The Least Convenient Possible World
Related to: Is That Your True Rejection?
"If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponents’ arguments. But if you’re interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponents’ arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter; you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."
-- Black Belt Bayesian, via Rationality Quotes 13
Yesterday John Maxwell's post wondered how much the average person would do to save ten people from a ruthless tyrant. I remember asking some of my friends a vaguely related question as part of an investigation of the Trolley Problems:
You are a doctor in a small rural hospital. You have ten patients, each of whom is dying for the lack of a separate organ; that is, one person needs a heart transplant, another needs a lung transplant, another needs a kidney transplant, and so on. A traveller walks into the hospital, mentioning how he has no family and no one knows that he's there. All of his organs seem healthy. You realize that by killing this traveller and distributing his organs among your patients, you could save ten lives. Would this be moral or not?
I don't want to discuss the answer to this problem today. I want to discuss the answer one of my friends gave, because I think it illuminates a very interesting kind of defense mechanism that rationalists need to be watching for. My friend said:
It wouldn't be moral. After all, people often reject organs from random donors. The traveller would probably be a genetic mismatch for your patients, and the transplantees would have to spend the rest of their lives on immunosuppressants, only to die within a few years when the drugs failed.
On the one hand, I have to give my friend credit: his answer is biologically accurate, and beyond a doubt the technically correct answer to the question I asked. On the other hand, I don't have to give him very much credit: he completely missed the point and lost a valuable effort to examine the nature of morality.
So I asked him, "In the least convenient possible world, the one where everyone was genetically compatible with everyone else and this objection was invalid, what would you do?"
He mumbled something about counterfactuals and refused to answer. But I learned something very important from him, and that is to always ask this question of myself. Sometimes the least convenient possible world is the only place where I can figure out my true motivations, or which step to take next. I offer three examples:
1: Pascal's Wager. Upon being presented with Pascal's Wager, one of the first things most atheists think of is this:
Perhaps God values intellectual integrity so highly that He is prepared to reward honest atheists, but will punish anyone who practices a religion he does not truly believe simply for personal gain. Or perhaps, as the Discordians claim, "Hell is reserved for people who believe in it, and the hottest levels of Hell are reserved for people who believe in it on the principle that they'll go there if they don't."
This is a good argument against Pascal's Wager, but it isn't the least convenient possible world. The least convenient possible world is the one where Omega, the completely trustworthy superintelligence who is always right, informs you that God definitely doesn't value intellectual integrity that much. In fact (Omega tells you) either God does not exist or the Catholics are right about absolutely everything.
Would you become a Catholic in this world? Or are you willing to admit that maybe your rejection of Pascal's Wager has less to do with a hypothesized pro-atheism God, and more to do with a belief that it's wrong to abandon your intellectual integrity on the off chance that a crazy deity is playing a perverted game of blind poker with your eternal soul?
2: The God-Shaped Hole. Christians claim there is one in every atheist, keeping him from spiritual fulfillment.
Some commenters on Raising the Sanity Waterline don't deny the existence of such a hole, if it is intepreted as a desire for purpose or connection to something greater than one's self. But, some commenters say, science and rationality can fill this hole even better than God can.
What luck! Evolution has by a wild coincidence created us with a big rationality-shaped hole in our brains! Good thing we happen to be rationalists, so we can fill this hole in the best possible way! I don't know - despite my sarcasm this may even be true. But in the least convenient possible world, Omega comes along and tells you that sorry, the hole is exactly God-shaped, and anyone without a religion will lead a less-than-optimally-happy life. Do you head down to the nearest church for a baptism? Or do you admit that even if believing something makes you happier, you still don't want to believe it unless it's true?
3: Extreme Altruism. John Maxwell mentions the utilitarian argument for donating almost everything to charity.
Some commenters object that many forms of charity, especially the classic "give to starving African orphans," are counterproductive, either because they enable dictators or thwart the free market. This is quite true.
But in the least convenient possible world, here comes Omega again and tells you that Charity X has been proven to do exactly what it claims: help the poor without any counterproductive effects. So is your real objection the corruption, or do you just not believe that you're morally obligated to give everything you own to starving Africans?
You may argue that this citing of convenient facts is at worst a venial sin. If you still get to the correct answer, and you do it by a correct method, what does it matter if this method isn't really the one that's convinced you personally?
One easy answer is that it saves you from embarrassment later. If some scientist does a study and finds that people really do have a god-shaped hole that can't be filled by anything else, no one can come up to you and say "Hey, didn't you say the reason you didn't convert to religion was because rationality filled the god-shaped hole better than God did? Well, I have some bad news for you..."
Another easy answer is that your real answer teaches you something about yourself. My friend may have successfully avoiding making a distasteful moral judgment, but he didn't learn anything about morality. My refusal to take the easy way out on the transplant question helped me develop the form of precedent-utilitarianism I use today.
But more than either of these, it matters because it seriously influences where you go next.
Say "I accept the argument that I need to donate almost all my money to poor African countries, but my only objection is that corrupt warlords might get it instead", and the obvious next step is to see if there's a poor African country without corrupt warlords (see: Ghana, Botswana, etc.) and donate almost all your money to them. Another acceptable answer would be to donate to another warlord-free charitable cause like the Singularity Institute.
If you just say "Nope, corrupt dictators might get it," you may go off and spend the money on a new TV. Which is fine, if a new TV is what you really want. But if you're the sort of person who would have been convinced by John Maxwell's argument, but you dismissed it by saying "Nope, corrupt dictators," then you've lost an opportunity to change your mind.
So I recommend: limit yourself to responses of the form "I completely reject the entire basis of your argument" or "I accept the basis of your argument, but it doesn't apply to the real world because of contingent fact X." If you just say "Yeah, well, contigent fact X!" and walk away, you've left yourself too much wiggle room.
In other words: always have a plan for what you would do in the least convenient possible world.
Comments (57)
One difficulty with the least convenient possible world is where that least convenience is a significant change in the makeup of the human brain. For example, I don't trust myself to make a decision about killing a traveler with sufficient moral abstraction from the day-to-day concerns of being a human. I don't trust what I would become if I did kill a human. Or, if that's insufficient, fill in a lack of trust in the decisionmaking in general for the moment. (Another example would be the ability to trust Omega in his responses)
Because once that's a significant issue in the subject , then the least convenient possible world you're asking me to imagine doesn't include me -- it includes some variant of me whose reactions I can predict, but not really access. Porting them back to me is also nontrivial.
It is an interesting thought experiment, though.
I apologize for banging on about the railroad question, but I think the way you phrased it does an excellent job of illustrating (and has helped me isolate) why I've always vaguely uncomfortable with Utilitarianism. There is a sharp moral contrast which the question doesn't innately recognize between the patients entering into a voluntary lottery, and the forced-sacrifice of the wandering traveller.
Unbridled Utilitarianism, taken to the extreme, would mandate some form of forced Socialism. I think it was you who commented on OvercomingBias, that one of the risks associated with Cryogenics is waking up in a society where you are not permitted to auto-euthanize. Utilitarianism might argue that the utility of your own diminished suffering would be less than the utility of others people valuing your continued life.
While Utilitarianism is excellent for considering consequences, I think it's a mistake to try and raise it as a moral principle. I lean towards a somewhat Objectivist viewpoint: namely, that the first principle we ought to start with is that each person has the right to their own person and property, and that it is immoral to try and take it from them for any cause.
Following from this, let me address your third question: I'd argue that this type of wealth transfer not only undermines long-term economic develop of the African country (empirical, I could be proved wrong), not only prevents me from spending money on quality products & investing in practical businesses (once again, empirical), but that on a deeper level it undermines the individuality which I value in the human condition. Askin which produces greater happiness & material wealth, Communism or Capitalism, is an empirical question: Omega could come down and tell me that Communism will produce 10x the happiness, or 100x, or whatever. But the idea of slamming everybody into the same, mass produced box to maximize happiness utility sounds suspiciously like Orgasmium.
I don't see how you can compromise on these principles. Either each person has full ownership of themselves (so long as they don't infringe on others), or they have zero ownership. Morality (as I would define it) demands that we fight to protect others freedom, but it says nothing about ensuring their welfare. Giving something for 'free' is just another form of enslavement - even if it's only survival and dependence in exchange for a smug sense of superiority.
On a side note, you did a brilliant job of deconstructing 'morality based on empiricism.'
I voted up on your post, Yvain, as you've presented some really good ideas here. Although it may seem like I'm totally missing your point by my response to your 3 scenarios, I assure you that I am well aware that my responses are of the "dodging the question" type which you are advocating against. I simply cannot resist to explore these 3 scenarios on their own.
In all 3 scenarios, I would ask Omega further questions. But these being "least convenient world" scenarios, I suspect it'd be all "Sorry, can't answer that" and then fly away. And I'd call it a big jerk.
For Pascal Wager's specific scenario, I'd probably ask Omega "Really? Either God doesn't exist or everything the Catholics say is correct? Even the self-contradicting stuff?" And of course, he'd decline to answer and fly away.
So then I'd be stuck trying to decide whether God doesn't exist, or logic is incorrect (i.e. reality can be logically self inconsistent). I'm tempted to adopt Catholicism (for the same reason I would one-box on Newcomb: I want the rewards), but I'm not sure how my brain could handle a non-logical reality. So I really don't know what would happen here.
But let's say Omega additionally tells me that Catholicism is actually self-consistent, and I just misunderstood something about it, before flying away. In that case, I guess I'd start to study Catholicism. If my revised view of Catholicism has me believe that it does some rather cruel stuff (stone people for minor offenses, etc.) then I'd have to weight that against my desire to not suffer eternal torture.
I mean, eternal torture is pretty frickin' bad. I think in the end, I'd convert. And I'd also try to convert as many other people as possible, because I suspect I'd need to be cruel to fewer people if fewer people went against Christianity.
To clarify your scenario, I'm guessing Omega explicitly tells me that I will be happier if I believe something untrue (i.e. God). I would probably reject God in this case, as Omega is implicitly confirming that God does not exist, and I do care about truth more than happiness. I've already experience this in other manners, so this is a much easier scenario for me to imagine.
I don't think I can overcome this challenge. No matter how much I think about it, I find myself putting up semantic stop signs. In my "least convenient world", Omega tells me that Africa is so poverty stricken, and that my contribution would be so helpful, that I would be improving the lives of billions of people, in exchange for giving up all my wealth. While I might not donate all my money to save 10, I think I value billions of lives more than my own life. Do I value it more than my own happiness? This is an extremely painful question for me to think about, so I stop thinking about it.
"Okay", I say to Omega, "what if I only donate X percent of my money, and keep the rest for myself?" In one possible "least convenient world", Omega tells me that the charity is run by some nutcase whom, for whatever reason, will only accept an all-or-nothing deal. Well, when I phrase it like that, I feel like not donating anything, and blaming it on the nutcase. So suppose instead Omega tells me "There's some sort of principles of economy of scale which is too complicated for me to explain to you which basically means that your contribution will be wasted unless you contribute at least Y amount of dollars, which coincidentally just happens to be your total net worth." Again, I'm torn and find it difficult to come to a conclusion.
Alternative, I say to Omega "I'll just donate X percent of my money." Omega tells me "that's good, but it's not optimum." And I reply "Okay, but I don't have to do the optimum." but then Omega convinces me that actually, yes, I really should be doing the optimum somehow. Perhaps something along the line of how my current "ignore Africa altogether" behaviour is better than the behaviour of going to Africa and killing, torturing, raping everyone there. That doesn't mean that the "ignore Africa" strategy is moral.
One way to train this: in my number theory class, there was a type of problem called a PODASIP. This stood for Prove Or Disprove And Salvage If Possible. The instructor would give us a theorem to prove, without telling us if it was true or false. If it was true, we were to prove it. If it was false, then we had to disprove it and then come up with the "most general" theorem similar to it (e.g. prove it for Zp after coming up with a counterexample in Zm).
This trained us to be on the lookout for problems with the theorem, but then seeing the "least convenient possible world" in which it was true.
There are real life examples where reality has turned out to be the "least convenient of possible worlds". I have spent many hours arguing with people who insist that there are no significant gender differences (beyond the obvious), and are convinced that to assert otherwise is morally reprehensible.
They have spent so long arguing that such differences do not exist, and this is the reason that sexism is wrong, that their morality just can't cope with a world in which this turns out not to be true. There are many similar politically charged issues - Pinker discusses quite a few in the Blank Slate - where people aren't wiling to listen to arguments about factual issues because they believe they have moral consequences.
The problem, of course - and I realise this is the main point of this post - is that if your morality is contingent on empirical issues where you might turn out to be wrong, you have to accept the consequences. If you believe that sexism is wrong because there are no heritable gender differences, you have to be willing to accept that if these differences do turn out to exist then you'll say sexism is ok.
This is probably a test you should apply to all of your moral beliefs - if it just so happens that I'm wrong about the factual issue on which I'm basing my belief is wrong, will really I be willing to change my mind?
I like the phrase "precedent utilitarianism". It sounds to utilitarians like you're joining their camp, while actually pointing out that you're taking a long-term view of utility, which they usually refuse to do. The important ingredient is paying attention to incentives, which is really the rational response to most questions about morality. Many choices which seem "fairer", "more just", or whose alternatives provoke a disgust response don't take the long-term view into account. If we go around sacrificing every lonely stranger to the highest benefit of others nearby, no one is safe. It's a tragedy that all those people are sick and will die if they don't get help, but we don't make the world less tragic by sacrificing one to save ten every chance we get.
The problem with the 'god shaped hole' situation (and questions of happiness in general) is that if something doesn't make you happy NOW, it becomes very difficult to believe that it will make you happy LATER.
For example, say some Soma-drug was invented that, once taken, would make you blissfully happy for the rest of your life. Would you take it? Our immediate reaction is to say 'no', probably because we don't like the idea of 'fake', chemically-induced happiness. In other words, because the idea doesn't make us happy now, we don't really believe it will make us happy later.
Valuing truth seems like just another way of saying truth makes you happy. Because filling the god shaped hole means not valuing truth, the idea doesn't make you happy right now, so you don't really believe it will make you happy later.
I don't see any problem with acknowledging that in a world very different from this one my beliefs and actions would also be different. For example, I think the fact that there are and have been so many different religions with significantly different beliefs as to what God wants is evidence that none of them are correct. It follows that if there was just one religion with any significant number of adherents then that would be evidence (not proof) that that religion was in fact correct.
Maybe if Omega tells me it's Catholicism or nothing I'll become a Catholic. Maybe if he says it's the Aztec religion or nothing I'll cut out your beating heart and toss you down a pyramid. But no worries, neither one is going to happen in the real world.
I think a better way to frame this issue would be the following method.
For example, if I respond to your question of the solitary traveler with "You shouldn't do it because of biological concerns." Accept the answer and then ask, what would need to change in this situation for you to accept the killing of the traveler as moral?
I remember this method giving me deeper insight into the Happiness Box experiment.
Here is how the process works:
Surprising conclusion! Aha! Then you do believe that there is a difference between a happiness box and the real world, namely your acceptance of the existence of other minds and the obligations those minds place on you.
That distinction was important to me, not only intellectually but in how I approached my life.
Hope this contributes to the conversation.
David
I find a similar strategy useful when I am trying to argue my point to a stubborn friend. I ask them, "What would I have to prove in order for you to change your mind?" If they answer "nothing" you know they are probably not truth-seekers.
Great, David! I love it.
Namely, the point of reversal of your moral decision is that it helps to identify what this particular moral position is really about. There are many factors to every decision, so it might help to try varying each of them, and finding other conditions that compensate for the variation.
For example, you wouldn't enter the happiness box if you suspected that information about it giving the true happiness is flawed, that it's some kind of lie or misunderstanding (on anyone's part), of which the situation of leaving your family on the outside is a special case, and here is a new piece of information. Would you like your copy to enter the happiness box if you left behind your original self? Would you like a new child to be born within the happiness box? And so on.
"I believe that God’s existence or non-existence can not be rigorously proven."
Cannot be proven by us, with our limits on detection, or cannot be proven in principle?
Because if it's the latter, you're saying that the concept of 'God' has no meaning.
Formalize this a bit:
"I believe that X’s existence or non-existence can not be rigorously proven."
Where X is of the set of beings imagined by or could be imagined by humans, e.g.: God, Gnomes, Zeus, Wotan, Vishnu, unicorns, leprechauns, Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc. Why is any one of the statements that result from such substitutions more meaningful than any other?
I think just because something cannot be proven (even in principle) does not necessarily imply that it is not true, let alone has no meaning.
See Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, for example.
It is the latter (I’m an agnostic). However, I don’t see why the concept has no meaning. Would you say that axioms in math are meaningless?
It's possible to decide which axioms are in effect from the inside of a sufficiently complex mathematical system (such as this universe), however.
For that matter, it would be possible to deduce the existence of a god, too; you just have to die. Granted, there are some issues with this, but nobody said deducing the axiom had to be convenient.
"It's possible to decide which axioms are in effect from the inside of a sufficiently complex mathematical system (such as this universe), however."
I don't think I understand what you mean.
"For that matter, it would be possible to deduce the existence of a god, too; you just have to die."
When you meet a god, how can you be sure it's not a hallucination?
Assuming the entity in question is cooperative, try this:
Ask it if P=NP is true, and for a proof for its answer to that in a form that you can easily understand. There's three possible outcomes:
If you get something that appears like an elegant proof, memorize it and recheck it every now and then. If your mind is sufficiently malfunctioning that it can't distinguish an elegant proof for P=NP from something that isn't, you may not be able to notice that from inside. There's still a chance whatever is afflicting you will get better over time; hence, do periodic rechecks, and pay particular attention to any nagging doubts about the proof you get while performing those.
In the meantime, interpret the fact that you've gotten an apparent proof as significant evidence for the entity in question being real and very powerful.
It says "There is no elegant proof". Next?
Ask again, with another famously unsolved math problem. Repeat until it stops saying that or you run out of problems you know.
If you ran out, ask the entity to choose a famous math problem not yet solved by human mathematicians, explain the problem to you, and then give you the solution including an elegant proof. Next time you have internet access, check whether the problem in question is indeed famous and doesn't have a published solution.
If the entity says "there are no famous unsolved math problems with elegant proofs", I would consider that significant empirical evidence that it isn't what it claims to be.
It could give a formally checkable proof, that is far from being elegant, but your own simple proof checkers that you understand well can plough through a billion steps and verify the result.
"Would you say that axioms in math are meaningless?"
They distinguish one hypothetical world from another. Furthermore, some of them can be empirically tested. At present, Euclidean geometry seems to be false and Riemannian to be true, and the only difference is a single axiom.
I think the words "true" and "false" have some connotation that you might not want to imply? Perhaps it would clearer to phrase this as "At present, it seems like the geometry of our universe is not Euclidean and that the geometry of our universe is Riemannian.".
They distinguish one hypothetical world from another.
It's a subtle distinction, but I think it's more accurate and useful to say that the axioms define a mathematical universe, and that a mathematical universe cannot be true or false but only a better or poorer model of the physical universe.
Euclidean geometry isn't a theory about the world, and therefore cannot be falsified by evidence from the world. The primitives (e.g. "line" and "point") do not have unambiguous referents in the world.
You can associate real-world things (e.g. patterns of graphite, or wooden rods) to those primitives, and to the extent that they satisfy the axioms, they will also satisfy the conclusions.
Math is not physics.
"Math is not physics."
It's made out of physics. I think perhaps you mean that math isn't about physics.
To the degree that axioms aren't being used to talk about potential worlds, I would say that they're meaningless.
"They distinguish one hypothetical world from another."
Just like different religions.
"Furthermore, some of them can be empirically tested. "
Empirical tests do not prove a proposition, but increase the odds of its being correct (just like "miracles" would raise the odds in favor of religion).
Yvain,
Do you have a blog or home page with more material you've written? Failing that, is there another site (apart from OB) with contributions from you that might be interesting to LW readers?
Thanks for your interest. My blog is of no interest to anyone but my immediate personal friends, but I am working on a website. I'll let you know when it's up.
Hey Yvain. I found your blog a little while ago (I think it was from an interesting comment on Patri's LiveJournal, or maybe he linked to you). I disagree that your blog isn't interesting to people that aren't immediate friends (for example, I found your arguments about boycotts and children's rights to be interesting and persuasive). I respect that you seem to not want to link to it here, so I won't. But I urge you to change your mind!
Ha, this was just enough information for my google-fu to finally succeed.
Yvain, I have a feeling that between your articles here, your travels through Outer Mongolia, and your apparent all-around awesomosity, EY has some stiff competition for cult leader.
Thank you, Michael, for not linking to it here, and thank you, Badger, for the kind words. Although I'm not going to accept any comparisons to EY until I've come up with and implemented at least one feasible plan to save the world.
Let's try something different.
The Yvain's post presented a new method for dealing with the stopsign problem in reasoning about questions of morality. The stopsign problem consists in following an invalid excuse to avoid thinking about the issue at hand, instead of doing something constructive about resolving the issue.
The method presented by Yvain consists in putting in place the universal countermeasure against the stopsign excuses: whenever a stopsign comes up, you move the discussed moral issue to a different, hypothetical setting, where the stopsign no longer applies. The only valid excuse in this setting is that you shouldn't do something, which also resolves the moral question.
However, the moral questions should be concerned with reality, not with fantasy. Whenever a hypothetical setting is brought in the discussion of morality, it should be understood as a theoretical device for reasoning about the underlying moral judgment applicable to the real world. There is a danger in fallaciously generalizing the moral conclusion from fictional evidence, both because there might be factors in the fictional setting that change your decision and which you haven't properly accounted for in the conclusion, and because decision extracted from the fictional setting is drawn in the far mode, running a risk of being too removed from the real world to properly reflect people's preferences.
I'm not sure if I'm evading the spirit of the post, but it seems to me that the answer to the opening problem is this:
If you were willing to kill this man to save these ten others, then you should long ago have simply had all ten patients agree to a 1/10 game of Russian Roulette, with the proviso that the nine winners get the organs of the one loser.
While emphasizing that I don't want this post to turn into a discussion of trolley problems, I endorse that solution.
Throwing a die is a way of avoiding bias in choosing a person to kill. If you choose a person to kill personally, you run a risk of doing in in an unfair fashion, and thus being guilty in making an unfair choice. People value fairness. Using dice frees you of this responsibility, unless there is a predictably better option. You are alleviating additional technical moral issues involved in killing a person. This issue is separate from deciding whether to kill a person at all, although the reduction in moral cost of killing a person achieved by using the fair roulette technology may figure in the original decision.
Very good point, and crystalizes some of my thinking on some of the discussion on the tyrant/charity thing.
As far as the specific problems you posed...
For your souped up Pascal's Wager, I admit that one gives me pause. Taking into account the fact that Omega singled out one out of the space of all possible religions, etc etc... Well, the answer isn't obvious to me right now. This flavor would seem to not admit to any of the usual basic refutations of the wager. I think under these circumstances, assuming Omega wasn't open to answering any further questions and wasn't giving any other info, I'd probably at least spend rather more time investigating Catholicism, studying the religion a bit more and really thinking things through.
For question 2 (the really "god shaped" hole) though, personally, while I value happiness, it's not the only thing I value. I'll take truth, thank you very much. (In the spirit of this, I'm assuming there's no psychological trick that would let me fake-believe enough to fill the hole or other ways of getting around the problem.) But yeah, I think I'd choose truth there.
Question 3? Assuming the most inconvenient world (ie, there's no way that I could potentially do more good by keeping the money, etc etc, no way out of the "give it away to do maximal good") well, I'm not sure what I'd do, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to in any way justify not giving it away to Charity X. Though, if I actually had a known Omega give me that information, then I think that might just be enough to give me the mental/emotional/willpower strength to do it. ie, assuming that I KNEW that that way was really the path if I wanted to optimize the good I do in the world, not just in an abstract theoretical way, but was actually told that by a known Omega, well, that might be enough to get me to actually do it.
The souped up Pascal's Wager seems like the thousand door version of Monty Hall.
with regards to the third question: what if I believe that any resources given simply allow the population to expand and hence cause more suffering than letting people die?
If you don't really believe that, and it's just your excuse for not giving away lots of money, you should say loud and clear "I don't believe I'm morally obligated to reduce suffering if it inconveniences me too much." And then you've learned something useful about yourself.
But if you do really believe that, and you otherwise accept John's argument, you should say explicitly, "I accept I'm morally obligated to reduce suffering as much as possible, even at the cost of great inconvenience to myself. However, I am worried because of the contingent fact that giving people more resources will lead to more population, causing more suffering."
And if you really do believe that and think it through, you'll end up spending almost all your income on condoms for third world countries.
Obviously, you wait for one of the sick patients to die, and use that person's organs to save the others, letting the healthy traveler go on his way. ;)
But that isn't the least convenient possible world - the least convenient one is actually the one in which the traveler is compatible with all the sick people, but the sick people are not compatible with each other.
Actually, you don't even need to add that additional complexity to make the world sufficiently inconvenient.
If the rest of the patients are sufficiently sick, their organs may not really be suitable for use as transplants, right?
"first, do no harm"
It's remarkable that medical traditions predating transplants* already contain an injunction against butchering passers by for spare parts
*I thought this was part of the Hippocratic oath but apparently it's not
An injunction to do no harm is part of the Hippocratic oath, and the actual text has multiple translations, so I don't think it's too far-fetched to attribute "first, do no harm" to the oath.
Obligatory wikipedia link.
On the other hand:
This was from the article on first, do no harm.
*kill traveler to save patients problem
assuming that
-the above solutions (patient roulette) were not viable
-upon recieving their new organs, the patients would be restored to full functionality, the equal of or better utility generators than the traveler
then I would kill the traveler. however, if the traveler successfully defended himself, and turned the tables on me, I would use my dying breath to happily congratulate his self preservation instinct and wish him no further problems on the remainder of his journey. and of course Id have left instructions w my nurse to put my body on ice and call the doctor from the next town over to come and do the transplants from my own organs.
if catholicism is true, then Im already in hell. what else can you call an arbitrary, irrational universe?
if there is a evolutionary trap in the human mind that requires irrational belief to achieve optimal happiness, then I just add that to the list of all the other 'design flaws' and ignore.
I can not imagine a least convenient world in which something resembling what we understand of the laws of economics operates, where both I and the africans would not be better off by me using my money to invest in local industry, or financing an anti-warlord coup dtat. if you want to fiat that these ppl cant work, or that the dictator is unstoppable and will nationalize and embezzle my investments, then I dont see how charity is going to do any better. if theres no way that my capital can improve their economy, then they are just flat doomed, and Id rather keep my money.
The problem is the "least convenient world" seems to involve a premise that would, in and of itself, be unverifiable.
The best example is the pascals wager issue - Omega tells me with absolute certainty that It's either a specific version of God (Not, for instance Odin, but Catholicism), or no God.
But I'm not willing to believe in an omniscient deity called God, taking it back a step and saying "But we know it's either or, because the omniscient de . . . errr . . . Omega tells you so" is just redefining an omniscient deity.
Well, if I don't believe is assuming god exists without proof, I can happily not assume Omega exists without proof. Proof is verifiably impossible, because all I can prove is that Omega is smarter than me.
Since I won't assume anything based only on the fact that someone is smarter than me - which is all I know about Omega - then no, the fact that Omega says any of this stuff and states it by fiat isn't going to convince me.
If Omega is that damn smart, it can go to the effort of proving it's statements.
Jonnan
Post-script: Which suddenly explains to me why I would pick the million dollar box, and leave the $1000 dollars alone. Because that's win win - either I get the million or I prove Omega is in fact not omniscient. He might be smarter than me (almost certainly is - the memory on this bio-computer I'm running needs upgraded something fierce, and the underlying operating system was last patched 30,000 years ago or so), but I can't prove it, I can only debunk it, and the only way to do that is to take the million.
Yes, to make it work, you may have to imagine yourself in an unreachable epistemic state. I don't see why this is a problem, though.
No, to make it work you have to assume that you believe in omniscience in order to clarify whether you believe in omniscience, a classic 'begging the question' scenario.
You're right that the existence of Omega is information relevant to the existence of other omniscient beings, but in the least convenient world Omega tells you that it is not the Catholic version God, and you still need to decide if that being exists. (And you really do have to decide that specific question because eternal damnation is in the payoff matrix.)
Omniscience is almost a side issue.
Not if omniscience is A) a necessary prerequisite to the existence of a deity, and B) by definition unverifiable to an entity that is not itself omniscient.
Without being omniscient myself, I can only adjudge the accuracy of Omega's predictions based in the accuracy of it's known predictions versus the accuracy of my own.
Unfortunately, the mere fact that I am not omniscient means I cannot, with 100% accuracy, know the accuracy of Omega's decisions, because I am aware of the concepts of selection bias, and furthermore may not be capable of actually evaluating the accuracy of all Omega's predictions.
I can take this further, but fundamentally, to be able to verify Omega's omniscience, I actually have to be omniscient . Otherwise I can only adjudge that Omega's ability to predict the future is greater, statistically, than my own, to some degree 'x', with a probable error on my part 'y', said error which may or may not place Omega's accuracy equal to or greater than 100%.
Omega may in fact be omniscient, but that fact is itself unverifiable, and any philosophical problem that assumes A) I am rational, but not omniscient B) Omega is omniscient, and C) I accept B as true has a fundamental contradiction. By definition, I cannot be both rational and accept that Omega is Omniscient. At best I can only accept that Omega has, so far as I know, a flawless track record, because that is all I can observe.
Unfortunately, I think this seemingly small difference between "Omniscient" and "Has been correct to the limit of my ability to observe" makes a fairly massive difference in what the logical outcome of "Omega" style problems is.
Jonnan
The whole idea of an unreachable epistemic state seems to be tripping you up. In the least convenient world, you know that Omega is omniscient, and the fact that you cannot verify that knowledge doesn't trouble you.
Although I understand and appreciate your approach the particular examples do not represent particularly good ones:
1: Pascal's Wager:
For an atheist the least convenient possible world is one where testable, reproducible scientific evidence strongly suggests the existence of some "super-natural" (clearly no-longer super-natural) being that we might ascribe the moniker of God to. In such a world any "principled atheist" would believe what the verifiable scientific evidence support as probably true. "Atheists" who did not do that would be engaging in the exact same delusional thinking modern-day theists engage in: belief in "beings" despite the utter lack of evidence supporting the existence of such "beings" only in reverse, like flat-earthers.
2: The God-Shaped Hole:
The use of "Omega" here is a fair bit over the absurd line. It very much sounds like you wish to create the following situation for atheists: suppose there exists an oracle that can tell you that there is a "hole" in you and it's "God shaped", but cannot confirm the existence nor non-existence of the "God" that the hole is "shaped" like. Well, then my hole (being an atheist) is penguin shaped ;-).
It is clear that you want to create a world where some form of definitive information about some other "thing" is true while trying to maintain the "true" state of the existence or non-existence of that thing left undecided. Alas, your not allowed that degree of freedom. If definitive statements are made and accepted as true then the thing that the statement references also must exist in some meaningful way.
3: Extreme Altruism
Lots of leeway is left in your example to re-cast the moral dilemma, for example:
a. Charity X is, in fact, using the money you give it to feed people in Africa, but the population that is being helped lives in a fundamentally unsustainable environment. Suppose changes in weather patterns means that getting a meaningful sustained water supply requires considerable cost. In this case the charity itself is engaging in the morally wrong thing by not supporting efforts to relocate the people to a place that can sustain them better. Your analysis (not literally you, the "you" responding to pleas for money) leads you to extreme altruism. Others follow-suit creating an unsustainable dependant society. In the case of extreme charity you accidentally do harm: they're alive, but utterly dependant of the charity of others.
b. Turn the entire situation amoral: why should their lives there be of such an importance to affect me, in any way, here? I.E. why is this a moral consideration at all? In this context person a may choose to contribute to charity X not knowing if "in the large" a "good overall outcome" will result from such a donation, regardless of amount contributed. Another way of looking at it is if I consider increased happiness being an important element of "good morality" (dubious?) then is my personal depletion of resources and the "net" increase in happiness in the receiving population a net increase of happiness overall? And is that the "right" thing? By who's measure?
The above examples are not meant as a broad-stroke justification for a "let-em starve" thing. The issue simply concerns constraining the examples sufficiently to get the outcome you are looking for. To simplify matters this particular example is closely analogous to the trolley situation above: suppose the doctor offered to the patient with the good organs the option of donating all the organs to the patients in need, but as a result the patient would need to survive on uncomfortable synthetic replacements of his organs.
“Do you head down to the nearest church for a baptism? Or do you admit that even if believing something makes you happier, you still don't want to believe it unless it's true?”
I believe that God’s existence or non-existence can not be rigorously proven. Likewise there is no rigorous protocol for estimating the chances. Therefore we are forced to rely on our internal heuristics which are extremely sensitive to our personal preferences for the desired answer. Consequently, people, who would be happier believing in God, mostly likely already do so. The same principle applies to people with “rationality-shaped holes”. It’s possible that one group is on average happier than the other. However, becoming happier simply by switching sides may not be possible without a profound personality change. In other words you need to become somebody else than you are now. Since this seems little different from being erased and replaced by another person, it’s hardly an appealing choice for most people.
On the other hand, we seem to be little concerned about the gradual change of our personalities (compare yourself now and twenty years ago). Hence, it’s quite possible for the same physical person at different points of life to be comfortable in totally different camps.
For fun here's my personal contribution to "yet another proof of the non-existence of God (of the Bible)", not that really any such "proof" ought to be necessary.
The Bible (and other Arahamic texts) is quite clear that God is both omniscient and omnipotent. But at the same time endowed man with free will (Genesis 2:7-17 - Adam had CHOICE). The problem is that these are irreconcilably contradictory.
Omniscience implies the complete LACK of free will because God already knows everything that will ever happen. In fact, from God's point of view everything that ever could happen has already happened.
Omnipotence implies that even if God lacked omniscience, somehow intrinsically, he could grant omniscience to himself, after all, he is omnipotent right? If he cannot grant himself omniscience then he is not omnipotent because there are tasks that are beyond even his power! At the same time he would also not be omniscient.
So, either we have free will and God is not omniscient (and therefore flawed because he can be wrong about anything -> i.e. not know the outcome of any decision he makes), or we do not have free will and God has always know everything including every soul that would occupy heaven and hell (including knowing for all eternity that Lucifer would fall) -> i.e. your illusion of making choices is irrelevant - your final disposition has always been known - and he made it that way. All that we know is some expression of some ultimately constant "reality". God can play such a reality out along any parameter he wants and the path through is "reality" simulation would always be the same.
Furthermore, God being omnipotent is beyond time: our soul has already been basking in heaven or burning in hell for eternity already (for our notions of time simply do not apply to such a being), the mere illusion of your life is ultimately irrelevant. If God is not beyond time then he is bound by our limits of seeing into the future, again implying that he is both NOT omniscient and NOT omnipotent.
Free will implies the God of the Bible does not exist. Q.E.D. -OR- All of it doesn't matter in the slightest.
"your illusion of making choices is irrelevant - your final disposition has always been known - and he made it that way."
I think this is where the trouble is. Just because God knows the outcome doesn't mean he made it that way. For example, if you've known a friend for an extremely long time, and he has never chosen A over B, you can be reasonably sure he'll pick A. That doesn't he has no choice. God is just someone who has infinite knowledge of you. He knows what you will end up doing, but you still have to carry it out and make the choice yourself. It really just depends on how you define "free will" and "choice".