Suppose you’ve been surreptitiously doing me good deeds for months. If I “thank my lucky stars” when it is really you I should be thanking, it would misrepresent the situation to say that I believe in you and am grateful to you. Maybe I am a fool to say in my heart that it is only my lucky stars that I should thank—saying, in other words, that there is nobody to thank—but that is what I believe; there is no intentional object in this case to be identified as you.
Suppose instead that I was convinced that I did have a secret helper but that it wasn’t you—it was Cameron Diaz. As I penned my thank-you notes to her, and thought lovingly about her, and marveled at her generosity to me, it would surely be misleading to say that you were the object of my gratitude, even though you were in fact the one who did the deeds that I am so grateful for. And then suppose I gradually began to suspect that I had been ignorant and mistaken, and eventually came to the correct realization that you were indeed the proper recipient of my gratitude. Wouldn’t it be strange for me to put it this way: “Now I understand: you are Cameron Diaz!”
--Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (discussing the differences between the “intentional object” of a belief and the thing-in-the-world inspiring that belief)
In large part, yes. This passage is in Dennett’s chapter on “Belief in Belief,” and he has an aside on the next page describing how to “turn an atheist into a theist by just fooling around with words”—namely, that “if ‘God’ were just the name of whatever it is that produced all creatures great and small, then God might turn out to be the process of evolution by natural selection.”
But I think there’s also a more general rationality point about keeping track of the map-territory distinction when it comes to abstract concepts, and about ensuring that we’re not confusing ourselves or others by how we use words.
Sorry, can you clarify what you mean here? None of what passes an ideological turing test? Are you saying something like “theists erroneously conclude that the proponents of evolution must believe in God because evolutionists believe that evolution is what produced all creatures great and small”? What exactly is the mistake that theists make on this point that would lead them to fail the ideological turing test?
Or, did I misunderstand you, and are you saying that people like Dennett fail the ideological turing test with theists?
“if ‘God’ were just the name of whatever it is that produced all creatures great and small, then God might turn out to be the process of evolution by natural selection.”
This, specifically, almost never passes an i-turing test IME. I’ve been called a “sick scientologist” (I assume they didn’t know what “Scientology” really is) on account of the claim that if there is a “God”, it’s the process by which evolution or physics happens to work in our world.
Likewise, if I understand what Dennett is saying correctly, the things he’s saying are not accepted by God-believers, namely that God could be any sort of metaphor or anthropomorphic representation of natural processes, or of the universe and its inner workings, or “fate” in the sense that “fate” and “free will” are generally understood (i.e. the dissolved explanation) by LWers, or some unknown abstract Great Arbiter of Chance and Probability.
(I piled in some of my own attempts in there, but all of the above was rejected time and time again in discussion with untrained theists, down to a single exception who converted to a theology-science hybrid later on and then, last I heard, doesn’t really care about theological issues anymore because they seem to have realized that it makes no difference and intuitively dissolved their questions. Discussions with people who have thoroughly studied formal theology usually fare slightly better, but they also have a much larger castle of anti-epistemology to break down.)
Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. In case my initial reply to MugaSofer was misleading, Dennett doesn’t really seem to be suggesting here that this is really what most theists believe, or that many theists would try to convert atheists with this tactic. It’s more just a tongue-in-cheek example of what happens when you lose track of what concept a particular group of syllables is supposed to point at.
But I think there are a great many people who purport to believe in “God,” whose concept of God really is quite close to something like the “anthropomorphic representation of natural processes, or of the universe and its inner workings.” Probably not for those who identify with a particular religion, but most of the “spiritual but not religious” types seem to have something like this in mind. Indeed, I’ve had quite a few conversations where it became clear that someone couldn’t tell me the difference between a universe where “God exists” and where “God doesn’t exist.”
Regarding the second paragraph, I agree with your estimate that most “spiritual but not religious” people might think this way. I was, at some point in the past, exactly there in belief-space—I identified as “spiritual but not religious” explicitly, and explicitly held beliefs along those lines (minus the “anthropomorphic” part, keeping only the “mental” or “thinking” part of the anthropomorphism for some reason).
When I later realized that there was no tangible difference and no existing experiment that could tell me whether it was true, I kind of stopped caring, and eventually the questions dissipated on their own, though I couldn’t tell exactly why at the time. When I found LW and read the sequences, I figured out what had happened, which was fun, but the real crisis of faith (if you can call it that—I never was religious to begin with, only “spiritual”) had happened long before then.
People I see who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and also know some science seem to behave in very similar manners to how I did back then, so I think it makes sense to assume a significant amount of them believe something like this.
In case my initial reply to MugaSofer was misleading, Dennett doesn’t really seem to be suggesting here that this is really what most theists believe, or that many theists would try to convert atheists with this tactic.
For the record, I didn’t interpret your comment that way.
Before I became a rationalist, I believed that there was no god, but there were souls, and they manifested through making quantum randomness nonrandom.
I realized that lower-level discussions of free will were kind of pointless. I abandoned the eternal-springing hope that souls and psychic powers (Hey! Look! For some reason, all of air molecules just happened to be moving upward at the same time! It seems like this guy is a magnet for one in a 10^^^^^^^10 thermodynamic occurances! And they always help him!) could exist. I fully accepted the physical universe.
It’s two tens with six supers between them! That’s twice as much as 10^^^10, right!
I guess it just intuitively seems like there should be a useful not-impossible-just-rare event that has a probability in that range (long-term vacuum fluctuation appearance of a complex and useful machine on the order of 5kg, maybe?)
Let’s say there are 10^^10 particles in the universe, each one of them independently has a 1 in 10^^10 chance of doing what we want over some small unit of time, and we are interested in 10^^10 of those units of time. Then the probability that the event we want to observe happens is much better than 1 in 10^^12, and that was only two up-arrows.
(We can rewrite ((10^^10)^(10^^10))^(10^^10) as 10^(10^^9 x 10^^10 x 10^^10) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^3) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^10). This would be the same as 10^^12 if we took exponents in a different order, and the order used to calculate 10^^12 happens to be the one that gives the largest possible number. Actually if I were more careful I could probably get 10^^11 as a bound as well.)
And although I’m not entirely sure about the time-resolution business, I think the numbers in the calculation I just did are an upper bound for what we’d want in order to compute the probabability of any universe-history at an atomic scale.
I’ve been called a “sick scientologist” (I assume they didn’t know what “Scientology” really is) on account of the claim that if there is a “God”, it’s the process by which evolution or physics happens to work in our world.
Holy cow, you’ve tried this? Were you dealing with creationists?
I assume a significant amount of them were. I also tried subtly using God/Fate, God/Freewill, God/Physics, God/Universe, God/ConsciousMultiverse, and God/Chance, as interchangeable “redefinitions” (of course, on different samples each time) and was similarly called on it.
Incidentally, I can’t confirm if this suggests a pattern (it probably does), but in one church I tried, for fun, combining all of them and just conflating all the meanings of all the above into “God”, and then sometimes using the specific terms and/or God interchangeably when discussing a specific subset or idea. The more confused I made it, the more people I convinced and got to engage in self-reinforcing positive-affect dialogue. So if this was the only evidence available, I’d be forced to tentatively conclude: The more confused your usage of “God” is, the more it matches the religious usage, and the more it passes ideological turing tests!
(Spoiler: It does. The rest of my evidence confirms this.)
This ought not be surprising. The more confused a concept is, the more freedom my audience has to understand it to mean whatever suits their purposes. In some audiences, this means it gets criticized more. In others, it gets accepted more uncritically.
Hmm. I’m pretty sure that if I renamed some other confused idea “God” it wouldn’t work so well. Or do you mean confusing?
I assume a significant amount of them were.
On it’s own, that sounds like your assumption is based on the fact that they were religious, which is on the face of it absurd, so I’m guessing you have some evidence you declined to mention.
Incidentally, where does the term “ideological turing test” come from? I’ve never heard it before.
Hmm. I’m pretty sure that if I renamed some other confused idea “God” it wouldn’t work so well. Or do you mean confusing?
Yes, sorry. I was using the term “confused” in a slightly different manner from the one LWers are used to, and “confusing” fits better. Basically, “meaninglessly mysterious and deep-sounding” would be the more LW-friendly description, I think.
On it’s own, that sounds like your assumption is based on the fact that they were religious, which is on the face of it absurd, so I’m guessing you have some evidence you declined to mention.
Ah, yes. Mostly the conversations and responses I got themselves gave me very strong impressions of creationism, and also some (rather unreliable, however, but still sufficient bayesian evidence) small-scale, local, privately-funded survey statistics about religion and beliefs.
To top that, most of the religious places and forums/websites I was visiting were found partially through the help of my at-the-time-girlfriend, whose family was very religious (and dogmatic) and creationist, so I suspect there probably was some effect there. I don’t count this, though, because that would be double-counting (it’s overridden by the “conversations with people” evidence)
Incidentally, where does the term “ideological turing test” come from? I’ve never heard it before.
No clue. I first saw it on LessWrong, and I think someone linked me to a wiki page about it when I asked what it meant, but I can’t remember or find that instance.
--Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (discussing the differences between the “intentional object” of a belief and the thing-in-the-world inspiring that belief)
He’s talking about God here, right?
In large part, yes. This passage is in Dennett’s chapter on “Belief in Belief,” and he has an aside on the next page describing how to “turn an atheist into a theist by just fooling around with words”—namely, that “if ‘God’ were just the name of whatever it is that produced all creatures great and small, then God might turn out to be the process of evolution by natural selection.”
But I think there’s also a more general rationality point about keeping track of the map-territory distinction when it comes to abstract concepts, and about ensuring that we’re not confusing ourselves or others by how we use words.
Besides, none of it passes an ideological turing test with an overwhelming majority of God-believers. I tried it.
Sorry, can you clarify what you mean here? None of what passes an ideological turing test? Are you saying something like “theists erroneously conclude that the proponents of evolution must believe in God because evolutionists believe that evolution is what produced all creatures great and small”? What exactly is the mistake that theists make on this point that would lead them to fail the ideological turing test?
Or, did I misunderstand you, and are you saying that people like Dennett fail the ideological turing test with theists?
Oh, sorry.
This, specifically, almost never passes an i-turing test IME. I’ve been called a “sick scientologist” (I assume they didn’t know what “Scientology” really is) on account of the claim that if there is a “God”, it’s the process by which evolution or physics happens to work in our world.
Likewise, if I understand what Dennett is saying correctly, the things he’s saying are not accepted by God-believers, namely that God could be any sort of metaphor or anthropomorphic representation of natural processes, or of the universe and its inner workings, or “fate” in the sense that “fate” and “free will” are generally understood (i.e. the dissolved explanation) by LWers, or some unknown abstract Great Arbiter of Chance and Probability.
(I piled in some of my own attempts in there, but all of the above was rejected time and time again in discussion with untrained theists, down to a single exception who converted to a theology-science hybrid later on and then, last I heard, doesn’t really care about theological issues anymore because they seem to have realized that it makes no difference and intuitively dissolved their questions. Discussions with people who have thoroughly studied formal theology usually fare slightly better, but they also have a much larger castle of anti-epistemology to break down.)
Ah, okay, thanks for clarifying. In case my initial reply to MugaSofer was misleading, Dennett doesn’t really seem to be suggesting here that this is really what most theists believe, or that many theists would try to convert atheists with this tactic. It’s more just a tongue-in-cheek example of what happens when you lose track of what concept a particular group of syllables is supposed to point at.
But I think there are a great many people who purport to believe in “God,” whose concept of God really is quite close to something like the “anthropomorphic representation of natural processes, or of the universe and its inner workings.” Probably not for those who identify with a particular religion, but most of the “spiritual but not religious” types seem to have something like this in mind. Indeed, I’ve had quite a few conversations where it became clear that someone couldn’t tell me the difference between a universe where “God exists” and where “God doesn’t exist.”
Regarding the second paragraph, I agree with your estimate that most “spiritual but not religious” people might think this way. I was, at some point in the past, exactly there in belief-space—I identified as “spiritual but not religious” explicitly, and explicitly held beliefs along those lines (minus the “anthropomorphic” part, keeping only the “mental” or “thinking” part of the anthropomorphism for some reason).
When I later realized that there was no tangible difference and no existing experiment that could tell me whether it was true, I kind of stopped caring, and eventually the questions dissipated on their own, though I couldn’t tell exactly why at the time. When I found LW and read the sequences, I figured out what had happened, which was fun, but the real crisis of faith (if you can call it that—I never was religious to begin with, only “spiritual”) had happened long before then.
People I see who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and also know some science seem to behave in very similar manners to how I did back then, so I think it makes sense to assume a significant amount of them believe something like this.
For the record, I didn’t interpret your comment that way.
Before I became a rationalist, I believed that there was no god, but there were souls, and they manifested through making quantum randomness nonrandom.
Which part(s) of that set of beliefs did becoming a rationalist cause you to change?
This was long before Less Wrong.
I realized that lower-level discussions of free will were kind of pointless. I abandoned the eternal-springing hope that souls and psychic powers (Hey! Look! For some reason, all of air molecules just happened to be moving upward at the same time! It seems like this guy is a magnet for one in a 10^^^^^^^10 thermodynamic occurances! And they always help him!) could exist. I fully accepted the physical universe.
I get the concept of hyperbole, but this:
Is ludicrously too far.
It’s two tens with six supers between them! That’s twice as much as 10^^^10, right!
I guess it just intuitively seems like there should be a useful not-impossible-just-rare event that has a probability in that range (long-term vacuum fluctuation appearance of a complex and useful machine on the order of 5kg, maybe?)
Not… quite.
Let’s say there are 10^^10 particles in the universe, each one of them independently has a 1 in 10^^10 chance of doing what we want over some small unit of time, and we are interested in 10^^10 of those units of time. Then the probability that the event we want to observe happens is much better than 1 in 10^^12, and that was only two up-arrows.
(We can rewrite ((10^^10)^(10^^10))^(10^^10) as 10^(10^^9 x 10^^10 x 10^^10) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^3) which is less than 10^((10^^10)^10). This would be the same as 10^^12 if we took exponents in a different order, and the order used to calculate 10^^12 happens to be the one that gives the largest possible number. Actually if I were more careful I could probably get 10^^11 as a bound as well.)
And although I’m not entirely sure about the time-resolution business, I think the numbers in the calculation I just did are an upper bound for what we’d want in order to compute the probabability of any universe-history at an atomic scale.
Holy cow, you’ve tried this? Were you dealing with creationists?
I assume a significant amount of them were. I also tried subtly using God/Fate, God/Freewill, God/Physics, God/Universe, God/ConsciousMultiverse, and God/Chance, as interchangeable “redefinitions” (of course, on different samples each time) and was similarly called on it.
Incidentally, I can’t confirm if this suggests a pattern (it probably does), but in one church I tried, for fun, combining all of them and just conflating all the meanings of all the above into “God”, and then sometimes using the specific terms and/or God interchangeably when discussing a specific subset or idea. The more confused I made it, the more people I convinced and got to engage in self-reinforcing positive-affect dialogue. So if this was the only evidence available, I’d be forced to tentatively conclude: The more confused your usage of “God” is, the more it matches the religious usage, and the more it passes ideological turing tests!
(Spoiler: It does. The rest of my evidence confirms this.)
This ought not be surprising. The more confused a concept is, the more freedom my audience has to understand it to mean whatever suits their purposes. In some audiences, this means it gets criticized more. In others, it gets accepted more uncritically.
This reminds me a lot of Spinoza’s proof of God in Ethics, although I recognize that is probably partially due to personal biases of mine.
Hmm. I’m pretty sure that if I renamed some other confused idea “God” it wouldn’t work so well. Or do you mean confusing?
On it’s own, that sounds like your assumption is based on the fact that they were religious, which is on the face of it absurd, so I’m guessing you have some evidence you declined to mention.
Incidentally, where does the term “ideological turing test” come from? I’ve never heard it before.
The term was coined by Brian Caplan here
Ah, cool. That’s actually a really good idea, someone should set that up. An empirical test of how well you understand a position/ideology.
Yes, sorry. I was using the term “confused” in a slightly different manner from the one LWers are used to, and “confusing” fits better. Basically, “meaninglessly mysterious and deep-sounding” would be the more LW-friendly description, I think.
Ah, yes. Mostly the conversations and responses I got themselves gave me very strong impressions of creationism, and also some (rather unreliable, however, but still sufficient bayesian evidence) small-scale, local, privately-funded survey statistics about religion and beliefs.
To top that, most of the religious places and forums/websites I was visiting were found partially through the help of my at-the-time-girlfriend, whose family was very religious (and dogmatic) and creationist, so I suspect there probably was some effect there. I don’t count this, though, because that would be double-counting (it’s overridden by the “conversations with people” evidence)
No clue. I first saw it on LessWrong, and I think someone linked me to a wiki page about it when I asked what it meant, but I can’t remember or find that instance.
Thanks for explaining! Shame about the ITT though.
That’s what I thought. Thanks for explaining.