hairyfigment comments on Causal Reference - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 October 2012 10:12PM

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Tags: seq_epistemology causality meaningfulness reference consciousness qualia zombies

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Comment author: dspeyer 21 October 2012 06:47:27AM 4 points [-]

Religion and epiphenomenalogy differ in three important ways:

  • Religion is widespread. Almost everyone knows what it is. Most people have at least some religious memes sticking in their heads. A significant fraction of people have dangerous religious memes in their heads so decreasing those qualifies as raising the sanity waterline. Epiphenomenalogy is essentially unknown outside academic philosophy, and now the lesswrong readership.
  • Religion has impact everywhere. People have died because of other people's religious beliefs, and not just from violence. Belief in epiphenomenalogy has almost no impact on the lives of non-believers.
  • Religious thought patterns re-occur. Authority, green/blue, and "it is good to believe" show up over and over again. The sort of thoughts that lead to epiphenomenalogy are quite obscure.
Comment author: hairyfigment 21 October 2012 06:31:10PM 3 points [-]

The word "epiphenomenalogy" is rare. The actual theory seems like an academic remnant of the default belief that 'You can't just reduce everything to numbers, people are more than that.'

So your last point seems entirely wrong. Zombie World comes from the urge to justify religious dualism or say that it wasn't all wrong (not in essence). And the fact that someone had to take it this far shows how untenable dualism seems in a practical sense, to educated people.

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