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Viliam_Bur comments on Open Thread, July 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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I've been talking to some friends who have some rather odd spiritual (in the sense of disorganised religion) beliefs. Odd because its a combination of modem philosophy LW would be familiar with (acausal commuication between worlds of Tegmark's level IV multiverse) ancient religion, and general weirdness. I have trouble pointing my finger at exactly what is wrong with this reasoning, although I'm fairly sure there is a flaw, in the same way I'm quite sure I'm not a Boltzmann brain, but it can be hard articulating why. So, if anyone is interested, here is the reasoning:
1) Dualism is wrong, due to major philosophical problems as well as Occam's razor
2) I think therefore I am, so I know that the 'mental world' exists.
3) Therefore Idealism is true, the mental world exists but the physical is just an illusion
4) In response to 'so why can't you fly?' the answer is a lack of mental discipline: after all, its hard to control your thoughts
5) If two different people existed in the same universe, there is no reason why they would perceive the same illusions.
6) Therefore, each universe consists of one conscious observer and their illusory reality
7) But Tegmark's level IV multiverse is true, so we can acausaly communicate between worlds, in fact all conversations are actually acausal communication between worlds.
8) This also implies there is reincarnation, of a sort - there is no body to die, so you just construct a new illusory reality.
From here on it gets into more standard 'spiritual' realms, although I did find it amusing when my friend told me that there are at least aleph-2 gods.
I should state that these beliefs are largely pointless, in that its not obvious that they actually influence any decisions the believers make, and that they do seem to make people happy without any major downsides.
I should also make it clear that I don't believe this, because I wouldn't want to lose status as a rationalist by believing in something unpopular!
TL;DR
To a large extent, this boils down to: how do I distinguish between the hypothesizes that the universe is lawful, and the hypothesis that the universe is determined by my beliefs, and I believe it to be lawful.
How do you know what you claim to know? (Okay, not you, but whoever said this.) Do you have any reproducible experimental proof of whatever violation of physical laws using mental discipline?
Isn't it suspicious that undisciplined thoughts are enough to create an illusion of physical reality perfectly obeying the physical laws, but are unable to violate the laws? That sounds to me like speaking about an archer who always perfectly hits the middle of the target, but is unable to shoot the arrow outside of the target, supposedly because he is too clumsy. I mean, isn't hitting the center of the target more difficult that missing the target? Wouldn't creating a reality perfectly obeying the laws of physics all the time require more mental discipline than having things happen randomly?
I am sure there can be dozen ad-hoc explanations, I just wanted to show how it doesn't make sense.
So, if you get killed, your mental discipline will improve enough to let you create new reality you can't create now? Interesting...
To play devils' advocate ... do you have any reproducible experimental proof of believing that an event would happen that would violate the laws of physics, and then the laws were upheld?
Yes, I quite agree. It's also odd that I cannot play the violin, and yet other people can, which would imply that I can imagine people with knowledge that I don't have. If reality was an illusion, I would expect it to be a lot more like wonderland.
However, we are dealing with priors and intuition here, in that we cannot run experiments, getting disembodied consciousnesses to imagine realities and then observing what they imagine. Its difficult to even run thought experiments, given that you would be trying to model something that supposedly works outside of physics.
So: if you have a prior belief that an illusory reality would be undisciplined (and I agree here), and someone else has a prior that this is not a problem, and that reductionism is highly implausible, how can this disagreement be resolved?
Even if both parties were perfect Bayesian reasoners, Aumann's agreement theorem doesn't apply, because there is no experimental evidence to update on. How can we determine which prior is correct? Perhaps we could agree that approximate Kolmogorov complexity provides an objective prior, although I think objections would be raised, but even in that case it doesn't help in practice unless you can actually calculate approximate Kolmogorov complexity.
I think the mental discipline is supposed to be needed to control reality, not to create it. Nevertheless, anything that allows one to escape death does make 'motivated cognition' spring to mind.