Hey all,

Tons going on in my life lately. I've been happily married for over 3 years now (the poor woman, lol), through that marriage I became a father and soon after a grandfather. I've been working full time in IT at a University, and have recently started my journey for a Degree.

One of the General Education classes that I'm taking has to do with different Worldviews and how faith affects them (or how the worldview affects faith).

I'm hoping I can find a candidate here to interview. It shouldn't take long...maybe 10 to 15 minutes, and will be confidential. The assignment is to interview someone who has significantly different beliefs than myself and ask them some general worldview questions.

I'd love to talk to someone who is either an Atheist or Agnostic and ask a few questions in relation to how they see things in the big picture.

This is not a bible thumping session, nor do I want to impose any of my beliefs on anyone else. It's simply an information gathering session so I can write a report on it to turn in on Thursday.

If you are open to this and don't mind a few minutes of your time taken, please PM me on here and I'll get right back with you. This interview can be done through email if that is best for you, or through a phone call...totally up to you.

I have a fallback that I can do this interview with, so it's fine if no one has the time or inclination to do this, I just genuinely have appreciated some of the intellectual discourse on here and feel like I'll get pretty straight responses to my questions.

Hope everyone is doing well and for those of you in the northern regions are preparing for a cold winter!

Elemynt
Jason

Actually, I'll do this one for ya. I'm a fairly intolerant Atheist Send me a PM and I'll give you my email and cell info.

Thanks Tali and also to those who PMed me.

I've gotten all the responses I needed for this assignment.

It is a testament to this community and the people in it that I recieved multiple responses on this request. I would have been thrilled with just one, but having multiple people respond and being willing to give up time that they could be doing something likely more enjoyable then helping me out really says a lot about the character of people from good ol Lanys.

Thanks again all!

Elemynt

I'd be interested to see what the questions were.

What he said. If were all willing the 5 of us left here and post our answers.

Yea I'm a little curious as well.

I participated. I think the questions make for interesting discussion. I'd be interested in seeing the report that was generated, but here are the questions(and my initial answers - I responded on my way out the door to a job interview, so they're not exactly as eloquent as I would maybe hope, but still get the idea across)

If I'm out of line to post Elemynts questions without his permission, apologies. It didn't seem like it would hurt anything, and I think the conversation could be entertaining.

Putting it in quotes so it stands out, and bolding the questions.

Hmmm, abstract philosophical discussion of highly personal values on an internet message board? What could possibly go wrong!

But what the hell, I'll bite. Nom nom.

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I don't claim absolute knowledge here, but as a scientist and an atheist I tend to go with the simplest explanation that fits all the observed data. So when it comes to metaphysics, I'm basically a materialist: I believe that it's all matter and energy (two sides of the same coin, really, as Einstein taught us). As for "spiritual beings," the most common one we talk about is the mind or the soul: a sort of ethereal being that rides and guides our bodies. That's pretty much bunk. I think that consciousness is an emergent characteristic of certain types of neural networks; the close links between neuroscience and psychology tend to support this. See, for example, the case of Phineas Gage. When the hardware changes, so does the software. Where's the room in that picture for the abstraction of the soul?

As for other kinds of spiritual beings -- gods, devils, angels, demons, efreeti, jinn, sprites, faeries, etc etc -- I think they're fun mythological creations, and the stories about them can be entertaining and useful, but I don't believe in 'em. Lots of evidence against them, no evidence for them.


I think we're basically just animals. Marvelously complex animals with sophisticated patterns of thought, language and culture, to be sure, but animals just the same. We often talk of Nature (capital N) as though it were some sacred state from which we humans have departed, but I think this is a misconception. In the first place, our physical environment is constantly changing as the living things that inhabit it evolve, grow, and eventually die out. In the second place, we are not separate from our surroundings. We're an intimately connected part of them. We change our environment and it changes us, a fluid give and take, constantly unfolding. I think it behooves us to understand and respect that connection.

On the cosmic scale, I think humans are even less special. Our civilization so far has spanned about 10,000 years on one small planet. A blip in the vast expanse of time and space, and probably not even a unique one. Observational astronomers in recent years have discovered hundreds of extra-solar planets nearby, many of which are in the "habitable zone" (the range of conditions over which we think life could well arise). Some of these planets, I'll wager, most likely harbor living creatures. While I doubt we'll contact an intelligent alien species in my lifetime, I do think we'll discover signs of life elsewhere in the universe, maybe even in our own solar system.


Hmm, tough one. I suppose I could get snarky and say something like "gravity," but I'll assume by limit you mean, "prevent us from reaching our potential as a species." I think that our potential is vast, starting with becoming peaceful, enlightened beings and moving on to epic species-scale endeavors like eliminating poverty, perfecting our understanding of the laws of nature, and exploring the galaxy. Lots of things limit us in that respect, but here are a couple biggies:

The first I'll call greed, or power hunger. While all animals act out of self-interest most of the time, some humans take that inclination to the extreme. Our world suffers, and has suffered for millennia, because throughout history small groups of people have hoarded disproportionate amounts of power and resources at the expense of their fellow men. These power-hungry individuals are basically sociopaths. If we are to grow as a species, I believe our societies need to rein in these individuals' greed.

The second I'll call short-sightedness: the tendency of groups to prioritize their own interests over others'. Usually these "others" are separated spatially (other nations), temporally (other generations), culturally (other races and ethnicities) or economically (other classes). If we look at human potential as a truly species-level quality, then this creation of in-groups is divisive and limiting.


I wish I knew. I think these sorts of society-scale problems are too complex for us to really understand. We can theorize and develop models and so on, but I think we really just have to experiment. Keep what works, cut out the things that don't.

If there's a guiding principle I go by, it's that the burden of proof is always on authority. Anytime one entity tries to exert power over another, the powerful must justify their actions. If they can't, then the power systems in question are unjust and should be dismantled. I think this applies equally well at the individual scale, for example an abusive relationship, and at the global scale, like with the U.S. invading sovereign nations in violation of international law.


Meaning, sure. Suffering is the basic condition of humanity. We are born into it and we live with it, to some degree, all our lives. Purpose? I suppose so. Shared suffering can be a powerful tool for uniting people under a common cause. But more importantly, I think that a purpose of a good society is to minimize the suffering felt by its members.


Happiness, purpose, fulfillment. Creative expression. Love. To name a few.

Elemynt, record these responses for contrast in a follow-up study called "Differences in Gamer Responses to Highly Personal Questions in Private vs. Public Settings".

I noticed Noojens' responses become progressively shorter.. late for an appointment, sir? =p

Didn't read everything, but the whole idea of human limitation caught my eye. I'd have to say emotion is one of the biggest factors holding most people back(and, quite frankly, as a species). I think people give up FAR too easily in trying to control negative emotions. When some people DO try, they block it out completely, instead of taking a more moderate approach and allowing some emotion to come through(through different outlets, etc). We know from studies that bottling doesn't work.

I'm not saying go Vulcan, but it's amazing how much people are held back by it. Holding everything in is unhealthy, but giving up and letting yourself become ruled by them is equally unhealthy. The smartest and most accomplished people I've met had incredible emotional control.

It's one of our greatest assets and one of our greatest weaknesses. Great things can come from emotion, as well as terrible things.

1. What is your view of reality? (Is everything simply matter and energy, are there some spiritual beings, are the inhabitants of earth all that exists?.....something that describes the big picture in regards to your worldview on reality)

Everything is matter and energy, but not simply. "Spiritual" beings beings may exist, but are sentient organizations of energy that follow the same physical rules as everyone else. We don't understand the principle of how they work, but we don't understand everything about our own circulatory systems either. Given that our existence demonstrates the likelihood of life as nonzero, and the sheer number of times the dice have ben rolled, I'm certain life exists elsewhere in the universe in some form. Reality itself doesn't have a higher purpose -- but as Joss Whedon put it, "when nothing you do really matters, all that matters is what you do."

2. Where do you think Human's fit in the grand scheme of things?

Humans are the only fully sentient species known to ourselves. This means (among a whole lot of other things) that we possess advanced enough reasoning to make the necessary tools to bend the environment to our will (though not the collective control to do so safely), and also the neural complexity to make sabotage of our own thinking laughably easy. I believe we're in the very early stages of sentient development, and if more advanced aliens were to detect us right now, they would no more converse with us on Earth than you would strike up a conversation about philosophy with a chimpanzee at the zoo. We're absolute masters of our tiny, tiny domain, and we have no idea what's waiting out there except that to get out there, it had to be older or smarter than us.

3. Name 2 things that seem to limit the Human race?

A. Disunity of purpose in the long run. We can't get enough people to align their enlightened sense of self-interest into a collective goal long enough to achieve it unless the benefits to oneself are tangible and almost immediate.

B. Unity of purpose in the short run. We can get people to align very basic sense of self-interest into a collective goal for the duration of a commercial break and with very little conscious control. We call it mob mentality.

Basically, appeals to the higher brain fall flat while appeals to the lower functions almost always succeed. The result is that the percentage of American Idol viewers who vote for their favorite contestants grossly exceeds the percentage of American citizens who vote for their President, and is many times the percentage of any state's population that votes for its Governor.

4. What do you think a good solution would be to that problem?

Time. The world is shrinking; improvements in transportation and communications technology have the side-effect of holding us more accountable to our peers. The less we're alone psychologically, the better we behave.

5. Is there any meaning or benefit to human suffering? (could be emotional, physical, or both)

What is peace worth to those who never knew war? There must be struggles to overcome, or we grow weak; puzzles to solve, or else we grow dim; pain to endure, or else we grow numb.

6. What things do you desire most in life? (list 2 or 3 things..can be more but 2 or 3 is fine).

Control of my most immediate surroundings, but only that.
Protection from disaster.
Constantly new experiences.
Company.

To some extent, but this also promotes people who lead fake lives to fully engorge themselves in them. A truer test of morality(applicable to many other tests of character) is what a person does when there are few witnesses and fewer consequences to their actions. If no one socially permits a person to do something, and they're never in a situation where that is tested, they have little room or chance to grow.

No doubt we'd behave better on average under those circumstances(at least in the short term), but it wouldn't be an accurate indicator, and people held back by that will only last as long as society is around to keep them in check.

I'm not sure that doses of anonymity are necessarily the answer, but at least opportunities present themselves for a person to face decision points. Unless someone is a sociopath, I think eventually a person looks inward to ask themselves if they're doing the right thing after X number of situations where no consequences happened for their bad actions. There's little reason to question that if society tells you it's bad, dictated to you by the majority.

I don't agree that conditioning works in the order you describe. Endless decision points will not produce progress -- but consequences will.