I see it as a simplification, personally. God is a critically important concept for humanity; less than 7% of the global population are atheists and less than 5% of the US population are atheists (look it up, I’m not kidding). Regardless of the merits or shortcomings of doing so, refusing to recognize the inherent impulse to theism in human beings requires a great deal of mental gymnastics.
The question, for most people, becomes one of assigning internal or external agency to this spiritual impulse that the vast majority of humans share. Many atheists believe that the desire to know God comes from inside individual human minds; that it is a product of internal fears, childhood conditioning or simple ignorance. Religions that posit a God or gods outside the human mind usually assign the source of religious belief to that outside agency.
For pantheists that sort of question is meaningless sophistry, since there is only one source, and every questioner is a participant in divinity, not a supplicant outside of it. In my opinion (both as a scientist and as an ordained minister) this way of understanding God and humanity is fundamentally simpler and fits the observable data better than any of the others I have studied.
Of course you are! This is a cause for joy and celebration and prezzies on your birthday.
The name that you call an actuality doesn’t make it less or more, except in your own mind. The assignment of meaning or meaninglessness is also up to you; choose the mental state that makes you optimally happy and good.
These are old questions, and Daniel Kahneman has previously shown that these aren’t a test of your analytical skill. Your performance on these tests can be “primed”. A simple analytical “priming” can vastly improve your performance.
Knowing that performance can be “primed”, I would be very curious if they properly controlled the experiment to verify that no additional interference caused people to perform differently. In fact, I would be willing to bet that they allowed something to interfere BEFORE the questions, not after the questions. I would be willing to be that the experiment is not repeatable.
I wonder if calling those two separate “systems” is an artificial divide. At least some of the fast, instinctive judgments we make come from previous experience, perhaps originally performed slowly and analytically. So things can drift from “2” to “1” as we learn to respond reflexively to patterns.
I still is it’s fascinating, especially in how we’re fooled: when do we falsely match a pattern (as in the math questions above), or what intuitive judgments of ours have no basis at all in experiential or analytical thinking?
I think you’re correct that it is possible for skills or some systems of thought to shift from 2 to 1, but that doesn’t change the fact that the divide exists.
It is fascinating. We are all making unexamined judgements all the time about everything; other people, situations and ourselves, based on our brain’s tendency to take the shorthand of sterotypes, culture, personal biases, etc., and apply them to any given person or situation. If we could learn to slow down more often and challenge these unconscious assumptions, we might solve a lot of social problems.
I’m Australian, so it didn’t have anywhere near as much of an impact on me as it would to an American. My daughter’s birthday will always be a few days after the start of school.
I suppose that’s what I mean by intrinsic value (I may be a little sloppy with my terms). It doesn’t have any value given to it by some outside order. There’s no plan for it. It doesn’t mean anything. But we can give it value if we think life is worth something in and of itself.
