Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active

Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by Traubenfuchs on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:41AM (#32398673)

Unless one believes in supernatural creators, observers and judges, there is no point in anything and existence, life and consciousness are all unlucky coincidences. We are an absolutely pointless long term consequence of the natural process of evolution, that can start anytime the environment for life is just right.

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by dekken_ on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @10:49AM (#32398796)

> Unless one believes in supernatural creators, observers and judges, there is no point in anything and existence

This is your opinion. There are other possibilities.

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by Traubenfuchs on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @11:54AM (#32399617)

> There are other possibilities.

They are unprovable but irrefutable delusions or part of frameworks people made up to come to peace with the truth.

Examples frameworks would be pitiful reasons to exist like "keep the species alive", "keep the family line going", "I need to be behave this and that way because my deity will judge me when I die" etc.

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by mistermann on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @11:32AM (#32399352)

If this is true, why do atheists get so bent out of shape when you don't comply with their scriptures?

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by Traubenfuchs on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @11:46AM (#32399506)

By all means, don't follow "our scriptures", whatever those may be, but accept that we consider anything anyone would call "faith" and belief in the super natural somewhere on the scale between magical thinking and mental illness.

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by mistermann on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @02:22PM (#32401776)

If people were so forgiving when it's time to walk the talk.

Regardless, this (particularly, the conceptualization of the supernatural) is somewhat of a variation of the kind of thinking that I'm referring to. I don't disagree that this isn't formally documented in scripture, but nonetheless it seems to have somehow ended up broadly installed in minds (both theist and atheist, to be fair), not unlike how various behaviors can be observed in theists despite it not being a part of formal scripture.

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by dron57 on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @11:45AM (#32399497)

Atheists don't have scriptures. Religious people love thinking about atheism as just another religion and will bring up all kinds of examples like Stalin and Mao commited attrocities in the name of religion.

In reality atheists don't have anything in common with one another. There is no shared belief system or a set of scriptures for atheists. Stalin and Mao did however have a shared belief system and it wasn't atheism.

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Re:Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active by mistermann on Tuesday August 09, 2022 @04:12PM (#32403595)

> In reality atheists don't have anything in common with one another.

This seems unlikely.

> There is no shared belief system or a set of scriptures for atheists.

Large quantities of those I talk to on the internet seem to disagree.

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