Anyway, there are a lot of speculations what can be and what can not.
I worry we may be getting lost in the weeds again. We need to try and find cruxes. Is this related to a crux of yours? What exactly are you getting at?
prior probabilities: that all our possible future observations are finite and that they are infinite are not negligible?
Even if time could be extended infinitely without the universe dying, there is no time at which the infinity has been completed. It’s always finite so far.
An “immortal” being with finite memory in infinite time will eventually forget enough things to repeat itself in a loop, living the same life over and over again.
Can this be avoided? There are limits to any physical realization of memory. If you try to pack too many bits in a given volume of space, it will collapse into a black hole. And then adding anything more will make the event horizon bigger. Infinite memory requires infinite space and energy. Maybe with basement universes it could be done. They might have to communicate through wormholes or something. This is all very speculative, so I don’t know.
Well we can also make infinite memory (as you suggested). But, ok, what would you put as prior probability that the theoretically possible observation data is infinite? Looks like you are not strongly against it, so what about something between 0.5 and 0.1? (Of course we can’t strictly prove it right now). If you say “yes, this works” we can move on. If you would claim that this probability is also supertiny, like 10^(-1000) , I will continue to argue (well, yes, if we can not at all observe in all the infinite future infinite data, it does not make sense to talk about omniscient God).
To show you what I am leading to:
-if the total possible observation data is infinite, what is prior probability that it is exactly reproduced by finite hypothesis? I argue that it is infinitesimal
-what is the probability that there exist such infinite hypothesis? I argue that 1, for example, “witch did (copypaste all the data)”. Predictive force of this hypothesis is zero
-we need predictivity so we assume that there are finite approximations that can partially reproduce the data. Such assumption is less strong than assumption of the finite exact hypothesis so it should be preferred.
-therefore, we should use Solomonoff’s lightsaber not on full theories, but on approximmations
-consider two classes of approximations. The first gives exact predictions where it can and predicts nothing whee it can not. The second is weaker, it sometimes gives wrong predictions. Since the second is weaker, the priors for this are significantly higher. So, I would say, if observable data is infinite, most of our approximate theory have from time to time give wrong predictions
-this does not say, of course, how often are these wrong predictions. If they are too often, such approximation is useless.
-Basically, since predictions are laws of nature, wrong predictions are miracles. We should expect to them to exist but to be rare.
-Talking about aliens. Infinite hypothesis “God with such attributes exists” can be used only as approximation (that is, basically, our understanding of it). The finite hypothesis “aliens fake us to believe that God with such attributes exists” also can be used only as approximation, (that is our understanding of God + assumption that it is faked by aliens). Thus such approximation is longer and should be given smaller probability.
well, yes, if we can not at all observe in all the infinite future infinite data, it does not make sense to talk about omniscient God
You are not a future hyper-mind made of basement universes and wormholes. You’re a mortal human like me, with a lifespan measured in mere decades so far. Yet you claim to have knowledge of an infinite God. How did you come to this conclusion? By what method can you make such an assertion? Is this special pleading for a special case or do you use this method for anything else? Why should I consider that method sound and reliable?
My best guess: you were indoctrinated in childhood by your parents and community, long before you were old enough to develop critical thinking skills of your own. For obvious survival reasons, children are very inclined to learn from their parents and elders. The memeplex of any of the old religions must be self-sustaining, or they wouldn’t still be here. They include psychological tricks to produce fake evidence, to stop questions, to make empty threats. They include answers to your questions or at least pretend to. It became part of your identity. You later learned of the methods of science, but they didn’t become a part of you the same way. You compartmentalized the lessons and didn’t use them to update your old thinking. You sought out evidence to support your belief instead of trying to disprove it to see if it would hold up, like a scientist.
Most people seem to use this method. You are not alone. And that’s exactly the problem with it. People are using the same methods to believe in other religions that you already know to be false. How can that method be reliable if it so reliably produces the wrong answers? What makes you any different from them? Accident of birth. That’s it. Your methods are the same.
Maybe that’s a crux for me. If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that reliably produced good results, instead of these obvious fallacies, I would have a much harder time dismissing the proposition as a fraud.
” You sought out evidence to support your belief instead of trying to disprove it to see if it would hold up, like a scientist. ”
1. If I would do this I would never go to this website discussing this with you. Assume good intentions.
2. As you said, for infinitesimal prior probability no evidence is enough. That is what I am arguing here. If I get persuaded that probability is indeed infinitesimal, all my evidence are nothing. I can see resurrection of the deads and still it won’t be enough then.
3. I can blame the same thing on you. I am not going to guess but there are so many stories of atheists who became atheists just because God didn’t do what they asked. “I do not want to deal with such God that does not do what I want, therefore there is no God.”
Ok, let us go back to our business if you don’t mind.
″ If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that reliably produced good results, instead of these obvious fallacies, I would have a much harder time dismissing the proposition as a fraud. ”
First, could you review the previous comment to see if you agree with the logic, and if not, what do you disagree in particular.
Second, if you agree with this logic, you should acknowledge that there is not negligible prior probability that miracles exist in principle. You can claim that they are rare, and each time you do not observe the miracle you can say it is even more rare.
Third, if you acknowledge that the miracles can happen, it is worth looking at the cases when someone claim them to happen in particular. If you have large organised religion (like Catholic, Anglican, Russian churches for example) you very often have special commitee (usually with scientists inside) that check if the miracle that people claim to be miracle, is indeed miracle. Very often they found it to be hoax or natural effect, but sometimes they acknowledge that this is indeed miracle. Other religions may also have miracles, as well as just something outside religion, but there may be no developed institution of miracle verification.
If I would do this I would never go to this website discussing this with you.
A fair point. But I still think you are compartmentalizing.
for infinitesimal prior probability no evidence is enough.
It’s never enough for induction, performed correctly. But an a priori deductive argument maybe could work. I’ve heard theists attempt these arguments, but have not found them convincing.
I can blame the same thing on you.
I am trying to find cruxes, not blame. I would rather leave our identities out of it and examine the question as objectively and impartially as possible. But your epistemology is extremely relevant in this case. It’s the rights of Mortimer Q. Snodgrass again. I don’t think the God hypothesis has enough going for it to even justify raising it to our attention. If we had started with a good scientific epistemology, this would not even be a question. Instead we started with a biased indoctrination, and have to dig ourselves out of it.
I am not going to guess but there are so many stories of atheists who became atheists just because God didn’t do what they asked. “I do not want to deal with such God that does not do what I want, therefore there is no God.”
It’s the availability heuristic again. Who have you heard these stories from? It’s probably not the atheists themselves! You can’t trust the clergy to be honest about this topic. They believe atheism is damnation, and so must present it as a sin. But for those raised atheist with a scientific worldview, believing in God seems as silly as believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
In my case, I was raised as a believer. My perspective changed due to an accumulation of a number of factors. The Problem of Evil was apparent to me in childhood. It introduced a doubt that I could not resolve. The biblical creation story also didn’t align with what I read of science as a child.
When I expressed my misgivings, my church told me that God was a God of Truth, and the teachings of the Church could not possibly contradict the Truth, once it was properly understood. So I withheld judgement until I could learn more. I held both the religious and the scientific worldview in my mind at once, in the hope that they could eventually be unified. I was compartmentalizing, but I was conscious that I was doing so. I could speculate and philosophize in either religious or scientific modes, and I knew which was which. I saw the fruits of science. Computers and rocket ships and vaccines. I had church-related experiences I could only describe as spiritual. Surely they both had to be true?
I studied my faith in depth. I was warned of the sin of pride. I was uncertain how to interpret that, but after study, concluded that the problem with pride was an unwillingness to learn from error. I resolved to always be honest with myself. God was a God of Truth, after all, so honesty could not be wrong. I learned to think more critically. I found many satisfying answers, but my doubts on these points, and more, only deepened. There was evidence against the faith, that was for certain. Doubts remained, but abandoning my faith would mean damnation and I could never convince myself it was false beyond a reasonable doubt.
Then I learned that civil cases were judged according to the preponderance of the evidence, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. In my commitment to honesty, I judged my faith again by this standard. Suddenly, many of the faith-promoting stories I had considered “evidence” no longer appeared that way. They were indistinguishable from no God at all. Once seen, I could not unsee it. Why was God pretending so hard not to exist? So we are less culpable for sins? Then why have a church at all? My faith was shaken (and not for the first time), but still I believed. I resolved to study more, to try and rebuild what I had lost.
In my church, we brethren sometimes minister to the other members, usually in pairs. I was usually too shy to participate, but I had studied enough to know answers from the scriptures. When ministering to one poor sister who was struggling, I went into religious mode and spouted off the relevant doctrine. This happened to be a point I had doubts about. And then the realization struck me: I didn’t believe a word of it. I sounded that confident, and I didn’t believe a word. I had lied to her. And worse I had lied to myself, the exact thing I had resolved not to do. I had so easily broken my commitment to honesty, just by studying doctrine. And if I could do it, so could any of the other members! They could sound so convicted, and yet not know! The testimony of the others I had been relying on may have been founded on nothing but air.
I still had my spiritual experiences, but they had always resisted critical examination. I finally understood that what I thought was the witness of the Holy Spirit, was only those around me interpreting my emotions for me in a certain way. They were spouting off doctrine memorized by repetition, the same as I had done to that poor sister. In another context, the same emotions could have been a witness for a completely different god. My faith was shattered to its very core.
My church regards all others as apostates. I had rejected them long ago. There was nowhere to turn. For a time, I considered myself agnostic. I told my story to a confidante, and she replied with something like, “so you’re an atheist then”. And in that moment, I realized it was true. I’m an atheist. I can’t believe in God anymore, even if I try.
And after reading the Sequences, and understanding Bayes, I realized that the faith-promoting stories I had thought were evidence, and then eventually no evidence at all, were actually evidence against the church. The church had actually been preemptively preaching some of its worst stories, so we would learn to think of them in the best possible light, before we had a chance to hear a more critical presentation from anyone else.
-Basically, since predictions are laws of nature, wrong predictions are miracles. We should expect to them to exist but to be rare.
Due to indexical uncertainty, we can always be surprised by low probability events. I don’t see these as evidence of God though.
-Talking about aliens. Infinite hypothesis “God with such attributes exists” can be used only as approximation (that is, basically, our understanding of it). The finite hypothesis “aliens fake us to believe that God with such attributes exists” also can be used only as approximation, (that is our understanding of God + assumption that it is faked by aliens). Thus such approximation is longer and should be given smaller probability.
Around in circles again, but is there a difference this time? Do we agree “fake alien God hypothesis” dominates “infinite God hypothesis”? When using induction? You don’t seem to be disputing it. But is “approximate God” simpler than “fake alien God”? That depends! How good is your approximation of “infinite”? How complex are your aliens?
But if you want to argue for a non-infinite God, that’s OK with me, but even if you convince me, it won’t be the infinite God you have convinced me of, but the finite approximation: Something more powerful than mankind, but not infinitely powerful. Something more knowledgeable than mankind, but not infinitely knowing… this sounds like you’re describing advanced aliens. They’re the same thing. I would then argue that the aliens are the reality and the “infinite God” is the approximation of them made by ignorant humans.
Even I would be willing to call such aliens “gods” given certain conditions, but we’re using your definition of “God”.
Can you convince me of approximately-God aliens? Maybe. My prior is not zero, but like the pet purple dragon from Mars, it would take a lot of evidence to convince me.
First, could you review the previous comment to see if you agree with the logic, and if not, what do you disagree in particular.
It feels like we are going around in circles at this point. I’m not sure where the disconnect is.
-if the total possible observation data is infinite, what is prior probability that it is exactly reproduced by finite hypothesis? I argue that it is infinitesimal
The set of all natural numbers is infinite, yet can be enumerated by a finite computer program (when run on an infinite computer, AKA, a Turing machine). There are many many other examples of infinite patterns enumerable by finite programs. And some of them, like “compute the digits of pi” seem pretty chaotic, yet their Kolmogorov complexity is small.
One wrinkle, which you might be alluding to, is that no program with infinite output ever halts. This is true, but there are halting programs that can compute any finite prefix of pi. And like I said before, at no point is your observation infinite. It’s always finite so far. The infinity is never completed.
So the hypothesis “these are the digits of pi” is considered by Solomonoff induction, but maybe it looks like a weighted sum of a class of programs that say “compute pi up to the nth digit” for some n. These still compress quite well, (especially for compressible n’s) so their Kolmogorov complexity is small. I don’t think this is an obstacle for Solomonoff induction.
Has Solomonoff induction got it wrong? Close but not quite? I would argue no. I don’t believe uncomputable sets can physically exist. There are no perfect circles. The abstraction called pi is the approximation, for whatever algorithm physics is actually running, which Solomonoff induction would eventually find.
I worry we may be getting lost in the weeds again. We need to try and find cruxes. Is this related to a crux of yours? What exactly are you getting at?
Even if time could be extended infinitely without the universe dying, there is no time at which the infinity has been completed. It’s always finite so far.
An “immortal” being with finite memory in infinite time will eventually forget enough things to repeat itself in a loop, living the same life over and over again.
Can this be avoided? There are limits to any physical realization of memory. If you try to pack too many bits in a given volume of space, it will collapse into a black hole. And then adding anything more will make the event horizon bigger. Infinite memory requires infinite space and energy. Maybe with basement universes it could be done. They might have to communicate through wormholes or something. This is all very speculative, so I don’t know.
Well we can also make infinite memory (as you suggested). But, ok, what would you put as prior probability that the theoretically possible observation data is infinite? Looks like you are not strongly against it, so what about something between 0.5 and 0.1? (Of course we can’t strictly prove it right now). If you say “yes, this works” we can move on. If you would claim that this probability is also supertiny, like 10^(-1000) , I will continue to argue (well, yes, if we can not at all observe in all the infinite future infinite data, it does not make sense to talk about omniscient God).
To show you what I am leading to:
-if the total possible observation data is infinite, what is prior probability that it is exactly reproduced by finite hypothesis? I argue that it is infinitesimal
-what is the probability that there exist such infinite hypothesis? I argue that 1, for example, “witch did (copypaste all the data)”. Predictive force of this hypothesis is zero
-we need predictivity so we assume that there are finite approximations that can partially reproduce the data. Such assumption is less strong than assumption of the finite exact hypothesis so it should be preferred.
-therefore, we should use Solomonoff’s lightsaber not on full theories, but on approximmations
-consider two classes of approximations. The first gives exact predictions where it can and predicts nothing whee it can not. The second is weaker, it sometimes gives wrong predictions. Since the second is weaker, the priors for this are significantly higher. So, I would say, if observable data is infinite, most of our approximate theory have from time to time give wrong predictions
-this does not say, of course, how often are these wrong predictions. If they are too often, such approximation is useless.
-Basically, since predictions are laws of nature, wrong predictions are miracles. We should expect to them to exist but to be rare.
-Talking about aliens. Infinite hypothesis “God with such attributes exists” can be used only as approximation (that is, basically, our understanding of it). The finite hypothesis “aliens fake us to believe that God with such attributes exists” also can be used only as approximation, (that is our understanding of God + assumption that it is faked by aliens). Thus such approximation is longer and should be given smaller probability.
You are not a future hyper-mind made of basement universes and wormholes. You’re a mortal human like me, with a lifespan measured in mere decades so far. Yet you claim to have knowledge of an infinite God. How did you come to this conclusion? By what method can you make such an assertion? Is this special pleading for a special case or do you use this method for anything else? Why should I consider that method sound and reliable?
My best guess: you were indoctrinated in childhood by your parents and community, long before you were old enough to develop critical thinking skills of your own. For obvious survival reasons, children are very inclined to learn from their parents and elders. The memeplex of any of the old religions must be self-sustaining, or they wouldn’t still be here. They include psychological tricks to produce fake evidence, to stop questions, to make empty threats. They include answers to your questions or at least pretend to. It became part of your identity. You later learned of the methods of science, but they didn’t become a part of you the same way. You compartmentalized the lessons and didn’t use them to update your old thinking. You sought out evidence to support your belief instead of trying to disprove it to see if it would hold up, like a scientist.
Most people seem to use this method. You are not alone. And that’s exactly the problem with it. People are using the same methods to believe in other religions that you already know to be false. How can that method be reliable if it so reliably produces the wrong answers? What makes you any different from them? Accident of birth. That’s it. Your methods are the same.
Maybe that’s a crux for me. If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that reliably produced good results, instead of these obvious fallacies, I would have a much harder time dismissing the proposition as a fraud.
” You sought out evidence to support your belief instead of trying to disprove it to see if it would hold up, like a scientist. ”
1. If I would do this I would never go to this website discussing this with you. Assume good intentions.
2. As you said, for infinitesimal prior probability no evidence is enough. That is what I am arguing here. If I get persuaded that probability is indeed infinitesimal, all my evidence are nothing. I can see resurrection of the deads and still it won’t be enough then.
3. I can blame the same thing on you. I am not going to guess but there are so many stories of atheists who became atheists just because God didn’t do what they asked. “I do not want to deal with such God that does not do what I want, therefore there is no God.”
Ok, let us go back to our business if you don’t mind.
″ If it could be shown that a God belief was founded on a sound epistemology that reliably produced good results, instead of these obvious fallacies, I would have a much harder time dismissing the proposition as a fraud. ”
First, could you review the previous comment to see if you agree with the logic, and if not, what do you disagree in particular.
Second, if you agree with this logic, you should acknowledge that there is not negligible prior probability that miracles exist in principle. You can claim that they are rare, and each time you do not observe the miracle you can say it is even more rare.
Third, if you acknowledge that the miracles can happen, it is worth looking at the cases when someone claim them to happen in particular. If you have large organised religion (like Catholic, Anglican, Russian churches for example) you very often have special commitee (usually with scientists inside) that check if the miracle that people claim to be miracle, is indeed miracle. Very often they found it to be hoax or natural effect, but sometimes they acknowledge that this is indeed miracle. Other religions may also have miracles, as well as just something outside religion, but there may be no developed institution of miracle verification.
A fair point. But I still think you are compartmentalizing.
It’s never enough for induction, performed correctly. But an a priori deductive argument maybe could work. I’ve heard theists attempt these arguments, but have not found them convincing.
I am trying to find cruxes, not blame. I would rather leave our identities out of it and examine the question as objectively and impartially as possible. But your epistemology is extremely relevant in this case. It’s the rights of Mortimer Q. Snodgrass again. I don’t think the God hypothesis has enough going for it to even justify raising it to our attention. If we had started with a good scientific epistemology, this would not even be a question. Instead we started with a biased indoctrination, and have to dig ourselves out of it.
It’s the availability heuristic again. Who have you heard these stories from? It’s probably not the atheists themselves! You can’t trust the clergy to be honest about this topic. They believe atheism is damnation, and so must present it as a sin. But for those raised atheist with a scientific worldview, believing in God seems as silly as believing in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.
In my case, I was raised as a believer. My perspective changed due to an accumulation of a number of factors. The Problem of Evil was apparent to me in childhood. It introduced a doubt that I could not resolve. The biblical creation story also didn’t align with what I read of science as a child.
When I expressed my misgivings, my church told me that God was a God of Truth, and the teachings of the Church could not possibly contradict the Truth, once it was properly understood. So I withheld judgement until I could learn more. I held both the religious and the scientific worldview in my mind at once, in the hope that they could eventually be unified. I was compartmentalizing, but I was conscious that I was doing so. I could speculate and philosophize in either religious or scientific modes, and I knew which was which. I saw the fruits of science. Computers and rocket ships and vaccines. I had church-related experiences I could only describe as spiritual. Surely they both had to be true?
I studied my faith in depth. I was warned of the sin of pride. I was uncertain how to interpret that, but after study, concluded that the problem with pride was an unwillingness to learn from error. I resolved to always be honest with myself. God was a God of Truth, after all, so honesty could not be wrong. I learned to think more critically. I found many satisfying answers, but my doubts on these points, and more, only deepened. There was evidence against the faith, that was for certain. Doubts remained, but abandoning my faith would mean damnation and I could never convince myself it was false beyond a reasonable doubt.
Then I learned that civil cases were judged according to the preponderance of the evidence, rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. In my commitment to honesty, I judged my faith again by this standard. Suddenly, many of the faith-promoting stories I had considered “evidence” no longer appeared that way. They were indistinguishable from no God at all. Once seen, I could not unsee it. Why was God pretending so hard not to exist? So we are less culpable for sins? Then why have a church at all? My faith was shaken (and not for the first time), but still I believed. I resolved to study more, to try and rebuild what I had lost.
In my church, we brethren sometimes minister to the other members, usually in pairs. I was usually too shy to participate, but I had studied enough to know answers from the scriptures. When ministering to one poor sister who was struggling, I went into religious mode and spouted off the relevant doctrine. This happened to be a point I had doubts about. And then the realization struck me: I didn’t believe a word of it. I sounded that confident, and I didn’t believe a word. I had lied to her. And worse I had lied to myself, the exact thing I had resolved not to do. I had so easily broken my commitment to honesty, just by studying doctrine. And if I could do it, so could any of the other members! They could sound so convicted, and yet not know! The testimony of the others I had been relying on may have been founded on nothing but air.
I still had my spiritual experiences, but they had always resisted critical examination. I finally understood that what I thought was the witness of the Holy Spirit, was only those around me interpreting my emotions for me in a certain way. They were spouting off doctrine memorized by repetition, the same as I had done to that poor sister. In another context, the same emotions could have been a witness for a completely different god. My faith was shattered to its very core.
My church regards all others as apostates. I had rejected them long ago. There was nowhere to turn. For a time, I considered myself agnostic. I told my story to a confidante, and she replied with something like, “so you’re an atheist then”. And in that moment, I realized it was true. I’m an atheist. I can’t believe in God anymore, even if I try.
And after reading the Sequences, and understanding Bayes, I realized that the faith-promoting stories I had thought were evidence, and then eventually no evidence at all, were actually evidence against the church. The church had actually been preemptively preaching some of its worst stories, so we would learn to think of them in the best possible light, before we had a chance to hear a more critical presentation from anyone else.
Due to indexical uncertainty, we can always be surprised by low probability events. I don’t see these as evidence of God though.
Around in circles again, but is there a difference this time? Do we agree “fake alien God hypothesis” dominates “infinite God hypothesis”? When using induction? You don’t seem to be disputing it. But is “approximate God” simpler than “fake alien God”? That depends! How good is your approximation of “infinite”? How complex are your aliens?
But if you want to argue for a non-infinite God, that’s OK with me, but even if you convince me, it won’t be the infinite God you have convinced me of, but the finite approximation: Something more powerful than mankind, but not infinitely powerful. Something more knowledgeable than mankind, but not infinitely knowing… this sounds like you’re describing advanced aliens. They’re the same thing. I would then argue that the aliens are the reality and the “infinite God” is the approximation of them made by ignorant humans.
Even I would be willing to call such aliens “gods” given certain conditions, but we’re using your definition of “God”.
Can you convince me of approximately-God aliens? Maybe. My prior is not zero, but like the pet purple dragon from Mars, it would take a lot of evidence to convince me.
It feels like we are going around in circles at this point. I’m not sure where the disconnect is.
The set of all natural numbers is infinite, yet can be enumerated by a finite computer program (when run on an infinite computer, AKA, a Turing machine). There are many many other examples of infinite patterns enumerable by finite programs. And some of them, like “compute the digits of pi” seem pretty chaotic, yet their Kolmogorov complexity is small.
One wrinkle, which you might be alluding to, is that no program with infinite output ever halts. This is true, but there are halting programs that can compute any finite prefix of pi. And like I said before, at no point is your observation infinite. It’s always finite so far. The infinity is never completed.
So the hypothesis “these are the digits of pi” is considered by Solomonoff induction, but maybe it looks like a weighted sum of a class of programs that say “compute pi up to the nth digit” for some n. These still compress quite well, (especially for compressible n’s) so their Kolmogorov complexity is small. I don’t think this is an obstacle for Solomonoff induction.
Has Solomonoff induction got it wrong? Close but not quite? I would argue no. I don’t believe uncomputable sets can physically exist. There are no perfect circles. The abstraction called pi is the approximation, for whatever algorithm physics is actually running, which Solomonoff induction would eventually find.