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 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.