There are atheists who try to make a virtue of necessity by saying mortality is what makes life precious. It's actually immortality that cheapens the value of life.
However, you have secular transhumanists who hope to achieve immortality by digitizing the mind, then uploading the contents into video games. An indestructible simulated paradise.
If atheists who say mortality is what makes life valuable had a shot at immortality, would they turn it down? Really? Eventually, they might become bored and commit suicide, but would they turn down the initial offer?
Hey Mr. Hays, if you get the time, can you give your thoughts about these 2 objections to Divine Conceptualism?
ReplyDelete"It's common for people unfamiliar with these philosophical notions (e.g.: concept, reference, intentionality, intentional object, etc) to assume they understand them well and thus know what's implied by them. The Divine Conceptualist assumes (seemingly without argument) that because a mind is needed to think about a concept, that a concept is itself the act of conceiving of some object, or is the performance of some other mental act, such as a believing a proposition. One can grant that conceiving of something is a mental act, but it does not follow from that fact that a concept - the object of one's act of conceiving - is itself a mental act and that it's ontology is ultimately mental.”
“The Divine Conceptualist is someone who thinks that propositions (or laws of logic, etc) are divine thoughts, and not independently existing platonic abstract objects. On Divine Conceptualism (DC), a proposition, like 2+2=4 (call it 'p'), is a divine thought. So say God's thought 'T' is supposed to be the proposition p. The problem is what is the content of T? If it has no content, then it is an empty thought, which is about nothing. But then how is T supposed to be the proposition p (which is that 2+2=4) and not some other proposition (like that 2+4=6)? If it is empty of content then nothing could make it about one but not the other (other than complete arbitrariness). But if T has content, that is if God's thought which is the proposition p is itself about something, then what is it about? If the content of T is the proposition 2+2=4, then we are into the regress, as that proposition was supposed to be God's thought T. The thought T has itself as its own content. This is an infinite regress. The reason it cannot be shrugged off is that it evacuates the thought of any content. Compare God's divine thought of a different proposition, say the law of non-contradiction. Call this T2. The same problem arises, whereby T2 has itself as its own content, in an infinite regress. And the issue is that T and T2 are identical in every respect. Each has itself as its own content in an infinite regress, yet somehow T is supposed to be 2+2=4 and T2 is supposed to be the law of non-contradiction. But nothing other than utterly arbitrary stipulation can account for this identification. Neither thought has any actual content, just an infinite regress of self-containment. This completely unravels the divine conceptualist position.”
I have it on good authority that Welty and Anderson plan to respond to objections to theistic conceptual realism. That's their summer project.
Delete