I’m sorry this feels like a bait-and-switch. Let me try to state my claim as clearly as I can: some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’). The nature of these experiences cannot be fully rendered into words, but it is of a similar character to that which causes even rational people to characterize the subjective experience of listening to music as somehow fundamentally different from looking at the grooves in a record despite the fact that the information entering your brain is the same in both cases.
some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’).
This seems a fairly empty claim. I believe in the existence of trees because I have had first-hand experiences (including: walking into a tree) for which the best explanation that I can come up with is that they were caused by the presence of trees.
I don’t see how this claim helps your argument.
A large part of this may be that I’m having some trouble seeing exactly what your argument is—it looks like you are claiming that you felt a sense of euphoria while having a religious experience once, and therefore have concluded that all religious experiences consist of nothing more than a sense of euphoria? How is this not a simple case of the typical mind fallacy, that is to say, the assumption that everyone else thinks in exactly the same way that you do?
The point I am trying to make is that some people believe in God for the exact same reason that you believe in trees: they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God.
all religious experiences consist of nothing more than a sense of euphoria
No, I’m advancing the hypothesis that such experiences are (at least part of) the foundation of religious belief, just as the first-hand experience of walking into a tree is (at least part of) the foundation of your belief in trees.
I strongly suspect, however, that most of your belief in trees comes not from walking into them, but from seeing them, with walking into them providing only additional confirmation for your prior belief. You don’t give this a lot of thought because the vast majority of your fellow creatures also see trees, and so your interactions with them become a network of self-reinforcing confirmations that trees do in point of fact exist. But imagine a different world, where everyone is blind except you, and the only tree is on the other side of a wide, impassable canyon. You can see the tree, but no one else can. Everyone thinks you’re insane because you believe in trees, indeed because you believe that the canyon has “another side” (what an absurd notion!)
How would you go about trying to convince your blind peers that you can in fact see the trees? Well, you might start by trying to convince them that you can see. This you can readily demonstrate, because you can do things that your blind peers can’t (I’ll leave it up to you to devise an appropriate experiment). But you still might have a hard time convincing them about trees. “Yeah, sure, he can do all kinds of cool tricks because of this supposed “gift of sight” that he has. But, c’mon, trees? Really?”
So now go back to 5000 BC and you’ve got people who think they hear the Voice of God. Some of them say, “God told me there is going to be a drought.” And by golly, the next year there is a drought. Can you see how some people might start to believe that there might be something to this God thing?
A while ago I talked to a person studying theology at university to become a minister. I asked him about spiritual experience. He answered that he doesn’t have any strong spiritual experiences and most of his classmates also haven’t. A few have and he considered them a bit strange because they were than also serious about things like no-sex-before-marriage. He was religious because he was brought up with the rituals of religion and not based on special spiritual experiences. The conversation took place in Berlin with is culturally different than the US, but he still considered himself to be really religious.
On the other hand I do have experience surrounding what most people would call a near-death experience. I do meditate together with nonreligious people who teach not to take visions during meditation too seriously.
It’s quite interesting that the spiritual experience of you was at a Christian summer camp and not in a church on Sunday. The Christian summer camp is not a standard institution of Christianity. The church on Sunday’s is. To me the church on Sunday is not a system that looks like it’s designed to produce spiritual experience. That’s how people can work on becoming Christian ministers without having had spiritual experience.
When it comes to the spiritual experience of lay people I Christian’s burned women as witches for going in that direction. I don’t think focusing on creating spiritual experience is a traditional focus of Christianity.
There are wide variations between the different Christian denominations/groups in terms of spiritual experiences. This includes their occurrence at all and how commonly they occur. Roman Catholics, more vanilla flavored groups (Baptists&Lutherans?), and the charismatic and pentecostal groups have massive variations on this that I’ve witnessed first hand.
I’m confident that there are Christian groups who have zero or next to zero spiritual experiences ever while there are also groups like the charismatic church within 5 km of my house where everyone in the entire church exhibits glossolalia and believes they are being gifted special fruits/powers via direct spirit possession by the holy spirit/ghost every single Sunday. That church has at least 300 members and is not an uncommon denomination in my area either. (And yes, watching a massive room full of >300 people stand around convulsing and making weird nonsense noises while they believe they’re being taken over by a non-human entity is about as disturbing as it sounds.)
The fact that people have stronger spiritual experiences at summer camps doesn’t surprise me based on what I’ve seen. The stuff that happened at a related church’s summer camp that I witnessed was even stranger and more discomforting that what I wrote above.
He answered that he doesn’t have any strong spiritual experiences and most of his classmates also haven’t. A few have and he considered them a bit strange because they were than also serious about things like no-sex-before-marriage.
This person sounds like an atheist who wants to cosplay as religious and considers the people who are actually religious to be “strange”.
Please note that “spiritual” != “supernatural”. I’m using “spiritual” here to describe a particular kind of subjective experience that some people have and others don’t. So there’s no such thing as “rejection of the spiritual”—that’s a category error.
The blindness metaphor presents spiritual sensitivity as an ability that rationalists lack.
That is exactly the hypothesis I’m advancing. I’m sorry if you find it offensive.
Your definition of “spiritual” is still not fully detailed here
That’s because spirituality is a subjective sensation, a quale. Those are notoriously difficult to define with precision.
does it contradict the proposition “spiritual” ∈ “supernatural”?
Spiritual experience is no more supernatural that any other subjective experience. But it can feel that way because of the manner in which it is induced.
Why do you characterize having spiritual experiences as an ability?
They happen to some people and not to others. For some such things (seizures, heart attacks, lapses of memory, panic attacks) we generally prefer not to have them happen to us, and wouldn’t call them “abilities”. For some (moments of insight, orgasms, restful nights’ sleep) we generally regard them as good things, and might call them “abilities”. Why should spiritual experiences—in particular, spiritual experiences of a kind that very strongly predispose the people who have them to draw incorrect conclusions about the world—be put in the latter category rather than the former?
One possible answer is that spiritual experiences are, well, nice. (Of course “nice” has exactly the wrong sorts of connotation here. Too bad.) But, e.g., falling wildly in love is nice too, but if you find that it happens every time you meet a new person-of-the-relevant-sex then any impartial observer would consider it more a liability than an ability. So that answer seems like it’s applying a wrong criterion.
Another possible answer is that spiritual experiences really are what many who have them say they are: actual perceptions of a transcendent reality. You feel like you’re in the presence of God? That’s because you actually are. I agree (of course) that if that’s so then having (the right sorts of) spiritual experience is an ability, and not having them is a disability. But you’ve already said you’re not yourself a believer, and if there is in fact no god then spiritual experiences that give the very strong impression of being encounters with a god are actively misleading. So that answer doesn’t seem to work.
The Christian tradition is very fond of a metaphor very much like the one you’re using here: “I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see”, etc. But what Christians generally mean by it is not that the “blind” don’t have spiritual experiences, but that the “blind” don’t perceive the presence and activity of God in whatever experiences (“spiritual” or not) they have. That’s a very reasonable usage (if we grant the Christians their premises). Yours seems quite different, and much less reasonable. If “spiritual experiences” are not perceptions of a transcendent reality, but endogenous brain phenomena, why is blindness a good metaphor for not having them, and more than for, say, not having ASMR?
Why do you characterize having spiritual experiences as an ability?
I think you’re reading too much positive connotation into the word “ability”. Some people can roll their tongues, other’s can’t. It’s not unreasonable to recast that as: some people have the ability to roll their tongues, others don’t.
There’s actually some evidence that the ability to have spiritual experience is adaptive, and that it can be learned and developed by conscious effort, so it might even be fair to characterize it is a skill. But again, don’t read too much endorsement into that. The ability to hang a spoon off your nose is a skill too.
Yup, that’s an ability. It’s a thing you can do when you want to do it and avoid when you don’t, and things with those characteristics we generally classify as abilities. Having “spiritual experiences” is not, for most people who have them, an ability in that sense—and if it were, I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I repeat: why classify “having spiritual experiences” as an ability rather than, say, a susceptibility? Why is it more like having ideas than like having colds? Why is it more like having orgasms than like having sneezes?
it can be learned and developed by conscious effort
If true, that would be (1) interesting and (2) a reason for seeing it as an ability. But let’s be a bit more careful. Having spiritual experiences on demand would be an ability (and, in the same way, if you had the rather peculiar superpower of catching a cold any time you wanted, that would be an ability although not a very useful one). But I don’t see that that makes the term “ability” appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I’m pushing this point because it seems to me that a lot of the work in your argument is actually being done by your choice of the word “ability” and your use of analogies (blindness...) that are only appropriate when talking about the absence of an ability, but it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve justified those choices. Maybe “ability” is a good term; maybe actually something with a different spin on it like “liability” or “susceptibility” would be better; maybe we need something more neutral. But when the choice of terminology and analogies matters, let’s have some actual support for it.
Yes, I understand. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to push back on.
But I don’t see that that makes the term “ability” appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I certainly agree with that, and so this reduces the issue to an empirical question: are spiritual experiences something that people can (mostly) control? I think they are. I don’t see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals like attending church, reciting prayers, singing, laying on of hands, sweat lodge ceremonies...
But it’s an “ability” that is more akin to “the ability to enjoy sex” or “the ability to appreciate modern art” than it is “the ability to fly an airplane” or “the ability to run a four-minute mile.”
I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I think that people who believe in God by and large don’t really think it through to that level of detail. Those that do tend to come to the conclusion you’d expect them to. And, BTW, this is why people don’t think it through. Losing the ability to commune with God can be very painful for some people. It’s rather like if you think too hard about the biological realities of sex you can lose the ability (sic!) to enjoy it.
I don’t see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals
I don’t see a lot of evidence of people getting venereal diseases outside the context of having sex, or getting hangovers outside the context of drinking a lot. Are those “abilities”? I don’t think so. If you agree, what’s the relevant difference?
Sure, why not? Someone who can drink heavily without getting a hangover can be said to have “the ability to hold their liquor.” It’s a little harder to find a commonly used phrase to refer to someone who can have unprotected sex without contracting venereal diseases. This would probably be referred to as an “immunity” rather than an “ability.”
If you want to speak of people having “immunity” from spiritual experiences I certainly won’t argue with you.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear and you ended up interpreting my question as almost the exact opposite of what I intended, so let me try to clarify.
You argue (if I understand right) as follows. Spiritual experiences generally occur only in certain contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. To that extent, they are voluntary. So, those who have spiritual experiences have some ability to choose whether to have them or not. So, having spiritual experiences is an “ability”.
But exactly parallel things are true of some things we don’t generally classify that way, like getting venereal diseases or having hangovers. Both of those things occur only in particular contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. (Having sex; drinking a lot of alcohol.)
I guess you would not generally speak of “the ability to contract gonorrhea” or “the ability to get a raging hangover”, any more than I would. So why does the fact that spiritual experiences generally occur in special contexts give good reason to speak of “the ability to have spiritual experiences”?
Ah. Well, one difference is that spiritual experiences feel good, and so many people seek them out. No one seeks to have a hangover or contract gonorrhea.
I am still not convinced, for reasons I’ll give in a moment, but actually I think this would be a good time to exercise some rationalist skills. We have a difficulty over definitions, so let’s taboo the term “ability” and perhaps take some cues from Yvain’s excellent post about “disease”.
So, can you state your thesis without using the word “ability” or anything equivalent? Can you make explicit what specific features of “spiritual experiences” are relevant and how they lead to the conclusions you want to draw?
I should fulfil my promise to explain why the combination of “only in some situations that we can seek out” and “feels good” isn’t enough to justify calling something an “ability”, at least as I use the word. Let me quote from Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections. “Him” here is an elderly man, Al, whose mental function is beginning to go downhill.
Still looking at the window, he raised his head with a tentative joy, as if he thought he recognized someone outside, someone he loved. [...] “There are children,” he said, sitting up straighter. “Do you see them?” [...] “Al, those are sunflowers, she [sc. his wife] said, half angry, half beseeching. “You’re seeing reflections in the window.”
Al has had a pleasant experience (thinking he saw children playing) which will occur only in certain circumstances that perhaps he could seek out (there being sunflowers around to confuse with children). Would you want to talk about the ability to confuse sunflowers with children? I wouldn’t.
So, can you state your thesis without using the word “ability” or anything equivalent?
Well, I’m actually defending two theses here, one of which is that “ability” is an appropriate term to use, but I’m happy to just agree to disagree about that.
Here’s a restatement of my other (hypo)thesis, making my best effort to avoid loaded terms:
There exists a kind of subjective experience that is analogous to but distinct from other subjective experiences like seeing a sunset, tasting food, hearing music, etc. It is a real subjective experience, not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology (though it can be associated with some pathologies, particularly in its more extreme forms). It is induced not by light nor chemicals nor sound, but rather by engaging in certain behaviors (like prayer) and approaching those behaviors with a certain mindset. The mindset is difficult to describe without using loaded words (I want to call it “faith”) so I’ll just call it the opposite of (or an absence of) skepticism (I presume that’s not a loaded term?)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation, either because they have not engaged in the behaviors that produce it, or because they are unable or unwilling to enter the mindset that produces it, or because their brains are wired in such a way that they are simply do not (I originally wrote “are unable to” here) experience it even with the right behavior and mindset. It is a situation completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green, and therefore cannot have the same subjective experience of seeing a tree and a sunset as someone who can (“is able to”) distinguish red and green.
It is this difference in firsthand subjective experience that accounts at least in part for the seemingly intractable differences among people when it comes to questions about the existence of deities. Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith (no pun intended) can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
I advance this hypothesis because if it is true then it seems plausible that disagreements over the existence of deities will become less intractable and more fruitful if those who have not had these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience, and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency. To the contrary, it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains, or at least a normal part of the human experience which they have simply never experienced. Moreover, the explanation of the experience in terms of an encounter with a deity may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief, and that presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful, even traumatic, because (among other things) it might make them think that they are suffering from a pathology or otherwise be mentally deficient.
Finally, though I didn’t make this explicit, I’m suggesting that all this should be taken into account when deciding how to interact with someone who believes in deities. Throwing logic at religion might not be the best move.
There exists a kind of subjective experience [...]
I think the only part of that paragraph that is in any way controversial is the bit where you say the experience in question is “not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology”—but I think most even of the most fire-breathing atheists wouldn’t claim that religious experience as such is a delusion (I think that would be a category error) or pathological. So: so far so good, but not much of substance yet.
(But, on that just-infinitesimally-controversial point—I remark that the word “real” that you use is at least a little bit loaded, and it’s not really clear to me what it means. I mean, what’s the alternative? They have this experience but it’s a fake experience? What would that even mean? The obvious thing for it to mean is that the experience doesn’t have the meaning they think it has; that although it seems to them that what they’ve experienced is being touched by an angel or spoken to by God or whatever, the real cause of their experience is something very different. But that’s the position you yourself have taken, so you surely can’t mean “real” in opposition to anything like that.)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation [...]
Again, true and uncontroversial.
completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green
Bzzzzt! I think it’s very interesting that even when deliberately trying to state your thesis without loaded terms, you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency. I suggest that unless religious experiences are actual perceptions of non-natural realities—a position that AIUI you explicitly reject—the two things are demonstrably not “completely analogous”. Why? Because probably the single most salient thing about that inability-to-distinguish, the thing that explains why it’s sometimes called “colour blindness”, is that it involves an actual perceptual deficit. In “colour-blind” individuals, an extremely important channel by which information about the external world flows into their brain has substantially less sensitivity, substantially less bandwidth, than in individuals with normal colour vision. The colour-blind get less information about the world through their eyes than the not-colour-blind, and you can measure how much less. Whereas those who don’t have “spiritual experiences” … don’t have a particular kind of experience, which by your own account conveys no information about the outside world, no genuine insight into the nature of reality—it’s just an experience that some people have and some people find enjoyable or moving or motivating.
Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith [...] can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
Again, true and close to 100% uncontroversial. (Aside from the caveat stated above about the word “real”.)
disagreements [...] will become [...] more fruitful if those who have not have these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience [...]
So far (I acknowledge that your sentence isn’t over yet) this seems true but pointless: so far as I can tell, pretty much everyone acknowledges that. So let’s continue and see whether it gets more contentful as the sentence continues.
and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency.
Still 100% uncontroversial; so far as I can tell basically no one claims that having religious experiences is necessarily symptomatic of pathology or mental deficiency.
(So, so far, it seems to me that the thesis you’re advancing is true but—my apologies! -- utterly uninteresting. It’s as if you were earnestly enjoining us not to punch believers in the face while discussing religion with them: sure, it’s good advice, but whatever makes you think we need it? I think this explains some of the negativity in the responses you’ve had: if you earnestly tell people not to punch believers in the face, they’re liable to get the impression that you think they would be punching believers in the face without your advice, and that would be a stupid thing to do, and no one likes being told they’re stupid.)
it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains
You’re really not trying all that hard to avoid loaded terms, are you? :-) I’m getting the impression that for some reason it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours. But I’m not sure what that reason is. A cynical hypothesis would be that you like feeling superior to those skeptics, but I bet the truth is more interesting than that. Any idea what it might be?
the explanation [...] may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief [...] presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful
Yup, it may. This is perhaps the least obvious thing you’ve said, but—sorry, again—it’s still pretty damn obvious.
although I didn’t make this explicit
I think you did. Right back in the OP, you wrote: “The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It’s about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.”
So after all this, I think my conclusion is this: with the value-laden bits stripped out, what you’re saying is common knowledge, to such an extent that the suggestion that skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it. That feels like a really uncharitable and negative conclusion, which I regret. Perhaps I’m missing something that’s genuinely non-obvious, or perhaps I’m overoptimistic about the actual understanding and knowledge of skeptics. If so, perhaps you can point out some bit of what you’ve said that I should be more surprised by, or something?
I’d like to say a few words on one other point that’s maybe getting a bit overlooked in this discussion, which is that there are plenty of religious people who don’t have much in the way of religious experiences, plenty more who do but who don’t take them to be the main support for their beliefs, and also plenty of skeptics who have very similar experiences but interpret them very differently; and that having such experiences doesn’t seem to make skeptics any less abrasive. For instance, Sam Harris (author of, e.g., “The End of Faith”, one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement) is a practitioner of meditation, which he says provides him with mystical experiences, but he’s every bit as antireligious as, say, Richard Dawkins. On the other side: well, every now and then you get religious “revivals” characterized by fairly widespread religious experiences, often manifesting as things like “speaking in tongues”, and what makes them notable is precisely the fact that this is not the usual state of affairs in the churches where they happen. For instance, back in the mid-1990s when I was an evangelical Christian, there was something of a to-do in the UK’s evangelical Anglican churches about the so-called Toronto Blessing, and I’m pretty sure that in the churches I frequented this was mostly because most of the people there, most of the time, did not have dramatic religious experiences at all, and they were excited at the prospect of such experiences becoming more common.
So, if plenty of religious people seldom or never have these experiences, and quite a few very vigorously anti-religious people do have them, it seems to me that the difference between having them and not having them can’t be that large a part of what makes some people skeptical about religion and others not. I dare say it plays a role sometimes, but it seems like you’re suggesting that it’s more than that, and I find that unlikely.
you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency.
That’s right, because I think it is a kind of deficiency, though I would not have used that word if you had not introduced it into the conversation.
There’s a lot of controversy within the deaf community about whether being deaf is a deficiency or just another way of being, kind of like being gay. Personally, I think being deaf is a deficiency, but there’s a significant faction of the deaf community that would take offense at that. Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
it involves an actual perceptual deficit
Fair enough. Let me choose a different analogy then: some people have a subjective experience called “empathy” which manifests as a visceral revulsion at, for example, deliberately inflicting pain on another person even in situations where inflicting such pain might provide a net benefit to the inflicter. Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
Note that this has nothing to do with any objective judgement about the state of the world. Sociopaths and psychopaths know that other people experience pain, they just don’t care.
it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours
The truth is important to me, yes. But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it, just like I wouldn’t use “deficiency” without being prompted. Most people are straight, so technically being straight is normal and so one could argue that not being straight is “abnormal”. But by that standard, having red hair is abnormal. That is not what most people mean when they say “abnormal.”
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend. So let me try this: If you’re white you have a deficiency in skin pigmentation, and this deficiency leads to an inability to tolerate a lot of sun exposure without injury. Despite using the words “deficiency” and “inability” this is intended to be a mere statement of fact, not a value judgement. That is the sense in which I intend such words to be read when it comes to the “ability” to have spiritual experiences. Having spiritual experiences (or not) is neither good not bad, just different.
skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it
What can I say? I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it. That’s one of the things that motivated me to start writing about this.
It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics. The world bifurcates rather neatly into two camps: those who think what I’m saying is obvious and common knowledge, and those who think I’m a category 5 loon. And there are card-carrying physicists in both camps.
I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed. (But personally I think your continued insistence on applying negative-valence terminology to Those Who Do Not Have Spiritual Experiences is much ruder than anything I’ve said in this discussion.)
Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function. Whether that justifies using terms like “disability”, or whether e.g. membership in the Deaf community is a sufficiently important counterbalancing good to make such terms inappropriate, is perhaps debatable; but again it seems to me that you are drawing an analogy where the central feature of the thing on one side of the analogy is not present on the other.
My pushback consists mostly of pointing that out. It therefore doesn’t seem very similar to me.
Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
I think what’s usually “officially” reckoned pathological, if you look in the DSM or whatever, is not lack of empathy as such but psychopathy, a condition identified not merely by lack of empathy but by other underlying characteristics and outward effects including lack of concern for the welfare of others. Perhaps lack of empathy itself should be reckoned pathological, though, so let’s proceed with that stipulation.
So let’s consider why not having empathy is (or might be, or should be) considered pathological, when (e.g.) not having much melanin in your skin, or not having an appendix, is not. It seems to me that there are two reasons. First: not having empathy not infrequently leads to severe adverse consequences for other people: psychopaths are greatly overrepresented in the criminal population, for instance. Severe adverse consequences are an important part of what leads things to be reckoned pathologies. Second: not having empathy is rare. That’s not a necessary condition for calling something a pathology, but it helps; in doubtful cases, things present in a large fraction of the population are more likely to be reckoned just “normal variation” rather than pathology.
I mentioned “not having much melanin” as an example earlier, and actually it’s an informative one. If you merely have rather little melanin, you’re called “white-skinned” and that’s regarded as a normal condition. If you have none at all (and other things that tend to go along with having none at all) you’re called “albino” and that’s regarded as a pathology. Why? I think for the same reasons as I gave above: albinism is worse for you than merely being “white”, and much rarer.
Can we bring that parallel back to the case of psychopathy? I think so. Psychopathy is what you get when someone has no empathy at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with absence of empathy, and there are substantial bad effects. (Just as albinism is what you get when someone has no melanin at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with that, and there are substantial bad effects.) There is substantial variation in empathy within the “normal” population, though (just as there is substantial variation in amount of melanin and hence in skin tone) and people who are merely rather low in empathy are not generally considered pathological, though they might well be considered not very nice.
(There’s an important difference; so far as I know, there aren’t mostly-discrete populations with substantially different empathy levels, in the way that there are mostly-discrete populations with substantially different melanin levels.)
OK, enough preparatory stuff. How does this apply to the sorts of transcendent experiences we’re talking about? How close is your analogy? Let’s see.
First of all (dammit, more preparatory stuff; sorry) I think we need to clarify a thing or two about those experiences, because you’ve written about them in a rather black-and-white way: religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them, and that’s why one group is religious and the other is skeptical. I’ve already suggested that actually both the “discordant” categories have plenty of people in them, but I want to draw attention to another relevant fact: having-these-experiences isn’t a binary thing. Not only because the frequency of such experiences can vary continuously, but also because there’s a continuum of experiences of this type, ranging from transcendent life-changing brain-buggering ones down to minor ones you might barely notice. The less dramatic ones are more common, and I suggest that what you might call “low-grade” spiritual experiences—a sense of great awe at something like the Grand Canyon or the starry sky, a passing feeling of exhilaration for no particular reason, briefly losing your sense of individuality at a concert or political rally, etc., etc., etc. -- are quite common even among the actively anti-religious. Even, e.g., everyone’s favourite skeptical punching bag, Richard Dawkins. Unless, of course, you define your terms so that those who don’t interpret their experiences as encounters with a non-natural reality are ipso facto not having that kind of experience; I hope you can see the problems that that would raise.
Now, exactly what I want to say about the analogy between spiritual experiences and empathy depends on exactly what we count as “having transcendent experiences”. How often? How dramatic?
If you mean having quite dramatic ones quite often: In this case, my impression is that even among the actively religious most people don’t have dramatic spirtiual experiences often. So not-having-the-experiences would be not merely within the range of normal variation, but actually the majority situation. What about the adverse-effects criterion? Well, on the one hand, dramatic spiritual experiences are generally greatly treasured by those who have them, so not having them seems like it involves missing out on something valuable. On the other hand, dramatic spirirtual experiences seem to be systematically misleading: those who have them are disproportionately likely to embrace factually incorrect metaphysical theses with enough enthusiasm that it redirects the course of their lives, so having them seems like a dangerous business. This all looks to me to have rather the same shape as taking mind-altering drugs: the effects can be pleasant or overwhelming or life-alteringly overwhelming, but pursuing them can take over your life and lead you to situations you really wouldn’t have wanted to be in before you started. I think it’s far from clear that the adverse consequences of not having the experiences are worse than those of having them.
If you mean having low-grade ones not so often: In this case, my impression is that very many of the people you’re taking aim at (including the one target you’ve mentioned twice by name, Richard Dawkins) do “have the experiences”, so the question of whether not having them should be considered pathological is kinda irrelevant.
But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal: “a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend.
If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
If you mean only that he wasn’t willing to use the loaded language you prefer, to treat Not Having The Experiences as a deficit, an abnormality, a thing like psychopathy and colour-blindness—yeah, sure, I dare say he wasn’t, but (as I thought I’d made very clear) that isn’t what I’m saying is commonplace.
If you mean something else: what did he deny? That some religious people have dramatic religious experiences? That some skeptics don’t? That having dramatic religious experiences tends to make people more inclined to believe in a religion? (These are all things I would be surprised to find him denying, but he’s done surprising things before.) Or what?
It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics
I wouldn’t generally advise being worried on account of being called a loon by Luboš Motl, who has rather eccentric ideas about what constitutes lunacy. But, without making any comment on whether either his complaints or those of the unspecified other people who think what you’re saying is boringly familiar are correct, it seems to me that there’s no inconsistency. Motl says you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says and have made a mistake about polarization of light. As to the former, if you say “Copenhagen says X but actually Y” then Motl can be right if actually Copenhagen says something other than X, and the other guys can be right if every practising quantum physicist already accepts Y. As to the latter, what you say can be mostly correct and obvious even if there are a couple of mistakes in there.
So I’m not seeing the inconsistency there any more than here.
(In any case, I hope it’s clear that being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right.)
I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed.
OK, I’m sorry if I was being humor-impaired.
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function.
You’ll have to take this up with someone in the deaf community because I’m on your side of this particular issue. Nonetheless, the fact is that there exist deaf people who vehemently disagree with both of us on this.
So let’s consider why not having empathy
You’re getting too far into the weeds here. I brought up empathy not because it’s exactly the same as spiritual experience sensitivity (I’m going to start abbreviating that as SES) but because it’s a purely internal subjective experience and not relatable to anything that is objectively measurable outside the individual brain that is experiencing it. Of course many of the salient details are different, that’s why I didn’t choose it as my primary example.
religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them
I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is, but either way I don’t agree with this statement. In fact, I rather belabor the point that I am a skeptic who has spiritual experiences, so I myself am a counterexample.
I also think that a fair number of religious people don’t have spiritual experiences. Mother Theresa, for example, probably never had one.
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal
No, that really is an unjustified extrapolation on your part. Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.
Again, no. Some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the ability to produce the enzyme that digests lactose. This is actually the “normal” state of affairs; the ability to digest lactose arose very late in human evolutionary history. But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal.”
You really are reading more into these words than I intend or that is justified by common patterns of usage.
If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
Because English doesn’t have enough value-neutral words. How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements? The very name “lactose intolerance” has a value judgement built into it: intolerance.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
I was on an Antarctic cruise with him so we had a lot of conversations over the course of about three weeks. I got to know him quite well on a personal level. He specifically denied a lot of things. The overall tenor of his denials was to make clear that he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural, even if those beliefs have a net benefit to them. For example: at one point I argued that belief can have demonstrable benefits through the placebo effect. So even if God wasn’t real, the idea of God was real and had real and potentially beneficial effects for some people, and so dissuading them of these beliefs was not necessarily a good thing to do. His response was (and these are his exact words—I will never forget them): “But it’s not true.” Meaning: it doesn’t matter if dissuading people from their belief might send them into existential despair or even cause them actual harm; allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil.
you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says
Well, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what the Copenhagen interpretation is. But there is no question that the elements I presented are commonly associated with the Copenhagen brand, even if that’s not what Motl thinks of when he uses the term.
and have made a mistake about polarization of light
What mistake would that be?
being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right
Certainly true, but when one of those attacks is, “What you’re saying is so obvious it’s insulting for you to think we didn’t already know this” and the other is, “What you’re saying is so obviously false that it’s not even worth a respectful debunking” then I actually feel pretty good about having had something worthwhile to say, even if I might not be right.
I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is
Actually, not quite either; it’s intended as a restatement not of your explicitly taken position (which I know it is contrary to) but of what seems to me to be implicit in how you write about these things. You say (and I agree) that some skeptics have “spiritual experiences” and some religious people don’t; but I think no one reading the rest of what you write would get that impression.
Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
I am not saying “lisper says X is normal; therefore lisper says not-X is abnormal”. Not at all. I am pointing at an instance where you wrote something more specific. I quoted it before; let me quote it again. “it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. (Emphasis yours.) What would count as “abnormal”, if having a normal part of the wiring of the human brain missing from your brain doesn’t?
But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal”.
Again it seems that you’re taking me to argue that if you think something is normal then you have to think its opposite is abnormal. I agree that you needn’t do any such thing, and that is not the argument I was making. (See above.)
How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements?
“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well. If more detail is required: “Children’s bodies produce an enzyme called lactase that breaks down one of the constituents in milk. Many adults’ bodies don’t, and if those people drink milk or eat things made from milk they feel ill afterwards. Some adults’ bodies do, especially in Western Europe and places colonized by Western Europeans. Those people can digest milk products without feeling bad.”
Or, if we need a brief technical-sounding term: “lactase nonpersistence”.
He specifically denied a lot of things.
You know, I was hoping you might be specific. (I see that you give one specific example below, on which I will comment in a moment; it doesn’t seem to me that it actually supports what you’re saying.)
he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural
I hope you won’t be offended by my saying this, but given your apparent inability in this discussion to state your thesis without using terms that (so it seems to me, and so it might plausibly have seemed to Richard Dawkins if you did the same in conversation with him) represent these believers as being better than skeptics who don’t share their experiences, it seems plausible to me that what Dawkins actually took exception was those value judgements, rather than the bare assertions that, e.g., religious people sometimes have religious experiences and see those as evidence for their religion.
The specific example you give seems, actually, quite clearly not a matter of Dawkins disagreeing with the factual statements you’ve been making about spiritual experiences (as opposed to the value judgements you’ve been making, which as I already said are not obvious and uncontroversial). He didn’t—at least, those words you will never forget didn’t—deny that the idea of God can have beneficial effects. He just indicated that, as you put it, “allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil”.
I wonder whether I’ve failed to communicate effectively what it is in what you’re saying that I think is commonplace and obvious. I suggest that you’re saying two main things. (1) Some religious people have religious experiences, and these are part of why they believe what they do, and the experiences are real experiences and very important to those people, and non-religious people talking to religious people should bear all that in mind. (2) These experiences are valuable and positive, and people who have them are normal and people who don’t have them are not normal and have something missing from their brains and are like colour-blind or deaf people.
I think #1 is obvious and commonplace. I think #2 is a matter of values and definitions more than of facts, and I do not think you have given us good reason to agree with it.
The specific thing you quote Richard Dawkins as saying contradicts neither #1 nor #2 as such (though I bet he disagrees with #2) but a further claim you haven’t explicitly made in this discussion (though you’ve made some gestures in its direction): that belief (as opposed to spiritual experiences) can have sufficiently positive consequences to make it a good thing even when incorrect. I think that’s a more plausible claim than #2 and a more controversial one (especially around here) than #1. But it isn’t what you’ve been saying here so far.
[...] Copenhagen interpretation [...]
I have the impression I didn’t make it clear enough that I am not endorsing any of Motl’s criticisms. I haven’t watched your Google talk and therefore have no opinion about the correctness of any specific claims you made there, and I think Motl is a buffoon.
What mistake would that be?
The one Motl claims you made in the blog post you linked to. (Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the only thing I am saying about his claim is that it’s consistent with the “opposite” criticisms you say you’ve received. I have no idea whether any of the criticisms from either side are correct because, again, I don’t know any of the details of what you have said about quantum physics.)
when one of those attacks is [...] and the other is [...]
… you should consider the possibility that they are addressing different things you’ve said. Compare the old joke: “There is much in X’s book that is new, and much that is correct. Unfortunately, the new parts are not correct and the correct parts are not new.”
I repeat that I have no idea what you’ve said about quantum physics, and therefore no idea whether any complaint of that sort has any validity. But I might level a similar complaint at what you’ve been saying here about spiritual experiences.
First, I want to thank you for continuing to engage on this. Your feedback is very much appreciated. But we may need to agree to disagree on this.
“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities, notwithstanding that their beliefs are objectively false. How’s that?
Dawkins
If you want to formulate a question to direct to Dawkins that is phrased in a way that you would accept his answer as definitive, I will forward it to him, thought it’s possible that his recent health issues might prevent him from replying in a timely manner.
In my conversations with him he more than once disagreed categorically with statements that were essentially equivalent (though not word-for-word identical) with the formulation I just gave.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities [...]
Aha, a much more objectively stated thesis. It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing, though. This one I agree is neither obviously true nor obviously false. Since it still has the value-dependent word “benefit” in, disagreement about it might stem mostly from differences in values—e.g., how to trade off being happier against having more accurate beliefs. (FWIW I think I would agree with the statement, but I suspect my estimate of what fraction of religious people really are better off on net because of their beliefs would be lower than yours.)
his recent health issues
Yeah, I think he has other more important things on his plate than clearing up a side-issue in our discussion.
It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing
It is different, and I argued with myself over whether to include the explanation of how to get from A to B, but decided not to because the waters were muddy enough already. It’s one of these things that I thought would be obvious, but obviously (!) my intuitions about what is obvious are failing me in this case.
In any case, if you want to pursue this, I’m happy to elaborate. (Maybe I should write a followup post?) But this thread is already pretty long, maybe we should call it a day. Your call.
I have no trouble seeing a connection. If you think there’s more—an actual implication—then I may be missing something. (Or we may merely disagree, which I think is more likely.)
Feel free to elaborate or not as you please. I have no objection to calling it a day.
The blindness metaphor presents spiritual sensitivity as an ability that rationalists lack.
That is exactly the hypothesis I’m advancing.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that people who strive to discipline their thinking process to constantly improve themselves, become sharper, make fewer mistakes, notice and correct their own biases, revise their opinions, and mercilessly seek their own weak points somehow lack awareness of an entire and tremendously important field of human experience?
Rationalists are the last group of people I’d expect to miss something so crucial, if it were real.
Yes, that’s pretty much correct, except for one very important thing.
You didn’t actually say it, but there’s a subtle implication in the way you framed my position that the causality runs in a particular direction, i.e. rationalists strive to discipline their thinking etc. and AS A RESULT lack awareness of an entire field of human experience. That is wrong. In fact, it’s exactly backwards. (And I can now understand why you might have found it offensive.)
The causality runs in the opposite direction: some people lack (first-hand) awareness of this important field of human experience, and because they lack this awareness they tend to become rationalists. So this “lack of first-hand awareness” is not necessarily a deficit.
Here’s an analogy: some people feel addictive cravings more than others. Someone who doesn’t experience addictive cravings might have a hard time empathizing with someone who does because they can’t imagine what it’s like to have an addictive craving, never having had one of their own. So they might imagine that kicking an addiction is a simple matter of “exercising more self control” or some such thing, and have a hard time understanding why an addict would have such a hard time doing that. In an exactly analogous manner, someone who is not sensitive to spiritual experience might have a hard time understanding or empathizing with someone who does. It does not follow that not feeling addictive cravings is a bad thing.
Rationalists are the last group of people I’d expect to miss something so crucial, if it were real.
That depends a great deal on who you consider “rationalists.” I’ve met a lot of self-identified rationalists but who are not even willing to consider the idea that spiritual experience varies across the human population as a hypothesis worthy of consideration. Heck, this article got so many downvotes early on that it almost cost me my posting privileges here on LW! Harshing on religious people seems to play a very important role in the social cohesion of many groups of people who self-identify as rationalists, and so it’s not too surprising that the suggestion that there might be something wrong with that is met with a great deal of hostility. Even self-identified rationalists are still human.
You didn’t actually say it, but there’s a subtle implication in the way you framed my position that the causality runs in a particular direction, i.e. rationalists strive to discipline their thinking etc. and AS A RESULT lack awareness of an entire field of human experience. That is wrong. In fact, it’s exactly backwards. (And I can now understand why you might have found it offensive.)
The causality runs in the opposite direction: some people lack (first-hand) awareness of this important field of human experience, and because they lack this awareness they tend to become rationalists. So this “lack of first-hand awareness” is not necessarily a deficit.
There is a third option; the third option is that there is correlation but not causation, in either direction. That the rationalist community started out top-heavy enough with atheists that atheism has become something of an in-group bias; strongly and vocally religious people tend to be shunned to some degree, not enough to force all out, but enough to maintain the atheistic dominance in most groups that call themselves rationalist.
That is indeed a third possibility, but I think it can be safely ruled out. If there were a shred of actual evidence that spiritual experience was anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon then I’m pretty sure the rational community would welcome religious people with open arms. The problem is, there is no such evidence, so there’s a limit to how welcoming rationalists can be to someone who insists that God is an actual deity.
If there were a shred of actual evidence that spiritual experience was anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon then I’m pretty sure the rational community would welcome religious people with open arms. The problem is, there is no such evidence
Let’s consider briefly the opposite case. Let’s assume that there’s some miracle that can be called up on demand. It’s simple, straightforward, and experimentally verifiable.
In fact, drawing inspiration from the Miracle of Lanciano, let’s say that bread and wine turn to flesh and blood every time the priest consecrates it. Every time. It always has the same DNA, which matches what one might expect of a Nazerene aroundabout 10A.D. Repeatedly. Assume that this has always been the case, as long as anyone can tell, ever since the early years A.D. (and, as far as anyone knows, nobody tried it before then).
What happens? Well, presumably, a group of scientists investigate the phenomenon. They take measurements. They show how momentum and energy are conserved in the process. They check very thoroughly for any form of trickery, and find none.
Eventually, one of them comes up with some long, complicated, barely plausible theory involving spontaneous chemical reactions in organic substances, suggests that this is the same process by which the bread you eat turns into part of you, and concludes that bread is an excellent food for growing children as it is easily converted to human muscles.
In short, because it is a repeatable miracle, someone tries to fit it into the realm of things that are explainable without postulating the existence of God. If he is successful, then it looks like God is being cagey, and if he is not, then it looks like we are merely awaiting someone able to figure out a successful explanation (and God is being cagey).
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps:
First, everyone would strongly suspect fraud of some kind. So there’d be a lot of attempts to check this—from scientists and from Randi-type debunkers. Ex hypothesi these would not in fact detect fraud.
At this point we would have a very well verified phenomenon that’s fabulously difficult to fit into the standard naturalist/reductionist framework—the only way we know of for whether someone has been validly ordained as a priest to influence what happens is via some kind of mind that’s able to work with concepts like “priest”, “ordained”, and “valid”. So somewhere around here I would expect the great majority of scientific skeptical types to conclude that something is paying attention to human religious rituals. Might be God, might be aliens with eccentric interests, might be some sort of superpowered AI whose existence we never noticed, etc., etc., etc., but it seems like it has to be something with a mind and with abilities that go way beyond ours.
It would be worth checking a few more-reductionist things. For instance: just what changes to the process of priest-making suffice to make transubstantiation not work? (In many traditions, and in particular in those traditions that believe in transubstantiation in our world, priests have to be ordained by bishops, and bishops have to be ordained by other bishops, and the process involves a ceremonial laying on of hands. Is it possible that there’s some thing that gets transferred when that happens? That would be interesting, and might make some of the more-natural options look a bit more plausible. On the other hand, does success depend essentially on intent everywhere down the line? That seems to require non-human minds watching.)
If someone comes up with an actually-working theory about chemical reactions, that would be very interesting indeed—but it would need to be a theory that explains why the process only works for priests, and only when they are performing a eucharistic ceremony. Otherwise, it’s going to be much less plausible even to the most thoroughgoing skeptic than “a god did it” or “superpowered aliens did it”.
Distinguishing between the various kinds of superpowered nonhuman intelligence that might have done this thing would be tricky. It seems like it would need to be either something rather like the god of Christianity, or else something deliberately masquerading as the god of Christianity. That might already be enough to justify adopting Christianity as at least a working hypothesis.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ll just add that you don’t have to get anywhere near this level of improbability (converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry) to get convincing evidence of the existence of a deity. It would be enough to show that people who prayed to a particular deity could produce any measurable effect that could not be accounted for by a placebo effect with statistically higher probability of success than those who prayed to some other deity. It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something—anything—but have it be the same thing in both cases. The two believers write down what God tells them without communicating with each other, and then you check to see if they match. If people who prayed to Jesus matched more often than people who prayed to Allah under otherwise identical circumstances, that would really get my attention.
When I suggest things like this to believers, the response is invariably a citation of Matthew 4:7 or some variation on that theme.
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
I think you are making an elementary error: from “the Bible says not-X”, inferring “the Bible doesn’t say X”.
Deuteronomy 6:16 says “You shall not put YHWH your god to the test as you did at Massah”. That’s a reference to the events described in Exodus 17:7: “[Moses] named the place Massah and Meribah, because the children of Israel quarrelled and tested YHWH, saying ‘Is YHWH among us or not?’.” That’s the bit where they get all grumpy at Moses because they have nothing to drink, and he strikes a rock with his staff and produces water.
So it’s all a bit flaky, but I don’t think Jesus is wrong here. The Israelites get grumpy and accuse Moses of bringing them all this way out into the desert to let them die of thirst; Moses performs a miracle to give them some water and reassure them; God, as purportedly quoted by the author of Deuteronomy, interprets this as putting God to the test (this, if anything, is the dubious bit; the story in Exodus sounds as if their problem was thirst more than it was doubt) and tells them not to do it again; Jesus appeals to this when challenged to demonstrate that he, like Moses, has God on his side. (Digression: It seems to me that his response here would have been better as a response to the previous temptation—to make rocks into food—which is awfully reminiscent of what the Israelites had had Moses do. I wonder, and this is pure baseless speculation, whether at one point there were two temptation narratives going around, both involving the stones-into-food challenge, with Jesus giving the “man does not live by bread alone” answer in one version and the “do not put God to the test” answer in the other—and then Mark or Q or whoever wanted to include both stories but needed a second temptation, and therefore made one up. This would also explain why the second temptation is such a silly one.)
Heh, you’re right. I missed this because in the KJV Deu6:16 is translated as “shall not” rather than “shalt not” so my text search didn’t find it. I stand corrected. Sorry, Jesus.
God, as purportedly quoted by the author of Deuteronomy, interprets this as putting God to the test (this, if anything, is the dubious bit; the story in Exodus sounds as if their problem was thirst more than it was doubt)
They doubted God’s ability to provide them with water.
Now I’m imagining it a bit like a long journey in a car, with Israel the nation being like a very whiny child:
“Are we there yet?”
“We’ll get there when we get there.”
...
“Are we THERE yet?”
“No.”
...
“Are we there yet?”
“No, we didn’t get there in the last ten seconds.”
...
“I’m thirsty.”
“Here, have some water, and if you can’t sit quietly for a few minutes, I’ll have you wandering the desert for forty years, okay?”
converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry
Okay, I haven’t looked into this in any detail, but I must say this comes as a surprise. What elements are in meat that aren’t in bread, or vice versa? (I had expected that they were both, pretty near entirely, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which is why the human body can digest bread and use it to grow—which is really a long-term way of transforming it into human flesh).
It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something—anything—but have it be the same thing in both cases.
Now, that would be interesting. It does require God’s deliberate participation—in fact, all experiments to prove His existence do—so it’s not going to work if He doesn’t play ball. (Which brings us right back to the question of why He is so cagey about the whole existence thing at all...)
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
There’s a list of places where the new testament quotes or refers to the old over here. I see gjm’s already found this quote, but it might save you some future searches in similar circumstances.
What elements are in meat that aren’t in bread, or vice versa?
OK, I was wrong about this. I thought that wine didn’t contain iron, but it does. (I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus’s alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)
But it doesn’t matter. My whole point was that you wouldn’t have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I’ll believe.
(I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus’s alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)
Or instantaneous transportation over perhaps large distances.
But it doesn’t matter. My whole point was that you wouldn’t have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I’ll believe.
Fair enough. Let me take a stab at it, then.
Free will.
We know that matter is deterministic; electrons, protons, neutrons all follow pretty well-understood laws. We know that the human body is made of electrons, protons and neutrons; perfectly normal matter. Therefore, human behaviour should also follow from those same laws; it’s merely a massive amount of work to follow the reactions of such a vast amount of electrons, protons and neutrons, which is why no-one has done the calculation yet. This implies that human behaviour should be deterministic.
Yet people continually insist that they have free will. That they have choices. That they can choose to get up in the morning, or to sleep late.
Can you explain the phenomenon of free will without the existence of a deity?
Yet people continually insist that they have free will. [...] Can you explain the phenomenon of free will without the existence of a deity?
There is no phenomenon of free will. There’s no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will. What there is, is the phenomenon of people believing they have free will. And that has various explanations.
However, it’s no different from other popular beliefs with no empiric evidence. People naturally (“by default”) believe in souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye, and a hundred other things for which the existence of belief isn’t strong evidence. Since free will, like souls, is pretty much by definition empirically unobservable, people’s belief in it (that doesn’t come with a concrete argument) in it isn’t evidence for it, since the belief couldn’t have been caused by observation.
There’s no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will.
That statement seems (currently) true enough; presumably if we could execute a free will test, someone would have done it by now and there would be no need for these debates.
You compare free will with “souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye...”. It seems to me that the notion of free will is actually more similar to the notion of consciousness than it is to those things that you list. Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can’t really empirically test for consciousness. Both consciousness and free will seem like useful concepts that most people perceive and experience even though we can’t empirically test for them and we may lack rigorous, universally agreed upon definitions for them.
Do you believe that consciousness is a phenomenon? If so, then what empiric test or observable property would you use to determine whether something (e.g. an artificially intelligent computing system) is conscious?
Both consciousness and free will seem like useful concepts that most people perceive and experience even though we can’t empirically test for them and we may lack rigorous, universally agreed upon definitions for them.
They are useful concepts exactly and only because they are such strong and common intuitions people have, so we have to use these concepts to model other people’s beliefs and behavior. In the same way that an atheist needs to understand religion.
Do you believe that consciousness is a phenomenon?
Different people use very different, often contradictory definitions of ‘consciousness’. Some are obviously true (for humans): for example “a system that models itself as part of the world and understands that its outputs determine the behavior of that part”. Some are by definition empirically untestable: “conscious entities experience events but do not affect them, and some things (people) have such conscious entities attached, while others (simple animals) don’t”, a la p-zombies, or for example “I know I have qualia but I can’t know if others do”, similar to solipsism.
In general, I think there is no “study of consciousness” (as there would be of a phenomenon); there is, however, a lot of study of the way people use the word “consciousness”, which involves psychology, sociology/culture, linguistics, neurology, and so forth. And the same is true for “free will”.
In general, I think there is no “study of consciousness”
There is a study of consciousness, or at least aspects of consciousness, as anyone can discover via google, and it is not just a study of the way people use the word.
Anaesthesiologists study consciousness, meaning awareness of the environment and ability to form memories, as something that can be switched on and off. Cognitive psychologists study access consciousness, the ability to make verbal reports about some of what is going on in your head. Perceptual psychologists study phenomenal consciousness, blind spots, blind sight, synaesthesia, and so on.
Now, maybe you could answer my questions: why didn’t you know the above, why didn’t say you research it, and why you think it is a good idea to make armchair pronouncements abut what science can do?
These are all good and useful fields of study, but crucially, they’re using the word “consciousness” to mean something different from what was under discussion here, which I did my best to point out.
This subthread started with the g_pepper saying:
Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can’t really empirically test for consciousness. Both consciousness and free will seem like useful concepts that most people perceive and experience even though we can’t empirically test for them and we may lack rigorous, universally agreed upon definitions for them.
Clearly, whatever is being talked about here doesn’t belong to one of the fields of study you mentioned. In none of those fields does the statement that “we can’t [ever] empirically test for consciousness” make sense—obviously we can test if a person (or other system) is forming memories, is able to make verbal reports, has blind spots, etc. We don’t need to rely on people’s own impressions of being conscious, either.
This is “consciousness” in the vernacular (and philosophical) sense, closely related to sentience: the possession of a subjective experience. It’s a confused concept, which doesn’t admit empirical study, just like souls or dualist free will don’t. But people’s belief in, and beliefs about, the concept can be studied.
why you think it is a good idea to make armchair pronouncements abut what science can do?
I never said science can’t do something.
The tone of your reply seems aggressive. What did I say that you found offensive?
In general there is a study of consciousness, but there is not a study of some specific aspects, theories and definitions.
This is “consciousness” in the vernacular (and philosophical) sense, closely related to sentience: the possession of a subjective experience.
Subjective experience can be studied up to a point, eg synaesthesia. The studies tend to assume that subjects have experiences an are report them accurately....n other words, the assume the non zombie hood of the subjects. Zombiehood isn’t testable, but is a specific theory of consciousness, not “consciousness”.
In general there is a study of consciousness, but there is not a study of some specific aspects, theories and definitions.
In other words: there is study of some definitions (or referents) of “consciousness”, and not of others, and the one that was used originally in this thread isn’t studied.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘in general’ here, but I think that might be semantics and not any concrete difference of opinion between us.
This is “consciousness” in the vernacular (and philosophical) sense, closely related to sentience: the possession of a subjective experience. It’s a confused concept, which doesn’t admit empirical study, just like souls or dualist free will don’t.
And yet I know that I possess a subjective experience, and I suspect that you do to. Just because something does not currently lend itself to quantitative scientific study does not mean that it is not real.
ETA:
It’s a confused concept, which doesn’t admit empirical study, just like souls or dualist free will don’t.
Note that much of the discussion of free will in this comments section has had nothing to do with souls or dualist free will; e.g. compatibilism has nothing to do with souls or dualism.
And yet I know that I possess a subjective experience, and I suspect that you do to. Just because something does not currently lend itself to quantitative scientific study does not mean that it is not real.
(Edited) That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict what I said. Subjective experience is real—we all have it. Being real, it can be studied. But I strongly expect that whatever the study produces won’t e.g. let us tell if a non-human is conscious (has subjective experience) except by arbitrary definitions that ultimately rely on being-similar-to-humans.
Note that much of the discussion of free will in this comments section has had nothing to do with souls or dualist free will; e.g. compatibilism has nothing to do with souls or dualism.
That’s true, which is why I specified dualist free will.
Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can’t really empirically test for consciousness.
If contentiousness doesn’t exist how can we empirically test for anything? Empiricism is based on using past observations to predict future observations, it becomes meaningless if there’s nothing there to do the observing.
There’s no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will.
Given a naturalistic model of free will, it is possible in principle to tell whether something has free will. It is generally difficult in practice, since testing naturalistic theory of FW tends to involve investigating whether a) there is real quantum (or other) indeterminism, and (b) exactly how the brain works.
In general, you can;’t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
In general, you can;’t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
I agree: in fact, you usually can’t generalize about any property of thing X for different, contradictory or unrelated, definitions of “X”. Here, like in the subthread about consciousness, I wasn’t trying to generalize.
I was using the definition used in the comment I was replying to, which—implicitly but clearly—talks about a deterministic universe and a supernatural free will. I should have made that explicit.
...you raise an excellent point. Free will can be adequately explained by the existence of the soul; some form of stuff, of whatever nature, that is not deterministic and can somehow make decisions, and which is a part of every human being.
But then, what is the soul? If it is physical—some arrangement of quarks or something—then can it really be entirely limited to humanity? What of the chimpanzee? On the flip side, is that the missing piece preventing the creation of artificial intelligence?
If is is not physical, then what sort of stuff is it? Where does it come from, where does it go (or does it dissipate and evaporate on death)? If it dissipates, then what are the products of that dissipation, do they hang around, undetected but building up somehow, or are they somehow recycled into new people? Is there a limit to the amount of soulstuff that exists on the Earth, and does that create a hard limit on the possible population of said Earth? What happens if Earth’s population exceeds that limit? And if such soulstuff does exist, then is that reason to update in favour of the possibility of existence of some much larger intelligence?
Because if there was a giant brain of physical matter hovering around Earth, we’d see it. If there was a giant brain of some undetectable non-matter stuff hovering around, then the fact that we can’t see it doesn’t mean a thing, one way or another.
It’s still significantly less likely to be there than not, but rather more likely than if intelligence needs a brain-like matter substrate to work on.
Okay, I’ve only skimmed this site, but I find myself agreeing with a lot of the points he makes. This is dangerous, because I haven’t seen him prove any of those points, merely argue convincingly for them, and that implies that I’m likely to miss subtle flaws in said arguments (if such flaws exist) because his conclusions seem to mostly confirm my thoughts on the matter.
This is dangerous, because I haven’t seen him prove any of those points, merely argue convincingly for them, and that implies that I’m likely to miss subtle flaws in said arguments (if such flaws exist) because his conclusions seem to mostly confirm my thoughts on the matter.
Then you have a prima-facie convincing case of a naturalistic FW. The point is that the idea that FW requires the existence of a deity has no traction amongst professional philosophers, theologians, etc, and is more of an internet meme.
...you certainly make a convincing case. But I do not intend to argue that free will requires a deity, merely that free will is more likely given a deity than not given a deity.
free will is more likely given a deity than not given a deity.
Not convinced. In particular, a genuinely omnipotent deity is arguably incompatible with free will for any other agent; perhaps a merely omniscient deity is. The arguments here are about as convincing as the arguments for incompatibility between a deterministic universe and free will.
Much less impressive sorts of deity—e.g., those of the ancient Greek or Roman pantheon—pose much less threat to free will, but it’s also hard to see how they do anything to make it more likely.
It seems to me that it takes quite a “fine-tuned” notion of deity to make free will more likely. Perhaps you need what many theologians profess to believe in—a god who in some sense could be omnipotent but has somehow chosen not to exercise that power in all its fulness. It’s not clear to me that this idea is even internally consistent; in any case, it’s certainly not something that inevitably follows from the idea of a deity.
You are mistaken: we can write a story, we can know everything that happens in the story, and we are omnipotent in the story: whatever we write, happens in the story. But that doesn’t prevent us from writing “Peter had free will and freely chose to go left instead of right.”
In fact, someone who is omnipotent can produce free will precisely because they are omnipotent, just as in the example where the reason why you can “produce” a character with free will is because you are omnipotent relative to that character.
As the author of a story, I have the power to write in the preface, before the story is written at all, “Peter has free will and in chapter 4, he will freely choose to go left.”
It would be ridiculous to say that Peter isn’t free, and that I am wrong about my story. He is free in the story, just as he has certain other characteristics in the story. Of course, he is not free in real life, but that is just because he does not exist in real life, but only in the story, where he is also free.
The same thing would apply to a situation where you are created free by an omnipotent being. In that being’s world, you do not have free will, but that is just because you do not exist at all in that being’s world. In your own world, you both exist and have free will. This is what was meant by the traditional theology that maintained that God is not one being among other beings, but a being above all beings. The creator and the created things exist in very different realms of existence, like an author and the story world created by the author.
It would be ridiculous to say that Peter isn’t free, and that I am wrong about my story.
Since I have no problems being ridiculous, I will say that Peter does not have free will even if you claim so in your story.
Take at a puppeteer with his marionettes on a stage: when he says “Do not look at me, look at the puppets, they are free to do whatever they want!” are you going to believe him?
Being a bit more explicit, the problem, as TheOtherDave noted, is inconsistency. Saying “Peter will freely choose to go left” is self-contradictory.
And the issue with separating things into “worlds”—e.g. the world of the Creator and the world of the created—is that it’s not useful or illuminating. I can do the same thing, too—I can make an abacus and use it to calculate. Can I declare that my abacus has “free will” on its own, lower, plane of existence?
As the author of a story, I have the power to write in the preface, before the story is written at all, “Peter has free will and in chapter 4, he will freely choose to go left.” It would be ridiculous to say that Peter isn’t free, and that I am wrong about my story. He is free in the story, just as he has certain other characteristics in the story.
So, just to clarify my understanding of your claim here… if I write in my story “Peter goes left and simultaneously stands still,” is it similarly ridiculous to say that I’m wrong about my story? Are we therefore similarly committed to the idea that I have created a (fictional) being who both moves and stands still?
If I write in my story “Peter correctly adds 2 and 2 to get 5”, does the same kind of reasoning apply?
Are these things all, on your view, similarly analogous to the relationship of God to beings in the real world?
Discussing the possibility of putting something incoherent into a story is not a clarification but a sidetrack, unless you have some evidence that free will is incoherent.
I don’t think it is a sidetrack, actually… at least, not if we charitably assume your initial comment is on-point.
Let me break this down in order to be a little clearer here.
Lumifer asserted that omniscience and free will are incompatible, and you replied that as the author of a story you have the ability to state that a character will in the future make a free choice. “The same thing would apply,” you wrote, “to a situation where you are created free by an omnipotent being.”
I understand you to mean that just like the author of a story can state that (fictional) Peter has free will and simultaneously know Peter’s future actions, an omniscient being can know that (actual) Peter has free will and simultaneously know Peter’s future actions.
Now, consider the proposition A: the author of a story can state that incompatible things occur simultaneously.
If A is true, then the fact that the author can state these things has nothing to do with whether free will and omniscience are incompatible… the author can make those statements whether free will and omniscience are incompatible or not. Consequently, that the author can make those statements does not provide any evidence, one way or the other, as to whether free will and omniscience are incompatible.
In other words, if A is true, then your response to Lucifer has nothing whatsoever to do with Lucifer’s claim, and your response to Lucifer is entirely beside Lucifer’s point. Whereas if A is false, your response may be on-point, and we should charitably assume that it is.
So I’m asking you: is A true? That is: can an author simultaneously assert incompatible things in a story? I asked it in the form of concrete examples because I thought that would be clearer, but the abstract question works just as well.
Your response was to dismiss the question as a sidetrack, but I hope I have now clarified sufficiently what it is I’m trying to clarify.
Not convinced. In particular, a genuinely omnipotent deity is arguably incompatible with free will for any other agent;
A genuinely omnipotent deity can remove your free will at any point, and can override your free will at any point; thus, if you have free will in a universe including a truly omnipotent deity, then you have that free will at the sufferance of said deity. I don’t think that this means you can’t have free will.
perhaps a merely omniscient deity is.
...I’m currently debating this point with lisper in a separate thread.
Much less impressive sorts of deity—e.g., those of the ancient Greek or Roman pantheon—pose much less threat to free will, but it’s also hard to see how they do anything to make it more likely.
Agreed. I wouldn’t count those as deities—they’re closer, in my mind, to sufficiently advanced aliens (with surprisingly human psychologies).
It seems to me that it takes quite a “fine-tuned” notion of deity to make free will more likely. Perhaps you need what many theologians profess to believe in—a god who in some sense could be omnipotent but has somehow chosen not to exercise that power in all its fulness. It’s not clear to me that this idea is even internally consistent; in any case, it’s certainly not something that inevitably follows from the idea of a deity.
...point taken. My thought process is that a deity would have some probability of deliberately wanting to create a universe that includes free will, and that probability will be higher than the probability of free will developing in a completely random universe (because free will is such a complicated thing that the odds of it turning up by chance are extremely small). I am assuming that if a sufficiently powerful deity wants to create free will, and is willing to go to the effort to do so, then there will be free will.
I don’t think this means you can’t have free will.
I think it’s at least debatable. I am inclined toward compatibilism myself, in this as with determinism, but I think that in both cases it requires a rather “weak” notion of free will.
free will is such a complicated thing that the odds of it turning up by chance are extremely small
Is free will complicated? It looks to me as if intelligent life is complicated, but given intelligent life free will is one of (1) impossible, (2) inevitable, (3) neither of those but doesn’t involve extra complication as such. I’m not sure which, not least because I think it depends on how you define free will and I’m not even sure there is an altogether satisfactory definition, never mind what the best definition is if so.
I don’t think this means you can’t have free will.
I think it’s at least debatable. I am inclined toward compatibilism myself, in this as with determinism, but I think that in both cases it requires a rather “weak” notion of free will.
I certainly agree that it’s debatable, and that there are some very strong arguments for the side I’m arguing against.
free will is such a complicated thing that the odds of it turning up by chance are extremely small
Is free will complicated?
I think so. Life is at the very least a necessary precondition (I think), but I need to ignore that particular complexity lest I fall victim to the anthropic principle. Taking intelligent life as a precondition may be inadvisable, as I suspect that free will may be a necessary precondition for intelligence—which would mean that intelligent life always has free will, by definition of intelligence.
But the main reason why I think that free will must be a fairly complicated thing is because it runs completely contrary to the idea that particle physics is perfectly predictable, if we could but solve the necessary calculations. Life is compatible with the idea that the behaviour of the individual electrons, protons, neutrons is predictable, and that therefore a closed set of such particles is predictable, and that therefore the system as a whole is predictable. Free will requires a closed set of particles that are able to do different things in the same situation. I have no idea what the physics of free will looks like at a particle level, but I don’t see how it can possibly be anything simple.
While there are perhaps circumstances where physical theories fail to predict the future accurately (someone earlier in this thread posted a paper to that effect—was that you?), in general, the failure requires very specific circumstances which do not apply to human decision-making.
For example, Newtonian physics was described as having a failure condition that, at any point, a particle could enter the area under consideration from pretty much infinitely far away, moving at several billion times the speed of light. This requires that the area under contemplation be an open system ; that it, it permits the entry of distant particles. Yet, enclose a human inside a forcefield, prevent any such distant-particle interactions, and Newtonian physics does become predictable; and, at the same time, the human does not lose his free will.
Newtonian physics is not a good model of particle physics. The best model is quantum mechanics which is not usually regarded as determistic.
True enough, the applicability of quantum indeterminism to neurons is a difficult and unclear subject …. but you didn’t say brains are deterministic, you said particles were.
It’s deterministic enough to make extremely accurate predictions of the measured results of experiments. Even if there’s plenty of room for debate about whether or not a given particle was here or there when its position can’t be measured.
True enough, the applicability of quantum indeterminism to neurons is a difficult and unclear subject …. but you didn’t say brains are deterministic, you said particles were.
Let me phrase it this way, then. If free will exists, then brains must be at least partially non-deterministic (or, just for completeness, the decision must somehow originate somewhere else). Brains consist of neutrons, electrons, and protons, which must obey the laws of physics.
It’s deterministic enough to make extremely accurate predictions of the measured results of experiments
Of some experiments.
Even if there’s plenty of room for debate about whether or not a given particle was here or there when its position can’t be measured.
That’s the wrong way round. You are asuming that underlying determinism is the default option, and that quantum indeterminism is a weird minority position, that needs to make its case. But actually, it is quantum determinism
which is fighting the rearguard action, after Bells theorem and the Aspect experiment.
Let me phrase it this way, then. If free will exists, then brains must be at least partially non-deterministic (or, just for completeness, the decision must somehow originate somewhere else). Brains consist of neutrons, electrons, and protons, which must obey the laws of physics
That’s not a complete argument....you need to add the premise that obeying the laws of physics entails determinism.
That’s not a complete argument....you need to add the premise that obeying the laws of physics entails determinism.
You’re right, that’s missing. I’m no longer certain that it’s warranted… I don’t know enough about quantum physics to be completely certain one way or the other.
Any deity? Is there a logical connection between the idea of a deity in general, and FW.… or are you running off the shear familiarity of the Judeo-Christian god concept,
I was thinking Judeo-Christian, but my line of argument could be rephrased as a universe planned out in advance would be more likely to have free will than a completely random universe.
Because free will seems to be an extremely fragile thing. Perfectly predictable physics precludes most notions of free will, and perfectly random physics precludes most notions of predictability; there’s a very delicate balance involved in having a world predictable enough that free will matters (because you can make decisions with strong certainty as to the consequences thereof) yet unpredictable enough to permit free will at all.
At the same time, it seems to me a thing that would be desirable to include in a planned-out universe.
Because free will seems to be an extremely fragile thing.
More fragile than intelligence, etc?
Perfectly predictable physics precludes most notions of free will, and perfectly random physics precludes most notions of predictability; there’s a very delicate balance involved in having a world predictable enough that free will matters (because you can make decisions with strong certainty as to the consequences thereof) yet unpredictable enough to permit free will at all.
You seem to be assuming that free will is inherited, as it were, form the fundamental laws of physics, so that if they don’t have the exact balance required themselves, free will is impossible. It seems to me that the law of physica allow individual systems to display a wide range of behaviour, from extreme chaos to exteme determinsim, (and therefore embracing the Goldilocks zone) and that it is the systems themselves that are responsible for the fine-tuning.
ETA
Free will is not the only thing that requires fine balance. Intelligence itself does...a balance between creativity and rule-following, between over and under detection of patterns,
At the same time, it seems to me a thing that would be desirable to include in a planned-out universe.
Probably not more fragile than intelligence. I’d put it at a good deal less fragile, in fact. But reasoning based on the presence of intelligence in the universe risks falling into the anthropic trap...
You seem to be assuming that free will is inherited, as it were, form the fundamental laws of physics, so that if they don’t have the exact balance required themselves, free will is impossible.
Yes, in the sense that all behaviours of complex systems that consist entirely of atoms must be consistent with the laws governing the behaviour of atoms.
It seems to me that the law of physica allow individual systems to display a wide range of behaviour, from extreme chaos to exteme determinsim, (and therefore embracing the Goldilocks zone) and that it is the systems themselves that are responsible for the fine-tuning.
I do not claim that free will is, or even must be, an inevitable result of the fundamental laws of physics. I merely claim that, for free will to exist, the fundamental laws of physics must allow it, in the same way as the fundamental laws of physics allow intelligence.
At the same time, it seems to me a thing that would be desirable to include in a planned-out universe.
Why?
Because I can think of few other reasons to create a universe. Anything made of matter—a creator capable of creating a universe can certainly create any amount of matter. Energy? Similarly.
But a free-willed creature is of a whole nother order. We build structures of logic; we dream, we imagine, we create entire worlds in our heads and then we share them with each other… I may be suffering from a pro-human bias here, but (a) I think that’s really special, and (b) I’m having trouble coming up with a way to get that without a universe to keep the people in.
I suppose our universe could be intended as some sort of work of art, like a sort of four-dimensional sculpture, designed to appeal to aesthetic senses so much more all-encompassing than our own limited viewpoints...
Probably not more fragile than intelligence. I’d put it at a good deal less fragile, in fact. But reasoning based on the presence of intelligence in the universe risks falling into the anthropic trap...
Which trap? Of thinking that something is likely just because we are in a place where it has occurred ?
You seem to be assuming that free will is inherited, as it were, form the fundamental laws of physics, so that if they don’t have the exact balance required themselves, free will is impossible.
Yes, in the sense that all behaviours of complex systems that consist entirely of atoms must be consistent with the laws governing the behaviour of atoms
Which? What occurs physically must not contradict the laws of physics, but that is weaker claim than saying the laws of physics must be specifically fine tuned for it.
I do not claim that free will is, or even must be, an inevitable result of the fundamental laws of physics
But the alternative does not give you such a strong argument that FW is unlikely.
Because I can think of few other reasons to create a universe
Meaning other reasons wouldn’t motivate you if you you were God, or wouldn’t motuvate a God like you, an anthropomorphic God … but a deity only reduces the unlikelihood of FW if it us likely, and likely to create FW. But the cultural famiarity of anthropomorphic deities is not objective probability.
Which trap? Of thinking that something is likely just because we are in a place where it has occurred ?
The anthropic trap is the trap of thinking that something is likely when it cannot be observed if it has not occurred. So, for example, I do think it is likely that alternate universes will have stars, because stars can exist independently of the presence of observers; but I’m not so sure about intelligent life, because if there were no intelligence, what would observe it?
Which? What occurs physically must not contradict the laws of physics, but that is weaker claim than saying the laws of physics must be specifically fine tuned for it.
My claim is that what occurs physically must not contradict the laws of physics. Yes, this is a weaker claim. Yes, this does not give me as strong an argument as the other claim, but I can’t support the other claim.
Meaning other reasons wouldn’t motivate you if you you were God, or wouldn’t motuvate a God like you, an anthropomorphic God …
...hmmmm. Good point. I have very little reason to assume that God’s reasoning even approaches anything vaguely humanlike in any manner.
Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man’s first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God’s orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve’s rebellion can look back with our 20⁄20 hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there’s this big booming voice on her left saying, “Don’t eat this fruit” and a snake on her right saying, “Don’t listen to that clown, he’s lying to you. Go ahead and eat it.” How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
So I don’t see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don’t see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven’t heard?
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don’t have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it’s a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I’m a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I’m “really” a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn’t have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can’t escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it’s not.
From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
Hmmm. Yet, she then gives the fruit to Adam. Adam’s situation at the time is analogous to Eve’s—he has no knowledge of good and evil. But, at this point, Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act. (Exactly what Adam did, after eating the fruit, before being expelled from the garden, is a matter of conjecture).
But I really don’t see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven’t heard?
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will. (Any that don’t have free will are basically a complicated computer, and it must be easier to create a computer than to create a computer inside a universe that takes a few billion years to produce said computer). So a universe created by a deity which includes intelligent agents is very likely to have free will.
On the other hand, a universe not created by a deity won’t be subject to the above argument. A mostly deterministic universe is likely to come up with, if anything, mostly deterministic life. So, it seems that the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life and free will must be much smaller than the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life.
Therefore, a universe containing intelligent life is more likely to have been created by a deity if it also includes free will.
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence.
I have never read Dennet’s book, and merely seen the wikipedia summary you linked to. However, one thing strikes me in it:
One of the book’s more controversial claims is that qualia do not (and cannot) exist.
This is a surprise to me, as I do perceive redness when I look at something red, and that is a quale, as I understand it. And I know that either my “red” quale or my “green” quale must be very different to the analogous qualia of a red-green colourblind man. So they clearly do exist (unless Dennet has a definition of “qualia” which is very different to mine).
Assuming that our definitions are not in conflict, I can accept the possibility that Dennet’s mental landscape does not include qualia, and his argument thus follows from the typical mind fallacy. Different mental landscapes have been shown to be startlingly different before, after all.
But, whether our disagreement on qualia is a matter of definition or fallacy, the fact that he makes such a claim does leave me deeply suspicious of his conclusions. (Doesn’t make them wrong, but does cause me to discount him as a credible authority on the matter).
As to free will being an illusion—hmmm. I don’t really have an answer for that. I can say that will seems to act exactly as if it was free in many ways. I certainly feel as though I have free will, but I have no firm proof that that quale corresponds to the actual reality of the matter.
Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act.
That’s not clear. It’s ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It’s possible that Eve “took” the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve’s tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let’s look at the situation from Eve’s point of view: she’s just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they’re naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn’t actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it’s strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it’s bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God’s order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn’t correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was “evil” seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will.
That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don’t yet know how. But even if we knew how it’s far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)
qualia do not (and cannot) exist
This is an oversimplification of Dennet’s position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it’s weird. You need to read Dennett’s book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It’s actually a useful skill to cultivate.
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it’s because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn’t.
I certainly feel as though I have free will
Of course you do. So do I. It’s a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.
That’s not clear. It’s ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short—perhaps in the range of seconds.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve’s tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption?
The tree apparently granted “knowledge of good and evil”. So, if it was evil, Eve would have known, as she had that knowledge.
And then, after eating, Adam and Eve hid. If they had thought God evil, I would expect them to have hidden from fear of Him—yet they hid from fear of their own nakedness, implying that they saw fault in their own actions and wanted to avoid the consequences thereof.
Under interrogation, they shifted the blame instead of grovelling for mercy—again, this seems more the act of a person who knows they have done wrong than that of someone fearing an external evil.
...admittedly, it’s a thin thread.
(Genesis doesn’t actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it’s strongly implied)
Interestingly, it implies that it’s not being naked that is bad, but knowingly being naked; thus, a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge. For some sins, ignorance might even be completely defensible.
For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don’t yet know how.
Because we don’t know how, yes. If we did know how, what would the result be?
Creating an intelligent agent without free will is, by necessity, limited. A non-free-willed entity can either have every action it can take planned out to the last decimal point (think a calculator, or a computer) which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate (it might be able to do those things faster, and without getting bored, which is why computers are useful); or it can be deliberately unpredictable, which means it’s almost certain to go wrong in some way which it can’t correct for.
And if you want something to calculate faster for you, then a fourteen-billion-year input before it gets to the calculating seems a little counter-intuitive. (I suppose if you have enough calculations, it can still be worth it).
Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices. To take an extreme example; let us assume that, at the age of 90, I release a complete autobiography, detailing my choices at every major decision point in my life. A time traveller from the year 3000 gets hold of this book, and then comes back to the present day, careful to change nothing (perhaps arriving on one of the moons of Jupiter). This time traveller knows what I will decide, yet his presence does not in any way constrain my freedom to make those decisions.
This is an oversimplification of Dennet’s position
It was taken from the wikipedia summary. I’m not surprised.
but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion.
...huh. Fascinating. You’re right, I do perceive illusory motion. But motion is a thing that exists independent of my perception; if a tree falls in the forest, then the fact of its motion is entirely independent of my observation thereof. A quale is different, in that the perception of the redness is the quale; the optical illusion which you provided somehow gives the quale of motion without actually having motion (which means that qualia don’t exactly have a 1:1 mapping to the underlying reality).
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by “quale” differs from what you (and presumably Dennet) mean be “quale”.
The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It’s actually a useful skill to cultivate.
...I am mystified. This skill seems to me merely convincing yourself that your own consciousness and free will are illusory, that you have no control over your acts and that there is not, in fact, a ‘you’ to have this complete lack of control? Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it’s because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn’t.
Oh, yes. There are degrees of existence, things that exist only in part, or in potentia, or even things that strongly affect the world despite not existing, sometimes despite not even being possible to exist. No problem with that.
I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word “Then”. That word (“az”) does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here’s an interesting bit o’ trivia: the original of “a tree to be desired to make one wise” is “w’nech’mäd häëtz l’has’Kiyl” which literally means, “and the tree was cute for wisdom.” (Actually, it’s not quite “wisdom”, the meaning of “l’has’Kiyl” is broader than that. A better translation would be something like “smartness” or “brainpower”.)
if it was evil, Eve would have known
Sure, but 1) I don’t grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn’t know it was evil except in retrospect.
a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge
That’s the Ethan Couch defense, and it’s not entirely indefensible. We don’t generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices.
You are mistaken.
time traveller
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it’s actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by “quale” differs from what you
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it’s useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it’s much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It’s kind of like having a lucid dream.
But why don’t you go read the book before we go further.
There are degrees of existence
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it’s a vector space.
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word “Then”. That word (“az”) does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here’s an interesting bit o’ trivia: the original of “a tree to be desired to make one wise” is “w’nech’mäd häëtz l’has’Kiyl” which literally means, “and the tree was cute for wisdom.” (Actually, it’s not quite “wisdom”, the meaning of “l’has’Kiyl” is broader than that. A better translation would be something like “smartness” or “brainpower”.)
Huh. Maybe I’ve been playing too many role-playing games, but I tend to think of “wisdom” and “smartness” as somewhat but not entirely correlated; with “smartness” being more related to academics and book-learning and “wisdom” more common-sense and correctness of intuition.
Sure, but 1) I don’t grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn’t know it was evil except in retrospect.
I’ll trust you with regards to the Hebrew and abandon this line of argument in the face of point 2.
That’s the Ethan Couch defense, and it’s not entirely indefensible. We don’t generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
Granted. Those who are not ignorant have a duty to alleviate the ignorance of others—Ezekiel 3 verses 17 to 21 are relevant here. (Note that the ignorant man is still being punished—just because his sin is lesser in his ignorance does not mean that it is nothing—so education is still important to reduce sin).
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
Granted. I was talking computable in theory. If we’re considering computable in practice, then there’s the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait before the first (known to us) computing devices appeared in this universe; that’s more than enough time to figure out how to build a computer, than build that computer, then calculate more digits of pi than I can imagine.
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me. I can see where you’re coming from—you’re saying that the idea that someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
I’m not sure that it is, though. Just because I could choose something else doesn’t mean that I will choose something else. (Although that gets into the murky waters of whether it is possible for me to do that which I am never observed to do...)
Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, (See also this and this.
Okay, I’ve had a look at those. The first one kind of skipped over the math for how one ends up with a negative entropy—that supercorrelation is mentioned as being odd, but nowhere is it explained what that means. (It’s also noted that the quantum correlation measurement is analogous to the classical one, but I am left uncertain as to how, when, and even if that analogy breaks down, because I do not understand that critical part of the maths, and how it corresponds to the real world, and I am left with the suspicion that it might not).
So, I’m not saying the conclusion as presented in the paper is necessarily wrong. I’m saying I don’t follow the reasoning that leads to it.
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
I will concede that there is no reason why the quale of free will can’t exist without free will. I will, however, firmly maintain that the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist.
Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
But it’s much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not.
This is a contradiction. If you don’t have free will, then you have no control and cannot take control; if you do take control, then you have the free will to, at the very least, decide to take that control.
I’m not saying that the certainty can’t improve the illusion. I’ll trust you on that point, that you have somehow found some way to take the certainty that you do not have free will and—somehow—use this to give yourself at least the illusion of greater control over your own life. (I’m rather left wondering how, but I’ll trust that it’s possible). However, the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
But why don’t you go read the book before we go further.
We would probably need to put this line of debate on hold for some time, then. I’d have to find a copy first.
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it’s a vector space.
Okay, how does that work? I can see how existence as a continuum makes sense (and, indeed, that’s how I think of it), but as a vector space?
I tend to think of “wisdom” and “smartness” as somewhat but not entirely correlated
Well, they are. Maybe “mental faculties” would be a better translation. But it’s neither here nor there.
the ignorant man is still being punished
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
education is still important to reduce sin
Indeed. But God didn’t provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
then there’s the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait
Huh? I don’t understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity “cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate”. I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can’t.
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can’t do; that’s kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can’t do.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me.
Actually, that’s not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that’s a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you’ve travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)
[if] someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you’re predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
Just because I could choose something else doesn’t mean that I will choose something else.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That’s what it means to be reliably predictable.
but nowhere is it explained what that means
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I’ll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I’ll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion
Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?
the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
Well, yeah, at root I’m not doing it deliberately. What I’m doing (when I do it—I don’t always, it’s hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I’m doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.
[1] For example, I’m not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I’m slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That’s what it means to be reliably predictable.
The word “could” is a tricksy one, and I think it likely that your disagreement with CCC about free will has a lot to do with different understandings of “could” (and of its associated notions like “possible” and “inevitably”).
The reason “could” is tricky is that whether or not something “could” happen (or could have happened) is usually reckoned relative to some state of knowledge. If you flip a coin but keep your hand over it so that you can see how it landed but I can’t then from my perspective it could be either heads or tails but from yours it can’t.
To assess free will you have to take the perspective of some hypothetical agent that has all of the knowledge that is potentially available. If such an agent can predict your actions then you cannot have free will because, as I pointed out before, your actions are determined by factors that are accessible to this hypothetical agent but not to you. Such agents do not exists in our world so we can still argue about it, but in a hypothetical world where we postulate the existence of such an agent (i.e. a world with time travel in to the past without the possibility of changing the past, or a world with a Newcomb-style intelligent alien) the argument is settled: such an agent exists, you are reliably predictable, and you cannot have free will. (This, by the way, is the resolution of Newcomb’s paradox: you should always take the one box. The only reason people think that two boxes might be the right answer is because they refuse to relinquish the intuition that they have free will despite the overwhelming (hypothetical in the case of Newcomb’s paradox) evidence against it.)
you should always take the one box. The only reason people think that two boxes might be the right answer is because they refuse to relinquish the intuition that they have free will despite the overwhelming (hypothetical in the case of Newcomb’s paradox) evidence against it.
You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take, or whether or not to believe in free will. But if your argument is correct, then they do not.
You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take
Do I? That wasn’t my intention. They don’t have a choice in which box to take, any more than they have a choice in whether or not they find my argument compelling. If they find my argument compelling then (if they are rational) they will take 1 box and win $1M. If they don’t, then (maybe) they won’t. There’s no real “choice” involved (though there is the very compelling illusion of choice).
This is actually a perfect illustration of the limits of free will even in our own awareness: you can’t decide whether to find a particular argument compelling or not, it’s something that just happens to you.
What can I say? The compatibilists are wrong. The proof is simple: either all reliably predictable agents have free will, or some do and some don’t. If they all do, then a rock has free will and we will just have to agree to disagree about that (some people actually do take that position). If some do and some don’t, then in order for the term “free will” to have meaning you need a criterion by which to distinguish reliably predictable agents with free will from those without it. No one has ever come up with such a criterion (AFAIK).
There are a number of useful terms for which no one has ever come up with a precisely stated and clearly defensible criterion. Beautiful, good, conscious, etc. This surely does indicate that there’s something unsatisfactory about those terms, but I don’t think the right way to deal with it is to declare that nothing is beautiful, good, or conscious.
Having said which, I think I can give a not-too-hopeless criterion distinguishing agents we might reasonably want to say have free will from those we don’t. X has free will in regard to action Y if and only if every good explanation for why X did Y goes via X’s preference for Y or decision to do Y or something of the kind.
So, if you do something purely “on autopilot” without any actual wish to do it, that condition fails and you didn’t do it freely; if you do it because a mad neuroscientist genius has reprogrammed your brain so that you would inevitably have done Y, we can go straight from that fact to your doing Y (but if she did it by making you want to do Y then arguably the best explanation still makes use of that fact, so this is a borderline case, which is exactly as it should be); if you do it because someone who is determined that you should do Y is threatening to torture your children to death if you don’t, more or less the same considerations apply as for the mad neuroscientist genius (and again this is good, because it’s a borderline case—we might want to say that you have free will but aren’t acting freely).
What does this criterion say about “normal” decisions, if your brain is in fact implemented on top of deterministic physics? Well, an analysis of the causes of your action would need to go via what happened in your brain when you made the decision; there would be an “explanation” that just follows the trajectories of the elementary particles involved (or something of the kind; depends on exactly what deterministic physics) but I claim that wouldn’t be a good explanation—in the same way as it wouldn’t be a good explanation for why a computer chess player played the move it did just to analyse the particle trajectories, because doing so doesn’t engage at all with the tree-searching and position-evaluating the computer did.
One unsatisfactory feature of this criterion is that it appeals to the notions of preference and decision, which aren’t necessarily any easier to define clearly than “free will” itself. Would we want to say that that computer chess player had free will? After all, I’ve just observed that any good explanation of the move it played would have to go via the process of searching and evaluation it did. Well, I would actually say that a chess-playing computer does something rather like deciding, and I might even claim it has a little bit of free will! (Free will, like everything else, comes in degrees). Still, “clearly” not very much, so what’s different? One thing that’s different, though how different depends on details of the program in ways I don’t like, is that there may be an explanation along the following lines. “It played the move it did because that move maximizes the merit of the position as measured by a 12-ply search with such-and-such a way of scoring the positions at the leaves of the search tree.” It seems fair to say that that really is “why” the computer chose the move it did; this seems like just as good an explanation as one that gets into more details of the dynamics of the search process; but it appeals to a universal fact about the position and not to the actual process the computer went through.
You could (still assuming determinism) do something similar for the choices made by the human brain, but you’d get a much worse explanation—because a human brain (unlike the computer) isn’t just optimizing some fairly simply defined function. An explanation along these lines would end up amounting to a complete analysis of particle trajectories, or maybe something one level up from that (activation levels in some sophisticated neural-network model, perhaps) and wouldn’t provide the sort of insight we seek from a good explanation.
In so far as your argument works, I think it also proves that the incompatibilists are wrong. I’ve never seen a really convincing incompatibilist definition of “free will” either. Certainly not one that’s any less awful than the compatibilist one I gave above. It sounds as if you’re proposing something like “not being reliably predictable”, but surely that won’t do; do you want to say a (quantum) random number generator has free will? Or a mechanical randomizing device that works by magnifying small differences and is therefore not reliably predictable from any actually-feasible observations even in a deterministic (say, Newtonian) universe?
I don’t think the right way to deal with it is to declare that nothing is beautiful, good, or conscious.
Yes, obviously. But it is also a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is beautiful, so too it is a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is free will. Like I said, it’s really quibbling over terminology, which is almost always a waste of time.
Having said which, I think I can give a not-too-hopeless criterion distinguishing agents we might reasonably want to say have free will from those we don’t. X has free will in regard to action Y if and only if every good explanation for why X did Y goes via X’s preference for Y or decision to do Y or something of the kind.
OK, that’s not entirely unreasonable, but on that definition no reliably predictable agent has free will because there is always another good explanation that does not appeal to the agent’s desires, namely, whatever model would be used by a reliable predictor.
One unsatisfactory feature of this criterion is that it appeals to the notions of preference and decision, which aren’t necessarily any easier to define clearly than “free will” itself.
Indeed.
I would actually say that a chess-playing computer does something rather like deciding, and I might even claim it has a little bit of free will!
OK, then you’re intuitive definition of “free will” is very different from mine. I would not say that a chess playing computer has free will, at least not given current chess-playing technology. On my view of free will, a chess playing computer with free will should be able to decide, for example, that it didn’t want to play chess any more.
It sounds as if you’re proposing something like “not being reliably predictable”, but surely that won’t do; do you want to say a (quantum) random number generator has free will?
I’d say that not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
I think ialdabaoth actually came pretty close to getting it right:
‘free will’ isn’t a binary thing; it’s a relational measurement with a spectrum. And predictability is explicitly incompatible with it, in the same way that entropy measurements depend on how much predictive information you have about a system. (I suspect that ‘entropy’ and ‘free will’ are essentially identical terms, with the latter applying to systems that we want to anthropomorphize.)
no reliably predictable agent has free will because there is always another good explanation that does not appeal to the agent’s desires, namely, whatever model would be used by a reliable predictor.
I think that’s wrong for two reasons. The first is that the model might explicitly include the agent’s desires. The second is that a model might predict much better than it explains. (Though exactly what constitutes good explanation is another thing people may reasonably disagree on.)
a chess playing computer with free will should be able to decide, for example, that it didn’t want to play chess any more.
I think that’s better understood as a limit on its intelligence than on its freedom. It doesn’t have the mental apparatus to form thoughts about whether or not to play chess (except in so far as it can resign any given game, of course). It may be that we shouldn’t try to talk about whether an agent has free will unless it has some notion of its own decision-making process, in which case I’d say not that the chess program lacks free will, but that it’s the wrong kind of thing to have or lack free will. (If you have no will, it makes no sense to ask whether it is free.)
not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Your objection to compatibilism was, unless I badly misunderstood, that no one has given a good compatibilist criterion for when something has free will. My objection was that you haven’t given a good incompatibilist criterion either. The fact that you can state a necessary condition doesn’t help with that; the compatibilist can state necessary conditions too.
I think ialdabaoth actually came pretty close to getting it right
There seem to me to be a number of quite different ways to interpret what he wrote. I am guessing that you mean something like: “I define free will to be unpredictability, with the further condition that we apply it only to agents we wish to anthropomorphize”. I suppose that gets around my random number generator example, but not really in a very satisfactory way.
So, anyway, suppose someone offers me a bribe. You know me well, and in particular you know that (1) I don’t want to do the thing they’re hoping to bribe me to, (2) I care a lot about my integrity, (3) I care a lot about my perceived integrity, and (4) the bribe is not large relative to how much money I have. You conclude, with great confidence, that I will refuse the bribe. Do you really want to say that this indicates that I didn’t freely refuse the bribe?
On another occasion I’m offered another bribe. But this time some evildoer with very strange preferences gets hold of me and compels me, at gunpoint, to decide whether to take it by flipping a coin. My decision is now maximally unpredictable. Is it maximally free?
I think the answers to the questions in those paragraphs should both be “no”, and accordingly I think unpredictability and freedom can’t be so close to being the same thing.
the model might explicitly include the agent’s desires
OK, let me try a different counter-argument then: do you believe we have free will to choose our desires? I don’t. For example, I desire chocolate. This is not something I chose, it’s something that happened to me. I have no idea how I could go about deciding not to desire chocolate. (I suppose I could put myself through some sort of aversion therapy, but that’s not the same thing. That’s deciding to try to train myself not to desire chocolate.)
If we don’t have the freedom to choose our desires, then on what basis is it reasonable to call decisions that take those non-freely-chosen desires into account “free will”?
a model might predict much better than it explains
This is a very deep topic that is treated extensively in David Deutsch’s book, “The Beginning of Infinity” (also “The Fabric of Reality”, particularly chapter 7). If you want to go down that rabbit hole you need to read at least Chapter 7 of TFOR first, otherwise I’ll have to recapitulate Deutsch’s argument. The bottom line is that there is good reason to believe that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are not possible.
If you have no will, it makes no sense to ask whether it is free.
Sure. Do you distinguish between “will” and “desire”?
the compatibilist can state necessary conditions too.
Really? What are they?
Do you really want to say that this indicates that I didn’t freely refuse the bribe?
Yes.
Is it maximally free?
Yes, which is to say, not free at all. It is exactly as free as the first case.
The only difference between the two cases is in your awareness of the mechanism behind the decision-making process. In the first case, the mechanism that caused you to choose to refuse the bribe is inside your brain and not accessible to your conscious self. In the second case, (at least part of) the mechanism that causes you to make the choice is more easily accessible to your conscious self. But this is a thin reed because the inaccessibility of your internal decision making process is (almost certainly) a technological limitation, not a fundamental difference between the two cases.
If we don’t have the freedom to choose our desires, then on what basis is it reasonable to call decision that take those non-freely-chosen desires into account “free will”?
If Jewishness is inherited from one’s mother, and a person’s great^200000-grandmother [EDITED to fix an off-by-1000x error, oops] was more like a chimpanzee than a modern human and had neither ethnicity nor religion as we now understand them, then on what basis is it reasonable to call that person Jewish?
If sentences are made up of letters and letters have no meaning, then on what basis is it reasonable to say that sentences have meaning?
It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can.
David Deutsch’s book [...] also [...]
I have read both books. I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible, but it is some time since I read the book and I have just now only glanced at it rather than rereading it in depth. If you reckon Deutsch says that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you remind me where in the chapter he does it? Or, if you have an argument that starts from what Deutsch does in that chapter and concludes that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you sketch it? (I do not guarantee to agree with everything Deutsch says.)
Do you distinguish between “will” and “desire”?
I seldom use the word “will” other than in special contexts like “free will”. Why do you ask?
What are they [sc. necessary conditions for free will that a compatibilist might state]?
One such might be: “For an action to be freely willed, the causes leading up to it must go via a process of conscious decision by the agent.”
[...] not free at all. It is exactly as free as the first case.
Meh, OK. So let me remind you that the question we were (I thought) discussing at this point was: are there clearer-cut satisfactory criteria for “free will” available to incompatibilists than to compatibilists? Now, of course if you say that by definition nothing counts as an instance of free will then that’s a nice clear-cut criterion, but it also has (so far as it goes) nothing at all to do with freedom or will or anything else.
I think you’re saying something a bit less content-free than that; let me paraphrase and you can correct me if I’m getting it wrong. “Free will means unpredictability-in-principle. Everything is in fact predictable in principle, and therefore nothing is actually an instance of free will.” That’s less content-free because we can then ask: OK, what if you’re wrong about everything being predictable in principle; or what if you’re right but we ask about a hypothetical different world where some things aren’t predictable in principle?
Let’s ask that. Imagine a world in which some sort of objective-collapse quantum mechanics is correct, and many things ultimately happen entirely at random. And let’s suppose that whether or not the brain uses quantum effects in any “interesting” way, it is at least affected by them in a chaos-theory sort of way: that is, sometimes microscale randomness arising from quantum mechanics ends up having macroscale effects on what your brain does. And now let’s situate my two hypothetical examples in this hypothetical world. In this world, of course, nothing is entirely predictable, but some things are much more predictable than others. In particular, the first version of me (deciding whether to take the bribe on the basis of my moral principles and preferences and so forth, which ends up being very predictable because the bribe is small and my principles and preferences strong) is much more predictable (both in principle and in practice) in this world than the second version (deciding, at gunpoint, on the basis of what I will now make a quantum random number generator rather than a coin flip). In this world, would you accordingly say that first-me is choosing much less freely than second-me?
The only difference between the two cases is your awareness [...]
I don’t think that’s correct. For instance, in the second case I am coerced by another agent, and in the first I’m not; in the first case my decision is a consequence of my preferences regarding the action in question, and in the second it isn’t (though it is a consequence of my preference for living over dying; but I remark that your predictability criterion gives the exact same result if in the second case the random number generator is wired directly into my brain so as to control my actions with no conscious involvement on my part at all).
You may prefer notions of free will with a sort of transitive property, where if X is free and X is caused by Y1,...,Yn (and nothing else) then one of the Y must be free. (Or some more sophisticated variant taking into account the fact that freedom comes in degrees, that the notion of “cause” is kinda problematic, etc.) I see no reason why we have to define free will in such a way. We are happy to say that a brain is intelligent even though it is made of neurons which are not intelligent, that a statue resembles Albert Einstein even though it is made of atoms that do not resemble Einstein, that a woolly jumper is warm even though it is made of individual fibres that aren’t, etc.
It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can.
Of course. Does this mean that you concede that our desires are not freely chosen?
I have read both books.
Oh, good!
I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible
You’re right, the argument in chapter 7 is not complete, it’s just the 80⁄20 part of Deutsch’s argument, so it’s what I point people to first. And non-explanatory models with predictive power are not impossible, they’re just extremely unlikely (probability indistinguishable from zero). The reason they are extremely unlikely is that in a finite universe like ours there can exist only a finite amount of data, but there are an infinite number of theories consistent with that data, nearly all of which have low predictive power. Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power. Hence, it is overwhelmingly likely that a theory with high predictive power will have high explanatory power.
In this world, would you accordingly say that first-me is choosing much less freely than second-me?
No.
First, I disagree with “Free will means unpredictability-in-principle.” It doesn’t mean UIP, it simply requires UIP. Necessary, not sufficient.
Second, to be “real” free will, there would have to be some circumstances where you accept the bribe and surprise me. In this respect, you’ve chosen a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a better one: we’re in a restaurant and I know you love burgers and pasta, both of which are on the menu. I know you’ll choose one or the other, but I have no idea which. In that case, it’s possible that you are making the choice using “real” free will.
in the second case I am coerced by another agent, and in the first I’m not
Not so. In the first case you are being coerced by your sense of morality, or your fear of going to prison, or something like that. That’s exactly what makes your choice not to take the bribe predictable. The only difference is that the mechanism by which you are being coerced in the second case is a little more overt.
You may prefer notions of free will with a sort of transitive property
No, what I require is a notion of free will that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that can predict anything that can be predicted in principle. (I also want to give this hypothetical observer an oracle for the halting problem because I don’t think that Turing machines exercise “free will” or “decide” whether or not to halt.) This is simply the same criterion I apply to any phenomenon that someone claims is objectively real.
Does this mean that you concede that our desires are not freely chosen?
I think some of our desires are more freely chosen than others. I do not think an action chosen on account of a not-freely-chosen desire is necessarily best considered unfree for that reason.
[...] are not impossible [...]
That isn’t quite what you said before, but I’m happy for you to amend what you wrote.
The reason they are extremely unlikely [...]
It seems to me that the argument you’re now making has almost nothing to do with the argument in chapter 7 of Deutsch’s book. That doesn’t (of course) in any way make it a bad argument, but I’m now wondering why you said what you did about Deutsch’s books.
Anyway. I think almost all the work in your argument (at least so far as it’s relevant to what we’re discussing here) is done by the following statement: “Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power.” I think this is incorrect; simplicity plus past predictive success is a pretty decent filter too. (Theories with these properties have not infrequently turned out to be embeddable in theories with good explanatory power, of course, as when Mendeleev’s empirically observed periodicity was explained in terms of electron shells, and the latter further explained in terms of quantum mechanics.)
It doesn’t mean UIP, it simply requires UIP.
OK, but in that case either you owe us something nearer to necessary and sufficient conditions, or else you need to retract your claim that incompatibilism does better than compatibilism in the “is there a nice clear criterion?” test. Also, if you aren’t claiming anything close to “free will = UIP” then I no longer know what you meant by saying that ialdabaoth got it more or less right.
to be “real” free will, there would have to be some circumstances where [...]
Sure. That would be why I said “with great confidence” rather than “with absolute certainty”. I might, indeed, take the bribe after all, despite all those very strong reasons to expect me not to. But it’s extremely unlikely. (So no, I don’t agree that I’ve “chosen a bad example”; rather, I think you misunderstood the example I gave.)
let me propose a better one
If you say “you chose a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a better one” and then give an example that doesn’t even vaguely gesture in the direction of making my point, I’m afraid I start to doubt that you are arguing in good faith.
Not so. In the first case you are being coerced by [...]
The things you describe me as being “coerced by” are (1) not agents and (2) not external to me. These are not irrelevant details, they are central to the intuitive meaning of “free will” that we’re looking for philosophically respectable approximations to. (Perhaps you disagree with my framing of the issue. I take it that that’s generally the right way to think about questions like “what is free will?”.)
In particular, I think your claim about “the only difference” is flatly wrong.
what I require is a notion of free will that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that can predict anything that can be predicted in principle.
That sounds sensible on first reading, but I think actually it’s a bit like saying “what I require is a notion of right and wrong that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that doesn’t care about suffering” and inferring that our notions of right and wrong shouldn’t have anything to do with suffering. Our words and concepts need to be useful to us, and if some such concept would be uninteresting to a hypothetical superbeing that can predict anything that’s predictable in principle, that is not sufficient reason for us not to use it. Still more when your hypothetical superbeing needs capabilities that are probably not even in principle possible within our universe.
(I think, in fact, that even such a superbeing might have reason to talk about something like “free will”, if it’s talking about very-limited beings like us.)
any phenomenon that someone claims is objectively real.
I haven’t, as it happens, been claiming that free will is “objectively real”. All I claim is that it may be a useful notion. Perhaps it’s only as “objectively real” as, say, chess; that is, it applies to us, and what it is is fundamentally dependent on our cognitive and other peculiarities, and a world of your hypothetical superbeings might be no more interested in it than they presumably would be in chess, but you can still ask “to what extent is X exercising free will?” in the same way as you could ask “is X a better move than Y, for a human player with a human opponent?”.
an example that doesn’t even vaguely gesture in the direction of making my point
Sorry about that. I really was trying to be helpful.
I haven’t, as it happens, been claiming that free will is “objectively real”. All I claim is that it may be a useful notion.
Well, heck, what are we arguing about then? Of course it’s a useful notion.
chess
A better analogy would be “simultaneous events at different locations in space.” Chess is a mathematical abstraction that is the same for all observers. Simultaneity, like free will, depends on your point of view.
You’re arguing that no one has it and AIUI that nothing in the universe ever could have it. Doesn’t seem that useful to me.
Chess is a mathematical abstraction that is the same for all observers.
I did consider substituting something like cricket or baseball for that reason. But I think the idea that free will is viewpoint-dependent depends heavily on what notion of free will you’re working with. I’m still not sure what yours actually is, but mine doesn’t have that property, out at any rate doesn’t have it to do great an extent as yours seems to.
Free will is a useful notion because we have the perception of having it, and so it’s useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don’t really have it. It’s useful in the same way that it’s useful to talk about, say, “the force of gravity” even though in reality there is no such thing. (That’s actually a pretty good analogy. The force of gravity is a reasonable approximation to the truth for nearly all everyday purposes even though conceptually it is completely wrong. Likewise with free will.)
You said that a chess-playing computer has (some) free will. I disagree (obviously because I don’t think anything has free will). Do you think Pachinko machines have free will? Do they “decide” which way to go when they hit a pin? Does the atmosphere have free will? Does it decide where tornadoes appear?
When I say “real free will” I mean this:
Decisions are made by my conscious self. This rules out pachinko machines, the atmosphere, and chess-playing computers having free will.
Before I make a decision, it must be actually possible for me to choose more than one alternative. Ergo, if I am reliably predictable, I cannot have free will because if I am reliably predictable then it is not possible for me to choose more than one alternative. I can only choose the alternative that a hypothetical predictor would reliably predict.
I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that.
it’s useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don’t really have it.
I think it’s more helpful to talk about whatever we have that we’re trying to talk about, even if some of what we say about it isn’t quite right, which is why I prefer notions of free will that don’t become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there’s an omnipotent god or whatever.
I agree that gravity makes a useful analogy. Gravity behaves in a sufficiently force-like way (at least in regions of weakish spacetime curvature, like everywhere any human being could possibly survive) that I think for most purposes it is much better to say “there is, more or less, a force of gravity, but note that in some situations we’ll need to talk about it differently” than “there is no force of gravity”. And I would say the same about “free will”.
Do you think Pachinko machines have free will?
I don’t know much about Pachinko machines, but I don’t think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation, in which case I would not want to describe them as having free will even to the (very attenuated) extent that a chess program might have.
Does the atmosphere have free will?
Again, I don’t think there are any sort of deliberative processes going on there, so no free will.
I mean this: [...] Decisions are made by my conscious self.
So there are two parts to this, and I’m not sure to what extent you actually intend them both. Part 1: decisions are made by conscious agents. Part 2: decisions are made, more specifically, by those agents’ conscious “parts” (of course this terminology doesn’t imply an actual physical division).
it must be actually possible for me to choose more than one alternative
Of course “actually possible” is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible? If I’m understanding you right, you’d cash it out roughly as follows: look at the probability distribution of possible outcomes in advance of the decision; then freedom = entropy of that probability distribution (or something of the kind).
So then freedom depends on what probability distribution you take, and you take the One True Measure of freedom to be what you get for an observer who knows everything about the universe immediately before the decision is made (more precisely, everything in the past light-cone of the decision); if the universe is deterministic then that’s enough to determine the answer after the decision is made too, so no decisions are free.
One obvious problem with this is that our actual universe is not deterministic in the relevant sense. We can make a device based on radioactive decay or something for which knowledge of all that can be known in advance of its operation is not sufficient to tell you what it will output. For all we know, some or all of our decisions are actually affected enough by “amplified” quantum effects that they can’t be reliably predicted even by an observer with access to everything in their past light-cone.
It might be worse. Perhaps some of our decisions are so affected and some not. If so, there’s no reason (that I can see) to expect any connection between “degree of influence from quantum randomness” and any of the characteristics we generally think of as distinguishing free from not-so-free—practical predictability by non-omniscient observers, the perception of freeness that you mentioned before, external constraints, etc.
It doesn’t seem to me that predictability by a hypothetical “past-omniscient” observer has much connection with what in other contexts we call free will. Why make it part of the definition?
I prefer notions of free will that don’t become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there’s an omnipotent god or whatever.
That’s like saying, “I prefer triangles with four sides.” You are, of course, free to prefer whatever you want and to use words however you want. But the word “free” has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism. Free means, “not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes.” If my actions are determined by physics or by God, I am not free.
I don’t think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation
And you think chess-playing machines do?
BTW, if your standard for free will is “having processing that resembles human deliberation” then you’ve simply defined free will as “something that humans have” in which case the question of whether or not humans have free will becomes very uninteresting because the answer is tautologically “yes”.
So there are two parts to this
I’d call them two “interpretations” rather than two “parts”. But I intended the latter: to qualify as free will on my view, decisions have to be made by the conscious part of a conscious agent. If I am conscious but I base my decision on a coin flip, that’s not free will.
“actually possible” is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible?
Whatever is not impossible. In this case (and we’ve been through this) if I am reliably predictable then it is impossible for me to do anything other than what a hypothetical reliable predictor predicts. That is what “reliably predictable” means. That is why not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition for free will. It’s really not complicated.
Why make it part of the definition?
Because that is what the “free” part of “free will” means. If I am faced with a choice between A and B and a reliable predictor predicts I am going to choose A, then I cannot choose B (again, this is what “reliably predictor” means). If I cannot choose B then I am not free.
the word “free” has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism.
I don’t think that’s at all clear, and the fact that a clear majority of philosophers are compatibilists indicates that a bunch of people who spend their lives thinking about this sort of thing also don’t think it’s impossible for “free” to mean something compatible with determinism.
Let’s take a look at that definition of yours, and see what it says if my decisions are determined by the laws of physics. “Not under the control or in the power of another”? That’s OK; the laws of physics, whatever they are, are not another agent. “Able to act or be done as one wishes”? That’s OK too; of course in this scenario what I wish is also determined by the laws of physics, but the definition doesn’t say anything about that.
(I wouldn’t want to claim that the definition you selected is a perfect one, of course.)
And you think chess-playing machines do [sc. have processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation]?
Yup. Much much simpler, of course. Much more limited, much more abstract. But yes, a tree-search with an evaluation at the leaves does indeed resemble human deliberation somewhat. (Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?)
if your standard for free will is “having processing that resembles human deliberation”
Nope. But not having such processing seems like a good indication of not having free will, because whatever free will is it has to be something to do with making decisions, and nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like, and I think the absence of any process that looks at all like deliberation seems to me to be a large part of why. (Though I would be happy to reconsider in the face of something that behaves in ways that seem sufficiently similar to, e.g., apparently-free humans despite having very different internals.)
if I am reliably predictable then it is impossible for me to do anything other than what a hypothetical reliable predictor predicts
I have pointed out more than once that in this universe there is never prediction that reliable, and anything less reliable makes the word “impossible” inappropriate. For whatever reason, you’ve never seen fit even to acknowledge my having done so.
But let’s set that aside. I shall restate your claim in a form I think better. “If you are reliably predictable, then it is impossible for your choice and the predictor’s prediction not to match.” Consider a different situation, where instead of being predicted your action is being remembered. If it’s reliably rememberable, then it is impossible for your action and the remember’s memory not to match—but I take it you wouldn’t dream of suggesting that that involves any constraint on your freedom.
So why should it be different in this case? One reason would be if the predictor, unlike the rememberer, were causing your decision. But that’s not so; the prediction and your decision are alike consequences of earlier states of the world. So I guess the reason is because the successful prediction indicates the fact that your decision is a consequence of earlier states of the world. But in that case none of what you’re saying is an argument for incompatibilism; it is just a restatement of incompatibilism.
It’s really not complicated.
Please consider the possibility that other people besides yourself have thought about this stuff, are reasonably intelligent, and may disagree with you for reasons other than being too stupid to see what is obvious to you.
again, this is what “reliable predictor” means
No. It means you will not choose B, which is not necessarily the same as that you cannot choose B. And (I expect I have said this at least once already in this discussion) words like “cannot” and “impossible” have a wide variety of meanings and I see no compelling reason why the only one to use when contemplating “free will” is the particular one you have in mind.
This would not be the first time in history that the philosophical community was wrong about something.
Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?
No, I get that. But “a very little bit” is still distinguishable from zero, yes?
nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like
Nothing about it seems human decision-like. But that’s a prejudice because you happen to be human. See below...
I would be happy to reconsider in the face of something that behaves in ways that seem sufficiently similar to, e.g., apparently-free humans despite having very different internals.
I believe that intelligent aliens could exist (in fact, almost certainly do exist). I also believe that fully intelligent computers are possible, and might even be constructed in our lifetime. I believe that any philosophy worth adhering to ought to be IA-ready and AI-ready, that is, it should not fall apart in the face of intelligent aliens or artificial intelligence. (Aside: This is the reason I do not self-identify as a “humanist”.)
Also, it is far from clear that chess computers work anything at all like humans. The hypothesis that humans make decisions by heuristic search has been pretty much disproven by >50 years of failed AI research.
I have pointed out more than once that in this universe there is never prediction that reliable, and anything less reliable makes the word “impossible” inappropriate. For whatever reason, you’ve never seen fit even to acknowledge my having done so.
I hereby acknowledge your having pointed this out. But it’s irrelevant. All I require for my argument to hold is predictability in principle, not predictability in fact. That’s why I always speak of a hypothetical rather than an actual predictor. In fact, my hypothetical predictor even has an oracle for the halting problem (which is almost certainly not realizable in this universe) because I don’t believe that Turing machines exercise free will when “deciding” whether or not to halt.
it is just a restatement of incompatibilism.
That’s possible. But just because incompatibalism is a tautology does not make it untrue.
I don’t think it is a tautology. The state of affairs for a reliable predictor to exist would be that there is something that causes both my action and the prediction, and that whatever this is is accessible to the predictor before it is accessible to me (otherwise it’s not a prediction). That doesn’t feel like a tautology to me, but I’m not going to argue about it. Either way, it’s true.
Please consider the possibility that other people besides yourself have thought about this stuff
Of course. As soon as someone presents a cogent argument I’m happy to consider it. I haven’t heard one yet (despite having read this ).
It means you will not choose B, which is not necessarily the same as that you cannot choose B.
That’s really the crux of the matter I suppose. It reminds me of the school of thought on the problem of theodicy which says that God could eliminate evil from the world, but he chooses not to for some reason that is beyond our comprehension (but is nonetheless wise and good and loving). This argument has always struck me as a cop-out. If God’s failure to use His super-powers for good is reliably predictable, then that to me is indistinguishable from God not having those super powers to begin with.
You can see the absurdity of it by observing that this same argument can be applied to anything, not just God. I can argue with equal validity that rocks can fly, they just choose not to. Or that I could, if I wanted to, mount an argument for my position that is so compelling that you would have no choice but to accept it, but I choose not to because I am benevolent and I don’t want to shatter your illusion of free will.
I don’t see any possible way to distinguish between “can not” and “with 100% certainty will not”. If they can’t be distinguished, they must be the same.
I already pointed out that your own choice of definition doesn’t have the property you claimed (being fundamentally incompatible with determinism). I think that suffices to make my point.
This would not be the first time in history that the philosophical community was wrong about something.
Very true. But if you are claiming that some philosophical proposition is (not merely true but) obvious and indeed true by definition, then firm disagreement by a majority of philosophers should give you pause.
You could still be right, of course. But I think you’d need to offer more and better justification than you have so far, to be at all convincing.
But “a very little bit” is still distinguishable from zero, yes?
Well, the actual distinguishing might be tricky, especially as all I’ve claimed is that arguably it’s so. But: yes, I have suggested—to be precise about my meaning—that some reasonable definitions of “free will” may have the consequence that a chess-playing program has a teeny-tiny bit of free will, in something like the same way as John McCarthy famously suggested that a thermostat has (in a very aetiolated sense) beliefs.
Nothing about it seems human decision-like.
Nothing about it seems decision-like at all. My notion of what is and what isn’t a decision is doubtless influenced by the fact that the most interesting decision-making agents I am familiar with are human, which is why an abstract resemblance to human decision-making is something I look for. I have only a limited and (I fear) unreliable idea of what other forms decision-making can take. As I said, I’ll happily revise this in the light of new data.
I believe that any philosophy worth adhering to ought to be IA-ready and AI-ready
Me too; if you think that what I have said about decision-making isn’t, then either I have communicated poorly or you have understood poorly or both. More precisely: my opinions about decision-making surely aren’t altogether IA/AI-ready, for the rather boring reason that I don’t know enough about what intelligent aliens or artificial intelligences might be like for my opinions to be well-adjusted for them. But I do my best, such as it is.
The hypothesis that humans make decisions by heuristic search has been pretty much disproven
First: No, it hasn’t. The hypothesis that humans make all their decisions by heuristic search certainly seems pretty unlikely at this point, but so what? Second and more important: I was not claiming that humans make decisions by tree searching. (Though, as it happens, when playing chess we often do—though our trees are quite different from the computers’.) I claim, rather, that humans make decisions by a process along the lines of: consider possible actions, envisage possible futures in each case, evaluate the likely outcomes, choose something that appears good. Which also happens to be an (extremely handwavy and abstract) description of what a chess-playing program does.
All I require for my argument to hold is predictability in principle, not predictability in fact.
Perfectly reliable prediction is not possible in principle in our universe. Not even with a halting oracle.
because I don’t believe that Turing machines exercise free will when “deciding” whether or not to halt.
I think the fact that you never actually get to observe the event of “such-and-such a TM not halting” means you don’t really need to worry about that. In any case, there seems to me something just a little improper about finagling your definition in this way to make it give the results you want: it’s as if you chose a definition in some principled way, found it gave an answer you didn’t like, and then looked for a hack to make it give a different answer.
just because incompatibilism is a tautology does not make it untrue.
Of course not. But what I said was neither (1) that incompatibilism is a tautology nor (2) that that makes it untrue. I said that (1) your argument was a tautology, which (2) makes it a bad argument.
As soon as someone presents a cogent argument I’m happy to consider it.
I think that may say more about your state of mind than about the available arguments. In any case, the fact that you don’t find any counterarguments to your position cogent is not (to my mind) good reason for being rudely patronizing to others who are not convinced by what you say.
It reminds me of [...]
I regret to inform you that “argument X has been deployed in support of wrong conclusion Y” is not good reason to reject argument X—unless the inference from X to Y is watertight, which in this case I hope you agree it is not.
I don’t see any possible way to distinguish between “can not” and “with 100% certainty will not”.
This troubles me not a bit, because you can never say “with 100% certainty will not” about anything with any empirical content. Not even if you happen to be a perfect reasoner and possess a halting oracle.
And at degrees of certainty less than 100%, it seems to me that “almost certainly will not” and “very nearly cannot” are quite different concepts and are not so very difficult to disentangle, at least in some cases. Write down ten common English boys’ names. Invite me to choose names for ten boys. Can I choose the names you wrote down? Of course. Will I? Almost certainly not. If the notion of possibility you’re working with leads you to a different conclusion, so much the worse for that notion of possibility.
Sorry, it is not my intention to be either rude or patronizing. But there are some aspects of this discussion that I find rather frustrating, and I’m sorry if that frustration occasionally manifests itself as rudeness.
you can never say “with 100% certainty will not” about anything with any empirical content
Of course I can: with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today. With 100% certainty, no one will exhibit superluminal communication today. With 100% certainty, the sun will not rise in the west tomorrow. With 100% certainty, I will not be the president of the United States tomorrow.
Nothing about [a pachinko machine] seems decision-like at all.
a thermostat has (in a very aetiolated sense) beliefs.
Do you believe that a thermostat makes decisions? Do you believe that a thermostat has (a little bit of) free will?
Perfectly reliable prediction is not possible in principle in our universe. Not even with a halting oracle.
I presume you mean “perfectly reliable prediction of everything is not possible in principle.” Because perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) is clearly possible. And perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) with a halting oracle is possible by definition.
with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today
100%? Really? Not just “close to 100%, so let’s round it up” but actual complete certainty?
I too am a believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but I don’t see on what grounds anyone can be 100% certain that the SLoT is universally correct. I say this mostly on general principles—we could just have got the physics wrong. More specifically, there are a few entropy-related holes in our current understanding of the world—e.g., so far as I know no one currently has a good answer to “why is the entropy so low at the big bang?” nor to “is information lost when things fall into black holes?”—so just how confidently would you bet that figuring out all the details of quantum gravity and of the big bang won’t reveal any loopholes?
Now, of course there’s a difference between “the SLoT has loopholes” and “someone will reveal a way to exploit those loopholes tomorrow”. The most likely possible-so-far-as-I-know worlds in which perpetual motion machines are possible are ones in which we discover the fact (if at all) after decades of painstaking theorizing and experiment, and in which actual construction of a perpetual motion machine depends on somehow getting hold of a black hole of manageable size and doing intricate things with it. But literally zero probability that some crazy genius has done it in his basement and is now ready to show it off? Nope. Very small indeed, but not literally zero.
the sun will not rise in the west. [...] I will not be the president of the United States
Again, not zero. Very very very tiny, but not zero.
Do you believe that a thermostat makes decisions?
It does something a tiny bit like making decisions. (There is a certain class of states of affairs it systematically tries to bring about.) However, there’s nothing in what it does that looks at all like a deliberative process, so I wouldn’t say it has free will even to the tiny extent that maybe a chess-playing computer does.
For the avoidance of doubt: The level of decision-making, free will, intelligence, belief-having, etc., that these simple (or in the case of the chess program not so very simple) devices exhibit is so tiny that for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful simply to say: No, these devices are not intelligent, do not have beliefs, etc. Much as for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful to say: No, the coins in your pocket are not held away from the earth by the gravitational pull of your body. Or, for that matter: No, there is no chance that I will be president of the United States tomorrow.
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding, or are you playing to the gallery and trying to get me to say things that sound silly? (If so, I think you may have misjudged the gallery.)
perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) is clearly possible.
Empirical things? Do you not, in fact, believe in quantum mechanics? Or do you think “in half the branches, by measure, X will happen, and in the other half Y will happen” counts as a perfectly reliable prediction of whether X or Y will happen?
is possible by definition.
Only perfectly non-empirical things. Sure, you can “predict” that a given Turing machine will halt. But you might as well say that (even without a halting oracle) you can “predict” that 3x4=12. As soon as that turns into “this actual multiplying device, right here, will get 12 when it tries to multiply 3 by 4”, you’re in the realm of empirical things, and all kinds of weird things happen with nonzero probability. You build your Turing machine but it malfunctions and enters an infinite loop. (And then terminates later when the sun enters its red giant phase and obliterates it. Well done, I guess, but then your prediction that that other Turing machine would never terminate isn’t looking so good.) You build your multiplication machine and a cosmic ray changes the answer from 12 to 14. You arrange pebbles in a 3x4 grid, but immediately before you count the resulting pebbles all the elementary particles in one of the pebbles just happen to turn up somewhere entirely different, as permitted (albeit with staggeringly small probability) by fundamental physics.
[EDITED to fix formatting screwage; silly me, using an asterisk to denote multiplication.]
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding,
I’m not sure what I “expect” but yes, I am trying to achieve mutual understanding. I think we have a fundamental disconnect in our intuitions of what “free will” means and I’m trying to get a handle on what it is. If you think that a thermostat has even a little bit of free will then we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you think even a Nest thermostat, which does some fairly complicated processing before “deciding” whether or not to turn on the heat has even a little bit of free will then we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you think that an industrial control computer, or an airplane autopilot, which do some very complicated processing before “deciding” what to do have even a little bit of free will then we’ll have to agree to disagree. Likewise for weather systems, pachinko machines, geiger counters, and computers searching for a counterexample to the Collatz conjecture. If you think any of these things has even a little bit of free will then we will simply have to agree to disagree.
100%? Really? Not just “close to 100%, so let’s round it up” but actual complete certainty?
Most people, by “100% certainty”, mean “certain enough that for all practical purposes it can be treated as 100%”. Not treating the statement as meaning that is just Internet literalness of the type that makes people say everyone on the Internet has Aspergers.
Most people, by “100% certainty”, mean “certain enough that for all practical purposes it can be treated as 100%”.
Not in the context of discussions of omniscience and whether pachinko machines have free will :-/
that makes people say everyone on the Internet has Aspergers.
People who say this should go back to their TVs and Bud Lights and not try to overexert themselves with complicated things like that system of intertubes.
However, in this particular discussion the distinction between certainty and something-closely-resembling-certainty is actually important, for reasons I mentioned earlier.
Are you seriously arguing that “free” in “free will” might mean the same thing as (say) “free” in “free beer”? Come on.
What ontological category does physics have in your view of the world?
That’s a very good question, and it depends (ironically) on which of two possible definitions of physics you’re referring to. If you mean physics-the-scientific-enterprise (let’s call that physics1) then it exists in the ontological category of human activity (along with things like “commerce”). If you mean the underlying processes which are the object of study in physics1 (let’s call that physics2) then I’d put those in the ontological category of objective reality.
Note that ontological categories are not mutually exclusive. Existence is a vector space. Physics1 is also part of objective reality, because it is an emergent property of physics2.
You can see free will as 1 d : enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another. There no other person who controls your actions.
The next definitions is: 2 a : not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itself
I think you can make a good case that the way someone’s neurons work is part of their own nature or being.
You ontological model that there’s an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic
I think this is a difference in the definition of the word “I”, which can reasonably be taken to mean at least three different things:
The totality of my brain and body and all of the processes that go on there. On this definition, “I have lungs” is a true statement.
My brain and all of the computational processes that go on there (but not the biological processes). On this definition, “I have lungs” is a false statement, but “I control my breathing” is a true statement.
That subset of the computational processes going on in my brain that we call “conscious.” On this view, the statement, “I control my breathing” is partially true. You can decide to stop breathing for a while, but there are hard limits on how long you can keep it up.
To me, the question of whether I have free will is only interesting on definition #3 because my conscious self is the part of me that cares about such things. If my conscious self is being coerced or conned, then I (#3) don’t really care whether the origin of that coercion is internal (part of my sub-conscious or my physiology) or external.
Basically after you previously argued that there only one reasonable definition of free will you now moved to the position that there are multiple reasonable definitions and you have particular reasons why you prefer to focus on a specific one?
Is that a reasonable description of your position?
No, not even remotely close. We seem to have a serious disconnect here.
For starters, I don’t think I ever gave a definition of “free will”. I have listed what I feel to be (two) necessary conditions for it, but I don’t think I ever gave sufficient conditions, which would be necessary for a definition. I’m not sure I even know what sufficient conditions would be. (But I think those necessary conditions, plus the known laws of physics, are enough to show that humans don’t have free will, so I think my position is sound even in the absence of a definition.) And I did opine at one point that there is only one reasonable interpretation of the word “free” in a context of a discussion of “free will.” But that is not at all the same thing as arguing that there is only one reasonable definition of “free will.” Also, the question of what “I” means is different from the question of what “free will” means. But both are (obviously) relevant to the question of whether or not I have free will.
The reason I brought up the definition of “I” is because you wrote:
You ontological model that there’s an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic
That is not my position. (And ontology is a bit of a red herring here.) I can’t even imagine what it means for a neuron to “do something that not in their nature or being”, let alone that this departure from “nature or being” could be caused by physics. That’s just bizarre. What did I say that made you think I believed this?
I can’t define “free will” just like I can’t define “pornography.” But I have an intuition about free will (just like I have one about porn) that tells me that, whatever it is, it is not something that is possessed by pachinko machines, individual photons, weather systems, or a Turing machine doing a straightforward search for a counter-example to the Collatz conjecture. I also believe that “will not with 100% reliability” is logically equivalent to “can not” in that there is no way to distinguish these two situations. If you wish to dispute this, you will have to explain to me how I can determine whether the reason that the moon doesn’t leave earth orbit is because it can’t or because it chooses not to.
I can’t even imagine what it means for a neuron to “do something that not in their nature or being”, let alone that this departure from “nature or being” could be caused by physics. That’s just bizarre. What did I say that made you think I believed this?
I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there’s no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen. If I misunderstood that you make the argument feel free to point that out.
Given the dictionary definition of “free” that seems to be flawed.
I can’t define “free will” just like I can’t define “pornography.”
That’s an appeal to the authority of your personal intuition. It prevents your statements from being falsifiable. It moves the statements into to vague to be wrong territory.
If I have a conversation with a person who has akrophobie to debug then I’m going to use words in a way where I only care about the effect of the words but not whether my sentences make falsifiable statements. If I however want to have a rational discussion on LW than I strive to use rational language. Language that makes concrete claims that allow others to engage with me in rational discourse.
Again that’s what distinguish rational!LW from rational!NewAtheist. If you don’t simply want to have a replacement of religion, but care about reasoning than it’s useful to not be to vague to be wrong.
The thing you wrote about only calling the part of you I that corresponds to your conscious mind looks to me like subclinical depersonalization disorder. A notion of the self that can be defended but that’s unhealthy to have.
I not only have lungs. My lungs are part of the person that I happen to be.
If you wish to dispute this, you will have to explain to me how I can determine whether the reason that the moon doesn’t leave earth orbit is because it can’t or because it chooses not to.
If we stay with the dictionary definition of freedom why look at the nature of the moon. Is the fact that it revolves around the earth an emergent property of how the complex internals of the moon work or isn’t it?
My math in that area isn’t perfect but objects that can be modeled by nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons might be a criteria.
Nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons can reasonably described as using heuristics to make choices. They make them based on the algorithm that’s programmed into them and that algorithm can by reasonably described as being part of the nature of a specific nondeterministic finite automatons.
I don’t think the way that the moon resolves around the earth is reasonably modeled with
nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons.
I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there’s no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen.
No, that’s not my argument. My argument (well, one of them anyway) is that if I am reliably predictable, then it must be the case that I am deterministic, and therefore I cannot have free will.
I actually go even further than that. If I am not reliably predictable, then I might have free will, but my mere unpredictability is not enough to establish that I have free will. Weather systems are not reliably predictable, but they don’t have free will. It is not even the case that non-determinism is sufficient to establish free will. Photons are non-deterministic, but they don’t have free will.
That’s an appeal to the authority of your personal intuition.
Well, yeah, of course it is (though I would not call my intuitions an “authority”). This whole discussion starts from a subjective experience that I have (and that other people report having), namely, feeling like I have free will. I don’t know of any way to talk about a subjective experience without referring to my personal intuitions about it.
The difference between free will and other subjective experiences like, say, seeing color, is that seeing colors can be easily grounded in an objective external reality, whereas with free will it’s not so easy. In fact, no one has exhibited a satisfactory explanation of my subjective experience that is grounded in objective reality, hence my conclusion that my subjective experience of having free will is an illusion.
This whole discussion starts from a subjective experience that I have (and that other people report having), namely, feeling like I have free will.
To the extend that the subjective experience you call free will is independent on what other people mean with the term free will, the arguments about it aren’t that interesting for the general discussion about whether what’s commonly called free will exists.
More importantly concepts that start from “I have the feeling that X is true” usually produce models of reality that aren’t true in 100% of the cases. They make some decent predictions and fail predictions in other cases.
It’s usually possible to refine concepts to be better at predicting. It’s part of science to develop operationalized terms.
This started by you saying But the word "free" has an established meaning in English. That’s you pointing to a shared understanding of free and not you pointing to your private experience.
No, that’s not my argument. My argument (well, one of them anyway) is that if I am reliably predictable, then it must be the case that I am deterministic, and therefore I cannot have free will.
Human’s are not reliably predictive due to being NFA’s. Out of memory Heinz von Förster bring the example of a child answer the question of: “What’s 1+1?” with “Blue”. It needs a education to train children to actually give predicable answers to the question what’s “What’s 1+1?”.
Weather systems are not reliably predictable, but they don’t have free will.
I think the issue with why weather systems are not predictable is not because they aren’t free to make choices (if you use certain models) but because is about the part of “will”. Having a will is about having desires. The weather doesn’t have desires in the same sense that humans do and thus it has no free will.
I think that humans do have desire that influence the choices they make even in the absence of them being conscious of the desire creating the choice.
The difference between free will and other subjective experiences like, say, seeing color, is that seeing colors can be easily grounded in an objective external reality
Grounding the concept of color in external reality isn’t trival. There are many competing definitions. You can define it over what the human eye perceives which has a lot to do with human genetics that differ from person to person. You can define it over wave-lengths. . You can define it over RGB values.
It doesn’t make sense to argue that color doesn’t exist because the human qualia of color doesn’t map directly to the wave-length definition of color
With color the way you determine the difference between colors is also a fun topic. The W3C definition for example leads to strange consequences.
That’s you pointing to a shared understanding of free and not you pointing to your private experience.
You’re conflating two different things:
Attempting to communicate about a phenomenon which is rooted in a subjective experience.
Attempting to conduct that communication using words rather than, say, music or dance.
Talking about the established meaning of the word “free” has to do with #2, not #1. The fact that my personal opinion enters into the discussion has to do with #1, not #2.
I think that humans do have desire that influence the choices they make
Yes, of course I agree. But that’s not the question at issue. The question is not whether we have “desires” or “will” (we all agree that we do), the question is whether or not we have FREE will. I think it’s pretty clear that we do NOT have the freedom to choose our desires. At least I don’t seem to; maybe other people are different. So where does this alleged freedom enter the process?
Grounding the concept of color in external reality isn’t trival
I never said it was. In fact, the difficulty of grounding color perception in objective reality actually supports my position. One would expect that the grounding of free will perception in objective reality to be at least as difficult as grounding color perception, but I don’t see those who support the objective reality of free will undertaking such a project, at least not here.
I’m willing to be convinced that this free will thing is real, but as with any extraordinary claim the burden is on you to prove that it is, not on me to prove that it is not.
I’m willing to be convinced that this free will thing is real, but as with any extraordinary claim the burden is on you to prove that it is, not on me to prove that it is not.
Pretty much everyone perceives himself/herself freely making choices, so the claim that free will is real is consistent with most peoples’ direct experience. While this does not prove that free will is real, it does suggest that the claim that free will is real is not really any more extraordinary than the claim that it is not real. So, I do not think that the person claiming that free will is real has any greater burden of proof than the person who claims that it is not.
That’s not a valid argument for at least four reasons:
There are manyperceptualillusions, so the hypothesis that free will is an illusion is not a priori an extraordinary claim. (In fact, the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion!)
There is evidence that free will is in fact a perceptual illusion.
It makes evolutionary sense that the genes that built our brains would want to limit the extent to which they could become self-aware. If you knew that your strings were being pulled you might sink into existential despair, which is not generally salubrious to reproductive fitness.
We now understand quite a bit about how the brain works and about how computers work, and all the evidence indicates that the brain is a computer. More precisely, there is nothing a brain can do that a properly programmed Turing machine could not do, and therefore no property that a brain have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely do not have free will (if you believe that a thermostat has free will, well, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree about that). So if free will is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that have free will from those that do not. I have heard no one propose such a criterion that doesn’t lead to conclusions that grate irredeemably upon my intuitions about what free will is (or what it would have to be if it were a real thing).
In this respect, free will really is very much like God except that the subjective experience of free will is more common than the subjective experience of the Presence of the Holy Spirit.
BTW, it is actually possible that the subjective experience of free will is not universal among humans. It is possible that some people don’t have this subjective perception, just as some people don’t experience the Presence of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that this lack of the subjective perception of free will is what leads some people to submit to the will of Allah, or to become Calvinists.
so the hypothesis that free will is an illusion is not a priori an extraordinary claim
I basically agree with that too—it is you rather than me who brought up the notion of extraordinary claims. It seems to me that the notion of extraordinary claims in this case is a red herring—that free will is real is a claim, and that free will is not real is a claim; I am simply arguing that neither claim has a greater burden of proof than the other. In fact, I think that there is room for reasonable people to disagree with regard to the free will question.
In fact, the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion!
I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sounds intriguing! Do you a link or a reference with additional information?
2 There is evidence that free will is in fact a perceptual illusion
None of those experiments provides strong evidence; the article you linked lists for several of the experiments objections to interpreting the experiment as evidence against free will (e.g., per the article, “Libet himself did not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will”). One thing in particular that I noticed is that many of the experiments dealt with more-less arbitrary decisions—e.g. when to flick one’s wrist, when to make brisk finger movements at arbitrary intervals, etc. Even if it could be shown that the brain somehow goes on autopilot when making trivial, arbitrary decisions that hold no significant consequences, it is not clear that this says anything about more significant decisions—e.g. what college to attend, how much one should spend on a house, etc.
3 It makes evolutionary sense that the genes that built our brains would want to limit the extent to which they could become self-aware. If you knew that your strings were being pulled you might sink into existential despair, which is not generally salubrious to reproductive fitness.
That is a reasonable statement and I have no argument with it. But, while it provides a possible explanation why we might perceive free will even if it does not exist, I don’t think that it provides significant evidence against free will.
4 We now understand quite a bit about how the brain works and about how computers work, and all the evidence indicates that the brain is a computer. More precisely, there is nothing a brain can do that a properly programmed Turing machine could not do
I agree with that.
and therefore no property that a brain have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely do not have free will… So if free will is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that have free will from those that do not.
If that statement is valid, then it seems to me that the following statement is also valid:
“There is no property that a brain can have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely are not conscious. So if consciousness is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not.”
So, do you believe that consciousness is a real thing? And, can a Turing machine be conscious? If so, how are we to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not?
neither claim has a greater burden of proof than the other
That may be. Nonetheless, at the moment I believe that free is an illusion, and I have some evidence that supports that belief. I see no evidence to support the contrary belief. So if you want to convince me that free will is real then you’ll have to show me some evidence.
If you don’t care what I believe then you are under no obligations :-)
None of those experiments provides strong evidence
The fact that you can reliably predict some actions that people perceive as volitional up to ten seconds in advance seems like pretty strong evidence to me. But I suppose reasonable people could disagree about this. In any case, I didn’t say there was strong evidence, I just said there was some evidence.
So, do you believe that consciousness is a real thing?
That depends a little on what you mean by “a real thing.” Free will and consciousness are both real subjective experiences, but neither one is objectively real. Their natures are very similar. I might even go so far as to say that they are the same phenomenon. I recommend reading this book if you really want to understand it.
And, can a Turing machine be conscious?
Yes, of course. You would have to be a dualist to believe otherwise.
If so, how are we to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not?
That’s very tricky. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that our current methods of determining consciousness produce a lot of false negatives. But if a computer that could pass the Turing test told me it was conscious, and could describe for me what it’s like to be a conscious computer, I’d be inclined to believe it.
I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sounds intriguing! Do you a link or a reference with additional information?
It’s not that deep. It just means that your perception of reality is different from actual reality in some pretty fundamental ways. The sun appears to revolve around the earth, but it doesn’t. The chair you’re sitting on seems like a solid object, but it isn’t. “Up” always feels like it’s the same direction, but it’s not. And you feel like you have free will, but you don’t. :-)
If you don’t care what I believe then you are under no obligations
As a matter of fact, I think the free will question is an interesting question, but not an instrumentally important question; I can’t really think of anything I would do differently if I were to change my mind on the matter. This is especially true if you are right—in that case we’d both do whatever we’re going to do and it wouldn’t matter at all!
Free will and consciousness are both real subjective experiences, but neither one is objectively real. Their natures are very similar. I might even go so far as to say that they are the same phenomenon.
Interesting. The reason I asked the question is that there are some thinkers who deny the reality of free will but accept the reality of consciousness (e.g. Alex Rosenberg); I was curious if you are in that camp. It sounds as though you are not.
I recommend reading this book if you really want to understand (consciousness).
Glad to see you are open to at least some of Daniel Dennett’s views! (He’s a compatibilist, I believe.)
It’s not that deep. It (the idea that the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion) just means that your perception of reality is different from actual reality in some pretty fundamental ways. The sun appears to revolve around the earth, but it doesn’t. The chair you’re sitting on seems like a solid object, but it isn’t. “Up” always feels like it’s the same direction, but it’s not.
Understood. My confusion came from the term “Galilean Universe” which I assumed was a reference to Galileo (who was actually on-board with the idea of the Earth orbiting the Sun—that is one of the things that got him into some trouble with the authorities!)
we’d both do whatever we’re going to do and it wouldn’t matter at all!
Exactly right. I live my life as if I’m a classical conscious being with free will even though I know that metaphysically I’m not. It’s kind of fun knowing the truth though. It gives me a lot of peace of mind.
I was curious if you are in that camp.
I’m not familiar with Rosenberg so I couldn’t say.
Glad to see you are open to at least some of Daniel Dennett’s views! (He’s a compatibilist, I believe.)
Yes, I think you’re right. (That video is actually well worth watching!)
Galilean Universe
Sorry, my bad. I meant it in the sense of Galilean relativity (a.k.a. Newtonian relativity, though Galileo actually thought of it first) where time rather than the speed of light is the same for all observers.
(That’s actually a pretty good analogy. The force of gravity is a reasonable approximation to the truth for nearly all everyday purposes even though conceptually it is completely wrong. Likewise with free will.)
The common understanding of free will does run into a lot of problems when it comes to issues such as habit change.
There are people debating whether or not hypnosis can get people to do something against their free will, with happens to be a pretty bad question. Questions such as can people decide by free will not to have an allergic reaction? are misleading.
They or one of their matrilinear ancestors converted to Judaism?
In case it wasn’t clear: I was not posing “on what basis …” as a challenge, I was pointing out that it isn’t much of a challenge and that for similar reasons lisper’s parallel question about free will is not much of a challenge either.
My intuition has always been that ‘free will’ isn’t a binary thing; it’s a relational measurement with a spectrum. And predictability is explicitly incompatible with it, in the same way that entropy measurements depend on how much predictive information you have about a system. (I suspect that ‘entropy’ and ‘free will’ are essentially identical terms, with the latter applying to systems that we want to anthropomorphize.)
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. But compatibilists don’t agree with that. They think that there is such a thing as free will in some absolute sense, and that this thing is “compatible” (hence the name) with determinacy/reliable predictability.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
education is still important to reduce sin
Indeed. But God didn’t provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Huh? I don’t understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity “cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate”. I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can’t.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can’t calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can’t do; that’s kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can’t do.
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
[if] someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you’re predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
but nowhere is it explained what that means
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I’ll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I’ll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable… predestined.
I still don’t understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don’t understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
I’ll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I’ll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist—even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?
The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.
Yes. Did you read “31 flavors of ontology”?
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit.
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit,
But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Any designed object is either...
Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.
could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer
Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?
we can predict what they [computers] will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.
The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me … that there are no free variables in any observation
No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit
Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.
Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?
The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.
Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.
I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these “dimensions” a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That’s a vector space.
The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked “Do Not Press”.
And I’m not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked “do not press” is probably justified.
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider—biting a kitten’s tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
Delegation?
And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel—Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.
Whoops.
Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on) or cannot be guaranteed to continue to perform to specification.
we can predict what they [computers] will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs
No, we can’t. (link to the Halting Problem)
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do).
No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle.
...I’m going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox).
Agreed.
Each of these is orthogonal to the other.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I’m not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can’t be colinear.
(Incidentally, I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked “Do Not Press”.
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, “DO NOT PRESS” and on the right it says “PRESS THIS BUTTON”. (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, “Do not press this button” and “Press this button for important information on how to use this remote”. God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)
Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail?
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Delegation?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:
“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do
I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
why they can’t be colinear.
Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you’ve lost.
I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.
But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, “DO NOT PRESS” and on the right it says “PRESS THIS BUTTON”.
Hmmmm. Not sure that’s quite right. The serpent wasn’t an authority figure. Maybe label the button “DO NOT PRESS” and add a stranger (a door-to-door insurance salesman, perhaps) who claims that you’ll never know what the button does until you try it?
Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail?
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
(And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Okay, in both cases, the situation is basically the same—a juvenile member of one species attacks and damages a juvenile member of another species. Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Delegation?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
Because it’s really boring to have to keep trying to individually explain the same basic principles to each of a hundred thousand near-complete idiots?
Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
If so, then he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world (Genesis 4, end of verse 14: “anyone who finds me will kill me”). Either he thinks that everyone else is arbitrarily evil, or he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:
“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails. (Technically, you could consider that as using your brain as the computer and running the program, except you can interrupt it at any point and investigate the current state)
the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do
I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
The point I’m trying to make with the coin/time-traveller example is that knowledge of the future—even perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
(Side note: I don’t actually know GW-the-myth. It’s a bit of cultural extelligence that I, as a non-American, haven’t really been exposed to. I’m not certain whether it’s important to this argument that I should)
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.
Hmmm. An interesting point. A thing can certainly change category over time. An idea can become a character in a book can become a character in a film can become ten thousand separate, distinct ideas can become a thousand incompatible fanfics. At some point, the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary.
Consider; I can create the idea of a character who is some strange mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (perhaps, to mix in some Star Trek, they were merged in a transporter accident). It would not be true to say that this is the same character as Luke, but it would also not be true to say that it’s entirely not the same character as Luke. Similarly with Han. But it would be true to say that Han is not the same character as Luke.
So whether two things are the same or not is, at the very least, a continuum.
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
Because it’s really boring
Seriously?
he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world
No he didn’t. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he’s lamenting the result of that curse.
he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
I don’t actually know GW-the-myth.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure, from Genesis 2 verse 20-24, in which God created Eve (from Adam’s rib) and brought her to Adam.
Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
So you accept self-defense as a justification, but not complete (but not wilful) ignorance?
Because it’s really boring
Seriously?
Well, I’m guessing, but yes, it’s a serious guess. Omnipotence means the ability to do everything, it does not mean that everything is pleasant to do. And I certainly know I’d start to lose patience a bit after explaining individually to the hundredth person why stealing is wrong.
he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
The curse, in and of itself, is not what’s going to make people want to kill him (if it was, then God could merely remove that aspect of the curse, rather than install a separate Mark as a warning to people not to do that). No, the curse merely prevented him from farming, from growing his own food. I’m guessing it also, as a result, made his guilt obvious—everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother.
But the curse is not what’s making Cain expect other people to kill him. He clearly expects that other people will freely choose to kill him, and that suggests to me that he knew he had done wrong.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
I don’t see how that follows. I can imagine ways to produce a next generation consisting of entirely evil (or, at best, morally neutral) actions. What do you think would prevent the appearance of a new generation?
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
I’m not saying it’s fast. Compared to a computer, pen-and-paper is really, really slow. That’s why we have computers. But fourteen billion years is a really, really, really long time.
perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
That’s provided that the perfect knowledge of the future is somehow derived from a study of the present state of the universe. The time traveller voids this implicit assumption by deriving his perfect knowledge from a study of the future state of the universe.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
Ah, thank you. That explains it all quite neatly.
I’m not sure it’s really worth the bother of coming up with a different example at this point—your point was quite clearly made, even without knowledge of the story. (If it makes any difference, I’m South African, which is probably going to be less helpful than one might think considering the number of separate cultures in here).
the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary
The serpent wasn’t an authority figure.
How could Eve have known that?
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure
That’s a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
it’s a serious guess
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don’t think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin’ person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, “OK, I’ve had it, I’m going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!” ???
Sheesh.
everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can’t see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
I don’t see how that follows.
Because “the good stuff” is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That’s why we are social animals. That’s why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it’s exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
I’m South African
I’ve been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that’s saying something.
That’s a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question.
...I want to say that it’s common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But… Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with.
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don’t think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin’ person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, “OK, I’ve had it, I’m going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!” ???
There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years’ time there’s a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children...
everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can’t see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning “he can’t grow crops, therefore he killed his brother” is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist).
I don’t think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
Because “the good stuff” is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That’s why we are social animals. That’s why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a “pure evil” tribe easily. But even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
I’m not claiming they’d be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short.
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it’s exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it’s intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question.
I’ve been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that’s saying something.
Yeah… wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long as you stay off the floodplains), even our own private floral kingdom… absolutely horrible politicians.
why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
Maybe because God has cursed him to be a “fugitive and a vagabond.” People didn’t like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don’t ).
I don’t think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, “Wow, Cain, you’re right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
If it’s intended to find the answer
This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn’t make your argument any less bogus.
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, “Wow, Cain, you’re right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
I read it as more along the lines of “No, nobody’s going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down.”
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
...fair enough. Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.
I read it as more along the lines of “No, nobody’s going to kill you.
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
“Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
I don’t know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can’t help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
“Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
That wasn’t a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we’re given here is an if-then—if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the “if” is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain’s irrational fear of the “if” part happening.
(I also can’t help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
I think it’s “kill them and six members of their clan/family”, but I’m not sure.
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from “continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff” to “doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time”.
In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:
When the Lord saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time,
...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the “and”).
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions.
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.
And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on—things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.
“The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”. Again, I don’t see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
I think it’s “kill them and six members of their clan/family”, but I’m not sure.
If you’re not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person’s family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing.
Sure, and so are everyone else’s.
my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture
A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
CCC may be claiming that the Bible (in this translation?) does not accurately represent God’s motive here. But that just calls attention to the fact that—for reasons which escape me even after trying to read the comment tree—you’re both talking about a story that seems ridiculous on every level. Your last paragraph indeed seems like a more fruitful line of discussion.
“The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”. Again, I don’t see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
Looking at another translation:
So the Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who met him not to kill him.
And the Lord set a [protective] [b]mark (sign) on Cain, so that no one who found (met) him would kill him.
(footnote: “Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.”)
The Lord put a sign on Cain so that no one who found him would assault him.
And the Lord put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him.
So the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one would kill him at sight.
Then the Lord put a mark on Cain to warn anyone who might try to kill him.
Yahweh appointed a sign for Cain, so that anyone finding him would not strike him.
Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of “so that no one would kill him”, but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning—something easily understood as “DO NOT KILL THIS MAN”—but I don’t see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain’s life.
If you’re not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person’s family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, “if A then B”. Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes “if 1=2 then B”. Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: “If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold”. Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.
the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
I don’t see how it’s possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.
my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture
A Muslim would disagree with you.
I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God’s Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.
Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: “If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold”. Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain.
Ordinary English doesn’t work like that. “If X, then Y will happen” includes possible worlds in which X is true.
“If you fall into the sun, you will die” expresses a meaningful idea even if nobody falls into the sun.
Exactly. “Did not” is not the same as “can not.” Particularly since God’s threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don’t happen even though they can.
But we don’t even need to look to God’s forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
I wasn’t speaking about “did not”. I was speaking about “will not”, which is distinct from “can not” and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future—unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.
But we don’t even need to look to God’s forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
Every man who is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it, can be saved.
In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don’t know it’s necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren’t.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn’t terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don’t think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I’m disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from “nonbelievers can be saved” or even “nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be” you can infer “proselytizing is bad for the people it’s aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned”.
“The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.”—Terry Pratchett, Eric
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don’t mean that most people haven’t heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who “is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it”.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
I don’t see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God’s will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
It is quite possible that a large number of people...in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It’s better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
I don’t think that God is malevolent.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren’t Christians, but it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding [...] you don’t have to do X. But once you really understand [...] all of a sudden you better do X.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your “best understanding” tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don’t. In that case, a rule that you’re saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don’t.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there’s very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you’re saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don’t hold those attitudes, but isn’t directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity—meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes—definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do.
I bet he can. But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he’s benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that’s what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too
It isn’t “you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved”. It’s “imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement”. Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, “the tinder for sin” (fomes peccati);
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all [...]
I realise that it’s totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we’re talking about right now. CCC’s original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by “splinter Protestant groups” but not widely accepted by Christians. I don’t know what he’d put in each category.
Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it.
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you’re just reiterating your position.
(I think it’s likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all).
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it’s saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it’s difficult now. Etc.)
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said;
I’m not stating a position, I’m observing someone else’s position. “God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity”, when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won’t punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn’t.
I’ve never heard a Christian say anything like “if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don’t stand on your head, God will send you to Hell”.
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false.
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”.
My observations do not yield the same results as yours.
seems to mean
How can you tell? Usually the question just isn’t brought up. I mean, usually what happens is that someone says “isn’t it unfair for people to be damned on account of mere ignorance?” and someone else responds: yeah, it would be, but actually that doesn’t happen because those people will be judged in some unknown fashion according to their consciences. And generally the details of exactly how that works are acknowledged to be unknown, so there’s not much more to say.
But for what it’s worth, the nearest thing to a statement of this idea in the actual Bible, which comes in the Letter to the Romans, says this:
They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them
(emphasis mine) which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
This doesn’t explicitly address the question of what happens if that conscience is bearing false witness and the wrong law is written in their hearts; again, that question tends not to come up in these discussions.
Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it? Because Purgatory comes in degrees, or at least in variable terms, and falls far short of hell in awfulness. So, in those Christians’ view, God has a wide range of punishments available that are much milder than eternal damnation. (Though some believers in Purgatory would claim it isn’t exactly punishment.)
I have also heard, from Protestants, the idea that although you can escape damnation no matter how wicked a life you lead and attain eternal felicity, there may be different degrees of that eternal felicity on offer. So it isn’t only Catholics who have possible sanctions for bad behaviour even for the saved.
(This seems like a good point at which to reiterate that although I’m kinda-sorta defending Christians here, I happen not to be among their number and think what most of them say about salvation and damnation is horrible morally, incoherent logically, or both.)
which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
I would interpret “accuse” to mean “they claim they are violating the law because they don’t know better, but itheir thoughts show that hey really do know better”—not to mean “they believe something is a law and if so they will be punished for not following the nonexistent law”.
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it?
No, the criticism is that either
God punishes people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid (like non-Christians who don’t follow Christian commands), or
God doesn’t punish people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid, in which case the best thing to do is make sure people don’t know about Christianity.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
This doesn’t depend on the punishment being infinite or eternal.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
Hmmmm. Here’s a third option; the punishment for a sin committed in ignorance is a lot lighter than the punishment for a sin committed deliberately. “A lot lighter” implies neither infinite nor eternal; merely a firm hint that that is not the way to go about things.
In this case, letting people know what the rules are will save them a lot of trouble (and trial-and-error) along the way.
I think I misunderstood what you meant by “my criticism”. (You’ve made a number of criticisms in the course of this thread.) In any case, the argument you’re now offering looks different to me from the one you’ve been making in earlier comments, and to which I thought I was responding.
In any case, I think what you’re offering now is not correct. Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
If you are not a Christian, you are judged on the basis of how good a life you’ve led, according to your own conscience[1]; if it’s very good, you get saved; if not, you get damned.
If you are a Christian, you are saved regardless of how good a life you’ve led.
[1] Perhaps with some sort of tweak so that deliberately cultivating shamelessness doesn’t help you; e.g., maybe you’re judged according to the strictest your conscience has been, or something. I suspect it’s difficult to fill in the details satisfactorily, but not necessarily any harder than e.g. dealing with the difficulties utilitarian theories tend to have when considering actions that can change how many people there are.
In this scenario, what comes of your dichotomy? Well: (1) God only punishes people for things their own conscience tells them (or told them, or could have told them if they’d listened, or something) to be wrong. So no, he isn’t punishing people for things they couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid. But (2) making sure people don’t know about Christianity will not benefit them, because if they fail to live a very good life they will be damned if they don’t know about Christianity but might be saved if they do. (And, Christians would probably add, if they know about Christianity they’re more likely to live a good life because they will be better informed about what constitutes one.)
Again: I think there are serious problems with this scenario (e.g., damning anyone seems plainly unjust to me if it means eternal torture) so we are agreed on that score. I just think your analysis of the problems is incorrect.
Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that. It would produce bizarre results such as the equivalent of Huckleberry Finn going to Hell because he helped a runaway slave but his conscience told him that helping a runaway slave is wrong. For a modern equivalent, a gay person whose conscience tells him that homosexuality is wrong would go to Hell for it.
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that.
Do you have any evidence for that, other than the fact that it has consequences you find bizarre? (Most versions of Christianity have quite a lot of consequences—or in some cases explicitly stated doctrines—that I find bizarre and expect you find at least as bizarre as I do.)
I have at least one piece of evidence on my side, which is that I spent decades as a Christian and what I describe is not far from my view as I remember it. (I mostly believed that damnation meant destruction rather than eternal torture; I don’t think that makes much difference to the sub-point currently at issue.) I think if actually asked “so, does that mean that someone might be damned rather than saved on account of doing something he thought wrong that was actually right?” my answer would have been (1) somewhat evasive (“I don’t claim to know the details of God’s policy; he hasn’t told us and it’s not obvious what it should be… ”) but (2) broadly in line with what I’ve been describing here (”… but if I have to guess, then yes: I think that doing something believing it to be wrong is itself a decision to act wrongly, and as fit to make the difference between salvation and damnation as any other decision to act wrongly.”)
I don’t recall ever giving much consideration to the question of people who do good things believing them to be evil, which I take as evidence for my suggestion earlier that most Christians holding that non-Christians may be judged “on their merits” likewise don’t think about it much if at all, which in case it’s not obvious I think is relevant because it means that even if you’re correct that thinking hard enough about it would show an incoherence in the position I described, that won’t actually stop many Christians holding such a position: because scarcely any will think hard enough about it.
47 “The servant who knows what his master wants but is not ready, or who does not do what the master wants, will be beaten with many blows! 48 But the servant who does not know what his master wants and does things that should be punished will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And from the one trusted with much, much more will be expected.
...which implies that, while there is a punishment for sin committed in ignorance, it is far less than that for sin committed knowingly.
(Proverbs 24:12 also seems relevant; and there’s a lot of probably-at-least-slightly relevant passages linked from here).
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider “true Christianity”, and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is “going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation”.
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it’s a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.
I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn’t for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes.
And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we’ve now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.
the eternal torment isn’t for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes
Not for “other crimes”, but specifically because of the original sin. The default outcome for humans is eternal torment, but Jesus offers an escape :-/
Not for “other crimes”, but specifically because of the original sin.
Some Christians would say that, some not. (Very very crudely, Catholics would somewhat agree, Protestants mostly wouldn’t. The Eastern Orthodox usually line up more with the Catholics than with the Protestants, but I forget where they stand on this one.)
Many would say, e.g., that “original sin” bequeaths us all a sinful “nature” but it’s the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
(But yes, most Christians would say that the default outcome for humans as we now are is damnation, whether or not they would cash that out in the traditional way as eternal torment.)
“original sin” bequeaths us all a sinful “nature” but it’s the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
Wouldn’t Protestants agree that without the help of Jesus (technically, grace) humans cannot help but yield to their sinful nature? The original sin is not something mere humans can overcome by themselves.
They probably would (the opposite position being Pelagianism, I suppose). But they’d still say our sins are our fault and we are fully responsible for them.
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that’s the case, please stop.)
My remark was not about the “fully responsible” part, but about the “your fault” part.
Note that guilt has nothing to do with being responsible for your own choices. The feeling of guilt is counterproductive regardless of what you choose to do.
Telling people “this is your fault” is a pretty good way to ensure that they feel guilty.
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that’s the case, please stop.)
No, that is not the case. It does appear that I had misunderstood what you said, though.
My remark was not about the “fully responsible” part, but about the “your fault” part.
This being the misunderstanding.
I think I now see more clearly what you were saying. You were saying that a statement along the lines of “Everything wrong in your life is YOUR FAULT!” would be making people feel guilty on purpose. This I agree with.
(What I thought you were saying—and what I did not agree with—is now unimportant.)
Sorry for that accusation, it was caused by your phrasing which (to me) sounded suggestive of indignation, and following the scheme often found in unpleasant arguments, i.e. repeating someone’s words (or misinterpreted words) in a loud-angry-questioning tone. As a suggestion, remember that this way of phrasing questions can be misunderstood?
I apologise for my error.
Nothing happened that requires apologies :) It’s cool :)
As a suggestion, remember that this way of phrasing questions can be misunderstood?
I shall try to bear that in mind in the future. Tonal information is stripped from plain-text communication, and will be guessed (possibly erroneously) by the reader.
(I knew that already, actually, but it’s not an easy lesson to always remember)
a lot of those “other crimes” are thought crimes too
Oh yes. I wasn’t saying “Christianity is much less horrible than you think”, just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude.
Jesus was pretty clear about this.
Actually, by and large the things he says about hell seem to me to fit the “final destruction” interpretation better than the “eternal torture” interpretation. Matthew 13:42 and 50, e.g., refer to throwing things into a “blazing furnace”; I don’t know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed. Mark 16:16 (1) probably wasn’t in the original version of Mark’s gospel and (2) just says “will be condemned” rather than specifying anything about what that entails; did you intend a different reference?
There are things Jesus is alleged to have said that sound more like eternal torture; e.g., Matthew 25:46. Surprise surprise, the Bible is not perfectly consistent with itself.
It seems pretty obvious to me that descriptions of hell could easily be just metaphorical. There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it’s like a never-ending fire that brings suffering and destruction in way that perpetuates itself. Eternal fire is a great way to describe it if one were looking for a metaphor. It’s this fire you need saving from. Enter Jesus.
Honestly, it’s a wonder to me hell isn’t treated as an obvious metaphor, but rather it is still a very real place for many mainstream Christians. I suppose it’s because they must also treat the resurrection as literal, and that bit loses some of it’s teeth if there is no real heaven/hell.
I don’t know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed.
There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it’s like a never-ending fire
That’s ingenious, but it really doesn’t seem to me easy to reconcile with the actual Hell-talk in the NT. E.g., Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don’t fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. And that passage in Matthew 25, which should scare the shit out of every Christian, talks about “eternal punishment” and is in any case clearly meant to be happening post mortem, or at least post resurrectionem. And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
If all we had to go on was the fact that Christianity has a tradition involving sin and eternal torment, I might agree with you. But what we have is more specific and doesn’t seem to me like it fits your theory very well.
because they must also treat the resurrection as literal
Yes, I think that’s at least part of it. (There’s something in C S Lewis—I think near the end of The problem of pain—where he says (or maybe quotes someone else as saying) that he’s never encountered anyone with a really lively hope of heaven who didn’t also have a serious fear of hell.)
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
I don’t think “sometimes an omnipotent superbeing can stop you being consumed when you’re thrown into a furnace” is much of an argument against “furnaces are generally better metaphors for destruction than for long-lasting punishment” :-).
Hm. Not worth getting into a line-by-line breakdown, but I’d argue anything said about hell in the Gospels (or the NT) could be read purely metaphorically without much strain.
A couple of the examples you’ve mentioned:
Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don’t fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
Seems to me he could just be saying something like: “They can take our lives and destroy our flesh, but we must not betray the Spirit of the movement; the Truth of God’s kingdom.”
This is a pretty common sentiment among revolutionaries.
And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
I think it’s a fairly common view that the author of Revelation was writing about recent events in Jerusalem (Roman/Jewish wars) using apocalyptic, highly figurative language. I’m no expert, but this is my understanding.
The Greek for hell used often in the NT is “gehenna” and (from my recall) refers to a garbage dump that was kept outside the walls of the city. Jesus might have been using this as a literal direct comparison to the hell that awaited sinners… but it seems more likely to me he just meant it as symbolic.
Anyway, tough to know what original authors/speakers believed. It is admittedly my pet theory that a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc. Low probability I’m right.
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego
This was just a joke funny to only former fundamentalists like me. :)
the author of Revelation was writing about recent events
Yes, but more precisely I think he was writing about recent events and prophesying doom to the Bad Guys in that narrative. I’m pretty sure that lake of burning sulphur was intended as part of the latter, not the former.
gehenna
Yes, that’s one reason why I favour “final destruction” over “eternal torture” as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren’t expecting it to last for ever.
a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc.
It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how plausible I find it.
a joke
For the avoidance of doubt, I did understand that it was a joke. (Former moderate evangelical here. I managed to avoid outright fundamentalism.)
Yes, that’s one reason why I favour “final destruction” over “eternal torture” as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren’t expecting it to last for ever.
The Biblical text as a whole seems very inconsistent to me if you are looking to choose either annihilationism or eternal conscious torment. The OT seems to treat death as final; then you have the rich man and Lazarus and “lake of fire” talk on the other side of the spectrum.
It is my sense that the Bible is actually very inconsistent on the issue because it is an amalgamation of lots of different, sometimes contradictory, views and ideas about the afterlife. You can find a common thread if you’d like...but you have to glaze over lots of inconsistencies.
For sure the Bible as a whole is far from consistent about this stuff. Even the NT specifically doesn’t speak with one voice. My only claim is that the answer to the question “what is intended by the teachings about hell ascribed to Jesus in the NT?” is nearer to “final destruction” than to “eternal torture”. I agree that the “rich man & Lazarus” story leans the other way but that one seems particularly clearly not intended to have its incidental details treated as doctrine.
I think there’s a joke to the effect that if you’re bad in life then when you die God will send you to New Jersey, and I don’t know anything about translations of earlier versions of the bible but I kind of hope that it’s possible for us to interpret the Gehenna comparison as parallel to that.
If someone told me that when I die God would send me to New Jersey, I’d understand that he was joking and being symbolic. But I would not reason “well, people in New Jersey die, so obviously he is trying to tell me that people in Hell get destroyed after a while”.
Nope, because dying is not a particularly distinctive feature of life in New Jersey; it happens everywhere in much the same way. So being sent to New Jersey wouldn’t make any sense as a symbol for being destroyed. What if someone told you that God will send you to the electric chair when you die?
If someone said that, I would assume he is trying to tell me that God will punish me in a severe and irreversible manner after I die.
It’s true that actual pits of flame kill people rather than torture them forever, but going from that to Hell being temporary is a case of some parts of the metaphor fighting others. He used a pit of flame as an example rather than dying in your sleep because he wanted to emphasize the severity of the punishment. If the metaphor was also meant to imply that Hell is temporary like a fire pit, the metaphor would be deemphasizing the severity of the punishment. A metaphor would not stand for two such opposed things unless the person making it is very confused.
I agree that he wanted to emphasize the severity, but that doesn’t have to mean making it out to be as severe as it could imaginably be. Fiery (and no doubt painful) total and final destruction is pretty severe, after all.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure
I don’t follow the reasoning you’re expecting her to have used. She couldn’t possibly have seen God taking one of Adam’s ribs and making her out of it, for the excellent reason that for most of that process she didn’t even exist. Is she supposed to accept God as an authority figure just because he tells her he made her?
No, but she would have seen God taking her to Adam. And Adam also behaving as if it had been God who had made her.
...admittedly, it would have been incredibly easy (even probable) for her to have missed this sort of delicate social cue when she was, perhaps, mere hours old.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
Yes, if in fact he was completely enough ignorant. What do I mean by “enough”? Well, if you come across a mysterious button then you should at least suspect that pushing it will do something dramatic you would on balance prefer not to have done, and if you push it anyway then that’s a bit irresponsible. You aren’t completely ignorant, because you have some idea of the sorts of things mysterious buttons might do when pushed.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
What’s the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? “If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them.”
Leaving aside the question of the culpability of Adam and Eve in this story, it seems clear to me that God is most certainly culpable, especially in the version of the story endorsed by many Christians where the Fall is ultimately responsible for sending billions of people to eternal torment. He puts A&E in this situation where if they Do The Thing then the consequences will be unimaginably horrendous. He tells them not to do it—OK, fair enough—but he doesn’t tell them accurately what the consequences will be, he doesn’t give them evidence that the consequences will be what he says[1], and most importantly he doesn’t in any way prepare them for the fact that in the garden with them is someone else—the serpent—who will with great cunning try to get them to do what God’s told them not to.
If I put my child in a room with a big red button that launches nuclear missiles, and also put in that room another person who is liable to try to get her to press the button, and if I know that in that case she is quite likely to be persuaded, and if all I say is “now, Child, you can do what you like in the room but don’t press that button”—why then, I am much more at fault than she is if those missiles get launched.
[1] In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then “in that day you will surely die”, and they don’t; the serpent tells Eve that they won’t, and they don’t.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
I take your point—it is just to avoid punishment for ignorance so complete. (Mind you, whoever deliberately connected that twig to the nuclear launch silo should get into some trouble).
What’s the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? “If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them.”
When I was a small child, I found myself in a nice place with two people who called themselves my parents. I did not remember anything before then; my parents told me that this was because I had not yet been born. They claimed to have somehow had something to do with creating me. They informed me, once I had learned to communicate with them, of several rules that, at the time, appeared arbitrary (why was I allowed to colour in in this book, but not my Dad’s expensive encyclopedias? Why was I barred from wandering out onto the road to get a close look at the cars? Why should I not accept candy from a stranger?) They may have tried to explain the consequences of breaking those rules, but if they did, I certainly didn’t understand them. If some stranger had attempted to persuade me to break those rules, then the correct action for me to take would be to ignore the stranger.
(Which makes the Adam and Eve story a cautionary tale for small children, I guess.)
In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then “in that day you will surely die”, and they don’t; the serpent tells Eve that they won’t, and they don’t.
I’d understood that to mean “on that day your death will become inevitable”—since they were thrown out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life (which could apparently confer immortality) their eventual deaths did become certain on that day.
I don’t think you answered my question: what’s the underlying principle?
I agree that it is generally best for people who, perhaps on account of being very young, are not able to survive effectively by making their own decisions to obey the people taking care of them. But I’m not sure this is best understood as a moral obligation, and surely sometimes it’s a mistake—some parents and other carers are, one way or another, very bad indeed. And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don’t seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
But let’s run with your analogy for a moment, and suppose that in fact Adam and Eve were as incompetent as toddler-you, and needed to be fenced about with incomprehensible absolute prohibitions whose real reasons they couldn’t understand. Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone? If they had, what would you think of someone who said “oh, it’s all CCC’s fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to.”?
a cautionary tale for small children
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: “Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents’ arbitrary instructions, they’re likely to throw you out of the house.” Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
on that day your death will become inevitable
That’s an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation? I’m going entirely off translations—I know maybe ten words of Hebrew—but it sure looks to me as if God says, simply and straightforwardly, that eating the fruit means dying the same day. Taking it to mean “your death will become inevitable” or “you will die spiritually” or something of the kind seems to me like rationalization.
But, again, I don’t know Hebrew and maybe “in that day you will surely die” really can mean “in that day it will become sure that on another day you will die”. Anyone want to enlighten me further?
I don’t think you answered my question: what’s the underlying principle?
I’m not actually sure.
I do think that there’s really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal, that it’s rather meant as a fable, to illustrate some important point. (It may be some sort of heavily mythological coating over an internal grain of historical truth, but if so, then it’s pretty deeply buried).
I’m not entirely sure what that point is. Part of it may be “the rules are there for a reason, don’t break them unless you’re really sure”. Part of it may be intended for children—“listen to your parents, they know better than you”. (And yes, some parents are bad news; but, by and large, the advice “listen to your parents” is very good advice for toddlers, because most parents care about their toddlers).
And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don’t seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
I do wonder, though—how old were they supposed to be? It seems that they were created in adult bodies, and gifted from creation with the ability to speak, but they may well have had a toddler’s naivete.
Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone?
Not if they had any option.
If they had, what would you think of someone who said “oh, it’s all CCC’s fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to.”?
Toddler-me would probably have expected that reaction. Current-me would consider putting toddler-me in that room to be horrendously irresponsible.
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: “Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents’ arbitrary instructions, they’re likely to throw you out of the house.” Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
I see it as more “obey your parents, or you’re going to really hate what comes next”. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty broadly applicable.
on that day your death will become inevitable
That’s an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation?
If you know ten words of Hebrew, then you know ten more words of Hebrew than I do.
there’s really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal
Do you mean there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, or there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not intended literally? I agree with the former but am unconvinced by the latter. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I have absolutely zero problems with Christians or Jews not taking it literally; I was among their number for many years.)
ten words of Hebrew
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I’d forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.) Of course the actual point here is that neither of us knows Hebrew, so we’re both guessing about what it means to say (as commonly translated into English) “in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die”.
Do you mean there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, or there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not intended literally?
I think there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, and (at least) very good evidence that it’s not intended literally. I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it’s not intended literally..
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I’d forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.)
Shalom—I think that’s “peace”, right? I’m not sure. I don’t know shema at all, and adam I know only as the name of the first man.
So, it seems I know more Hebrew than I thought; but nonetheless, you are perfectly correct about the point.
Yup, shalom is peace. (Related to salaam in Arabic.) I thought you might know shema from the famous declaration of monotheism, which goes something like Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, adonai ekhad”, meaning “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. (It comes from Deuteronomy, and is used liturgically.) I think adam* actually means “man” as well as being the name of the first one.
There are some other Hebrew words you might know because they’re used to make Biblical names; e.g., Isaac = Yitzhak and means something like “he laughs”, which you might remember from the relevant bit in the Bible. (I think I remember you saying you’re a Christian, which is why I thought you might know some of those.)
I thought you might know shema from the famous declaration of monotheism, which goes something like Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, adonai ekhad, meaning “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. (It comes from Deuteronomy, and is used liturgically.)
I don’t think I’m personally familiar with that phrase.
I think adam actually means “man” as well as being the name of the first one.
That makes sense. I think I recall seeing a footnote to that effect.
...if I had a perfect memory, I probably would know a lot more Hebrew than I do. I’ve seen the derivations of a lot of Biblical names, I just haven’t really thought of them as being particularly important enough to memorise. There are plenty of things about Isaac more important than the etymology of his name, after all.
Understood, and I hope I didn’t give the impression that I think anyone is obliged to remember this sort of thing. (It happens that my brain grabs onto such things pretty effortlessly, which I guess is partial compensation for the other things it’s rubbish at.)
I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it’s not intended literally.
How good that evidence is depends on whether the incredibly good evidence was available to (and incredibly good evidence for) the original writers.
A lot of the best reasons for thinking that the early chapters of Genesis are not literally true were (so far as anyone knows) completely unknown when those chapters were written.
According to Genesis 2 verse 10-14, the Garden was watered by a stream, which later split into four rivers. Two of those have, according to a brief Google search, gone missing in the time since Genesis was written, but the Tigris and the Euphrates would have been well known, even then. So checking up on Eden would have simply required heading up one of those rivers.
...which, now that I think about it, would have required someone willing to leave home for perhaps several days at a time and travel into the unknown, just to see what’s there.
checking up on Eden would have simply required heading up one of those rivers.
Nah. If you head up those rivers and don’t find Eden, the obvious conclusion is just that God removed it some time after Adam and Eve left because it was surplus to requirements. It doesn’t (at least not obviously, so far as I can see) refute the Genesis story.
Genesis says it was protected by an angel with a flaming sword. I think it might be reasonable not to expect to find the Garden… but one could expect to find the angel with the flaming sword. After all, if something’s there as security, it’s generally put where unauthorised people can find it.
It’s not an obvious refutation, but it’s more likely the result of a non-literal than a literal Garden of Eden.
If Eden was removed as surplus to requirements, so presumably was the angel. And this all seems like such an obvious thing for an Eden-literalist to say after trekking up the river and finding nothing that I really don’t see how the (then) present-day absence of the GoE and angel could possibly have been much evidence against a literal Eden.
You might want to know that you have accidentally replied to my comment instead of CCC’s. (In particular, your reply won’t have made CCC’s inbox icon light up.)
Hmmmmm. I didn’t think of ratios, but this transsubstantiation would take place in the atmosphere—perhaps atmospheric nitrogen could be pulled in to make up the difference. Or some of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen could be released into the atmosphere as gasses (carbon dioxide in the case of the oxygen). Or both.
At the very least, a chemical transmutation theory would need to consider that possibility.
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps
Perhaps you are right. It’s not easy to be certain of this sort of hypothetical—I have a lot of confidence that there will be some people who react as per my prediction, and that there will be some people who react as per your prediction, but which group (if either) will gain enough backing to be considered the mainstream opinion is difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell.
You mean, at the time? When I was twelve? I have no idea. That was a long time ago. I can’t reconstruct all the details of my thought processes back then. I suspect I just didn’t think it through.
I really don’t understand the problem here. In between “fantasies made up out of whole cloth” and “genuine communication with a deity” there is a broad range of possibilities, and I think the truth lies in that range rather than at either extreme. Spiritual experiences are real experiences, and they can feel like a genuine encounter with a deity without actually being a genuine encounter with a deity.
I think there a lot wrong with that paragraph. Mostly again stemming from confusing rational!new-atheist with rational!LW.
This community does welcome religious people with open arms in the sense that it doesn’t treat them badly just for being religious. One person converted from being atheist to Christianity while being employed by CFAR based on good reasoning.
From a Bayesian perspective there evidence that Zeus exist as Tyrrell McAllister writes in What Bayesianism taught me.
There’s definitely a shred of evidence as Scott describes in The Control Group Is Out Of Control. The core question is whether that’s enough to counteract our scepticism against those claims being true and most people in this community don’t think the evidence is strong enough for that.
One person converted from being atheist to Christianity while being employed by CFAR based on good reasoning.
That’s interesting. Is this “good reasoning” recorded anywhere? I’d love to see it.
There’s definitely a shred of evidence
Really? What is it?
Before you answer, pay close attention to the wording of my claim: there is no evidence that spiritual experience is anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon. Such evidence would have to be more than just something that could be caused by a deity, it would have to be something that could not be neurophysiological. And AFAICT, there really is not a single instance of such evidence. If you disagree, please cite the evidence you think exists and we can discuss it.
BTW, this is not an extreme claim. There is zero evidence that quantum mechanics is false. There is zero evidence that general relativity is false. This is so despite the fact that we know that one or the other (possibly both) must in fact be false because they are logically incompatible with each other, so they can’t both be true. And it is so despite the fact that the entire physics community is actively looking for such evidence, and that finding it would be considered a major breakthrough. Anyone who finds such evidence will almost certainly win the Nobel prize. Likewise, anyone who had actual evidence of a spiritual phenomenon that could not be (or even had a very low probability of being) neurophysiological will have made a major scientific breakthrough. So the fact that the headlines are not filled with stories of someone being feted for finding this evidence is evidence that such evidence does not exist.
it would have to be something that could not be neurophysiological
That’s wrong. Something that couldn’t be neurophysiological would be not merely evidence but proof (not necessarily of a deity, of course, but of some external cause). I suggest that, e.g., Srinivasa Ramanujan’s experience of having mathematical insights given to him by the goddess Namagiri was evidence that he was in contact with a supernatural being—but, of course, far less evidence than it would take to convince me that he really was in contact with such a being.
For A to be evidence of B, all it takes is that A is more likely if B than if not-B. Dreams of goddesses handing out what turn out to be genuine (and highly unusual) mathematical insights are more likely if there are in fact goddesses able to hand out such insights than if there are not, because the existence of such goddesses would provide one more mechanism by which such dreams could occur.
I would suggest that Ramanujan’s experiences might be as much as 10:1 evidence for the existence of the goddess Namagiri Thayar. But, of course, every other mathematician who has insights without any sign of gods and goddesses getting involved is evidence against, quite apart from all the other reasons not to believe in Namagiri Thayar or any other goddess.
Perhaps you are using the term “shred of evidence” to denote something more than that. Fair enough, I suppose, but then I’m afraid I think you chose your words badly.
Very well, I concede the point. I should not have said that “there is not a shred of evidence.” Still, AFAICT the evidence favors neurobiology by a very substantial margin.
I provided a link. Scott writes that Bem’s meta-analysis in favor of paranormal phenomena makes the conclusion that paranormal phenomena exist with standards of evidence that are higher than those standards for a lot of phenomena we expect as real.
That doesn’t mean that you have to convinced by Bem’s evidence but claiming that it isn’t a shred of evidence is wrong.
Such evidence would have to be more than just something that could be caused by a deity
Interestingly you speak of deity’s while I haven’t said anything about deities. The question of whether deities exist is a different question then whether they are real spiritual experiences exist.
Again that’s a problem with the muddled notion of spiritual under which you wrote the opening post. You link ideas together that can exist independent from each other.
And it is so despite the fact that the entire physics community is actively looking for such evidence, and that finding it would be considered a major breakthrough.
It isn’t. The amount of people investigating paranormal effects is quite small.
Anyone who finds such evidence will almost certainly win the Nobel prize.
In a world where there are no cultural forces that make people not want to accept such evidence that might be true.
It took till 2008 till a Cochrane study concluded that chiropratics techniques have an effect on reducing back pain. Decades for recognizing a fairly ease to produce effect.
Nobody got the Nobel Prize.
Paradgim change is really hard. It’s nothing that you get by someone making a new discovery that can easily conceptualized in the old ways of seeing the world and then newspapers convincing everybody that it’s true. Reading Kuhn might be useful to understand how scientific change works.
claiming that it isn’t a shred of evidence is wrong
OK, I concede the point. There may be a shred of evidence (but not much more than a shred, at least AFAICT).
you speak of deity’s
Only because “deity” is easier to type than “supernatural phenomenon.”
The question of whether deities exist is a different question then whether they are real spiritual experiences exist.
Well, yeah, that was actually my whole thesis: spiritual experiences are real even though the deities (or whatever) that some people ascribe them to are (almost certainly) not.
Only because “deity” is easier to type than “supernatural phenomenon.”
In general scientific writing doesn’t use five letter words that are easy to type but longer more precise words.
Well, yeah, that was actually my whole thesis: spiritual experiences are real even though the deities (or whatever) that some people ascribe them to are (almost certainly) not.
In Bem’s meta analysis case we are talking about extrasensory perception. Information transfer for which our existing theories don’t account. Not just experience.
In general scientific writing doesn’t use five letter words
Sure, but this is a comment thread, not a journal submission.
we are talking about extrasensory perception
I don’t see why that is relevant. What difference does it make if it’s God or ESP or leprechauns? Strong evidence for any of those would be enough to be of considerable interest.
Also, can you please re-post the link to “Bem’s meta analysis”? I can’t figure out what you’re referring to here.
BTW, I read the Leah Libresco piece you referred me to. Thanks for the reference. I don’t agree with you that it represents “good reasoning.” Her reasoning was, essentially, “Someone has asked me a question for which I do not have a satisfactory answer. Therefore everything the Catholic church teaches must be true.” That doesn’t seem like good reasoning to me.
Sure, but this is a comment thread, not a journal submission.
We are at a place that values reasoning. You are making a mistake in reasoning by switching different claims with each other.
Also, can you please re-post the link to “Bem’s meta analysis”? I can’t figure out what you’re referring to here.
Again you make a reasoning mistake by confusing claims. I didn’t said I linked to Bem’s meta analysis. I said I linked to Scott Alexander’s discussion of it. And I linked to it in the first sentence speaking about a shard of evidence. Is that too hard too find?
But in general looking up papers isn’t hard if you want to look up papers of Bem there’s Google Scholar. If you are actually interested in the evidence than reading a bit Bem could be worthwhile to understand his arguments.
Her reasoning was, essentially, “Someone has asked me a question for which I do not have a satisfactory answer.
To the extend that you think that’s why Leah changed the position I don’t think that summarizes what I know over the process from reading her writting. The information about her the ideological turing project might be distributed over more articles.
I’m trying to keep up with a lot of parallel threads here simultaneously, and backtracking a thread more than 2-3 steps is actually fairly time consuming because of the way the LW UI is set up. I was hoping you might do me a favor and save me the trouble of having to go back and figure out what you were referring to.
But since you’re giving me a hard time for my lack of precision and adherence to the conventions of scientific discourse, here is how Scott Alexander references Bem:
“Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014), full text available for download at the top bar of the link above...”
The link that I presume he’s referring to (the phrase “the link above” is ambiguous because there are many links above) has anchor text, “What now, motherfuckers?” which is not a phrase you find much in scientific discourse. I followed that link, and it leads to a page that has the abstract of the paper that I presume you’re referring to, and a notation that says “Not available for download.” So that’s as far as I’m willing to go down that particular rabbit hole. Sorry. Life is short.
The information about her the ideological turing project might be distributed over more articles.
Of course it is, and I read some of them. I don’t have time to go back and read everything she’s written. But going from being a non-theist to being a theist is a huge leap, and it calls for a better explanation than the one she gave if she wanted anyone to accept is as “good reasoning” rather than a straightforward leap of faith.
I think this is the paper in question, completely online. I think this is official and not in any way illegitimately piratical. There is apparently a more recent revised version, but since even the first published version (to which that’s a link) postdates Scott’s article you should probably start with that.
So that’s as far as I’m willing to go down that particular rabbit hole. Sorry. Life is short.
If you don’t actually want to evaluate the paper, the basic heuristic is to trust what a highly regarded member of this community with Scott Alexander says about it. It does provide a fair amount of evidence. It therefore makes sense to update and not continue to say that there’s no evidence at all.
“Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014)
We live at a time where that’s the information that specifies a scientific paper. It’s quite alright to say that you don’t care about the evidence for paranormal phenomena and spend your time on other issues.
If you however do care about the state of the evidence then there a time where it makes sense to read scientific papers instead about making arguments about what the evidence is based on what’s reported in mainstream media.
I have no problem with someone saying that he doesn’t know or cares to know about the state of the evidence, but if that’s your position don’t claim that there’s no evidence.
the basic heuristic is to trust what a highly regarded member of this community with Scott Alexander says about it
The even more basic heuristic is to look at the history of psi claims and observe that the overwhelming majority of them have failed to stand up to scrutiny. It might even be true that not a single psi claim has ever stood up to scrutiny (though this depends a bit on what you mean by “scrutiny”.) It is certainly true that no psi phenomenon has ever been reliably reproduced, and that the Randi prize went unclaimed despite there having been over 1000 applicants. One person’s opinion, no matter how well respected, doesn’t make much of a Bayesian dent in that mountain of negative evidence. People can be fooled, and people make mistakes. Even smart people.
It is certainly true that no psi phenomenon has ever been reliably reproduced, and that the Randi prize went unclaimed despite there having been over 1000 applicants.
The linked paper is about a meta-study that described how a specifc psi phenomena was reliably reproduced.
There’s an older meta-review of Ganzfeld experiments that came to a similar result. Ganzfeld experiments have been multiple time reproduced.
The standard of the Randi prize (betting chances of 1:1,000,000) is substantially more tough than the standards of evidence-based medicine (two trials that beat 1:20).
You don’t go around and say that there’s no significant evidence that FDA approved drugs work because they aren’t proven to work for Randi’s standards.
a meta-study that described how a specifc psi phenomena was reliably reproduced.
That’s not what reliable reproduction means. What it means is that you would be willing to place a real-money bet on the outcome of a future experiment.
You don’t go around and say that there’s no significant evidence that FDA approved drugs work
Actually, there’s good reason to believe that the drug testing process has some serious flaws. But even under ideal circumstances, the odds of getting a false positive are 1 in 400. There have been about 1500 drugs approved by the FDA so almost certainly at least 3 or 4 of them actually don’t work. Those are good enough odds for me, particularly when compared to the alternatives.
The standard of the Randi prize (betting chances of 1:1,000,000) is substantially more tough than the standards of evidence-based medicine (two trials that beat 1:20).
Yes, of course. If Randi had used the FDA standard, then with over 1000 applicants, you would expect two or three of them to win at 1:400 purely by chance. I’ll take the bet at 1:400 confidence if you’re willing to pay 1/40th of the prize as an entrance fee, and are willing to do the experiment more than once. In fact, I’ll go you one better: You name any statistical test you think you can beat and I’ll take a bet at 10:1 odds. Heck, make it 2:1. (If it’s good enough for a Vegas casino, it’s good enough for me.) Truthfully, that’s a bet I would be absolutely thrilled to lose.
But my prediction is that you will not accept this offer.
Could you refer me to any authoritive scientific body that defines the test of what scientific results are defined as reliably produced over real-money bets?
I think you can make an argument that the scientific establishment should work that way, but if you consider that to be the sole standard you have to throw out most scientific findings because nobody ever bet on them.
You name any statistical test you think you can beat and I’ll take a bet at 10:1 odds. Heck it 2:1
I think Dean Radin or Bem might be open to do a run at the Ganzfeld experiment provided the amount of money involved justifies the effort or there reputation to be gained by a prominent skeptic holding the other side of the bet.
On the other hand I’m personally not in the business of doing parapsychology experiments.
You are asking me to advance an argument from authority? Seriously?
nobody ever bet on them
That’s not true. You place implicit bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results every time you use any piece of modern technology. If you’ve ever flown in an airplane you have actually staked your life on the proposition that scientific results are reliably reproducible.
And, BTW, the reason very few people ever place “real” bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results is that there’s a shortage of suckers stupid enough to bet against it.
I’m personally not in the business of doing parapsychology experiments.
Aaaaand… here come the excuses. What a surprise.
I’m not asking you to conduct the experiment, I’m just asking you how much you’d be willing to bet.
You place implicit bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results every time you use any piece of modern technology. If you’ve ever flown in an airplane you have actually staked your life on the proposition that scientific results are reliably reproducible.
There a plenty of Yoga people who produce reliable Yoga results by using a theory that assumes the existance of chakra’s. That doesn’t prove the theory of chakra’s to be right. Successful technology is not the same thing as successful science.
Futhermore there’s a lot of science which is not effectively used in technology, do you consider that to be illegimate?
I’m not asking you to conduct the experiment, I’m just asking you how much you’d be willing to bet.
The core idea with betting is to be specific about the terms of the bet. If you wan to bet about whether Bem or Dean Radin produce publishable statistically significant results for paranormal phenomena in the future, then I would be pretty confident that they do.
It’s just that I don’t expect you to take such a bet, because you likely would want some sort of tamperproof enviroment.
That’s where things get complicated and I’m not interested in setting up such an enivroment. People like Bem or Radin on the other hand seem to me open to be engaged in such a way. People who are publically on the record for stating that their reason not to participate in Randi experiment was that their effect sizes where lower than what’s required for Randi.
For my myself the topic isn’t worth the effort of building up experiments and investing hundreds of hours for that.
Apart from that I personally don’t take bets with strangers and if I would than rather about topics where there definite evidence in one direction and not topics that are grey.
Successful technology is not the same thing as successful science.
That’s why I specified modern technology. Computers. Airplanes. Microwave ovens.
Futhermore there’s a lot of science which is not effectively used in technology, do you consider that to be illegimate?
That’s a non-sequitur. Your claim was:
you have to throw out most scientific findings because nobody ever bet on them
In fact, every time you turn on your cell phone you are placing an implicit bet on vast swaths of scientific knowledge. That there might be additional areas of scientific knowledge that you aren’t placing bets on doesn’t change that.
The core idea with betting is to be specific about the terms of the bet.
Here are the terms: choose your favorite psi experiment where the odds of a positive result based on pure chance are objectively computable. Let’s say those odds are N:1. We bet at M*N:1 odds for some multiplier M>=2. If you make M larger than 2 that indicates greater confidence and you get more bragging rights should you win. We iterate until you either concede, or you have won $10,000 from me.
their reason not to participate in Randi experiment was that their effect sizes where lower than what’s required for Randi.
There are well known techniques for extracting signals from noisy channels to any desired level of statistical confidence. Physicist regularly get six-sigma results (odds of resulting by change of less than one in 3 million) from signal-to-noise ratios in the negative tens of dB. This is part of what it means to be “reliably reproducible.”
you likely would want some sort of tamperproof enviroment.
Well, duh. Any intellectually honest seeker of the truth should want some assurances that they are not being deceived.
I don’t think that’s fair. More like: “Someone has asked me a question for which the least unsatisfactory answer I can find is that there is a god who somewhat resembles that of Christianity; I have already decided that Roman Catholicism is the most plausible variety of theism; therefore I shall convert to Roman Catholicism”. She doesn’t say explicitly the bit about having already decided that RCism is the most plausible sort of theism, but it seems clear from context.
The step from theism-in-general to RCism-in-particular is, though, something Leah seems particularly unwilling to justify in any way that would make sense to a skeptic, and I agree it looks like a very weak point. Just not quite as weak as you represent it as being :-).
Sure, I’d agree with that. Sometimes when trying to be brief one fails to capture all of the subtle nuances of someone else’s argument. But one way or another, I think she skipped a step or two.
I can see how you can get to something resembling “morality loves me”. What I don’t see is how you get from there to “Jesus, an actual flesh-and-blood human being (who was also the physical embodiment of the omniscient omnipresent omnipotent deity who created the universe) died for my sins, and this is an actual point of physical fact, not merely an allegorical myth.”
The quality of the reasoning involved is debatable, and Leah’s apparent reluctance to say more about just how the reasoning went doesn’t seem like a good sign. (For the avoidance of doubt, I firmly agree that Leah is very intelligent and I’m sure she was trying to reason well. But even very intelligent people trying to reason well perpetrate bad reasoning sometimes.)
When I say good reasoning then I mean using the ideological turing test to decide which experts know most about the subject and then copying the judgement of those experts.
That’s not the only thing that Leah did, but bootstraping priors in that way is a pretty sophisticated way to reason. It’s an impressive example on focusing more on using a reasoning technique than focusing on achiving the generally accepted results that your social circle wants you to achieve.
As far as relucatance goes, I think most people aren’t fully transparent about all reasoning that goes into major belief changes in written articles.
using the ideological turing test to decide which experts know most about the subject and then copying the judgement of those experts
Although Leah hasn’t been terribly forthcoming about how her conversion happened, I think she’s said enough to be pretty sure that it wasn’t that. What makes you think it was?
Read the blog post you linked to. She doesn’t say anything about ideological Turing tests; she doesn’t say anything about deferring to the judgement of experts-on-religion; she says she had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make sense of ethics and decided that “Morality just loves me or something” provided the best explanation.
the generally accepted results that your social circle wants you to achieve
My understanding is that a lot of Leah’s social circle was RC even before she converted.
Leah ran an ideological Turing test, in which theists scored better than atheists, AND
Leah converted to Catholicism
with the false proposition
Leah ran an ideological Turing test, in which theists scored better than atheists, AND SO
Leah converted to Catholicism.
Wikipedia’s page
… also neither claims nor implies that Leah’s conversion was a result of her finding that Christians did better than atheists in her ideological Turing test.
No, I didn’t think your metaphor was meant to imply we failed to see the spiritual because of all the mental discipline. What I found offensive was the idea that we failed to see the spiritual despite of all the mental discipline.
Your example with addicts can backfire. Ex-addicts become good sobriety counselors the same way ex-believers become good advocates for reason. And the whole idea of comparing spirituality with addiction… it’s like you’re making my arguments for me.
It’s also some people’s standard reaction to being insulted. And an argument can be irrefutable (1) by being right, (2) by being too vague and allusive to get a grip on, or (3) by being nonsense. Or (4) by there actually being no argument to refute. In this case, lisper hasn’t made any actual argument for characterizing not having “spiritual experiences” as a kind of blindness, he’s just gone ahead and done it.
(There’s no shame in being colour-blind, says lisper. Quite true. There should be no shame in being unintelligent either, but most people here would be greatly displeased at being called unintelligent. There should be no shame in being ugly, but most people—perhaps fewer here than in most venues—would be greatly displeased at being called ugly.)
Being stupid or ugly is not quite the same as being color-blind or spirituality-blind because stupidity and ugliness have a more direct impact on your reproductive fitness,
Of course it’s not quite the same. Neither is being stupid quite the same as being ugly. But do you really think a thing is only a real insult if it’s about something that directly impacts your reproductive fitness? That seems a very odd idea to me. (And I question whether being intelligent—as opposed to unintelligent, rather than outright stupid—is a net benefit to reproductive fitness; I would guess that typical reproductive fitness is no worse at IQ 100 than at IQ 140. If you think “unintelligent” implies stupider than that, feel free to pretend I said “not especially intelligent” instead of “unintelligent”.)
And because stupidity have more direct impact on IQ score, uglyness on actor profession opportunities, color-blind on painter options and spirituality-blindness on inner feeling of well-being perhaps?
If we’re being very charitable, spirituality-blindness might mean something like “low trait absorption)” which would imply a reduced ability to benefit from placebo effects.
edit: Sorry, I didn’t figure out how to make a link that includes a closing bracket work in this comment syntax.
It’s also some people’s standard reaction to being insulted.
True, and unfortunately polymathwannabe seems to regard any implication that the identity he likes to dress as is less than perfect to be a personal attack on him.
The point I am trying to make is that some people believe in God for the exact same reason that you believe in trees: they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God.
Or, to put it another way, some people believe in God because they have seen evidence of God.
No, I’m advancing the hypothesis that such experiences are (at least part of) the foundation of religious belief, just as the first-hand experience of walking into a tree is (at least part of) the foundation of your belief in trees.
Well… okay. I don’t really think that can be argued against. In fact, looking at the bible, Phillipians 3 verse 3:
we worship God by means of his Spirit and rejoice in our life in union with Christ Jesus
suggests that there was at the very least rejoicing, which is what one might expect from a sense of euphoria.
I strongly suspect, however, that most of your belief in trees comes not from walking into them, but from seeing them, with walking into them providing only additional confirmation for your prior belief. You don’t give this a lot of thought because the vast majority of your fellow creatures also see trees, and so your interactions with them become a network of self-reinforcing confirmations that trees do in point of fact exist.
Also, climbing them.
But imagine a different world, where everyone is blind except you, and the only tree is on the other side of a wide, impassable canyon. You can see the tree, but no one else can. Everyone thinks you’re insane because you believe in trees, indeed because you believe that the canyon has “another side” (what an absurd notion!)
Okay...
How would you go about trying to convince your blind peers that you can in fact see the trees?
I think I’d be more interested in trying to convince them that the other side of the canyon exists, and there’s more space for houses and farms there and thus this “bridge” idea that I keep going on about is not as stupid as you think it is you idiots!
...I might lose my temper with them on occasion.
But it’s really the same question, at the heart of it. How do I convince someone of the existence of something that they cannot directly observe, and that, indeed, they have a strong social pressure against admitting the existence of? I can tell them about it; they will laugh and shake their heads. I can describe it in detail—someone will ask what lies behind the little hill, and when I cannot tell him, he will laugh and say that that is why this ‘sight’ I keep going on about cannot possibly exist, because it is no harder to feel on one side of the hill than the other. I can attempt to build a bridge—and the Blind will work to stop me, describing how no such structure has ever succeeded in the past, even when I managed to persuade others to help me (in vain will I point out the width of the canyon, the crumbliness of the far edge, or the fact that letting a blind man lower the bridge was why it fell into the canyon last time) and it is all a waste of resources.
Or, to put it another way, some people believe in God because they have seen evidence of God.
Yes. Exactly.
Also, climbing them.
Religious people have a similarly intricate web of self-reinforcing evidence for their beliefs. The “evidence” of God’s handiwork is all around you, even in the trees. In fact, it is so difficult to see why all of the intricacies of nature are not evidence of an intelligent designer that it took humans many millennia to figure it out, and it is considered a major intellectual accomplishment. Evolution is only obvious in retrospect.
I think I’d be more interested in trying to convince them that the other side of the canyon exists
OK, but now consider this question: what evidence could your blind peers offer that would convince you that what you think you are seeing is not in fact real, but is actually just an epiphenomenon of some neurobiological process going on entirely inside your brain?
OK, but now consider this question: what evidence could your blind peers offer that would convince you that what you think you are seeing is not in fact real, but is actually just an epiphenomenon of some neurobiological process going on entirely inside your brain?
Hmmmm. Tricky.
I can see it. Without trees on this side—and specifically, without wood—I presumably can’t build a bridge over to the other side. (And if I could, then I’d have plenty of proof that it exist and I break the metaphor) So, we can’t go over there and observe it directly (by means of touch, a sense that everyone shares). The only evidence I have for the existence of the other side of the canyon is sight—I can see it.
I imagine that if the blind people could somehow convince me that sight is really hallucination—that is to say, what I “see” is entirely an internal process within the brain and not at all related to external reality in any way (except perhaps insofar that I only “see” what I expect to “see”) - then that would be sufficient to make me question the reality of the other side of the canyon.
...I guess I could throw a rock at it and listen for the impact
Note that it is not necessary for all of your visions (sic!) to be hallucinations to sustain this puzzle. It’s enough that faraway things are illusory. Maybe you’re living in a “Truman Show”-style virtual reality, where the far side of the canyon is actually a projected image. (A mirage is a real-world example of something that looks very different from its true nature when viewed from far away.)
Note that it is not necessary for all of your visions (sic!) to be hallucinations to sustain this puzzle. It’s enough that faraway things are illusory. Maybe you’re living in a “Truman Show”-style virtual reality, where the far side of the canyon is actually a projected image.
Hmmm. True, but now we’re talking about a world specifically designed to produce the appearance of the opposite side of the canyon even when it doesn’t exist. I think that we can, at least tentatively, discount active malevolence as an explanation for why I see the opposite side of the canyon.
Mind you, I’m not saying it can’t be a mirage. If I’m short-sighted—so that everything beyond a certain distance is blurry and unrecognisable—and there just happens to be a large reflective surface partway across the canyon—then I may see the reflection of this side of the canyon, fail to recognise it due to the blurring, and claim that there is an opposite side to the canyon. (This can be recognised by a simple test, should anyone manage to produce prescription spectacles).
But let us say that my blind peers bring me incredibly convincing evidence for the idea that there is no other side of the canyon. They are very persuasive in that this “sight” business is a brain disease caused by being out and about in the heat of the day, making my brain overheat, and only in the coolness of night, when all is dark, am I sane. (And, sure enough, when it’s dark then it’s too dark to see the other side of the canyon).
But none of this is evidence that there is no other side. The other side could still be there—even if every argument advanced by my blind peers is true—and while I am sitting here questioning my sanity, the other side continues to sit there, perhaps visible to me alone, but nonetheless visible, and I should not throw that evidence away.
but now we’re talking about a world specifically designed to produce the appearance of the opposite side of the canyon even when it doesn’t exist
Not necessarily. That just happened to be the case in “The Truman Show.” We actually have a real-world version of this scenario going on in cosmology right now. There are two “trees” on the far side of the canyon: dark matter and dark energy, both of which are just labels for “the mysterious unknown thing that causes the observed data to not match up with the currently best available theories”. (Note that in the tree scenario you would not have the word “tree” in your vocabulary, or if you did, it could not possibly mean anything other than “The mysterious unknown thing on the far side of the canyon that looks completely unlike anything nearby.”)
BTW, have you ever seen a mirage? They look very convincing at a distance, even with sharp vision.
Not necessarily. That just happened to be the case in “The Truman Show.”
Yes, but if the universe is an intentional simulation, then someone is running it. (I haven’t seen the film myself, but I understand that someone was actually running the Truman Show). The atheist hypothesis is that there is no-one running the universe—claiming that the universe has been designed, by someone, to give the impression of having been designed by someone when, in actuality, there was no designer of the universe is somewhat self-contradictory.
We actually have a real-world version of this scenario going on in cosmology right now. There are two “trees” on the far side of the canyon: dark matter and dark energy, both of which are just labels for “the mysterious unknown thing that causes the observed data to not match up with the currently best available theories”.
Not quite the same thing. There’s no debate on whether or not those trees exist, there’s merely debate on exactly what those trees are.
BTW, have you ever seen a mirage? They look very convincing at a distance, even with sharp vision.
Yes, the type where you look along a long, straight road on a hot day and the more distant portion of the road appears to vanish, leaving the sides of the road apparently delimiting a patch of sky. Mirages can be convincing, but they can’t look like anything, and they’re very dependent on where the observer stands and the air temperature on the day, so they can be tested for.
if the universe is an intentional simulation, then someone is running it
I think you’re conflating the features of a hypothetical universe that I conjured up to make a point with what I believe to be the case in the world we live in. In the world we live in, there is no evidence that we are in an intentional simulation. All the evidence is that everything we can see arises from simple processes (where “simple” is meant in the technical sense of having low Kolmogorov complexity ).
claiming that the universe has been designed, by someone, to give the impression of having been designed by someone
I’m not sure that’s really what you meant to say, but that is not the “atheist hypothesis.” The atheist hypothesis is that the appearance of design can come about in ways other than having a designer (like natural selection or anthropic bias), and so the appearance of design is not slam-dunk proof of the existence of a Designer.
Okay, I can see that I was unclear. Let me clarify my point. Well, two points and a conclusion.
Point 1) The Truman Show Hypothesis is that the world has been intentionally designed to appear, in some way, to be something that it is not, and any new attempts to discover the true nature of the universe will be foiled by an active opposing intelligence which is running said universe.
Point 2) The “atheist hypothesis” is that there is no-one running the universe.
Conclusion, taking both point 1 and point 2 into account: Claiming that the universe has been designed, by someone, to give the impression of having been designed by someone when, in actuality, there was no designer of the universe is somewhat self-contradictory.
This does not imply that the universe could appear to be different to how it is. It merely states that if there is no-one running the universe, then the universe can not be run in such a way as to actively prevent every possible means to find its true nature—the universe, in that case, must be running entirely on natural laws without an active intelligence behind them.
...I hope that’s clearer.
Now, if we are living in a universe that we merely fail to properly understand, then eventually someone will figure it out, because there is not an active intelligence preventing that figuring out.
Oh, I see. When I brought up the Truman Show I didn’t mean for the intentionality of it to be relevant. I just brought it up as an illustrative example of how distant things could have a fundamentally different cause (not necessarily an intentional one) than nearby things.
Let me try this again: there are subjective experiences that some people have and other people don’t (seeing trees, hearing the Voice of God). To those who have them, those subjective experiences feel like they are caused by external factors (real trees, actual deities). For various reasons (canyons, the desire of deities to preserve human free will or whatever) the question of whether those subjective experiences are actually caused by trees or deities, or whether they are simple neurobiological phenomena (i.e. illusions), resists experimental inquiry. Under those circumstances, how do you decide whether these subjective experiences are actually evidence of trees or deities, or whether they are illusions?
The point is that this is not necessarily an easy question to answer. The fact that God doesn’t talk to you is not slam-dunk evidence that God does not exist, just as the fact that the blind people can’t see the tree on the other side of the canyon is not slam-dunk evidence that the tree isn’t real. Likewise, the fact that many people hear the Voice of God is not slam-dunk evidence that He does exist, just as the fact that you can see the tree is not slam-dunk evidence that the tree exists.
Oh, I see. When I brought up the Truman Show I didn’t mean for the intentionality of it to be relevant.
...oh, right. My apologies for misunderstanding you, then. So, what you were suggesting was basically some form of mirage, then.
The point is that this is not necessarily an easy question to answer.
Completely agreed. If it was an easy question to answer, then there would not be nearly so many debates about it.
Mind you, in the case of the tree, there is an experiment that can prove its existence, or lack thereof—one merely needs to find a way to get close enough to touch it. (Similarly, it is possible to prove God exists, if He agrees—if He pushes some clouds aside and says “Look, everybody, here I am!”, then that’ll be pretty convincing evidence, for anyone who happens to see it at least). Of course, these experiments are at least difficult and perhaps impossible to set up...
So, what you were suggesting was basically some form of mirage, then.
It was supposed to be ambiguous, that’s the whole point. It’s a thought experiment designed to get a non-believer to understand what it’s like to be someone who believes in God because they have had a subjective experience that, to them, is indistinguishable from hearing the Voice of God. Non-believers seem to have a really hard time imagining that (outside the context of mental illness), so I thought it might be easier to imagine being someone who believes in trees because you have had a subjective experience that is indistinguishable to you from seeing a real tree, but under circumstances where you cannot share that experience with anyone else except through testimony.
one merely needs to find a way to get close enough to touch it
Yes. Hence the canyon.
if He pushes some clouds aside and says “Look, everybody, here I am!”, then that’ll be pretty convincing evidence
Yes, if God wanted to prove Her existence She certainly could. But the theory is that She chooses to remain hidden because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe. (Unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case you deny that humans have free will and things get rather bizarre.)
It was supposed to be ambiguous, that’s the whole point.
Quite, yes. The thought experiment was that I saw what looked like a tree on the other side of the canyon. It could be a tree, it could be a mirage—my sight is telling me it’s a tree, but there are a lot of blind people around who are telling me there’s no such thing as trees, and I have no evidence beyond that of my sight.
It’s a really good analogy, and I like it very much.
Yes, if God wanted to prove Her existence She certainly could. But the theory is that She chooses to remain hidden because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe.
Well—we know that She (male pronouns are often used, but I’m pretty sure God is genderless) chooses to remain hidden—currently, at least. (Interestingly, if one looks at certain parts of the Old Testament—particularly much of Exodus—it seems that God wasn’t always so cagey. Parting the Red Sea and dropping it on Pharoah’s army was hardly a subtle miracle. And then there was the manna in the desert...)
But whether that’s because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe or for some other reason, I can’t really offer an opinion on. It’s possible that She’d be willing to cooperate in an experiment if we could find the right experiment, for whatever reason—but it’s also possible, given current behaviour, that God will simply refuse to cooperate with any experiment intended to prove Her existence beyond doubt...
It’s a really good analogy, and I like it very much.
Thank you! You just made my day.
Parting the Red Sea and dropping it on Pharoah’s army was hardly a subtle miracle.
Yeah, but those good old days are apparently behind us. It’s a shame that God didn’t think to make a video. Now that would have been cool!
it’s also possible, given current behaviour, that God will simply refuse to cooperate with any experiment intended to prove Her existence beyond doubt...
One of the things that I’ve often heard Christians say is, “God could do X and Y and Z (because He (they never refer to God as She) is omnipotent) but He chooses not to.” The idea of an omnipotent deity whose behavior is reliably predictable by mere mortals has always struck me as logically incoherent. But what do I know? ;-)
Yeah, but those good old days are apparently behind us. It’s a shame that God didn’t think to make a video. Now that would have been cool!
It would have, yes!
...probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to be usable in modern video players, though. I don’t think there’s many physical media that can manage a few thousand years in the desert, short of a miracle.
One of the things that I’ve often heard Christians say is, “God could do X and Y and Z (because He (they never refer to God as She) is omnipotent) but He chooses not to.” The idea of an omnipotent deity whose behavior is reliably predictable by mere mortals has always struck me as logically incoherent. But what do I know? ;-)
Well, the argument goes that “God could do X and Y and Z, and no other force could prevent God from doing X and Y and Z, because omnipotence. Yet I observe that X and Y and Z are not, in fact, done. Assuming that my observations are not in error, this means that X and Y and Z were not done; I know that the only reason why God might not do X and Y and Z is by choosing not to, since no force can stop God. Therefore, God must have chosen not to do X and Y and Z.”
So it’s not really prediction as much as it is observation (and fitting those observations into existing ideas about reality).
I don’t think there’s many physical media that can manage a few thousand years in the desert, short of a miracle.
The desert is actually quite good at preserving all manner of things. But this is neither here nor there. If God had wanted a video of the parting of the Red Sea so survive to modern times He could surely have arranged it because, well, that’s kind of what it means to be omnipotent.
I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still. I’m a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.
I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still.
On the basis of what? (no, I’m not asking you to quote me the appropriate chapter and verse)
There is an old theological debate about constraints on God. Is He really omnipotent, literally, or there are things He is unable to do? I don’t think this debate has a satisfactory resolution.
Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?
I don’t think this debate has a satisfactory resolution.
Really? If you are willing to seriously entertain the possibility that the answer could be “no”, why is that not a satisfactory resolution? It seems to me to be consistent with all the data.
Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?
I guess I’m surprised to find religious people here. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless. I’ve never understood how anyone can maintain faith in the face of rational scrutiny. Maybe someone here will be able explain it to me.
I didn’t say you [sc. Lumifer] were [sc. religious].
Hmm. I don’t see how else to make sense of the exchange you and Lumifer have just had. Let me follow the steps backward, and you can tell me what I’ve got wrong. (Unless all you mean is that you only implied Lumifer is religious by saying things that don’t make sense on other assumptions, and didn’t explicitly say he is. In which case I agree but I’m not sure why it’s relevant: Lumifer’s denial of religiosity is just as relevant if you merely implied its contrary as if you explicitly stated it.)
You said “I guess I’m surprised to find religious people here”.
That was in response to Lumifer’s question “Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?”.
I infer that you were surprised about finding “this attitude” here because doing so amounts to finding religious people.
I infer that you consider that “this attitude” indicates that its holder is a religious person.
OK, so what’s “this attitude”? Lumifer asked that question in response to your saying “I’m a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.” (That wasn’t the whole content of your comment, but I don’t think any other part of it can reasonably be thought to be what Lumifer was referring to.)
So “this attitude” is evidently “find[ing] this remarkable”. What’s “this”?
You said that in response to Lumifer’s statement “For a mere mortal you seem to be very sure of what God will or will not ever do.”
I don’t see how to take all this other than as saying that (1) you (reasonably) interpret that remark of Lumifer’s as finding your confidence about what God will do remarkable, and (2) consider that attitude—i.e., finding your confidence remarkable—to indicate that its holder—i.e., Lumifer—is a religious person.
It could, I guess, be that “this attitude” was expressed by someone else other than Lumifer and you were commenting on them rather than Lumifer. But no one other than Lumifer replied to your comment about what God would not ever do.
I can’t figure out any explanation of the conversation you and Lumifer have just had that doesn’t involve you (mis)identifying Lumifer as a religious person.
My surprise at finding religious people on LW was not specifically a reaction to anything Lumifer said, it was more general than that. I guess my surprise was triggered more by something ChristianKi said in another branch of this discussion than anything Lumifer said. But this has become a very long and branchy discussion so it’s very likely that any attempt on my part to reconstruct my past mental states will have some errors.
I tentatively concluded that Lumifer was religious because that seemed like the most charitable interpretation of his remarks to that point. When he told me he wasn’t, I update my Bayesian posteriors and concluded that he’s probably a troll. But I didn’t want to say so because my Bayesian estimate on the possibility that he might have something worthwhile to teach me is not yet indistinguishable from zero. But it’s getting damn close.
OK, I’m getting a little confused about what point you’re trying to make. Most of the time when people talk about what God can and cannot do it’s because they believe God is real. But you said you’re not religious, so you don’t believe God is real. So what does it even mean for a non-real God to be omnipotent?
The reason I’m confident that God is constrained by the laws of physics is that I believe that God is a fictional character. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, it means that He exists in a different ontological category than people who believe in God think He’s in. Fictional characters are subject to the laws of physics insofar as they can only do things that their authors can describe, and so they are subject to the limitations of computability theory. God cannot tell us the value of Chaitin’s Omega to more precision than we ourselves can compute it.
Fictional characters can have effects in the real world. People alter their behavior because of things that fictional characters are reported to have said. But those kinds of effects are still limited by the laws of physics, and generally do not extend to making radical changes in the angular velocity of a planet, hence my confident prediction.
So what does it even mean for a non-real God to be omnipotent?
Generally speaking, if you are discussing things like attributes of God, there are two positions you might take.
One position is that God is not real, so discussing His attributes is no better than debating patterns on wings of fairies. At this point we’re done, there is nothing else to say.
Another position is to add an implicit “conditional on God being real” to statements. That allows you to discuss e.g. theology without necessarily being religious.
I thought we are operating in the second mode, but if we’re not, there isn’t really anything to talk about, is there? And when you said “I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still” what you meant was simply “it did not happen”—right? The “again” was an unnecessary flourish?
Fictional characters are subject to the laws of physics insofar as they can only do things that their authors can describe
Fictional characters are subject to fictional laws of physics in the fictional worlds the authors create. If you just want to say that gods do not exist, the question of whether they are subject to (real) laws of physics is a nonsensical question.
Fictional characters can have effects in the real world.
Not quite. People’s beliefs (which might or might not involve fictional characters) do have effects in reality via actions of these people. But that’s a trivial observation, so I’m not sure of the point you’re making.
Another position is to add an implicit “conditional on God being real” to statements.
OK, but that begs the question of which god (lower-case g) you’re conditioning on. This was actually the mode I was arguing in when I cited the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the carob tree.
Fictional characters are subject to fictional laws of physics in the fictional worlds the authors create.
That too, but they are also subject to constraints imposed by the theory of computation on their authors (at least so long as their authors are Turing machines). That actually rules out omnipotent gods even in fiction. Simply saying that something is omnipotent doesn’t make it omnipotent even in a fictional world.
But that’s a trivial observation
It might be a trivial observation, but it has very profound consequences that are not immediately apparent. Specifically, there’s a positive feedback loop where certain beliefs produce effects which provide evidence that support those beliefs. Such beliefs can become self-sustaining even in cases where the beliefs themselves are objectively false. But because they are self-sustaining, they can be very hard to dislodge.
Ironically, an example of such a self-sustaining but objectively false belief is the belief that rationalism will win the battle of ideas, or even that it’s a better way to live your life, simply because, well, it’s rational. (I’m not saying you believe this, but many people do.)
but that begs the question of which god (lower-case g) you’re conditioning on.
Since the context of the discussion involved quotes from Torah/Bible, I thought it was apparent.
so long as their authors are Turing machines
Speaking of ontological categories… Humans are not Turing machines.
a positive feedback loop where certain beliefs produce effects which provide evidence that support those beliefs
Sure, but I still don’t see it as particularly profound. It happens all the time and is the mechanism involved in some well-known biases. I understand your point that “personal experience” of a believer is suspect as evidence and that point has some validity, but this is a complex discussion involving interpretations, cultural expectations, philosophy of qualia, etc. etc. :-)
Since the context of the discussion involved quotes from Torah/Bible, I thought it was apparent.
It isn’t apparent. Genesis is part of three different religious traditions with radically different theologies. For example, there’s a rich tradition in Judaism of arguing with God, and even winning sometimes (e.g. Exo32:9-14), something which would be unthinkable in Christianity or Islam.
Humans are not Turing machines.
The software processes running on human brains can, as far as anyone can tell, be modeled by a Turing machine, so if a TM can’t do it, neither can a human, and hence neither can any fictional character a human can describe.
I still don’t see it as particularly profound
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that.
But let us say that my blind peers bring me incredibly convincing evidence for the idea that there is no other side of the canyon.
Your blind peers can’t bring you convincing evidence that there’s no other side to the canyon unless there actually is no other side to the canyon. It’s like asking “what if homeopaths provided you with incredibly convincing evidence that homeopathy worked, would you still cling to what science says?” (The answer is that if it was possible to produce incredibly convincing evidence for homeopathy, we would be in a very different world than we are now, and science would be saying different things.)
Your blind peers can’t bring you convincing evidence that there’s no other side to the canyon unless there actually is no other side to the canyon.
On the contrary, it is quite possible to come up with some very convincing arguments for something that is false. There are many ways to do this, either by means of flawed argument, logical fallacy, carefully selecting only the evidence that supports a given theory, and so on. If I am sufficiently cautious in examining the arguments, I may identify the flaws and expose them—but it is also possible that I may fail to notice the flaws, because I am not perfect.
It’s like asking “what if homeopaths provided you with incredibly convincing evidence that homeopathy worked, would you still cling to what science says?”
A homeopath can provide a convincing argument by providing a very long list of people who were ill, took a homeopathic remedy, and then recovered; and accompanying it with a very long list of people who were ill, took no homeopathic remedy, and got worse.
Anyone who notices the cherry-picking of evidence will see the flaw in that argument, but it will nonetheless convince many people.
I don’t consider “evidence which would convince at least some people” to be “incredibly convincing evidence”. Even poorly convincing evidence will convince someone—poorly convincing evidence isn’t the same as nonconvincing evidence.
Ah, I think we have the point of disconnect here. I consider “incredibly convincing evidence” to be any evidence which would convince me. I am aware that this includes some flawed evidence that would convince me of incorrect things, but I can’t provide a good example, because if I knew how it was flawed then it would not convince me (and if it has convinced me, then I don’t know that it is flawed). Thus, yes, my examples were only vaguely convincing, in order to make the flaws clearer.
some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’).
I don’t see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
listening to music as somehow fundamentally different from looking at the grooves in a record despite the fact that the information entering your brain is the same in both cases.
You should drop this analogy. The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
I don’t see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
It seems obviously true to me too. And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean “information” in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in. That the information is the same in both cases can be shown by showing that either system can be reconstructed from the other. The grooves can be reconstructed from the audio (this is how the grooves were created in the first place), and the audio can be reconstructed from the grooves (this is what happens when you play the record.)
If you want to challenge this claim, please mount an argument. Don’t just proclaim that it’s false.
And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
Yeah, so? Some people just don’t want to be convinced, why should you spend your time and effort on them?
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean “information” in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in.
Information in the information-theoretical sense does not “enter the brain”. The audio can be reconstructed from the grooves, but not by the brain.
Simply put, the brain does not have the same information in those two cases. In particular, the brain does not care about some abstract theoretical information equivalence. It’s just a brain, not an idealized infomation-processing agent.
The audio can be reconstructed from the grooves, but not by the brain.
is irrelevant to the question of how the information flows. The information that comprises music is stored on the record, not the record player. The player merely transduces that information from one format (grooves) to another (sound). The brain can’t do that transduction process, but it can (and does) process the information. The proof is that a brain equipped with suitable tools could make a copy of a record (and hence the information on that record) by looking at and making measurements of the grooves.
The proof is that a brain equipped with suitable tools could make a copy of a record (and hence the information on that record) by looking at and making measurements of the grooves.
That’s not what “processes information” means. A photocopier does not “process information” when it makes a copy of a document. It just makes a copy. Similarly, a brain could peer at the grooves all it likes, and, presumably, could make a copy of them, but that makes it no better than a record-producing machine.
Your claim is, essentially, that from the brain’s point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same. However the brain cannot convert the grooves to the music (or the music to the grooves). It requires the transformation be made externally before it can process the information.
the information entering your brain is the same in both cases
And that is clearly true. It doesn’t matter how (or even whether) that information is “processed”.
Note that your re-statement of my claim, “from the brain’s point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same” is not my actual claim. I said nothing about “the brain’s point of view”. That phrase is non-sensical with respect to an information-theoretical analysis.
If you really want to get technical, there is a “point of view” with respect to information content, and that is the repertoire of distinguishable states that a system can be said to potentially be in. The choice of that repertoire is arbitrary, and so can be said to be a “point of view.” There is an implied “point of view” with respect to music, and that is the ability to reconstruct the audio waveform within the range of human hearing, roughly 20HZ-20kHz. With respect to that “point of view”, my claim is correct, and can actually be mathematically proven to be correct by the Nyquist sampling theorem.
What is not the same—and this is the whole point—is the subjective experience of having the same information entering your brain through different sensory modalities. The intellectual understanding of spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology or whatever is very different from the actual subjective experience, and if you haven’t had the actual subjective experience, your understanding of spirituality is necessarily limited by that.
One is between information structured in such a way as to operate on our brains so as to produce a subjective response, and information that we have to do some work to interpret. (E.g., music in the form of sound waves versus music in the form of a printed score—at least, for people who understand music notation but don’t have the fluency of some professional musicians who can look at a score and “hear” what it says.)
The other is between information we are able to make sense of and information we aren’t. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after encryption using a cipher I don’t know how to break, with a key I don’t know.)
In practice some things are intermediate. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after “encryption” with ROT13.)
Giving me a micrograph of an LP’s grooves is much more like the second of those than like the first. Maybe the information is interpretable in principle—I guess I could measure very carefully, and then do a Fourier transform by hand and figure out what frequences are present, etc., etc., etc. -- but in practice, showing me those micrographs is going to convey essentially no information about the music to me. I’m not much better off than if you’d encrypted the data (and certainly worse than if you’d just ROT13ed it.)
So when you contrast music and words, you’re confusing matters because most of the difference you profess to find is not between music and words, but between different degrees of “difficulty” in reconstructing the content in a form we can make use of. If you’d compared “listening to the audiobook of a novel” with “reading the text of the novel, after encryption with a cipher of moderate difficulty” you’d have had something much nearer to the comparison between “listening to music” and “looking at micrographs of a record groove”—and you’d no longer have found so big a difference between words and music.
The thing is, you could have done this right and it would have served your purpose almost equally well. Audiobook versus printed novel; recorded music versus printed score. For all but the very best musicians, the printed score will have far less power to please or move than the recorded music; the relationship here is much closer to the relationship between an audiobook and a printed novel; and you could run with that and draw your analogy with religious/spiritual experiences. But I have the impression that you wanted to stress (I would say, to overstate) the ineffability of those experiences—and as a result you made a bogus comparison instead of a good one.
Well, OK, but this is a very different kind of critique than you were offering before. Before you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim:
The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
Now you’re mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices. It’s a constructive critique, so I thank you for that. But let me explain why I made the choice that I did.
The point I was trying to make is that the subjective sensation of spiritual experience matters. It is too facile to dismiss God as simply “a pernicious delusion” as Dawkins does. There are people for whom a phenomenon that they call “the presence of the holy spirit” (or whatever) is every bit as real and non-delusional as the phenomenon that you call “hearing the music” is for you. Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The difference between music and spiritual experience is that all humans have the subjective experience of hearing music (even deaf people!) but not all humans have spiritual experiences. So I had to find a way to illustrate the reality of spiritual experience to an audience which by and large has not had such experiences and is generally predisposed to dismiss them as delusions. I considered and discarded many possible ways of doing this, and finally settled on music because of its universality. But the subjective sensation of reading sheet music depends on how much you have been trained to read sheet music, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters with that kind of relativity. So for the counterpoint I wanted a rendering of music that no human has been trained to process. I picked grooves in the hopes that people would intuitively understand that the music is somehow there, but you can’t “get at the essence of it” by looking. You have to do something else. In the same way, you can’t “get at the essence” of a spiritual experience by understanding the neurobiology of it and calling it a delusion. You have to do something else.
I’m not sure if I made the right choice. But I think I made a defensible one.
you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim
No, that wasn’t me, it was Lumifer.
Now you’re mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices.
That doesn’t seem to me like a good description of what I’m doing. In particular, my criticism is not mostly about the rhetorical effect of what you wrote, but about its logic.
Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The boundary between experience and explanation is fuzzy and porous, but it seems to me that when (say) Richard Dawkins calls belief in God a pernicious delusion, what he is saying is precisely that believers’ explanatory theory of their experiences is wrong, not that they didn’t have the experiences. The same goes, I think, for most other atheists who loudly criticize theism and theists. So I fear you may be tilting at windmills.
But I must say a few words about the fuzziness and porousness of that boundary. Suppose I have a hallucination, think I see my dead grandmother, and conclude that I have seen a ghost. And suppose you don’t believe ghosts are real. I say to you “I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother”. You say “No, you didn’t”. Are you denying my experience, or my interpretation of it? I think you might reasonably deny two things I would claim, while accepting a third. You accept that I had an experience as of seeing my dead grandmother. You deny that I actually saw an actual thing that resembled my dead grandmother. And you deny, more specifically, that I saw a ghost. Something similar—though of course it needn’t involve outright hallucination—may happen with religious experiences. I feel an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and majesty; I conceptualize this as experiencing the presence of a divine being; I conclude that Jesus loves me and wants me to go and be a missionary. Richard Dawkins may reasonably accept that I felt those things; deny that I felt the presence of a divine being; deny in particular that I learned that Jesus wants me to be a missionary.
And the difficulty is that if you ask me in either of these cases to say what my experience was then—quite aside from the possibility that it may have been somewhat indescribable—I may well think of it, and describe it, in terms that already have some theorizing built into them. I may say, in the first case, “the experience I had was that I saw a ghost”; in the second, “the experience I had was of feeling the presence of God”. If you disagree with the inbuilt theorizing, are you denying the reality of my experience? I think that’s mostly a matter of definition; in any case, I see no reason why skeptics shouldn’t do it. (Though sometimes it might be impolitic to do it out loud.)
You have to do something else.
If you want a deep understanding of the experience, yes you do. But I’m not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that. I feel quite comfortable saying that, at least to a good first approximation[1], no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences. And if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death, it may suffice to say “your experiences can’t possibly be much evidence for that” rather than getting an intimate understanding of what those experiences are like.
[1] The hedging is because maybe there are exotic ways for an experience to convey a lot of evidence; e.g., perhaps when you think you hear God speaking to you he tells you some very specific piece of information you couldn’t reasonably have known or worked out, and it turns out to be correct; that’s at least evidence of something, though it’s hard to see how you could know it was God. So far as I can tell, nothing like this is going on in the great majority of religious experiences.
I say to you “I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother”. You say “No, you didn’t”.
I wouldn’t say that. I would say, “I believe that you think you saw the ghost of your dead grandmother. And it’s not entirely out of the question that it was in fact the ghost of your dead grandmother. But I think it’s more likely that there’s some other explanation.”
And actually, I probably wouldn’t even say that. I would probably say, “I’m sorry your grandmother is dead. She must have meant a lot to you.”
I’m not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that.
“Obligation” is an odd word to use here. If you believe that having a more complete model and accurate model of the world is a good thing, then it seems to me that it follows logically that having a better model of why some people believe the things they do is a good thing. Does that constitute an “obligation”? I don’t know, but I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences
If prayer’s to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence (at least to me) that that god existed and the others didn’t. Many religious claims are in fact falsifiable (and falsified) theories.
if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death
Oh, yes, of course. I’m not suggesting that we disarm against the fundamentalist wackos. What I’m suggesting is that some people who profess to believe in God are actually our (non-believers) intellectual allies in many other matters, and so having a better theory of how that happens (or, at the very least, employing less inflammatory rhetoric towards them) might make the world a better place for everyone. That’s all.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough: the “you” and “I” there were so called just for convenience. I wouldn’t say the things “I” say in that paragraph, either. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that both the answers you say you might give are better than a flat “No, you didn’t”. Of course.)
“Obligation” is an odd word to use here. [...] I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
Well, the whole point of what you’ve been saying here seems to be that skeptics who argue against religious beliefs are (or at least many of them are) doing something wrong, that instead of arguing over religious beliefs they should be empathizing with religious experiences or something like that.
I agree that understanding things is better than not understanding them. But understanding any specific thing is not always a high priority.
If prayers to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence [...]
Of course. Perhaps I was unclear: I didn’t mean “nothing that could possibly happen would constitute strong evidence”, I meant “no purely internal religious experience would constitute strong evidence”. (With the proviso I stated, of course.) In other words, the sort of “experience” that I thought this whole discussion was about.
fundamentalist wackos
Plenty of people who are not in any useful sense fundamentalist wackos believe that the world was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness. And while wanting gay people stoned to death is probably in wacko-only territory, there are plenty of non-wackos who want gay people not to be allowed to marry one another for reasons that are ultimately pretty similar to the wackos’ reasons.
some people who profess to believe in God are actually [...] allies in many other matters
Yup, absolutely true. I don’t think this is as little understood as I think you think it is.
less inflammatory rhetoric
If all you’re saying is that in many contexts it is better not to insist on talking about sky fairies and telling religious people they’re crazy—why, yes, I agree. And, again, my impression is that most people here do too.
Although LW is on the whole a pretty unreligious place, there are active members here who are religious believers, and I don’t think they get abused for it. And from time to time someone comes along and says, more or less, “hi, I’m a believer but sympathetic to rationalism; can we talk?” and the responses mostly seem pretty respectful and polite to me. See, e.g., this post from a believer leaning towards agnosticism and wanting thoughts on miracles, though of course the “I might deconvert” framing may have made people nicer.
Well, my OP was not written specifically for LW, and it’s possible that posting it here was not appropriate, at least not without some significant revisions. If so, I apologize. I’ll try to do better next time.
they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’).
1) (snarky response) I’m not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs.
2) (real response) the value of “God” matters a whole lot in this discussion. The bait and switch I worry about is that any personal experience gets used to justify extremely unlikely belief clusters. I don’t think someone’s hallucinations justifies my rejection of Occam’s Razor.
The nature of these experiences cannot be fully rendered into words, but it is of a similar character to that which causes even rational people to characterize the subjective experience of listening to music
I think this is a stretched analogy, but even if I accepted it, nobody who enjoys music is telling me to accept a bunch of other supernatural bullshit.
I’m not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs.
I’m not suggesting it should influence your beliefs about the world. I’m suggesting it should influence your beliefs about them.
supernatural bullshit
This is exactly what I’m talking about. By choosing to call it “supernatural bullshit” rather than “a not altogether unreasonable (though nonetheless mistaken) attempt to account for real subjective experiences that they have had and I have not (and in the absence of education and information that I possess that they might not)” you miss a very important truth: you are dealing with a fellow human being who might be making an honest attempt to make sense of the world in the face of subjective experiences and other background that may be very different from your own. By choosing to label their beliefs “supernatural bullshit” you might be shutting down possible avenues of communication and the opportunity to make the world a better place, even if it is supernatural bullshit.
I debated with myself about whether to use the inflammatory or reconciliatory framing. It really can go either way, depending on what other parts of the spiritual/supernatural belief cluster is being dragged along with the personal experiences, and what the spriritualist is asking me to accept beyond just “some difficult-to-describe experiences have occurred”.
I’m sorry this feels like a bait-and-switch. Let me try to state my claim as clearly as I can: some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’). The nature of these experiences cannot be fully rendered into words, but it is of a similar character to that which causes even rational people to characterize the subjective experience of listening to music as somehow fundamentally different from looking at the grooves in a record despite the fact that the information entering your brain is the same in both cases.
This seems a fairly empty claim. I believe in the existence of trees because I have had first-hand experiences (including: walking into a tree) for which the best explanation that I can come up with is that they were caused by the presence of trees.
I don’t see how this claim helps your argument.
A large part of this may be that I’m having some trouble seeing exactly what your argument is—it looks like you are claiming that you felt a sense of euphoria while having a religious experience once, and therefore have concluded that all religious experiences consist of nothing more than a sense of euphoria? How is this not a simple case of the typical mind fallacy, that is to say, the assumption that everyone else thinks in exactly the same way that you do?
The point I am trying to make is that some people believe in God for the exact same reason that you believe in trees: they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God.
No, I’m advancing the hypothesis that such experiences are (at least part of) the foundation of religious belief, just as the first-hand experience of walking into a tree is (at least part of) the foundation of your belief in trees.
I strongly suspect, however, that most of your belief in trees comes not from walking into them, but from seeing them, with walking into them providing only additional confirmation for your prior belief. You don’t give this a lot of thought because the vast majority of your fellow creatures also see trees, and so your interactions with them become a network of self-reinforcing confirmations that trees do in point of fact exist. But imagine a different world, where everyone is blind except you, and the only tree is on the other side of a wide, impassable canyon. You can see the tree, but no one else can. Everyone thinks you’re insane because you believe in trees, indeed because you believe that the canyon has “another side” (what an absurd notion!)
How would you go about trying to convince your blind peers that you can in fact see the trees? Well, you might start by trying to convince them that you can see. This you can readily demonstrate, because you can do things that your blind peers can’t (I’ll leave it up to you to devise an appropriate experiment). But you still might have a hard time convincing them about trees. “Yeah, sure, he can do all kinds of cool tricks because of this supposed “gift of sight” that he has. But, c’mon, trees? Really?”
So now go back to 5000 BC and you’ve got people who think they hear the Voice of God. Some of them say, “God told me there is going to be a drought.” And by golly, the next year there is a drought. Can you see how some people might start to believe that there might be something to this God thing?
A while ago I talked to a person studying theology at university to become a minister. I asked him about spiritual experience. He answered that he doesn’t have any strong spiritual experiences and most of his classmates also haven’t. A few have and he considered them a bit strange because they were than also serious about things like no-sex-before-marriage. He was religious because he was brought up with the rituals of religion and not based on special spiritual experiences. The conversation took place in Berlin with is culturally different than the US, but he still considered himself to be really religious.
On the other hand I do have experience surrounding what most people would call a near-death experience. I do meditate together with nonreligious people who teach not to take visions during meditation too seriously.
It’s quite interesting that the spiritual experience of you was at a Christian summer camp and not in a church on Sunday. The Christian summer camp is not a standard institution of Christianity. The church on Sunday’s is. To me the church on Sunday is not a system that looks like it’s designed to produce spiritual experience. That’s how people can work on becoming Christian ministers without having had spiritual experience.
When it comes to the spiritual experience of lay people I Christian’s burned women as witches for going in that direction. I don’t think focusing on creating spiritual experience is a traditional focus of Christianity.
It is in the American South.
It is very much the focus of charismatic Christian sects.
There are wide variations between the different Christian denominations/groups in terms of spiritual experiences. This includes their occurrence at all and how commonly they occur. Roman Catholics, more vanilla flavored groups (Baptists&Lutherans?), and the charismatic and pentecostal groups have massive variations on this that I’ve witnessed first hand.
I’m confident that there are Christian groups who have zero or next to zero spiritual experiences ever while there are also groups like the charismatic church within 5 km of my house where everyone in the entire church exhibits glossolalia and believes they are being gifted special fruits/powers via direct spirit possession by the holy spirit/ghost every single Sunday. That church has at least 300 members and is not an uncommon denomination in my area either. (And yes, watching a massive room full of >300 people stand around convulsing and making weird nonsense noises while they believe they’re being taken over by a non-human entity is about as disturbing as it sounds.)
The fact that people have stronger spiritual experiences at summer camps doesn’t surprise me based on what I’ve seen. The stuff that happened at a related church’s summer camp that I witnessed was even stranger and more discomforting that what I wrote above.
This person sounds like an atheist who wants to cosplay as religious and considers the people who are actually religious to be “strange”.
That’s religion in Germany for you.
Not that it should matter in a debate, but I find a metaphor that characterizes rejection of the spiritual as a form of blindness very offensive.
That surprises me. Why?
Please note that “spiritual” != “supernatural”. I’m using “spiritual” here to describe a particular kind of subjective experience that some people have and others don’t. So there’s no such thing as “rejection of the spiritual”—that’s a category error.
The blindness metaphor presents spiritual sensitivity as an ability that rationalists lack.
Your definition of “spiritual” is still not fully detailed here, but does it contradict the proposition “spiritual” ∈ “supernatural”?
That is exactly the hypothesis I’m advancing. I’m sorry if you find it offensive.
That’s because spirituality is a subjective sensation, a quale. Those are notoriously difficult to define with precision.
Spiritual experience is no more supernatural that any other subjective experience. But it can feel that way because of the manner in which it is induced.
Why do you characterize having spiritual experiences as an ability?
They happen to some people and not to others. For some such things (seizures, heart attacks, lapses of memory, panic attacks) we generally prefer not to have them happen to us, and wouldn’t call them “abilities”. For some (moments of insight, orgasms, restful nights’ sleep) we generally regard them as good things, and might call them “abilities”. Why should spiritual experiences—in particular, spiritual experiences of a kind that very strongly predispose the people who have them to draw incorrect conclusions about the world—be put in the latter category rather than the former?
One possible answer is that spiritual experiences are, well, nice. (Of course “nice” has exactly the wrong sorts of connotation here. Too bad.) But, e.g., falling wildly in love is nice too, but if you find that it happens every time you meet a new person-of-the-relevant-sex then any impartial observer would consider it more a liability than an ability. So that answer seems like it’s applying a wrong criterion.
Another possible answer is that spiritual experiences really are what many who have them say they are: actual perceptions of a transcendent reality. You feel like you’re in the presence of God? That’s because you actually are. I agree (of course) that if that’s so then having (the right sorts of) spiritual experience is an ability, and not having them is a disability. But you’ve already said you’re not yourself a believer, and if there is in fact no god then spiritual experiences that give the very strong impression of being encounters with a god are actively misleading. So that answer doesn’t seem to work.
The Christian tradition is very fond of a metaphor very much like the one you’re using here: “I once was lost but now am found, / Was blind, but now I see”, etc. But what Christians generally mean by it is not that the “blind” don’t have spiritual experiences, but that the “blind” don’t perceive the presence and activity of God in whatever experiences (“spiritual” or not) they have. That’s a very reasonable usage (if we grant the Christians their premises). Yours seems quite different, and much less reasonable. If “spiritual experiences” are not perceptions of a transcendent reality, but endogenous brain phenomena, why is blindness a good metaphor for not having them, and more than for, say, not having ASMR?
I think you’re reading too much positive connotation into the word “ability”. Some people can roll their tongues, other’s can’t. It’s not unreasonable to recast that as: some people have the ability to roll their tongues, others don’t.
There’s actually some evidence that the ability to have spiritual experience is adaptive, and that it can be learned and developed by conscious effort, so it might even be fair to characterize it is a skill. But again, don’t read too much endorsement into that. The ability to hang a spoon off your nose is a skill too.
Yup, that’s an ability. It’s a thing you can do when you want to do it and avoid when you don’t, and things with those characteristics we generally classify as abilities. Having “spiritual experiences” is not, for most people who have them, an ability in that sense—and if it were, I think they should (and perhaps even would) for that very reason doubt that God (the gods, the life-force permeating all things, the ancestral spirits, whatever) had much to do with it.
I repeat: why classify “having spiritual experiences” as an ability rather than, say, a susceptibility? Why is it more like having ideas than like having colds? Why is it more like having orgasms than like having sneezes?
If true, that would be (1) interesting and (2) a reason for seeing it as an ability. But let’s be a bit more careful. Having spiritual experiences on demand would be an ability (and, in the same way, if you had the rather peculiar superpower of catching a cold any time you wanted, that would be an ability although not a very useful one). But I don’t see that that makes the term “ability” appropriate for people who have them involuntarily.
I’m pushing this point because it seems to me that a lot of the work in your argument is actually being done by your choice of the word “ability” and your use of analogies (blindness...) that are only appropriate when talking about the absence of an ability, but it doesn’t seem to me that you’ve justified those choices. Maybe “ability” is a good term; maybe actually something with a different spin on it like “liability” or “susceptibility” would be better; maybe we need something more neutral. But when the choice of terminology and analogies matters, let’s have some actual support for it.
Yes, I understand. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to push back on.
I certainly agree with that, and so this reduces the issue to an empirical question: are spiritual experiences something that people can (mostly) control? I think they are. I don’t see a lot of evidence of people having spiritual experiences outside the context of certain deliberate practices and rituals like attending church, reciting prayers, singing, laying on of hands, sweat lodge ceremonies...
But it’s an “ability” that is more akin to “the ability to enjoy sex” or “the ability to appreciate modern art” than it is “the ability to fly an airplane” or “the ability to run a four-minute mile.”
I think that people who believe in God by and large don’t really think it through to that level of detail. Those that do tend to come to the conclusion you’d expect them to. And, BTW, this is why people don’t think it through. Losing the ability to commune with God can be very painful for some people. It’s rather like if you think too hard about the biological realities of sex you can lose the ability (sic!) to enjoy it.
I don’t see a lot of evidence of people getting venereal diseases outside the context of having sex, or getting hangovers outside the context of drinking a lot. Are those “abilities”? I don’t think so. If you agree, what’s the relevant difference?
Sure, why not? Someone who can drink heavily without getting a hangover can be said to have “the ability to hold their liquor.” It’s a little harder to find a commonly used phrase to refer to someone who can have unprotected sex without contracting venereal diseases. This would probably be referred to as an “immunity” rather than an “ability.”
If you want to speak of people having “immunity” from spiritual experiences I certainly won’t argue with you.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear and you ended up interpreting my question as almost the exact opposite of what I intended, so let me try to clarify.
You argue (if I understand right) as follows. Spiritual experiences generally occur only in certain contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. To that extent, they are voluntary. So, those who have spiritual experiences have some ability to choose whether to have them or not. So, having spiritual experiences is an “ability”.
But exactly parallel things are true of some things we don’t generally classify that way, like getting venereal diseases or having hangovers. Both of those things occur only in particular contexts that people can voluntarily put themselves in. (Having sex; drinking a lot of alcohol.)
I guess you would not generally speak of “the ability to contract gonorrhea” or “the ability to get a raging hangover”, any more than I would. So why does the fact that spiritual experiences generally occur in special contexts give good reason to speak of “the ability to have spiritual experiences”?
Ah. Well, one difference is that spiritual experiences feel good, and so many people seek them out. No one seeks to have a hangover or contract gonorrhea.
I am still not convinced, for reasons I’ll give in a moment, but actually I think this would be a good time to exercise some rationalist skills. We have a difficulty over definitions, so let’s taboo the term “ability” and perhaps take some cues from Yvain’s excellent post about “disease”.
So, can you state your thesis without using the word “ability” or anything equivalent? Can you make explicit what specific features of “spiritual experiences” are relevant and how they lead to the conclusions you want to draw?
(By “your thesis”, I mean what you described before as “exactly the hypothesis I’m advancing”.)
I should fulfil my promise to explain why the combination of “only in some situations that we can seek out” and “feels good” isn’t enough to justify calling something an “ability”, at least as I use the word. Let me quote from Jonathan Franzen’s book The Corrections. “Him” here is an elderly man, Al, whose mental function is beginning to go downhill.
Al has had a pleasant experience (thinking he saw children playing) which will occur only in certain circumstances that perhaps he could seek out (there being sunflowers around to confuse with children). Would you want to talk about the ability to confuse sunflowers with children? I wouldn’t.
Well, I’m actually defending two theses here, one of which is that “ability” is an appropriate term to use, but I’m happy to just agree to disagree about that.
Here’s a restatement of my other (hypo)thesis, making my best effort to avoid loaded terms:
There exists a kind of subjective experience that is analogous to but distinct from other subjective experiences like seeing a sunset, tasting food, hearing music, etc. It is a real subjective experience, not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology (though it can be associated with some pathologies, particularly in its more extreme forms). It is induced not by light nor chemicals nor sound, but rather by engaging in certain behaviors (like prayer) and approaching those behaviors with a certain mindset. The mindset is difficult to describe without using loaded words (I want to call it “faith”) so I’ll just call it the opposite of (or an absence of) skepticism (I presume that’s not a loaded term?)
Some people do not have firsthand experience of this subjective sensation, either because they have not engaged in the behaviors that produce it, or because they are unable or unwilling to enter the mindset that produces it, or because their brains are wired in such a way that they are simply do not (I originally wrote “are unable to” here) experience it even with the right behavior and mindset. It is a situation completely analogous to the well-known phenomenon that some people cannot distinguish the colors red and green, and therefore cannot have the same subjective experience of seeing a tree and a sunset as someone who can (“is able to”) distinguish red and green.
It is this difference in firsthand subjective experience that accounts at least in part for the seemingly intractable differences among people when it comes to questions about the existence of deities. Some people believe in deities because they have had real subjective experiences that they believe in good faith (no pun intended) can best be explained as a firsthand interaction with a deity.
I advance this hypothesis because if it is true then it seems plausible that disagreements over the existence of deities will become less intractable and more fruitful if those who have not had these subjective experiences nonetheless acknowledge the possibility that their interlocutors might have had such an experience, and that this is not necessarily symptomatic of any kind of pathology or mental deficiency. To the contrary, it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains, or at least a normal part of the human experience which they have simply never experienced. Moreover, the explanation of the experience in terms of an encounter with a deity may be deeply meaningful to the person that holds this belief, and that presenting them with evidence that this belief is false may be intensely painful, even traumatic, because (among other things) it might make them think that they are suffering from a pathology or otherwise be mentally deficient.
Finally, though I didn’t make this explicit, I’m suggesting that all this should be taken into account when deciding how to interact with someone who believes in deities. Throwing logic at religion might not be the best move.
Maybe I should make this a whole ’nuther post.
I think the only part of that paragraph that is in any way controversial is the bit where you say the experience in question is “not a delusion nor an indication of any kind of mental pathology”—but I think most even of the most fire-breathing atheists wouldn’t claim that religious experience as such is a delusion (I think that would be a category error) or pathological. So: so far so good, but not much of substance yet.
(But, on that just-infinitesimally-controversial point—I remark that the word “real” that you use is at least a little bit loaded, and it’s not really clear to me what it means. I mean, what’s the alternative? They have this experience but it’s a fake experience? What would that even mean? The obvious thing for it to mean is that the experience doesn’t have the meaning they think it has; that although it seems to them that what they’ve experienced is being touched by an angel or spoken to by God or whatever, the real cause of their experience is something very different. But that’s the position you yourself have taken, so you surely can’t mean “real” in opposition to anything like that.)
Again, true and uncontroversial.
Bzzzzt! I think it’s very interesting that even when deliberately trying to state your thesis without loaded terms, you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency. I suggest that unless religious experiences are actual perceptions of non-natural realities—a position that AIUI you explicitly reject—the two things are demonstrably not “completely analogous”. Why? Because probably the single most salient thing about that inability-to-distinguish, the thing that explains why it’s sometimes called “colour blindness”, is that it involves an actual perceptual deficit. In “colour-blind” individuals, an extremely important channel by which information about the external world flows into their brain has substantially less sensitivity, substantially less bandwidth, than in individuals with normal colour vision. The colour-blind get less information about the world through their eyes than the not-colour-blind, and you can measure how much less. Whereas those who don’t have “spiritual experiences” … don’t have a particular kind of experience, which by your own account conveys no information about the outside world, no genuine insight into the nature of reality—it’s just an experience that some people have and some people find enjoyable or moving or motivating.
Again, true and close to 100% uncontroversial. (Aside from the caveat stated above about the word “real”.)
So far (I acknowledge that your sentence isn’t over yet) this seems true but pointless: so far as I can tell, pretty much everyone acknowledges that. So let’s continue and see whether it gets more contentful as the sentence continues.
Still 100% uncontroversial; so far as I can tell basically no one claims that having religious experiences is necessarily symptomatic of pathology or mental deficiency.
(So, so far, it seems to me that the thesis you’re advancing is true but—my apologies! -- utterly uninteresting. It’s as if you were earnestly enjoining us not to punch believers in the face while discussing religion with them: sure, it’s good advice, but whatever makes you think we need it? I think this explains some of the negativity in the responses you’ve had: if you earnestly tell people not to punch believers in the face, they’re liable to get the impression that you think they would be punching believers in the face without your advice, and that would be a stupid thing to do, and no one likes being told they’re stupid.)
You’re really not trying all that hard to avoid loaded terms, are you? :-) I’m getting the impression that for some reason it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours. But I’m not sure what that reason is. A cynical hypothesis would be that you like feeling superior to those skeptics, but I bet the truth is more interesting than that. Any idea what it might be?
Yup, it may. This is perhaps the least obvious thing you’ve said, but—sorry, again—it’s still pretty damn obvious.
I think you did. Right back in the OP, you wrote: “The antidote for this frustration is to realize that spirituality is not about logic. It’s about subjective experiences that not everyone is privy to. Logic is about looking at the grooves. Spirituality is about hearing the music.”
So after all this, I think my conclusion is this: with the value-laden bits stripped out, what you’re saying is common knowledge, to such an extent that the suggestion that skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it. That feels like a really uncharitable and negative conclusion, which I regret. Perhaps I’m missing something that’s genuinely non-obvious, or perhaps I’m overoptimistic about the actual understanding and knowledge of skeptics. If so, perhaps you can point out some bit of what you’ve said that I should be more surprised by, or something?
I’d like to say a few words on one other point that’s maybe getting a bit overlooked in this discussion, which is that there are plenty of religious people who don’t have much in the way of religious experiences, plenty more who do but who don’t take them to be the main support for their beliefs, and also plenty of skeptics who have very similar experiences but interpret them very differently; and that having such experiences doesn’t seem to make skeptics any less abrasive. For instance, Sam Harris (author of, e.g., “The End of Faith”, one of the “Four Horsemen” of the New Atheist movement) is a practitioner of meditation, which he says provides him with mystical experiences, but he’s every bit as antireligious as, say, Richard Dawkins. On the other side: well, every now and then you get religious “revivals” characterized by fairly widespread religious experiences, often manifesting as things like “speaking in tongues”, and what makes them notable is precisely the fact that this is not the usual state of affairs in the churches where they happen. For instance, back in the mid-1990s when I was an evangelical Christian, there was something of a to-do in the UK’s evangelical Anglican churches about the so-called Toronto Blessing, and I’m pretty sure that in the churches I frequented this was mostly because most of the people there, most of the time, did not have dramatic religious experiences at all, and they were excited at the prospect of such experiences becoming more common.
So, if plenty of religious people seldom or never have these experiences, and quite a few very vigorously anti-religious people do have them, it seems to me that the difference between having them and not having them can’t be that large a part of what makes some people skeptical about religion and others not. I dare say it plays a role sometimes, but it seems like you’re suggesting that it’s more than that, and I find that unlikely.
Oh, come on. I thought we were being civil here.
That’s right, because I think it is a kind of deficiency, though I would not have used that word if you had not introduced it into the conversation.
There’s a lot of controversy within the deaf community about whether being deaf is a deficiency or just another way of being, kind of like being gay. Personally, I think being deaf is a deficiency, but there’s a significant faction of the deaf community that would take offense at that. Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.
Fair enough. Let me choose a different analogy then: some people have a subjective experience called “empathy” which manifests as a visceral revulsion at, for example, deliberately inflicting pain on another person even in situations where inflicting such pain might provide a net benefit to the inflicter. Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.
Note that this has nothing to do with any objective judgement about the state of the world. Sociopaths and psychopaths know that other people experience pain, they just don’t care.
The truth is important to me, yes. But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it, just like I wouldn’t use “deficiency” without being prompted. Most people are straight, so technically being straight is normal and so one could argue that not being straight is “abnormal”. But by that standard, having red hair is abnormal. That is not what most people mean when they say “abnormal.”
You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend. So let me try this: If you’re white you have a deficiency in skin pigmentation, and this deficiency leads to an inability to tolerate a lot of sun exposure without injury. Despite using the words “deficiency” and “inability” this is intended to be a mere statement of fact, not a value judgement. That is the sense in which I intend such words to be read when it comes to the “ability” to have spiritual experiences. Having spiritual experiences (or not) is neither good not bad, just different.
What can I say? I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it. That’s one of the things that motivated me to start writing about this.
It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics. The world bifurcates rather neatly into two camps: those who think what I’m saying is obvious and common knowledge, and those who think I’m a category 5 loon. And there are card-carrying physicists in both camps.
I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed. (But personally I think your continued insistence on applying negative-valence terminology to Those Who Do Not Have Spiritual Experiences is much ruder than anything I’ve said in this discussion.)
Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function. Whether that justifies using terms like “disability”, or whether e.g. membership in the Deaf community is a sufficiently important counterbalancing good to make such terms inappropriate, is perhaps debatable; but again it seems to me that you are drawing an analogy where the central feature of the thing on one side of the analogy is not present on the other.
My pushback consists mostly of pointing that out. It therefore doesn’t seem very similar to me.
I think what’s usually “officially” reckoned pathological, if you look in the DSM or whatever, is not lack of empathy as such but psychopathy, a condition identified not merely by lack of empathy but by other underlying characteristics and outward effects including lack of concern for the welfare of others. Perhaps lack of empathy itself should be reckoned pathological, though, so let’s proceed with that stipulation.
So let’s consider why not having empathy is (or might be, or should be) considered pathological, when (e.g.) not having much melanin in your skin, or not having an appendix, is not. It seems to me that there are two reasons. First: not having empathy not infrequently leads to severe adverse consequences for other people: psychopaths are greatly overrepresented in the criminal population, for instance. Severe adverse consequences are an important part of what leads things to be reckoned pathologies. Second: not having empathy is rare. That’s not a necessary condition for calling something a pathology, but it helps; in doubtful cases, things present in a large fraction of the population are more likely to be reckoned just “normal variation” rather than pathology.
I mentioned “not having much melanin” as an example earlier, and actually it’s an informative one. If you merely have rather little melanin, you’re called “white-skinned” and that’s regarded as a normal condition. If you have none at all (and other things that tend to go along with having none at all) you’re called “albino” and that’s regarded as a pathology. Why? I think for the same reasons as I gave above: albinism is worse for you than merely being “white”, and much rarer.
Can we bring that parallel back to the case of psychopathy? I think so. Psychopathy is what you get when someone has no empathy at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with absence of empathy, and there are substantial bad effects. (Just as albinism is what you get when someone has no melanin at all, along with other unusual features that tend to coexist with that, and there are substantial bad effects.) There is substantial variation in empathy within the “normal” population, though (just as there is substantial variation in amount of melanin and hence in skin tone) and people who are merely rather low in empathy are not generally considered pathological, though they might well be considered not very nice.
(There’s an important difference; so far as I know, there aren’t mostly-discrete populations with substantially different empathy levels, in the way that there are mostly-discrete populations with substantially different melanin levels.)
OK, enough preparatory stuff. How does this apply to the sorts of transcendent experiences we’re talking about? How close is your analogy? Let’s see.
First of all (dammit, more preparatory stuff; sorry) I think we need to clarify a thing or two about those experiences, because you’ve written about them in a rather black-and-white way: religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them, and that’s why one group is religious and the other is skeptical. I’ve already suggested that actually both the “discordant” categories have plenty of people in them, but I want to draw attention to another relevant fact: having-these-experiences isn’t a binary thing. Not only because the frequency of such experiences can vary continuously, but also because there’s a continuum of experiences of this type, ranging from transcendent life-changing brain-buggering ones down to minor ones you might barely notice. The less dramatic ones are more common, and I suggest that what you might call “low-grade” spiritual experiences—a sense of great awe at something like the Grand Canyon or the starry sky, a passing feeling of exhilaration for no particular reason, briefly losing your sense of individuality at a concert or political rally, etc., etc., etc. -- are quite common even among the actively anti-religious. Even, e.g., everyone’s favourite skeptical punching bag, Richard Dawkins. Unless, of course, you define your terms so that those who don’t interpret their experiences as encounters with a non-natural reality are ipso facto not having that kind of experience; I hope you can see the problems that that would raise.
Now, exactly what I want to say about the analogy between spiritual experiences and empathy depends on exactly what we count as “having transcendent experiences”. How often? How dramatic?
If you mean having quite dramatic ones quite often: In this case, my impression is that even among the actively religious most people don’t have dramatic spirtiual experiences often. So not-having-the-experiences would be not merely within the range of normal variation, but actually the majority situation. What about the adverse-effects criterion? Well, on the one hand, dramatic spiritual experiences are generally greatly treasured by those who have them, so not having them seems like it involves missing out on something valuable. On the other hand, dramatic spirirtual experiences seem to be systematically misleading: those who have them are disproportionately likely to embrace factually incorrect metaphysical theses with enough enthusiasm that it redirects the course of their lives, so having them seems like a dangerous business. This all looks to me to have rather the same shape as taking mind-altering drugs: the effects can be pleasant or overwhelming or life-alteringly overwhelming, but pursuing them can take over your life and lead you to situations you really wouldn’t have wanted to be in before you started. I think it’s far from clear that the adverse consequences of not having the experiences are worse than those of having them.
If you mean having low-grade ones not so often: In this case, my impression is that very many of the people you’re taking aim at (including the one target you’ve mentioned twice by name, Richard Dawkins) do “have the experiences”, so the question of whether not having them should be considered pathological is kinda irrelevant.
But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal: “a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.
If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.
What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?
If you mean only that he wasn’t willing to use the loaded language you prefer, to treat Not Having The Experiences as a deficit, an abnormality, a thing like psychopathy and colour-blindness—yeah, sure, I dare say he wasn’t, but (as I thought I’d made very clear) that isn’t what I’m saying is commonplace.
If you mean something else: what did he deny? That some religious people have dramatic religious experiences? That some skeptics don’t? That having dramatic religious experiences tends to make people more inclined to believe in a religion? (These are all things I would be surprised to find him denying, but he’s done surprising things before.) Or what?
I wouldn’t generally advise being worried on account of being called a loon by Luboš Motl, who has rather eccentric ideas about what constitutes lunacy. But, without making any comment on whether either his complaints or those of the unspecified other people who think what you’re saying is boringly familiar are correct, it seems to me that there’s no inconsistency. Motl says you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says and have made a mistake about polarization of light. As to the former, if you say “Copenhagen says X but actually Y” then Motl can be right if actually Copenhagen says something other than X, and the other guys can be right if every practising quantum physicist already accepts Y. As to the latter, what you say can be mostly correct and obvious even if there are a couple of mistakes in there.
So I’m not seeing the inconsistency there any more than here.
(In any case, I hope it’s clear that being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right.)
OK, I’m sorry if I was being humor-impaired.
You’ll have to take this up with someone in the deaf community because I’m on your side of this particular issue. Nonetheless, the fact is that there exist deaf people who vehemently disagree with both of us on this.
You’re getting too far into the weeds here. I brought up empathy not because it’s exactly the same as spiritual experience sensitivity (I’m going to start abbreviating that as SES) but because it’s a purely internal subjective experience and not relatable to anything that is objectively measurable outside the individual brain that is experiencing it. Of course many of the salient details are different, that’s why I didn’t choose it as my primary example.
I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is, but either way I don’t agree with this statement. In fact, I rather belabor the point that I am a skeptic who has spiritual experiences, so I myself am a counterexample.
I also think that a fair number of religious people don’t have spiritual experiences. Mother Theresa, for example, probably never had one.
No, that really is an unjustified extrapolation on your part. Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.
Again, no. Some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the ability to produce the enzyme that digests lactose. This is actually the “normal” state of affairs; the ability to digest lactose arose very late in human evolutionary history. But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal.”
You really are reading more into these words than I intend or that is justified by common patterns of usage.
Because English doesn’t have enough value-neutral words. How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements? The very name “lactose intolerance” has a value judgement built into it: intolerance.
I was on an Antarctic cruise with him so we had a lot of conversations over the course of about three weeks. I got to know him quite well on a personal level. He specifically denied a lot of things. The overall tenor of his denials was to make clear that he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural, even if those beliefs have a net benefit to them. For example: at one point I argued that belief can have demonstrable benefits through the placebo effect. So even if God wasn’t real, the idea of God was real and had real and potentially beneficial effects for some people, and so dissuading them of these beliefs was not necessarily a good thing to do. His response was (and these are his exact words—I will never forget them): “But it’s not true.” Meaning: it doesn’t matter if dissuading people from their belief might send them into existential despair or even cause them actual harm; allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil.
Well, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what the Copenhagen interpretation is. But there is no question that the elements I presented are commonly associated with the Copenhagen brand, even if that’s not what Motl thinks of when he uses the term.
What mistake would that be?
Certainly true, but when one of those attacks is, “What you’re saying is so obvious it’s insulting for you to think we didn’t already know this” and the other is, “What you’re saying is so obviously false that it’s not even worth a respectful debunking” then I actually feel pretty good about having had something worthwhile to say, even if I might not be right.
Actually, not quite either; it’s intended as a restatement not of your explicitly taken position (which I know it is contrary to) but of what seems to me to be implicit in how you write about these things. You say (and I agree) that some skeptics have “spiritual experiences” and some religious people don’t; but I think no one reading the rest of what you write would get that impression.
I am not saying “lisper says X is normal; therefore lisper says not-X is abnormal”. Not at all. I am pointing at an instance where you wrote something more specific. I quoted it before; let me quote it again. “it might be an indication of a normal part of the wiring of the human brain that is missing from their brains”. (Emphasis yours.) What would count as “abnormal”, if having a normal part of the wiring of the human brain missing from your brain doesn’t?
Again it seems that you’re taking me to argue that if you think something is normal then you have to think its opposite is abnormal. I agree that you needn’t do any such thing, and that is not the argument I was making. (See above.)
“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well. If more detail is required: “Children’s bodies produce an enzyme called lactase that breaks down one of the constituents in milk. Many adults’ bodies don’t, and if those people drink milk or eat things made from milk they feel ill afterwards. Some adults’ bodies do, especially in Western Europe and places colonized by Western Europeans. Those people can digest milk products without feeling bad.”
Or, if we need a brief technical-sounding term: “lactase nonpersistence”.
You know, I was hoping you might be specific. (I see that you give one specific example below, on which I will comment in a moment; it doesn’t seem to me that it actually supports what you’re saying.)
I hope you won’t be offended by my saying this, but given your apparent inability in this discussion to state your thesis without using terms that (so it seems to me, and so it might plausibly have seemed to Richard Dawkins if you did the same in conversation with him) represent these believers as being better than skeptics who don’t share their experiences, it seems plausible to me that what Dawkins actually took exception was those value judgements, rather than the bare assertions that, e.g., religious people sometimes have religious experiences and see those as evidence for their religion.
The specific example you give seems, actually, quite clearly not a matter of Dawkins disagreeing with the factual statements you’ve been making about spiritual experiences (as opposed to the value judgements you’ve been making, which as I already said are not obvious and uncontroversial). He didn’t—at least, those words you will never forget didn’t—deny that the idea of God can have beneficial effects. He just indicated that, as you put it, “allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil”.
I wonder whether I’ve failed to communicate effectively what it is in what you’re saying that I think is commonplace and obvious. I suggest that you’re saying two main things. (1) Some religious people have religious experiences, and these are part of why they believe what they do, and the experiences are real experiences and very important to those people, and non-religious people talking to religious people should bear all that in mind. (2) These experiences are valuable and positive, and people who have them are normal and people who don’t have them are not normal and have something missing from their brains and are like colour-blind or deaf people.
I think #1 is obvious and commonplace. I think #2 is a matter of values and definitions more than of facts, and I do not think you have given us good reason to agree with it.
The specific thing you quote Richard Dawkins as saying contradicts neither #1 nor #2 as such (though I bet he disagrees with #2) but a further claim you haven’t explicitly made in this discussion (though you’ve made some gestures in its direction): that belief (as opposed to spiritual experiences) can have sufficiently positive consequences to make it a good thing even when incorrect. I think that’s a more plausible claim than #2 and a more controversial one (especially around here) than #1. But it isn’t what you’ve been saying here so far.
I have the impression I didn’t make it clear enough that I am not endorsing any of Motl’s criticisms. I haven’t watched your Google talk and therefore have no opinion about the correctness of any specific claims you made there, and I think Motl is a buffoon.
The one Motl claims you made in the blog post you linked to. (Again, for the avoidance of doubt, the only thing I am saying about his claim is that it’s consistent with the “opposite” criticisms you say you’ve received. I have no idea whether any of the criticisms from either side are correct because, again, I don’t know any of the details of what you have said about quantum physics.)
… you should consider the possibility that they are addressing different things you’ve said. Compare the old joke: “There is much in X’s book that is new, and much that is correct. Unfortunately, the new parts are not correct and the correct parts are not new.”
I repeat that I have no idea what you’ve said about quantum physics, and therefore no idea whether any complaint of that sort has any validity. But I might level a similar complaint at what you’ve been saying here about spiritual experiences.
First, I want to thank you for continuing to engage on this. Your feedback is very much appreciated. But we may need to agree to disagree on this.
Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities, notwithstanding that their beliefs are objectively false. How’s that?
If you want to formulate a question to direct to Dawkins that is phrased in a way that you would accept his answer as definitive, I will forward it to him, thought it’s possible that his recent health issues might prevent him from replying in a timely manner.
In my conversations with him he more than once disagreed categorically with statements that were essentially equivalent (though not word-for-word identical) with the formulation I just gave.
At least we can agree on that! :-)
Indeed :-).
Aha, a much more objectively stated thesis. It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing, though. This one I agree is neither obviously true nor obviously false. Since it still has the value-dependent word “benefit” in, disagreement about it might stem mostly from differences in values—e.g., how to trade off being happier against having more accurate beliefs. (FWIW I think I would agree with the statement, but I suspect my estimate of what fraction of religious people really are better off on net because of their beliefs would be lower than yours.)
Yeah, I think he has other more important things on his plate than clearing up a side-issue in our discussion.
It is different, and I argued with myself over whether to include the explanation of how to get from A to B, but decided not to because the waters were muddy enough already. It’s one of these things that I thought would be obvious, but obviously (!) my intuitions about what is obvious are failing me in this case.
In any case, if you want to pursue this, I’m happy to elaborate. (Maybe I should write a followup post?) But this thread is already pretty long, maybe we should call it a day. Your call.
I have no trouble seeing a connection. If you think there’s more—an actual implication—then I may be missing something. (Or we may merely disagree, which I think is more likely.)
Feel free to elaborate or not as you please. I have no objection to calling it a day.
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that people who strive to discipline their thinking process to constantly improve themselves, become sharper, make fewer mistakes, notice and correct their own biases, revise their opinions, and mercilessly seek their own weak points somehow lack awareness of an entire and tremendously important field of human experience?
Rationalists are the last group of people I’d expect to miss something so crucial, if it were real.
Yes, that’s pretty much correct, except for one very important thing.
You didn’t actually say it, but there’s a subtle implication in the way you framed my position that the causality runs in a particular direction, i.e. rationalists strive to discipline their thinking etc. and AS A RESULT lack awareness of an entire field of human experience. That is wrong. In fact, it’s exactly backwards. (And I can now understand why you might have found it offensive.)
The causality runs in the opposite direction: some people lack (first-hand) awareness of this important field of human experience, and because they lack this awareness they tend to become rationalists. So this “lack of first-hand awareness” is not necessarily a deficit.
Here’s an analogy: some people feel addictive cravings more than others. Someone who doesn’t experience addictive cravings might have a hard time empathizing with someone who does because they can’t imagine what it’s like to have an addictive craving, never having had one of their own. So they might imagine that kicking an addiction is a simple matter of “exercising more self control” or some such thing, and have a hard time understanding why an addict would have such a hard time doing that. In an exactly analogous manner, someone who is not sensitive to spiritual experience might have a hard time understanding or empathizing with someone who does. It does not follow that not feeling addictive cravings is a bad thing.
That depends a great deal on who you consider “rationalists.” I’ve met a lot of self-identified rationalists but who are not even willing to consider the idea that spiritual experience varies across the human population as a hypothesis worthy of consideration. Heck, this article got so many downvotes early on that it almost cost me my posting privileges here on LW! Harshing on religious people seems to play a very important role in the social cohesion of many groups of people who self-identify as rationalists, and so it’s not too surprising that the suggestion that there might be something wrong with that is met with a great deal of hostility. Even self-identified rationalists are still human.
There is a third option; the third option is that there is correlation but not causation, in either direction. That the rationalist community started out top-heavy enough with atheists that atheism has become something of an in-group bias; strongly and vocally religious people tend to be shunned to some degree, not enough to force all out, but enough to maintain the atheistic dominance in most groups that call themselves rationalist.
That is indeed a third possibility, but I think it can be safely ruled out. If there were a shred of actual evidence that spiritual experience was anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon then I’m pretty sure the rational community would welcome religious people with open arms. The problem is, there is no such evidence, so there’s a limit to how welcoming rationalists can be to someone who insists that God is an actual deity.
There have been a few shreds, here and there. Few, far between, and next to impossible to repeat.
That’s one of the many things that theists seem to have a hard time explaining: why is God so fleepin’ cagey?
Let’s consider briefly the opposite case. Let’s assume that there’s some miracle that can be called up on demand. It’s simple, straightforward, and experimentally verifiable.
In fact, drawing inspiration from the Miracle of Lanciano, let’s say that bread and wine turn to flesh and blood every time the priest consecrates it. Every time. It always has the same DNA, which matches what one might expect of a Nazerene aroundabout 10A.D. Repeatedly. Assume that this has always been the case, as long as anyone can tell, ever since the early years A.D. (and, as far as anyone knows, nobody tried it before then).
What happens? Well, presumably, a group of scientists investigate the phenomenon. They take measurements. They show how momentum and energy are conserved in the process. They check very thoroughly for any form of trickery, and find none.
Eventually, one of them comes up with some long, complicated, barely plausible theory involving spontaneous chemical reactions in organic substances, suggests that this is the same process by which the bread you eat turns into part of you, and concludes that bread is an excellent food for growing children as it is easily converted to human muscles.
In short, because it is a repeatable miracle, someone tries to fit it into the realm of things that are explainable without postulating the existence of God. If he is successful, then it looks like God is being cagey, and if he is not, then it looks like we are merely awaiting someone able to figure out a successful explanation (and God is being cagey).
I think your prediction is wrong. I think that if that happened, the scientific-and-skeptical community would go through something like the following steps:
First, everyone would strongly suspect fraud of some kind. So there’d be a lot of attempts to check this—from scientists and from Randi-type debunkers. Ex hypothesi these would not in fact detect fraud.
At this point we would have a very well verified phenomenon that’s fabulously difficult to fit into the standard naturalist/reductionist framework—the only way we know of for whether someone has been validly ordained as a priest to influence what happens is via some kind of mind that’s able to work with concepts like “priest”, “ordained”, and “valid”. So somewhere around here I would expect the great majority of scientific skeptical types to conclude that something is paying attention to human religious rituals. Might be God, might be aliens with eccentric interests, might be some sort of superpowered AI whose existence we never noticed, etc., etc., etc., but it seems like it has to be something with a mind and with abilities that go way beyond ours.
It would be worth checking a few more-reductionist things. For instance: just what changes to the process of priest-making suffice to make transubstantiation not work? (In many traditions, and in particular in those traditions that believe in transubstantiation in our world, priests have to be ordained by bishops, and bishops have to be ordained by other bishops, and the process involves a ceremonial laying on of hands. Is it possible that there’s some thing that gets transferred when that happens? That would be interesting, and might make some of the more-natural options look a bit more plausible. On the other hand, does success depend essentially on intent everywhere down the line? That seems to require non-human minds watching.)
If someone comes up with an actually-working theory about chemical reactions, that would be very interesting indeed—but it would need to be a theory that explains why the process only works for priests, and only when they are performing a eucharistic ceremony. Otherwise, it’s going to be much less plausible even to the most thoroughgoing skeptic than “a god did it” or “superpowered aliens did it”.
Distinguishing between the various kinds of superpowered nonhuman intelligence that might have done this thing would be tricky. It seems like it would need to be either something rather like the god of Christianity, or else something deliberately masquerading as the god of Christianity. That might already be enough to justify adopting Christianity as at least a working hypothesis.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ll just add that you don’t have to get anywhere near this level of improbability (converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry) to get convincing evidence of the existence of a deity. It would be enough to show that people who prayed to a particular deity could produce any measurable effect that could not be accounted for by a placebo effect with statistically higher probability of success than those who prayed to some other deity. It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something—anything—but have it be the same thing in both cases. The two believers write down what God tells them without communicating with each other, and then you check to see if they match. If people who prayed to Jesus matched more often than people who prayed to Allah under otherwise identical circumstances, that would really get my attention.
When I suggest things like this to believers, the response is invariably a citation of Matthew 4:7 or some variation on that theme.
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
I think you are making an elementary error: from “the Bible says not-X”, inferring “the Bible doesn’t say X”.
Deuteronomy 6:16 says “You shall not put YHWH your god to the test as you did at Massah”. That’s a reference to the events described in Exodus 17:7: “[Moses] named the place Massah and Meribah, because the children of Israel quarrelled and tested YHWH, saying ‘Is YHWH among us or not?’.” That’s the bit where they get all grumpy at Moses because they have nothing to drink, and he strikes a rock with his staff and produces water.
So it’s all a bit flaky, but I don’t think Jesus is wrong here. The Israelites get grumpy and accuse Moses of bringing them all this way out into the desert to let them die of thirst; Moses performs a miracle to give them some water and reassure them; God, as purportedly quoted by the author of Deuteronomy, interprets this as putting God to the test (this, if anything, is the dubious bit; the story in Exodus sounds as if their problem was thirst more than it was doubt) and tells them not to do it again; Jesus appeals to this when challenged to demonstrate that he, like Moses, has God on his side. (Digression: It seems to me that his response here would have been better as a response to the previous temptation—to make rocks into food—which is awfully reminiscent of what the Israelites had had Moses do. I wonder, and this is pure baseless speculation, whether at one point there were two temptation narratives going around, both involving the stones-into-food challenge, with Jesus giving the “man does not live by bread alone” answer in one version and the “do not put God to the test” answer in the other—and then Mark or Q or whoever wanted to include both stories but needed a second temptation, and therefore made one up. This would also explain why the second temptation is such a silly one.)
Heh, you’re right. I missed this because in the KJV Deu6:16 is translated as “shall not” rather than “shalt not” so my text search didn’t find it. I stand corrected. Sorry, Jesus.
They doubted God’s ability to provide them with water.
Now I’m imagining it a bit like a long journey in a car, with Israel the nation being like a very whiny child:
“Are we there yet?”
“We’ll get there when we get there.”
...
“Are we THERE yet?”
“No.”
...
“Are we there yet?”
“No, we didn’t get there in the last ten seconds.”
...
“I’m thirsty.”
“Here, have some water, and if you can’t sit quietly for a few minutes, I’ll have you wandering the desert for forty years, okay?”
Okay, I haven’t looked into this in any detail, but I must say this comes as a surprise. What elements are in meat that aren’t in bread, or vice versa? (I had expected that they were both, pretty near entirely, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which is why the human body can digest bread and use it to grow—which is really a long-term way of transforming it into human flesh).
Now, that would be interesting. It does require God’s deliberate participation—in fact, all experiments to prove His existence do—so it’s not going to work if He doesn’t play ball. (Which brings us right back to the question of why He is so cagey about the whole existence thing at all...)
There’s a list of places where the new testament quotes or refers to the old over here. I see gjm’s already found this quote, but it might save you some future searches in similar circumstances.
OK, I was wrong about this. I thought that wine didn’t contain iron, but it does. (I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus’s alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)
But it doesn’t matter. My whole point was that you wouldn’t have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I’ll believe.
Or instantaneous transportation over perhaps large distances.
Fair enough. Let me take a stab at it, then.
Free will.
We know that matter is deterministic; electrons, protons, neutrons all follow pretty well-understood laws. We know that the human body is made of electrons, protons and neutrons; perfectly normal matter. Therefore, human behaviour should also follow from those same laws; it’s merely a massive amount of work to follow the reactions of such a vast amount of electrons, protons and neutrons, which is why no-one has done the calculation yet. This implies that human behaviour should be deterministic.
Yet people continually insist that they have free will. That they have choices. That they can choose to get up in the morning, or to sleep late.
Can you explain the phenomenon of free will without the existence of a deity?
There is no phenomenon of free will. There’s no empiric test or observable property that tells you whether someone or something has free will. What there is, is the phenomenon of people believing they have free will. And that has various explanations.
However, it’s no different from other popular beliefs with no empiric evidence. People naturally (“by default”) believe in souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye, and a hundred other things for which the existence of belief isn’t strong evidence. Since free will, like souls, is pretty much by definition empirically unobservable, people’s belief in it (that doesn’t come with a concrete argument) in it isn’t evidence for it, since the belief couldn’t have been caused by observation.
That statement seems (currently) true enough; presumably if we could execute a free will test, someone would have done it by now and there would be no need for these debates.
You compare free will with “souls, the afterlife, spirits, gods, the underworld, sympathetic magic, witchcraft, the evil eye...”. It seems to me that the notion of free will is actually more similar to the notion of consciousness than it is to those things that you list. Pretty much everyone is under the impression that he or she is conscious, and yet we can’t really empirically test for consciousness. Both consciousness and free will seem like useful concepts that most people perceive and experience even though we can’t empirically test for them and we may lack rigorous, universally agreed upon definitions for them.
Do you believe that consciousness is a phenomenon? If so, then what empiric test or observable property would you use to determine whether something (e.g. an artificially intelligent computing system) is conscious?
They are useful concepts exactly and only because they are such strong and common intuitions people have, so we have to use these concepts to model other people’s beliefs and behavior. In the same way that an atheist needs to understand religion.
Different people use very different, often contradictory definitions of ‘consciousness’. Some are obviously true (for humans): for example “a system that models itself as part of the world and understands that its outputs determine the behavior of that part”. Some are by definition empirically untestable: “conscious entities experience events but do not affect them, and some things (people) have such conscious entities attached, while others (simple animals) don’t”, a la p-zombies, or for example “I know I have qualia but I can’t know if others do”, similar to solipsism.
In general, I think there is no “study of consciousness” (as there would be of a phenomenon); there is, however, a lot of study of the way people use the word “consciousness”, which involves psychology, sociology/culture, linguistics, neurology, and so forth. And the same is true for “free will”.
There is a study of consciousness, or at least aspects of consciousness, as anyone can discover via google, and it is not just a study of the way people use the word.
A study of “consciousness” under which definition?
Anaesthesiologists study consciousness, meaning awareness of the environment and ability to form memories, as something that can be switched on and off. Cognitive psychologists study access consciousness, the ability to make verbal reports about some of what is going on in your head. Perceptual psychologists study phenomenal consciousness, blind spots, blind sight, synaesthesia, and so on.
Now, maybe you could answer my questions: why didn’t you know the above, why didn’t say you research it, and why you think it is a good idea to make armchair pronouncements abut what science can do?
These are all good and useful fields of study, but crucially, they’re using the word “consciousness” to mean something different from what was under discussion here, which I did my best to point out.
This subthread started with the g_pepper saying:
Clearly, whatever is being talked about here doesn’t belong to one of the fields of study you mentioned. In none of those fields does the statement that “we can’t [ever] empirically test for consciousness” make sense—obviously we can test if a person (or other system) is forming memories, is able to make verbal reports, has blind spots, etc. We don’t need to rely on people’s own impressions of being conscious, either.
This is “consciousness” in the vernacular (and philosophical) sense, closely related to sentience: the possession of a subjective experience. It’s a confused concept, which doesn’t admit empirical study, just like souls or dualist free will don’t. But people’s belief in, and beliefs about, the concept can be studied.
I never said science can’t do something.
The tone of your reply seems aggressive. What did I say that you found offensive?
In general there is a study of consciousness, but there is not a study of some specific aspects, theories and definitions.
Subjective experience can be studied up to a point, eg synaesthesia. The studies tend to assume that subjects have experiences an are report them accurately....n other words, the assume the non zombie hood of the subjects. Zombiehood isn’t testable, but is a specific theory of consciousness, not “consciousness”.
In other words: there is study of some definitions (or referents) of “consciousness”, and not of others, and the one that was used originally in this thread isn’t studied.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘in general’ here, but I think that might be semantics and not any concrete difference of opinion between us.
And yet I know that I possess a subjective experience, and I suspect that you do to. Just because something does not currently lend itself to quantitative scientific study does not mean that it is not real.
ETA:
Note that much of the discussion of free will in this comments section has had nothing to do with souls or dualist free will; e.g. compatibilism has nothing to do with souls or dualism.
(Edited) That’s true, but it doesn’t necessarily contradict what I said. Subjective experience is real—we all have it. Being real, it can be studied. But I strongly expect that whatever the study produces won’t e.g. let us tell if a non-human is conscious (has subjective experience) except by arbitrary definitions that ultimately rely on being-similar-to-humans.
That’s true, which is why I specified dualist free will.
If contentiousness doesn’t exist how can we empirically test for anything? Empiricism is based on using past observations to predict future observations, it becomes meaningless if there’s nothing there to do the observing.
Given a naturalistic model of free will, it is possible in principle to tell whether something has free will. It is generally difficult in practice, since testing naturalistic theory of FW tends to involve investigating whether a) there is real quantum (or other) indeterminism, and (b) exactly how the brain works.
In general, you can;’t generalise about the testability of things like consciousness and free will, when there are a lot of different theories and definitions of both.
I agree: in fact, you usually can’t generalize about any property of thing X for different, contradictory or unrelated, definitions of “X”. Here, like in the subthread about consciousness, I wasn’t trying to generalize.
I was using the definition used in the comment I was replying to, which—implicitly but clearly—talks about a deterministic universe and a supernatural free will. I should have made that explicit.
It seems to me like souls that somehow affect the brain would completely suffice. Why do you think an all-powerful and all-knowing god is needed?
...you raise an excellent point. Free will can be adequately explained by the existence of the soul; some form of stuff, of whatever nature, that is not deterministic and can somehow make decisions, and which is a part of every human being.
But then, what is the soul? If it is physical—some arrangement of quarks or something—then can it really be entirely limited to humanity? What of the chimpanzee? On the flip side, is that the missing piece preventing the creation of artificial intelligence?
If is is not physical, then what sort of stuff is it? Where does it come from, where does it go (or does it dissipate and evaporate on death)? If it dissipates, then what are the products of that dissipation, do they hang around, undetected but building up somehow, or are they somehow recycled into new people? Is there a limit to the amount of soulstuff that exists on the Earth, and does that create a hard limit on the possible population of said Earth? What happens if Earth’s population exceeds that limit? And if such soulstuff does exist, then is that reason to update in favour of the possibility of existence of some much larger intelligence?
Why exactly?
Because if there was a giant brain of physical matter hovering around Earth, we’d see it. If there was a giant brain of some undetectable non-matter stuff hovering around, then the fact that we can’t see it doesn’t mean a thing, one way or another.
It’s still significantly less likely to be there than not, but rather more likely than if intelligence needs a brain-like matter substrate to work on.
No, we don’t.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/Determinism.pdf
Some people think so:
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/standard_argument.html
Huh. Interesting.
So, even in general relativity, there’s some circumstances in which the same initial conditions can lead to differing future states?
Okay, I’ve only skimmed this site, but I find myself agreeing with a lot of the points he makes. This is dangerous, because I haven’t seen him prove any of those points, merely argue convincingly for them, and that implies that I’m likely to miss subtle flaws in said arguments (if such flaws exist) because his conclusions seem to mostly confirm my thoughts on the matter.
Then you have a prima-facie convincing case of a naturalistic FW. The point is that the idea that FW requires the existence of a deity has no traction amongst professional philosophers, theologians, etc, and is more of an internet meme.
...you certainly make a convincing case. But I do not intend to argue that free will requires a deity, merely that free will is more likely given a deity than not given a deity.
Not convinced. In particular, a genuinely omnipotent deity is arguably incompatible with free will for any other agent; perhaps a merely omniscient deity is. The arguments here are about as convincing as the arguments for incompatibility between a deterministic universe and free will.
Much less impressive sorts of deity—e.g., those of the ancient Greek or Roman pantheon—pose much less threat to free will, but it’s also hard to see how they do anything to make it more likely.
It seems to me that it takes quite a “fine-tuned” notion of deity to make free will more likely. Perhaps you need what many theologians profess to believe in—a god who in some sense could be omnipotent but has somehow chosen not to exercise that power in all its fulness. It’s not clear to me that this idea is even internally consistent; in any case, it’s certainly not something that inevitably follows from the idea of a deity.
Yes, I think so, too. Especially in the case where an omnipotent omniscient deity is the creator of everything.
You are mistaken: we can write a story, we can know everything that happens in the story, and we are omnipotent in the story: whatever we write, happens in the story. But that doesn’t prevent us from writing “Peter had free will and freely chose to go left instead of right.”
In fact, someone who is omnipotent can produce free will precisely because they are omnipotent, just as in the example where the reason why you can “produce” a character with free will is because you are omnipotent relative to that character.
Let’s switch tenses.
“Peter has free will and will freely choose to go left instead of right”. Does Peter actually have free will?
This gets us into the standard “can God create a stone so heavy He Himself cannot lift it” paradox territory.
Specifically, creation of true free will requires sacrificing omniscience.
As the author of a story, I have the power to write in the preface, before the story is written at all, “Peter has free will and in chapter 4, he will freely choose to go left.”
It would be ridiculous to say that Peter isn’t free, and that I am wrong about my story. He is free in the story, just as he has certain other characteristics in the story. Of course, he is not free in real life, but that is just because he does not exist in real life, but only in the story, where he is also free.
The same thing would apply to a situation where you are created free by an omnipotent being. In that being’s world, you do not have free will, but that is just because you do not exist at all in that being’s world. In your own world, you both exist and have free will. This is what was meant by the traditional theology that maintained that God is not one being among other beings, but a being above all beings. The creator and the created things exist in very different realms of existence, like an author and the story world created by the author.
Since I have no problems being ridiculous, I will say that Peter does not have free will even if you claim so in your story.
Take at a puppeteer with his marionettes on a stage: when he says “Do not look at me, look at the puppets, they are free to do whatever they want!” are you going to believe him?
Being a bit more explicit, the problem, as TheOtherDave noted, is inconsistency. Saying “Peter will freely choose to go left” is self-contradictory.
And the issue with separating things into “worlds”—e.g. the world of the Creator and the world of the created—is that it’s not useful or illuminating. I can do the same thing, too—I can make an abacus and use it to calculate. Can I declare that my abacus has “free will” on its own, lower, plane of existence?
So, just to clarify my understanding of your claim here… if I write in my story “Peter goes left and simultaneously stands still,” is it similarly ridiculous to say that I’m wrong about my story? Are we therefore similarly committed to the idea that I have created a (fictional) being who both moves and stands still?
If I write in my story “Peter correctly adds 2 and 2 to get 5”, does the same kind of reasoning apply?
Are these things all, on your view, similarly analogous to the relationship of God to beings in the real world?
Discussing the possibility of putting something incoherent into a story is not a clarification but a sidetrack, unless you have some evidence that free will is incoherent.
I don’t think it is a sidetrack, actually… at least, not if we charitably assume your initial comment is on-point.
Let me break this down in order to be a little clearer here.
Lumifer asserted that omniscience and free will are incompatible, and you replied that as the author of a story you have the ability to state that a character will in the future make a free choice. “The same thing would apply,” you wrote, “to a situation where you are created free by an omnipotent being.”
I understand you to mean that just like the author of a story can state that (fictional) Peter has free will and simultaneously know Peter’s future actions, an omniscient being can know that (actual) Peter has free will and simultaneously know Peter’s future actions.
Now, consider the proposition A: the author of a story can state that incompatible things occur simultaneously.
If A is true, then the fact that the author can state these things has nothing to do with whether free will and omniscience are incompatible… the author can make those statements whether free will and omniscience are incompatible or not. Consequently, that the author can make those statements does not provide any evidence, one way or the other, as to whether free will and omniscience are incompatible.
In other words, if A is true, then your response to Lucifer has nothing whatsoever to do with Lucifer’s claim, and your response to Lucifer is entirely beside Lucifer’s point. Whereas if A is false, your response may be on-point, and we should charitably assume that it is.
So I’m asking you: is A true? That is: can an author simultaneously assert incompatible things in a story? I asked it in the form of concrete examples because I thought that would be clearer, but the abstract question works just as well.
Your response was to dismiss the question as a sidetrack, but I hope I have now clarified sufficiently what it is I’m trying to clarify.
A genuinely omnipotent deity can remove your free will at any point, and can override your free will at any point; thus, if you have free will in a universe including a truly omnipotent deity, then you have that free will at the sufferance of said deity. I don’t think that this means you can’t have free will.
...I’m currently debating this point with lisper in a separate thread.
Agreed. I wouldn’t count those as deities—they’re closer, in my mind, to sufficiently advanced aliens (with surprisingly human psychologies).
...point taken. My thought process is that a deity would have some probability of deliberately wanting to create a universe that includes free will, and that probability will be higher than the probability of free will developing in a completely random universe (because free will is such a complicated thing that the odds of it turning up by chance are extremely small). I am assuming that if a sufficiently powerful deity wants to create free will, and is willing to go to the effort to do so, then there will be free will.
I think it’s at least debatable. I am inclined toward compatibilism myself, in this as with determinism, but I think that in both cases it requires a rather “weak” notion of free will.
Is free will complicated? It looks to me as if intelligent life is complicated, but given intelligent life free will is one of (1) impossible, (2) inevitable, (3) neither of those but doesn’t involve extra complication as such. I’m not sure which, not least because I think it depends on how you define free will and I’m not even sure there is an altogether satisfactory definition, never mind what the best definition is if so.
I certainly agree that it’s debatable, and that there are some very strong arguments for the side I’m arguing against.
I think so. Life is at the very least a necessary precondition (I think), but I need to ignore that particular complexity lest I fall victim to the anthropic principle. Taking intelligent life as a precondition may be inadvisable, as I suspect that free will may be a necessary precondition for intelligence—which would mean that intelligent life always has free will, by definition of intelligence.
But the main reason why I think that free will must be a fairly complicated thing is because it runs completely contrary to the idea that particle physics is perfectly predictable, if we could but solve the necessary calculations. Life is compatible with the idea that the behaviour of the individual electrons, protons, neutrons is predictable, and that therefore a closed set of such particles is predictable, and that therefore the system as a whole is predictable. Free will requires a closed set of particles that are able to do different things in the same situation. I have no idea what the physics of free will looks like at a particle level, but I don’t see how it can possibly be anything simple.
But that idea is false.
While there are perhaps circumstances where physical theories fail to predict the future accurately (someone earlier in this thread posted a paper to that effect—was that you?), in general, the failure requires very specific circumstances which do not apply to human decision-making.
For example, Newtonian physics was described as having a failure condition that, at any point, a particle could enter the area under consideration from pretty much infinitely far away, moving at several billion times the speed of light. This requires that the area under contemplation be an open system ; that it, it permits the entry of distant particles. Yet, enclose a human inside a forcefield, prevent any such distant-particle interactions, and Newtonian physics does become predictable; and, at the same time, the human does not lose his free will.
Newtonian physics is not a good model of particle physics. The best model is quantum mechanics which is not usually regarded as determistic.
True enough, the applicability of quantum indeterminism to neurons is a difficult and unclear subject …. but you didn’t say brains are deterministic, you said particles were.
It’s deterministic enough to make extremely accurate predictions of the measured results of experiments. Even if there’s plenty of room for debate about whether or not a given particle was here or there when its position can’t be measured.
Let me phrase it this way, then. If free will exists, then brains must be at least partially non-deterministic (or, just for completeness, the decision must somehow originate somewhere else). Brains consist of neutrons, electrons, and protons, which must obey the laws of physics.
Of some experiments.
That’s the wrong way round. You are asuming that underlying determinism is the default option, and that quantum indeterminism is a weird minority position, that needs to make its case. But actually, it is quantum determinism which is fighting the rearguard action, after Bells theorem and the Aspect experiment.
That’s not a complete argument....you need to add the premise that obeying the laws of physics entails determinism.
You’re right, that’s missing. I’m no longer certain that it’s warranted… I don’t know enough about quantum physics to be completely certain one way or the other.
Any deity? Is there a logical connection between the idea of a deity in general, and FW.… or are you running off the shear familiarity of the Judeo-Christian god concept,
I was thinking Judeo-Christian, but my line of argument could be rephrased as a universe planned out in advance would be more likely to have free will than a completely random universe.
Why?
Because free will seems to be an extremely fragile thing. Perfectly predictable physics precludes most notions of free will, and perfectly random physics precludes most notions of predictability; there’s a very delicate balance involved in having a world predictable enough that free will matters (because you can make decisions with strong certainty as to the consequences thereof) yet unpredictable enough to permit free will at all.
At the same time, it seems to me a thing that would be desirable to include in a planned-out universe.
More fragile than intelligence, etc?
You seem to be assuming that free will is inherited, as it were, form the fundamental laws of physics, so that if they don’t have the exact balance required themselves, free will is impossible. It seems to me that the law of physica allow individual systems to display a wide range of behaviour, from extreme chaos to exteme determinsim, (and therefore embracing the Goldilocks zone) and that it is the systems themselves that are responsible for the fine-tuning.
ETA Free will is not the only thing that requires fine balance. Intelligence itself does...a balance between creativity and rule-following, between over and under detection of patterns,
Why?
Probably not more fragile than intelligence. I’d put it at a good deal less fragile, in fact. But reasoning based on the presence of intelligence in the universe risks falling into the anthropic trap...
Yes, in the sense that all behaviours of complex systems that consist entirely of atoms must be consistent with the laws governing the behaviour of atoms.
I do not claim that free will is, or even must be, an inevitable result of the fundamental laws of physics. I merely claim that, for free will to exist, the fundamental laws of physics must allow it, in the same way as the fundamental laws of physics allow intelligence.
Because I can think of few other reasons to create a universe. Anything made of matter—a creator capable of creating a universe can certainly create any amount of matter. Energy? Similarly.
But a free-willed creature is of a whole nother order. We build structures of logic; we dream, we imagine, we create entire worlds in our heads and then we share them with each other… I may be suffering from a pro-human bias here, but (a) I think that’s really special, and (b) I’m having trouble coming up with a way to get that without a universe to keep the people in.
I suppose our universe could be intended as some sort of work of art, like a sort of four-dimensional sculpture, designed to appeal to aesthetic senses so much more all-encompassing than our own limited viewpoints...
Which trap? Of thinking that something is likely just because we are in a place where it has occurred ?
Which? What occurs physically must not contradict the laws of physics, but that is weaker claim than saying the laws of physics must be specifically fine tuned for it.
But the alternative does not give you such a strong argument that FW is unlikely.
Meaning other reasons wouldn’t motivate you if you you were God, or wouldn’t motuvate a God like you, an anthropomorphic God … but a deity only reduces the unlikelihood of FW if it us likely, and likely to create FW. But the cultural famiarity of anthropomorphic deities is not objective probability.
The anthropic trap is the trap of thinking that something is likely when it cannot be observed if it has not occurred. So, for example, I do think it is likely that alternate universes will have stars, because stars can exist independently of the presence of observers; but I’m not so sure about intelligent life, because if there were no intelligence, what would observe it?
My claim is that what occurs physically must not contradict the laws of physics. Yes, this is a weaker claim. Yes, this does not give me as strong an argument as the other claim, but I can’t support the other claim.
...hmmmm. Good point. I have very little reason to assume that God’s reasoning even approaches anything vaguely humanlike in any manner.
Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man’s first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God’s orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve’s rebellion can look back with our 20⁄20 hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there’s this big booming voice on her left saying, “Don’t eat this fruit” and a snake on her right saying, “Don’t listen to that clown, he’s lying to you. Go ahead and eat it.” How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!
So I don’t see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don’t see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven’t heard?
Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don’t have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it’s a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I’m a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I’m “really” a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn’t have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can’t escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it’s not.
Hmmm. Yet, she then gives the fruit to Adam. Adam’s situation at the time is analogous to Eve’s—he has no knowledge of good and evil. But, at this point, Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act. (Exactly what Adam did, after eating the fruit, before being expelled from the garden, is a matter of conjecture).
Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will. (Any that don’t have free will are basically a complicated computer, and it must be easier to create a computer than to create a computer inside a universe that takes a few billion years to produce said computer). So a universe created by a deity which includes intelligent agents is very likely to have free will.
On the other hand, a universe not created by a deity won’t be subject to the above argument. A mostly deterministic universe is likely to come up with, if anything, mostly deterministic life. So, it seems that the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life and free will must be much smaller than the number of non-created universes containing intelligent life.
Therefore, a universe containing intelligent life is more likely to have been created by a deity if it also includes free will.
I have never read Dennet’s book, and merely seen the wikipedia summary you linked to. However, one thing strikes me in it:
This is a surprise to me, as I do perceive redness when I look at something red, and that is a quale, as I understand it. And I know that either my “red” quale or my “green” quale must be very different to the analogous qualia of a red-green colourblind man. So they clearly do exist (unless Dennet has a definition of “qualia” which is very different to mine).
Assuming that our definitions are not in conflict, I can accept the possibility that Dennet’s mental landscape does not include qualia, and his argument thus follows from the typical mind fallacy. Different mental landscapes have been shown to be startlingly different before, after all.
But, whether our disagreement on qualia is a matter of definition or fallacy, the fact that he makes such a claim does leave me deeply suspicious of his conclusions. (Doesn’t make them wrong, but does cause me to discount him as a credible authority on the matter).
As to free will being an illusion—hmmm. I don’t really have an answer for that. I can say that will seems to act exactly as if it was free in many ways. I certainly feel as though I have free will, but I have no firm proof that that quale corresponds to the actual reality of the matter.
That’s not clear. It’s ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It’s possible that Eve “took” the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.
But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve’s tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let’s look at the situation from Eve’s point of view: she’s just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they’re naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn’t actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it’s strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it’s bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God’s order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn’t correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was “evil” seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.
That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don’t yet know how. But even if we knew how it’s far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)
This is an oversimplification of Dennet’s position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it’s weird. You need to read Dennett’s book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It’s actually a useful skill to cultivate.
BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it’s because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn’t.
Of course you do. So do I. It’s a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.
Hmmm. It seems to depend on the translation; some translations are ambiguous about the chronology, and some are not. I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.
Though this translation suggests that the interval between the two acts implied in the original was very short—perhaps in the range of seconds.
This one’s interesting for the footnotes
The tree apparently granted “knowledge of good and evil”. So, if it was evil, Eve would have known, as she had that knowledge.
And then, after eating, Adam and Eve hid. If they had thought God evil, I would expect them to have hidden from fear of Him—yet they hid from fear of their own nakedness, implying that they saw fault in their own actions and wanted to avoid the consequences thereof.
Under interrogation, they shifted the blame instead of grovelling for mercy—again, this seems more the act of a person who knows they have done wrong than that of someone fearing an external evil.
...admittedly, it’s a thin thread.
Interestingly, it implies that it’s not being naked that is bad, but knowingly being naked; thus, a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge. For some sins, ignorance might even be completely defensible.
Because we don’t know how, yes. If we did know how, what would the result be?
Creating an intelligent agent without free will is, by necessity, limited. A non-free-willed entity can either have every action it can take planned out to the last decimal point (think a calculator, or a computer) which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate (it might be able to do those things faster, and without getting bored, which is why computers are useful); or it can be deliberately unpredictable, which means it’s almost certain to go wrong in some way which it can’t correct for.
And if you want something to calculate faster for you, then a fourteen-billion-year input before it gets to the calculating seems a little counter-intuitive. (I suppose if you have enough calculations, it can still be worth it).
My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices. To take an extreme example; let us assume that, at the age of 90, I release a complete autobiography, detailing my choices at every major decision point in my life. A time traveller from the year 3000 gets hold of this book, and then comes back to the present day, careful to change nothing (perhaps arriving on one of the moons of Jupiter). This time traveller knows what I will decide, yet his presence does not in any way constrain my freedom to make those decisions.
It was taken from the wikipedia summary. I’m not surprised.
...huh. Fascinating. You’re right, I do perceive illusory motion. But motion is a thing that exists independent of my perception; if a tree falls in the forest, then the fact of its motion is entirely independent of my observation thereof. A quale is different, in that the perception of the redness is the quale; the optical illusion which you provided somehow gives the quale of motion without actually having motion (which means that qualia don’t exactly have a 1:1 mapping to the underlying reality).
I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by “quale” differs from what you (and presumably Dennet) mean be “quale”.
...I am mystified. This skill seems to me merely convincing yourself that your own consciousness and free will are illusory, that you have no control over your acts and that there is not, in fact, a ‘you’ to have this complete lack of control? Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?
Oh, yes. There are degrees of existence, things that exist only in part, or in potentia, or even things that strongly affect the world despite not existing, sometimes despite not even being possible to exist. No problem with that.
I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word “Then”. That word (“az”) does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here’s an interesting bit o’ trivia: the original of “a tree to be desired to make one wise” is “w’nech’mäd häëtz l’has’Kiyl” which literally means, “and the tree was cute for wisdom.” (Actually, it’s not quite “wisdom”, the meaning of “l’has’Kiyl” is broader than that. A better translation would be something like “smartness” or “brainpower”.)
Sure, but 1) I don’t grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn’t know it was evil except in retrospect.
That’s the Ethan Couch defense, and it’s not entirely indefensible. We don’t generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.
You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.
You are mistaken.
Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it’s actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.
Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?
Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it’s useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it’s much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It’s kind of like having a lucid dream.
But why don’t you go read the book before we go further.
Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it’s a vector space.
Huh. Maybe I’ve been playing too many role-playing games, but I tend to think of “wisdom” and “smartness” as somewhat but not entirely correlated; with “smartness” being more related to academics and book-learning and “wisdom” more common-sense and correctness of intuition.
I’ll trust you with regards to the Hebrew and abandon this line of argument in the face of point 2.
Granted. Those who are not ignorant have a duty to alleviate the ignorance of others—Ezekiel 3 verses 17 to 21 are relevant here. (Note that the ignorant man is still being punished—just because his sin is lesser in his ignorance does not mean that it is nothing—so education is still important to reduce sin).
Granted. I was talking computable in theory. If we’re considering computable in practice, then there’s the question of why there was a several-billion-year wait before the first (known to us) computing devices appeared in this universe; that’s more than enough time to figure out how to build a computer, than build that computer, then calculate more digits of pi than I can imagine.
I can think of quite a few arguments that time travel is impossible, but this is a new one to me. I can see where you’re coming from—you’re saying that the idea that someone, somewhere, might know with certainty what I will decide in a given set of circumstances is logically incompatible with the idea that I might choose something else.
I’m not sure that it is, though. Just because I could choose something else doesn’t mean that I will choose something else. (Although that gets into the murky waters of whether it is possible for me to do that which I am never observed to do...)
Okay, I’ve had a look at those. The first one kind of skipped over the math for how one ends up with a negative entropy—that supercorrelation is mentioned as being odd, but nowhere is it explained what that means. (It’s also noted that the quantum correlation measurement is analogous to the classical one, but I am left uncertain as to how, when, and even if that analogy breaks down, because I do not understand that critical part of the maths, and how it corresponds to the real world, and I am left with the suspicion that it might not).
So, I’m not saying the conclusion as presented in the paper is necessarily wrong. I’m saying I don’t follow the reasoning that leads to it.
I will concede that there is no reason why the quale of free will can’t exist without free will. I will, however, firmly maintain that the quale of free will (along with many other qualia, like the quale of redness) can be and has been directly observed, and therefore does exist.
Fair enough, but that seems to be the case when you are not using the skill of being certain that your free will is an illusion.
This is a contradiction. If you don’t have free will, then you have no control and cannot take control; if you do take control, then you have the free will to, at the very least, decide to take that control.
I’m not saying that the certainty can’t improve the illusion. I’ll trust you on that point, that you have somehow found some way to take the certainty that you do not have free will and—somehow—use this to give yourself at least the illusion of greater control over your own life. (I’m rather left wondering how, but I’ll trust that it’s possible). However, the idea that you are doing so deliberately implies that you not only have, but are actively exercising your free will.
We would probably need to put this line of debate on hold for some time, then. I’d have to find a copy first.
Okay, how does that work? I can see how existence as a continuum makes sense (and, indeed, that’s how I think of it), but as a vector space?
Well, they are. Maybe “mental faculties” would be a better translation. But it’s neither here nor there.
That hardly seems fair. That means that if Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit then they would have been punished for the sins that they committed out of ignorance.
Indeed. But God didn’t provide any. In fact, He specifically commanded A&E to remain ignorant.
Huh? I don’t understand that at all. Your claim was that any designed entity “cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate”. I exhibited a computer that can calculate a trillion digits of pi as a counterexample. What does the fact that evolution took a long time to produce the first computer have to do with it? The fact remains that computers can do things that their human designers can’t.
In fact, just about anything that humans build can do things humans can’t do; that’s kind of the whole point of building them. Bulldozers. Can openers. Hammers. Paper airplanes. All of these things can do things that their human designers can’t do.
Actually, that’s not an argument that time travel is impossible. Time travel is indeed impossible, but that’s a different argument :-) Time travel and free will are logically incompatible, at least under certain models of time travel. (If the past can change once you’ve travelled into it so that you can no longer reliably predict the future, then time travel and free will can co-exist.)
Exactly. This is necessarily part of the definition of free will. If you’re predictable to an external agent but not to yourself then it must be the case that there is something that determines your future actions that is accessible to that agent but not to you.
But if you are reliably predictable then it is not the case that you could choose something else. That’s what it means to be reliably predictable.
Sorry about that. I tried to write a pithy summary but it got too long for a comment. I’ll have to write a separate article about it I guess. For the time being I’ll just have to ask you to trust me: time travel into the past is ruled out by quantum mechanics. (This should be good news for you because it leaves open the possibility of free will!)
Yes!!! Exactly!!! That is in fact the whole point of my OP: the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit has also been directly observed and therefore does exist (despite the fact that the Holy Spirit does not).
Sorry, that didn’t parse. What is “that”?
Well, yeah, at root I’m not doing it deliberately. What I’m doing (when I do it—I don’t always, it’s hard work [1]) is to improve the illusion that I’m doing things deliberately. But as with classical reality, a good-enough illusion is good enough.
[1] For example, I’m not doing it right now. I really ought to be doing real work, but instead I’m slacking off writing this response, which is a lot more fun, but not really what I ought to be doing.
Yes. Did you read “31 flavors of ontology”?
The word “could” is a tricksy one, and I think it likely that your disagreement with CCC about free will has a lot to do with different understandings of “could” (and of its associated notions like “possible” and “inevitably”).
The reason “could” is tricky is that whether or not something “could” happen (or could have happened) is usually reckoned relative to some state of knowledge. If you flip a coin but keep your hand over it so that you can see how it landed but I can’t then from my perspective it could be either heads or tails but from yours it can’t.
To assess free will you have to take the perspective of some hypothetical agent that has all of the knowledge that is potentially available. If such an agent can predict your actions then you cannot have free will because, as I pointed out before, your actions are determined by factors that are accessible to this hypothetical agent but not to you. Such agents do not exists in our world so we can still argue about it, but in a hypothetical world where we postulate the existence of such an agent (i.e. a world with time travel in to the past without the possibility of changing the past, or a world with a Newcomb-style intelligent alien) the argument is settled: such an agent exists, you are reliably predictable, and you cannot have free will. (This, by the way, is the resolution of Newcomb’s paradox: you should always take the one box. The only reason people think that two boxes might be the right answer is because they refuse to relinquish the intuition that they have free will despite the overwhelming (hypothetical in the case of Newcomb’s paradox) evidence against it.)
You sound as though they have some choice as to which box to take, or whether or not to believe in free will. But if your argument is correct, then they do not.
Do I? That wasn’t my intention. They don’t have a choice in which box to take, any more than they have a choice in whether or not they find my argument compelling. If they find my argument compelling then (if they are rational) they will take 1 box and win $1M. If they don’t, then (maybe) they won’t. There’s no real “choice” involved (though there is the very compelling illusion of choice).
This is actually a perfect illustration of the limits of free will even in our own awareness: you can’t decide whether to find a particular argument compelling or not, it’s something that just happens to you.
This is questionable, and I would expect many compatibilists to say quite the opposite.
What can I say? The compatibilists are wrong. The proof is simple: either all reliably predictable agents have free will, or some do and some don’t. If they all do, then a rock has free will and we will just have to agree to disagree about that (some people actually do take that position). If some do and some don’t, then in order for the term “free will” to have meaning you need a criterion by which to distinguish reliably predictable agents with free will from those without it. No one has ever come up with such a criterion (AFAIK).
There are a number of useful terms for which no one has ever come up with a precisely stated and clearly defensible criterion. Beautiful, good, conscious, etc. This surely does indicate that there’s something unsatisfactory about those terms, but I don’t think the right way to deal with it is to declare that nothing is beautiful, good, or conscious.
Having said which, I think I can give a not-too-hopeless criterion distinguishing agents we might reasonably want to say have free will from those we don’t. X has free will in regard to action Y if and only if every good explanation for why X did Y goes via X’s preference for Y or decision to do Y or something of the kind.
So, if you do something purely “on autopilot” without any actual wish to do it, that condition fails and you didn’t do it freely; if you do it because a mad neuroscientist genius has reprogrammed your brain so that you would inevitably have done Y, we can go straight from that fact to your doing Y (but if she did it by making you want to do Y then arguably the best explanation still makes use of that fact, so this is a borderline case, which is exactly as it should be); if you do it because someone who is determined that you should do Y is threatening to torture your children to death if you don’t, more or less the same considerations apply as for the mad neuroscientist genius (and again this is good, because it’s a borderline case—we might want to say that you have free will but aren’t acting freely).
What does this criterion say about “normal” decisions, if your brain is in fact implemented on top of deterministic physics? Well, an analysis of the causes of your action would need to go via what happened in your brain when you made the decision; there would be an “explanation” that just follows the trajectories of the elementary particles involved (or something of the kind; depends on exactly what deterministic physics) but I claim that wouldn’t be a good explanation—in the same way as it wouldn’t be a good explanation for why a computer chess player played the move it did just to analyse the particle trajectories, because doing so doesn’t engage at all with the tree-searching and position-evaluating the computer did.
One unsatisfactory feature of this criterion is that it appeals to the notions of preference and decision, which aren’t necessarily any easier to define clearly than “free will” itself. Would we want to say that that computer chess player had free will? After all, I’ve just observed that any good explanation of the move it played would have to go via the process of searching and evaluation it did. Well, I would actually say that a chess-playing computer does something rather like deciding, and I might even claim it has a little bit of free will! (Free will, like everything else, comes in degrees). Still, “clearly” not very much, so what’s different? One thing that’s different, though how different depends on details of the program in ways I don’t like, is that there may be an explanation along the following lines. “It played the move it did because that move maximizes the merit of the position as measured by a 12-ply search with such-and-such a way of scoring the positions at the leaves of the search tree.” It seems fair to say that that really is “why” the computer chose the move it did; this seems like just as good an explanation as one that gets into more details of the dynamics of the search process; but it appeals to a universal fact about the position and not to the actual process the computer went through.
You could (still assuming determinism) do something similar for the choices made by the human brain, but you’d get a much worse explanation—because a human brain (unlike the computer) isn’t just optimizing some fairly simply defined function. An explanation along these lines would end up amounting to a complete analysis of particle trajectories, or maybe something one level up from that (activation levels in some sophisticated neural-network model, perhaps) and wouldn’t provide the sort of insight we seek from a good explanation.
In so far as your argument works, I think it also proves that the incompatibilists are wrong. I’ve never seen a really convincing incompatibilist definition of “free will” either. Certainly not one that’s any less awful than the compatibilist one I gave above. It sounds as if you’re proposing something like “not being reliably predictable”, but surely that won’t do; do you want to say a (quantum) random number generator has free will? Or a mechanical randomizing device that works by magnifying small differences and is therefore not reliably predictable from any actually-feasible observations even in a deterministic (say, Newtonian) universe?
Yes, obviously. But it is also a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is beautiful, so too it is a waste of time trying to get everyone to agree on what is free will. Like I said, it’s really quibbling over terminology, which is almost always a waste of time.
OK, that’s not entirely unreasonable, but on that definition no reliably predictable agent has free will because there is always another good explanation that does not appeal to the agent’s desires, namely, whatever model would be used by a reliable predictor.
Indeed.
OK, then you’re intuitive definition of “free will” is very different from mine. I would not say that a chess playing computer has free will, at least not given current chess-playing technology. On my view of free will, a chess playing computer with free will should be able to decide, for example, that it didn’t want to play chess any more.
I’d say that not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
I think ialdabaoth actually came pretty close to getting it right:
I think that’s wrong for two reasons. The first is that the model might explicitly include the agent’s desires. The second is that a model might predict much better than it explains. (Though exactly what constitutes good explanation is another thing people may reasonably disagree on.)
I think that’s better understood as a limit on its intelligence than on its freedom. It doesn’t have the mental apparatus to form thoughts about whether or not to play chess (except in so far as it can resign any given game, of course). It may be that we shouldn’t try to talk about whether an agent has free will unless it has some notion of its own decision-making process, in which case I’d say not that the chess program lacks free will, but that it’s the wrong kind of thing to have or lack free will. (If you have no will, it makes no sense to ask whether it is free.)
Your objection to compatibilism was, unless I badly misunderstood, that no one has given a good compatibilist criterion for when something has free will. My objection was that you haven’t given a good incompatibilist criterion either. The fact that you can state a necessary condition doesn’t help with that; the compatibilist can state necessary conditions too.
There seem to me to be a number of quite different ways to interpret what he wrote. I am guessing that you mean something like: “I define free will to be unpredictability, with the further condition that we apply it only to agents we wish to anthropomorphize”. I suppose that gets around my random number generator example, but not really in a very satisfactory way.
So, anyway, suppose someone offers me a bribe. You know me well, and in particular you know that (1) I don’t want to do the thing they’re hoping to bribe me to, (2) I care a lot about my integrity, (3) I care a lot about my perceived integrity, and (4) the bribe is not large relative to how much money I have. You conclude, with great confidence, that I will refuse the bribe. Do you really want to say that this indicates that I didn’t freely refuse the bribe?
On another occasion I’m offered another bribe. But this time some evildoer with very strange preferences gets hold of me and compels me, at gunpoint, to decide whether to take it by flipping a coin. My decision is now maximally unpredictable. Is it maximally free?
I think the answers to the questions in those paragraphs should both be “no”, and accordingly I think unpredictability and freedom can’t be so close to being the same thing.
OK, let me try a different counter-argument then: do you believe we have free will to choose our desires? I don’t. For example, I desire chocolate. This is not something I chose, it’s something that happened to me. I have no idea how I could go about deciding not to desire chocolate. (I suppose I could put myself through some sort of aversion therapy, but that’s not the same thing. That’s deciding to try to train myself not to desire chocolate.)
If we don’t have the freedom to choose our desires, then on what basis is it reasonable to call decisions that take those non-freely-chosen desires into account “free will”?
This is a very deep topic that is treated extensively in David Deutsch’s book, “The Beginning of Infinity” (also “The Fabric of Reality”, particularly chapter 7). If you want to go down that rabbit hole you need to read at least Chapter 7 of TFOR first, otherwise I’ll have to recapitulate Deutsch’s argument. The bottom line is that there is good reason to believe that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are not possible.
Sure. Do you distinguish between “will” and “desire”?
Really? What are they?
Yes.
Yes, which is to say, not free at all. It is exactly as free as the first case.
The only difference between the two cases is in your awareness of the mechanism behind the decision-making process. In the first case, the mechanism that caused you to choose to refuse the bribe is inside your brain and not accessible to your conscious self. In the second case, (at least part of) the mechanism that causes you to make the choice is more easily accessible to your conscious self. But this is a thin reed because the inaccessibility of your internal decision making process is (almost certainly) a technological limitation, not a fundamental difference between the two cases.
(I see you’ve been downvoted. Not by me.)
If Jewishness is inherited from one’s mother, and a person’s great^200000-grandmother [EDITED to fix an off-by-1000x error, oops] was more like a chimpanzee than a modern human and had neither ethnicity nor religion as we now understand them, then on what basis is it reasonable to call that person Jewish?
If sentences are made up of letters and letters have no meaning, then on what basis is it reasonable to say that sentences have meaning?
It is not always best to make every definition recurse as far back as it possibly can.
I have read both books. I do not think chapter 7 of TFoR shows that theories with high predictive power but low explanatory power are impossible, but it is some time since I read the book and I have just now only glanced at it rather than rereading it in depth. If you reckon Deutsch says that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you remind me where in the chapter he does it? Or, if you have an argument that starts from what Deutsch does in that chapter and concludes that predictive power guarantees explanatory power, could you sketch it? (I do not guarantee to agree with everything Deutsch says.)
I seldom use the word “will” other than in special contexts like “free will”. Why do you ask?
One such might be: “For an action to be freely willed, the causes leading up to it must go via a process of conscious decision by the agent.”
Meh, OK. So let me remind you that the question we were (I thought) discussing at this point was: are there clearer-cut satisfactory criteria for “free will” available to incompatibilists than to compatibilists? Now, of course if you say that by definition nothing counts as an instance of free will then that’s a nice clear-cut criterion, but it also has (so far as it goes) nothing at all to do with freedom or will or anything else.
I think you’re saying something a bit less content-free than that; let me paraphrase and you can correct me if I’m getting it wrong. “Free will means unpredictability-in-principle. Everything is in fact predictable in principle, and therefore nothing is actually an instance of free will.” That’s less content-free because we can then ask: OK, what if you’re wrong about everything being predictable in principle; or what if you’re right but we ask about a hypothetical different world where some things aren’t predictable in principle?
Let’s ask that. Imagine a world in which some sort of objective-collapse quantum mechanics is correct, and many things ultimately happen entirely at random. And let’s suppose that whether or not the brain uses quantum effects in any “interesting” way, it is at least affected by them in a chaos-theory sort of way: that is, sometimes microscale randomness arising from quantum mechanics ends up having macroscale effects on what your brain does. And now let’s situate my two hypothetical examples in this hypothetical world. In this world, of course, nothing is entirely predictable, but some things are much more predictable than others. In particular, the first version of me (deciding whether to take the bribe on the basis of my moral principles and preferences and so forth, which ends up being very predictable because the bribe is small and my principles and preferences strong) is much more predictable (both in principle and in practice) in this world than the second version (deciding, at gunpoint, on the basis of what I will now make a quantum random number generator rather than a coin flip). In this world, would you accordingly say that first-me is choosing much less freely than second-me?
I don’t think that’s correct. For instance, in the second case I am coerced by another agent, and in the first I’m not; in the first case my decision is a consequence of my preferences regarding the action in question, and in the second it isn’t (though it is a consequence of my preference for living over dying; but I remark that your predictability criterion gives the exact same result if in the second case the random number generator is wired directly into my brain so as to control my actions with no conscious involvement on my part at all).
You may prefer notions of free will with a sort of transitive property, where if X is free and X is caused by Y1,...,Yn (and nothing else) then one of the Y must be free. (Or some more sophisticated variant taking into account the fact that freedom comes in degrees, that the notion of “cause” is kinda problematic, etc.) I see no reason why we have to define free will in such a way. We are happy to say that a brain is intelligent even though it is made of neurons which are not intelligent, that a statue resembles Albert Einstein even though it is made of atoms that do not resemble Einstein, that a woolly jumper is warm even though it is made of individual fibres that aren’t, etc.
Of course. Does this mean that you concede that our desires are not freely chosen?
Oh, good!
You’re right, the argument in chapter 7 is not complete, it’s just the 80⁄20 part of Deutsch’s argument, so it’s what I point people to first. And non-explanatory models with predictive power are not impossible, they’re just extremely unlikely (probability indistinguishable from zero). The reason they are extremely unlikely is that in a finite universe like ours there can exist only a finite amount of data, but there are an infinite number of theories consistent with that data, nearly all of which have low predictive power. Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power. Hence, it is overwhelmingly likely that a theory with high predictive power will have high explanatory power.
No.
First, I disagree with “Free will means unpredictability-in-principle.” It doesn’t mean UIP, it simply requires UIP. Necessary, not sufficient.
Second, to be “real” free will, there would have to be some circumstances where you accept the bribe and surprise me. In this respect, you’ve chosen a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a better one: we’re in a restaurant and I know you love burgers and pasta, both of which are on the menu. I know you’ll choose one or the other, but I have no idea which. In that case, it’s possible that you are making the choice using “real” free will.
Not so. In the first case you are being coerced by your sense of morality, or your fear of going to prison, or something like that. That’s exactly what makes your choice not to take the bribe predictable. The only difference is that the mechanism by which you are being coerced in the second case is a little more overt.
No, what I require is a notion of free will that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that can predict anything that can be predicted in principle. (I also want to give this hypothetical observer an oracle for the halting problem because I don’t think that Turing machines exercise “free will” or “decide” whether or not to halt.) This is simply the same criterion I apply to any phenomenon that someone claims is objectively real.
I think some of our desires are more freely chosen than others. I do not think an action chosen on account of a not-freely-chosen desire is necessarily best considered unfree for that reason.
That isn’t quite what you said before, but I’m happy for you to amend what you wrote.
It seems to me that the argument you’re now making has almost nothing to do with the argument in chapter 7 of Deutsch’s book. That doesn’t (of course) in any way make it a bad argument, but I’m now wondering why you said what you did about Deutsch’s books.
Anyway. I think almost all the work in your argument (at least so far as it’s relevant to what we’re discussing here) is done by the following statement: “Explanatory power turns out to be the only known effective filter for theories with high predictive power.” I think this is incorrect; simplicity plus past predictive success is a pretty decent filter too. (Theories with these properties have not infrequently turned out to be embeddable in theories with good explanatory power, of course, as when Mendeleev’s empirically observed periodicity was explained in terms of electron shells, and the latter further explained in terms of quantum mechanics.)
OK, but in that case either you owe us something nearer to necessary and sufficient conditions, or else you need to retract your claim that incompatibilism does better than compatibilism in the “is there a nice clear criterion?” test. Also, if you aren’t claiming anything close to “free will = UIP” then I no longer know what you meant by saying that ialdabaoth got it more or less right.
Sure. That would be why I said “with great confidence” rather than “with absolute certainty”. I might, indeed, take the bribe after all, despite all those very strong reasons to expect me not to. But it’s extremely unlikely. (So no, I don’t agree that I’ve “chosen a bad example”; rather, I think you misunderstood the example I gave.)
If you say “you chose a bad example to make your point, so let me propose a better one” and then give an example that doesn’t even vaguely gesture in the direction of making my point, I’m afraid I start to doubt that you are arguing in good faith.
The things you describe me as being “coerced by” are (1) not agents and (2) not external to me. These are not irrelevant details, they are central to the intuitive meaning of “free will” that we’re looking for philosophically respectable approximations to. (Perhaps you disagree with my framing of the issue. I take it that that’s generally the right way to think about questions like “what is free will?”.)
In particular, I think your claim about “the only difference” is flatly wrong.
That sounds sensible on first reading, but I think actually it’s a bit like saying “what I require is a notion of right and wrong that is the same for all observers, including a hypothetical one that doesn’t care about suffering” and inferring that our notions of right and wrong shouldn’t have anything to do with suffering. Our words and concepts need to be useful to us, and if some such concept would be uninteresting to a hypothetical superbeing that can predict anything that’s predictable in principle, that is not sufficient reason for us not to use it. Still more when your hypothetical superbeing needs capabilities that are probably not even in principle possible within our universe.
(I think, in fact, that even such a superbeing might have reason to talk about something like “free will”, if it’s talking about very-limited beings like us.)
I haven’t, as it happens, been claiming that free will is “objectively real”. All I claim is that it may be a useful notion. Perhaps it’s only as “objectively real” as, say, chess; that is, it applies to us, and what it is is fundamentally dependent on our cognitive and other peculiarities, and a world of your hypothetical superbeings might be no more interested in it than they presumably would be in chess, but you can still ask “to what extent is X exercising free will?” in the same way as you could ask “is X a better move than Y, for a human player with a human opponent?”.
Sorry about that. I really was trying to be helpful.
Well, heck, what are we arguing about then? Of course it’s a useful notion.
A better analogy would be “simultaneous events at different locations in space.” Chess is a mathematical abstraction that is the same for all observers. Simultaneity, like free will, depends on your point of view.
You’re arguing that no one has it and AIUI that nothing in the universe ever could have it. Doesn’t seem that useful to me.
I did consider substituting something like cricket or baseball for that reason. But I think the idea that free will is viewpoint-dependent depends heavily on what notion of free will you’re working with. I’m still not sure what yours actually is, but mine doesn’t have that property, out at any rate doesn’t have it to do great an extent as yours seems to.
Free will is a useful notion because we have the perception of having it, and so it’s useful to be able to talk about whatever it is that we perceive ourselves to have even though we don’t really have it. It’s useful in the same way that it’s useful to talk about, say, “the force of gravity” even though in reality there is no such thing. (That’s actually a pretty good analogy. The force of gravity is a reasonable approximation to the truth for nearly all everyday purposes even though conceptually it is completely wrong. Likewise with free will.)
You said that a chess-playing computer has (some) free will. I disagree (obviously because I don’t think anything has free will). Do you think Pachinko machines have free will? Do they “decide” which way to go when they hit a pin? Does the atmosphere have free will? Does it decide where tornadoes appear?
When I say “real free will” I mean this:
Decisions are made by my conscious self. This rules out pachinko machines, the atmosphere, and chess-playing computers having free will.
Before I make a decision, it must be actually possible for me to choose more than one alternative. Ergo, if I am reliably predictable, I cannot have free will because if I am reliably predictable then it is not possible for me to choose more than one alternative. I can only choose the alternative that a hypothetical predictor would reliably predict.
I don’t know how to make it any clearer than that.
I think it’s more helpful to talk about whatever we have that we’re trying to talk about, even if some of what we say about it isn’t quite right, which is why I prefer notions of free will that don’t become necessarily wrong if the universe is deterministic or there’s an omnipotent god or whatever.
I agree that gravity makes a useful analogy. Gravity behaves in a sufficiently force-like way (at least in regions of weakish spacetime curvature, like everywhere any human being could possibly survive) that I think for most purposes it is much better to say “there is, more or less, a force of gravity, but note that in some situations we’ll need to talk about it differently” than “there is no force of gravity”. And I would say the same about “free will”.
I don’t know much about Pachinko machines, but I don’t think they have any processes going on in them that at all resemble human deliberation, in which case I would not want to describe them as having free will even to the (very attenuated) extent that a chess program might have.
Again, I don’t think there are any sort of deliberative processes going on there, so no free will.
So there are two parts to this, and I’m not sure to what extent you actually intend them both. Part 1: decisions are made by conscious agents. Part 2: decisions are made, more specifically, by those agents’ conscious “parts” (of course this terminology doesn’t imply an actual physical division).
Of course “actually possible” is pretty problematic language; what counts as possible? If I’m understanding you right, you’d cash it out roughly as follows: look at the probability distribution of possible outcomes in advance of the decision; then freedom = entropy of that probability distribution (or something of the kind).
So then freedom depends on what probability distribution you take, and you take the One True Measure of freedom to be what you get for an observer who knows everything about the universe immediately before the decision is made (more precisely, everything in the past light-cone of the decision); if the universe is deterministic then that’s enough to determine the answer after the decision is made too, so no decisions are free.
One obvious problem with this is that our actual universe is not deterministic in the relevant sense. We can make a device based on radioactive decay or something for which knowledge of all that can be known in advance of its operation is not sufficient to tell you what it will output. For all we know, some or all of our decisions are actually affected enough by “amplified” quantum effects that they can’t be reliably predicted even by an observer with access to everything in their past light-cone.
It might be worse. Perhaps some of our decisions are so affected and some not. If so, there’s no reason (that I can see) to expect any connection between “degree of influence from quantum randomness” and any of the characteristics we generally think of as distinguishing free from not-so-free—practical predictability by non-omniscient observers, the perception of freeness that you mentioned before, external constraints, etc.
It doesn’t seem to me that predictability by a hypothetical “past-omniscient” observer has much connection with what in other contexts we call free will. Why make it part of the definition?
That’s like saying, “I prefer triangles with four sides.” You are, of course, free to prefer whatever you want and to use words however you want. But the word “free” has an established meaning in English which is fundamentally incompatible with determinism. Free means, “not under the control or in the power of another; able to act or be done as one wishes.” If my actions are determined by physics or by God, I am not free.
And you think chess-playing machines do?
BTW, if your standard for free will is “having processing that resembles human deliberation” then you’ve simply defined free will as “something that humans have” in which case the question of whether or not humans have free will becomes very uninteresting because the answer is tautologically “yes”.
I’d call them two “interpretations” rather than two “parts”. But I intended the latter: to qualify as free will on my view, decisions have to be made by the conscious part of a conscious agent. If I am conscious but I base my decision on a coin flip, that’s not free will.
Whatever is not impossible. In this case (and we’ve been through this) if I am reliably predictable then it is impossible for me to do anything other than what a hypothetical reliable predictor predicts. That is what “reliably predictable” means. That is why not being reliably predictable is a necessary but not sufficient condition for free will. It’s really not complicated.
Because that is what the “free” part of “free will” means. If I am faced with a choice between A and B and a reliable predictor predicts I am going to choose A, then I cannot choose B (again, this is what “reliably predictor” means). If I cannot choose B then I am not free.
I don’t think that’s at all clear, and the fact that a clear majority of philosophers are compatibilists indicates that a bunch of people who spend their lives thinking about this sort of thing also don’t think it’s impossible for “free” to mean something compatible with determinism.
Let’s take a look at that definition of yours, and see what it says if my decisions are determined by the laws of physics. “Not under the control or in the power of another”? That’s OK; the laws of physics, whatever they are, are not another agent. “Able to act or be done as one wishes”? That’s OK too; of course in this scenario what I wish is also determined by the laws of physics, but the definition doesn’t say anything about that.
(I wouldn’t want to claim that the definition you selected is a perfect one, of course.)
Yup. Much much simpler, of course. Much more limited, much more abstract. But yes, a tree-search with an evaluation at the leaves does indeed resemble human deliberation somewhat. (Do I need to keep repeating in each comment that all I claim is that arguably chess-playing programs have a very little bit of free will?)
Nope. But not having such processing seems like a good indication of not having free will, because whatever free will is it has to be something to do with making decisions, and nothing a pachinko machine or the weather does seems at all decision-like, and I think the absence of any process that looks at all like deliberation seems to me to be a large part of why. (Though I would be happy to reconsider in the face of something that behaves in ways that seem sufficiently similar to, e.g., apparently-free humans despite having very different internals.)
I have pointed out more than once that in this universe there is never prediction that reliable, and anything less reliable makes the word “impossible” inappropriate. For whatever reason, you’ve never seen fit even to acknowledge my having done so.
But let’s set that aside. I shall restate your claim in a form I think better. “If you are reliably predictable, then it is impossible for your choice and the predictor’s prediction not to match.” Consider a different situation, where instead of being predicted your action is being remembered. If it’s reliably rememberable, then it is impossible for your action and the remember’s memory not to match—but I take it you wouldn’t dream of suggesting that that involves any constraint on your freedom.
So why should it be different in this case? One reason would be if the predictor, unlike the rememberer, were causing your decision. But that’s not so; the prediction and your decision are alike consequences of earlier states of the world. So I guess the reason is because the successful prediction indicates the fact that your decision is a consequence of earlier states of the world. But in that case none of what you’re saying is an argument for incompatibilism; it is just a restatement of incompatibilism.
Please consider the possibility that other people besides yourself have thought about this stuff, are reasonably intelligent, and may disagree with you for reasons other than being too stupid to see what is obvious to you.
No. It means you will not choose B, which is not necessarily the same as that you cannot choose B. And (I expect I have said this at least once already in this discussion) words like “cannot” and “impossible” have a wide variety of meanings and I see no compelling reason why the only one to use when contemplating “free will” is the particular one you have in mind.
How would you define it then?
This would not be the first time in history that the philosophical community was wrong about something.
No, I get that. But “a very little bit” is still distinguishable from zero, yes?
Nothing about it seems human decision-like. But that’s a prejudice because you happen to be human. See below...
I believe that intelligent aliens could exist (in fact, almost certainly do exist). I also believe that fully intelligent computers are possible, and might even be constructed in our lifetime. I believe that any philosophy worth adhering to ought to be IA-ready and AI-ready, that is, it should not fall apart in the face of intelligent aliens or artificial intelligence. (Aside: This is the reason I do not self-identify as a “humanist”.)
Also, it is far from clear that chess computers work anything at all like humans. The hypothesis that humans make decisions by heuristic search has been pretty much disproven by >50 years of failed AI research.
I hereby acknowledge your having pointed this out. But it’s irrelevant. All I require for my argument to hold is predictability in principle, not predictability in fact. That’s why I always speak of a hypothetical rather than an actual predictor. In fact, my hypothetical predictor even has an oracle for the halting problem (which is almost certainly not realizable in this universe) because I don’t believe that Turing machines exercise free will when “deciding” whether or not to halt.
That’s possible. But just because incompatibalism is a tautology does not make it untrue.
I don’t think it is a tautology. The state of affairs for a reliable predictor to exist would be that there is something that causes both my action and the prediction, and that whatever this is is accessible to the predictor before it is accessible to me (otherwise it’s not a prediction). That doesn’t feel like a tautology to me, but I’m not going to argue about it. Either way, it’s true.
Of course. As soon as someone presents a cogent argument I’m happy to consider it. I haven’t heard one yet (despite having read this ).
That’s really the crux of the matter I suppose. It reminds me of the school of thought on the problem of theodicy which says that God could eliminate evil from the world, but he chooses not to for some reason that is beyond our comprehension (but is nonetheless wise and good and loving). This argument has always struck me as a cop-out. If God’s failure to use His super-powers for good is reliably predictable, then that to me is indistinguishable from God not having those super powers to begin with.
You can see the absurdity of it by observing that this same argument can be applied to anything, not just God. I can argue with equal validity that rocks can fly, they just choose not to. Or that I could, if I wanted to, mount an argument for my position that is so compelling that you would have no choice but to accept it, but I choose not to because I am benevolent and I don’t want to shatter your illusion of free will.
I don’t see any possible way to distinguish between “can not” and “with 100% certainty will not”. If they can’t be distinguished, they must be the same.
I already pointed out that your own choice of definition doesn’t have the property you claimed (being fundamentally incompatible with determinism). I think that suffices to make my point.
Very true. But if you are claiming that some philosophical proposition is (not merely true but) obvious and indeed true by definition, then firm disagreement by a majority of philosophers should give you pause.
You could still be right, of course. But I think you’d need to offer more and better justification than you have so far, to be at all convincing.
Well, the actual distinguishing might be tricky, especially as all I’ve claimed is that arguably it’s so. But: yes, I have suggested—to be precise about my meaning—that some reasonable definitions of “free will” may have the consequence that a chess-playing program has a teeny-tiny bit of free will, in something like the same way as John McCarthy famously suggested that a thermostat has (in a very aetiolated sense) beliefs.
Nothing about it seems decision-like at all. My notion of what is and what isn’t a decision is doubtless influenced by the fact that the most interesting decision-making agents I am familiar with are human, which is why an abstract resemblance to human decision-making is something I look for. I have only a limited and (I fear) unreliable idea of what other forms decision-making can take. As I said, I’ll happily revise this in the light of new data.
Me too; if you think that what I have said about decision-making isn’t, then either I have communicated poorly or you have understood poorly or both. More precisely: my opinions about decision-making surely aren’t altogether IA/AI-ready, for the rather boring reason that I don’t know enough about what intelligent aliens or artificial intelligences might be like for my opinions to be well-adjusted for them. But I do my best, such as it is.
First: No, it hasn’t. The hypothesis that humans make all their decisions by heuristic search certainly seems pretty unlikely at this point, but so what? Second and more important: I was not claiming that humans make decisions by tree searching. (Though, as it happens, when playing chess we often do—though our trees are quite different from the computers’.) I claim, rather, that humans make decisions by a process along the lines of: consider possible actions, envisage possible futures in each case, evaluate the likely outcomes, choose something that appears good. Which also happens to be an (extremely handwavy and abstract) description of what a chess-playing program does.
Perfectly reliable prediction is not possible in principle in our universe. Not even with a halting oracle.
I think the fact that you never actually get to observe the event of “such-and-such a TM not halting” means you don’t really need to worry about that. In any case, there seems to me something just a little improper about finagling your definition in this way to make it give the results you want: it’s as if you chose a definition in some principled way, found it gave an answer you didn’t like, and then looked for a hack to make it give a different answer.
Of course not. But what I said was neither (1) that incompatibilism is a tautology nor (2) that that makes it untrue. I said that (1) your argument was a tautology, which (2) makes it a bad argument.
I think that may say more about your state of mind than about the available arguments. In any case, the fact that you don’t find any counterarguments to your position cogent is not (to my mind) good reason for being rudely patronizing to others who are not convinced by what you say.
I regret to inform you that “argument X has been deployed in support of wrong conclusion Y” is not good reason to reject argument X—unless the inference from X to Y is watertight, which in this case I hope you agree it is not.
This troubles me not a bit, because you can never say “with 100% certainty will not” about anything with any empirical content. Not even if you happen to be a perfect reasoner and possess a halting oracle.
And at degrees of certainty less than 100%, it seems to me that “almost certainly will not” and “very nearly cannot” are quite different concepts and are not so very difficult to disentangle, at least in some cases. Write down ten common English boys’ names. Invite me to choose names for ten boys. Can I choose the names you wrote down? Of course. Will I? Almost certainly not. If the notion of possibility you’re working with leads you to a different conclusion, so much the worse for that notion of possibility.
Sorry, it is not my intention to be either rude or patronizing. But there are some aspects of this discussion that I find rather frustrating, and I’m sorry if that frustration occasionally manifests itself as rudeness.
Of course I can: with 100% certainty, no one will exhibit a working perpetual motion machine today. With 100% certainty, no one will exhibit superluminal communication today. With 100% certainty, the sun will not rise in the west tomorrow. With 100% certainty, I will not be the president of the United States tomorrow.
Do you believe that a thermostat makes decisions? Do you believe that a thermostat has (a little bit of) free will?
I presume you mean “perfectly reliable prediction of everything is not possible in principle.” Because perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) is clearly possible. And perfectly reliable prediction of some things (in principle) with a halting oracle is possible by definition.
100%? Really? Not just “close to 100%, so let’s round it up” but actual complete certainty?
I too am a believer in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but I don’t see on what grounds anyone can be 100% certain that the SLoT is universally correct. I say this mostly on general principles—we could just have got the physics wrong. More specifically, there are a few entropy-related holes in our current understanding of the world—e.g., so far as I know no one currently has a good answer to “why is the entropy so low at the big bang?” nor to “is information lost when things fall into black holes?”—so just how confidently would you bet that figuring out all the details of quantum gravity and of the big bang won’t reveal any loopholes?
Now, of course there’s a difference between “the SLoT has loopholes” and “someone will reveal a way to exploit those loopholes tomorrow”. The most likely possible-so-far-as-I-know worlds in which perpetual motion machines are possible are ones in which we discover the fact (if at all) after decades of painstaking theorizing and experiment, and in which actual construction of a perpetual motion machine depends on somehow getting hold of a black hole of manageable size and doing intricate things with it. But literally zero probability that some crazy genius has done it in his basement and is now ready to show it off? Nope. Very small indeed, but not literally zero.
Again, not zero. Very very very tiny, but not zero.
It does something a tiny bit like making decisions. (There is a certain class of states of affairs it systematically tries to bring about.) However, there’s nothing in what it does that looks at all like a deliberative process, so I wouldn’t say it has free will even to the tiny extent that maybe a chess-playing computer does.
For the avoidance of doubt: The level of decision-making, free will, intelligence, belief-having, etc., that these simple (or in the case of the chess program not so very simple) devices exhibit is so tiny that for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful simply to say: No, these devices are not intelligent, do not have beliefs, etc. Much as for most purposes it is much simpler and more helpful to say: No, the coins in your pocket are not held away from the earth by the gravitational pull of your body. Or, for that matter: No, there is no chance that I will be president of the United States tomorrow.
Where are you heading with these questions? I mean, are you expecting them to help achieve mutual understanding, or are you playing to the gallery and trying to get me to say things that sound silly? (If so, I think you may have misjudged the gallery.)
Empirical things? Do you not, in fact, believe in quantum mechanics? Or do you think “in half the branches, by measure, X will happen, and in the other half Y will happen” counts as a perfectly reliable prediction of whether X or Y will happen?
Only perfectly non-empirical things. Sure, you can “predict” that a given Turing machine will halt. But you might as well say that (even without a halting oracle) you can “predict” that 3x4=12. As soon as that turns into “this actual multiplying device, right here, will get 12 when it tries to multiply 3 by 4”, you’re in the realm of empirical things, and all kinds of weird things happen with nonzero probability. You build your Turing machine but it malfunctions and enters an infinite loop. (And then terminates later when the sun enters its red giant phase and obliterates it. Well done, I guess, but then your prediction that that other Turing machine would never terminate isn’t looking so good.) You build your multiplication machine and a cosmic ray changes the answer from 12 to 14. You arrange pebbles in a 3x4 grid, but immediately before you count the resulting pebbles all the elementary particles in one of the pebbles just happen to turn up somewhere entirely different, as permitted (albeit with staggeringly small probability) by fundamental physics.
[EDITED to fix formatting screwage; silly me, using an asterisk to denote multiplication.]
I’m not sure what I “expect” but yes, I am trying to achieve mutual understanding. I think we have a fundamental disconnect in our intuitions of what “free will” means and I’m trying to get a handle on what it is. If you think that a thermostat has even a little bit of free will then we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you think even a Nest thermostat, which does some fairly complicated processing before “deciding” whether or not to turn on the heat has even a little bit of free will then we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you think that an industrial control computer, or an airplane autopilot, which do some very complicated processing before “deciding” what to do have even a little bit of free will then we’ll have to agree to disagree. Likewise for weather systems, pachinko machines, geiger counters, and computers searching for a counterexample to the Collatz conjecture. If you think any of these things has even a little bit of free will then we will simply have to agree to disagree.
Most people, by “100% certainty”, mean “certain enough that for all practical purposes it can be treated as 100%”. Not treating the statement as meaning that is just Internet literalness of the type that makes people say everyone on the Internet has Aspergers.
Not in the context of discussions of omniscience and whether pachinko machines have free will :-/
People who say this should go back to their TVs and Bud Lights and not try to overexert themselves with complicated things like that system of intertubes.
I am aware of that, thanks.
However, in this particular discussion the distinction between certainty and something-closely-resembling-certainty is actually important, for reasons I mentioned earlier.
The dictionary disagrees.
Freehas many different meanings.What ontological category does
physicshave in your view of the world?Are you seriously arguing that “free” in “free will” might mean the same thing as (say) “free” in “free beer”? Come on.
That’s a very good question, and it depends (ironically) on which of two possible definitions of physics you’re referring to. If you mean physics-the-scientific-enterprise (let’s call that physics1) then it exists in the ontological category of human activity (along with things like “commerce”). If you mean the underlying processes which are the object of study in physics1 (let’s call that physics2) then I’d put those in the ontological category of objective reality.
Note that ontological categories are not mutually exclusive. Existence is a vector space. Physics1 is also part of objective reality, because it is an emergent property of physics2.
You can see free will as
1 d : enjoying personal freedom : not subject to the control or domination of another. There no other person who controls your actions.The next definitions is:
2 a : not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being : choosing or capable of choosing for itselfI think you can make a good case that the way someone’s neurons work is part of their own nature or being.
You ontological model that there’s an enity called physics_2 that causes neurons to do something that not in their nature or being is problematic
I think this is a difference in the definition of the word “I”, which can reasonably be taken to mean at least three different things:
The totality of my brain and body and all of the processes that go on there. On this definition, “I have lungs” is a true statement.
My brain and all of the computational processes that go on there (but not the biological processes). On this definition, “I have lungs” is a false statement, but “I control my breathing” is a true statement.
That subset of the computational processes going on in my brain that we call “conscious.” On this view, the statement, “I control my breathing” is partially true. You can decide to stop breathing for a while, but there are hard limits on how long you can keep it up.
To me, the question of whether I have free will is only interesting on definition #3 because my conscious self is the part of me that cares about such things. If my conscious self is being coerced or conned, then I (#3) don’t really care whether the origin of that coercion is internal (part of my sub-conscious or my physiology) or external.
Basically after you previously argued that there only one reasonable definition of
free willyou now moved to the position that there are multiple reasonable definitions and you have particular reasons why you prefer to focus on a specific one?Is that a reasonable description of your position?
No, not even remotely close. We seem to have a serious disconnect here.
For starters, I don’t think I ever gave a definition of “free will”. I have listed what I feel to be (two) necessary conditions for it, but I don’t think I ever gave sufficient conditions, which would be necessary for a definition. I’m not sure I even know what sufficient conditions would be. (But I think those necessary conditions, plus the known laws of physics, are enough to show that humans don’t have free will, so I think my position is sound even in the absence of a definition.) And I did opine at one point that there is only one reasonable interpretation of the word “free” in a context of a discussion of “free will.” But that is not at all the same thing as arguing that there is only one reasonable definition of “free will.” Also, the question of what “I” means is different from the question of what “free will” means. But both are (obviously) relevant to the question of whether or not I have free will.
The reason I brought up the definition of “I” is because you wrote:
That is not my position. (And ontology is a bit of a red herring here.) I can’t even imagine what it means for a neuron to “do something that not in their nature or being”, let alone that this departure from “nature or being” could be caused by physics. That’s just bizarre. What did I say that made you think I believed this?
I can’t define “free will” just like I can’t define “pornography.” But I have an intuition about free will (just like I have one about porn) that tells me that, whatever it is, it is not something that is possessed by pachinko machines, individual photons, weather systems, or a Turing machine doing a straightforward search for a counter-example to the Collatz conjecture. I also believe that “will not with 100% reliability” is logically equivalent to “can not” in that there is no way to distinguish these two situations. If you wish to dispute this, you will have to explain to me how I can determine whether the reason that the moon doesn’t leave earth orbit is because it can’t or because it chooses not to.
Some people can, and it is not unhelpful to be able to do so.
I thought you made an argument that physical determinism somehow means that there’s no free will because physics is causes an effect to happen. If I misunderstood that you make the argument feel free to point that out.
Given the dictionary definition of “free” that seems to be flawed.
That’s an appeal to the authority of your personal intuition. It prevents your statements from being falsifiable. It moves the statements into to vague to be wrong territory.
If I have a conversation with a person who has akrophobie to debug then I’m going to use words in a way where I only care about the effect of the words but not whether my sentences make falsifiable statements. If I however want to have a rational discussion on LW than I strive to use rational language. Language that makes concrete claims that allow others to engage with me in rational discourse.
Again that’s what distinguish rational!LW from rational!NewAtheist. If you don’t simply want to have a replacement of religion, but care about reasoning than it’s useful to not be to vague to be wrong.
The thing you wrote about only calling the part of you I that corresponds to your conscious mind looks to me like subclinical depersonalization disorder. A notion of the self that can be defended but that’s unhealthy to have.
I not only have lungs. My lungs are part of the person that I happen to be.
If we stay with the dictionary definition of freedom why look at the nature of the moon. Is the fact that it revolves around the earth an emergent property of how the complex internals of the moon work or isn’t it?
My math in that area isn’t perfect but objects that can be modeled by nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons might be a criteria.
Nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons can reasonably described as using heuristics to make choices. They make them based on the algorithm that’s programmed into them and that algorithm can by reasonably described as being part of the nature of a specific nondeterministic finite automatons.
I don’t think the way that the moon resolves around the earth is reasonably modeled with nontrival nondeterministic finite automatons.
No, that’s not my argument. My argument (well, one of them anyway) is that if I am reliably predictable, then it must be the case that I am deterministic, and therefore I cannot have free will.
I actually go even further than that. If I am not reliably predictable, then I might have free will, but my mere unpredictability is not enough to establish that I have free will. Weather systems are not reliably predictable, but they don’t have free will. It is not even the case that non-determinism is sufficient to establish free will. Photons are non-deterministic, but they don’t have free will.
Well, yeah, of course it is (though I would not call my intuitions an “authority”). This whole discussion starts from a subjective experience that I have (and that other people report having), namely, feeling like I have free will. I don’t know of any way to talk about a subjective experience without referring to my personal intuitions about it.
The difference between free will and other subjective experiences like, say, seeing color, is that seeing colors can be easily grounded in an objective external reality, whereas with free will it’s not so easy. In fact, no one has exhibited a satisfactory explanation of my subjective experience that is grounded in objective reality, hence my conclusion that my subjective experience of having free will is an illusion.
To the extend that the subjective experience you call free will is independent on what other people mean with the term free will, the arguments about it aren’t that interesting for the general discussion about whether what’s commonly called free will exists.
More importantly concepts that start from “I have the feeling that X is true” usually produce models of reality that aren’t true in 100% of the cases. They make some decent predictions and fail predictions in other cases.
It’s usually possible to refine concepts to be better at predicting. It’s part of science to develop operationalized terms.
This started by you saying
But the word "free" has an established meaning in English. That’s you pointing to a shared understanding offreeand not you pointing to your private experience.Human’s are not reliably predictive due to being NFA’s. Out of memory Heinz von Förster bring the example of a child answer the question of: “What’s 1+1?” with “Blue”. It needs a education to train children to actually give predicable answers to the question what’s “What’s 1+1?”.
I think the issue with why weather systems are not predictable is not because they aren’t free to make choices (if you use certain models) but because is about the part of “will”. Having a will is about having desires. The weather doesn’t have desires in the same sense that humans do and thus it has no free will.
I think that humans do have desire that influence the choices they make even in the absence of them being conscious of the desire creating the choice.
Grounding the concept of color in external reality isn’t trival. There are many competing definitions. You can define it over what the human eye perceives which has a lot to do with human genetics that differ from person to person. You can define it over wave-lengths. . You can define it over RGB values.
It doesn’t make sense to argue that color doesn’t exist because the human qualia of color doesn’t map directly to the wave-length definition of color
With color the way you determine the difference between colors is also a fun topic. The W3C definition for example leads to strange consequences.
You’re conflating two different things:
Attempting to communicate about a phenomenon which is rooted in a subjective experience.
Attempting to conduct that communication using words rather than, say, music or dance.
Talking about the established meaning of the word “free” has to do with #2, not #1. The fact that my personal opinion enters into the discussion has to do with #1, not #2.
Yes, of course I agree. But that’s not the question at issue. The question is not whether we have “desires” or “will” (we all agree that we do), the question is whether or not we have FREE will. I think it’s pretty clear that we do NOT have the freedom to choose our desires. At least I don’t seem to; maybe other people are different. So where does this alleged freedom enter the process?
I never said it was. In fact, the difficulty of grounding color perception in objective reality actually supports my position. One would expect that the grounding of free will perception in objective reality to be at least as difficult as grounding color perception, but I don’t see those who support the objective reality of free will undertaking such a project, at least not here.
I’m willing to be convinced that this free will thing is real, but as with any extraordinary claim the burden is on you to prove that it is, not on me to prove that it is not.
Pretty much everyone perceives himself/herself freely making choices, so the claim that free will is real is consistent with most peoples’ direct experience. While this does not prove that free will is real, it does suggest that the claim that free will is real is not really any more extraordinary than the claim that it is not real. So, I do not think that the person claiming that free will is real has any greater burden of proof than the person who claims that it is not.
That’s not a valid argument for at least four reasons:
There are many perceptual illusions, so the hypothesis that free will is an illusion is not a priori an extraordinary claim. (In fact, the feeling that you are living in a classical Galilean universe is a perceptual illusion!)
There is evidence that free will is in fact a perceptual illusion.
It makes evolutionary sense that the genes that built our brains would want to limit the extent to which they could become self-aware. If you knew that your strings were being pulled you might sink into existential despair, which is not generally salubrious to reproductive fitness.
We now understand quite a bit about how the brain works and about how computers work, and all the evidence indicates that the brain is a computer. More precisely, there is nothing a brain can do that a properly programmed Turing machine could not do, and therefore no property that a brain have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely do not have free will (if you believe that a thermostat has free will, well, we’re just going to have to agree to disagree about that). So if free will is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that have free will from those that do not. I have heard no one propose such a criterion that doesn’t lead to conclusions that grate irredeemably upon my intuitions about what free will is (or what it would have to be if it were a real thing).
In this respect, free will really is very much like God except that the subjective experience of free will is more common than the subjective experience of the Presence of the Holy Spirit.
BTW, it is actually possible that the subjective experience of free will is not universal among humans. It is possible that some people don’t have this subjective perception, just as some people don’t experience the Presence of the Holy Spirit. It is possible that this lack of the subjective perception of free will is what leads some people to submit to the will of Allah, or to become Calvinists.
I agree with that
I basically agree with that too—it is you rather than me who brought up the notion of extraordinary claims. It seems to me that the notion of extraordinary claims in this case is a red herring—that free will is real is a claim, and that free will is not real is a claim; I am simply arguing that neither claim has a greater burden of proof than the other. In fact, I think that there is room for reasonable people to disagree with regard to the free will question.
I don’t know what that means exactly, but it sounds intriguing! Do you a link or a reference with additional information?
None of those experiments provides strong evidence; the article you linked lists for several of the experiments objections to interpreting the experiment as evidence against free will (e.g., per the article, “Libet himself did not interpret his experiment as evidence of the inefficacy of conscious free will”). One thing in particular that I noticed is that many of the experiments dealt with more-less arbitrary decisions—e.g. when to flick one’s wrist, when to make brisk finger movements at arbitrary intervals, etc. Even if it could be shown that the brain somehow goes on autopilot when making trivial, arbitrary decisions that hold no significant consequences, it is not clear that this says anything about more significant decisions—e.g. what college to attend, how much one should spend on a house, etc.
That is a reasonable statement and I have no argument with it. But, while it provides a possible explanation why we might perceive free will even if it does not exist, I don’t think that it provides significant evidence against free will.
I agree with that.
If that statement is valid, then it seems to me that the following statement is also valid:
“There is no property that a brain can have that cannot be given to a Turing machine. Some Turing machines definitely are not conscious. So if consciousness is a real thing you should be able to exhibit some way to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not.”
So, do you believe that consciousness is a real thing? And, can a Turing machine be conscious? If so, how are we to distinguish those Turing machines that are conscious will from those that are not?
That may be. Nonetheless, at the moment I believe that free is an illusion, and I have some evidence that supports that belief. I see no evidence to support the contrary belief. So if you want to convince me that free will is real then you’ll have to show me some evidence.
If you don’t care what I believe then you are under no obligations :-)
The fact that you can reliably predict some actions that people perceive as volitional up to ten seconds in advance seems like pretty strong evidence to me. But I suppose reasonable people could disagree about this. In any case, I didn’t say there was strong evidence, I just said there was some evidence.
That depends a little on what you mean by “a real thing.” Free will and consciousness are both real subjective experiences, but neither one is objectively real. Their natures are very similar. I might even go so far as to say that they are the same phenomenon. I recommend reading this book if you really want to understand it.
Yes, of course. You would have to be a dualist to believe otherwise.
That’s very tricky. I don’t know. I’m pretty sure that our current methods of determining consciousness produce a lot of false negatives. But if a computer that could pass the Turing test told me it was conscious, and could describe for me what it’s like to be a conscious computer, I’d be inclined to believe it.
It’s not that deep. It just means that your perception of reality is different from actual reality in some pretty fundamental ways. The sun appears to revolve around the earth, but it doesn’t. The chair you’re sitting on seems like a solid object, but it isn’t. “Up” always feels like it’s the same direction, but it’s not. And you feel like you have free will, but you don’t. :-)
As a matter of fact, I think the free will question is an interesting question, but not an instrumentally important question; I can’t really think of anything I would do differently if I were to change my mind on the matter. This is especially true if you are right—in that case we’d both do whatever we’re going to do and it wouldn’t matter at all!
Interesting. The reason I asked the question is that there are some thinkers who deny the reality of free will but accept the reality of consciousness (e.g. Alex Rosenberg); I was curious if you are in that camp. It sounds as though you are not.
Glad to see you are open to at least some of Daniel Dennett’s views! (He’s a compatibilist, I believe.)
Understood. My confusion came from the term “Galilean Universe” which I assumed was a reference to Galileo (who was actually on-board with the idea of the Earth orbiting the Sun—that is one of the things that got him into some trouble with the authorities!)
Exactly right. I live my life as if I’m a classical conscious being with free will even though I know that metaphysically I’m not. It’s kind of fun knowing the truth though. It gives me a lot of peace of mind.
I’m not familiar with Rosenberg so I couldn’t say.
Yes, I think you’re right. (That video is actually well worth watching!)
Sorry, my bad. I meant it in the sense of Galilean relativity (a.k.a. Newtonian relativity, though Galileo actually thought of it first) where time rather than the speed of light is the same for all observers.
The common understanding of free will does run into a lot of problems when it comes to issues such as habit change.
There are people debating whether or not hypnosis can get people to do something against their free will, with happens to be a pretty bad question. Questions such as
can people decide by free will not to have an allergic reaction?are misleading.Or you can convert into it.
I think you need at least a couple more zeroes in there for that to be right.
They or one of their matrilinear ancestors converted to Judaism?
In case it wasn’t clear: I was not posing “on what basis …” as a challenge, I was pointing out that it isn’t much of a challenge and that for similar reasons lisper’s parallel question about free will is not much of a challenge either.
Oooops! I meant there to be three more. Will fix. Thanks.
My intuition has always been that ‘free will’ isn’t a binary thing; it’s a relational measurement with a spectrum. And predictability is explicitly incompatible with it, in the same way that entropy measurements depend on how much predictive information you have about a system. (I suspect that ‘entropy’ and ‘free will’ are essentially identical terms, with the latter applying to systems that we want to anthropomorphize.)
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. But compatibilists don’t agree with that. They think that there is such a thing as free will in some absolute sense, and that this thing is “compatible” (hence the name) with determinacy/reliable predictability.
If a man pushes a button that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance?
As I understand the theology, until they had eaten the fruit, the only thing that they could do that was a sin was to eat the fruit. Which they had been specifically warned not to do.
He commanded them not to eat the fruit. Their sin was to eat the fruit, so the command itself might be considered sufficient education to tell them that what they were doing was something they should not be doing.
And then, later, God educated Moses with the Ten Commandments and a long list of laws.
Okay, let me re-state my argument.
1) Any designed object is either limited to actions that its designer can calculate and understand (in theory, given infinite time and paper to write on).
2) In the case of a calculating device like a computer, this means that, given infinite time and infinite paper and stationary, the designer of a computer can in theory perform any calculation that the computer can. (A real designer can’t calculate a trillion digits of pi on pencil and paper because his life is not long enough).
3) The universe has been around for something like 14 billion years.
4) If the universe has a designer, and if the purpose of the universe is to perform some calculation using the processing power of the intelligence that has developed in the universe, then could the universe provide the answer to that calculation any more quickly than the designer of the universe with pencil, paper, and a 14-billion-year head start?
Yes, but we can predict what they will do given knowledge of all relevant inputs. In the special case of computers, predicting what they will calculate is equivalent to doing the calculation oneself.
Knowledge of the future is not the same as control of the future.
To take a simpler example; let us say you flip a fair coin ten times, and come up with HHHHHTTHHT. After you have done so, I write down HHHHHTTHHT on a piece of paper and use a time machine to send it to the past, before you flipped the coin.
Thus, when you flip the coin, there exists a piece of paper that says HHHHHTTHHT. This matches with the series of coin-flips that you then make. In what way is this piece of paper influenced by anything that controls the results of the coin-flips?
It does not, actually. The same quantum-mechanical argument tells me (if I understand the diagrams correctly) that there are no free variables in any observation; that is to say, the result of every experiment is predetermined, unavoidable… predestined.
I still don’t understand the argument, but it certainly looks like an argument against free will to me. (Maybe that is because I don’t understand it).
Let me know if/when you write that separate article.
I’ll agree that the quale of the Presence of the Holy Spirit does exist, and I’ll agree that this is not, in and of itself, sufficient evidence to prove beyond doubt the existence of the Holy Spirit. (I will argue that it is evidence in favour of the existence of the Holy Spirit, on the basis that everything which there is a quale for and which is directly measurable in itself does exist—even if the quale can occasionally be triggered without the thing for which the quale exists).
The idea that “You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will”.
I did. The author of the blog post claims that things can be real to different degrees; that Mozilla Firefox is real in a fundamentally different way to the tree outside my window, which in turn is real in a fundamentally different way to Frodo Baggins.
I don’t see why this means that existence needs to be more than a continuum, though. All it is saying is that points on that continuum (Frodo Baggins, the tree outside my window) are different points on that continuum.
Of course it is just. How could you possibly doubt it? I mean, imagine the scene: you’re at home watching TV when you suddenly realize that there’s a button on your universal remote that you’ve never pressed and you have no idea what it does. You’re too lazy to get up off the couch to get the manual (and you have no idea where it is anyway, you probably threw it out) so you just push it to see what it does. Nothing happens.
The next day you turn on the TV to discover that nuclear armageddon has broken out at 100 million people are dead. An hour later the FBI shows up at your door and says, “You didn’t push that red button on your remote last night, did you?” “Why yes, yes I did,” you reply. “Is that a problem?” “Well, yes, it rather is. You see, that button launched the nuclear missiles, so I’m afraid you are now the greatest mass murderer in the history of humanity and we’re going to have to take you in. Turn around please.”
Yeah, this theory has always struck me as rather bizarre. So before eating the fruit it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens, perfectly OK to abuse and rape your children, and after you eat the fruit suddenly these things are not OK. Makes no sense to me.
But why is this a sin? Remember, at this point this is a command issued (according to your theory) by a deity who thinks it’s perfectly OK to torture kittens and rape children. Such a deity does not have a lot of moral authority IMHO.
Yeah, that’s another weird thing. God educated Moses. Why not educate everyone? Why should Moses get the benefit of seeing God directly while the rest of us have to make do with second-hand accounts of what God said? And why should we trust Moses? Prophets are a dime a dozen. Why Moses and not Mohammed? Or Joseph Smith? Or L. Ron Hubbard?
And as long as we’re on the topic, why wait so long to educate Moses? By the time we get to Moses, God has already committed a long string of genocides to punish people for sinning (the Flood, Sodom) despite the fact that they have not yet had the benefit of any education from God, even second-hand. That feels very much like the button scenario above, which I should hope grates on your moral intuition as much as it does on mine.
Your either-or construct is missing the “or” clause.
Of course it could. Why would you doubt it?
No, we can’t.
I didn’t say it was. But reliable knowledge of the future requires that the future be determined by the present. If it is possible to reliably predict the outcome of a coin toss, then the coin toss is deterministic, and therefore the coin cannot have free will. So unless you want to argue that a coin has free will, your example is a complete non-sequitur.
No, you’ve got this wrong. Quantum randomness is the only thing in our universe (that we know of) that is unpredictable even in principle. So it is possible that free will exists because quantum randomness exists. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that quantum effects have any bearing on human mental processes. So while one cannot rule out the possibility that quantum randomness might lead to free will in something there is no evidence that it leads to free will in us.
Will do. (UPDATE: the article is here )
Yes, of course it is. That was my whole point.
Ah. Then yes, I agree. You can live in the Matrix with or without the knowledge that you are living in the Matrix. Personally, I choose the red pill.
There are different ways of existing. There is existence-as-material-object (trees, houses). There is existence-as-fictional-character (Frodo). There is existence-as-patterns-of-bits-in-a-computer-memory (Firefox). Each of these is orthogonal to the other. George Washington, for example, existed as a physical object, and he also exists as a fictional character (in the story of chopping down the cherry tree). Along each of these “dimensions” a thing can exist to varying degrees. The transformation of a tree into a house is a gradual process. During that process, the tree exists less and less and the house exists more and more. So you have multiple dimensions, each of which has a continuous metric. That’s a vector space.
The real point, though, is that disagreements over whether or not something exists are usually (but not always) disagreements over the mode in which something exists. God clearly exists. The question is what mode he exists in. Fictional character? Material object? Something else?
(BTW, the author of “31 flavors” is me.)
For the analogy to match the Garden of Eden example, the red button needs to be clearly marked “Do Not Press”.
And I’m not saying that the just punishment should be same for something done in ignorance. But, at the very least, having pushed the button on the remote, the person in this analogy needs to be very firmly told that that was something that he should not have done. A several-hour lecture on not pushing buttons marked “do not press” is probably justified.
Put like that, is does seem odd. But consider—biting a kitten’s tail would be a form of torturing kittens. Is it okay for a three-month-old baby, who does not understand what it is doing, to bite a kitten’s tail? (And is it okay for the kitten to then claw at the baby?)
Delegation?
Lots of other people had some idea of what was right and wrong, even before Moses. Consider Cain and Abel—Cain knew it was wrong to kill Abel, but did it anyway. (I have no idea where that knowledge was supposed to have come from, but it was there)
Whoops.
Okay, but we can still predict the output of the computer at any given, finite, time step.
The important thing in the coin example is not the coin, but the time traveller. The prediction of the coin tosses is not made from knowledge of the present state of the world, but rather from knowledge of the future state of the world; that is to say, the state in which the coin tosses have already happened. The mechanism by which the coin tosses happen is thus irrelevant (the coin tosses can be replaced by a person with free will calling out “head!” and “tail!” in whatever order he freely desires to do).
...I’m going to read your further explanation article before I respond to this.
Agreed.
Why? I can see how the rest of your argument follows from this; I’m not seeing why these different types of existence must be orthogonal, why they can’t be colinear.
(Incidentally, I’d consider “George Washington the physical object” and “George Washington the fictional character” to be two different things which, confusingly, share the same name).
Not quite. It needs to have TWO labels. On the left it says, “DO NOT PRESS” and on the right it says “PRESS THIS BUTTON”. (Actually, a more accurate rendition might be, “Do not press this button” and “Press this button for important information on how to use this remote”. God really needs a better UI/UX guy.)
No. Of course not. Why would you doubt it?
Yes. Of course. Why would you doubt it?
Huh??? Why would an omnipotent deity need to delegate?
How do you know that? Just because he denied doing it? Maybe he thought it was perfectly OK to kill Abel, but wanted to avoid what he saw as unjust punishment.
Also, let’s look at man’s next transgression:
“Ge6:5 And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”
In other words, God’s first genocide (the Flood) was quite literally for thought crimes. Does it seem likely to you that the people committing these (unspecified) thought crimes knew they were transgressing against God’s will?
Really? How exactly would you do that? Because the only way I know of to tell what a computer is going to do at step N once N is sufficiently large is to build a computer and run it for N steps.
I really don’t get what point you’re trying to make here. My position is that people do not have free will, only the illusion of free will. If it were possible to actually do this experiment, that would simply prove that my position is correct.
Because you lose critical information that way, and that leads to unproductive arguments that are actually about the information that you’ve lost.
See, this is exactly what I’m talking about. This is kind of like arguing over whether Shakespeare’s plays were really written by Shakespeare, or by someone else who happened to have the same name. You’ve lost critical information here, namely, that there is a connection between GW-the-historical-person and GW-the-myth that goes far beyond that fact that they have the same name.
Or take another example: Buzz Lighyear started out existing as as an idea in someone’s head. At some later point in time, Buzz Lightyear began to exist also as a cartoon character. These are distinct because Buzz-as-cartoon-character has properties that Buzz-as-idea doesn’t. For example, Buzz-as-cartoon-character has a voice. Buzz-as-idea doesn’t.
But these two Buzz Lightyears are not two separate things that just happen to have the same name, they are one thing that exists in two different ontological categories.
Hmmmm. Not sure that’s quite right. The serpent wasn’t an authority figure. Maybe label the button “DO NOT PRESS” and add a stranger (a door-to-door insurance salesman, perhaps) who claims that you’ll never know what the button does until you try it?
Okay, in both cases, the situation is basically the same—a juvenile member of one species attacks and damages a juvenile member of another species. Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because it’s really boring to have to keep trying to individually explain the same basic principles to each of a hundred thousand near-complete idiots?
If so, then he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world (Genesis 4, end of verse 14: “anyone who finds me will kill me”). Either he thinks that everyone else is arbitrarily evil, or he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails. (Technically, you could consider that as using your brain as the computer and running the program, except you can interrupt it at any point and investigate the current state)
The point I’m trying to make with the coin/time-traveller example is that knowledge of the future—even perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
(Side note: I don’t actually know GW-the-myth. It’s a bit of cultural extelligence that I, as a non-American, haven’t really been exposed to. I’m not certain whether it’s important to this argument that I should)
Hmmm. An interesting point. A thing can certainly change category over time. An idea can become a character in a book can become a character in a film can become ten thousand separate, distinct ideas can become a thousand incompatible fanfics. At some point, the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary.
Consider; I can create the idea of a character who is some strange mix of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker (perhaps, to mix in some Star Trek, they were merged in a transporter accident). It would not be true to say that this is the same character as Luke, but it would also not be true to say that it’s entirely not the same character as Luke. Similarly with Han. But it would be true to say that Han is not the same character as Luke.
So whether two things are the same or not is, at the very least, a continuum.
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
Seriously?
No he didn’t. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he’s lamenting the result of that curse.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
Indeed.
Eve could have known that God was an authority figure, from Genesis 2 verse 20-24, in which God created Eve (from Adam’s rib) and brought her to Adam.
So you accept self-defense as a justification, but not complete (but not wilful) ignorance?
Well, I’m guessing, but yes, it’s a serious guess. Omnipotence means the ability to do everything, it does not mean that everything is pleasant to do. And I certainly know I’d start to lose patience a bit after explaining individually to the hundredth person why stealing is wrong.
The curse, in and of itself, is not what’s going to make people want to kill him (if it was, then God could merely remove that aspect of the curse, rather than install a separate Mark as a warning to people not to do that). No, the curse merely prevented him from farming, from growing his own food. I’m guessing it also, as a result, made his guilt obvious—everyone would recognise the man who could not grow crops, and know he’d killed his brother.
But the curse is not what’s making Cain expect other people to kill him. He clearly expects that other people will freely choose to kill him, and that suggests to me that he knew he had done wrong.
I don’t see how that follows. I can imagine ways to produce a next generation consisting of entirely evil (or, at best, morally neutral) actions. What do you think would prevent the appearance of a new generation?
Yes, and over fourteen billion years, how many digits of pi can they produce?
I’m not saying it’s fast. Compared to a computer, pen-and-paper is really, really slow. That’s why we have computers. But fourteen billion years is a really, really, really long time.
That’s provided that the perfect knowledge of the future is somehow derived from a study of the present state of the universe. The time traveller voids this implicit assumption by deriving his perfect knowledge from a study of the future state of the universe.
Ah, thank you. That explains it all quite neatly.
I’m not sure it’s really worth the bother of coming up with a different example at this point—your point was quite clearly made, even without knowledge of the story. (If it makes any difference, I’m South African, which is probably going to be less helpful than one might think considering the number of separate cultures in here).
Your point is well made.
That’s a red herring. The question was not how she could have known that God was an authority figure. The question was how she could have known that the snake was NOT an authority figure too.
Oh, come on. Even if we suppose that God can get bored, you really don’t think he could have come up with a more effective way to spread the Word than just having one-on-one chats with individual humans? Why not hold a big rally? Or make a video? Or at least have more than one freakin’ person in the room when He finally gets fed up and says, “OK, I’ve had it, I’m going to tell you this one more time before I go on extended leave!” ???
Sheesh.
You do know that this is LessWrong, right? A site dedicated to rationality and the elimination of logical fallacies and cognitive bias? Because you are either profoundly ignorant of elementary logic, or you are trolling. For your reasoning here to be valid it would have to be the case that the only possible reason someone could not grow crops is that they had killed their brother. If you can’t see how absurd that is then you are beyond my ability to help.
Because “the good stuff” is essential to our survival. Humans cannot survive without cooperating with each other. That’s why we are social animals. That’s why we have evolved moral intuitions about right and wrong.
What difference does that make? Yes, 14B years is a long time, but it’s exactly the same amount of time for a computer. However much humans can calculate in 14B years (or any other amount of time you care to pull out of your hat) a computer can calculate vastly more.
I’ve been to SA twice. Beautiful country, but your politics are even more fucked up than ours here in the U.S., and that’s saying something.
Oh, right. Hmmm. Good question.
...I want to say that it’s common sense that not everyone who claims to be an authority figure is one, and that preferably one authority figure should introduce another on first meeting. But… Eve may well have been only hours old, and would not have any experience to back that up with.
There are plenty of ways to handle it, yes. All of which work very well for one generation. Twenty, thirty years’ time there’s a new batch turning up. One either needs a recording or, better yet, get them to teach their children...
Yes, I know exactly what site this is. Yes, I know that the reasoning “he can’t grow crops, therefore he killed his brother” is badly flawed. But the question is not whether people would think like that. The question is why would Cain, a human with biases and flawed logic, why would he think that people would reason like that?
And I think that the answer to that question is, because Cain had a guilty conscience. Because he had a guilty conscience, he defaults to expecting that, if anyone else sees something that is a result of his crime, they will correctly divine the reason for what they see (Cain was very much not a rationalist).
I don’t think that there is any evidence to suggest that anyone else actually thought like Cain expected them to think.
On a tribal level, yes, a cooperative tribe will outcompete a “pure evil” tribe easily. But even the “pure evil” tribe might hang around for two, maybe three generations.
I’m not claiming they’d be able to survive long-term, by any means. I just think one generation is a bit short.
That is true. However, in this case, if the universe if a computer, then the computer appears to have just sat around and waited for the first 14B years doing nothing. If it’s intended to find the answer to some question faster than its creator could, then it must be a pretty big question.
Yeah… wonderful climate, great biodiversity, near-total lack of large-scale natural disasters (as long as you stay off the floodplains), even our own private floral kingdom… absolutely horrible politicians.
Maybe because God has cursed him to be a “fugitive and a vagabond.” People didn’t like fugitives and vagabonds back then (they still don’t ).
Well, God seemed to think it was a plausible theory. His response was to slap himself in the forehead and say, “Wow, Cain, you’re right, people are going to try to kill you, which is not an appropriate punishment for murder. Here, I’d better put this mark on your forehead to make sure people know not to kill you.” (Funny how God was against the death penalty before he was for it.)
How are they going to feed themselves? They wouldn’t last one year without cooperating to hunt or grow crops. Survival in the wild is really, really hard.
This universe is not (as far as we can tell) intended to do anything. That doesn’t make your argument any less bogus.
I read it as more along the lines of “No, nobody’s going to kill you. Here, let me give you a magic feather just to calm you down.”
...fair enough. Doesn’t mean they weren’t doing a lot of evil, though, even if they were occasionally cooperating.
You are, of course, free to interpret literature however you like. But God was quite explicit about His thought process:
“Ge4:15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”
I don’t know how God could possibly have made it any clearer that He thought someone killing Cain was a real possibility. (I also can’t help but wonder how you take sevenfold-vengeance on someone for murder. Do you kill them seven times? Kill them and six innocent bystanders?)
You have lost the thread of the conversation. The Flood was a punishment for thought crimes (Ge6:5). The doing-nothing-but-evil theory was put forward by you as an attempt to reconcile this horrible atrocity with your own moral intuition:
You seem to have run headlong into the fundamental problem with Christian theology: if we are inherently sinful, then our moral intuitions are necessarily unreliable, and hence you would expect there to be conflicts between our moral intuitions and God’s Word as revealed by the Bible. You would expect to see things in the Bible that make you go, “Whoa, that doesn’t seem right to me.” At this point you must choose between the Bible and your moral intuitions. (Before you choose you should read Jeremiah 19:9.)
That wasn’t a thought process. That was spoken words; the intent behind those words was not given. What we’re given here is an if-then—if anyone slays Cain, then that person will have vengeance taken upon him. It does not say whether or not the “if” is at all likely to happen, and may have been intended merely to calm Cain’s irrational fear of the “if” part happening.
I think it’s “kill them and six members of their clan/family”, but I’m not sure.
Yes, and then we discussed the viability of continually doing evil, as it pertains to survival for more than one generation. You were sufficiently persuasive on the matter of cooperation for survival that I then weakened my stance from “continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff” to “doing a whole lot of evil stuff a lot of the time”.
In fact, looking at Genesis 6:5:
...it mentions two things. It mentions how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time. This is two separate things; the first part seems, to me, to refer to wicked deeds (with continuously evil thoughts only mentioned after the “and”).
But my moral intuitions are also, to a large degree, a product of my environment, and specifically of my upbringing. My parents were Christian, and raised me in a Christian environment; I might therefore expect that my moral intuition is closer to God’s Word than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture.
And, looking at human history, there most certainly have been cultures that regularly did things that I would find morally objectionable. In fact, there are still such cultures in existence today. Human cultures have, in the past, gone to such horrors as human sacrifice, cannibalism, and so on—things which my moral intuitions say are badly wrong, but which (presumably) someone raised in such a culture would have much less of a problem with.
“The LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him”. Again, I don’t see how God could have possibly made it any clearer that the intent of putting the mark on Cain was to prevent the otherwise very real possibility of people killing him.
If you’re not sure, then you must believe that there could be circumstances under which killing six members of a person’s family as punishment for a crime they did not commit could be justified. I find that deeply disturbing.
No, it simply refers to an evil state of being. It says nothing about what brought about that state. But it doesn’t matter. The fact that it specifically calls out thoughts means that the Flood was at least partially retribution for thought crimes.
Sure, and so are everyone else’s.
A Muslim would disagree with you. Have you considered the possibility that they might be right and you are wrong? It’s just the luck of the draw that you happened to be born into a Christian household rather than a Muslim one. Maybe you got unlucky. How would you tell?
But you keep dancing around the real question: Do you really believe that killing innocent bystanders can be morally justified? Or that genocide as a response to thought crimes can be morally justified? Or that forcing people to cannibalize their own children (Jeremiah 19:9) can be morally justified? Because that is the price of taking the Bible as your moral standard.
CCC may be claiming that the Bible (in this translation?) does not accurately represent God’s motive here. But that just calls attention to the fact that—for reasons which escape me even after trying to read the comment tree—you’re both talking about a story that seems ridiculous on every level. Your last paragraph indeed seems like a more fruitful line of discussion.
Looking at another translation:
(footnote: “Many commentators believe this sign not to have been like a brand on the forehead, but something awesome about Cain’s appearance that made people dread and avoid him. In the Talmud, the rabbis suggested several possibilities, including leprosy, boils, or a horn that grew out of Cain. But it was also suggested that Cain was given a pet dog to serve as a protective sign.”)
Looking over the list, most of them do say something along the lines of “so that no one would kill him”, but there are a scattering of others. I interpret is as saying that the sign given to Cain was a clear warning—something easily understood as “DO NOT KILL THIS MAN”—but I don’t see any sign that it was ever actually necessary to save Cain’s life.
There is a fallacy at work here. Consider a statement of the form, “if A then B”. Consider the situation where A is a thing that is never true; for example 1=2. Then the statement becomes “if 1=2 then B”. Now, at this point, I can substitute in anything I want for B, and the statement remains morally neutral; since one can never be equal to two.
Now, the statement given here was as follows: “If someone kills Cain, then that person will have vengeance laid against them sevenfold”. Consider, then, that perhaps no-one killed Cain. Perhaps he died of pneumonia, or was attacked by a bear, or fell off a cliff, or drowned.
I don’t see how it’s possible to be in an evil state of being without at least seriously attempting to do evil deeds.
I see I phrased my point poorly. Let me fix that. My moral intuition is closer to what is in the Bible than it would have been had I been raised in a different culture. While the theoretical Muslim and I may have some disagreements as to what extent the Bible is God’s Word, I think we can agree on this rephrased point.
I have considered the possibility. My conclusion is that it would take pretty convincing evidence to persuade me of that, but it is not impossible that I am wrong.
Are you familiar with the trolley problem? In short, it raises the question of whether or not it is a morally justifiable action to kill one innocent bystander in order to save five innocent bystanders.
Ordinary English doesn’t work like that. “If X, then Y will happen” includes possible worlds in which X is true.
“If you fall into the sun, you will die” expresses a meaningful idea even if nobody falls into the sun.
Exactly. “Did not” is not the same as “can not.” Particularly since God’s threats are intended to have a deterrent effect. The whole point (I presume) is to try to influence things so that evil acts don’t happen even though they can.
But we don’t even need to look to God’s forced familial cannibalism in Jeremiah. The bedrock of Christianity is the threat of eternal torment for a thought crime: not believing in Jesus.
I wasn’t speaking about “did not”. I was speaking about “will not”, which is distinct from “can not” and is a form that can only be employed by a speaker with sufficient certainty about the future—unknown to me, but not to an omniscient being.
According to official Catholic doctrine:
In other words, trying to do the right thing counts.
Jesus very plainly disagreed:
“Mark16:16 He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”
At best, that means that trying to do the right thing counts if you’re ignorant of Christianity. Most people aren’t ignorant of Christianity, and rampant proselytization makes things much worse since with more people who have heard of Christianity, fewer can use that escape clause.
In fact, it doesn’t just apply to knowing Christianity’s existence. The more you understand Christianity, according to that, the more you have to do to be saved.
And even then, it has loopholes you can drive a truck through. “Can be saved”, not “will be saved”—it’s entirely consistent with that statement for God not to save anyone.
It could be that (1) if you are ignorant of Christianity you can escape damnation by living a good life, but (2) living a good enough life is really hard, especially if you don’t know it’s necessary to escape damnation, and that (3) for that reason, those who are aware of Christianity have better prospects than those who aren’t.
(Given that the fraction of people aware of Christianity who accept it isn’t terribly high, that would require God to be pretty nasty, but so does the whole idea of damnation as commonly understood among Christians. And it probably sounded better back when the great majority of people who knew of Christianity were Christians at least in name.)
I don’t think that you are, in a practical sense, disagreeing with me or lisper, even if on some abstract level Christianity lets some nonbeliever be saved.
The only thing I’m disagreeing with you about here is the following claim: that from “nonbelievers can be saved” or even “nonbelievers can be saved, and a substantial number will be” you can infer “proselytizing is bad for the people it’s aimed at because it makes them more likely to be damned”.
“The gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that’s where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won’t do if they don’t know about it. This explains why it is so important to shoot missionaries on sight.”—Terry Pratchett, Eric
I disagree. Most people are ignorant of Christianity.
I don’t mean that most people haven’t heard of it. Most people have. A lot of them have heard (and believe) things about it that are false; or have merely heard of it but no more; or, worse yet, have only heard of some splinter Protestant groups and assumed that all Christians agree with them.
It is quite possible that a large number of people, hearing of the famous Creationism/Evolution debate, believe that Christianity and Science are irreconcilable and thus, in pursuit of the truth, reject what they have heard of Christianity and try to do what is right. This, to my understanding, fits perfectly in to being a person who “is ignorant of the Gospel of Christ and of his Church, but seeks the truth and does the will of God in accordance with his understanding of it”.
I don’t see how that follows. Seeking the truth and doing God’s will in accordance with your best understanding thereof seems to be what everyone should be doing. What “more” do you think one should be doing with a better understanding of Christianity?
That is true. If God were malevolent, opposed to saving people, then He could use those loopholes.
I don’t think that God is malevolent.
They didn’t get them from thin air. They got them from Christians. This amounts to a no true Scotsman defense—all the things all those other Christians say, they aren’t true Christianity.
If that counts as being ignorant, the same problem arises: It’s better to be ignorant than knowledgeable.
Christianity says you should do X. If you are only required to follow Christianity to your best understanding to be saved, and you don’t understand Christianity as requiring X, you don’t have to do X to be saved. But once you really understand that Christianity requires you to do X, then all of a sudden you better do X. Following it to the best of your understanding means that the more you understand, the more you have to do.
And I’m sure you can think of plenty of things which Christianity tells you to do. It’s not as if examples are particularly scarce.
The way God is described by Christians looks just like malevolence. If God really saves people who follow Christianity to the best of their understanding, without loopholes like “maybe he will save them but maybe he won’t so becoming more Christian is a safer bet”, Christians wouldn’t proselytize.
In some cases they got them only very indirectly from Christians. And in some cases they got them from the loudest Christians; it would be no-true-Scotsman-y to say that those people aren’t Christians, but it’s perfectly in order to say “those ideas are certainly Christian ideas, but they are not the only Christian ideas and most Christians disagree with them”.
It sounds as if you’re assuming that improved understanding of Christianity always means discovering more things you’re supposed to do. But it could go the other way too: perhaps initially your “best understanding” tells you you have to do Y, but when you learn more you decide you don’t. In that case, a rule that you’re saved iff you act according to your best understanding would say that initially you have to do Y but later on you don’t.
(E.g., some versions of Christianity say that actually there’s very little you have to do. You have to believe some particular things, and hold some particular attitudes, and if you do those then you’re saved. Whether you murder people, give money to charities, help your landlady take out the garbage, etc., may be evidence that you do or don’t hold those attitudes, but isn’t directly required for anything. In that case, converting someone to Christianity—meaning getting them to hold those beliefs and attitudes—definitely makes their salvation more likely.)
I bet he can. But that’s not the same as being able to think of plenty of things Christianity says you have to do, on pain of damnation.
I do largely agree with this, with the qualification that it depends which Christians. I think some do genuinely have beliefs about God which, if true, would mean that he’s benevolent. (I think this requires them to be not terribly orthodox.)
I think CCC is trying to say that those aren’t Christian ideas at all and that people who think that that’s what Christianity is like are mistaken, not just choosing a smaller group of Christians over a larger one.
It isn’t “you do the exact set of things described by your mistaken understanding of Christianity, and you are saved”. It’s “imperfect understanding is an excuse for failing to meet the requirement”. Improved understanding can only increase the things you must do, never reduce it. In other words, if you falsely think that Christianity requires being a vegetarian, and you fail to be a vegetarian (thus violating your mistaken understanding of it, but not actually violating true Christianity), you can still be saved.
Everything that Christianity says you should do, is under pain of damnation (or has no penalty at all). It’s not as if God has some other punishment short of damnation that he administers instead when your sin is mild.
There are plenty of punishments short of eternal damnation that an omnipotent being can hand out.
From here:
I realise that it’s totally unclear to me exactly which ideas we’re talking about right now. CCC’s original comment mentioned things widely believed about Christianity that are just false, and things that are taught by “splinter Protestant groups” but not widely accepted by Christians. I don’t know what he’d put in each category.
Well, that’s exactly the position I explicitly argued against. I’m afraid I haven’t grasped on what grounds you disagree with what I said; it looks like you’re just reiterating your position.
(I think it’s likely that some Christians do hold opinions that, when followed through, have the consequence that teaching someone about Christianity makes them less likely to be saved. I am saying only that I see no reason why Christians holding that some non-Christians will escape damnation by living a good life according to what understanding they have are in no sense required to hold opinions with that consequence.)
The details depend on the variety of Christianity, but e.g. for Roman Catholicism this is flatly false. And for many Protestant flavours of Christianity, it’s saved from being false only by that last parenthesis: there are things you should do but that do not have a penalty. (So why do them? Because you believe God says you should and you want to do what he says. Because you want to. Because you think doing them makes it less likely that you will eventually do something that is bad enough to lose your salvation. Because you believe God says you should and has your best interests at heart, so that in the long run it will be good for you even if it’s difficult now. Etc.)
I’m not stating a position, I’m observing someone else’s position. “God may save someone who misunderstands Christianity”, when stated by Christians, seems to mean that God won’t punish someone for not following a rule that he doesn’t know about. It doesn’t mean that God will punish someone for not following a rule that he thinks is real but isn’t.
I’ve never heard a Christian say anything like “if you think God requires you to stand on your head, and you don’t stand on your head, God will send you to Hell”.
I stand corrected for Catholicism, but the substance of my criticism remains. Just replace “Hell” with “Hell or Purgatory”.
My observations do not yield the same results as yours.
How can you tell? Usually the question just isn’t brought up. I mean, usually what happens is that someone says “isn’t it unfair for people to be damned on account of mere ignorance?” and someone else responds: yeah, it would be, but actually that doesn’t happen because those people will be judged in some unknown fashion according to their consciences. And generally the details of exactly how that works are acknowledged to be unknown, so there’s not much more to say.
But for what it’s worth, the nearest thing to a statement of this idea in the actual Bible, which comes in the Letter to the Romans, says this:
(emphasis mine) which you will notice has “accuse” as well as “excuse”.
This doesn’t explicitly address the question of what happens if that conscience is bearing false witness and the wrong law is written in their hearts; again, that question tends not to come up in these discussions.
But doing so completely breaks your criticism, doesn’t it? Because Purgatory comes in degrees, or at least in variable terms, and falls far short of hell in awfulness. So, in those Christians’ view, God has a wide range of punishments available that are much milder than eternal damnation. (Though some believers in Purgatory would claim it isn’t exactly punishment.)
I have also heard, from Protestants, the idea that although you can escape damnation no matter how wicked a life you lead and attain eternal felicity, there may be different degrees of that eternal felicity on offer. So it isn’t only Catholics who have possible sanctions for bad behaviour even for the saved.
(This seems like a good point at which to reiterate that although I’m kinda-sorta defending Christians here, I happen not to be among their number and think what most of them say about salvation and damnation is horrible morally, incoherent logically, or both.)
I would interpret “accuse” to mean “they claim they are violating the law because they don’t know better, but itheir thoughts show that hey really do know better”—not to mean “they believe something is a law and if so they will be punished for not following the nonexistent law”.
No, the criticism is that either
God punishes people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid (like non-Christians who don’t follow Christian commands), or
God doesn’t punish people for things they can’t reasonably be expected to avoid, in which case the best thing to do is make sure people don’t know about Christianity.
1 is bad because people are punished for something that isn’t their fault; 2 would blatantly contradict what Christians think is good.
This doesn’t depend on the punishment being infinite or eternal.
Hmmmm. Here’s a third option; the punishment for a sin committed in ignorance is a lot lighter than the punishment for a sin committed deliberately. “A lot lighter” implies neither infinite nor eternal; merely a firm hint that that is not the way to go about things.
In this case, letting people know what the rules are will save them a lot of trouble (and trial-and-error) along the way.
I think I misunderstood what you meant by “my criticism”. (You’ve made a number of criticisms in the course of this thread.) In any case, the argument you’re now offering looks different to me from the one you’ve been making in earlier comments, and to which I thought I was responding.
In any case, I think what you’re offering now is not correct. Consider the following possible world which is, as I’ve already said, roughly what some Christians consider the actual world to be like:
If you are not a Christian, you are judged on the basis of how good a life you’ve led, according to your own conscience[1]; if it’s very good, you get saved; if not, you get damned.
If you are a Christian, you are saved regardless of how good a life you’ve led.
[1] Perhaps with some sort of tweak so that deliberately cultivating shamelessness doesn’t help you; e.g., maybe you’re judged according to the strictest your conscience has been, or something. I suspect it’s difficult to fill in the details satisfactorily, but not necessarily any harder than e.g. dealing with the difficulties utilitarian theories tend to have when considering actions that can change how many people there are.
In this scenario, what comes of your dichotomy? Well: (1) God only punishes people for things their own conscience tells them (or told them, or could have told them if they’d listened, or something) to be wrong. So no, he isn’t punishing people for things they couldn’t reasonably be expected to avoid. But (2) making sure people don’t know about Christianity will not benefit them, because if they fail to live a very good life they will be damned if they don’t know about Christianity but might be saved if they do. (And, Christians would probably add, if they know about Christianity they’re more likely to live a good life because they will be better informed about what constitutes one.)
Again: I think there are serious problems with this scenario (e.g., damning anyone seems plainly unjust to me if it means eternal torture) so we are agreed on that score. I just think your analysis of the problems is incorrect.
I don’t think many Christians consider the world to be like that. It would produce bizarre results such as the equivalent of Huckleberry Finn going to Hell because he helped a runaway slave but his conscience told him that helping a runaway slave is wrong. For a modern equivalent, a gay person whose conscience tells him that homosexuality is wrong would go to Hell for it.
Do you have any evidence for that, other than the fact that it has consequences you find bizarre? (Most versions of Christianity have quite a lot of consequences—or in some cases explicitly stated doctrines—that I find bizarre and expect you find at least as bizarre as I do.)
I have at least one piece of evidence on my side, which is that I spent decades as a Christian and what I describe is not far from my view as I remember it. (I mostly believed that damnation meant destruction rather than eternal torture; I don’t think that makes much difference to the sub-point currently at issue.) I think if actually asked “so, does that mean that someone might be damned rather than saved on account of doing something he thought wrong that was actually right?” my answer would have been (1) somewhat evasive (“I don’t claim to know the details of God’s policy; he hasn’t told us and it’s not obvious what it should be… ”) but (2) broadly in line with what I’ve been describing here (”… but if I have to guess, then yes: I think that doing something believing it to be wrong is itself a decision to act wrongly, and as fit to make the difference between salvation and damnation as any other decision to act wrongly.”)
I don’t recall ever giving much consideration to the question of people who do good things believing them to be evil, which I take as evidence for my suggestion earlier that most Christians holding that non-Christians may be judged “on their merits” likewise don’t think about it much if at all, which in case it’s not obvious I think is relevant because it means that even if you’re correct that thinking hard enough about it would show an incoherence in the position I described, that won’t actually stop many Christians holding such a position: because scarcely any will think hard enough about it.
I’ve found a few other passages that seem to have a bearing on this question.
Luke 12:47-48 states:
...which implies that, while there is a punishment for sin committed in ignorance, it is far less than that for sin committed knowingly.
(Proverbs 24:12 also seems relevant; and there’s a lot of probably-at-least-slightly relevant passages linked from here).
You make an excellent point. There are a number of things being proposed by groups that call themselves Christian, often in the honest belief that they are right to propose such things (and to do so enthusiastically), which I nonetheless find myself in firm disagreement with. (For example, creationism).
To avoid the fallacy, then, and to deal with such contradictions, I shall define more narrowly what I consider “true Christianity”, and I shall define it as Roman Catholicism (or something sufficiently close to it).
One example of X that I can think of, off the top of my head, is “going to Church on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation”.
It is true that one who does want to be a good Christian will need to go to Church, while one who is ignorant will also be ignorant of that requirement. Hmmmm. So you have a clear point, there.
I think that one reasonable analogy is that it’s a bit like writing an exam at university. Sure, you can self-study and still ace the test, but your odds are a lot better if you attend the lectures. And trying to invite others to attend the lectures improves their odds of passing, as well.
I think a lot of Christians would say that the eternal torment isn’t for the crime of not believing in Jesus but for other crimes; what believing in Jesus would do is enable one to escape the sentence for those other crimes.
And a lot of Christians, mostly different ones, would say that the threat of eternal torment was a mistake that we’ve now outgrown, or was never intended to be taken literally, or is a misunderstanding of a threat of final destruction, or something of the kind.
Not for “other crimes”, but specifically because of the original sin. The default outcome for humans is eternal torment, but Jesus offers an escape :-/
Some Christians would say that, some not. (Very very crudely, Catholics would somewhat agree, Protestants mostly wouldn’t. The Eastern Orthodox usually line up more with the Catholics than with the Protestants, but I forget where they stand on this one.)
Many would say, e.g., that “original sin” bequeaths us all a sinful “nature” but it’s the sinful thoughts and actions we perpetrate for which we are rightly and justly damned.
(But yes, most Christians would say that the default outcome for humans as we now are is damnation, whether or not they would cash that out in the traditional way as eternal torment.)
Wouldn’t Protestants agree that without the help of Jesus (technically, grace) humans cannot help but yield to their sinful nature? The original sin is not something mere humans can overcome by themselves.
They probably would (the opposite position being Pelagianism, I suppose). But they’d still say our sins are our fault and we are fully responsible for them.
This sounds like making people feel guilty on purpose.
Saying “you are responsible for your own choices” is making people feel guilty on purpose?
(Your way of phrasing the question suggests you might be looking for a pointless argument with me. If that’s the case, please stop.)
My remark was not about the “fully responsible” part, but about the “your fault” part.
Note that guilt has nothing to do with being responsible for your own choices. The feeling of guilt is counterproductive regardless of what you choose to do.
Telling people “this is your fault” is a pretty good way to ensure that they feel guilty.
No, that is not the case. It does appear that I had misunderstood what you said, though.
This being the misunderstanding.
I think I now see more clearly what you were saying. You were saying that a statement along the lines of “Everything wrong in your life is YOUR FAULT!” would be making people feel guilty on purpose. This I agree with.
(What I thought you were saying—and what I did not agree with—is now unimportant.)
I apologise for my error.
Sorry for that accusation, it was caused by your phrasing which (to me) sounded suggestive of indignation, and following the scheme often found in unpleasant arguments, i.e. repeating someone’s words (or misinterpreted words) in a loud-angry-questioning tone. As a suggestion, remember that this way of phrasing questions can be misunderstood?
Nothing happened that requires apologies :) It’s cool :)
I shall try to bear that in mind in the future. Tonal information is stripped from plain-text communication, and will be guessed (possibly erroneously) by the reader.
(I knew that already, actually, but it’s not an easy lesson to always remember)
Could be. (For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not endorsing any of this stuff: I think it’s logically dodgy and morally odious.)
[EDITED to fix an autocorrect error. If you saw “I’m not encoding any of this stuff”, that’s why.]
I liked the version with “encoding” :) It makes sense in its own way, if you have some programming background :)
Only an extremely limited kind of sense :-).
Fair enough, but a lot of those “other crimes” are thought crimes too, e.g. Exo20:17, Mat5:28.
Jesus was pretty clear about this. Mat13:42 (and in case you didn’t get it the first time he repeats himself in verse 50), Mark16:16.
Oh yes. I wasn’t saying “Christianity is much less horrible than you think”, just disagreeing with one particular instance of alleged horribilitude.
Actually, by and large the things he says about hell seem to me to fit the “final destruction” interpretation better than the “eternal torture” interpretation. Matthew 13:42 and 50, e.g., refer to throwing things into a “blazing furnace”; I don’t know about you, but when I throw something on the fire I generally do so with the expectation that it will be destroyed. Mark 16:16 (1) probably wasn’t in the original version of Mark’s gospel and (2) just says “will be condemned” rather than specifying anything about what that entails; did you intend a different reference?
There are things Jesus is alleged to have said that sound more like eternal torture; e.g., Matthew 25:46. Surprise surprise, the Bible is not perfectly consistent with itself.
On hell:
It seems pretty obvious to me that descriptions of hell could easily be just metaphorical. There is a perpetual, persistent nature to sin—it’s like a never-ending fire that brings suffering and destruction in way that perpetuates itself. Eternal fire is a great way to describe it if one were looking for a metaphor. It’s this fire you need saving from. Enter Jesus.
Honestly, it’s a wonder to me hell isn’t treated as an obvious metaphor, but rather it is still a very real place for many mainstream Christians. I suppose it’s because they must also treat the resurrection as literal, and that bit loses some of it’s teeth if there is no real heaven/hell.
Yeah but Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
That’s ingenious, but it really doesn’t seem to me easy to reconcile with the actual Hell-talk in the NT. E.g., Jesus tells his listeners on one occasion: don’t fear men who can throw your body into prison; rather fear God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell. And that passage in Matthew 25, which should scare the shit out of every Christian, talks about “eternal punishment” and is in any case clearly meant to be happening post mortem, or at least post resurrectionem. And that stuff in Revelation about a lake of burning sulphur, which again seems clearly to be for destruction and/or punishment. And so on.
If all we had to go on was the fact that Christianity has a tradition involving sin and eternal torment, I might agree with you. But what we have is more specific and doesn’t seem to me like it fits your theory very well.
Yes, I think that’s at least part of it. (There’s something in C S Lewis—I think near the end of The problem of pain—where he says (or maybe quotes someone else as saying) that he’s never encountered anyone with a really lively hope of heaven who didn’t also have a serious fear of hell.)
I don’t think “sometimes an omnipotent superbeing can stop you being consumed when you’re thrown into a furnace” is much of an argument against “furnaces are generally better metaphors for destruction than for long-lasting punishment” :-).
Hm. Not worth getting into a line-by-line breakdown, but I’d argue anything said about hell in the Gospels (or the NT) could be read purely metaphorically without much strain.
A couple of the examples you’ve mentioned:
Seems to me he could just be saying something like: “They can take our lives and destroy our flesh, but we must not betray the Spirit of the movement; the Truth of God’s kingdom.”
This is a pretty common sentiment among revolutionaries.
I think it’s a fairly common view that the author of Revelation was writing about recent events in Jerusalem (Roman/Jewish wars) using apocalyptic, highly figurative language. I’m no expert, but this is my understanding.
The Greek for hell used often in the NT is “gehenna” and (from my recall) refers to a garbage dump that was kept outside the walls of the city. Jesus might have been using this as a literal direct comparison to the hell that awaited sinners… but it seems more likely to me he just meant it as symbolic.
Anyway, tough to know what original authors/speakers believed. It is admittedly my pet theory that a lot of western religion is the erection of concrete literal dogmas from what was only intended as metaphors, teaching fables, etc. Low probability I’m right.
This was just a joke funny to only former fundamentalists like me. :)
Yes, but more precisely I think he was writing about recent events and prophesying doom to the Bad Guys in that narrative. I’m pretty sure that lake of burning sulphur was intended as part of the latter, not the former.
Yes, that’s one reason why I favour “final destruction” over “eternal torture” as a description of what he was warning of. In an age before non-biodegradable plastics, if you threw something into the town dump, with its fire and its worms, you weren’t expecting it to last for ever.
It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure how plausible I find it.
For the avoidance of doubt, I did understand that it was a joke. (Former moderate evangelical here. I managed to avoid outright fundamentalism.)
The Biblical text as a whole seems very inconsistent to me if you are looking to choose either annihilationism or eternal conscious torment. The OT seems to treat death as final; then you have the rich man and Lazarus and “lake of fire” talk on the other side of the spectrum.
It is my sense that the Bible is actually very inconsistent on the issue because it is an amalgamation of lots of different, sometimes contradictory, views and ideas about the afterlife. You can find a common thread if you’d like...but you have to glaze over lots of inconsistencies.
For sure the Bible as a whole is far from consistent about this stuff. Even the NT specifically doesn’t speak with one voice. My only claim is that the answer to the question “what is intended by the teachings about hell ascribed to Jesus in the NT?” is nearer to “final destruction” than to “eternal torture”. I agree that the “rich man & Lazarus” story leans the other way but that one seems particularly clearly not intended to have its incidental details treated as doctrine.
I think there’s a joke to the effect that if you’re bad in life then when you die God will send you to New Jersey, and I don’t know anything about translations of earlier versions of the bible but I kind of hope that it’s possible for us to interpret the Gehenna comparison as parallel to that.
If someone told me that when I die God would send me to New Jersey, I’d understand that he was joking and being symbolic. But I would not reason “well, people in New Jersey die, so obviously he is trying to tell me that people in Hell get destroyed after a while”.
Nope, because dying is not a particularly distinctive feature of life in New Jersey; it happens everywhere in much the same way. So being sent to New Jersey wouldn’t make any sense as a symbol for being destroyed. What if someone told you that God will send you to the electric chair when you die?
If someone said that, I would assume he is trying to tell me that God will punish me in a severe and irreversible manner after I die.
It’s true that actual pits of flame kill people rather than torture them forever, but going from that to Hell being temporary is a case of some parts of the metaphor fighting others. He used a pit of flame as an example rather than dying in your sleep because he wanted to emphasize the severity of the punishment. If the metaphor was also meant to imply that Hell is temporary like a fire pit, the metaphor would be deemphasizing the severity of the punishment. A metaphor would not stand for two such opposed things unless the person making it is very confused.
I agree that he wanted to emphasize the severity, but that doesn’t have to mean making it out to be as severe as it could imaginably be. Fiery (and no doubt painful) total and final destruction is pretty severe, after all.
Yeah, that’s a better example.
I don’t follow the reasoning you’re expecting her to have used. She couldn’t possibly have seen God taking one of Adam’s ribs and making her out of it, for the excellent reason that for most of that process she didn’t even exist. Is she supposed to accept God as an authority figure just because he tells her he made her?
No, but she would have seen God taking her to Adam. And Adam also behaving as if it had been God who had made her.
...admittedly, it would have been incredibly easy (even probable) for her to have missed this sort of delicate social cue when she was, perhaps, mere hours old.
Yes, if in fact he was completely enough ignorant. What do I mean by “enough”? Well, if you come across a mysterious button then you should at least suspect that pushing it will do something dramatic you would on balance prefer not to have done, and if you push it anyway then that’s a bit irresponsible. You aren’t completely ignorant, because you have some idea of the sorts of things mysterious buttons might do when pushed.
If a man walking in the woods steps on a twig that was actually attached to a mechanism that launches a thousand nuclear bombs, is it just for him to avoid punishment on the grounds of complete ignorance? Of course it is.
What’s the underlying principle here? I mean, would you endorse something like this? “If you find yourself in a nice place with no memory of anything before being there, and someone claiming to be its creator and yours gives you instructions, it is always wrong to disobey them.”
Leaving aside the question of the culpability of Adam and Eve in this story, it seems clear to me that God is most certainly culpable, especially in the version of the story endorsed by many Christians where the Fall is ultimately responsible for sending billions of people to eternal torment. He puts A&E in this situation where if they Do The Thing then the consequences will be unimaginably horrendous. He tells them not to do it—OK, fair enough—but he doesn’t tell them accurately what the consequences will be, he doesn’t give them evidence that the consequences will be what he says[1], and most importantly he doesn’t in any way prepare them for the fact that in the garden with them is someone else—the serpent—who will with great cunning try to get them to do what God’s told them not to.
If I put my child in a room with a big red button that launches nuclear missiles, and also put in that room another person who is liable to try to get her to press the button, and if I know that in that case she is quite likely to be persuaded, and if all I say is “now, Child, you can do what you like in the room but don’t press that button”—why then, I am much more at fault than she is if those missiles get launched.
[1] In fact, the only consequence the story represents God as telling them about does not happen; God says that if they eat it then “in that day you will surely die”, and they don’t; the serpent tells Eve that they won’t, and they don’t.
I take your point—it is just to avoid punishment for ignorance so complete. (Mind you, whoever deliberately connected that twig to the nuclear launch silo should get into some trouble).
When I was a small child, I found myself in a nice place with two people who called themselves my parents. I did not remember anything before then; my parents told me that this was because I had not yet been born. They claimed to have somehow had something to do with creating me. They informed me, once I had learned to communicate with them, of several rules that, at the time, appeared arbitrary (why was I allowed to colour in in this book, but not my Dad’s expensive encyclopedias? Why was I barred from wandering out onto the road to get a close look at the cars? Why should I not accept candy from a stranger?) They may have tried to explain the consequences of breaking those rules, but if they did, I certainly didn’t understand them. If some stranger had attempted to persuade me to break those rules, then the correct action for me to take would be to ignore the stranger.
(Which makes the Adam and Eve story a cautionary tale for small children, I guess.)
I’d understood that to mean “on that day your death will become inevitable”—since they were thrown out of the Garden and away from the Tree of Life (which could apparently confer immortality) their eventual deaths did become certain on that day.
I don’t think you answered my question: what’s the underlying principle?
I agree that it is generally best for people who, perhaps on account of being very young, are not able to survive effectively by making their own decisions to obey the people taking care of them. But I’m not sure this is best understood as a moral obligation, and surely sometimes it’s a mistake—some parents and other carers are, one way or another, very bad indeed. And Adam and Eve as portrayed in the Genesis narrative don’t seem to have been anything like as incapable as you were when you had no idea why scribbling in one book might be worse than scribbling in another.
But let’s run with your analogy for a moment, and suppose that in fact Adam and Eve were as incompetent as toddler-you, and needed to be fenced about with incomprehensible absolute prohibitions whose real reasons they couldn’t understand. Would your parents have put toddler-you in a room with a big red button that launches the missiles, sternly told you not to push it, and then left you alone? If they had, what would you think of someone who said “oh, it’s all CCC’s fault that the world is a smoking ruin. He pushed that button even though his parents told him not to.”?
It certainly makes more sense that way than as history. But even so, it comes down to something like this: “Remember, kids! If you disobey your parents’ arbitrary instructions, they’re likely to throw you out of the house.” Ah, the piercing moral insight of the holy scriptures.
That’s an interpretation sometimes put on the text by people with a strong prior commitment to not letting the text have mistakes in it. But does what it says actually admit that interpretation? I’m going entirely off translations—I know maybe ten words of Hebrew—but it sure looks to me as if God says, simply and straightforwardly, that eating the fruit means dying the same day. Taking it to mean “your death will become inevitable” or “you will die spiritually” or something of the kind seems to me like rationalization.
But, again, I don’t know Hebrew and maybe “in that day you will surely die” really can mean “in that day it will become sure that on another day you will die”. Anyone want to enlighten me further?
I’m not actually sure.
I do think that there’s really incredibly good evidence that the Adam and Eve story is not literal, that it’s rather meant as a fable, to illustrate some important point. (It may be some sort of heavily mythological coating over an internal grain of historical truth, but if so, then it’s pretty deeply buried).
I’m not entirely sure what that point is. Part of it may be “the rules are there for a reason, don’t break them unless you’re really sure”. Part of it may be intended for children—“listen to your parents, they know better than you”. (And yes, some parents are bad news; but, by and large, the advice “listen to your parents” is very good advice for toddlers, because most parents care about their toddlers).
I do wonder, though—how old were they supposed to be? It seems that they were created in adult bodies, and gifted from creation with the ability to speak, but they may well have had a toddler’s naivete.
Not if they had any option.
Toddler-me would probably have expected that reaction. Current-me would consider putting toddler-me in that room to be horrendously irresponsible.
I see it as more “obey your parents, or you’re going to really hate what comes next”. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty broadly applicable.
If you know ten words of Hebrew, then you know ten more words of Hebrew than I do.
In short, I have no idea.
Do you mean there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, or there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not intended literally? I agree with the former but am unconvinced by the latter. (But, for the avoidance of doubt, I have absolutely zero problems with Christians or Jews not taking it literally; I was among their number for many years.)
I started writing a list and realised that maybe the figure is more like 30; the words I know are all in dribs and drabs from various sources, and I’d forgotten a few sources. I suspect you actually know at least some of the same ones I do. (Some likely examples: shalom, shema, adam.) Of course the actual point here is that neither of us knows Hebrew, so we’re both guessing about what it means to say (as commonly translated into English) “in the day that you eat it, you shall surely die”.
I think there’s incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true, and (at least) very good evidence that it’s not intended literally. I consider the fact that there is incredibly good evidence that it’s not literally true to, in and of itself, be pretty good evidence that it’s not intended literally..
Shalom—I think that’s “peace”, right? I’m not sure. I don’t know shema at all, and adam I know only as the name of the first man.
So, it seems I know more Hebrew than I thought; but nonetheless, you are perfectly correct about the point.
Yup, shalom is peace. (Related to salaam in Arabic.) I thought you might know shema from the famous declaration of monotheism, which goes something like Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, adonai ekhad”, meaning “Hear, Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one”. (It comes from Deuteronomy, and is used liturgically.) I think adam* actually means “man” as well as being the name of the first one.
There are some other Hebrew words you might know because they’re used to make Biblical names; e.g., Isaac = Yitzhak and means something like “he laughs”, which you might remember from the relevant bit in the Bible. (I think I remember you saying you’re a Christian, which is why I thought you might know some of those.)
I don’t think I’m personally familiar with that phrase.
That makes sense. I think I recall seeing a footnote to that effect.
...if I had a perfect memory, I probably would know a lot more Hebrew than I do. I’ve seen the derivations of a lot of Biblical names, I just haven’t really thought of them as being particularly important enough to memorise. There are plenty of things about Isaac more important than the etymology of his name, after all.
Understood, and I hope I didn’t give the impression that I think anyone is obliged to remember this sort of thing. (It happens that my brain grabs onto such things pretty effortlessly, which I guess is partial compensation for the other things it’s rubbish at.)
No worries, you didn’t give that impression at all.
How good that evidence is depends on whether the incredibly good evidence was available to (and incredibly good evidence for) the original writers.
A lot of the best reasons for thinking that the early chapters of Genesis are not literally true were (so far as anyone knows) completely unknown when those chapters were written.
According to Genesis 2 verse 10-14, the Garden was watered by a stream, which later split into four rivers. Two of those have, according to a brief Google search, gone missing in the time since Genesis was written, but the Tigris and the Euphrates would have been well known, even then. So checking up on Eden would have simply required heading up one of those rivers.
...which, now that I think about it, would have required someone willing to leave home for perhaps several days at a time and travel into the unknown, just to see what’s there.
Nah. If you head up those rivers and don’t find Eden, the obvious conclusion is just that God removed it some time after Adam and Eve left because it was surplus to requirements. It doesn’t (at least not obviously, so far as I can see) refute the Genesis story.
Genesis says it was protected by an angel with a flaming sword. I think it might be reasonable not to expect to find the Garden… but one could expect to find the angel with the flaming sword. After all, if something’s there as security, it’s generally put where unauthorised people can find it.
It’s not an obvious refutation, but it’s more likely the result of a non-literal than a literal Garden of Eden.
If Eden was removed as surplus to requirements, so presumably was the angel. And this all seems like such an obvious thing for an Eden-literalist to say after trekking up the river and finding nothing that I really don’t see how the (then) present-day absence of the GoE and angel could possibly have been much evidence against a literal Eden.
...I take your point. If there had been Eden literalists back then, then that evidence alone would have been insufficient to convince them otherwise.
This comment has been moved here
You might want to know that you have accidentally replied to my comment instead of CCC’s. (In particular, your reply won’t have made CCC’s inbox icon light up.)
Doh! Thanks for the heads-up.
Here you go.
I would expect there to be much more protein in meat than in bread, and therefore much more nitrogen.
Hmmmmm. I didn’t think of ratios, but this transsubstantiation would take place in the atmosphere—perhaps atmospheric nitrogen could be pulled in to make up the difference. Or some of the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen could be released into the atmosphere as gasses (carbon dioxide in the case of the oxygen). Or both.
At the very least, a chemical transmutation theory would need to consider that possibility.
Perhaps you are right. It’s not easy to be certain of this sort of hypothetical—I have a lot of confidence that there will be some people who react as per my prediction, and that there will be some people who react as per your prediction, but which group (if either) will gain enough backing to be considered the mainstream opinion is difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell.
What convinced you?
What convinced me of what? That my spiritual experience was a neurobiological phenomenon and not evidence of a deity?
What convinced you that your spiritual experience is more than purely neurobiological?
You mean, at the time? When I was twelve? I have no idea. That was a long time ago. I can’t reconstruct all the details of my thought processes back then. I suspect I just didn’t think it through.
If that isn’t a mammoth-sized red flag for the solidity of your case, you and I inhabit separate conceptual universes.
You do understand that lisper is not now claiming that spiritual experiences are genuine encounters with a non-natural reality, right?
Lisper’s words:
I really don’t understand the problem here. In between “fantasies made up out of whole cloth” and “genuine communication with a deity” there is a broad range of possibilities, and I think the truth lies in that range rather than at either extreme. Spiritual experiences are real experiences, and they can feel like a genuine encounter with a deity without actually being a genuine encounter with a deity.
Yes, but “more than mere fantasies made up” is not the same as “genuine encounters with a non-natural reality”.
I think there a lot wrong with that paragraph. Mostly again stemming from confusing rational!new-atheist with rational!LW.
This community does welcome religious people with open arms in the sense that it doesn’t treat them badly just for being religious. One person converted from being atheist to Christianity while being employed by CFAR based on good reasoning.
From a Bayesian perspective there evidence that Zeus exist as Tyrrell McAllister writes in What Bayesianism taught me.
There’s definitely a shred of evidence as Scott describes in The Control Group Is Out Of Control. The core question is whether that’s enough to counteract our scepticism against those claims being true and most people in this community don’t think the evidence is strong enough for that.
That’s interesting. Is this “good reasoning” recorded anywhere? I’d love to see it.
Really? What is it?
Before you answer, pay close attention to the wording of my claim: there is no evidence that spiritual experience is anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon. Such evidence would have to be more than just something that could be caused by a deity, it would have to be something that could not be neurophysiological. And AFAICT, there really is not a single instance of such evidence. If you disagree, please cite the evidence you think exists and we can discuss it.
BTW, this is not an extreme claim. There is zero evidence that quantum mechanics is false. There is zero evidence that general relativity is false. This is so despite the fact that we know that one or the other (possibly both) must in fact be false because they are logically incompatible with each other, so they can’t both be true. And it is so despite the fact that the entire physics community is actively looking for such evidence, and that finding it would be considered a major breakthrough. Anyone who finds such evidence will almost certainly win the Nobel prize. Likewise, anyone who had actual evidence of a spiritual phenomenon that could not be (or even had a very low probability of being) neurophysiological will have made a major scientific breakthrough. So the fact that the headlines are not filled with stories of someone being feted for finding this evidence is evidence that such evidence does not exist.
That’s wrong. Something that couldn’t be neurophysiological would be not merely evidence but proof (not necessarily of a deity, of course, but of some external cause). I suggest that, e.g., Srinivasa Ramanujan’s experience of having mathematical insights given to him by the goddess Namagiri was evidence that he was in contact with a supernatural being—but, of course, far less evidence than it would take to convince me that he really was in contact with such a being.
For A to be evidence of B, all it takes is that A is more likely if B than if not-B. Dreams of goddesses handing out what turn out to be genuine (and highly unusual) mathematical insights are more likely if there are in fact goddesses able to hand out such insights than if there are not, because the existence of such goddesses would provide one more mechanism by which such dreams could occur.
I would suggest that Ramanujan’s experiences might be as much as 10:1 evidence for the existence of the goddess Namagiri Thayar. But, of course, every other mathematician who has insights without any sign of gods and goddesses getting involved is evidence against, quite apart from all the other reasons not to believe in Namagiri Thayar or any other goddess.
Perhaps you are using the term “shred of evidence” to denote something more than that. Fair enough, I suppose, but then I’m afraid I think you chose your words badly.
Very well, I concede the point. I should not have said that “there is not a shred of evidence.” Still, AFAICT the evidence favors neurobiology by a very substantial margin.
It’s http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/06/this-is-my-last-post-for-the-patheos-atheist-portal.html
I provided a link. Scott writes that Bem’s meta-analysis in favor of paranormal phenomena makes the conclusion that paranormal phenomena exist with standards of evidence that are higher than those standards for a lot of phenomena we expect as real.
That doesn’t mean that you have to convinced by Bem’s evidence but claiming that it isn’t a shred of evidence is wrong.
Interestingly you speak of deity’s while I haven’t said anything about deities. The question of whether deities exist is a different question then whether they are real spiritual experiences exist.
Again that’s a problem with the muddled notion of spiritual under which you wrote the opening post. You link ideas together that can exist independent from each other.
It isn’t. The amount of people investigating paranormal effects is quite small.
In a world where there are no cultural forces that make people not want to accept such evidence that might be true.
It took till 2008 till a Cochrane study concluded that chiropratics techniques have an effect on reducing back pain. Decades for recognizing a fairly ease to produce effect. Nobody got the Nobel Prize.
Paradgim change is really hard. It’s nothing that you get by someone making a new discovery that can easily conceptualized in the old ways of seeing the world and then newspapers convincing everybody that it’s true. Reading Kuhn might be useful to understand how scientific change works.
OK, I concede the point. There may be a shred of evidence (but not much more than a shred, at least AFAICT).
Only because “deity” is easier to type than “supernatural phenomenon.”
Well, yeah, that was actually my whole thesis: spiritual experiences are real even though the deities (or whatever) that some people ascribe them to are (almost certainly) not.
In general scientific writing doesn’t use five letter words that are easy to type but longer more precise words.
In Bem’s meta analysis case we are talking about extrasensory perception. Information transfer for which our existing theories don’t account. Not just experience.
Sure, but this is a comment thread, not a journal submission.
I don’t see why that is relevant. What difference does it make if it’s God or ESP or leprechauns? Strong evidence for any of those would be enough to be of considerable interest.
Also, can you please re-post the link to “Bem’s meta analysis”? I can’t figure out what you’re referring to here.
BTW, I read the Leah Libresco piece you referred me to. Thanks for the reference. I don’t agree with you that it represents “good reasoning.” Her reasoning was, essentially, “Someone has asked me a question for which I do not have a satisfactory answer. Therefore everything the Catholic church teaches must be true.” That doesn’t seem like good reasoning to me.
We are at a place that values reasoning. You are making a mistake in reasoning by switching different claims with each other.
Again you make a reasoning mistake by confusing claims. I didn’t said I linked to Bem’s meta analysis. I said I linked to Scott Alexander’s discussion of it. And I linked to it in the first sentence speaking about a shard of evidence. Is that too hard too find?
But in general looking up papers isn’t hard if you want to look up papers of Bem there’s Google Scholar. If you are actually interested in the evidence than reading a bit Bem could be worthwhile to understand his arguments.
To the extend that you think that’s why Leah changed the position I don’t think that summarizes what I know over the process from reading her writting. The information about her the ideological turing project might be distributed over more articles.
Fair enough. I’ll endeavor to be more precise.
I’m trying to keep up with a lot of parallel threads here simultaneously, and backtracking a thread more than 2-3 steps is actually fairly time consuming because of the way the LW UI is set up. I was hoping you might do me a favor and save me the trouble of having to go back and figure out what you were referring to.
But since you’re giving me a hard time for my lack of precision and adherence to the conventions of scientific discourse, here is how Scott Alexander references Bem:
“Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron, and Duggan (2014), full text available for download at the top bar of the link above...”
The link that I presume he’s referring to (the phrase “the link above” is ambiguous because there are many links above) has anchor text, “What now, motherfuckers?” which is not a phrase you find much in scientific discourse. I followed that link, and it leads to a page that has the abstract of the paper that I presume you’re referring to, and a notation that says “Not available for download.” So that’s as far as I’m willing to go down that particular rabbit hole. Sorry. Life is short.
Of course it is, and I read some of them. I don’t have time to go back and read everything she’s written. But going from being a non-theist to being a theist is a huge leap, and it calls for a better explanation than the one she gave if she wanted anyone to accept is as “good reasoning” rather than a straightforward leap of faith.
Put ”?context=5″ on the end of the comment’s permalink url to backtrack 5 steps.
So, for example, backtracking this comment 5 steps would be http://lesswrong.com/lw/n9y/is_spirituality_irrational/d4c9?context=5
Aha! Thanks!
I think this is the paper in question, completely online. I think this is official and not in any way illegitimately piratical. There is apparently a more recent revised version, but since even the first published version (to which that’s a link) postdates Scott’s article you should probably start with that.
Thanks!
If you don’t actually want to evaluate the paper, the basic heuristic is to trust what a highly regarded member of this community with Scott Alexander says about it. It does provide a fair amount of evidence. It therefore makes sense to update and not continue to say that there’s no evidence at all.
We live at a time where that’s the information that specifies a scientific paper. It’s quite alright to say that you don’t care about the evidence for paranormal phenomena and spend your time on other issues. If you however do care about the state of the evidence then there a time where it makes sense to read scientific papers instead about making arguments about what the evidence is based on what’s reported in mainstream media.
I have no problem with someone saying that he doesn’t know or cares to know about the state of the evidence, but if that’s your position don’t claim that there’s no evidence.
The even more basic heuristic is to look at the history of psi claims and observe that the overwhelming majority of them have failed to stand up to scrutiny. It might even be true that not a single psi claim has ever stood up to scrutiny (though this depends a bit on what you mean by “scrutiny”.) It is certainly true that no psi phenomenon has ever been reliably reproduced, and that the Randi prize went unclaimed despite there having been over 1000 applicants. One person’s opinion, no matter how well respected, doesn’t make much of a Bayesian dent in that mountain of negative evidence. People can be fooled, and people make mistakes. Even smart people.
I already conceded this point, so you are now attacking a straw man. If you’re not going to cut me any slack over terminology the you should expect me to cut you any when you don’t pay attention. (Though I submit that this conversation will be more fruitful if we both cut each other a little more slack.)
The linked paper is about a meta-study that described how a specifc psi phenomena was reliably reproduced.
There’s an older meta-review of Ganzfeld experiments that came to a similar result. Ganzfeld experiments have been multiple time reproduced.
The standard of the Randi prize (betting chances of 1:1,000,000) is substantially more tough than the standards of evidence-based medicine (two trials that beat 1:20).
You don’t go around and say that there’s no significant evidence that FDA approved drugs work because they aren’t proven to work for Randi’s standards.
That’s not what reliable reproduction means. What it means is that you would be willing to place a real-money bet on the outcome of a future experiment.
Actually, there’s good reason to believe that the drug testing process has some serious flaws. But even under ideal circumstances, the odds of getting a false positive are 1 in 400. There have been about 1500 drugs approved by the FDA so almost certainly at least 3 or 4 of them actually don’t work. Those are good enough odds for me, particularly when compared to the alternatives.
Yes, of course. If Randi had used the FDA standard, then with over 1000 applicants, you would expect two or three of them to win at 1:400 purely by chance. I’ll take the bet at 1:400 confidence if you’re willing to pay 1/40th of the prize as an entrance fee, and are willing to do the experiment more than once. In fact, I’ll go you one better: You name any statistical test you think you can beat and I’ll take a bet at 10:1 odds. Heck, make it 2:1. (If it’s good enough for a Vegas casino, it’s good enough for me.) Truthfully, that’s a bet I would be absolutely thrilled to lose.
But my prediction is that you will not accept this offer.
Could you refer me to any authoritive scientific body that defines the test of what scientific results are defined as reliably produced over real-money bets?
I think you can make an argument that the scientific establishment should work that way, but if you consider that to be the sole standard you have to throw out most scientific findings because nobody ever bet on them.
I think Dean Radin or Bem might be open to do a run at the Ganzfeld experiment provided the amount of money involved justifies the effort or there reputation to be gained by a prominent skeptic holding the other side of the bet.
On the other hand I’m personally not in the business of doing parapsychology experiments.
You are asking me to advance an argument from authority? Seriously?
That’s not true. You place implicit bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results every time you use any piece of modern technology. If you’ve ever flown in an airplane you have actually staked your life on the proposition that scientific results are reliably reproducible.
And, BTW, the reason very few people ever place “real” bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results is that there’s a shortage of suckers stupid enough to bet against it.
Aaaaand… here come the excuses. What a surprise.
I’m not asking you to conduct the experiment, I’m just asking you how much you’d be willing to bet.
For my part, I’ll put up $10,000.
There a plenty of Yoga people who produce reliable Yoga results by using a theory that assumes the existance of chakra’s. That doesn’t prove the theory of chakra’s to be right. Successful technology is not the same thing as successful science.
Futhermore there’s a lot of science which is not effectively used in technology, do you consider that to be illegimate?
The core idea with betting is to be specific about the terms of the bet. If you wan to bet about whether Bem or Dean Radin produce publishable statistically significant results for paranormal phenomena in the future, then I would be pretty confident that they do.
It’s just that I don’t expect you to take such a bet, because you likely would want some sort of tamperproof enviroment. That’s where things get complicated and I’m not interested in setting up such an enivroment. People like Bem or Radin on the other hand seem to me open to be engaged in such a way. People who are publically on the record for stating that their reason not to participate in Randi experiment was that their effect sizes where lower than what’s required for Randi.
For my myself the topic isn’t worth the effort of building up experiments and investing hundreds of hours for that.
Apart from that I personally don’t take bets with strangers and if I would than rather about topics where there definite evidence in one direction and not topics that are grey.
That’s why I specified modern technology. Computers. Airplanes. Microwave ovens.
That’s a non-sequitur. Your claim was:
In fact, every time you turn on your cell phone you are placing an implicit bet on vast swaths of scientific knowledge. That there might be additional areas of scientific knowledge that you aren’t placing bets on doesn’t change that.
Here are the terms: choose your favorite psi experiment where the odds of a positive result based on pure chance are objectively computable. Let’s say those odds are N:1. We bet at M*N:1 odds for some multiplier M>=2. If you make M larger than 2 that indicates greater confidence and you get more bragging rights should you win. We iterate until you either concede, or you have won $10,000 from me.
There are well known techniques for extracting signals from noisy channels to any desired level of statistical confidence. Physicist regularly get six-sigma results (odds of resulting by change of less than one in 3 million) from signal-to-noise ratios in the negative tens of dB. This is part of what it means to be “reliably reproducible.”
Well, duh. Any intellectually honest seeker of the truth should want some assurances that they are not being deceived.
I don’t think that’s fair. More like: “Someone has asked me a question for which the least unsatisfactory answer I can find is that there is a god who somewhat resembles that of Christianity; I have already decided that Roman Catholicism is the most plausible variety of theism; therefore I shall convert to Roman Catholicism”. She doesn’t say explicitly the bit about having already decided that RCism is the most plausible sort of theism, but it seems clear from context.
The step from theism-in-general to RCism-in-particular is, though, something Leah seems particularly unwilling to justify in any way that would make sense to a skeptic, and I agree it looks like a very weak point. Just not quite as weak as you represent it as being :-).
Sure, I’d agree with that. Sometimes when trying to be brief one fails to capture all of the subtle nuances of someone else’s argument. But one way or another, I think she skipped a step or two.
I can see how you can get to something resembling “morality loves me”. What I don’t see is how you get from there to “Jesus, an actual flesh-and-blood human being (who was also the physical embodiment of the omniscient omnipresent omnipotent deity who created the universe) died for my sins, and this is an actual point of physical fact, not merely an allegorical myth.”
The quality of the reasoning involved is debatable, and Leah’s apparent reluctance to say more about just how the reasoning went doesn’t seem like a good sign. (For the avoidance of doubt, I firmly agree that Leah is very intelligent and I’m sure she was trying to reason well. But even very intelligent people trying to reason well perpetrate bad reasoning sometimes.)
When I say good reasoning then I mean using the ideological turing test to decide which experts know most about the subject and then copying the judgement of those experts.
That’s not the only thing that Leah did, but bootstraping priors in that way is a pretty sophisticated way to reason. It’s an impressive example on focusing more on using a reasoning technique than focusing on achiving the generally accepted results that your social circle wants you to achieve.
As far as relucatance goes, I think most people aren’t fully transparent about all reasoning that goes into major belief changes in written articles.
Although Leah hasn’t been terribly forthcoming about how her conversion happened, I think she’s said enough to be pretty sure that it wasn’t that. What makes you think it was?
Read the blog post you linked to. She doesn’t say anything about ideological Turing tests; she doesn’t say anything about deferring to the judgement of experts-on-religion; she says she had a lot of trouble figuring out how to make sense of ethics and decided that “Morality just loves me or something” provided the best explanation.
My understanding is that a lot of Leah’s social circle was RC even before she converted.
She did elsewhere. She run the first ideological Turing test for religion. Theists scored better. A catholic scored best overall.
I didn’t reread the article. I just took the link from Wikipedia’s page on ideological turing tests that points to her moving to Catholics.
I think you are mixing up the true proposition
Leah ran an ideological Turing test, in which theists scored better than atheists, AND
Leah converted to Catholicism
with the false proposition
Leah ran an ideological Turing test, in which theists scored better than atheists, AND SO
Leah converted to Catholicism.
… also neither claims nor implies that Leah’s conversion was a result of her finding that Christians did better than atheists in her ideological Turing test.
No, I didn’t think your metaphor was meant to imply we failed to see the spiritual because of all the mental discipline. What I found offensive was the idea that we failed to see the spiritual despite of all the mental discipline.
Your example with addicts can backfire. Ex-addicts become good sobriety counselors the same way ex-believers become good advocates for reason. And the whole idea of comparing spirituality with addiction… it’s like you’re making my arguments for me.
OK, then I’m back to being puzzled about this. There’s no more shame in not having spiritual experiences than there is in being color blind.
Well, I’m pretty sure that when the dust settles it will turn out that we agree on more than we disagree. In fact, it’s a theorem ;-)
It shouldn’t. Unfortunately, “taking offense” is some people’s standard reaction to arguments they can’t refute.
It’s also some people’s standard reaction to being insulted. And an argument can be irrefutable (1) by being right, (2) by being too vague and allusive to get a grip on, or (3) by being nonsense. Or (4) by there actually being no argument to refute. In this case, lisper hasn’t made any actual argument for characterizing not having “spiritual experiences” as a kind of blindness, he’s just gone ahead and done it.
(There’s no shame in being colour-blind, says lisper. Quite true. There should be no shame in being unintelligent either, but most people here would be greatly displeased at being called unintelligent. There should be no shame in being ugly, but most people—perhaps fewer here than in most venues—would be greatly displeased at being called ugly.)
Being stupid or ugly is not quite the same as being color-blind or spirituality-blind because stupidity and ugliness have a more direct impact on your reproductive fitness,
Of course it’s not quite the same. Neither is being stupid quite the same as being ugly. But do you really think a thing is only a real insult if it’s about something that directly impacts your reproductive fitness? That seems a very odd idea to me. (And I question whether being intelligent—as opposed to unintelligent, rather than outright stupid—is a net benefit to reproductive fitness; I would guess that typical reproductive fitness is no worse at IQ 100 than at IQ 140. If you think “unintelligent” implies stupider than that, feel free to pretend I said “not especially intelligent” instead of “unintelligent”.)
And because stupidity have more direct impact on IQ score, uglyness on actor profession opportunities, color-blind on painter options and spirituality-blindness on inner feeling of well-being perhaps?
If we’re being very charitable, spirituality-blindness might mean something like “low trait absorption)” which would imply a reduced ability to benefit from placebo effects.
edit: Sorry, I didn’t figure out how to make a link that includes a closing bracket work in this comment syntax.
Replacing it with %29 will do. I’m not sure whether preceding it with a backslash does. Let’s see.
URL-encoding with percent signs: trait absorption.
Backslashes on parentheses:trait absorption).
Looks like they both work.
True, and unfortunately polymathwannabe seems to regard any implication that the identity he likes to dress as is less than perfect to be a personal attack on him.
Have you had spiritual experiences? How do you explain them? How would you convince others of the reality of those experiences?
Or, to put it another way, some people believe in God because they have seen evidence of God.
Well… okay. I don’t really think that can be argued against. In fact, looking at the bible, Phillipians 3 verse 3:
suggests that there was at the very least rejoicing, which is what one might expect from a sense of euphoria.
Also, climbing them.
Okay...
I think I’d be more interested in trying to convince them that the other side of the canyon exists, and there’s more space for houses and farms there and thus this “bridge” idea that I keep going on about is not as stupid as you think it is you idiots!
...I might lose my temper with them on occasion.
But it’s really the same question, at the heart of it. How do I convince someone of the existence of something that they cannot directly observe, and that, indeed, they have a strong social pressure against admitting the existence of? I can tell them about it; they will laugh and shake their heads. I can describe it in detail—someone will ask what lies behind the little hill, and when I cannot tell him, he will laugh and say that that is why this ‘sight’ I keep going on about cannot possibly exist, because it is no harder to feel on one side of the hill than the other. I can attempt to build a bridge—and the Blind will work to stop me, describing how no such structure has ever succeeded in the past, even when I managed to persuade others to help me (in vain will I point out the width of the canyon, the crumbliness of the far edge, or the fact that letting a blind man lower the bridge was why it fell into the canyon last time) and it is all a waste of resources.
Yes. Exactly.
Religious people have a similarly intricate web of self-reinforcing evidence for their beliefs. The “evidence” of God’s handiwork is all around you, even in the trees. In fact, it is so difficult to see why all of the intricacies of nature are not evidence of an intelligent designer that it took humans many millennia to figure it out, and it is considered a major intellectual accomplishment. Evolution is only obvious in retrospect.
OK, but now consider this question: what evidence could your blind peers offer that would convince you that what you think you are seeing is not in fact real, but is actually just an epiphenomenon of some neurobiological process going on entirely inside your brain?
Hmmmm. Tricky.
I can see it. Without trees on this side—and specifically, without wood—I presumably can’t build a bridge over to the other side. (And if I could, then I’d have plenty of proof that it exist and I break the metaphor) So, we can’t go over there and observe it directly (by means of touch, a sense that everyone shares). The only evidence I have for the existence of the other side of the canyon is sight—I can see it.
I imagine that if the blind people could somehow convince me that sight is really hallucination—that is to say, what I “see” is entirely an internal process within the brain and not at all related to external reality in any way (except perhaps insofar that I only “see” what I expect to “see”) - then that would be sufficient to make me question the reality of the other side of the canyon.
...I guess I could throw a rock at it and listen for the impact
Cool, then you get it.
Note that it is not necessary for all of your visions (sic!) to be hallucinations to sustain this puzzle. It’s enough that faraway things are illusory. Maybe you’re living in a “Truman Show”-style virtual reality, where the far side of the canyon is actually a projected image. (A mirage is a real-world example of something that looks very different from its true nature when viewed from far away.)
Hmmm. True, but now we’re talking about a world specifically designed to produce the appearance of the opposite side of the canyon even when it doesn’t exist. I think that we can, at least tentatively, discount active malevolence as an explanation for why I see the opposite side of the canyon.
Mind you, I’m not saying it can’t be a mirage. If I’m short-sighted—so that everything beyond a certain distance is blurry and unrecognisable—and there just happens to be a large reflective surface partway across the canyon—then I may see the reflection of this side of the canyon, fail to recognise it due to the blurring, and claim that there is an opposite side to the canyon. (This can be recognised by a simple test, should anyone manage to produce prescription spectacles).
But let us say that my blind peers bring me incredibly convincing evidence for the idea that there is no other side of the canyon. They are very persuasive in that this “sight” business is a brain disease caused by being out and about in the heat of the day, making my brain overheat, and only in the coolness of night, when all is dark, am I sane. (And, sure enough, when it’s dark then it’s too dark to see the other side of the canyon).
But none of this is evidence that there is no other side. The other side could still be there—even if every argument advanced by my blind peers is true—and while I am sitting here questioning my sanity, the other side continues to sit there, perhaps visible to me alone, but nonetheless visible, and I should not throw that evidence away.
Not necessarily. That just happened to be the case in “The Truman Show.” We actually have a real-world version of this scenario going on in cosmology right now. There are two “trees” on the far side of the canyon: dark matter and dark energy, both of which are just labels for “the mysterious unknown thing that causes the observed data to not match up with the currently best available theories”. (Note that in the tree scenario you would not have the word “tree” in your vocabulary, or if you did, it could not possibly mean anything other than “The mysterious unknown thing on the far side of the canyon that looks completely unlike anything nearby.”)
BTW, have you ever seen a mirage? They look very convincing at a distance, even with sharp vision.
Yes, but if the universe is an intentional simulation, then someone is running it. (I haven’t seen the film myself, but I understand that someone was actually running the Truman Show). The atheist hypothesis is that there is no-one running the universe—claiming that the universe has been designed, by someone, to give the impression of having been designed by someone when, in actuality, there was no designer of the universe is somewhat self-contradictory.
Not quite the same thing. There’s no debate on whether or not those trees exist, there’s merely debate on exactly what those trees are.
Yes, the type where you look along a long, straight road on a hot day and the more distant portion of the road appears to vanish, leaving the sides of the road apparently delimiting a patch of sky. Mirages can be convincing, but they can’t look like anything, and they’re very dependent on where the observer stands and the air temperature on the day, so they can be tested for.
I think you’re conflating the features of a hypothetical universe that I conjured up to make a point with what I believe to be the case in the world we live in. In the world we live in, there is no evidence that we are in an intentional simulation. All the evidence is that everything we can see arises from simple processes (where “simple” is meant in the technical sense of having low Kolmogorov complexity ).
I’m not sure that’s really what you meant to say, but that is not the “atheist hypothesis.” The atheist hypothesis is that the appearance of design can come about in ways other than having a designer (like natural selection or anthropic bias), and so the appearance of design is not slam-dunk proof of the existence of a Designer.
Of course. Analogies are never perfect.
Okay, I can see that I was unclear. Let me clarify my point. Well, two points and a conclusion.
Point 1) The Truman Show Hypothesis is that the world has been intentionally designed to appear, in some way, to be something that it is not, and any new attempts to discover the true nature of the universe will be foiled by an active opposing intelligence which is running said universe.
Point 2) The “atheist hypothesis” is that there is no-one running the universe.
Conclusion, taking both point 1 and point 2 into account: Claiming that the universe has been designed, by someone, to give the impression of having been designed by someone when, in actuality, there was no designer of the universe is somewhat self-contradictory.
This does not imply that the universe could appear to be different to how it is. It merely states that if there is no-one running the universe, then the universe can not be run in such a way as to actively prevent every possible means to find its true nature—the universe, in that case, must be running entirely on natural laws without an active intelligence behind them.
...I hope that’s clearer.
Now, if we are living in a universe that we merely fail to properly understand, then eventually someone will figure it out, because there is not an active intelligence preventing that figuring out.
Oh, I see. When I brought up the Truman Show I didn’t mean for the intentionality of it to be relevant. I just brought it up as an illustrative example of how distant things could have a fundamentally different cause (not necessarily an intentional one) than nearby things.
Let me try this again: there are subjective experiences that some people have and other people don’t (seeing trees, hearing the Voice of God). To those who have them, those subjective experiences feel like they are caused by external factors (real trees, actual deities). For various reasons (canyons, the desire of deities to preserve human free will or whatever) the question of whether those subjective experiences are actually caused by trees or deities, or whether they are simple neurobiological phenomena (i.e. illusions), resists experimental inquiry. Under those circumstances, how do you decide whether these subjective experiences are actually evidence of trees or deities, or whether they are illusions?
The point is that this is not necessarily an easy question to answer. The fact that God doesn’t talk to you is not slam-dunk evidence that God does not exist, just as the fact that the blind people can’t see the tree on the other side of the canyon is not slam-dunk evidence that the tree isn’t real. Likewise, the fact that many people hear the Voice of God is not slam-dunk evidence that He does exist, just as the fact that you can see the tree is not slam-dunk evidence that the tree exists.
...oh, right. My apologies for misunderstanding you, then. So, what you were suggesting was basically some form of mirage, then.
Completely agreed. If it was an easy question to answer, then there would not be nearly so many debates about it.
Mind you, in the case of the tree, there is an experiment that can prove its existence, or lack thereof—one merely needs to find a way to get close enough to touch it. (Similarly, it is possible to prove God exists, if He agrees—if He pushes some clouds aside and says “Look, everybody, here I am!”, then that’ll be pretty convincing evidence, for anyone who happens to see it at least). Of course, these experiments are at least difficult and perhaps impossible to set up...
It was supposed to be ambiguous, that’s the whole point. It’s a thought experiment designed to get a non-believer to understand what it’s like to be someone who believes in God because they have had a subjective experience that, to them, is indistinguishable from hearing the Voice of God. Non-believers seem to have a really hard time imagining that (outside the context of mental illness), so I thought it might be easier to imagine being someone who believes in trees because you have had a subjective experience that is indistinguishable to you from seeing a real tree, but under circumstances where you cannot share that experience with anyone else except through testimony.
Yes. Hence the canyon.
Yes, if God wanted to prove Her existence She certainly could. But the theory is that She chooses to remain hidden because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe. (Unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case you deny that humans have free will and things get rather bizarre.)
Quite, yes. The thought experiment was that I saw what looked like a tree on the other side of the canyon. It could be a tree, it could be a mirage—my sight is telling me it’s a tree, but there are a lot of blind people around who are telling me there’s no such thing as trees, and I have no evidence beyond that of my sight.
It’s a really good analogy, and I like it very much.
Well—we know that She (male pronouns are often used, but I’m pretty sure God is genderless) chooses to remain hidden—currently, at least. (Interestingly, if one looks at certain parts of the Old Testament—particularly much of Exodus—it seems that God wasn’t always so cagey. Parting the Red Sea and dropping it on Pharoah’s army was hardly a subtle miracle. And then there was the manna in the desert...)
But whether that’s because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe or for some other reason, I can’t really offer an opinion on. It’s possible that She’d be willing to cooperate in an experiment if we could find the right experiment, for whatever reason—but it’s also possible, given current behaviour, that God will simply refuse to cooperate with any experiment intended to prove Her existence beyond doubt...
Thank you! You just made my day.
Yeah, but those good old days are apparently behind us. It’s a shame that God didn’t think to make a video. Now that would have been cool!
One of the things that I’ve often heard Christians say is, “God could do X and Y and Z (because He (they never refer to God as She) is omnipotent) but He chooses not to.” The idea of an omnipotent deity whose behavior is reliably predictable by mere mortals has always struck me as logically incoherent. But what do I know? ;-)
It would have, yes!
...probably wouldn’t have survived long enough to be usable in modern video players, though. I don’t think there’s many physical media that can manage a few thousand years in the desert, short of a miracle.
Well, the argument goes that “God could do X and Y and Z, and no other force could prevent God from doing X and Y and Z, because omnipotence. Yet I observe that X and Y and Z are not, in fact, done. Assuming that my observations are not in error, this means that X and Y and Z were not done; I know that the only reason why God might not do X and Y and Z is by choosing not to, since no force can stop God. Therefore, God must have chosen not to do X and Y and Z.”
So it’s not really prediction as much as it is observation (and fitting those observations into existing ideas about reality).
The desert is actually quite good at preserving all manner of things. But this is neither here nor there. If God had wanted a video of the parting of the Red Sea so survive to modern times He could surely have arranged it because, well, that’s kind of what it means to be omnipotent.
No, it really is prediction: God will never again reveal Himself unambiguously the way he once did. He will forever be the god of the gaps, hiding in the fringes of statistical distributions and the private subjective experiences of believers.
For a mere mortal you seem to be very sure of what God will or will not ever do.
I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still. I’m a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.
On the basis of what? (no, I’m not asking you to quote me the appropriate chapter and verse)
There is an old theological debate about constraints on God. Is He really omnipotent, literally, or there are things He is unable to do? I don’t think this debate has a satisfactory resolution.
Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?
Um… physics?
Really? If you are willing to seriously entertain the possibility that the answer could be “no”, why is that not a satisfactory resolution? It seems to me to be consistent with all the data.
I guess I’m surprised to find religious people here. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless. I’ve never understood how anyone can maintain faith in the face of rational scrutiny. Maybe someone here will be able explain it to me.
God is not constrained by physics, is He?
Which data?
I am not religious.
One obvious answer is reliance on personal experience.
I’m pretty sure He is.
Oh my goodness, where to begin? How about here.
I didn’t say you were.
That’s usually a mistake.
Hmm. I don’t see how else to make sense of the exchange you and Lumifer have just had. Let me follow the steps backward, and you can tell me what I’ve got wrong. (Unless all you mean is that you only implied Lumifer is religious by saying things that don’t make sense on other assumptions, and didn’t explicitly say he is. In which case I agree but I’m not sure why it’s relevant: Lumifer’s denial of religiosity is just as relevant if you merely implied its contrary as if you explicitly stated it.)
You said “I guess I’m surprised to find religious people here”.
That was in response to Lumifer’s question “Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?”.
I infer that you were surprised about finding “this attitude” here because doing so amounts to finding religious people.
I infer that you consider that “this attitude” indicates that its holder is a religious person.
OK, so what’s “this attitude”? Lumifer asked that question in response to your saying “I’m a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.” (That wasn’t the whole content of your comment, but I don’t think any other part of it can reasonably be thought to be what Lumifer was referring to.)
So “this attitude” is evidently “find[ing] this remarkable”. What’s “this”?
You said that in response to Lumifer’s statement “For a mere mortal you seem to be very sure of what God will or will not ever do.”
I don’t see how to take all this other than as saying that (1) you (reasonably) interpret that remark of Lumifer’s as finding your confidence about what God will do remarkable, and (2) consider that attitude—i.e., finding your confidence remarkable—to indicate that its holder—i.e., Lumifer—is a religious person.
It could, I guess, be that “this attitude” was expressed by someone else other than Lumifer and you were commenting on them rather than Lumifer. But no one other than Lumifer replied to your comment about what God would not ever do.
I can’t figure out any explanation of the conversation you and Lumifer have just had that doesn’t involve you (mis)identifying Lumifer as a religious person.
What am I missing?
My surprise at finding religious people on LW was not specifically a reaction to anything Lumifer said, it was more general than that. I guess my surprise was triggered more by something ChristianKi said in another branch of this discussion than anything Lumifer said. But this has become a very long and branchy discussion so it’s very likely that any attempt on my part to reconstruct my past mental states will have some errors.
I tentatively concluded that Lumifer was religious because that seemed like the most charitable interpretation of his remarks to that point. When he told me he wasn’t, I update my Bayesian posteriors and concluded that he’s probably a troll. But I didn’t want to say so because my Bayesian estimate on the possibility that he might have something worthwhile to teach me is not yet indistinguishable from zero. But it’s getting damn close.
When you say “God is constrainted by physics”, what do you mean by the word “God”? The God of Abraham, being omnipotent, doesn’t seem to be.
Not sure, what a link to Wikipedia on theodicy is doing here.
As to not relying on personal experience, well, it calls to mind “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” X-)
OK, I’m getting a little confused about what point you’re trying to make. Most of the time when people talk about what God can and cannot do it’s because they believe God is real. But you said you’re not religious, so you don’t believe God is real. So what does it even mean for a non-real God to be omnipotent?
The reason I’m confident that God is constrained by the laws of physics is that I believe that God is a fictional character. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, it means that He exists in a different ontological category than people who believe in God think He’s in. Fictional characters are subject to the laws of physics insofar as they can only do things that their authors can describe, and so they are subject to the limitations of computability theory. God cannot tell us the value of Chaitin’s Omega to more precision than we ourselves can compute it.
Fictional characters can have effects in the real world. People alter their behavior because of things that fictional characters are reported to have said. But those kinds of effects are still limited by the laws of physics, and generally do not extend to making radical changes in the angular velocity of a planet, hence my confident prediction.
Generally speaking, if you are discussing things like attributes of God, there are two positions you might take.
One position is that God is not real, so discussing His attributes is no better than debating patterns on wings of fairies. At this point we’re done, there is nothing else to say.
Another position is to add an implicit “conditional on God being real” to statements. That allows you to discuss e.g. theology without necessarily being religious.
I thought we are operating in the second mode, but if we’re not, there isn’t really anything to talk about, is there? And when you said “I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still” what you meant was simply “it did not happen”—right? The “again” was an unnecessary flourish?
Fictional characters are subject to fictional laws of physics in the fictional worlds the authors create. If you just want to say that gods do not exist, the question of whether they are subject to (real) laws of physics is a nonsensical question.
Not quite. People’s beliefs (which might or might not involve fictional characters) do have effects in reality via actions of these people. But that’s a trivial observation, so I’m not sure of the point you’re making.
I disagree. People can (and do) have interesting and constrained discussions and even debates about fictional characters all the time.
OK, but that begs the question of which god (lower-case g) you’re conditioning on. This was actually the mode I was arguing in when I cited the story of Rabbi Eliezer and the carob tree.
That too, but they are also subject to constraints imposed by the theory of computation on their authors (at least so long as their authors are Turing machines). That actually rules out omnipotent gods even in fiction. Simply saying that something is omnipotent doesn’t make it omnipotent even in a fictional world.
It might be a trivial observation, but it has very profound consequences that are not immediately apparent. Specifically, there’s a positive feedback loop where certain beliefs produce effects which provide evidence that support those beliefs. Such beliefs can become self-sustaining even in cases where the beliefs themselves are objectively false. But because they are self-sustaining, they can be very hard to dislodge.
Ironically, an example of such a self-sustaining but objectively false belief is the belief that rationalism will win the battle of ideas, or even that it’s a better way to live your life, simply because, well, it’s rational. (I’m not saying you believe this, but many people do.)
Since the context of the discussion involved quotes from Torah/Bible, I thought it was apparent.
Speaking of ontological categories… Humans are not Turing machines.
Sure, but I still don’t see it as particularly profound. It happens all the time and is the mechanism involved in some well-known biases. I understand your point that “personal experience” of a believer is suspect as evidence and that point has some validity, but this is a complex discussion involving interpretations, cultural expectations, philosophy of qualia, etc. etc. :-)
It isn’t apparent. Genesis is part of three different religious traditions with radically different theologies. For example, there’s a rich tradition in Judaism of arguing with God, and even winning sometimes (e.g. Exo32:9-14), something which would be unthinkable in Christianity or Islam.
The software processes running on human brains can, as far as anyone can tell, be modeled by a Turing machine, so if a TM can’t do it, neither can a human, and hence neither can any fictional character a human can describe.
I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree about that.
“But it’s not true!”
That would run contrary to omnipotence.
Indeed it would.
Your blind peers can’t bring you convincing evidence that there’s no other side to the canyon unless there actually is no other side to the canyon. It’s like asking “what if homeopaths provided you with incredibly convincing evidence that homeopathy worked, would you still cling to what science says?” (The answer is that if it was possible to produce incredibly convincing evidence for homeopathy, we would be in a very different world than we are now, and science would be saying different things.)
On the contrary, it is quite possible to come up with some very convincing arguments for something that is false. There are many ways to do this, either by means of flawed argument, logical fallacy, carefully selecting only the evidence that supports a given theory, and so on. If I am sufficiently cautious in examining the arguments, I may identify the flaws and expose them—but it is also possible that I may fail to notice the flaws, because I am not perfect.
A homeopath can provide a convincing argument by providing a very long list of people who were ill, took a homeopathic remedy, and then recovered; and accompanying it with a very long list of people who were ill, took no homeopathic remedy, and got worse.
Anyone who notices the cherry-picking of evidence will see the flaw in that argument, but it will nonetheless convince many people.
I don’t consider “evidence which would convince at least some people” to be “incredibly convincing evidence”. Even poorly convincing evidence will convince someone—poorly convincing evidence isn’t the same as nonconvincing evidence.
Ah, I think we have the point of disconnect here. I consider “incredibly convincing evidence” to be any evidence which would convince me. I am aware that this includes some flawed evidence that would convince me of incorrect things, but I can’t provide a good example, because if I knew how it was flawed then it would not convince me (and if it has convinced me, then I don’t know that it is flawed). Thus, yes, my examples were only vaguely convincing, in order to make the flaws clearer.
I don’t see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
You should drop this analogy. The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
It seems obviously true to me too. And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean “information” in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in. That the information is the same in both cases can be shown by showing that either system can be reconstructed from the other. The grooves can be reconstructed from the audio (this is how the grooves were created in the first place), and the audio can be reconstructed from the grooves (this is what happens when you play the record.)
If you want to challenge this claim, please mount an argument. Don’t just proclaim that it’s false.
Yeah, so? Some people just don’t want to be convinced, why should you spend your time and effort on them?
Information in the information-theoretical sense does not “enter the brain”. The audio can be reconstructed from the grooves, but not by the brain.
Simply put, the brain does not have the same information in those two cases. In particular, the brain does not care about some abstract theoretical information equivalence. It’s just a brain, not an idealized infomation-processing agent.
I’m really beginning to wonder.
Of course it does. That too is easily demonstrated.
Maybe your brain doesn’t care, but mine does.
Enlighten me, please.
This:
is irrelevant to the question of how the information flows. The information that comprises music is stored on the record, not the record player. The player merely transduces that information from one format (grooves) to another (sound). The brain can’t do that transduction process, but it can (and does) process the information. The proof is that a brain equipped with suitable tools could make a copy of a record (and hence the information on that record) by looking at and making measurements of the grooves.
That’s not what “processes information” means. A photocopier does not “process information” when it makes a copy of a document. It just makes a copy. Similarly, a brain could peer at the grooves all it likes, and, presumably, could make a copy of them, but that makes it no better than a record-producing machine.
Your claim is, essentially, that from the brain’s point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same. However the brain cannot convert the grooves to the music (or the music to the grooves). It requires the transformation be made externally before it can process the information.
I really don’t want to quibble over the meaning of the word “process”. The original claim was:
And that is clearly true. It doesn’t matter how (or even whether) that information is “processed”.
Note that your re-statement of my claim, “from the brain’s point of view the information in the grooves and the information in the music is the same” is not my actual claim. I said nothing about “the brain’s point of view”. That phrase is non-sensical with respect to an information-theoretical analysis.
If you really want to get technical, there is a “point of view” with respect to information content, and that is the repertoire of distinguishable states that a system can be said to potentially be in. The choice of that repertoire is arbitrary, and so can be said to be a “point of view.” There is an implied “point of view” with respect to music, and that is the ability to reconstruct the audio waveform within the range of human hearing, roughly 20HZ-20kHz. With respect to that “point of view”, my claim is correct, and can actually be mathematically proven to be correct by the Nyquist sampling theorem.
What is not the same—and this is the whole point—is the subjective experience of having the same information entering your brain through different sensory modalities. The intellectual understanding of spiritual experience in terms of neurobiology or whatever is very different from the actual subjective experience, and if you haven’t had the actual subjective experience, your understanding of spirituality is necessarily limited by that.
You’re collapsing two distinctions.
One is between information structured in such a way as to operate on our brains so as to produce a subjective response, and information that we have to do some work to interpret. (E.g., music in the form of sound waves versus music in the form of a printed score—at least, for people who understand music notation but don’t have the fluency of some professional musicians who can look at a score and “hear” what it says.)
The other is between information we are able to make sense of and information we aren’t. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after encryption using a cipher I don’t know how to break, with a key I don’t know.)
In practice some things are intermediate. (E.g., the text of a novel, and the same thing after “encryption” with ROT13.)
Giving me a micrograph of an LP’s grooves is much more like the second of those than like the first. Maybe the information is interpretable in principle—I guess I could measure very carefully, and then do a Fourier transform by hand and figure out what frequences are present, etc., etc., etc. -- but in practice, showing me those micrographs is going to convey essentially no information about the music to me. I’m not much better off than if you’d encrypted the data (and certainly worse than if you’d just ROT13ed it.)
So when you contrast music and words, you’re confusing matters because most of the difference you profess to find is not between music and words, but between different degrees of “difficulty” in reconstructing the content in a form we can make use of. If you’d compared “listening to the audiobook of a novel” with “reading the text of the novel, after encryption with a cipher of moderate difficulty” you’d have had something much nearer to the comparison between “listening to music” and “looking at micrographs of a record groove”—and you’d no longer have found so big a difference between words and music.
The thing is, you could have done this right and it would have served your purpose almost equally well. Audiobook versus printed novel; recorded music versus printed score. For all but the very best musicians, the printed score will have far less power to please or move than the recorded music; the relationship here is much closer to the relationship between an audiobook and a printed novel; and you could run with that and draw your analogy with religious/spiritual experiences. But I have the impression that you wanted to stress (I would say, to overstate) the ineffability of those experiences—and as a result you made a bogus comparison instead of a good one.
Well, OK, but this is a very different kind of critique than you were offering before. Before you were making a simple (and wrong) technical claim:
Now you’re mounting a critique of my rhetorical choices. It’s a constructive critique, so I thank you for that. But let me explain why I made the choice that I did.
The point I was trying to make is that the subjective sensation of spiritual experience matters. It is too facile to dismiss God as simply “a pernicious delusion” as Dawkins does. There are people for whom a phenomenon that they call “the presence of the holy spirit” (or whatever) is every bit as real and non-delusional as the phenomenon that you call “hearing the music” is for you. Their explanatory theory of this phenomenon is wrong, but their experience is a real experience, not a delusion.
The difference between music and spiritual experience is that all humans have the subjective experience of hearing music (even deaf people!) but not all humans have spiritual experiences. So I had to find a way to illustrate the reality of spiritual experience to an audience which by and large has not had such experiences and is generally predisposed to dismiss them as delusions. I considered and discarded many possible ways of doing this, and finally settled on music because of its universality. But the subjective sensation of reading sheet music depends on how much you have been trained to read sheet music, and I didn’t want to muddy the waters with that kind of relativity. So for the counterpoint I wanted a rendering of music that no human has been trained to process. I picked grooves in the hopes that people would intuitively understand that the music is somehow there, but you can’t “get at the essence of it” by looking. You have to do something else. In the same way, you can’t “get at the essence” of a spiritual experience by understanding the neurobiology of it and calling it a delusion. You have to do something else.
I’m not sure if I made the right choice. But I think I made a defensible one.
No, that wasn’t me, it was Lumifer.
That doesn’t seem to me like a good description of what I’m doing. In particular, my criticism is not mostly about the rhetorical effect of what you wrote, but about its logic.
The boundary between experience and explanation is fuzzy and porous, but it seems to me that when (say) Richard Dawkins calls belief in God a pernicious delusion, what he is saying is precisely that believers’ explanatory theory of their experiences is wrong, not that they didn’t have the experiences. The same goes, I think, for most other atheists who loudly criticize theism and theists. So I fear you may be tilting at windmills.
But I must say a few words about the fuzziness and porousness of that boundary. Suppose I have a hallucination, think I see my dead grandmother, and conclude that I have seen a ghost. And suppose you don’t believe ghosts are real. I say to you “I saw the ghost of my dead grandmother”. You say “No, you didn’t”. Are you denying my experience, or my interpretation of it? I think you might reasonably deny two things I would claim, while accepting a third. You accept that I had an experience as of seeing my dead grandmother. You deny that I actually saw an actual thing that resembled my dead grandmother. And you deny, more specifically, that I saw a ghost. Something similar—though of course it needn’t involve outright hallucination—may happen with religious experiences. I feel an overwhelming sense of love and acceptance and majesty; I conceptualize this as experiencing the presence of a divine being; I conclude that Jesus loves me and wants me to go and be a missionary. Richard Dawkins may reasonably accept that I felt those things; deny that I felt the presence of a divine being; deny in particular that I learned that Jesus wants me to be a missionary.
And the difficulty is that if you ask me in either of these cases to say what my experience was then—quite aside from the possibility that it may have been somewhat indescribable—I may well think of it, and describe it, in terms that already have some theorizing built into them. I may say, in the first case, “the experience I had was that I saw a ghost”; in the second, “the experience I had was of feeling the presence of God”. If you disagree with the inbuilt theorizing, are you denying the reality of my experience? I think that’s mostly a matter of definition; in any case, I see no reason why skeptics shouldn’t do it. (Though sometimes it might be impolitic to do it out loud.)
If you want a deep understanding of the experience, yes you do. But I’m not convinced that skeptics are under any sort of obligation to want that. I feel quite comfortable saying that, at least to a good first approximation[1], no experience could actually give all that much evidence for the things that some believers infer from their experiences. And if, for whatever reason, the question actually at issue is whether our universe was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness, or whether men who have sex with other men should be stoned to death, it may suffice to say “your experiences can’t possibly be much evidence for that” rather than getting an intimate understanding of what those experiences are like.
[1] The hedging is because maybe there are exotic ways for an experience to convey a lot of evidence; e.g., perhaps when you think you hear God speaking to you he tells you some very specific piece of information you couldn’t reasonably have known or worked out, and it turns out to be correct; that’s at least evidence of something, though it’s hard to see how you could know it was God. So far as I can tell, nothing like this is going on in the great majority of religious experiences.
Oh, sorry, my mistake.
I wouldn’t say that. I would say, “I believe that you think you saw the ghost of your dead grandmother. And it’s not entirely out of the question that it was in fact the ghost of your dead grandmother. But I think it’s more likely that there’s some other explanation.”
And actually, I probably wouldn’t even say that. I would probably say, “I’m sorry your grandmother is dead. She must have meant a lot to you.”
“Obligation” is an odd word to use here. If you believe that having a more complete model and accurate model of the world is a good thing, then it seems to me that it follows logically that having a better model of why some people believe the things they do is a good thing. Does that constitute an “obligation”? I don’t know, but I don’t want to quibble over terminology.
If prayer’s to a particular god were answered more often than prayers to some other god, that would be pretty convincing evidence (at least to me) that that god existed and the others didn’t. Many religious claims are in fact falsifiable (and falsified) theories.
Oh, yes, of course. I’m not suggesting that we disarm against the fundamentalist wackos. What I’m suggesting is that some people who profess to believe in God are actually our (non-believers) intellectual allies in many other matters, and so having a better theory of how that happens (or, at the very least, employing less inflammatory rhetoric towards them) might make the world a better place for everyone. That’s all.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear enough: the “you” and “I” there were so called just for convenience. I wouldn’t say the things “I” say in that paragraph, either. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that both the answers you say you might give are better than a flat “No, you didn’t”. Of course.)
Well, the whole point of what you’ve been saying here seems to be that skeptics who argue against religious beliefs are (or at least many of them are) doing something wrong, that instead of arguing over religious beliefs they should be empathizing with religious experiences or something like that.
I agree that understanding things is better than not understanding them. But understanding any specific thing is not always a high priority.
Of course. Perhaps I was unclear: I didn’t mean “nothing that could possibly happen would constitute strong evidence”, I meant “no purely internal religious experience would constitute strong evidence”. (With the proviso I stated, of course.) In other words, the sort of “experience” that I thought this whole discussion was about.
Plenty of people who are not in any useful sense fundamentalist wackos believe that the world was created by a superbeing of vast power and goodness. And while wanting gay people stoned to death is probably in wacko-only territory, there are plenty of non-wackos who want gay people not to be allowed to marry one another for reasons that are ultimately pretty similar to the wackos’ reasons.
Yup, absolutely true. I don’t think this is as little understood as I think you think it is.
If all you’re saying is that in many contexts it is better not to insist on talking about sky fairies and telling religious people they’re crazy—why, yes, I agree. And, again, my impression is that most people here do too.
Although LW is on the whole a pretty unreligious place, there are active members here who are religious believers, and I don’t think they get abused for it. And from time to time someone comes along and says, more or less, “hi, I’m a believer but sympathetic to rationalism; can we talk?” and the responses mostly seem pretty respectful and polite to me. See, e.g., this post from a believer leaning towards agnosticism and wanting thoughts on miracles, though of course the “I might deconvert” framing may have made people nicer.
Well, my OP was not written specifically for LW, and it’s possible that posting it here was not appropriate, at least not without some significant revisions. If so, I apologize. I’ll try to do better next time.
1) (snarky response) I’m not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs. 2) (real response) the value of “God” matters a whole lot in this discussion. The bait and switch I worry about is that any personal experience gets used to justify extremely unlikely belief clusters. I don’t think someone’s hallucinations justifies my rejection of Occam’s Razor.
I think this is a stretched analogy, but even if I accepted it, nobody who enjoys music is telling me to accept a bunch of other supernatural bullshit.
I’m not suggesting it should influence your beliefs about the world. I’m suggesting it should influence your beliefs about them.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. By choosing to call it “supernatural bullshit” rather than “a not altogether unreasonable (though nonetheless mistaken) attempt to account for real subjective experiences that they have had and I have not (and in the absence of education and information that I possess that they might not)” you miss a very important truth: you are dealing with a fellow human being who might be making an honest attempt to make sense of the world in the face of subjective experiences and other background that may be very different from your own. By choosing to label their beliefs “supernatural bullshit” you might be shutting down possible avenues of communication and the opportunity to make the world a better place, even if it is supernatural bullshit.
I debated with myself about whether to use the inflammatory or reconciliatory framing. It really can go either way, depending on what other parts of the spiritual/supernatural belief cluster is being dragged along with the personal experiences, and what the spriritualist is asking me to accept beyond just “some difficult-to-describe experiences have occurred”.