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jpet comments on 2013 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Took it. Comments:
Hopefully you have a way to filter out accidental duplicates (i.e. a hidden random ID field or some such), because I submitted the form by accident several times while filling it out. (I was doing it from my phone, and basically any slightly missed touch on the UI resulted in accidental submission).
Multiple choice questions should always have a "none" option of some kind, because once you select a radio button option there's no way to deselect it. Most of them did but not all.
I answered "God" with a significant probability because the way the definitions is phrased, I would say it includes whoever is running the simulation if the simulation hypothesis is true. I'm sure many people interpreted it differently. I'd suggest making this distinction explicit one way or the other next time.
It defined "God" as supernatural didn't it? In what sense is someone running a simulation supernatural? Unless you think for some reason that the real external world is not constrained by natural laws?
Maybe my definition of "supernatural" isn't the correct definition, but I often think of the word as describing certain things which we do not (currently) understand. And if we do eventually come to understand them, then we will need to augment our understanding of the natural laws...Assuming this "supernatural" stuff actually exists.
I suppose a programer could defy the laws he made for his virtual world when he intervenes from outside the system....But earthly programers obey the natural physical laws when they mess with the hardware, which also runs based on these same laws. I understand this is what you mean by "constrained by natural laws".
There are no "correct" or "incorrect" definitions, though, are there? Definitions are subjective, it's only important that participants of a discussion can agree on one.
Well... Definitions that map badly onto the underlying reality are inconvenient at best and actively misleading at worst.
Besides, definitions do not exist in a vacuum. They can be evaluated by their fitness to a purpose which means that if you specify a context you can speak of correct and incorrect definitions.
That's true, though I think "optimal" would be a better word for that than "correct".
Even agreement isn't necessary, but successful communication would be nice.
When A says X to B, it helps if A and B agree on what X refers to at that time, even if X refers to something different when B says X.
True. There's also the option "B implicitly understands what A means by X although it usually means something else to B" which is different from "A and B explicitly agree on what X refers to at that time".
Consider also the possibility that A says X to B correctly predicting that it means something else to B. This would also be sufficient for successful communication, no explicit agreement needed.
Perhaps you meant these to be contained in your statement, and NNOTM did too. In that case we both failed to understand eachother without explicit agreement :)
Yes, I agree that (case 1) A and B explicitly agreeing on what X means is different from (case 2) B implicitly understanding what X means to A, or (case 3) A implicitly understanding what X will mean to B.
And, yes, I meant "A and B agree on what X refers to [when A says X to B]" to include all three cases, as well as several others.
And yes, if you understood me to be referring only to case 1, then we failed to understand each other.
Could be a language issue. The Finnish word for agreement pretty much always refers to explicit agreement, whereas there is no simple word for implicit agreement in Finnish language that isn't directly translatable to "mutual understanding" or something like that.
In English, "agree" often means something like "coincide". (And Romance languages sometimes say "coincide" for "agree", as in opinions coinciding.)
For a discussion of the meaning of supernatural see here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/eth.1977.5.1.02a00040/pdf
If everything in your universe is a simulation, then the external implementation of it is at least extra-natural from your point of view, not constrained by any of the simulated natural laws. So you might as well call it supernatural if you like.
If you include all layers of simulation all the way out to base reality as part of the one huge natural system, then everything is natural, even if most of it is unknowable.
I'm no theologian, but it seems to me that this view of the supernatural does not conform to the usual picture of God philosophers put forward, in terms of being the "prime mover" and so on. They are usually trying to solve the "first cause" problem, among other things, which doesn't really mesh with God as the super-scientist, since one is still left wondering about where the world external to the simulation comes from.
I agree that my definition of the supernatural is not very useful in practice, but I think it is necessary if one is talking about God at all :p. What other word should we use? I quite like your suggested "extra-natural" for things not of this world, which leaves supernatural for things that indeed transcend the constraints of logic.
Well, I can't find any use for the word supernatural myself, even in connection with God. It doesn't seem to mean anything. I can imagine discussing God as a hypothetical natural phenomenon that a universe containing sentient life might have, for example, without the s word making any useful contribution.
Maybe anything in mathematics that doesn't correspond to something in physics is supernatural? Octonions perhaps, or the Monster Group. (AFAIK, not being a physicist or mathematician)
Hmm, I couldn't agree with that later definition. Physics is just the "map" after all, and we are always improving it. Mathematics (or some future "completed" mathematics) seems to me the space of things that are possible. I am not certain, but this might be along the lines of what Wittgenstein means when he says things like
"In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in an atomic fact the possibility of that atomic fact must already be prejudged in the thing.
If things can occur in atomic facts, this possibility must already lie in them.
(A logical entity cannot be merely possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)" (from the Tractatus - possibly he undoes all this in his later work, which I have yet to read...)
This is a tricky nest of definitions to unravel of course. I prefer to not call anything supernatural unless it lies outside the "true" order of reality, not just if it isn't on our map yet. I am a physicist though, and it is hard for me to see the logical possibility of anything outside the "true" order of the universe. Nevertheless, it seems to me like this is what people intend when they talk about God. But then they also try to prove that He must exist from logical arguments. These goals seem contradictory to me, but I guess that's why I'm an athiest :p.
I don't know where less "transcendant" supernatural entities fit into this scheme of course. Magic powers and vampires etc need not neccessarily defy logical description, they just don't seem to exist.
I agree that in the end, banishing the word supernatural is probably the easiest way to go :p.
I'd like to keep the word supernatural in my (inner?) vocabulary, but "unconstrained by physics" makes absolutely no sense to me, so I tried to choose a definition that doesn't make my brain hurt. If we inspect the roots of the word, you can see it roughly means "above nature", nature here being the observable universe whether it's a simulation or not. I find this definition suits the situation pretty well.
I can't disagree with that :p. I will concede that the survey question needs some refinement.
We had some discussion of this here.