AspiringRationalist comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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-- Penn Jilette.
This argument really isn't very good. It works on precisely none of the religious people I know, because:
A: They don't believe that God would tell them to do anything wrong.
B: They believe in Satan, who they are quite certain would tell them to do something wrong.
C: They also believe that Satan can lie to them and convincingly pretend to be God.
Accordingly, any voice claiming to be God and also telling them to do something they feel is evil must be Satan trying to trick them, and is disregarded. They actually think like that, and can quote relevant scripture to back their position, often from memory. This is probably better than a belief framework that would let them go out and start killing people if the right impulse struck them, but it's also not a worldview that can be moved by this sort of argument.
Seems a perfectly sensible way to think. Being religious doesn't mean being stupid enough to fall for that argument.
My experience is that this framework is not consistently applied, though.
For example, I've tried pointing out that it follows from these beliefs that if our moral judgments reject what we've been told is the will of God then we ought to obey our moral judgments and reject what we've been told is the will of God. The same folks who have just used this framework to reject treating something reprehensible as an expression of the will of God will turn around and tell me that it's not my place to judge God's will.
Yeah, that happens too. Best argument I've gotten in support of the position is that they feel that they are able to reasonably interpret the will of God through scripture, and thus instructions 'from God' that run counter to that must be false. So it's not quite the same as their own moral intuition vs a divine command, but their own scriptural learning used as a factor to judge the authenticity of a divine command.
Penn Jilette is wrong to call someone not following a god's demands an atheist. Theism is defined by existence claims regarding gods (whether personal or more broadly defined), as a classifier it does not hinge on following said gods' mandates.
Although it seems like an overly-broad definition of "atheist", I think that the quote is only intended to apply to belief in the monotheistic Supreme Being, not polytheistic small-g-gods.
My comment applies just the same, whether you spell god God, G_d, GOD or in some other manner: You can believe such a being exists (making you a theist) without following its moral codex or whatever commands it levies on you. Doesn't make you an atheist.
Although, if you believe it always tells the truth, then you should follow whatever counterintuitive claim it makes about your own preferences and values, no? So if God were to tell you that sacrificing your son is what CEV_(Kawoomba) would do, would you do it?
I have a certain probability I ascribe to the belief that god always tells the truth, let's say this is very high.
I also have a certain probability with which I believe that CEV_(Kawoomba) contained such a command. This is negligible because (from the definition) it certainly doesn't fit with "were more the [man] [I] wished [I] were".
However, we can lay that argument (evening out between a high and a very low probability) aside, there's a more important one:
The point is that my values are not CEV_(Kawoomba), which is a concept that may make sense for an AI to feed with, or even to personally aspire to, but is not self-evidently a concept we should unequivocally aspire to. In a conflict between my values and some "optimized" (in whatever way) values that I do not currently have but that may be based on my current values, guess which ones win out? (My current ones.)
That aside, there is no way that the very foundation of my values could be turned topsy turvy and still fit with CEV's mandate of "being the person I want to be".
The quote specifies God, not "a voice claiming to be God". I'm not sure what evidence would be required, but presumably there must be some, or why would you follow any revelation?
In that case, the Christian's obvious and correct response is "that wouldn't happen", and responding to that with "yeah, but what if? huh? huh?" is unlikely to lead to a fruitful conversation. Penn's original thought experiment is simply broken.
Replace "God" by "rationality" and consider the question asked of yourself. How do you respond?
Except that most Christians think that people have, in reality, been given orders directly by God. I suspect they would differ on what evidence is required before accepting the voice is God, but once they have accepted it's God talking then reusing to comply would be ... telling. OTOH, I would totally kill people in that situation (or an analogous one with an FAI,) and I don't think that's irrational.
[EDIT: I had to replace a little more than that to make it coherent; I hope I preserved your intentions while doing so.]
My answer is, of course, yes. If someone claims that they would not kill even if it was the rational choice then ... ***** them. It's the right damn choice. Not choosing it is, in fact, the wrong choice.
(I'm ignoring issues regarding running on hostile hardware here, because you should be taking that kind of bias into account before calling something "rational".)
What do the real Christians that you know say about that characterisation? I don't know any well enough to know what they think (personal religious beliefs being little spoken of in the UK), but just from general knowledge of the doctrines I understand that the sources of knowledge of God's will are the Bible, the church, and personal revelation, all of these subject to fallible human interpretation. Different sects differ in what weight they put on these, Protestants being big on sola scriptura and Catholics placing great importance on the Church. Some would add the book of nature, God's word revealed in His creation. None of this bears any more resemblance to "direct orders from God", than evolutionary biology does to "a monkey gave birth to a human".
Now look at what you had to do to get that answer: reduce the matter to a tautology by ignoring all of the issues that would arise in any real situation in which you faced this decision, and conditioning on them having been perfectly solved. Speculating on what you would do if you won the lottery is more realistic. There is no "rationality" that by definition gives you perfect answers beyond questioning, any more than, even to the Christian, there is such a God.
They think you should try and make sure it's really God (they give conflicting answers as to how, mostly involving your own moral judgments which seems kinda tautological) and then do as He says. Many (I think all, actually) mentioned the Binding of Isaac. Of course, they do not a believe they will actually encounter such a situation.
AFAIK, all denominations of Christianity, and for that matter other Abrahamic religions, claim that there have been direct revelations from God.
As I said, simply replacing the word "God" with "rationality" yields clear nonsense, obviously, so I had to change some other stuff while attempting to preserve the spirit of your request. It seems I failed in this. Could you perform the replacement yourself, so I can answer what you meant to ask?
Your own moral judgements, of course, come from God, the source of all goodness and without whose grace man is utterly corrupt and incapable of anything good of his own will. That is what conscience is (according to Christians). So this is not tautological at all, but simply a matter of taking all the evidence into account and making the best judgement we can in the face of our own fallibility. A theme of this very site, on occasion.
Yes, I mentioned that ("personal revelation"). But it's only one component of knowledge of the divine, and you still have the problem of deciding when you've received one and what it means.
Not at all. Your formulation of the question is exactly what I had in mind, and your answer to it was exactly what I expected.
Ah, good point. But the specific example was that He had commanded you to do something apperently wrong - kill your son - hence the partial tautology.
Whoops, so you did.
... how is that compatible with "None of this bears any more resemblance to "direct orders from God", than evolutionary biology does to "a monkey gave birth to a human"."?
Then why complain I had twisted it into a tautology?
You cannot cross a chasm by pointing to the far side and saying, "Suppose there was a bridge to there? Then we could cross!" You have to actually build the bridge, and build it so that it stays up, which Penn completely fails to do. He isn't even trying to. He isn't addressing Christians. He's addressing people who are atheists already, getting in a good dig at those dumb Christians who think that a monkey gave birth to a human, sorry, that anyone should kill their child if God tells them to. Ha ha ha! Is he not witty!
The more I think about that quote, the stupider it seems.
There is a biblical description of how to tell if a given instruction is divine or not, found at the start of 1 John chapter four:
One can also use the example of Jesus' temptation in the desert to see how to react if one is not sure.
And yet, I have never had a theist claim that "Every spirit who acknowledges that Jesus the Messiah has become human—and remains so—is from God." That any spirit that agrees with scripture, maybe.
Was Jesus unsure if the temptation in the desert was God talking?
No, but the temptation was rejected specifically on the grounds that it did not agree with scripture. Therefore, the same grounds can surely be used in other, similar situations, including those where one is unsure of who is talking.
For those unaware of how the story goes:
That seems like a misuse of the word "rationality". The "rational" course of action is directly dependent upon whatever your response will be to the thought experiment according to your utility function (and therefore values mostly) and decision algorithm, and so somewhat question-begging.
A better term would be "your decision theory", but that is trivially dismissible as non-rational - if you disagree with the results of the decision theory you use, then it's not optimal, which means you should pick a better one.
If a utility function and decision theory system that are fully reflectively coherent with myself agree with me that for X reasons killing my child is necessarily and strictly more optimal than other courses of action even taking into account my preference for the survival of my child over that of other people, then yes, I definitely would - clearly there's more utility to be gained elsewhere, and therefore the world will predictably be a better one for it. This calculation will (must) include the negative utility from my sadness, prison, the life lost, the opportunity costs, and any other negative impacts of killing my own child.
And as per other theorems, since the value of information and accuracy here would obviously be very high, I'd make really damn sure about these calculations - to a degree of accuracy and formalism much higher than I believe my own mind would currently be capable of with lives involved. So with all that said, in a real situation I would doubt my own calculations and would assign much greater probability to an error in my calculations or a lack / bias in my information, than to my calculations being right and killing my own child being optimal.
Any other specifics I forgot to mention?
It is entirely possible for someone to believe in an evil god, and (quite reasonably) decline to do that god's alleged bidding.
Amen!
Most theists use the term "God" to refer to a good god. An evil god, by this definition, would not be God, and thus believing in it does not mean you are not an "atheist" (defined as someone who does not believe in God.)
(Whether this definition is more or less useful than one that doesn't mention morality is left as an exercise for the reader.)
It's hardly fair to describe this tiny modicum of doubt as atheism, even in the umbrella sense that covers agnosticism.
?!
If you believe in an immensely powerful being that isn't moral, then you don't believe in "God". You believe in Cthulhu.
Plenty of cultures throughout history have conceived of gods that weren't particularly good. The gods of Mesopotamia were assholes by the standards of their own culture, not just ours; a hero was someone who could stand up to them.
If people who don't even believe in the religion have come to conceive of divinity in such a way that it "doesn't count" if the entity doesn't satisfy the whole omnipotent/omnibenevolent package, it's a sign of just how much modern monotheism has dominated the memetic landscape.
I managed to pass much of my childhood as a real outsider to religion, not just lacking belief, but having almost no awareness of what most people believed. My first exposure to religion and mythology was polytheistic, and I didn't recognize the distinction between "living" and "dead" religion (at the time, I thought they were all fringe beliefs preserved by minorities,) so I still recall the confusion I felt when I started to find that most people saw polytheism as fundamentally different and less plausible.
... wow. That sounds like a story worth telling in full.
As a member of this culture, however, I note that when the G is capitalized it's referring to the Supreme Being that the top ... four, I think? ... religions claim exists, which is different enough from the usual squabbling polytheistic gods to be sometimes worth distinguishing, in addition to having rather more traction. Of course, a Gods are a specific subtype of gods.
Well, top two at least. Christianity and Islam take the top spots, followed by Hinduism, which has a Supreme Existence, but no tenets of it being benevolent (at least as far as I've been able to find, maybe some Hindus believe differently, as it's not a very homogeneous religion.) Here's a table of top religions by adherents. It's not clear how to count down from there since some of the items are aggregations of what might not fairly count as individual religions, but after Islam, the next religion down claiming a benevolent supreme being has close to two orders of magnitude fewer adherents.
Not that this affects the point of what our cultural understanding of "God" means, but it does give a bit of a sense of how much that idea is an outlier in human culture.
I don't know if this is as interesting as you're hoping, but my father is an atheist offshoot of a very religious family, and my mother is an agnostic/deist who was once a member of the Transcendental Meditation movement. My paternal grandmother is a Born Again Christian, and she decided I was old enough to proselytize to around the age of three. One of my earliest memories is having her ask me "Do you know anything about God?" I told her "I know about a god named Zeus." Since I didn't know how to read that point, I can only guess how I picked up that information, but my best guess is that it was from my father, since he would occasionally tell me stories from mythology.
My family moved out of the Bible Belt very shortly after that, and I believe it had more than a little to do with getting away from my father's family, who my mother was always somewhat uncomfortable with. When I became a little bit older, I became very interested in mythology (my reading level exploded in first grade, and I remember passing long hours in class reading books of mythology when I was supposed to be doing something else.) At this time, I didn't know anyone who talked to me about an active belief in a living religion (except when my grandmother called.) My only exposure to living religion was basically killed before presenting it to me; we celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah (my mother is from a Jewish family,) and I was told the stories behind the celebrations, as well as a couple of the major Jewish holidays we would sometimes visit my mother's family for, but they were presented as stories, not as something I ought to believe in. I was explicitly told that some people believed these things, but I interpreted this as "People like my grandma, who're kind of weird and make my parents a bit uncomfortable, but not the sort of people I know around here." I saw religious celebrations as part of a cultural heritage that people were taking the excuse to celebrate over, not a sign that the religions were still a force in the community.
Since my exposure to Christianity and Judaism as well as various dead religions came mostly from stories, rather than dogma (I learned about things like the story of Samson way before anyone tried to convince me that Jesus died for my sins,) my idea of religion was basically "huge collections of stories that people used to make up to explain the world and entertain each other. Some people still believe in them, but you'd have to be kind of weird to believe in those sorts of things today." If I saw someone wearing a cross or something, I assumed that they were using an observation of cultural heritage as an excuse to wear something pretty. I couldn't be surrounded by the sort of weird people who made my parents uncomfortable, or they'd be uncomfortable all the time, and people would be talking about God nonstop (I recognized that Hassidic Jews were religious, because they did make my mother uncomfortable, since she was raised in extremely reformed family, and was brought up thinking of them as the sort of people who made it hard for Jews to assimilate.)
Since nobody was trying to mold my religious beliefs for me, I experimented myself with various ideas of the divine, but I never got any sort of sign that they were real, so I always dropped them. I had a sense that somewhere out there there were things that worked by different rules than we were used to, but eventually (before I started getting accustomed to the idea of live religion) I realized that I was probably suffering from motivated cognition, and just because I wanted to discover something like that didn't mean it existed.
The idea of a single, absolute, benevolent god, was one that I experimented with, but it never had much traction with me because it was like one of those simple, elegant scientific hypotheses you hear fringe scientists expound now and then, which seem to perfectly explain everything they apply it to, only then you look around a bit more and find that there are a zillion experiments that completely fly in the face of its predictions, and the reason other scientists don't believe it is because it simply doesn't agree with the data. Polytheism was a bit less elegant, but a much better fit for the data. How does the supernatural produce a sort-of functional world like ours where some people are really happy an successful and some people are miserable, and there are huge accomplishments and major tragedies and love and war, and people can end up lucky or unlucky whether they're good or bad? By having a whole bunch of gods with goals at complete cross purposes, who sometimes get along and sometimes hate each other, who may cooperate, or may outright sabotage each others' efforts, but who've at least found that they're better off if they don't devolve into all-out war against each other. When I tried to get signs that these gods actually existed, I always turned up nada, so I figured they probably didn't really exist either, but I could see why most religious people, ever, would be polytheists.
It wasn't until I was eleven or so that I started to find that significantly more of my peers professed to actually believe in things like a big man in the sky who rules over everything than I would have imagined, and at first I thought it was just because they were even more immature than I thought, and their parents were just making up stories they could handle that they'd just grow out of later, like Santa Claus. It was when I was twelve that I finally realized that no, lots of people really do still believe in religion, and not just the people you can tell right away that they're kind of weird or crazy.
I dunno, that's an interesting case study if nothing else.
Regarding monotheism ... it has emerged independently a few times, if nothing else:
In Greece and India, philosophers noticed that the gods didn't really seem worthy of worship / multiple omnipotent agents didn't make sense.
In both Egypt and Israel, individual cults grew into henotheistic religions which eventually blurred into monotheism - probably for at least partly political reasons, and Happy Death Spirals were probably also involved.
Interestingly, Christianity appears to have partly reverted to polytheism during the dark ages - and there are many syncretic minor religions/cults that are polytheistic while retaining a largely Christian framework.
It seems to me that polytheism is easier to grasp, and so tends to be popular by default, while monotheism is easier to defend, and so tends to emerge when it needs to be defended (whether from political opponents or your own knowledge about reality) - and the two most popular religions both started out monotheist (give or take a trinity.)
More ontopic, it's arguable whether using such a common term to mean such a specific concept is privileging the hypothesis, but it's pretty common these days, and most "converts" to atheism came from Christian backgrounds. [citation needed]
Remember that ~33% of the world is Christian (which is more than any other religion), and so it is not all that surprising that many atheists come from Christian backgrounds, simply because the probability that an arbitrary person came from a Christian background is quite high to start with.
Well, yes. That would be why most converts to atheism came from Christian backgrounds. Along with greater concentrations of both in the western world and so on. Since most atheists (and most LWers) come from such a BG, it seems worth having terminology relating to it, was my point.
I'm not so sure about that. We have much more exposure to attempts to defend monotheism from polytheism or atheism, so it may appear easier, because there's a glut of arguments coming from that direction. That could just be a historical accident though. Maybe we could have ended up quite easily in a world where the most popular religions were offshoots of Chinese syncretism, and we'd be much more familiar with arguments defending polytheism.
Monotheism has sprung up in polytheistic cultures, but in some cases we've also reinterpreted the work of old philosophers through monotheistic lenses. A lot of classical Greek philosophers framed their arguments in terms of "the gods," who're now interpreted as talking about "god," and the idea of omnipotence wasn't really in popular circulation. The closest I know of any Greek philosopher coming to monotheism was Aristotle with his Prime Mover, but it was Aquinas who reinterpreted this as being about God. To Aristotle, the Prime Mover was more like a basic energy principle behind everything. The gods came from it, but it wasn't a being so much as The Stuff that Makes Stuff Happen.
The Science of the Discworld II provides a substantiation for the claim that monotheism produces better science than polytheism; when a monotheist wants to know why thunderstorms happen, he has no trouble with the idea that there's a single, consistent set of rules to be applied, if he can but find out what they are (while the polytheist is still trying to work out which gods are having an argument).
I never found that argument very compelling. The Classical Greeks did a whole lot better than the Christians at developing scientific knowledge, before the Renaissance. Both monotheistic and polytheistic tradtions can foster either strong or weak scientific progress. Islam is a good example of a monotheistic tradition moving from high to low scientific productivity by the shifting of ideas within that tradition (see The Incoherence of the Philosophers.)
A polytheist can perfectly easily see the world as functioning according to a single, consistent set of rules, that all the various gods operate within, while a monotheist can just as well see the world as completely tied to the whims of an ontologically basic mental entity which is outside our conception of logic, such that the most basic reason we can ever explain anything with is "because that's what God wants" (which is the idea that essentially led to the atrophy of Islamic science.)
Well, I can hardly prove I'm not biased by overexposure to such arguments. Still, I think disproving Monoteism requires greater, well, skill than disproving polytheism.
There are numerous civilizations that believed in immoral and amoral gods. Are you saying they were Cthulhu-worshipers?
Well ... yeah. "Immoral and amoral god"* sounds a lot like the definition I was using for "Cthulhu", in fact.
*(as opposed to capital-G-God)
That seems to cheapen Cthulhu, to be honest. The emotional impact of Lovecraft's stories, and of their descendants such as the Azathoth metaphor, relies not on an immoral or amoral Power (that's well-trod territory in many religions and not a few fantasies) but rather on Powers with motivations fundamentally incompatible with human minds: entities of godlike potency that can neither be mollified nor bargained with nor easily apprehended in native reasoning modes.
That doesn't describe the occupants of any historical mythology I can think of, at least not in its folk form. Humanity's gods are often profoundly unpleasant in a number of ways, but in terms of characterization they're almost always recognizably humanlike if not fully human.
Hmm. You have a point; most gods are recognizably anthropomorphic. OTOH, many of them are "beyond good and evil" in addition to possessing vast power, which is what I was aiming for. If you can suggest a better term, I'll edit the comment.
That's an interesting question. The first thing that comes to mind is the Gnostic Demiurge (named as Yaldabaoth, Saklas, or Samael depending on who you're asking; there are other names), the explicitly unFriendly creator spirit who is nonetheless not an embodiment of evil as per Satan or Angra Mainyu.
I'm not sure if there are any good type specimens for "unFriendly god", though. It's not hard to find spirits of evil in polytheistic or henotheistic religions, but using one of those names would carry unwelcome implications, and while a decent working definition for "god" in a number of polytheistic pantheons might be "a bigger jerk than most everyone else", using someone like Thor as an example would imply polytheism before it implies unFriendliness.
Worse still, it needs to be something immediately familiar to anyone reading the comment :(
A Gnostic who believes that the God the Christians worship is an evil demiurge who made the flawed creation in which we are imprisoned and from which we may escape by regaining contact with the true Supreme Being, has a belief about the Christian God. A Gnostic and a Christian will agree that they are disagreeing with each other over the nature of that being.
... they would? They disagree regarding the source of their beliefs, and various other details (eg the world is evil,) but I wouldn't have thought that the existence (as opposed to identity) of God was one of them.
This discussion shows signs of becoming a dispute over definitions, incidentally.
It's been that since the start. The Penn quote is just broken and deserves no further attention.
Well then, arguably, no-one actually believes in "God" at all.
Um, no. The fact that people are mistaken about what such a God would instruct them to do does not change the fact that they believe it exists and gave them certain instructions.
I think that this quote might benefit by tabooing the word "god".
Does it mean "an omniscient, omnipotent being"?
Does it mean "an omniscient, omnibenevolent being that would never ask you to do anything truly evil, but may on occasion ask you to do things that you don't see the sense in, and that in fact appear evil at first glance"?
Does it mean "a being worthy of respect and obedience, even in the most dire circumstances"?
I asked a religious relative something along these lines.
Her response was that God would never ask people to do bad things, and if it seemed that He was that would just be someone else deceiving her.
I explained the atheist view on this sort of thing and then the conversation shifted directions before I thought to point out the example of God asking someone to sacrifice their child in the bible.
An acquaintance of my family said something like that to me years ago. My response at the time was to ask her whether that meant more generally that if something I think is bad is presented to me as Divine instruction, I should reject it, since it is clearly something other than God at work. Her response was that no, there's a difference between something that actually is bad, and something I just think is bad. I asked her how I tell the difference; she suggested I ask God. I tapped out.
But ... there is a difference between "something that actually is bad, and something I just think is bad." If Omega told me sacrificing a child was the best option by my preferences, I would do so (or at least accept that I should; I would probably experience a lot of akrasia.) Wouldn't you?
There absolutely is a difference, yes.
But if the answer to "how do I tell the difference?" is that I ask the entity who is making the request in the first place, we've now achieved full epistemic closure.
That is: if I don't know whether Omega tells the truth or not, and I don't know whether Omega has my best interests in mind or not, and Omega tells me to sacrifice a child, I probably wouldn't sacrifice the child. Would you?
More generally, there is a big difference between "what ought I do, if X is the case?" and "what decision will the decision procedure that I ought to implement make, given non-zero but uncompelling evidence that X is the case?" Thought experiments often ask the former, but the latter is more relevant to my actual life.
I assume she expected you to ask God, y'know, now, not immediately after something claiming to be Him appeared and ordered you to kill 'em all. (Presumably asking Him "wait, are you sure killing children is a good idea?" would be met with a "yes". Or a thunderbolt.)
Sure, that's probably true. I don't see what difference it makes, though.
I mean, OK, suppose I wait an hour, or a day, or a week, or however long I decide to wait, and I ask again, and a Voice says "Yes, kill 'em all." Do I believe it's God now? Why?
Conversely, I wait however long I decide to wait and I ask again and a Voice says "No, don't kill 'em." Do I believe that's God? Why?
Do I ask a dozen times and take the most common answer?
None of those seem reasonable. It seems to me that on her account, what I ought to do is rely on my judgment of right and wrong rather than obeying the Voice, since the Voice is unreliable.
Which I completely agree with, but it didn't seem to be what she was saying more generally.
I meant that if you get contradictory answers to your previous question, then you can safely assume that one of the Voices isn't God - and I guess you should go with the one with the best track record? [EDIT: based on your own judgement.] We don't seem to disagree on anything, anyway.
Agreed with that much, certainly.
Why?
If I encounter a being approximately equivalent to God - (almost) all-knowing, benevolent etc. - and it tells me to do something, why the hell should I refuse? If Omega told you something was the best choice according to your preferences - presumably as part of a larger game - why wouldn't you try and achieve that?
My best guess is that Mr. Jilette is confused regarding morality.
Because most people who are convinced by their pet moral principle to kill kids are utterly wrong.
You're saying that if a Friendly superintellligence told you something was the right thing to do - however you define right - then you would trust your own judgement over theirs?
Acting the other way around would be trusting my judgement that the AI is friendly.
In any case, I would expect a superintelligence, friendly or not, to be able to convince me to kill my child, or do whatever.
Yes. Yes it would. Do you consider it so inconceivable that it might be the best course of action to kill one child that it outweighs any possible evidence of Friendliness?
And so, logically, could God. Apparently FAIs don't arbitrarily reprogram people. Who knew?