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advancedatheist comments on Getting Nearer - Less Wrong
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In practice atheism has more in common with veganism than with "not doing/believing X."
Vegans don't just not eat animals or abjure the use animal products like leather. The firebrands among them engage in an ideological critique of our civilization's practice of exploiting animals, and they argue the moral and practical advantages of abandoning that exploitation..
Similarly, the high-profile atheists don't just not believe in gods. They present philosophical and scientific critiques of god beliefs and argue that we would do better by abandoning these beliefs.
whats about my position: I am not entirely sure that God creator of universe does not exist*, but I am very sure that religions are not positively linked to existence of God, and if anything, plurality of them, internal contradictions, and behaviour of them towards eachother constitutes weak evidence for non-existence of God in general, and very strong evidence for non-existence of God as defined by any of the religions.
Consequently, someone could call me 'militant' when it comes to atheism - i see religions as evil - but i'm technically agnostic.
(*it is actually conditional for me on what has lower Kolmogorov complexity: our universe which eventually self organizes us, intelligent observers, or an universe which eventually self organize a single intelligence that fills all of it and proceeds to do stuff like 'imagining' universes and otherwise be bored. Note that those 2 things may be equivalent; we don't know how it will turn out, and the 'singularity' may indeed end up with singular intelligence)
This depends on how you define Kolmogorov complexity of universes. The Turing machine that simulates all other Turing machines is not the best explanation for all nontrivial universes if you require the explanation to be empirical.
Yes, of course. I do think that there will be a formalization of KC that's fairly language independent, though. Basically, KC is here as a form of Occam's razor.
Also, the comparison between those 2 universe rules may directly yield the complexity difference, e.g. removal of rule leading to god-making. In any case I don't think it'll be possible to make any progress on this until superintelligence, which won't need any of our insights. That is kind of depressing thought.
Do you think its the correct form of Occam's razor? In other words, does Occam's razor properly take a unique form?
Well, I don't think most atheists do that. (IIRC, someone (EY?) proposed to use untheist for someone who doesn't believe in God and antitheist for what you say.)
ETA: IIUC there is a very large social stigma attached to atheism in America, so I guess that over there only people who are pretty sure of their position would self-identify as atheists; so probably in America the fraction of self-identified atheists who “present philosophical and scientific critiques of god beliefs” would be a lot greater. Where I am, theists and atheists might jokingly mock each other much like fans of different football teams would, but most of them don't usually try to convert each other any more than fans of different football teams would -- I suspect many people would even see that as rude in most situations.
I hear it's generally seen as treasonous to switch football teams, rather than rooting for your hometown team for your entire life. If that's true, religious conversions seem more socially acceptable.
Except that a lot of well known Americans in the entertainment industry, which aims at the lower common denominators of American society, have come out by now as nonbelievers, along with ones in other countries who have some name recognition in the U.S. Their skepticism of religion doesn't seem to have hurt their ability to make a living in a competitive market. For some examples:
:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_atheists_in_film,_radio,_television_and_theater