I’m skeptical about the possibility of really carrying out this kind of visualization (or, more broadly, imaginary leap). Here’s why.
I might be able to say that I can imagine the existence of a god, and what the world would be like if, say, it were the Christian one. But I can’t imagine myself in that world—in that world, I’m a different person. For in that world, either I hold the counterfactually true belief that there is such a god, or I don’t. If I don’t hold that belief, then my response to that world is the same as my response to this world. If I do hold it, well, how can I model that?
This point is related to a point that Eliezer made in the comments, that I think just absolutely nails the problem, for a narrower class of the true set of states for which the problem exists:
You can invent all kinds of Gods and demand that I visualize the case of their existence, or of their telling me various things, but you can’t necessarily force me to visualize the case where I accept their statement that killing babies is a good idea—not unless you can argue it well enough to create a real moral doubt in my mind.
Exactly.
But I maintain that you can’t model the existence of a God with the right properties (including omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence) without being able to model that acceptance.
And likewise, the woman who believed in the soul couldn’t model her reaction to a world without a soul without being able to experience herself as a person who genuinely doesn’t believe in a soul. But she can only have that experience by becoming such a person.
I think this is just a limitation of human psychology. Cf. Thomas Nagel’s great article, What is it like to be a bat? The argument doesn’t directly apply, but the intuition does.
I’m skeptical about the possibility of really carrying out this kind of visualization (or, more broadly, imaginary leap). Here’s why.
I might be able to say that I can imagine the existence of a god, and what the world would be like if, say, it were the Christian one. But I can’t imagine myself in that world—in that world, I’m a different person. For in that world, either I hold the counterfactually true belief that there is such a god, or I don’t. If I don’t hold that belief, then my response to that world is the same as my response to this world. If I do hold it, well, how can I model that?
This point is related to a point that Eliezer made in the comments, that I think just absolutely nails the problem, for a narrower class of the true set of states for which the problem exists:
You can invent all kinds of Gods and demand that I visualize the case of their existence, or of their telling me various things, but you can’t necessarily force me to visualize the case where I accept their statement that killing babies is a good idea—not unless you can argue it well enough to create a real moral doubt in my mind.
Exactly.
But I maintain that you can’t model the existence of a God with the right properties (including omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence) without being able to model that acceptance.
And likewise, the woman who believed in the soul couldn’t model her reaction to a world without a soul without being able to experience herself as a person who genuinely doesn’t believe in a soul. But she can only have that experience by becoming such a person.
I think this is just a limitation of human psychology. Cf. Thomas Nagel’s great article, What is it like to be a bat? The argument doesn’t directly apply, but the intuition does.