When I first encountered Less Wrong, two or three years ago, I would have agreed with the Oaksford & Chater quotation and would have found it completely mainstream. The intellectual paradigm of my social circles was that one needed to be self-consistent in their worldview, and beyond that there was room for variation, especially as people would have a lot of different experiences swaying them one way or another.
I thought Less Wrong was extremely, iconoclastically, over-confident in its assertion that people should or must be atheists to be rational. So I positioned for a while (perhaps a week) that one could be religious and still have a self-consistent world view, but then I began to see that wasn’t the entire criterion for rationality here.
People most often threw the idea of ‘Occam’s razor’ at me, which I never did find compelling or applied very well to theism, but I eventually identified that the most important secondary criterion for rationality here, which I think is what makes physical materialism different from mainstream rationality, is that belief should only be supported by the positive existence of (physical) evidence.
For example, a theist has lots of ‘evidence’ for their faith, including affirming emotional and mental states, the example of the religious conviction of their friends and family, and the authority of religious leaders. However, physical materialism would train us to reject all that as evidence of a personal God—there are other explanations for these observations.
I think that physical materialism is the natural extension of the scientific worldview. Basically, if you can’t distinguish between hypotheses you have to reserve judgment.
So in the end it’s not enough to have a self-consistent world view. Your world view must also be “justified”, where the criteria for justification is a little different (or at least more strongly applied, since we’re already such a strongly science-based culture) than the mainstream. It’s closely connected to the idea, “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” which is also less mainstream.
This is just to analyze the most immediately striking difference, which is the atheism/theism divide with mainstream views.
The concern with existential risk / AI / cryonics divide would also be interesting to analyze. My first proposal would be that it isn’t so much that these concerns aren’t mainstream, but that for the mainstream there is a lot of positive interest in these things in the “far” mode (we love such themes in science fiction movies) but somehow the LW point of view is to think of these things in much more near mode. I attribute this to a personality or value difference; this paradigm will attract some people naturally, other people like me seem to be immune to considering such things ‘near’, whereas I expect many people would be waiting for a social phase shift before they altered their views.
I eventually identified that the most important secondary criterion for rationality here, which I think is what makes physical materialism different from mainstream rationality, is that belief should only be supported by the positive existence of (physical) evidence.
So, it’s true that all the evidence I use is physical, but I don’t even know what it would mean for evidence to be non-physical. My brain is physical, evidence that can interact with my brain is physical, mental events that my brain experiences are physical. If I had some sort of soul that was not made of quarks and gluons or anything else that physicists talk about, but it interacted with my physical brain, by that interaction, I would consider that the soul had to be physical, even if it is a different sort of physical stuff that anything else we know about.
For example, a theist has lots of ‘evidence’ for their faith, including affirming emotional and mental states, the example of the religious conviction of their friends and family, and the authority of religious leaders. However, physical materialism would train us to reject all that as evidence of a personal God
So, we would not actually dismiss the emotional and mental states as non-physical, because they, having been observed by a physical system, clearly are physical.
there are other explanations for these observations.
That points to part of the correct explanation. The emotional and mental states are not considered strong evidence because, although they are likely given that God exists, they are not unlikely given that God does not exist.
Yes, certainly. I hope you don’t think I disagree with any of your points.
Well, actually, if I was required to take issue with any of them, it would be with the importance of probability in deciding that the existence of God is not compelling. I don’t think probability has much to do with it, especially in that perhaps in a counterfactual reality there ought to be a high probability that he exists. But what is compelling is that once you are detached from the a priori belief he is present, you notice that he isn’t. For me, it isn’t so much a question of “existence” but failed promise.
So, it’s true that all the evidence I use is physical, but I don’t even know what it would mean for evidence to be non-physical. My brain is physical, evidence that can interact with my brain is physical, mental events that my brain experiences are physical. If I had some sort of soul [...] I would consider that the soul had to be physical, even if it is a different sort of physical stuff that anything else we know about.
It seems you might have forgotten, if you were ever familiar, with the pre-materialist understanding of the concept of ‘non-physical’. Personally, I’ve forgotten. It’s hard to hang on to a concept that is rendered inconsistent. I don’t think it was as coarse as ‘these thoughts make me happy, so they must be true’ or that feelings and ‘mental states’ are considered to be independent somehow of scientific analysis. Though maybe. Maybe it was the idea that a person could figure stuff out about the world by thinking in a certain way about what “ought” to be, where ‘ought’ is pulled from some Platonian ideal value system.
Yes … that you can sit in a chair and decide that circles exist, and would exist even if there didn’t happen to be any. That’s there another source of knowing.
When I first encountered Less Wrong, two or three years ago, I would have agreed with the Oaksford & Chater quotation and would have found it completely mainstream. The intellectual paradigm of my social circles was that one needed to be self-consistent in their worldview, and beyond that there was room for variation, especially as people would have a lot of different experiences swaying them one way or another.
I thought Less Wrong was extremely, iconoclastically, over-confident in its assertion that people should or must be atheists to be rational. So I positioned for a while (perhaps a week) that one could be religious and still have a self-consistent world view, but then I began to see that wasn’t the entire criterion for rationality here.
People most often threw the idea of ‘Occam’s razor’ at me, which I never did find compelling or applied very well to theism, but I eventually identified that the most important secondary criterion for rationality here, which I think is what makes physical materialism different from mainstream rationality, is that belief should only be supported by the positive existence of (physical) evidence.
For example, a theist has lots of ‘evidence’ for their faith, including affirming emotional and mental states, the example of the religious conviction of their friends and family, and the authority of religious leaders. However, physical materialism would train us to reject all that as evidence of a personal God—there are other explanations for these observations.
I think that physical materialism is the natural extension of the scientific worldview. Basically, if you can’t distinguish between hypotheses you have to reserve judgment.
So in the end it’s not enough to have a self-consistent world view. Your world view must also be “justified”, where the criteria for justification is a little different (or at least more strongly applied, since we’re already such a strongly science-based culture) than the mainstream. It’s closely connected to the idea, “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” which is also less mainstream.
This is just to analyze the most immediately striking difference, which is the atheism/theism divide with mainstream views.
The concern with existential risk / AI / cryonics divide would also be interesting to analyze. My first proposal would be that it isn’t so much that these concerns aren’t mainstream, but that for the mainstream there is a lot of positive interest in these things in the “far” mode (we love such themes in science fiction movies) but somehow the LW point of view is to think of these things in much more near mode. I attribute this to a personality or value difference; this paradigm will attract some people naturally, other people like me seem to be immune to considering such things ‘near’, whereas I expect many people would be waiting for a social phase shift before they altered their views.
So, it’s true that all the evidence I use is physical, but I don’t even know what it would mean for evidence to be non-physical. My brain is physical, evidence that can interact with my brain is physical, mental events that my brain experiences are physical. If I had some sort of soul that was not made of quarks and gluons or anything else that physicists talk about, but it interacted with my physical brain, by that interaction, I would consider that the soul had to be physical, even if it is a different sort of physical stuff that anything else we know about.
So, we would not actually dismiss the emotional and mental states as non-physical, because they, having been observed by a physical system, clearly are physical.
That points to part of the correct explanation. The emotional and mental states are not considered strong evidence because, although they are likely given that God exists, they are not unlikely given that God does not exist.
Yes, certainly. I hope you don’t think I disagree with any of your points.
Well, actually, if I was required to take issue with any of them, it would be with the importance of probability in deciding that the existence of God is not compelling. I don’t think probability has much to do with it, especially in that perhaps in a counterfactual reality there ought to be a high probability that he exists. But what is compelling is that once you are detached from the a priori belief he is present, you notice that he isn’t. For me, it isn’t so much a question of “existence” but failed promise.
It seems you might have forgotten, if you were ever familiar, with the pre-materialist understanding of the concept of ‘non-physical’. Personally, I’ve forgotten. It’s hard to hang on to a concept that is rendered inconsistent. I don’t think it was as coarse as ‘these thoughts make me happy, so they must be true’ or that feelings and ‘mental states’ are considered to be independent somehow of scientific analysis. Though maybe. Maybe it was the idea that a person could figure stuff out about the world by thinking in a certain way about what “ought” to be, where ‘ought’ is pulled from some Platonian ideal value system.
Yes … that you can sit in a chair and decide that circles exist, and would exist even if there didn’t happen to be any. That’s there another source of knowing.