How do you convince people god exists?

Fourier wrote: »

I can't really state anything more than that.

Nor, as I said, will I.

Fourier wrote: »

Do you have links to the studies that show this? I would like to see exactly what they're saying and the statistics.

Sure. First my memory which I thought was letting me down and would necessitate me listening to a podcast again suddenly woke up. I blame the heat. The paper I was talking about related to how people view the concept of Free Will is by Sarkissian et al and is called "Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal?". One of the papers it cites, done by Nichols and Knobe, is itself worth a read.

As for agency production in the brain there is a useful Meta Analysis https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00429-010-0298-1 which has a list of studies all worth a read through related to which areas of the brain consistently associate themselves with different kinds of agency. Such as the one called The neural processes underlying self-agency.

They had fun making attempts to disrupt that feeling of control in many studies like this one https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.2010.0404 which I am sure made them feel like Agents of Hydra at times. There was also a paper by the same author Haggard and someone with an spellable Swedish like name called "Modulation of the human sense of agency" I think. But was very similar. I also remember a tangential discussion paper by.... someone I cant remember who.... called "Brain Mind and Machine" which was exploring the impact of brain implant technology on our concepts of Free will and Personal Identity. There is also discussions on why this is difficult to study at all: https://edoc.ub.uni-muenchen.de/21547/1/Havlicek_Ondrej.pdf while there are also interesting papers looking into which things the brain uses to feed the sense of agency, and how some inputs dominate others, even when the dominant ones are erroneous: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130019

I admit I am now coming up blank trying to find the citations related to patients retrospectively attributing agency to actions that they had no agency over. I will have to return to you with these when I find them. I know I first heard them in talks by VS Ramachandran who was investigating specifically Split Brain Dualistic personalities.... where there was seemingly two distinct personalities operating out of one brain.... and one personality would explain the actions of the other as if they were intentionally their own. But I went from there and read a lot of this in other papers I now cant find of patients who have involuntary movements.... either caused by a medical injury or condition.... or caused by brain stimulation by the scientists.... who would then retrospectively invent narrative and intention as to why they made that movement. When I have more time I will try to find/remember these as they were really interesting at the time and it is slight loss of face I can not cite them now having referred to them. I will track them down.

Fourier wrote: »

I think in recent years there has been increased skepticism in evolution evolving "illusions" considering the evolutionary cost of it in most models of evolutionary cost.

Skepticism of an evolved trait based purely on "cost" however makes no sense. For one or both of two reasons.

The first is many things evolve, despite their cost, because they "piggy back" on something else which evolved for good reason. And as such their "cost" is a moot point.

The second is that no discussion of cost makes even a modicum of sense unless you also consider what that cost may have paid for. The cost of evolving a trait is never too high or low in isolation. You have to know the full picture of cost-benefit. For example one paper I vaguely remember reading (author Tankersley I am almost sure) showed a correlation between an increased response to agency.... and altruism. My own hypothesis links it more to things like the Intentional Stance and similar things like empathy and so forth.

That said though, one would have to see how the "cost" was evaluated in the first place? Was it a high "cost" to evolve that illusion (assuming it is one)? We would not want to merely assert it was a high cost because it feels like it should be. Perhaps it was not high at all! And further..... have we evaluated the RELATIVE costs between evolving an illusion of free will, and evolving ACTUAL free will? If the cost of the latter is higher, then the argument against the cost of the former reverses itself entirely does it not?

So I guess I would have to... how did you put it.... "see exactly what they're saying and the statistics" if you want to throw me out some reading material to keep me occupied/quiet for a few hours or days If I can read anything in this DAMNABLE HEAT. My entire skin feels like runny eggs in this heat and I am only surviving through the periodic application of swimming pools, and ice cream.

Fourier wrote: »

Similarly considering it seems intuitively like we have free will and since agency and free will have efficacy in another areas of science (e.g. psychology, decision theory) some, though not all, consider the "illusion" explanation unlikely as well.

An intuition that, as I said, we can affect it at the level of the brain. Which would appear to undermine that scepticism some what. Further if something was an illusion, I am not sure why observing it toddlers would negate that. Are they being assumed to be less prone to illusion than us and hence if they display the trait too then it can not be illusory? Or what was the thinking there?

Further is the "efficacy in other areas" of which you speak somehow undermined if it was illusory? I am not entirely sure to what you refer but I can see a free will dynamic, whether real or illusory, being equally efficacious there. To take a wild example just because I mentioned it yesterday, how we sentence and rehabilitate criminals. If we proved free will entirely real, or entirely illusory, tomorrow..... I do not think that would be affected. Because operating under the narrative AS IF the criminal has free will and made a choice..... will work either way in how we operate our justice system. It would likely affect deeply our motivations for how we operate our justice system though, in ways I think potentially very conducive to human well being.

I do not know if I have free will. I am agnostic but doubtful on it at this time. But I operate every day under the rubric that I do. And that would not change tomorrow if I found out for sure one way, or the other. Nor can I think at this time of a reason why it might.

Fourier wrote: »

Is that the right reading? (If you have read the surrounding literature, ignore if not)

Seems at first glance to be pretty right yes, I would have to go re-read it all myself to remember as this is old stuff for me. Which again.... time constraints at the moment. Especially given the amount of time I have invested in this conversation Through no free will of my own I jokingly add.

People are likely wondering why neither of us appear to have jobs to go to.

Fourier wrote: »

Do you mean texts on evolutionary cost analysis?

Not sure. You are saying that there are people sceptical that the illusion of free will would evolve because of the "cost" of evolving it. So I would want to see what "cost" they think was involved, what threshold they are using and why as to what cost is "Too high" so scepticism should kick in, and how they evaluated it related to other possibilities such as evolving ACTUAL free will.

So for example I would love to see the "cost" figures that explain why they think evolving the illusion of free will would cost more than evolving ACTUAL free will. Further given how little we understand free will and consciousness in the first place.... how are they even evaluating the costs at all? If we do not know how something works at all, how can we even evaluate HOW it evolved, let alone the cost of doing so?

Further evaluation of costs in evolution should never be end-to-end. One should check if there were things that evolved as sub modules for other reasons. If they did, they should not be included in the cost of evolving the final product. For example one would not look at the "cost" of evolving Color Vision. One would notice that evolving a sensitivity to light in and of itself was a project worth undertaking and had it's own cost benefits. THEN something else happened. THEN something else. And so on. So the actual cost of developing color vision is an evaluation of something that happened MUCH later in the whole process, while much of the required frame work was also in place.

So did they account for this? Or not? Be nice to see that too!

But as I said cost is irrelevant. Only cost-benefit is relevant. Because generally speaking no cost can be deemed too high until you evaluate what it pays for. If the cost paid for altruism, empathy, the intentional stance, theory of mind, social cohesion, and retributive justice to name a few random things.... what cost is "too high" for those things exactly?

Fourier wrote: »

I'm just reading the papers now, I'm not sure (genuinely) how the way they affect the sense of agency lends evidence to it being an illusion, can you explain a bit. The seem to say you can disrupt agency ascription. However you can disrupt many mental features that are not illusions, it doesn't make us think they are illusions.

Well indeed, it does beg the question then which things are NOT illusions. Maybe it is illusions all the way down. For example I love the Alien Hand experiment. Have you ever tried it? This is where you conceal your hand from yourself and look at a fake hand instead, which is placed VERY close to your concealed one. Then another person stimulates both hands in the same way, and after a period of time your brain switches to thinking the fake hand is your real one. The fun part then is to jab a knife into the fake one and watch the reaction.

But in this case I would say the fact you can disrupt the sense of agency in and of itself is not what is interesting here. But that you can do so without seeming to hamper in any way the process of the patient in question still seemingly making choices and actions. The fact that feeling you have agency, while happily going through the motions of seeming to engage in it, appears superfluous to any requirements is certainly quite interesting.

We seem to have a low level Intuition about this too. When Charles Whitman was found to have a brain tumor in the hypothalamus region of his brain a lot of people found this to be in some way exculpatory to his crimes. Many people feel he could be deemed not to be entirely responsible for his actions, without agency really. Yet he, like us, appeared to be standing up, making actions, making choices, and executing them in an entirely functional sense. So what if for all of us it is simply "turtles all the way down", or in this case Tumors all the way down? If one configuration of a brain makes someone feel like free will or agency can be diminished or even precluded..... then why not any configuration?

Maybe "food for thought" or "evidence", I dunno what the best word for it here. But it certainly feeds into my sceptical and agnostic position on the entire subject.

Fourier wrote: »

They were studies on altruism. They fairly conclusively show that toddlers possess non-selfish "genuine" altruism by eliminating certain explanations. Toddlers are selected because they a pre certain forms of socialization so you can control those as explanations of their altruism.

Sure, but I am not seeing how free will, or even consciousness itself, being an illusion would negate ANY of those findings, or vice versa how such findings would be in any way evidence for or against the existence of free will. What am I missing? The same too for your passing reference to "Decision Theory". While I am not sure what you specifically mean when you use that term, I am not aware of any area of Decision Theory that would not function under the ASSUMPTION of free will just as well as under ACTUAL Free will.

Fourier wrote: »

By "doubtful" do you mean "have doubts" or "I lean more toward no free will"?

I can not say I lean OVERALL one way or the other.

Intellectually maybe slightly towards none, but only slightly.

Emotionally the other way for the same reason most people do..... that our feeling of agency as an individual if it is an illusion..... is certainly a hugely and overwhelmingly powerful one. It really really really really feels like I am the author of my actions and choices. But so what I suppose? There are theists who come to this forum who really really really really feel there is a god. That does not change the fact they do not appear to have any arguments, evidence, data or reasoning to present us that suggests there actually is one. Actually I remember a short quip from Christopher Hitchens when he was asked by a theist if he believed in Free Will or not. He answered "Of course I believe in Free Will. I have no choice." and I think this is exactly what he meant there.

Rhetorically I guess I lean towards none more strongly. Mainly for the "Devils advocate" motivation it gives me to engage with the topic at all. It is more motivating to.... not defend per se but "come at it"....... from the less accepted side of the divide as you tend to get more intellectual and informative push-back from people who then engage with you on the topic. Since most people seem to believe they have free will, if you discuss the positive rather than the negative position.... you simply get less people interested to engage in the conversation. The nature of humanity I suppose, disagreement brokers more discourse than agreement. So if I am genuinely down the middle on a given topic, I sometimes err rhetorically towards the contrarian position even if I am in no way invested in it myself.

But I am interested in human well being too for example. And I note from studies of various kinds that choice can genuinely cause a reduction in well being or even actual effectiveness. And in things like Justice the notion the criminal having free will can lead us more towards a desire for retribution, than rehabilitation. Free will motivates justice as a means to punish the criminal, where as a lack of it tends to motivate our sense of justice towards maximising the well being of society.

So I dunno, but sometimes it SEEMS to me that if it turned out there was no such thing as free will that might actually be better for the well being of our species over all than if it turned out there is.

Sorry heat related issues, and issues of my working away from home in my new job, kept me off the forum for awhile. Eating a 700g cheese burger last night has not helped much either

Fourier wrote: »

Or do you more mean if something like this were rigorously demonstrated?

A little of both, I hope you enjoy reading the literature in general. Certainly.... as you pointed out yourself I think.... that we can make choices without a sense of agency does not in any way prove free will does not exist. But if an organism can have agency without a sense of that agency.... it does bring up questions worth asking.... such as whether Free Will and Agency are superfluous to requirements or not.

Fourier wrote: »

It's an example of something suspected to be an illusion that turned out not to be, but it's not about free will.

That feeds a little back into my musings on why evolution would bother with the "cost" of evolving free will, or an illusion of free will, in the first place. One of my own hypothesis is that it serves functions such as "intentional stance" "theory of mind" and even altruism. That an illusion of free will would be a useful module to have when representing in our minds external agents such as other humans.

It pays us for example to be able to model the minds of others, and their intentions, in our own mind. When you ask yourself a question like "Does He know that I know that he cheated on his wife, and what will he do with that information if he does" requires us to model the mind of that other in our own mind.... and perhaps even model our own mind in the mind of that model. And in order to evaluate what that person is going to do with that information, we model them as an agent with agency and intention and goals and motivations.

Are we more equipped to second guess the intentions and motivations and actions and choices of others.... if we have such a concept in our own selves? And is there any reason to think we would be better equipped to do that if the faculty were real, or merely illusory? Why would we expect either to be more effective than the other really?

One of the benefits in the cost-benefit analysis of questioning why we would evolve things like free will, or even just an illusion of it, could be just that therefore. By having a concept of free will, real or imagined, in our own selves..... could this serve to benefit our ability to model the minds of others in this way?

Similar for altruism. By having the impression of others as having agency and will... does this in any way serve our faculty of altruism?

All useful and interesting questions to ask. I certainly have none of the answers myself.

kelly1 wrote: »

Life had to start with a minimum of a complete cell. Panspermia doesn't solve the complexity, specificity problem. The natural formation of a self-replicating cell is inconceivably improbable.

That to me is evidence for God (as per thread title).

Your whole argument is a logical fallacy. IF life had to start with a minimum of a complete cell then you could argue that he natural formation of a self-replicating cell is inconceivably improbable. But you have zero evidence to support your claim that life had to start with a complete cell. Not understanding how something happened is not evidence that God did it, the only thing it's evidence of is that we need to keep expanding our knowledge as a species.

'The cell is irreducibly complex' is just the latest in a long string of supposedly 'irreducibly complex' biological systems that the creationist movement have held up as evidence of a creator God. Remember when the eye was considered irreducibly complex, or the bacterial flagellum?

kneemos wrote: »

If a God didn't allow cancer you'd say why is there starvation? Get rid of starvation you say why do folk fall down stairs,etc,etc,etc.

What you're talking about is an impossible utopia where the ultimate logical conclusion is a world where everyone lives the same perfect pain and trouble free life.

I would say it's more because we don't live in God's Kingdom. We live apart from God.