Alex Rosenberg very kindly read it for which I was grateful: https://drchrisearl.substack.com/p/the-atheists-guide-to-meaning-and?r=5by8be&utm_medium=ios
Can you please elaborate on your views on free will ? Compatibilist along Dennett’s views or different?
Enjoyable interview with Rosenberg! I’ll go through the provided list of pithy questions/answers where I think improvements might be made. (These are answers that I suspect a future community of metascientists will agree upon in their quest to found the function of science in general.)
Point 1: Instead of asserting “There is no God” I think they’ll assert that such beliefs must be banned from standard science since this would render it obsolete to the degree that such a being impacts our world, which is to say, violates systemic causality.
Point 2: “Physics” merely consists of modeling, so even when done well this is not conceptually the right sort of thing to found a metaphysical platform upon. Per point 1 an appropriate idea would be to reduce reality to “systemic causality”.
Point 3: On purpose or meaning, this reduces back to feeling good/bad, or sentience. The universe doesn’t have this though there is an associated physics of value (which still needs empirical determination). Evolution used this physics to create the conscious form of function (as described in my new post: https://eborg760.substack.com/p/post6-axiologically-founding-science)
Point 4: Freewill can be said to exist as a function of ignorance. This is to say that the more ignorant you are about the causal dynamics which force someone to do horrible things to you, the more “evil” you can effectively say they are. Removing that ignorance however changes such “evilness” to “badness”.
Point 5: On morality, in my next post I’ll reduce moral forms of creature back to two value based components of psychology. For now however they essentially reduce to care and the desire for respect.
Point 6: Love? See point 3.