“Mr Prophet, are you claiming that there is no other theory to account for all this that has less intrinsic information content than a theory which assumes the existence of a fundamental, non-contingent mind—a mind which apparently cannot be accounted for by some theory containing less information, given that the mind is supposed to be non-contingent?”
He had better have a good answer to that: Otherwise I don’t care how many true predictions he has made or NP problems he has solved. None of that comes close to fixing the ultra-high information loading in his theory.
“The reason you feel confused is because you assume the universe must have a simple explanation.
The minimum message length necessary to describe the universe is long—long enough to contain a mind, which in fact it does. There is no fundamental reason why the Occamian prior must be appropriate. It so happens that Allah has chosen to create a world that, to a certain depth, initially appears to follow that law, but Occam will not take you all the way to the most fundamental description of reality.
I could write out the actual message description, but to demonstrate that the message contains a mind requires volumes of cognitive science that have not been developed yet. Since both the message and the proof of mind will be discovered by science within the next hundred years, I choose to spend my limited time on earth in other areas.”
Yes—I would ask this question:
“Mr Prophet, are you claiming that there is no other theory to account for all this that has less intrinsic information content than a theory which assumes the existence of a fundamental, non-contingent mind—a mind which apparently cannot be accounted for by some theory containing less information, given that the mind is supposed to be non-contingent?”
He had better have a good answer to that: Otherwise I don’t care how many true predictions he has made or NP problems he has solved. None of that comes close to fixing the ultra-high information loading in his theory.
“The reason you feel confused is because you assume the universe must have a simple explanation.
The minimum message length necessary to describe the universe is long—long enough to contain a mind, which in fact it does. There is no fundamental reason why the Occamian prior must be appropriate. It so happens that Allah has chosen to create a world that, to a certain depth, initially appears to follow that law, but Occam will not take you all the way to the most fundamental description of reality.
I could write out the actual message description, but to demonstrate that the message contains a mind requires volumes of cognitive science that have not been developed yet. Since both the message and the proof of mind will be discovered by science within the next hundred years, I choose to spend my limited time on earth in other areas.”
Do you think that is persuasive?
It’s not sufficient to persuade me, but I do think it shows that the hypothesis is not a priori completely impossible.