Atheism
Community Guide
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Statement of Purpose
- This is a support and conversation community for people who don't believe in gods.
- Superstition hucksters have no reason to subscribe or post here at all.
- If you are looking to debate or proselytize, options will be linked lower in the sidebar.
Acceptable
- Honest questions or conversations.
- Discussions on parenting or advice.
- Struggles, frustrations, coming out.
- Atheist memes. We can have fun!
- News headlines relevant to atheism.
Unacceptable
Depending on severity, you might be warned before adverse action is taken.
- Anything against site rules.
- Illegal and/or NSFW material.
- Troll posts and comments. There will be no attempt to explain what that means.
- Leading questions, agenda pushing, or disingenuous attempts to bait members.
- Personal attacks or flaming.
Inadvisable
- Self promotion or upvote farming.
- Excessive shitposting or off-topic discussion.
Application of warnings or bans will be subject to moderator discretion. Feel free to appeal. If changes to the guidelines are necessary, they will be adjusted.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a group that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of any other group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you you will be banned on sight.
Provable means able to provide proof to the moderation, and, if necessary, to the community.
~ /c/nostupidquestions
If you want your space listed in this sidebar and it is especially relevant to the atheist or skeptic communities, PM DancingPickle and we'll have a look!
Connect with Atheists
- Matrix: #atheism:envs.net
Help and Support Links
- Freedom From Religion Foundation
- The Secular Therapy Project
- Secular Students Alliance
- Black Nonbelievers
- The Clergy Project
- Atheist Alliance International
- Sunday Assembly
- Atheist Ireland
- Atheism UK
- Atheists United
Streaming Media
This is mostly YouTube at the moment. Podcasts and similar media - especially on federated platforms - may also feature here.
- Atheist Debates - Matt Dillahunty
- Rationality Rules
- Friendly Atheist
- Making Sense with Sam Harris
- Cosmic Skeptic
- Genetically Modified Skeptic
- Street Epistemology
- Armored Skeptic
- NonStampCollector
Orgs, Blogs, Zines
- Center for Inquiry
- American Atheists
- Humanists International
- Atheist Republic
- The Brights
- The Angry Atheist
- History for Atheists
- Rationalist International
- Atheist Revolution
- Debunking Christianity
- Godless Mom
- Atheist Freethinkers
Mainstream
Bibliography
Start here...
...proceed here.
- God is Not Great (Hitchens)
- The God Delusion (Dawkins)
- The End of Faith (Harris)
- Why I Am Not a Christian (Russell)
- Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris)
Proselytize Religion
From Reddit
As a community with an interest in providing the best resources to its members, the following wiki links are provided as historical reference until we can establish our own.
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Consciousness is an emergent property of underlying factors and is absolutely subject to physical laws. Have you ever gone to a dentist and taken gas? Your consciousness and its processes were altered during that time specifically because your consciousness is inextricable linked to your body. There is no mind over matter because mind is matter. What you’re talking about is metaphysics. We’re not ghosts crammed into a meat robot. Our consciousness emerges from our body like a flower blooms on a bush and if you poison the bush the mind is poisoned too.
You are confusing the concepts, consciousness obviously arises from brains, and brains are subject to physical laws. But the consciousness exist in a virtual reality constructed by the brain.
So while the brain is dependent on physical laws to work, it's the same with a computer game, that relies on the computer to work, but both are disconnected from reality in the way they work.
Computer games work through software, this allows software to function way beyond the mere concept of transistors switching.
In much the same way, our brains have layers, where although our consciousness is tied to the physical properties of the brain, it is not tied DIRECTLY to it. If it was tied directly, it would be an automaton without consciousness, and couldn't for instance have memory or learn.
However this works, there is a sort of "shim" between consciousness and the physical brain. Just like in a computer there is are drivers, API and software on top of the hardware, before you get the final result of for instance a computer game or an AI.
Absolutely definitely NOT! I don't claim we have souls or any other nonsense of that sort.
No. Your consciousness is an emergent property of your physical brain, and your consciousness is in fact subject to the same physical laws as it’s substrate. There is no decoupling the two. One emerges from the other. Believing that your mind is decoupled from your body, and acts independently from it, is a metaphysical belief for which there is no evidence, in fact, there is contrary evidence.
Your video game analogy is flawed for a number of reasons, but let’s see if we can work with it. You imagine that there is a software/hardware relationship between the mind and brain and that is not true. You mind and brain developed with eachother and are inseparable. You can’t remove the mind from the brian and you can’t remove the brain from the mind. Software is installed into a computer from by an outside force. You have to download it, or stick in a DVD if you’re old like me. It requires an outside agent, and if your mind is software, who is that agent? Is it god? Is it Steve Jobs ghost? Have we reinvented religion?
If your mind is a computer game (which it isn’t) then all the things you see on your screen, the magic, the monsters, etc. All of those things are deterministic. It’s a set collection of ones and zeroes running through a processor and reacting predictably to the outside stimulus. Your video game experience is an emergent property of ones and zeroes being process on a silicon chip. You cannot separate the video game experience from the silicon chip any more than you could separate the mind from the brain.
You say you believe that the mind is “Connected” to the brain but not “Directly”, then what is the nature of that connection and on what are you basing that belief? If the mind does not does not reside in the brain, where does the mind reside?
True
True
True
True, but the brain is way more sophisticated, and works more like an FPGA with self modifying code. The brain reprograms itself when it learns, and although that reprogramming is physical. the virtual reality constructed by the brain is not. Just like a simulation is independent on what hardware it is running on, you can simulate whatever disregarding whether it runs on one computational machine or another. The simulation is dependent on the hardware to run, but how it runs is not. Very basically you can simulate water without having any water in the machine.
The way your mind works is like a virtual machine, you have created a model in your brain of the reality you live in. In your brain you are able to manipulate that reality to predict outcomes, without doing anything to the actual reality. That's basically exactly the same as a virtual reality, which is where my Computer game analogy comes from. Because computer games too are simple forms of virtual realities.
But further than that, you can also imagine things that are not real, and create new concepts that never existed before. That because the consciousness is not limited by reality.
Not exactly, but close enough, depends on how "mind" is defined. The mind is definitely tied to the brain, the consciousness is what we may consider the highest function of the mind. The mind constructs a virtual reality, and our self consciousness exist in that virtual reality, and nowhere else. The mind is actually the shim, or middle layer or connection between brain and consciousness. Consciousness is absolutely dependent on the brain to work, but it is not directly dependent on the brain in how it works. The exact same number of neurons in 2 different brains can work very similarly from a physical perspective. But the consciousnesses and minds can be night and day apart. Like the mind is the "programming" of the brain, and our consciousness is a result of that programming.
Sorry that my answer is so long. I'm trying to express the idea as clearly as I possibly can.