Or, the other way around, perhaps “values” are defined by being robust to ontology shifts.
This seems wrong to me. I don’t think that reductive physicalism is true (i. e. the hard problem really is hard), but if I did, I would probably change my values significantly. Similarly for religious values; religious people seem to think that God has a unique metaphysical status such that his will determines what is right and wrong, and if no being with such a metaphysical status existed, their values would have to change.
Suppose that there’s a kid who is really looking forward to eating the cake his mother promised to bake for him this evening. You might say he values this cake that he’s sure exists as he’s coming back home after school. Except, he shortly learns that there’s no cake: his mother was too busy to make it. Do his values change?
Same with God. Religious people value God, okay. But if they found out there’s no God, that doesn’t mean they’d have to change their values; only their beliefs. They’d still be the kinds of people who’d value an entity like God if that entity existed. If God doesn’t exist, and divine morality doesn’t either, that’d just mean the world is less aligned with their values than they’d thought — like the kid who has less sweets than he’d hoped for. They’d re-define their policies to protect or multiply whatever objects of value actually do exist in the world, or attempt to create the valuable things that turned out not to exist (e. g., the kid baking a cake on his own).
Absent cake on a particular evening is a much more decisive failure than nonexistence of an abstract deity, because the abstract deity can be channeled and interacted with in imagination, especially posthuman imagination. Its relevance to a lot of future thoughts and decisions isn’t easily refuted by things like its absence on the table on a particular evening. Faith in strongly inaccessible cardinals doesn’t falter because of their apparent nonexistence in the physical world.
Nope, can’t bake the cake in the past, that’s why it’s an actual refutation, a meaningful disanalogy with the deity case, the reason your arguments about ignoring nonexistent deities don’t seem convincing, unlike the much more convincing argument about cake.
Faith in strongly inaccessible cardinals doesn’t falter because of their apparent nonexistence in the physical world.
The hypothetical we’re discussing is premised on a believer’s faith being shaken. If it’s shaken, but they refuse to admit the deity doesn’t exist, and start acting like talking to their imaginary version of that deity is as good as interacting with it, that’s… fine? I still don’t see how any of that involves value changes.
The hypothetical we’re discussing is premised on a believer’s faith being shaken.
The premise is that deity is revealed to be nonexistent, not that faith in deity is shaken. I’m arguing that it’s coherent and indeed the correct all-else-equal outcome for faith to remain unshaken by the discovery that it doesn’t physically exist. This does involve admitting that it doesn’t physically exist, no confusion/denial with that. (There are also no value changes, but we don’t even get to the point of worrying about those.)
If a deity is revealed to be physically nonexistent, that is perfectly in order because deities are supernatural rather than physical. But if it’s revealed that a deity is totally nonexistent i.e. that there is no entity which is the referent of its name, then that is equivalent to faith in it being shaken.
Usually you just need to find appropriate axioms, because if morally the object exists (which manifests in ability to reason about it and the facts that were initially discovered), it doesn’t matter very much if the original formulation of it didn’t work for some technical reason, say led to a formal contradiction in a convoluted way that doesn’t scream a natural explanation for inevitability of the contradiction. This does seem like a bit of an ontological crisis though, but the point is that threatening total nonexistence is very hard once you have even an informal understanding of what it is you are talking about, at most you get loss of relevance.
We have things that a given mathematician believes to be true, things that are proved to be true, and mediating between them things that have a moral reason to be true. Or, if you like, things that ought to be true, or as some mathematicians say: things that are morally true.
but the point is that threatening total nonexistence is very hard once you have even an informal understanding of what it is you are talking about, at most you get loss of relevance
True, it’s hard, but it does happen. As evidenced by the many of us who actually have become apostates of our native religions. After becoming convinced that the central thesis of the faith was in error, the jig was up.
EDIT: I think your way of phrasing it is descriptively the most accurate, because it’s psychologically quite possible to resist the act of apostasy despite not actually believing in the truth of your own beliefs. However, for many of us, we would consider such a person a non-believer and hence a de facto apostate, even if they didn’t think of themselves that way.
True, it’s hard, but it does happen. As evidenced by the many of us who become apostates
You are misplacing the referent if “it”. I was talking of abstract total nonexistence, not loss of worship. These are different things.
Loss of worship doesn’t witness total nonexistence, it’s possible to stop worshipping a thing that exists even physically, and to care less about a thing that exists abstractly. The fact that something is not worshiped is not any sort of argument for its abstract total nonexistence.
The argument whose applicability (not validity) I was contesting was that abstract total nonexistence implies loss of worship. I talked of how abstract total nonexistence of something previously informally motivated is unusual, doesn’t normally happen, only quantitative loss of degree of relevance (generic moral worth). And so the argument rarely applies, because its premise rarely triggers, not giving the conclusion of loss of worship.
The loss of worship itself can of course happen for other reasons, I wasn’t discussing this point.
Yes, I agreed in my edit that “worship”/”loss-of-worship” are possible necessary and sufficient correlates of “non-apostate”/”apostate” depending on your definition. However, one might say that worship is not sufficient; what is also required is belief.
However, one might say that worship is not sufficient; what is also required is belief.
Not sufficient for non-apostasy? What is “belief”? Some things abstractly exist, as coherent ideas. They don’t exist in the physical world. They matter or not in some way. Where’s “belief” in this, existence in the physical world specifically? Surely not, since then what is the relevance of talking about abstract total nonexistence?
What I would call “belief” or even “existence” in a sense that generalizes beyond the physical is moral relevance, things you care about and take into account in decision making. There is another thread on this point under this very post. In these terms, deities more strongly exist for believers and weakly exist for non-believers, with relevance for non-believers gained from their channeling via imagination of believers.
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.
With regard to God specifically, belief in God is somewhat unique because God is supposed to make certain things good in virtue of his existence; the value of the things religious people value is predicated on the existence of God. In contrast, the value of cake to the kid is not predicated on the actual existence of the cake.
They’d re-define their policies to protect or multiply whatever objects of value actually do exist in the world, or attempt to create the valuable things that turned out not to exist (e. g., the kid baking a cake on his own).
Well, yes, assuming there still are other things of value for them, at least potentially. But if a robot had been a hedonistic consequentialist, then learned that itself and all beings in its universe lacked any phenomenal experiences (and that such experiences were impossible in its universe), that robot wouldn’t have any further set of objects to value while still being a hedonistic consequentialist.
You seem to be saying: well, when people say “all I really value is X” they don’t really mean that literally. But sometimes, for some agents, it is true that all they value is X. In such cases, there is no further set of things to still value. Utilitarians might fit this description of such an agent. This is why NickGabs had mentioned the hard problem of consciousness.
Okay, yes. One interpretation of the consequentialism I mentioned degrades gracefully like you say, giving “all zeroes” to a world of mere automata. (That’s a point in favor of such a consequentialism that it cannot ever become internally inconsistent.) But what you’re saying in the general case doesn’t fit what people usually mean when they talk about their values. A world without a God is not merely a world with lower utility for a theist, because the concept of “world” is already defined in terms of a God for the theist to begin with. You think otherwise perhaps because you have carved the concept-space up in such a way that lets you take apart different ideas like “world”, “God”, “value” and evaluate them separately. But this is not the case for the theist. Otherwise, they would not be a theist.
You’re right that it ought to work that way, though.
… And so when such a theist discovers that their world-model is fundamentally wrong, they will re-carve it in a way such that they can take “God” out of it, and then find things they can value in the world that actually exists, or, failing that, would assign it zero value and completely break down. No?
I mean, what are you suggesting? What do you think a theist who discovers that God doesn’t exist would do, that wouldn’t fit into one of the three scenarios I’d outlined above?
A theist who has apostatized may still be the same person afterwards, but by no means are they the same agency. One agent has simply died, being replaced with a new one.
Either there are some concrete things corresponding to personal identity/preference satisfaction/etc., or we value not these things but some actually-existing correlates of these things, or acting like we value these things is a heuristic that instrumentally helps us arrive at good outcomes. Either way, ontology shifts don’t do anything bad to our values.
Leading to this claim, which is very alluring to me, even if I disagree with it:
Or, the other way around, perhaps “values” are defined by being robust to ontology shifts.
You gave the example that us learning that our world is physical didn’t make us value humans less, even if we no longer believe that they have immortal souls. That’s true, we still value humans. But the problem is that the first group of agents (medieval “we”) are a different group than the second group (post-industrial “we”). Each group has a different concept of “human”. The two concepts roughly map to the same targets in the territory, but the semantic meaning is different in a way that is crucial to the first group of agents. The first group weren’t convinced that they were wrong. They simply got replaced by a new group who inherited their title.
That might sound dramatic, but ask a truly committed religious person if they can imagine themselves not believing in God. They will not be able to imagine it. This is because, in fact, they would no longer be the same agency in the sense that is crucial to them. Society would legally consider them the same person, and their apostate future-self might claim the same title as them and even deny that the change really mattered, but the original entity who was asked, the theistic agent, would no longer recognize any heir as legitimate at that point. From its point of view, it has simply died. That is why the theist cannot even imagine becoming an apostate, even if they grant that there’s a greater than zero chance of becoming an apostate at all times.
It’s true what you say, if you’re talking about people i.e. biological human organisms. Such entities will always be doing something in the world up until the very moment they physically expire, including having their whole world view shattered and living in the aftermath of that. However, pre-world-view-shattering them would not recognize post-world-view-shattering them as a legitimate heir. The person might be the same, but it’s a different agency in control.
Similar things can be said about populations and governments.
I think I get what you mean. Human minds’ “breakdown protocol” in case the universe turns out to be empty of value isn’t to just shut down; the meat keeps functioning, so what happens is the gradual re-assembly of a new mind/agent from the pieces of the old one. Does that pass the ITT?
But I remain unconvinced that this is what happens during a crisis of faith. By themselves, the theist’s refusal to admit their future apostate self as an heir, and their belief that they’d die if they were to lose faith, don’t mean much to me beyond “the religion memeplex encourages its hosts to develop such beliefs to strengthen its hold on them”. Especially if the apostate later denies that these beliefs were true.
And while my model of a devout mind in the middle of a crisis of faith is indeed dramatic and involves some extreme mental states… I’m unconvinced that this involves changes to terminal values. The entire world-model and the entire suite of instrumental values being rewritten is dramatic enough on its own, and “terminal values” slot nicely into the slot of “what’s guiding this rewriting”/”what’s the main predictor of what the apostate’s instrumental values will be”.
Building off of your other answer here, I think I can imagine at least one situation where your terminal values will get vetoed. Imagine that you discovered, to your horror, that all of your actions up until now have been subconsciously motivated to bring about doomsday. Causing the death of everyone is actually your terminal goal, which you were ignorant of. Furthermore, your subconsciously motivated actions actually have been effective at bringing the world closer and closer to its demise. Your only way to divert this now is to throw yourself immediately out of the window to your death, thereby averting your own terminal goal.
Would you do this?
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person, but are they really the same agent?
Suppose I would end up walking out the window. And it would be the wrong action for me to take. I would be foiled by a bunch of bad heuristics and biases I’d internalized over the course of my omnicidal plot. There would be no agent corresponding to me whose values would be satisfied by this.
It would be not unlike, say, manipulating and gaslighting someone until they decide to kill their entire family. This would be against the values the person would claim as their “truer” ones, but in the moment, under the psychological pressure and the influence of some convincing lies, it’d (incorrectly) feel to them like a good idea.
This seems wrong to me. I don’t think that reductive physicalism is true (i. e. the hard problem really is hard), but if I did, I would probably change my values significantly. Similarly for religious values; religious people seem to think that God has a unique metaphysical status such that his will determines what is right and wrong, and if no being with such a metaphysical status existed, their values would have to change.
Suppose that there’s a kid who is really looking forward to eating the cake his mother promised to bake for him this evening. You might say he values this cake that he’s sure exists as he’s coming back home after school. Except, he shortly learns that there’s no cake: his mother was too busy to make it. Do his values change?
Same with God. Religious people value God, okay. But if they found out there’s no God, that doesn’t mean they’d have to change their values; only their beliefs. They’d still be the kinds of people who’d value an entity like God if that entity existed. If God doesn’t exist, and divine morality doesn’t either, that’d just mean the world is less aligned with their values than they’d thought — like the kid who has less sweets than he’d hoped for. They’d re-define their policies to protect or multiply whatever objects of value actually do exist in the world, or attempt to create the valuable things that turned out not to exist (e. g., the kid baking a cake on his own).
None of that involves changes to values.
Absent cake on a particular evening is a much more decisive failure than nonexistence of an abstract deity, because the abstract deity can be channeled and interacted with in imagination, especially posthuman imagination. Its relevance to a lot of future thoughts and decisions isn’t easily refuted by things like its absence on the table on a particular evening. Faith in strongly inaccessible cardinals doesn’t falter because of their apparent nonexistence in the physical world.
Which is analogous to baking the cake yourself, sure.
Nope, can’t bake the cake in the past, that’s why it’s an actual refutation, a meaningful disanalogy with the deity case, the reason your arguments about ignoring nonexistent deities don’t seem convincing, unlike the much more convincing argument about cake.
I think I’m missing some inferential step.
The hypothetical we’re discussing is premised on a believer’s faith being shaken. If it’s shaken, but they refuse to admit the deity doesn’t exist, and start acting like talking to their imaginary version of that deity is as good as interacting with it, that’s… fine? I still don’t see how any of that involves value changes.
The premise is that deity is revealed to be nonexistent, not that faith in deity is shaken. I’m arguing that it’s coherent and indeed the correct all-else-equal outcome for faith to remain unshaken by the discovery that it doesn’t physically exist. This does involve admitting that it doesn’t physically exist, no confusion/denial with that. (There are also no value changes, but we don’t even get to the point of worrying about those.)
If a deity is revealed to be physically nonexistent, that is perfectly in order because deities are supernatural rather than physical. But if it’s revealed that a deity is totally nonexistent i.e. that there is no entity which is the referent of its name, then that is equivalent to faith in it being shaken.
Usually you just need to find appropriate axioms, because if morally the object exists (which manifests in ability to reason about it and the facts that were initially discovered), it doesn’t matter very much if the original formulation of it didn’t work for some technical reason, say led to a formal contradiction in a convoluted way that doesn’t scream a natural explanation for inevitability of the contradiction. This does seem like a bit of an ontological crisis though, but the point is that threatening total nonexistence is very hard once you have even an informal understanding of what it is you are talking about, at most you get loss of relevance.
E Cheng (2004) Mathematics, morally
True, it’s hard, but it does happen. As evidenced by the many of us who actually have become apostates of our native religions. After becoming convinced that the central thesis of the faith was in error, the jig was up.
EDIT: I think your way of phrasing it is descriptively the most accurate, because it’s psychologically quite possible to resist the act of apostasy despite not actually believing in the truth of your own beliefs. However, for many of us, we would consider such a person a non-believer and hence a de facto apostate, even if they didn’t think of themselves that way.
You are misplacing the referent if “it”. I was talking of abstract total nonexistence, not loss of worship. These are different things.
Loss of worship doesn’t witness total nonexistence, it’s possible to stop worshipping a thing that exists even physically, and to care less about a thing that exists abstractly. The fact that something is not worshiped is not any sort of argument for its abstract total nonexistence.
The argument whose applicability (not validity) I was contesting was that abstract total nonexistence implies loss of worship. I talked of how abstract total nonexistence of something previously informally motivated is unusual, doesn’t normally happen, only quantitative loss of degree of relevance (generic moral worth). And so the argument rarely applies, because its premise rarely triggers, not giving the conclusion of loss of worship.
The loss of worship itself can of course happen for other reasons, I wasn’t discussing this point.
Yes, I agreed in my edit that “worship”/”loss-of-worship” are possible necessary and sufficient correlates of “non-apostate”/”apostate” depending on your definition. However, one might say that worship is not sufficient; what is also required is belief.
Not sufficient for non-apostasy? What is “belief”? Some things abstractly exist, as coherent ideas. They don’t exist in the physical world. They matter or not in some way. Where’s “belief” in this, existence in the physical world specifically? Surely not, since then what is the relevance of talking about abstract total nonexistence?
What I would call “belief” or even “existence” in a sense that generalizes beyond the physical is moral relevance, things you care about and take into account in decision making. There is another thread on this point under this very post. In these terms, deities more strongly exist for believers and weakly exist for non-believers, with relevance for non-believers gained from their channeling via imagination of believers.
Fair enough, I suppose I was using imprecise language. Stated as this, I don’t disagree.
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.
With regard to God specifically, belief in God is somewhat unique because God is supposed to make certain things good in virtue of his existence; the value of the things religious people value is predicated on the existence of God. In contrast, the value of cake to the kid is not predicated on the actual existence of the cake.
Well, yes, assuming there still are other things of value for them, at least potentially. But if a robot had been a hedonistic consequentialist, then learned that itself and all beings in its universe lacked any phenomenal experiences (and that such experiences were impossible in its universe), that robot wouldn’t have any further set of objects to value while still being a hedonistic consequentialist.
You seem to be saying: well, when people say “all I really value is X” they don’t really mean that literally. But sometimes, for some agents, it is true that all they value is X. In such cases, there is no further set of things to still value. Utilitarians might fit this description of such an agent. This is why NickGabs had mentioned the hard problem of consciousness.
Sure. So the universe is worthless for such agents. I don’t see how that’s a problem with my model...?
Okay, yes. One interpretation of the consequentialism I mentioned degrades gracefully like you say, giving “all zeroes” to a world of mere automata. (That’s a point in favor of such a consequentialism that it cannot ever become internally inconsistent.) But what you’re saying in the general case doesn’t fit what people usually mean when they talk about their values. A world without a God is not merely a world with lower utility for a theist, because the concept of “world” is already defined in terms of a God for the theist to begin with. You think otherwise perhaps because you have carved the concept-space up in such a way that lets you take apart different ideas like “world”, “God”, “value” and evaluate them separately. But this is not the case for the theist. Otherwise, they would not be a theist.
You’re right that it ought to work that way, though.
… And so when such a theist discovers that their world-model is fundamentally wrong, they will re-carve it in a way such that they can take “God” out of it, and then find things they can value in the world that actually exists, or, failing that, would assign it zero value and completely break down. No?
I mean, what are you suggesting? What do you think a theist who discovers that God doesn’t exist would do, that wouldn’t fit into one of the three scenarios I’d outlined above?
A theist who has apostatized may still be the same person afterwards, but by no means are they the same agency. One agent has simply died, being replaced with a new one.
I’d be genuinely interested if you could elaborate on that, including the agency vs. personality distinction you’re making here.
Okay. Let me back up a bit. You had said:
Leading to this claim, which is very alluring to me, even if I disagree with it:
You gave the example that us learning that our world is physical didn’t make us value humans less, even if we no longer believe that they have immortal souls. That’s true, we still value humans. But the problem is that the first group of agents (medieval “we”) are a different group than the second group (post-industrial “we”). Each group has a different concept of “human”. The two concepts roughly map to the same targets in the territory, but the semantic meaning is different in a way that is crucial to the first group of agents. The first group weren’t convinced that they were wrong. They simply got replaced by a new group who inherited their title.
That might sound dramatic, but ask a truly committed religious person if they can imagine themselves not believing in God. They will not be able to imagine it. This is because, in fact, they would no longer be the same agency in the sense that is crucial to them. Society would legally consider them the same person, and their apostate future-self might claim the same title as them and even deny that the change really mattered, but the original entity who was asked, the theistic agent, would no longer recognize any heir as legitimate at that point. From its point of view, it has simply died. That is why the theist cannot even imagine becoming an apostate, even if they grant that there’s a greater than zero chance of becoming an apostate at all times.
It’s true what you say, if you’re talking about people i.e. biological human organisms. Such entities will always be doing something in the world up until the very moment they physically expire, including having their whole world view shattered and living in the aftermath of that. However, pre-world-view-shattering them would not recognize post-world-view-shattering them as a legitimate heir. The person might be the same, but it’s a different agency in control.
Similar things can be said about populations and governments.
Thanks for elaborating!
I think I get what you mean. Human minds’ “breakdown protocol” in case the universe turns out to be empty of value isn’t to just shut down; the meat keeps functioning, so what happens is the gradual re-assembly of a new mind/agent from the pieces of the old one. Does that pass the ITT?
But I remain unconvinced that this is what happens during a crisis of faith. By themselves, the theist’s refusal to admit their future apostate self as an heir, and their belief that they’d die if they were to lose faith, don’t mean much to me beyond “the religion memeplex encourages its hosts to develop such beliefs to strengthen its hold on them”. Especially if the apostate later denies that these beliefs were true.
And while my model of a devout mind in the middle of a crisis of faith is indeed dramatic and involves some extreme mental states… I’m unconvinced that this involves changes to terminal values. The entire world-model and the entire suite of instrumental values being rewritten is dramatic enough on its own, and “terminal values” slot nicely into the slot of “what’s guiding this rewriting”/”what’s the main predictor of what the apostate’s instrumental values will be”.
Building off of your other answer here, I think I can imagine at least one situation where your terminal values will get vetoed. Imagine that you discovered, to your horror, that all of your actions up until now have been subconsciously motivated to bring about doomsday. Causing the death of everyone is actually your terminal goal, which you were ignorant of. Furthermore, your subconsciously motivated actions actually have been effective at bringing the world closer and closer to its demise. Your only way to divert this now is to throw yourself immediately out of the window to your death, thereby averting your own terminal goal.
Would you do this?
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are the same person, but are they really the same agent?
Suppose I would end up walking out the window. And it would be the wrong action for me to take. I would be foiled by a bunch of bad heuristics and biases I’d internalized over the course of my omnicidal plot. There would be no agent corresponding to me whose values would be satisfied by this.
It would be not unlike, say, manipulating and gaslighting someone until they decide to kill their entire family. This would be against the values the person would claim as their “truer” ones, but in the moment, under the psychological pressure and the influence of some convincing lies, it’d (incorrectly) feel to them like a good idea.