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Will_Newsome comments on A Rationalist's Tale - Less Wrong
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With Leibniz it's a lot clearer that his God was a programmer trying to make most efficient use of His resources to do the optimal thing, and he had intuitions but of course not any explicit language to talk about what that algorithm would look like. That's roughly the extent to which I think I'm thinking of the same decision algorithm as Aquinas, the convergent objective decision theory. The specifics of that decision theory, nobody knows. The point is that none of the best thinkers were thinking about a big male human in the sky, and were instead thinking about Platonic algorithms, ever since early Christianity was influenced by neoplatonism. Leibniz made it computationalesque but only recently with decision theory is theology become truly mathematical.
Maybe. In this case, most would agree that at this level of vagueness saying that two thinkers are contemplating exactly the same idea is incorrect and misleading terminology, and your comment suggests that you don't actually mean that.
Okay. It's like a hypothesis about future revelations, where both Aquinas and I are being shown a series of different agents and we'd agree more than my prediction of LW priors would suggest as to which of those agents were more or less Godlike. It's like we have different labels for what is ultimately the same thing but we don't even know what that thing is yet; but the fact that they're different labels is misleading as to the extent to which we're talking or not talking about what is ultimately the same thing. Still, point taken.
Do the theologians know about this?
/shrugs I'd be very surprised, but I know nothing about modern theology. I've been reading philosophy by working my way forward through time. If there were/are any competent computer scientist/theologians after Leibniz then I do not yet know about them.
(ETA: I suppose I could become one if I put my mind to it but unfortunately I have this whole "figuring out how moral justification works so that everything I love about the world doesn't perish" thing to deal with.)