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Alex_Altair comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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The only fact necessary to rationally be an atheist is that there is no evidence for a god. We don't need any arguments -- evolutionary or historical or logical -- against a hypothesis with no evidence.
The reason I don't spend a cent of my time on it is because of this, and because all arguments for a god are dishonest, that is, they are motivated by something other than truth. It's only slightly more interesting than the hypothesis that there's a teapot around venus. And there are plenty of other things to spend time on.
As a side note, I have spent time on learning about the issue, because it's one of the most damaging beliefs people have, and any decrease in it is valuable.
The existence of the universe is actually very strong evidence in favor of theism. It just isn't nearly strong enough to overcome the insanely low prior that is appropriate.
I contend that there is evidence for a god. Observation: Things tend to have causes. Observation: Agenty things are better at causing interesting things than non-agenty things. Observation: We find ourselves in a very interesting universe.
Those considerations are Bayesian evidence. The fact that many, many smart people have been theistic is Bayesian evidence. So now you have to start listing the evidence for the alternate hypothesis, no?
Do you mean all arguments on Christian internet fora, or what? There's a vast amount of theology written by people dedicated to finding truth. They might not be good at finding truth, but it is nonetheless what is motivating them.
I should really write a post on the principle of charity...
I realize this is rhetoric, but still... seriously? The question of whether the universe came into being via an agenty optimization process is only slightly more interesting than teapots orbiting planets?
I agree that theism tends to be a very damaging belief in many contexts, and I think it is good that you are fighting against its more insipid/irrational forms.
I suppose that their ratio is very high, but that their difference is still extremely small.
As for your evidence that there is a god, I think you're making some fundamentally baseless assumptions about how the universe should be "expected" to be. The universe is the given. We should not expect it to be disordered any more than we should expect it to be ordered. And I'd say that the uninteresting things in the universe vastly outnumber the interesting things, whereas for humans they do not.
Also, I must mention the anthropic principle. A universe with humans much be sufficiently interesting to cause humans in the first place.
But I do agree that many honest rational people, even without the bias of existent religion, would at least notice the analogy between the order humans create and the universe itself, and form the wild but neat hypothesis that it was created by an agent. I'm not sure if that analogy is really evidence, anymore than the ability of a person to visualize anything is evidence for it.
You can't just not have a prior. There is certainly no reason to assume the the universe as we have found has the default entropy. And we actually have tools that allow us to estimate this stuff- the complexity of the universe we find ourselves in is dependent on a very narrow range values in our physics. Yes I'm making the fine-tuning argument and of course knowing this stuff should increase our p estimate for theism. That doesn't mean P(Jehovah) is anything but minuscule-- the prior for an uncreated, omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent God is too low for any of this to justify confident theism.
I can't help but feel that this sentence pervasively redefines 'interesting things' as 'appears agent-caused'.
As curious agents ourselves, we're pre-tuned to find apparently-agent-caused things interesting. So, I don't think a redefinition necessarily took place.
This is sort of what I meant. I am leery of accidentally going in the reverse direction - so instead of "thing A is agent-caused -> pretuned to find agent-caused interesting -> thing A is interesting" we get "thing A is interesting -> pretuned to find agent-caused interesting -> thing A is agent-caused".
This is then a redefinition; I have folded agent-caused into "interesting" and made it a necessary condition.
Yes!
Possible prior work: Why and how to debate charitably, by User:pdf23ds.
Your choice of wording here makes it obvious that you are aware of the counter-argument based on the Anthropic Principle. (Observation: uninteresting venues tend not to be populated by observers.) So, what is your real point?
I would think "Observers who find their surroundings interesting duplicate their observer-ness better" is an even-less-mind-bending anthropic-style argument.
Also this keeps clear that "interesting" is more a property of observers than of places.
(nods) Yeah, I would expect life forms that fail to be interested in the aspects of their surroundings that pertain to their ability to produce successful offspring to die out pretty quickly.
That said, once you're talking about life forms with sufficiently general intelligences that they become interested in things not directly related to that, it starts being meaningful to talk about phenomena of more general interest.
Of course, "general" does not mean "universal."
If we have a prior of 100 to 1 against agent-caused universes, and .1% of non-agent universes have observers observing interestingness while 50% of agent-caused universes have it, what is the posterior probability of being in an agent-caused universe?
I make it about 83% if you ignore the anthropic issues (by assuming that all universes have observers, or that having observers is independent of being interesting, for example). But if you want to take anthropic issues into account, you are only allowed to take the interestingness of this universe as evidence, not its observer-ladenness. So the answer would have to be "not enough data".
You can't not be allowed to take the observer-ladenness of a universe as evidence.
Limiting case: Property X is true of a universe if and only if it has observers. May we take the fact that observers exist in our universe as evidence that observers exist there?
I have no idea what probability should be assigned to non-agent universes having observers observing interesting things (though for agent universes, 50% seems too low), but I also think your prior is too high.
I think there is some probability that there are no substantial universe simulations, and some probability that the vast majority of universes are simulations, but even if we live in a multiverse where simulated universes are commonplace, our particular universe seems like a very odd choice to simulate unless the basement universe is very similar to our own. I also assign a (very) small probability to the proposition that our universe is computationally capable of simulating universes like itself (even with extreme time dilation), so that also seems unlikely.
Probabilities were for example purposes only. I made them up because they were nice to calculate with and sounded halfway reasonable. I will not defend them. If you request that I come up with my real probability estimates, I will have to think harder.
Ah, well your more general point was well-made. I don't think better numbers are really important. It's all too fuzzy for me to be at all confident about.
I still retain my belief that it is implausible that we are in a universe simulation. If I am in a simulation, I expect that it is more likely that I am by myself (and that conscious or not, you are part of the simulation created in response to me), moderately more likely that there are a small group of humans being simulated with other humans and their environment dynamically generated, and overall very unlikely that the creators have bothered to simulate any part of physical reality that we aren't directly observing (including other people). Ultimately, none of these seem likely enough for me to bother considering for very long.
The first part of your belief that "it is implausible that we are in a universe simulation" appears to be based on the argument:
If simulationism, then solipsism is likely.
Solipsism is unlikely, so . . .
Chain of logic aside, simulationism does not imply solipsism. Simulating N localized space-time patterns in one large simulation can be significantly cheaper than simulating N individual human simulations. So some simulated individuals may exist in small solipsist sims, but the great majority of conscious sims will find themselves in larger shared simulations.
Presumably a posthuman intelligence on earth would be interested in earth as a whole system, and would simulate this entire system. Simulating full human-mind equivalents is something of a sweet spot in the space of approximations.
There is a massive sweet spot, an extremely effecient method, of simulating a modern computer - which is to simulate it at the level of it's turing equivalent circuit. Simulating it at a level below this - say at the molecular level, is just a massive waste of resources, while any simulation above this loses accuracy completely.
It is postulated that a similar simulation scale separation exists for human minds, which naturally relates to uploads and AI.
I don't understand why human-mind equivalents are special in this regard. This seems very anthropocentric, but I could certainly be misinterpreting what you said.
Cheaper, but not necessarily more efficient. It matters which answers one is looking for, or which goals one is after. It seems unlikely to me that my life is directed well enough to achieve interesting goals or answer interesting questions that a superintelligence might pose, but it seems even more unlikely that simulating 6 billion humans, in the particular way they appear (to me) to exist is an efficient way to answer most questions either.
I'd like to stay away from telling God what to be interested in, but out of the infinite space of possibilities, Earth seems too banal and languorous to be the one in N that have been chosen for the purpose of simulation, especially if the basement universe has a different physics.
If the basement universe matches our physics, I'm betting on the side that says simulating all the minds on Earth and enough other stuff to make the simulation consistent is an expensive enough proposition that it won't be worthwhile to do it many times. Maybe I'm wrong; there's no particular reason why simulating all of humanity in the year of 2011 needs to take more than 10^18 J, so maybe there's a "real" milky way that's currently running 10^18 planet-scale sims. Even that doesn't seem like a big enough number to convince me that we are likely to be one of those.
I meant there is probably some sweet spot in the space of [human-mind] approximations, because of scale separation, which I elaborated on a little later with the computer analogy.
Cheaper implies more efficient, unless the individual human simulations somehow have a dramatically higher per capita utility.
A solipsist universe has extraneous patchwork complexity. Even assuming that all of the non-biological physical processes are grossly approximated (not unreasonable given current simulation theory in graphics), they still may add up to a cost exceeding that of one human mind.
But of course a world with just one mind is not an accurate simulation, so you now you need to populate it with a huge number of pseudo-minds which functionally are indistinguishable from the perspective of our sole real observer but somehow use much less computational resources.
Now imagine a graph of simulation accuracy vs computational cost of a pseudo-mind. Rather than being linear, I believe it is sharply exponential, or J-shaped with a single large spike near the scale separation point.
The jumping point is where the pseudo-mind becomes a real actual conscious observer of it's own.
The rationale for this cost model and the scale separation point can be derived from what we know about simulating computers.
Perhaps not your life in particular, but human life on earth today?
Simulating 6 billion humans will probably be the only way to truly understand what happened today from the perspective of our future posthuman descendants. The alternatives are . . . creating new physical planets? Simulation will be vastly more efficient than that.
The basement reality is highly unlikely to have different physics. The vast majority of simulations we create today are based on approximations of currently understood physics, and I don't expect this to every change - simulations have utility for simulators.
I'm a little confused about the 10^18 number.
From what I recall, at the limits of computation one kg of matter can hold roughly 10^30 bits, and a human mind is in the vicinity of 10^15 bits or less. So at the molecular limits a kg of matter could hold around a quadrillion souls - an entire human galactic civilization. A skyscraper of such matter could give you 10^8 kg .. and so on. Long before reaching physical limits, posthumans would be able to simulate many billions of entire earth histories. At the physical molecular limits, they could turn each of the moon's roughly 10^22 kg into an entire human civilization, for a total of 10^37 minds.
The potential time scale compression are nearly as vast - with estimated speed limits at around 10^15 ops/bit/sec in ordinary matter at ordinary temperatures, vs at most 10^4 ops/bit/sec in human brains, although not dramatically higher than the 10^9 ops/bit/sec of today's circuits. The potential speedup of more than 10^10 over biological brains allows for about one hundred years per second of sidereal time.
To uploads, yes, but a faithful simulation of the universe, or even a small portion of it. would have to track a lot more variables than the processes of the human minds within it.
Optimal approximate simulation algorithms are all linear with respect to total observer sensory input. This relates to the philosophical issue of observer dependence in QM and whether or not the proverbial unobserved falling tree actually exists.
So the cost of simulating a matrix with N observers is not expected to be dramatically more than simulating the N observer minds alone - C*N. The phenomena of dreams is something of a practical proof.
Some of it anyway.
Isn't it interesting how there's so much raw material that the interesting things can use to make more interesting things?
Really? Your explanation for why there's lots of stuff is that an incredibly powerful benevolent agent made it that way? What does that explanation buy you over just saying that there's lots of stuff?
Again, some of it. The vast vast majority of raw material in the universe is not used, and has never been used, for making interesting things.
Why are you ignoring the future?
Back when I used to hang around over at talk.origins, one of the scientist/atheists there seemed to think that the sheer size of the universe was the best argument against the theist idea of a universe created for man. He thought it absurd that a dramatic production starring H. sapiens would have such a large budget for stage decoration and backdrops when it begins with such a small budget for costumes - at least in the first act.
Your apparent argument is that a big universe is evidence that Someone has big plans for us. The outstanding merit of your suggestion, to my mind, is that his argument and your anti-argument, if brought into contact, will mutually annihilate leaving nothing but a puff of smoke.
Are you proposing that in the future we will necessarily end up using some large proportion of the universe's material for making interesting things? I mean, I agree that that's possible, but it hardly seems inevitable.
I think that is more-or-less the idea, yes - though you can drop the "necessarily ".
Don't judge the play by the first few seconds.
The reason I put in "necessarily" is because it seems like Will Newsome's anthropic argument requires that the universe was designed specifically for interesting stuff to happen. If it's not close to inevitable, why didn't the designer do a better job?
Maybe there's no designer. Will doesn't say he's 100% certain - just that he thinks interestingness is "Bayesian evidence" for a designer.
I think this is a fairly common sentiment - e.g. see Hanson.
Necessarily? Er... no. But I find the arguments for a decent chance of a technological singularity to be pretty persuasive. This isn't much evidence in favor of us being primarily computed by other mind-like processes (as opposed to getting most of our reality fluid from some intuitively simpler more physics-like computation in the universal prior specification), but it's something. Especially so if a speed prior is a more realistic approximation of optimal induction over really large hypothesis spaces than a universal prior is, which I hope is true since I think it'd be annoying to have to get our decision theories to be able to reason about hypercomputation...
"Interesting" is subjective, and further, I think you overestimate how many interesting things we actually know to be caused by "agenty things." Phenomena with non-agenty origins include: any evolved trait or life form (as far as we have seen), any stellar/astronomical/geological body/formation/event...
It is pretty likely you are correct, but this is probably the best example of question-begging I have ever seen.
All Dreaded_Anomaly needs for the argument I take him or her to be making is that those things are not known to be caused by "agenty things". More precisely: Will Newsome is arguing "interesting things tend to be caused by agents", which is a claim he isn't entitled to make before presenting some (other) evidence that (e.g.) trees and clouds and planets and elephants and waterfalls and galaxies are caused by agents.
It seems to me that basing such a list on evidence-based likelihood is different than basing it on mere assumption, as begging the question would entail. I do see how it fits the definition from a purely logical standpoint, though.
Interestingness is objective enough to argue about. (Interestingly enough, that is the very paper that eventually led me to apply for Visiting Fellowship at SIAI.) I think that the phenomena you listed are not nearly as interesting as macroeconomics, nuclear bombs, genetically engineered corn, supercomputers, or the singularity.
Edit: I misunderstood the point of your argument. Going back to responding to your actual argument...
I still contend that we live in a very improbably interesting time, i.e. on the verge of a technological singularity. Nonetheless this is contentious and I haven't done the back of the envelope probability calculations yet. I will try to unpack my intuitions via arithmetic after I have slept. Unfortunately we run into anthropic reference class problems and reality fluid ambiguities where it'll be hard to justify my intuitions. That happens a lot.
All of those phenomena are caused by human action! Once you know humans exist, the existence of macroeconomics is causally screened off from any other agentic processes. All of those phenomena, collectively, aren't any more evidence for the existence of an intelligent cause of the universe than the existence of humans: the existence of such a cause and the existence of macroeconomics are conditionally independent events, given the existence of humans.
Right, I was responding to Dreaded_Anomaly's argument that interesting things tend not to be caused by agenty things, which was intended as a counterargument to my observation that interesting things tend to be caused by agenty things. The exchange was unrelated to the argument about the relatively (ab)normal interestingness of this universe. I think that is probably the reason for the downvotes on my comment, since without that misinterpretation it seems overwhelmingly correct.
Edit: Actually, I misinterpreted the point of Dreaded_Anomaly's argument, see above.
I'm not sure how an especially interesting time (improbable or otherwise) occurring ~13.7 billion years after the universe began implies the existence of God.
Ack! Watch out for that most classic of statistical mistakes: seeing something interesting happen, going back and calculating the probability of that specific thing (rather than interesting things in general!) having happened, seeing that that probability is small, and going "Ahah, this is hardly likely to have happened by chance, therefore there's probably something else involved."
In this case, I think Fun Theory specifies that there are an enormous number of really interesting things, each of minuscule individual probability, but highly likely as an aggregate.
Of course. Good warning though.
Depends on personal standards of interest. I may be more interested in questions which I can imagine answering than ones whose anwer is a matter of speculation, even if the first class refers to small unimportant objects while the second speaks about the whole universe. Practically, finding out teapots orbiting Venus would have more tangible consequences than realising that "universe was caused by an agenty process" is true (when further properties of the agent remain unspecified). The feeling of grandness associated with learning the truth about the very beginning of the universe, when the truth is so vague that all anticipated expectations remain the same as before, doesn't count in my eyes.
Even if you forget heaven, hell, souls, miracles, prayer, religious morality and plethora of other things normally associated with theism (which I don't approve because confusion inevitably appears when words are redefined), and leave only "universe was created by an agenty process" (accepting that "universe" has some narrower meaning than "everything which exists"), you have to point out how can we, at least theoretically, test it. Else, it may not be closed for being definitely false, but still would be closed for being uninteresting.
Evidence allows one to dissociate theories and rule out those incompatible with observational history.
The best current fit theory to our current observational history is the evolution of the universe from the Big Bang to now according to physics.
If you take that theory it also rather clearly shows a geometric acceleration of local complexity and predicts (vaguely) Singularity-type events as the normal endpoints of technological civilizations.
Thus the theory also necessarily predicts not one universe, but an entire set of universes embedded in a hierarchy starting with a physical parent universe.
Our current observational history is compatible with being in any of these pocket universes, and thus we are unlikely to be so lucky as to be in the one original parent universe.
Thus our universe in all likelihood was literally created by a super-intelligence in a parent universe.
We don't need any new evidence to support this conclusion, as it's merely an observation derived from our current best theory.