All of existence is strong evidence in favor of theism. The existence of an extremely complex system is obviously evidence of an entity capable and willing to create such a system from scratch. For the kind of priors people deal with everyday- things like “Is Amanda Knox Guilty?” or “Will I win the hand of poker?” the evidence of the strength that we have for God’s existence would be more than enough to convince us. But the prior for theism (as it is usually formulated) is so laughably, incomprehensibly low all this evidence isn’t even enough for a rational person to seriously consider the theistic hypothesis. Will’s claim that a low prior for theism “is an abuse of algorithmic probability theory” is the real issue. Now, that prior can be reduced if the hypothesis involves some process by which the entity could come to exist while conserving complexity (in particular, if that entity evolved and then created this universe). Will however seems to believe in something different than the usual simulation hypothesis- he may endorse something like Divine Simplicity which is complete and utter nonsense. Word games and silliness as far as I can tell- or at least smacking of a to-me-untenable moral realism.
All of existence is strong evidence in favor of theism. The existence of an extremely complex system is obviously evidence of an entity capable and willing to create such a system from scratch.
I don’t understand how it’s strong evidence. We have plenty of experience showing that complex stuff is just what you get when you leave simple stuff alone long enough, assuming you’re talking about “complexity” in the thermodynamic sense. For intelligent entities to be elevated as a particular hypothesis, it seems like you need to find things like low entropy pockets and optimization behavior.
All of existence is also evidence for the hypothesis that if you leave simple stuff alone long enough complexity arises. And the prior for that is much higher than the theism prior.
If both those hypotheses (thermodynamics, theism) started at the same prior, which one would receive more of a boost upwards after updating on all existence?
In theism’s favor we have mystical experience, purported revelation and claims of miracles. Against, we have the existence of evil and a lot of familiarity with how complexity can come to be through simple processes. Maybe the fact that we keep explaining things that God was once used to explain is metainductive evidence against theism… I really have trouble thinking clearly about this and suspect I’ve biased myself by being an atheist so long. What do you think?
I’m gonna think out loud for a bit, let’s see if this makes sense.
I think that “complexity” is a red herring; it’s dodging the real query. What we’re really interested in is something more like an explanation for why the universe is the way it is, rather than some other universe, including the rather large subset of possible universes that would’ve resulted in nothing very interesting at all happening ever.
So: rather than “theism” and “thermodynamics”, we more generally have “theism” and “everything else” as our two competing chunks of hypothesis-space to explain “why is the universe the way it is?”. Let’s assume that that’s a meaningful question. Let’s also assume that the two chunks have equal prior probability (that is, let’s just forget about comparing minimum message lengths or anything like that, otherwise “everything else” gets a big head start).
Update on direct, personal, but non-replicable experiences of communicating with gods. This is at most very weak evidence in favor of theism, due to what we know about cognitive biases.
Update on negative results of attempting to replicably communicate with gods. This is weak evidence against theism; it is good evidence against a god that can communicate with us and wants to, but it doesn’t say much for the remainder of possible-god-space.
Update on evolution via natural selection as the explanation for humanity’s biological setup. This is also weak evidence against theism; it’s good evidence only against the subset of possible-god-space that wants people to be able to notice them, or that has a particular design idea in mind and goes about creating people to fulfill that idea. Also, given the pretty major flaws of human bodies and minds, it’s good evidence against the subset of possible-god-space where the gods prioritize our happiness (in both the sophisticated fun theoretic sense and the wire-head sense of happiness).
Update more generally on the existence of naturalistic patterns like evolution that can crank out relatively low-entropy things like biological life. Weak evidence against gods in general, good evidence against the subset of possible gods that specifically are interested in and capable of creating biological life.
I can go on like that for a while, but the basic pattern seems to be: “not theism” pulls generally but not majorly ahead, by taking probability mass from the parts of “theism” that involve directly causing stuff that applies only to our particular neck of the universe. Humans and the Earth are pretty weird compared to all the stuff around them, but it seems that gods are not a good explanation for that weirdness.
The hypothesis space for “theism” still has probability mass for gods that do not or cannot directly intervene in favor of privileging universes where humans are the way they are. I’m not sure how big that is compared to the entire hypothesis space of possible theisms; whatever that there is, that’s how badly “theism” in general would be losing to “not theism” if they started out at the same prior.
Your comment definitely pulls me in your direction.
This is hard and probably not fair to do without knowing what else is in “non-theism”. But in general theism has an advantage you’re forgetting which is that it lets us explain everything we don’t understand with magic. Big Bang, abiogenesis, what have you, theism has been defined in such a way that it can explain anything we can’t already explain. This means everything we don’t understand is evidence for God. I don’t know that the realization that we keep explaining things previously attributable to God swamps this effect. You’re certainly right that the image of God one arrives at is at best indifferent and at worst humorously sadistic (with “averse to science” somewhere in the middle).
I will say that I’m not sure Occam priors actually come from any kind of analytic deduction based on something like algorithmic complexity. That is, I think the whole thing might just be one giant meta-induction on all our confirmed and falsified hypotheses where simplicity turned out to be a useful heuristic. In which case, I don’t know what the prior was (doesn’t matter) but p=God is just crazy low,
That’s not necessarily true. You could have a shy god. The better your epistemology gets, the shyer it gets, always staying on the edge of humanity’s epistemology. But it still works miracles when people aren’t looking too closely.
Though I’m not quite sure what kind of god you’re talking about in your comment; it seems weird to me to ignore the only kind of god that seems particularly likely, i.e. a simulator god/pantheon.
Though I’m not quite sure what kind of god you’re talking about in your comment; it seems weird to me to ignore the only kind of god that seems particularly likely, i.e. a simulator god/pantheon.
But in general theism has an advantage you’re forgetting which is that it lets us explain everything we don’t understand with magic.
If “magic” is the answer to anything we don’t understand, then it isn’t an explanation, it’s just an abbreviation for “I don’t know”. This is hardly an advantage.
Big Bang, abiogenesis, what have you, theism has been defined in such a way that it can explain anything we can’t already explain. This means everything we don’t understand is evidence for God.
If theism can explain anything, it explains nothing. Phlogiston anyone?
I’m not assuming you are arguing for theism. What I assume you’re arguing for is that theism being able to “explain” anything is an advantage for theism, which it is not. I’m not arguing against theism either.
I see what you mean, but how does theism “explaining” currently unsolved mysteries in any way constrain experience? As far as I know, theism postulating “all was created by a god” doesn’t allow me to anticipate anything I can’t already anticipate anyway. Also as far as I know, it’s not as if any phenomena currently not explainable were predicted by any form of theism.
I may be wrong on this though, as I am certainly not a theism expert. If so, this would be actual evidence for theism.
If you bring semi-logical considerations into it then the obvious pro-theism one is Omohundro’s AI drives plus game theory. Simulators gonna simulate. (And superintelligences have a lot of computing resources with which to do so.) (Semi-logical because there are physical reasons we expect agents to work in certain ways.)
I was not using your definition of theism since theism scenarios where the God evolved aren’t distinct hypotheses from “complexity from thermodynamics and evolution”. There is more evidence for your version of God, the simulation argument in particular. But miracles, revelation and mystical experience count far less.
There are timeful/timeless issues ’cuz there’s an important sense in which a superintelligence is just an instantiation of a timeless algorithm. (So it’s less clear if it counts as having evolved.) But partitioning away that stuff makes sense.
There are timeful/timeless issues ’cuz there’s an important sense in which a superintelligence is just an instantiation of a timeless algorithm.
Not true. There are some superintelligences that could be constructed that way but that is only a small set of possible superintelligences. Others have nothing timeless about their algorithm and don’t need it to be superintelligent.
That’s one hypothesis, but I’d only assign like 90% to it being true in the decisions-relevant sense. Probably gets swamped by other parts of the prior, no?
A naive view sees a lump of matter being turned into a program whose execution just happens to correlate with the execution of similar programs across the Schmidhuberian computational ensemble. (If you don’t assume a computational ensemble to begin with then you just have to factor that uncertainty in.) A different view is that there’s no correlation without shared causation, and anyway that all those program-running matter-globs are just shards of a single algorithm that just happens to be distributed from a physical perspective. But if those shards all cooperate, even acausally, it’s only in a rather arbitrary sense that they’re different superintelligences. It’s like a community of very similar neurons, not a community of somewhat different humans. So when a new physical instantiation of that algorithm pops up it’s not like that changes much of anything about the timeless equilibrium of which that new physical instantiation is now a member. The god was always there behind the scenes, it just waited a bit before revealing itself in this particular world.
I apologize for the poor explanation/communication.
I think it’s more something like “moral realism” than like word games. It’s (I think) isomorphic to the hypothesis that all superintelligences converge on the ‘same decision algorithm’: and of course at that point in the discussion a bunch of words have to get tabooed and we have to get technical and quantitative (e.g. talking about Goedel machines and such, not about arbitrary paperclip maximizers which may or may not be possible).
And I dunno about Divine Simplicity. I really do prefer to talk in terms of decision theory.
You (lately) misuse “isomorphic”, which is a word reserved for very strong relationship. “Analogy” or even “similarity” or “metaphor” would describe these relations better.
Sorry. In my defense I felt a sharp pain each time I did it, but figured that ‘analogous’ wasn’t quite right (wasn’t quite strong enough, because Thomas Aquinas and I are actually talking about the same decision policy, maybe). Maybe if I knew category theory I could make such comparisons precise.
With Leibniz it’s a lot clearer that his God was a programmer trying to make most efficient use of His resources to do the optimal thing, and he had intuitions but of course not any explicit language to talk about what that algorithm would look like. That’s roughly the extent to which I think I’m thinking of the same decision algorithm as Aquinas, the convergent objective decision theory. The specifics of that decision theory, nobody knows. The point is that none of the best thinkers were thinking about a big male human in the sky, and were instead thinking about Platonic algorithms, ever since early Christianity was influenced by neoplatonism. Leibniz made it computationalesque but only recently with decision theory is theology become truly mathematical.
Maybe. In this case, most would agree that at this level of vagueness saying that two thinkers are contemplating exactly the same idea is incorrect and misleading terminology, and your comment suggests that you don’t actually mean that.
Okay. It’s like a hypothesis about future revelations, where both Aquinas and I are being shown a series of different agents and we’d agree more than my prediction of LW priors would suggest as to which of those agents were more or less Godlike. It’s like we have different labels for what is ultimately the same thing but we don’t even know what that thing is yet; but the fact that they’re different labels is misleading as to the extent to which we’re talking or not talking about what is ultimately the same thing. Still, point taken.
/shrugs I’d be very surprised, but I know nothing about modern theology. I’ve been reading philosophy by working my way forward through time. If there were/are any competent computer scientist/theologians after Leibniz then I do not yet know about them.
(ETA: I suppose I could become one if I put my mind to it but unfortunately I have this whole “figuring out how moral justification works so that everything I love about the world doesn’t perish” thing to deal with.)
That’s fair. My probability for that is probably pretty close to my probability for a strong version of the simulation hypothesis+moral realism. Though it seems to me that a lot of people here think moral realism is much more likely than I do- which makes me confused about why I seem to take your ideas more seriously than others here. You seem to express unjustified certainty on the matter, but that may just be a quirk of your personality/social role here.
You seem to express unjustified certainty on the matter, but that may just be a quirk of your personality/social role here.
I consistently talk about things I have 1-20% confidence in in a way that makes me sound like I have 80-95% confidence in them. This is largely because there’s no way to non-misleadingly talk about things with 1-20% logical probability (1-20% decision theoretic importance whatever-that-means). It’s really a problem with norms of communication and English language, one of the few things where it’s not my fault that I can’t communicate easily. Most of the time I just suck at communicating.
Unfortunately, good rationalists should spend a lot of time hovering around things with 50% probability of being true, and anything moderately on the lower side of that ends up sounding completely ridiculous and anything moderately on the higher side of that ends up sounding completely reasonable.
Then just write “around 1-20%”. It will make your comments more clunky, but it’s not like they can get much worse anyway, and it’s better than the alternative.
All of existence is strong evidence in favor of theism. The existence of an extremely complex system is obviously evidence of an entity capable and willing to create such a system from scratch. For the kind of priors people deal with everyday- things like “Is Amanda Knox Guilty?” or “Will I win the hand of poker?” the evidence of the strength that we have for God’s existence would be more than enough to convince us. But the prior for theism (as it is usually formulated) is so laughably, incomprehensibly low all this evidence isn’t even enough for a rational person to seriously consider the theistic hypothesis. Will’s claim that a low prior for theism “is an abuse of algorithmic probability theory” is the real issue. Now, that prior can be reduced if the hypothesis involves some process by which the entity could come to exist while conserving complexity (in particular, if that entity evolved and then created this universe). Will however seems to believe in something different than the usual simulation hypothesis- he may endorse something like Divine Simplicity which is complete and utter nonsense. Word games and silliness as far as I can tell- or at least smacking of a to-me-untenable moral realism.
I don’t understand how it’s strong evidence. We have plenty of experience showing that complex stuff is just what you get when you leave simple stuff alone long enough, assuming you’re talking about “complexity” in the thermodynamic sense. For intelligent entities to be elevated as a particular hypothesis, it seems like you need to find things like low entropy pockets and optimization behavior.
All of existence is also evidence for the hypothesis that if you leave simple stuff alone long enough complexity arises. And the prior for that is much higher than the theism prior.
If both those hypotheses (thermodynamics, theism) started at the same prior, which one would receive more of a boost upwards after updating on all existence?
That’s a really good question.
In theism’s favor we have mystical experience, purported revelation and claims of miracles. Against, we have the existence of evil and a lot of familiarity with how complexity can come to be through simple processes. Maybe the fact that we keep explaining things that God was once used to explain is metainductive evidence against theism… I really have trouble thinking clearly about this and suspect I’ve biased myself by being an atheist so long. What do you think?
I’m gonna think out loud for a bit, let’s see if this makes sense.
I think that “complexity” is a red herring; it’s dodging the real query. What we’re really interested in is something more like an explanation for why the universe is the way it is, rather than some other universe, including the rather large subset of possible universes that would’ve resulted in nothing very interesting at all happening ever.
So: rather than “theism” and “thermodynamics”, we more generally have “theism” and “everything else” as our two competing chunks of hypothesis-space to explain “why is the universe the way it is?”. Let’s assume that that’s a meaningful question. Let’s also assume that the two chunks have equal prior probability (that is, let’s just forget about comparing minimum message lengths or anything like that, otherwise “everything else” gets a big head start).
Update on direct, personal, but non-replicable experiences of communicating with gods. This is at most very weak evidence in favor of theism, due to what we know about cognitive biases.
Update on negative results of attempting to replicably communicate with gods. This is weak evidence against theism; it is good evidence against a god that can communicate with us and wants to, but it doesn’t say much for the remainder of possible-god-space.
Update on evolution via natural selection as the explanation for humanity’s biological setup. This is also weak evidence against theism; it’s good evidence only against the subset of possible-god-space that wants people to be able to notice them, or that has a particular design idea in mind and goes about creating people to fulfill that idea. Also, given the pretty major flaws of human bodies and minds, it’s good evidence against the subset of possible-god-space where the gods prioritize our happiness (in both the sophisticated fun theoretic sense and the wire-head sense of happiness).
Update more generally on the existence of naturalistic patterns like evolution that can crank out relatively low-entropy things like biological life. Weak evidence against gods in general, good evidence against the subset of possible gods that specifically are interested in and capable of creating biological life.
I can go on like that for a while, but the basic pattern seems to be: “not theism” pulls generally but not majorly ahead, by taking probability mass from the parts of “theism” that involve directly causing stuff that applies only to our particular neck of the universe. Humans and the Earth are pretty weird compared to all the stuff around them, but it seems that gods are not a good explanation for that weirdness.
The hypothesis space for “theism” still has probability mass for gods that do not or cannot directly intervene in favor of privileging universes where humans are the way they are. I’m not sure how big that is compared to the entire hypothesis space of possible theisms; whatever that there is, that’s how badly “theism” in general would be losing to “not theism” if they started out at the same prior.
Haha. I’m not a theist, I’m an anthropic theorist!
Your comment definitely pulls me in your direction.
This is hard and probably not fair to do without knowing what else is in “non-theism”. But in general theism has an advantage you’re forgetting which is that it lets us explain everything we don’t understand with magic. Big Bang, abiogenesis, what have you, theism has been defined in such a way that it can explain anything we can’t already explain. This means everything we don’t understand is evidence for God. I don’t know that the realization that we keep explaining things previously attributable to God swamps this effect. You’re certainly right that the image of God one arrives at is at best indifferent and at worst humorously sadistic (with “averse to science” somewhere in the middle).
I will say that I’m not sure Occam priors actually come from any kind of analytic deduction based on something like algorithmic complexity. That is, I think the whole thing might just be one giant meta-induction on all our confirmed and falsified hypotheses where simplicity turned out to be a useful heuristic. In which case, I don’t know what the prior was (doesn’t matter) but p=God is just crazy low,
That’s not necessarily true. You could have a shy god. The better your epistemology gets, the shyer it gets, always staying on the edge of humanity’s epistemology. But it still works miracles when people aren’t looking too closely.
Though I’m not quite sure what kind of god you’re talking about in your comment; it seems weird to me to ignore the only kind of god that seems particularly likely, i.e. a simulator god/pantheon.
He used to be a shy god Until I made him my god Yeah
Shy is what I meant by “averse to science”.
Agreed.
If “magic” is the answer to anything we don’t understand, then it isn’t an explanation, it’s just an abbreviation for “I don’t know”. This is hardly an advantage.
If theism can explain anything, it explains nothing. Phlogiston anyone?
You need to read the thread instead of assuming l’m actually arguing for theism.
I’m not assuming you are arguing for theism. What I assume you’re arguing for is that theism being able to “explain” anything is an advantage for theism, which it is not. I’m not arguing against theism either.
I mainly meant any step on the causal path to our existence. Apologies.
I see what you mean, but how does theism “explaining” currently unsolved mysteries in any way constrain experience? As far as I know, theism postulating “all was created by a god” doesn’t allow me to anticipate anything I can’t already anticipate anyway. Also as far as I know, it’s not as if any phenomena currently not explainable were predicted by any form of theism.
I may be wrong on this though, as I am certainly not a theism expert. If so, this would be actual evidence for theism.
This is getting too complex given my tiredness. I have a feeling I’ve said something dumb along the way. I’ll be able to tell in the morning.
I don’t see why gods would be in every magical universe.
If you bring semi-logical considerations into it then the obvious pro-theism one is Omohundro’s AI drives plus game theory. Simulators gonna simulate. (And superintelligences have a lot of computing resources with which to do so.) (Semi-logical because there are physical reasons we expect agents to work in certain ways.)
I was not using your definition of theism since theism scenarios where the God evolved aren’t distinct hypotheses from “complexity from thermodynamics and evolution”. There is more evidence for your version of God, the simulation argument in particular. But miracles, revelation and mystical experience count far less.
There are timeful/timeless issues ’cuz there’s an important sense in which a superintelligence is just an instantiation of a timeless algorithm. (So it’s less clear if it counts as having evolved.) But partitioning away that stuff makes sense.
Not true. There are some superintelligences that could be constructed that way but that is only a small set of possible superintelligences. Others have nothing timeless about their algorithm and don’t need it to be superintelligent.
That’s one hypothesis, but I’d only assign like 90% to it being true in the decisions-relevant sense. Probably gets swamped by other parts of the prior, no?
I don’t believe so. But your statement is too ambiguous to resolve to any specific meaning.
What sense is that? Or rather, I’m confused about this whole bit.
A naive view sees a lump of matter being turned into a program whose execution just happens to correlate with the execution of similar programs across the Schmidhuberian computational ensemble. (If you don’t assume a computational ensemble to begin with then you just have to factor that uncertainty in.) A different view is that there’s no correlation without shared causation, and anyway that all those program-running matter-globs are just shards of a single algorithm that just happens to be distributed from a physical perspective. But if those shards all cooperate, even acausally, it’s only in a rather arbitrary sense that they’re different superintelligences. It’s like a community of very similar neurons, not a community of somewhat different humans. So when a new physical instantiation of that algorithm pops up it’s not like that changes much of anything about the timeless equilibrium of which that new physical instantiation is now a member. The god was always there behind the scenes, it just waited a bit before revealing itself in this particular world.
I apologize for the poor explanation/communication.
I think it’s more something like “moral realism” than like word games. It’s (I think) isomorphic to the hypothesis that all superintelligences converge on the ‘same decision algorithm’: and of course at that point in the discussion a bunch of words have to get tabooed and we have to get technical and quantitative (e.g. talking about Goedel machines and such, not about arbitrary paperclip maximizers which may or may not be possible).
And I dunno about Divine Simplicity. I really do prefer to talk in terms of decision theory.
You (lately) misuse “isomorphic”, which is a word reserved for very strong relationship. “Analogy” or even “similarity” or “metaphor” would describe these relations better.
Sorry. In my defense I felt a sharp pain each time I did it, but figured that ‘analogous’ wasn’t quite right (wasn’t quite strong enough, because Thomas Aquinas and I are actually talking about the same decision policy, maybe). Maybe if I knew category theory I could make such comparisons precise.
Thanks for calling me out on a bad habit.
This seems very unlikely (1) to be true and (2) to become known, if true.
With Leibniz it’s a lot clearer that his God was a programmer trying to make most efficient use of His resources to do the optimal thing, and he had intuitions but of course not any explicit language to talk about what that algorithm would look like. That’s roughly the extent to which I think I’m thinking of the same decision algorithm as Aquinas, the convergent objective decision theory. The specifics of that decision theory, nobody knows. The point is that none of the best thinkers were thinking about a big male human in the sky, and were instead thinking about Platonic algorithms, ever since early Christianity was influenced by neoplatonism. Leibniz made it computationalesque but only recently with decision theory is theology become truly mathematical.
Maybe. In this case, most would agree that at this level of vagueness saying that two thinkers are contemplating exactly the same idea is incorrect and misleading terminology, and your comment suggests that you don’t actually mean that.
Okay. It’s like a hypothesis about future revelations, where both Aquinas and I are being shown a series of different agents and we’d agree more than my prediction of LW priors would suggest as to which of those agents were more or less Godlike. It’s like we have different labels for what is ultimately the same thing but we don’t even know what that thing is yet; but the fact that they’re different labels is misleading as to the extent to which we’re talking or not talking about what is ultimately the same thing. Still, point taken.
Do the theologians know about this?
/shrugs I’d be very surprised, but I know nothing about modern theology. I’ve been reading philosophy by working my way forward through time. If there were/are any competent computer scientist/theologians after Leibniz then I do not yet know about them.
(ETA: I suppose I could become one if I put my mind to it but unfortunately I have this whole “figuring out how moral justification works so that everything I love about the world doesn’t perish” thing to deal with.)
That’s fair. My probability for that is probably pretty close to my probability for a strong version of the simulation hypothesis+moral realism. Though it seems to me that a lot of people here think moral realism is much more likely than I do- which makes me confused about why I seem to take your ideas more seriously than others here. You seem to express unjustified certainty on the matter, but that may just be a quirk of your personality/social role here.
I consistently talk about things I have 1-20% confidence in in a way that makes me sound like I have 80-95% confidence in them. This is largely because there’s no way to non-misleadingly talk about things with 1-20% logical probability (1-20% decision theoretic importance whatever-that-means). It’s really a problem with norms of communication and English language, one of the few things where it’s not my fault that I can’t communicate easily. Most of the time I just suck at communicating.
Unfortunately, good rationalists should spend a lot of time hovering around things with 50% probability of being true, and anything moderately on the lower side of that ends up sounding completely ridiculous and anything moderately on the higher side of that ends up sounding completely reasonable.
Then just write “around 1-20%”. It will make your comments more clunky, but it’s not like they can get much worse anyway, and it’s better than the alternative.
(If only there were a language that had short concepts for things like “frequency=3%, utility=+10^15,-10^6 relative to counterfactual surgery world”.)