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FWIW, I'm not the one who downvoted you. Actually, I'll upvote your every comment in this discussion now, since I appreciate you being engaged. And I hope others will switch from "I don't like this comment" mode and into "it's interesting to see a Muslim openly discussing faith and rationality, so it's worth an upvote.
Well, presumably you were brought up as one, or maybe converted as an adult, as many do. If it's the former, why not have a look around for what you look in faith and see if Islam is the best? Maybe Buddhism or something would work better? If it's the latter, how did you choose Islam over other religions?
Thanks, shminux. I'm quite accustomed to being quickly rejected. (I've been "conferencing," we used to call it, since the 1980s on the W.E.L.L., where I was a moderator.) The common comment is tl;dr. But when I'm succinct, I'm also not understood. Getting it just right, under most conditions, can be a tad difficult in writing, which is very narrow-bandwidth. Sometimes it's not clear that there even is a "just right." The optimized writing, for some readerships, might be none at all.
Now, to your questions. Along with most who accepted Islam as adults, we don't say "converted." I started out as an agnostic/atheist in my teens, but then life demonstrated something else to me, and that's a long story. I was, for a time, a student of Buddhism, and could still be called a Buddhist. I translated the Heart Sutra from the Sanskrit, in my 20s, and had some great correspondence with Edward Conze. Fun.
However, I eventually read the Qur'an, and saw something in it, a, shall we say, familiar message. Some of it seemed really weird. So, eventually, I began to read it in Arabic. The weirdness almost entirely disappeared. Artifact of translation. Again, this would be a long conversation in itself.
I did not "choose Islam over other religions." There is no "over" and, in a sense, there is no "other" as well. Rather, I accepted what I came to understand was the Qur'an. I trust it as a "message from Reality." The definition of "Muslim" can be boiled down to that, essentially.
But everything is a message from Reality.
The Qur'an appears to me as remarkably clear, but that certainly could be because Arabic is a context-driven language, each word is derived from root meanings, with the specific meaning being supplied by context, and that context includes our individual understandings.
If I thought that beating women is a-okay, there is a famous verse that could confirm it for me. However, given my own context, that verse, as commonly translated, seemed quite weird, uncharacteristically unjust, really bad advice. Looking at Arabic, the word translated as "beat" is "adrib." The word means "strike," the correspondence in English is pretty good. "Beat" is repeated striking, and would be shown as a different grammatical form. "Beat" is a terrible translation. By men, of course.
Okay, "strike." Still sounds bad, eh? However, what does "strike" mean? It's only in a context where physical striking is expected that we come up with the negative meaning. "Strike up the band" doesn't mean whack them. "Strike a metaphor" -- an actual Qur'anic usage -- doesn't mean "crush it." Say something "striking" or take a 'striking" action -- something to get her attention -- is probably the meaning, to me. And I could then relate this to the textual context, and it makes sense. Do something unexpected. Being a bully is boring, it doesn't work, not to create fulfilling marriages.
And for the Buddhism question, my turn to ask. What does "work better" mean?
I'd love to hear it. If you have it on your blog, feel free to link. Or PM me, if you like.
That confuses me. My understanding is that Muslims warship the same God Hebrews and Christians do, so one must accept this concept over whatever other religions profess.
Well, clearly you have a need for a supernatural component in your worldview, apparently due to your life experiences. This is hardly unusual, though often suppressed, and EY confesses to nearly the same in The Magnitude of His Own Folly:
though his alief at the time was in a Just Universe rather than in an explicit God.
So why is it that
when you read Qur'an in Arabic? Do you think that this is one of those untranslatables (like those EY described in his short fiction Three Worlds Collide), or can it be expressed in English?
None of this would be particularly usable in terms of argument or convincing someone else. I saw "coincidences" on a level that made no sense, without there being what could be called "something more" than the ordinary world of cause and effect, operating only locally. Like three events that did not occur to me before or since, that would be rare for anyone, and that all happened, seemingly independently, one after the other, on one day, in about an hour. And that seemed to mean something. Basically, something like "Don't worry, it's covered."
And I also experienced something directly, it would be called "mystical" here, except that it's really quite ordinary. It's a shift in perspective. Suppose that we are seeing all of life through a mirror. We don't realize this, because we don't see the signs that the mirror exists, we don't see the edges. Sometimes we might see that the mirror is dirty, though. I won't go there yet.
However, what does a mirror look like? Suppose that a mirror has a certain characteristic color. Let's call that color "clarity." Suppose that one has a faculty for seeing that color. (I suspect we all do.)
This isn't "scientific." There is no way to show that there is any "clarity" other than the reality of what is reflected. Or directly seen. It's an experience, though, and because of it, the whole elementary level of Zen koans became transparent for me, and when I asked a Zen master about this, he confirmed it. I was something like 22 years old. I didn't have training, I was just lucky, or something.
I don't consider this truly significant, but I could probably write a book about it. It's not the way I think any more, particularly. Again, all this did for me was to connect me with wide religious traditions, which I saw, then, as referring to experience that was not the "ordinary way" of looking at things. I've not fully expressed this at all, I was just describing the gateway that I walked through.
Because I wasn't taught by any individual or within any tradition, I didn't have a method for transmitting this. I was able to confirm some others, though. Landmark Education, however, is teaching "transformation," and a crucial part of that is the concept of "nothing." It can easily sound like total BS, but ... people actually -- and with reasonable reliability -- experience it, can talk about it with each other, it is easily visible, and it has transformative value, people do become more competent, more effective, happier, fully self-expressed, etc. Call it "clearing away the cobwebs," perhaps. Again, clarity itself. No content.
Okay, sorry about confusing you, that's not my goal. You are referring to "bulk behavior," that more or less assumes that Muslims and Jews and Christians "worship the same God." Sort of. But each of those categories covers a huge variety of actual beliefs. Some Christian concepts of God are very different from some Muslim concepts. When I said that there is no "over" I meant that I wasn't rejecting anything by accepting Islam. And when I said that there is no "other" (religion), I meant that "lslam" is a name -- this is standard -- for the natural relationship of the human to Reality.
(That's very standard Islam, only I use the term Reality to refer to God. Color me ecumenical.)
What "other religions," then? Buddhism is actually a whole set of religions, there is a huge variation. Many Buddhists don't accept the "Buddhist mythology," just the actual practice, the psychology, if you will. Buddhism has been considered an "atheist religion," because some forms don't refer to a deity at all. My interest, though, is in what those who actually practice Buddhism experience. Why would I be interested in rejecting this or in thinking my own experience superior?
I'm not sure what "supernatural" means. Out of the ordinary? But isn't deep rationalism out of the ordinary? What are we talking about?
There is something called, loosely, "causeless joy." Call it "existential joy." Is it real? I really don't know, I just know that it's really cool! In the end, whatever I experience is a state of the brain, a pile of patterns, right? Except for one thing. What is this "I" that supposedly is having this experience? There is a pile of patterns, that's a practically universal understanding -- and very Buddhist, the skandhas. But is there anything else? I'd say, sure, but I can't prove it. What else there is, I'll call Reality. I can't prove that Reality exists, but so what?
I don't talk about "belief in God," not for myself. Certainly many people use this language, but, for me, and in my reading of the Qur'an, the issue is a basic relationship with Reality. What you pointed out from EY was a kind of trust in Reality, he called it the Universe.
Is Reality sentient? That would be more of the issue, eh? I don't know. I am simply moved to trust it.
Now, as to the Qur'an, it's pretty simple. It's not that the Qur'an is "untranslatable," per se, it is that each word in Arabic has a huge number of possible meanngs, and to translate it into English requires choosing English meanings, and the English set of meanings for a word is often very different from the Arabic set of meanings. So by translating it, one is "specifying" the meaning more than what was present in the original (and/or possibly adding new meanings). And this is necessarily limited by the understanding of the translator. From what I've seen, the best isn't nearly good enough, and the task is largely impossible, unless one replaces a "translation" with an explanation that covers every possible meaning of a text, and that would be ... huge. And would still doubtless be incomplete.
Two of the followers of the Prophet were arguing about the text. One said it went a certain way, call it A. The other said, no, it was B. So they went to the Prophet. He listened to the first, and said, "Yes." He listened to the second, and said, "Yes." And then he said that the Qur'an was revealed in seven dialects, and that each dialect carried seven levels of meaning.
It might help to understand that "seven" is common Arabic usage for "many." That tradition is a commonly-accepted one. It kind of blows the fundamentalists out of the water.
The Qur'an calls itself a "reminder." I read that as implying that it will only show us what we already know.
In the local parlance, "supernatural" is used to describe theories that have mental thingies in them whose behavior can't be explained in terms of a bunch of interacting non-mental thingies. Pretty sure the definition originates with Richard Carrier.
I have no idea what limits there are on what "interacting non-mental thingies" can do. As an example, I don't know what an "angel" is, much less how one works. I accept -- as a Muslim -- that the mention of angels in the Qur'an means something, it isn't just stupid, but I don't know what it is, but I somewhat assume that it refers to psychic forces, i.e., patterns in the mind, or patterns of patterns, etc.
(Actually, the first mention makes sense even though I don't know what the angels are. That passage is really about us and what we do, and it's a story that leads into the story of Satan, which I know is a psychic force, the hatred of the human -- that is, pure intelligence that is full of disdain for this wet mess, this bag of shit. Okay, recognize.)
I read Carrier. Interesting.
Reality, for me, is either Theostoa (without the ether construct) or SuperTheostoa, and I can't distinguish them, and I can't imagine how to distinguish them. Any mental thingie that might be ascribed to SuperTheostoa might be a not-understood, non-mental characteristic of Theostoa.
But both Theostoa and SuperTheostoa are covered by the word Reality. Aside from reality, there is nothing. When we "worship" other than Reality, we are led astray, leading me to the credo of Islam. Laa ilaaha illa 'llah, there is no object-worthy-of-worship (ilah, god) except The Object (al-ilah, the god, shortened to Allah).
All the lesser "supernaturals" seem like fantasy to me. There may be realities -- defined as actual experience -- behind them, but ... there are other possible explanations as well. I distinguish "experience" from what we take it to mean.
Setting up Reality as God, then, as a mode of thinking, leads to study, testing, falsification, rejection of dogma, clarity (in many senses), etc. It leads to trust in Something behind life, though for some it could lead to fear, even terror. It depends on what is already in the heart. "Heart," again, can be understood as a pile of mental thingies (high-level patterns of patterns) that are made up of interacting non-mental thingies (patterns), arising from the machine (the brain) and the programming (memories and interactions of memories). Or it is a "mental thingie" with its own existence, i.e., supernatural, but I don't see evidence for that.
A piece of meat is trying to figure out if there is anything other than itself. Perhaps I'm actually agnostic, full circle, except that I'm also Muslim, by the definitions.
This is overthought, but maybe it's useful to someone.
OK, thank you for describing what you mean by being a "Muslim rationalist". Certainly EY or most regulars would not use the word rationality to describe your worldview, because it appears incompatible with Reductionism, though I suppose it should not prevent you from being instrumentally rational.
You are welcome, shminux. Since you used this collection of letters, "reductionism," and appear to posit that my view is "incompatible" with it, I looked it up. Yukdowsky's article, for starters. Aside from EY using the device of positing a series of stupid arguments to refute, and being a bit naive about what others "believe," when he actually gets to the definition, it seems quite like the way I think. In fact, if I hadn't noticed this many times, reading his work, I'd not be bothering with LW at all.
Yet I'm suspicious of any "ism," a high-level abstraction, proposed as if representing reality. Indeed, wouldn't a reductionist be suspicious?
Reductionism as a practical approach, fine.
Now, I notice that EY, in the post, capitalizes Reality.
He's expressing, first, a reductionist position. It is indeed an "ism." It proposes itself as what is "really" so (but, to his credit, he qualifies it: as far as we can tell. Setting aside a quibble about "we," that's fine).
He is pointing to a unity, but is describing that unity in terms of present understanding ("elementary particle fields and fundamental forces"). Take out the "really," understand "physics" as a heuristic, a method of making predictions, a map rather than the territory, and I'm right with him, down to capitalizing Reality, because it becomes a proper noun.
A proper noun that happens to have, it seems, amazing "computing power." Now, my question: is this "computing power" intelligent?
If you have an answer, coming from knowledge, I'd love to hear how you know it. I'd answer the question myself, but these comments are already long.
Dude, you don't get to distrust "ism"s when you belong to an organized religion. Some even-handedness, please!
I've seen a lot of things, like bananas, planes, philosophical dissertations, moods, religious experiences, and equations. In each case where I was able to look, I found that those things were made of parts, and that if you removed the parts and their interactions there was nothing left over. In each case where someone told me otherwise, they had no convincing evidence. Therefore, I don't believe anyone who says "Maybe the true laws of nature aren't reductionist after all" if they can't show me an exception to current theories that looks non-reductionist.
You said earlier
and talk about reality being intelligent. The way I understand your claim is a sort of pantheism, where the universe is an intelligent, divine being. (I know very little of Muslim worldviews but that's not the sort of theological claim I associate with Islam.) I can see the appeal, but if there's intelligence, where's the brain? I've never seen intelligence that didn't come from a very specific kind of structure. Show me how the universe has that structure, or why the mountains of evidence against disembodied intelligence are invalid.
You also said
Augh what the fuck is wrong with you, reality kills 150000 people everyday and does nothing against torture, why would you ever trust it?
On an unrelated note, which bits of the Qur'an struck you most? I've tried to read the thing several times, but it's even more boring that the genealogical parts of the Bible, and all I've gathered so far is "OBEY", which is right there in the name, and platitudes like "Be just, don't be evil".
"Belong to an organized religion." Huh? Do they own me? MixedNuts thinks I don't mistrust "Islamism?" Where did that come from?
Problem is, this is a non-reductionist point of view, because it asserts that a map is the territory. "Reductionist" is, as described by Yudkowsky, an absence rather than a presence, but it is being asserted here as an absolute quality of "the true laws of nature." Nature doesn't have laws, AFAIK, we invent them as summary methods for predicting our experience, and someone who believes Nature does have this construct called "laws" is not reductionist. Want to be a reductionist, toss that belief.
I'm not seeing that I'm being read carefully. I did not "talk about Reality being intelligent." I asked a question.
I didn't claim what was asserted. Rather, I note it as some kind of possibility. In one sense, though, I can state something logically. If we are intelligent, and if we are real, then Reality must be intelligent. However, I do have some doubt about our intelligence, as well as our reality.
MixedNuts, you have a concept of "Muslim" as if it comprehensively identifies the world view of someone who admits being Muslim. I pointed to the Mu'tazila as a historical counter-example, what is called the "rationalist" school in Islam. Not that I "believe in" the "Mu'taziliyya positions."
It seems to be that you are attempting to stuff the thinking of an individual (me) into some set of fixed categories. How does that work for you? Does it help you to understand people?
Fascinating. Where is your brain, MixedNuts? Does it exist in the universe? (These are questions, not insults!) Does your brain have the quality of "intelligence"?
If so, then does not Reality necessarily have the quality of intelligence?
Where did you get this "disembodied" from? (That might be something to do with SuperTheostoa.) I asked a question about Reality and intelligence. It could also be considered to be a question as to the nature of intelligence.
I'm being read with a pile of assumptions being added. That may be useful if it leads to the assumptions being identified as such. Is that possible?
There is no "mountain of evidence" against "disembodied intelligence." In fact, I haven't seen one piece of such. Which is no reason to accept disembodied intelligence, we don't accept propositions merely because there is no evidence against them. Unless, of course, we want to, or choose to. It might be useful, for this or that purpose.
It seems my comment about trust in reality struck home in some way. MixedNuts does not trust Reality, many people don't trust Reality. I mentioned that as a possibility. I did not suggest that one should trust reality. For some people, there may be no possibility of choice, for starters, but an irresolvable distrust in Reality is a psychopathology, it leads to many dysfunctions.
Why would I trust Reality?
Because I've got no fucking choice, that's why. Or, more accurately, a Hobson's choice. If I don't trust Reality, I have no way of knowing anything, not to mention I have a life of utter insecurity. And, yes, people live such lives.
Apparently there is a meme here that death is horrible, and so too is torture. I can get on board the latter, because torture doesn't seem to be inevitable, but death is inevitable. Sooner or later. Run the math on the risks. (But this is a factual assertion, and, of course, could be wrong. I just wouldn't bet on it.)
Stuff exists -- or appears to exist -- that many of us detest as human beings. That's obvious. What does this mean about Reality itself? It does demolish naive conceptions of Reality, for sure. Or of God. Same thing!
Obey. Great! I'm not sure what passage is being referred to, and this is certainly coming from translation. The only common equivalent I come up with in Arabic for "to obey" is aslam. It means to accept. Accept what?
Reality.
Aslamtu li r-rabbi 'l-^alamiyn. I accept the Lord of the Worlds (^alamiyn). I think it was Abraham who said that, but I forget. "Worlds" is a term that could refer to nations, but I find more meaning from the root, ^ilm, to know. The realms of knowledge.
I could look up Qur'anic usages of the root SLM, and of other words that might mean "obey," if anyone is interested.
Yes, reading the Qur'an will be boring, if you read the translation of someone with a boring world-view. If you are looking for what is wrong with it, you will also be bored. It will be slogging through piles of symbols that are mostly meaningless.
Just an idea: you create the meaning. You see what you choose to see, when it comes to seeing "meaning."
Finding deep meaning is difficult with narrow translations. Someone familiar with Arabic, but stuck with piles of traditional interpretations (the "right" ones), may just find confirmation of them. Nevertheless, I've found Muslim scholars to be usually quite open-minded. There are exceptions, scholars who pander to the fundamentalists.
My approach was different. I had to depend, initially, on translations, but when a verse seemed "difficult," I looked up the words, and I usually had come to know the biases of the translator. Then I read the whole book in Arabic. Initially, I knew only the pronunciations, roughly. (I eventually got some classical training.) Then I read it again. And again.... I started to memorize it, from the beginning. As I did this, meaning that made sense -- the only useful kind -- started to pop out commonly, instead of just occasionally. I started to have the basis for routine recognition. Like a child.
I used to hate memorization, I had no respect for rote learning. Goes to show.
I don't think you don't mistrust Islam as a concept. I think you tackle the concepts directly, rather than adding an extra barrier of "this is an abstracted ideology, I don't buy those". You call yourself a Muslim, not an independent theologian with ideas from Islam.
Well obviously, once you accept that everything else follows. What I'm asking is why you think that, give that it looks very lawful: objects fall down, energy is conserved, if a prediction is true on Monday it stays true on Tuesday, every exception to known rules turns out to obey deeper rules with practical consequences we can exploit. Why can't we just say "The thing has looked absolutely lawful for millenia, case closed"?
?!?!??
As I see it, the reduction that works best is "Here are the elementary particles, here are the laws that govern them, everything else follows from that. Maybe the particles and laws are also made of parts, we're still looking.". I can't see what's non-reductionist about natural laws - I'm not even sure reductions are possible without some laws, though they don't have to be as rigorous as ours look.
Cell membranes are permeable to water, I contain cell membranes, I am not permeable to water. By "reality" we do mean the set of cell phones and pineapples and copies of Alice in Wonderland and horses and so on, right? Clearly, whether it's real-in-some-philosophical-sense or not, it contains intelligence: you, me, Deep Blue. But the whole set doesn't seem to be intelligent itself; to coordinate its intelligent parts into a higher-level structure, or to build intelligence out of non-intelligent parts.
And if it's not an intelligent being that can make decisions, or even a perfectly lawful mechanism you can control if you understand it well enough, I have to stop asking why you trust it and ask what trusting it even means.
I have no clue what I said that sounded even vaguely like that. I mean, I know at least two Muslims, so I can see there's no Muslim hive mind. And I said in so many words that I don't understand either your worldview or any other Islam-flavored worldview.
Dichotomy. Either it's embodied, and I want to know where and why it can be called "reality's intelligence" rather than "several billion entirely unrelated intelligences", or it's not and I want to know how that works.
You don't have to trust the whole thing. You can trust your perceptions not to go so wonky you won't be able to correct for them, or individual people not to stab you in the face, for example. If you trust anything to keep you out of major trouble, that's certainly going to be relaxing but you can in fact get in major trouble.
I do not accept that inevitable things are thereby okay. It doesn't seem that I can make torture less bad by building a world where torture is very likely, so by continuity making it inevitable changes nothing. If a horrible dictator conquers the world and nobody can escape I don't endorse accepting that. How do you derive an "ought" from that "is"?
So what is the sophisticated answer that makes it okay? I've seen attempts, but they were less than convincing.
Nah, I'm referring to a general idea, not a specific passage. Things about submitting (probably the kind of acceptance you're talking about), being humble, playing by the rules, encouraging others to do the same, and so on. Which I'm used to seeing as an introduction to "Now here are the specific intricate rules about tying shoes", not as the main point.
Man, I just wanted to Have Read An Important Cultural Work. So I suppose I need to read it with the eyes of a typical reader. Which I can't have because I haven't read the thing. Well, crap.
Huh, interesting. Why is the Qur'an then superior to the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Tintin, or a blank piece of paper?
Also, how do you know that you accept the Qur'an, rather than just projecting on it what you already believe? Or is there no difference?
I mistrust all concepts, in theory.
In fact, of course, I rely on concepts in daily life. In practice, I trust some. But they are all suspect, because, compared to the pure possibility of emptiness, they limit us. We trade that loss for utility.
Concepts are great! But the map is not the territory. If I want to know the territory, I have to experience the territory, any map will distract me. If I have chosen to travel from A to B, then a map can be very useful.
Ideally, I have the map, I can plot a course from A to B, but if I pass by C, of greater interest than B, I'll still see C, even if it's not on the map of All Places of Interest.
It's more fundamental than that. I mistrust any interpretation. Abstracted ideologies are merely further from what I do trust, Reality. Sensory data is an aspect of reality. What that data can be made to mean is interpretation.
I wear a Muslim hat.
I'm not a theologian, though I do think about what might be called theology. Islam, as I define it -- which happens to resemble the sources -- is not theology, though it has theological implications.
In many ways my approach is Buddhist, if one wants an "ism" to try to contain it.
Most of us are so distracted by words.
"Okay" is a human judgment. Any story that makes it "okay" is a human story, invented, because "okay" does not exist in Reality, just as "not okay" does not exist.
So you aren't convinced by this or that story. That only tells us something about you, not about Reality, and "you" don't exist, in Reality. "You" are a concept, an illusion, not a reality. As am I.
You are looking for explanations of an illusion. It can be done, I'll claim. That is, by the way, a reductionist claim. Right?
I will also claim that an experience, a state of being, is possible that doesn't make "evil" okay, "evil" being shorthand for the "detestable," but it leads to something else, an acceptance of Reality that also gives us maximum power to change, to create transformation. Call it clear thinking if you like, that leads to maximized probability for effective action, rooted in fundamental values.
What's "fundamental"? Well it's probably written in our DNA. It isn't an absolute, it's a quality of life as it evolved, so this is reductionist. Or there is something beyond Theostoa, there is SuperTheostoa, and I can't tell the difference. Not yet, anyway, and it may not be possible.
Well, "superior" has a lost, unspecified standard. I've never encountered anything else like the Qur'an. It claims that it is not the first "message", and I can see traces elsewhere. However, the best alternative mentioned above is the "blank piece of paper." If you can receive the message in a blank piece of paper, you would receive the message in all the rest.
I could justify this statement from the Qur'an itself.
Setting aside issues with "believe," there is no difference. You could say that the Qur'an is a mirror which shows me, if I pay attention, what I know, or think I know.
Yes, there is a danger. However, if the basic message is accepted, if I stick with the blank piece of paper, and don't believe anything that is not on it, I won't actually create persistent error.
Aristotelian logic, right? Look at the assumption:
"entirely unrelated." Where did that come from? If they are intelligent, and if the Reality that they encounter is connected, they are not unrelated.
Something is missing here. There is an intelligence that transcends human intelligence, and it is possible for any of us to experience it. Landmark routinely accomplishes this, failure is rare. It's called the Self in Landmark, sometimes they capitalize the whole word, SELF.
My theory or understanding is that the Self is what arises or is experienced when two (or more) human brains are entrained, when their thinking is coherent and free. It's not mere "social reality," where people agree on memes. The intelligence of the Self. compared to that of an individual human, could be like the intelligence of an ant colony compared to that of an individual ant. To me, faced with this experience, the Self seems to be unlimited. However, I do assume that it is limited, in fact, it's simply operating in another realm, a realm not accessible to me as an individual.
By the way, in Landmark, this distinction is communicated in the Advanced Course. The Forum brings people into contact with it, but not explicitly.
I tested this. I told a story to people who had taken the Advanced Course (and that requires the Forum as a prerequisite).
"The Forum is about becoming free of the limitations of our past -- they nod -- the Advanced Course is about this."
Everyone who has taken the AC, when I've said that, has lit up. It's palpable, I'm sure it could be measured psychometrically. (And I just met a neurologist, a scientist, just completing the same training I completed, who is working on that). People who haven't, mostly, ask "About what?"
And if I try to explain it, well, I may be reacting from within my own world of survival, looking good, being right, blah blah. I'm not being there. And for that test to work as a test, I have to be there, with that very person.
While people who have experienced this, in any of various approaches -- Landmark certainly doesn't own this -- can talk about it with each other, I've never seen it successfully explained to anyone who hadn't experienced it. And I didn't experience anything like this, myself, until my mid-thirties. I was way too caught in my own head.
In other words, "multiple intelligences" may not be independent at all. In the example I gave from Landmark, there is a high-bandwidth connection. It's not just words, which are very low-bandwidth. It's the small muscle movements, the eyes, tone of voice, the presence of the person, that allows this connection. To experience that presence, we have to have dropped, or be able to drop, the "chatter" that normally dominates most brain activity, and attend to what is actually present. Reality, right here, right now.
I.e., the collective intelligence of a group might be far higher than that of any individual, so much higher that the individual may not be able to perceive on understand it, but can only notice it, by certain marks, and accept it.
The mark that I would point to first is clarity, but there are also other marks like love, joy, compassion, courage, that are not about individual survival. Landmark is not just about this experience, however, because it's understood that this can be merely something pleasant (or transiently ecstatic), so it's tested, against real-world measures, that show the operation of higher intelligence. Long story.
This would be a good time to define what you mean by a physical law. Likely it is not the same as what Abd means. I am guessing that you assign some meaning to this term other than "it's a useful mathematical model for humans to explain and predict some of the stuff they see sometimes". I'm guessing further that Abd concludes from your implied (and possibly misunderstood) definition that if physical laws are guiding "reality" than they are not reducible to quarks and leptons themselves, which does call the whole idea of reductionism in question.
I'd suggest clarifying this concept first before arguing about it.
How?
Incidentally, I suspect that you would not hold some of the beliefs you appear to hold if you had read the sequences. That's not a criticism as such, but still.
Yes.
No. A few small parts of it do: human brains, to a lesser extent other animals, and that's it, as far as we've seen. There might also be intelligent aliens somewhere in the vastness.
If that's enough to say that Reality has the quality of intelligence, it is also enough to say the Reality has the qualities of being inebriated, sober, radioactive, inert, rarefied, dense, at 3 degrees C, at 10 million degrees C, every possible colour and none.
ETA: In other words, "Reality has the quality of intelligence" is a deepity: true in a trivial sense and false in a trivial sense, but when the two senses are expressed by the same sentence, it sounds profound.
I guess we should first agree on what the term "intelligent" means. I do not have a good definition, but let's borrow the one given by Eliezer. It ought to be an instrumentally good one, given that constructing an intelligence (a "friendly" one) is his life's goal:
Now, I assume that your definition would not be identical to his, so feel free to express it here.
Smart.
[edit: I didn't see an alternate meaning for what I wrote. I meant that it was smart to check for or seek agreement on the meaning, not that "intelligent" means "smart," a mere synonym.]
The post refers to a definition, but doesn't state it. A previous post has a definition:
I read this as an ability to "solve problems" efficiently, "cross-domain," i.e., not just in some narrow field. In our discussion, I quote EY as referring to Reality as if it has huge computational ability.
My own thinking has reflected on the "omniscience" and "omnipotence" of God as being almost a tautology: Reality knows all things, and over all things has power.
Reality, however, is not an "artificial intelligence," although artificial intelligence may exist, may be real. If it exists, it is limited by its computational power. The computational power of Reality will necessarily be greater. It may not be unlimited though. The Many Worlds interpretation might extend the power of Reality almost infinitely.
On the other hand, is Reality "efficient"?
I have no confidence in these ideas as "truth," but do see them as possibly useful, in terms of the relationship with Reality that might be fostered by them.
So, if you agree with EY's definition of intelligence, where do you think you two diverge, him being an atheist and you a Muslim?
I don't know that we diverge. We have not discussed this. Do remember, above, that I said that the difference between a theist and atheist was only a thin space. It might not even be an important space. However, that could depend on what he means by "atheist" and what I mean by "Muslim," which has been the whole point of this discussion, coming as commentary on EY's "Uncritical Supercriticality."
His post seems to me to be about this problem we have of making assumptions about people and positions from affliiations, and what amount to political responses to real or imagined difference. "The affective death spiral." Thanks, shminux, for the questions you ask, which, in my experience, bring insight.
Is this specific to the Arabic language, or is it just the mismatch there will be between any two languages? I note that Christians take a completely different view of their sacred text: it must be provided to everyone in their own language, the better for them to understand it.
I would be interested to see your exegesis of some specific passage from the Qur'an along these lines. Perhaps as a top-level discussion post. I've read it in English translation (this translation), and to my eyes it consists mostly of exhortations to believe and promises of doom to unbelievers, and almost nothing about what anyone is expected to believe or to do beyond allegiance to the tribe. Randomly dropping into this online version yielded eight suras consisting of nothing else, and two that contained that plus some rather sketchily recounted stories.
What is it a reminder of? My reading of it reminds me only of the leaders of the ant colonies in T.H. White's The Once and Future King.
It's not specific to Arabic, but Arabic is particularly amenable to such wide interpretation.
Well, what Christians? Some Christians do insist on studying the "relatively original" texts.
And the problem Christians face is different. To some extent, they don't have the original text. They only have translations (at best) and rumors (in the other direction.)
Much Christian opinion (as with much Muslim opinion) is preposterous. In order to revere the Bible, as "the Word of God," and especially what they will hold up and thump or whatever they do, they have to create a whole doctrine of "inspired translation." They have to assume, as well, that there is a message that can be translated, one size fits all, equivalent. No wonder the standard Christian story is so ... dumb.
(I hasten to add that there are lots of Christians who understand it differently, and, in my experience, they more that they actually know about their religion, the broader their view. The naive fundamentalist view is largely ignorant of Christian tradition, not only of other possibilities.)
What happens with a text like the Qur'an, or the Torah, or the Gospels, is that they are interpreted, and that the interpretations come to be considered the original message, so much so that the original message practically disappears -- even if the text is being read in the original language.
I read what's reported of Jesus in the Gospels, and don't notice that he claims to be God. He said some other things that are so interpreted, even though there are alternate interpretations that, in some cases, are extremely simple and consistent with the context. I've gone over these passages with Christians, on occasion. It is as if they can't hear the alternate meanings, they keep saying, "But he said ...!"
However, they don't know what he said. He didn't speak Greek, for starters, as far as we can tell. The only actual words of Jesus purportedly preserved were the words on the cross, kept in Aramaic, the language of the people of the time. (Aramaic and Arabic are very similar.)
Now as to Qur'anic exegesis, I'd be happy to look at any particular passage, indeed,it's an obligation (it's that "Muslim" thing, though it's also broader, I do feel an obligation to respond on topics where I have unusual knowledge) . I can't create top level posts, though my karma has been coming back up from the initial big whack. But I can respond to them.
It doesn't say. I can only say what's obvious to me, from my own experience of it. It's a reminder of life, of our relationship with Reality, and we all, if we study and carefully consider ourselves, already know what it would remind us of. But there still is a language problem.
Or it's not for you. The Qur'an does not, as some might assume, condemn "non-Muslims." It warns against the consequences of denial, though. Yup. Be careful, eh? (And the Book says that it is for those who seek to be careful, it just doesn't create a Careful Club, with badges that will ward off Hellfire, just say the magic words.
Rumi made the point.
He describes the situation of the castle of a King, defended by dogs. Someone coming, unwelcome, to the castle, telling the dogs, "I take refuge in the King from your viciousness," will be torn to pieces by them. No, only if the visitor is actually clinging to the "hem of the King" will they be safe. Rumi was asserting that the most common ritual phrase in Islam, repeated with every prayer session, was useless unless it represented a reality.
An actual refuge being taken in Reality, an actual trust in Reality, I've been saying.
There is a good chance that you understood none of it. That's okay. It's not in your language, and was not explained to you consistently with your existing accepted concepts (i.e., creating a bridge).. You expected something different from a book. This is no ordinary book, even if we simply look at it from a point of view of history.
If communication is the purpose, that is a defect, not a virtue.
Yes. If accurate, unambiguous communication is the purpose, that's true, though for that purpose, even in English, terms must be specifically defined for context. Jargon. Seems to me that this happens around here.
If a different form of communication is the purpose, such as with poetry, Arabic might even be optimal.
However, the Qur'an does explain why it's in Arabic. It's because Muhammad was Arab. And so was his community.
Did you notice the place where I mentioned that each of the seven "dialects" (sets of meanings for words) and the seven "interpretations" was confirmed by the Prophet as being legitimate? I assume, for some purpose.
The Leader Astray is one of the names of God, for example. The Qur'an is not a science textbook, in spite of some rather naive and enthusiastic claims by some Muslims.
Well, duh. For the same reason, the Torah is in Hebrew, the New Testament was originally in Greek, and the Buddhist scriptures were originally in Pali. It's almost as if, to communicate an idea to people, you have to express it in their language. Fancy that!
I did, but I lack your faith in the value of ambiguity and obscurity, regarding them instead as deepity engines.
I'd caution against creating a TLP on virtues of Islam, or any other religion for that matter. While it might be obvious to you that Islam is like nothing else, the inferential gap to the LW community is basically uncrossable, so you will only get whacked again. The general understanding is that Eliezer has adequately dealt with faith and religion when discussing belief in belief, and that Reductionism does not need faith, let alone any specific religion or scripture. I am guessing that the inferential gap works the other way, too: you likely misunderstand some of the standard ideas accepted and discussed here. It would be a good exercise in rational thinking to identify and analyze such inferential gaps between you and the more mainstream LWers.
The general understanding is that none of that particular topic is unique to Eliezer, who mentions (but doesn't always cite) his sources on "belief in belief" — specifically Sagan and Dennett.
I would also caution against using the idea "mainstream LWers" ....
Right. I did not mean to imply that it was original research, though I suspect that he reproduced much of it on his own before matching with the existing literature.
My definition of a "mainstream LWer" is someone who adopts the Reductionism sequence without any significant reservations. Whether it's a good definition may be open to debate.
My definition of "phyggery" is ... ah, never mind.
This "general understanding" might be so for some (most?) in the LW community, but my prior on that is, like, highly unlikely that a single individual in a few words has "adequately dealt" with centuries of human experience and thought and inquiry. What is quite possible is that EY has addressed certain outlines of the subject;.Generally I'm in agreement with him, but also see certain unexplored points. I'm continuing to read, and as I read more, I find both more agreement and more of what I usually call "edges."
I wouldn't dream of "creating a TLP on 'virtues of Islam.' Wrong place, for sure. I'm far more interested in rationality and the stated goals of this blog.
However, there was a whole school of Islam, dominant for a time, called the "rationalists," and science was considered compatible with Islam for centuries. That's an Islam that, I assume, most LWians haven't contacted. So there may be some room for this, that's all.
I'm quite aware that atheism is the standard belief here. However, is that a rational necessity? (And if it is, I'm still interested in the question of what atheism is. I do not think of it as being "wrong.")
What is "obvious" to me is not what is being inferred by some from what I've written, nor would I expect it would be obvious to others who don't share the necessary referents. I simply offered to respond if asked.
Fubarobfusco, thanks for the link. I'll check that out. I do not imagine that LWers are monolithic, though some may imagine that their own opinions are the opinions of the group. Maybe. More likely, not, though they might dominate.
edit: I'd already read that, and TheSimpleTruth. I've been looking for a while, and I haven't seen an examination of "faith and religion," but only of certain naive ideas about them. I'm pretty sure that a higher degree of sophistication exists here. But I can't yet prove it. Where should I look?