Woo Dennett! *quality *doublepromote

First off, major LOL, I'm an atheist, so thanks for assuming I'm Christian but I ain't.

Ok, I'm wrong. You're not religious but you certainly come off as excessively and disproportionately apologetic/sympathetic towards it. Sort of an anecdote that being an atheist doesn't necessarily mean one can think clearly about all things, but is that because I've been unable to understand you or is that because you've been unable to properly lay-out-on-the-table your position?.


I believe Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and those like them are doing atheists everywhere a disservice with their absolutist language (i.e. all religious people are crazy, stupid, etc., all religions are evil, etc., and so on and so forth). This makes atheists everywhere look like some kind of reverse hate-mongers.

This is a modification of your previous statement that they were just as fundamentalist as those they criticize, which I think is a tad more reasonable but still way off the mark. Please show the evidence that Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, or Dennett is as fundamentalist and hateful as the religious fundamentalists they criticize (or have made blanket statements about all religious people). This is a statement you made earlier and you should have no problem backing this up. I'm pissed off because you're carelessly saying stuff like this as if its an established fact. It is not. You have all your work ahead of you.

Also, Dawkins et al. do NOT just run around crudely saying ALL religious people are stupid, deluded, or idiots. This is a strawman. They reserve their scorn of the religious mindset in proportion to their nastiness/harm to society. They're very careful to not make blanket statements regarding those who, through no choice of their own, were brought up religiously and have not been able to shake it off.

Yes, people who believe things for which there is no evidence ARE deluded, irregardless of the offense taken at such a statement. You should already understand that these men value truth over comfortable lies, and when informing someone of their delusions (for example, taking calls from a religious listener on a radio station) they (with not the not surprising at all exception of Hitchens) tend to be very explicit in explaining that they aren't being contemptuous or disdainful when they say say this, it is simply the truth. They do not just outright rudely call people idiots or morons. I'd like to see an example of this as I've never seen it.


It is exactly the kind of language of the fundamentalist opponents they profess to hate. Think about radical Islam--we're all Western devils because we don't subscribe to Sharia law, right?

Exactly, eh? Well then you should have no problem supplying some quotes with the full context (no quotemines) that measure up then. Regurgitating ignorant, second-hand blanket statements don't count.


The link I posted that compared Hitchens to Malcom X is spot on. Malcom X got a lot of media attention for his radical views, but in the end what did he accomplish? We don't celebrate Malcom X Day, you'll notice. Martin Luther King's Jr.'s message of cooperation and mutual understanding is what moved people's hearts on both sides of the divide and got us moving forward as a country, not Malcom X's divisiveness.

This comparison is vague as hell. One could replace Hitchens with most any influential/controversial thinker and it would still sound as if it were authoritative. Who the hell is saying Christopher Hitchens HAS to be that guy and why? There's plenty of room for all kinds, the MLKs and the Malcom-Xs. Basically you want Christopher to be something other than what he is.


Confronting and dealing with those people is going to require cooperation and dialogue between both the religious and non-religious people, between theists and atheists, between gnostics and agnostics.

You'll find no disagreement there from me. We only differ in our approach.


The failure of incredibly intelligent men like Hitchens to see this and their insistence on furthering the divisiveness on this issue is a great tragedy in my opinion. They don't see the forest through the trees. You want to prevent religion from dominating the political and cultural scene? So do a lot of religious people (the vast majority in most Western states). And their numbers VASTLY outnumber the atheists. Insulting those people who are clearly your potential allies hardly seems like a good way to go about getting them to see your point of view."

Do you really believe those leaders of the major religious institutions will relinquish their incommensurable power and malign influence on society if atheists (and the common people in general) just start fawning and kissing their asses and showing undue respect to these self-appointed, inherently corrupt, deluded arbiters of a lying morality? Pointing out their harmful ideology is hurting the cause of reason? You're placing far too much importance on tone and not truth.


When was the last time someone called you an idiot and you just sat there calmly and said, "You know what, you're right! I AM an idiot!

Provide some examples of the New Atheist's doing literally this and you may have a point. They don't. I have never once seen Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, or Harris calling saying "You're stupid, an idiot, a moron." UNLESS they (I really think only Hitchens would qualify here) were thoroughly provoked by an incredulous and ignorant bigot. More to the point, if one infers from the sum total of the reasoned arguments leveled against them that the only conclusion is that they must be an idiot for believing nonsense then that does NOT reflect on the person making the argument.

It seems as if you want moderate religious people to be coddled and not treated as the adults. Kid's gloves are for kids.


On a side note, I included the clip from Hitchens' brother because he points out the fact that Hitchens has built himself a tower, secluded himself inside of it, and is simply hurling missiles at anything that moves outside without bothering to try to engage in real dialogue.

And that's simply his opinion, in which he didn't really even attempt to qualify. Family members are probably the least objective source of information when it comes to the psychological state of another member that one could possibly ask for! Ask any practicing psychiatrist. The only reason this is authoritative to you at all is because it perfectly reaffirms a bias you've already held. This seems to be a common theme here.


I think the clip in this vid from the Glenn Beck show is the most telling of this, where Beck is trying to tell him that he doesn't consider Hitchens an enemy and Hitchens is actively trying to make Beck an enemy. He's not interested in real dialogue (to be fair to Hitchens, neither are many of his debate opponents)

<groan> He's not TRYING to make Beck his enemy. It'd be like me constantly provoking and demonizing and lying about someone and then wondering why he/she would have the nerve to not be my friend, it beggars belief! Beck has made himself an enemy of the reasonable, not the other way around and he most definitely isn't trying to "have a dialogue". I'm really starting to question why I even bothered responding at this point.


He's interested in making smart-alec comments and getting good sound bites--which is fine for an entertainer but doesn't get my respect for him as a thinker.

He loves a good debate, why is this surprising? It is what he is good at and his life's blood. Being entertaining does not by fiat exclude the substance of his arguments, which he is able to deftly supply in spades with incredible recall and erudition. Since you haven't argued the substance but merely the style in which its delivered (and shown yourself to have not even bothered to read their written works before you impugn your own personal bias onto them), you basically have just openly admitted that it isn't substance you place importance on in a good thinker but TONE. Well, to that I say, good luck.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by Ornthoron.

If Dennett is aware that cake is just supernormal stimuli, it seems like he should be able to live a lifestyle that doesn't make him overweight and likely to die prematurely (as well as drain society's resources for the medical complications he'll experience).

Your video, Dan Dennett: Cute, sexy, sweet, funny, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 2 Badge!

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by my15minutes. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Daniel-Dennett-Evolution-is-a-strange-inverson-of-reasoning

Dawkins, Dennett, McGinn, Miller, Turner and Weinberg - all parts were previously sifted. So is it considered a dupe or not?

Great stuff nonetheless, my favorite was McGinn.

The response by that theologian was more word salad than all the Hidden Valley Ranches of the world can dress... only to meekly concede Dennett's point at the last breath.

>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^gwiz665:
He reminds me of Daniel Dennett.
Well, rottenseed, it's not really wrong. The force of gravity is constant and when that force influences the anvil more than the force from the explosion ("overcomes" it) it goes in the direction of gravity.

physics fail. PM myself or mycroft for further explanation.


Isn't this just semantics? Drawing in the forces as vectors, you add (I think) the vectors together and factor in wind resistance and all that and get the final direction the anvil flies. Because gravity is constantly at about 9.8 m/s2 (depending on where on the earth it was launched, how far it goes up - negligible differences) and the energy from the explosion is not constant, the resulting force vector becomes less and less upwards and eventually turns and points downwards towards the center of gravity ("overcomes" it).

Where is that so horribly wrong? I''m not a physics guy, I'm just going by my high school stuff and what makes sense when you program physics stuff - so enlighten me with your mighty brain.

^ I think there's one with him and Dinish D'Souza.
http://www.videosift.com/search?q=dan+dennett
http://www.videosift.com/search?q=daniel+dennett

All good.

>> ^Lodurr:
I don't see the point to that definition of substance dualism. How much farther removed from "physical" can you get than existing in a separate, invisible dimension? All the statements substance dualism makes about consciousness can still be true in a scenario where consciousness is part of an extra-physical dimension.
I watched Dennett's talk, the salient point comes at the conclusion which is "free will exists in the sense that matters," which is to say "real" free will doesn't exist, and that the universe is still ultimately deterministic in his view.

I guess I misunderstood your point. I thought that your statement that "we can't presently percieve" something meant that we might be able to percieve it in the future. But then I don't see your point about how today's non-physical is tomorrow's physical. If we can percieve it, it's physical. If we in principle can't percieve it, I argue that it's irrelevant, because it can't affect our bodies.


You're basically right about Dennett. Consider, though, that so-called "real" free will would be indistinguishible from Dennett's kind of free will, since you can never reproduce an event exactly.

>> ^Almanildo:

Postulating a new kind of physical interaction isn't substance dualism; you have to take the new stuff completely out of physics to call it dualist.

On the subject of determinism, we don't really know whether physics is deterministic. My belief is that it's not. However, it's not a given that determinism is even relevant for the problem of free will. Daniel Dennett argues (quite convincingly in my book) that it's not.


I don't see the point to that definition of substance dualism. How much farther removed from "physical" can you get than existing in a separate, invisible dimension? All the statements substance dualism makes about consciousness can still be true in a scenario where consciousness is part of an extra-physical dimension.

I watched Dennett's talk, the salient point comes at the conclusion which is "free will exists in the sense that matters," which is to say "real" free will doesn't exist, and that the universe is still ultimately deterministic in his view.

I think it's fairly obvious that quantum indeterminacy is generally incapable of showing that we have something like free will. There are arguments which may show that, under certain conditions, quantum indeterminacy is quite capable of generating something more or less like free will. Roger Penrose (the brilliant mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who co-formulated the Penrose-Hawking theorems) advanced such an argument, attempting in Shadows of the Mind to show quantum effects in microtubules of the brain are responsible for both consciousness and free will. However, further research into the physics of the brain showed this line of reasoning to be ultimately defunct.

>> ^Almanildo:
>>
However, it's not a given that determinism is even relevant for the problem of free will. Daniel Dennett argues (quite convincingly in my book) that it's not.

>> ^Lodurr:

That's the point, that today's "non-physical" is tomorrow's "physical." Dualists argue that consciousness results from physical interactions that we can't presently perceive, and that these interactions aren't limited to our perceivable dimensions.
@Almanildo, the problem with classical physics-based consciousness is that physics is deterministic, and our experience of consciousness is non-deterministic. We've recently gone from thinking that we were completely free-willed to a more complex understanding of brain chemistry and motor functions, but the basic experience of awareness and self-guided thought seem fundamentally impossible to pin as deterministic.

Postulating a new kind of physical interaction isn't substance dualism; you have to take the new stuff completely out of physics to call it dualist.


On the subject of determinism, we don't really know whether physics is deterministic. My belief is that it's not. However, it's not a given that determinism is even relevant for the problem of free will. Daniel Dennett argues (quite convincingly in my book) that it's not.