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wedrifid comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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That probability is off by a factor of 100 from the one I mentioned.
(And with 'no evidence either way' the probability assigned would be far, far lower than that. It takes rather a lot of evidence to even find your God in hypothesis space.)
You're right, I'm sorry. It was 0.0001. That's still pretty small, though. Is that really what you think it is?
Don't think of my God, then. Any deity at all.
Do we want to be Bayesian about it? Of course we do. Let's imagine two universes. One formed spontaneously, one was created. Which is more likely to occur?
Personally I think that the created one seems more likely. Apparently you think that the spontaneity is more believable. But as for the probability that any given universe is created rather than accidental, 0.0001 seems unrealistically low. And if that's not the number you actually believe—it was just an example—what is?
What evidence makes you think this?
I don't have any evidence. I know, downvote me now. But I suspect some sort of Bayesian analysis might support this, because if there is a deity, it is likely to create universes, whereas if there is no deity, universes have to form spontaneously, which requires a lot of things to fall into place perfectly.
Okay, so what makes you think this is true? I'm wondering how on earth we would even figure out how to answer this question, let alone be sure of the answer.
What has to fall into place for this to occur? Exactly how unlikely is it?
Look, let's just admit that this line of reasoning is entirely speculative anyway...
Um, why cut off the conversation at this point rather than your original one, in that case?
All I'm saying is that if you need numbers and evidence to continue, we're not going to get any further.
...
Excuse me?
It isn't obvious that this is at all meaningful, and gets quickly into deep issues of anthropics and observer effects. But aside from that, there's some intuition here that you seem to be using that may not be shared. Moreover, it also has the weird issue that most forms of theism have a deity that is omnipotent and so should exist over all universes.
Note also that the difference isn't just spontaneity v. created. What does it mean for a universe to be created? And what does it mean to call that creating aspect a deity? One of the major problems with first cause arguments and similar notions is that even when one buys into them it is extremely difficult to jump from their to theism. Relevant SMBC.
Certainly this is a tough issue, and words get confusing really quickly. What intuition am I not sharing? Sorry if by "universe" I meant scenario or existence or something that contains God when there is one.
What I mean by "deity" and "created" is that either there is a conscious, intelligent mind (I think we all agree what that means) organizing our world/universe/reality, or there isn't. And of course I'm not trying to sell you on my particular religion. I'm just trying to point out that I think there's not any more inherent reason to believe there is no deity than to believe there is one.
Ok. So in this context, why do you think that one universe is more likely than the other? It may help to state where "conscious" and "intelligent" and "mind" come into this argument.
On the contrary, that shouldn't be an "of course". If you sincerely believe and think you have the evidence for a particular religion, you should present it. If you don't have that evidence, then you should adjust your beliefs.
Even if one thinks one is in a constructed universe, it in no way follows that the constructor is divine or has any other aspects one normally associates with a deity. For example, this universe could be the equivalent of a project for a 12 dimensional grad student in a wildly different universe (ok, that might be a bit much- it might just be by an 11 -dimensional bright undergrad).
What do you mean as an "inherent" reason? Are you solely making a claim here about priors, or are you making a claim about what evidence there actually is when we look out at the world? Incidentally, you should be surprised if this is true- for the vast majority of hypotheses, the evidence we have should assign them probabilities far from 50%. Anytime one encounters a hypothesis which is controversial in a specific culture, and one concludes that it has a probability close to 1/2, one should be concerned that one is reaching such a conclusion not out of rational inquiry but more out of an attempt to balance competing social and emotional pressures.
How about this, from Mormon user calcsam:
Seems legit to me.
I'd actually consider that deity in the sense of a conscious, intelligent being who created the universe intentionally. As opposed to it happening by cosmic hazard. (That is, no conscious creator.)
Would you assign that being any of the traits normally connected to being a deity? For example, if the 11 dimensional undergrad say not to eat shellfish, or to wear special undergarments, would you listen?
Yes, I would listen if was confident that was where it was coming from. This 11-dimensional undergrad is much more powerful and almost certainly smarter than me, and knowingly rebelling would not be a good idea. If this undergrad just has a really sick sense of humor, then, well, we're all screwed in any case.
And if the 11-dimensional undergrad says you should torture a baby?
Clearly, then I need to make awfully sure it's actually God and not a hallucination. I would probably not do it because in that case I know that the undergrad does have a sick sense of humor and I shouldn't listen to him because we're all screwed anyway.
Now, if you're going to bring up Abraham and Isaac or something like that, remember that in this case Abraham was pretty darn sure it was actually God talking.
As JoshuaZ says, there's no "of course" about it. If some particular religion is right and I am wrong, then I absolutely want to know about it ! So if you have some evidence to present, please do so.
I think that my religion is right and you are misguided. I really do, for reasons of my own. But I don't have any "evidence" to share with you, especially if you are committed to explaining it away as you may not be but many people here are.
Remember that my original question was just to see where this community stood. I don't have all that many grand answers myself. I suppose I could actually say that if you honestly absolutely want to know and are willing to open your mind, then you should try reading this book—I'm serious, but I'm aware how silly that would sound in such a context as this. Really, I don't want to become that guy.
I'm young, and I myself am trying to find good, rational arguments in favor of God. I'm trying to reconcile rationality and religion in my mind, and if I can't find anyone online, I'll figure it out myself and write a blog post about it in twenty years.
But what it seems I've found is that no, most of the people on this site (based on my representative sample of about a dozen, I know) have never been presented with solid arguments in favor of religion. Maybe I'll manage to find some or write them myself, and maybe I'll decide that the population of Less Wrong is as closed-minded as I feared. In any case, thank you for being more open than certain others.
Ah, no, haven't you read the How to Actually Change Your Mind sequence? Or at least the Against Rationalization subsequence and The Bottom Line? You can't just decide "I want to prove the existence of God" and then write a rational argument. You can't start with the bottom line. Really, read the sequence, or at least the subsequence I pointed out.
I wasn't under the impression that the Book of Mormon was substantially more convincing than any other religious holy book. I have, however, heard that the Mormon church does exceptionally well at building a community. If you'd like to talk about that, I'd be extremely interested.
How sure are you that more solid arguments exist? We don't know about them. You apparently don't know about them. If you've got any that you're hiding, remember that if God actually exists we would really like to know about it; we don't want to explain anything away that isn't wrong.
Yes, I have read the sequence. I think that not being one-sided sometimes requires a conscious effort, and is a worthwhile cause.
Of course you won't read the Book of Mormon. I wouldn't expect you to. But if you want "evidence" which has firmly convinced millions of people—here it is. I personally have found it more powerful than the Bible or Qur'an.
You're right, I don't have any solid arguments in favor of religion. My original question of this post was actually just to ask if you had any—and I've gotten an answer. No, you believe there are none.
I've shown you one source that convinces a lot of people; consider yourself to know about it. I would recommend reading it, too, if you're really interesting in finding the truth.
Can you expand on that? What is this perception of "power" you get in varying degrees from such books, and what is the relation between that sensation and deciding whether anything in those books is true?
I've read the Bible and the Qur'an, and while I haven't read the Book of Mormon, I have a copy (souvenir of a visit to Salt Lake City). I'll have a look at it if you like, but I'm not expecting much, because of the sort of thing that books like these are. Neither the Bible nor the Qur'an convince me that any of the events recounted in them ever happened, or that any of the supernatural entities they talk about ever existed, or that their various moral prescriptions should be followed simply because they appear there. How could they?
A large part of the Bible is purported history, and to do history right you can't rely on a single collection of old and multiply-translated documents which don't amount to a primary source for much beyond their own existence, especially when archaeology (so I understand) doesn't turn up all that much to substantiate it. And things like the Genesis mythology are just mythology. The world was not created in six days. Proverbs, Wisdom, the "whatsoever things..." passage, and so on, fine: but I read them in the same spirit as reading the rationality quote threads here. Where there be any virtue, indeed.
The Qur'an consists primarily of injunctions to believe and imprecations against unbelievers. I'm not going to swallow that just because of its aggressive manner.
So, that is my approach to religious documents. This "power" that leads many people to convert to a religion, that gives successful missionaries thousands of converts in a single day: I have to admit that I have no idea what experience people are talking about. Why would reading a book or tract open my eyes to the truth? Especially if I have reason to think that the authors were not engaged in any sort of rational inquiry?
That is, BTW, also my approach to non-religious documents, and I find it really odd when I see people saying of things like, say, Richard Dawkins' latest, "this book changed the way I see things!" It's a frequent jibe of religious people against atheists that "atheism is just another religion", but when people within atheism convert so readily from one idea to another just by reading a book, I have to wonder whether "religion" might be just the word for that mental process.
What's strange about converting from one idea to another by reading a book? A book can contain a lot of information. Sometimes it doesn't even take very much to change one's mind. Suppose a person believes that the continents can't be shifting, because there's no room for them to move around on a solid sphere. Then they read about subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, and see a diagram of plate movement around the world, and think "Oh, I guess it can happen that way, how silly of me not to have thought of that."
I haven't found any religious text convincing, because they tend to be heavy on constructing a thematic message and providing social motivation to believe, light on evidence, but for a lot of people that's a normal way to become convinced of things (indeed, I recently finished reading a book where the author discussed how, among the tribe he studied, convincing people of a proposition was almost entirely a matter of how powerful a claim you were prepared to make and what authority you could muster, rather than what evidence you could present or how probable your claim was.)
I know how most atheists feel about the Bible. Really, I do. But if you don't understand what's so powerful about a book, and you want to know, then you really should give it a try—I might say that the last chapter of Moroni especially addresses this.
(I promise I'm not trying to convert you. I don't remotely expect you to have a spiritual experience because of this one chapter.)
Yes, it's easy to compare religion and atheism to each other as well as professional sports and a lot of other human behaviors. I'm all for free thought and not being persuaded by powerful words alone. However, just as I try to be able to enjoy ridiculous sports games, I'm glad to understand why people believe what they do.
Have you read the Quran in the original Arabic? It's pretty famously considered to lose a lot in translation.
I haven't, of course, but the only ex-muslim I've spoken to about it agrees that even in the absence of his religious belief, it's a much more powerful and poetic work in Arabic.
Working on it :)
I can sometimes actually understand entire verses but it is in fact a goal of mine. I'd think it must lose a lot in translation.
I was honest when I said that I'd love to see some convincing evidence for the existence of any god. If you have some, then by all means, please present it. However, if I look at your evidence and find that it is insufficient to convince me, this does not necessarily mean that I'm closed-minded (though I still could be, of course). It could also mean that your reasoning is flawed, or that your observations can be more parsimoniously explained by a cause other than a god.
A big part of being rational is learning to work around your own biases. Consider this: if you can't find any solid arguments for the existence of your particular version of God... is it possible that there simply aren't any ?
Yes, it's possible that there aren't any. That makes your beliefs much, much simpler. But I think that it's much safer and healthier to assume that you just haven't been exposed to any yet. I can't call you closed-minded for not having been exposed, and I'm sure that if some good arguments did pop up you at least would be willing to hear them. I'm sorry that I don't myself have any; I'm going to keep looking for a few years, if you don't mind.
At what point do I stop looking, though ? For example, a few days ago I lost my favorite flashlight (true story). I searched my entire apartment for about an hour, but finally gave up; my guess is that I left it somewhere while I was hiking. I am pretty sure that the flashlight is not, in fact, inside my apartment... but should I keep looking until I'd turned over every atom ?
You stop looking when you decide it's no longer helpful, obviously. You've stopped looking, and I'm not blaming you for that. I am still looking.
I do mind. If you look for a few years for "rational" arguments for Mormonism you will be wasting your life duplicating the effort of thousands of people before you. Please don't. Even if you remain Mormon, there are far better things you can do than theology.
What should I spend my next few years of rationalism doing then?
It seems that according to you, my options are
a) leave my religion in favor of rationalism. (feel free to tell me this, but if my parents find out about it they'll be worried and start telling me you're a satanic cult. I can handle it.)
b) leave rationalism in favor of religion. (not likely. I could leave Less Wrong if it's not open-minded enough, but I won't renounce rational thinking.)
c) learn to live with the conflict in my mind.
Suggestions?
So this is a problem. In general, there are types of claims that don't easily have shared evidence (e.g. last night I had a dream that was really cool, but I forgot it almost as soon as I woke up, I love my girlfriend, when I was about 6 years old I got the idea of aliens who could only see invisible things but not visible things, etc.) But most claims, especially claims about what we expect of reality around us should depend on evidence that can be shared.
So this is already a serious mistake. One shouldn't try to find rational arguments in favor of one thing or another. One should find the best evidence for and against a claim, and then judge the claim based on that.
You may want to seriously consider that the arguments you are looking for don't exist. In the meantime, may I recommend reddit's Debate Religion forum. They are dedicated to discussing a lot of these issues and may be a better forum for some of the things you are interested. Of course, the vast majority of things related to rationality has very little to do with whether or not there are any deities, and so you are more than welcome to stick around here. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here.
Yea!
Note that my expressed intention in this post was not to start a religious debate, though I have enjoyed that too. I have considered that the arguments I'm looking for don't exist; what I've found is that at least you guys don't have any, which means that from your position this case is entirely one-sided. So generally, your belief that religion is inherently ridiculous from a rationalist standpoint has never actually been challenged at all.
Definitely it's been interesting. Thanks.
If you really want rationalist (more properly, post-rationalist) arguments in favor of God, I recommend looking through Will Newsome's comments from a few years ago; also through his twitter accounts @willnewsome and @willdoingthings.
If you follow my advice, though, may God have mercy on your soul; because Will Newsome will have none on your psychological health.
Thanks for the reference; someone else mentioned him and I've enjoyed the blog it led me to, but I didn't think to look through his comments.
You are privileging the hypothesis of (presumably one specific strain of) monotheism. That is not actually a rational approach. The kind of question a rationalist would ask is not "does God exist?" but "what should I think about cosmology" or "what should I think about ethics?" First you examine the universe around you, and then you come up with hypotheses to see how well they match that. If you don't start from the incorrectly narrow hypothesis space of [your strain of monotheism, secular cosmology acccording to the best guesses of early 21st century science], you end up with a much lower probability for your religion being true, even if science turns out to be mistaken about the particulars of the cosmology.
Put another way: What probability do you assign to Norse mythology being correct? And how well would you respond if someone told you you were being closed-minded because you'd never heard a solid argument for Thor?
I'm sorry if you feel that I've called you closed-minded, no personal offense was intended. But it's a bit worrisome when a community as a whole has only ever heard one viewpoint.
As for the Book of Mormon... try to think of it this way.
Imagine that, tomorrow, you meet aliens from a faraway star system. The aliens look like giant jellyfish, and are in fact aquatic; needless to say, they grew up in a culture radically different from ours. While this alien species does possess science and technology (or else they wouldn't make it all the way to Earth !), they have no concept of "religion". They do, however, have a concept of fiction (as well as non-fiction, of course, or else they wouldn't have developed science).
The aliens have studied our radio transmissions, translated our language, and downloaded a copy of the entire Web; this was easy for them since their computers are much more powerful than ours. So, the aliens have access to all of our literature, movies, and other media; but they have a tough time making sense of some of it. For example, they are pretty sure that the Oracle SQL Manual is non-fiction (they pirated a copy of Oracle, and it worked). They are also pretty sure that Little Red Riding Hood is fiction (they checked, and they're pretty sure that wolves can't talk). But what about a film like Lawrence of Arabia ? Is that fiction ? The aliens aren't sure.
One of the aliens comes to you, waving a copy of The Book of Mormon (or whichever scripture you believe in) in its tentacles (but in a friendly kind of way). It asks you to clarify: is this book fiction, or non-fiction ? If it contains both fictional and non-fictional passages, which are which ? Right now, the alien is leaning toward "fiction" (it checked, and snakes can't talk), but, with us humans, one can never be sure.
What do you tell the alien ?
a) I would tell them it's non-fiction. Are Yudkowsky's posts fiction or non-fiction? What about the ones where he tells clearly made-up instructional stories?
b) No need to bash the Book of Mormon. I'm fully aware how you people feel about it. But—
you did in fact ask.
It was not my intent to bash the Book of Mormon specifically; I just used it as a convenient stand-in for "whichever holy scripture you believe in". Speaking of which:
The alien spreads its tentacles in confusion, then pulls out a stack of books from the storage compartment of its exo-suit. "What about all these other ones ?", it asks. You recognize the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, Enuma Elish, the King James Bible, and the Nordic Eddas; you can tell by the way the alien's suit is bulging that it's got a bunch more books in there. The alien says (or rather, its translation software says for it),
"We can usually tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction. For example, your fellow human Yudkowsky wrote a lot of non-fictional articles about things like ethics and epistemology, but he also wrote fictional stories such as Three Worlds Collide. In that, he is similar to [unpronounceable], the author on our own world who wrote about imaginary worlds in order to raise awareness his ideas concerning [untranslateable] and [untranslateable], which is now the basis of our FTL drive. Sort of like your own Aesop, in fact.
But these books", -- the alien waves some of its tentacles at the huge stack -- "are confusing our software. Their structure and content contains many elements that are usually found only in fiction; for example, talking animals, magical powers, birds bigger than mountains, some sort of humanoids beings that are said to live in the skies or at the top of tall mountains or perhaps in orbit, shapeshifters, and so on. We checked, and none of those things exist in real life.
But then, we talked to other humans such as yourself, and they told us that some of these books are true in a literal sense. Oddly enough, each human seems to think that one particular book is true, and all the others are fictional or allegorical, but groups of humans passionately disagree about which book is true, as well as about the meaning of individual passages.
Thus, we [unpronounceable]" -- you recognize the word for the alien's own species -- "are thoroughly confused. Are these books fiction, or aren't they ? For example", the alien says as it flips open the Book of Mormon, "do you really believe that snakes can talk ? Or that your Iron Age ancestors could build wooden submarines ? Or that a mustard seed is the smallest thing there is ? Or that there's an invisible person in the sky who watches your every move ?"
The alien takes a pause to breathe (or whatever it is they do), then flips open some of the other books.
"What about these ? Do you believe in a super-powered being called Thor, who creates lightning bolts with his hammer, Mjolnir ? Do you think that some humans can cast magic spells that actually work ? And what about Garuda the mega-bird, is he real ?
If you believe some of these books are truth and others fiction, how do you tell the difference ? Our software can't tell the difference, and neither can we..."
Funny, I could swear someone already asked me that, and I gave them an answer. I'll see if I can find the specific thread...
The universe looks very undesigned -- the fine-tuned constants and the like only allow conscious observers and so can be discounted on the basis of the anthropic principle (in a set of near-infinite universes, even undesigned ones, conscious observers would only inhabit universes with constants such that would allow their existence -- there's no observer who'd observe constants that didn't permit their existence)
So pretty much all the evidence seems to speak of a lack of any conscious mind directing or designing the universe, neither malicious nor benevolent.
I know many, many people who think that the universe looks designed. I can refer you to Ivy League scientists if you want.
There are 7 billion people in the world. One can find "many, many" people to believe all sorts of things, especially if one's going to places devoted to gathering such people together.
But the stuff that are really created by conscious minds, there's rarely a need to argue about them. When the remnants of Mycenae were discovered nobody (AFAIK) had to argue whether they were a natural geological formation or if someone built them. Nobody had to debate whether the Easter Island statues were designed or not.
The universe is either undesigned and undirected, or it's very cleverly designed so as to look undesigned and undirected. And frankly, if the latter is the case, it'd be beyond our ability to manage to outwit such clever designers; in that hypothetical case to believe it was designed would be to coincidentally reach the right conclusion by making all the wrong turns just because a prankster decided to switch all the roadsigns around.
There are many, many Ivy League scientists. Again beware confirmation bias, the selection of evidence towards a predetermined conclusion. Do you have statistics for the percentage of Ivy League scientists that say "the universe looks designed" vs the ones that say "the universe doesn't look designed" ? That'd be more useful.
Aaaand unfortunately we're getting into personal opinion. It's easy enough to find statistics about belief among top scientists, though.
As an addendum to my above comment -- if you personally feel that the universe looks designed, can you tell me how would it look in the counterfactual where you were observing a blatantly UNdesigned universe?
Here's for example elements of a hypothetical blatantly designed world: Continents in the shape of animals or flowers. Mountains that are huge statues. Laws of conservation that don't easily reduce to math (e.g. conservation of energy, momentum, etc) but rather to human concepts (conservation of hope, conservation of dramatic irony). Clouds that reshape themselves to amuse and entertain the people watching them.
The intuition you're not sharing is that presence is inherently less likely than absence. I'm not entirely sure how to convey that.
What would be your prior probability for God existing before updating on your own existence?
I have absolutely no idea. Good question. What would be yours?
It's not a well-defined enough hypothesis to assign a number to: but the the main thing is that it's going to be very low. In particular, it is going to be lower than a reasonable prior for a universe coming into existence without a creator. The reason existence seems like evidence of a creator, to us, is that we're used to attributing functioning complexity to an agent-like designer. This is the famous Watchmaker analogy that I am sure you are familiar with. But everything we know about agents designing things tells us that the agents doing the designing are always far more complex than the objects they've created. The most complicated manufactured items in the world require armies of designers and factory workers and they're usually based on centuries of previous design work. Even then, they are probably no manufactured objects in the world that are more complex than human beings.
So if the universe were designed, the designer is almost certainly far more complex than the universe. And as I'm sure you know, complex hypotheses get low initial priors. In other words: a spontaneous Watchmaker is far more unlikely than a spontaneous watch. Now: an apologist might argue that God is different. That God is in fact simple. Actually, they have argued this and such attempts constitute what I would call the best arguments for the existence of God. But there are two problems with these attempts. First, the way they argue that God is simple is based on imprecise, anthropocentric vocabulary that hides complexity. An "omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and omnibenevolent creator" sounds pretty simple. But if you actually break down each component into what it would actually have to be computationally it would be incredibly complex. The only way it's simple is with hand-waving magic.
Second, A simple agent is totally contrary to our actual experience with agents and their designs. But that experience is the only thing leading us to conclude that existence is evidence for a designer in the first place. We don't have any evidence that a complex design can come from a simple creator.
This a more complex and (I think) theoretically sophisticated way of making the same point the rhetorical question "Who created the creator?" makes. The long and short of it is that while existence perhaps is very good evidence for a creator, the creator hypothesis involves so much complexity that the prior for His spontaneous existence is necessarily lower than the prior for the universe's spontaneous existence.
I agree that the "omnibenevolent" part would be incredibly complex (FAI-complete).
But "omnipotent", "omnipresent" and "omniscient" seem much easier. For example, it could be a computer which simulates this world -- it has all the data, all the data are on its hard disk, and it could change any of these data.
I actually think this illustrates my point quite nicely: the lower limit for the complexity of God (the God you describe) is by definition slightly more complicated than the world itself (the universe is included in your description!).
In which direction?
I mentioned 0, 1 and 0.0001. Ibidem asked about 0.0001%. That's 100 times lower.
Ah, sorry. I misread your statement as talking about a prior rather than with the evidence at hand and didn't notice the percentage mark. Your edited comment is more clear.