If your prior includes the serious possibility of a Tempter that seems reliable until you have to trust it on something important, why couldn’t the Tempter also falsify scientific data you gather?
When I condition on the existence of this impossible prophet, many improbable ideas are raised to attention, not merely the one that he asserts.
To bring the thought-experiment slightly closer to reality, aliens arrive, bringing advanced technology and religion. Do we accept the religion along with the technology? I’m sure science fiction has covered that one umpteen times, but the scenario has already been played out in history, with European civilisation as the aliens. They might have some things worth taking regarding how people should deal with each other, but strange people from far away with magic toys are no basis for taking spooks any more seriously.
Suppose a server appeared on the internet relaying messages from someone claiming to be the sysadmin of the simulation we’re living in, and asking that we refrain from certain types of behavior because it’s making his job difficult. Is there any set of evidence that would persuade you to go along with the requests, and how would the necessary degree of evidence scale with the inconvenience of the requests?
That should be a very easy claim to prove, actually. If someone really were the sysadmin of the universe, they could easily do a wide variety of impossible things that anyone can could verify. For example, they could write their message in the sky with a special kind of photon that magically violates the laws of physics in an obvious way (say, for example, it interacts with all elements normally except one which it inexplicably doesn’t interact with at all). Or find/replace their message into the genome of a designated species. Or graffiti it onto every large surface in the world simultaneously.
Of course, there would be no way to distinguish a proper sysadmin of the universe from someone who had gotten root access improperly, either from the simulated universe, the parent universe, or some other universe. And this does raise a problem for any direct evidence in support of a religion—no matter how strong the evidence gets, the possibility that someone has gained the ability to generate arbitrarily much fake evidence, or reliably deceive you somehow, will always remain indistinguishable; so anything with a significantly lower prior probability than that, is fundamentally impossible to prove. Most or all religions have a smaller prior probability than the “someone has gained magical evidence-forging powers and is using them” hypothesis, and as a result, even if strong evidence for them were to suddenly start appearing (which it hasn’t), that still wouldn’t be enough to prove them correct.
I still have a basic problem with the method of posing questions about possibilities I currently consider fantastically improbable. My uncertainty about how I would deal with the situation goes up with its improbability, and what I would actually do will be determined largely by details absent from the description of the improbable scenario.
It is as if my current view of the world—that is, my assignments of probabilities to everything—is a digital photograph of a certain resolution. When I focus on vastly improbable possibilities, it is as if I inspect a tiny area of the photograph, only a few pixels wide, and try to say what is depicted there. I can put that handful of pixels through my best image-processing algorithms, but all I’m going to get back is noise.
Can you consider hypothetical worlds with entirely different histories from ours? Rather than trying to update based on your current state of knowledge, with mountains of cumulative experience pointing a certain way, imagine what that mountainous evidence could have been in a deeply different world than this one.
For example, suppose the simulation sysadmin had been in active communication with us since before recorded history, and was commonplace knowledge casually accepted as mere fact, and the rest of the world looked different in the ways we would expect such a world to.
Unwinding the thread backwards, I see that my comment strayed into irrelevance from the original point, so never mind.
I would like to ask you this, though: of all the people on Earth who feel as sure as you do about the truth or falsehood of various religions, what proportion do you think are actually right? If your confidence in your beliefs regarding religion is a larger number than this, then what additional evidence do you have that makes you think you’re special?
When I condition on the existence of this impossible prophet, many improbable ideas are raised to attention, not merely the one that he asserts.
To bring the thought-experiment slightly closer to reality, aliens arrive, bringing advanced technology and religion. Do we accept the religion along with the technology? I’m sure science fiction has covered that one umpteen times, but the scenario has already been played out in history, with European civilisation as the aliens. They might have some things worth taking regarding how people should deal with each other, but strange people from far away with magic toys are no basis for taking spooks any more seriously.
I find the alien argument very persuasive.
Suppose a server appeared on the internet relaying messages from someone claiming to be the sysadmin of the simulation we’re living in, and asking that we refrain from certain types of behavior because it’s making his job difficult. Is there any set of evidence that would persuade you to go along with the requests, and how would the necessary degree of evidence scale with the inconvenience of the requests?
That should be a very easy claim to prove, actually. If someone really were the sysadmin of the universe, they could easily do a wide variety of impossible things that anyone can could verify. For example, they could write their message in the sky with a special kind of photon that magically violates the laws of physics in an obvious way (say, for example, it interacts with all elements normally except one which it inexplicably doesn’t interact with at all). Or find/replace their message into the genome of a designated species. Or graffiti it onto every large surface in the world simultaneously.
Of course, there would be no way to distinguish a proper sysadmin of the universe from someone who had gotten root access improperly, either from the simulated universe, the parent universe, or some other universe. And this does raise a problem for any direct evidence in support of a religion—no matter how strong the evidence gets, the possibility that someone has gained the ability to generate arbitrarily much fake evidence, or reliably deceive you somehow, will always remain indistinguishable; so anything with a significantly lower prior probability than that, is fundamentally impossible to prove. Most or all religions have a smaller prior probability than the “someone has gained magical evidence-forging powers and is using them” hypothesis, and as a result, even if strong evidence for them were to suddenly start appearing (which it hasn’t), that still wouldn’t be enough to prove them correct.
I still have a basic problem with the method of posing questions about possibilities I currently consider fantastically improbable. My uncertainty about how I would deal with the situation goes up with its improbability, and what I would actually do will be determined largely by details absent from the description of the improbable scenario.
It is as if my current view of the world—that is, my assignments of probabilities to everything—is a digital photograph of a certain resolution. When I focus on vastly improbable possibilities, it is as if I inspect a tiny area of the photograph, only a few pixels wide, and try to say what is depicted there. I can put that handful of pixels through my best image-processing algorithms, but all I’m going to get back is noise.
Can you consider hypothetical worlds with entirely different histories from ours? Rather than trying to update based on your current state of knowledge, with mountains of cumulative experience pointing a certain way, imagine what that mountainous evidence could have been in a deeply different world than this one.
For example, suppose the simulation sysadmin had been in active communication with us since before recorded history, and was commonplace knowledge casually accepted as mere fact, and the rest of the world looked different in the ways we would expect such a world to.
In other words, can I read fiction? Yes, but I don’t see where this is going.
Unwinding the thread backwards, I see that my comment strayed into irrelevance from the original point, so never mind.
I would like to ask you this, though: of all the people on Earth who feel as sure as you do about the truth or falsehood of various religions, what proportion do you think are actually right? If your confidence in your beliefs regarding religion is a larger number than this, then what additional evidence do you have that makes you think you’re special?