Is there non-dualist theism? if not, that’s the bottleneck making dismissal of theism justified, though ignorance does not excuse inaccurate descriptions of theism.
My problem with Will’s outlook is that if we are indeed being “watched over by a superintelligence”, it doesn’t appear to care about us in any very helpful way. Our relationship to it is therefore more about survival than it is about morality. According to the scenario, there is some thing out there which is all-powerful, whose actions depend partly on our actions, and which doesn’t care about {long list of evolutionary and historical holocausts}, in any way that we would recognize as caring. Clearly, if we had any idea of the relationship between our actions and its actions, it would be in one’s interest, first of all, to act so that it would not allow various awful things to happen to you and anyone you care about, and second, to act so that you might gain some advantage from its powers.
It appears that the only distinctive reason Will has for entertaining such a scenario is the usual malarkey about timeless game-theoretic equilibria… A while back, I was contemplating a post, to be called “Towards a critique of acausal reason”, which was going to mention three fallacies of timeless decision theory: acausal democracy, acausal trade, acausal blackmail. The last two arise from a fallacy of selective attention: to believe them possible, you must only pay attention to possible worlds which only care about you in a highly specific way. But for any possible world where there is an intelligence simulating your response and which will do X if you do Y, there is another possible world where there is an intelligence which will do X if you don’t do Y. And the actual multiplicity of worlds in which intelligences make decisions on the basis of decisions made by agents in other possible worlds that they are simulating it is vanishingly small, in the set of all possible worlds. Why the hell would you base your decision, regarding what to do in your own reality, on the opinions or actions of a possible entity in another world? You may as well just flip a coin. The whole idea that intelligences in causally disjoint worlds are in a position to trade, bargain, or arrive at game-theoretic equilibria is deeply flawed; it’s only a highly eccentric agent which “cares” strongly about events which are influenced by only an extremely small fraction of its subjective duplicates (its other selves in the space of possible worlds). So some of these “eccentric agents” may genuinely “do deals”, but there is no reason to think that they are anything more than a vanishingly small minority among the total population of the multiverse. (Obviously it would be desirable for people trying to work rigorously in TDT to make this argument in a rigorous form, but I don’t see anything that’s going to change the basic conclusion.)
So that leaves us in the more familiar situation, of possibly being in a simulation, or possibly facing the rise of a superintelligence in the near future, or possibly being somewhere in the guts of a cosmic superintelligence which either just tolerates our existence because we haven’t crossed thresholds-of-caring yet, or which has a purpose for us which extends to tolerating the holocausts I mentioned earlier. All of this suggests that our survival and well-being are on the line, but it doesn’t suggest that we are embedded in an order that is moral in any conventional sense.
We are now advanced enough to tackle this issue formally, by trying to construct an equilibrium in a combinatorially exhaustive population of acausal trading programs. Is there an acausal version of the “no-trade theorem”?
I brought up a similar objection to acausal trade, and found [Nesov_2010]’s reply somewhat convincing.
His reply doesn’t address the problem of potentially prohibitive difficulty of acausal trade, it merely appeals to its theoretical possibility. Essentially, the argument is that “there is still a chance”, but that’s not enough,
“between zero chance of becoming wealthy, and epsilon chance, there is an order-of-epsilon difference”
What does that even mean? Does that mean something like: hypothetical lunar farmers in a hypothetical lunar utopia should send down some ore to Earth, and that actual people hundreds of years earlier in a representative body voted 456-450 not to fund a lunar expedition even with a rider to the bill requiring future farmers to send down ore, but the farmer votes from the future+450 > 456? So the farmers “promised’ to send ore?
acausal blackmail
It seems more like a real self inflicted wound than a fallacy or fake blackmail to me, perhaps we don’t disagree. it’s something that is real if one has certain patterns of mind that one could self modify away from, I think.
By “acausal democracy”, I mean the attempt to justify the practice of democracy—specifically, the act of voting—with timeless decision theory. No-one until you has attempted to depict a genuinely acausal democracy :-) This doesn’t involve the “fallacy of selective attention”, it’s another sort of error, or combination of errors, in which TDT reasoning is supposed to apply to agents with only a bare similarity to yourself. See discussion here for a related example.
I also think we agree regarding acausal blackmail, that for a human being it can only be a mistake. Only one of those “eccentric agents” with a very peculiar utility function or decision architecture could rationally be susceptible to acausal blackmail—its decision procedure would have to insist that “selective attention” (to just those possible worlds where the specific blackmail threat is being made) is important, rather than attending to other worlds where contrary threats are being made, or to worlds where the action under consideration will be rewarded rather than punished, or to worlds where the agent is simply a free agent not being threatened or enticed by a captor who cares about acausal dealmaking (and those worlds should be in the vast majority).
My problem with Will’s outlook is that if we are indeed being “watched over by a superintelligence”, it doesn’t appear to care about us in any very helpful way.
The only “plausible” (heh) scenario I can come up with is that a future civilization developed backward time travel, but to avoid paradox it required full non-interaction, so it developed a means of close observation without changing that which is observed, and used it to upload everyone upon their information theoretic death.
I don’t think I really have an outlook, I just notice that I am very confused about a lot of things that other people are ignoring. And my social role is different from my betting odds. (I notice I am confused about whether or not this is justified, about what meta-level policy I should have for situations like this.)
((((I feel compelled to stir up drama for people because they are too complacent to stir up drama for themselves. Unfortunately it is hard to stir up drama by going meta.))))
You’re talking about theodicy; have you read Leibniz on the subject? The most existent of all possible worlds, the world that takes the least bits to specify, because existence is good… Anyway I find it plausible that the universe is weird and that miracles do happen, but once luck reveals clearly how its decision policy works you get Goodhardt’s law problems, so it lies low. Bow chicka bow wow, God of the gaps FTW.
In A History of Western Philosohy, Bertrand Russell wrote of Leibniz that
His best thought was not such as would win him popularity, and he left his records of it
unpublished in his desk. What he published was designed to win the approbation of princes and
princesses. The consequence is that there are two systems of philosophy which may be regarded as
representing Leibniz: one, which he proclaimed, was optimistic, orthodox, fantastic, and shallow;
the other, which has been slowly unearthed from his manuscripts by fairly recent editors, was
profound, coherent, largely Spinozistic, and amazingly logical. It was the popular Leibniz who
invented the doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds (to which F. H. Bradley added the
sardonic comment “and everything in it is a necessary evil”); it was this Leibniz whom Voltaire
caricatured as Doctor Pangloss. It would be unhistorical to ignore this Leibniz, but the other is of
far greater philosophical importance.
and Russell seems to think that “best of all possible worlds” is the shallow public theodicy, and “most existent” is the private theodicy, and they are not the same thing—since privately (according to Russell’s account), Leibniz speculated that the world which gets to exist is the one which has the most entities in it (maximum number of entities logically capable of coexisting). But then Russell also writes that Leibniz may have considered this a sign of God’s goodness—it’s good to exist, and God makes the world with the most possible things… I am much more sympathetic to Nietzsche’s metaphysics, as described in the posthumous notes collected in The Will to Power, and his skeptical analysis of the psychology behind philosophies which set forth identities such as Reason = Virtue = Happiness. Nietzsche to my knowledge did not speculate as to why there is something rather than nothing, one reason why Heidegger could see Nietzsche’s ontology as the final stage in the forgetting of Being, but his will-to-power analysis is plausible as an explanation of why beings-who-happen-to-exist end up constructing metaphysical systems which say that to be is good, and to be is inevitable, so goodness is inevitable.
So Nietzsche wrote a bunch of stuff in notebooks and even started writing a book called “The Will to Power”. He abandoned it but used a lot of the ideas in his last few works. Upon his death his anti-semitic sister arranged the notebooks and abandoned text into “The Will to Power”. Much of it is in line with stuff he published and that stuff, it is fair to say is representative of his views. But where TWTP says things Nietzsche didn’t include in his later works (which were written after the notes used to create TWTP)… it’s likely that he that he didn’t publish those ideas because he ended up not liking them for whatever reason. Plus, the editorial decisions made by his sister were made by his sister… for example Nietzsche made lots of organization outlines only one of which had “Discipline and Breeding” as a book title… that that outline was chosen in lieu of others is a result of his sister’s ideology (which Nietzsche opposed).
I doubt there is anything in there that is so far away from Nietzsche’s actual views that you aren’t equipped to talk about Nietzsche (the stuff you talk about above is certainly something he’s be down with). I can’t tell you what specifically is in TWTP that isn’t in his other books because I haven’t read it- it’s usually just something read by Nietzsche scholars.
(Looking at this comment it kind of sounds like I’m playing status games “You read the wrong book.” etc. I don’t mean that, you probably have at least as good an understanding of Nietzsche’s views as I do. Mainly I’m just recommending that you be careful about ascribing all of TWTP to Nietzsche and pointing this out so that people don’t read your comment and then go out and buy TWTP in order to understand Nietzsche. And of course, just because Nietzsche didn’t agree with everything in the book doesn’t mean what’s in there aren’t good ideas.)
But where TWTP says things Nietzsche didn’t include in his later works (which were written after the notes used to create TWTP)… it’s likely that he that he didn’t publish those ideas because he ended up not liking them for whatever reason.
There are sections of TWTP—e.g. “The Mechanical Interpretation of the World”—which cover topics simply not addressed in any of Nietzsche’s finished works. (By the way, the version of TWTP that I’m familiar with is Walter Kaufmann’s.) So all we can say is that they lack the final imprimatur of appearing in a book “author”ized by Nietzsche himself. There’s no evidence here of a change of opinion. It is at least possible that he would subsequently have disagreed with some of the thoughts anthologized in TWTP—though presumably he agreed with them at the time he wrote them.
On at least one subject—the meaning of the “eternal recurrence”—I believe TWTP shows that a lot of Nietzsche scholarship has been on the wrong track. Many interpreters have said that the eternal recurrence is a state of mind, or a metaphor, anything but a literal recurrence. But in these notes, Nietzsche shows himself to be interested in eternal recurrence as a physical hypothesis. He reasons: the universe is finite, it has a finite number of possible states, if any state was an end state it would already have ended, therefore it recurs eternally. He thinks this is the world-picture that 20th-century science will produce and endorse. And then—this is the part I think is hilarious—he thinks that lots of people will kill themselves because they can’t bear the thought of their lives being repeated infinitely often in the future cycles of time. The “superman” is supposed to be someone who finds the eternal recurrence a joyous thing, because they love their life and the whole of existence, and the eternal recurrence provides their existence with a sort of eternity that is otherwise not available in a universe of relentless flux. In this regard Nietzsche’s futurology was doubly wrong—first, that isn’t the world-picture that science produces; second, it’s only a very rare individual who would take this claim—the alleged fact of existing again in a distant future aeon—seriously enough to make it the basis for choosing life or death. But I have the same appreciation for the imagination behind this piece of Nietzschean cultural futurology, as I do for the uniquely weird worldviews that are sometimes exhibited on LW. :-)
Well, they were personal notebooks- so who knows how speculative he was being. The key thing is, this wasn’t what he was working on when he died. Published works intervened between TWTP and his death. That combined with the sheer implausibility of the metaphysics you’ve described might suggest he wasn’t that committed to the whole thing ;-). It sounds fascinating though.
He reasons: the universe is finite, it has a finite number of possible states, if any state was an end state it would already have ended, therefore it recurs eternally.
Are there any arguments for these claims? I’m fascinated by the (often very compelling!) arguments past generations had for how the physical world had to be. Aristotle is the best at this.
Yes, lots of it. E.g. Leibniz’s monadology is monist (obviously); it’s equivalent to computationalism in fact. But note that it’s not like dualism is well-understood ’round these parts either. It’s really hard to find a way in which you can say that a property dualist is wrong. It tends to be like, yeah, we get it, minds reside in brains, neuroscience is cool and shit, but repeatedly bringing it up as if nobody had ever heard that before is a facepalm-inducing red herring.
It seems that monadology relies on something like Plato’s theory of forms. That fills the role usually played by dualism in theism. Is there theism without that?
Leibniz doesn’t believe in material substance, so in no sense is he a dualist. If you are asking if there are materialists theists- eh, maybe but as far as I know it has never been a well developed view. That said, the entire platonism-materialism question can probably be reduced to an issue of levels of simulation… in which case it is easy to envision a plausible theism that is essentially dualist but not repugnant to our computationalist sensibilities.
If you first tell them, or give them enough information to realize, or strongly suspect, that without this concession by them they fail, then you can get them to agree to very nearly anything.
But those people are slightly different than the versions uninformed of this, people who would reject it.
The unorthodoxy is motivated and not serious in terms of relative degrees of belief based on what is most likely true.
“Fall”? I don’t understand the second sentence either.
The unorthodoxy is motivated and not serious in terms of relative degrees of belief based on what is most likely true.
Often, though on occasion their reasons are isomorphic to stories we’d find plausible. If someone thought it was worthwhile to reinterpret some of the older theistic philosophers in light of modern information theory and computer science… some interesting ideas might fall out.
But yes- I doubt there are more than a handful of educated theists not working with the bottom line already filled in.
the second sentence means I am trying to distinguish between who someone is and who they might have been. Another intuition pump: put identical theists in identical rooms, on one play a television program explaining how they have to admit that all good evidence makes it unlikely there exists (insert theological thing here, an Adam and eve, a soul, whatever) and on the other play something unrelated to the issue. Then ask the previously identical people if they believe in whatever poorly backed theological thing they previously believed. the unorthodox will flee the false position, but only if they see it as obviously false.
Often, though on occasion their reasons are isomorphic to stories we’d find plausible.
That doesn’t mean the reasons we find it implausible aren’t good or can’t be taught., just as teaching how carbon dating relates to the age of the Earth militates against believing it is ~6,000 years old, one can show why what ancestors tell you in dreams isn’t good evidence.
So my conclusion, my supposition, is that if you muster up the most theistic-compatible metaphysics you find plausible, and show it to those theists who don’t know why anything more supernatural is implausible, inconsistent or incoherent, they will reject it.
That they accept it after learning that you have good objections to anything more theistic is not impressive at all.
Got it. Don’t disagree. But it doesn’t follow that a) we should disregard all theistic philosophy or b) not use theistic language. Given that there are live possibilities that resemble theism the circle of concepts and arguments surrounding traditional, religious theism are likely to be fruitful.
But yes- I doubt there are more than a handful of educated theists not working with the bottom line already filled in.
Rationalization is an important skill of rationality. (There probably needs to be a post about that.) But anyway, I think my “theistic” intuitions are very similar to those of Thomas Aquinas, a.k.a. the rock that Catholic philosophy is built on. Like, actually similar in that we’re thinking about the same decision agent and its properties, not just we’re thinking about similar ideas.
Theism without computationalism? It’s not popular, but most Less Wrong folk are computationalists AFAIK. Hence the “timeless decision theory” and “Tegmark” and “simulation argument” memes floating around. I don’t see how a computationalist can ignore theism on the grounds that it claims that abstract things exist.
Because I’ve studied metaphysics? It’s not even a quirky feature of abstract objects it’s often how they are defined. Now that distinction may be merely an indexical one—the physical universe could be an abstraction in some other physical universe and we just call ours ‘concrete’ because we’re in it. But the distinction is still true.
If you can give an instance of an abstract object exerting causal influence that would be big news in metaphysics.
(Note that an abstract object exerting causal influence is not the same as tokens of that abstraction exerting causal influence due features that the token possesses in virtue of being a token of that abstract object. That is “Bayes Theorem caused me to realize a lot of my beliefs were wrong” is referring to the copy of Bayes Theorem in your brain, not the Platonic entity. There are also type-causal statements like “Smoking causes cancer” but these are not claims of abstract objects having causal influence just abstractions on individual, token instances of causality. None of this, or my assent to lessdazed question, reflects a disparaging attitude toward abstract objects. You can’t talk about the world without them. They’re just not what causes are made of.)
Okay, thanks; right after commenting I realized I’d almost certainly mixed up my quotation and referent. (Such things often happen to a computationalist.)
ETA: A few days ago I got the definition of moral cognitivism completely wrong too… maybe some of my neurons are dying. :/
True, but I think only in the same sense that everyone vastly overemphasizes the importance of Babbage. They both made cool theoretical advances that didn’t have much of an effect on later thinking. This gives a sort of distorted view of cause and effect but the counterfactual worlds are actually worth figuring in to your tale in this case. Wow that would take too long to write out clearly, but maybe it kinda makes sense. (Chaitin actually discovered Leibniz after he developed his brand of algorithmic information theory; but he was like ‘ah, this guy knew where it was at’ when he found out about him.)
Chaitin actually discovered Leibniz after he developed his brand of algorithmic information theory; but he was like ‘ah, this guy knew where it was at’ when he found out about him.
I should point out that Leibniz had the two key ideas that you need to get this modern definition of randomness, he just never made the connection. For Leibniz produced one of the first calculating machines, which he displayed at the Royal Society in London, and he was also one of the first people to appreciate base-two binary arithmetic and the fact that everything can be represented using only 0s and 1s. So, as Martin Davis argues in his book The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, Leibniz was the first computer scientist, and he was also the first information theorist. I am sure that Leibniz would have instantly understood and appreciated the modern definition of randomness.
OTOH, Wiener already in 1948 explicitly saw the digital computer as the fulfilment of Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator. (Quoted on Wiki here, full text (maybe paywalled) here.)
(The history of how the idea of computation got formulated is really pertinent for FAI researchers. Justification is a lot like computation. I think we’re nearing the “Leibniz stage” of technical moral philosophy. Luckily we already have the language of computation (and decision theory) to build off of in order to talk about justification. Hopefully that will reduce R&D time from centuries to decades. I’m kind of hopeful.)
E.g. this is what most theism actually looks like: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/ . A lot of it is simply hypotheses about attractors for superintelligences and the Platonic algorithms that they embody. Trust me, I am not just being syncretic.
Please make a claim. Are you saying that if one were to take a proxy for quality like citations to papers/capita of religious studies branches of universities, or the top theological seminaries attached to the most competitive Ivy League Schools, or similar, you are 95% confident that at least 70% of the theist professors believe something like this?
Or is it a stronger claim? With 50% confidence, what percentage of counties and county-equivalents in the United States have most self-identified theists or spiritualists or whatever believing something like this? 50%? 10%?
In what percentage are there at least ten such people?
I don’t see how that is the claim at issue. Most people are incompetent. That tells us little about what theism is. How would knowing the answer tell us anything useful about whether or not theism itself is or isn’t a tenable philosophical position? I really dislike focusing on individual people, I’d rather look at memes. Can I guess at how many of the SEP’s articles on theism are not-obviously-insane and not just if-a-tree-falls debates? I think that question is much more interesting and informative. I’d say… like, 30%.
That’s what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it. Most biologists are mediocre at biology (many are creationists, God forbid!); that doesn’t mean we should call the thing that good biologists do by some other name. (If this is a poor analogy I don’t immediately see how, but it does have the aura of an overly leaky analogy.) If you asked “why reason in terms of theism instead of decision theory?” then I’d say “well we should obviously reason in terms of decision theory; I’d just prefer we not have undue contempt for an interesting memeplex that we’re not yet very familiar with”.
Biology is the repository of probable information left over after putting data and experiments through the sieve of peer review (the process is also “biology”). The more important ideas get parsed more. Mediocre enough biologists don’t add to biology.
Theology starts with a belief system and is the remnants that by their own lights theologians have not discarded. The process of discarding is also called theology. Unsophisticated people are likely to fail to see what is wrong with more of the original belief set than sophisticated ones, they don’t add to showing what is wrong with the belief pile. It isn’t a crazy analogy, but it’s not quite symmetrical.
To call this theism says more about the language than the beliefs you describe. Is the word closest in idea-space to this memeplex theism? OK, maybe, but it could have been “hunger for waffles and other, lesser breakfast foods” with a few adjustments to the history without adjusting anything at all about the ideas. These beliefs didn’t originate as the unfalsifiable part of an arbitrary cult focused on breakfast, as it happens.
an interesting memeplex
it’s interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It’s not interesting as something at all likely to be true.
it’s interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It’s not interesting as something at all likely to be true.
I disagree; certain ideas that theism originated are as likely to be true as certain ideas about decision theory are likely to be true, because they’re isomorphic.
You are reasoning from cached priors without bothering to recompute likelihood ratios (not like you’re actually looking at evidence at all; did you read the article on divine simplicity? Do you have a knockdown reason that I should ignore that debate other than “stupid people believe in God, therefore belief in God is stupid”?). You are ignoring evidence. “Ignore”: ignorance. You are ignorant about theism. That’s cool; you don’t have all the time in the world. But don’t confidently assert that something is not likely to be true when you clearly know very little about it. This is an important part of rationality.
Edit: In other words, you do not have magical inductive biases and you have seen significantly less evidence than I have. This should be more than enough to cause you to be hesitant.
You are ignorant about theism. That’s cool; you don’t have all the time in the world. But don’t confidently assert that something is not likely to be true when you clearly know very little about it. This is an important part of rationality.
You confidently assert my ignorance. That assertion is notable.
you have seen significantly less evidence than I have.
You’re much more confident of this than I am. You should be more hesitant.
Duly noted. Can we share a few representative reasons? What do you think I don’t already think you know about why “theism” (a word that may soon need to be tabooed) isn’t worth looking into?
I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: “The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn’t ‘possess’ the quality of optimizerness—it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium.” And so on and so forth. (Counterarguments would be like “what, there is a sense of equilibrium that implies that this algorithm is a decision theoretic zombie, I think you’re using a non-intuitive definition of ‘equilibrium’” and things like that, or something. It’s better to talk in terms of decision theory but that doesn’t mean they’re not actually equivalent. The parts that don’t boil down to predictions about decision theory tend to be just quibbling over ways of carving reality, which is often informative but not when the subject matter is so politically charged.)
I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: “The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn’t ‘possess’ the quality of optimizerness—it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium.” And so on and so forth.
I think you need to take a big step back and consider what you’ve studied and what you’ve come up with. I’m not sure where divine simplicity fits in your worldview exactly, but in the course of my own decision theory studies, I came up with an issue that seems to shoot down that concept entirely: there can be no decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems, because there are optimization problems for which the solution space is infinite, and there is an infinite chain of progressively better solutions. Worse, the universe we presently occupy appears to be infinite, and to have such chains for almost all sensible optimization criteria. The best we can do, decision-theory wise, is to bite off special cases, come up with transforms and simplifications to make those cases more broadly applicable, and fall back on imperfect heuristics for the rest.
But there’s a much bigger issue here. It looks to me like you’ve taken a few batches of concentrated confusion—the writings of old philosophers—and invented a novel interpretation to give it meaning. You then took these reinterpretations and mixed them into what started out as a sensible worldview. You’re talking about studying Aquinas and Leibniz, and this makes me very worried, because my longstanding belief is that these authors, and most others of their era, are cognitive poison that will drive you insane. Furthermore, your writings recently look to me like evidence that this may actually be happening. You should probably be looking to consolidate your findings, and to communicate them.
Divine simplicity is a hypothesis, what you say is strong evidence against that hypothesis. But I think it’s still a coherent hypothesis. At the very least we can talk about Goedelian stuff or NFL theorems to counterargue a bunch of the stronger ‘omnipotence, omniscience’ stuff… but things are all weird when you’re that abstract; you can just say, “okay, well, this agent is multipartite and so even if one part has one Chaitin’s constant this other part has another Chaitin’s constant and so you can get around it”, or something, but I doubt that actually works or makes sense. On the other hand it’s always really unclear to me when the math is or isn’t being used outside its intended domain. Basically I notice I am confused when I try to steel man “optimal decision policy” arguments, for or against. (There’s also this other thing that’s like “optimal given boundedness” but I think that doesn’t count.)
I disagree about Aquinas and Leibniz. I see them as putting forth basically sane hypotheses that are probably wrong but probably at least a little relevant for our decision policies. I don’t think that theology is a useful area of study, not when we have decision theory, but I really don’t think that Leibniz especially was off track with his theology. (I dunno if you missed my comments about how he was really thinking in terms of the intuitions behind algorithmic information theory?)
I have significant familiarity with Aquinas, and I do not see anything worth reading Aquinas for, save perhaps arguing with theists. Insofar as there are interesting ideas in his writing, they are better presented elsewhere (particularly in modern work with the benefit of greatly improved knowledge and methods), with greater clarity and without so much nonsense mixed in. Recommending that people read Aquinas, or castigating them for not having read Aquinas, seems like a recipe for wasting their time.
I saw this after making my Plato’s theory of forms comment at 10:19:54AM.
This is what I thought the article was saying.
the subject matter is so politically charged
Everyone seems to be operating under something like the law of conservation of ninjitsu here. You seem to be perhaps the worst offender, with gratuitous offensiveness and the like being approximately equal among all of the few theists here and the many atheists.
In this thread alone:
Sadly Less Wrong seems to know absolutely nothing about theism, which ends up with me repeatedly facepalming when people feel obliged to demonstrate how incredibly confident they are that theism is stupid and worth going out of their way to signal contempt for.
It tends to be like, yeah, we get it, minds reside in brains, neuroscience is cool and shit, but repeatedly bringing it up as if nobody had ever heard that before is a facepalm-inducing red herring.
theism is a less naive perspective on cosmology-morality than atheism is
Also bad is how you characterize what LW thinks, this seems like a artificial way to pretend you have the only or best informed position by averaging many people on here with the people who do’t know and don’t care to know about things that the best evidence they have shows are elaborate rationalizations and meta-hipsterism by intellectuals.
Is there non-dualist theism? if not, that’s the bottleneck making dismissal of theism justified, though ignorance does not excuse inaccurate descriptions of theism.
My problem with Will’s outlook is that if we are indeed being “watched over by a superintelligence”, it doesn’t appear to care about us in any very helpful way. Our relationship to it is therefore more about survival than it is about morality. According to the scenario, there is some thing out there which is all-powerful, whose actions depend partly on our actions, and which doesn’t care about {long list of evolutionary and historical holocausts}, in any way that we would recognize as caring. Clearly, if we had any idea of the relationship between our actions and its actions, it would be in one’s interest, first of all, to act so that it would not allow various awful things to happen to you and anyone you care about, and second, to act so that you might gain some advantage from its powers.
It appears that the only distinctive reason Will has for entertaining such a scenario is the usual malarkey about timeless game-theoretic equilibria… A while back, I was contemplating a post, to be called “Towards a critique of acausal reason”, which was going to mention three fallacies of timeless decision theory: acausal democracy, acausal trade, acausal blackmail. The last two arise from a fallacy of selective attention: to believe them possible, you must only pay attention to possible worlds which only care about you in a highly specific way. But for any possible world where there is an intelligence simulating your response and which will do X if you do Y, there is another possible world where there is an intelligence which will do X if you don’t do Y. And the actual multiplicity of worlds in which intelligences make decisions on the basis of decisions made by agents in other possible worlds that they are simulating it is vanishingly small, in the set of all possible worlds. Why the hell would you base your decision, regarding what to do in your own reality, on the opinions or actions of a possible entity in another world? You may as well just flip a coin. The whole idea that intelligences in causally disjoint worlds are in a position to trade, bargain, or arrive at game-theoretic equilibria is deeply flawed; it’s only a highly eccentric agent which “cares” strongly about events which are influenced by only an extremely small fraction of its subjective duplicates (its other selves in the space of possible worlds). So some of these “eccentric agents” may genuinely “do deals”, but there is no reason to think that they are anything more than a vanishingly small minority among the total population of the multiverse. (Obviously it would be desirable for people trying to work rigorously in TDT to make this argument in a rigorous form, but I don’t see anything that’s going to change the basic conclusion.)
So that leaves us in the more familiar situation, of possibly being in a simulation, or possibly facing the rise of a superintelligence in the near future, or possibly being somewhere in the guts of a cosmic superintelligence which either just tolerates our existence because we haven’t crossed thresholds-of-caring yet, or which has a purpose for us which extends to tolerating the holocausts I mentioned earlier. All of this suggests that our survival and well-being are on the line, but it doesn’t suggest that we are embedded in an order that is moral in any conventional sense.
I brought up a similar objection to acausal trade, and found Nesov’s reply somewhat convincing. What do you think?
We are now advanced enough to tackle this issue formally, by trying to construct an equilibrium in a combinatorially exhaustive population of acausal trading programs. Is there an acausal version of the “no-trade theorem”?
His reply doesn’t address the problem of potentially prohibitive difficulty of acausal trade, it merely appeals to its theoretical possibility. Essentially, the argument is that “there is still a chance”, but that’s not enough,
What does that even mean? Does that mean something like: hypothetical lunar farmers in a hypothetical lunar utopia should send down some ore to Earth, and that actual people hundreds of years earlier in a representative body voted 456-450 not to fund a lunar expedition even with a rider to the bill requiring future farmers to send down ore, but the farmer votes from the future+450 > 456? So the farmers “promised’ to send ore?
It seems more like a real self inflicted wound than a fallacy or fake blackmail to me, perhaps we don’t disagree. it’s something that is real if one has certain patterns of mind that one could self modify away from, I think.
By “acausal democracy”, I mean the attempt to justify the practice of democracy—specifically, the act of voting—with timeless decision theory. No-one until you has attempted to depict a genuinely acausal democracy :-) This doesn’t involve the “fallacy of selective attention”, it’s another sort of error, or combination of errors, in which TDT reasoning is supposed to apply to agents with only a bare similarity to yourself. See discussion here for a related example.
I also think we agree regarding acausal blackmail, that for a human being it can only be a mistake. Only one of those “eccentric agents” with a very peculiar utility function or decision architecture could rationally be susceptible to acausal blackmail—its decision procedure would have to insist that “selective attention” (to just those possible worlds where the specific blackmail threat is being made) is important, rather than attending to other worlds where contrary threats are being made, or to worlds where the action under consideration will be rewarded rather than punished, or to worlds where the agent is simply a free agent not being threatened or enticed by a captor who cares about acausal dealmaking (and those worlds should be in the vast majority).
Right, humans can’t even do straightforward causal reasoning, let alone weird superrational reasoning.
The only “plausible” (heh) scenario I can come up with is that a future civilization developed backward time travel, but to avoid paradox it required full non-interaction, so it developed a means of close observation without changing that which is observed, and used it to upload everyone upon their information theoretic death.
I don’t think I really have an outlook, I just notice that I am very confused about a lot of things that other people are ignoring. And my social role is different from my betting odds. (I notice I am confused about whether or not this is justified, about what meta-level policy I should have for situations like this.)
((((I feel compelled to stir up drama for people because they are too complacent to stir up drama for themselves. Unfortunately it is hard to stir up drama by going meta.))))
You’re talking about theodicy; have you read Leibniz on the subject? The most existent of all possible worlds, the world that takes the least bits to specify, because existence is good… Anyway I find it plausible that the universe is weird and that miracles do happen, but once luck reveals clearly how its decision policy works you get Goodhardt’s law problems, so it lies low. Bow chicka bow wow, God of the gaps FTW.
In A History of Western Philosohy, Bertrand Russell wrote of Leibniz that
and Russell seems to think that “best of all possible worlds” is the shallow public theodicy, and “most existent” is the private theodicy, and they are not the same thing—since privately (according to Russell’s account), Leibniz speculated that the world which gets to exist is the one which has the most entities in it (maximum number of entities logically capable of coexisting). But then Russell also writes that Leibniz may have considered this a sign of God’s goodness—it’s good to exist, and God makes the world with the most possible things… I am much more sympathetic to Nietzsche’s metaphysics, as described in the posthumous notes collected in The Will to Power, and his skeptical analysis of the psychology behind philosophies which set forth identities such as Reason = Virtue = Happiness. Nietzsche to my knowledge did not speculate as to why there is something rather than nothing, one reason why Heidegger could see Nietzsche’s ontology as the final stage in the forgetting of Being, but his will-to-power analysis is plausible as an explanation of why beings-who-happen-to-exist end up constructing metaphysical systems which say that to be is good, and to be is inevitable, so goodness is inevitable.
The Will to Power is universally regarded as not representative of Nietzsche’s views.
So what parts would he have disagreed with?
So Nietzsche wrote a bunch of stuff in notebooks and even started writing a book called “The Will to Power”. He abandoned it but used a lot of the ideas in his last few works. Upon his death his anti-semitic sister arranged the notebooks and abandoned text into “The Will to Power”. Much of it is in line with stuff he published and that stuff, it is fair to say is representative of his views. But where TWTP says things Nietzsche didn’t include in his later works (which were written after the notes used to create TWTP)… it’s likely that he that he didn’t publish those ideas because he ended up not liking them for whatever reason. Plus, the editorial decisions made by his sister were made by his sister… for example Nietzsche made lots of organization outlines only one of which had “Discipline and Breeding” as a book title… that that outline was chosen in lieu of others is a result of his sister’s ideology (which Nietzsche opposed).
I doubt there is anything in there that is so far away from Nietzsche’s actual views that you aren’t equipped to talk about Nietzsche (the stuff you talk about above is certainly something he’s be down with). I can’t tell you what specifically is in TWTP that isn’t in his other books because I haven’t read it- it’s usually just something read by Nietzsche scholars.
(Looking at this comment it kind of sounds like I’m playing status games “You read the wrong book.” etc. I don’t mean that, you probably have at least as good an understanding of Nietzsche’s views as I do. Mainly I’m just recommending that you be careful about ascribing all of TWTP to Nietzsche and pointing this out so that people don’t read your comment and then go out and buy TWTP in order to understand Nietzsche. And of course, just because Nietzsche didn’t agree with everything in the book doesn’t mean what’s in there aren’t good ideas.)
I agree with much of what you say, except
There are sections of TWTP—e.g. “The Mechanical Interpretation of the World”—which cover topics simply not addressed in any of Nietzsche’s finished works. (By the way, the version of TWTP that I’m familiar with is Walter Kaufmann’s.) So all we can say is that they lack the final imprimatur of appearing in a book “author”ized by Nietzsche himself. There’s no evidence here of a change of opinion. It is at least possible that he would subsequently have disagreed with some of the thoughts anthologized in TWTP—though presumably he agreed with them at the time he wrote them.
On at least one subject—the meaning of the “eternal recurrence”—I believe TWTP shows that a lot of Nietzsche scholarship has been on the wrong track. Many interpreters have said that the eternal recurrence is a state of mind, or a metaphor, anything but a literal recurrence. But in these notes, Nietzsche shows himself to be interested in eternal recurrence as a physical hypothesis. He reasons: the universe is finite, it has a finite number of possible states, if any state was an end state it would already have ended, therefore it recurs eternally. He thinks this is the world-picture that 20th-century science will produce and endorse. And then—this is the part I think is hilarious—he thinks that lots of people will kill themselves because they can’t bear the thought of their lives being repeated infinitely often in the future cycles of time. The “superman” is supposed to be someone who finds the eternal recurrence a joyous thing, because they love their life and the whole of existence, and the eternal recurrence provides their existence with a sort of eternity that is otherwise not available in a universe of relentless flux. In this regard Nietzsche’s futurology was doubly wrong—first, that isn’t the world-picture that science produces; second, it’s only a very rare individual who would take this claim—the alleged fact of existing again in a distant future aeon—seriously enough to make it the basis for choosing life or death. But I have the same appreciation for the imagination behind this piece of Nietzschean cultural futurology, as I do for the uniquely weird worldviews that are sometimes exhibited on LW. :-)
Well, they were personal notebooks- so who knows how speculative he was being. The key thing is, this wasn’t what he was working on when he died. Published works intervened between TWTP and his death. That combined with the sheer implausibility of the metaphysics you’ve described might suggest he wasn’t that committed to the whole thing ;-). It sounds fascinating though.
Are there any arguments for these claims? I’m fascinated by the (often very compelling!) arguments past generations had for how the physical world had to be. Aristotle is the best at this.
Weird, I’m pretty sure that was in the original.
And I thought it was Voltaire’s satire of Leibniz.
Here: http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Leibniz%20-%20Theodicy.htm
Oh. Yes, the idea was in Leibniz, but the specific quote is Voltaire’s, I believe.
Speaking of Voltaire, his theism is a really good example of meta-contrarianism.
Ah, got it.
Yes, lots of it. E.g. Leibniz’s monadology is monist (obviously); it’s equivalent to computationalism in fact. But note that it’s not like dualism is well-understood ’round these parts either. It’s really hard to find a way in which you can say that a property dualist is wrong. It tends to be like, yeah, we get it, minds reside in brains, neuroscience is cool and shit, but repeatedly bringing it up as if nobody had ever heard that before is a facepalm-inducing red herring.
It seems that monadology relies on something like Plato’s theory of forms. That fills the role usually played by dualism in theism. Is there theism without that?
Leibniz doesn’t believe in material substance, so in no sense is he a dualist. If you are asking if there are materialists theists- eh, maybe but as far as I know it has never been a well developed view. That said, the entire platonism-materialism question can probably be reduced to an issue of levels of simulation… in which case it is easy to envision a plausible theism that is essentially dualist but not repugnant to our computationalist sensibilities.
It would be repugnant to their sensibilities if you described in detail the sorts of scenarios that comply with our sensibilities.
For most, probably. But you might be surprised how much unorthodoxy is out there.
If you first tell them, or give them enough information to realize, or strongly suspect, that without this concession by them they fail, then you can get them to agree to very nearly anything.
But those people are slightly different than the versions uninformed of this, people who would reject it.
The unorthodoxy is motivated and not serious in terms of relative degrees of belief based on what is most likely true.
“Fall”? I don’t understand the second sentence either.
Often, though on occasion their reasons are isomorphic to stories we’d find plausible. If someone thought it was worthwhile to reinterpret some of the older theistic philosophers in light of modern information theory and computer science… some interesting ideas might fall out.
But yes- I doubt there are more than a handful of educated theists not working with the bottom line already filled in.
Edited “fall” to “fail”.
the second sentence means I am trying to distinguish between who someone is and who they might have been. Another intuition pump: put identical theists in identical rooms, on one play a television program explaining how they have to admit that all good evidence makes it unlikely there exists (insert theological thing here, an Adam and eve, a soul, whatever) and on the other play something unrelated to the issue. Then ask the previously identical people if they believe in whatever poorly backed theological thing they previously believed. the unorthodox will flee the false position, but only if they see it as obviously false.
Something like this.
That doesn’t mean the reasons we find it implausible aren’t good or can’t be taught., just as teaching how carbon dating relates to the age of the Earth militates against believing it is ~6,000 years old, one can show why what ancestors tell you in dreams isn’t good evidence.
So my conclusion, my supposition, is that if you muster up the most theistic-compatible metaphysics you find plausible, and show it to those theists who don’t know why anything more supernatural is implausible, inconsistent or incoherent, they will reject it.
That they accept it after learning that you have good objections to anything more theistic is not impressive at all.
Got it. Don’t disagree. But it doesn’t follow that a) we should disregard all theistic philosophy or b) not use theistic language. Given that there are live possibilities that resemble theism the circle of concepts and arguments surrounding traditional, religious theism are likely to be fruitful.
Immortals with infinite mind space definitely should not ignore theistic philosophy.
It’s sometimes useful to use theistic language, sometimes not. Usually when I see it when theism isn’t a subject, it isn’t useful.
Rationalization is an important skill of rationality. (There probably needs to be a post about that.) But anyway, I think my “theistic” intuitions are very similar to those of Thomas Aquinas, a.k.a. the rock that Catholic philosophy is built on. Like, actually similar in that we’re thinking about the same decision agent and its properties, not just we’re thinking about similar ideas.
Theism without computationalism? It’s not popular, but most Less Wrong folk are computationalists AFAIK. Hence the “timeless decision theory” and “Tegmark” and “simulation argument” memes floating around. I don’t see how a computationalist can ignore theism on the grounds that it claims that abstract things exist.
I do not think Plato’s forms are equivalent to computationalism.
Modern platonism is just the view that abstract objects exist.
Do they causally do anything?
Of course not.
What? Of course abstract objects have causal influence… why do you think people don’t think they do?
Because I’ve studied metaphysics? It’s not even a quirky feature of abstract objects it’s often how they are defined. Now that distinction may be merely an indexical one—the physical universe could be an abstraction in some other physical universe and we just call ours ‘concrete’ because we’re in it. But the distinction is still true.
If you can give an instance of an abstract object exerting causal influence that would be big news in metaphysics.
(Note that an abstract object exerting causal influence is not the same as tokens of that abstraction exerting causal influence due features that the token possesses in virtue of being a token of that abstract object. That is “Bayes Theorem caused me to realize a lot of my beliefs were wrong” is referring to the copy of Bayes Theorem in your brain, not the Platonic entity. There are also type-causal statements like “Smoking causes cancer” but these are not claims of abstract objects having causal influence just abstractions on individual, token instances of causality. None of this, or my assent to lessdazed question, reflects a disparaging attitude toward abstract objects. You can’t talk about the world without them. They’re just not what causes are made of.)
Okay, thanks; right after commenting I realized I’d almost certainly mixed up my quotation and referent. (Such things often happen to a computationalist.)
ETA: A few days ago I got the definition of moral cognitivism completely wrong too… maybe some of my neurons are dying. :/
Metaphysics of abstract processes: Pythagoras → Leibniz → Turing. Platonism → monadology → algorithmic information theory.
Math and logics: Archimedes et al → Leibniz → Turing. Logic → symbolic logic → theory of computation.
Philosophy of cognition: (haven’t researched yet) → Leibniz → Turing. ? → alphabet of thought → Church-Turing thesis.
Computer engineering: Archimedes → Pascal-Leibniz → Turing. Antikythera mechanism → symbolic calculator → computer.
I think you’re vastly over emphasizing the historic importance of Leibniz.
True, but I think only in the same sense that everyone vastly overemphasizes the importance of Babbage. They both made cool theoretical advances that didn’t have much of an effect on later thinking. This gives a sort of distorted view of cause and effect but the counterfactual worlds are actually worth figuring in to your tale in this case. Wow that would take too long to write out clearly, but maybe it kinda makes sense. (Chaitin actually discovered Leibniz after he developed his brand of algorithmic information theory; but he was like ‘ah, this guy knew where it was at’ when he found out about him.)
Interesting! You have a cite?
This is the original essay I read, I think: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/chaitin.htm
It’ll take a few minutes, Googling Leibniz+Chaitin gives a lot of plausible hits.
OTOH, Wiener already in 1948 explicitly saw the digital computer as the fulfilment of Leibniz’s calculus ratiocinator. (Quoted on Wiki here, full text (maybe paywalled) here.)
(The history of how the idea of computation got formulated is really pertinent for FAI researchers. Justification is a lot like computation. I think we’re nearing the “Leibniz stage” of technical moral philosophy. Luckily we already have the language of computation (and decision theory) to build off of in order to talk about justification. Hopefully that will reduce R&D time from centuries to decades. I’m kind of hopeful.)
E.g. this is what most theism actually looks like: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/divine-simplicity/ . A lot of it is simply hypotheses about attractors for superintelligences and the Platonic algorithms that they embody. Trust me, I am not just being syncretic.
Please make a claim. Are you saying that if one were to take a proxy for quality like citations to papers/capita of religious studies branches of universities, or the top theological seminaries attached to the most competitive Ivy League Schools, or similar, you are 95% confident that at least 70% of the theist professors believe something like this?
Or is it a stronger claim? With 50% confidence, what percentage of counties and county-equivalents in the United States have most self-identified theists or spiritualists or whatever believing something like this? 50%? 10%?
In what percentage are there at least ten such people?
I don’t see how that is the claim at issue. Most people are incompetent. That tells us little about what theism is. How would knowing the answer tell us anything useful about whether or not theism itself is or isn’t a tenable philosophical position? I really dislike focusing on individual people, I’d rather look at memes. Can I guess at how many of the SEP’s articles on theism are not-obviously-insane and not just if-a-tree-falls debates? I think that question is much more interesting and informative. I’d say… like, 30%.
Why call it “theism”?
That’s what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls it. Most biologists are mediocre at biology (many are creationists, God forbid!); that doesn’t mean we should call the thing that good biologists do by some other name. (If this is a poor analogy I don’t immediately see how, but it does have the aura of an overly leaky analogy.) If you asked “why reason in terms of theism instead of decision theory?” then I’d say “well we should obviously reason in terms of decision theory; I’d just prefer we not have undue contempt for an interesting memeplex that we’re not yet very familiar with”.
Biology is the repository of probable information left over after putting data and experiments through the sieve of peer review (the process is also “biology”). The more important ideas get parsed more. Mediocre enough biologists don’t add to biology.
Theology starts with a belief system and is the remnants that by their own lights theologians have not discarded. The process of discarding is also called theology. Unsophisticated people are likely to fail to see what is wrong with more of the original belief set than sophisticated ones, they don’t add to showing what is wrong with the belief pile. It isn’t a crazy analogy, but it’s not quite symmetrical.
To call this theism says more about the language than the beliefs you describe. Is the word closest in idea-space to this memeplex theism? OK, maybe, but it could have been “hunger for waffles and other, lesser breakfast foods” with a few adjustments to the history without adjusting anything at all about the ideas. These beliefs didn’t originate as the unfalsifiable part of an arbitrary cult focused on breakfast, as it happens.
it’s interesting as the least easy to falsify, arguably unfalsifiable core of motivated, unjustified belief. It’s not interesting as something at all likely to be true.
I disagree; certain ideas that theism originated are as likely to be true as certain ideas about decision theory are likely to be true, because they’re isomorphic.
You are reasoning from cached priors without bothering to recompute likelihood ratios (not like you’re actually looking at evidence at all; did you read the article on divine simplicity? Do you have a knockdown reason that I should ignore that debate other than “stupid people believe in God, therefore belief in God is stupid”?). You are ignoring evidence. “Ignore”: ignorance. You are ignorant about theism. That’s cool; you don’t have all the time in the world. But don’t confidently assert that something is not likely to be true when you clearly know very little about it. This is an important part of rationality.
Edit: In other words, you do not have magical inductive biases and you have seen significantly less evidence than I have. This should be more than enough to cause you to be hesitant.
You confidently assert my ignorance. That assertion is notable.
You’re much more confident of this than I am. You should be more hesitant.
Duly noted. Can we share a few representative reasons? What do you think I don’t already think you know about why “theism” (a word that may soon need to be tabooed) isn’t worth looking into?
I can briefly try to translate the divine simplicity thing: “The perfectly reflective Platonic decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems doesn’t ‘possess’ the quality of optimizerness—it is optimization, just as it is reflectivity. Being a Platonic algorithm, it does not have inputs or outputs, but controls all programs ambiently. It has no potentiality, only actuality: everything is at equilibrium.” And so on and so forth. (Counterarguments would be like “what, there is a sense of equilibrium that implies that this algorithm is a decision theoretic zombie, I think you’re using a non-intuitive definition of ‘equilibrium’” and things like that, or something. It’s better to talk in terms of decision theory but that doesn’t mean they’re not actually equivalent. The parts that don’t boil down to predictions about decision theory tend to be just quibbling over ways of carving reality, which is often informative but not when the subject matter is so politically charged.)
I think you need to take a big step back and consider what you’ve studied and what you’ve come up with. I’m not sure where divine simplicity fits in your worldview exactly, but in the course of my own decision theory studies, I came up with an issue that seems to shoot down that concept entirely: there can be no decision algorithm that performs optimally on all optimization problems, because there are optimization problems for which the solution space is infinite, and there is an infinite chain of progressively better solutions. Worse, the universe we presently occupy appears to be infinite, and to have such chains for almost all sensible optimization criteria. The best we can do, decision-theory wise, is to bite off special cases, come up with transforms and simplifications to make those cases more broadly applicable, and fall back on imperfect heuristics for the rest.
But there’s a much bigger issue here. It looks to me like you’ve taken a few batches of concentrated confusion—the writings of old philosophers—and invented a novel interpretation to give it meaning. You then took these reinterpretations and mixed them into what started out as a sensible worldview. You’re talking about studying Aquinas and Leibniz, and this makes me very worried, because my longstanding belief is that these authors, and most others of their era, are cognitive poison that will drive you insane. Furthermore, your writings recently look to me like evidence that this may actually be happening. You should probably be looking to consolidate your findings, and to communicate them.
Divine simplicity is a hypothesis, what you say is strong evidence against that hypothesis. But I think it’s still a coherent hypothesis. At the very least we can talk about Goedelian stuff or NFL theorems to counterargue a bunch of the stronger ‘omnipotence, omniscience’ stuff… but things are all weird when you’re that abstract; you can just say, “okay, well, this agent is multipartite and so even if one part has one Chaitin’s constant this other part has another Chaitin’s constant and so you can get around it”, or something, but I doubt that actually works or makes sense. On the other hand it’s always really unclear to me when the math is or isn’t being used outside its intended domain. Basically I notice I am confused when I try to steel man “optimal decision policy” arguments, for or against. (There’s also this other thing that’s like “optimal given boundedness” but I think that doesn’t count.)
I disagree about Aquinas and Leibniz. I see them as putting forth basically sane hypotheses that are probably wrong but probably at least a little relevant for our decision policies. I don’t think that theology is a useful area of study, not when we have decision theory, but I really don’t think that Leibniz especially was off track with his theology. (I dunno if you missed my comments about how he was really thinking in terms of the intuitions behind algorithmic information theory?)
I have significant familiarity with Aquinas, and I do not see anything worth reading Aquinas for, save perhaps arguing with theists. Insofar as there are interesting ideas in his writing, they are better presented elsewhere (particularly in modern work with the benefit of greatly improved knowledge and methods), with greater clarity and without so much nonsense mixed in. Recommending that people read Aquinas, or castigating them for not having read Aquinas, seems like a recipe for wasting their time.
(I agree with this.)
I saw this after making my Plato’s theory of forms comment at 10:19:54AM.
This is what I thought the article was saying.
Everyone seems to be operating under something like the law of conservation of ninjitsu here. You seem to be perhaps the worst offender, with gratuitous offensiveness and the like being approximately equal among all of the few theists here and the many atheists.
In this thread alone:
Also bad is how you characterize what LW thinks, this seems like a artificial way to pretend you have the only or best informed position by averaging many people on here with the people who do’t know and don’t care to know about things that the best evidence they have shows are elaborate rationalizations and meta-hipsterism by intellectuals.