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Jiro comments on Open Thread: March 4 - 10 - Less Wrong
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The possibility that a random cloud is a hallucination is low because clouds are well-studied and there is plenty of evidence for the existence of clouds--evidence of such a nature that anyone can see it. Furthermore, we know something about hallucinations--hallucinations don't cause random people to see random objects under random circumstances. A random cloud in the sky is not the type of thing that hallucinations typically make people see.
Your mystical experience was observable only by yourself, and was of a type which is known to be caused by brain malfunction.
But the more that different religions can do this, the less the meaning of the mystical experience. If God gives those experiences to people of all religions, then those experiences are no longer evidence for any particular religion. For all you know, the Muslim idea of God is the true one, the Christian one is false, and the Muslim God gives experiences to Christians in the same way you think that the Christian one gives experiences to Muslims. Maybe Christianity is really false, the pagans are right that there is a god and a goddess, and they give mystical experiences to Christians. Maybe some form of devil-worship is correct; I assume you believe that the Devil can't hand out mystical experiences, but if you are wrong about just that part, your experience could just as well come from the Devil.
It simply suggests that the criteria that God uses, when deciding when to make His presence known, are not limited to the professed religion of the person in question. Exactly what those criteria are, is not fully clear; but any religion which helped to foster those criteria amongst its adherents would be at least partially correct, in its effects if not necessarily in its dogma.
Why not? We're talking about the what may be second-most powerful entity in existence. (Mind you, there's a big difference between can and will; the existence of the Devil strongly implies the existence of God, and if the Devil is trying to discourage religion, then it would be counterproductive unless some other effects of said experience outweigh that risk.)
That sounds like you're agreeing with me. If God gives people mystical experiences no matter what their religion, mystical experiences are no good in showing that the religion is true. Of course this is a matter of degree. The wider the range of people get the experiences, the worse the experiences are at showing anything.
If beings other than God (such as the Devil) can give out mystical experiences, it's even worse. Mystical experiences not only don't show that the religion is true, they don't even show that "God exists" is true. At this point I don't see why you care that it's not just a brain malfunction, because even if it wasn't, you have no way to tell between an experience sent by God, one sent by the Devil, and there being a sorcerer on every block who occasionally pulls pranks by giving random people mystical experiences.
(As for why the Devil would want to do that? Maybe he knows that people interpret mystical experiences as evidence for their religion being true and he can incite religious conflict by giving people of opposing religions mystical experiences.)
It does not prevent said experiences from showing the existence of God, or from hinting at the criteria He finds important.
The devil is defined more-or-less by being in oppostion to God. If the devil exists, then so does God, pretty much.
And humans capable of pulling off a trick like that would almost certainly have been discovered by now if they were common.
The more different kinds of God you think can give out mystical experiences, the vaguer the "God" that those experiences demonstrate the existence of. If the Muslim version of God can send them, maybe it shows there's a God but he's not necessarily Christian. If polytheistic pagan gods can send them, maybe it shows that there's a God but he's not necessarily Christian and there isn't necessarily one of him either. You've ended up "proving" there's a God who has few attributes other than his name.
That's just a matter of semantics. Maybe a devil-like being without a God can't strictly speaking be called the Devil, but whatever you call him, surely you believe that if the normal Devil can give out mystical experiences, so can that one, right?
"Every block" is just an example. Suppose there were few but not no sorcerers in the world. Couldn't they produce mystical experiences that you could not tell from God-borne ones?
(And how do you explain the fact that people can take drugs that cause mystical experiences, get electrical shocks to their brain that trigger mystical experiences, and why some known mental illnesses are associated with mystical experiences? None of these things happen for seeing clouds except in passing.)
I find your comment very confusing. Might I suggest that we continue this discussion, after tabooing the words 'God' and 'Devil'?
I'll start out by rewriting my previous post under those same constraints:
It does not prevent said experiences from showing the existence of [an omnipotent, omniscient being], or from hinting at the criteria He finds important.
The [being opposing an omnipotent, omniscient being] is defined more-or-less by being in oppostion to [an omnipotent, omniscient being]. If the [being opposing an omnipotent, omniscient being] exists, then so does [said omnipotent, omniscient being], pretty much.
And humans capable of pulling off a trick like that would almost certainly have been discovered by now if they were common.
No, not unless the claim that you're making fits whatever words you use instead of "God" and "Devil". In order for it to work, you would have to assert that mystical experiences can come only from omnipotent, omniscient beings or other beings who share a cosmology, and from nobody else. I find that a very peculiar thing to claim.
I would think that, if they exist, pagan gods should be able to provide mystical experiences. Pagan gods aren't omnipotent and omniscient. A being that resembled the devil but didn't oppose anyone powerful could provide mystical experiences, and he wouldn't be omniscient, omnipotent, or in opposition to someone who is. Sorcerers aren't omniscient or omnipotent, yet they could make such experiences. And we know that brain stimulation, drugs, starvation, and mental illness can produce mystical experiences and they have nothing to do with omnipotence or omniscience.
And as for sorcerers being common, the argument doesn't depend on them being common, just on them existing. Rare sorcerers are equally a problem for the theory as common ones. There's also the possibility that sorcerers exist in a society that is intentionally kept hidden from discovery by the muggles. (And even then, who's to say that sorcerers haven't been discovered? They haven't been discovered in a reproducible way in a laboratory, but neither has God. They certainly have been discovered in the sense that an awful lot of people over a wide range of times and places were confident that they are real.)
No, I simply need to assert that such experiences are more likely given the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent being than they are without the existence of such a being.
Consider, for example; if I find a drop of oil on my driveway one morning, I may conclude that my car has an oil leak. There are other ways that the oil may have got there; someone else may have parked in my driveway for a few hours overnight, and he may have an oil leak. Or a neighbour may have dripped some oil on my driveway as a prank.
The mere existence of alternate hypothesis is not, on its own, sufficient to show that a conclusion cannot be correct.
Okay, since you're not tabooing 'god', I'm going to take a guess that you mean a very powerful and knowledgeable but neither omnipotent nor omniscient being which is part of a community of similarly powerful and knowledgeable beings, whose unified actions underlie the basic physics of the universe. Is that approximately correct?
If that is what you meant, then yes, you are correct; however, the chances that such beings exist is very small, because if a number of nearly-equally-powerful yet different beings were trying to run the physics of the universe, then we would almost certainly by now have spotted some areas of blatant disagreement between different beings; it would, in short, almost certainly be clearly impossible that a theory of everything could ever be produced. (If they never disagreed about anything ever, then are they really separate beings?)
I'm guessing here (because I'm really not sure what you mean) that you mean a single powerful and knowledgeable but neither omnipotent nor omniscient being?
If so, then again, you're right. Such a being could provide such an experience.
Yes. And I know that I didn't have electrodes in my brain, I hadn't taken drugs, I wasn't starved, and I'm mentally healthy.
True. The occasional rare sorceror who doesn't even know he's a sorceror would work. This would imply some circumstance, possibly some rare genetic mutation, which would permit some human brain to have a very direct effect on another human brain. If this could be controlled - even slightly - and if it worked on non-human brains as well, it could have a drastic positive effect on an organism's survival. If this were the case, I'd expect to see at least one type of mildly telepathic animal, exploiting this.
...I might not, of course. It might be that the 'sorcerors' are the first organism to exhibit this rare mutation.
And if there was a God, and there was a Devil who opposed him, we'd almost certainly have spotted some areas of disagreement between them. (You could claim that yes, we have spotted such things, but of course the same claim could be made for pagan gods.)
Also, pagan gods needn't necessarily run the physics of the universe in the sense of changing the cosmological constant.
This would be true for certain types of psychic powers, but there are other things which can be done only by humans. Sorcerers with spellbooks have to be able to read, for instance, and even if you quibble about whether animals can read, they wouldn't be able to read well enough to use a spellbook.
The point is that mystical experiences are known to have physical causes other than the existence of a supernatural being. I would expect milder versions of those to occasionally produce mystical experiences too. Nobody may have put an electrode in your brain, but the brain is complex and can occasionally misfire by itself.
No, that's not enough. Given that this is lesswrong, I hope you are aware of Bayseianism. The extent to which an experience is evidence of a God compared to evidence of other things that produce mystical experiences depends on your priors.It may be that a God is more likely to produce a mystical experience than anything else, but the prior for the existence of God is low enough that a mystical experience is still most likely to have been caused by something other than God.
Only if they were roughly equal in power and ability. If God is so comparatively powerful that the Devil doesn't get to make changes to the laws of physics, then we wouldn't see any such disagreements (because physics as a whole is still then under control of one being)
In that case, can you please explain to me what exactly you mean by the phrase 'pagan gods'?
Yes, I am aware of Bayesianism.
My prior for the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient being was set pretty high; somewhere over 50%. Why do you claim that that prior has to be set "low enough that a mystical experience is still most likely to have been caused by something other than God"?