From Google Video: For further research of the claims made in this video, AstroTheology & Shamanism: Thousands of years ago, in the pre monarchic era, sacred plants and other entheogenic substances highly respected for their ability to bring forth the divine, Yahweh, God, The Great Spirit, etc., by the many cultures who used them.

Often the entire tribe or community would partake in the entheogenic rites and rituals. These rites were often used an initiation into adulthood, for healing, to help guide the community in the decision process, and to bring the direct religious experience to anyone seeking it. In the pre literate world, the knowledge of psychedelic sacraments, as well as fertility rites and astronomical knowledge surrounding the sun, stars, and zodiac, known as astrotheology, were anthropomorphized into a character or a deity; consequently, their stories & practices could easily be passed down for generations. Weather changes over millennia caused environmental changes that altered the availability of foods and plant sacraments.

If a tribe lost its shamanic El-der (El - God), all of the tribe's knowledge of their plant sacraments as well as astronomical knowledge would be lost. The Church’s inquisitions extracted this sacred knowledge from the local Shamans, who were then exterminated.

I only discovered of this series, by watching one of the videos hehe. Their videos are amazingly and creatively created. It all just very fun stuff and I love how they made their insects fit in their world.

>> wiki:
Minuscule is a growing collection of short animations that follow the day-to-day existence of anthropomorphic insects. The characters are modelled on computer in 3D and are then set against real scenery. Each animation has a short, self contained and often humorous storyline. The audio is a combination of genuine insect and ambient recordings, and sound effects such as car or helicopter or aircraft engines, synthesized buzzings etc. Throughout each episode, no (human) words are ever spoken, Nevertheless, Anthropogenic 'insect like words' are often trumpeted by the various protagonist insects. The background settings are mostly of rural France, and include farm houses, fences, cars, road surfaces, drains, gutters and garbage bins. Humans themselves appear only peripherally (if at all) & the only consistent peripheral witnesses to many of the goings~on, are cows that appear as disinterested bystanders.

*promote
Now I'm off to watch the other ones

panda with a pipe.. cowboy t-rex... those are awesome! i see what you mean

In reply to this comment by Lann:
Maybe because it's an anthropomorphic lynx...but your avatar reminds me of these guy's shops.

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5404421
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=100563

Maybe because it's an anthropomorphic lynx...but your avatar reminds me of these guy's shops.

http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5404421
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=100563

So I was skimming your post here, and I came to this line: "to put things in their simplest form.the universe and everything within it..is god." which is exactly the line I always use to describe Pantheism, which is what I believe in. Or more accurately, naturalistic Pantheism.

While I was raised Methodist, and went to Sunday school, Christianity just never made sense to me. It was too close to Santa Claus. Be good, and you'll get presents! Be bad and you'll go to Hell! So years ago when I took PHIL 101 in college, we touched on Pantheism and Spinoza. As the class covered so many different religions and philosophies, we didn't stay on it for too long. Later, I looked it up in the dictionary and this was the definition I found:
1. The doctrine which states that all existing matter and actions within the Universe are God
2. Toleration of all other worships and creeds

That pretty much nailed it on the head for me. God was not an omnipresent, omniscient and benevolent being as the Christians andother faiths believe, nor was it broken out into a pantheon of separate beings, each requisite with their primary token. It is the human perception and cultural mores that create and label good and evil, just like that same perception provides some with a "God" with anthropomorphic and/or supernatural qualities. Or labeling the God as "good". Instead, God was just a word used to describe and represent all things within and beyond known reality. It doesn't mean God is good, or bad; it doesn't mean that God is some other separate entity or force that resides in the Universe. Everything is God...you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. (Sorry, went a little Yoda on you there)

But also (well, at least in this dictionary), it included the line regarding tolerating all other worships and creeds. Which fit me as well. Hey, if you want worship Christ, good for you! If you want to go dance naked around a bonfire up in the mountains, more power to ya! If that's what floats your boat, awesome. But DON'T try to change my line of thinking to be in line with yours, as 1) it's disrespectful and 2) I certainly wouldn't do the same to you. So that was another plus.

So I don't know if you're a Pantheist or not, but it sounded like it when I read your post, and was inspired to share. Anyway, take care, and have a good weekend mang!

Sorry it took so long to respond, I had a busy weekend.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

I'm going to need a definition of "decide" I suppose. It seems like you are dancing around these squishy intuitive concepts instead of having a specific physical distinction to point out. The amoeboid is composed of a lipid bilayer membrane riddled with intricate protein micro-machines that detect changes in the environment, and behaviorally compensate. To discount the intricacy of the mechanisms of genetic expression and chemical signaling that exist even in the simplest of eukaryotic organism is foolish IMHO. Many of the modern models of genetic expression, and compensation for environmental factors look strikingly similar to the connectionist network models of the brain. The computations are similar in the abstract.


You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Well, more likely I'm moldopomorphizing us. What goals do we have that are ultimately distinct from survival, reproduction, and the general continuity of our species? Even something as seemingly unrelated as making music, or art could be cast as some sort of mating ritual. When you somehow separate our behavior from the rest of life on Earth it's as though you want to draw a barrier between us and them. You want to somehow separate us from the natural order. I hate to break it to you, but it just isn't so. We are just demonstrate the spatial heterogeneity of the second law of thermodynamics.


Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

I experience the moment. In fact, that's all I'm ever experiencing, although my sensation of it may run a little behind. I never experience my memory, I merely compare my experience to memory. Further, what I'm suggesting is not entirely distinct from any experience we claim to have. Some autistic individuals, for instance, report an extremely chaotic existence, in which causal models can't be formed as sensory modalities are not unified in the same way as ours. They are experienced as independent inputs, not reflective of a coherent physical world. Still, they experience it.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

Things can not be enforced without an enforcer. Further, as you've conceded the determinism of our brains, again, how are we not passively allowing the laws of nature to push us around? What exactly are we deciding?


I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

No, I believe that by some other physical mechanism, likely involving quarks and particle physics that I admittedly have a poor understanding of, the electron receives information from not immediately proximal locations, and physically displaces itself to a location with more desirable properties given its current energy state. I don't see how that's different than cuddling up to a warm fire.


You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

Something like that , although I still don't like the word decide. I don't necessarily think they do come to a consensus. It's just that, as with an attractor network, or similar guaranteed convergence dynamical systems, certain macroscopic states are just more likely than others, despite chaos at the subordinate level. The reason I'd rather drop the word decide is because I don't necessarily want to open the door to something like free will. To cast it in a "God" metaphor, I imagine more of an omniscient God, than an omnipotent God.


Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

I can't other than to refer you to what I presume you to have. I could suggest focussing on your breathing, or what have you. I can point you towards literature showing that people that claim to focus on their consciousness can perform physical feats not previous considered possible (for instance monks rewriting the books on the physical tolerance of the human body to cold). Otherwise, I can't. I will say this, however, I take it to be the atomic element of inductive reason. The natural "laws" you are taking as primary are secondary. There is a simple reason for this as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out. If suddenly we were to observe all bits of matter floating away from one another, and were to confirm we were not hallucinating, and perhaps have the experience corroborated by our colleagues, it would not be the experience which was wrong, it would be the laws of nature. Experience has primacy. Matter is merely the logical consequence of applying induction to our particular set of shared experiences.


And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

I told you, in the best english I can, what X is. It's the qualia of phenomenal experience. Now I can't provide you with direct evidence for it, but I can tell you that nearly everyone I talk to has some sense of what I mean.


You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

I take the Bayesian sense of the word. All probabilities are subjective degrees of belief. I adopt this degree of belief based on anecdotal experience and generalizations therein. None of this would be accepted as evidence by any reviewer, nor should it, and thus I wouldn't want to risk my credibility by asserting it as fact. I can believe some hypotheses to be more likely than others on the basis of no evidence, and in fact do all the time. That's how I, and all other scientists, decide what experiment to run next. I should not, however, expect you to believe me a priori, as you may operate on different axioms, and draw from different anecdotal experience. Thus, I would not feel compelled to assert my beliefs as fact, other than in so far as they are, in fact, my beliefs.

>> ^bmacs27: How are our actions not "probabilistic events?" The amoeba is operating off the same basic principals.

They are not simple probabilistic events, and they are operating off the same basic principles, that does not mean that systems do not have qualities which their component parts lack.

Does a piston have the capacity to convert petrol into kinetic energy? Does an internal combustion engine have this capacity? Which part of the engine imbues it with this power?

Systems are qualitatively different from their component parts, and some sets of systems, such as systems which decide, are qualitatively different from systems which don't

It's moving matter in order to seek out food, and even flexing its pseudopods along the shortest path between food sources in proportion to their delivery frequency.

You are anthropomorphizing the mold, it does move, this motion increases its chances of finding food, it survives/reproduces. It in no way displays evidence of doing any of this "in order" to accomplish some goal. If you want to suggest that evolution, as a system, displays intelligence, by selecting molds which move in certain ways, I would be willing to acknowledge that intelligence, not a consciousness, but an intelligence.

Why is memory necessary for experience?

Why is context necessary for experience? What do you experience in infinitesimal time? Why should we posit some sort of experience which is entirely distinct from the type we claim to have?

Electrons are "comparing" electric fields when they settle into a state, otherwise they couldn't obey their physical laws.

Physical laws are not obeyed, they are enforced. electron movements are completely deterministic, like billiard balls, they roll down hill, they don't decide if/when to do so.

As far as I'm concerned an electron is sensing an electrical field in the same way I am sensing visual band EM.

I don't believe that you are claiming that electrons have tiny field sensors which feed into a neural network which analyzes them for patterns and then attributes meaning to them by comparing them to earlier similar sensation patterns. Perhaps you can state this more clearly.

I just believe that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter.

You seem to be positing that the structure of the universe is not topological, but that it is instead the consequence of 10^80 atoms all working on concert to decide what the laws of the universe are at this moment. If this is your thesis I am inclined to ask on what basis you think it is even vaguely likely that they would came to a consensus, such as they must to allow the functioning of a universe like ours.

It's the sheer fact that there is a phenomenal experience, not the particular nature of those phenomena.

Please provide some basis to believe that there is a phenomenal experience.

You've presented me no evidence that I should only expect phenomenal experience in a complex organism, as you have no test for phenomenal experience.

And that will persist as long as we are not talking about anything. You say "X exists". I say "What is X?". You say "You can't disprove X". And here we are talking about nothing.

"I believe that P(X) > P(!X)". Something you shouldn't really care to contest,

You must be using an alternate form of the word "believe". How can someone believe something, and simultaneously be completely unwilling to assert that it is a fact?

3 things:

1) This looks terrible and disturbing.

2) They are not people. This is a discussion we've had before about animals and feelings (I think it was with yourhydra?). Chicks do not experience pain in the same way that we do and they do not contemplate their fate like we would. People tend to anthropomorphize small cuddly animals, but it's not a baby. It's a chicken.

3) There are things that are far more disturbing, with bigger animals and/or people. Torturing a person is a million times worse than this, and have you seen how bad dogs and cats have it in Thailand?

I'm not a complete cold-hearted bastard; I don't like seeing something like this, I don't like to see cows being slaughtered either, but I sure do like beef. So I'm going to have to accept that a cow died to bring me my juicy rib-eye, and I can live with that.

>> ^siftbot:
Issykitty has already been awarded a star point for this post - ignoring quality request by therealblankman.


You're just in a pissy mood because I didn't get them some stupid piece of anthropomorphic kitchen equipment.

>> ^EndAll:
I care what you think! This is an excellent blog entry, and it has provoked a very interesting discussion.
Do animals have senses of humor? Do monkeys giggle at their farts?
Perhaps that's something else exclusive to humans :}


Sometimes I wonder about my dog. As we walk down the hall she'll intentionally try to trip me. It's completely out of nowhere, she uses her front paw and accurately knocks the moving leg into the other. She seems to want to instigate play. I may be anthropomorphizing the situation but it seems like she is playing a "joke" on me.

But the problem is you ARE powerless to affect your government. Getting "your guy" into the presidency is not demonstrating your power.

If you aren't powerless, then why is the bill for murder and torture still being paid by us? Why then is there still a system that is nationalizing labor and industry if you stand so strongly against it? Why are we paying for a system that is mortgaging the future citizens (not even born, their parents may not even be born yet) of this country to pay for our temporary economic comfort? Why do you continue to support a system that is spending your money to maintain hegemony throughout the world by violent means?

You will feel different when the "other party's guy" gets in office. Remember when Bush was running up the deficit and he was extending the power of the Executive Branch (wiretapping comes to mind)? Remember how outraged you were? Now that your guy is in office, he's continuing Bush's policies (wiretapping comes to mind) and increasing the deficit, but you are somehow okay with it because you voted for him therefore you exercised your "power" to change government.

We're an empire. I would guess you're okay with that.

In reply to this comment by NetRunner:
Well, let me start by saying to you, with deadly seriousness, that I am opposed to:

• Jingoism
  
• Nationalization of labor and industry
  
• Government taking care of you from cradle to grave (depending on the definition of "take care of" and "you")
  
• Blindly following law without questioning it
  
• Lack of accountability for anyone
  
• Torture
  
• Murder, mass or otherwise
  

In your hypothetical situation, I would mostly be concerned that the man stood trial for the murder, robbing me would be a secondary concern. I might forgive it if the initial plan was to save two children, but then someone killed a member of his family, and he used the second half of the money for revenge instead. Probably not though.

The problem with the analogy is that you're anthropomorphizing government as a single person, who makes unilateral decisions, and whose actions and mindset I have no control over.

Perhaps to you that's an accurate description of government, but to me it's not. Maybe I'll feel differently the next time a party that's antithetical to me comes to power, but I suspect I'll never feel powerless to affect my government again.

Well, let me start by saying to you, with deadly seriousness, that I am opposed to:

• Jingoism
  
• Nationalization of labor and industry
  
• Government taking care of you from cradle to grave (depending on the definition of "take care of" and "you")
  
• Blindly following law without questioning it
  
• Lack of accountability for anyone
  
• Torture
  
• Murder, mass or otherwise
  

In your hypothetical situation, I would mostly be concerned that the man stood trial for the murder, robbing me would be a secondary concern. I might forgive it if the initial plan was to save two children, but then someone killed a member of his family, and he used the second half of the money for revenge instead. Probably not though.

The problem with the analogy is that you're anthropomorphizing government as a single person, who makes unilateral decisions, and whose actions and mindset I have no control over.

Perhaps to you that's an accurate description of government, but to me it's not. Maybe I'll feel differently the next time a party that's antithetical to me comes to power, but I suspect I'll never feel powerless to affect my government again.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
Obviously I jest when I compare you or any Democrat/Republican to Nazis. There's a distinct line between the two, but there are also some similarities that are scary. Jingoism is one. Nationalization of labor and industry is another. The idea of compulsory duty or debt to a government that will take care of you from cradle to grave is yet another.

But the worst is this blind affectation of righteousness toward following what is the law without questioning it. When someone cries out against an atrocity perpetrated by the government, the answer from most statists and bureaucrats is typically "but it's the law", as if to imply that the mere existence of the law is justification within itself for any atrocity it reaps. Or, that because it's the law (of the collective) the statist or bureaucrat has no individual accountability for their actions.

As if to say... "I'm just doing my job." Or "I took the Jews from the train to the showers, because it was my job. I wasn't the one who ordered them murdered, so I am not accountable."

In that regard, yes, there are dangerous similarities. For instance, our Federal income tax (extorted money) goes to fund torture and murder of innocent people in the Middle East, but you defend this system that steals our money (our labor, our time, our energy) to pay for this.

If I stole a hundred dollars from you at gun point, used fifty of it to pay for a drug to save a sick child's life, but spent the other fifty to have a man murdered, would you not still want me to pay for my crime of stealing the money? Let alone the crime of murder? Wouldn't you want to ensure that I was never able to steal your money again? And that even though I did save a child's life, it doesn't justify the means? Would you not agree?

I smell anthropomorphization. All I could see was a dog looking at and sniffing the computer for a while, then walking over to the cat, possibly in response to some movement the cat made off camera, then going back to watch the movement on the computer screen again (which I doubt it was able to interpret anyways). I didn't see it being confused by "two cats" (though probably from the movement on the screen that it wasn't able to interpret), nor did I see any blown minds. Your average "the World's Funniest Animals" clip. Meaning not very funny. So no upvote from me. (And probably a few negative upvotes for this comment.)

Or maybe that otherwise useless piece of anthropomorphic kitchen equipment that ostensibly controls this website could get off his lazy butt and automagically apply a "blocked" warning for comedy central?

This is a great response. Good on ya.

In reply to this comment by Ariane:
I consider myself an Atheist simply because of the fact that I am not a theist.

A theist cannot simply be someone who believes in God, because there are so many levels to the God question. I decided to take a pragmatical approach and ask "Does it matter if God exists?"

When you restate the question that way, most all speculative philosophies all end up on the NO side. If you believe there is an intelligence at work in the universe (pantheism), you probably will conclude that this intelligence is so foreign to human existence that this "intelligence" plays no role whatsoever in human lives. If you take the Buddhist approach and say "Everything is God", then there is no separate entity controlling existence.

Ultimately, the only philosophy where God really matters, is Anthropomorphic Theism = God is a separate entity with human characteristics that watches over us and cares what we say and do.

Conclusion: If you believe in an Anthropomorphic God, you are a theist. If your idea of God is anything else, it is for all intents and purposes the same as not believing in God at all.

I have a love of science. Understanding the true nature of the world around me fills me with awe and wonder. There are many mysteries to existence, some so difficult we humans may not be capable of answering them, yet we thinking humans are still driven to find those answers, while the unthinking ones are content with slapping the label "God" on it and calling it a day.