OK I’ll bite. I’d also like to practice the technique. Shall we do this in the comments then? And would you consider trying this with more than one interlocutor? We could maybe rot13 “spoilers”, if you like, but I’m not sure which parts you’d be concerned with.
Also, before we get started, the prerequisites must be observed. The first: Epistemic humility.
If there is God.
I desire to believe that there is God;
If there is not God,
I desire to believe that there is not God;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
—The Litany of Tarski, for “There is God”.
I say it, I mean it. Can you recite the Litany aloud and sincerely mean it, on you honor? If so, we can proceed to the next prerequisite, if not, we have to work on epistemology first.
If there is God. I desire to believe that there is God; If there is not God, I desire to believe that there is no God; Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
I say it, I mean it. Stop me if I appear to be attracted to the good effects of placebo more than to the truth.
I am ok with many interlocutors, but you will need to explain how to use double crux in this case. And yes, let us do it here in comments. Do you have your cruxes already? If no, please do not read further. If yes, here are mine (go to the very bottom):
1. I believe that there are miracles. By the miracle I understand event or series of events that have either extremely low probability, seems to break the laws of Nature or have significantly higher probability to occur in the world with God rather than without.
2. I believe that the person can have contact with God through prayer. I would say—every person, but I am not that confident.
3. If the perception of the human mind is equivalent to the perception of the full-brain simulation, I believe that we live in the simulation (what is basically means that there is a Programmer who is like God). If the perception is not equivalent, I believe that it means indeducibility of the perception from the laws of Nature, what significantly increases my expectation that there is a God.
Your cruxes are formulated as “Why do I believe what I believe?”
This is quite different from what seems to me important to get at in double crux—“What would change my mind?”
For example, case 2 is only crux if it is true that: “Were you to believe that a person can not have contact with God through prayer, then you would change your mind and think there’s no God”.
Is that correct?
As a metaphor, think of a ceiling supported by a few walls. It’s usually the case when constructing houses that not all walls are equally important to keeping the ceiling up. Some are merely decorative—you can knock them over and put up a new one elsewhere, and the thing will be fine. But others are load-bearing—if you take those walls down, the ceiling itself will come crashing in.
From experience, I find something similar happens with belief. For a given belief, I can often list many arguments supporting it. And those usually that take the form “I believe X”. But it often turns out that most of them aren’t actually the load-bearing reason I believe it. Because were I to knock them down and stop believing them, I still would not change my mind about X. To find the ones which are actually load-bearing, it’s more useful to use as a search query “If false, would this change my mind?”, rather than “Do I believe this?”
1. Are magic tricks miracles because they seem to break the laws of Nature? Are lotteries miracles because they are extremely low probability? What counts as a law of nature? Does it factor human knowledge into it? Are superfluids an example of breaking the law of nature of liquids?
3. What would you conclude about existence of god in the indistinguishable case? Would the programmer be god or would that be a separate entity? Do you think the perception is distinguishable?
#3 has two branches. I agree that if mental things are ontologically basic, then supernatural explanations for things in general, including God, become more probable. But again this isn’t nearly enough to establish your God in particular, as opposed to lesser spirits and whatnot. So it’s not a crux for me.
On the other branch, I do find it plausible that a full-brain simulation could be conscious, and that it follows that the apparent universe around us could also be simulated, because we have no access to the Universe outside of our perceptions. And then yes, there could be a programmer, which would qualify as being a Higher Power.
But the Programmer seems to be incompatible with the Christian God. After all, the programmer could also have a programmer. And there could be multiple programmers who work on your simulation. Polytheism? And then there could be multiple instantiations of you in this moment. Run on different computers. Programmed by different Programmers. And because we’re assuming reducible perception in this branch, there’s simply no fact of the matter as to which one of them you are. They’re bit-for-bit identical. Which Programmer is God? This branch is not a crux for me either.
#2, as worded, assumes God exists, and so is begging the question. Obviously, if God exists, then it trivially follows that “there is a God”. It can’t be our Statement B if it is just an obfuscated Statement A. That’s no progress.
Just complaining about a fallacy seems uncharitable, so I’m trying to build a steelman out of this, but it’s not working. If we remove “God” and replace it with “Higher Power”, then it’s no better than #1 as a crux. We still don’t know it’s your God we’re talking to. If we remove “God” altogether, then we’re talking about humans having psychic powers, which doesn’t seem to help. Maybe you can word it better than I can.
The human mind is made of parts that can disagree or get out of sync. Auditory hallucinations are known to science, but telepathic communication is not. So on priors, I would first assume a hallucination. How can we distinguish these cases? At a minimum, I think the voice in your head would need to reveal things that it could not know simply from being inside your head. But even given that, if we’re already assuming extrasensory perception for the telepathy, how do we know you’re not hallucinating and clairvoyant as opposed to telepathic and in contact with an alien? Maybe it would help if said alien had multiple contacts, as this would seem to reduce the chance that they’re all hallucinations, but only if the contacts independently agree about what the alien is saying. But if we’re already assuming telepathy, how do we know the contacts aren’t colluding telepathically behind your back? Maybe we would still need some outside confirmation the alien exists. Can we prove that people are telepathic but not clairvoyant? Can we prove that people are only telepathic with aliens but not each other?
You are saying that you can totally communicate with a non-existent god so that point is only a single sided crux at the moment.
I don’t really understand the difference between clairvoyant and telepathic. Either the contact mechanism is know or unknown. If it is known we can argue what kind of entities can be in that kind of contact. If it is not known there is no point in differentiating between different types as the details could be anything.
While both telepathy and clairvoyance involve a mind gaining knowledge through means other than the known sense input modes*, telepathy refers to communication between two or more minds, whereas clairvoyance usually involves only one mind.
One example of telepathy in pop culture is the Vulcan Mind Meld, where a Vulcan can achieve various levels of mind-to-mind communication through (apparently) touch alone.
One example of clairvoyance in pop culture is Farsight, a Star Wars universe Force Power that allows the user to look at things that are not in their usual visual range.
In this context, I believe gilch is suggesting that it would be difficult to discern between a telepath communicating with a remote (unseen) being and a clairvoyant whose mode of knowing is to hallucinate a conversation, but where no other being is present.
*Known sensory modalities for living things on earth include but are not limited to vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance, proprioception, time perception and magnetoreception.
if the clairvoyant knows any thing ie their experience correlates to anything then the other being is present. But I guess it would be hopeless to establish how reliable the information channel is using that information channel only.
If you have an other being involved in any way the power isn’t clairvoyance, it’s telepathy. The problem is how to distinguish the telepath from the clairvoyant who interprets their unusual senses by hallucinating non-existent “voices” or some such.
I do not believe in “miracles”, in the sense that you probably mean, but if I somehow discovered I was mistaken about that fact, I still would not believe in God (though my prior would be higher than it is now).
Therefore, #1 is not a crux for me. Miracles would be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. (So this may be a co-crux for me.)
All this would prove is a “Higher Power” of some kind, but the most likely Higher Powers on priors are not The one God in question, but AGIs or aliens, because these explanations do not require the burdensome details of the supernatural. And even if we are willing to entertain “supernatural” explanations (and, as I see it, we must, to include your version of God), then unspecified magical forces or lesser supernatural beings, like genies or even small-‘g’ pagan gods must be considered. Not to mention all of the big-G Gods of the wrong monotheistic religions.
Do you believe in weak decay? Do you think weak decay is a low probablity event? Why does not weak decay fit within the sense of miracle here? Do you believe every kind of chess game that has played out has played out multiple times? If not why are the low frequency games not these low probablity event series? What kinds of events would be raised in probablity if god would exist? Would there be a separating signature from aliens and other fantasticals?
I do believe weak decay happens. For an individual atom, perhaps weak decay is a low probability event, but the weak decay experiments have been repeated many many times. Low probability events happen all the time.
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight… I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
—Richard Feynman
Low probability, but that’s no miracle. Any car you see should have a unique license plate.
I am having a very hard time coming up with any evidence that could distinguish the God in question from other far more probable higher powers.
Definitely not, because they do not start out with equal priors. That’s just Bayes. Every conjunctive detail can only decrease the prior probability, which is the principle known as Occam’s Razor. The God in question is a highly conjunctive claim with lots of burdensome details.
Note also that “The Orthodox Christian God” may have a similar prior to other monotheist’s Gods, when taken individually, but it can’t really be bigger than the set of monotheistic Gods as a whole, which can’t be bigger than the set of gods as a whole, or the set of supernatural creatures as a whole, or the set of unspecified supernatural forces as a whole, as each successive set contains the former set. And if we cut out the burdensome detail of “the supernatural”, then we’re left with natural higher powers like alien teenagers, which is still plenty unlikely on priors, but is at least known to be possible based on established science. We haven’t even established that the supernatural exists at all.
I think in your treatment between different monotheistic gods there would be evidence that would favour one god over another even if both start similarly dysmally low. However if you had two gods and they are indistinguishable from aliens then they should not be distinguishable from each other. I guess there are two senses in that in “evidence we currently have” vs “evidence that could ever exist”. Like I would think that god hypothesis would not have increased probability for flying saucers. But if god doesn’t raise the expectation of saucers does god raise the expectation of anything? If it doesn’t raise the expectation of anything then there is nothing to disagree about because we don’t mean anything.
Do you have reason to believe that valentinlespukhin is in fact using a different definition than he explicitly provided here? The explicit definition was of the form a,b or c and you claim to believe that entities of type a exist. Why would you not believe that the disjunction exists?
Paraphrasing: By the miracle I understand event or series of events that have either: a) extremely low probability, b) seems to break the laws of Nature or c) have significantly higher probability to occur in the world with God rather than without.
“Low probability events happen all the time”
‘I do not believe in “miracles”, in the sense that you probably mean’
The sense in which you replied to “miracles” seems not to be able to be understood in the literal definition provided, so you either used your own private definition or did not believe that their definition was accurately spelled out. Now the discussion has shifted and there has been an additonal feature added that miracles are connected to christian worship. If you are assuming they have additional properties it might be fruitful to be explicit about them.
Yes, I was responding to what I thought he meant instead of his literal wording there. That’s why I included “in the sense that you probably mean”. I don’t think “low probability” by itself is sufficient to make an event a miracle, and was assuming there was more to it than that, like an apparent purpose for being that way, perhaps.
I am ok with many interlocutors, but you will need to explain how to use double crux in this case.
We can use others as facilitators to help keep us on track. But Double Crux is a pairwise activity. If someone else bites before one of us changes our minds, then you would do it paired with an interlocutor other than me, as a separate thread. The double crux for each pair may be different, so you’re just doing Double Crux twice. But I would be able to read the other thread to understand your position better.
OK I’ll bite. I’d also like to practice the technique. Shall we do this in the comments then? And would you consider trying this with more than one interlocutor? We could maybe rot13 “spoilers”, if you like, but I’m not sure which parts you’d be concerned with.
Also, before we get started, the prerequisites must be observed. The first: Epistemic humility.
If there is God.
I desire to believe that there is God;
If there is not God,
I desire to believe that there is not God;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
—The Litany of Tarski, for “There is God”.
I say it, I mean it. Can you recite the Litany aloud and sincerely mean it, on you honor? If so, we can proceed to the next prerequisite, if not, we have to work on epistemology first.
I’d appreciate it if this was done publicly: I’ve never seen it done before.
Great! Ok, I am honestly reciting:
If there is God.
I desire to believe that there is God;
If there is not God,
I desire to believe that there is no God;
Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.
I say it, I mean it. Stop me if I appear to be attracted to the good effects of placebo more than to the truth.
I am ok with many interlocutors, but you will need to explain how to use double crux in this case. And yes, let us do it here in comments. Do you have your cruxes already? If no, please do not read further. If yes, here are mine (go to the very bottom):
1. I believe that there are miracles. By the miracle I understand event or series of events that have either extremely low probability, seems to break the laws of Nature or have significantly higher probability to occur in the world with God rather than without.
2. I believe that the person can have contact with God through prayer. I would say—every person, but I am not that confident.
3. If the perception of the human mind is equivalent to the perception of the full-brain simulation, I believe that we live in the simulation (what is basically means that there is a Programmer who is like God). If the perception is not equivalent, I believe that it means indeducibility of the perception from the laws of Nature, what significantly increases my expectation that there is a God.
Your cruxes are formulated as “Why do I believe what I believe?”
This is quite different from what seems to me important to get at in double crux—“What would change my mind?”
For example, case 2 is only crux if it is true that: “Were you to believe that a person can not have contact with God through prayer, then you would change your mind and think there’s no God”.
Is that correct?
As a metaphor, think of a ceiling supported by a few walls. It’s usually the case when constructing houses that not all walls are equally important to keeping the ceiling up. Some are merely decorative—you can knock them over and put up a new one elsewhere, and the thing will be fine. But others are load-bearing—if you take those walls down, the ceiling itself will come crashing in.
From experience, I find something similar happens with belief. For a given belief, I can often list many arguments supporting it. And those usually that take the form “I believe X”. But it often turns out that most of them aren’t actually the load-bearing reason I believe it. Because were I to knock them down and stop believing them, I still would not change my mind about X. To find the ones which are actually load-bearing, it’s more useful to use as a search query “If false, would this change my mind?”, rather than “Do I believe this?”
1. Are magic tricks miracles because they seem to break the laws of Nature? Are lotteries miracles because they are extremely low probability? What counts as a law of nature? Does it factor human knowledge into it? Are superfluids an example of breaking the law of nature of liquids?
3. What would you conclude about existence of god in the indistinguishable case? Would the programmer be god or would that be a separate entity? Do you think the perception is distinguishable?
#3 has two branches. I agree that if mental things are ontologically basic, then supernatural explanations for things in general, including God, become more probable. But again this isn’t nearly enough to establish your God in particular, as opposed to lesser spirits and whatnot. So it’s not a crux for me.
On the other branch, I do find it plausible that a full-brain simulation could be conscious, and that it follows that the apparent universe around us could also be simulated, because we have no access to the Universe outside of our perceptions. And then yes, there could be a programmer, which would qualify as being a Higher Power.
But the Programmer seems to be incompatible with the Christian God. After all, the programmer could also have a programmer. And there could be multiple programmers who work on your simulation. Polytheism? And then there could be multiple instantiations of you in this moment. Run on different computers. Programmed by different Programmers. And because we’re assuming reducible perception in this branch, there’s simply no fact of the matter as to which one of them you are. They’re bit-for-bit identical. Which Programmer is God? This branch is not a crux for me either.
#2, as worded, assumes God exists, and so is begging the question. Obviously, if God exists, then it trivially follows that “there is a God”. It can’t be our Statement B if it is just an obfuscated Statement A. That’s no progress.
Just complaining about a fallacy seems uncharitable, so I’m trying to build a steelman out of this, but it’s not working. If we remove “God” and replace it with “Higher Power”, then it’s no better than #1 as a crux. We still don’t know it’s your God we’re talking to. If we remove “God” altogether, then we’re talking about humans having psychic powers, which doesn’t seem to help. Maybe you can word it better than I can.
If you would have telepathic contact with a foreign intelligence would that make you think that other communication party exists?
What would convince you that another person beside yourself was having communication contact with non-human intelligences?
Do you lack the communcation potential to non-human intelligences? If yes that would be material disagreement whether every person can.
The human mind is made of parts that can disagree or get out of sync. Auditory hallucinations are known to science, but telepathic communication is not. So on priors, I would first assume a hallucination. How can we distinguish these cases? At a minimum, I think the voice in your head would need to reveal things that it could not know simply from being inside your head. But even given that, if we’re already assuming extrasensory perception for the telepathy, how do we know you’re not hallucinating and clairvoyant as opposed to telepathic and in contact with an alien? Maybe it would help if said alien had multiple contacts, as this would seem to reduce the chance that they’re all hallucinations, but only if the contacts independently agree about what the alien is saying. But if we’re already assuming telepathy, how do we know the contacts aren’t colluding telepathically behind your back? Maybe we would still need some outside confirmation the alien exists. Can we prove that people are telepathic but not clairvoyant? Can we prove that people are only telepathic with aliens but not each other?
You are saying that you can totally communicate with a non-existent god so that point is only a single sided crux at the moment.
I don’t really understand the difference between clairvoyant and telepathic. Either the contact mechanism is know or unknown. If it is known we can argue what kind of entities can be in that kind of contact. If it is not known there is no point in differentiating between different types as the details could be anything.
While both telepathy and clairvoyance involve a mind gaining knowledge through means other than the known sense input modes*, telepathy refers to communication between two or more minds, whereas clairvoyance usually involves only one mind.
One example of telepathy in pop culture is the Vulcan Mind Meld, where a Vulcan can achieve various levels of mind-to-mind communication through (apparently) touch alone.
One example of clairvoyance in pop culture is Farsight, a Star Wars universe Force Power that allows the user to look at things that are not in their usual visual range.
In this context, I believe gilch is suggesting that it would be difficult to discern between a telepath communicating with a remote (unseen) being and a clairvoyant whose mode of knowing is to hallucinate a conversation, but where no other being is present.
*Known sensory modalities for living things on earth include but are not limited to vision, hearing, taste, smell, touch, balance, proprioception, time perception and magnetoreception.
if the clairvoyant knows any thing ie their experience correlates to anything then the other being is present. But I guess it would be hopeless to establish how reliable the information channel is using that information channel only.
If you have an other being involved in any way the power isn’t clairvoyance, it’s telepathy. The problem is how to distinguish the telepath from the clairvoyant who interprets their unusual senses by hallucinating non-existent “voices” or some such.
I do not believe in “miracles”, in the sense that you probably mean, but if I somehow discovered I was mistaken about that fact, I still would not believe in God (though my prior would be higher than it is now).
Therefore, #1 is not a crux for me. Miracles would be a necessary, but not a sufficient condition. (So this may be a co-crux for me.)
All this would prove is a “Higher Power” of some kind, but the most likely Higher Powers on priors are not The one God in question, but AGIs or aliens, because these explanations do not require the burdensome details of the supernatural. And even if we are willing to entertain “supernatural” explanations (and, as I see it, we must, to include your version of God), then unspecified magical forces or lesser supernatural beings, like genies or even small-‘g’ pagan gods must be considered. Not to mention all of the big-G Gods of the wrong monotheistic religions.
Do you believe in weak decay? Do you think weak decay is a low probablity event? Why does not weak decay fit within the sense of miracle here? Do you believe every kind of chess game that has played out has played out multiple times? If not why are the low frequency games not these low probablity event series? What kinds of events would be raised in probablity if god would exist? Would there be a separating signature from aliens and other fantasticals?
I do believe weak decay happens. For an individual atom, perhaps weak decay is a low probability event, but the weak decay experiments have been repeated many many times. Low probability events happen all the time.
Low probability, but that’s no miracle. Any car you see should have a unique license plate.
I am having a very hard time coming up with any evidence that could distinguish the God in question from other far more probable higher powers.
If the evidence would be exactly the same for god as for other things shouldn’t it be equally likely to be god rather than less likely?
Definitely not, because they do not start out with equal priors. That’s just Bayes. Every conjunctive detail can only decrease the prior probability, which is the principle known as Occam’s Razor. The God in question is a highly conjunctive claim with lots of burdensome details.
Note also that “The Orthodox Christian God” may have a similar prior to other monotheist’s Gods, when taken individually, but it can’t really be bigger than the set of monotheistic Gods as a whole, which can’t be bigger than the set of gods as a whole, or the set of supernatural creatures as a whole, or the set of unspecified supernatural forces as a whole, as each successive set contains the former set. And if we cut out the burdensome detail of “the supernatural”, then we’re left with natural higher powers like alien teenagers, which is still plenty unlikely on priors, but is at least known to be possible based on established science. We haven’t even established that the supernatural exists at all.
I think in your treatment between different monotheistic gods there would be evidence that would favour one god over another even if both start similarly dysmally low. However if you had two gods and they are indistinguishable from aliens then they should not be distinguishable from each other. I guess there are two senses in that in “evidence we currently have” vs “evidence that could ever exist”. Like I would think that god hypothesis would not have increased probability for flying saucers. But if god doesn’t raise the expectation of saucers does god raise the expectation of anything? If it doesn’t raise the expectation of anything then there is nothing to disagree about because we don’t mean anything.
Do you have reason to believe that valentinlespukhin is in fact using a different definition than he explicitly provided here? The explicit definition was of the form a,b or c and you claim to believe that entities of type a exist. Why would you not believe that the disjunction exists?
I’m sorry, you’ve lost me here? What are a, b or c? What entities of type “a” did I claim exist?
Paraphrasing: By the miracle I understand event or series of events that have either: a) extremely low probability, b) seems to break the laws of Nature or c) have significantly higher probability to occur in the world with God rather than without.
“Low probability events happen all the time”
‘I do not believe in “miracles”, in the sense that you probably mean’
The sense in which you replied to “miracles” seems not to be able to be understood in the literal definition provided, so you either used your own private definition or did not believe that their definition was accurately spelled out. Now the discussion has shifted and there has been an additonal feature added that miracles are connected to christian worship. If you are assuming they have additional properties it might be fruitful to be explicit about them.
Yes, I was responding to what I thought he meant instead of his literal wording there. That’s why I included “in the sense that you probably mean”. I don’t think “low probability” by itself is sufficient to make an event a miracle, and was assuming there was more to it than that, like an apparent purpose for being that way, perhaps.
We can use others as facilitators to help keep us on track. But Double Crux is a pairwise activity. If someone else bites before one of us changes our minds, then you would do it paired with an interlocutor other than me, as a separate thread. The double crux for each pair may be different, so you’re just doing Double Crux twice. But I would be able to read the other thread to understand your position better.