Comments on: Explain/Worship/Ignore?

By: jonvon

jonvon — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 19:21:42 +0000

daaaaaaamn that’s a good post. sums up exactly the way i feel about things. i’m not a scientist, but i do engage in observation, more as a poet than anything else in terms of what i end up doing or creating with that observation. the things i believe are the things i’ve observed. it wasn’t always that way for me, but it is now.

i recently sat and listened to robert bly read lots of poetry. he talked a bit in an offhand way about writing poetry, and what he said was, if the last line you just wrote makes sense to you, cross it out.

somehow poets go straight to worship, if they are really operating at top form. but this worship poets engage in is not irresponsible, not if it is good. it might be hard to figure out which poetry hits this mark, but i have a sneaky suspicion that a rationalist in top form would be well suited to see it happening, perhaps moreso than many poets.

By: TGGP

TGGP — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 02:18:55 +0000

“God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary. The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment. The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.”
—
A reply to anonymous from a fictional character

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 01:50:46 +0000

You know, modern computer science gives us lots of examples of questions that we can’t ever know the answer to even though they have mundane answers. These could require halting oracles to answer, but could also simply need physically unrealizable computing power due to their complexity class. Maybe science ends when the next step in the causal chain is simply provably not answerable with realistic resources.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 23:17:59 +0000

But why bother “worshipping” something entirely unlike and completely indifferent to yourself? Doesn’t the “personality” of the creator in play matter a great deal in our choice of worship? You need a far more detailed argument to prove that whatever exists at the end of the recursion is worth our consideration, let alone our admiration. I see no need for anything remotely concious to end it. Unless, of course, you are just using the word “worship” as some hippy feel-good term for anything you can’t explain and want to pretend not to ignore.

By: Kaj Sotala

Kaj Sotala — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:12:59 +0000

We can hit Explain for the Big Bang, and wait while science grinds through its process, and maybe someday it will return a perfectly good explanation. But then that will just bring up another dialog box. I was reminded of "can the second law of thermodynamics be reversed?", here.

By: hrh

hrh — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 16:19:42 +0000

I’ve found that hitting either (E) or (I) entails a bit of (W). If you’re running regressions on some enormous dataset creating some elasticity estimates, and you’re pretty sure that the estimate should be positive and not negative, and you find it’s negative you can either hit (E) – systematize the anomalous result: what’s driving it and why is this set of datapoints not what the theory would predict – which I suppose is joined by the sentiment toward God that’s either (W) God, why the f— did you make this universe so f—– complicated or (W) thanks be to God for giving the sciences such a vast wealth of material for the highest form of human activity, study (or some other suitable expression of gratitude).

Or you could say (I) – the “bad” option – maybe I’ll just try this regression using another specification and forget I ever saw this… and hit (W) to say either thank God no one else saw that or (W) I hope to God no one ever gets their hands on this dataset until it’s substantively different…

By: Robs

Robs — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:18:53 +0000

Interpreting “Spirits”, or “Gods” as physical creatures is completely missing the point, which is to attempt to describe natural phenomena in terms of human personality. Personality is more understandable to people in general than the numerical measurements and relational formulae that are the currently trendy ways of describing nature. Complaining that there are no observable physical creatures out there making rain, or whatever, is like complaining that there are no actual physical numbers or physical laws in nature, just observations, and that therefore science is nonsense.

By: Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:41:09 +0000

Suppose that rain actually was blood shed by large sky-going creatures? Only now, in later years, and with the conventional mistaken belief that religion is non-disprovable, do we think of "sky spirits" as a non-explanation. Back in the old days, it was a reasonable hypothesis. It's just that later it was found to be wrong. On the other hand, it's not clear how to test "From the before time. From the long long ago." Even in the days when people actually believed their religions, this counts as hitting Worship.

By: James Blair

James Blair — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:25:48 +0000

I will note that in this particular fable you do not distinguish between different approaches to the Explain option. Mythological and scientific explanations are produced by different methods and have different qualities. I would especially note that scientific explanations have the quality of being predictive where mythological ones are not.

It doesn't have to. You request enough explanations and you start getting answers that make sense as they probe for the shortcomings of the answers you were given. Thorough investigation was not always the norm.

By: Benquo

Benquo — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 02:39:15 +0000

Mr. Rozendaal, should we reexamine the notion of “Explain”? Perhaps the ultimate goal (from a value perspective) is power, not knowledge as such. (This would obviously constitute a testability criterion.) Or, with Bacon, we could similarly say that Knowledge is Power. Either way, the sky-spirits answer is substantively different from, for instance, Lavoisier’s explanation of combustion.

Perhaps “Explain” should be split into “delay” and “scientific answer”?