Yay! Thanks! << closest I could get to a dancing smiley. This one is just too freaky >> (like he's on acid or something)

Time for bed....

Thanks!  Honest question: What does it make you wonder about?

 I have posted this thread in the atheism forum on facebook.  I'm surprised that the wonderism discussion didn't go further here.  Now that the site has more activity, I would like to remain an observer and humbly request that you read the first post on wonderism and tell me anything you have to say about it.  I'd like to know what you think.  I'm sure Natural would be glad to answer any questions.

Here are the early reactions on facebook:

"Brian this is way to deep for me!"

"You had me at 'An attempt to identify core ideas shared by many of the greatest defenders of science and reason E.g. Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Feynman, Richard Dawkins, and countless others.'   Hear, hear."

"before reading it I'm going to guess it has something to do with amazon princesses and golden lassos."

One person on FB asked if it's like pantheism or Taoism. Pantheism, definitely not. It's entirely naturalistic in worldview. I would also shy away from connecting it too much with Taoism, as I find Taoism to be quite an apathetic and/or complacent philosophy. However, there is something similar in the use of dualistic yin/yang-ish intuitive language, which might also be considered similar to more modern concepts of 'dialectic'.

However, if there is a 'dialectic' that wonderism is most similar to, it would be the Socratic dialectic, aka the technique of Socratic dialogue.

One quote I've taken a shine to:

* 'heaven' here is from the translator's interpretation. More accurately, the goddess Iris (literally, the rainbow) was a messenger of the Greek Gods. I would invoke metaphor here, like the metaphor of Prometheus, and in the manner that Socrates is using Iris as a metaphor, and interpret Iris as being something more akin to the imagination, or thought, or concept, or understanding.

I wonder if intuition and wonder truly are just human feelings... hmmm... oh, I see what you did there... you got me... damn you natural!

Not if you think or are internally 'wired' like I am.

To me, godlessness and being happy with that alone is intuitive. If I am wrong, I refine whatever sense of intuition I have until I increase my rate of successful comprehension, simply by practicing my sense of intuition. Praying for miracles that never come, believing something intelligent is behind the formation of the universe or universes, believing said intelligence "works in mysterious ways" to somehow explain all the inconsistencies between what actually happens on Earth and what some religious leader or philosopher wants everyone to believe, writing a giant scroll or book full of inane and ineffectual rules of daily living and starting an organization with the intent of acting on some supposed supreme being's will, are all counterintuitive to me (and always have been to some extent.) It simply amounts to doing what your parents and grandparents want you to do.

Being atheist, imo... requires understanding that other people will not tell the truth 100% of the time. Instead, most people I know (including the really smart and intellectually gifted individuals) or know about to some degree will simply tell me what they want me to hear or read. As near as I can understand, everyone else is in this same position I often find myself in, meaning that they have to decipher fact from fiction (or fact from personal bias) in what other people communicate to them.

On the other hand, using "mathematics as my window to the universe" never made a great deal of sense to me, but is highly effective in theoretical physics nonetheless. It is the 'correct' mindset to have before becoming a physicist.

So intuition certainly does have some problems because it tends to rely on the sum of one's life experiences and one may not have the correct life experiences to be intuitive in a highly effective manner. Albert Einstein, I believe, was a highly intuitive thinker in addition to being a prodigal mind. Then again, he also had trouble finding his way home and tying his shoes well into adulthood.

I'm not advocating over-estimating those things (or anything, actually). In fact, I've made several attempts to distinguish when and why they are appropriate or not in different circumstances.

One of my motivations with collecting ideas related to wonder is to avoid under-estimating them, in response to my initial urge to reject over-estimating them in the first place.

Think of it this way: When you want to avoid over-rating those things, what is your underlying motivation for doing that? It's because you don't want to fool yourself, right? You want a more accurate picture of reality. You're not willing to settle for what simply 'feels good' to believe, if those beliefs end up being illusionary.

In other words, you wonder whether "intuition and "awe and wonder" are over-rated", and so you cautiously approach them. Good for you, that's a wonderist impetus.

Now, if you took the additional stand, " and I'm not even willing to investigate those things anymore, because I know they are bullshit", then that would be pretending to know something you don't really know. That would be a failure of wonder, and would represent a fear of the unknown (the possibility that you could be wrong) to dominate your in-born curiosity at finding out what is the simple truth of the matter. That would be a terror response, not a wonder response.

So, I applaud you for being skeptical. Just don't let that initial skepticism define your final conclusions on the matter. It's a balance. There will always be a fear-ish response and a love-ish response. As I raise in Taking a Step Beyond Awe:

It is fairly certain that theism is based on intuition, and raw experiences of wonder. But that's not the same as wonderism. Wonder is just a starting point. You have to keep wondering. And when you do, you'll break out of theism. It's when you give up wondering, when you let the terrors of hell, or a jealous, vengeful god, or the fear of loss of salvation, or some such other fear-based religious dogma, to overcome your innate sense of wonder and curiosity, that you'll get stuck in theism.

Everyone's intuition is often wrong, mine included. However, you can't really 'not rely on it'. It's innate. It's how your brain functions. What you want to do is to train it so that that it works more rationally, so that you can intuitively question your own intuition, intuitively spot your own fallacious reasoning, and intuitively follow rational, logical reasoning. I don't think intuition (at least not the intuition I'm talking about: our brains' natural ability to make pretty good guesses) is something you can really avoid altogether.

Yes. Exactly. They are natural, human feelings, and should be treated as such. They are not 'divine revelation', or 'the Holy Spirit', or 'thetans', or whatever.

However, in the same way, they are not just metaphors or figures of speech, or imagined things like a disembodied 'soul'. They are real, natural, human characteristics which can and should be studied directly by science.

They are limited and imperfect, surely. But they are not necessarily useless, either. In fact they can be very very useful, if we are consciously aware of those important limitations and imperfections, and if we apply them responsibly and ethically.

That's what wonderism is all about. Trying to understand wonder itself, rationally, reasonably. And also trying to apply it responsibly and ethically, for good purposes. For a future of greater wonder. That's the whole point.

By the way: Thanks for the feedback, even if it is critical or negative. I wouldn't want to support any philosophy that can't handle negative criticism constructively. That way leads to dogma. Yuck!

Personally I think it is unavoidable, but a dogma doesn't have to be a negative thing

some wiki

It can just be a dogma that fights the bolded type of dogma.

But by its very nature it must be. By defining what it is you have made it authoritative, other people cannot change it without changing what it is. You have dictated to others what it is. If they diverge from it they cannot be following the same philosophy, by defination a believer cannot diverge from it because they will no longer be a believer. If you dispute it you cannot be a believer for the same reasons. Could I disputed god existing and still be a christian? Doubt yeah I can see, that should be bolded, people should doubt what they believe.

All good answers. If I am honest I don't like the term wonderism either it automatically sets the woowoo alarm in my head off. Not that I am sayng that is what it is. I do think you were right to want to bold the second sentence however I do think there is the danger of it becoming the type of thing it fights though assuming it ever goes further than a personal philosophy and becomes something a group of people follow. However you do have good answers to what I have said, whether or not it works like that in practice is a different matter.

What are the difficulties or challenges in "(finding) out how (the world) really is, not just how we wish it was", in your opinion? Is this a "visionary" or recently pioneered step within wonderism? Is discovering the workings of our homeworld and ourselves a question of philosophy or science? Is it a question of both at the same time?

Am I taking the wrong approach to asking about Wonderism?

To paraphrase Fenynman,

If you think you understand Wonderism, you don't.

Wonderism: A complete system of philosophy consistent with Godel's theorems.

You make your philosophy sound orthodox, and you compare it with "followers" of your philosophy, they didn't follow it, you invented your own philosophy, believing that something's orthodox is blind. You're starting an asexual philosophy of mountains and you expect me to follow it. Well I won't, you're just converting people for attention!

Sorry for the long delay.

There are indeed challenges to 'knowing' the real world. I would not say that wonderism has pioneered anything here. Science has been the pioneer, and we follow along for the ride. What I personally hope to do with wonderism is to package up all the best tools of science, mathematics, and philosophy together and wrap it together with intuitively understandable descriptions, metaphors, and presentations. Much like how Carl Sagan did in his work as a popularizer of science and scientific thinking.

One of the things I'm currently doing is tutoring students in math and science, and as part of this work, I have been trying to improve the way I explain and demonstrate things so that they are more interesting and fun to learn for the students.

Another thing I've been working on is to develop a better understanding myself of math, especially as it relates to probability and statistics, which is one of the kinds of 'glue' that brings math and science together. This has been very helpful for me, since I've been able to develop a firmer understanding of a basis for philosophical pragmatism, which up to this point I've only been able to describe intuitively (e.g. see Wonerism, Pragmatism, and Prediction.

The other major difficulty with 'knowing' reality is that our minds come with built-in flaws which lead to automatic, difficult to notice, and difficult to correct, systemic biases in our thought processes, which lead to fallacious reasoning. Previously, I would have just referred people to lists of different kinds of fallacies, which is still a very useful tool to get people started on self-skeptical critical thinking. But recently, while working on tying in the mathematics of probability theory, I've come to realize that there is a much more complete and thorough way to tackle this issue, and it has to do with Bayesian reasoning. This is what I'm currently working on now: to develop a simple enough, clear enough, and easy enough description of Bayesian reasoning, and some easy-to-use mathematical tools to help teach people how to think in a Bayesian way. Currently, it is too hard to explain in a short and easy manner. But there's no reason we shouldn't be able to make it easier to learn and understand. The math involved is actually not that difficult at all. It's just not packaged up for people who aren't already at a level of taking advanced statistics or artificial intelligence courses.

As for having a 'visionary' aspect to it, yes, but with the explicit acknowledgement that 'visions' of things are really just 'imaginations' of things, or perhaps intuitive guesses, and definitely not supernatural in any way, as is sometimes claimed in many religions. In the same way that a science fiction author might imagine a complex and detailed vision of the future, but publishes it under science *fiction*, I think it is fair that we can (and do, regularly, I might add) imagine various visions of the future and decide from among them, "Yikes, wouldn't want to live in that world," vs. "Actually, that would be a worthy improvement worth working towards, as long as we can do so in an ethical manner, to bring about a future of greater wonder." In order for the last kind of vision to be successful, it has to be grounded in an accurate understanding of reality, and for that it needs to rest its foundations on mainstream science and evidence-based reasoning. Speculation is a fine and good thing, as long as it is measured with hefty doses of skepticism to go along with it. I still daydream on a regular basis. I just don't confuse my daydreams with reality.

As for 'philosophy or science', I consider science to be an outgrowth of philosophy, specifically natural philosophy, and itself grounded in the philosophies of empiricism and pragmatism. Lots of philosophy is hokum, though, so perhaps we are talking about 'science-based philosophy' and 'philosophy-based science', and perhaps both at the same time.

No, you're not taking the wrong approach, I don't think. Asking questions seems to be an excellent approach to wonderism. Wonderism is built upon the asking of questions.

You must be talking about some phantom-Wonderist in your imagination, because you're describing the exact opposite of what I'm proposing. Orthodox? Questioning dogma is the opposite of orthodoxy. Followers? I explicitly expect that there will be people who agree in principle, but disagree with my interpretation, and acknowledge that that's actually a *good* thing. I don't expect anyone to follow it. I expect that if it's actually a good idea, then some people might try it for themselves, and decide for themselves if it suits them.

As for 'attention', first of all, how do you know what my motivations are? You haven't bothered to ask, only accuse. Secondly, if all I wanted was attention, it's awfully strange that I haven't gone whole-hog on an attention-gathering campaign. My promotion of this idea has been slow, steady, and measured. I don't add anything to it unless I'm pretty confident I can defend it against hard-core skeptics (like the folks here at the RRS, for instance). If I wanted attention, why do I explicitly deny authorship? Where's my vanity web-page? Why do I actively seek criticism, rather than just praise?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are questions I've asked myself repeatedly over the years, because I do *not* want my promotions of this idea to become an ego thing. I *don't want* it to be about me at all (to the extent it's possible to promote something without putting oneself 'out there'). It's just that I've looked and looked, and haven't found anyone else promoting the same thing I want to promote. There are some similar projects, but there are either core differences, or indeed some of them have succumbed to the temptations to make it about ego and cults-of-personality. I want no part of that.

So, if you have an actual criticism of anything I've said, please post a quote of it and explain what you think is wrong with it. If my ego is sneaking into my promotions, then I'd like to know so that I can remove it and fix the situation. Often it can be difficult to spot one's own biases, so getting critique from outside sources is invaluable. I welcome it. But please, address it to something I've actually said. Thanks.