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raydora comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can't predict without?
And what makes your God more likely than any other God or Gods?
I suppose it's a question of granularity. While there have been a number of sound arguments for 16/64 equalling 1/4, there are hitherto no arguments of equal strength for the existence of any particular deity.
16/64 being equal to 1/4 allows people to predict what will happen when they scale objects.
The existence of an afterlife. The presence of free will.
I start with the question, "Is there a God?", by which I mean a being both omnipotent and omniscient. I am confident that the answer to that question is "yes".
I have since assigned a number of further ideas to this concept, some of which are almost certainly wrong (but I'm not sure which ones). It is highly likely that someone else has come up with a more accurate idea of God than my idea. (There are seven billion people on Earth; the odds of my idea being the most accurate are laughably small).
...does that answer your question?
Yes, it does, though those answers lead to further questions.
How can you gain information from a prediction you cannot test, until you die? Is there some way to test it? Or have you encountered personal evidence of an afterlife already?
Why does free will or an afterlife require a God?
It's hard to convey tone in text, but these are honest questions. If they make you uncomfortable, it's fine if you ignore them.
Regarding the sequences, you may find it easier to derive the same information from books popularizing a lot of the source material it is based on, if the sequences themselves turn you off.
Well, the obvious answer is "by dying". However, this also prevents me from communicating my results, calling the usefulness of the procedure into question...
No, but there are people who have. Feel free to look them up.
Note that one of the requirements of canonisation as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church is that someone find evidence, sufficient to convince the Church, that the person being canonised is in the afterlife. So a look through the Vatican records will probably provide a number of examples to look over, if you'd like.
They do not require a God. My argument for both requires a God, but there may be other arguments that do not.
Actually, by and large they don't. There is one element of the Sequences which niggles at me a bit, but it doesn't really bother me all that much; Eleizer is perfectly entitled to his opinions.
This would be more impressive if it didn't so often happen that the ones with the best-sounding evidence so often turn out to be outright fraudulent. E.g., Eben Alexander's book ("Proof of Heaven") makes claims about his illness that are demonstrably untrue, and it turns out he's been in trouble before for reasons that call his integrity seriously into question (e.g., there is reason to think he's falsified patients' medical records); Alex Malarkey ("The Boy who went to Heaven") retracted his claims to have died and visited heaven.
Yeah, they do indeed require evidence sufficient to convince the church that the person is in the afterlife. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like the church needs terribly good evidence. Typically what they want to see is a miracle performed by the proto-saint's intercession. E.g., the miracle that qualified the former Pope John Paul II for beatification (he hasn't been canonized yet) is that a nun had a neurological condition, she prayed for him to intercede for her, and she stopped having symptoms. But (1) no one actually knows exactly what condition she has or had, and hence no one knows how likely remission is even without divine intervention, and (2) she appears to have had a relapse since the alleged miracle.
Yes, that is a problem - if you're making up the claim, you can make up evidence to be as convincing as you want.
Considering that the Church already thinks that there is an afterlife, the burden of proof they require is almost certainly lower - possibly significantly lower - than the burden of proof that you would be looking for... it's just the potential source of evidence that came most immediately to mind at the time.
John Paul II was canonized more than a year ago (you might have been looking at an older news source and not noticed the date on it.) There are definitely problems with the Church's canonization process, and if they really cared about the validity of miracles like that, they should publish the facts of the case and an explanation of why they think it was a miracle. But they don't do that, which allows for a lot more wishful thinking.
A more reasonable example of a miracle claim (which is not about the afterlife) is this. Most explanations which do not accept it as a miracle are mistaken in obvious ways, as for example Brian Dunning's explanation in the linked article. I'm not sure where he got the idea that doctors did not testify to the amputation, but that is simply completely false.
Whoops, you're right, he's been canonized now. Sorry about that.
I agree that the most convincing miracle stories aren't about the afterlife, but the question at issue here wasn't "do miracles ever happen?" but "do we have good evidence of an afterlife?"; the question arose because CCC cited the existence of an afterlife as something better explained by his variety of theism than by atheism.
(As to the specific alleged miracle you mention: at a remove of nearly 400 years, it seems difficult to say much about what actually happened; e.g., I don't see how we have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of a concerted fraud some time after the alleged events, the enquiry at Zaragoza being an outright fiction; or a smaller-scale earlier fraud along Dunning's lines, but with the doctors having been bribed to say what they did. Of course either of those would be a strange and unusual happening -- but stranger and more unusual than a completely amputated leg miraculously growing back?)
This is circular reasoning. You can argue that your theory makes it likely that the miracle didn't happen, but then you can't use it as evidence for your theory.
It's not circular reasoning; even without deciding between naturalism and the various candidate supernaturalisms we know from straightforward observation that major miracles are extremely rare and hoaxes are not so rare.
Depending on the scale of the hoax.
I agree that even the most convincing miracle accounts do not necessarily imply that it is more reasonable to accept them than to suppose that they most likely have strange and unusual human and natural explanations. That's what I said earlier in comparing claims of revelation to claims of intelligent design in biology.
So, I can't help but note that the existence of an afterlife does not follow from "a being both omnipotent and omniscient." ("Free will" does not seem terribly well defined, but "possibility and could-ness" in the sense of that post does not follow either - save perhaps for the omni-being, and then only in a more general sense.)
What can you predict with the part you expressed confidence in? What makes you confident?
Ah. The presence of an omniscient, omnipotent being is important to the proof, but it is not the only element in that proof (the other elements are taken from observation of the universe, and are less controversial).
Consider; if an omnipotent, omniscient being exists, then it must take one of three stances with regard to humanity. It must either support the existence of humanity, or it must be neutral towards humanity, or it must support the non-existence of humanity. Since the being is omnipotent, if God wanted to wipe out humanity, God could (one or two well-placed asteroids a couple of million years back would have done it easily). Thus, I conclude that God is either in support of, or neutral towards humanity.
Now I also observe the universe around me, looking for traces of maliciousness in the laws of physics. So far, I have not found any. This implies that God is not into casual, petty cruelty without reason. It seems therefore likely that God is, at the very least, not evil.
The complete cessation of an intelligence would seem to be a great evil. Therefore, I postulate that there is a very strong probability that God has put some measures in place to prevent this. The measure most likely is some sort of afterlife; somewhere that a person can continue to survive, but not communicate back to those they leave behind.
Of course, this argument does not say that an afterlife is certain, given the existence of God, merely that it seems likely.
As to free will; here, I note that humans are demonstrably capable of the sort of casual cruelty that is absent from the laws of nature. Moreover, humans are capable of opposing each other. This strongly implies that at least some humans are capable of opposing what God wants. (This does not necessarily imply that said opposition has any chance of long-term success). This, in turn, seems to imply that humans do have some capacity to decide for themselves; hence, free will.
If the absence of maliciousness in the laws of physics is good evidence that God is not evil, is the absence of benevolence in the laws of physics good evidence that God is not good?
That would be a reasonable argument to make.
I would follow it up by claiming that the existence of free will is evidence of benevolence in the laws of physics.
With what definition of "free will"?
"Free will" consists of the ability of a person to determine their own future actions by some entirely internal process (which can observe, but is not controlled by, external factors); where "person" is defined as a collection of stuff such that the collection of stuff that makes up you has no overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up me and neither of us have any overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up (say) Barack Obama, or Trevor Noah, or Jacob Zuma.
Do you understand "is not controlled by" in such a way that having "free will" is inconsistent with (1) purely deterministic physics and/or (2) purely deterministic+random physics? (On the face of it your definition makes free will inconsistent with #1 but not with #2, but I can e.g. imagine a definition that restricts those "external factors" to, say, the state of the world outside one's body in at most the last year, in which case "free will" might be compatible with outright determinism.)
I don't think that free will can be reconciled with purely deterministic physics - free will implies that, in exactly the same situation, with each and every particle in exactly the same space, I can still choose whether to purchase those biscuits or not.
On the other hand, my decision whether or not to purchase those biscuits is not exactly random, either. There are a number of factors that go into it - in fact, considering force of habit, quite a few of my decisions are extremely predictable. So I'm not sure that random physics is entirely reconcilable either.
There is at least one thing in the laws of physics that seems like benevolence rather than the absence of it.
When animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, e.g. eat or engage in sex, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal.
That seems like benevolence. I could imagine a situation where everything that animals tended to do, was painful to them. You might say that is absurd, since then they would not tend to do those things. But they do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel. So there is nothing absurd about it, just like a person can be on a rollercoaster without any control over what is happening. It would be pretty terrible if life was like that, but fortunately it's not.
How do you know that? (For central examples of "animal").
The same way I know that you are a conscious being. In other words by comparing the way they behave with the way I behave.
That would imply that a bacterium engaging in things that feel pleasant to it. After all, like me, it tries to avoid things that cause it harm and tries to do things that benefit it.
It would also imply that a Roomba is engaging in things that feel pleasant to it.
obligatory xkcd response:
http://xkcd.com/1558/
Think about someone who owns a dog.
I did. How do you know that? You can't read the dog's mind and the dog can't talk to you. The dog could act in ways that you interpret as the dog being pleased, but trying to interpret it that way here would be circular reasoning since you are trying to show that the dog's actions show that things are pleasant to it.
What are you claiming -- that a dog is inherently unable to have "pleasant" feelings, or that humans have no capability whatsoever to judge the what's happening in the mind of a dog on the basis of its behaviour?
That isn't in the laws of physics, except in the trivial sense in which everything that happens in the world is "in the laws of physics" (in which case of course there are vastly many benevolent and malicious things "in the laws of physics").
I think there's a false dichotomy there. They do those things because of how they feel, and they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics. (Note that if you deny the latter half of this then you definitely aren't entitled to say that this is "in the laws of physics".)
I agree that in the normal sense, they do those things because of how they feel, and that they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics.
That's kind of my point. When I said, "They do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel," I meant this: I can imagine laws of physics that would imply that they do more or less the same things they do now, but they constantly feel bad about it. This is not something that might be impossible, like a zombie hypothesis. It is certainly possible, as is evident from the rollercoaster example.
In other words, the question is why the laws of physics and the way people feel are related in the way that they are, instead of a different way which would be much worse. I don't see any strong argument that the actual way is intrinsically much more probable.
And even if we showed that it is intrinsically more probable, someone could simply say that this shows that God is intrinsically good.
Physics seems like a weirdly low-level thing if we're thinking about whether or not animals' behavior could remain the same and their subjective experience could be a state of what we would call suffering in some possible world. I just don't think that you could make edits on that level and have changes that are so fine-tuned. Editing physics doesn't leave everything alone except subjective experience; editing physics breaks fire.
And if we have to settle for a physics that leaves at least most everything the same and life remains possible, then why wouldn't we expect reward mechanisms to evolve and for the default state of affairs to be one in which adaptive experiences 'feel good' and others 'feel bad'?
gjm called this a false dichotomy, but I think a better though perhaps more complex way of putting it is that you're mixing up your multi-level maps. Take free will and determinism as an example. Some people become fatalists because they think that determinism contradicts their idea of what possibility means. But they're contaminating their maps. You have a low-level map of physics where everything is lawful and there is no thing similar to what you might call 'possibility.' Then you have a high-level map of decision-making, and the fatalists take the lawfulness from their low-level physics map and draw it onto their high-level decision-making map, and say, "Well, the lawfulness overrules the possibility", and then they start making null decisions, but that's wrong. Possibility is a primitive notion in your high-level decision-making map and only in that map, just like the laws of physics are primitive notions in your low-level physics map and only in that map. In the territory, your brain runs on physics and your decision-making algorithm runs on physics, and your decision-making algorithm computing the output of logical nodes making decisions other than the one that it must make makes you feel possibility, and the whole process is lawful, and you have a bridge map between these two levels of maps; but the map is not the territory, and that goes both ways, and your high-level decision-making map is not the territory either, and sticking physics into it is like mixing apples and oranges. And even if that seems counterintuitive, I would say that any other policy is wrong, because the fatalists lose and the compatabilists win.
I agree with you about compatabilism, but I don't think that answers my question.
I am not saying that you could have physical situation exactly like the real world except with subjective experience reversed. I agree that in order to reverse subjective experience, you would need to make physical changes.
But with those physical changes, why couldn't you have a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good?
Maybe this is impossible. But if it is impossible, maybe that just shows that God is necessarily good.
I see a very strong argument that the actual way is much more probable. What does it mean to say that something feels bad? Mostly, I think, that whoever (or whatever) it feels bad to is strongly motivated to make it not happen. That's what feeling-bad is for, evolutionarily; it's what distinguishes those feelings as bad ones. So of course we should expect that people (and other animals) tend to do things that feel better in preference to things that feel worse.
(You might argue that the overall level of good-feeling is higher than we'd expect. But I don't see any reason to think that.)
As I said, I think there's an argument there for the goodness of God (or at least of the goodness of the universe) even if this relationship is intrinsically probable or even necessary.
This is probably another way of putting the same thing: do you think that overall it is good to exist? If the universe overall is neutral, the overall expectation would seem to be that it would be neutral to exist. But most people think it is good to exist. That suggests that overall the universe is good.
Not seeing maliciousness in the laws of physics is a very weak argument for an afterlife, because even if there is no afterlife, that doesn't mean that God is malicious. It just means that he doesn't prevent things from working the way they do naturally, just like he doesn't prevent a lion from eating a man, or a man from hunting the lion.
"Free will" is an ambiguous term. The sort of free will you've argued for here could be paraphrased as "not being God's puppets", but I hope it's obvious that that can't be evidence of God's existence. But you listed "free will" as something you can explain with God better than without!
I really don't think the fact that people sometimes do things a god should be expected to disapprove of can be evidence for that god's existence. Do you?
(Perhaps the argument you have in mind makes essential use of the fact that humans engage in a kind of cruelty "that is absence from the laws of nature". But I don't see how that can work. We should expect human behaviour, even if entirely derived from the laws of nature, to have features that aren't apparent when looking at the laws themselves -- just as, e.g., in Conway's "Game of Life" there are phenomena like gliders that aren't apparent from the almost-trivial rules of the game.)
Ah, let me elaborate, then.
Whether God exists or not, one can postulate a universe in which people are puppets - philosophical zombies, moving and acting according to some purely deterministic set of rules.
In the atheistic universe, those behaviours may be at odds with one another, because the rules are not guided; they do not have an aim. They may optimise for some goal on the individual, or even the group level, but there is no reason why they should do so in an efficient manner; a puppet universe may include humans who oppose each other.
In the theistic universe, the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient being suggests that there is some purpose to the universe. If all people are puppets, then, it is to be expected that all people work tirelessly towards a single goal, without opposing each other.
Therefore, the observation that people oppose each other cannot be used to argue for free will in the atheistic universe, but can do so in the theistic universe.
You've got it backwards. I'm not using it as evidence for God's existence; I'm using it as evidence for free will, given the existence of God as a postulate.
You are treating puppet and zombie as equivalents, but they are not. Rational deterministic agents may or may not succeed in co operating. Co-operation is probably the outcome that ideal rational agents would tend to , but non ideal agents face barriers to co operation. Puppets in a theistic universe may or may not co-operate depending on what the Puppetteer wants: some Purposes are served by struggle. Maybe the Puppetteer is a Nietzchian , who wants conflict and struggle to develop strength.
Puppets may or may not oppose each other, zombies may or may not oppose each other, free agents may or may not oppose each other. There's nothing you can deduce.
You are right that I am treating them as equivalent. How are they different?
Zombie=driven determinstitcally by their own inner workings, inherently predictable.
Puppet=controlled by an external force, not necessarily predictable, since the Puppeteer could be controlling them whimsically.
In that case, it sounds like the "zombie" is the atheistic no-free-will scenario, while the "puppet" is the theistic no-free-will scenario?
In that case, my argument is that the fact that people oppose each other quite strongly at times seems to suggest that we are not puppets but neither confirms nor denies the zombie hypothesis.
You were earlier when the topic first came up in this thread.
Er... no, I wasn't.
The question that was asked was "What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can't predict without?" I parsed this as "What can be shown, taking the existence of God as a postulate, that cannot be shown without that postulate?"
And one of the things that can be shown to be at least more likely with that postulate than not, is free will. Thus, I included it in the response to the question.
...I'm now beginning to wonder if I entirely missed the point of that question.
I think you did (but maybe I was the one who did); I took it to be presupposing that your belief in God is (or should be) the result of thinking that God explains some things about the world better than absence-of-God would, and asking what such things you had in mind. But maybe raydora was asking a question more like "what use is your belief?" than "what basis has your belief?". raydora, if you're reading this, which (if either) did you have in mind?
Anyway: my apologies for failing to consider the possibility that you were interpreting the question so differently from me and consequently misunderstanding the point of your answers!
No worries, it's all straightened out now.
Incidentally, TheAncientGeek found a severe problem in my argument for free will elsewhere.
Does that mean the bible which assumes that God wiped out most of humanity with the flood is definitely wrong and to the extend that God exists it's not the God of the bible?
No.
a) The existence of an afterlife would mean that those people were not destroyed. They had a really bad day and then woke up someplace else.
b) The story of the flood, in itself, may be a parable (by which I mean, a story intended to teach a lesson, usually of a moral or ethical nature, without necessarily being true) like the parable of the Good Samaritan, or the story of the Garden of Eden.
c) There may have been reason for the flood.
Any one of these alternatives could answer your question; personally, I think (b) is the most likely, though (a) and (c) are also possible.
If it's a parable, isn't the parable about the fact that certain actions like gay sex are bad enough that they warrant a God engaging in genocide? Even if the God didn't actually commit the genocide but merely wanted to make the point that doing so is justified, that still seems bad to me.
I think there are multiple morals.
What exactly do you mean by option (b)?
It seems to me that the first three of these imply a certain degree of incompetence on the part of the writers, editors, or god concerned, given how widely the story has been treated as history since its incorporation into scripture.
The fourth is fair enough, but it seems to me that (what I take to be) ChristianKI's inference "the bible contains this story, which is not true, so we should reduce our general confidence in what the bible says" is then reasonable (and indeed the decision to understand as fiction something in the bible that wasn't originally intended that way amounts to conceding that point).
Of course if the fifth option is right then all of the above may be moot.
This is somewhat muddled by the idea that the original story may have been an oral tradition for some time before being written down - that is to say, the person who put pen to paper may not have been the one to create the story in the first place, and may in fact have been removed from that person by several generations.
So it is quite possible that whoever originally created the story may have intended it as fiction with a moral, but that it may have been understood as history by the person who put stylus to papyrus. Or it may have started out as history, gained some embellishment along the way, then rephrased to highlight a perceived moral, then embellished again to further highlight that moral, then only written down.
I am very uncertain of the history behind how it got there. I think that it is most probable that it is now fiction with a moral; and I think that there have been a whole lot of biblical passages that have been very firmly, and very publically, misunderstood by some people with very loud voices (such as pretty much the entire Creationism movement).
I think that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is a collection of some fiction, some non-fiction - one of the clearest examples of fiction (to my eyes) is the book of Job, which seems to be an entire story written in such a way that it can be performed as a play by a handful of actors with little-to-no equipment (all the dramatic stuff happens off-stage and is introduced by messengers running in and shouting "This happened!").
I think that the morals that the fictional parts try to show are important; they should not be simply discounted and tossed aside because they did not happen.
Yeah. (I felt that my list of possibilities was already too long without bringing up the oral/written distinction, but it's important enough in view of the gradual evolution of oral traditions that that was probably a mistake on my part.)
I'm not sure quite what you mean by saying that it's now fiction with a moral; just that that's how believers do (or should) read it now, or something stronger?
I agree that some things in the Bible seem clearly to be intended as fiction; I'd put Jonah alongside Job in that category. And I agree that one absolutely shouldn't go from "X is fiction" to "let's ignore X". But going from "X was intended as history but turns out to be wrong history" to "let's ignore X" is more reasonable, though still not a slam-dunk (because maybe the story originated as wrong history but was kept around for the sake of things in it that don't depend on the history).
I'm pretty much saying that's how I read it.
I'm not so sure about Jonah (he seems a good deal less clear-cut than Job - at the very least, Jonah would be very hard to stage without some pretty impressive special effects) but apart from that, I think I agree with everything in this paragraph.
CCC already said that he thinks science is mostly right about the history of the universe, so presumably he does not believe such a flood ever happened.
Many Christians believe that such a flood never happened without thinking that the Bible is "definitely wrong" and without thinking that they believe in a God who is "not the God of the Bible."
Oh ye of little faith!
Global floods certainly happened in human history. What do you think happened to sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age (and humans were already around)?
There are claims that memories of such a flood are preserved in legends and stories in Australia, for example.
It doesn't even have to be a global flood: a big enough tsunami will suffice.
You seem to have missed the "without reason" part.