lisper

Karma: 269

lisper Feb 23, 2016, 8:25 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
OK, I’m getting a little confused about what point you’re trying to make. Most of the time when people talk about what God can and cannot do it’s because they believe God is real. But you said you’re not religious, so you don’t believe God is real. So what does it even mean for a non-real God to be omnipotent?

The reason I’m confident that God is constrained by the laws of physics is that I believe that God is a fictional character. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, it means that He exists in a different ontological category than people who believe in God think He’s in. Fictional characters are subject to the laws of physics insofar as they can only do things that their authors can describe, and so they are subject to the limitations of computability theory. God cannot tell us the value of Chaitin’s Omega to more precision than we ourselves can compute it.

Fictional characters can have effects in the real world. People alter their behavior because of things that fictional characters are reported to have said. But those kinds of effects are still limited by the laws of physics, and generally do not extend to making radical changes in the angular velocity of a planet, hence my confident prediction.

lisper Feb 23, 2016, 8:04 PM
1 point
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
My surprise at finding religious people on LW was not specifically a reaction to anything Lumifer said, it was more general than that. I guess my surprise was triggered more by something ChristianKi said in another branch of this discussion than anything Lumifer said. But this has become a very long and branchy discussion so it’s very likely that any attempt on my part to reconstruct my past mental states will have some errors.

I tentatively concluded that Lumifer was religious because that seemed like the most charitable interpretation of his remarks to that point. When he told me he wasn’t, I update my Bayesian posteriors and concluded that he’s probably a troll. But I didn’t want to say so because my Bayesian estimate on the possibility that he might have something worthwhile to teach me is not yet indistinguishable from zero. But it’s getting damn close.

lisper Feb 23, 2016, 6:31 PM
2 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

I have no idea how clear the chronology in the original Hebrew was.

I grew up speaking Hebrew, so I can tell you that the original is ambiguous too. The GNT translation interpolates the word “Then”. That word (“az”) does not appear in the original. The KJV translation is pretty good, but here’s an interesting bit o’ trivia: the original of “a tree to be desired to make one wise” is “w’nech’mäd häëtz l’has’Kiyl” which literally means, “and the tree was cute for wisdom.” (Actually, it’s not quite “wisdom”, the meaning of “l’has’Kiyl” is broader than that. A better translation would be something like “smartness” or “brainpower”.)

if it was evil, Eve would have known

Sure, but 1) I don’t grant your premise and 2) the order of events is ambiguous, so even if I grant the premise the possibility remains that Eve didn’t know it was evil except in retrospect.

a sin committed in ignorance is less evil than a sin committed in full knowledge

That’s the Ethan Couch defense, and it’s not entirely indefensible. We don’t generally prosecute children as adults. However, it is problematic if you use it as an excuse to game to system by remaining willfully ignorant. A parent who denied their child an education on the grounds that if the child remained profoundly ignorant then it would be incapable of sinning would probably be convicted of child abuse, and rightly so IMHO.

which means that it cannot do or calculate anything that its designer can’t do or calculate

You have to be careful to distinguish what is computable in theory vs what is computable in practice. Even now, computers can do many things that their creators cannot.

My having free will is not entirely incompatible with someone knowing my choices.

You are mistaken.

time traveller

Time travel, like omniscience, is logically incompatible with free will for exactly the reason you describe. But it’s actually deeper than that. Time travel is impossible because your physical existence is an illusion, just like your free will is an illusion. (See also this and this.

I become more and more certain as I continue that what I mean by “quale” differs from what you

Maybe. But if, as you have already conceded, the quale of motion can exist without motion, why cannot the quale of free will exist without free will?

Am I wrong and, if not, then how is this skill useful?

Yes, you are wrong. Coming to the realization that free will (and even classical reality itself) are illusions doesn’t make those illusions any less compelling. You can still live your life as if you were a classical being with free will while being aware of the fact that this is not actually true in the deepest metaphysical sense. As for why it’s useful, well, for starters it lets you stop wasting time worrying about whether or not you really have free will :-) But it’s much more useful than just that. By becoming aware of how your brain fools you into thinking you have free will you can actually take more control of your life. Yes, I know that sounds like a contradiction, but it’s not. You can use your knowledge that free will is an illusion to improve the illusion. It’s kind of like having a lucid dream.

But why don’t you go read the book before we go further.

There are degrees of existence

Not just degrees. Existence is not just a continuum, it’s a vector space.

lisper Feb 23, 2016, 5:14 PM
0 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
Indeed it would.

lisper Feb 23, 2016, 6:44 AM
4 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

God is not constrained by physics, is He?

I’m pretty sure He is.

Which data?

Oh my goodness, where to begin? How about here.

I am not religious.

I didn’t say you were.

One obvious answer is reliance on personal experience.

That’s usually a mistake.

lisper Feb 23, 2016, 2:59 AM
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

On the basis of what?

Um… physics?

I don’t think this debate has a satisfactory resolution.

Really? If you are willing to seriously entertain the possibility that the answer could be “no”, why is that not a satisfactory resolution? It seems to me to be consistent with all the data.

Why are you surprised about finding this attitude on LW?

I guess I’m surprised to find religious people here. Pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless. I’ve never understood how anyone can maintain faith in the face of rational scrutiny. Maybe someone here will be able explain it to me.
What links here?
- gjm's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by lisper (Feb 23, 2016, 6:11 PM; 1 point)

lisper Feb 22, 2016, 10:48 PM
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
I am indeed quite confident in my prediction that God will never again make the sun stand still. I’m a little surprised that anyone here on LW would find this remarkable.
What links here?
- gjm's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by lisper (Feb 23, 2016, 6:11 PM; 1 point)

lisper Feb 22, 2016, 5:10 PM
0 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

Eve does have that knowledge, and she chooses to use it to tempt Adam, an evil act.

That’s not clear. It’s ambiguous whether these events in Genesis 3:6 are being recounted in strict chronological order. It’s possible that Eve “took” the fruit and gave it to Adam first, and they both ate it together. Gen3:7 sure sounds to me like they were both enlightened simultaneously.

But even if we grant the premise that Eve ate first, by what standard do you classify Eve’s tempting of Adam to be evil? The only way you can get there is by assuming God to be good, but are we really justified in making such an assumption? Again, let’s look at the situation from Eve’s point of view: she’s just eaten the fruit. Her eyes have been opened, and she realizes that they’re naked and that this is bad (Genesis doesn’t actually say explicitly that being naked is bad, but it’s strongly implied). Furthermore, the only way to get Adam to see that it’s bad to be naked is to get him to eat the fruit. The only reason not to do this is God’s order that they should remain ignorant. But the mere fact that God wanted them to remain ignorant is evidence that God is not good and hence should not be obeyed. Maybe that reasoning isn’t correct but it seems to me to be defensible. The proposition that getting Adam to eat the fruit was “evil” seems to me to be far from a slam-dunk.

Well, the basic idea is that, if the universe is created, then it makes sense to give any intelligent agents in that universe free will.

That doesn’t make any sense to me at all. For starters, we have a counterexample: humans create lots of things, but none of the things we create have free will because we don’t yet know how. But even if we knew how it’s far form clear that this would be desirable. Finally, free will seems to me to be logically incompatible with an omnipotent, omniscient deity (which I guess makes me a Calvinist :-)

qualia do not (and cannot) exist

This is an oversimplification of Dennet’s position, which is that consciousness and qualia (and free will) are illusions, exactly analogous to optical illusions. Yes, you do perceive redness when you look at something red, but you also (if you are like most people) perceive motion when you look at this image despite the fact that there is no motion. In exactly the same way you perceive redness where this is no redness, consciousness where there is no consciousness, and free will where there is no free will. Yes, it’s weird. You need to read Dennett’s book to understand it. The bottom line is that just as you can look at an illusory image in a way that reveals the fact that it is in fact an illusion, so too you can learn to look at your qualia and consciousness and perception of free will in ways that likewise reveal them to be illusions. It’s actually a useful skill to cultivate.

BTW, most of the time when people get into disputes over whether or not something exists it’s because they are making a fundamental error by assuming that existence is a dichotomy. It isn’t.

I certainly feel as though I have free will

Of course you do. So do I. It’s a very compelling illusion. But it is an illusion nonetheless.

lisper Feb 22, 2016, 3:51 PM
6 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

I don’t think there’s many physical media that can manage a few thousand years in the desert, short of a miracle.

The desert is actually quite good at preserving all manner of things. But this is neither here nor there. If God had wanted a video of the parting of the Red Sea so survive to modern times He could surely have arranged it because, well, that’s kind of what it means to be omnipotent.

So it’s not really prediction

No, it really is prediction: God will never again reveal Himself unambiguously the way he once did. He will forever be the god of the gaps, hiding in the fringes of statistical distributions and the private subjective experiences of believers.
What links here?
- gjm's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by lisper (Feb 23, 2016, 6:11 PM; 1 point)

lisper Feb 19, 2016, 6:10 PM
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

It seems quite different from the one we started out discussing

It is different, and I argued with myself over whether to include the explanation of how to get from A to B, but decided not to because the waters were muddy enough already. It’s one of these things that I thought would be obvious, but obviously (!) my intuitions about what is obvious are failing me in this case.

In any case, if you want to pursue this, I’m happy to elaborate. (Maybe I should write a followup post?) But this thread is already pretty long, maybe we should call it a day. Your call.

lisper Feb 19, 2016, 6:03 PM
3 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
Free will is highly problematic even with a deity. According to the Bible, God created us with free will but without the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and in fact man’s first recorded exercise of his free will was acquiring the ability to distinguish good and evil against God’s orders. This has always struck me as logically incoherent. We who have the benefit (or the burden, depending on how you look at it) of Eve’s rebellion can look back with our ²⁰⁄₂₀ hindsight and our ability to distinguish good and evil and see that Eve disobeyed God and that this was bad. But how could Eve have known that? I mean, think about it: here she is in the Garden of Eden, the second human ever to walk the face of the earth, no Bible, no history, no education, no literature, no cultural references of any kind, and without the ability to distinguish good and evil. So now there’s this big booming voice on her left saying, “Don’t eat this fruit” and a snake on her right saying, “Don’t listen to that clown, he’s lying to you. Go ahead and eat it.” How is she supposed to know which one to believe? From her point of view the situation is symmetric. How is she supposed to know that the Voice of God is good and the snake is evil? God has specifically forbidden her from acquiring that knowledge!

So I don’t see how the existence of free will is evidence of a deity of any kind, let alone evidence for the god of Abraham and Isaac. At best it would be evidence that our brains are quantum and not classical Turing machines, or maybe evidence for some new physics. But I really don’t see how you get from free will to God. Maybe you have an argument I haven’t heard?

Personally, I subscribe to the free-will-is-an-illusion school of thought. This is a corollary to the belief that consciousness itself is an illusion, for which there is quite a bit of evidence. I don’t have any problem with believing that free will is an illusion because it’s a damned good illusion, so I can go ahead and live my life as if I really had free will, just as I can go ahead and live my life as if I’m a classical being living in a Newtonian universe, even though I’m “really” a slice of the quantum wave function living in curved spacetime. That underlying metaphysical reality just doesn’t have much impact on my day-to-day life. I can’t escape this Matrix, so I may as well suspend disbelief and live as if it were real even though I know it’s not.

lisper Feb 19, 2016, 5:38 PM
4 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

It’s a really good analogy, and I like it very much.

Thank you! You just made my day.

Parting the Red Sea and dropping it on Pharoah’s army was hardly a subtle miracle.

Yeah, but those good old days are apparently behind us. It’s a shame that God didn’t think to make a video. Now that would have been cool!

it’s also possible, given current behaviour, that God will simply refuse to cooperate with any experiment intended to prove Her existence beyond doubt...

One of the things that I’ve often heard Christians say is, “God could do X and Y and Z (because He (they never refer to God as She) is omnipotent) but He chooses not to.” The idea of an omnipotent deity whose behavior is reliably predictable by mere mortals has always struck me as logically incoherent. But what do I know? ;-)

lisper Feb 19, 2016, 7:08 AM
3 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
First, I want to thank you for continuing to engage on this. Your feedback is very much appreciated. But we may need to agree to disagree on this.

“Some people get sick when they consume dairy products” would do pretty well.

Some people derive a net benefit from believing in deities, notwithstanding that their beliefs are objectively false. How’s that?

Dawkins

If you want to formulate a question to direct to Dawkins that is phrased in a way that you would accept his answer as definitive, I will forward it to him, thought it’s possible that his recent health issues might prevent him from replying in a timely manner.

In my conversations with him he more than once disagreed categorically with statements that were essentially equivalent (though not word-for-word identical) with the formulation I just gave.

Motl is a buffoon

At least we can agree on that! :-)

lisper Feb 18, 2016, 5:48 PM
0 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

I was aiming for “funny” rather than “rude”; I’m sorry if I missed.

OK, I’m sorry if I was being humor-impaired.

Deafness, like colour-blindness, involves an objectively measurable loss of sensory function.

You’ll have to take this up with someone in the deaf community because I’m on your side of this particular issue. Nonetheless, the fact is that there exist deaf people who vehemently disagree with both of us on this.

So let’s consider why not having empathy

You’re getting too far into the weeds here. I brought up empathy not because it’s exactly the same as spiritual experience sensitivity (I’m going to start abbreviating that as SES) but because it’s a purely internal subjective experience and not relatable to anything that is objectively measurable outside the individual brain that is experiencing it. Of course many of the salient details are different, that’s why I didn’t choose it as my primary example.

religious people have these experiences, skeptics don’t have them

I’m not sure whether you wrote that as a statement of your position or a re-statement of what you think my position is, but either way I don’t agree with this statement. In fact, I rather belabor the point that I am a skeptic who has spiritual experiences, so I myself am a counterexample.

I also think that a fair number of religious people don’t have spiritual experiences. Mother Theresa, for example, probably never had one.

But you were perfectly happy to use its opposite, “normal”, in a way that makes it clear you consider Those Who Do Not Have The Experiences to be not-normal

No, that really is an unjustified extrapolation on your part. Being heterosexual is normal. It does not follow that being homosexual is abnormal.

Saying “group A lacks a normal part of the human brain” may not use the word “abnormal”, but it most certainly uses the concept.

Again, no. Some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the ability to produce the enzyme that digests lactose. This is actually the “normal” state of affairs; the ability to digest lactose arose very late in human evolutionary history. But the ability to digest dairy products is not “abnormal.”

You really are reading more into these words than I intend or that is justified by common patterns of usage.

If you don’t intend such a value judgement, then I am at a loss to understand why even when you say you are trying to avoid loaded terms you are so insistent on, er, using loaded terms.

Because English doesn’t have enough value-neutral words. How would you describe lactose intolerance without using words that make implicit value judgements? The very name “lactose intolerance” has a value judgement built into it: intolerance.

What, specifically, did Richard Dawkins deny?

I was on an Antarctic cruise with him so we had a lot of conversations over the course of about three weeks. I got to know him quite well on a personal level. He specifically denied a lot of things. The overall tenor of his denials was to make clear that he didn’t believe any concession whatsoever should be made to the proposition that some people have firsthand subjective experiences that cause them to believe in the supernatural, even if those beliefs have a net benefit to them. For example: at one point I argued that belief can have demonstrable benefits through the placebo effect. So even if God wasn’t real, the idea of God was real and had real and potentially beneficial effects for some people, and so dissuading them of these beliefs was not necessarily a good thing to do. His response was (and these are his exact words—I will never forget them): “But it’s not true.” Meaning: it doesn’t matter if dissuading people from their belief might send them into existential despair or even cause them actual harm; allowing someone to believe in something that is not objectively true is the greater evil.

you’ve misrepresented exactly what the Copenhagen interpretation says

Well, there is no universally agreed upon definition of what the Copenhagen interpretation is. But there is no question that the elements I presented are commonly associated with the Copenhagen brand, even if that’s not what Motl thinks of when he uses the term.

and have made a mistake about polarization of light

What mistake would that be?

being attacked from both sides is no guarantee of being right

Certainly true, but when one of those attacks is, “What you’re saying is so obvious it’s insulting for you to think we didn’t already know this” and the other is, “What you’re saying is so obviously false that it’s not even worth a respectful debunking” then I actually feel pretty good about having had something worthwhile to say, even if I might not be right.

lisper Feb 18, 2016, 4:48 PM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

Successful technology is not the same thing as successful science.

That’s why I specified modern technology. Computers. Airplanes. Microwave ovens.

Futhermore there’s a lot of science which is not effectively used in technology, do you consider that to be illegimate?

That’s a non-sequitur. Your claim was:

you have to throw out most scientific findings because nobody ever bet on them

In fact, every time you turn on your cell phone you are placing an implicit bet on vast swaths of scientific knowledge. That there might be additional areas of scientific knowledge that you aren’t placing bets on doesn’t change that.

The core idea with betting is to be specific about the terms of the bet.

Here are the terms: choose your favorite psi experiment where the odds of a positive result based on pure chance are objectively computable. Let’s say those odds are N:1. We bet at M*N:1 odds for some multiplier M>=2. If you make M larger than 2 that indicates greater confidence and you get more bragging rights should you win. We iterate until you either concede, or you have won $10,000 from me.

their reason not to participate in Randi experiment was that their effect sizes where lower than what’s required for Randi.

There are well known techniques for extracting signals from noisy channels to any desired level of statistical confidence. Physicist regularly get six-sigma results (odds of resulting by change of less than one in 3 million) from signal-to-noise ratios in the negative tens of dB. This is part of what it means to be “reliably reproducible.”

you likely would want some sort of tamperproof enviroment.

Well, duh. Any intellectually honest seeker of the truth should want some assurances that they are not being deceived.

lisper Feb 18, 2016, 4:06 PM
2 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

What elements are in meat that aren’t in bread, or vice versa?

OK, I was wrong about this. I thought that wine didn’t contain iron, but it does. (I think I was conflating a different argument I was having with someone else over Jesus’s alleged transmutation of water into wine. That would require nuclear transmutation.)

But it doesn’t matter. My whole point was that you wouldn’t have to perform anywhere near even this level of miracle to convince me. Show me any reproducible phenomenon that is best explained by the existence of a deity and I’ll believe.

lisper Feb 18, 2016, 3:53 PM
0 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?
Aha! Thanks!

lisper Feb 18, 2016, 3:51 PM
4 points
in reply to: CCC’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

So, what you were suggesting was basically some form of mirage, then.

It was supposed to be ambiguous, that’s the whole point. It’s a thought experiment designed to get a non-believer to understand what it’s like to be someone who believes in God because they have had a subjective experience that, to them, is indistinguishable from hearing the Voice of God. Non-believers seem to have a really hard time imagining that (outside the context of mental illness), so I thought it might be easier to imagine being someone who believes in trees because you have had a subjective experience that is indistinguishable to you from seeing a real tree, but under circumstances where you cannot share that experience with anyone else except through testimony.

one merely needs to find a way to get close enough to touch it

Yes. Hence the canyon.

if He pushes some clouds aside and says “Look, everybody, here I am!”, then that’ll be pretty convincing evidence

Yes, if God wanted to prove Her existence She certainly could. But the theory is that She chooses to remain hidden because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe. (Unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case you deny that humans have free will and things get rather bizarre.)

lisper Feb 18, 2016, 2:23 AM
2 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

Bzzzzt!

Oh, come on. I thought we were being civil here.

you apparently just can’t help equating not having religious experiences with a deficiency.

That’s right, because I think it is a kind of deficiency, though I would not have used that word if you had not introduced it into the conversation.

There’s a lot of controversy within the deaf community about whether being deaf is a deficiency or just another way of being, kind of like being gay. Personally, I think being deaf is a deficiency, but there’s a significant faction of the deaf community that would take offense at that. Your pushback on this has a similar feel to it.

it involves an actual perceptual deficit

Fair enough. Let me choose a different analogy then: some people have a subjective experience called “empathy” which manifests as a visceral revulsion at, for example, deliberately inflicting pain on another person even in situations where inflicting such pain might provide a net benefit to the inflicter. Some people don’t experience empathy. This is widely considered pathological.

Note that this has nothing to do with any objective judgement about the state of the world. Sociopaths and psychopaths know that other people experience pain, they just don’t care.

it’s really important to you to portray skeptics, or at least some skeptics, as abnormal people with bits missing from their brains that cause them to be in a certain sense blind, like those who cannot distinguish colours

The truth is important to me, yes. But the word “abnormal” is really heavily loaded, so I wouldn’t use it, just like I wouldn’t use “deficiency” without being prompted. Most people are straight, so technically being straight is normal and so one could argue that not being straight is “abnormal”. But by that standard, having red hair is abnormal. That is not what most people mean when they say “abnormal.”

You seem to want to read a value judgement into my choice of words which I do not intend. So let me try this: If you’re white you have a deficiency in skin pigmentation, and this deficiency leads to an inability to tolerate a lot of sun exposure without injury. Despite using the words “deficiency” and “inability” this is intended to be a mere statement of fact, not a value judgement. That is the sense in which I intend such words to be read when it comes to the “ability” to have spiritual experiences. Having spiritual experiences (or not) is neither good not bad, just different.

skeptics reading it could be forgiven for feeling a bit insulted at the suggestion that they need to be told it

What can I say? I’ve met many people who vehemently deny it. In fact, I’ve had a personal conversation with Richard Dawkins where he vehemently denied it. That’s one of the things that motivated me to start writing about this.

It’s funny, I have a very similar experience when I talk to people about quantum mechanics. The world bifurcates rather neatly into two camps: those who think what I’m saying is obvious and common knowledge, and those who think I’m a category 5 loon. And there are card-carrying physicists in both camps.

lisper Feb 17, 2016, 11:34 PM
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Is Spirituality Irrational?

authoritive scientific body

You are asking me to advance an argument from authority? Seriously?

nobody ever bet on them

That’s not true. You place implicit bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results every time you use any piece of modern technology. If you’ve ever flown in an airplane you have actually staked your life on the proposition that scientific results are reliably reproducible.

And, BTW, the reason very few people ever place “real” bets on the reliable reproducibility of scientific results is that there’s a shortage of suckers stupid enough to bet against it.

I’m personally not in the business of doing parapsychology experiments.

Aaaaand… here come the excuses. What a surprise.

I’m not asking you to conduct the experiment, I’m just asking you how much you’d be willing to bet.

For my part, I’ll put up $10,000.