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CCC comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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I find this unconvincing. The basic theistic hypothesis is a description of an omnipotent, omniscient being; together with the probable aims and suspected intentions of such a being. The laws of physics would then derive from this.
The basic atheistic hypothesis is, as far as I understand it, the laws of physics themselves, arising from nothing, simply existing.
I am not convinced that the Kolmogorov complexity of the first is higher then the Kolmogorov complexity of the second. (Mind you, I haven't really compared them all that thoroughly - I could be wrong about that. But it, at the very least, is not obviously higher).
Before seeing this I thought you rejected all priors based on Kolmogorov complexity, as that seemed like the only way to save your position. (From what you said before you've read at least some of what Eliezer wrote on the difficulty of writing an AGI program. Hopefully you've read about the way that an incautious designer could create levers which do nothing, since the human brain is inclined to underestimate its own complexity.)
While guessing is clearly risky, it seems like you're relying on the idea that a program to simulate the right kind of "omnipotent, omniscient being" would necessarily show it creating our laws of physics. Otherwise it would appear absurd to compare the complexity of the omni-being to that of physics alone. (It also sounds like you're talking about a fundamentally mental entity, not a kind of local tyrant existing within physics.) But you haven't derived any of our physics from even a more specific theistic hypothesis, nor did the many intelligent people who thought about the logical implications of God in the Middle Ages! Do you actually think they just failed to come up with QM or thermodynamics because they didn't think about God enough?
Earlier when you tried to show that assuming any omni-being implied an afterlife, you passed over the alternative of an indifferent omni^2 without giving a good reason. You also skipped the idea of an omni-being not having people die in the first place. In general, a habit of ignoring alternatives will lead you to overestimate the prior probability of your theory. And in this case, if you want to talk about an omni^2 that has an interest in humans, we would naively expect it to create some high-level laws of physics which mention humans. You have not addressed this. It seems like in practice you're taking a scientific model of the world and adding the theistic hypothesis as an additional assumption, which - in the absence of evidence for your theory over the simpler one - lowers the probability by a factor of 2^(something on the order of MIRI's whole reason for being). Or at least it does by assumptions which you seem to accept.
Maybe the principle will be clearer if we approach it from the evidence side. Insofar as an omni^2 seems meaningful, I'd expect its work to be near optimal for achieving its goals. I say that literally nothing in existence which we didn't make is close to optimal for any goal, except a goal that overfits the data in a way that massively lowers that goal's prior probability. Show me an instance. And please remember what I said about examining alternatives.
Yes, I think so.
Yes, that is correct.
A few seconds' googling suggests (article here) that a monk by the name of Udo of Aachen figured out the Mandelbrot set some seven hundred years before Mandelbrot did by, essentially, thinking about God. (EDIT: It turns out Udo was an April Fools' hoax from 1999. See here for details.)
Mind you, simply starting from a random conception of God and attempting to derive a universe will essentially lead to a random universe. To start from the right conception of God necessarily requires some sort of observation - and I do think it is easier to derive the laws of physics from observation of the universe than it is to derive the mindset of an omniscient being (since the second seems to require first deriving the laws of physics in order to check your conclusions).
You are right. I skipped over the idea of an entirely indifferent omni-being; that case seems to have minimal probability of an afterlife (as does the atheist universe; in fact, they seem to have the same minimal probability). Showing that the benevolent case increases the probability of an afterlife is then sufficient to show that the probability of an afterlife is higher in the theistic universe than the atheistic universe (though the difference is less than one would expect from examining only the benevolent case).
I also skipped the possibility of there being no death at all; I skipped this due to the observation that this is not the universe in which we live. (I could argue that the process of evolution requires death, but that raises the question of why evolution is important, and the only answer I can think of there - i.e. to create intelligent minds - seems very self-centred)
I question whether it has an interest in humans specifically, or in intelligent life as a whole. (And there is at least a candidate for a high-level law of physics which mentions humans in particular - "humans have free will". It is not proven, despite much debate over the centuries, but it is not disproven either, and it is hard to see how it can derive from other physical laws)
This seems likely. It implies that the universe is the optimal method for achieving said goals, and therefore that said goals can be derived from a sufficiently close study of the universe.
It should also be noted that aesthetics may be a part of the design goals; in the same way as a dance is generally a very inefficient way for moving from point A to point B, the universe may have been designed in part to fulfill some (possibly entirely alien) sense of aesthetics.
I can't seem to think of one off the top of my head. (Mind you, I'm not sure that the goal of the universe has been reached yet; it may be something that we can't recognise until it happens, which may be several billion years away)
Took me a while to check this, because of course it would have been evidence for my point. (By the way, throughout this conversation, you've shown little awareness of the concept or the use of evidence in Bayesian thought.)
Are you trolling us?
...no, I am not intentionally trolling you. Thank you for finding that.
This is the danger of spending only a few seconds googling on a topic; on occasion, one finds oneself being fooled by a hoax page.
The general opinion around here (which I share) is that the complexity of those is much higher than you probably think it is. "Human-level" concepts like "mercy" and "adultery" and "benevolence" and "cowardice" feel simple to us, which means that e.g. saying "God is a perfectly good being" feels like a low-complexity claim; but saying exactly what they mean is incredibly complicated, if it's possible at all. Whereas, e.g., saying "electrons obey the Dirac equation" feels really complicated to us but is actually much simpler.
Of course you're at liberty to say: "No! Actually, human-level concepts really are simple, because the underlying reality of the universe is the mind of God, which entertains such concepts as easily as it does the equations of quantum physics". And maybe the relative plausibility of that position and ours ultimately depends on one's existing beliefs about gods and naturalism and so forth. I suggest that (1) the startling success of reductionist mathematics-based science in understanding, explaining and predicting the universe and (2) the total failure of teleological purpose-based thinking in the same endeavour (see e.g., the problem of evil) give good reason to prefer our position to yours.
That sounds really optimistic.
They can be derived from simple game theory as applied to humans.
I'm not entirely convinced, but in any case even "human" is a really complicated concept.
I guess that means humans don't exist. Oh, wait.
No, but it does mean that if you want to argue that humans exist you must provide strong positive evidence, perhaps telling us an address where we can meet a real live human ;)
I could stand to meet a real-life human. I've heard they exist, but I've had such a hard time finding one!
No idea where you get that from. Theories don't get a complexity penalty for the complexity of things that appear in universes governed by the theories, but for the complexity of their assumptions. If you have an explanation of the universe that has "there is a good god" as a postulate, then whatever complexity is hidden in the words "good" and "god" counts against that explanation.
Yes, and God would care about game theory concepts and apply them to whatever being exist.
If I'm correctly understanding what you're claiming, it's something like this: "One can postulate a supremely good being without needing human-level concepts that turn out to be really high-complexity, by defining 'good' in very general game-theoretic terms". (And, I assume from the context in which you're making the claims: "... And this salvages the project, mentioned above by CCC, of postulating God as an explanation for the world we see, the idea being that ultimately the details of physical law follow from God's commitment to making the best possible world or something of the kind".)
I'm very pessimistic about the prospects for defining "good" in abstract game-theoretic terms with enough precision to carry out any project like this. You'd need your definition to pick out what parts of the world are to count as agents that can be involved in game-like interactions, and to identify what their preferences are, and to identify what counts as a move in each game, and so forth. That seems really difficult (and high-complexity) to me, whether you focus on identifying human agents or whether you try to do something much more general. Evidently you think otherwise. Could you explain why?
(I'll mention two specific difficulties I anticipate if you're aiming for simplicity through generality. First: how do you avoid identifying everything as an agent and everything that happens as an action? Second: if the notion of goodness that emerges from this is to resemble ours enough for the word "good" actually to be appropriate, it will have to give different weight to different agents's interests -- humans should matter more than ducks, etc. How will it do that?)
So it would be difficult for a fintie being that is figuring out some facts that it doesn't already know on the basis of other facts that it does know. Now..how about an omniscient being?
I think you may be misunderstanding what the relevance of the "difficulty" is here.
The context is the following question:
If some notion like "perfectly benevolent being of unlimited power" turns out to have very low complexity, so much the better for theistic explanations of the universe. If it turns out to have very high complexity, so much the worse for such explanations.
(Of course that isn't the only relevant question. We also need to estimate how likely a universe like ours is on any given hypothesis. But right now it's the complexity we're looking at.)
In answering this question, it's completely irrelevant how good some hypothetical omniscient being might be at figuring out what parts of the world count as "agents" and what their preferences are and so on, even though ultimately hypothetical omniscient beings are what we're interested in. The atheistic argument here isn't "It's unlikely that the world was created by a god who wants to satisfy the preferences of agents in it, because identifying those agents and their preferences would be really difficult even for a god" (to which your question would be an entirely appropriate rejoinder). It's something quite different: "It's not a good explanation for the universe to say that it was created by a god who wants to satisfy the preferences of agents in it, because that's a very complex hypothesis, because the notions of 'agent' and 'preferences' don't correspond to simple computer programs".
(Of course this argument will only be convincing to someone who is on board with the general project of assessing hypotheses according to their complexity as defined in terms of computer programs or something roughly equivalent, and who agrees with the claim that human-level notions like 'agent' and 'preference' are much harder to write programs for than physics-level ones like 'electron'. Actually formalizing all this stuff seems like a very big challenge, but I remark that in principle -- if execution time and computer memory are no object -- we basically already know how to write a program that implements physics-so-far-as-we-understand-it, but we seem to be some way from writing one that implements anything much like morality-as-we-understand-it.)
This is motivated stopping. You don't want to admit any evidence for theism so you declare the problem impossible instead of thinking about it for 10 seconds.
Here are some hints: If you were dropped into an alien planet or even an alien universe you would have no trouble identifying the most agenty things.
Well there you go, agents are things that can be involved in game-like interactions.
This is the third time in the last few weeks that you have impugned my integrity on what seems to me to be zero evidence. I do wish you would at least justify such claims when you make them. (When I have asked you to do so in the past you have simply ignored the requests.)
Would it kill you to entertain some other hypotheses -- e.g., "the other guy is simply failing to notice something I have noticed" and "I am simply failing to notice something the other guy has noticed"? Perhaps it would; your consistent strategy of downvoting everyone who disagrees with you doesn't exactly suggest that you're here for a collaborative search for truth as opposed to fighting a war with arguments as soldiers.
[EDITED to add: I didn't, in fact, declare anything impossible; and before declaring it very difficult I did in fact think about it for more than ten seconds. I see little evidence that you've given as much thought to anything I've said in this discussion.]
I have agent-identifying hardware in my brain. It is, I think, quite complicated. I don't know how to make a computer identify agents, and so far as I know no one else does either. The best automated things I know of for tasks remotely resembling agent-identification are today's state-of-the-art image classifiers, which typically involve large mysterious piles of neural network weights, which surely count as high-complexity if anything does.
Identifying game-like interactions is also (so far as I can tell) a problem no one has any inkling how to solve, especially if we don't have the prior ability to identify the agents.
I think there a word missing there. ("trouble believing"? "trouble with"? "trouble recognizing"?)
Note that infinite sets can have very low informational complexity-- that's why complexity isn't a slam-dunk against MUH.
Don't think of infinite entities as very large finite entities.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't thinking of infinite entities as very large finite entities, nor was I claiming that infinite sets must have infinite complexity or anything of the kind. What I was claiming high complexity for is the concept of "good", not God or "perfectly good" as opposed to "merely very good".
Wouldn't "perfectly good" be the appropriate concept here?
Yes, but the point is that the "perfectly" part (1) isn't what I'm blaming for the complexity and (2) doesn't appear to me to make the complexity go away by its presence.
I don't see how you can be sure about, when there is so much disagreement about the meaning of good. Human preferences are complex because they are idiosyncratic, but why would a deity, particularly a "philosopher's god", have idiosyncratic preferences? And an omniscient deity could easily be a 100% accurate consequentialist..the difficult part of consequentialism, having reliable knowledge of the consequences, has been granted...all you need to add to omniscience is a Good Will.
IOW, regarding both atheism and consequentialism as slam-dunks is a bit of a problem, because if you follow through the consequences of consequentialism, many of the arguments atheism unravel: a consequentialist deity is fully entitled to destroy two cities to save 10, that would be his version of a trolley problem.
It seems to me that no set of preferences that can be specified very simply without appeal to human-level concepts is going to be close enough to what we call "good" to deserve that name.
I entirely agree, but I don't see how this makes a substantial fraction of the arguments for atheism unravel; in particular, most thoughtful statements of the argument from evil say not "bad things happen, therefore no god" but "bad things happen without any sign that they are necessary to enable outweighing gains, therefore probably no god".
Not if the deity is omnipotent.
That's debatable, at which point it is no longer a slam dunk.
That is possible. I have no idea how to specify such things in a minimum number of bits of information.
This is true; yet there may be fewer human-level concepts and more laws of physics. I am still unconvinced which complexity is higher; mainly because I have absolutely no idea how to measure the complexity of either in the first place. (One can do a better job of estimating the complexity of the laws of physics because they are better known, but they are not completely known).
But let us consider what happens if you are right, and the complexity of my hypothesis is higher than the complexity of yours. Then that would form a piece of probabilistic evidence in favour of the atheist hypothesis, and the correct action to take would be to update - once - in that direction by an appropriate amount. I'm not sure what an appropriate amount is; that would depend on the ratio of the complexities (but is capped by the possibility of getting that ratio wrong).
This argument does not, and can not, in itself, give anywhere near the amount of certainty implied by this statement (quoted from here):
I should also add that the existence of God does not invalidate reductionist mathematics-based thinking in any way.
Well, I suppose in principle there might. But would you really want to bet that way?
Yes, I completely agree.
Almost, but not exactly. It makes a difference how wrong, and in which direction.
One in a billion is only about 30 bits. I don't think it's at all impossible for the complexity-based calculation, if one could do it, to give a much bigger odds ratio than that. The question then is what to do about the possibility of having got the complexity-based calculation (or actually one's estimate of it) badly wrong. I'm inclined to agree that when one takes that into account it's not reasonable to use an odds ratio as large as 10^9:1.
But it's not as if this complexity argument is the only reason anyone has for not believing in God. (Some people consider it the strongest reason, but "strongest" is not the same as "only".)
Incidentally, I offer the following (not entirely serious) argument for pressing the boom-if-God button rather than the boom-with-small-probability button: the chances of the world being undestroyed afterwards are presumably better if God exists.
Insufficient information to bet either way.
Yes, that's what I meant by "capped" - if I did that calculation (somehow working out the complexities) and it told me that there was a one-in-a-billion chance, then there would be a far, far better than a one-in-a-billion chance that the calculation was wrong.
Noted.
If I assume that the second-strongest reason is (say) 80% as strong as the strongest reason (by which I mean, 80% as many bits of persuasiveness), the third-strongest reason is 80% as strong as that, and so on; if the strength of all this (potentially infinite) series of reasons is added together, it would come to five times as strong as the strongest reason.
Thus, for a thirty-bit strength from all the reasons, the strongest reason would need a six-bit strength - it would need to be worth one in sixty-four (approximately).
Of course, there's a whole lot of vague assumptions and hand-waving in here (particularly that 80% figure, which I just pulled out of nowhere) but, well, I haven't seen any reason to think it at all likely that the complexity argument is worth even three bits, never mind six.
(Mind you, I can see how a reasonable and intelligent person might disagree on me about that).
...serious or not, that is a point worth considering. I'm not sure that it's true, but it could be interesting to debate.
I would expect heavier tails than that. (For other questions besides that of gods, too.) I'd expect that there might be dozens of reasons providing half a bit or so.
For what it's worth, I might rate it at maybe 7 bits. Whether I'm a reasonable and intelligent person isn't for me to say :-).
Fair enough. That 80% figure was kindof pulled out of nowhere, really.
You think the theistic explanation might be as much as a hundred times more complex?
...there may be some element of my current position biasing my estimate, but that does seem a little excessive.
So far as this debate goes, my impression is that you either are both reasonable and intelligent or you're really good at faking it.
No, as much as seven bits more complex. (More precisely, I think it's probably a lot more more-complex than that, but I'm quite uncertain about my estimates.)
Damn, you caught me. (Seriously: I'm pretty sure that being really good at faking intelligence requires intelligence. I'm not so sure about reasonable-ness.)
One bit is twice as likely.
Seven bits are two-to-the-seven times as likely, which is 128 times.
...surely?
I can think of a few ways to fake greater intelligence then you have. Most of them require a more intelligent accomplice, in one way or another. But yes, reasonableness is probably easier to fake.
128x more unlikely but not 128x more complex; for me, at least, complexity is measured in bits rather than in number-of-possibilities.
[EDITED to add: If anyone has a clue why this was downvoted, I'd be very interested. It seems so obviously innocuous that I suspect it's VoiceOfRa doing his thing again, but maybe I'm being stupid in some way I'm unable to see.]
"Omnipotent", "omniscient", and "being" are packing a whole shit-ton of complexity, especially "being". They're definitely packing more than a model of particle physics, since we know that all known "beings" are implemented on top of particle physics.
I don't think mind designs are dependent on their underlying physics. The physics is a substrate, and as long as it provides general computation, intelligence would be achievable in a configuration of that physics. The specifics of those designs may depend on how those worlds function, like how jellyfish-like minds may be different from bird-like minds, but not the common elements of induction, analysis of inputs, and selection of outputs. That would mean the simplest a priori mind would have to be computed by the simplest provision of general computation, however. An infinitely divine Turing Machine, if you will.
That doesn't mean a mind is more basic than physics, though. That's an entirely separate issue. I haven't ever seen a coherent model of God in the first place, so I couldn't begin to judge the complexity of its unproposed existence. If God is a mind, then what substrate does it rest on?
"Being" surely does not have more complexity than particle physics. Particles are already beings.
"Being" in the sense of intelligent mind sure as hell does. Particles are not beings in that sense of the word, and that's the common sense.
We don't know that beings require particle physics - if the only animal I've ever seen is a dog, that is not proof that zebras don't exist.
I'm not saying that there isn't complexity in the word "being", just that I'm not convinced that your argument in favour of there being more complexity than particle physics is good.
Kolmogorov complexity is, in essence, "How many bits do you need to specify an algorithm which will output the predictions of your hypothesis?" A hypothesis which gives a universally applicable formula is of lower complexity than one which specifies each prediction individually. More simple formulas are of lower complexity than more complex formulas. And so on and so forth.
The source of the high Kolmogorov complexity for the theistic hypothesis is God's intelligence. Any religious theory which involves the laws of physics arising from God has to specify the nature of that God as an algorithm which specifies God's actions in every situation with mathematical precision and without reference to any physical law which would (under this theory) later arise from God. As you can imagine, doing so would take very, very many bits to do successfully. This leads to very high complexity as a result.
If we assume that God is a free-willed agent, then that might even be impossible in a finite number of bits...
The number of bits required to specify an agent with free will (insofar as free will is a meaningful term when discussing a deterministic universe) is definitely finite. Very large, but finite. Which is a good thing, since Kolmogorov priors specify a prior of 0 for a hypothesis with infinite complexity and assigning a prior of 0 to a hypothesis is a Bad Thing for a variety of reasons.
I don't understand the concept of specifying (in bits) an agent with free will.
The length (in bits for a program in a universal Turing machine) of the smallest algorithm which will output the same outputs as the agent if the agent were given the same inputs as the algorithm.
Do note that I said "insofar as free will is a meaningful term when discussing a deterministic universe". Many definitions of free will are defined around being non-deterministic, or non-computable. Obviously you couldn't write a deterministic computer program which has those properties. But there are reasons presented on this site to think that once you pare down the definition to the basic essentials of what is really meant and stop being confused by the language used to traditionally describe free will, that you should in principle be able to have a deterministic agent who does, in fact, have free will for all meaningful purposes.
I don't read it this way. The approach you linked to basically says that free will does not exist and is just a concept humans came up with to confuse themselves. If you accept this, then you should not use the "free will" terminology at all because there is no point to it. So I still don't understand that concept.
And yet here we have someone talking about "free will" as if it meant something, and CCC's usage seems entirely consistent with the meaning described here. (The link is a spoiler for the questions linked in the grandparent, but I've already tried to direct CCC's attention to the computable kind of "free will" in the hope of clarifying the discussion. That user claimed to have read a large part of the Sequences.)
Exactly so.
The only reason I'm using the free will terminology at all here is because the hypothesis under consideration (an entity with free will which resembles the Abrahamic God is responsible for the creation of our universe) was phrased in those terms. In order to evaluate the plausibility of that claim, we need a working definition of free will which is amiable to being a property of an algorithm rather than only applying to agents-in-abstract. I see no conflict between the basic notion of a divinely created universe and the framework for free will provided in the article hairyfigment links. One can easily imagine God deciding to make a universe, contemplating possible universes which They could create, using Their Godly foresight to determine what would happen in each universe and then ultimately deciding that the one we're in is the universe They would most prefer to create. There's many steps there, and many possible points of failure, but it is a hypothesis which you could, in principle, assign an objective Solomonoff prior to.
(Note: This post should not be taken as saying that the theistic hypothesis is true. Only that its likelihood can successfully be evaluated. I know it is tempting to take arguments of the form "God is a hypothesis which can be considered" to mean "God should be considered" or even "God is real" due to arguments being foot soldiers and it being really tempting to decry religion as not even coherent enough to parse successfully.)
Would you care to demonstrate? Preferably starting with explaining how the Solomonoff prior is relevant (note that a major point in theologies of all Abrahamic religions is that God is radically different from everything else (=universe)).
No, I would not care to demonstrate. A proof that a solution exists is not the same thing as a procedure for obtaining a solution. And this isn't even a formal proof: it's a rough sketch of how you'd go about constructing one, informally posted in a blog's comment section as part of a pointless and unpleasant discussion of religion.
If you can't follow how "It is possible-in-principle to calculate a Solomonoff prior for this hypothesis" relates to "We are dismissive of this hypothesis because it has high complexity and little evidence supporting it." I honestly can't help. This is all very technical and I don't know what you already know, so I have no idea what explanation would be helpful to close that inferential distance. And the comments section of a blog really isn't the best format. And I'm certainly not the best person to teach about this topic.
...could you elaborate on this point a bit more? I'd really like to know how you prove that.