I can think of at least two other stable states—in one, you’ve had an experience that has acted as strong Bayesian evidence for you of the evidence of $DEITY, but which is either a purely subjective experience or which is non-repeatable. As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray “Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again” and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.
Another stable state might be someone who has been convinced by Frank Tipler’s Omega Point hypothesis. Tipler himself is now clearly extremely irrational, but the hypothesis itself is taken seriously enough by people like David Deutsch (who is one of the less obviously-egregiously-stupid public intellectuals) that it’s not obviously dismissable out-of-hand.
I’m sure there are others, too.
EDIT—when I said “in the next five years” I meant to type “the next five minutes”, which would of course be much stronger evidence.
As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray “Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again” and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.
Do you really think that would be enough? Even if you don’t think that the God hypothesis has a truly massive prior probability to overcome, you’d still have to reconcile this with the fact that most prayers for improbable things go unanswered, to the point that nobody has ever provided a convincing statistical demonstration that it has any effect except on people who know that prayers have been made.
Taking this as sufficient Bayesian evidence to hold a belief in God seems like believing that a die is weighted because your roll came up a six, when you know that it’s produced an even distribution of numbers in all its rolls together.
It doesn’t seem to me to be possible to hold both rationality and religion in one’s head at the same time without compartmentalization, which is one of the things rationality seeks to destroy.
As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray “Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again” and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.
The reason why rationality destroys religion is precisely because there is no evidence of this kind. It’s not a priori impossible to hold rationality and religion decompartmentalised in one’s head, but it is impossible in this universe.
Even in that case, a very powerful being messing with you is more likely than an uncaused, ontologically fundamental very powerful being (and not just because of the conjunction—a caused, reducible very powerful being is far more likely). Or did you just mean that this point was less obvious, so it would be harder for someone to realize that they were wrong?
Tipler himself is now clearly extremely irrational
Was he more rational before? (I did read two of his books a while back, and I remember being very excited beforehand and very disappointed afterwards, but I can’t remember enough specifics to say why.)
I believe so. His career path seems to go:
70s—studies with John Wheeler, makes some small but clever contributions to cosmology and relativistic physics.
80s—Co-writes widely praised book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John Barrow, first suggests Omega Point hypothesis
90s—Writes The Physics Of Immortality, laying out Omega Point hypothesis in much more detail and explicitly identifying Omega Point with God. People think this is clever but going a little far. Tipler’s contract for a textbook on gravitation gets cancelled and the university at which he has tenure stop giving him pay-rises.
2000s—Writes The Physics Of Christianity, in which he suggests cloning Jesus from the Turin Shroud so we can learn how he annihilated baryons, becomes referee for creationist journals and occasional right-wing commentator, argues that Barack Obama is evil because the lumineferous aether is real and because of a bit of the film Starship Troopers.
The criticism of Obama was slightly more coherent than that. The Tribe paper in question really was an example of the common attempt for people to take ideas in math and physics and try to apply them as strong metaphors in other areas in ways that are really unhelpful and at best silly. In that regard, most of Tipler’s criticism was straight on.
he suggests cloning Jesus from the Turin Shroud so we can learn how he annihilated baryons, becomes referee for creationist journals and occasional right-wing commentator, argues that Barack Obama is evil because the lumineferous aether is real and because of a bit of the film Starship Troopers.
Ok that’s really...random. (Overused and underdefined word but that was the response my brain gave me).
But then he’ll come out with a piece of utterly lucid reasoning on applying Bayes’ theorem to the Born probabilities like http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611245 . Very, very strange man.
Wow. While I’m unsurprised that Tipler would take issue with yet another poetical injection of something that superficially looks like quantum physics into yet another unrelated subject area, I’m more surprised that he’d express it in such a bizzare manner. There’s a whole paragraph where he name-drops his academic genealogy. And then he acts like Obama is making these claims, when at best he contributed “analytic and research assistance”, whatever that means.
I read The Physics of Immortality as an undergrad in ’04 and was skeptical of his major claims. I’m disappointed by his downward spiral into crackpot territory.
I can think of at least two other stable states—in one, you’ve had an experience that has acted as strong Bayesian evidence for you of the evidence of $DEITY, but which is either a purely subjective experience or which is non-repeatable. As an example of this class of event, if I were to pray “Oh Lord, give me enough money to never have to work again” and then two hundred thousand people were to buy copies of my books in the next five years, that would be enough evidence that it would be rational for me to believe in God.
Another stable state might be someone who has been convinced by Frank Tipler’s Omega Point hypothesis. Tipler himself is now clearly extremely irrational, but the hypothesis itself is taken seriously enough by people like David Deutsch (who is one of the less obviously-egregiously-stupid public intellectuals) that it’s not obviously dismissable out-of-hand.
I’m sure there are others, too.
EDIT—when I said “in the next five years” I meant to type “the next five minutes”, which would of course be much stronger evidence.
Do you really think that would be enough? Even if you don’t think that the God hypothesis has a truly massive prior probability to overcome, you’d still have to reconcile this with the fact that most prayers for improbable things go unanswered, to the point that nobody has ever provided a convincing statistical demonstration that it has any effect except on people who know that prayers have been made.
Taking this as sufficient Bayesian evidence to hold a belief in God seems like believing that a die is weighted because your roll came up a six, when you know that it’s produced an even distribution of numbers in all its rolls together.
The reason why rationality destroys religion is precisely because there is no evidence of this kind. It’s not a priori impossible to hold rationality and religion decompartmentalised in one’s head, but it is impossible in this universe.
Even in that case, a very powerful being messing with you is more likely than an uncaused, ontologically fundamental very powerful being (and not just because of the conjunction—a caused, reducible very powerful being is far more likely). Or did you just mean that this point was less obvious, so it would be harder for someone to realize that they were wrong?
Was he more rational before? (I did read two of his books a while back, and I remember being very excited beforehand and very disappointed afterwards, but I can’t remember enough specifics to say why.)
I believe so. His career path seems to go: 70s—studies with John Wheeler, makes some small but clever contributions to cosmology and relativistic physics.
80s—Co-writes widely praised book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with John Barrow, first suggests Omega Point hypothesis
90s—Writes The Physics Of Immortality, laying out Omega Point hypothesis in much more detail and explicitly identifying Omega Point with God. People think this is clever but going a little far. Tipler’s contract for a textbook on gravitation gets cancelled and the university at which he has tenure stop giving him pay-rises.
2000s—Writes The Physics Of Christianity, in which he suggests cloning Jesus from the Turin Shroud so we can learn how he annihilated baryons, becomes referee for creationist journals and occasional right-wing commentator, argues that Barack Obama is evil because the lumineferous aether is real and because of a bit of the film Starship Troopers.
The criticism of Obama was slightly more coherent than that. The Tribe paper in question really was an example of the common attempt for people to take ideas in math and physics and try to apply them as strong metaphors in other areas in ways that are really unhelpful and at best silly. In that regard, most of Tipler’s criticism was straight on.
Yeah, except for two facts: Obama had no actual input into Tribe’s paper. Tipler’s physics in his paper is even less coherent than Tribe’s.
Ok that’s really...random. (Overused and underdefined word but that was the response my brain gave me).
The Tipler/Obama/aether connection seemed bizarre enough that I looked it up:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obama-vs-einstein/
Some quotes:
Einstein’s general relativity is just a special case of Newtonian gravity theory incorporating the ether
Hamilton-Jacobi theory is deterministic, hence quantum mechanics is equally deterministic
There was absolutely nothing revolutionary about twentieth century physics.
I agree on the “random” part.
That’s nothing. Read the full paper—http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1271310 . Forty-five pages of the most gloriously wrong thinking you’ll ever come across in your life.
But then he’ll come out with a piece of utterly lucid reasoning on applying Bayes’ theorem to the Born probabilities like http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0611245 . Very, very strange man.
I think this is a relevant rationality quote: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2ev/rationality_quotes_july_2010/28nw
Wow. While I’m unsurprised that Tipler would take issue with yet another poetical injection of something that superficially looks like quantum physics into yet another unrelated subject area, I’m more surprised that he’d express it in such a bizzare manner. There’s a whole paragraph where he name-drops his academic genealogy. And then he acts like Obama is making these claims, when at best he contributed “analytic and research assistance”, whatever that means.
I read The Physics of Immortality as an undergrad in ’04 and was skeptical of his major claims. I’m disappointed by his downward spiral into crackpot territory.