Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 12:18AM

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Comment author: Perplexed 22 January 2011 12:53:02AM *  8 points [-]

I've argued rather extensively against religion on this website.

That was my impression as well, but when I went looking for those arguments, they were very difficult to find. Perhaps my Google-fu is weak. Help from LW readers is welcome.

I found plenty of places where you spoke disrespectfully about religion, and quite a few places where you cast theists as the villains in your negative examples of rationality (a few arguably straw-men, but mostly fair). But I was surprised that I found very few places where you were actually arguing against religion.

Name a single one of those arguments which is equally effective against simulationism.

Well, the only really clear-cut example of a posting-length argument against religion is based on the "argument from evil". As such, it is clearly not equally effective against simulationism.

You did make a posting attempting to define the term "supernatural" in a way that struck me as a kind of special pleading tailored to exclude simulationism from the criticism that theism receives as a result of that definition.

This posting rejects the supernatural by defining it as 'a belief in an explanatory entity which is fundamentally, ontologically mental'. And why is that definition so damning to the supernaturalist program? Well, as I understand it, it is because, by this definition, to believe in the supernatural is anti-reductionist, and a failure of reductionism is simply inconceivable.

I wonder why there is not such a visceral negative reaction to explanatory entities which are fundamentally, ontologically computational? Certainly it is not because we know of at least one reduction of computation. We also know of (or expect to someday know of) at least one reduction of mind.

But even though we can reduce computation, that doesn't mean we have to reduce it. Respectable people have proposed to explain this universe as fundamentally a computational entity. Tegmark does something similar, speculating that the entire multiverse is essentially a Platonic mathematical structure. So, what justification exists to deprecate a cosmology based on a fundamental mental entity?

...

I only found one small item clearly supporting my claim. Eliezer, in a comment, makes this argument against creationists who invoke the Omphalos hypothesis

Never mind usefulness, it seems to me that "Evolution by natural selection occurs" and "God made the world and everything in it, but did so in such a way as to make it look exactly as if evolution by natural selection occured" are not the same hypothesis, that one of them is true and one of them is false, that it is simplicity that leads us to say which is which, and that we do, indeed, prefer the simpler of two theories that make the same predictions, rather than calling them the same theory.

I agree. But take a look at this famous paper by Bostrom. It cleverly sidesteps the objection that simulating an entire universe might be impossibly difficult by instead postulating a simulation of just enough physical detail so as to make it look exactly as if there were a real universe out there. "Are you living in a computer simulation?" "Are we living in a world which only looks like it evolved?" Eliezer chose to post a comment answering the latter question with a no. He has not, so far as I know, done the same with Bostrom's simulationist speculation.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 January 2011 10:37:17AM 6 points [-]

In lieu of an extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions, I'll simply note that having God create the world 5,000 years ago but fake the details of evolution is more burdensome than having a simulator approximate all of physics to an indistinguishable level of detail. Why? Because "God" is more burdensome than "simulator", God is antireductionist and "simulator" is not, and faking the details of evolution in particular in order to save a hypothesis invented by illiterate shepherds is a more complex specification in the theory than "the laws of physics in general are being approximated".

To me it seems nakedly obvious that "God faked the details of evolution" is a far more outre and improbable theory than "our universe is a simulation and the simulation is approximate". I should've been able to leave filling in the details as an exercise to the reader.

Comment author: Kevin 22 January 2011 10:49:10AM 18 points [-]

Extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions plz

Comment author: Perplexed 22 January 2011 05:30:39PM 5 points [-]

To me it seems nakedly obvious that "God faked the details of evolution" is a far more outre and improbable theory than "our universe is a simulation and the simulation is approximate". I should've been able to leave filling in the details as an exercise to the reader.

Trusting ones 'gut' impressions of the "nakedly obvious" like that and 'leaving the details as an exercise' is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when you have a well-tuned engine of rationality in your possession and you just need to get some intellectual work done.

But my impression of the thrust of the OP was that he was suggesting a bit of time-consuming calibration work so as to improve the tuning of our engines. Looking at our heuristics and biases with a bit of skepticism. Isn't that what this community is all about?

But enough of this navel gazing! I also would like to see that digression on Solomonoff induction in an anthropic situation.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 January 2011 01:01:26AM 5 points [-]

This just means you have a very narrow (Abrahamic) conception of God that not even most Christians have. (At least, most Christians I talk to have super-fuzzy-abstract ideas about Him, and most Jews think of God as ineffable and not personal these days AFAIK.) Otherwise your distinction makes little sense. (This may very well be an argument against ever using the word 'God' without additional modifiers (liberal Christian, fundamentalist Christian, Orthodox Jewish, deistic, alien, et cetera), but it's not an argument that what people sometimes mean by 'God' is a wrong idea. Saying 'simulator' is just appealing to an audience interested in a different literary genre. Turing equivalence, man!)

Of note is that the less memetically viral religions tend to be saner (because missionary religions mostly appealed to the lowest common denominator of epistemic satisfiability). Buddhism as Buddha taught it is just flat out correct about nearly everything (even if you disagree with his perhaps-not-Good but also not-Superhappy goal of eliminating imperfection/suffering/off-kilteredness). Many Hindu and Jain philosophers were good rationalists (in the sense that Epicurus was a good rationalist), for instance. To a first and third and fifth approximation, every smart person was right about everything they were trying to be right about. Alas, humans are not automatically predisposed to want to be right about the super far mode considerations modern rationalists think to be important.

Comment author: jacob_cannell 29 January 2011 01:21:31AM -1 points [-]

For many people the word "God" appears to just describe one's highest conception of good, the north pole of morality. Such as: "God is Love" in Christianity.

From that perspective, I guess God is Rationality for many people here.

Comment author: Furcas 29 January 2011 01:29:37AM 6 points [-]

For many people the word "God" appears to just describe one's highest conception of good, the north pole of morality.

People might say that, but they don't actually believe it. They're just trying to obfuscate the fact that they believe something insane.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 January 2011 01:28:35AM *  -1 points [-]

This conception lets you do a lot of fun associations. Since morality seems pretty tied up with good epistemology (preferences and beliefs are both types of knowledge, after all), and since knowledge is power (see Eliezer's posts on engines of cognition), then you would expect this conception of God to not only be the most moral (omnibenevolent) but the most knowledgeable (omniscient) and powerful (omnipotent). Because God embodies correctness He is thus convergent for minds approximating Bayesianism (like math) and has a universally very short description length (omnipresent), and is accessible from many different computations (arguably personal).

Delicious delicious metacontrarianism...

Comment author: NihilCredo 16 February 2011 07:23:20AM 1 point [-]

It's like Scholastic mad-libs!

Comment author: wnoise 29 January 2011 02:16:08AM 1 point [-]

Preferences are entangled with beliefs, certainly, but I don't see why I would consder them to be knowledge.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 29 January 2011 03:00:16AM 1 point [-]

What is your operational definition of knowledge?

Comment author: cousin_it 22 January 2011 01:56:47PM *  1 point [-]

Seconding Kevin's request. Seeing a sentence like that with no followup is very frustrating.