Questions APRIL 7

Conclude Playground, commence Goldstein's 36 Arguments thru Argument IX (check the Appendix for the briefer version). 

1. What are your concluding thoughts about Playground? Did anything in the concluding sections surprise you? How about Profunda's story within-thge-story, and the end of the story? The revelation about Rafi on 369? Do you have a response to any of the Discussion Questions in the Reading Group Guide at the end of the book? Do you think the future (or the present, for that matter) will resemble any of the stories in Playground any significant regard? Has the novel changed the way you think about any of the issues it raises?
2. Any thoughts about Claude's interpretation of the "distance to the horizon" conversation between Bart and Evie on 335, or about Claude's resemblance to PROFUNDA? Does "horizon" represent the future on earth, the possibility of life after death, or anything else? 
3. Was Rafi right to ask Todd for $$? Was Todd right to respond as he did? Are either or both of them good persons? Is it true that law and justice can never be automated? Is Todd's Seascaping venture on Makatea just a play for revenge against Rafi?  337-343
4. Any comment on Richard Powers's opening remarks in the Politics and Prose interview below? Are you surprised that he grew up on Chicago's north side, befriended a young African-American from the south side, dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, and considers both Todd and Rafi his alter egos?
5. Any comment on the Ezra Klein podcast with Michael Pollan discussing consciousness (below)? Does their conversation have any bearing on how you think about AI? Do you agree with Klein that machines might someday become conscious, or with Pollan that their disembodied state makes that highly unlikely? Will a significant percentage of people in the future "worship" computers, whether they become conscious or not? Do you agree, as Todd playfully concludes in Playground, that consciousness is sometimes overrated or at least overemphasized... that it doesn't finally matter whether smart machines are "conscious" or not?
6. Are all creatures, even Profunda, "playing in the world"? Are we playing a finite or an infinite game?
7. An Easter question, to transition from Playground to 36 Arguments: Do you believe Jesus literally rose from the dead, that AI and computers will in any sense bring the dead back to life, or that miracles happen? How do you define "miracle"? What do you think of Arthur C. Clarke's statement that “any sufficiently advanced technology," to the scientifically illiterate, "is indistinguishable from magic”?
8. Do you have any thoughts about any of the first nine arguments in Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God? (See the Appendix, starting on p. 347... also here*).
9. The chapter titles in 36 Arguments do not align with the argument titles in the Appendix. Why do you think that is? (Try to answer this before you look at my conversation with Claude.)
10. Are you familiar with "The Four Horsemen," and the New Atheist movement of a few years ago? Are you acquainted with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or the late Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens? What's your impression of them, and of that movement? What is your attitude towards secular humanism?
11. Have you read anything else by Goldstein? She has a Substack... Her latest book is a work of nonfiction, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Do you think the religious impulse is related to what she calls "mattering"? What do you think ultimately matters? What do you think is the relevance of philosophical arguments for or against the existence of a god or gods to the religious experience and faith of typical believers?
12.  Note that Goldstein's 36 arguments pertain to the conception of god as a supernatural creator being, an "agent that had [our] welfare at heart" (as Powers put it) and is omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent. Is that your conception of god? Or do you have an alternative definition?
13. Notice the continuity of the game-playing theme between these novels,with Lucinda's professional academic expertise in game theory. Do you think the sense of play implicit in her interest in games is similar to, or different from, the way Richard Powers and his characters think of it? [Game theory explained by a Princeton economist... and by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
14. Comment?: William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual[s] in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Is that, as Cass says, a "bloated" definition? 5   Is it a good one?
15. What do you think it might mean for an atheist to claim to have a soul? 
16. Have you read Freud's The Future of an Illusion? What do you think of his statement that “Religious doctrines … are all illusions, they do not admit of proof, and no one can be compelled to consider them as true or to believe in them"? Or any of these other statements from Freud?
17. What Boston-area school do you imagine Frankfurter U. to be based on? 
18. Are atheists unfairly stigmatized in America? 9
19. Was Descartes wrong about the "seat of the soul"? 12  Is Cass?   How do you think about the mind-body relation? Is soul something different than spirit, mind, and consciousness? Is it irreducible to body and brain?
20. What's your impression of Professor Klapper? 14ff.  Is he a pompous blowhard, a genius, both, neither?
21. Can you relate to "the strangeness of being just this"? 16-18, 61, 77   [James said the classic question of why there is something rather than nothing is not as compelling as the question of why there is this particular thing (or person, or experience) rather than some other that might have existed in its place.]
22. Is it desirable or even possible to view life sub specie aeternitatits? 18  If so, how does the world look different to you, from that perspective, than from the everyday way of thinking? 
23. What do you think of Lucinda's prosopagnosia? Is it an absence of mindfulness, in her case, as well as a neurological condition? 24, 27, 41
24. What do you think of Pascale's view of probability? 26-7, 30
25. Is the Wittgenstein Fallacy correct? 28
26. Is Game Theory's major assumption correct? 32
27. Should academics "fang" each other? 35-6
28. What do you think of Lucinda's exchange with Cass on 39-40?
29. Another thematic continuity: What do you think of Roz's Immortality Foundation? 53f., 89   Is aging "barbaric"?   What do you think of transhumanism? 
30. Should there be a quarrel between philosophy and poetry? 69
31. Is reversal of fortune really un-Darwinian? 70
32. Is it really possible to have a "view from nowhere"? 76
33. Have you known any "permanent grad students"? 79   Would you work with a professor who had a reputation for never allowing his students to finish?
34. Is scientism the "dogma of our day"? 81f.
35. Are the humanities "finished"? 85
36. What do you think of James's distinction between tough and tender minds (Pragmatism, Lec.1)? 93
37. Is the Singularity near? 94  Is it wise to ingest lots of supplements in an attempt to achieve longevity (to "live long enough to live forever")? 95   Would you want to achieve disembodied immortality, on earth or "in heaven"? 96-7   How much more time would you like to have, on earth? Would that change "the meaning of what it is to live a human life" for the worse? 98
38. Is "my suffering is bad" a tautology? 99
39. Should Cass and Gideon have defended Klapper to the philosophy grad students? 109
40. Share your comments on any of the first nine arguments (or the analyses thereof) in either the main text or the appendix that you'd like to. Do you like the "analytic" and systematic style of analysis in the appendix? 
41. Post your questions and comments, by Monday if possible.

==

*Appendix: 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

1. The Cosmological Argument


1. Everything that exists must have a cause.

2. The universe must have a cause (from 1).

3. Nothing can be the cause of itself.

4. The universe cannot be the cause of itself (from 3).

5. Something outside the universe must have caused the universe (from 2 & 4).

6. God is the only thing that is outside of the universe.

7. God caused the universe (from 5 & 6).

8. God exists.

FLAW 1: can be crudely put: Who caused God? The Cosmological Argument is a prime example of the Fallacy of Passing the Buck: invoking God to solve some problem, but then leaving unanswered that very same problem when applied to God himself. The proponent of the Cosmological Argument must admit a contradiction to either his first premise — and say that though God exists, he doesn't have a cause — or else a contradiction to his third premise — and say that God is self-caused. Either way, the theist is saying that his premises have at least one exception, but is not explaining whyGod must be the unique exception, otherwise than asserting his unique mystery (the Fallacy of Using One Mystery To Pseudo-Explain Another). Once you admit of exceptions, you can ask why the universe itself, which is also unique, can't be the exception. The universe itself can either exist without a cause, or else can be self-caused . Since the buck has to stop somewhere, why not with the universe?

FLAW 2: The notion of "cause" is by no means clear, but our best definition is a relation that holds between events that are connected by physical laws. Knocking the vase off the table caused it to crash to the floor; smoking three packs a day caused his lung cancer. To apply this concept to the universe itself is to misuse the concept of cause, extending it into a realm in which we have no idea how to use it. This line of skeptical reasoning, based on the incoherent demands we make of the concept of cause, was developed by David Hume.

COMMENT: The Cosmological Argument, like the Argument from the Big Bang, and The Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, are expressions of our cosmic befuddlement at the question: why is there something rather than nothing? The late philosopher Sydney Morgenbesser had a classic response to this question: "And if there were nothing? You'd still be complaining!"

2. The Ontological Argument


1. Nothing greater than God can be conceived (this is stipulated as part of the definition of "God").

2. It is greater to exist than not to exist.

3 . If we conceive of God as not existing, then we can conceive of something greater than God (from 2).

4. To conceive of God as not existing is not to conceive of God (from 1 and 3).

5. It is inconceivable that God not exist (from 4).

6. God exists.

This argument, first articulated by Saint Anselm (1033-1109), the Archbishop of Canterbury, is unlike any other, proceeding purely on the conceptual level. Everyone agrees that the mere existence of a concept does not entail that there are examples of that concept; after all, we can know what a unicorn is and at the same time say "unicorns don't exist." The claim of the Ontological Argument is that the concept of God is the one exception to this rule. The very concept of God, when defined correctly, entails that there is something that satisfies that concept. Although most people suspect that there is something wrong with this argument, it's not so easy to figure out what it is.

FLAW: It was Immanuel Kant who pinpointed the fallacy in the Ontological Argument: it is to treat "existence" as a property, like "being fat" or "having ten fingers." The Ontological Argument relies on a bit of wordplay, assuming that "existence" is just another property, but logically it is completely different. If you really could treat "existence" as just part of the definition of the concept of God, then you could just as easily build it into the definition of any other concept. We could, with the wave of our verbal magic wand, define a trunicorn as "a horse that (a) has a single horn on its head, and (b) exists." So if you think about a trunicorn, you're thinking about something that must, by definition, exist; therefore trunicorns exist. This is clearly absurd: we could use this line of reasoning to prove that any figment of our imagination exists.

COMMENT: Once again, Sydney Morgenbesser had a pertinent remark, this one offered as an Ontological Argument for God's Non-Existence: Existence is such a lousy thing, how could God go and do it?

3. The Argument from Design


A. The Classical Teleological Argument

1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware store could not assemble a watch.)

2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens, retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ only because together they make it possible for the animal to see.)

3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies an eyemaker (from 1 & 2).

4. These things have not had a human designer.

5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3 & 4).

6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).

7. God exists.

FLAW: Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer. Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of descendants. In any finite environment the replicators must compete for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its competitors will result in that line of replicators predominating in the population. After many generations, the dominant replicators will appear to have been designed for effective replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying errors which in the past did lead to effective replication. The fallacy in the argument, then is Premise 1 (and as a consequence, Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a complex function do not, in fact, require a designer.

In the twenty-first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological Argument in three forms:


B. The Argument from Irreducible Complexity

1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive and reproduce better than its competitors.

2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part would destroy the functional whole. Examples are, the lens and retina of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the molecular motor powering the cell's flagellum. Call these organs "irreducibly complex."

3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).

4. The Theory of Natural Selection cannot explain these irreducibly complex systems (from 1 & 3).

5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of the Classical Teleological Argument.

6. God exists (from 4 & 5 and the Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1: For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2: For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings, before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular mechanisms, such as the flagellum motor, invoked in the modern version of the Argument from Irreducible Complexity.

FLAW 3: (The Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological systems for which we don't yet know how they may have been useful in simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don't yet understand in molecular biology, and given the huge success that biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT: This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more general and fallacious... (continues)

https://www.edge.org/conversation/rebecca_newberger_goldstein-36-arguments-for-the-existence-of-god