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byrnema comments on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism - Less Wrong
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I think "love" is the most accessible example.
Love in a mundane sense is certainly part of the natural world: we observe it in a variety of organisms and there are sub-patterns (love between parents and their offspring, love between mates, love between an organism and its community.)
Religions take this and say that love is meaningful and that love is an important component of the meta-pattern. This is literally expressed as "God is love" or "God creates the world with his love" or "God loves you". When I hear these phrases, while I am also annoyed, I find that I can agree, after the translation that love is indeed an important pattern.
Certainly important to me, on a personal level. So suddenly it's about the personal aspect of a pattern existing in the physical world. Main religions, in practice, tend to focus on personal aspects so the inferential distance between the scientific observation of pattern and the personal experience of pattern starts getting really, extremely large. But science knows it can't yet explain the personal very well...
Wait a minute, byrnema. You're seriously saying that science can't explain why you love your kids? In a forum filled with evolutionary psychology wannabes?
Or do you simply say that science can't explain why the qualia of love feel this way instead of some other way? Then you don't need to bring love into the discussion, the mysterious redness of the color red would suffice. Is red mystery enough for you to posit a God? Me, I'd rather lament about the nascent state of brain science.
Interesting comment. I'll leave debating the development of the field to the evolutionary psychologists. For the record, it is clear that society at large usually calls on science for practical help in caring for their children, not the Bible. Science gives us all the information about the pattern, religion just tells us it matters (or how it matters; moral judgements). Religion sometimes says more, but I don't think it should.
Replace 'red' with 'beauty', and I would say 'yes'. Red is a fact and beauty is an interpretation.
Beauty is an interpretation assigned by physical systems such as human brains. An explanation would be in the realm of science, even though it may be complex enough that we haven't figured it out yet.
Beauty most definitely is not a fundamental property of the universe that is protected by some mysterious God or "meta-pattern". What we call beauty is not even likely to be considered beautiful by other intelligences, such as an AGI not specifically designed to share our notion of beauty, which would happily disassemble the Mona Lisa for paperclip parts.
Scientific rationalism not opposed to us having a concept of beauty, and assigning value to the concept and objects that embody it, but we cannot depend on the universe to protect these values for us, we have to do it ourselves. Note, this is not nihilism, scientific rationalism accepts that we have values, seeks to explain why we have those values, and enables us to protect those values.
I agree with every sentence you've written except for this one:
Beauty may be context dependent (I don't know what it is actually) but if we have a concept of beauty, then it has evolved naturally within the physical universe. The concept is a property of some minds (human minds), thus its a property of the natural world. I would predict that perhaps not every kind of sapient being, but certainly some subset of all sapient beings, would also develop a concept of beauty. If beauty is an actual property of the natural world, then it has a pattern. It would be easier to understand this pattern if there were other sentient beings with concepts of beauty to compare with. A sentient being could use the meta-patterning of beauty, once identified, to perceive and measure beauty outside its own specific context. I have "faith" that meta-beauty would be beautiful to all sentient beings that appreciate beauty -- this is identical to saying that there is a meaningful pattern.
I could conceivably have a theory of the baby-eaters' concept of beauty, that lets me accurately predict how beautiful they will find the act of ruthlessly eating their sentient young, but I will not find beauty in it, I will not see it as some universal meta pattern of beauty that I can appreciate like my own native concept of beauty. I simply do not find it beautiful that an adaption that evolved in harsh conditions to be cruel to sentient beings would persist beyond those harsh conditions and even become the centerpiece of a moral system. But that is a fact that must be included in any universally beautiful meta-beauty.
Something that is made up isn't part of the natural world and doesn't have to fit any pattern.
Then part of your faith is that nothing like the baby-eaters could possibly exist?
Not that, but that you can't deduce anything about the pattern from things that are made up. The patterns result from having to follow physical laws.. things you imagine don't have to.
Could your view be falsified if baby-eaters or a similar species turned out to be real?
This doesn't make it a fundamental property of the natural world. I suspect it's just a label we use for a certain fuzzy class of emotional responses. I'm skeptical that it's all that different from other emotional responses. Consider that humans also share a concept of "creepiness". Do you also have faith that "meta-creepiness" would be creepy to all sentient beings capable of being "creeped out"? It may be tempting to ascribe your reaction to something like a house centipede to a fundamental property of the critter, but "creepy", like "beautiful", seems firmly situated in the class of 2-place words.