New York Times reports on a scientific forum at the Salk Institute titled “Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival”, consisting of the usual suspects such as Weinberg and Dawkins repeating their angry young scientist polemics, described aptly by one of the conference speakers:
A Free-for-All on Science and Religion – New York Times
[...]
By the third day, the arguments had become so heated that Dr. Konner was reminded of “a den of vipers.”
“With a few notable exceptions,” he said, “the viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?”
His response to Mr. Harris and Dr. Dawkins was scathing. “I think that you and Richard are remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side,” he said, “and that you generate more fear and hatred of science.”
[...]
I wonder how it is that we (assuming there are at least a few non-scientistic atheists other than me) permit someone like Dawkins to presume to speak for us or the general position of atheism. Perhaps it is a good thing that a majority (if true) of scientists want to now make this an all out war (I assume they are now comfortable enough in their self-sufficiency to take this step). It may be a good thing since it forces the general population to have to choose some position and path, not necessarily religion or scientism.
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I’m no fan of Dawkins. However, I’d like to say that atheists are a herd of cats. No two agree with the other. They do like (some of them) to arch their backs and spit and howl.
This lack of cohesion is really what is the matter with atheism. The population base for generating and sustaining atheism is obviously a lot of scientific centers, but they have little to say about what glues together people.
The most potent connectors amongst atheists has been the socialist movements. Socialism has inspired what some like to characterize as religious fervor. I’m quite convinced myself, that the issue is information production of a particular type.
An info techie like you Ravi, what would you say about using avatars to build connection to supplement or supercede current human to human connections that say religions foster?
thanks,
Doyle
Doyle,
as usual I think you are quite right about the disagreements among atheists. I guess my own rant against Dawkins is an example!
I think you are also quite on the money with your attention to the glue that holds people together. For atheists, as you point out, it could be socialism or some form of left/liberalism, but to some extent I think this has been an unexamined attitude (received wisdom from a liberal education and enlightenment sympathies), permitting the holder of the attitude to freely depart from what leftism entails, where his own impulses and prejudices might depart from such leftism. On the other extreme, again as you hold, socialism has been converted and used as a religion by many of its orthodox adherents.
What those who attack religion in so broad a manner as to call any individual (who practices or believes any version) a sucker or a fool is that their reductionism succeeds only in analytically substantiating their point, but fails to offer alternatives that are vital and necessary — the glue.
Though I am a computing professional, I must confess I have not thought hard about “cyber”societies and roles… though I have had opportunity to, having worked with some pioneering folks at the Multimedia Research Lab within Bell Labs (some of the people who could arguably be credited with borrowing and applying the term ‘avatar’). I think communications through technology is a bit of a hydra that brings benefits and disadvantages. On the one hand it probably enables people with disabilities (you would know more) and in particular an “avatar” presents them as who they are to the public (not primarily as a “disabled” person). On the other hand, evolution has built into us intricate audio-visual cues and behaviour/response patterns, many of which are lost online.
Ravi writes;
On the other hand, evolution has built into us intricate audio-visual cues and behaviour/response patterns, many of which are lost online.
Doyle;
There is a disability in popular culture called face blindness where the person can’t recognize people based upon seeing the face. They can see the face but remembering them as a particular person is hard and not by the usual routes. For example they can’t recognize their mother.
I think your point above is a handy place to start a more lengthy discussion. The connection process between people is dominated by how well people understand or recognize the face. The avatar depending upon the computing power can represent a broad range of human like expressions to interact with person. For those people who are disabled and can’t use that route to knowing others; the blind, and so on, I will put aside for the time being.
The historical precedent for an avatar is the law. The law proscribes certain sorts of behaviors. Which in turn roughly shapes how a society functions. For example in tribal society where honor is an important issue and when law is absent, then honor leads to a lot of violence.
An avatar is a metaphor for how large numbers of people connect at once. What do people actually do? When the avatar talks to say 15,000 people at once what sort of uniting or connecting work makes sense? Well the avatar would presumably treat each person individually for their own history and perhaps way of understanding. But over all the avatar would treat everyone in some sort of friendly way. So that all the people have a common experience of how to interact with the avatar.
Therefore the avatar is in a mass way of showing how to interact with everyone in a friendly way. Like the law, this interaction suggests how people can interact in a given social system. Where as also the avatar records how people actually interact with the avatar. So that the structure of how they interact is more known than how people remember their loved ones, or friends. So that the avatar knows how you can interact with someone else, and can advise you about the best ways to interact without you having spent some time blundering about and hurting yourself and the other.
I note here once again the scale of interaction. The avatar can directly address many people at once and that is rough way of saying uniting all into a single group. That surpasses current methods of group assimilation and unification.
Churches for example have someone up front to blah blah, but the personal contact in the process is definitely limited. Compare the mega churches with community churches. The labor process of knowing the community is more stimulating in mega churches on some levels because the media tools allow things personal contact can’t do. Magnify and extend say music to a broader group to stimulate mass unity to a commonly heard music.
For socialists, I think they use Christian forms of community, particularly, Christian theories about how people understand the community. That works to some degree, but issues of equality and support can’t be addressed by Christian methods. Other major religions much less are reflected in current Socialist frameworks of common unity in the population.
Therefore there awaits a mass scale unification of society in a socialist mold. In the sense that huge numbers of people actually feel united in more than a vague theoretical way.
Doyle