Humans might not be a low-level atom, but obviously we have to privilege the hypothesis ‘something human-like did this’ if we’ve already observed a lot of human-like things in our environment.
Suppose I’m a member of a prehistoric tribe, and I see a fire in the distance. It’s fine for me to say ‘I have a low-ish prior on a human starting the fire, because (AFAIK) there are only a few dozen humans in the area’. And it’s fine for me to say ‘I’ve never seen a human start a fire, so I don’t think a human started this fire’. But it’s not fine for me to say ‘It’s very unlikely a human started that fire, because human brains are more complicated than other phenomena that might start fires’, even if I correctly intuit how and why humans are more complicated than other phenomena.
The case of Thor is a bit more complicated, because gods are different from humans. If Eliezer and cousin_it disagree on this point, maybe Eliezer would say ‘The complexity of the human brain is the biggest reason why you shouldn’t infer that there are other, as-yet-unobserved species of human-brain-ish things that are very different from humans’, and maybe cousin_it would say ‘No, it’s pretty much just the differentness-from-observed-humans (on the “has direct control over elemental forces” dimension) that matters, not the fact that it has a complicated brain.’
If that’s a good characterization of the disagreement, then it seems like Eliezer might say ‘In ancient societies, it was much more reasonable to posit mindless “supernatural” phenomena (i.e., mindless physical mechanisms wildly different from anything we’ve observed) than to posit intelligent supernatural phenomena.’ Whereas the hypothetical cousin-it might say that ancient people didn’t have enough evidence to conclude that gods were any more unlikely than mindless mechanisms that were similarly different from experience. Example question: what probability should ancient people have assigned to
The regular motion of the planets is due to a random process plus a mindless invisible force, like the mindless invisible force that causes recently-cooked food to cool down all on its own.
vs.
The regular motion of the planets is due to deliberate design / intelligent intervention, like the intelligent intervention that arranges and cooks food.
This seems right, though something about this still feels confusing to me in a way I can’t yet put into words. Might write a comment at a later point in time.
Humans might not be a low-level atom, but obviously we have to privilege the hypothesis ‘something human-like did this’ if we’ve already observed a lot of human-like things in our environment.
Suppose I’m a member of a prehistoric tribe, and I see a fire in the distance. It’s fine for me to say ‘I have a low-ish prior on a human starting the fire, because (AFAIK) there are only a few dozen humans in the area’. And it’s fine for me to say ‘I’ve never seen a human start a fire, so I don’t think a human started this fire’. But it’s not fine for me to say ‘It’s very unlikely a human started that fire, because human brains are more complicated than other phenomena that might start fires’, even if I correctly intuit how and why humans are more complicated than other phenomena.
The case of Thor is a bit more complicated, because gods are different from humans. If Eliezer and cousin_it disagree on this point, maybe Eliezer would say ‘The complexity of the human brain is the biggest reason why you shouldn’t infer that there are other, as-yet-unobserved species of human-brain-ish things that are very different from humans’, and maybe cousin_it would say ‘No, it’s pretty much just the differentness-from-observed-humans (on the “has direct control over elemental forces” dimension) that matters, not the fact that it has a complicated brain.’
If that’s a good characterization of the disagreement, then it seems like Eliezer might say ‘In ancient societies, it was much more reasonable to posit mindless “supernatural” phenomena (i.e., mindless physical mechanisms wildly different from anything we’ve observed) than to posit intelligent supernatural phenomena.’ Whereas the hypothetical cousin-it might say that ancient people didn’t have enough evidence to conclude that gods were any more unlikely than mindless mechanisms that were similarly different from experience. Example question: what probability should ancient people have assigned to
vs.
Yeah, that’s a good summary of my view (except maybe I wouldn’t even persist into the fourth paragraph). Thanks!
This seems right, though something about this still feels confusing to me in a way I can’t yet put into words. Might write a comment at a later point in time.