"Gods are ontologically distinct from creatures, or they're not worth the paper they're written on." -- Damien Broderick
If you believe in a Matrix or in the Simulation Hypothesis, you believe in powerful aliens, not deities. Next!
There's also no hint of worship which everyone else on the planet thinks is a key part of the definition of a religion; if you believe that Cthulhu exists but not Jehovah, and you hate and fear Cthulhu and don't engage in any Elder Rituals, you may be superstitious but you're not yet religious.
This is mere distortion of both the common informal use and advanced formal definitions of the word "atheism", which is not only unhelpful but such a common religious tactic that you should not be surprised to be downvoted.
A Simulator would be ontologically distinct from creatures like us-- for any definition of ontologically distinct I can imagine wanting use. The Simulation Hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis in the most literal sense- it's a hypothesis about what our physical universe really is, beyond the wave function.
Yeah, Will's theism in this post isn't the theism of believers, priests or academic theologians. And with certain audiences confusion would likely result and so this language should be avoided with those audiences. But I think we're somewhat more sophisticated than that- and if there are reasons to use theistic vocabulary then I don't see why we shouldn't. I'm assuming Will has these reasons, of course.
Keep in mind, the divine hasn't always been supernatural. Greek gods were part of natural explanations of phenomena, Aristotle's god was just there to provide a causal stopping place, Hobbes's god was physical, etc. We don't have to cow-tow to the usage of present religious authorities. God has always been a flexible word, there is no particular reason to take modern science to be falsifying God instead of telling us what a god, if one exists, must be like.
I feel like we lose o...
You seem to be dictating that theist beliefs and simulationist beliefs should not be collected together into the same reference class. (The reason for this dictat seems to be that you disrespect the one and are intrigued by the other - but never mind that.)
However, this does not seem to address the point which I think the OP was making. Which seems to be that arguments for (against) theism and arguments for (against) simulationism should be collected together in the same reference class. That if we do so, we discover that many of the counter-arguments that we advance against theist apologetics are (objectively speaking) equally effective against simulationist speculation. Yet (subjectively speaking) we don't feel they have the same force.
Contempt for those with whom you disagree is one of the most dangerous traps facing an aspiring rationalist. I think that it would be a very good idea if the OP were to produce that posting on charity-in-interpretation which he mentioned.
Next!
we discover that many of the counter-arguments that we advance against theist apologetics are (objectively speaking) equally effective against simulationist speculation
I've argued rather extensively against religion on this website. Name a single one of those arguments which is equally effective against simulationism.
I've argued rather extensively against religion on this website.
That was my impression as well, but when I went looking for those arguments, they were very difficult to find. Perhaps my Google-fu is weak. Help from LW readers is welcome.
I found plenty of places where you spoke disrespectfully about religion, and quite a few places where you cast theists as the villains in your negative examples of rationality (a few arguably straw-men, but mostly fair). But I was surprised that I found very few places where you were actually arguing against religion.
Name a single one of those arguments which is equally effective against simulationism.
Well, the only really clear-cut example of a posting-length argument against religion is based on the "argument from evil". As such, it is clearly not equally effective against simulationism.
You did make a posting attempting to define the term "supernatural" in a way that struck me as a kind of special pleading tailored to exclude simulationism from the criticism that theism receives as a result of that definition.
This posting rejects the supernatural by defining it as 'a belief in an explanatory entity which is fundament...
Help from LW readers is welcome.
I'll chime in that Eliezer provided me with the single, most personally powerful argument that I have against religion. (I'm not as convinced by razor and low-prior arguments, perhaps because I don't understand them.)
The argument not only pummels religion it identifies it: religion is the pattern matching that results when you feel around for the best (most satisfying) answer. To paraphrase Eliezer's argument (if someone knows the post, I'll link to it, there's at least this); while you're in the process of inventing things, there's nothing preventing you from making your theory as grand as you want. Once you have your maybe-they're-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent. Especially the vigorous head-nodding in the congregation.
I don't have so much against pattern matching. I think it has it's uses, and religion provides many of them (to feel connected and integrated and purposeful, etc). But it's an absurd means of epistemology. I think it's amazing that religions go from 'whoever made us must love us and want us to love the world' --which is a very natural pattern for humans to m...
Extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions plz
For many people the word "God" appears to just describe one's highest conception of good, the north pole of morality.
People might say that, but they don't actually believe it. They're just trying to obfuscate the fact that they believe something insane.
"Powerful aliens" has connotations that may be even more inaccurate; it makes me think of Klingon warlords or something.
Primarily because I get a lot of glee out of meta-contrarianism and talking in a way that would make stereotypical aspiring rationalists think I was crazy. Secondarily because the language is culturally rich. Tertiarily because I figure out what smart people actually mean when they talk about faith, charkras, souls, et cetera, and it's fun to rediscover those concepts and find their naturalistic basis. Quaternarily it allows me to practice charity in interpretation and steel-manning of bad arguments. Zerothly (I forgot the most important reason!) it is easier to speak in such a way, which makes it easier to see implications and decompartmentalize knowledge. Senarily it is more aesthetic than rationalistic jargon.
I get a lot of glee out of meta-contrarianism and talking in a way that would make stereotypical aspiring rationalists think I was crazy
I agree that verbal masturbation is fun, but it's not helpful when you're tying to actually communicate with people. Consider purchasing contrarian glee and communication separately.
I wish crackpot theories were considered a legitimate form of art. They're like fantasy worldbuilding but better.
I think Ben from TakeOnIt put it well:
P.P.G. Bateson said:
Say what you mean, even if it takes longer, rather than use a word that carries so many different connotations.
Interestingly, I can't actually think of a word with more connotations than "God". Perhaps this is a function of the fact that:
- All definitions of "God" agree that "God" is the most important thing.
- There is nothing more disagreeable than what is the most important thing.
There's definitely something deeply appealing about theistic language. That's what makes it so dangerous.
This post could use a reminder of Less Wrong's working definition of the supernatural (of which theism, as virtually everyone uses the term, is surely a proper subset): it's something that involves an ontologically basic mental entity. We have no reason to suspect the existence of such things, and the simulation argument -- since it certainly does not appeal to such things -- doesn't change that a bit. Any resemblance to theism is superficial at most.
I'd also be curious to know what popular arguments for atheism you happen to think are so much weaker than you'd expected.
EDIT: ignore that last question if you like, I'm getting a sense for it elsewhere in the thread (though do not really agree).
I don't think the implications of accepting the simulation argument on one's worldview are that similar to believing in a supernatural omniscient creator of the universe and arbiter of morality. Absent a ready label for "one who accepts the simulation argument in a naturalistic framework," it's probably more convenient for such people to simply identify as "atheist." Conflating simulationism with theism is only liable to lead to confusion.
Conflating simulationism with theism is only liable to lead to confusion.
This observation dissolves your post. If you agree with it then repent properly, o' sinner.
How low a percentage does one need to assign a claim in order to declare it to be closed? I'd assign around a 5% chance that there exists something approximating God (using this liberally to include the large variety of entities which fall under that label). I suspect that my probability estimate is higher than many people on LW. (Tangent: I recently had a discussion with an Orthodox Jewish friend about issues related to Bayesianism, and he was surprised that I assigned the idea that high a probability. In his view, if he didn't have faith and had to assign a probability he said it might be orders of magnitude lower.) So how low a probability do we need to estimate before we consider something closed?
Moreover, how much attention should we pay to apologetics in general? We know that theology and apologetics are areas that have spent thousands of years of memetic evolution to be as dangerous as possible. They take almost every little opportunity to exploit the flaws in human cognition. Apologetic arguments aren't (generally) basilisk level, but they can take a large amount of cognitive resources to understand where they are wrong. After 10 or 15 of them, how much effort do we need ...
Didn't we have this conversation already? Words can be wrong. You can't easily divorce an existing word from its connotations, not by creating a new definition, certainly not by expecting the new definition to be inferred by the reader. There is no good reason to misuse words in this way, just state clearly what you intended to say (e.g. as komponisto suggested).
As it is, you are initiating an argument about definitions, activity without substance, controversy for the sake of controversy as opposed to controversy demanded by evidence.
The basic problem of specific agent-created-this-universe hypotheses is that of trying to explain complexity with greater complexity without a corresponding amount of evidence. Things like the Simulation Argument and other notions of "agenty processes in general creating this universe" are certainly not as preposterous as theistic religion, particularly in the absence of a good understanding of how existence works, but I think it confuses things to refer to this as theism. If our universe is a simulation developed by a computer science undergrad (from another reality) for a homework assignment, then that doesn't make them our God.
I recall a while ago that there was a brief thread where someone was arguing that phlogiston theory was actually correct, as long as you interpret it as identical to the modern scientific model of fire. I react to things like this similarly: theism/God were silly mistakes, let's move on and not get attached to old terminology. Rehabilitating the idea of "theism" to make it refer to things like the Simulation Hypothesis seems pointless; how does lumping those concepts together with Yahweh (as far as common usage is concerned) help us think about the more plausible ones?
I am interested in why you want to call simulation arguments, Tegmark cosmology, and Singularitarianism theism. I don't doubt there is a reference class that includes common-definition theistic beliefs as well as these beliefs; I do doubt whether that reference class is useful or desirable. At that point of broadness I feel like you're including certain competing theories of physics in the class 'theism'.
So I propose a hypothetical. Say LessWrong accepts this, and begins referring to these concepts as theistic, and renouncing their atheism if their Tegmarkian cosmological beliefs are stronger. What positive and what negative consequences do you expect from this?
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism.
The word "but" in the last sentence is a non-sequitur if there ever were one. Tegmark cosmology is not theism. Theism means Jehovah (etc). Yes, there are people who deny this, but those people are just trying to spread confusion in the hope of preventing unpleasant social conflicts. There is no legitimate sense in which Bostromian simulation arguments or Tegmarkian cosmological speculations could be said to be even vaguely memetically related to Jehovah-worship.
The plausibility of simulations or multiverses might be an open question, but the existence of Jehovah isn't. There's a big, giant, huge difference. If we think Tegmark may be correct, then we can just say "I think Tegmark may be correct". There is no need to pay any lip-service to ancient mistakes whose superficial resemblance to Tegmark (etc) is so slight that you would never notice it unless you were motivated to do so, or heard it from someone who was.
You're making good points, with which I largely agree, with some reservations (see below). I'd just point out that this wasn't the argument Komponisto was making - he was talking only about relatedness in the ancestry sense.
Your list of attributes is probably good enough to distinguish e.g. a simulation argument from "religions" and justify not calling it one. There are two difficulties, however. One is that adherence to these attributes isn't nearly as uniform among religions as it's often rhetorically assumed on LW to be. There's a tendency to: start talking about theism; assume in your argument that you're dealing with something like an omnipresent, omniscient monotheistic God of Judaism/Christianity whose believers are all Bible literalists; draw the desired conclusion and henceforth consider it applying to "theism" or "religion" in general. I find this fallacious tendency to be frequent in discussions of theism on LW. This comment from the earlier discussion is relevant, as are some other comments there. In this post, Eliezer comments that believing in simulation/the Matrix means you're believing in powerful aliens, not deities. Well, consider anc...
The only fact necessary to rationally be an atheist is that there is no evidence for a god. We don't need any arguments -- evolutionary or historical or logical -- against a hypothesis with no evidence.
The reason I don't spend a cent of my time on it is because of this, and because all arguments for a god are dishonest, that is, they are motivated by something other than truth. It's only slightly more interesting than the hypothesis that there's a teapot around venus. And there are plenty of other things to spend time on.
As a side note, I have spent time on learning about the issue, because it's one of the most damaging beliefs people have, and any decrease in it is valuable.
But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
To a non-scientifically-literate person, I might say that I think electrons exist as material objects, whereas to a physicist I would invoke Tegmark's idea that all that exist are mathematical structures.
One way to make sense of this is to thi...
I'm technically some kind of theist, because I believe this world is likely to be a simulation (although I don't believe it in my gut). I tell people I'm an atheist because telling them the more-accurate truth, that I am a theist, conveys negative information because of how they inevitably interpret it.
It's a reasonable thing to point out: Why do LWers criticize theism so heavily when they may be theists?
There's a confusion caused because our usage of the term doesn't distinguish between "theist re. this universe I'm in" and "theist for th...
Tegmark cosmology implies not only that there is a universe which runs this one as a simulation, but that there are infinitely many such universes and infinitely many such simulations. In some fraction of those universes, the simulation will have been designed by an intelligent entity. In some smaller fraction, that entity has the ability to mess with the contents of the simulation (our universe) or copy data out of it (eg, upload minds and give them afterlives). My theism is equal to my estimate of this latter fraction, which is very small.
Theists are wrong; is theism?
I think this is an interesting question! If rationalists speculated about the origin of the universe, what would they come up with? What if 15 rationalists made up a think-tank and were charged to speculate about the origin of the universe and assign probabilities to speculations? It would be a grievous mistake to begin with the hypothesis of theism, but could they end up with it on their list, with some non-negligible probability?
I don't think so. The main premise of the theistic religions is that an entity (a person? a min...
Part of the problem here is that there's no clear meaning of the word ‘god’ (taking for granted that ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’ are defined in terms of it). I usually identify as ‘secular humanist’ rather than ‘atheist’, mostly because it's more precise, but also because I have seen people define ‘god’ in such a way that I believe that one might well exist. These have all been very vague definitions (more along pantheistic than monotheistic lines), but they're not gratuitous (like defining ‘god’ to mean, say, my nose), and by these lights I'm merely a (weak)...
Agreed. I think this is a cultural thing rather than a truly rational thing. I was brought up as an atheist, and would still describe myself as such, but I wouldn't give a zero probability to the simulation argument, or to Tipler's Omega Point, or whatever (I wouldn't give a high probability to either - and Tipler's work post about 1994 has been obvious ravings) and I can imagine other scenarios in which something we might call God might exist. I don't see myself changing my mind on the theism question, but I don't consider it a closed one.
When I abandoned religion, a friend of mine did the same at about the same time. We spoke recently and it turned out that he self-labeled as agnostic, me - "atheist". We discussed this a bit and I said something to the extent that "I do not see a shred of justice in the world that would indicated a working of a personal god; if there is something like a god that runs the universe amorally, we may as well call it physics and get on with it".
It seems that you want to draw the additional distinction of "agenty" things vs. dumb gears, but as long as they only "care" about persons as atmos, vs. moral agents, who cares? It admittedly tickles curiosity, but will hardly change the program...
I'm in the 'everything that can exist does so; we're a fixed point in a cloud of possibilities' camp. I'm also an atheist because I see theism as an extra-ordinarily arbitrary and restrictive constraint on what should or must be true in order for us to exist.
It's simply too narrow and unjustified for me to take seriously, and the fact that its trappings are naive and full of wishful thinking and ulterior motives means I certainly don't.
Well, agents pretty much tend to be complicated things that need to be explained in terms of more basic things. So if some sort of agent in some sense deliberately created our world... that agent still wouldn't be the most fundamental thing, it would need to be explained in terms of more basic principles. Somewhere along the line there'd have to be "simple math" or such. (Even if somehow you could have an infinite hierarchy of agents, then the basic math type explanation would have to explain/predict the hierarchy of agents.)
As far as "whate...
When you talk about the whooole Universe, you should not artificially exclude the intelligent creator from it. And if you do include it, then your question can be rephrased like this: Is it possible that the interaction graph of our Universe has a strange hourglass shape with us in the lower bulb, and some intelligent creator in the upper bulb? I say very unlikely.
The simulation argument may suggest some weird interconnected network of bulbs, but that has nothing to do with theism. When and if humanity becomes aware of our simulators, our reaction will not...
There's not enough evidence to locate the hypothesis, so while I technically give it a non-zero probability, that probability is not high enough for me to consider it worth significant time to investigate.
As for arguing against it in public: at most one human religion can be true. All the others must be false. So decreasing the amount of religion in the world improves net accuracy. Also and perhaps more importantly, religion is a major source of Dark Side Epistemology. So on the meta-level, minimizing the influence of religion will help people become more rational.
If you think that it's easier to locate the hypothesis of Jehovah than the hypothesis of theism, then you're falling victim to a variation of the conjunction fallacy. Belief in Jehovah is itself a variety of theism.
Nevertheless, I agree with you that there's plenty of evidence to locate the hypothesis of Jehovah (and therefore there is at least that much to locate theism), just very little evidence to confirm it when it's examined.
I think the theism/atheism debate is considered closed in the following sense: no one currently has any good reasons in support of theism (direct evidence, or rational/Bayesian arguments). We can't say that such a reason won't show up in the future, but from what we know right now, theism just isn't worth considering. The territory, from all indications, is Godless (and soulless, for that matter), so the map should reflect that.
What about those few of us who don't believe that the Simulation Argument is most probably true ? Don't get me wrong, it could be true, I just don't see any evidence to suppose that it is.
On that note, I always understood the word "theism" to mean "gods exist, and they interfere in the workings of our Universe in detectable ways". Isn't someone who believes in entirely unfalsifiable gods functionally equivalent to an atheist ?
(1) My discussion with a theist today settled on the issue whether to even accept that a "higher domain" creates a "lower domain" for a good purpose. My argument is: why waste reality?
(2) There is a somewhat false duality between creation and discovery: whether the performer determines the result, or the object determines the result, can be relative to the modeling faculty of the observer. And since we as observers and simultaneously "the object" have free will, from our perspective we are in any case rather discovered than created. And as long as God does not act upon the discovery, it is inconsequential.
Does naturalism vs. supernaturalism strike you as controversial? If not, what question is left?
I personally use "naturalist" to describe myself instead of "atheist" or "agnostic" because I believe it captures my beliefs much more strongly- I don't have certainty there is no omnipotent entity, and I am more committed than just shrugging my shoulders. Supernaturalism is right out, and most varieties of naturalistic theism don't hold water.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid."
No, no! Don't go back on your excellent question because the LessWrong-affiliationist-zombies downthumb-bombed it. You defined theism in a way so that your question is valid.
By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
That is emphatically not what people like Alvin Plantinga are talking about. Simulation argument provides no support for omni-benevolent omni-potent omni-scient omni-present entities; I don't know why you bring it up.
And if you've been reading Luke's blog, you probably already know that one of the...
If you don't mind my asking, how did it come to be that you were raised to believe that convincing arguments against theism existed without discovering what they are? That sounds like a distorted reflection of a notion I had in my own childhood, when I thought that there existed a theological explanation for differences between the Bible and science but that I couldn't learn them yet; but to my recollection I was never actually told that, I just worked it out from the other things I knew.
The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid."
Sure we do: it is called "intelligent design" - or more specifically, intelligent design of life and/or the universe.
My article on the topic: Viable Intelligent Design Hypotheses.
Many folk here on LW take the simulation argument (in its more general forms) seriously. Many others take Singularitarianism1 seriously. Still others take Tegmark cosmology (and related big universe hypotheses) seriously. But then I see them proceed to self-describe as atheist (instead of omnitheist, theist, deist, having a predictive distribution over states of religious belief, et cetera), and many tend to be overtly dismissive of theism. Is this signalling cultural affiliation, an attempt to communicate a point estimate, or what?
I am especially confused that the theism/atheism debate is considered a closed question on Less Wrong. Eliezer's reformulations of the Problem of Evil in terms of Fun Theory provided a fresh look at theodicy, but I do not find those arguments conclusive. A look at Luke Muehlhauser's blog surprised me; the arguments against theism are just not nearly as convincing as I'd been brought up to believe2, nor nearly convincing enough to cause what I saw as massive overconfidence on the part of most atheists, aspiring rationalists or no.
It may be that theism is in the class of hypotheses that we have yet to develop a strong enough practice of rationality to handle, even if the hypothesis has non-negligible probability given our best understanding of the evidence. We are becoming adept at wielding Occam's razor, but it may be that we are still too foolhardy to wield Solomonoff's lightsaber Tegmark's Black Blade of Disaster without chopping off our own arm. The literature on cognitive biases gives us every reason to believe we are poorly equipped to reason about infinite cosmology, decision theory, the motives of superintelligences, or our place in the universe.
Due to these considerations, it is unclear if we should go ahead doing the equivalent of philosoraptorizing amidst these poorly asked questions so far outside the realm of science. This is not the sort of domain where one should tread if one is feeling insecure in one's sanity, and it is possible that no one should tread here. Human philosophers are probably not as good at philosophy as hypothetical Friendly AI philosophers (though we've seen in the cases of decision theory and utility functions that not everything can be left for the AI to solve). I don't want to stress your epistemology too much, since it's not like your immortal soul3 matters very much. Does it?
Added: By theism I do not mean the hypothesis that Jehovah created the universe. (Well, mostly.) I am talking about the possibility of agenty processes in general creating this universe, as opposed to impersonal math-like processes like cosmological natural selection.
Added: The answer to the question raised by the post is "Yes, theism is wrong, and we don't have good words for the thing that looks a lot like theism but has less unfortunate connotations, but we do know that calling it theism would be stupid." As to whether this universe gets most of its reality fluid from agenty creators... perhaps we will come back to that argument on a day with less distracting terminology on the table.
1 Of either the 'AI-go-FOOM' or 'someday we'll be able to do lots of brain emulations' variety.
2 I was never a theist, and only recently began to question some old assumptions about the likelihood of various Creators. This perhaps either lends credibility to my interest, or lends credibility to the idea that I'm insane.
3 Or the set of things that would have been translated to Archimedes by the Chronophone as the equivalent of an immortal soul (id est, whatever concept ends up being actually significant).