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 theodicy, see Eliezer's Fun Theory sequence and "Beyond the Reach of God".)
Your slippery slope argument does not strike me as an actual contribution to the discussion. You have to show that the people and ideas I think are worthwhile are in the set of stupid-therefore-contemptible memes, not assume the conclusion.
Unfortunately, I doubt you or any of the rest of Less Wrong have actually looked at any of the ideas you're criticizing, or really know what they actually are, as I have been continually pointing out. Prove me wrong! Show me how an ontology can be incorrect, then show me how Leibniz's ontology was incorrect. Show me that it's absurd to describe the difference between humans and animals as humans having a soul where animals do not. Show me that it's absurd to call the convergent algorithm of superintelligence "God", if you don't already have the precise language needed to talk in terms of algorithmic probability theory. Better, show me how it would be possible for you to construct such an argument.
We are blessed in that we have the memes and tools to talk of such things with precision; if Leibniz were around today, he too would be making his arguments using algorithmic probability theory and talking about simulations by superintelligences. But throughout history and throughout memespace there is a dearth of technicality. That does not make the ideas expressed incorrect, it simply makes it harder to evaluate them. And if we don't have the time to evaluate them, we damn well shouldn't be holding those ideas in mocking contempt. We should know to be more meta than that.
I can't understand why you're more interested in the discourse of theism than in the discourse of astrology
One is correct and interesting, one is incorrect and uninteresting. And if you don't like that I am assuming the conclusion, you will see why I do not like it when others do the same.
There are two debates we could be having. One of them is about choice of language. Another is about who or what we should let ourselves have un-reflected upon contempt for. The former debate is non-obvious and like I said would involve a lot of consideration from a lot of technical fields, and anyway might be very person-dependent. The second is the one that I think is less interesting but more important. I despise the unreflected-upon contempt that the Less Wrong memeplex has for things it does not at all understand.
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.