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Uh-oh, that's a bad sign. If someone on LessWrong thinks something like that, I'd better give it credence. But now I'm confused because I can't think what has given you that idea. Ergo, there appears to be evidence that I've not only made a mistake in thinking, but made one unknowingly, and failed to realize afterward or even see that something was wrong.
So, this gives me two questions and I feel like an idiot for asking them, and if this site had heretofore been behaving like other internet sites this would be the point where the name-calling would start, but you guys seem more willing than average to help people straighten things out when they're confused, so I'm actually going to bother asking:
What do you mean by "basic premise" and "can't question" in this context? Do you mean that I can't consider his nonexistence as a counterfactual? Or is there a logical impossibility in my conception of God that I've failed to notice?
Can I have specific quotes, or at least a general description, of when I've been evasive? Since I'm unaware of it, it's probably a really bad thinking mistake, not actual evasiveness-- that or I have a very inaccurate self-concept.
Actually, no possibility seems good here (in the sense that I should revise my estimate of my own intelligence and/or honesty and/or self-awareness down in almost every case), except that something I said yesterday while in need of more sleep came out really wrong. Or that someone else made a mistake, but given that I've gotten several downvotes (over seventeen, I think) in the last couple of hours, that's either the work of someone determined to downvote everything I say or evidence that multiple people think I'm being stupid.
(You know, I do want to point out that the comment about testing his lucky socks was mostly a joke. I do assign a really low prior probability to the existence of lucky socks anywhere, in case someone voted me down for being an idiot instead of for missing the point and derailing the analogy. But testing it really is what I would do in real life if given the chance.)
This isn't a general objection to my religion, is it? (I'm guessing no, but I want to make sure.)
There is a man in the sky who created everything and loves all of us, even the 12-year-old girl getting gang-raped to death right now. His seeming contradictions are part of a grander plan that we cannot fathom.
Can't, won't, unwilling to. Yes, it's possible for you to question it, but you aren't doing so.
Sure you can. How is a universe not set in motion by God notably different from one that is?
Anyone can make up anything and claim that, because it's impossible to prove, it's also impossible to disprove. I don't see any priors for religious belief beyond the fact that a lot of people like the Bible and the Bible is really old and the past is foggy so maybe, just maybe...
See below (about the socks).
You obviously aren't stupid, but you are obviously selectively skeptical:
Oh, but not to the existence of an omnipotent superbeing?
I'm not convinced that this is an accurate perception of AspiringKnitter's comments here so far.
E.g., I don't think she's yet claimed both omnipotence and omnibenevolence as attributes of god, so you may be criticizing views she doesn't hold. If there's a comment I missed, then ignore me. :)
But at a minimum, I think you misunderstood what she was asking by, "Do you mean that I can't consider his nonexistence as a counterfactual?" She was asking, by my reading, if you thought she had displayed an actual incapability of thinking that thought.
I don't think my correct characterization of a fictional being has any bearing on whether or not it exists. Actually, that counts for non-fictional beings as well.
AspiringKnitter has established (to my satisfaction at least) that she is capable of thinking, period. Reflective equilibrium is another matter.
If you're granted "fictional", then no. But if you don't believe in unicorns, you'd better mean "magical horse with a horn" and not "narwhal" or "rhinoceros".
Not how I would have put that, but mostly ADBOC this. (I wouldn't have called him a man, nor would I have singled out the sky as a place to put him. But yes, I do believe in a god who created everything and loves all, and ADBOC the bit about the 12-year-old-- would you like to get into the Problem of Evil or just agree to disagree on the implied point even though that's a Bayesian abomination? And agree with the last sentence.)
I'd ask you what would look different if I did, but I think you've answered this below.
You think I'm one of those people. Let me begin by saying that God's existence is an empirical fact which one could either prove or disprove.
I worry about telling people why I converted because I fear ridicule or accusations of lying. However, I'll tell you this much: I suddenly became capable of feeling two new sensations, neither of which I'd felt before and neither of which, so far as I know, has words in English to describe it. Sensation A felt like there was something on my skin, like dirt or mud, and something squeezing my heart, and was sometimes accompanied by a strange scent and almost always by feelings of distress. Sensation B never co-occurred with Sensation A. I could be feeling one, the other or neither, and could feel them to varying degrees. Sensation B felt relaxing, but also very happy and content and jubilant in a way and to a degree I'd never quite been before, and a little like there was a spring of water inside me, and like the water was gold-colored, and like this was all I really wanted forever, and a bit like love. After becoming able to feel these sensations, I felt them in certain situations and not in others. If one assumed that Sensation A was Bad and Sensation B was Good, then they were consistent with Christianity being true. Sometimes they didn't surprise me. Sometimes they did-- I could get the feeling that something was Bad even if I hadn't thought so (had even been interested in doing it) and then later learn that Christian doctrine considered it Bad as well.
I do not think a universe without God would look the same. I can't see any reason why a universe without God would behave as if it had an innate morality that seems, possibly, somewhat arbitrary. I would expect a universe without God to work just like I thought it did when I was an atheist. I would expect there to be nothing wrong (no signal saying Bad) with... well, anything, really. A universe without God has no innate morality. The only thing that could make morality would be human preference, which changes an awful lot. And I certainly wouldn't expect to get a Good signal on the Bible but a Bad signal on other holy books.
So. That's the better part of my evidence, such as it is.
This would be considerably more convincing if Christianity were a unified movement.
Suppose there existed only three religions in the world, all of which had a unified dogma and only one interpretation of it. Each of them had a long list of pretty specific doctrinal points, like one religion considering Tarot cards bad and another thinking that they were fine. If your Good and Bad sensations happened to precisely correspond to the recommendations of one particular religion, even in the cases where you didn't actually know what the recommendations were beforehand, then that would be some evidence for the religion being true.
However, in practice there are a lot of religions, and a lot of different Christian sects and interpretations. You've said that you've chosen certain interpretations instead of others because that's the interpretation that your sensations favored. Consider now that even if your sensations were just a quirk of your brain and mostly random, there are just so many different Christian sects and varying interpretations that it would be hard not to find some sect or interpretation of Christian doctrine who happened to prescribe the same things as your sensations do.
Then you need to additionally take into account ordinary cognitive flaws like confirmation bias: once you begin to believe in the hypothesis that your sensations reflect Christianity's teachings, you're likely to take relatively neutral passages and read into them doctrinal support for your position, and ignore passages which say contrary things.
In fact, if I've read you correctly, you've explicitly said that you choose the correct interpretation of Biblical passages based on your sensations, and the Biblical passages which are correct are the ones that give you a Good feeling. But you can't then say that Christianity is true because it's the Christian bits that give you the good feeling - you've defined "Christian doctrine" as "the bits that give a good feeling", so "the bits that give a good feeling" can't not be "Christian doctrine"!
Furthermore, our subconscious models are often accurate but badly understood by our conscious minds. For many skills, we're able to say what's the right or wrong way of doing something, but be completely unable to verbalize the reason. Likewise, you probably have a better subconscious model of what would be "typical" Christian dogma than you are consciously aware of. It is not implausible that you'd have a subconscious process making guesses on what would be a typical Christian response to something, giving you good or bad sensation based on that, and often guessing right (especially since, as noted before, there's quite a lot of leeway in how a "Christian response" is defined).
For instance, you say that you hadn't thought of Tarot cards being Bad before. But the traditional image of Christianity is that of being strongly opposed to witchcraft, and Tarot cards are used for divination, which is strongly related to witchcraft. Even if you hadn't consciously made that connection, it's obvious enough that your subconscious very well could have.
I don't think the conclusion that the morality described by sensations A/B is a property of the universe at large has been justified. You mention that the sensations predict in advance what Christian doctrine describes as moral or immoral before you know directly what that doctrine says, but that strikes me as being an investigation method that is not useful, for two reasons:
Christian culture is is very heavily permeated throughout most English-speaking cultures. A person who grows up in such a culture will have a high likelihood of correctly guessing Christianity's opinion on any given moral question, even if they haven't personally read the relevant text.
More generally, introspection is a very problematic way of gathering data. Many many biases, both obvious and subtle, come into play, and make your job way more difficult. For example: Did you take notes on each instance of feeling A or B when it occurred, and use those notes (and only those notes) later when validating them against Christian doctrine? If not, you are much more likely to remember hits than misses, or even to after-the-fact readjust misses into hits; human memory is notorious for such things.
Just to echo the others that brought this up, I applaud your courage; few people have the guts to jump into the lions' den, as it were. That said, I'm going to play the part of the lion (*) on this topic.
How do you know that these sensations come from a supernatural entity, and not from your own brain ? I know that if I started experiencing odd physical sensations, no matter how pleasant, this would be my first hypothesis (especially since, in my personal case, the risk of stroke is higher than average). In fact, if I experienced anything that radically contradicted my understanding of the world, I'd probably consider the following explanations, in order of decreasing likelihood:
This list is not exhaustive, obviously, it's just some stuff I came up with off the top of my head. Each next bullet point is less probable than the one before it, and thus I'd have to reject pretty much every other explanation before arriving at "the Christian God exists".
(*) Or a bobcat, at least.
Is either of those well-known? What about the pattern with which they're felt? Sound like anything you know? Me neither.
That don't have any other effect? That remain stable for years? With no other sign of mental illness? Besides, if I set out by assuming that I can't tell anything because I'm crazy anyway, what good does that do me? It doesn't tell me what to predict. It doesn't tell me what to do. All it tells me is "expect nothing and believe nothing". If I assume it's just these hallucinations and everything else is normal, then I run into "my brain is functioning abnormally and I am experiencing hallucinations that tell me Christian doctrine is true even when I don't know the doctrine in question", which is the original problem you're trying to explain.
And instead of messing with me like a real trickster, it convinces me to worship something other than it and in so doing increases my quality of life?
You've read xkcd?
In addition to dlthomas's suggestion of the affect heuristic, I'd suggest something like the ideomotor effect amplified by confirmation bias.
However, there's a reason I put "cognitive bias" as the first item on my list: I believe that it is overwhelmingly more likely than any alternatives. Thus, it would take a significant amount of evidence to convince me that I'm not laboring under such a bias, even if the bias does not yet have a catchy name.
AFAIK some brain cancers can present this way. In any case, if I started experiencing unusual physical symptoms all of a sudden, I'd consult a medical professional. Then I'd write down the results of his tests, and consult a different medical professional, just in case. Better safe than sorry.
Trickster spirits (especially Tanuki or Kitsune) rarely demand worship; messing with people is enough for them. Some such spirits are more or less benign; the Tanuki and Raven both would probably be on board with the idea of tricking a human into improving his or her life.
That said, you skipped over human agents and aliens, both of which are IMO overwhelmingly more likely to exist than spirits (though that doesn't make them likely to exist in absolute terms).
Hadn't everyone ? :-)
Perhaps a round with this bad boy with give you some perspective.
It sounds a little like the affect heuristic.
AspiringKnitter, what do you think about people who have sensory experiences that indicate that some other religion or text is correct?
Do they actually exist?
Well, as best I can tell my maintainer didn't install the religion patch, so all I'm working with is the testaments of others; but I have seen quite a variety of such testaments. Buddhism and Hinduism have a typology of religious experience much more complex than anything I've seen systematically laid down in mainline Christianity; it's usually expressed in terms unique to the Dharmic religions, but vipassanā for example certainly seems to qualify as an experiential pointer to Buddhist ontology.
If you'd prefer Western traditions, a phrase I've heard kicked around in the neopagan, reconstructionist, and ceremonial magic communities is "unsubstantiated personal gnosis". While that's a rather flippant way of putting it, it also seems to point to something similar to your experiences.
Huh, interesting. I should study that in more depth, then.
Careful, you may end up like Draco in HPMoR chapter 23, without a way to gom jabbar the guilty parties (sorry about the formatting):
Nah, false beliefs are worthless. That which is true is already so; owning up to it doesn't make it worse. If I turned out to actually be wrong-- well, I have experience being wrong about religion. I'd probably react just like I did before.
Feel free to elaborate or link if you have talked about it before.
Sure. Pick a religion.
God does not solve this problem.
It sounded like she was already coming down on the side of the good being good because it is commanded by God when she said, "an innate morality that seems, possibly, somewhat arbitrary."
So maybe the dilemma is not such a problem for her.
No, I don't think you think believing is an inherently worthwhile pastime. I just think you're one of the billions of humans throughout history who have had inaccurate beliefs.
Innateness is not a property of the physical world -- the only world. Agents manage to cooperate sometimes, other times they don't. TimS said it better.
Except it isn't evidence. It's testimony. It's really, really articulate testimony, actually... but still not evidence. You felt some strong feelings, noticed they were similar to biblical morality, and non sequiturishly concluded that God is real.
In a world entirely without morality, we are constantly facing situations where trusting another person would be mutually beneficial, but trusting when the other person betrays is much worse than mutual betrayal. Decision theory has a name for this type of problem: Prisoner's Dilemma. The rational strategy is to defect, which makes a pretty terrible world.
But when playing an indefinite number of games, it turns out that cooperating, then punishing defection is a strong strategy in an environment of many distinct strategies. That looks a lot like "turn the other cheek" combined with a little bit of "eye for an eye." Doesn't the real world behavior consistent with that strategy vaguely resemble morality?
In short, decision theory suggests that material considerations can justify a substantial amount of "moral" behavior.
Regarding your sensations A and B, from the outside perspective it seems like you've been awfully lucky that your sense of right and wrong match your religious commitments. If you believed Westboro Baptist doctrine but still felt sensations A and B at the same times you feel them now, then you'd being doing sensation A behavior substantially more frequently. In other words, I could posit that you have a built-in morality oracle, but why should I believe that the oracle should be labelled Christian? If I had the same moral sensations you do, why shouldn't I call it rationalist morality?
I would say tit-for-tat looks very much like "eye for an eye" but very little like "turn the other cheek", which seems much more like a cooperatebot.
it's turn the other cheek in the sense that you immediately forgive as soon as you figure out that your partner is willing to cooperate
But that's also true with eye for an eye - one defection merits one defection; it's not "two eyes for an eye".
Fair enough. Usually, the sort of people who say "eye for eye" mean something closer to to "bag or rice for your entire life", tho.
Edit: Calibration and all that, you know?
...I became a Christian and determined my religious beliefs based on sensations A and B. Why would I believe in unsupported doctrine that went against what I could determine of the world? I just can't see myself doing that. My sense of right and wrong match my religious commitments because I chose my religious commitments so they would fit with my sense of right and wrong.
Because my built-in morality oracle likes the Christian Bible.
It's sufficient to explain some, but not all, morality. Take tarot cards, for example. What was there in the ancestral environment to make those harmful? That just doesn't make any sense with your theory of morality-as-iterated-Prisoner's-Dilemma.
If you picked a sect based on your moral beliefs, then that is evidence that your Christianity is moral. It is not evidence that morality is your Christianity (i.e. "A implies B" is not equivalent "B implies A").
And if playing with tarot cards could open a doorway for demons to enter the world (or whatever wrong they cause), it seems perfectly rational to morally condemn tarot cards. I don't morally condemn tarot cards because I think they have the same mystical powers as regular playing cards (i.e. none). Also, I'm not intending to invoke "ancestral environment" when I invoke decision theory.
But that's already conditional on a universe that looks different from what most atheists would say exists. If you see proof that tarot cards-- or anything else-- summon demons, your model of reality takes a hit.
I don't understand. Can you clarify?
If tarot cards have mystical powers, I absolutely need to adjust my beliefs about the supernatural. But you seemed to assert that decision theory can't say that tarot are immoral in the universes where they are actually dangerous.
Alice has a moral belief that divorce is immoral. This moral belief is supported by objective evidence. She is given a choice to live in Distopia, where divorce is permissible by law, and Utopia, where divorce is legally impossible. For the most part, Distopia and Utopia are very similar places to live. Predictably, Alice chooses to live in Utopia. The consistency between Alice's (objectively true) morality and Utopian law is evidence that Utopia is moral. It is not evidence that Utopia is the cause of Alice's morality (i.e. is not evidence that morality is Utopian - the grammatical ordering of phrases does not help making my point).
Oh, I'm sorry. Yes, that does make sense. Decision theory WOULD assert it, but to believe they're immoral requires belief in some amount of supernatural something, right? Hence it makes no sense under what my prior assumptions were (namely, that there was nothing supernatural).
Oh, now I understand. That makes sense.
Accepting the existence of the demon portal should not impact your disbelief in a supernatural morality.
Anyways, the demons don't even have to be supernatural. First hypothesis would be hallucination, second would be aliens.
I don't see that decision theory cares why an activity is dangerous. Decision theory seems quite capable of imposing disincentives for poisoning (chemical danger) and cursing (supernatural danger) in proportion to their dangerousness and without regard to why they are dangerous.
The whole reason I'm invoking decision theory is to suggest that supernatural morality is not necessary to explain a substantial amount of human "moral" behavior.
I will gladly continue this conversation, but only if someone with a higher karma score than mine assures me I'm not other-optimizing, being impolite, or generally pushing too hard. I often berate people without realizing and I'd like to not do that anymore, on the internet or anywhere else.
I think that should probably be AspiringKnitter's call. (I don't think you're pushing too hard, given the general norms of this community, but I'm not sure of what our norms concerning religious discussions are.)
If you want it to be my call, then I say go ahead.
You were not entirely clear, but you seem to be taking these as signals of things being Bad or Good in the morality sense, right? Ok so it feels like there is an objective morality. Let's come up with hypotheses:
You have a morality that is the thousand shards of desire left over by an alien god. Things that were a good idea (for game theory, etc reasons) to avoid in the ancestral environment tend to feel good so that you would do them. Things that feel bad are things you would have wanted to avoid. As we know, an objective morality is what a personal morality feels like from the inside. That is, you are feeling the totally natural feelings of morality that we all feel. Why you attached special affect to the bible, I suppose that's the affect hueristic: you feel like the bible is true and it is the center of your belief or something, and that goodness gets confused with a moral goodness. This is all hindsight, but it seems pretty sound.
Or it could be Jesus-is-Son-of-a-Benevolent-Love-Agent-That-Created-the-Universe. I guess God is sending you signals to say what sort of things he likes/doesn't like? Is that the proposed mechanism for morality? I don't know enough about the theory to say much more.
Ok now let's consider the prior. The complex loving god hypothesis is incredibly complicated. Minds are so complex we can't even build one yet. It would take a hell of a lot more than your feeling-of-morality evidence to even raise this to our attention. A lot more than any scientific hypothesis has ever collected, I would say. You must have other evidence, not only to overcome the prior, but all the evidence against a loving god who intelligently arranged anything,
Anyways, It sounds like you were primarily a moral nihilist before your encounter with the god-prescribes-a-morality hypothesis. Have you read Eliezers metaethics stuff? it deals the with subject of morality in a neutral universe quite well.
I'm afraid I don't see why you call your reward-signal-from-god is an "objective morality" It sounds like the best course of action would be to learn the mechanism and seize control of it like AIXI would.
I (as a human) already have a strong morality, so if I figured out that the agent responsible for all of the evil in the universe were directly attempting to steer me with a subtle reward signal, I'd be pissed. It's interesting that you didn't have that reaction. I guess that's the moral nihilism thing. You didn't know you had your own morality.
There are two problems with this argument. First, each individual god might be very improbable, but that could be counterbalanced by the astronomical number of possible gods (e.g. consider all possible tweaks to the holy book), so you can argue apriori against specific flavors of theism but not against theism in general. Second, if Eliezer is right and AI can develop from a simple seed someone can code up in their garage, that means powerful minds don't need high K-complexity. A powerful mind (or a program that blossoms into one) could even be simpler than physics as we currently know it, which is already quite complex and seems to have even more complexity waiting in store.
IMO a correct argument against theism should focus on the "loving" part rather than the "mind" part, and focus on evidence rather than complexity priors. The observed moral neutrality of physics is more probable if there's no moral deity. Given what we know about evolution etc., it's hard to name any true fact that makes a moral deity more likely.
I'm not sure that everything in my comment is correct. But I guess LW could benefit from developing an updated argument against (or for) theism?
Your argument about K-complexity is a decent shorthand but causes people to think that this "simplicity" thing is baked into the universe (universal prior) as if we had direct access to the universe (universal prior, reference machine language) and isn't just another way of saying it's more probable after having updated on a ton of evidence. As you said it should be about evidence not priors. No one's ever seen a prior, at best a brain's frequentist judgment about what "priors" are good to use when.
That may be somewhat misleading. A seed AI, denied access to external information, will be a moron. Yet the more information it takes into memory the higher the K-complexity of the thing, taken as a whole, is.
You might be able to code a relatively simple AI in your garage, but if it's going to be useful it can't stay simple.
ETA: Also if you take the computer system as a whole with all of the programming libraries and hardware arrangements - even 'hello world' would have high K-complexity. If you're talking about whatsoever produces a given output on the screen in terms of a probability mass I'm not sure it's reasonable to separate the two out and deal with K-complexity as simply a manifestation of high level APIs.
Relevant LW post.
For every every program that could be called a mind, there are very very very many that are not.
Eliezer's "simple" seed AI is simple compared to an operating system (which people code up in their garages), not compared to laws of physics.
As long as we continue to accept occams razor, there's no reason to postulate fundamental gods.
Given that a god exists by other means (alien singularity), I would expect it to appear approximately moral, because it would have created me (or modified me) with approximately it's own morality. I assume that god would understand the importance of friendly intelligence. So yeah, the apparent neutrality is evidence against the existence of anything like a god.
Fair point, but I think you need lots of code only if you want the AI to run fast, and K-complexity doesn't care about speed. A slow naive implementation of "perfect AI" should be about the size of the math required to define a "perfect AI". I'd be surprised if it were bigger than the laws of physics.
You're right; AIXI or whatever is probably around the same complexity as physics. I bet physics is a lot simpler than it appears right now tho.
Now I'm unsure that a fundamental intelligence even means anything. AIXI, for example is IIRC based on bayes and occam induction, who's domain is cognitive engines within universes more or less like ours. What would a physics god optimising some morality even be able to see and do? It sure wouldn't be constrained by bayes and such. Why not just replace it with a universe that is whatever morality maximised;
max(morality)is simpler thangod(morality)almost no matter how simple god is. Assuming a physics god is even a coherent concept.In our case, assuming a fundamental god is coherent, the "god did it" hypothesis is strictly defeated (same predictions, less theory) by the "god did physics" hypothesis, which is strictly defeated by the "physics" hypothesis. (becuase physics is a simpler morality than anything else that would produce our world, and if we use physics, god doesn't have to exist)
That leaves us with only alien singularity gods, which are totally possible, but don't exist here by the reasoning I gave in parent.
What did I miss?
That's a reasonable bet. Another reasonable bet is that "laws of physics are about as complex as minds, but small details have too little measure to matter".
Well, yeah. Then I guess the question is whether our universe is a byproduct of computing max(morality) for some simple enough "morality" that's still recognizable as such. Will_Newsome seems to think so, or at least that's the most sense I could extract from his comments...
Friendly intelligence is not particularly important when the intelligence in question is significantly less powerful an optimizer than its creator. I'm not really sure what would motivate a superintelligence to create entities like me, but given the assumption that one did so, it doesn't seem more likely that it created me with (approximately) its own morality than that it created me with some different morality.
I take it you don't think we have a chance of creating a superpowerful AI with our own morality?
We don't have to be very intelligent to be a threat if we can create something that is.
I don't think we have a chance of doing so if we have a superintelligent creator who has taken steps to prevent us from doing so, no. (I also don't think it likely that we have such a creator.)
A really intelligent response, so I upvoted you, even though, as I said, it surprised me by telling me that, just as one example, tarot cards are Bad when I had not even considered the possibility, so I doubt this came from inside me.
Well you are obviously not able to predict the output of your own brain, that's the whole point of the brain. If morality is in the brain and still too complex to understand, you would expect to encounter moral feelings that you had not anticipated.
Upvoted for courage.
I can understand your hesitation about telling that story. Thanks for sharing it.
Some questions, if you feel like answering them:
Can you give me some examples of things you hadn't known Christian doctrine considered Bad before you sensed them as A?
If you were advising someone who lacks the ability to sense Good and Bad directly on how to have accurate beliefs about what's Good and Bad, what advice would you give? (It seems to follow from what you've said elsewhere that simply telling them to believe Christianity isn't sufficient, since lots of people sincerely believe they are following the directive to "believe Christianity" and yet end up believing Bad things. It seems something similar applies to "believe the New Testament". Or does it?)
If you woke up tomorrow and you experienced sensation A in situations that were consistent with Christianity being true, and experienced sensation B in situations that were consistent with Islam being true, what would you conclude about the world based on those experiences?
** EDIT: My original comment got A and B reversed. Fixed.
Do you currently get a "Bad" signal on other holy books?
Do you get it when you don't know it's another holy book?
Let's try that! I got a Bad signal on the Koran and a website explaining the precepts of Wicca, but I knew what both of those were. I would be up for trying a test where you give me quotes from the Christian Bible (warning: I might recognize them; if so, I'll tell you, but for what it's worth I've only read part of Ezekiel, but might recognize the story anyway... I've read a lot of the Bible, actually), other holy books and neutral sources like novels (though I might have read those, too; I'll tell you if I recognize them), without telling me where they're from. If it's too difficult to find Biblical quotes, other Christian writings might serve, as could similar writings from other religions. I should declare up front that I know next to nothing about Hinduism but once got a weak Good reading from what someone said about it. Also, I would prefer longer quotes; the feelings build up from unnoticeable, rather than hitting full-force instantly. If they could be at least as long as a chapter of the Bible, that would be good.
That is, if you're actually proposing that we test this. If you didn't really want to, sorry. It just seems cool.
Upvoted for the willingness to test, and in general for being a good sport.
Try this one:
The preparatory prayer is made according to custom.
The first prelude will be a certain historical consideration of _ on the one part, and __ on the other, each of whom is calling all men to him, to be gathered together under his standard.
The second is, for the construction of the place, that there be represented to us a most extensive plain around Jerusalem, in which _ stands as the Chief-General of all good people. Again, another plain in the country of Babylon, where _ presents himself as the captain of the wicked and [God's] enemies.
The third, for asking grace, will be this, that we ask to explore and see through the deceits- of the evil captain, invoking at the same time the Divine help in order to avoid them ; and to know, and by grace be able to imitate, the sincere ways of the true and most excellent General, _ .
The first point is, to imagine before my eyes, in the Babylonian plain, the captain of the wicked, sitting in a chair of fire and smoke, horrible in figure, and terrible in countenance.
The second, to consider how, having as sembled a countless number of demons, he disperses them through the whole world in order to do mischief; no cities or places, no kinds of persons, being left free.
The third, to consider what kind of address he makes to his servants, whom he stirs up to seize, and secure in snares and chains, and so draw men (as commonly happens) to the desire of riches, whence afterwards they may the more easily be forced down into the ambition of worldly honour, and thence into the abyss of pride.
Thus, then, there are three chief degrees of temptation, founded in riches, honours, and pride; from which three to all other kinds of vices the downward course is headlong.
If I had more of the quote, it would be easier. I get a weak Bad feeling, but while the textual cues suggest it probably comes from either the Talmud or the Koran, and while I think it is, I'm not getting a strong feeling on this quote, so this makes me worry that I could be confused by my guess as to where it comes from.
But I'm going to stick my neck out anyway; I feel like it's Bad.
That is what I had expected. St. Ignatius is a Catholic frequently derided by non-Catholic fundamentalist Christians.
I think it's here
I admit to being surprised that this is a Christian writing.
What do you think of this; it's a little less obscure:
Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if [God] should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock. Were it not that so is the sovereign pleasure of [God], the earth would not bear you one moment; for you are a burden to it; the creation groans with you; the creature is made subject to the bondage of your corruption, not willingly; the sun don't willingly shine upon you to give you light to serve sin and [the evil one]; the earth don't willingly yield her increase to satisfy your lusts; nor is it willingly a stage for your wickedness to be acted upon; the air don't willingly serve you for breath to maintain the flame of life in your vitals, while you spend your life in the service of [God]'s enemies. [God]'s creatures are good, and were made for men to serve [God] with, and don't willingly subserve to any other purpose, and groan when they are abused to purposes so directly contrary to their nature and end. And the world would spew you out, were it not for the sovereign hand of him who hath subjected it in hope. There are the black clouds of [God]'s wrath now hanging directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm, and big with thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of [God] it would immediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of [God] for the present stays his rough wind; otherwise it would come with fury, and your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the chaff of the summer threshing floor.
Bad? I think Bad, but wish I had more of the quote.
That moderately surprises me. It's from "Sinners in the hands of an angry god" by Johnathan Edwards.
I recognized it by the first sentence, but then I have read it several times. (For those of you that haven't heard of it, it is probably the most famous American sermon, delivered in 1741.)
I think it's this.
Huh! How about this:
… the mysterious (tablet)…is surrounded by an innumerable company of angels; these angels are of all kinds, — some brilliant and flashing _, down to _. The light comes and goes on the tablet; and now it is steady...
And now there comes an Angel, to hide the tablet with his mighty wing. This Angel has all the colours mingled in his dress; his head is proud and beautiful; his headdress is of silver and red and blue and gold and black, like cascades of water, and in his left hand he has a pan-pipe of the seven holy metals, upon which he plays. I cannot tell you how wonderful the music is, but it is so wonderful that one only lives in one's ears; one cannot see anything any more.
Now he stops playing and moves with his finger in the air. His finger leaves a trail of fire of every colour, so that the whole Aire is become like a web of mingled lights. But through it all drops dew.
(I can't describe these things at all. Dew doesn't represent what I mean in the least. For instance, these drops of dew are enormous globes, shining like the full moon, only perfectly transparent, as well as perfectly luminous.) ... All this while the dewdrops have turned into cascades of gold finer than the eyelashes of a little child. And though the extent of the Aethyr is so enormous, one perceives each hair separately, as well as the whole thing at once. And now there is a mighty concourse of angels rushing toward me from every side, and they melt upon the surface of the egg in which I am standing __, so that the surface of the egg is all one dazzling blaze of liquid light.
Now I move up against the tablet, — I cannot tell you with what rapture. And all the names of __, that are not known even to the angels, clothe me about. All the seven senses are transmuted into one sense, and that sense is dissolved in itself ...
Neutral/no idea.
Because I'm curious
Fairly read as a whole and in the context of the trial, the instructions required the jury to find that Chiarella obtained his trading advantage by misappropriating the property of his employer's customers. The jury was charged that,
Record 677 (emphasis added). The language parallels that in the indictment, and the jury had that indictment during its deliberations; it charged that Chiarella had traded "without disclosing the material non-public information he had obtained in connection with his employment." It is underscored by the clarity which the prosecutor exhibited in his opening statement to the jury. No juror could possibly have failed to understand what the case was about after the prosecutor said:
"In sum, what the indictment charges is that Chiarella misused material nonpublic information for personal gain and that he took unfair advantage of his position of trust with the full knowledge that it was wrong to do so. That is what the case is about. It is that simple."
Id. at 46. Moreover, experienced defense counsel took no exception and uttered no complaint that the instructions were inadequate in this regard. [Therefore, the conviction is due to be affirmed].
I get no reading here. My guess is that this is some sort of legal document, in which case I'm not really surprised to get no reading. Is that correct?
Yes, it is a legal document. Specifically a dissent from the reversal of a criminal conviction. In particular, I think the quoted text is an incredibly immoral and wrong-headed understanding of American criminal law. Which makes it particularly depressing that the writer was Chief Justice when he wrote it
One more, then I'll stop.
Man is a rope tied between beast and [superior man] - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an overture and a going under.
I love those that know not how to live except by going under, for they are those who cross over.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great reverers, and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going under and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may some day become the [superior man’s].
I love him who lives to know, and wants to know so that the [superior man] may live some day. Thus he wants to go under.
I love him who works and invents to build a house for the [superior man] and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to go under.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to go under, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who does not hold back one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be entirely the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides over the bridge as spirit.
I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and catastrophe: for his virtue’s sake he wants to live on and to live no longer.
I love him who does not want to have too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a noose on which his catastrophe may hang.
I love him whose soul squanders itself, who wants no thanks and returns none: for he always gives away, and does not want to preserve himself.
I love him who is abashed when the dice fall to make his fortune, and who asks: "Am I a crooked gambler?” For he wants to perish.
I love him who casts golden words before his deed, and always does more than he promises: for he wants to go under.
I love him who justifies future and redeems past generations: for he wants to perish of the present.
I love him who chastens his God, because he loves his God: for he must perish of the wrath of his God.
I love him whose soul is deep even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience: thus he gladly goes over the bridge.
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things spell his going under.
I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the entrails of his heart, but his heart causes him to go under.
I love all who are as heavy drops, falling one by one out of the dark cloud that hangs over men: they herald the advent of lightning, and, as heralds, they perish.
Behold, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called [superior man].
I get a moderate Good reading (?!) and I'm confused to get it because the morality the person is espousing seems wrong. I'm guessing this comes from someone's writings about their religion, possibly an Eastern religion?
Walter Kaufman (Nietzsche's translator here) prefers overman as the best translation of ubermensch.
ETA: This is some interesting commentary on the work
I'm surprised. I'd heard Nietzsche was not a nice person, but had also heard good things about him... huh. I'll have to read his work, now. I wonder if the library has some.
I know very little about Nietzsche, but I recognized this instantly because the first three lines were quoted in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. :-)
It's easy to find an equally forceful bit by Nietzsche that's not been quoted to death, really. Had AK recognized it, you would've botched a perfectly good test.
It's being a long time since I read that... I guess Nietzsche wouldn't have found "moderation in all things" too appealing...
Cute.
With, I assume, the names changed? Otherwise it seems too easy :-P
Yes, where names need to be changed. [God] will be sufficient to confuse me as to whether it's "the LORD" or "Allah" in the original source material. There might be a problem with substance in very different holy books where I might be able to guess the religion just by what they're saying (like if they talk about reincarnation or castes, I'll know they're Hindu or Buddhist). I hope anyone finding quotes will avoid those, of course.
This is a bit off-topic, but, out of curiosity, is there anything in particular that you find objectionable about Wicca on a purely analytical level ? I'm not saying that you must have such a reason, I'm just curious.
Just in the interests of pure disclosure, the reason I ask is because I found Wicca to be the least harmful religion among all the religions I'd personally encountered. I realize that, coming from an atheist, this doesn't mean much, of course...
Assuming you mean besides the fact that it's wrong (by both meanings-- incorrect and sinful), then no, nothing at all.
I'm actually not entirely sure what you mean by "incorrect", and how it differs from "sinful". As an atheist, I would say that Wicca is "incorrect" in the same way that every other religion is incorrect, but presumably you'd disagree, since you're religious.
Some Christians would say that Wicca is both "incorrect" and "sinful" because its followers pray to the wrong gods, since a). YHVH/Jesus is the only God who exists, thus worshiping other (nonexistent) gods is incorrect, and b). he had expressly commanded his followers to worship him alone, and disobeying God is sinful. In this case, though, the "sinful" part seems a bit redundant (since Wiccans would presumably worship Jesus if they were convinced that he existed and their own gods did not). But perhaps you meant something else ?
I mean incorrect in that they believe things that are wrong, yes; they believe in, for instance, a goddess who doesn't really exist. And sinful because witchcraft is forbidden.
OK, last one from me, if you're still up for it.
There is nothing that you can claim, nothing that you can demand, nothing that you can take. And as soon as you try to take something as if it were your own-- you lose your [innocence]. The angel with the flaming sword stands armed against all selfhood that is small and particular, against the "I" that can say "I want..." "I need..." "I demand..." No individual enters Paradise, only the integrity of the Person.
Only the greatest humility can give us the instinctive delicacy and caution that will prevent us from reaching out for pleasures and satisfactions that we can understand and savor in this darkness. The moment we demand anything for ourselves or even trust in any action of our own to procure a deeper intensification of this pure and serene rest in [God], we defile and dissipate the perfect gift that [He] desires to communicate to us in the silence and repose of our own powers.
If there is one thing we must do it is this: we must realize to the very depths of our being that this is a pure gift of [God] which no desire, no effort and no heroism of ours can do anything to deserve or obtain. There is nothing we can do directly either to procure it or to preserve it or to increase it. Our own activity is for the most part an obstacle to the infusion of this peaceful and pacifying light, with the exception that [God] may demand certain acts and works of us by charity or obedience, and maintain us in deep experimental union with [Him] through them all, by [His] own good pleasure, not by any fidelity of ours.
At best we can dispose ourselves for the reception of this great gift by resting in the heart of our own poverty, keeping our soul as far as possible empty of desires for all the things that please and preoccupy our nature, no matter how pure or sublime they may be in themselves.
And when [God] reveals [Himself] to us in contemplation we must accept [Him] as [He] comes to us, in [His] own obscurity, in [His] own silence, not interrupting [Him] with arguments or words, conceptions or activities that belong to the level of our own tedious and labored existence.
We must respond to [God]'s gifts gladly and freely with thanksgiving, happiness and joy; but in contemplation we thank [Him] less by words than by the serene happiness of silent acceptance. ... It is our emptiness in the presence of the abyss of [His] reality, our silence in the presence of [His] infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which [His] light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises [Him]. It is this that causes love of [God] and wonder and adoration to swim up into us like tidal waves out of the depths of that peace, and break upon the shores of our consciousness in a vast, hushed surf of inarticulate praise, praise and glory!
(I might fail to communicate clearly with this comment; if so, my apologies, it's not purposeful. E.g. normally if I said "Thomistic metaphysical God" I would assume the reader either knew what I meant (were willing to Google "Thomism", say) or wasn't worth talking to. I'll try not to do that kind of thing in this comment as badly as I normally do. I'm also honestly somewhat confused about a lot of Catholic doctrine and so my comment will likely be confused as a result. To make things worse I only feel as if I'm thinking clearly if I can think about things in terms of theoretical computer science, particularly algorithmic probability theory; unfortunately not only is it difficult to translate ideas into those conceptual schemes, those conceptual schemes are themselves flawed (e.g. due to possibilities of hypercomputation and fundamental problems with probability that've been unearthed by decision theory). So again, my apologies if the following is unclear.)
I'm going to accept your interpretation at face value, i.e. accept that you're blessed with a supernatural charisma or something like that. That said, I'm not yet sure I buy the idea that the Thomistic metaphysical God, the sole optimal decision theory, the Form of the Good, the Logos-y thing, has much to do with transhumanly intelligent angels and demons of roughly the sort that folk around here would call superintelligences. (I haven't yet read the literature on that subject.) In my current state of knowledge if I was getting supernatural signals (which I do, but not as regularly as you do) then I would treat them the same way I'd treat a source of information that claimed to be Chaitin's constant: skeptically.
In fact it might not be a surface-level analogy to say that God is Chaitin's omega (and is thus a Turing oracle), for they would seem to share a surprising number of properties. Of course Chaitin's constant isn't computable, so there's no algorithmic way to check if the signals you're getting come from God or from a demon that wants you to think it's God (at least for claimed bits of Chaitin's omega that you don't already know). I believe the Christians have various arguments about states of mind that protect you from demonic influences like that; I haven't read this article on infallibility yet but I suspect it's informative.
Because there doesn't seem to be an algorithmic way of checking if God is really God rather than any other agent that has more bits of Chaitin's constant than you do, you're left in a situation where you have to have what is called faith, I think. (I do not understand Aquinas's arguments about faith yet; I'm not entirely sure I know what it is. I find the ideas counter-intuitive.) I believe that Catholics and maybe other Christians say that conscience is something like a gift from God and that you can trust it, so if your conscience objects to the signals you're getting then that at least a red flag that you might be being influenced by self-delusion or demons or what have you. But this "conscience" thing seems to be algorithmic in nature (though that's admittedly quite a contentious point), so if it can check the truth value of the moral information you're getting supernaturally then you already had those bits of Chaitin's constant. If your conscience doesn't say anything about it then it would seem you're dealing with a situation where you're supposed/have to have faith. That's the only way you can do better than an algorithmic approach.
Note that part of the reasons that I think about these things is 'cuz I want my FAI to be able to use bits of Chaitin's constant that it finds in its environment so as to do uncomputable things it otherwise wouldn't have. It is an extension of this same personal problem of what to do with information whose origin you can't algorithmicly verify.
Anyway it's a sort of awkward situation to be in. It seems natural to assume that this agent is God but I'm not sure if that is acceptable by the standard of (Kant's weirdly naive version of) Kan't categorical imperative. I notice that I am very confused about counterfactual states of knowledge and various other things that make thinking about this very difficult.
So um, how do you approach the problem? Er did I even describe the problem in such a way that it's understandable?
I don't think I'm smart enough to follow this comment. Edit: but I think you're wrong about me having some sort of supernatural charisma... I'm pretty sure I haven't said I'm special, because if I did, I'd be wrong.
Hm, so how would you describe the mechanism behind your sensations then? (Sorry, I'd been primed to interpret your description in light of similar things I'd seen before which I would describe as "supernatural" for lack of a better word.)
...I wasn't going to come back to say anything, but fine. I'd say it's God's doing. Not my own specialness. And I'm not going to continue this conversation further.
Okay, thanks. I didn't mean to imply 'twas your own "specialness" as such; apologies for being unclear. ETA: Also I'm sorry for anything else? I get the impression I did/said something wrong. So yeah, sorry.
FWIW, apparently (per Wikipedia) the word "charism" "denotes any good gift that flows from God's love to man."
The dirt just sits there? It doesn't also squeeze your skin? Or instead throb as if it had been squeezed for a while, but uniformly, not with a tourniquet, and was just released?
Just sits there. Anyway, dirt is a bad metaphor.
Oh and also you should definitely look into using this to help build/invoke FAI/God. E.g. my prospective team has a slot open which you might be perfect for. I'm currently affiliated with Leverage Research who recently received a large donation from Jaan Tallinn, who also supports the Singularity Institute.
For what it's worth, the downvotes appear to be correlated with anyone discussing theology. Not directed at you in particular. At least, that's my impression.
You do realize it might very well mean death to your Bayes score to say or think things like that around an omnipotent being who has a sense of humor, right? This is the sort of Dude Who wrestles with a mortal then names a nation to honor the match just to taunt future wannabe-Platonist Jews about how totally crazy their God is. He is perfectly capable of engineering some lucky socks just so He can make fun of you about it later. He's that type of Guy. And you do realize that the generalization of Bayes score to decision theoretic contexts with objective morality is actually a direct measure of sinfulness? And that the only reason you're getting off the hook is that Jesus allegedly managed to have a generalized Bayes score of zero despite being unable to tell a live fig tree from a dead one at a moderate distance and getting all pissed off about it for no immediately discernible reason? Just sayin', count your blessings.
Yes, of course. Why he'd do that, instead of all the other things he could be doing, like creating a lucky hat or sending a prophet to explain the difference between "please don't be an idiot and quibble over whether it might hurt my feelings if you tell me the truth" and "please be as insulting as possible in your dealings with me".
No, largely because I have no idea what that would even mean. However, if you mean that using good epistemic hygiene is a sin because there's objective morality, or if you think the objective morality only applies in certain situations which require special epistemology to handle, you're wrong.
It's just that now "lucky socks" is the local Schelling point. It's possible I don't understand God very well, but I personally am modally afraid of jinxing stuff or setting myself up for dramatic irony. It has to do with how my personal history's played out. I was mostly just using the socks thing as an example of this larger problem of how epistemology gets harder when there's a very powerful entity around. I know I have a really hard time predicting the future because I'm used to... "miracles" occurring and helping me out, but I don't want to take them for granted, but I want to make accurate predictions... And so on. Maybe I'm over-complicating things.
Okay, I can understand that. It can be annoying. However, the standard framework does still apply; you can still use Bayes. It's like anything else confusing you.
I see what you're saying and it's a sensible approximation but I'm not actually sure you can use Bayes in situations with "mutual simulation" like that. Are you familiar with updateless/ambient decision theory perchance?
No, I'm not. Should I be? Do you have a link to offer?
This post combined with all the comments is perhaps the best place to start, or this post might be an easier introduction to the sorts of problems that Bayes has trouble with. This is the LW wiki hub for decision theory. That said it would take me awhile to explain why I think it'd particularly interest you and how it's related to things like lucky socks, especially as a lot of the most interesting ideas are still highly speculative. I'd like to write such an explanation at some point but can't at the moment.