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50lbsofstorkmeat 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).
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)).
...could you elaborate on this point a bit more? I'd really like to know how you prove that.