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CCC comments on Is Spirituality Irrational? - Less Wrong
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Let's consider briefly the opposite case. Let's assume that there's some miracle that can be called up on demand. It's simple, straightforward, and experimentally verifiable.
In fact, drawing inspiration from the Miracle of Lanciano, let's say that bread and wine turn to flesh and blood every time the priest consecrates it. Every time. It always has the same DNA, which matches what one might expect of a Nazerene aroundabout 10A.D. Repeatedly. Assume that this has always been the case, as long as anyone can tell, ever since the early years A.D. (and, as far as anyone knows, nobody tried it before then).
What happens? Well, presumably, a group of scientists investigate the phenomenon. They take measurements. They show how momentum and energy are conserved in the process. They check very thoroughly for any form of trickery, and find none.
Eventually, one of them comes up with some long, complicated, barely plausible theory involving spontaneous chemical reactions in organic substances, suggests that this is the same process by which the bread you eat turns into part of you, and concludes that bread is an excellent food for growing children as it is easily converted to human muscles.
In short, because it is a repeatable miracle, someone tries to fit it into the realm of things that are explainable without postulating the existence of God. If he is successful, then it looks like God is being cagey, and if he is not, then it looks like we are merely awaiting someone able to figure out a successful explanation (and God is being cagey).
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps:
First, everyone would strongly suspect fraud of some kind. So there'd be a lot of attempts to check this -- from scientists and from Randi-type debunkers. Ex hypothesi these would not in fact detect fraud.
At this point we would have a very well verified phenomenon that's fabulously difficult to fit into the standard naturalist/reductionist framework -- the only way we know of for whether someone has been validly ordained as a priest to influence what happens is via some kind of mind that's able to work with concepts like "priest", "ordained", and "valid". So somewhere around here I would expect the great majority of scientific skeptical types to conclude that something is paying attention to human religious rituals. Might be God, might be aliens with eccentric interests, might be some sort of superpowered AI whose existence we never noticed, etc., etc., etc., but it seems like it has to be something with a mind and with abilities that go way beyond ours.
It would be worth checking a few more-reductionist things. For instance: just what changes to the process of priest-making suffice to make transubstantiation not work? (In many traditions, and in particular in those traditions that believe in transubstantiation in our world, priests have to be ordained by bishops, and bishops have to be ordained by other bishops, and the process involves a ceremonial laying on of hands. Is it possible that there's some thing that gets transferred when that happens? That would be interesting, and might make some of the more-natural options look a bit more plausible. On the other hand, does success depend essentially on intent everywhere down the line? That seems to require non-human minds watching.)
If someone comes up with an actually-working theory about chemical reactions, that would be very interesting indeed -- but it would need to be a theory that explains why the process only works for priests, and only when they are performing a eucharistic ceremony. Otherwise, it's going to be much less plausible even to the most thoroughgoing skeptic than "a god did it" or "superpowered aliens did it".
Distinguishing between the various kinds of superpowered nonhuman intelligence that might have done this thing would be tricky. It seems like it would need to be either something rather like the god of Christianity, or else something deliberately masquerading as the god of Christianity. That might already be enough to justify adopting Christianity as at least a working hypothesis.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I'll just add that you don't have to get anywhere near this level of improbability (converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry) to get convincing evidence of the existence of a deity. It would be enough to show that people who prayed to a particular deity could produce any measurable effect that could not be accounted for by a placebo effect with statistically higher probability of success than those who prayed to some other deity. It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something -- anything -- but have it be the same thing in both cases. The two believers write down what God tells them without communicating with each other, and then you check to see if they match. If people who prayed to Jesus matched more often than people who prayed to Allah under otherwise identical circumstances, that would really get my attention.
When I suggest things like this to believers, the response is invariably a citation of Matthew 4:7 or some variation on that theme.
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
I think you are making an elementary error: from "the Bible says not-X", inferring "the Bible doesn't say X".
Deuteronomy 6:16 says "You shall not put YHWH your god to the test as you did at Massah". That's a reference to the events described in Exodus 17:7: "[Moses] named the place Massah and Meribah, because the children of Israel quarrelled and tested YHWH, saying 'Is YHWH among us or not?'." That's the bit where they get all grumpy at Moses because they have nothing to drink, and he strikes a rock with his staff and produces water.
So it's all a bit flaky, but I don't think Jesus is wrong here. The Israelites get grumpy and accuse Moses of bringing them all this way out into the desert to let them die of thirst; Moses performs a miracle to give them some water and reassure them; God, as purportedly quoted by the author of Deuteronomy, interprets this as putting God to the test (this, if anything, is the dubious bit; the story in Exodus sounds as if their problem was thirst more than it was doubt) and tells them not to do it again; Jesus appeals to this when challenged to demonstrate that he, like Moses, has God on his side. (Digression: It seems to me that his response here would have been better as a response to the previous temptation -- to make rocks into food -- which is awfully reminiscent of what the Israelites had had Moses do. I wonder, and this is pure baseless speculation, whether at one point there were two temptation narratives going around, both involving the stones-into-food challenge, with Jesus giving the "man does not live by bread alone" answer in one version and the "do not put God to the test" answer in the other -- and then Mark or Q or whoever wanted to include both stories but needed a second temptation, and therefore made one up. This would also explain why the second temptation is such a silly one.)
Heh, you're right. I missed this because in the KJV Deu6:16 is translated as "shall not" rather than "shalt not" so my text search didn't find it. I stand corrected. Sorry, Jesus.
They doubted God's ability to provide them with water.
Now I'm imagining it a bit like a long journey in a car, with Israel the nation being like a very whiny child:
"Are we there yet?"
"We'll get there when we get there."
...
"Are we THERE yet?"
"No."
...
"Are we there yet?"
"No, we didn't get there in the last ten seconds."
...
"I'm thirsty."
"Here, have some water, and if you can't sit quietly for a few minutes, I'll have you wandering the desert for forty years, okay?"
Okay, I haven't looked into this in any detail, but I must say this comes as a surprise. What elements are in meat that aren't in bread, or vice versa? (I had expected that they were both, pretty near entirely, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which is why the human body can digest bread and use it to grow - which is really a long-term way of transforming it into human flesh).
Now, that would be interesting. It does require God's deliberate participation - in fact, all experiments to prove His existence do - so it's not going to work if He doesn't play ball. (Which brings us right back to the question of why He is so cagey about the whole existence thing at all...)
There's a list of places where the new testament quotes or refers to the old over here. I see gjm's already found this quote, but it might save you some future searches in similar circumstances.
OK, I was wrong about this. I thought that wine didn't contain iron, but it does. (I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus's alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)
But it doesn't matter. My whole point was that you wouldn't have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I'll believe.
Or instantaneous transportation over perhaps large distances.
Fair enough. Let me take a stab at it, then.
Free will.
We know that matter is deterministic; electrons, protons, neutrons all follow pretty well-understood laws. We know that the human body is made of electrons, protons and neutrons; perfectly normal matter. Therefore, human behaviour should also follow from those same laws; it's merely a massive amount of work to follow the reactions of such a vast amount of electrons, protons and neutrons, which is why no-one has done the calculation yet. This implies that human behaviour should be deterministic.
Yet people continually insist that they have free will. That they have choices. That they can choose to get up in the morning, or to sleep late.
Can you explain the phenomenon of free will without the existence of a deity?
It seems to me like souls that somehow affect the brain would completely suffice. Why do you think an all-powerful and all-knowing god is needed?
...you raise an excellent point. Free will can be adequately explained by the existence of the soul; some form of stuff, of whatever nature, that is not deterministic and can somehow make decisions, and which is a part of every human being.
But then, what is the soul? If it is physical - some arrangement of quarks or something - then can it really be entirely limited to humanity? What of the chimpanzee? On the flip side, is that the missing piece preventing the creation of artificial intelligence?
If is is not physical, then what sort of stuff is it? Where does it come from, where does it go (or does it dissipate and evaporate on death)? If it dissipates, then what are the products of that dissipation, do they hang around, undetected but building up somehow, or are they somehow recycled into new people? Is there a limit to the amount of soulstuff that exists on the Earth, and does that create a hard limit on the possible population of said Earth? What happens if Earth's population exceeds that limit? And if such soulstuff does exist, then is that reason to update in favour of the possibility of existence of some much larger intelligence?
Why exactly?
Because if there was a giant brain of physical matter hovering around Earth, we'd see it. If there was a giant brain of some undetectable non-matter stuff hovering around, then the fact that we can't see it doesn't mean a thing, one way or another.
It's still significantly less likely to be there than not, but rather more likely than if intelligence needs a brain-like matter substrate to work on.
No, we don't.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/Determinism.pdf
Some people think so:
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html
Huh. Interesting.
So, even in general relativity, there's some circumstances in which the same initial conditions can lead to differing future states?
Okay, I've only skimmed this site, but I find myself agreeing with a lot of the points he makes. This is dangerous, because I haven't seen him prove any of those points, merely argue convincingly for them, and that implies that I'm likely to miss subtle flaws in said arguments (if such flaws exist) because his conclusions seem to mostly confirm my thoughts on the matter.
Then you have a prima-facie convincing case of a naturalistic FW. The point is that the idea that FW requires the existence of a deity has no traction amongst professional philosophers, theologians, etc, and is more of an internet meme.
...you certainly make a convincing case. But I do not intend to argue that free will requires a deity, merely that free will is more likely given a deity than not given a deity.
Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man's first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God's orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve's rebellion can look back with our 20/20 hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there's this big booming voice on her left saying, "Don't eat this fruit" and a snake on her right saying, "Don't listen to that clown, he's lying to you. Go ahead and eat it." How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
So I don't see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don't see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven't heard?
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don't have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it's a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I'm a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I'm "really" a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn't have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can't escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it's not.
Hmmm. Yet, she then gives the fruit to Adam. Adam's situation at the time is analogous to Eve's - he has no knowledge of good and evil. But, at this point, Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act. (Exactly what Adam did, after eating the fruit, before being expelled from the garden, is a matter of conjecture).
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will. (Any that don't have free will are basically a complicated computer, and it must be easier to create a computer than to create a computer inside a universe that takes a few billion years to produce said computer). So a universe created by a deity which includes intelligent agents is very likely to have free will.
On the other hand, a universe not created by a deity won't be subject to the above argument. A mostly deterministic universe is likely to come up with, if anything, mostly deterministic life. So, it seems that the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life and free will must be much smaller than the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life.
Therefore, a universe containing intelligent life is more likely to have been created by a deity if it also includes free will.
I have never read Dennet's book, and merely seen the wikipedia summary you linked to. However, one thing strikes me in it:
This is a surprise to me, as I do perceive redness when I look at something red, and that is a quale, as I understand it. And I know that either my "red" quale or my "green" quale must be very different to the analogous qualia of a red-green colourblind man. So they clearly do exist (unless Dennet has a definition of "qualia" which is very different to mine).
Assuming that our definitions are not in conflict, I can accept the possibility that Dennet's mental landscape does not include qualia, and his argument thus follows from the typical mind fallacy. Different mental landscapes have been shown to be startlingly different before, after all.
But, whether our disagreement on qualia is a matter of definition or fallacy, the fact that he makes such a claim does leave me deeply suspicious of his conclusions. (Doesn't make them wrong, but does cause me to discount him as a credible authority on the matter).
As to free will being an illusion - hmmm. I don't really have an answer for that. I can say that will seems to act exactly as if it was free in many ways. I certainly feel as though I have free will, but I have no firm proof that that quale corresponds to the actual reality of the matter.
That's not clear. It's ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It's possible that Eve "took" the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve's tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let's look at the situation from Eve's point of view: she's just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they're naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn't actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it's strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it's bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God's order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn't correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was "evil" seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.
That doesn't make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don't yet know how. But even if we knew how it's far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)
This is an oversimplification of Dennet's position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it's weird. You need to read Dennett's book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It's actually a useful skill to cultivate.
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it's because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn't.
Of course you do. So do I. It's a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short - perhaps in the range of seconds.
This one's interesting for the footnotes
The tree apparently granted "knowledge of good and evil". So, if it was evil, Eve would have known, as she had that knowledge.
And then, after eating, Adam and Eve hid. If they had thought God evil, I would expect them to have hidden from fear of Him - yet they hid from fear of their own nakedness, implying that they saw fault in their own actions and wanted to avoid the consequences thereof.
Under interrogation, they shifted the blame instead of grovelling for mercy - again, this seems more the act of a person who knows they have done wrong than that of someone fearing an external evil.
...admittedly, it's a thin thread.
Interestingly, it implies that it's not being naked that is bad, but knowingly being naked; thus, a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge. For some sins, ignorance might even be completely defensible.
Because we don't know how, yes. If we did know how, what would the result be?
Creating an intelligent agent without free will is, by necessity, limited. A non-free-willed entity can either have every action it can take planned out to the last decimal point (think a calculator, or a computer) which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can't do or calculate (it might be able to do those things faster, and without getting bored, which is why computers are useful); or it can be deliberately unpredictable, which means it's almost certain to go wrong in some way which it can't correct for.
And if you want something to calculate faster for you, then a fourteen-billion-year input before it gets to the calculating seems a little counter-intuitive. (I suppose if you have enough calculations, it can still be worth it).
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices. To take an extreme example; let us assume that, at the age of 90, I release a complete autobiography, detailing my choices at every major decision point in my life. A time traveller from the year 3000 gets hold of this book, and then comes back to the present day, careful to change nothing (perhaps arriving on one of the moons of Jupiter). This time traveller knows what I will decide, yet his presence does not in any way constrain my freedom to make those decisions.
It was taken from the wikipedia summary. I'm not surprised.
...huh. Fascinating. You're right, I do perceive illusory motion. But motion is a thing that exists independent of my perception; if a tree falls in the forest, then the fact of its motion is entirely independent of my observation thereof. A quale is different, in that the perception of the redness is the quale; the optical illusion which you provided somehow gives the quale of motion without actually having motion (which means that qualia don't exactly have a 1:1 mapping to the underlying reality).
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by "quale" differs from what you (and presumably Dennet) mean be "quale".
...I am mystified. This skill seems to me merely convincing yourself that your own consciousness and free will are illusory, that you have no control over your acts and that there is not, in fact, a 'you' to have this complete lack of control? Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
Oh, yes. There are degrees of existence, things that exist only in part, or in potentia, or even things that strongly affect the world despite not existing, sometimes despite not even being possible to exist. No problem with that.
There is no phenomenon of free will. There's no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will. What there is, is the phenomenon of people believing they have free will. And that has various explanations.
However, it's no different from other popular beliefs with no empiric evidence. People naturally ("by default") believe in souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye, and a hundred other things for which the existence of belief isn't strong evidence. Since free will, like souls, is pretty much by definition empirically unobservable, people's belief in it (that doesn't come with a concrete argument) in it isn't evidence for it, since the belief couldn't have been caused by observation.
That statement seems (currently) true enough; presumably if we could execute a free will test, someone would have done it by now and there would be no need for these debates.
You compare free will with "souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye...". It seems to me that the notion of free will is actually more similar to the notion of consciousness than it is to those things that you list. Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can't really empirically test for consciousness. Both consciousness and free will seem like useful concepts that most people perceive and experience even though we can't empirically test for them and we may lack rigorous, universally agreed upon definitions for them.
Do you believe that consciousness is a phenomenon? If so, then what empiric test or observable property would you use to determine whether something (e.g. an artificially intelligent computing system) is conscious?
If contentiousness doesn't exist how can we empirically test for anything? Empiricism is based on using past observations to predict future observations, it becomes meaningless if there's nothing there to do the observing.
They are useful concepts exactly and only because they are such strong and common intuitions people have, so we have to use these concepts to model other people's beliefs and behavior. In the same way that an atheist needs to understand religion.
Different people use very different, often contradictory definitions of 'consciousness'. Some are obviously true (for humans): for example "a system that models itself as part of the world and understands that its outputs determine the behavior of that part". Some are by definition empirically untestable: "conscious entities experience events but do not affect them, and some things (people) have such conscious entities attached, while others (simple animals) don't", a la p-zombies, or for example "I know I have qualia but I can't know if others do", similar to solipsism.
In general, I think there is no "study of consciousness" (as there would be of a phenomenon); there is, however, a lot of study of the way people use the word "consciousness", which involves psychology, sociology/culture, linguistics, neurology, and so forth. And the same is true for "free will".
There is a study of consciousness, or at least aspects of consciousness, as anyone can discover via google, and it is not just a study of the way people use the word.
Given a naturalistic model of free will, it is possible in principle to tell whether something has free will. It is generally difficult in practice, since testing naturalistic theory of FW tends to involve investigating whether a) there is real quantum (or other) indeterminism, and (b) exactly how the brain works.
In general, you can;'t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
I agree: in fact, you usually can't generalize about any property of thing X for different, contradictory or unrelated, definitions of "X". Here, like in the subthread about consciousness, I wasn't trying to generalize.
I was using the definition used in the comment I was replying to, which - implicitly but clearly - talks about a deterministic universe and a supernatural free will. I should have made that explicit.
I would expect there to be much more protein in meat than in bread, and therefore much more nitrogen.
Hmmmmm. I didn't think of ratios, but this transsubstantiation would take place in the atmosphere - perhaps atmospheric nitrogen could be pulled in to make up the difference. Or some of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen could be released into the atmosphere as gasses (carbon dioxide in the case of the oxygen). Or both.
At the very least, a chemical transmutation theory would need to consider that possibility.
Perhaps you are right. It's not easy to be certain of this sort of hypothetical - I have a lot of confidence that there will be some people who react as per my prediction, and that there will be some people who react as per your prediction, but which group (if either) will gain enough backing to be considered the mainstream opinion is difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell.