Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I’ve been triangulating around two problems while discussing ‘God’ concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by ‘cause’, ‘God’, etc) and one of concept (can ‘God’ mean something without agency?). I’m beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I’m assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
I was trying to make a neutral, insightful reply to what I thought was your real point and not get distracted by the semantics of the whole ‘God’ thing.
Though I suppose I was also trying to indicate a plausible reason for why typical humans might end up ascribing agency to a first cause: a reason to avoid words with connotations of agency in discussions of first cause. If agency is somehow entangled in our concept of causation thats a limitation of the concept. It is not evidence there is an actual agent with causal control over the universe or even that such an agent is possible. And even if it was evidence for that, the complexity penalty associated with invoking agency is so great we’d have to conclude by modus tollens that there was no first cause.
“God” has enough baggage that it’s probably a good idea to avoid—at least in premises of arguments. If you conclude that some entity or event exists that you want to label “God” for personal ritual I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.
Your comment is interesting, and I agree with you that our concept of causality gets strained as we push it away from agency, and as humans we have difficulty not projecting agency onto causes. Would you mind summarizing whether your comment is a reply to something I said in particular or a general comment?
I’ve been triangulating around two problems while discussing ‘God’ concepts on Less Wrong: one of language (needing to clarify what I mean by ‘cause’, ‘God’, etc) and one of concept (can ‘God’ mean something without agency?). I’m beginning to lose confidence that these words have the abstract meanings I’m assigning them, in which case I would be happy to use different words.
I was trying to make a neutral, insightful reply to what I thought was your real point and not get distracted by the semantics of the whole ‘God’ thing.
Though I suppose I was also trying to indicate a plausible reason for why typical humans might end up ascribing agency to a first cause: a reason to avoid words with connotations of agency in discussions of first cause. If agency is somehow entangled in our concept of causation thats a limitation of the concept. It is not evidence there is an actual agent with causal control over the universe or even that such an agent is possible. And even if it was evidence for that, the complexity penalty associated with invoking agency is so great we’d have to conclude by modus tollens that there was no first cause.
“God” has enough baggage that it’s probably a good idea to avoid—at least in premises of arguments. If you conclude that some entity or event exists that you want to label “God” for personal ritual I don’t think there is necessarily anything wrong with that.