It seems like Thane Ruthenis is claiming rather that even if one accepted that their religious view was refuted, that still wouldn’t destroy the believer’s value system, or to quote directly: “Either way, ontology shifts don’t do anything bad to our values.”
I’m not responding to what happens if a deity loses relevance in one’s thinking. I’m arguing that deity’s nonexistence in physical reality is by itself not a reason at all for it to lose relevance (or a central place) in one’s thinking, that such relevance can coherently persevere on its own, with no support from reality.
I think we may be using different definitions of “value”. There’s a “value” like “what this agent is optimizing for right now”, and a “value” like “the cognitive structure that we’d call this agent’s terminal values if we looked at a comprehensive model of that agent”. I’m talking about the second type.
And e. g. the Divine Command model of morality especially has nothing to do with that second type. It’s explicitly “I value the things God says to value because He says to value them”. Divine Command values are explicitly instrumental, not terminal.
It seems like Thane Ruthenis is claiming rather that even if one accepted that their religious view was refuted, that still wouldn’t destroy the believer’s value system, or to quote directly: “Either way, ontology shifts don’t do anything bad to our values.”
I’m not responding to what happens if a deity loses relevance in one’s thinking. I’m arguing that deity’s nonexistence in physical reality is by itself not a reason at all for it to lose relevance (or a central place) in one’s thinking, that such relevance can coherently persevere on its own, with no support from reality.
I think we may be using different definitions of “value”. There’s a “value” like “what this agent is optimizing for right now”, and a “value” like “the cognitive structure that we’d call this agent’s terminal values if we looked at a comprehensive model of that agent”. I’m talking about the second type.
And e. g. the Divine Command model of morality especially has nothing to do with that second type. It’s explicitly “I value the things God says to value because He says to value them”. Divine Command values are explicitly instrumental, not terminal.
Under your latter definition, could an agent be surprised by learning what its values are?
Yes, very much so.