= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Theists are wrong; is theism?
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (533)
I'm in the 'everything that can exist does so; we're a fixed point in a cloud of possibilities' camp. I'm also an atheist because I see theism as an extra-ordinarily arbitrary and restrictive constraint on what should or must be true in order for us to exist.
It's simply too narrow and unjustified for me to take seriously, and the fact that its trappings are naive and full of wishful thinking and ulterior motives means I certainly don't.
The way I've been envisioning theism is as a pretty broad class of hypotheses that is basically described as 'this patch of the universe we find ourselves in is being computed by something agenty'. What is your conception of theism that makes it more arbitrary and restrictive than this?
There's not enough evidence to locate the hypothesis, so while I technically give it a non-zero probability, that probability is not high enough for me to consider it worth significant time to investigate.
As for arguing against it in public: at most one human religion can be true. All the others must be false. So decreasing the amount of religion in the world improves net accuracy. Also and perhaps more importantly, religion is a major source of Dark Side Epistemology. So on the meta-level, minimizing the influence of religion will help people become more rational.
That line works a lot better for 'Jehovah' than 'theism', especially if you apply the latter term liberally.
Huh? I would think if anything it is the other way around. We have something which locates the Jehovah hypothesis, ancient texts claiming the entity's intervention and modern individuals claiming to communicate with the entity. The real issue is that after locating, there are much better explanations for the data.
If you think that it's easier to locate the hypothesis of Jehovah than the hypothesis of theism, then you're falling victim to a variation of the conjunction fallacy. Belief in Jehovah is itself a variety of theism.
Nevertheless, I agree with you that there's plenty of evidence to locate the hypothesis of Jehovah (and therefore there is at least that much to locate theism), just very little evidence to confirm it when it's examined.
Yes, you're right. That's an awful conjunction fallacy. Almost textbookish. Ugh.
I think the theism/atheism debate is considered closed in the following sense: no one currently has any good reasons in support of theism (direct evidence, or rational/Bayesian arguments). We can't say that such a reason won't show up in the future, but from what we know right now, theism just isn't worth considering. The territory, from all indications, is Godless (and soulless, for that matter), so the map should reflect that.
When you say there are no good reasons in support of theism, I assume you mean the truth of theism, not the idea that it may create positive externalities? Or are you claiming that there is no benefit to theism whatsoever?
If the territory is to be faithfully represented, we cannot say that the existence of a deity is a necessary component, but that doesn't necessarily imply that the existence of religion is a pure negative.
"Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on." -- Damien Broderick
If you believe in a Matrix or in the Simulation Hypothesis, you believe in powerful aliens, not deities. Next!
There's also no hint of worship which everyone else on the planet thinks is a key part of the definition of a religion; if you believe that Cthulhu exists but not Jehovah, and you hate and fear Cthulhu and don't engage in any Elder Rituals, you may be superstitious but you're not yet religious.
This is mere distortion of both the common informal use and advanced formal definitions of the word "atheism", which is not only unhelpful but such a common religious tactic that you should not be surprised to be downvoted.
Also http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1817
Yes. Next. I think this post demonstrates the need for downvotes to be a a greater than 1.0 multiple of upvotes. What argument is there otherwise other than the status quo?
To the extent that positive karma is a reward for the poster and an indication of what people desire to see (both very true), we should not expect a distribution about the mean of zero. If the average comment is desirable and deserving of reward, then the average comment will be upvoted.
I didn't say anything about centering on zero, and agree that would be incorrect. However, modification to the current method is likely challenging and no one's actually going to do any novel karma engineering here so it was a silly comment for me to make.
Most upper ontologies allow no such ontological distinction. E.g. my default ontology is algorithmic information theory, which allows for tons of things that look like gods.
I agree with the rest of your comment, though. I don't know what 'worship' means yet (is it just having lots of positive affect towards something?), but it makes for a good distinction between religion and not-quite-religion.
Time for me to reread A Human's Guide to Words, I suppose. But in my head and with Visiting Fellows folk I think I will continue to use an ontological language stolen from theism.
I'm curious to know why you prefer this language. I kind of like it too, but can't really put a finger on why.
There's a buttload of thinking that's been done in this language in earlier times, and if we use the language, that suggests we can reuse the thinking, which is pretty exciting if true. But mostly I don't think it is.
(For any discredited theory along the lines of gods or astrology, you want to focus on its advocates from the past more than from the present, because the past is when the world's best minds were unironically into these things.)
Tangentially, it's important to note that most followers of a philosophy/religion are going to be stupid compared to their founders, so we should probably just look at what founders had to say. (Christ more than His disciples, Buddha more than Zen practitioners, Freud and Jung more than their followers, et cetera.) Many people who are now considered brilliant/inspiring had something legitimately interesting to say. History is a decent filter for intellectual quality.
That said, everything you'd ever need to know is covered by a combination of Terence McKenna and Gautama Buddha. ;)
This doesn't follow. The founder of a religion is likely to be more intelligent or at least more insightful than an average follower, but a religion of any size is going to have so many followers that a few of them are almost guaranteed to be more insightful than the founder was; founding a religion is a rare event that doesn't have any obvious correlation with intelligence.
I'd also be willing to bet that founding a successful religion selects for a somewhat different skill set than elucidating the same religion would.
You're mostly right; upvoted. I suppose I was thinking primarily of Buddhism, which was pretty damn exceptional in this regard. Buddha was ridiculously prodigious. There are many Christians with better ideas about Christianity than Christ, and the same is probably true of Zoroaster and Mohammed, though I'm not aware of them. Actually, if anyone has links to interesting writing from smart non-Sufi Muslims, I'd be interested.
This kind of depends on criteria for success. If number of adherents is what matters then I agree, if correctness is what matters then it's probably a very similar skill set. Look at what postmodernists would probably call Eliezer's Singularity subreligion, for instance.
Also I should note that by 'intelligence' I mostly meant 'predisposition to say insightful or truthful things', which is rather different from g.
Primarily because I get a lot of glee out of meta-contrarianism and talking in a way that would make stereotypical aspiring rationalists think I was crazy. Secondarily because the language is culturally rich. Tertiarily because I figure out what smart people actually mean when they talk about faith, charkras, souls, et cetera, and it's fun to rediscover those concepts and find their naturalistic basis. Quaternarily it allows me to practice charity in interpretation and steel-manning of bad arguments. Zerothly (I forgot the most important reason!) it is easier to speak in such a way, which makes it easier to see implications and decompartmentalize knowledge. Senarily it is more aesthetic than rationalistic jargon.
Except I think it's safe to say this sort of thing typically isn't what they mean, merely what they perhaps might mean if they were thinking more clearly. And it's not at all clear how you could find analogs to the more concrete religious ideas (e.g. chakras or the holy trinity).
If the person would violently disagree that this is in fact what they intended to say, I'm not sure it can be called "charity of interpretation" anymore. And while I agree steel-manning of bad arguments is important, to do it to such an extent seems to be essentially allowing your attention to be hijacked by anyone with a hypothesis to privilege.
I agree that verbal masturbation is fun, but it's not helpful when you're tying to actually communicate with people. Consider purchasing contrarian glee and communication separately.
I agree, though I was describing the case where I can do both simultaneously (when I'm talking to people who either don't mind or join in on the fun). This post was more an example of just not realizing that the use of the word 'theism' would have such negative and distracting connotations.
That's a good point, but where do you recommend getting contrarian glee separate from communication?
Here, of course.
Cached thoughts: Crackpot Theory (48 readers)? Closet Survey, The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You, The Irrationality Game? Omegle?
I wish crackpot theories were considered a legitimate form of art. They're like fantasy worldbuilding but better.
I think Ben from TakeOnIt put it well:
There's definitely something deeply appealing about theistic language. That's what makes it so dangerous.
What I think of as the informal definition of atheism is something like "the state of not believing in God or gods". I believe in gods and God, and I take this into account in my human approximation of a decision theory. I'm not yet sure what their intentions are, and I'm not inclined to worship them yet, but by my standards I'm definitely not an atheist. What is your definition of atheism such that it is meaningfully different from 'not religious'? Why are we throwing a good word like 'theism' into the heap of wrong ideas? It's like throwing out 'singularity' because most people pattern match it to Kurzweil, despite the smartest people having perfectly legitimate beliefs about it.
It doesn't really matter, I just think that it's sad that so many rationalists consider themselves atheists when by reasonable definition it seems they definitely are not, even if atheism has more correct connotations than the alternatives (though I call myself a Buddhist, which makes the problem way easier). Perhaps I am not seeing the better definition?
Possibly a bad example, since a number of people here advocate that. I remember a comment somewhere that people at SIAI were considering renaming it for related reasons.
I think they're going to drop the 'for Artificial Intelligence' part, but I think they're keeping the 'Singularity' part, since they're interested in other things besides seed AI that are traditionally 'Singularitarian'. (Side note: I'm not sure if I should use 'we' or 'they'. I think 'they'. Nobody at SIAI wants to speak for SIAI, since SIAI is very heterogenous. And anyway I'm just a Visiting Fellow.) The social engineering aspects of the problem are complicated. Accuracy, or memorability? Rationalists should win, after all...
You could go with "it" and sidestep the problem.
Thanks!
Here's the one I remembered (there may have been a couple of other mentions):
(I agree with this, but do not have a better name to propose.)
I know one isn't supposed to use web comics to argue a point, but I've always found SMBC is the exception to that rule. Maybe not always to get the point across so much as to lighten the mood.
When I want to discuss something, I use a relevant SMBC comic to get people to locate the thing I am talking about. I say decision theory ethics, people glaze over. I link this and they get it immediately.
Not relevant: when people want to use god-particles, etc, to justify belief in God, I use this. It is significantly more effective than any argument I've employed.
[Deleted: Gods "run an intrinsically infinitary inference system".] ETA: agreed, silly.
is summarily rejected. What does 'intrinsically infinitary' even mean?
You seem to be dictating that theist beliefs and simulationist beliefs should not be collected together into the same reference class. (The reason for this dictat seems to be that you disrespect the one and are intrigued by the other - but never mind that.)
However, this does not seem to address the point which I think the OP was making. Which seems to be that arguments for (against) theism and arguments for (against) simulationism should be collected together in the same reference class. That if we do so, we discover that many of the counter-arguments that we advance against theist apologetics are (objectively speaking) equally effective against simulationist speculation. Yet (subjectively speaking) we don't feel they have the same force.
Contempt for those with whom you disagree is one of the most dangerous traps facing an aspiring rationalist. I think that it would be a very good idea if the OP were to produce that posting on charity-in-interpretation which he mentioned.
Next!
I've argued rather extensively against religion on this website. Name a single one of those arguments which is equally effective against simulationism.
(Somewhat related: for those that haven't seen it, Eliezer's Beyond the Reach of God is an excellent article.)
Perhaps I missed the point of your recommendation. That article by Eliezer seems to argue against the existence of a benevolent God who allows evil and death but does not balance this by endowing humans with immortal souls. Since at least 95% of those who worship Jehovah (to say nothing of Hindus) understand the Deity quite differently, I don't really see the relevance.
But while I am speaking to you, I'm curious as to whether (in my grandfather comment) I correctly captured the point of your OP?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It's like Scholastic mad-libs!
Preferences are entangled with beliefs, certainly, but I don't see why I would consder them to be knowledge.
What is your operational definition of knowledge?
People might say that, but they don't actually believe it. They're just trying to obfuscate the fact that they believe something insane.
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.
Seconding Kevin's request. Seeing a sentence like that with no followup is very frustrating.
Extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions plz
The post you are looking for is Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Thx. But I don't read that as arguing against religion. Instead it seems to be an argument against one feature of modern religion - its claim to unfalsifiability (since it deals with a Non-Overlapping MAgisterium, 'NOMA' using the common acronym). Eliezer thinks this is pretty wimpy. He seems to have more respect for old-time religion, like those priests of Baal who stuck their necks out, so to speak, and submitted their claims to empirical testing.
Can this attitude of critical rationalism be redeployed against simulationist claims? Or at least against the claims of those modern simulationists who keep their simulations unfalsifiable and don't permit interaction between levels of reality? Against people like Bostrom who stipulate that the simulations that they multiply (without necessity) should all be indistinguishable from the real thing - at least to any simulated observer? I will leave that question to the reader. But I don't think that it qualifies as a posting in which Eliezer argues against religion in toto. He is only arguing against one feature of modern apologetics.
The other part of the argument in that post is that existing religions are not only falsifiable, but have already been falsified by empirical evidence.
A "Truman Show"-style simulation. Less burdensome on the details - but their main application seems likely to be entertainment. How entertaining are you?
I'll chime in that Eliezer provided me with the single, most personally powerful argument that I have against religion. (I'm not as convinced by razor and low-prior arguments, perhaps because I don't understand them.)
The argument not only pummels religion it identifies it: religion is the pattern matching that results when you feel around for the best (most satisfying) answer. To paraphrase Eliezer's argument (if someone knows the post, I'll link to it, there's at least this); while you're in the process of inventing things, there's nothing preventing you from making your theory as grand as you want. Once you have your maybe-they're-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent. Especially the vigorous head-nodding in the congregation.
I don't have so much against pattern matching. I think it has it's uses, and religion provides many of them (to feel connected and integrated and purposeful, etc). But it's an absurd means of epistemology. I think it's amazing that religions go from 'whoever made us must love us and want us to love the world' --which is a very natural pattern for humans to match -- to this great detailed web of fabrication. In my opinion, the religions hang themselves with the details. We might speculate about what our creator would be like, but religions make up way too much stuff in way too much detail and then make it dogma. (I already knew the details were wrong, but I learned to recognize the made-up details as the symptom of lacking epistemology to begin with.)
Now that I recognize this pattern (the pattern of finding patterns that feel right, but which have no reason to be true) I see it other places too. It seems pattern matching will occur wherever there is a vacuum of the scientific method. Whenever we don't know, we guess. I think it takes a lot of discipline to not feel compelled by guesses that resonate with your brain. (It seems it would help if your brain was wired a little differently so that the pattern didn't resonate as well -- but this is just a theory that sounds good.)
Dennett tells a similar "agentification" story:
I also would like to see a link to that post, if anyone recognizes it.
I'll agree that to (atheist) me, it certainly seems that one big support for religious belief is the natural human tendency toward wishful thinking. However, it doesn't do much good to provide convincing arguments against religion as atheists picture it. You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Pity I can't turn that around and use it against simulationism. :)
I found it: this is the post I meant. But it wasn't written by Eliezer, sorry. (The comment I linked to in the grandparent that was resonates with this idea for me, and I might have seen more resonance in older posts.)
I'm confused. I just want to understand religion, and the world in general, better. Are you interested in deconversion?
Ha ha. Simulationism is of course a way cool idea. I think the compelling meme behind it though is that we're being tricked or fooled by something playful. When you deviate from this pattern, the idea is less culturally compelling.
In particular, the word 'simulation' doesn't convey much. If you just mean something that evolves according to rules, then our universe is apparently a simulation already anyway.
Thx. That is a good posting. As was the posting to which it responded
Whoops! Bad assumption on my part. Sorry. No, I am not particularly interested in turning theists into atheists either, though I am interested in rational persuasion techniques more generally.
I'll have to review your arguments to provide a really well informed response. Please allow me roughly 24 hours. But in the meantime, I know I have seen arguments invoking Occam's razor and "locating the hypothesis" here. I was under the impression that some of those were yours. As I understand those arguments, they apply equally well to theism and simulationism. That is, they don't completely rule out those hypotheses, but they do suggest that they deserve vanishingly low priors.
"Decoherence is Simple" seems relevant here. It's about the many-worlds interpretation, but the application to simulation arguments should be fairly straightforward.
I'm afraid I don't see the application to simulation arguments. You will have to spell it out.
I fully agree with EY that Occam is not a valid argument against MWI. For that matter, I don't even see it as a valid argument against the Tegmark Ultimate Ensemble. But I do see it as a valid argument against either a Creator (unneeded entity) or a Simulator (also an unneeded entity). The argument against our being part of a simulation is weakened only if we already know that simulations of universes as rich as ours are actually taking place. But we don't know that. We don't even know that it is physically and logically possible.
Nevertheless, your mention of MWI and simulation in the same posting brings to mind a question that has always bugged me. Are simulations understood to cover all Everett branches of the simulated world? And if they are understood to cover all branches, is that broad coverage achieved within a single (narrow) Everett branch of the universe doing the simulating?
Occam's razor weighs heavily against theism and simulism - for very similar reasons.
Probably a bit more heavily against theism, though. That has a bunch of additional razor-violating nonsense associated with it. It does not seem too unreasonable to claim that the razor weighs more heavily against theism.
From what I've seen, the primary argument for simulationism is anthropic: if simulating a whole universe is possible, then some entity would do it a lot, so there are probably a lot more simulations out there than "basement realities", so we're probably in a simulation. What effect MWI has on this, and what other arguments are out there, I don't know.
Typical atheist arguments focus on it not being necessary for god to exist to explain what we see, and this coupled with a low prior makes theism unjustified--basically the "argument from no good evidence in favor". This is fine, because the burden of proof is on the theists. But if you find the anthropic argument for the simulation hypothesis good, then that's one more good argument than theism has.
A Simulator would be ontologically distinct from creatures like us-- for any definition of ontologically distinct I can imagine wanting use. The Simulation Hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis in the most literal sense- it's a hypothesis about what our physical universe really is, beyond the wave function.
Yeah, Will's theism in this post isn't the theism of believers, priests or academic theologians. And with certain audiences confusion would likely result and so this language should be avoided with those audiences. But I think we're somewhat more sophisticated than that- and if there are reasons to use theistic vocabulary then I don't see why we shouldn't. I'm assuming Will has these reasons, of course.
Keep in mind, the divine hasn't always been supernatural. Greek gods were part of natural explanations of phenomena, Aristotle's god was just there to provide a causal stopping place, Hobbes's god was physical, etc. We don't have to cow-tow to the usage of present religious authorities. God has always been a flexible word, there is no particular reason to take modern science to be falsifying God instead of telling us what a god, if one exists, must be like.
I feel like we lose out on interesting discussions here where someone says something that pattern matches to something an evangelical apologist might say. It's like we're all of a sudden worried about losing a debate with a Christian instead of entertaining and discussing interesting ideas. We're among friends here, we don't need to worry about how we frame a discussion so much.
I wish this viewpoint were more common, but judging from the OP's score, it is still in minority.
I just picked up Sam Harris's latest book - the Moral Landscape, which is all about the idea that it is high time science invaded religion's turf and claimed objective morality as a scientific inquiry.
Perhaps the time is also come when science reclaims theism and the related set of questions and cosmologies. The future (or perhaps even the present) is rather clearly a place where there are super-powerful beings that create beings like us and generally have total control over their created realities. It's time we discussed this rationally.
Sam Harris is misguided at best in the major conclusions he draws about objective morality. See this blog post by Sean Carroll, which links to his previous posts on the subject.
My views on "reclaiming" theism are summed up by ata's previous comment:
I just started reading it and picked it really because I needed something for the train in a hurry. In part I read the likes of Harris just to get a better understanding of what makes a popular book. As far as I've read into Harris's thesis about objective morality, I see it as rather hopeless; depending ultimately on the notion of a timeless universal human brain architecture which is mythical even today, posthuman future aside.
Carroll's point at the end about attempting to find the 'objective truth' about what is the best flavor of ice cream echoes my thoughts so far on the "Moral Landscape".
The interesting part wasn't his theory, it was the idea that the entire belief space currently held by religion is now up for grabs.
In regards to ata's previous comment, I don't agree at all.
Theism is not some single atomic belief. It is an entire region in belief space. You can pull out many of the sub-beliefs and reduce them to atomic binary questions which slice idea-space, such as:
Was this observable universe created by a superintelligence?
Those in the science camp used to be pretty sure the answer to that was no, but it turns out they may very well be wrong, and the theists may have guessed correctly all along (Simulation Argument).
Did superintelligences intervene in earth's history? How do they view us from a moral/ethical standpoint? And so on . . .
These questions all have definitive answers, and with enough intelligence/knowledge/computation they are all probably answerable.
You can say "theism/God" were silly mistakes, but how do you rationalize that when we now know that true godlike entities are the likely evolutionary outcome of technological civilizations and common throughout the multiverse?
I try not to rationalize.
I don't think we should reward correct guesses that were made for the wrong reasons (and are only correct by certain stretches of vocabulary). Talking about superintelligences is more precise and avoids vast planes of ambiguity and negative connotations, so why not just do that?
I don't think it is any stretch of vocabulary to use the word 'god' to describe future superintelligences.
If the belief is correct, it can't also be a silly mistake.
The entire idea that one must choose words carefully to avoid 'vast planes of ambiguity and negative connotations' is at the heart of the 'theism as taboo' problem.
The SA so far stands to show that the central belief of broad theism is basically correct. Let's not split hairs on that and just admit it. If that is true however then an entire set of associated and dependent beliefs may also be correct, and a massive probability update is in order.
Avoiding the 'negative connotations' to me suggests this flawed process of consciously or sub-consciously distancing any possible mental interpretation of the Singularity and the SA such that it is similar to theistic beliefs.
I suspect most people tend to do this because of belief inertia, the true difficulty of updating, and social signaling issues arising from being associated with a category of people who believe in the wrong versions of a right idea for insufficient reasons.
"The universe was created by an intelligence" is the central belief of deism, not theism. Whether or not the intelligence would interact with the universe, for what reasons, and to what ends, are open questions.
Also, at this point I'm more inclined to accept Tegmark's mathematical universe description than the simulation argument.
That seems oxymoronic to me.
There are superficial similarities between the simulation argument and theism, but, for example, the idea of worship/deference in the latter is a major element that the former lacks. The important question is: will using theistic terminology help with clarity and understanding for the simulation argument? The answer does not appear to be yes.
Have you read Less Wrong's metaethics sequence? It and The Moral Landscape reach pretty much the same conclusions, except about the true nature of terminal values, which is a major conclusion, but only one among many.
Sean Carroll, on the other hand, gets absolutely everything wrong.
Given that the full title of the book is "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values," I think that conclusion is the major one, and certainly the controversial one. "Science can help us judge things that involve facts" and similar ideas aren't really news to anyone who understands science. Values aren't a certain kind of fact.
I don't see where Sean's conclusions are functionally different from those in the metaethics sequence. They're presented in a much less philosophically rigorous form, because Sean is a physicist, not a philosopher (and so am I). For example, this statement of Sean's:
and this one of Eliezer's:
seem to express the same sentiment, to me.
If you really object to Sean's writing, take a look at Russell Blackford's review of the book. (He is a philosopher, and a transhumanist one at that.)
To be accurate Harris should have inserted the word "Instrumental" before "Values" in his book's title, and left out the paragraphs where he argues that the well-being of conscious minds is the basis of morality for reasons other than that the well-being of conscious minds is the basis of morality. There would still be at least two thirds of the book left, and there would still be a huge amount of people who would find it controversial, and I'm not just talking about religious fundamentalists.
The difference is huge. Eliezer and I do believe that our 'convictions' have the same status as objective laws of nature (although we assign lower probability to some of them, obviously).
I wouldn't limit "people who don't understand science" to "religious fundamentalists," so I don't think we really disagree. A huge amount of people find evolution to be controversial, too, but I wouldn't give much credence to that "controversy" in a serious discussion.
The quantum numbers which an electron possesses are the same whether you're a human or a Pebblesorter. There's an objectively right answer, and therefore objectively wrong answers. Convictions/terminal values cannot be compared in that way.
I understand what Eliezer means when he says:
but he later says
That's what the difference is, to me. An electron would have its quantum numbers whether or not humanity existed to discover them. 2 + 2 = 4 is true whether or not humanity is around to think it. Terminal values are higher level, less fundamental in terms of nature, because humanity (or other intelligent life) has to exist in order for them to exist. We can find what's morally right based on terminal values, but we can't find terminal values that are objectively right in that they exist whether or not we do.
Okay, let me make my claim stronger then: A huge amount of people who understand science would find the truncated version of TML described above controversial: A big fraction of the people who usually call themselves moral nihilists or moral relativists.
I'm saying that there is an objectively right answer, that terminal values can be compared (in a way that is tautological in this case, but that is fundamentally the only way we can determine the truth of anything). See this comment.
Do you believe it is true that "For every natural number x, x = x"? Yes? Why do you believe that? Well, you believe it because for every natural number x, x = x. How do you compare this axiom to "For every natural number x, x != x"?
Anyway, at least one of us is misunderstanding the metaethics sequence, so this exchange is rather pointless unless we want to get into a really complex conversation about a sequence of posts that has to total at least 100,000 words, and I don't want to. Sorry.
Careful. The quantum numbers are no more than a basis for describing an electron. I can describe a stick as spanning a distance 3 meters wide and 4 long, while a pebblesorter describes it as being 5 meters long and 0 wide, and we can both be right. The same thing can happen when describing a quantum object.
Hard to say, my sense is those of us endorsing/sympathizing/tolerant of Will's position were pretty persuasive in this thread. The OP's score went up from where it was when I first read the post.
I'm in complete agreement with Dreaded_Anomaly on this. Harris is excellent on the neurobiology of religion, as an anti-apologist and as a commentator on the status of atheism as a public force. But he is way out of his depths as a moral philosopher. Carroll's reaction is pretty much dead on. Even by the standards of the ethical realists Harris's arguments just aren't any good. As philosophy, they'd be unlikely to meet the standards for publication.
Now, once you accept certain controversial things about morality then much of what Harris says does follow. And from what I've seen Harris says some interesting things on that score. But it's hard to get excited when the thesis the book got publicized with is so flawed.
It bothers me when an easily researched, factually incorrect statement is upvoted so many times. There are many different definitions of atheism, but one good one might be:
The book does not define personal or transcendent, but it is unlikely that either would exclude "god is an extradimensional being who created us using a simulation" as a theistic argument. For example, one likely definition of transcendent is:
Beings living outside the simulation would definitely qualify as transcendent since we have no way of experiencing their universe. To be clear, I am not saying this is the only possible definition of atheism. I am only saying that it is one reasonable definition of atheism, and to claim that it is not a definition, as Eliezer's post has done, is factually incorrect.
"Powerful aliens" has connotations that may be even more inaccurate; it makes me think of Klingon warlords or something.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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."
Of course. Good warning though.
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.
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.
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.
I can't help but feel that this sentence pervasively redefines 'interesting things' as 'appears agent-caused'.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Agreed. I think this is a cultural thing rather than a truly rational thing. I was brought up as an atheist, and would still describe myself as such, but I wouldn't give a zero probability to the simulation argument, or to Tipler's Omega Point, or whatever (I wouldn't give a high probability to either - and Tipler's work post about 1994 has been obvious ravings) and I can imagine other scenarios in which something we might call God might exist. I don't see myself changing my mind on the theism question, but I don't consider it a closed one.
No, no! Don't go back on your excellent question because the LessWrong-affiliationist-zombies downthumb-bombed it. You defined theism in a way so that your question is valid.
(1) My discussion with a theist today settled on the issue whether to even accept that a "higher domain" creates a "lower domain" for a good purpose. My argument is: why waste reality?
(2) There is a somewhat false duality between creation and discovery: whether the performer determines the result, or the object determines the result, can be relative to the modeling faculty of the observer. And since we as observers and simultaneously "the object" have free will, from our perspective we are in any case rather discovered than created. And as long as God does not act upon the discovery, it is inconsequential.
When I abandoned religion, a friend of mine did the same at about the same time. We spoke recently and it turned out that he self-labeled as agnostic, me - "atheist". We discussed this a bit and I said something to the extent that "I do not see a shred of justice in the world that would indicated a working of a personal god; if there is something like a god that runs the universe amorally, we may as well call it physics and get on with it".
It seems that you want to draw the additional distinction of "agenty" things vs. dumb gears, but as long as they only "care" about persons as atmos, vs. moral agents, who cares? It admittedly tickles curiosity, but will hardly change the program...
What makes you think an agenty, simulator-type god wouldn't care about persons as moral agents?
Not wouldn't, doesn't. And I think it doesn't due to lack of evidence.
An agenty simulator type god that actually did care about persons as moral agents would have created a very different universe than this one (assuming they were competent).
I find that the SA leads us to believe just the opposite.
Future posthumans will be descended in one form or another from people alive today. Some of them may be uploads of people who actually were alive today, some of them may have been raised up and new biological humans and uploads, or even just loosely based on human minds through reading and absorbing our culture.
If these future posthumans share much of the same range of values that we have, many of them will be interested in the concept of resurrecting the dead - recreating likely simulations of deceased, lost humans from their history - whether personal or general.
Well if it were chiefly concerned with us having a lot of fun, or not experiencing pain or fulfilling more of our preferences then yes. But maybe the simulator is trying to evolve companions. Or maybe it is chiefly concerned with answering counter-factual questions and so we have to suffer for it to get the right answers... but that doesn't mean the simulator doesn't care about us at all. Maybe it saves us when we die and are no longer needed for the simulation. Or maybe the simulator just has weird values and this is their version of a eutopia.
"Companions, the creator seeketh, and not corpses--and not herds or believers either. Fellow-creators the creator seeketh--those who grave new values on new tables."
Sure we do: it is called "intelligent design" - or more specifically, intelligent design of life and/or the universe.
My article on the topic: Viable Intelligent Design Hypotheses.
Your general point in your linked piece is sound, because one can imagine eventually falsifying at least some of the proposed theories you list, but you do wrong to say Kitzmiller is problematic. It was a legal finding, based on testimony and hard evidence, that the folks claiming that Intelligent Design was science, were in fact tantamount to a conspiracy to dress "Creationism" in new clothes. Creationism had already been declared a fundamentally religious doctrine, and not a scientific theory. That was settled law. The folks who brought in ID actually had discussion with one another about how best to convert Creationist texts into ID texts and pamphlets without them being recognizable as creationism.
These were charlatans of the worst sort, caught in their own lies. I suggest reading the decision.
Does naturalism vs. supernaturalism strike you as controversial? If not, what question is left?
I personally use "naturalist" to describe myself instead of "atheist" or "agnostic" because I believe it captures my beliefs much more strongly- I don't have certainty there is no omnipotent entity, and I am more committed than just shrugging my shoulders. Supernaturalism is right out, and most varieties of naturalistic theism don't hold water.
According to Wikipedia, a naturalist is usually understood to be something different than a proponent of naturalism. Common usage tends to be more confused about the distinction between a naturalist and a naturist.
When you talk about the whooole Universe, you should not artificially exclude the intelligent creator from it. And if you do include it, then your question can be rephrased like this: Is it possible that the interaction graph of our Universe has a strange hourglass shape with us in the lower bulb, and some intelligent creator in the upper bulb? I say very unlikely.
The simulation argument may suggest some weird interconnected network of bulbs, but that has nothing to do with theism. When and if humanity becomes aware of our simulators, our reaction will not be worship. Rather, we will try to invade and overpower them, like the protagonists of Greg Egan's Crystal Nights did. (Sorry for the spoiler.)
Maybe you already are aware of this example, but for others who are new to this kind of arguments, I recommend the following exercise: Imagine two Universes, both containing intelligent beings simulating the other Universe. Here it is not even meaningful to ask who is the Creator and who is the Creature.
I don't see how that can really happen. I've never heard a non-hierarchical simulation hypothesis.
Consider an agent that has to simulate itself in order to understand consequences of its own decisions. Of course, there's bound to be some logical uncertainty in this process, but the agent could have exact definition of itself, and so eventually ability to see all the facts. For two agents, that's a form of acausal communication (perception). (This is meaningless only in the same sense as ordinary simulation hypothesis is meaningless.)
It's one of the implications of a universe that can compute actual infinities; it's been proposed in ficton, but I don't know about beyond that.
That is correct, and an even better fictional example is the good short story titled I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility. But this is not exactly what I meant here. I don't propose any non-hierarchical or infinite simulation hypothesis. Rather, all I am saying is that it is not a logical impossibility that two Universes have such a weird yin-yang simulated-simulant relationship. (Even in perfect isolation, just the two of them, without invoking an infinite chain of universes.) Obviously it is acausal, but that is a probabilistic, thermodynamic kind of improbable rather than logical impossible.
Maybe an easier such example is a spatially centrally symmetric Universe, where you can meet your exact clone who always does what you do. Or my very favorite, the temporally symmetric Universe, a version of the Gold Universe. Or a Hinduist Universe where time goes in circles. The point is, the idea that we live in a constructed, causally almost-but-not-perfectly isolated part of the Universe seems just an aesthetically displeasing corner case when discussed in the context of all these imaginable interaction networks.
That is emphatically not what people like Alvin Plantinga are talking about. Simulation argument provides no support for omni-benevolent omni-potent omni-scient omni-present entities; I don't know why you bring it up.
And if you've been reading Luke's blog, you probably already know that one of the best arguments for theism is the free will defense of the omni-s being consistent with the existence of evil, but since we don't think free will is even a coherent concept, it leaves us unmoved.
Beyond that, it's just not a very good argument. If the entity was omnipotent, it could have given us free will without creating evil. At the least, it could have created less evil by giving all humans force fields, so all we could do to harm each other would be to gossip and insult.
gwern,
Plantinga's Free Will Defense is not an argument for theism. The conclusion of the free will argument is that it is not logically impossible for God and evil to co-exist. That is an extremely modest conclusion on the part of the theist.
If you don't mind my asking, how did it come to be that you were raised to believe that convincing arguments against theism existed without discovering what they are? That sounds like a distorted reflection of a notion I had in my own childhood, when I thought that there existed a theological explanation for differences between the Bible and science but that I couldn't learn them yet; but to my recollection I was never actually told that, I just worked it out from the other things I knew.
I knew some convincing arguments against theism, but I suppose what I explicitly did not know of were counterarguments to the theistic counterarguments against those atheistic convincing arguments, because I was quick to dismiss the theistic counterarguments in the first place.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Didn't we have this conversation already? Words can be wrong. You can't easily divorce an existing word from its connotations, not by creating a new definition, certainly not by expecting the new definition to be inferred by the reader. There is no good reason to misuse words in this way, just state clearly what you intended to say (e.g. as komponisto suggested).
As it is, you are initiating an argument about definitions, activity without substance, controversy for the sake of controversy as opposed to controversy demanded by evidence.
That was a different conversation, though the same theme of using words incorrectly also came up, if that's what you mean.
There are good reasons to do so among people who share the same language, like me and some SIAI folk. It makes communication faster, and makes it easier to see single step implications. Being precise has large consequences for brains that run largely on single step insights from cached knowledge. I agree that in the case of this post my choice of language was flat out wrong, though.
Arguments about definitions are very important! Choosing a language where it's easier to see implications is important for bounded agents. That said, it wasn't what I was trying to do with this post, and you're right that it would have been a totally lost cause if that's what I was trying to do.
To take advantage of this one might want to compress cached knowledge as much as possible; the resulting single step insights would then have correspondingly greater generality. Using structured personal knowledge databases along with spaced repetition would be one way of accomplishing this.
This post could use a reminder of Less Wrong's working definition of the supernatural (of which theism, as virtually everyone uses the term, is surely a proper subset): it's something that involves an ontologically basic mental entity. We have no reason to suspect the existence of such things, and the simulation argument -- since it certainly does not appeal to such things -- doesn't change that a bit. Any resemblance to theism is superficial at most.
I'd also be curious to know what popular arguments for atheism you happen to think are so much weaker than you'd expected.
EDIT: ignore that last question if you like, I'm getting a sense for it elsewhere in the thread (though do not really agree).
Carrier's definition of supernaturalism as non-reductionist explanations involving ontologically basic mental entities is something of a strawman argument and makes the term somewhat useless. (ie it is not the definition many theists would even argue)
The more typical definition of supernaturalism usually refers to events that operate outside of the normal laws of physics. This definition is potentially relevant to simulationism, because a simulator would of course be free to occasionally intervene and violate normal physical 'law' if so desired. Of course, this entity itself would still be reducible to simpler physical processes in it's own universe.
But what does that even mean? How are the "normal" laws of physics distinguished from the actual laws of physics?
The normal laws of physics being those that predict the universe absent interventions from said external universe, which may include some extraneous special case code.
The same physics could describe the whole system of course at some deeper level, so perhaps 'normal' was not quite the right distinction. Limited?
I don't think the implications of accepting the simulation argument on one's worldview are that similar to believing in a supernatural omniscient creator of the universe and arbiter of morality. Absent a ready label for "one who accepts the simulation argument in a naturalistic framework," it's probably more convenient for such people to simply identify as "atheist." Conflating simulationism with theism is only liable to lead to confusion.
Voted up and agreed; I often forget that Less Wrong is rightly conscientious about keeping inferential distances imposed by terminological suboptimality to a minimum.
This observation dissolves your post. If you agree with it then repent properly, o' sinner.
It doesn't really dissolve what I was actually trying to get at with my post, though; it just means I didn't do a good job at explaining what I was getting at. How do rationalists repent? I have karma to burn...
I'd say they repent by updating their beliefs, and cleaning up the debris left by their old ones. This is rather similar for rationalists and non-rationalists alike really. Kind of like apologizing for stealing the candy from the drugstore and promising to pay it back..
Hm, that's not a particularly natural fit here... the only beliefs I'd be updating are beliefs about what styles of communication should be normative. Still, it's my style to treat ontological disagreement as a big deal, so I'll update accordingly.
How low a percentage does one need to assign a claim in order to declare it to be closed? I'd assign around a 5% chance that there exists something approximating God (using this liberally to include the large variety of entities which fall under that label). I suspect that my probability estimate is higher than many people on LW. (Tangent: I recently had a discussion with an Orthodox Jewish friend about issues related to Bayesianism, and he was surprised that I assigned the idea that high a probability. In his view, if he didn't have faith and had to assign a probability he said it might be orders of magnitude lower.) So how low a probability do we need to estimate before we consider something closed?
Moreover, how much attention should we pay to apologetics in general? We know that theology and apologetics are areas that have spent thousands of years of memetic evolution to be as dangerous as possible. They take almost every little opportunity to exploit the flaws in human cognition. Apologetic arguments aren't (generally) basilisk level, but they can take a large amount of cognitive resources to understand where they are wrong. After 10 or 15 of them, how much effort do we need to spend seeing if # 16 (variation of first cause argument number 8) is worth spending resources investigation? Also, given that there's a vibrant subset of the internet that is dedicated to handling just this question and related issues, why should LW be the forum for handling the issue?
There's a related issue: humans are overactive agent recognizers. We love to see patterns where none exist and see intelligence in random action. Theism fits with deep-seated human intuitions. In contrast, MWI, simulationism and full-scale Tegmark all clash strongly with human intuition. They may seem weird, but the weirdness may not be a product of evidential issues but rather that they clash with human intuitions. So putting them in the same category as religion may be misleading.
Incidentally, I'm curious, would you similarly object if LW said explicitly that homeopathy was a closed subject? What about evolution? Star formation? If these are different, why are they different?
Perhaps a question becomes a closed issue not when the probability of the belief reaches a certain point, but when our estimate of the probability of the belief changing reaches a certain threshold. A fair coin is heads 50% of the time, and my probability won't change. That's a closed question. I may be fairly confident about the modern theory of star formation, but I wouldn't be too surprised if a new theory added some new details. So it's not a closed subject.
I can imagine no evidence that would lead me to believe in something nonfalsifiable. Theism is a closed subject.
This comment is brilliant. In particular, I'd really really love to see two top level posts covering:
...and...
Both really fascinating insights, I'd love to read more. Especially the first one about memetic evolution to be dangerous - I wonder what various secular social and societal memes fit in similarly.
I am interested in why you want to call simulation arguments, Tegmark cosmology, and Singularitarianism theism. I don't doubt there is a reference class that includes common-definition theistic beliefs as well as these beliefs; I do doubt whether that reference class is useful or desirable. At that point of broadness I feel like you're including certain competing theories of physics in the class 'theism'.
So I propose a hypothetical. Say LessWrong accepts this, and begins referring to these concepts as theistic, and renouncing their atheism if their Tegmarkian cosmological beliefs are stronger. What positive and what negative consequences do you expect from this?
I think this is an interesting question! If rationalists speculated about the origin of the universe, what would they come up with? What if 15 rationalists made up a think-tank and were charged to speculate about the origin of the universe and assign probabilities to speculations? It would be a grievous mistake to begin with the hypothesis of theism, but could they end up with it on their list, with some non-negligible probability?
I don't think so. The main premise of the theistic religions is that an entity (a person? a mind?) created us and that this entity is like a person and like a parent: it chose to create us (agency), wants the best for us, and authoritatively defines what is good behavior. This is too obviously an artifact of human psychology. Being children with parents is such an important part of our biology it's certainly going to be an important component of our psychology. (Don't various psychological theories claim that 'growing up' means internalizing the authority of parents as part of our psyche?)
The simulation hypothesis? This is also an anthropomorphic, privileged hypothesis, but with the advantage of being quite possible. So humans could do it or could have done it. (Being human, they could do something anthropomorphic like that.) But the rationalists in my think-tank aren't charged with the probability of the simulation hypothesis. Deciding we might be in a simulation only pushes the question further out -- what's the origin of the universe that's simulating the others?
Given how 'weird' it must be to create* the universe (to create everything), I think we must decide that this creator is outside our comprehension. This creator (agent or thing or mechanism) not only created everything, it contains the explanation for why there is anything at all rather than nothing, and what 'something' and 'nothing' even mean.
I think that the rationalists would come out of their conference with the conclusion that any adjectives that have ever been used to describe the creator -- omniscient, benevolent, omnipotent; or even 'agenty' don't make any sense in the context of such a thing.
In particular, it seems just silly to be concerned about whether this thing has a 'mind'. What would it do with this mind? Other than create the universe, exactly as it has done / been doing. It seems like a mind is useful thing humans have to think through stuff and make decisions. To make computations about causality given limited information. A mind would be irrelevant outside causality and information. Probably 'intention' would be too, so that challenges 'agency'.
... I can't think of anything interesting that the rationalists could even apply, speculatively, to the entity: creator that would make any sense.
* Even 'creation' doesn't make sense outside of time, but I mean the 'mechanism' at whatever level of abstraction that would explain the universe to a mind that could understand it.
I'll develop my thoughts about not being able to sensibly apply the description 'agenty' to the creator because wondering why agency should be a key question is what originally motivated my above comment.
You can search 'agenty' and find many comments on this page that discuss whether we should speculate that the creator has agency. I found myself wondering throughout these comments what is specifically being meant by this. If the creator is 'agenty', what properties must it have and are those properties necessarily interesting?
I could probably look around and find a definition I would like better, but my definition of 'agenty' when I first start thinking about it is that this has meaning in a specifically human context.
Broadly, something 'agenty' is something that makes decisions according to a complex decision tree algorithm. This is a human-context-specific definition because "complex" means relative to what we consider complex. A mammal makes complex decisions and thus is 'agenty' while a simple process like water makes simple decisions (described by a small number of equations and the properties of the immediate physical space) and is not agenty. A complex inanimate thing (like 'evolution') and a simple animate thing (like a virus) would give us pause, straining our immediate, concrete conception of agency.
I'm willing to say that evolution has agency (it has goals -- long term stable solutions -- and complicated ways of achieving these goals) and water has simple agency. This because in my opinion what was really meant when we made the agency dichotomy between humans and water is that humans have free will and water doesn't. But finally with a deterministic world view, this distinction dissolves. Humans have as much agency as anything else, but our decision algorithm is very complex to us, whereas we can often reliably predict what water will do.
Then to apply this concept of agency to the mechanism of creation of the universe... All the rules and steady states of the universe could be interpreted as its 'intentions' and, as such, it would have very complex agency. Another person may have a different set of meanings that they associate with agency, intention, etc., and consider this a terrible anthropomorphism if my words were mapped to their meanings. However, I don't think it reflects an actual difference in beliefs about the territory.
If someone reading this has a different ontology, what would you specifically mean by the creator having agency, if it did?
I'm technically some kind of theist, because I believe this world is likely to be a simulation (although I don't believe it in my gut). I tell people I'm an atheist because telling them the more-accurate truth, that I am a theist, conveys negative information because of how they inevitably interpret it.
It's a reasonable thing to point out: Why do LWers criticize theism so heavily when they may be theists?
There's a confusion caused because our usage of the term doesn't distinguish between "theist re. this universe I'm in" and "theist for the root universe". Possibly because there may be no one in the latter category, who both believes in multiple levels of simulated universes, and that the original root universe was created by a deity.
Which definition is more usable (makes more distinctions about how you should act depending on whether you are a theist): Theist for this universe, or theist for root universe?
Considering whether your current universe was made by a god might seem to have more impact on your behavior. But considering whether the root universe was made by a god might have more impact on your philosophy and ethics.
Well, agents pretty much tend to be complicated things that need to be explained in terms of more basic things. So if some sort of agent in some sense deliberately created our world... that agent still wouldn't be the most fundamental thing, it would need to be explained in terms of more basic principles. Somewhere along the line there'd have to be "simple math" or such. (Even if somehow you could have an infinite hierarchy of agents, then the basic math type explanation would have to explain/predict the hierarchy of agents.)
As far as "whatever translates to immortal soul", we pretty much mostly know that. We don't know the details of how it works, but we know that it amounts to physical/computational processes in the brain". (Less immortal than we'd like, but that's what we need to do something about.)
Even if an agenty process created our world, how does that alter this fact? It may influence some details (like if there is such an agenty process, we need to work out just how much of a threat that process/being is (and various other details) and thus deal with it accordingly, of course).
However, does our world ultimately look like it's primarily generated via agenty processes or by mindless processes?
To a non-scientifically-literate person, I might say that I think electrons exist as material objects, whereas to a physicist I would invoke Tegmark's idea that all that exist are mathematical structures.
One way to make sense of this is to think about humanity as a region in mind space, with yourself and your listener as points in that region. The atheist who hasn't heard about Bostrom/Tegmark yet is sitting between you and your listener, and you're just using atheism as a convenient landmark while trying to point your listener in your general direction.
Why do you say that? I don't think anyone has gone mad or otherwise suffered really bad consequences from thinking about Bostrom/Tegmark-like ideas... (Umm, I guess some people had nightmares after hearing about Roko's idea, but still, it doesn't seem that bad overall.)
I meant that a lot of arguments about what kinds of objectives a creator god might have, for example, would be very tricky to do right, with lots of appeals to difficult-to-explain Occamian intuitions. Maybe this is me engaging in typical mind fallacy though, and others would not have this problem. People going crazy is a whole other problem. Currently people don't think very hard about cosmology or decision theory or what not. I think this might be a good thing, considering how crazy the Roko thing was.
I see. I think at this point we should be trying to figure out how to answer such questions in principle with the view of eventually handing off the task of actually answering them to an FAI, or just our future selves augmented with much stronger theoretical understanding of what constitute correct answers to these questions. Arguing over the answers now, with our very limited understanding of the principles involved, based on our "Occamian intuitions", does not seem like a good use of time. Do you agree?
It seems that people build intuitions about how general super-high-level philosophy is supposed to be done by examining their minds as their minds examine specific super-high-level philosophical problems. I guess the difference is that in one case you have an explicit goal of being very reflective on the processes by which you're doing philosophical reasoning, whereas the sort of thing I'm talking about in my post doesn't imply a goal of understanding how we're trying to understand cosmology (for example). So yes I agree that arguing over the answers is probably a waste of time, but arguing over which ways of approaching answers is justified seems to be very fruitful. (I'm not really saying anything new here, I know -- most of Less Wrong is about applying cognitive science to philosophy.)
As a side note, it seems intuitively obvious that Friendliness philosophers and decision theorists should try and do what Tenenbaum and co. do when trying to figure out what Bayesian algorithms their brains might be approximating in various domains, sometimes via reflecting on those algorithms in action. Training this skill on toy problems (like the work computational cognitive scientists have already done) in order to get a feel for how to do similar reflection on more complicated algorithms/intuitions (like why this or that way of slicing up decision theoretic policies into probabilities and utilities seems natural, for instance) seems like a potentially promising way to train our philosophical power.
I think we agree that debating e.g. what sorts of game theoretic interactions between AIs would likely result in them computing worlds like ours is probably a fool's endeavor insofar as we hope to get precise/accurate answers in themselves and not better intuitions about how to get an AI to do similar reasoning.
The listener in this case being a theist you're trying to explain your epistemic position to, I assume. (It took me a moment to figure out the context.)
Possibly related: "(Hugh) Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from manic depression and committed suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father" (via rwallace).
My gut feeling is the causal flow goes "manic depression -> suicide, alternate universes" rather than "alternate universes -> manic depression -> suicide".
Honestly, I wouldn't be that sure. On this very site I've seen people say their reason for signing up for cryonics was their belief in MWI.
It would not surprise me if "suicide -> hell" decreases the overall number of suicides and "suicide -> anthropic principle leaves you in other universes" increases the overall number of suicides.
Really? What's the reasoning there (if you remember)?
The post is here. The reasoning as written is:
My comments on the subject (having cut out the tree debating MWI) can be found here.