Atheists From The United States

"The distance between oneself and other persons and other species can fall anywhere on a continuum. Even for other persons the understanding of what it is like to be them is only partial, and when one moves to species very different from oneself, a lesser degree of partial understanding may still be available. The imagination is remarkably flexible. My point, however, is not that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat. I am not raising that epistemological problem. My point is rather that even to form a conception of what it is like to be a bat and a fortiori to know what it is like to be a bat, one must take up the bat's point of view."

"I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type. It is often possible to take up a point of view other than one's own, so the comprehension of such facts is not limited to one's own case. There is a sense in which phenomenological facts are perfectly objective: one person can know or say of another what the quality of the other's experience is. They are subjective, however, in the sense that even this objective ascription of experience is possible only for someone sufficiently similar to the object of ascription to be able to adopt his point of view — to understand the ascription in the first person as well as in the third, so to speak. The more different from oneself the other experiencer is, the less success one can expect with this enterprise."

"Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experience of bats, if we only knew what they were like."

"Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one's arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one's mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one's feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task."

"[T]he essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation. … But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat."

"Bats … present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life."

"[E]very subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective physical theory will abandon that point of view."

"Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed."

"Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless."

"Consciousness is what makes the mind–body problem really intractable."

"Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions."

"I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails — simply in virtue of our mental concepts — that the system is conscious."

"In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that."

"The kind of worry I am talking about here—the worry about what’s left of the individual—moved Thomas Nagel, in The View from Nowhere, to reverse his own earlier defense of the publicity of reason, and to argue that some kinds of reasons are private or agent-relative after all. An agent has a special relationship to his own projects and own loved ones, and Nagel argued that, because of that relationship, the agent’s desires to engage in those projects and to promote the happiness of his loved ones are sources of reasons for him but not necessarily for anybody else."

"Common sense doesn't have the last word in ethics or anywhere else, but it has, as J. L. Austin said about language, the first word: it should be examined before it is discarded."

"Ethics increases the range of what it is about ourselves that we can will—extending it from our actions to the motives and character traits and dispositions from which they arise. We want to be able to will the sources of our actions down to the very bottom."

"We assume that our own advances in objectivity are steps along a path that extends beyond them and beyond all our capacities. But even allowing unlimited time, or an unlimited number of generations, to take as many successive steps as we like, the process can never be completed. … What is wanted is some way of making the most objective standpoint the basis of action."

"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time."

"Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture that tries to skip it will never grow up."

"[W]hen the objective gaze is turned on human beings and other experiencing creatures, who are undeniably parts of the world, it can reveal only what they are like in themselves. And if the way things are for these subjects is not part of the way things are in themselves, an objective account, whatever it shows, will omit something. So reality is not just objective reality, and the pursuit of objectivity is not an equally effective method of reaching the truth about everything."

"The idealist tradition, including contemporary phenomenology, has of course admitted subjective points of view as basic and has gone to the opposite length of denying an irreducible objective reality. … I find the idealist solution unacceptable …: objective reality cannot be analyzed or shut out of existence any more than subjective reality can. Even if not everything is something from no point of view, some things are.The deep source of both idealism and its objectifying opposite is the same: a conviction that a single world cannot contain both irreducible points of view and irreducible objective reality — that one of them must be what there really is and the other somehow reducible or dependent on it. This is a very powerful idea. To deny it is in a sense to deny that there is a single world."

"What is more subjective is not necessarily more private. In general it is intersubjectively available. I assume that the intersubjective ideas of experience, of action, and of the self are in some sense public or common property. That is why the problems of mind and body, free will, and personal identity are not just problems about one's own case."

"The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitting its reality. But often what appears to a more subjective point of view cannot be accounted for in this way. So either the objective conception of the world is incomplete, or the subjective involves illusions that should be rejected."

"[I]f things emerged from a spaceship which we could not be sure were machines or conscious beings, what we were wondering about would have an answer even if the things were so different from anything we were familiar with that we could never discover it. It would depend on whether there was something it was like to be them, not on whether behavioral similarities warranted our saying so. … [W]e need … to ask whether experience is present in [the] alien thing[s], … whether there is something it is like to be them, and … the answer to that question is what determines whether they are conscious."

"[T]he organism does not have a point of view: the person or creature does."

"A feature of experience is subjective if it can in principle be understood only from one type of point of view: that of a being like the one having the experience, or at least like it in the relevant modality. The phenomenological qualities of our own experiences are subjective in this way. The physical events in our brains are not. Human physiologists may take a special interest in them; but they can, in principle, be understood just as well, or even better, by creatures totally unlike us in physical and mental structure. To understand them such creatures need not take up our point of view. Physical brain processes can be understood objectively, from the outside, because they are not subjective phenomena. And no description or analysis of the objective nervous system, however complete, will ever by itself imply anything which is not objective, i.e. which can be understood only from one kind of viewpoint, that of the being whose states are being described. One cannot derive a pour soi from an en soi."

"Last July, President Biden said, 'You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.' Well, I already knew that was wrong then, and now we all do. The former Director of the CDC, Robert Redfield, believes COVID originated in a lab believes COVID originated in the lab, and now our intelligence agencies agree, it might have. But for months on social media, it was banned to even discuss it.""

"Beginning with recognizing what we are doing to kids is unnecessary and horrible, and I don’t even like kids. But making kids, where the Covid survivability rate of 99.98 percent, mask up like bandits. Unfortunately, the thing that is getting stolen is their education, their sanity, and their social skills. A study this week from a professor at John Hopkins concluded that the lockdowns we all suffered through had little impact on reducing COVID deaths. Okay, that’s kind of a big one to get wrong."

"There is always going to be another variant. We cannot go on forever in permanent hair-on-fire, cancel Christmas, hand-jobs through a hazmat suit."

"A more pertinent question to ask about the word woke might be why in such a short time gone from a rallying cry to a pejorative. If the word only made you think of rational, deserved causes like teaching a less whitewashed version of American history, AOC would still want to own it. But it's a joke because it makes you think of people who wake up offended and take orders from Twitter. And their oversensitivity has grown tiresome."

"This is a term [woke] folks like you brought out very recently, had been proudly displaying it every march since. Just last year, The Guardian declared 'woke' the 'word of our era.' I guess they didn't get the memo from the 'Mean Girls Club’… What a great strategy, never missing an opportunity to remind voters how lame and clueless and hopelessly uncool they are, especially since those are the ones who actually vote. But OK, fine. What word would you like us to use for the plainly insane excesses of the left that are not liberalism but something completely different? Because you can't have that word 'liberal' from us and think it should cover things like canceling [Abraham] Lincoln, and teaching third-graders they're oppressors. That's all your new-think."

"You're [Democrats] alienating a whole lot of people, particularly whites without a college degree, which is most of them in a country that is still 70% white. I'd say, 'Do the math,' but math is a form of white supremacy."

"So don’t put this into a this category ‘this is settled science’,.. anything that deviates from the one true opinion on this means you’re a some horrible bigot and transphobic. That is not what is going on here. I don’t think David Chappelle is transphobic… Maybe we are going too far with the children part of this. You know, kids should not be really making decisions about their gender."

"[Cuomo]: It's just the truth, we're just telling them the truth, is that racism continues, it's systemic, it's in everything around us, but you have to be taught where it is everywhere because that's how we remedy it. And otherwise, you're just hiding from the truth." [Maher]: That’s nuts, it’s just silly, it’s just virtue signaling."

"You can't come up with good solutions unless you're realistic about what the problem is. I mean, it was only like 10 or 20 years ago that no state in America would vote for gay marriage. I mean, it was on the ballot like 35 times. Now it's the law of the land and no one is against it."

"Kids are taught and sometimes separated into groups, oppressor and oppressed. Again, does a kid even know what those words mean? Would they gravitate toward that if you hadn't told them? I mean, you're taking something that was getting better, race relations in America, and we -- I think everyone recognizes, everyone right-thinking, in my view, that still a lot of work needs to be done."

"But there is a reason why the term woke has come to signify going to far and doing things that make no sense. I keep saying this to the Democratic Party. The reason why you're so toxic is because you have become the party of no common sense."

"My politics have not changed. I am an old school liberal… when we’re talking about the race issue, they changed, not me… We should be moving towards a colorblind society where we don’t see race. That is the old way to look at it. I think that is still a good way to look at. That how we win, when it doesn’t matter what your race is--the quality of your character, not the color of your skin. That’s not wokism. Wokism we have to see it everywhere all the time."

"They [parents in Virginia] are not objecting to Black history being taught. There are other things going on in the schools… Like separating children by race, and describing them either as oppressed or oppressor. I mean, there are children coming home who feel traumatized by this. That's what parents are objecting to."

"Word inflation is a problem. You can try to change reality by changing the words, but you can’t. It just stops you from dealing with it. One of the bad guys in Nineteen Eighty-Foursays, ‘The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought.’ It’s Orwellian, and Orwell never ends well."

"Social justice warriors who are fond of governing by hashtag like to say that silence is violence. And we know that because it rhymes."

"Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of ... HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though."

"When my dear brother Bill Maher calls, as he frequently does, I do my best to hop out to L.A. and work with him on Real Time. I revel in his comic brilliance and progressive politics even as I joyfully wrestle with his agnosticism."

""PC" has almost become a household word. In the 1991 Academy Awards pageant, a commentator joked that Dances with Wolves was "politically correct" (it shows Native Americans as decent and most of the white troops trying to exterminate them as bad guys). Since then, movie critics have sneered at films with anti-racist content, like Follow Me Home or Amistad, for their "PC" essence. The term has even inspired a major television show, Bill Maher's "Politically Incorrect" talkfest. Progressive people use the term without thinking twice about its reactionary function."

"renewable installations present dramatically lower risks than either fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them. As comedian Bill Maher once observed, "You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.""

"I don't fear A.I. anymore because it couldn't possibly be any more robotic than the humans who run things now."

"In San Francisco, the city is so nice you'll step in poop twice, there's an area where homeless people were urinating and defecating and it was starting to annoy the people breaking into cars. So, the city tried to build a public toilet last year but then gave up when the cost hit $1.7 million. Not $1.7 million for a public toilet system, $1.7 million for one toilet… So then a private company took pity on San Francisco and offered to build them their toilet for free. But after, quote… ‘project management, construction management, architecture and engineering fees, permits, civic design review, surveys, contract preparation, and cost estimation’, the free toilet was going to cost almost a million dollars."

"As Barack Obama once said, one of the biggest lessons he learned as president is there is no such thing as shovel-ready jobs. Environmental impact statements used to be a few pages long, now they’re thousands of pages of legalistic nonsense and take an average of 4 and a half years to complete with thousands of bureaucrats filling out millions of paper forms that kill hundreds of forests to answer the question is this good for the environment?"

"Semafor estimates that if the red tape could be cut on everything that is currently stuck in the renewable queue, the United States would be 80% zero carbon in 7 years. The enemy of clean air isn't just Big Oil, it's Big Permitting. It's not that America isn't able to get anything done, it's that we're not allowed to. Of course, there should be consideration of the environment on everything we build but as so often happens on the left they seem to have no ability to recognize when they've taken a concept way too far and are in fact hurting their own cause."

"How ironic, with all the talk about the urgency to switching to green energy, our deep state of petty tyrants wasted almost two decades over permitting and nitpicking over the environmental impacts and social effects of the very thing that would most positively impact the environment."