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gjm comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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The basic form of the atheistic argument found in the Sequences is as follows: "The theistic hypothesis has high Kolmogorov complexity compared to the atheistic hypothesis. The absence of evidence for God is evidence for the absence of god. This in turn suggests that the large number of proponents of religion is more likely due to God being an improperly privileged hypothesis in our society rather than Less Wrong and the atheist community in general missing key pieces of evidence in favour of the theistic hypothesis."
Now, you could make a counterpoint along the lines of "But what about 'insert my evidence for God here'? Doesn't that suggest the opposite, and that God IS real?" There is almost certainly some standard rebuttal to that particular piece of evidence which most of us have already previously seen. God is a very well discussed topic, and most of the points anyone will bring up have been brought up elsewhere. And so, Less Wrong as a community has for the most part elected to not entertain these sorts of arguments outside of the occasional discussion thread, if only so that we can discuss other topics without every thread becoming about religion (or politics).
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).
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?
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.
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.