Ah. The presence of an omniscient, omnipotent being is important to the proof, but it is not the only element in that proof (the other elements are taken from observation of the universe, and are less controversial).
Consider; if an omnipotent, omniscient being exists, then it must take one of three stances with regard to humanity. It must either support the existence of humanity, or it must be neutral towards humanity, or it must support the non-existence of humanity. Since the being is omnipotent, if God wanted to wipe out humanity, God could (one or two well-placed asteroids a couple of million years back would have done it easily). Thus, I conclude that God is either in support of, or neutral towards humanity.
Now I also observe the universe around me, looking for traces of maliciousness in the laws of physics. So far, I have not found any. This implies that God is not into casual, petty cruelty without reason. It seems therefore likely that God is, at the very least, not evil.
The complete cessation of an intelligence would seem to be a great evil. Therefore, I postulate that there is a very strong probability that God has put some measures in place to prevent this. The measure most likely is some sort of afterlife; somewhere that a person can continue to survive, but not communicate back to those they leave behind.
Of course, this argument does not say that an afterlife is certain, given the existence of God, merely that it seems likely.
As to free will; here, I note that humans are demonstrably capable of the sort of casual cruelty that is absent from the laws of nature. Moreover, humans are capable of opposing each other. This strongly implies that at least some humans are capable of opposing what God wants. (This does not necessarily imply that said opposition has any chance of long-term success). This, in turn, seems to imply that humans do have some capacity to decide for themselves; hence, free will.
If the absence of maliciousness in the laws of physics is good evidence that God is not evil, is the absence of benevolence in the laws of physics good evidence that God is not good?
There is at least one thing in the laws of physics that seems like benevolence rather than the absence of it.
When animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, e.g. eat or engage in sex, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal.
That seems like benevolence. I could imagine a situation where everything that animals tended to do, was painful to them. You might say that is absurd, since then they would not tend to do those things. But they do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel. So there is nothing absurd about it, just like a person can be on a rollercoaster without any control over what is happening. It would be pretty terrible if life was like that, but fortunately it’s not.
That would imply that a bacterium engaging in things that feel pleasant to it. After all, like me, it tries to avoid things that cause it harm and tries to do things that benefit it.
It would also imply that a Roomba is engaging in things that feel pleasant to it.
I did. How do you know that? You can’t read the dog’s mind and the dog can’t talk to you. The dog could act in ways that you interpret as the dog being pleased, but trying to interpret it that way here would be circular reasoning since you are trying to show that the dog’s actions show that things are pleasant to it.
What are you claiming—that a dog is inherently unable to have “pleasant” feelings, or that humans have no capability whatsoever to judge the what’s happening in the mind of a dog on the basis of its behaviour?
In this context, you are claiming that “when animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal”. Judging what is happening in the mind of the animal on the basis of its behavior, in order to support this claim, is circular reasoning.
That isn’t in the laws of physics, except in the trivial sense in which everything that happens in the world is “in the laws of physics” (in which case of course there are vastly many benevolent and malicious things “in the laws of physics”).
But they do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel.
I think there’s a false dichotomy there. They do those things because of how they feel, and they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics. (Note that if you deny the latter half of this then you definitely aren’t entitled to say that this is “in the laws of physics”.)
I agree that in the normal sense, they do those things because of how they feel, and that they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics.
That’s kind of my point. When I said, “They do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel,” I meant this: I can imagine laws of physics that would imply that they do more or less the same things they do now, but they constantly feel bad about it. This is not something that might be impossible, like a zombie hypothesis. It is certainly possible, as is evident from the rollercoaster example.
In other words, the question is why the laws of physics and the way people feel are related in the way that they are, instead of a different way which would be much worse. I don’t see any strong argument that the actual way is intrinsically much more probable.
And even if we showed that it is intrinsically more probable, someone could simply say that this shows that God is intrinsically good.
I see a very strong argument that the actual way is much more probable. What does it mean to say that something feels bad? Mostly, I think, that whoever (or whatever) it feels bad to is strongly motivated to make it not happen. That’s what feeling-bad is for, evolutionarily; it’s what distinguishes those feelings as bad ones. So of course we should expect that people (and other animals) tend to do things that feel better in preference to things that feel worse.
(You might argue that the overall level of good-feeling is higher than we’d expect. But I don’t see any reason to think that.)
As I said, I think there’s an argument there for the goodness of God (or at least of the goodness of the universe) even if this relationship is intrinsically probable or even necessary.
This is probably another way of putting the same thing: do you think that overall it is good to exist? If the universe overall is neutral, the overall expectation would seem to be that it would be neutral to exist. But most people think it is good to exist. That suggests that overall the universe is good.
We just had someone argue that in practice they don’t (speaking of evolution). I don’t wholly endorse the argument, but let’s not casually dismiss it—the point that people need something to live for seems true enough.
That post was not arguing that people think that overall it is bad to exist. It was arguing that people don’t think it is good to exist forever, which is quite different.
Balderdash. The link argues that people do not want to keep living for even a matter of millenia if they “have nothing to live for,” in the author’s own words (and he argues that most people only care about having/raising children, which they lose interest in). This is clearly evidence for people being indifferent between existence and non-existence without a goal, or “neutral” as you put it before you somehow forgot that alternative.
That would still mean that existence was overall good for them by giving them the possibility of raising children (or reaching other goals they might have), which they would not have otherwise.
Physics seems like a weirdly low-level thing if we’re thinking about whether or not animals’ behavior could remain the same and their subjective experience could be a state of what we would call suffering in some possible world. I just don’t think that you could make edits on that level and have changes that are so fine-tuned. Editing physics doesn’t leave everything alone except subjective experience; editing physics breaks fire.
And if we have to settle for a physics that leaves at least most everything the same and life remains possible, then why wouldn’t we expect reward mechanisms to evolve and for the default state of affairs to be one in which adaptive experiences ‘feel good’ and others ‘feel bad’?
gjm called this a false dichotomy, but I think a better though perhaps more complex way of putting it is that you’re mixing up your multi-level maps. Take free will and determinism as an example. Some people become fatalists because they think that determinism contradicts their idea of what possibility means. But they’re contaminating their maps. You have a low-level map of physics where everything is lawful and there is no thing similar to what you might call ‘possibility.’ Then you have a high-level map of decision-making, and the fatalists take the lawfulness from their low-level physics map and draw it onto their high-level decision-making map, and say, “Well, the lawfulness overrules the possibility”, and then they start making null decisions, but that’s wrong. Possibility is a primitive notion in your high-level decision-making map and only in that map, just like the laws of physics are primitive notions in your low-level physics map and only in that map. In the territory, your brain runs on physics and your decision-making algorithm runs on physics, and your decision-making algorithm computing the output of logical nodes making decisions other than the one that it must make makes you feel possibility, and the whole process is lawful, and you have a bridge map between these two levels of maps; but the map is not the territory, and that goes both ways, and your high-level decision-making map is not the territory either, and sticking physics into it is like mixing apples and oranges. And even if that seems counterintuitive, I would say that any other policy is wrong, because the fatalists lose and the compatabilists win.
I agree with you about compatabilism, but I don’t think that answers my question.
I am not saying that you could have physical situation exactly like the real world except with subjective experience reversed. I agree that in order to reverse subjective experience, you would need to make physical changes.
But with those physical changes, why couldn’t you have a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good?
Maybe this is impossible. But if it is impossible, maybe that just shows that God is necessarily good.
a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good
How are you defining “bad” and “good”, in this world whose creatures are so different from us?
I suggest: “feel good” means “have subjective properties that tend to make such creatures seek experiences that have them” and “feel bad” means “have subjective properties that tend to make such creatures avoid experiences that have them”.
In which case, a world in which adaptive experiences feel worse than non-adaptive ones is a world in which creatures systematically pursue maladaptive goals and avoid adaptive ones. Evolution will get rid of such creatures pretty quickly, no?
if it is impossible, maybe that just shows that God is necessarily good.
Suppose I’m right about evolution (see above); how would you get from there to “God is necessarily good”?
Subjective properties that tend to make a creature seek something can only do that because those subjective properties correspond to some objective physical property, at least if you aren’t supporting dualism.
Why do the subjective properties that, in fact, tend to make people seek such experiences, correspond to objective properties that lead to that particular physical result (i.e. tending to physically move toward those results.)
You can say this is a tautology, and it is, in a way. But if we are simply talking about the particular subjective property in itself (as opposed to the fact that we happen to be pointing to it using our tendency to seek it), it is not a tautology, even if it may be a physical necessity.
In other words: zombies are probably physically impossible. But if they were possible, and if they were actual, instead of real humans, then reality would be neutral, neither good nor evil, since there would be no experience. In a similar way, negative-humans (who tend to seek painful experiences and avoid pleasant ones) are likely physically impossible. But if they were possible and actual, then the universe would be evil, and nearly all experiences would be bad.
But as it is, most experiences are good, and the universe is good. Talking about God here is probably a distraction, but if the universe is good, then its cause or causes should also be good. If the facts that make the universe good are necessary, then its causes are necessarily good.
Talking about God here is probably a distraction, but if the universe is good, then its cause or causes should also be good.
Actually, you’re affirming the consequent. If the cause of the universe is good, then the universe will be good. But if we observe that the universe is good, then we cannot infer that the cause of the universe is necessarily good.
Classic example:
If I have the flu, then I have a sore throat.
I have a sore throat.
Therefore, I have the flu.
Affirming the consequent is valid in the terms of the evidence relation. In other words, the fact that I have a sore throat is evidence that I have the flu, although not proof.
In the same way, the universe being good is evidence that the cause is good. If up to that point, we assumed that the cause was entirely neutral, our best estimate will now be that the cause is good.
That’s true, but there are other equally explanatory hypotheses that don’t involve good causes, so at the very least, the fact that the universe is good (although I would contest or at least qualify that claim) is not evidence either way. It doesn’t help you figure out which possible world you’re in.
I suggest that things coming out of evolutionary biology are more like logical than physical necessities; we would expect the same sort of dynamics to apply even with very different physical laws. (On the other hand, the “necessity” involved is weaker, because evolution is a stochastic process and it’s very possible for suboptimal bits of design to get fixed in a population.)
So, anyway, the situation seems to be something like this: Any organisms with anything we could reasonably identify as “feeling good” or “feeling bad” experiences will tend to seek the ones that “feel good” in preference to the ones that “feel bad”, almost tautologously. This means that, doing whatever they do, they will tend to “feel better” than we can imagine them doing if (e.g.) they absurdly sought out “feeling bad” experiences in preference to “feeling good” ones.
So far, so good. But to describe this by saying that “most experiences are good, and the universe is good” seems wrong to me, and I don’t see how you get from “the facts that make the universe good are necessary” to “its causes are necessarily good”. To expand on those points:
First: yes, living things will do nicer things in preference to nastier. But those are comparative terms. If everything in (say) human experience were made substantially more or substantially less pleasant uniformly it would have little impact on our decisions, but surely it could change whether “most experiences are good”. My actual impression is that most experiences are neutral and the amounts of good and bad aren’t terribly different. We have both orgasms and headaches; both enlightenment and boredom; both the satisfaction of a job well done and the frustration of failing to achieve what we should. I don’t see any reason to think other animals’ balance is very different.
Second: if “the universe is good” is meant to be just another way of saying “most experience is good” then I don’t think passing from one to the other does anything other than invite confusion. If it’s not, then I think you need some further justification for saying that the universe is good.
Third: let’s suppose, e.g., that some simple argument in terms of evolution does lead to the conclusion that, largely independent of the details of physical law etc., most experiences of most living things will be experienced as good rather than bad. How do you get from there to “the causes of the universe are necessarily good”? I just don’t see it. There certainly isn’t any generally valid inference from “X has property P” to “the causes of X have property P”; consider e.g. the case where X is the physical universe and P is “is made of matter and energy” or “is made of quantum fields” or something of the kind; if the physical universe has causes at all then they might be mathematical laws, or gods, or happenings in some other universe with different laws; they certainly needn’t be made of the same stuff as our universe.
I think I disagree with the first part (that we can’t understand the idea of something doing things that feel bad rather than feel good, or that there are obvious reasons why this is impossible in principle), but I won’t argue that for two reasons. First because that would probably end up being a very time consuming discussion, and second because, as I said, I think I can make my argument even if I grant your point.
Regarding your three points:
It sounds like you are saying that there is a balance of good and evil in human life which is basically equal, so that overall life is neutral. If this is the case, it would certainly make sense to say that the universe is neutral as well. But I disagree that the overall balance is neutral, and I think that most people disagree. Most people have a strong preference to live, rather than to die, even in a painless way. This implies that they think the value of the rest of their life is significantly higher than zero. This suggests that you are undervaluing positive experiences and overemphasizing negative experiences, compared to the values that most people place on those. And I doubt that in practice you personally think your life is worthless on balance.
When I say that the universe is good, I do not just mean that life or experience is overall good. If that needs additional justification, I will do that in addressing the third point.
I agree that a cause does not always have the properties of the effect. But goodness has a particular meaning which affects the issue. Without trying to give a formal definition, saying that something is good certainly means something like “this is a desirable state of affairs,” and likewise saying that something is bad would mean something undesirable. But then if a cause brings about a good effect, it brings about a desirable state of affairs. And if the thing was desirable, bringing it about was desirable, and so there is reason to call the cause good as well, even though it still doesn’t mean exactly the same thing (to call the thing good and to call its cause good.)
I don’t think my first part says quite what you say it says, but never mind that since you’ve agreed not to contest it :-).
On good versus neutral versus bad, and wanting to live: wanting and liking are different things, and I think there are (alas) plenty of people who feel that their life contains more bad than good but still have no wish to die. (And, also alas, some who admit that their life contains more good than bad but do want to die, at least some of the time.) No, I don’t think my life is worthless on balance. I think I have an unusually good life. [EDITED to add: And I expect a lot of other people here on LW have unusually good lives too. It’s a group selected for high intelligence (almost necessary to find much LW material interesting), reasonable amounts of leisure time (else we’d be doing other things), not being overwhelmed with other concerns (else again we’d be doing other things), easy access to the internet (since that’s where LW is), membership in a somewhat-dominant culture (because LW is anglophone and founded by people in the US), etc. None of these things is universal here, none of them is either necessary or sufficient for a good life, but they all tend to be characteristic of LW participants and they all tend to go along with a more pleasant life.]
On causes and effects: if by “good” you mean only “bringing about more desirable than undesirable effects, on balance” then I am, at least provisionally, prepared to agree that if an effect is good then that’s evidence for the goodness of each of its causes. But it seems to me that this is a much weaker sense of “good” than the one usually intended by people who say that God is “good”. Suppose I have a child (as in fact I do) and that I alternate between treating her kindly and beating her (as in fact I do not). If I do her more good than harm, overall, does this justify calling me “good”? Of course not.
What does your argument from goodness of experience really come down to? Only this, I think: “The universe has in it more good experiences than bad, perhaps just because of the logic of evolution. So whatever, if anything, caused our universe to exist may have the property of tending to produce more good experiences than bad. The god in whom I believe is supposed to have that property, so this imbalance between good and bad experiences is evidence for that god”. I hope it’s clear that if so it’s very weak evidence.
I basically agree with what you said about wanting and liking. That’s one reason why it’s easy for me to imagine a situation where I constantly do things that feel awful and avoid the pleasant ones. Because to some extent that already happens. But life is not even close to being like that as a whole.
I also agree that people on LW are likely to have better lives on average than people in general, and also that at least some people would say that overall there is more bad than good in their lives, while still not wanting to commit suicide or anything like that. But I very much doubt that this is even close to a majority of people, even in very poor countries or in a historical sense. I realize I could be wrong about this and that (if so) someone could prove it with the proper statistics. But this is my current sense of the situation.
Regarding calling the causes good, that is one reason why I said it was a distraction (relative to this argument) to talk about God. Because normally when people say “God,” they think of a person, and in fact a particular person, with the result that instead of talking about some particular point, people are actually discussing whether or not the doctrines of someone’s religion are true or false as a whole.
In any case, as you point out, saying that someone is a “good person,” has a particular meaning, certainly more than saying that overall the person causes more good than bad. But in that way there is no contradiction in someone being a good thing but a bad person, because “good thing” and “good person” mean two different things.
I agree with your summary of the argument, at least as far as it goes.
Well, if you detach your argumentation about good versus bad experience from talk of “God”, then all you’re left with is: People have more good than bad experiences on the whole, so if the universe has causes then they are more likely to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more good than bad experiences, than to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more bad than good experiences.
Which is fair enough, but I’m sure originally this was being proposed as evidence for belief in a good god, and it really doesn’t seem to me to offer more than a tiny amount (and, further, in so far as it does the highly mixed character of human experience seems to provide at least as much evidence against the perfectly good gods of various religions).
Actually, that wasn’t how I meant it even originally (even if in fact it is weak evidence for that). I suppose it wasn’t unreasonable for you to understand it that way because I used the word “benevolence,” and in reply to a comment about whether God is good or not, but in fact I was only objecting to the implied claim that the laws of physics (and therefore whatever causes them) are overall absolutely neutral, and I used the word benevolence because you used it.
I agree with you that there is good evidence against the idea of God as a perfectly good person, in a literal sense, especially if you understand that in the sense that God is someone who is supposed to look at every particular thing which is happening and decide whether or not it’s a good idea to allow it to happen or not. It seems very likely that no such thing is happening.
I was only objecting to the implied claim that the laws of physics [...] are overall absolutely neutral
Oh, OK! But in that case I wonder whether there’s a miscommunication. I forget who was claiming that the laws of physics are “neutral”, but what I would mean if I made such a claim is simply that nothing in those laws is about justice or charity or benevolence or honesty or anything of the kind. Of course it might turn out that the laws of physics have consequences of which we morally approve (e.g., living things tending to do things that lead to good rather than bad experiences) or disapprove (e.g., living things competing ruthlessly against one another much of the time), and if you believe in gods and devils and the like then you might think that some of those consequences are actually “design features” rather than emergent coincidences, but the laws themselves simply don’t operate at the same level as moral considerations do.
It seems unlikely to me that anyone here was deliberately claiming, or implying, that the laws of physics can’t have any consequences to which we attach moral weight.
There was probably some miscommunication, perhaps because when people talk about things they have certain interests. This can happen in a completely non-truth related way, as e.g. a website like Answers in Genesis is not interested in discovering the truth, but in arguing for creationism without any regard for reality. However, even when people want to know or discuss the truth they still have particular motivations which affect the discussion. So for example if someone is interested at the moment in thinking about one particular aspect of reality, he is more likely to interpret other people’s statements as being relevant to that consideration, even if they are in fact irrelevant or less relevant than he would like.
But I’m not sure it’s completely an issue of miscommunication because I’m not very comfortable with your explanation here either. Let me try to summarize your comment before I try to explain why I have a problem with it:
The laws of physics that we know and use are mathematical laws about mass and force and so on. It is obvious that these do not contain anything about justice etc.
It turns out that these laws have various consequences which have moral importance for us, some good and some bad.
But the laws “don’t operate at the same level,” even if someone might suppose that the above good or bad consequences are the result of someone’s good or bad intentions. If they are an argument for such good or bad intentions, they are a fairly weak argument for it.
(I realize that there is more here than you said in the comment I’m replying to, but I’m summarizing also based on our previous discussion.)
I agree with all three of these points. However, I still have a problem with your comment as a whole, probably because of this: “you might think that some of these consequences are actually ‘design features’ rather than emergent coincidences.”
It is perfectly obvious that mathematical laws as such are not about morality, and in that sense it is not an interesting question. But it seems unlikely that mathematical laws are the most fundamental causes of the world, because they are abstractions, not realities. So the more interesting question is, if the mathematical laws have other causes, what is the relationship of those causes to morality?
Your statement seems to suggest that either those causes designed morality and human life, or morality is an “emergent coincidence” relative to them, as it is relative to the mathematical laws in themselves. I think this is a false dichotomy. For example, fire makes things hot, and this is neither by design on the part of the fire, nor by emergent coincidence. Of course, you could say that this is because fire is “about” heat, while the laws of physics (and consequently their causes) are presumably not about morality. So if it isn’t by design, it seems to be by coincidence.
I disagree with this conclusion, but there is no way to explain this disagreement without reopening the can of worms I was planning to keep closed. So instead of making that argument as a whole, I’ll do it by talking about a question.
I think that dualism about experience is probably false. For example, some things look orange to me, and some things look blue. I don’t think that it is possible to change that fact without either changing those objects physically, or changing me physically. With the appropriate physical changes on either side, however, it would be possible to make those orange things look blue, and the blue things look orange.
But despite this belief, I think it is a meaningful question to ask, “Why do oranges look orange to me, instead of blue?”, and one that cannot be answered in an explanatory way by reference to those physical causes that would in fact change things so that oranges look blue.
I think it is a meaningful question, one that currently no one can answer. It is possible that no one will ever be able to answer it. And it is possible even that no one can answer it in principle, in the sense that the “answer” is not something intelligible to a human mind.
I do not think that answers that have to do with the structure of the human brain and the mathematical laws of physics do or can answer this question.
I do not think that it is a meaningless question, like “Why I am myself instead of being gjm?” This question is meaningless, not only in the sense that we cannot answer it, but in the sense that there is nothing that is being asked. There is no “I” who had the possibility of being either myself or someone else. It is clear to me that the question about orange and blue is quite different. A world where oranges look blue is a quite different world (unlike the world where I am gjm), and so it is meaningful to ask why we are not in that different world.
I could also make the question into “Why am I conscious at all, instead of being a philosophical zombie?”, even though that might make the opening in the can of worms too wide. Note that saying that philosophical zombies are impossible does not answer the question. I agree that they are impossible, given the brute fact that we are actually conscious. The question is why they are impossible, and something being impossible is not always self-explanatory, and no one has yet explained this particular case. Nor does it explain it to give a lengthy explanation of physical causes which would lead to someone saying words like “I am conscious,” even if he were a philosophical zombie.
The existence of this kind of question, and the impossibility of answering it in any standard way, suggests to me that there is something in the basic causes of laws of physics which has a stronger relationship with consciousness (and probably also good and evil, given how fundamental these are in our experience) than emergent coincidence, but different from design. Thus more like the relationship between fire and heat, although not exactly this relationship either.
It is by no means obvious that the laws of physics could not be about morality or humans. A law to prevent human beings from losing all of their limbs would, if expressed in the same ‘language’ as the other laws, be absurdly long—but any being we could reasonably describe as “omnipotent and omniscient” would have no trouble creating it.
I don’t know if I understand the rest of the parent. Would you like to replace “oranges” with “dresses” and try again? If Martha’s perceptions consisted entirely of connections, - let’s say she could only register differences between the photons arriving from different areas and compare these mathematical differences with other patterns of difference, which may activate other nodes in her network—would she describe anything differently?
I didn’t say it is obvious that there couldn’t be laws of physics about morality or about humans. I said it is obvious that the ones we actually know and use are not about those things.
As for the rest, I’ll adopt the style that Socrates calls “polemical,” and say that “I have given my argument, if you disagree it is up to you to refute it.” Mostly because I didn’t want to get involved in that discussion in the first place.
I am not saying that you could have physical situation exactly like the real world except with subjective experience reversed. I agree that in order to reverse subjective experience, you would need to make physical changes.
To be clear, I didn’t think you were proposing any sort of p-zombie-like hypothesis, where mental states are epiphenomenal or otherwise.
But with those physical changes, why couldn’t you have a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good?
I think this is the same sort of error that a lot of people make when they ask “Why am I who I am instead of someone else?” They think that their identity exists primitively in the territory or even that it existed before their body; but it’s a wrong question because they have the causality reversed. The question would make sense if you were some ghost-in-the-machine and you or someone else picked some physical body, but that’s not how it works. Your body caused your mind, so you always are who you are and the question is confused. (I also don’t mean to exclude the possibility of anthropic reasoning in this example.) The good and the bad don’t exist primitively in the territory, they are caused by evolutionary processes that develop organisms with reward mechanisms, and we identify reward and punishment, among other things, with these high-level concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that didn’t exist before us, so good is always good and bad is always bad and the question is confused.
Although with what I’ve seen in neuroscience, some creature like what you describe doesn’t necessarily seem outside of the realm of physical possibility to me. If people can simultaneously observe that they are paralyzed and come up with endless excuses for why they aren’t, and the cognitive processes we’re talking about in this case aren’t too intertwined, then I can perhaps conceive of a creature that continues to perform adaptive behaviors but experiences suffering and happiness in the reverse. But I would expect someone to have to construct it, not for it to evolve. Or maybe an evolved creature with the most horrible sort of oddly complex neurological lesion.
“Free will” consists of the ability of a person to determine their own future actions by some entirely internal process (which can observe, but is not controlled by, external factors); where “person” is defined as a collection of stuff such that the collection of stuff that makes up you has no overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up me and neither of us have any overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up (say) Barack Obama, or Trevor Noah, or Jacob Zuma.
Do you understand “is not controlled by” in such a way that having “free will” is inconsistent with (1) purely deterministic physics and/or (2) purely deterministic+random physics? (On the face of it your definition makes free will inconsistent with #1 but not with #2, but I can e.g. imagine a definition that restricts those “external factors” to, say, the state of the world outside one’s body in at most the last year, in which case “free will” might be compatible with outright determinism.)
I don’t think that free will can be reconciled with purely deterministic physics—free will implies that, in exactly the same situation, with each and every particle in exactly the same space, I can still choose whether to purchase those biscuits or not.
On the other hand, my decision whether or not to purchase those biscuits is not exactly random, either. There are a number of factors that go into it—in fact, considering force of habit, quite a few of my decisions are extremely predictable. So I’m not sure that random physics is entirely reconcilable either.
OK. So, do you consider that you actually have good evidence for the existence of free will in this sense? If so, what is that evidence?
The obvious alternative hypothesis, which seems to me to explain all the evidence I know of just as well, is that at the level of physics there’s nothing but determinism and maybe randomness, but it looks different to us because we can’t see all the details. We think “I could have done otherwise in the exact same situation” because we have seen ourselves and others do different things in very similar-looking situations, we can imagine making a different decision in what feels like the same situation, etc.; but we don’t get to observe the exact states of all the particles that compose us and the world around us, and what we think of as “the same situation” may actually be quite different in its details. We also don’t get to observe the mechanisms that lead to our making whatever choices we do, so those choices feel like opaque black-box miracles to us. No magical contra-causal free will is required for things to look this way to us.
I did think I had a good argument for free will (given the existence of God), but TheAncientGeek has punctured that. (I had a second argument as well, but I’m waiting to see whether TheAncientGeek has any comment on that one).
Aside from that, all I’ve really got is that:
(a) What I do feels like free will; that may be an illusion.
(b) What other people do is consistent enough to suggest that their actions are being guided by individual, similarly free-willed minds.
...both of which are fairly weak evidence, if anything.
It’s clear that if you put someone in very similar situations and ask them to make a choice, over time they will converge to making a certain choice a certain percentage of the time. That could easily be the same percentage of the time that would be predicted by deterministic physics plus e.g. quantum uncertainty, so I don’t see any reason in principle why your account of free will could not be consistent with everything happening according to the laws of physics, if there is randomness in the laws of physics.
As for the feeling, if a deterministic chess computer had feelings, it would have to have the feeling that it could make any move it wanted, because if it didn’t feel that way, it couldn’t consider all the possibilities, and it can’t decide on a move without considering all the possibilities. This doesn’t prevent chess computers from being deterministic, so it might not prevent you from having a feeling like that, even if your actions are in fact deterministic.
It’s clear that if you put someone in very similar situations and ask them to make a choice, over time they will converge to making a certain choice a certain percentage of the time.
No, it’s not clear at all. If ask me to make choices in similar situations, first I might humor you, then I’ll get bored and start fucking around with the system, and then I’ll get really bored and stop cooperating with you. There won’t be much of a convergence over time.
then I’ll get bored and start fucking around with the system, and then I’ll get really bored and stop cooperating with you. There won’t be much of a convergence over time.
The problem with that model seems to be that as time goes on, the situation in which you are put in becomes increasingly dissimilar to the original one, just because of we’ve added memories of having had to make this choice x number of times before. If we could run the experiment so that you always felt like it was the first time you were in this situation, perhaps by putting the same kind of decision in different contexts and spreading them out over time and with various distractions, do you think you’d still deviate in the same way?
I know I’m going back from territory to less practical abstraction here, but I think this kind of difficult-to-collect data would be more revealing for this question.
Most of my point is that you can not. Among I things, I change over time.
As a practical example, I drink beer. Various kinds of. My beer preferences do not converge over time. Instead, they wander over different styles, different hoppiness/maltiness/etc., even different breweries. I have no idea what kind of beer I will like in, say, a year, but it probably will be different from what I like now.
Showing that something works in a toy model does not show that the same thing works in actual reality.
Sure, I totally agree with you—in real life, we can really put a person in exactly the same situation twice. If we could, this whole free will argument would be a lot easier to solve.
That said, I do think the toy models are useful. Pretending we can do this experiment gives an answer to the problem I’ve never managed to pick a hole in (and tbh getting other people’s input on it is the hidden motivation for entering this discussion):
If we could let you choose a beer, then rewind the universe—including all particles, forces, and known and unknown elements of cognition anyone might postulate such as souls and deities back to their starting position—then let it go again, there are only really two things that could happen:
1) you choose the same beer because that’s what the universe was leading up to or
2) you choose a different beer despite the fact that all parameters of the universe known and unknown are the same.
The first outcome would suggest determinism; the second randomness, or at least independence from all variables which we consider “self” such as personality, memory and perhaps souls and things, since they were all rewound with the universe. I’d be really interested to hear of any third option anyone can think of!
As you say, showing this in a toy model isn’t the same as showing it in actual reality; but when the actual experiment is impossible, one is arguing about abstract concepts anyway, and one has a lot of difficulty imagining outcomes not encompassed in the model I’m not sure we can do much better.
I suspect that if we take the average of e.g. the bitterness of the beers that you have been drinking, it has already converged to an average, and future developments will probably not change that average much, even if there are some years when you drink sweet beers and some years when you drink bitter beers.
Perhaps, although I don’t see how you can know that unless you have been making measurements, or unless it has definitely been going in the direction of getting more and more sweet, or more and more bitter.
In any case, since beer does not differ an infinite amount in sweetness and bitterness, it won’t be easy to stop that average from converging sooner or later.
Um, if I’m swinging from Lambics to Stouts with excursions into IPAs and Belgian Trappists, do you really think I converged on a particular bitterness?
it won’t be easy to stop that average from converging sooner or later.
The concept of convergence does not apply to the “average position”. It always exists.
You are probably thinking of statistical estimation with uncorrelated errors. That is not the case here, you are not estimating some unobserved parameter.
But that doesn’t mean my taste in beer will converge to some value. All it means is that the average of history of my beer wanderings will be somewhere around the middle of the range—an observation which is quite useless for the free will debate.
The general point I was making is that there is nothing about free will, even if by definition it means you have more than one option in the same physical situation, which gives us a reason to expect a pattern different from determinism with the addition of some randomness. So unless someone can show how those patterns would be different, there isn’t any special reason to suppose that our actions couldn’t correspond entirely to the laws of physics, without that meaning we don’t have free will.
a pattern different from determinism with the addition of some randomness
That’s heavily underspecified. Most everything can be fit into a pattern of “determinism with the addition of some randomness”.
In any case, you started with a specific claim that the choices will converge. Outside of the toy-model setup I didn’t think it was necessarily true and I still don’t think so.
I meant that the changing average of the choices will converge, in the way I expect to happen in the beer case. I still think this will happen under all normal circumstances.
I’m not seeing what that says about free will. If you pick out a selection of numbers from one to a hundred, and you keep going, then the more numbers you pick out the less effect each new number will have on the running average.
I just don’t see how this leads to “free will can be explained by deterministic physics plus randomness”.
I don’t think it proves that. I think it suggests that it may be the case. We already know that deterministic physics plus randomness will result in statistical patterns like that. I am just saying that free will is going to result in statistical patterns as well.
As far as I know, those could be the same patterns, which would mean that free will would be consistent with deterministic physics plus randomness. That is not a proof. I am just saying I don’t know of any specific reasons to think those patterns will be different. Do you have reasons like that?
The thing is, the “pattern” you’ve picked up is a pattern that every series of numbers follows—that every series of numbers must follow. Any hypothesis will result in the same pattern—if I think that free will is controlled by the number of cookies eaten in Western Australia every second Tuesday, and I try to see if it follows the pattern of the average converging to a value as more samples are added, I’ll find the same pattern.
If “having the same pattern” is to have any sort of predictive power at all, then that pattern must be a pattern that the data can possibly not have under another hypothesis.
I’m mystified by this discussion. entirelyuseless seems to be saying that if you look at the history of choices someone has made in similar situations, they will show some kind of convergence, which I see no reason at all to believe. And CCC seems to be saying that every sequence of numbers shows this pattern, which I not only see no reason to believe but can refute. (E.g., consider the sequence consisting of one +1, two −1s, four +1s, eight −1s, etc. The average after 2^n-1 steps oscillates between about −1/3 and about +1/3.) And none of this seems to have anything much to do with free will; in so far as the “libertarian” notion of free will makes sense at all, it seems perfectly consistent with making choices that average out in the long run, at least with probability → 1 or something of the kind, and determinism is perfectly consistent with not doing so, since e.g. the sequence of numbers I just described can be produced by a very simple computer program (at least if it either has infinite memory or has at least a few hundred bits and isn’t observed for longer than the lifetime of the universe).
Well, that isn’t what “converges” means in mathematics (it means there’s a particular value towards which one gets and stays arbitrarily close), but with that definition it is indeed tautologously true that wandering around within a bounded region yields “converging” averaged values. (But not if the region can be unbounded. Easy counterexample: One +1, two −2, four +4, eight −8, etc.)
Well, that isn’t what “converges” means in mathematics (it means there’s a particular value towards which one gets and stays arbitrarily close), but with that definition it is indeed tautologously true that wandering around within a bounded region yields “converging” averaged values.
If the steps get smaller sufficiently slowly, there are counterexamples similar to yours with +1s and −1s. It’s difficult to get convergence short of explicitly imposing convergence.
Confinement to a bounded region implies accumulation points (points to which some subsequence converges), but there can be any number of those. They can even be dense in the space.
There are counterexamples to convergence-in-the-usual-sense, and my example was one of them.
If one takes CCC’s statement of what s/he meant by “convergence” absolutely at face value, then there are not only counterexamples but trivial counterexamples; e.g., begin 0,0,1; the first step moves the rolling average by 0 and the second doesn’t.
What I took CCC as actually meaning was that the differences converge-in-the-usual-sense to zero, or equivalently that one can make them small enough by waiting long enough. That’s straightforwardly true because if the diameter of your region is D then after n steps your average can’t move by more than D/n per step.
What I took CCC as actually meaning was that the differences converge-in-the-usual-sense to zero, or equivalently that one can make them small enough by waiting long enough. That’s straightforwardly true because if the diameter of your region is D then after n steps your average can’t move by more than D/n per step.
Just to confirm—yes, that’s what I’d meant. Which it trivially true, yes; that is why I couldn’t understand why entirelyuseless was attaching any special significance to it.
What I took CCC as actually meaning was that the differences converge-in-the-usual-sense to zero, or equivalently that one can make them small enough by waiting long enough.
That’s what CCC said in his last post, but it’s not a useful property for showing what was originally claimed by entirelyuseless, who said:
I meant that the changing average of the choices will converge, in the way I expect to happen in the beer case.
This doesn’t follow from shrinking steps, because:
That’s straightforwardly true because if the diameter of your region is D then after n steps your average can’t move by more than D/n per step.
The sum of that over all n is divergent, so the average can move around anywhere if you wait long enough. In fact, for any number of passes of averaging, that will still be true: if the underlying sequence goes somewhere and sticks there long enough, the average will eventually get there. Then the underlying sequence can go somewhere else, and so on.
To put this in more concrete terms, with an example of a property that for many people shows no long-term stability in their lifetime, consider physical location (relative to the geocentric frame). A person may live for years in one place, then years in another town or another continent, and make such moves at various times in their life. For such a person, there is no useful concept of their average location. In the case of the original example, a person’s taste in beer can make just as drastic changes, on top of which, the world changes and new beers are created, the space of the random walk changes as the walk is being made.
entirelyuseless’s original claim:
The random walk doesn’t converge. But the average position does.
I agree. (Did something I said give a contrary impression? I thought I’d said right at the outset that the original claims of both entirelyuseless and CCC are wrong.)
I have already said that I agree that it is mathematically possible to prevent the average from converging, just that this is not likely to happen in real life. In RichardKennaway’s comment, “goes somewhere and sticks there long enough” means progressively longer periods of time, and so is not realistic.
I’m not saying that people’s choices converge in the sense of getting closer to a particular value, but that the average converges. You are right to say that this is not a necessary property of every sequence of values (and CCC was mistaken.)
You say that there is no reason to think I am right about this, but your proposed sequence of numbers suggests that I am, namely by showing that the only way the average won’t converge is if you purposely choose a sequence to prevent that from happening. Suppose you offer someone chocolate or vanilla ice cream once a week. I think there are very good reasons to think that the moving average would begin to change slower and slower very quickly, and would basically converge after a while. This would happen unless the person used a sequence like the above: namely, unless he chose a sequence with the explicit intention of preventing convergence.
I agree that someone can have this intention, and that this would not refute determinism. In that sense you could say that the whole discussion is irrelevant. But the relevance, from my point of view, is that it makes the question more concrete. The basic point is that you can, if you want, define free will so that it is not consistent with determinism. But then it will be consistent with determinism plus randomness, unless you propose some prediction which is not consistent with the second. And no one had done that. So no one has even suggested a definition of free will which would be inconsistent with being produced by some form of physical laws.
So no one has even suggested a definition of free will which would be inconsistent with being produced by some form of physical laws.
Given that our universe clearly does operate on some form of physical laws, if anyone were to provide such a definition of free will, it should be trivial to show that it’s not how our universe works.
I think there are very good reasons to think that the moving average would begin to change slower and slower very quickly, and would basically converge after a while.
Not if the person’s preferences are changing gradually over time. That is a real thing that really happens.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I agree that any notion of free will it’s credible to think we have is consistent with physicalism.)
I agree that a person’s preferences can change over time but it will not have the effect of an average that goes back and forth without his preferences changing back and forth, but remaining stable at the extremes for longer and longer periods of time (much like your sequence). This is not a likely thing to happen in real life.
Anyway I also agree that the particulars of this are not that important to my point.
Basically I am saying that deterministic physics plus randomness can produce any possible pattern, as you’re noting. So it can also produce the pattern produced by free will. Or do you have some idea of what free will would do which is different from deterministic physics plus randomness? If so, I haven’t see it suggested yet.
Basically I am saying that deterministic physics plus randomness can produce any possible pattern, as you’re noting. So it can also produce the pattern produced by free will.
Yes, I agree. It can. Deterministic physics alone can, if you have a long enough list of rules.
As for the feeling, if a deterministic chess computer had feelings, it would have to have the feeling that it could make any move it wanted, because if it didn’t feel that way, it couldn’t consider all the possibilities, and it can’t decide on a move without considering all the possibilities.
...I’m not seeing this. It can consider all the possibilities even if it knows that it must play the possibility with the highest odds of winning—in fact, knowing that means that it must consider all the possibilities in order to calculate those odds, surely?
Even if it knows that it must play the move with the highest odds of winning, as far as it knows when it starts considering, that could be any of the moves.
But yes that would be knowledge that its move is objectively deterministic. This would not necessarily prevent it from feeling like it could make any move it wanted, just like people who believe themselves subject to deterministic physics still feel like they can do whatever they want.
But the chess computer doesn’t have to know what is determining its moves, in which case it will be even more likely to feel that it can make whatever move it wants.
Well, yes, feeling like it has freedom doesn’t really prevent it from not having freedom; but I don’t see how the feeling of freedom makes any difference at all. Why shouldn’t the chess computer feel constrained?
I agree that the feeling doesn’t make any difference. That’s what I’m saying: whether it feels constrained or not, it may or may not be deterministic. Those are two different things. The same is true for us.
“Free will” is an ambiguous term. The sort of free will you’ve argued for here could be paraphrased as “not being God’s puppets”, but I hope it’s obvious that that can’t be evidence of God’s existence. But you listed “free will” as something you can explain with God better than without!
I really don’t think the fact that people sometimes do things a god should be expected to disapprove of can be evidence for that god’s existence. Do you?
(Perhaps the argument you have in mind makes essential use of the fact that humans engage in a kind of cruelty “that is absence from the laws of nature”. But I don’t see how that can work. We should expect human behaviour, even if entirely derived from the laws of nature, to have features that aren’t apparent when looking at the laws themselves—just as, e.g., in Conway’s “Game of Life” there are phenomena like gliders that aren’t apparent from the almost-trivial rules of the game.)
“Free will” is an ambiguous term. The sort of free will you’ve argued for here could be paraphrased as “not being God’s puppets”, but I hope it’s obvious that that can’t be evidence of God’s existence. But you listed “free will” as something you can explain with God better than without!
Ah, let me elaborate, then.
Whether God exists or not, one can postulate a universe in which people are puppets—philosophical zombies, moving and acting according to some purely deterministic set of rules.
In the atheistic universe, those behaviours may be at odds with one another, because the rules are not guided; they do not have an aim. They may optimise for some goal on the individual, or even the group level, but there is no reason why they should do so in an efficient manner; a puppet universe may include humans who oppose each other.
In the theistic universe, the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient being suggests that there is some purpose to the universe. If all people are puppets, then, it is to be expected that all people work tirelessly towards a single goal, without opposing each other.
Therefore, the observation that people oppose each other cannot be used to argue for free will in the atheistic universe, but can do so in the theistic universe.
I really don’t think the fact that people sometimes do things a god should be expected to disapprove of can be evidence for that god’s existence. Do you?
You’ve got it backwards. I’m not using it as evidence for God’s existence; I’m using it as evidence for free will, given the existence of God as a postulate.
In the atheistic universe, those behaviours may be at odds with one another, because the rules are not guided; they do not have an aim. They may optimise for some goal on the individual, or even the group level, but there is no reason why they should do so in an efficient manner; a puppet universe may include humans who oppose each other.
You are treating puppet and zombie as equivalents, but they are not. Rational deterministic agents may or may not succeed in co operating. Co-operation is probably the outcome that ideal rational agents would tend to , but non ideal agents face barriers to co operation. Puppets in a theistic universe may or may not co-operate depending on what the Puppetteer wants: some Purposes are served by struggle. Maybe the Puppetteer is a Nietzchian , who wants conflict and struggle to develop strength.
In the theistic universe, the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient being suggests that there is some purpose to the universe. If all people are puppets, then, it is to be expected that all people work tirelessly towards a single goal, without opposing each other.
Puppets may or may not oppose each other, zombies may or may not oppose each other, free agents may or may not oppose each other. There’s nothing you can deduce.
In that case, it sounds like the “zombie” is the atheistic no-free-will scenario, while the “puppet” is the theistic no-free-will scenario?
In that case, my argument is that the fact that people oppose each other quite strongly at times seems to suggest that we are not puppets but neither confirms nor denies the zombie hypothesis.
I don’t see that. We make our own puppets fight, eg in video games.
...you make an excellent point. In fact, I think you’ve pretty much invalidated my entire (presented) argument for free will given the existence of God.
I have an alternative argument in favour of free will (given the existence of God) if you’d like to have a look over it—it requires not just God, but a (at least vaguely) benevolent God, which is why I didn’t present it earlier (it requires more assumptions therefore it is a weaker argument).
In short, the alternative argument runs as follows; start with the assumption of a benevolent God (and noting the lack of malevolence in the laws of physics as at least weak evidence for the benevolence of a deity). Note that humans, unlike the laws of physics, are capable of being malevolent towards each other; extremely malevolent, in some cases. If they were puppets of a generally benevolent God, then that malevolence is out of place; and this is therefore evidence in favour of free will. (This also implies that God considers free will more important than preventing malevolence).
The question that was asked was “What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can’t predict without?” I parsed this as “What can be shown, taking the existence of God as a postulate, that cannot be shown without that postulate?”
And one of the things that can be shown to be at least more likely with that postulate than not, is free will. Thus, I included it in the response to the question.
...I’m now beginning to wonder if I entirely missed the point of that question.
I’m now beginning to wonder if I entirely missed the point of that question.
I think you did (but maybe I was the one who did); I took it to be presupposing that your belief in God is (or should be) the result of thinking that God explains some things about the world better than absence-of-God would, and asking what such things you had in mind. But maybe raydora was asking a question more like “what use is your belief?” than “what basis has your belief?”. raydora, if you’re reading this, which (if either) did you have in mind?
Anyway: my apologies for failing to consider the possibility that you were interpreting the question so differently from me and consequently misunderstanding the point of your answers!
Anyway: my apologies for failing to consider the possibility that you were interpreting the question so differently from me and consequently misunderstanding the point of your answers!
No worries, it’s all straightened out now.
Incidentally, TheAncientGeek found a severe problem in my argument for free will elsewhere.
Not seeing maliciousness in the laws of physics is a very weak argument for an afterlife, because even if there is no afterlife, that doesn’t mean that God is malicious. It just means that he doesn’t prevent things from working the way they do naturally, just like he doesn’t prevent a lion from eating a man, or a man from hunting the lion.
So far, I have not found any. This implies that God is not into casual, petty cruelty without reason.
Does that mean the bible which assumes that God wiped out most of humanity with the flood is definitely wrong and to the extend that God exists it’s not the God of the bible?
Does that mean the bible which assumes that God wiped out most of humanity with the flood is definitely wrong
No.
a) The existence of an afterlife would mean that those people were not destroyed. They had a really bad day and then woke up someplace else.
b) The story of the flood, in itself, may be a parable (by which I mean, a story intended to teach a lesson, usually of a moral or ethical nature, without necessarily being true) like the parable of the Good Samaritan, or the story of the Garden of Eden.
c) There may have been reason for the flood.
Any one of these alternatives could answer your question; personally, I think (b) is the most likely, though (a) and (c) are also possible.
That whoever originally wrote that story intended it to be understood as fiction with a moral, rather than as truth?
That it may have originated as (alleged) history, but whoever incorporated it into the documents that became Jewish and Christian scriptures did so with the intention that it should be understood as fiction with a moral?
That whoever wrote it may have intended it to be seriously believed, but God arranged for it to land up in the Jewish and Christian scriptures with the intention that it should be treated as fiction with a moral?
That it doesn’t really matter why it was written or how it got into the scriptures, but nowadays it should be understood as fiction?
Something else?
It seems to me that the first three of these imply a certain degree of incompetence on the part of the writers, editors, or god concerned, given how widely the story has been treated as history since its incorporation into scripture.
The fourth is fair enough, but it seems to me that (what I take to be) ChristianKI’s inference “the bible contains this story, which is not true, so we should reduce our general confidence in what the bible says” is then reasonable (and indeed the decision to understand as fiction something in the bible that wasn’t originally intended that way amounts to conceding that point).
Of course if the fifth option is right then all of the above may be moot.
This is somewhat muddled by the idea that the original story may have been an oral tradition for some time before being written down—that is to say, the person who put pen to paper may not have been the one to create the story in the first place, and may in fact have been removed from that person by several generations.
So it is quite possible that whoever originally created the story may have intended it as fiction with a moral, but that it may have been understood as history by the person who put stylus to papyrus. Or it may have started out as history, gained some embellishment along the way, then rephrased to highlight a perceived moral, then embellished again to further highlight that moral, then only written down.
I am very uncertain of the history behind how it got there. I think that it is most probable that it is now fiction with a moral; and I think that there have been a whole lot of biblical passages that have been very firmly, and very publically, misunderstood by some people with very loud voices (such as pretty much the entire Creationism movement).
The fourth is fair enough, but it seems to me that (what I take to be) ChristianKI’s inference “the bible contains this story, which is not true, so we should reduce our general confidence in what the bible says” is then reasonable (and indeed the decision to understand as fiction something in the bible that wasn’t originally intended that way amounts to conceding that point).
I think that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is a collection of some fiction, some non-fiction—one of the clearest examples of fiction (to my eyes) is the book of Job, which seems to be an entire story written in such a way that it can be performed as a play by a handful of actors with little-to-no equipment (all the dramatic stuff happens off-stage and is introduced by messengers running in and shouting “This happened!”).
I think that the morals that the fictional parts try to show are important; they should not be simply discounted and tossed aside because they did not happen.
Yeah. (I felt that my list of possibilities was already too long without bringing up the oral/written distinction, but it’s important enough in view of the gradual evolution of oral traditions that that was probably a mistake on my part.)
I’m not sure quite what you mean by saying that it’s now fiction with a moral; just that that’s how believers do (or should) read it now, or something stronger?
I agree that some things in the Bible seem clearly to be intended as fiction; I’d put Jonah alongside Job in that category. And I agree that one absolutely shouldn’t go from “X is fiction” to “let’s ignore X”. But going from “X was intended as history but turns out to be wrong history” to “let’s ignore X” is more reasonable, though still not a slam-dunk (because maybe the story originated as wrong history but was kept around for the sake of things in it that don’t depend on the history).
I’m not sure quite what you mean by saying that it’s now fiction with a moral; just that that’s how believers do (or should) read it now, or something stronger?
I’m pretty much saying that’s how I read it.
I agree that some things in the Bible seem clearly to be intended as fiction; I’d put Jonah alongside Job in that category. And I agree that one absolutely shouldn’t go from “X is fiction” to “let’s ignore X”. But going from “X was intended as history but turns out to be wrong history” to “let’s ignore X” is more reasonable, though still not a slam-dunk (because maybe the story originated as wrong history but was kept around for the sake of things in it that don’t depend on the history).
I’m not so sure about Jonah (he seems a good deal less clear-cut than Job—at the very least, Jonah would be very hard to stage without some pretty impressive special effects) but apart from that, I think I agree with everything in this paragraph.
I’m not suggesting that Jonah was intended as a play; I think it more likely that it was just intended to be read (or told aloud). But it seems (1) not very likely to be true-as-history even if we assume that some fairly miracle-happy version of Christianity or Judaism is right, (2) quite well designed as a story-with-a-moral, and (3) very much like the sort of story-with-a-moral that would get written to make a point. (I’m guessing that the background is one of controversy over the attitudes Israelites should have towards nasty heathen foreigners. Jonah is not meant to be a sympathetic figure in this story.)
Well, Ninevah at least was a place that actually existed (according to Wikipedia). Beyond that… well, you make some good points, but I still think it’s far less clear-cut than Job.
b) The story of the flood, in itself, may be a parable (by which I mean, a story intended to teach a lesson, usually of a moral or ethical nature,
If it’s a parable, isn’t the parable about the fact that certain actions like gay sex are bad enough that they warrant a God engaging in genocide?
Even if the God didn’t actually commit the genocide but merely wanted to make the point that doing so is justified, that still seems bad to me.
CCC already said that he thinks science is mostly right about the history of the universe, so presumably he does not believe such a flood ever happened.
Many Christians believe that such a flood never happened without thinking that the Bible is “definitely wrong” and without thinking that they believe in a God who is “not the God of the Bible.”
so presumably he does not believe such a flood ever happened.
Oh ye of little faith!
Global floods certainly happened in human history. What do you think happened to sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age (and humans were already around)?
Ah. The presence of an omniscient, omnipotent being is important to the proof, but it is not the only element in that proof (the other elements are taken from observation of the universe, and are less controversial).
Consider; if an omnipotent, omniscient being exists, then it must take one of three stances with regard to humanity. It must either support the existence of humanity, or it must be neutral towards humanity, or it must support the non-existence of humanity. Since the being is omnipotent, if God wanted to wipe out humanity, God could (one or two well-placed asteroids a couple of million years back would have done it easily). Thus, I conclude that God is either in support of, or neutral towards humanity.
Now I also observe the universe around me, looking for traces of maliciousness in the laws of physics. So far, I have not found any. This implies that God is not into casual, petty cruelty without reason. It seems therefore likely that God is, at the very least, not evil.
The complete cessation of an intelligence would seem to be a great evil. Therefore, I postulate that there is a very strong probability that God has put some measures in place to prevent this. The measure most likely is some sort of afterlife; somewhere that a person can continue to survive, but not communicate back to those they leave behind.
Of course, this argument does not say that an afterlife is certain, given the existence of God, merely that it seems likely.
As to free will; here, I note that humans are demonstrably capable of the sort of casual cruelty that is absent from the laws of nature. Moreover, humans are capable of opposing each other. This strongly implies that at least some humans are capable of opposing what God wants. (This does not necessarily imply that said opposition has any chance of long-term success). This, in turn, seems to imply that humans do have some capacity to decide for themselves; hence, free will.
If the absence of maliciousness in the laws of physics is good evidence that God is not evil, is the absence of benevolence in the laws of physics good evidence that God is not good?
There is at least one thing in the laws of physics that seems like benevolence rather than the absence of it.
When animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, e.g. eat or engage in sex, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal.
That seems like benevolence. I could imagine a situation where everything that animals tended to do, was painful to them. You might say that is absurd, since then they would not tend to do those things. But they do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel. So there is nothing absurd about it, just like a person can be on a rollercoaster without any control over what is happening. It would be pretty terrible if life was like that, but fortunately it’s not.
How do you know that? (For central examples of “animal”).
The same way I know that you are a conscious being. In other words by comparing the way they behave with the way I behave.
That would imply that a bacterium engaging in things that feel pleasant to it. After all, like me, it tries to avoid things that cause it harm and tries to do things that benefit it.
It would also imply that a Roomba is engaging in things that feel pleasant to it.
obligatory xkcd response:
http://xkcd.com/1558/
Think about someone who owns a dog.
I did. How do you know that? You can’t read the dog’s mind and the dog can’t talk to you. The dog could act in ways that you interpret as the dog being pleased, but trying to interpret it that way here would be circular reasoning since you are trying to show that the dog’s actions show that things are pleasant to it.
What are you claiming—that a dog is inherently unable to have “pleasant” feelings, or that humans have no capability whatsoever to judge the what’s happening in the mind of a dog on the basis of its behaviour?
In this context, you are claiming that “when animals have a strong tendency to do certain things, those things tend to be pleasant to the animal”. Judging what is happening in the mind of the animal on the basis of its behavior, in order to support this claim, is circular reasoning.
Nope, that’s not me, that’s entirelyuseless.
But you haven’t answered my question.
Sorry. Make that “you are supporting a claim that...”
If you want the literal answer to your question, the answer is that I’m not claiming anything.
Note that disputing a claim of X is not itself a claim of not-X..
That isn’t in the laws of physics, except in the trivial sense in which everything that happens in the world is “in the laws of physics” (in which case of course there are vastly many benevolent and malicious things “in the laws of physics”).
I think there’s a false dichotomy there. They do those things because of how they feel, and they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics. (Note that if you deny the latter half of this then you definitely aren’t entitled to say that this is “in the laws of physics”.)
I agree that in the normal sense, they do those things because of how they feel, and that they feel the way they do because of the laws of physics.
That’s kind of my point. When I said, “They do those things because of the laws of physics, not because of how they feel,” I meant this: I can imagine laws of physics that would imply that they do more or less the same things they do now, but they constantly feel bad about it. This is not something that might be impossible, like a zombie hypothesis. It is certainly possible, as is evident from the rollercoaster example.
In other words, the question is why the laws of physics and the way people feel are related in the way that they are, instead of a different way which would be much worse. I don’t see any strong argument that the actual way is intrinsically much more probable.
And even if we showed that it is intrinsically more probable, someone could simply say that this shows that God is intrinsically good.
I see a very strong argument that the actual way is much more probable. What does it mean to say that something feels bad? Mostly, I think, that whoever (or whatever) it feels bad to is strongly motivated to make it not happen. That’s what feeling-bad is for, evolutionarily; it’s what distinguishes those feelings as bad ones. So of course we should expect that people (and other animals) tend to do things that feel better in preference to things that feel worse.
(You might argue that the overall level of good-feeling is higher than we’d expect. But I don’t see any reason to think that.)
As I said, I think there’s an argument there for the goodness of God (or at least of the goodness of the universe) even if this relationship is intrinsically probable or even necessary.
This is probably another way of putting the same thing: do you think that overall it is good to exist? If the universe overall is neutral, the overall expectation would seem to be that it would be neutral to exist. But most people think it is good to exist. That suggests that overall the universe is good.
We just had someone argue that in practice they don’t (speaking of evolution). I don’t wholly endorse the argument, but let’s not casually dismiss it—the point that people need something to live for seems true enough.
That post was not arguing that people think that overall it is bad to exist. It was arguing that people don’t think it is good to exist forever, which is quite different.
Balderdash. The link argues that people do not want to keep living for even a matter of millenia if they “have nothing to live for,” in the author’s own words (and he argues that most people only care about having/raising children, which they lose interest in). This is clearly evidence for people being indifferent between existence and non-existence without a goal, or “neutral” as you put it before you somehow forgot that alternative.
That would still mean that existence was overall good for them by giving them the possibility of raising children (or reaching other goals they might have), which they would not have otherwise.
I don’t see how such an argument would work, as I’ve said in another comment. Perhaps explain there if you feel like it?
Physics seems like a weirdly low-level thing if we’re thinking about whether or not animals’ behavior could remain the same and their subjective experience could be a state of what we would call suffering in some possible world. I just don’t think that you could make edits on that level and have changes that are so fine-tuned. Editing physics doesn’t leave everything alone except subjective experience; editing physics breaks fire.
And if we have to settle for a physics that leaves at least most everything the same and life remains possible, then why wouldn’t we expect reward mechanisms to evolve and for the default state of affairs to be one in which adaptive experiences ‘feel good’ and others ‘feel bad’?
gjm called this a false dichotomy, but I think a better though perhaps more complex way of putting it is that you’re mixing up your multi-level maps. Take free will and determinism as an example. Some people become fatalists because they think that determinism contradicts their idea of what possibility means. But they’re contaminating their maps. You have a low-level map of physics where everything is lawful and there is no thing similar to what you might call ‘possibility.’ Then you have a high-level map of decision-making, and the fatalists take the lawfulness from their low-level physics map and draw it onto their high-level decision-making map, and say, “Well, the lawfulness overrules the possibility”, and then they start making null decisions, but that’s wrong. Possibility is a primitive notion in your high-level decision-making map and only in that map, just like the laws of physics are primitive notions in your low-level physics map and only in that map. In the territory, your brain runs on physics and your decision-making algorithm runs on physics, and your decision-making algorithm computing the output of logical nodes making decisions other than the one that it must make makes you feel possibility, and the whole process is lawful, and you have a bridge map between these two levels of maps; but the map is not the territory, and that goes both ways, and your high-level decision-making map is not the territory either, and sticking physics into it is like mixing apples and oranges. And even if that seems counterintuitive, I would say that any other policy is wrong, because the fatalists lose and the compatabilists win.
I agree with you about compatabilism, but I don’t think that answers my question.
I am not saying that you could have physical situation exactly like the real world except with subjective experience reversed. I agree that in order to reverse subjective experience, you would need to make physical changes.
But with those physical changes, why couldn’t you have a situation where adaptive experiences feel bad and non-adaptive ones feel good?
Maybe this is impossible. But if it is impossible, maybe that just shows that God is necessarily good.
How are you defining “bad” and “good”, in this world whose creatures are so different from us?
I suggest: “feel good” means “have subjective properties that tend to make such creatures seek experiences that have them” and “feel bad” means “have subjective properties that tend to make such creatures avoid experiences that have them”.
In which case, a world in which adaptive experiences feel worse than non-adaptive ones is a world in which creatures systematically pursue maladaptive goals and avoid adaptive ones. Evolution will get rid of such creatures pretty quickly, no?
Suppose I’m right about evolution (see above); how would you get from there to “God is necessarily good”?
I basically agree with your definitions. However:
Subjective properties that tend to make a creature seek something can only do that because those subjective properties correspond to some objective physical property, at least if you aren’t supporting dualism.
Why do the subjective properties that, in fact, tend to make people seek such experiences, correspond to objective properties that lead to that particular physical result (i.e. tending to physically move toward those results.)
You can say this is a tautology, and it is, in a way. But if we are simply talking about the particular subjective property in itself (as opposed to the fact that we happen to be pointing to it using our tendency to seek it), it is not a tautology, even if it may be a physical necessity.
In other words: zombies are probably physically impossible. But if they were possible, and if they were actual, instead of real humans, then reality would be neutral, neither good nor evil, since there would be no experience. In a similar way, negative-humans (who tend to seek painful experiences and avoid pleasant ones) are likely physically impossible. But if they were possible and actual, then the universe would be evil, and nearly all experiences would be bad.
But as it is, most experiences are good, and the universe is good. Talking about God here is probably a distraction, but if the universe is good, then its cause or causes should also be good. If the facts that make the universe good are necessary, then its causes are necessarily good.
Actually, you’re affirming the consequent. If the cause of the universe is good, then the universe will be good. But if we observe that the universe is good, then we cannot infer that the cause of the universe is necessarily good.
Classic example:
Affirming the consequent is valid in the terms of the evidence relation. In other words, the fact that I have a sore throat is evidence that I have the flu, although not proof.
In the same way, the universe being good is evidence that the cause is good. If up to that point, we assumed that the cause was entirely neutral, our best estimate will now be that the cause is good.
That’s true, but there are other equally explanatory hypotheses that don’t involve good causes, so at the very least, the fact that the universe is good (although I would contest or at least qualify that claim) is not evidence either way. It doesn’t help you figure out which possible world you’re in.
I suggest that things coming out of evolutionary biology are more like logical than physical necessities; we would expect the same sort of dynamics to apply even with very different physical laws. (On the other hand, the “necessity” involved is weaker, because evolution is a stochastic process and it’s very possible for suboptimal bits of design to get fixed in a population.)
So, anyway, the situation seems to be something like this: Any organisms with anything we could reasonably identify as “feeling good” or “feeling bad” experiences will tend to seek the ones that “feel good” in preference to the ones that “feel bad”, almost tautologously. This means that, doing whatever they do, they will tend to “feel better” than we can imagine them doing if (e.g.) they absurdly sought out “feeling bad” experiences in preference to “feeling good” ones.
So far, so good. But to describe this by saying that “most experiences are good, and the universe is good” seems wrong to me, and I don’t see how you get from “the facts that make the universe good are necessary” to “its causes are necessarily good”. To expand on those points:
First: yes, living things will do nicer things in preference to nastier. But those are comparative terms. If everything in (say) human experience were made substantially more or substantially less pleasant uniformly it would have little impact on our decisions, but surely it could change whether “most experiences are good”. My actual impression is that most experiences are neutral and the amounts of good and bad aren’t terribly different. We have both orgasms and headaches; both enlightenment and boredom; both the satisfaction of a job well done and the frustration of failing to achieve what we should. I don’t see any reason to think other animals’ balance is very different.
Second: if “the universe is good” is meant to be just another way of saying “most experience is good” then I don’t think passing from one to the other does anything other than invite confusion. If it’s not, then I think you need some further justification for saying that the universe is good.
Third: let’s suppose, e.g., that some simple argument in terms of evolution does lead to the conclusion that, largely independent of the details of physical law etc., most experiences of most living things will be experienced as good rather than bad. How do you get from there to “the causes of the universe are necessarily good”? I just don’t see it. There certainly isn’t any generally valid inference from “X has property P” to “the causes of X have property P”; consider e.g. the case where X is the physical universe and P is “is made of matter and energy” or “is made of quantum fields” or something of the kind; if the physical universe has causes at all then they might be mathematical laws, or gods, or happenings in some other universe with different laws; they certainly needn’t be made of the same stuff as our universe.
I think I disagree with the first part (that we can’t understand the idea of something doing things that feel bad rather than feel good, or that there are obvious reasons why this is impossible in principle), but I won’t argue that for two reasons. First because that would probably end up being a very time consuming discussion, and second because, as I said, I think I can make my argument even if I grant your point.
Regarding your three points:
It sounds like you are saying that there is a balance of good and evil in human life which is basically equal, so that overall life is neutral. If this is the case, it would certainly make sense to say that the universe is neutral as well. But I disagree that the overall balance is neutral, and I think that most people disagree. Most people have a strong preference to live, rather than to die, even in a painless way. This implies that they think the value of the rest of their life is significantly higher than zero. This suggests that you are undervaluing positive experiences and overemphasizing negative experiences, compared to the values that most people place on those. And I doubt that in practice you personally think your life is worthless on balance.
When I say that the universe is good, I do not just mean that life or experience is overall good. If that needs additional justification, I will do that in addressing the third point.
I agree that a cause does not always have the properties of the effect. But goodness has a particular meaning which affects the issue. Without trying to give a formal definition, saying that something is good certainly means something like “this is a desirable state of affairs,” and likewise saying that something is bad would mean something undesirable. But then if a cause brings about a good effect, it brings about a desirable state of affairs. And if the thing was desirable, bringing it about was desirable, and so there is reason to call the cause good as well, even though it still doesn’t mean exactly the same thing (to call the thing good and to call its cause good.)
I don’t think my first part says quite what you say it says, but never mind that since you’ve agreed not to contest it :-).
On good versus neutral versus bad, and wanting to live: wanting and liking are different things, and I think there are (alas) plenty of people who feel that their life contains more bad than good but still have no wish to die. (And, also alas, some who admit that their life contains more good than bad but do want to die, at least some of the time.) No, I don’t think my life is worthless on balance. I think I have an unusually good life. [EDITED to add: And I expect a lot of other people here on LW have unusually good lives too. It’s a group selected for high intelligence (almost necessary to find much LW material interesting), reasonable amounts of leisure time (else we’d be doing other things), not being overwhelmed with other concerns (else again we’d be doing other things), easy access to the internet (since that’s where LW is), membership in a somewhat-dominant culture (because LW is anglophone and founded by people in the US), etc. None of these things is universal here, none of them is either necessary or sufficient for a good life, but they all tend to be characteristic of LW participants and they all tend to go along with a more pleasant life.]
On causes and effects: if by “good” you mean only “bringing about more desirable than undesirable effects, on balance” then I am, at least provisionally, prepared to agree that if an effect is good then that’s evidence for the goodness of each of its causes. But it seems to me that this is a much weaker sense of “good” than the one usually intended by people who say that God is “good”. Suppose I have a child (as in fact I do) and that I alternate between treating her kindly and beating her (as in fact I do not). If I do her more good than harm, overall, does this justify calling me “good”? Of course not.
What does your argument from goodness of experience really come down to? Only this, I think: “The universe has in it more good experiences than bad, perhaps just because of the logic of evolution. So whatever, if anything, caused our universe to exist may have the property of tending to produce more good experiences than bad. The god in whom I believe is supposed to have that property, so this imbalance between good and bad experiences is evidence for that god”. I hope it’s clear that if so it’s very weak evidence.
I basically agree with what you said about wanting and liking. That’s one reason why it’s easy for me to imagine a situation where I constantly do things that feel awful and avoid the pleasant ones. Because to some extent that already happens. But life is not even close to being like that as a whole.
I also agree that people on LW are likely to have better lives on average than people in general, and also that at least some people would say that overall there is more bad than good in their lives, while still not wanting to commit suicide or anything like that. But I very much doubt that this is even close to a majority of people, even in very poor countries or in a historical sense. I realize I could be wrong about this and that (if so) someone could prove it with the proper statistics. But this is my current sense of the situation.
Regarding calling the causes good, that is one reason why I said it was a distraction (relative to this argument) to talk about God. Because normally when people say “God,” they think of a person, and in fact a particular person, with the result that instead of talking about some particular point, people are actually discussing whether or not the doctrines of someone’s religion are true or false as a whole.
In any case, as you point out, saying that someone is a “good person,” has a particular meaning, certainly more than saying that overall the person causes more good than bad. But in that way there is no contradiction in someone being a good thing but a bad person, because “good thing” and “good person” mean two different things.
I agree with your summary of the argument, at least as far as it goes.
Well, if you detach your argumentation about good versus bad experience from talk of “God”, then all you’re left with is: People have more good than bad experiences on the whole, so if the universe has causes then they are more likely to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more good than bad experiences, than to be such as to generally produce (ultimately) more bad than good experiences.
Which is fair enough, but I’m sure originally this was being proposed as evidence for belief in a good god, and it really doesn’t seem to me to offer more than a tiny amount (and, further, in so far as it does the highly mixed character of human experience seems to provide at least as much evidence against the perfectly good gods of various religions).
Actually, that wasn’t how I meant it even originally (even if in fact it is weak evidence for that). I suppose it wasn’t unreasonable for you to understand it that way because I used the word “benevolence,” and in reply to a comment about whether God is good or not, but in fact I was only objecting to the implied claim that the laws of physics (and therefore whatever causes them) are overall absolutely neutral, and I used the word benevolence because you used it.
I agree with you that there is good evidence against the idea of God as a perfectly good person, in a literal sense, especially if you understand that in the sense that God is someone who is supposed to look at every particular thing which is happening and decide whether or not it’s a good idea to allow it to happen or not. It seems very likely that no such thing is happening.
Oh, OK! But in that case I wonder whether there’s a miscommunication. I forget who was claiming that the laws of physics are “neutral”, but what I would mean if I made such a claim is simply that nothing in those laws is about justice or charity or benevolence or honesty or anything of the kind. Of course it might turn out that the laws of physics have consequences of which we morally approve (e.g., living things tending to do things that lead to good rather than bad experiences) or disapprove (e.g., living things competing ruthlessly against one another much of the time), and if you believe in gods and devils and the like then you might think that some of those consequences are actually “design features” rather than emergent coincidences, but the laws themselves simply don’t operate at the same level as moral considerations do.
It seems unlikely to me that anyone here was deliberately claiming, or implying, that the laws of physics can’t have any consequences to which we attach moral weight.
There was probably some miscommunication, perhaps because when people talk about things they have certain interests. This can happen in a completely non-truth related way, as e.g. a website like Answers in Genesis is not interested in discovering the truth, but in arguing for creationism without any regard for reality. However, even when people want to know or discuss the truth they still have particular motivations which affect the discussion. So for example if someone is interested at the moment in thinking about one particular aspect of reality, he is more likely to interpret other people’s statements as being relevant to that consideration, even if they are in fact irrelevant or less relevant than he would like.
But I’m not sure it’s completely an issue of miscommunication because I’m not very comfortable with your explanation here either. Let me try to summarize your comment before I try to explain why I have a problem with it:
The laws of physics that we know and use are mathematical laws about mass and force and so on. It is obvious that these do not contain anything about justice etc.
It turns out that these laws have various consequences which have moral importance for us, some good and some bad.
But the laws “don’t operate at the same level,” even if someone might suppose that the above good or bad consequences are the result of someone’s good or bad intentions. If they are an argument for such good or bad intentions, they are a fairly weak argument for it.
(I realize that there is more here than you said in the comment I’m replying to, but I’m summarizing also based on our previous discussion.)
I agree with all three of these points. However, I still have a problem with your comment as a whole, probably because of this: “you might think that some of these consequences are actually ‘design features’ rather than emergent coincidences.”
It is perfectly obvious that mathematical laws as such are not about morality, and in that sense it is not an interesting question. But it seems unlikely that mathematical laws are the most fundamental causes of the world, because they are abstractions, not realities. So the more interesting question is, if the mathematical laws have other causes, what is the relationship of those causes to morality?
Your statement seems to suggest that either those causes designed morality and human life, or morality is an “emergent coincidence” relative to them, as it is relative to the mathematical laws in themselves. I think this is a false dichotomy. For example, fire makes things hot, and this is neither by design on the part of the fire, nor by emergent coincidence. Of course, you could say that this is because fire is “about” heat, while the laws of physics (and consequently their causes) are presumably not about morality. So if it isn’t by design, it seems to be by coincidence.
I disagree with this conclusion, but there is no way to explain this disagreement without reopening the can of worms I was planning to keep closed. So instead of making that argument as a whole, I’ll do it by talking about a question.
I think that dualism about experience is probably false. For example, some things look orange to me, and some things look blue. I don’t think that it is possible to change that fact without either changing those objects physically, or changing me physically. With the appropriate physical changes on either side, however, it would be possible to make those orange things look blue, and the blue things look orange.
But despite this belief, I think it is a meaningful question to ask, “Why do oranges look orange to me, instead of blue?”, and one that cannot be answered in an explanatory way by reference to those physical causes that would in fact change things so that oranges look blue.
I think it is a meaningful question, one that currently no one can answer. It is possible that no one will ever be able to answer it. And it is possible even that no one can answer it in principle, in the sense that the “answer” is not something intelligible to a human mind.
I do not think that answers that have to do with the structure of the human brain and the mathematical laws of physics do or can answer this question.
I do not think that it is a meaningless question, like “Why I am myself instead of being gjm?” This question is meaningless, not only in the sense that we cannot answer it, but in the sense that there is nothing that is being asked. There is no “I” who had the possibility of being either myself or someone else. It is clear to me that the question about orange and blue is quite different. A world where oranges look blue is a quite different world (unlike the world where I am gjm), and so it is meaningful to ask why we are not in that different world.
I could also make the question into “Why am I conscious at all, instead of being a philosophical zombie?”, even though that might make the opening in the can of worms too wide. Note that saying that philosophical zombies are impossible does not answer the question. I agree that they are impossible, given the brute fact that we are actually conscious. The question is why they are impossible, and something being impossible is not always self-explanatory, and no one has yet explained this particular case. Nor does it explain it to give a lengthy explanation of physical causes which would lead to someone saying words like “I am conscious,” even if he were a philosophical zombie.
The existence of this kind of question, and the impossibility of answering it in any standard way, suggests to me that there is something in the basic causes of laws of physics which has a stronger relationship with consciousness (and probably also good and evil, given how fundamental these are in our experience) than emergent coincidence, but different from design. Thus more like the relationship between fire and heat, although not exactly this relationship either.
It is by no means obvious that the laws of physics could not be about morality or humans. A law to prevent human beings from losing all of their limbs would, if expressed in the same ‘language’ as the other laws, be absurdly long—but any being we could reasonably describe as “omnipotent and omniscient” would have no trouble creating it.
I don’t know if I understand the rest of the parent. Would you like to replace “oranges” with “dresses” and try again? If Martha’s perceptions consisted entirely of connections, - let’s say she could only register differences between the photons arriving from different areas and compare these mathematical differences with other patterns of difference, which may activate other nodes in her network—would she describe anything differently?
I didn’t say it is obvious that there couldn’t be laws of physics about morality or about humans. I said it is obvious that the ones we actually know and use are not about those things.
As for the rest, I’ll adopt the style that Socrates calls “polemical,” and say that “I have given my argument, if you disagree it is up to you to refute it.” Mostly because I didn’t want to get involved in that discussion in the first place.
To be clear, I didn’t think you were proposing any sort of p-zombie-like hypothesis, where mental states are epiphenomenal or otherwise.
I think this is the same sort of error that a lot of people make when they ask “Why am I who I am instead of someone else?” They think that their identity exists primitively in the territory or even that it existed before their body; but it’s a wrong question because they have the causality reversed. The question would make sense if you were some ghost-in-the-machine and you or someone else picked some physical body, but that’s not how it works. Your body caused your mind, so you always are who you are and the question is confused. (I also don’t mean to exclude the possibility of anthropic reasoning in this example.) The good and the bad don’t exist primitively in the territory, they are caused by evolutionary processes that develop organisms with reward mechanisms, and we identify reward and punishment, among other things, with these high-level concepts of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ that didn’t exist before us, so good is always good and bad is always bad and the question is confused.
Although with what I’ve seen in neuroscience, some creature like what you describe doesn’t necessarily seem outside of the realm of physical possibility to me. If people can simultaneously observe that they are paralyzed and come up with endless excuses for why they aren’t, and the cognitive processes we’re talking about in this case aren’t too intertwined, then I can perhaps conceive of a creature that continues to perform adaptive behaviors but experiences suffering and happiness in the reverse. But I would expect someone to have to construct it, not for it to evolve. Or maybe an evolved creature with the most horrible sort of oddly complex neurological lesion.
That would be a reasonable argument to make.
I would follow it up by claiming that the existence of free will is evidence of benevolence in the laws of physics.
With what definition of “free will”?
“Free will” consists of the ability of a person to determine their own future actions by some entirely internal process (which can observe, but is not controlled by, external factors); where “person” is defined as a collection of stuff such that the collection of stuff that makes up you has no overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up me and neither of us have any overlap with the collection of stuff that makes up (say) Barack Obama, or Trevor Noah, or Jacob Zuma.
Do you understand “is not controlled by” in such a way that having “free will” is inconsistent with (1) purely deterministic physics and/or (2) purely deterministic+random physics? (On the face of it your definition makes free will inconsistent with #1 but not with #2, but I can e.g. imagine a definition that restricts those “external factors” to, say, the state of the world outside one’s body in at most the last year, in which case “free will” might be compatible with outright determinism.)
I don’t think that free will can be reconciled with purely deterministic physics—free will implies that, in exactly the same situation, with each and every particle in exactly the same space, I can still choose whether to purchase those biscuits or not.
On the other hand, my decision whether or not to purchase those biscuits is not exactly random, either. There are a number of factors that go into it—in fact, considering force of habit, quite a few of my decisions are extremely predictable. So I’m not sure that random physics is entirely reconcilable either.
OK. So, do you consider that you actually have good evidence for the existence of free will in this sense? If so, what is that evidence?
The obvious alternative hypothesis, which seems to me to explain all the evidence I know of just as well, is that at the level of physics there’s nothing but determinism and maybe randomness, but it looks different to us because we can’t see all the details. We think “I could have done otherwise in the exact same situation” because we have seen ourselves and others do different things in very similar-looking situations, we can imagine making a different decision in what feels like the same situation, etc.; but we don’t get to observe the exact states of all the particles that compose us and the world around us, and what we think of as “the same situation” may actually be quite different in its details. We also don’t get to observe the mechanisms that lead to our making whatever choices we do, so those choices feel like opaque black-box miracles to us. No magical contra-causal free will is required for things to look this way to us.
I did think I had a good argument for free will (given the existence of God), but TheAncientGeek has punctured that. (I had a second argument as well, but I’m waiting to see whether TheAncientGeek has any comment on that one).
Aside from that, all I’ve really got is that:
(a) What I do feels like free will; that may be an illusion. (b) What other people do is consistent enough to suggest that their actions are being guided by individual, similarly free-willed minds.
...both of which are fairly weak evidence, if anything.
It’s clear that if you put someone in very similar situations and ask them to make a choice, over time they will converge to making a certain choice a certain percentage of the time. That could easily be the same percentage of the time that would be predicted by deterministic physics plus e.g. quantum uncertainty, so I don’t see any reason in principle why your account of free will could not be consistent with everything happening according to the laws of physics, if there is randomness in the laws of physics.
As for the feeling, if a deterministic chess computer had feelings, it would have to have the feeling that it could make any move it wanted, because if it didn’t feel that way, it couldn’t consider all the possibilities, and it can’t decide on a move without considering all the possibilities. This doesn’t prevent chess computers from being deterministic, so it might not prevent you from having a feeling like that, even if your actions are in fact deterministic.
No, it’s not clear at all. If ask me to make choices in similar situations, first I might humor you, then I’ll get bored and start fucking around with the system, and then I’ll get really bored and stop cooperating with you. There won’t be much of a convergence over time.
The abstraction is not the territory.
The problem with that model seems to be that as time goes on, the situation in which you are put in becomes increasingly dissimilar to the original one, just because of we’ve added memories of having had to make this choice x number of times before. If we could run the experiment so that you always felt like it was the first time you were in this situation, perhaps by putting the same kind of decision in different contexts and spreading them out over time and with various distractions, do you think you’d still deviate in the same way?
I know I’m going back from territory to less practical abstraction here, but I think this kind of difficult-to-collect data would be more revealing for this question.
Most of my point is that you can not. Among I things, I change over time.
As a practical example, I drink beer. Various kinds of. My beer preferences do not converge over time. Instead, they wander over different styles, different hoppiness/maltiness/etc., even different breweries. I have no idea what kind of beer I will like in, say, a year, but it probably will be different from what I like now.
Showing that something works in a toy model does not show that the same thing works in actual reality.
Sure, I totally agree with you—in real life, we can really put a person in exactly the same situation twice. If we could, this whole free will argument would be a lot easier to solve.
That said, I do think the toy models are useful. Pretending we can do this experiment gives an answer to the problem I’ve never managed to pick a hole in (and tbh getting other people’s input on it is the hidden motivation for entering this discussion):
If we could let you choose a beer, then rewind the universe—including all particles, forces, and known and unknown elements of cognition anyone might postulate such as souls and deities back to their starting position—then let it go again, there are only really two things that could happen: 1) you choose the same beer because that’s what the universe was leading up to or 2) you choose a different beer despite the fact that all parameters of the universe known and unknown are the same.
The first outcome would suggest determinism; the second randomness, or at least independence from all variables which we consider “self” such as personality, memory and perhaps souls and things, since they were all rewound with the universe. I’d be really interested to hear of any third option anyone can think of!
As you say, showing this in a toy model isn’t the same as showing it in actual reality; but when the actual experiment is impossible, one is arguing about abstract concepts anyway, and one has a lot of difficulty imagining outcomes not encompassed in the model I’m not sure we can do much better.
Within the toy model, yes. In actual reality, you still don’t know.
The trivial third option is to drink wine :-P
On a bit more serious note, if you set up the problem so that the outcomes are X and not-X, there could be no third option.
I suspect that if we take the average of e.g. the bitterness of the beers that you have been drinking, it has already converged to an average, and future developments will probably not change that average much, even if there are some years when you drink sweet beers and some years when you drink bitter beers.
Empirically speaking, you are wrong.
Perhaps, although I don’t see how you can know that unless you have been making measurements, or unless it has definitely been going in the direction of getting more and more sweet, or more and more bitter.
In any case, since beer does not differ an infinite amount in sweetness and bitterness, it won’t be easy to stop that average from converging sooner or later.
Um, if I’m swinging from Lambics to Stouts with excursions into IPAs and Belgian Trappists, do you really think I converged on a particular bitterness?
Random walk, even if bounded, does not converge.
The random walk doesn’t converge. But the average position does.
The concept of convergence does not apply to the “average position”. It always exists.
You are probably thinking of statistical estimation with uncorrelated errors. That is not the case here, you are not estimating some unobserved parameter.
I mean your average position on any day taken as the average of all the values up to that day.
As days increase indefinitely, this changing average will converge (e.g. to the central value.)
But that doesn’t mean my taste in beer will converge to some value. All it means is that the average of history of my beer wanderings will be somewhere around the middle of the range—an observation which is quite useless for the free will debate.
The general point I was making is that there is nothing about free will, even if by definition it means you have more than one option in the same physical situation, which gives us a reason to expect a pattern different from determinism with the addition of some randomness. So unless someone can show how those patterns would be different, there isn’t any special reason to suppose that our actions couldn’t correspond entirely to the laws of physics, without that meaning we don’t have free will.
That’s heavily underspecified. Most everything can be fit into a pattern of “determinism with the addition of some randomness”.
In any case, you started with a specific claim that the choices will converge. Outside of the toy-model setup I didn’t think it was necessarily true and I still don’t think so.
I meant that the changing average of the choices will converge, in the way I expect to happen in the beer case. I still think this will happen under all normal circumstances.
I, um...
I’m not seeing what that says about free will. If you pick out a selection of numbers from one to a hundred, and you keep going, then the more numbers you pick out the less effect each new number will have on the running average.
I just don’t see how this leads to “free will can be explained by deterministic physics plus randomness”.
I don’t think it proves that. I think it suggests that it may be the case. We already know that deterministic physics plus randomness will result in statistical patterns like that. I am just saying that free will is going to result in statistical patterns as well.
As far as I know, those could be the same patterns, which would mean that free will would be consistent with deterministic physics plus randomness. That is not a proof. I am just saying I don’t know of any specific reasons to think those patterns will be different. Do you have reasons like that?
The thing is, the “pattern” you’ve picked up is a pattern that every series of numbers follows—that every series of numbers must follow. Any hypothesis will result in the same pattern—if I think that free will is controlled by the number of cookies eaten in Western Australia every second Tuesday, and I try to see if it follows the pattern of the average converging to a value as more samples are added, I’ll find the same pattern.
If “having the same pattern” is to have any sort of predictive power at all, then that pattern must be a pattern that the data can possibly not have under another hypothesis.
I’m mystified by this discussion. entirelyuseless seems to be saying that if you look at the history of choices someone has made in similar situations, they will show some kind of convergence, which I see no reason at all to believe. And CCC seems to be saying that every sequence of numbers shows this pattern, which I not only see no reason to believe but can refute. (E.g., consider the sequence consisting of one +1, two −1s, four +1s, eight −1s, etc. The average after 2^n-1 steps oscillates between about −1/3 and about +1/3.) And none of this seems to have anything much to do with free will; in so far as the “libertarian” notion of free will makes sense at all, it seems perfectly consistent with making choices that average out in the long run, at least with probability → 1 or something of the kind, and determinism is perfectly consistent with not doing so, since e.g. the sequence of numbers I just described can be produced by a very simple computer program (at least if it either has infinite memory or has at least a few hundred bits and isn’t observed for longer than the lifetime of the universe).
...I had understood “converges” to mean that each successive sample moves the rolling average by a smaller and smaller amount.
Well, that isn’t what “converges” means in mathematics (it means there’s a particular value towards which one gets and stays arbitrarily close), but with that definition it is indeed tautologously true that wandering around within a bounded region yields “converging” averaged values. (But not if the region can be unbounded. Easy counterexample: One +1, two −2, four +4, eight −8, etc.)
If the steps get smaller sufficiently slowly, there are counterexamples similar to yours with +1s and −1s. It’s difficult to get convergence short of explicitly imposing convergence.
Confinement to a bounded region implies accumulation points (points to which some subsequence converges), but there can be any number of those. They can even be dense in the space.
There are counterexamples to convergence-in-the-usual-sense, and my example was one of them.
If one takes CCC’s statement of what s/he meant by “convergence” absolutely at face value, then there are not only counterexamples but trivial counterexamples; e.g., begin 0,0,1; the first step moves the rolling average by 0 and the second doesn’t.
What I took CCC as actually meaning was that the differences converge-in-the-usual-sense to zero, or equivalently that one can make them small enough by waiting long enough. That’s straightforwardly true because if the diameter of your region is D then after n steps your average can’t move by more than D/n per step.
Just to confirm—yes, that’s what I’d meant. Which it trivially true, yes; that is why I couldn’t understand why entirelyuseless was attaching any special significance to it.
That’s what CCC said in his last post, but it’s not a useful property for showing what was originally claimed by entirelyuseless, who said:
This doesn’t follow from shrinking steps, because:
The sum of that over all n is divergent, so the average can move around anywhere if you wait long enough. In fact, for any number of passes of averaging, that will still be true: if the underlying sequence goes somewhere and sticks there long enough, the average will eventually get there. Then the underlying sequence can go somewhere else, and so on.
To put this in more concrete terms, with an example of a property that for many people shows no long-term stability in their lifetime, consider physical location (relative to the geocentric frame). A person may live for years in one place, then years in another town or another continent, and make such moves at various times in their life. For such a person, there is no useful concept of their average location. In the case of the original example, a person’s taste in beer can make just as drastic changes, on top of which, the world changes and new beers are created, the space of the random walk changes as the walk is being made.
entirelyuseless’s original claim:
cannot be salvaged.
I agree. (Did something I said give a contrary impression? I thought I’d said right at the outset that the original claims of both entirelyuseless and CCC are wrong.)
I have already said that I agree that it is mathematically possible to prevent the average from converging, just that this is not likely to happen in real life. In RichardKennaway’s comment, “goes somewhere and sticks there long enough” means progressively longer periods of time, and so is not realistic.
I’m not saying that people’s choices converge in the sense of getting closer to a particular value, but that the average converges. You are right to say that this is not a necessary property of every sequence of values (and CCC was mistaken.)
You say that there is no reason to think I am right about this, but your proposed sequence of numbers suggests that I am, namely by showing that the only way the average won’t converge is if you purposely choose a sequence to prevent that from happening. Suppose you offer someone chocolate or vanilla ice cream once a week. I think there are very good reasons to think that the moving average would begin to change slower and slower very quickly, and would basically converge after a while. This would happen unless the person used a sequence like the above: namely, unless he chose a sequence with the explicit intention of preventing convergence.
I agree that someone can have this intention, and that this would not refute determinism. In that sense you could say that the whole discussion is irrelevant. But the relevance, from my point of view, is that it makes the question more concrete. The basic point is that you can, if you want, define free will so that it is not consistent with determinism. But then it will be consistent with determinism plus randomness, unless you propose some prediction which is not consistent with the second. And no one had done that. So no one has even suggested a definition of free will which would be inconsistent with being produced by some form of physical laws.
Given that our universe clearly does operate on some form of physical laws, if anyone were to provide such a definition of free will, it should be trivial to show that it’s not how our universe works.
Not if the person’s preferences are changing gradually over time. That is a real thing that really happens.
(For the avoidance of doubt: I agree that any notion of free will it’s credible to think we have is consistent with physicalism.)
I agree that a person’s preferences can change over time but it will not have the effect of an average that goes back and forth without his preferences changing back and forth, but remaining stable at the extremes for longer and longer periods of time (much like your sequence). This is not a likely thing to happen in real life.
Anyway I also agree that the particulars of this are not that important to my point.
Basically I am saying that deterministic physics plus randomness can produce any possible pattern, as you’re noting. So it can also produce the pattern produced by free will. Or do you have some idea of what free will would do which is different from deterministic physics plus randomness? If so, I haven’t see it suggested yet.
Yes, I agree. It can. Deterministic physics alone can, if you have a long enough list of rules.
...I’m not seeing this. It can consider all the possibilities even if it knows that it must play the possibility with the highest odds of winning—in fact, knowing that means that it must consider all the possibilities in order to calculate those odds, surely?
Even if it knows that it must play the move with the highest odds of winning, as far as it knows when it starts considering, that could be any of the moves.
But yes that would be knowledge that its move is objectively deterministic. This would not necessarily prevent it from feeling like it could make any move it wanted, just like people who believe themselves subject to deterministic physics still feel like they can do whatever they want.
But the chess computer doesn’t have to know what is determining its moves, in which case it will be even more likely to feel that it can make whatever move it wants.
Well, yes, feeling like it has freedom doesn’t really prevent it from not having freedom; but I don’t see how the feeling of freedom makes any difference at all. Why shouldn’t the chess computer feel constrained?
I agree that the feeling doesn’t make any difference. That’s what I’m saying: whether it feels constrained or not, it may or may not be deterministic. Those are two different things. The same is true for us.
“Free will” is an ambiguous term. The sort of free will you’ve argued for here could be paraphrased as “not being God’s puppets”, but I hope it’s obvious that that can’t be evidence of God’s existence. But you listed “free will” as something you can explain with God better than without!
I really don’t think the fact that people sometimes do things a god should be expected to disapprove of can be evidence for that god’s existence. Do you?
(Perhaps the argument you have in mind makes essential use of the fact that humans engage in a kind of cruelty “that is absence from the laws of nature”. But I don’t see how that can work. We should expect human behaviour, even if entirely derived from the laws of nature, to have features that aren’t apparent when looking at the laws themselves—just as, e.g., in Conway’s “Game of Life” there are phenomena like gliders that aren’t apparent from the almost-trivial rules of the game.)
Ah, let me elaborate, then.
Whether God exists or not, one can postulate a universe in which people are puppets—philosophical zombies, moving and acting according to some purely deterministic set of rules.
In the atheistic universe, those behaviours may be at odds with one another, because the rules are not guided; they do not have an aim. They may optimise for some goal on the individual, or even the group level, but there is no reason why they should do so in an efficient manner; a puppet universe may include humans who oppose each other.
In the theistic universe, the presence of an omnipotent, omniscient being suggests that there is some purpose to the universe. If all people are puppets, then, it is to be expected that all people work tirelessly towards a single goal, without opposing each other.
Therefore, the observation that people oppose each other cannot be used to argue for free will in the atheistic universe, but can do so in the theistic universe.
You’ve got it backwards. I’m not using it as evidence for God’s existence; I’m using it as evidence for free will, given the existence of God as a postulate.
You are treating puppet and zombie as equivalents, but they are not. Rational deterministic agents may or may not succeed in co operating. Co-operation is probably the outcome that ideal rational agents would tend to , but non ideal agents face barriers to co operation. Puppets in a theistic universe may or may not co-operate depending on what the Puppetteer wants: some Purposes are served by struggle. Maybe the Puppetteer is a Nietzchian , who wants conflict and struggle to develop strength.
Puppets may or may not oppose each other, zombies may or may not oppose each other, free agents may or may not oppose each other. There’s nothing you can deduce.
You are right that I am treating them as equivalent. How are they different?
Zombie=driven determinstitcally by their own inner workings, inherently predictable.
Puppet=controlled by an external force, not necessarily predictable, since the Puppeteer could be controlling them whimsically.
In that case, it sounds like the “zombie” is the atheistic no-free-will scenario, while the “puppet” is the theistic no-free-will scenario?
In that case, my argument is that the fact that people oppose each other quite strongly at times seems to suggest that we are not puppets but neither confirms nor denies the zombie hypothesis.
Yep.
I don’t see that. We make our own puppets fight, eg in video games.
...you make an excellent point. In fact, I think you’ve pretty much invalidated my entire (presented) argument for free will given the existence of God.
I have an alternative argument in favour of free will (given the existence of God) if you’d like to have a look over it—it requires not just God, but a (at least vaguely) benevolent God, which is why I didn’t present it earlier (it requires more assumptions therefore it is a weaker argument).
In short, the alternative argument runs as follows; start with the assumption of a benevolent God (and noting the lack of malevolence in the laws of physics as at least weak evidence for the benevolence of a deity). Note that humans, unlike the laws of physics, are capable of being malevolent towards each other; extremely malevolent, in some cases. If they were puppets of a generally benevolent God, then that malevolence is out of place; and this is therefore evidence in favour of free will. (This also implies that God considers free will more important than preventing malevolence).
You were earlier when the topic first came up in this thread.
Er… no, I wasn’t.
The question that was asked was “What can you predict with the existence of your God that you can’t predict without?” I parsed this as “What can be shown, taking the existence of God as a postulate, that cannot be shown without that postulate?”
And one of the things that can be shown to be at least more likely with that postulate than not, is free will. Thus, I included it in the response to the question.
...I’m now beginning to wonder if I entirely missed the point of that question.
I think you did (but maybe I was the one who did); I took it to be presupposing that your belief in God is (or should be) the result of thinking that God explains some things about the world better than absence-of-God would, and asking what such things you had in mind. But maybe raydora was asking a question more like “what use is your belief?” than “what basis has your belief?”. raydora, if you’re reading this, which (if either) did you have in mind?
Anyway: my apologies for failing to consider the possibility that you were interpreting the question so differently from me and consequently misunderstanding the point of your answers!
No worries, it’s all straightened out now.
Incidentally, TheAncientGeek found a severe problem in my argument for free will elsewhere.
Not seeing maliciousness in the laws of physics is a very weak argument for an afterlife, because even if there is no afterlife, that doesn’t mean that God is malicious. It just means that he doesn’t prevent things from working the way they do naturally, just like he doesn’t prevent a lion from eating a man, or a man from hunting the lion.
Does that mean the bible which assumes that God wiped out most of humanity with the flood is definitely wrong and to the extend that God exists it’s not the God of the bible?
No.
a) The existence of an afterlife would mean that those people were not destroyed. They had a really bad day and then woke up someplace else.
b) The story of the flood, in itself, may be a parable (by which I mean, a story intended to teach a lesson, usually of a moral or ethical nature, without necessarily being true) like the parable of the Good Samaritan, or the story of the Garden of Eden.
c) There may have been reason for the flood.
Any one of these alternatives could answer your question; personally, I think (b) is the most likely, though (a) and (c) are also possible.
What exactly do you mean by option (b)?
That whoever originally wrote that story intended it to be understood as fiction with a moral, rather than as truth?
That it may have originated as (alleged) history, but whoever incorporated it into the documents that became Jewish and Christian scriptures did so with the intention that it should be understood as fiction with a moral?
That whoever wrote it may have intended it to be seriously believed, but God arranged for it to land up in the Jewish and Christian scriptures with the intention that it should be treated as fiction with a moral?
That it doesn’t really matter why it was written or how it got into the scriptures, but nowadays it should be understood as fiction?
Something else?
It seems to me that the first three of these imply a certain degree of incompetence on the part of the writers, editors, or god concerned, given how widely the story has been treated as history since its incorporation into scripture.
The fourth is fair enough, but it seems to me that (what I take to be) ChristianKI’s inference “the bible contains this story, which is not true, so we should reduce our general confidence in what the bible says” is then reasonable (and indeed the decision to understand as fiction something in the bible that wasn’t originally intended that way amounts to conceding that point).
Of course if the fifth option is right then all of the above may be moot.
This is somewhat muddled by the idea that the original story may have been an oral tradition for some time before being written down—that is to say, the person who put pen to paper may not have been the one to create the story in the first place, and may in fact have been removed from that person by several generations.
So it is quite possible that whoever originally created the story may have intended it as fiction with a moral, but that it may have been understood as history by the person who put stylus to papyrus. Or it may have started out as history, gained some embellishment along the way, then rephrased to highlight a perceived moral, then embellished again to further highlight that moral, then only written down.
I am very uncertain of the history behind how it got there. I think that it is most probable that it is now fiction with a moral; and I think that there have been a whole lot of biblical passages that have been very firmly, and very publically, misunderstood by some people with very loud voices (such as pretty much the entire Creationism movement).
I think that the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is a collection of some fiction, some non-fiction—one of the clearest examples of fiction (to my eyes) is the book of Job, which seems to be an entire story written in such a way that it can be performed as a play by a handful of actors with little-to-no equipment (all the dramatic stuff happens off-stage and is introduced by messengers running in and shouting “This happened!”).
I think that the morals that the fictional parts try to show are important; they should not be simply discounted and tossed aside because they did not happen.
Yeah. (I felt that my list of possibilities was already too long without bringing up the oral/written distinction, but it’s important enough in view of the gradual evolution of oral traditions that that was probably a mistake on my part.)
I’m not sure quite what you mean by saying that it’s now fiction with a moral; just that that’s how believers do (or should) read it now, or something stronger?
I agree that some things in the Bible seem clearly to be intended as fiction; I’d put Jonah alongside Job in that category. And I agree that one absolutely shouldn’t go from “X is fiction” to “let’s ignore X”. But going from “X was intended as history but turns out to be wrong history” to “let’s ignore X” is more reasonable, though still not a slam-dunk (because maybe the story originated as wrong history but was kept around for the sake of things in it that don’t depend on the history).
I’m pretty much saying that’s how I read it.
I’m not so sure about Jonah (he seems a good deal less clear-cut than Job—at the very least, Jonah would be very hard to stage without some pretty impressive special effects) but apart from that, I think I agree with everything in this paragraph.
I’m not suggesting that Jonah was intended as a play; I think it more likely that it was just intended to be read (or told aloud). But it seems (1) not very likely to be true-as-history even if we assume that some fairly miracle-happy version of Christianity or Judaism is right, (2) quite well designed as a story-with-a-moral, and (3) very much like the sort of story-with-a-moral that would get written to make a point. (I’m guessing that the background is one of controversy over the attitudes Israelites should have towards nasty heathen foreigners. Jonah is not meant to be a sympathetic figure in this story.)
Well, Ninevah at least was a place that actually existed (according to Wikipedia). Beyond that… well, you make some good points, but I still think it’s far less clear-cut than Job.
If it’s a parable, isn’t the parable about the fact that certain actions like gay sex are bad enough that they warrant a God engaging in genocide? Even if the God didn’t actually commit the genocide but merely wanted to make the point that doing so is justified, that still seems bad to me.
I think there are multiple morals.
If you do something that you know you shouldn’t, there will almost certainly be bad consequences.
Not knowing what those consequences are will not prevent them from happening.
If you act in the correct way and take competent instruction, you can save yourself even while everyone around you dies.
In such circumstances, it may not actually be possible to save those around you without dooming yourself.
When going out into a dangerous situation, find some way to check how safe it is first.
Look after your animals. (This would be more relevant in a more agricultural society)
CCC already said that he thinks science is mostly right about the history of the universe, so presumably he does not believe such a flood ever happened.
Many Christians believe that such a flood never happened without thinking that the Bible is “definitely wrong” and without thinking that they believe in a God who is “not the God of the Bible.”
Oh ye of little faith!
Global floods certainly happened in human history. What do you think happened to sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age (and humans were already around)?
There are claims that memories of such a flood are preserved in legends and stories in Australia, for example.
It doesn’t even have to be a global flood: a big enough tsunami will suffice.
You seem to have missed the “without reason” part.