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Thomas comments on How confident is your atheism? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (149)
My atheism toward Christian God (or any other) is very like my skepticism toward the Little Red Riding Hood adventure.
The same thing.
10^-50.
"Lots of people believe it" is evidence for it being true, just weak evidence.
Or, it is really rather strong evidence but there are all sorts of other evidence (including other people's beliefs) that overwhelm it.
Or, "lots of people believe X" is (when that's all you've got) strong evidence, but it can be broken down into sub-possibilities depending on how they come to believe X, and when you look at that in the case of (say) Christianity it turns out not to be very good evidence after all. (For instance, because most people who believe it turn out to believe it mostly because other people induced them to believe it when they were too young to think it through properly.)
(I think the contrary evidence would be plenty strong enough even if "lots of people believe it" were good evidence in this case, but it happens not to be.)
This is compatible with what Thomas said, as long as his prior for the Christian hypothesis is sufficiently lower than that for the Red Riding Hood hypothesis, and that doesn't seem unreasonable given certain construals of the "Christian hypothesis".
"Some people believe it" counts as evidence. But if you think the spread of Christianity seems likely to happen without any deities (see this possible explanation) then the vast majority of the people who've professed belief in it do not constitute any additional evidence. Some of those living after their countries dispensed with heresy/blasphemy laws seem like exceptions.
What's the probability that you're in a simulation? What's the probability that one of the religions in the simulation is a message from the simulator? And is the product of those probabilities really as small as 10^-50?
What does God want with a simulation? We could technically reconcile a sim with "Christian God" as normally understood, who does not get his power from clever engineering. But that just brings us back to the point that our world does not look designed, much less designed by a specifically Christian deity.
Maybe Yaweh is a drunk or a crackhead who just happened to get a hold of some hightech simulation equipment, or perhaps such equipment is common place in his universe?
If Many Worlds is true, it HAS to be true just by the fact that every nonzero thing HAS to happen, so why the fuck I was down voted makes no sense.
No. The many worlds interpretation is still restricted by the laws of physics and the available quantum states of interacting wavefunctions. In many worlds, every possible thing happens given the above constraints (with the appropriate measure), but not every "nonzero" thing. There are plenty of "nonzero" things we can imagine that aren't actually possible. See Gell-Mann's principle: "Everything not forbidden is compulsory." (emphasis added)
Further, "true" in a simulation does not actually qualify as true for most religions, given their own stated claims. The conflation of the simulation argument with theism has been previously discussed at length on LW. See, e.g., this comment from the very large thread:
Do you have any opinion on whether continuum-many things are possible, or whether there's just a finite or countable number of possibilities?
I suspect the nature of quantum mechanics limits the possibilities to the countable regime. Max Tegmark discusses this topic here, in the section "How many parallel universes are there?".
You know, perhaps I should apologize for my question, just a little bit; or for the intent behind it. One of my objections to MWI is that it's ill-defined to a degree that laypeople would not guess, from the way that its advocates talk. I noticed on Rolf's thread that you are a physicist, and I thought, OK, I'll see how much this guy has really thought about it... Then it dawned on it me that you were just explicating rather than advocating MWI - that is, explaining a few details of an idea that you know something about because of your profession, but not necessarily an idea that you would champion as The Answer.
Nowadays I try to limit my arguing about MWI to discussions with physicists who really believe it. They need to be physicists so that it can be a technical discussion, and they need to be believers so that I can demand answers to specific questions. Most physicists have rigorous justifications for their physical opinions only for those parts of physics that they need professionally, and that usually doesn't extend to "quantum foundations".
Most physicists are intrigued or even enthusiastic about that topic, and they'll certainly have opinions and thoughts about it, but when pressed they'll admit to agnosticism, shrug their shoulders, take resort in diffident positivism, etc. When it comes to MWI, you can't have a critical discussion if for the other person it's just a fuzzy opinion, rather than an idea as clear as relativity or a specific equation of motion.
I could undoubtedly have a serious debate with someone like Tegmark, because he's very serious about the multiverse concept, and he's written technical works of quantum cosmology which provide a framework for questions like, countable or uncountable, what's the ontological meaning of the measure, how do you avoid a preferred frame, and so on. But the framework is subtly or even radically different for each serious MWI advocate, which is why it's just about impossible to set down a general-purpose critique of MWI.
Yes, this is what I was doing.
My personal view is that the many worlds interpretation is probably closer to being correct than other popular (e.g. collapse-based) interpretations. What I mean by this is that it wouldn't surprise me if the "correct" interpretation has not been fully realized by anyone yet, but once it is developed, we will be able to look back and say that many worlds was not as far off.
I lean toward the wave function having real physical significance rather than being just a mathematical tool; people said the same thing about quarks, once upon a time. (Many people still think quarks are just a mathematical tool, despite the 17-year-old discovery of the top quark which is too heavy to hadronize before it decays.)
As Rolf mentioned in his thread, high energy experiment doesn't really deal directly with interpreting quantum mechanics and wave functions. While I'm probably better versed in QM than many physicists whose focus is on classical scales, I would not claim to have a conception of many worlds which is as clear as relativity.
I never said it violated any laws of physics, but within a computer simulation you could easily have a simulated God with the power to change the simulation or people walking on water etc. That's exactly why I said "in simulation". Obviously even if MWI is true that does not makes universes with different laws real.
In a simulation you could also make it so that after a person "die" he ends up in a "heaven" or "hell". This is 100% inevitable in Many Worlds
You supported your claim with the statement "every nonzero thing has to happen," which, on its face, ignores the constraint of the laws of physics. You haven't shown that your claim is compatible with the laws of physics as we understand them, and for a claim of "100% inevitability" that burden of proof is on you. The physical possibility of that level of simulation is far from a settled question.
And again, even if this claim is true, it doesn't imply or equate to the actual truth of any religion.
The statement that "every non-zero thing has to happen" in this context obviously refers to the wavefunction of QM. I am not arguing FOR the simulation hypothesis, but I thought it was generally accepted that simulation is possible... And IF it is, then due to the non-zero of MWI (if MWI IS TRUE) automatically means that these absurd simulations HAS to exist.
I never said that this would equate to actual truth of any religion. I am as atheistic as one can possibly be. Obviously these would not be actual Gods in the sense that they are supernatural, but they would be so pragmatically WITHIN this simulation.
Clearly, that was not obvious to me. There is a common misunderstanding that many worlds implies that "everything is possible," and that statement seemed to match this pattern.
It is accepted by many, but it has not been demonstrated to the level where solely postulating many worlds qualifies as an acceptable argument for your point.
I am not sure how else I could have been expected to interpret "then all religions has to be true (in a simulation)."
Well, I am sorry for being so sloppy with my answer. But it seems we have cleared it up.
Now I would love to see you answer Mitchell_Porters question
The simulation implies the Bible God as strongly as it implies the Little Red Riding Hood. How probable is that the naughty wolf is our simulator?
Apply this reasoning to a contemporary computer game of quest or combat. In a medieval setting, you might have good guys, bad guys, and extra background characters. Our discussion is like being a character in such a game, trying to guess what it's all about; and your proposition amounts to saying that the intentions and interventions of The Players are just as likely to be centered on the second cow from the right in scene 4, as they are to be centered on one of the obviously major factions of opinion whose struggles define our history and tear our world apart.
So no, it ought to be a few orders of magnitude more likely that one (or even all) of those big civilizational blocs on our planet is puppeted by hidden intelligences, than it is likely that a character from a minor French fable is the unique signature-within-the-sim of our creator-artist.
I think we can at least agree that our world, and manifest human nature, have the capacity to produce the world's religions, and the histories they have engendered, without any external intervention. So judged according to the absence of obviously beyond-the-world or beyond-the-sim information, in texts like the Bible, the Quran, etc, one should indeed demote the probability that these religions are cosmologically, ontologically, or nonmetaphorically true. But how much demotion of probability, that's the question.
Are you telling me, that the LRRH is 1000 times less likely the Creator's word to us, than let say the Bible?
I don't see a good justification for this. But even if it is, 10^-50 or 10^-53 is all very small. It is deep down somewhere, near the zero.
The big bad wolf, as described in the story, doesn't have the ability to create a stimulation (or do any programing whatsoever), whereas God, as described in the bible, does.
Oh no. The story deliberately hides the Wolf's powers. THAT is not very unlikely compared to the rest, is it?
Coincidentially I was pondering this very question a few weeks ago. If many worlds interpretation is true, then all religions has to be true (in a simulation)
Most religions make metaphysical claims which contradict mwi.