But you don’t need an absolute “faith in science” to learn and apply it; you just need to keep finding evidence that it works, and correspondingly diminish your probability that the world contains massive ineffable elements.
I submit that you seize onto the concept of absolute faith in science because it seems to allow you to believe in God (which is very reassuring and makes many social interactions better if you can affirm it), and not because you’d really be in danger of total nihilism without it.
What massive ineffable elements? God could be a concept, or a principle, determining the consistency of the universe.
I actually have little attachment to belief in God. Tthere are no social interactions that depend upon it—my father and I are very close and he is a boisterous atheist—and belief in God is not reassuring at all, because apparently bad things nevertheless happen.
Confessionally, my real attachment is to a belief in external value of the human person or purpose, or any subset of the physical universe, which seems much more difficult to justify than belief in God. I don’t know if it exists, but I know that I want it to.
You are in danger of nihilism without it. Belief in the meaning of anything is not justified in a particular (restricted) set of “good epistemology” that I’m talking about.
But, extending the epistemology to include meaning of any kind immediately allows room for something strong enough to be God. I’m not sure whether, to support this, I would next need to argue that the existence of any meaning is strong enough to be equivalent to God, or whether I need to argue that meaning exists.
Again, your stated reason for resorting to faith just doesn’t hold water. Think of it in terms of Untheism. If you were a rationalist of a species that had never had world religions, and you suddenly realized that there was a problem with the epistemological foundations of even your best-supported empirical principles (not to mention your moral intuitions), this might indeed cause you some worry. You might explore some different ways to remedy this (or learn to live with it without sacrificing the things you care about).
But would you really, if it weren’t otherwise really desirable to do so, come up with the idea: “Hey! I can recover my confidence in the reasonability of the universe if I, with no other support for this hypothesis, suppose that the entire universe is the creation of some infinite mind-like thing with an unconditional respect for reason! If I just use an incredibly dubious principle to undergird everything else, I’ll be fine!”
I seriously doubt that. I think you might look for an alternative solution, were it not for those social and psychological pressures you feel in the direction of affirming something like the deity your friends and family believe in.
So, have you sat down and thought for five minutes about whether there’s some other way to avoid total nihilism?
I’m willing to think about it for another 5 minutes.
I am not so attached to the existence of God—no social pressures to speak of (my father, one of my closest friends, is a boisterous atheist) and the only thing I am attached to is the value and meaning of life, not God. So I’m open to a Third Alternative.
Suppose, indeed, I were a rationalist of an Untheist society. As I observed the world around me, I would eventually, inevitably ask, how come the patterns are so consistent and dovetail with one another? Physical reality works, evolution works, mathematics works. Would it be very long before I asked if there was some kind of meta-organization?
Possible responses:
A pragmatic one: I wouldn’t mind, perhaps, if someone told me, “apparently this is the limit of our knowledge”. Like a fish that has evolved no ability to comprehend that the ocean is on a planet inside a solar system, you’ve simply not evolved an ability to understand or conclude anything at this level of abstraction. Anything you imagine might happen at the higher levels will only ever be imagination. So this would lead to agnosticism. And anti-philosophy.
A hopeful one: Things makes sense and have order on all lower levels, thus by induction (or by taking some kind of limit) they will as well on the higher levels. There is purpose and meaning, even on the meta-levels. So this would lead to faith, and actually theism since you expect a single connecting weave.
A depressing one: It is most justified to believe there is no meta-organization. You notice the patterns that exist and ignore the non-patterns. The occurrence of patterns is random, arbitrary, meaningless. Some patterns are more common than others (see, circles are everywhere, they have a high probability) but there’s no pattern for the collection of the patterns.This would depress me, that I assume meaning on all these smaller scales of pattern but there isn’t one at the higher level. It would at least negate my confidence in the value of the lower level patterns, and possibly even negate my belief in the perception of the patterns. (The same way an interesting pattern of numbers in a phone book column is not really a pattern, or the way a set of random dots will always appear to have some dots arranged in lines.)
I wonder if I take “B” but lean towards the first solution, which is why I feel rather equanimous about arguments for the “existence” of God. Then, I would feel very strongly that this go-nowhere philosophizing isn’t exploited to project the superiority of the C group over the B group.
Is there anything supernatural about meta-organization?
Take your hypothetical a step further: suppose that not only were you born into an Untheist society, but also a universe where physical reality, evolution, and mathematics did not “work.” In universe-prime, the laws of physics do not permit stars to form, yet the Earth orbits the Sun; evolution cannot produce life, but humans exist; physicists and mathematicians prove that math can’t describe reality, yet people know where the outfielder should stand to catch the fly ball.
byrnema-prime would have an open-and-shut case that some supernatural agency was tampering with the forces of nature. The “miraculous” violations of its meta-organization would be powerful evidence for the existence of God.
“Imagine,” byrnema-prime might argue to an untheist, “a universe very different from ours, where every known phenomenon arose predictably from other known phenomena. In such a universe, your rejection of the supernatural would be proper; supernatural causes would not be required to produce what people observe. But in our universe, where miracles occur, atheism just can’t be justified.”
Which byrnema has the stronger argument? Which is evidence for God’s existence, A or ~A?
Is there anything supernatural about meta-organization?
No. The meta-organization is a property of the natural world.
Which is evidence for God’s existence, A or ~A?
The God you are talking about in ~A—the one causing the miraculous violations—sounds like some kind of creature. It would be a subset of a larger universe U that includes ~A and includes the creature. Does this universe U have any rules?
Or suppose you really insist that the creature is God. This creature is not imposing logic, so logic is not one of the rules of ~A. Perhaps it doesn’t impose any consistent rules. Then it is not endowing ~A with any consistent value or meaning. So you would have a situation where the humans in ~A have evidence of God, but the notion of God provides nothing.
My belief in science (trustworthy observation, logic, epistemology, etc.) is equivalent with my belief in God, which is why I find belief in God to be necessary.
Suppose, indeed, I were a rationalist of an Untheist society… Would it be very long before I asked if there was some kind of meta-organization?
The meta-organization is a property of the natural world.
It sounds like you’re saying that your “God” is not supernatural. This isn’t just a problem of proper usage. A theist who believes in a deity (which, given proper usage, is redundant) is at least being internally consistent when using ineffable language like “God,” “belief,” and “faith,” because she’s imagining something ineffable. Using ineffable language to describe natural phenomena just generates mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
The God you are talking about in ~A—the one causing the miraculous violations—sounds like some kind of creature.
The argument, “your puny God is a creature and mine isn’t” sounds like one more retreat to mystery. A God that causes miracles is only required to be a creature insofar as a God that causes patterns to be “consistent and dovetail with one another” (in other words, prevents miracles) is also required to be a creature.
Yes, I believe that God is natural—not supernatural.
I think what you’re saying is that if I claim that the meta-pattern is natural, then it’s part of the physical world – thus inside science, and thus not anything we mean by God.
But what I’ve been saying all along is that there are some things – patterns/meanings/interpretations – that are not within science but that are within the natural world. Theists believe (I think most fundamentally it is just this that they believe) that meanings and patterns exist in some real, meaningful way. Religions consist of describing these patterns in great detail, and they have all kinds of disagreements about what the patterns are and what parts are most relevant. And there’s a disagreement about whether the pattern is natural (and, usually, impersonal) or supernatural (usually, then, also personal and interactive).
Thus, there are theists that are ideologically scientists (e.g., Einstein) and those that are non-scientists (e.g., Creationists). What they have in common is the belief that the universe is organized (meaningful). There are rationalists that believe the universe is random (a chilling and impersonal place) and those that believe there is meaning. What rationalists have in common is the scientific ideology. IMO, rationalists that believe in meaning but call themselves atheists are a group of people who think it is more important to distinguish themselves from non-scientist theists than nihilist rationalists. If it isn’t clear, my long term goal would be to see this group pulled from anti-atheism. (But untheism, a matter of definition, is fine.) I think non-scientific theists need guidance to more greatly value science, not cultural annihilation of “theism” because it is so immutably antithetical to science. Theism is antithetical only to nihilism. Explaining that a scientific ideology doesn’t eradicate meaning is the first step to guiding theists, but this isn’t done very well. And finally my argument that if you do not adequately (clearly, definitively) distinguish yourselves from nihilism when you try to convert theists with “science”, you won’t succeed.
Religions consist of describing these patterns in great detail
Could you give me an example of such a description, preferably from one of the big two religions. Because I don’t recognise this feature of religion at all.
Love in a mundane sense is certainly part of the natural world: we observe it in a variety of organisms and there are sub-patterns (love between parents and their offspring, love between mates, love between an organism and its community.)
Religions take this and say that love is meaningful and that love is an important component of the meta-pattern. This is literally expressed as “God is love” or “God creates the world with his love” or “God loves you”. When I hear these phrases, while I am also annoyed, I find that I can agree, after the translation that love is indeed an important pattern.
Certainly important to me, on a personal level. So suddenly it’s about the personal aspect of a pattern existing in the physical world. Main religions, in practice, tend to focus on personal aspects so the inferential distance between the scientific observation of pattern and the personal experience of pattern starts getting really, extremely large. But science knows it can’t yet explain the personal very well...
Wait a minute, byrnema. You’re seriously saying that science can’t explain why you love your kids? In a forum filled with evolutionary psychology wannabes?
Or do you simply say that science can’t explain why the qualia of love feel this way instead of some other way? Then you don’t need to bring love into the discussion, the mysterious redness of the color red would suffice. Is red mystery enough for you to posit a God? Me, I’d rather lament about the nascent state of brain science.
Wait a minute, byrnema. You’re seriously saying that science can’t explain why you love your kids? In a forum filled with evolutionary psychology wannabes?
Interesting comment. I’ll leave debating the development of the field to the evolutionary psychologists. For the record, it is clear that society at large usually calls on science for practical help in caring for their children, not the Bible. Science gives us all the information about the pattern, religion just tells us it matters (or how it matters; moral judgements). Religion sometimes says more, but I don’t think it should.
Or do you simply say that science can’t explain why the qualia of love feel this way instead of some other way? Then you don’t need to bring love into the discussion, the mysterious redness of the color red would suffice. Is red mystery enough for you to posit a God?
Replace ‘red’ with ‘beauty’, and I would say ‘yes’. Red is a fact and beauty is an interpretation.
Beauty is an interpretation assigned by physical systems such as human brains. An explanation would be in the realm of science, even though it may be complex enough that we haven’t figured it out yet.
Beauty most definitely is not a fundamental property of the universe that is protected by some mysterious God or “meta-pattern”. What we call beauty is not even likely to be considered beautiful by other intelligences, such as an AGI not specifically designed to share our notion of beauty, which would happily disassemble the Mona Lisa for paperclip parts.
Scientific rationalism not opposed to us having a concept of beauty, and assigning value to the concept and objects that embody it, but we cannot depend on the universe to protect these values for us, we have to do it ourselves. Note, this is not nihilism, scientific rationalism accepts that we have values, seeks to explain why we have those values, and enables us to protect those values.
I agree with every sentence you’ve written except for this one:
Beauty most definitely is not a fundamental property of the universe
Beauty may be context dependent (I don’t know what it is actually) but if we have a concept of beauty, then it has evolved naturally within the physical universe. The concept is a property of some minds (human minds), thus its a property of the natural world. I would predict that perhaps not every kind of sapient being, but certainly some subset of all sapient beings, would also develop a concept of beauty. If beauty is an actual property of the natural world, then it has a pattern. It would be easier to understand this pattern if there were other sentient beings with concepts of beauty to compare with. A sentient being could use the meta-patterning of beauty, once identified, to perceive and measure beauty outside its own specific context. I have “faith” that meta-beauty would be beautiful to all sentient beings that appreciate beauty—this is identical to saying that there is a meaningful pattern.
The concept is a property of some minds (human minds), thus its a property of the natural world.
This doesn’t make it a fundamental property of the natural world. I suspect it’s just a label we use for a certain fuzzy class of emotional responses. I’m skeptical that it’s all that different from other emotional responses. Consider that humans also share a concept of “creepiness”. Do you also have faith that “meta-creepiness” would be creepy to all sentient beings capable of being “creeped out”? It may be tempting to ascribe your reaction to something like a house centipede to a fundamental property of the critter, but “creepy”, like “beautiful”, seems firmly situated in the class of 2-place words.
I could conceivably have a theory of the baby-eaters’ concept of beauty, that lets me accurately predict how beautiful they will find the act of ruthlessly eating their sentient young, but I will not find beauty in it, I will not see it as some universal meta pattern of beauty that I can appreciate like my own native concept of beauty. I simply do not find it beautiful that an adaption that evolved in harsh conditions to be cruel to sentient beings would persist beyond those harsh conditions and even become the centerpiece of a moral system. But that is a fact that must be included in any universally beautiful meta-beauty.
Not that, but that you can’t deduce anything about the pattern from things that are made up. The patterns result from having to follow physical laws.. things you imagine don’t have to.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary. While some aspects may be arbitrary, there are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. The only reason why there wouldn’t be a common rule is if beauty is completely arbitrary, in which case we wouldn’t expect other species to have the concept anyway. The common rule would validate beauty in different contexts (if the rule applies in a context, then beauty is validated in that context) and would provide the possibility of a common universal beauty (if it is possible to satisfy the rule in a way that is context independent).
(edit: a hypothetical description of this applied to baby-eaters with a pretend meta-rule was taken out because I thought it was inane)
I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary.
It may be worth asking yourself which fear is driving this faith. If you woke up tomorrow without faith in the universal significance of your concept of beauty, what would change? Are you avoiding some disastrous change in world-view that would alter your behavior, or are you simply addicted to the positive affect you get from contemplating beauty?
A priori beliefs are beliefs without evidence. If a belief doesn’t respond to further evidence, this is also a property of a priori beliefs. Normal beliefs can behave like this, and be generally accepted. The concept of “faith”, to make it non-vacuous, needs to be opposed to normal human cognition (preferences). But this makes it similar to “insanity”, which is unlikely what the people who advocate the practice mean. Their concept of “faith” isn’t obvious.
A priori beliefs are beliefs without evidence. If a belief doesn’t respond to further evidence, this is also a property of a priori beliefs. Normal beliefs can behave like this, and be generally accepted.
I think the terms “a priori belief” and “faith” refer to the same concept. Can you provide an example of a “normal, generally accepted” a priori belief?
The concept of “faith”, to make it non-vacuous, needs to be opposed to normal human cognition (preferences).
I don’t see how this follows. What do preferences have to do with it?
Well, take the statement that there are green-skinned, blue-eyed, humanoid aliens living on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse. Since this is a very specific statement, it’s a priori very unlikely to be true, so that the belief that there are no such aliens is rational despite the lack of evidence for it; it’s not a faith-based belief.
Perhaps a better definition of faith would be, “intentionally self-deceiving belief”.
It’s certainly a more condescending definition, at least.
Has Occam’s Razor been semantically cleaved from the notion of “faith” in a convincing way here or elsewhere? How does your a priori reasoning differ from “faith in simpler explanations”?
The greater the specificity of a concept is, the less plausible it must be. For example, if I make two guesses, first that you have a sibling, and second that this hypothetical sibling is female, the second, more specific guess is necessarily less likely to be true than the first one.
Eliezer has written some stuff about this, but if you’re interested in a really rigorous argument, I recommend Paul Almond’s Occam’s Razor series (nine articles in total):
Thanks for the link. Some of Almond’s other stuff was already on my “to read” list, it looks like I’ll be sinking a weekend on his site some time soon.
I think I see the distinction you’re making… the things inherent in the structure and relationships of a set of concepts (like specificity) effectively function as a priori truths, even though the concepts may be “about” empirical matters. This is clearly different from “faith”, which has a more speculative nature. My vague intuition that Occam’s Razor is somehow “like faith” still isn’t discharged, but perhaps Almond will bludgeon that out of me with his series.
I think the terms “a priori belief” and “faith” refer to the same concept. Can you provide an example of a “normal, generally accepted” a priori belief?
I hope you mean “belief that doesn’t change in response to evidence”, because a priori beliefs is exactly what determines what you do with evidence and what you can come to believe later. For an example of unchanging belief: if you toss a normal coin 10 times and it lands “heads” each time, your belief about the probability of it coming “heads” should remain almost the same.
Epistemic beliefs are one side of the preference specification, the other in this formalism being utility function. If the behavior of “faith” beliefs is different from normal beliefs, it follows that they act contrary to the framework that expresses human preferences as probability+utility, breaking human preference as a result and leading to behavior that is insane (i.e. incorrect) according to human preferences (ethics/morality).
A possible common rule of beauty would be that a thing is beautiful if it is appreciated by some sentient being that finds it beautiful. However, this is completely vacuous, defining no constraint on what a sentient being might find beautiful. It does not prohibit arbitrary concepts of beauty. It is also far from fundamental, as the sentient beings are made of complicated physical systems.
Do you have a concept of a common rule that actually implies that some concept of beauty is impossible?
Yes, but not exactly. First, symmetry is a property of an object, whereas beauty isn’t. You can consider an object beautiful one day and not beautiful the next even though it hasn’t changed. Rather, if a creature observes something, “beauty” seems to be a perception the creature has about his perception of the object. But even though it’s second-order or whatever the correct terminology is, yes, I am talking about beauty as a “real” thing. I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I suppose you could conceivably observe “beauty” with an MRI (?), trained to recognize the signature of that experience.
To the extent which beauty is a real thing, that’s science. What science doesn’t give us is that the experience of beauty is significant in and of itself. By significant ‘in and of itself’ I mean that it’s not just significant because it is useful in helping us select a healthy mate, but in some way inherently awesome. I’ll use awesome here as possessing some significance additional to the significance that can be scientifically demonstrated. Of course the perception of awe could be recognized by the MRI. Theists describe this as feeling that the uinverse is purposeful and connected, but I will give a non-magical definition. If beauty is an inherently awesome thing, my thesis is that this awesomeness stems from its pattern in the natural world. Or rather, that the experience of awe comes from the perception of significant pattern but I’m afraid I’m being too meta already.
The following won’t make sense unless you actually consider beauty some type of real thing. Beauty has resulted from the natural laws of the universe: these laws resulted in atoms, that resulted in molecules, that resulted in life, that resulted in sapient humans that resulted in the experience of beauty, observed by an MRI when a person observes something they consider beautiful. Consider the relationship of the real existing thing “beauty” with the laws of the universe – it’s analogous to some kind of mathematical structure because the laws of the universe are analogous to mathematical structures/equations. It’s like some kind of sub-manifold in the phase space. This is what I’m calling “pattern”. Problematically, for us, everything that exists, including random noise, is a pattern and whether a pattern is awesome or not is interpretative, so it’s not verifiable of falsifiable. Nevertheless, humans are very good at identifying whether a pattern is awesome or not. Perhaps someone else could say more, but I just call this awesome-perception an aspect of “intuition” and know it must be contained within “good epistemology” because its what scientists and mathematicians use.
Finally, lets suppose that upon inspection, the pattern “Beauty” turns out to be just one of an infinite number of ways of solving the problem “P=motivate a creature to choose the healthiest mate”. I would then consider “beauty” real but arbitrary. On the other hand, suppose that “beauty” is a pattern that self-organizes in an infinite number of different contexts. Maybe, for example, it is present even among sapient creatures that are so unlike us they have no concept of evolution. Creating mammals and creating human minds was just one way that the universe was able to create the pattern “beauty”. And, therefore, “wow” – beauty is awesome. But this is just an illustrative example, I don’t claim to spell out what makes one pattern arbitrary and another pattern meaningful. My preference would be that significance doesn’t come from the prevalence or persistence of the pattern, but in the properties of the solutions, things like critical points, asymptotes, etc. I don’t care whether beauty is such a pattern, but I’d be very surprised though if “perception of truth” wasn’t such a pattern among sapient creatures.
I agree; it’s mushy and pseudo-sciency. But all I’m trying to say is that it would be logical to think that if there’s order at the lowest levels (Shroedinger, etc) then there’s order on the higher levels. But I don’t seem to be understood with that. What is the disconnect?
I suppose I have to argue why, I apologize for this being long and IMO inane.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary. While some aspects may be arbitrary, there are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. The only reason why there wouldn’t be a common rule is if beauty is completely arbitrary, in which case we wouldn’t expect other species to have the concept anyway. The common rule would validate beauty in different contexts and would provide the possibility of a common universal beauty.
For the sake of argument: Let’s suppose a meta-property of beauty is the following rule: Something is beautiful if it physically manifests a value that you have. (This is the best I can come up with.)
The baby-eaters think that ruthlessly eating their young is beautiful. Applying the meta-rule, ruthlessly eating babies must represent some value X they have. (For example, X could be the thrill of power, exerting their will in defiance of what is good.). Thus the beauty of ruthlessness (context: baby-eaters) is validated by the fact that it is a physical manifestation of the value X.
It doesn’t matter if you value X. By logical application of the meta-rule, if you value X, you will be able to see some beauty in the physical manifestation of X. If you don’t value X, then it won’t be beautiful to you. This does not present any problem.
There’s mostly nothing meaningful here: I just got out what I put in with this silly example. But just one thing: even though your ideas of beauty are quite different from the baby-eaters, it is possible to find something beautiful in common. Namely, if there’s a common value. The beauty of the manifestation of a common value would have an external, objective beauty. This objective beauty evolved from whatever rules evolved sapience and the concept of beauty in the first place (quantum mechanics, somehow).
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary. There are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. This common rule would define a common beauty. For example, let’s suppose a meta-property of beauty is the following rule: Something will be beautiful if it physically manifests a value that you have. (This is the best I can come up with.)
From what you’ve written above, we assume these baby-eaters think that ruthlessly eating their young is beautiful. Applying the meta-rule, ruthlessness must represent some value X they have. (For example, X could be the thrill of power, exerting their will in defiance of what is good.). Thus the beauty of ruthlessness is validated by the fact that it is a physical manifestation of the value X. (If you find yourself dissatisfied with this it is likely because I didn’t pick a good enough meta-rule.)
It doesn’t matter if you value X . By logical application of the meta-rule, if you value X, you will be able to see some beauty in the physical manifestation of X. If you don’t value X, then it won’t be beautiful to you. You said you can’t see beauty in ruthlessly eating babies, so actually you don’t value X. This does not present any problem.
Because this is what’s promised: you will both find a common application of the meta-rule beautiful. This would mean finding a common value, and physically manifesting it as Y. It is clear you would both find this thing Y beautiful.
There’s mostly nothing meaningful here: I just got out what I put in with this silly example. But just one thing: even though your ideas of beauty are different, you find something beautiful in common. This common beauty is external, objective beauty.
But you don’t need an absolute “faith in science” to learn and apply it; you just need to keep finding evidence that it works, and correspondingly diminish your probability that the world contains massive ineffable elements.
I submit that you seize onto the concept of absolute faith in science because it seems to allow you to believe in God (which is very reassuring and makes many social interactions better if you can affirm it), and not because you’d really be in danger of total nihilism without it.
What massive ineffable elements? God could be a concept, or a principle, determining the consistency of the universe.
I actually have little attachment to belief in God. Tthere are no social interactions that depend upon it—my father and I are very close and he is a boisterous atheist—and belief in God is not reassuring at all, because apparently bad things nevertheless happen.
Confessionally, my real attachment is to a belief in external value of the human person or purpose, or any subset of the physical universe, which seems much more difficult to justify than belief in God. I don’t know if it exists, but I know that I want it to.
You are in danger of nihilism without it. Belief in the meaning of anything is not justified in a particular (restricted) set of “good epistemology” that I’m talking about.
But, extending the epistemology to include meaning of any kind immediately allows room for something strong enough to be God. I’m not sure whether, to support this, I would next need to argue that the existence of any meaning is strong enough to be equivalent to God, or whether I need to argue that meaning exists.
Again, your stated reason for resorting to faith just doesn’t hold water. Think of it in terms of Untheism. If you were a rationalist of a species that had never had world religions, and you suddenly realized that there was a problem with the epistemological foundations of even your best-supported empirical principles (not to mention your moral intuitions), this might indeed cause you some worry. You might explore some different ways to remedy this (or learn to live with it without sacrificing the things you care about).
But would you really, if it weren’t otherwise really desirable to do so, come up with the idea: “Hey! I can recover my confidence in the reasonability of the universe if I, with no other support for this hypothesis, suppose that the entire universe is the creation of some infinite mind-like thing with an unconditional respect for reason! If I just use an incredibly dubious principle to undergird everything else, I’ll be fine!”
I seriously doubt that. I think you might look for an alternative solution, were it not for those social and psychological pressures you feel in the direction of affirming something like the deity your friends and family believe in.
So, have you sat down and thought for five minutes about whether there’s some other way to avoid total nihilism?
I’m willing to think about it for another 5 minutes.
I am not so attached to the existence of God—no social pressures to speak of (my father, one of my closest friends, is a boisterous atheist) and the only thing I am attached to is the value and meaning of life, not God. So I’m open to a Third Alternative.
Suppose, indeed, I were a rationalist of an Untheist society. As I observed the world around me, I would eventually, inevitably ask, how come the patterns are so consistent and dovetail with one another? Physical reality works, evolution works, mathematics works. Would it be very long before I asked if there was some kind of meta-organization?
Possible responses:
A pragmatic one: I wouldn’t mind, perhaps, if someone told me, “apparently this is the limit of our knowledge”. Like a fish that has evolved no ability to comprehend that the ocean is on a planet inside a solar system, you’ve simply not evolved an ability to understand or conclude anything at this level of abstraction. Anything you imagine might happen at the higher levels will only ever be imagination. So this would lead to agnosticism. And anti-philosophy.
A hopeful one: Things makes sense and have order on all lower levels, thus by induction (or by taking some kind of limit) they will as well on the higher levels. There is purpose and meaning, even on the meta-levels. So this would lead to faith, and actually theism since you expect a single connecting weave.
A depressing one: It is most justified to believe there is no meta-organization. You notice the patterns that exist and ignore the non-patterns. The occurrence of patterns is random, arbitrary, meaningless. Some patterns are more common than others (see, circles are everywhere, they have a high probability) but there’s no pattern for the collection of the patterns.This would depress me, that I assume meaning on all these smaller scales of pattern but there isn’t one at the higher level. It would at least negate my confidence in the value of the lower level patterns, and possibly even negate my belief in the perception of the patterns. (The same way an interesting pattern of numbers in a phone book column is not really a pattern, or the way a set of random dots will always appear to have some dots arranged in lines.)
I wonder if I take “B” but lean towards the first solution, which is why I feel rather equanimous about arguments for the “existence” of God. Then, I would feel very strongly that this go-nowhere philosophizing isn’t exploited to project the superiority of the C group over the B group.
Is there anything supernatural about meta-organization?
Take your hypothetical a step further: suppose that not only were you born into an Untheist society, but also a universe where physical reality, evolution, and mathematics did not “work.” In universe-prime, the laws of physics do not permit stars to form, yet the Earth orbits the Sun; evolution cannot produce life, but humans exist; physicists and mathematicians prove that math can’t describe reality, yet people know where the outfielder should stand to catch the fly ball.
byrnema-prime would have an open-and-shut case that some supernatural agency was tampering with the forces of nature. The “miraculous” violations of its meta-organization would be powerful evidence for the existence of God.
“Imagine,” byrnema-prime might argue to an untheist, “a universe very different from ours, where every known phenomenon arose predictably from other known phenomena. In such a universe, your rejection of the supernatural would be proper; supernatural causes would not be required to produce what people observe. But in our universe, where miracles occur, atheism just can’t be justified.”
Which byrnema has the stronger argument? Which is evidence for God’s existence, A or ~A?
No. The meta-organization is a property of the natural world.
The God you are talking about in ~A—the one causing the miraculous violations—sounds like some kind of creature. It would be a subset of a larger universe U that includes ~A and includes the creature. Does this universe U have any rules?
Or suppose you really insist that the creature is God. This creature is not imposing logic, so logic is not one of the rules of ~A. Perhaps it doesn’t impose any consistent rules. Then it is not endowing ~A with any consistent value or meaning. So you would have a situation where the humans in ~A have evidence of God, but the notion of God provides nothing.
You wrote:
It sounds like you’re saying that your “God” is not supernatural. This isn’t just a problem of proper usage. A theist who believes in a deity (which, given proper usage, is redundant) is at least being internally consistent when using ineffable language like “God,” “belief,” and “faith,” because she’s imagining something ineffable. Using ineffable language to describe natural phenomena just generates mysterious answers to mysterious questions.
The argument, “your puny God is a creature and mine isn’t” sounds like one more retreat to mystery. A God that causes miracles is only required to be a creature insofar as a God that causes patterns to be “consistent and dovetail with one another” (in other words, prevents miracles) is also required to be a creature.
Yes, I believe that God is natural—not supernatural.
I think what you’re saying is that if I claim that the meta-pattern is natural, then it’s part of the physical world – thus inside science, and thus not anything we mean by God.
But what I’ve been saying all along is that there are some things – patterns/meanings/interpretations – that are not within science but that are within the natural world. Theists believe (I think most fundamentally it is just this that they believe) that meanings and patterns exist in some real, meaningful way. Religions consist of describing these patterns in great detail, and they have all kinds of disagreements about what the patterns are and what parts are most relevant. And there’s a disagreement about whether the pattern is natural (and, usually, impersonal) or supernatural (usually, then, also personal and interactive).
Thus, there are theists that are ideologically scientists (e.g., Einstein) and those that are non-scientists (e.g., Creationists). What they have in common is the belief that the universe is organized (meaningful). There are rationalists that believe the universe is random (a chilling and impersonal place) and those that believe there is meaning. What rationalists have in common is the scientific ideology. IMO, rationalists that believe in meaning but call themselves atheists are a group of people who think it is more important to distinguish themselves from non-scientist theists than nihilist rationalists. If it isn’t clear, my long term goal would be to see this group pulled from anti-atheism. (But untheism, a matter of definition, is fine.) I think non-scientific theists need guidance to more greatly value science, not cultural annihilation of “theism” because it is so immutably antithetical to science. Theism is antithetical only to nihilism. Explaining that a scientific ideology doesn’t eradicate meaning is the first step to guiding theists, but this isn’t done very well. And finally my argument that if you do not adequately (clearly, definitively) distinguish yourselves from nihilism when you try to convert theists with “science”, you won’t succeed.
Could you give me an example of such a description, preferably from one of the big two religions. Because I don’t recognise this feature of religion at all.
I think “love” is the most accessible example.
Love in a mundane sense is certainly part of the natural world: we observe it in a variety of organisms and there are sub-patterns (love between parents and their offspring, love between mates, love between an organism and its community.)
Religions take this and say that love is meaningful and that love is an important component of the meta-pattern. This is literally expressed as “God is love” or “God creates the world with his love” or “God loves you”. When I hear these phrases, while I am also annoyed, I find that I can agree, after the translation that love is indeed an important pattern.
Certainly important to me, on a personal level. So suddenly it’s about the personal aspect of a pattern existing in the physical world. Main religions, in practice, tend to focus on personal aspects so the inferential distance between the scientific observation of pattern and the personal experience of pattern starts getting really, extremely large. But science knows it can’t yet explain the personal very well...
Wait a minute, byrnema. You’re seriously saying that science can’t explain why you love your kids? In a forum filled with evolutionary psychology wannabes?
Or do you simply say that science can’t explain why the qualia of love feel this way instead of some other way? Then you don’t need to bring love into the discussion, the mysterious redness of the color red would suffice. Is red mystery enough for you to posit a God? Me, I’d rather lament about the nascent state of brain science.
Interesting comment. I’ll leave debating the development of the field to the evolutionary psychologists. For the record, it is clear that society at large usually calls on science for practical help in caring for their children, not the Bible. Science gives us all the information about the pattern, religion just tells us it matters (or how it matters; moral judgements). Religion sometimes says more, but I don’t think it should.
Replace ‘red’ with ‘beauty’, and I would say ‘yes’. Red is a fact and beauty is an interpretation.
Beauty is an interpretation assigned by physical systems such as human brains. An explanation would be in the realm of science, even though it may be complex enough that we haven’t figured it out yet.
Beauty most definitely is not a fundamental property of the universe that is protected by some mysterious God or “meta-pattern”. What we call beauty is not even likely to be considered beautiful by other intelligences, such as an AGI not specifically designed to share our notion of beauty, which would happily disassemble the Mona Lisa for paperclip parts.
Scientific rationalism not opposed to us having a concept of beauty, and assigning value to the concept and objects that embody it, but we cannot depend on the universe to protect these values for us, we have to do it ourselves. Note, this is not nihilism, scientific rationalism accepts that we have values, seeks to explain why we have those values, and enables us to protect those values.
I agree with every sentence you’ve written except for this one:
Beauty may be context dependent (I don’t know what it is actually) but if we have a concept of beauty, then it has evolved naturally within the physical universe. The concept is a property of some minds (human minds), thus its a property of the natural world. I would predict that perhaps not every kind of sapient being, but certainly some subset of all sapient beings, would also develop a concept of beauty. If beauty is an actual property of the natural world, then it has a pattern. It would be easier to understand this pattern if there were other sentient beings with concepts of beauty to compare with. A sentient being could use the meta-patterning of beauty, once identified, to perceive and measure beauty outside its own specific context. I have “faith” that meta-beauty would be beautiful to all sentient beings that appreciate beauty—this is identical to saying that there is a meaningful pattern.
This doesn’t make it a fundamental property of the natural world. I suspect it’s just a label we use for a certain fuzzy class of emotional responses. I’m skeptical that it’s all that different from other emotional responses. Consider that humans also share a concept of “creepiness”. Do you also have faith that “meta-creepiness” would be creepy to all sentient beings capable of being “creeped out”? It may be tempting to ascribe your reaction to something like a house centipede to a fundamental property of the critter, but “creepy”, like “beautiful”, seems firmly situated in the class of 2-place words.
I could conceivably have a theory of the baby-eaters’ concept of beauty, that lets me accurately predict how beautiful they will find the act of ruthlessly eating their sentient young, but I will not find beauty in it, I will not see it as some universal meta pattern of beauty that I can appreciate like my own native concept of beauty. I simply do not find it beautiful that an adaption that evolved in harsh conditions to be cruel to sentient beings would persist beyond those harsh conditions and even become the centerpiece of a moral system. But that is a fact that must be included in any universally beautiful meta-beauty.
Something that is made up isn’t part of the natural world and doesn’t have to fit any pattern.
Then part of your faith is that nothing like the baby-eaters could possibly exist?
Not that, but that you can’t deduce anything about the pattern from things that are made up. The patterns result from having to follow physical laws.. things you imagine don’t have to.
Could your view be falsified if baby-eaters or a similar species turned out to be real?
No.
At least one of the following statements has to be true:
Your view of meta-patterns is wrong.
Nothing like the baby-eaters can exist.
A meta-pattern of beauty that I can find beautiful validates the baby-eaters’ concept of beauty.
Which one do you think is true?
I think (3) is true.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary. While some aspects may be arbitrary, there are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. The only reason why there wouldn’t be a common rule is if beauty is completely arbitrary, in which case we wouldn’t expect other species to have the concept anyway. The common rule would validate beauty in different contexts (if the rule applies in a context, then beauty is validated in that context) and would provide the possibility of a common universal beauty (if it is possible to satisfy the rule in a way that is context independent).
(edit: a hypothetical description of this applied to baby-eaters with a pretend meta-rule was taken out because I thought it was inane)
It may be worth asking yourself which fear is driving this faith. If you woke up tomorrow without faith in the universal significance of your concept of beauty, what would change? Are you avoiding some disastrous change in world-view that would alter your behavior, or are you simply addicted to the positive affect you get from contemplating beauty?
These concepts can’t be communicated this way. Taboo “faith” and “God” and “metapattern”, and see what happens.
Surely the meaning of “faith” is straightforward enough: Belief without evidence.
A priori beliefs are beliefs without evidence. If a belief doesn’t respond to further evidence, this is also a property of a priori beliefs. Normal beliefs can behave like this, and be generally accepted. The concept of “faith”, to make it non-vacuous, needs to be opposed to normal human cognition (preferences). But this makes it similar to “insanity”, which is unlikely what the people who advocate the practice mean. Their concept of “faith” isn’t obvious.
I think the terms “a priori belief” and “faith” refer to the same concept. Can you provide an example of a “normal, generally accepted” a priori belief?
I don’t see how this follows. What do preferences have to do with it?
Well, take the statement that there are green-skinned, blue-eyed, humanoid aliens living on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse. Since this is a very specific statement, it’s a priori very unlikely to be true, so that the belief that there are no such aliens is rational despite the lack of evidence for it; it’s not a faith-based belief.
Perhaps a better definition of faith would be, “intentionally self-deceiving belief”.
It’s certainly a more condescending definition, at least.
Has Occam’s Razor been semantically cleaved from the notion of “faith” in a convincing way here or elsewhere? How does your a priori reasoning differ from “faith in simpler explanations”?
The greater the specificity of a concept is, the less plausible it must be. For example, if I make two guesses, first that you have a sibling, and second that this hypothetical sibling is female, the second, more specific guess is necessarily less likely to be true than the first one.
Eliezer has written some stuff about this, but if you’re interested in a really rigorous argument, I recommend Paul Almond’s Occam’s Razor series (nine articles in total):
http://www.paul-almond.com/
Thanks for the link. Some of Almond’s other stuff was already on my “to read” list, it looks like I’ll be sinking a weekend on his site some time soon.
I think I see the distinction you’re making… the things inherent in the structure and relationships of a set of concepts (like specificity) effectively function as a priori truths, even though the concepts may be “about” empirical matters. This is clearly different from “faith”, which has a more speculative nature. My vague intuition that Occam’s Razor is somehow “like faith” still isn’t discharged, but perhaps Almond will bludgeon that out of me with his series.
I hope you mean “belief that doesn’t change in response to evidence”, because a priori beliefs is exactly what determines what you do with evidence and what you can come to believe later. For an example of unchanging belief: if you toss a normal coin 10 times and it lands “heads” each time, your belief about the probability of it coming “heads” should remain almost the same.
Epistemic beliefs are one side of the preference specification, the other in this formalism being utility function. If the behavior of “faith” beliefs is different from normal beliefs, it follows that they act contrary to the framework that expresses human preferences as probability+utility, breaking human preference as a result and leading to behavior that is insane (i.e. incorrect) according to human preferences (ethics/morality).
A possible common rule of beauty would be that a thing is beautiful if it is appreciated by some sentient being that finds it beautiful. However, this is completely vacuous, defining no constraint on what a sentient being might find beautiful. It does not prohibit arbitrary concepts of beauty. It is also far from fundamental, as the sentient beings are made of complicated physical systems.
Do you have a concept of a common rule that actually implies that some concept of beauty is impossible?
Are you talking about some of the real things that the human concept of beauty has a tendency to latch onto, like symmetry?
Yes, but not exactly. First, symmetry is a property of an object, whereas beauty isn’t. You can consider an object beautiful one day and not beautiful the next even though it hasn’t changed. Rather, if a creature observes something, “beauty” seems to be a perception the creature has about his perception of the object. But even though it’s second-order or whatever the correct terminology is, yes, I am talking about beauty as a “real” thing. I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I suppose you could conceivably observe “beauty” with an MRI (?), trained to recognize the signature of that experience.
To the extent which beauty is a real thing, that’s science. What science doesn’t give us is that the experience of beauty is significant in and of itself. By significant ‘in and of itself’ I mean that it’s not just significant because it is useful in helping us select a healthy mate, but in some way inherently awesome. I’ll use awesome here as possessing some significance additional to the significance that can be scientifically demonstrated. Of course the perception of awe could be recognized by the MRI. Theists describe this as feeling that the uinverse is purposeful and connected, but I will give a non-magical definition. If beauty is an inherently awesome thing, my thesis is that this awesomeness stems from its pattern in the natural world. Or rather, that the experience of awe comes from the perception of significant pattern but I’m afraid I’m being too meta already.
The following won’t make sense unless you actually consider beauty some type of real thing. Beauty has resulted from the natural laws of the universe: these laws resulted in atoms, that resulted in molecules, that resulted in life, that resulted in sapient humans that resulted in the experience of beauty, observed by an MRI when a person observes something they consider beautiful. Consider the relationship of the real existing thing “beauty” with the laws of the universe – it’s analogous to some kind of mathematical structure because the laws of the universe are analogous to mathematical structures/equations. It’s like some kind of sub-manifold in the phase space. This is what I’m calling “pattern”. Problematically, for us, everything that exists, including random noise, is a pattern and whether a pattern is awesome or not is interpretative, so it’s not verifiable of falsifiable. Nevertheless, humans are very good at identifying whether a pattern is awesome or not. Perhaps someone else could say more, but I just call this awesome-perception an aspect of “intuition” and know it must be contained within “good epistemology” because its what scientists and mathematicians use.
Finally, lets suppose that upon inspection, the pattern “Beauty” turns out to be just one of an infinite number of ways of solving the problem “P=motivate a creature to choose the healthiest mate”. I would then consider “beauty” real but arbitrary. On the other hand, suppose that “beauty” is a pattern that self-organizes in an infinite number of different contexts. Maybe, for example, it is present even among sapient creatures that are so unlike us they have no concept of evolution. Creating mammals and creating human minds was just one way that the universe was able to create the pattern “beauty”. And, therefore, “wow” – beauty is awesome. But this is just an illustrative example, I don’t claim to spell out what makes one pattern arbitrary and another pattern meaningful. My preference would be that significance doesn’t come from the prevalence or persistence of the pattern, but in the properties of the solutions, things like critical points, asymptotes, etc. I don’t care whether beauty is such a pattern, but I’d be very surprised though if “perception of truth” wasn’t such a pattern among sapient creatures.
Mush. Reread the metaethics sequence. The disagreement seems to be illusory, you just need to reconnect the terminology.
I agree; it’s mushy and pseudo-sciency. But all I’m trying to say is that it would be logical to think that if there’s order at the lowest levels (Shroedinger, etc) then there’s order on the higher levels. But I don’t seem to be understood with that. What is the disconnect?
-1 Theology
I think (3) is true.
I suppose I have to argue why, I apologize for this being long and IMO inane.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary. While some aspects may be arbitrary, there are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. The only reason why there wouldn’t be a common rule is if beauty is completely arbitrary, in which case we wouldn’t expect other species to have the concept anyway. The common rule would validate beauty in different contexts and would provide the possibility of a common universal beauty.
For the sake of argument: Let’s suppose a meta-property of beauty is the following rule: Something is beautiful if it physically manifests a value that you have. (This is the best I can come up with.)
The baby-eaters think that ruthlessly eating their young is beautiful. Applying the meta-rule, ruthlessly eating babies must represent some value X they have. (For example, X could be the thrill of power, exerting their will in defiance of what is good.). Thus the beauty of ruthlessness (context: baby-eaters) is validated by the fact that it is a physical manifestation of the value X.
It doesn’t matter if you value X. By logical application of the meta-rule, if you value X, you will be able to see some beauty in the physical manifestation of X. If you don’t value X, then it won’t be beautiful to you. This does not present any problem.
There’s mostly nothing meaningful here: I just got out what I put in with this silly example. But just one thing: even though your ideas of beauty are quite different from the baby-eaters, it is possible to find something beautiful in common. Namely, if there’s a common value. The beauty of the manifestation of a common value would have an external, objective beauty. This objective beauty evolved from whatever rules evolved sapience and the concept of beauty in the first place (quantum mechanics, somehow).
I think (3) is true.
It works like this. I have faith that human beauty isn’t completely arbitrary. There are some rules to it that would be shared by other species that have a concept of beauty. This common rule would define a common beauty. For example, let’s suppose a meta-property of beauty is the following rule: Something will be beautiful if it physically manifests a value that you have. (This is the best I can come up with.)
From what you’ve written above, we assume these baby-eaters think that ruthlessly eating their young is beautiful. Applying the meta-rule, ruthlessness must represent some value X they have. (For example, X could be the thrill of power, exerting their will in defiance of what is good.). Thus the beauty of ruthlessness is validated by the fact that it is a physical manifestation of the value X. (If you find yourself dissatisfied with this it is likely because I didn’t pick a good enough meta-rule.)
It doesn’t matter if you value X . By logical application of the meta-rule, if you value X, you will be able to see some beauty in the physical manifestation of X. If you don’t value X, then it won’t be beautiful to you. You said you can’t see beauty in ruthlessly eating babies, so actually you don’t value X. This does not present any problem.
Because this is what’s promised: you will both find a common application of the meta-rule beautiful. This would mean finding a common value, and physically manifesting it as Y. It is clear you would both find this thing Y beautiful.
There’s mostly nothing meaningful here: I just got out what I put in with this silly example. But just one thing: even though your ideas of beauty are different, you find something beautiful in common. This common beauty is external, objective beauty.