Accordingly my “God hypothesis” posterior probability has not updated in a very long time. I am, for example, not aware of what evidence there exists AT ALL with which to update this prior, but I suppose this is just because my posterior mass, conditional on the God hypothesis, came to rest, long ago, on a very non-falsifiable, (arguably science-compatible) version of belief in God. I.e. belief in a God who “operates all in accord with His will”, but who also does this exactly through the naturalistic mechanisms that we see operating all the time and not through miraculous interventions. Or, to be more precise, another indistinguishable possibility is that God is perpetrating miraculous interventions continuously, and just consistently wills to do them in exactly the way that the true but unknown “laws of nature” predict. It remains possible that God could revoke this policy at some future time: this does not require much Kolmogorov complexity.
What evidence was there in the first place to promote to your attention the hypothesis of a naturalistic god over no god at all? If you don’t have any particular evidence that favors a naturalistic god over no god, surely the hypothesis of no god requires less complexity.
A Bayesian might never abandon possibilities to which he or she assigns prior mass without new evidence, but in addition to evidence that shifts the posterior, one can also revise a belief on information that suggests that an inappropriate prior was assigned to begin with.
Well, I was raised on it. If one day your Mom says, “don’t touch the stove, it’ll hurt”, and voila she’s right, you start to think maybe you ought to pay attention to what they’re telling you some times, including when they talk about “God.” Theres no way to distinguish one form of advice from the other until you get more experience. On this basis many things are acquired by making inferences based on the actions of people around us as we are growing up. “Everyone is wearing pants. Hmm. I guess I should too” is a pretty good heuristic Bayesian argument for many things, and keeps us out of trouble in unfamiliar experiences more often than not [cite some darwin page on here].
If I hadn’t been raised that way, probably nothing would have promoted it to my attention.
Knowing more about the processes that actually gave rise to your parents’ pronouncements on religion, do you think you were right to assign as much weight of evidence to them as you originally did?
Ah. Well, you’ve got me there. I’ll think about it. Your comment makes me think, though, about a more general issue. Is there a name for a bias that can happen if you think about an issue multiple times and get more and more convinced by, what actually, is essentially only one piece of evidence?
What evidence was there in the first place to promote to your attention the hypothesis of a naturalistic god over no god at all? If you don’t have any particular evidence that favors a naturalistic god over no god, surely the hypothesis of no god requires less complexity.
A Bayesian might never abandon possibilities to which he or she assigns prior mass without new evidence, but in addition to evidence that shifts the posterior, one can also revise a belief on information that suggests that an inappropriate prior was assigned to begin with.
Well, I was raised on it. If one day your Mom says, “don’t touch the stove, it’ll hurt”, and voila she’s right, you start to think maybe you ought to pay attention to what they’re telling you some times, including when they talk about “God.” Theres no way to distinguish one form of advice from the other until you get more experience. On this basis many things are acquired by making inferences based on the actions of people around us as we are growing up. “Everyone is wearing pants. Hmm. I guess I should too” is a pretty good heuristic Bayesian argument for many things, and keeps us out of trouble in unfamiliar experiences more often than not [cite some darwin page on here].
If I hadn’t been raised that way, probably nothing would have promoted it to my attention.
Knowing more about the processes that actually gave rise to your parents’ pronouncements on religion, do you think you were right to assign as much weight of evidence to them as you originally did?
Ah. Well, you’ve got me there. I’ll think about it. Your comment makes me think, though, about a more general issue. Is there a name for a bias that can happen if you think about an issue multiple times and get more and more convinced by, what actually, is essentially only one piece of evidence?
Well, there are various ways to double-count evidence, but that sounds a lot like the idea discussed in this post.
Thanks.