Ok, so I am not a student of literature or religion, but I believe there are fundamental human aesthetic principles that non-materialist religious and wholistic ideas satisfy in our psychology.

I'm wondering whether your statement is true only when you substitute 'some people's' for 'our' in 'our psychology'. I don't feel a god-shaped emotional hole in my psyche. I'm inclined to believe byrenma's self report that she does. I've talked about this with my lapsed-catholic mother and she feels similarly but I just don't experience the 'loss' she appears to.

Whether this is because I never really experienced much of a religious upbringing (I was reading The Selfish Gene at 8, I've still never read the Bible) or whether it is something about our personality types or our knowledge of science I don't know but there appears to be an experience of 'something missing' in a materialist world view amongst some people that others just don't seem to have.

The materialist in me figures from first principles, that it would seem that life has no meaning, morality has no basis, love is an illusion, everything is futile, etc.

Perhaps part of the difference between those who are satisfied/not satisfied with materialism is in what role something other than materialism could play here. I just don't get how any of the non-materialist 'answers' are more satisfying than the materialist ones. If it bothers you that morality is 'arbitrary', why is it more satisfying if it is the arbitrary preferences of god rather than the arbitrary preferences of humans? Just as I don't get how the answer 'because of god' to the question 'why is there something rather than nothing' is more satisfying for some people than the alternative materialist answer of 'it just is'.

As Eliezer says in Joy in the Merely Real:

You might say that scientists - at least some scientists - are those folk who are in principle capable of enjoying life in the real universe.

Yes, I think it's at least useful to make the attempt. The negative consequences if I turn out to be wrong seem insignificant - oh no, I tried to deceive myself about my ability to feel differently than I do!

As for making up stories about how my dumb emotional self arrived at an irrational belief, that sounds like fun, but I'm not sure how much I'd be confident that I had the right story. I've heard pjeby promote the idea (and claim that he can teach people to produce such stories by introspection). But I suppose if these stories work (get you to change your feelings) then there's also little harm.

We discussed a similar idea in reference to Godzilla, namely what kind of evidence we would need to believe that 'magical' elements existed in the world. The point you made then was that even something as outside our scientific understanding as Godzilla would be insufficient evidence to change our basic scientific world view, and that such evidence might not exist even in theory. I think this post could be easily improved by an introduction explaining this point, which you currently leave as an open question at the the end.

He was raised Jewish with the idea that it is unclean to have animals in the home

Where is he from, if you don't mind my asking? The Jewish cultures in the United States that I'm familiar with are okay with pets.

I would find this argument much more convincing if it were supported by people who actually have children. My mother goes beserk over a smiling infant in a way I cannot begin to comprehend (I am usually afraid I will accidentally hurt them). My husband, likewise, has an instant affinity for babies and always tries to communicate and play with them. He was raised Jewish with the idea that it is unclean to have animals in the home and does not find animals particularly adorable. In our culture we are inundated with anthropomorphised images of animals in television and given stuffed toys and pets that we take care of like children. It's not that surprising that we find animals cute when we focus so much attention on them as if they were little people. I do not know that such evaluations of 'cuteness' would hold cross-culturally, especially in cultures where people do kill and eat 'cute' animals on a regular basis.

Something like this is useful for the types of data points patients would have no reason to self-deceive over, however I worry that the general tendency for people to make their 'data' fit the stories they've written about themselves in their minds will promote superstitions. For example, a friend of mine is convinced that the aspartame in diet soda caused her rosacea/lupus. She's sent me links to chat-rooms that have blamed aspartame for everything from diabetes to alzheimer's, and it's disturbing to see the kind of positive feed-back loops that are created from anecdotes in which chat members state a clear link exists between symptoms and usage. One says, "I got symptom X after drinking diet soda," and another says, "I have symptom X, it must be from drinking diet soda!" and another says, "Thanks, after reading your comments, I stopped drinking diet soda and symptom X went away!" In spite of chat rooms dedicated to blaming diet soda for every conceivable health problem and the fall of American values, no scientific study to date has shown ANY negative side effect of aspartame even at the upper bounds of current human consumption.

Another example of hysterical positive-feedback would be the proliferation of insane allegations that the MMR vaccine causes autism. I would guess angry parents who wanted to believe MMR caused their child's autism would plot their 'data points' for the onset of their child's symptoms right after vaccination.

A site like this one may allow certain trends to rise out of the noise, but we must not forget the tendency people have to lie to themselves for a convenient story.

I think the key is that most people don't care whether or not AGW is occurring unless they can expect it to affect them. Since changing policy will negatively affect them immediately via increased taxes, decreased manufacture, etc., it's easier to just say they don't believe in AGW period. If the key counter-AGW measure on the table were funding for carbon-capture research, I think many fewer people would claim that they didn't believe in AGW.

My take on global warming is that no policy that has significant impact on the problem will be implemented until the frequency of droughts/hurricaines/floods/fires increases to obvious levels in the western world (fuck-Bengali policy is already in place, and I don't think more famines will change that). And by obvious, I mean obvious to a layman, as in 'when I was young we only had 1 hurricane per year, and now we have 10!' By this time, the only option will probably be technological.

There were some fantastic links here. Thankyou!

Does anyone here know what the break-down is among cryonics advocates between believing that A) in the future cryopreserved patients will be physically rejuvinated in their bodies and B) in the future cryopreserved patients will be brain-scanned and uploaded?

I think there is a reasonable probability of effective cryopreservation and rejuvination of a mammal (at least a mouse) in the next 25 years, but I think our ability to 'rejuvinate' will be largely dependent on the specific cryoincs technologies developed at that time, and that it is very unlikely cryonics methods developed before that time will be acceptable for rejuvination. Realize that once an effective cryopreservation method has been developed, socially there will be much more interest in perfecting it than there will be in going back to the old technology used to freeze past generations and figuring out how we can get that to work for their sake.

If D=false and E=true and there's $1M in the box and I two-box, then (in the particular Newcomb's variant described above) the predictor is not wrong. The predictor correctly computed that (D xor E) is true, and set up the box accordingly, as the rules of this particular variant prescribe.