Save your charity for where it's useful: disputes where the other side actually has a chance of being right (or at least informing you of something that's worth being informed of).
From my vantage point, you seem positively fixated on wanting to extract something of value from traditional human religions ("theism"). This is about as quixotic as it's possible to get. Down that road lies madness, as Eliezer would say.
You seem to be exemplifying my theory that people simply cannot stomach the notion that there could be an entire human institution, a centuries-old corpus of traditions and beliefs, that contains essentially zero useful information. Surely religion can't be all wrong, can it? Yes, actually, it can -- and it is.
It's not that there never was anything worth learning from theists, it's just that by this point, everything of value has already been inherited by our intellectual tradition (from the time when everyone was a theist) and is now available in a suitably processed, relevant, non-theistic form. The juice has already been squeezed.
For example, while speaking of God and monads, Leibniz invented calculus and foreshadowed digital computing. Nowadays, although we don't go around doing monadology or theodicy, we continue to hold Leibniz in high regard because of the integral sign and computers. This is what it looks like when you learn from theists.
And if you're going to persist in being charitable to people who continue to adhere to the biggest epistemic mistakes of yesteryear, why stop at mere theism? Why not young-earth creationism? Why not seek out the best arguments of the smartest homeopaths? Maybe this guy has something to teach us, with his all-encompassing synthesis of the world's religious traditions. Maybe I should be more charitable to his theory that astrology proves that Amanda Knox is guilty. Don't laugh -- he's smart enough to write grammatical sentences and present commentary on political events that is as coherent as that offered by anyone else!
My aim here is not (just) to tar-and-feather you with low-status associations. The point is that there is a whole universe of madness out there. Charity has its limits. Most hypotheses aren't even worth the charity of being mentioned. I can't understand why you're more interested in the discourse of theism than in the discourse of astrology, unless it's because (e.g.) Christianity remains a more prestigious belief system in our current general society than astrology. And if that's the case, you're totally using the wrong heuristic to find interesting and important ideas that have a chance of being true or useful.
To find the correct contrarian cluster, start with the correct cluster.
This sounds like a nitpick but I think it's actually very central to the discussion: things that are not even wrong can't be wrong. (That's not obviously true; elsewhere in this thread I talk about coding theory and Kraft's inequality and heuristics and biases and stuff as making the question very contentious, but the main idea is not obviously wrong.) Thus much or spirituality and theology can't be wrong. (And we do go around using monadology, it's just called computationalism and it's a very common meme around LW, and we do go around at least debating th...
Anyone who does not believe mental states are ontologically fundamental - ie anyone who denies the reality of something like a soul - has two choices about where to go next. They can try reducing mental states to smaller components, or they can stop talking about them entirely.
In a utility-maximizing AI, mental states can be reduced to smaller components. The AI will have goals, and those goals, upon closer examination, will be lines in a computer program.
But in the blue-minimizing robot, its "goal" isn't even a line in its program. There's nothing that looks remotely like a goal in its programming, and goals appear only when you make rough generalizations from its behavior in limited cases.
Philosophers are still very much arguing about whether this applies to humans; the two schools call themselves reductionists and eliminativists (with a third school of wishy-washy half-and-half people calling themselves revisionists). Reductionists want to reduce things like goals and preferences to the appropriate neurons in the brain; eliminativists want to prove that humans, like the blue-minimizing robot, don't have anything of the sort until you start looking at high level abstractions.
I took a similar tack asking ksvanhorn's question in yesterday's post - how can you get a more accurate picture of what your true preferences are? I said:
A more practical example: when people discuss cryonics or anti-aging, the following argument usually comes up in one form or another: if you were in a burning building, you would try pretty hard to get out. Therefore, you must strongly dislike death and want to avoid it. But if you strongly dislike death and want to avoid it, you must be lying when you say you accept death as a natural part of life and think it's crass and selfish to try to cheat the Reaper. And therefore your reluctance to sign up for cryonics violates your own revealed preferences! You must just be trying to signal conformity or something.
The problem is that not signing up for cryonics is also a "revealed preference". "You wouldn't sign up for cryonics, which means you don't really fear death so much, so why bother running from a burning building?" is an equally good argument, although no one except maybe Marcus Aurelius would take it seriously.
Both these arguments assume that somewhere, deep down, there's a utility function with a single term for "death" in it, and all decisions just call upon this particular level of death or anti-death preference.
More explanatory of the way people actually behave is that there's no unified preference for or against death, but rather a set of behaviors. Being in a burning building activates fleeing behavior; contemplating death from old age does not activate cryonics-buying behavior. People guess at their opinions about death by analyzing these behaviors, usually with a bit of signalling thrown in. If they desire consistency - and most people do - maybe they'll change some of their other behaviors to conform to their hypothesized opinion.
One more example. I've previously brought up the case of a rationalist who knows there's no such thing as ghosts, but is still uncomfortable in a haunted house. So does he believe in ghosts or not? If you insist on there being a variable somewhere in his head marked $belief_in_ghosts = (0,1) then it's going to be pretty mysterious when that variable looks like zero when he's talking to the Skeptics Association, and one when he's running away from a creaky staircase at midnight.
But it's not at all mysterious that the thought "I don't believe in ghosts" gets reinforced because it makes him feel intelligent and modern, and staying around a creaky staircase at midnight gets punished because it makes him afraid.
Behaviorism was one of the first and most successful eliminationist theories. I've so far ignored the most modern and exciting eliminationist theory, connectionism, because it involves a lot of math and is very hard to process on an intuitive level. In the next post, I want to try to explain the very basics of connectionism, why it's so exciting, and why it helps justify discussion of behaviorist principles.