

"The Internet Is My Religion" - jrlevine
http://www.jakelevine.me/blog/2011/06/the-internet-is-my-religion/

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billybob
"We are the leaders of this new religion. We have faith that people connected
can create a new world. Each one of us is a creator but together we are The
Creator."

It all sounds lovely until the universe turns into a cold, dead cinder.

Seriously, making stuff is beautiful, and helping people is beautiful, but
those don't add up to transcendent beings. If everything about us, right down
to our deepest desires, is fundamentally just the motion of atoms, when the
universe ends, it might has well have never happened.

I am a Christian, so I'm biased here#, but it seems to me that non-religious
people keep trying to simultaneously claim that the universe is merely a semi-
random collection of atoms and energy, AND that we can find transcendent
meaning in it. You can't have it both ways.

#Then again, I think it's impossible NOT to be biased about a question like
the meaning of life. We all want some particular thing to be true.

~~~
dinedal
I'm not sure what you mean by semi-random, could you explain further? As a
non-religious person myself I drop the 'semi-' and just go with utterly
random.

I'm also not sure why you think we can't have it both ways. Take chess for
example. There's a board, there's rules, and it plays. However ask any serious
player about the game, and you'll discover very quickly that there is far more
to the game then just the board and how the pieces move.

Why can't the same principle be applied to our universe, where the board is
what we perceive and the rules physics?

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billybob
"There's a board, there's rules, and it plays. However ask any serious player
about the game, and you'll discover very quickly that there is far more to the
game then just the board and how the pieces move."

If by "far more", you mean "following these rules can result in any one of a
large combination of outcomes, and at any given point it's nearly impossible
to keep them all in your head", I agree.

If you're talking about the thrill of it, that's external to the game: it's
human feelings and human interactions. Which is exactly what a materialistic
view of the universe would dismiss as illusory.

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pygy_
There is far more to non-religious views of subjectivity than the simplistic,
materialistic negationism. You're beating a straw man here.

See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Mind> for the details.

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yters
Materialistic negationism is the only coherent position, since there is only
material. Everything else is just as religious as the religions that atheists
bash.

~~~
pygy_
What about your own subjectivity? How would you explain the difference between
red and blue to a blind man, or what it feels like to fall in love to a robot
without the appropriate subjective apparatus (or even to someone who never did
(yes, it exists))?

See <http://clm.utexas.edu/~compjc/papers/Tononi2008a.pdf> and the next two
links for what I bet my money on regarding scientific theories of
consciousness.

[http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/boly_PBR_coma_science_20...](http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/boly_PBR_coma_science_2009.pdf)

[http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/massimini_PBR_coma_scien...](http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/papers/vs/massimini_PBR_coma_science_2009.pdf)

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pnathan
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. It's okay to appreciate helpful humanity, but
to deify it is absurd.

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insickness
For those of you who can't watch it or want a synopsis:

It's an inspiring talk about a guy who has dealt with multiple extreme health
issues, like cancer and a lung transplant, and how people--connected by the
internet--made it possible for him to get the help he needed to live. He's not
saying that he worships the internet, rather that communication and
understanding other people is what is best in all of us. In this sense, the
internet is his religion because it allows him to have faith in the goodness
of the world.

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Griever
Very interesting talk -- I think. Too bad I don't know how it ended because as
the email input prompt appeared I closed the window immediately.

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2shea
Use a fake email. The entire video is truly inspiring and worth watching.

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gaius
Read the comments on Youtube and tell me the Internet is "The Creator".

Right now the Internet is at the primordial ooze stage of evolution.

~~~
saraid216
Funny. I've read YouTube comments more thoughtful than yours.

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johnnyg
I hope religion is more than the interconnectedness of us all, though I've got
no idea.

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efnx
I think he's pretty right on. One can argue that currently the connection
between human beings made possible by the internet is _not_ godlike, but if
you extrapolate this kind of connection to its endpoint - telepathy and
humankind as an organism, you start to get something very godlike by today's
standards. If you still don't agree with him then we're arguing about the
definition of god, which is a silly thing to argue about.

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chipsy
The internet's a third level of "human organism," not a deity. The first two
levels being individuals, and traditionally organized bodies with leaders.

That said, it is a great source of "godly" works.

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thebooktocome
Lost me at the Rand quote.

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whackedspinach
Kept me a the Rand quote. Do you actually dislike the quote or just Rand in
general? If you disliked the quote, I would like to know what you disagreed
with. If the latter, I would have to say that ignoring everything someone has
ever said just because you disagree with them on some points is attacking the
person, not the idea. Just because I disagree with Hitler's actions doesn't
mean I ignore everything he ever said.

~~~
thebooktocome
1\. On the surface, it's false -- or else the blind cannot create. Rand has
few good words for people who are not ISO humans. This is not as clear in
Atlas Shrugged, but is more evident in her non-fiction, and I disapprove of
it.

A quick Google search brings up: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vJoaWa-kWQ>

2\. Quoting Rand signals, if not acceptance, approval for her general thesis.
It is a good thesis in so far as it romanticizes (in her technical sense of
the word, see _The Romantic Manifesto_) the ability of humans to produce great
things. It is a bad thesis in so far as it blames those who cannot produce
great things -- for any reason -- for "enslaving" those of the previous class.

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Alex3917
"The next Buddha will be a Sangha." — Thich Nhat Hanh

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known
Will Congress ratify Internet as a Religion?

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georgieporgie
_his slightly nervous, ever-so-geeky, sensibility..._

I would love for that sentence to be explained. The speaker took the stage and
spoke with confidence. I saw no signs of nervousness. As for geeky, I guess
you mean he was skinny, wearing a rumpled shirt and glasses? Sensibility? You
mean he looked sensitive, or reasonable?

I dunno, it just seems like a whole lot of snap judgment of a guy and some
words that seem to have just been assembled at random because it sounded cool.

~~~
ldh
Agreed, that language seems a bit overblown. And the extraneous comma makes it
stand out even further.

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davidcollantes
I can't see it. Where is the HTML5 version of this?

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VMG
Please add tl;drs to these sorts of things. I don't want to have to seek
randomly in the video to know what this is about.

