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komponisto comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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The word "but" in the last sentence is a non-sequitur if there ever were one. Tegmark cosmology is not theism. Theism means Jehovah (etc). Yes, there are people who deny this, but those people are just trying to spread confusion in the hope of preventing unpleasant social conflicts. There is no legitimate sense in which Bostromian simulation arguments or Tegmarkian cosmological speculations could be said to be even vaguely memetically related to Jehovah-worship.
The plausibility of simulations or multiverses might be an open question, but the existence of Jehovah isn't. There's a big, giant, huge difference. If we think Tegmark may be correct, then we can just say "I think Tegmark may be correct". There is no need to pay any lip-service to ancient mistakes whose superficial resemblance to Tegmark (etc) is so slight that you would never notice it unless you were motivated to do so, or heard it from someone who was.
Isn't this - I'm sorry if that sounds harsh - arguing by a forceful say-so? Sure, if you constrain theism rhetorically to "Jehovah-worship", that practice doesn't sound very similar to the Bostromian arguments. But "Bostromian arguments/Tegmarkian speculations" and "the claim that a god created the universe" sound pretty much memetically related to me.
You're saying that e.g. "we are living in a simulation run by sentient beings" and "we are living in a universe created by a sentient being" are such wildly different ideas that there's only superficial resemblance between them, and even that resemblance is unlikely to be noticed by anyone just thinking about the issue, and is rather spread as a kind of a perverse meme.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
The earliest time I can remember that anyone drew a very explicit connection between simulations and theism is in Stanislaw Lem's short story about Professor Corcoran. The book was originally published in 1971, when Bostrom was -2 years old. It's in the second volume of his Star Diaries; see "Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy: I" in this (probably pirated) scribd doc. I'd recommend it to anyone. Of course, it's very much possible that Lem wasn't the first to write up the idea.
See Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable for discussion of what religion is and how it arose. By "memetically related" I do not mean "memetically similar" (although I don't think there's much similarity either); I mean "related" in the sense of ancestry/inheritance. Bostrom's and Tegmark's arguments are not a branch of religion; they do not belong in that cluster.
No. The implication of the post, as I perceived it (have a look at its first paragraph) was "you guys shouldn't be so confident in your dismissal-of-religion ('atheism'); after all, you (perhaps rightly) are willing to entertain the ideas of Tegmark!"
Surely you understand what is wrong with this.
You think I don't believe what I'm writing?
I think you're wrong on similarity [1] and irrelevant on ancestry/inheritance. Only some among currently active religions are clearly "related" in the sense you employ (e.g. Judaism and Christianity); there's no strong evidence that most or all are so related. Since you presumably have no problem lumping them together under "religion", the claim that BTanism (grouped and named so purely for convenience) has no common ancestry with these religions is irrelevant to whether it should be judged a religion.
Also, I don't read the post as claiming "you guys are so dismissive of religion, but you're big on BTanism which is just as much a religion, so there!". Instead, I read the post as claiming "you guys are unreasonable in your overt dismissal of theism and your forceful insistence on it being a closed question, considering many of you are big on BTanism which has similar epistemological status to some varieties of theism". So it doesn't matter much whether BTanism is a religion or not; if that bothers you too much, just employ Taboo and talk about something like "a sentient being responsible for the creation of the observable universe" instead.
I don't fully agree with this idea (the post's argument as I read it), but I find myself somewhat sympathetic to it. It is indeed true in my opinion that the overt and insistent dismissal of theism on LW is a community-cohesiveness driven phenomenon. There's illuminating prior discussion at The uniquely awful example of theism.
No, I have no doubt that you believe what you're writing. Rather, I think that the strongly dismissive claims in your first comment in the thread, unbacked by any convincing argument or evidence, cause me to think that a strong cognitive bias is at work.
[1] Really, the similarity is so strong that I see no need for a detailed argument; but if one is desired, I think Lem's story, to which I linked earlier, serves admirably as one.
That. I think after all the comments I've scanned in this post, this was the first one where I really felt like I understood what the post was even really about. Thank you.
This does not follow. It is not necessary for my argument that different religions all be related to each other; it is only necessary that BTanism not be related to any of them, and (this part I asserted implicitly by linking to Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable) that it not have been generated by a similar process.
Varieties of "theism" which have similar epistemological status to BTanism are not subject on LW to the same kind of dismissal as religion, to the best of my knowledge. Nor should they be. But for the sake of avoiding confusion and undesirable connotations, they certainly shouldn't be called "theism".
If what you mean here is "merely community-cohesiveness driven phenomenon", then I disagree entirely. You might have been right if this were RichardDawkins.net or another specifically atheism-themed community, but it isn't. This is Less Wrong. Our starting point here is epistemology. Rejection of religion ("theism") is a consequence of that; the rejection may be strong but it is still incidental.
For my part, I see "open-mindedness" toward theism mostly as manifesting an inability to come to gut-level terms with the fact that large segments of the human population can be completely, totally wrong. The next biggest source after that is Will's problem, which is the pleasure that smart people derive from being contrarian and playing verbal and conceptual games. (If you like that, for goodness' sake be an artist! But keep your map-territory considerations pure.)
Which?
Again, this is Less Wrong, not a random internet forum. It is not possible to recapitulate the Sequences in every comment; that doesn't mean that strong opinions whose justifications lie therein are inadequately supported.
OK, I think I now understand the implicit part; I think you mean that religions of old made total, and not merely ontological, claims, which BTanism doesn't (I wasn't sure before what you were picking up from Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable, which I do know and read before; I thought it had something to do with disprovability).
I think you're right to point to that distinction.
Well, why not, if they're varieties of theism? Perhaps it'd be better if LW found another word to condemn, other than theism?
Such a word could be... theism! It does have two definitions, a broad and a narrow one. I checked a few dictionaries to be sure, and one of them helpfully elucidated the broad one as "the opposite of atheism", and the narrow one as "the opposite of deism".
"Largely", rather than "merely", is how I would put it. I'm not certain I understand the rest of your paragraph. To my mind, atheism (or, more precisely, strong dismissal of theism) being incidental to LW's charter doesn't mean it can't become a way to cohere the group, to nurture a sense of belonging. Note, by the way, that rejection of theism made it to the Welcome post, and is a unique example of a specific shared LW value there. Although that may be for pragmatic rather than signalling reasons.
That's an interesting theory I'd have to think about. Do you consider agnosticism as a subset of "open-mindedness", and thus the above as the primary explanation of agnosticism?
I don't know; there are several possibilities and it'd be impolite, not to mention fruitless, on my part to speculate.
Agreed in general.
Not sure how well this applies in the particular case. This thread has focused on two assertions in your original comment: "[not] memetically related" and "superficial resemblance ... is so slight that you would never notice it unless you were motivated to do so, or heard it from someone who was". You cited a Sequence post in your follow-up comment about the former (but I don't see any reference to that post or the idea of total claims of religions in your original comment - correct me if you disagree), and after some thickness on my part I acknowledge its relevance here. You don't seem to rely on anything from the Sequences for the latter.
The lumping together of religions under the category of "religion" isn't based on common ancestry, and neither it is based solely on "universe was created by god(s)". Religions have much more in common, e.g. reliance on tradition, sacred texts, sacred places, worship, prayer, belief in afterlife, claims about morality, self-declared unfalsifiability, anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism. Saying that simulation arguments belong to the same class as Judaism, Hinduism or Buddhism because they all claim that the world was created by intelligent agents is like putting atheism to the same category because it is also a belief about gods.
You're making good points, with which I largely agree, with some reservations (see below). I'd just point out that this wasn't the argument Komponisto was making - he was talking only about relatedness in the ancestry sense.
Your list of attributes is probably good enough to distinguish e.g. a simulation argument from "religions" and justify not calling it one. There are two difficulties, however. One is that adherence to these attributes isn't nearly as uniform among religions as it's often rhetorically assumed on LW to be. There's a tendency to: start talking about theism; assume in your argument that you're dealing with something like an omnipresent, omniscient monotheistic God of Judaism/Christianity whose believers are all Bible literalists; draw the desired conclusion and henceforth consider it applying to "theism" or "religion" in general. I find this fallacious tendency to be frequent in discussions of theism on LW. This comment from the earlier discussion is relevant, as are some other comments there. In this post, Eliezer comments that believing in simulation/the Matrix means you're believing in powerful aliens, not deities. Well, consider ancient Greek gods; they are not omniscient, not omnipresent, they can die... they're not more powerful than the simulation runners, and arguably not very ontologically different; are they not deities, but aliens? Was that not religion? [1]
It's kind of understandable that one thinks of the concept of God and Jehovah pops into view. But if you stick with Jehovah - and not even any Jehovah, but a particular, highly literally interpreted kind - it's no good pretending afterwards that you've dealt a blow to religion or to theism.
So proper account of what religions are actually out there makes your list of attribute much less universal, and the dividing line between religions and something like BTanism much less sharp. But, to be clear, I still think this line can be usefully drawn.
The second difficulty is something I've already written to Komponisto above: OK, it's not a religion, so what? The really important thing is whether it's like a religion in those things that ought to make a rationalist not glibly and gleefully dismiss one if they're psyched about another. And among those things worship and sacred texts are arguably less important than e.g. falsifiability. Have you seen a good way to falsify a simulation claim recently?
[1] I just remembered that Dan Simmons develops this theme in Ilium/Olympos. The second book is much worse than the first one.
The Greek gods were, in fact, immortal. Other gods could wound or imprison them, but they couldn't be killed. The Norse gods, on the other hand, could indeed die, and were fated to be destroyed in the Ragnarok.
Thanks! I'm not sure how come I was confused about this, but it's great to be corrected.
I know, nevertheless still I wanted to stress that we don't define religion by a single criterion.
Therefore I haven't listed omni-qualities, immortality and ontological distinctiveness among my criteria for religion. If you look at those criteria, the Greek religion satisfied almost all, save perhaps sacred texts and claims of unfalsifiability (seems that they have not enough time to develop the former and no reason for the latter). Religion usually surpasses the question of existence and identity of gods.
(Now we can make distinction between religion and theism, with the latter being defined solely in terms of god's existence and qualities. I am not sure yet what to think about that possibility.)
The line is not sharp, of course. Many people argue that Marxism is a religion, even if it explicitly denies god, and may have based that opinion on good arguments. It is also not enough clear what to think about Scientology. Religion, or simply cult? I don't think the classification is important at all.
No, I haven't. Actually my approach to simulation arguments is not much different from my approach to modern vague forms of theism: I notice it, but don't take it seriously.
It depends. Belief in importance, hidden message, or even literal truth of ancient texts is generally more reliable indicator of practical irrationality than having an opinion about some undecidable propositions is.
I think we've converged on violent agreement, except one point:
You're right. I retract this part.
I like the phrase.
So if I may take the implication: you don't take the SA seriously because . . it seems memetically similar to ideas espoused or held by agents you deem irrational?
Do you believe in calculus? Gravitation?
I though it was clear from the previous discussion that the reason was pretty weak testability of simulationism, rather than ad hominem reasoning.
Conflating simulationism with calculus or gravitation is absurd. Our universe would look very different if calculus or gravitation did not exist as we understand them, whereas we have no reason at all to suppose this is true of the simulation argument. There are statistical arguments for supposing it's true, but not all the assumptions in the mathematical model are given, and it increases the complexity of our model of reality without providing any explanatory power.
Calculus is a generic algorithmic tool, gravitation is an algorithmic predictive model of some subset of reality, simulationism is a belief about reality derived from future predictions of current physical theory. Yes these are distinct epistemological categories, my point was more that the similarity of simulationism to the older theism is an inadequate reason to dismiss simulationism.
This is I believe a common misunderstanding about the SA.
Suppose you are given a series of seemingly random numbers - say from a SETI signal. You put a crack team of mathematicians on it for many years and eventually they develop a complex model for the sequence that can predict it. It also appears that you can derive timing from the signal and determine how long it has been progressing. Then later you are able to run the model forward and predict that it in fact eventually repeats itself . . .
That last discovery is not a change to the model that need be justified by Ockham's razor. It does not add one iota to the model's complexity.
The SA doesn't add an iota of complexity to our model of reality - ie physics. It's a predicted consequence of running physics forward.
The OP does not make mention of the term 'religion'. Part of the confusion seems to stem from the conflation of theism and religion.
Theism is a philosophical belief about the nature of reality. The truthfulness of this belief as a map of reality is not somehow dependent or connected in belief space to magic rituals, prayers, voodo dolls or the memes of organized religion, even if they historically co-occur.
I beg to differ. In my view, the conflation is of theism with simulationism.
I didn't mean to talk about Jehovah specifically; I thought that using 'theism' would imply enough generality that I could get away without clarification, but I was obviously very mistaken. I added a sentence to the end of the post.
Your second paragraph seems to correctly point out a problem with my terminology. Nonetheless perhaps we could also have discussion on what I was (admittedly poorly) trying to start a discussion about, that is, the apparent contradiction between believing strong optimization processes outside the observable universe are possible and believing that such an optimization process didn't create the observable universe?
Nor, for that matter, did I: Zeus, Thor, and their innumerable counterparts should be considered included in the reference.
The way to have done that, in my opinion, would have been to title the post "Simulation/creator arguments" or something similar, and to avoid any mention of theism, atheism, or religion in the body of the post.
It was brave to even consider using a concept within a few inferential leaps from Jehovah here. :)
The way I read it, it seems like Will_Newsome is not using the word in this way. It may be a case of two concepts being mistakenly filed into the same basket -- certainly some people might, when they hear "Theism-in-general is a mistaken and sometimes harmful way of thinking about the world", understand "theism-in-general" to mean "any mode of thought that acknowledges the possibility of some intelligent mind that is outside and in control of our universe". Under this interpretation, the assertion is quite obviously false (or at least, not obviously true).
I wonder if there is still a disagreement if we Taboo "theism"? (Though your point in the last paragraph is a good one, I think.)
Indeed not; hence my criticism!
For some reason you seem to be categorizing the belief-space such that there is a little pocket called Jehovah-ism over here and then simulationism is another distinct island far far away.
The way I see it, theism is a whole vast space of belief-space, roughly dividing from the split based on the question: was the observable universe created by an agenty-process?
The SA leads us into that side of the belief-space, but the type of Jehova-ism you mention is just a little slice of a large territory.
The two may branch in the same direction from that question, but that doesn't mean that their consequences are remotely similar. You seem to be substituting in cached thoughts from religion as the consequences of simulationism when they really don't follow from it.
Such as?
Such as the morality of the simulators having any relation to our own. It would be much easier to simulate a universe from big bang conditions starting with a few basic rules and allow it to evolve from on its own than to deliberately engineer any sort of life forms within it, and the basic rules of our universe do not dictate that any intelligent life form needs a utility function that closely resembles our own.
Assuming it would even be practical for the simulators to single us out for observation, as such a miniscule part of the simulation, and they judge us according to their own utility function, it's a big leap to suppose that they would do anything about it with repercussions inside our own universe, so for our purposes it probably wouldn't matter.
Additionally, it's not established that the simulators would have practical control over the simulation. Given JoshuaZ's arguments, I concede that it's theoretically possible that the simulators could predict the output of the simulation in advance without running it, but that doesn't mean it's probable, let alone given.
I suspect that a full universe simulation of all of space-time, fifteen billion years of an entire universe, may have a cost complexity such that it could never be realized in any currently conceivable computer due to speed of light limitations. Even a galaxy sized black hole may not be sufficient. You are talking about a Tipler-like scenario that would probably require some massive re-engineering of the entire universe. I can't rule this out, but from what I've read of astrophysicist's reactions, it is questionable whether it is possible even in principle to collapse the universe in the fashion required. (Tipler figures it requires tachyons in his later response writings)
So no, that would not be much easier to simulate - it would be vastly more difficult, and may not even be possible in principle.
The more likely simulation is one run by our posthuman ancestors after a local Singularity on earth, where they have a massive amount of computation, enough to simulate perhaps a galaxy or galaxies full of virtual humans, but not the entire history of our universe. We must remember that they will want to simulate many possible samples as well. They will also probably simulate hypothetical aliens and hypothetical contact scenarios. Basically they will simulate future important sample time-slices.
Today humanity as a whole spends a large amount of time thinking about the present, slightly alternate versions of the present, historical time heavily weighted based on importance, and projected futures. We already are engaging in the limited creation of simulated realities. The phenomenon has already begun, it started with dreams, language, thought and is more recently amplified with computer simulation and graphics, and just chart that trajectory out into the future and amplify it by an exponential vastening . . . .
This is not the ordinary simulation argument, or even closely related to it. The proposition that you reject, that our universe is simulable in its entirety, is one of the premises of that argument.
I for one strongly predict that our future ancestors will never create a galaxy or multiple galaxies of virtual humans from their own past. It's ethically dubious, and far, far from being one of the most useful things they could do with that computing power if they simply want to determine the likely outcome of various contact scenarios or the what hypothetical aliens would be like. By the time we're capable of it, it simply wouldn't have much to recommend it as an idea.