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byrnema comments on Atheism = Untheism + Antitheism - Less Wrong
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No.
At least one of the following statements has to be true:
Which one do you think is true?
I think (3) is true.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn't completely arbitrary. While some aspects may be arbitrary, there are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. The only reason why there wouldn’t be a common rule is if beauty is completely arbitrary, in which case we wouldn’t expect other species to have the concept anyway. The common rule would validate beauty in different contexts (if the rule applies in a context, then beauty is validated in that context) and would provide the possibility of a common universal beauty (if it is possible to satisfy the rule in a way that is context independent).
(edit: a hypothetical description of this applied to baby-eaters with a pretend meta-rule was taken out because I thought it was inane)
It may be worth asking yourself which fear is driving this faith. If you woke up tomorrow without faith in the universal significance of your concept of beauty, what would change? Are you avoiding some disastrous change in world-view that would alter your behavior, or are you simply addicted to the positive affect you get from contemplating beauty?
These concepts can't be communicated this way. Taboo "faith" and "God" and "metapattern", and see what happens.
Surely the meaning of "faith" is straightforward enough: Belief without evidence.
A priori beliefs are beliefs without evidence. If a belief doesn't respond to further evidence, this is also a property of a priori beliefs. Normal beliefs can behave like this, and be generally accepted. The concept of "faith", to make it non-vacuous, needs to be opposed to normal human cognition (preferences). But this makes it similar to "insanity", which is unlikely what the people who advocate the practice mean. Their concept of "faith" isn't obvious.
I think the terms "a priori belief" and "faith" refer to the same concept. Can you provide an example of a "normal, generally accepted" a priori belief?
I don't see how this follows. What do preferences have to do with it?
Well, take the statement that there are green-skinned, blue-eyed, humanoid aliens living on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse. Since this is a very specific statement, it's a priori very unlikely to be true, so that the belief that there are no such aliens is rational despite the lack of evidence for it; it's not a faith-based belief.
Perhaps a better definition of faith would be, "intentionally self-deceiving belief".
It's certainly a more condescending definition, at least.
Has Occam's Razor been semantically cleaved from the notion of "faith" in a convincing way here or elsewhere? How does your a priori reasoning differ from "faith in simpler explanations"?
The greater the specificity of a concept is, the less plausible it must be. For example, if I make two guesses, first that you have a sibling, and second that this hypothetical sibling is female, the second, more specific guess is necessarily less likely to be true than the first one.
Eliezer has written some stuff about this, but if you're interested in a really rigorous argument, I recommend Paul Almond's Occam's Razor series (nine articles in total):
http://www.paul-almond.com/
I hope you mean "belief that doesn't change in response to evidence", because a priori beliefs is exactly what determines what you do with evidence and what you can come to believe later. For an example of unchanging belief: if you toss a normal coin 10 times and it lands "heads" each time, your belief about the probability of it coming "heads" should remain almost the same.
Epistemic beliefs are one side of the preference specification, the other in this formalism being utility function. If the behavior of "faith" beliefs is different from normal beliefs, it follows that they act contrary to the framework that expresses human preferences as probability+utility, breaking human preference as a result and leading to behavior that is insane (i.e. incorrect) according to human preferences (ethics/morality).
A possible common rule of beauty would be that a thing is beautiful if it is appreciated by some sentient being that finds it beautiful. However, this is completely vacuous, defining no constraint on what a sentient being might find beautiful. It does not prohibit arbitrary concepts of beauty. It is also far from fundamental, as the sentient beings are made of complicated physical systems.
Do you have a concept of a common rule that actually implies that some concept of beauty is impossible?
Are you talking about some of the real things that the human concept of beauty has a tendency to latch onto, like symmetry?
Yes, but not exactly. First, symmetry is a property of an object, whereas beauty isn’t. You can consider an object beautiful one day and not beautiful the next even though it hasn’t changed. Rather, if a creature observes something, “beauty” seems to be a perception the creature has about his perception of the object. But even though it's second-order or whatever the correct terminology is, yes, I am talking about beauty as a “real” thing. I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I suppose you could conceivably observe “beauty” with an MRI (?), trained to recognize the signature of that experience.
To the extent which beauty is a real thing, that’s science. What science doesn’t give us is that the experience of beauty is significant in and of itself. By significant ‘in and of itself’ I mean that it’s not just significant because it is useful in helping us select a healthy mate, but in some way inherently awesome. I'll use awesome here as possessing some significance additional to the significance that can be scientifically demonstrated. Of course the perception of awe could be recognized by the MRI. Theists describe this as feeling that the uinverse is purposeful and connected, but I will give a non-magical definition. If beauty is an inherently awesome thing, my thesis is that this awesomeness stems from its pattern in the natural world. Or rather, that the experience of awe comes from the perception of significant pattern but I'm afraid I'm being too meta already.
The following won't make sense unless you actually consider beauty some type of real thing. Beauty has resulted from the natural laws of the universe: these laws resulted in atoms, that resulted in molecules, that resulted in life, that resulted in sapient humans that resulted in the experience of beauty, observed by an MRI when a person observes something they consider beautiful. Consider the relationship of the real existing thing “beauty” with the laws of the universe – it’s analogous to some kind of mathematical structure because the laws of the universe are analogous to mathematical structures/equations. It's like some kind of sub-manifold in the phase space. This is what I’m calling “pattern”. Problematically, for us, everything that exists, including random noise, is a pattern and whether a pattern is awesome or not is interpretative, so it’s not verifiable of falsifiable. Nevertheless, humans are very good at identifying whether a pattern is awesome or not. Perhaps someone else could say more, but I just call this awesome-perception an aspect of “intuition” and know it must be contained within “good epistemology” because its what scientists and mathematicians use.
Finally, lets suppose that upon inspection, the pattern “Beauty” turns out to be just one of an infinite number of ways of solving the problem “P=motivate a creature to choose the healthiest mate”. I would then consider “beauty” real but arbitrary. On the other hand, suppose that “beauty” is a pattern that self-organizes in an infinite number of different contexts. Maybe, for example, it is present even among sapient creatures that are so unlike us they have no concept of evolution. Creating mammals and creating human minds was just one way that the universe was able to create the pattern “beauty”. And, therefore, “wow” – beauty is awesome. But this is just an illustrative example, I don’t claim to spell out what makes one pattern arbitrary and another pattern meaningful. My preference would be that significance doesn't come from the prevalence or persistence of the pattern, but in the properties of the solutions, things like critical points, asymptotes, etc. I don't care whether beauty is such a pattern, but I'd be very surprised though if "perception of truth" wasn't such a pattern among sapient creatures.
Mush. Reread the metaethics sequence. The disagreement seems to be illusory, you just need to reconnect the terminology.
I agree; it's mushy and pseudo-sciency. But all I'm trying to say is that it would be logical to think that if there's order at the lowest levels (Shroedinger, etc) then there's order on the higher levels. But I don't seem to be understood with that. What is the disconnect?