= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Dreaded_Anomaly comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (533)
"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.