Friday, February 15, 2013

[Travelogue] Antarctica part 7

On our second day at sea heading for the Antarctic peninsula I had a follow up meeting with Richard Dawkins to talk about the proposal I had written up for him a few days earlier.  TL;DR version: he was not interested in participating or even endorsing the idea, but he would be willing to provide some introductions, most notably to The Clergy Project, where he thought I might find a more sympathetic audience.

Since neither of us had anyplace to go I decided to try an audacious experiment.  About three years ago, while on another cruise, I wrote an imaginary dialog between myself and a prominent YouTube atheist who goes by the handle QualiaSoup.  It advances an argument for the proposition that the idea of God has many (but of course not all) of the same properties that God would have if he existed.  Thus one can plausibly claim that God exists if one defines God as an idea, an axiom that many theists would subscribe to.  It's a bit of a stretch, but I think the argument actually holds up pretty well, even after all this time.

I decided to try this argument out on Richard to see how far I got.  (NB: I told him up front what I wanted to do and asked him if he was OK with it.)  TL;DR: I got a lot further than I was expecting to.  I got a little hung up on the circularity of redefining God as the-idea-of-God and had to on-the-fly coin the terms God1 (a supernatural being, which does not exist) and God2 (the idea of God1, which does exist, and which can have real effects, some of them beneficial).  But in the end I ran out of steam and could not convince him that there was a point, that there was a useful distinction to be drawn between fiction and falsehood.  (I think his exact words were, "But what's the point if it isn't true?")  So in the end I took my best shot at reforming Richard Dawkins and I failed.  But I'm grateful that fate afforded me the opportunity.  And the some of the leads he gave me are still active and may result in something some day.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, the ship had to divert its course to the north because there was much more sea ice coming up from the Weddell Sea than had been expected (almost certainly a consequence of global warming).  Our captain (the coolest captain ever) had an open bridge policy, so I spent some time there watching the crew dodge icebergs. There's a whole terminology associated with ice.  Little pieces of ice are called growlers (I guess because of the sound they make as they scrape against the hull).  Slightly larger chunks of ice are called bergy bits (no, I am not making this up) but I was never entirely clear on where the dividing line was.  There are also lots of different kinds of icebergs, but I won't bore you with the details.

As a result of the unexpected ice our scheduled stop at Elephant Island had to be cancelled and instead we ended up at another one of the South Shetland Islands (I can't remember which one now, but I think it was Nelson Island).  We didn't land there, but we did get a zodiac tour.  I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.


(BTW, in case you haven't already realized it, you can click on these images and get larger versions.)




2 comments:

  1. Great pictures!

    One question about your God1/God2 ideas: how do you define 'existence' for ideas? (I guess the most troublesome concept here isn't religion/God, but existence). Further, how do you define the existence of something that is beyond/not dependent on space and time ? (God is supposed to be 'beyond' these things and the sentences 'God exists/does not exist' change/lose meaning based on what we understand by existence).

    (you asked for more comments :-p )

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  2. > Great pictures!

    Thanks!

    > how do you define 'existence' for ideas?

    I don't. I adopt an operationalist definition of existence: if it has a measurable effect then it exists. Ideas exist because they satisfy this definition. There is no separate definition of existence specific to ideas. And, BTW, the whole point of the dialog is that ideas and material things are not as different as commonly supposed: both are just configurations of some underlying substrate, brains in the former case, atoms in the latter. (And atoms, in turn, are configurations of the quantum wave function.)

    > Further, how do you define the existence of something that is beyond/not dependent on space and time ? (God is supposed to be 'beyond' these things and the sentences 'God exists/does not exist' change/lose meaning based on what we understand by existence).

    The same way: if it produces a measurable effect then it exists. The quantum wave function, for example, exists beyond space and time in some sense. (The quarrel that atheists have with a physically transcendent definition of God is not the physically transcendent part, it's the idea that this physically transcendent thing answers prayers, performs miracles, writes holy texts, yada yada yada.)

    > (you asked for more comments :-p )

    Yep. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete