If any man pretend to me that God hath spoken to him … immediately, and I make doubt of it, I cannot easily perceive what argument he can produce to oblige me to believe it .. For to say that God … hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to say he dreamed that God spoke to him.
But if my (not a mathematician) friend says that god spoke to him in a dream, and gave him a proof of the Goldbach conjecture, and he has the proof and it’s valid, then I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.
But then the dream is doing zero work: your friend could simply say God told him the proof of the conjecture, and your situation is the same—if the proof checks out then you need to compare base rate for gods delivering math proofs and your friend secretly having a hobby of being a mathematician and succeeding etc to see whether it changes your beliefs.
And delivering a mathematical proof is surely not what >99% of God’s previous statements were doing.
And delivering a mathematical proof is surely not what >99% of God’s previous statements were doing.
How do you know? People mention “divine inspiration” quite frequently. The point is that the statement is untestable and thus irrelevant, not that it is most likely false.
I don’t think the version with the math proof is meaningless in a probabilistic sense; my point is that the meaning comes from an additional factor unrelated to the dream, and I think Hobbes would agree that in the absence of any additional aspect of God speaking to the dreamer such as prophecies (objectively verifiable, like the proof!) there’s no reason to believe him. But these additional aspects are the strange and unusual things which might oblige Hobbes to believe him, not the speech in a dream.
And delivering a mathematical proof is surely not what >99% of God’s previous statements were doing.
Why is that relevant? To see the flaw in your reasoning replace “God” with “mathematician X” and notice that >99% of mathematician X’s previous statements aren’t delivering mathematics proofs either.
What I’ve observed in myself about reports of “God” doing something I’ll describe as “insufficient curiosity.” I have frequently not asked how the person identified the source as “God.”
White beard, what? No, I’ve assumed, way too easily, that their actual experience doesn’t matter.
And this could also be quite interesting if the person is a mathematician. Depends on what is more important to us, solving the unsolved math problem, and perhaps understanding heuristics, or coming up with evidence that something unexpected is going on. Can’t explain it? Goddidit. Q.E.D.
But then that doesn’t hold up to any decent Bayesian probabilistic analysis.
When you trace the chain of causality for why they thought it was “God” that spoke to them in the first place, you find that they use very vague heuristics for identifying speakers-in-dreams as “God” as opposed to “Some Mathematically-genius Alien”, and then that the source of those heuristics is even more vague and unlikely to be accurate: Biblical readings, inferences from the bible, third-hand accounts from some person who listened to some priest who read the Bible, etc.
So the final compound probability that their source of information was good and they correctly applied the right heuristics and their conclusion that “God” was communicating to them was correct and that it was actually a communication in a dream rather than a dream about a communication and that the proof was given by this communication rather than subconsciously arrived at by the non-mathematician friend somehow… is not very high.
(well, depending on some priors, obviously… if your priors for “God exists” and “God frequently communicates with people through dreams” are very high to begin with, the above starts sounding much more plausible)
I didn’t say I’d think God was involved. I said the deliberately vague, conjunction-fallacy-avoiding phrasing “I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.” That means I’d update P(God spoke to him OR aliens spoke to him OR he’s secretly a genius mathematician and trolling me OR he’s got serious math talent he can’t access consciously OR [more hypotheses I won’t bother generating because this didn’t happen]), with the most likely possibility being that my friend is a genius troll. Then I’d do more experiments.
Ah, yes. I took you to imply you would acknowledge the friend without telling him that he’s probably wrong, or that you’d update disproportionately higher the probability that “God spoke to him in his dream”. i.e. I had assumed an uncharitable interpretation. Doing more experiments on the basis that something interesting happening has suddenly become very likely sounds like a healthy (well, scientifically-healthy) thing to do!
Re. downvote: One single downvote usually doesn’t mean much for posts where I expected karma to remain near 0 anyway. Despite the name and intended purposes of this site, there are still systematic downvoters, karma trolls, generic trolls and biased people around. I’ve noticed (and corrected, hopefully) at least one instance where I was systematically being biased against a certain user and downvoting their comments more frequently than I should. I suspect not everyone is as careful with this.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 13
But if my (not a mathematician) friend says that god spoke to him in a dream, and gave him a proof of the Goldbach conjecture, and he has the proof and it’s valid, then I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.
But then the dream is doing zero work: your friend could simply say God told him the proof of the conjecture, and your situation is the same—if the proof checks out then you need to compare base rate for gods delivering math proofs and your friend secretly having a hobby of being a mathematician and succeeding etc to see whether it changes your beliefs.
And delivering a mathematical proof is surely not what >99% of God’s previous statements were doing.
How do you know? People mention “divine inspiration” quite frequently. The point is that the statement is untestable and thus irrelevant, not that it is most likely false.
I don’t think the version with the math proof is meaningless in a probabilistic sense; my point is that the meaning comes from an additional factor unrelated to the dream, and I think Hobbes would agree that in the absence of any additional aspect of God speaking to the dreamer such as prophecies (objectively verifiable, like the proof!) there’s no reason to believe him. But these additional aspects are the strange and unusual things which might oblige Hobbes to believe him, not the speech in a dream.
Why is that relevant? To see the flaw in your reasoning replace “God” with “mathematician X” and notice that >99% of mathematician X’s previous statements aren’t delivering mathematics proofs either.
Statements in general was not the reference class.
What I’ve observed in myself about reports of “God” doing something I’ll describe as “insufficient curiosity.” I have frequently not asked how the person identified the source as “God.”
White beard, what? No, I’ve assumed, way too easily, that their actual experience doesn’t matter.
And this could also be quite interesting if the person is a mathematician. Depends on what is more important to us, solving the unsolved math problem, and perhaps understanding heuristics, or coming up with evidence that something unexpected is going on. Can’t explain it? Goddidit. Q.E.D.
But then that doesn’t hold up to any decent Bayesian probabilistic analysis.
When you trace the chain of causality for why they thought it was “God” that spoke to them in the first place, you find that they use very vague heuristics for identifying speakers-in-dreams as “God” as opposed to “Some Mathematically-genius Alien”, and then that the source of those heuristics is even more vague and unlikely to be accurate: Biblical readings, inferences from the bible, third-hand accounts from some person who listened to some priest who read the Bible, etc.
So the final compound probability that their source of information was good and they correctly applied the right heuristics and their conclusion that “God” was communicating to them was correct and that it was actually a communication in a dream rather than a dream about a communication and that the proof was given by this communication rather than subconsciously arrived at by the non-mathematician friend somehow… is not very high.
(well, depending on some priors, obviously… if your priors for “God exists” and “God frequently communicates with people through dreams” are very high to begin with, the above starts sounding much more plausible)
I didn’t say I’d think God was involved. I said the deliberately vague, conjunction-fallacy-avoiding phrasing “I would think something more interesting than a typical dream was going on.” That means I’d update P(God spoke to him OR aliens spoke to him OR he’s secretly a genius mathematician and trolling me OR he’s got serious math talent he can’t access consciously OR [more hypotheses I won’t bother generating because this didn’t happen]), with the most likely possibility being that my friend is a genius troll. Then I’d do more experiments.
Note: I didn’t downvote you.
Ah, yes. I took you to imply you would acknowledge the friend without telling him that he’s probably wrong, or that you’d update disproportionately higher the probability that “God spoke to him in his dream”. i.e. I had assumed an uncharitable interpretation. Doing more experiments on the basis that something interesting happening has suddenly become very likely sounds like a healthy (well, scientifically-healthy) thing to do!
Re. downvote: One single downvote usually doesn’t mean much for posts where I expected karma to remain near 0 anyway. Despite the name and intended purposes of this site, there are still systematic downvoters, karma trolls, generic trolls and biased people around. I’ve noticed (and corrected, hopefully) at least one instance where I was systematically being biased against a certain user and downvoting their comments more frequently than I should. I suspect not everyone is as careful with this.
Yep.
Barney Stinson once spoke to me in a dream.
That proves that Barney Stinson is real doesn’t it?