DaFranker comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong

65 Post author: Yvain 03 November 2012 11:00PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (733)
Tags: meta survey

Comments (733)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DaFranker 06 November 2012 04:16:10PM 3 points [-]

What if you believed in, say, angels or ghosts that used powers from outside the matrix?

I assumed that those aren't counted. They don't sound really ontologically basic, just "hard to access". We can-in-principle break outside the box, and we are-in-principle causally linked to outside-the-matrix powers, or something like that.

Comment author: MugaSofer 07 November 2012 08:57:17AM 0 points [-]

That's my point. They aren't ontologically basic, yet most people would consider them "supernatural" for all intents and purposes. At least, I would. The definition of "supernatural" offered is deliberately incoherent, which is great for winning arguments but bad for making predictions.

Comment author: DaFranker 07 November 2012 02:41:03PM 1 point [-]

Wait, could you explain (or taboo, if that's easier) what you mean by "incoherent"? I don't see what's incoherent about "event which happened because a nonreducible basic element of the building blocks of the universe has complex causal influence on the universe using complex internal rules". Is that the wrong way to interpret "events involving ontologically basic mental entities"?

Comment author: MugaSofer 08 November 2012 09:00:49AM 0 points [-]

Does this help?

By far the best definition I've ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier's: A "supernatural" explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.

This is the difference, for example, between saying that water rolls downhill because it wants to be lower, and setting forth differential equations that claim to describe only motions, not desires. It's the difference between saying that a tree puts forth leaves because of a tree spirit, versus examining plant biochemistry. Cognitive science takes the fight against supernaturalism into the realm of the mind.

Why is this an excellent definition of the supernatural? I refer you to Richard Carrier for the full argument. But consider: Suppose that you discover what seems to be a spirit, inhabiting a tree: a dryad who can materialize outside or inside the tree, who speaks in English about the need to protect her tree, et cetera. And then suppose that we turn a microscope on this tree spirit, and she turns out to be made of parts—not inherently spiritual and ineffable parts, like fabric of desireness and cloth of belief; but rather the same sort of parts as quarks and electrons, parts whose behavior is defined in motions rather than minds. Wouldn't the dryad immediately be demoted to the dull catalogue of common things?

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Excluding the supernatural

Comment author: DaFranker 08 November 2012 02:46:59PM *  1 point [-]

Well, re-reading the whole post did help a bit.

I'm not sure I agree with the statements that say "this is incoherent a priori", but I haven't explored the question in depth yet. It seems as if one could envision a universe where a certain specific quark (or replace with whatever most-elementary thing turns out to really be most elementary, if any) does unpredictable things and interacts with other selected quarks in the universe in specific ways that maximize the odds of a certain specific event happening later on, "as if" this quark had the intent of making this event happen.

Would this not be a mental entity that cannot be reduced? Perhaps this is exactly the kind of "confusion" Eliezer was talking about.

Comment author: MugaSofer 08 November 2012 02:56:05PM 0 points [-]

I think it would have to be conscious? Maybe? Hmm, that is confusing...

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit