Imagine that the kids in a family blamed broken items discovered around the house on "Todd." When the parents ask more about Todd, and ask the kids separately, they get conflicting answers about Todd’s height, skin color, personality, and so on. These facts would count as evidence against Todd:
You make an interesting point, but I think it is flawed. You do present some strong reasons why Todd might not exist, but comparing Todd with God is not an apt approach to take. Todd is an individual within a concrete set of boundaries: the family home, with limited access to that space. Thus, the differing descriptions of one distinct physical individual would be sketchy to anyone investigating this case.
Religious believers, on the other hand, claim distinct experiences with different manifestations of God at different times and in different circumstances. These experiences do seem to show some consistency with the idea of God and thus, are not contradictory. The contradictions tend to come from the interpretations of these texts as done by the believers in their own situations.
As an example, all three monotheistic religions recognize Jesus:- Judaism recognizes Jesus as a heretic (or a prophet, depending on who you talk to - I don't want to split hairs here though).- Christianity recognizes Jesus as the Messiah.- Islam recognizes Jesus as a major prophet.
Thus, there is some consensus around the main claims of Jesus. Does that mean that Jesus does or doesn't exist? No. The evidence isn't sufficient enough either way here.
So, all three faiths make mention of Jesus. They interpret him differently. Other dogmatic discussions occur for numerous other religious topics. Does disagreement mean that the subject doesn't exist? Not at all... in fact, based on the great deal of discussion and early source documentation pointing to the subject (God), I'd argue that there is some strong justifications to believe.
Ultimately, the question becomes one of epistemology. And, with all things dealing with truth, we never can be too sure. As a Christian, reason helps me, but ultimately there is some level of faith involved. But, isn't faith also involved when you look at other worldviews?
Feel free to check out my blog (http://toddhdow.org/) for plenty more discussion on this topic.
This might have gone on beyond what Robin wished it had, but I'd like to note that my reaction to the lack of "meaning" in the universe (independent of the subjective beliefs of individuals), is not "alas, woe and despair", just as we need not despair that there is no God.
Michael, ok, I don't really know much about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy, but if this paper by Nick is analytic philosophy (correct me if I'm wrong) then I think I have a low opinion of analytic philosophy as well.
Eliezer, I am still suspicious that your different way of putting things may be an indicator of some real disagreement, it would be helpful if you actually wrote that paper to explain.
Considering how long the comments have been getting, I'm going to give up for now. Simon, I agree with TGGP that there's no morality-stuff floating out there, but I think I reacted to this elementary epistemological realization in a perhaps different fashion than TGGP does - I said, "Oops, I messed up my understanding of morality, how silly of me," instead of "the universe is devoid of meaning, alas woe and despair". That's what I was trying to convey by the it all adds up to normality principle.
I guess you can just ignore the morality-as-computation stuff for now, that would probably take a paper to explain if I wanted to express it. Nick, Robin, just because an opinion is comparatively briefly expressed doesn't mean it's a jump to a conclusion. It can be something that was worked out over quite a long period, but heavily compressed. I don't know in advance what will or will not create an Aha! experience in others - apparently this didn't, but it was still worth a shot.
There is no ultimate reality. Just reality. That's all there ever is.
Let me explain what I mean by "ultimate reality".
For example last night I was dreaming and in that dream, a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in an airplane flying over Honolulu. Fortunately, it was just a "fizzle", so only a few tons of nuclear energy were released.
But then I woke up, and discovered that what I thought was reality was actually just me dreaming.
So in that sense, compared to the dream I was having, that dream was unreal, and this waking reality is more real (although perhaps not ultimately real).
In the same way, perhaps this seeming world we live in is itself similar to a dream. In fact, Robin has speculated on the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation. So if that is the case, it might be possible to discover that while still "within" the simulation. That would be akin to the phenomena of lucid dreaming, where one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming while the dream is happening.
In that event, what we know of as our lives here would be similar to my dream, and ultimate reality would be something quite different.
It seems to me that while there is some truth to the point about outputs being normal, the case is fairly overstated. Newtonian Gravity tells us that dense objects all fall at fairly similar speeds and move along parabolic trajectories. More dramatically, measurement or artistic training, not to mention developmental physiology, tell us that children have very different physical proportions from adults. Astoundingly in retrospect, these fairly simple observations were not made until the Renaissance. Slightly careful observation tells us that the normal conclusions are wrong. In economics this is often the case today, and many educated people still believe that government can basically dictate collective economic outcomes by, for instance, creating jobs for the unemployed, and almost everyone mis-predicted the outcomes of Milgram's authority experiments. The possibility that people can be wrong about the fairly 'obvious' is a big part of why we have formal reasoning mechanisms, as well as formal methods of empirical examination.
Of extremely high practical relevance, the conclusion that the highest priority for almost any sort of ethically concerned person is to reduce the probability of existential risk by encouraging the development of Friendly Artificial Intelligence does not constitute a 'boringly normal' output, but rather, a counterintuitive one.
Nick: Ironic parallel to the religion discussion, isn't it. Everyone disagrees about what the truth is, but everyone agrees that the truth is simple or obvious. As with Atheists, Professional (analytic) philosophers seem to constitute a class of self-declared 'experts' who's expertise is not generally recognized by those outside of the class, but at least in the case of philosophers we have some posters on this blog, such as myself, who recognize the alleged expertise without belonging to the class.
Simon: I think that you need to learn about the difference between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy.
This discussion has gotten away from the topic of the post, and with Nick I am uncomfortable with how quickly people jump to make strong claims on controversial issues. To the extent that I anticipate the claims I make will be controversial, I've tried to post on them one small piece at a time, so those who object have a full chance to make their case. I think this gives our best chance for a reasoned discussion.
Eliezer, you have got me confused about what you think. Do you agree with TGGP, or not? If yes, then I think you express it very badly, but I have no further objections. If not, please explain how you disagree.
Nick, while I am not as comfortable disagreeing with philosophers on philosophy as I am about disagreeing with astrologers on astrology (for example), I am a lot more comfortable than with disagreeing with any sort of hard scientist. I see relatively little evidence that philosophers, in general, base their views on any sort of physical evidence or sound reasoning.
It is counter-intuitive that the world is not flat, that we all evolved from single-celled organisms that arose by chance in the "primordial soup", that there is no magic or supernatural beings and that we not have free-will (the last two seem as much like "outputs" as your examples). It was not necessary for people to know the truth, so throughout human history we believed things that while not true were not terribly harmful to our ancestor's reproductive success. That something violates our intuitions is not sufficient reason to reject it. It would certainly be counter-intuitive and foolish to claim I am absolved of all responsibility for my actions and then not expect people to become upset at some of them, but it is not necessary to believe in an objective morality for this to be the case. In other words, emotivism does not lead to testably false predictions. "Killing is wrong" is not something it would be wise to dispute if you don't want people to suspect you might kill them, but our intuitions cannot really be reduced to that simple statement as we find it morally acceptable in situations ranging from eating plants and animals (if you are not a Jain) or appeasing the sun so it will rise (if you are an Aztec). Is there any objective way to determine whether the Jain or the Aztec is correct? You might believe so if you have already accepted a belief system you think to be true and one of them seems closer to yours, but it begs the question of what beliefs you should have chosen in the first place. I would expect that finding two people that will actually give the same response to all morality questions would be like trying to find identical utility functions (which I am not confident are even necessarily consistent for one person in real life).
I don't know if this makes a difference to you Eliezer, but I don't say these things to try and "show off how cynical" I am. I say they do not exist for the same reason I say God does not exist and I am stating my actual beliefs.
PPS: While the internals of the resolution may be counterintuitive - like human psychology being shaped by natural selection, rather than a god, strikes many people as counterintuitive - the outputs of the resolution should not be counterintuitive; the outputs should appear boringly normal. (E.g. General Relativity has hard-to-understand internals, but it outputs the boringly normal prediction that if you walk off a cliff, you fall.)
PS: To amplify on that last statement, what I mean is that confusing questions are not supposed to have confusing answers. It is perfectly realistic to suggest that "the nature of morality" (itself an ill-posed problem) has a resolution which is simple when viewed from the inside, but very counterintuitive to humans (for some reason or other). Problems about which people argue about a lot do not thereby need to be complicated in their resolutions; it makes just as much sense to suppose that the resolution is simple, but crosscuts more than one intuition.
So Robin,
Why for your e-mail address does not work?
At least this one did not: rhanson@gmn.edu
I wrote you an email about "ViewQuakes" and requested a response only to have it come back. So, PLEASE E-me at: religionsucks@webtv,net
THANKS
Neil
"A View Quacker"
P.S. "Reason" helps a believer? GIVE ME A BREAK!
Reason Child, is why MILLIONS & MILLIONS & MILLIONS or FORMER Christians have STOPPED believing in yourchildish myth and become Atheists.
Hey Robin,
You make an interesting point, but I think it is flawed. You do present some strong reasons why Todd might not exist, but comparing Todd with God is not an apt approach to take. Todd is an individual within a concrete set of boundaries: the family home, with limited access to that space. Thus, the differing descriptions of one distinct physical individual would be sketchy to anyone investigating this case.
Religious believers, on the other hand, claim distinct experiences with different manifestations of God at different times and in different circumstances. These experiences do seem to show some consistency with the idea of God and thus, are not contradictory. The contradictions tend to come from the interpretations of these texts as done by the believers in their own situations.
As an example, all three monotheistic religions recognize Jesus:- Judaism recognizes Jesus as a heretic (or a prophet, depending on who you talk to - I don't want to split hairs here though).- Christianity recognizes Jesus as the Messiah.- Islam recognizes Jesus as a major prophet.
Thus, there is some consensus around the main claims of Jesus. Does that mean that Jesus does or doesn't exist? No. The evidence isn't sufficient enough either way here.
So, all three faiths make mention of Jesus. They interpret him differently. Other dogmatic discussions occur for numerous other religious topics. Does disagreement mean that the subject doesn't exist? Not at all... in fact, based on the great deal of discussion and early source documentation pointing to the subject (God), I'd argue that there is some strong justifications to believe.
Ultimately, the question becomes one of epistemology. And, with all things dealing with truth, we never can be too sure. As a Christian, reason helps me, but ultimately there is some level of faith involved. But, isn't faith also involved when you look at other worldviews?
Feel free to check out my blog (http://toddhdow.org/) for plenty more discussion on this topic.
Thanks and talk soon!
Todd Dowhttp://toddhdow.org/
Eliezer: no Aha! for me this time. For lovely Aha!s other times, my sincere thanks.
This might have gone on beyond what Robin wished it had, but I'd like to note that my reaction to the lack of "meaning" in the universe (independent of the subjective beliefs of individuals), is not "alas, woe and despair", just as we need not despair that there is no God.
Michael, ok, I don't really know much about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy, but if this paper by Nick is analytic philosophy (correct me if I'm wrong) then I think I have a low opinion of analytic philosophy as well.
Eliezer, I am still suspicious that your different way of putting things may be an indicator of some real disagreement, it would be helpful if you actually wrote that paper to explain.
Considering how long the comments have been getting, I'm going to give up for now. Simon, I agree with TGGP that there's no morality-stuff floating out there, but I think I reacted to this elementary epistemological realization in a perhaps different fashion than TGGP does - I said, "Oops, I messed up my understanding of morality, how silly of me," instead of "the universe is devoid of meaning, alas woe and despair". That's what I was trying to convey by the it all adds up to normality principle.
I guess you can just ignore the morality-as-computation stuff for now, that would probably take a paper to explain if I wanted to express it. Nick, Robin, just because an opinion is comparatively briefly expressed doesn't mean it's a jump to a conclusion. It can be something that was worked out over quite a long period, but heavily compressed. I don't know in advance what will or will not create an Aha! experience in others - apparently this didn't, but it was still worth a shot.
There is no ultimate reality. Just reality. That's all there ever is.
Let me explain what I mean by "ultimate reality".
For example last night I was dreaming and in that dream, a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in an airplane flying over Honolulu. Fortunately, it was just a "fizzle", so only a few tons of nuclear energy were released.
But then I woke up, and discovered that what I thought was reality was actually just me dreaming.
So in that sense, compared to the dream I was having, that dream was unreal, and this waking reality is more real (although perhaps not ultimately real).
In the same way, perhaps this seeming world we live in is itself similar to a dream. In fact, Robin has speculated on the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation. So if that is the case, it might be possible to discover that while still "within" the simulation. That would be akin to the phenomena of lucid dreaming, where one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming while the dream is happening.
In that event, what we know of as our lives here would be similar to my dream, and ultimate reality would be something quite different.
It seems to me that while there is some truth to the point about outputs being normal, the case is fairly overstated. Newtonian Gravity tells us that dense objects all fall at fairly similar speeds and move along parabolic trajectories. More dramatically, measurement or artistic training, not to mention developmental physiology, tell us that children have very different physical proportions from adults. Astoundingly in retrospect, these fairly simple observations were not made until the Renaissance. Slightly careful observation tells us that the normal conclusions are wrong. In economics this is often the case today, and many educated people still believe that government can basically dictate collective economic outcomes by, for instance, creating jobs for the unemployed, and almost everyone mis-predicted the outcomes of Milgram's authority experiments. The possibility that people can be wrong about the fairly 'obvious' is a big part of why we have formal reasoning mechanisms, as well as formal methods of empirical examination.
Of extremely high practical relevance, the conclusion that the highest priority for almost any sort of ethically concerned person is to reduce the probability of existential risk by encouraging the development of Friendly Artificial Intelligence does not constitute a 'boringly normal' output, but rather, a counterintuitive one.
Nick: Ironic parallel to the religion discussion, isn't it. Everyone disagrees about what the truth is, but everyone agrees that the truth is simple or obvious. As with Atheists, Professional (analytic) philosophers seem to constitute a class of self-declared 'experts' who's expertise is not generally recognized by those outside of the class, but at least in the case of philosophers we have some posters on this blog, such as myself, who recognize the alleged expertise without belonging to the class.
Simon: I think that you need to learn about the difference between 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophy.
Bias? How about comparing religious leaders to lying children?
This discussion has gotten away from the topic of the post, and with Nick I am uncomfortable with how quickly people jump to make strong claims on controversial issues. To the extent that I anticipate the claims I make will be controversial, I've tried to post on them one small piece at a time, so those who object have a full chance to make their case. I think this gives our best chance for a reasoned discussion.
Eliezer, you have got me confused about what you think. Do you agree with TGGP, or not? If yes, then I think you express it very badly, but I have no further objections. If not, please explain how you disagree.
Nick, while I am not as comfortable disagreeing with philosophers on philosophy as I am about disagreeing with astrologers on astrology (for example), I am a lot more comfortable than with disagreeing with any sort of hard scientist. I see relatively little evidence that philosophers, in general, base their views on any sort of physical evidence or sound reasoning.
It is counter-intuitive that the world is not flat, that we all evolved from single-celled organisms that arose by chance in the "primordial soup", that there is no magic or supernatural beings and that we not have free-will (the last two seem as much like "outputs" as your examples). It was not necessary for people to know the truth, so throughout human history we believed things that while not true were not terribly harmful to our ancestor's reproductive success. That something violates our intuitions is not sufficient reason to reject it. It would certainly be counter-intuitive and foolish to claim I am absolved of all responsibility for my actions and then not expect people to become upset at some of them, but it is not necessary to believe in an objective morality for this to be the case. In other words, emotivism does not lead to testably false predictions. "Killing is wrong" is not something it would be wise to dispute if you don't want people to suspect you might kill them, but our intuitions cannot really be reduced to that simple statement as we find it morally acceptable in situations ranging from eating plants and animals (if you are not a Jain) or appeasing the sun so it will rise (if you are an Aztec). Is there any objective way to determine whether the Jain or the Aztec is correct? You might believe so if you have already accepted a belief system you think to be true and one of them seems closer to yours, but it begs the question of what beliefs you should have chosen in the first place. I would expect that finding two people that will actually give the same response to all morality questions would be like trying to find identical utility functions (which I am not confident are even necessarily consistent for one person in real life).
I don't know if this makes a difference to you Eliezer, but I don't say these things to try and "show off how cynical" I am. I say they do not exist for the same reason I say God does not exist and I am stating my actual beliefs.
PPS: While the internals of the resolution may be counterintuitive - like human psychology being shaped by natural selection, rather than a god, strikes many people as counterintuitive - the outputs of the resolution should not be counterintuitive; the outputs should appear boringly normal. (E.g. General Relativity has hard-to-understand internals, but it outputs the boringly normal prediction that if you walk off a cliff, you fall.)
Okay, I'd better sign off for the night.
PS: To amplify on that last statement, what I mean is that confusing questions are not supposed to have confusing answers. It is perfectly realistic to suggest that "the nature of morality" (itself an ill-posed problem) has a resolution which is simple when viewed from the inside, but very counterintuitive to humans (for some reason or other). Problems about which people argue about a lot do not thereby need to be complicated in their resolutions; it makes just as much sense to suppose that the resolution is simple, but crosscuts more than one intuition.
Nick, just because something isn't easy to understand or explain does not mean the answer has to be complicated when viewed from the inside.