Human morality is indeed the complex unfolding of a simple idea in a certain environment. It’s not the one you’re thinking of though. And if we’re talking about hypotheses for the fundamental nature of reality, rather than a sliver of it (because a sliver of something can be more complicated than the whole) you have to include the complexity of everything that contributes to how your simple thing will play out.
Note also that we can’t explain reality with a god with a utility function of “maximize the number of copies of some genes”, because the universe isn’t just an infinite expanse of copies of some genes. Any omnipotent god you want to use to explain real life has to have a utility function that desires ALL the things we see in reality. Good luck adding the necessary stuff for that into “good” without making “good” much more complicated, and without just saying “good is whatever the laws of physics say will happpen.”
You can say for any complex thing, “Maybe it’s really simple. Look at these other things that are really simple.” but there are many (exponentially) more possible complex things than simple things. The prior for a complex thing being generable from a simple thing is very low by necessity. If I think about this like, “well, I can’t name N things I am (N-1)/N confident of and be right N-1 times, and I have to watch out for overconfidence etc., so there’s no way I can apply 99% confidence to ‘morality is complicated’...” then I am implicitly hypothesis privileging. You can’t be virtuously modest for every complicated-looking utility function you wonder if could be simple, or your probability distribution will sum to more than 1.
By hypothesis, “God” means actus purus, moral perfection; there is no reason to double count.
I’m not double-counting. I’m counting once the utility function which specifies the exact way things shall be (as it must if we’re going with omnipotence for this god hypothesis), and once the utility-maximization stuff, and comparing it to the non-god hypothesis, where we just count the utility function without the utility maximizer.
Any omnipotent god you want to use to explain real life has to have a utility function that desires ALL the things we see in reality.
The principle of sufficient reason rides again....or, if not, God can create a small numbers
of entities thatbThe really wants to, and roll a die for the window dressing.
In response to your first paragraph,
Human morality is indeed the complex unfolding of a simple idea in a certain environment. It’s not the one you’re thinking of though. And if we’re talking about hypotheses for the fundamental nature of reality, rather than a sliver of it (because a sliver of something can be more complicated than the whole) you have to include the complexity of everything that contributes to how your simple thing will play out.
Note also that we can’t explain reality with a god with a utility function of “maximize the number of copies of some genes”, because the universe isn’t just an infinite expanse of copies of some genes. Any omnipotent god you want to use to explain real life has to have a utility function that desires ALL the things we see in reality. Good luck adding the necessary stuff for that into “good” without making “good” much more complicated, and without just saying “good is whatever the laws of physics say will happpen.”
You can say for any complex thing, “Maybe it’s really simple. Look at these other things that are really simple.” but there are many (exponentially) more possible complex things than simple things. The prior for a complex thing being generable from a simple thing is very low by necessity. If I think about this like, “well, I can’t name N things I am (N-1)/N confident of and be right N-1 times, and I have to watch out for overconfidence etc., so there’s no way I can apply 99% confidence to ‘morality is complicated’...” then I am implicitly hypothesis privileging. You can’t be virtuously modest for every complicated-looking utility function you wonder if could be simple, or your probability distribution will sum to more than 1.
I’m not double-counting. I’m counting once the utility function which specifies the exact way things shall be (as it must if we’re going with omnipotence for this god hypothesis), and once the utility-maximization stuff, and comparing it to the non-god hypothesis, where we just count the utility function without the utility maximizer.
The principle of sufficient reason rides again....or, if not, God can create a small numbers of entities thatbThe really wants to, and roll a die for the window dressing.