= 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)
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.
What about those few of us who don't believe that the Simulation Argument is most probably true ? Don't get me wrong, it could be true, I just don't see any evidence to suppose that it is.
On that note, I always understood the word "theism" to mean "gods exist, and they interfere in the workings of our Universe in detectable ways". Isn't someone who believes in entirely unfalsifiable gods functionally equivalent to an atheist ?
If I believe in unfalsifiable gods who prefer that I behave in certain ways (though they do not provide me with any evidence of that preference), and I value the preferences of those gods enough to change my behavior accordingly, then I will behave differently than if I do not believe in those gods or do not value their preferences.
That alone would make Dave-the-atheist not functionally equivalent to Dave-the-theist-without-evidence, wouldn't it?
Technically, yes, but atheists also behave differently from each other, for all kinds of reasons. If Dave-the-theist truly believes that his gods are unfalsifiable, then he probably won't be seeking to convert others to his faith (since attempting to do so would be futile by definition). At that point, he's just like any atheist with an opinion.
Why does the unfalsifiability of god show that believers won't proselytize?
A truly unfalsifiable god does not, by definition, provide any evidence of its existence. Thus, there's no "good news" to be spread, since a world with the god in it looks exactly the same as a world with the god.
Sure there is. For example, the Good News might be "God will reward those who worship him as follows: {blah blah blah} after they die." Unfalsifiable, but certainly good to know if true.
The fact that you demand evidence before adopting such a belief is of no particular interest to Dave-the-theist-without-evidence.
This is a falsifiable claim, assuming that we have some evidence of the afterlife. If we have no such evidence, then, in order for this to count as good news, the theist would first have to convince me that there's an afterlife.
In the absence of evidence, how is he going to convince anyone that his unfalsifiable belief is true ?
Agreed that given evidence of the afterlife, it's a falsifiable claim, and lacking such evidence it's unfalsifiable.
I know of no such evidence, so I conclude it's unfalsifiable.
Do you know of any such evidence?
If not, do you also conclude that it's unfalsifiable?
What you seem to be implying is that there exist no (or negligible numbers of) people in the real world who can be convinced of claims for which there is no evidence, which is demonstrably false. Are you in fact asserting that, or am I completely misunderstanding you?
Yes, I conclude that most kinds of afterlife are unfalsifiable. Some are falsifiable, but they are in the minority: for example, if your religion claims that the dead occasionally haunt the living from beyound the grave, that's a falsifiable claim.
Sort of. I would agree with this sentence as it is stated, with the caveat that what most people see as "evidence", and what you and I see as "evidence", are probably two different things. To use a crude example, most Creationists believe that the complexity of the natural world is evidence for God's involvement in its creation. Many theists believe that the feelings and emotions they experience after (or during) prayer are caused by their gods' explicit response to the prayer, which is also a kind of evidence.
Sure, you and I would probably discount these things as cognitive biases (well, I know I would), but that's beside the point; what matters here is that the theist thinks that the evidence is there, and thus his gods are falsifiable. When theists proselytize, they often use these kinds of evidence to convert people.
By contrast, someone who believes in an explicitly unfalsifiable god would not attribute any effects (mental or physical) to its existence, and thus does not have a workable way to convince others. The best he could say is, "you should believe as I do because it's a neat self-improvement technique", or something to that extent.
(shrug) Sure, if we expand the meaning of "evidence" to include things we don't consider evidence, then I agree that my earlier statement becomes false.
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?
(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.
There was already a thread on this. The general consensus seems to be that it isn't practical, if possible.
Hmm from my reading of the thread it doesn't look like much of a consensus.
I may want to revive this - the arguments against practicality don't seem convincing from an engineering perspective.
From a high quality upload's scanned mind one should get a great deal of information about the upload's closest friends, relatives, etc. The data from any one such upload many not be overwhelming, but you'd start with a large population of such uploads. People who were well known and loved would be easier cases, but you could also supplement the data in many cases with low-quality scans from poorly preserved bodies.
This should give one prior generation. Going back another previous generation would get murkier, but is still quite possible, especially with all the accessory historical records.
The farther back you go, the less 'accurate' the uploads become, but the less and less important this 'accuracy' becomes.
For example, assuming I become a posthuman, I will be interested in bring back my grandfather. There a huge space of possible minds that could match my limited knowledge and beliefs about this person I never met. Each of them would fully be my grandfather from my subjective perspective and would fully be my grandfather from their subjective perspective.
There is no objective standard frame of reference from which to evaluate absolute claims of personal identity. It is relative.
But if you simulate anything other than the actual brain states of the people in question, then they won't behave in exactly the same way. No matter how many other people's knowledge of me you integrate, for example, you won't have the data to predict what I'll eat for breakfast tomorrow with any accuracy (because I almost invariably eat breakfast alone.) Tiny differences like this will quickly propagate to create much larger ones between the simulation and the reality. Jump forward a few generations and you have zero population overlap between the new generation of the simulation and the next generation that was born in reality. If you're attempting historical recreation, this would be a pretty useless way to go about it.
If you wanted to create a simulation that was an approximation of a particular historical period at one point, but quickly divorced from it as it ran forward, that would be much more plausible, but why would you want to? Everything I can think of that could be accomplished in such a way could more easily be accomplished by doing something else.
Sure, but that's not relevant towards the goal. There are no 'actual' or exact brain states that canonically define people.
If you created a simulation of an alternate 1950 and ran it forward, it would almost certainly diverge, but this is no different than alternate branches of the multiverse. Running the alternate forward to say 2050 may generate a very different reality, but that may not matter much - as long as it also generates a bunch of variants of people we like.
This brings to mind a book by Heinlein about a man who starts jumping around between branches - "Job: a comedy of Justice".
Anyway, my knowledge of my grandfather is vague. But I imagine posthumans could probably nail down his DNA and eventually recreate a very plausible 1890 (around when he was born). We could also nail down a huge set of converging probability estimates from the historical record to figure out where he was when, what he was likely to have read, and so on.
Creating an initial population of minds is probably much trickier. Is there any way to create a fully trained neural net other than by actually training it? I suspect that it's impossible in principle. It's certainly the case in practice today.
In fact, there may be no simple shortcut without going way way back into earlier prehistory, but this is not a fundamental obstacle, as this simulation could presumably be a large public project.
Yes the approach of just creating some initial branch from scratch and then running it forward is extremely naive. If you'd like I could think of ten vastly more sophisticated algorithms that could shape the branch's forward evolution to converge with the main future worldline before breakfast.
The first thing that pops to mind: The historical data that we have forms a very sparse sampling, but we could use it to guide the system's forward simulation, with the historical data acting as constraints and attractors. In these worlds, fate would be quite real. I think this gives you the general idea, but it relates to bidirectional path tracing.
Such as?
We can get to that if you can establish that there's any good reason to do it in the first place.
Your justifications for running such simulations have so far seem to hinge on things we could learn from them (or simply creating them for their own sake, it appears that you're jumping between the two,) but if we know enough about the past to meaningfully create the simulations, then there's not much we stand to learn from making them. Yes, history could have branched in different ways depending on different events that could have occurred, we already know that. If you try to calculate all the possibilities as they branch off, you'll quickly run out of computing power no matter how advanced your civilization is. If you want to do calculations of the most likely outcomes of a certain event, you don't have to create a simulation so advanced that it appears to be a real universe from the inside to do that.
Excellent!
The two are intertwined - we can learn a great deal from our history and ancestors while simultaneous valuing it for other reasons than the learning.
Thinking is just a particular form of approximate simulation. Simulation is a very precise form of thinking.
Right now all we know about our history is the result of taking a small collection of books and artifacts and then thinking alot about them.
Why do we write books about Roman History and debate what really happened? Why do we make television shows or movies out of it?
Consider this just the evolution of what we already do today, for much of the same reasons, but amplified by astronomical powers of increased intelligence/computation generating thought/simulation.
This is what we call a naive algorithm, the kind you don't publish.
Calculations of the likely outcomes of certain events are the mental equivalents of thermostat operations - they are the types of things you do and think about when you lack hyperintelligence.
Eventually you want a nice canonical history. Not a book, not a movie, but the complete data set and recreation. As it is computed it exists, eventually perhaps you merge it back into the main worldline, perhaps not, and once done and completed you achieve closure.
Put another way, there is a limit where you can know absolutely every conceivable thing there is to know about your history, and this necessitates lots of massively super-detailed thinking about it - aka simulation.
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."
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.
Would you like to address your point of view on what the impact is in both cases, or link to relevant discussion? Is it "be on the lookout for miracles"? Why wouldn't we just do our business as usual being in a simulation as opposed to being in a "root universe"?
I don't mean that it has to do with which universe we are in. A lot of people believe, for reasons which have never been clear to me, that if a God created the universe, then that God's opinions have special moral status. I was presuming that that God does not have special moral status if it had been created by another God, or through evolution. But I don't know what Christians would say. Possibly they would refuse to consider the scenario.
Think about it from a slightly different perspective: the claim is that the universe has morality baked into it -- God created such a universe that moral laws are the same as laws of physics. In other words, the claim is that morality is objective and is embedded in reality. It's not an "opinion" at all.
In Christainity (or Judaism, or Islam) God cannot have been created (by somebody else of through evolution). In theology that's one of the biggest differences between God and the world -- one is uncreated and one is created.
They should refuse. Asking wrong questions has been a temptation by the Devil since the times of the original sin. A good Christian should know when to stop.
If God created the universe, then that's some evidence that He knows a lot. Not overwhelming evidence, since some models of creation might not require of the creator to know much.
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.
I've run into problems with "naturalist" with people thinking that it means I support organic farming, or alternative medicine, or similar things that tend to get marketed with the adjective "natural".
I've had better luck with "materialist", though that also has some pop-culture implications that I'm not trying to express.
Yeah, I avoid "materialist" for that reason. I usually go with "physicalist" for that sort of thing (or "reductionist" if I'm talking to someone who I think won't immediately misinterpret it).
Yeah, "physicalist" is good, I may have to start using that.
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?
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.
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?
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.
"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
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.
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.)
"Powerful aliens" has connotations that may be even more inaccurate; it makes me think of Klingon warlords or something.
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.
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.
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?
tl;dr - If you're going to equate morality with taste, understand that when we measure either of the two, taking agents into the process is a huge fact we can't leave out
I'll be upfront about having not read Sam Harris' book yet, though I did read the blog review to get a general idea. Nonetheless, I take issue with the following point:
I've found that an objective truth about the best flavor of ice cream can be found if one figures out which disguised query they're after. (Am I looking for "If I had to guess, what would random person z's favorite flavor of ice cream be, with no other information?" or am I looking for something else).
This attempt at making morality too subjective to measure by relating it to taste has always bothered me because people always ignore a main factor here: agents should be part of our computation. When I want to know what flavor of ice cream is best, I take into account people's preferences. If I want to know what would be the most moral action, I need to take into account it's effects on people (or myself, should I be a virtue ethicist, or how it aligns with my rules, should I be a deontologist). Admittedly the latter is tougher than the former, but that doesn't mean we have no hoped of dealing with it objectively. It just means we have to do the best we can with what we're given, which may mean a lot of individual subjectivity.
In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes about studying the subjective as objectively as possible when he decides on the three premises for understanding happiness: 1] Using imperfect tools sucks, but it's better than no tools. 2] An honest, real-time insider view is going to be more accurate than our current best outside views. 3] Abuse the law of real numbers to get around the imperfections of 1] and 2] (a.k.a measure often)
I perhaps should have elaborated more, or think through my objection to Harris more clearly, but in essence I believe the problem is not that of finding an objective morality given people's preferences, it's objectively determining what people's preferences should be.
There is an objective best ice cream flavor given a certain person's mind, but can we say some minds are objectively more correct on the matter of preferring the best ice cream flavor?
My attempt at a universal objective morality might take some maximization of value given our current preferences and then evolve it into the future, maximizing over some time window. Perhaps you need to extend that time window to the very end. This would lead to some form of cosmism - directing everything towards some very long term universal goal.
This post was clearer than your original, and I think we agree more here than we did before, which may partially be an issue of communication styles/methods/etc.
This I agree with, but it's more for the gut response of "I don't trust people to determine other people's values." I wonder if the latter could be handled objectively, but I'm not sure I'd trust humans to do it.
My reflex response to this question was "No" followed by "Wait, wouldn't I weight humans minds much more significantly than raccoons if I was figuring out human preferences?" Which I then thought through and latched on "Agents still matter; if I'm trying to model "best ice cream flavor to humans", I give the rough category of "human-minds" more weight than other minds. Heck, I hardly have a reason to include such minds, and instrumentally they will likely be detrimental. So in that particular generalization, we disagree, but I'm getting the feeling we agree here more than I had guessed.
We already have to deal with this when we raise children. Western societies generally favor granting individuals great leeway in modifying their preferences and shaping the preferences of their children. We also place much less value on the children's immediate preferences. But even this freedom is not absolute.
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.
You're right, I completely agree with the above in terms of the theism/deism distinction. The SA supports deism while allowing for theism but leaving it as an open question. My term "broad theism" meant to include theism & deism. Perhaps that category already has a term, not quite sure.
I find the SA has much stronger support - Tegmark requires the additional belief that other physical universes exist for which we can never possibly find evidence for against.
Some fraction of simulations probably have creators who desire some form of worship/deference, the SA turns this into a question of frequency or probability. I of course expect that worship-desiring creators are highly unlikely. Regardless, worship is not a defining characteristic of theism.
I see it as the other way around. The SA gives us a reasonable structure within which to (re)-evaluate theism.
How could we find evidence of the universe simulating our own, if we are in a simulation? They're both logical arguments, not empirical ones.
I really don't see what is so desirable about theism that we ought to define it to line up near-perfectly with the simulation argument in order to use it and related terminology. Any rhetorical scaffolding for dealing with Creators that theists have built up over the centuries is dripping with the negative connotations I referenced earlier. What net advantage do we gain by using it?
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.
Yes, I should have been more careful with my language. Thanks for pointing it out. Edited.
In quick approximation, what was this conclusion?
That terminal values are like axioms, not like theorems. That is, they're the things without which you cannot actually ask the question, "Is this true?"
You can say or write the words "Is", "this", and "true" without having axioms related to that question somewhere in your mind, of course, but you can't mean anything coherent by the sentence. Someone who asks, "Why terminal value A rather than terminal value B?" and expects (or gives) an answer other than "Because of terminal value A, obviously!"* is confused.
*That's assuming that A really is a terminal value of the person's moral system. It could be an instrumental value; people have been known to hold false beliefs about their own minds.
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.
Just be careful of true believers that may condemn you for heresy for using the other tribe's jargon! ;)
'Worship' or 'Elder Rituals' could not be reasonably construed as a relevant reply to your thread.
Eliezer is trying to define theism to mean religion, I think, so that atheism is still a defensible state of belief. I guess I'm okay with this, but it makes me sad to lose what I saw as a perfectly good word.
Strongly agree. Better to avoid synonyms when possible. 'Simulationism' is ugly and doesn't seem sufficiently general in the way 'theism' does.
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.
Also I should note that by 'intelligence' I mostly meant 'predisposition to say insightful or truthful things', which is rather different from g.
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.
There's a serious problem with this in Christianity in that you have to figure out what the founder actual said in the first place, which is very much an open problem concerning Christianity (and perhaps Bhuddism as well but I am less familiar with it at the moment).
For example, just this century with the rediscovery of the Gospel of Thomas you get a whole new set of information which is .. challenging to integrate to say the least, and also very interesting.
About half of the sayings are different (usually earlier, better) versions of stuff already in the synoptics, but there are some new gems - check out 22:
Or 108:
Those are certainly things that weren't in the bible before that people would have put a lot of work into interpreting if they had been, but "gems" is not the word I'd use.
Point taken. I was thinking of number of adherents.
Theres also the opportunity for a kind of metatheology- which might lead to some really interesting insights into humans and how they relate to the world.
I think Ben from TakeOnIt put it well:
There's definitely something deeply appealing about theistic language. That's what makes it so dangerous.
That advice makes sense for general audiences. Your average Christian might read a version of the Simulation argument written with theistic language as an endorsement of their beliefs. But I really doubt posters here would.
Frank Tipler actually produced a simulation argument as an endorsement of Christian belief. Along with some interesting cosmology making it possible for this universe to simulate itself! (It's easy when the accessible quantity of computronium tends to infinity as the age of the universe approaches its limit.) In Tipler's theory, God may not exist yet, but a kind of Singularity will create Him.
Of course, the average Christian has not yet heard of Tipler, nor would said Christian accept the endorsement. But it is out there.
One issue I've never understood about Tipler is how he got from theism to Christianity using the Omega Point argument. It seems very similar to the SMBC cartoon Eliezer already linked to. Tipler's argument is a plausibility argument for maybe, something, sort of like a deity if you squint at it. Somehow that then gives rise to Christianity with the theology along with it.
It's worth pointing out that we now know that the universe's expansion is accelerating, which would rule out the omega point even if it were plausible before.
IIRC, Tipler had that covered. A universe of infinite duration allows us to use eons of future time to simulate a single second of time in the current era. Something like the hotel with infinitely many rooms.
But please don't ask me to actually defend Tipler's mumbo-jumbo.
I don't think it can be defended any more. I picked it up a few weeks ago, read a few chapters, and thought, do I want to read any more given that he requires the universe to be closed? Dark energy would seem to forbid a Big Crunch and render even the early parts of his model moot.
Sweet! Wikipedia's image for Physical Cosmology, including your Dark Energy link, is the cosmic microwave background map from the WMAP mission. That was the first mission I worked with NASA. My job, as junior-underling attitude control engineer, was to come up with some way to salvage the medium cost, medium-risk mission if a certain part failed, and to help babysit the spacecraft during the least fun midnight-to-noon shift. Still, it feels good to have been a tiny part of something that has made a difference in how we understand our universe.
Disclaimer: My unofficial opinions, not NASA's. Blah, blah, blah.
I think you duplicated my post.
How does he get from there to Christianity in particular?
I'm not sure. I only read the first book - "Physics of Immortality". But I would suppose that he doesn't actually try to prove the truth of Christianity - he might be satisfied to simply make Christian doctrine seem less weird and impossible.
If you are assuming infinite computronium you may as well go ahead and assume simulation of all of the conceivable religions!
I suppose that leaves you in a position of Pascal's Gang Mugging.
That's basically Hindu theology in a nutshell. Or more accurately, Pascal's Gang Maybe Mugging Maybe Hugging.
If you assume a Tegmark multiverse — that all definable entities actually exist — then it seems to follow that:
All malicious deprivation — some mind recognizing another mind's definable possible pleasure, and taking steps to deny that mind's pleasure — implies the actual existence of the pleasure it is intended to deprive;
All benevolent relief — some mind recognizing another mind's definable possible suffering, and taking steps to alleviate that suffering — implies the actual existence of the suffering it is intended to relieve.
Since religions are human inventions, I would guess that any comprehensive simulation program already produces all conceivable religions.
But I'm guessing that you meant to talk about the simulation of all conceivable gods. That is another matter entirely. Even with unlimited computronium, you can only simulate possible gods - gods not entailing any logical contradictions. There may not be any such gods.
This doesn't affect Tipler's argument though. Tipler does not postulate God as simulated. Tipler postulates God as the simulator.
Here's a direct comparison of the two that I made.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
If creating a whole universe is possible, then some entity would do it a lot, so there are probably a lot more creations out there than "basement realities", so we're probably in a creation.
Luckily for the preservation of my atheism, I don't find the 'anthropic argument' for the simulation good. And I put the scare quotes there, because I don't think this is what is usually known as an anthropic argument.
I've argued rather extensively against religion on this website. Name a single one of those arguments which is equally effective against simulationism.
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.
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?
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.
People might say that, but they don't actually believe it. They're just trying to obfuscate the fact that they believe something insane.
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?
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
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 think that is usually called Patternicity these days. See:
Seeing patterns in noise and agency in patterns (especially fate) is probably a large factor in religious belief.
But what I was referring to by pattern matching was something different. Our cultural ideas about the world make lots of patterns, and there are natural ways to complete these patterns. When you hear the completion of these patterns, it can feel very correct, like something you already knew, or especially profound if it pulls together lots of memes.
For example, the Matrix is an idea that resonates with our culture. Everyone believes it on some level, or can relate to the world being like that. The movie was popular but the meme wasn't the result of the movie -- the meme was already there and the movie made it explicit and gave the idea a convenient handle. Human psychology plays a role. The Matrix as a concept has probably always been found in stories as a weak collective meme, but modern technology brought it more immediately and uniformly in our collective awareness.
I think religion is like that. A story that wrote itself from all the loose ends of what we already believe. Religious leaders are good at feeling and completing these collective patterns. Religion is probably in trouble because many of the memes are so anachronistic now. They survive to the extent that the ideas are based on psychology but the other stuff creates dissonance.
This isn't something to reference (I'm sure there are zillions of books developing this) or a personal theory, it's more or less a typical view about religion. It explains why there are so many religions differing in details (different things sounded good to different people) but with common threads. (Because the religions evolved together with overlapping cultures and reflect our common psychology.)
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.
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.
"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?
My thought was that the post linked in the grandparent argues that we should prefer logically simpler theories but not penalize theories just because they posit unobservable entities, and that some simple theories predict the existence of a simulator.
Yes, the possibility of simulations is taken as a premise of the simulation argument; if you doubt it, then it makes sense to doubt the simulation argument as well.
Perhaps we are using the word "simple" in different ways. Bostrom's assumption is the existence of an entity who wishes to simulate human minds in a way that convinces them that they exist in a giant expanding universe rather than a simulation. How is that "simple"? And, more to the point raised by the OP, how is it simpler than the notion of a Creator who created the universe so as to have some company "in His image and likeness".
Bostrom is saying that if advanced civilizations have access to enormous amounts of computing power and for some reason want to simulate less-advanced civilizations, then we should expect that we're in one of the simulations rather than basement-level reality, because the simulations are more numerous. The simulator isn't an arbitrarily tacked-on detail; rather, it follows from other assumptions about future technologies and anthropic reasoning. These other assumptions might be denied: perhaps simulations are impossible, or maybe anthropic reasoning doesn't work that way---but they seem more plausible and less gerrymandered than traditional theism.
Have you read the paper? I'm not convinced of it for a few reasons, but I'd consider it located at least.
Yes, I had read Bostrom's paper.
I would express my opinion of that argument using less litotes. But as to locating the hypotheses, I suppose I agree.
Which leads me to ask, have you read the catechism? Like most Catholic schoolchildren, I was encouraged to memorize much of it in elementary school, though I have since forgotten almost all of it. It also locates one hypothesis, a hypothesis considerably more popular than Bostrom's.
My new word of the day. It's not a bad one!
(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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
We observe a lack of evidence of contradictions in the concept of god; and absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Of course the FWD increases our probability for God if we accept it; what else could it possibly do, decrease it? The most charitable interpretation I can put on your comment is that you are confusedly saying 'yes, but it doesn't increase it by much' when I'm pointing out that 'it increases by some non-zero amount, however modest that amount may be'.
Okay, I see what you mean. Thanks for clarifying!
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.
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.
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.
You say that you can't imagine evidence that would cause you to believe in something nonfalsifiable. But then seem to apply that the theism in general. I'm curious. If say, almost all the evangelical Christians in the world disappeared along with all the world's children, would you not assign a substantial probability to the Rapture having just taken place?
Fair point. Some religions make falsifiable claims.
But my point still stands. I assign a low probability to the rapture happening -- even lower than there being a xian God, so I don't put much weight into the idea my religious beliefs will change. The people who take the rapture seriously do so because they also believe in nonfalsifiable things.