Atheists and theists are both right and wrong in their own way, but neither have a solid understanding of the important underlying considerations. If you asked me if souls are real or if God is real, I’d say yes to both, but the explanation thereof would be excruciatingly difficult, and I’d be tempted to label the question ‘not even wrong’, akin to ’If a tree falls in the forest...
Not to make things ‘excruciating’ for you but you can’t really leave that hanging.
Gah. I’ll stick my neck out a bit. Short barely-defensible version: sometimes your low-level-language/ontology should be bits, sometimes it should be gods. Souls are a pretty good model of how memetic cognitive algorithms make up about half of human experience and don’t reside in any one body. (You could remove all of the memes from someone’s body and put them in someone else’s body, and that’d be damn close to reincarnation. There are obvious objections here but I’m just going to plow ahead.) For instance, Wikipedia: “In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.”
‘Non-physical’ is the key concept. I like to model cognitive algorithms in terms of e.g. memetics and computer science and phenomenology, not in terms of atoms. So when the nasty monists come along and say ‘everything about this soul business can be explained in terms of atoms’, I say, well sure, the languages are Turing-equivalent, but who cares? There’s barely a difference in anticipated experiences, it’s just arguing about which ontology better carves reality at its joints. Personally, I’m just fine with using the ontology of souls and gods and magic. Yeah, half of it ‘reduces’ to the placebo effect and memetics and what not, but why choose that ontology? Use ontological pragmatism.
(I guess there’s an argument that you can have a speed prior over speed prior languages and should use low-level languages when all else is equal, but I find ‘algorithmic ontology’ to be simpler and easier to reason about than ‘atomic/physical ontology’ anyway, so once again I think I disagree with the monists.)
With regards to God in particular: God exists in a lot of peoples’ heads. He’s a massively parallel distributed cognitive algorithm that millions of people use and model. That’s more of an existence than your average person, by far. What atheists mean when they claim He doesn’t exist is something else that no theists actually care about. He’s revealed Himself to them. Once you’ve personally experienced the God cognitive algorithm, are you going to listen to some snobby scientist who comes along and tells you that God doesn’t exist? But you directly experienced Him! And so did half the people at your church! Silly ignorant scientsts.
In that sense, and it is an important sense, God is very real. More than that, all memes (memetic algorithms) are real. Now, it might be bad ontological pragmatism if this leads you to go ahead and start believing you’ll go to the Christian heaven after you die. And there are all sorts of just-plain-wrong things that theists believe. But I don’t think that they’re that much more wrong than your average atheist. Both are pretty damn wrong. But it doesn’t really matter, because most beliefs are clothes. It’s when people start taking things seriously that you run into trouble.
And I realize this comes across as just being pointlessly meta-contrarian, but it’s important to reason about these things correctly when you’re doing Friendliness philosophy.
With regards to God in particular: God exists in a lot of peoples’ heads. He’s a massively parallel distributed cognitive algorithm that millions of people use and model. . . . In that sense, and it is an important sense, God is very real. More than that, all memes (memetic algorithms) are real.
But that’s not the sense that theists mean when they say “God is real”, and it’s definitely not the sense that atheists mean when they say “God isn’t real”. When someone says “God isn’t real”, it’s not like they’re saying that God is not a meme that exists in anybody’s mind — a person needs to have their own mental copy of the God algorithm, and the understanding that millions of people share it, in order to even bother being an atheist. It’s pretty clear that they mean that the God algorithm isn’t a model of any actual agent that created the universe or acts on it independently of the humans modeling him.
So I’d disagree with “In that sense, and it is an important sense, God is very real.” Clearly in that sense God is real, but it seems like a profoundly unimportant sense to me, particularly because I don’t think anyone actually uses “real” that way. It seems like a type error; a god is an extremely different sort of thing than the idea of a god.
But that’s not the sense that theists mean when they say “God is real”, and it’s definitely not the sense that atheists mean when they say “God isn’t real”.
Indeed. God is the omniscient, omnipresent, infinitely powerful and utterly non-existent creator of the universe! Cognitive algorithms are cognitive algorithms. Sometimes they make people say the word ‘God’.
Clearly in that sense God is real, but it seems like a profoundly unimportant sense to me, particularly because I don’t think anyone actually uses “real” that way. It seems like a type error; a god is an extremely different sort of thing than the idea of a god
You’re right.
I suppose I’m just ignoring the unimportant senses because I’m talking to rationalists about what ‘God’ could be thought of as, and, well, the other more common ways of thinking about it don’t convey much information. I was mostly trying to convey an ontology of cognitive algorithms, but got sidetracked into talking about this God business via a request from the audience. I honestly don’t care much about how typical theists or atheists use the words, because, well, I don’t care what they think. ;) I think I managed to get my points across despite defecting in the words game. Still, my apologies.
Also something very much like the actual God exists in a Tegmark multiverse, but that’s also pretty unimportant, decision theoretically speaking. He’s just another counterfactual terrorist.
Also something very much like the actual God exists in a Tegmark multiverse, but that’s also pretty unimportant, decision theoretically speaking. He’s just another counterfactual terrorist.
Really? It sounds kinda like a self-defeating object. My guess is that there is an unending infinite hierarchy. But I don’t trust my intuitions about the large scale structure of the multiverse much.
Sure. And in that sense, Santa Claus is also real, and it’s entirely correct to say that “God is no more real than Santa Claus.” Or have I misunderstood you?
And yet, I suspect few theists would agree with that statement.
I wouldn’t say that’s entirely correct. God is significantly more real than Santa Claus. He’s inspired all kinds of art and science and devotion and what not, to a much greater extent than Santa Claus. Plus, people don’t really talk to Santa Claus, whereas they often talk to God, and sometimes He answers. God is a much more complex algorithm.
Theists wouldn’t agree with your statement, but I wouldn’t either. And there are lots of statements that are true that theists would disagree with, just like there are lots of statements that are true that anyone would disagree with, because people suck at epistemology. But that’s kind of tangential to the main thrust of my argument.
I’m a little startled by you interpreting “more real” as an quantitative comparison, when I meant it as a qualitative one, so I have to back up a bit and ask you to unpack that.
Presumably you aren’t arguing that inspiring art, science, devotion and whatnot is what it means to be real, or it would follow that most of the atoms in the universe are non-real and are in non-real configurations, which is a decidedly odd use of that word.
You say later that God is “much more complex,” and I can’t really see what that has to do with anything… I mean, a tree is much more complex than a wooden pole, but I wouldn’t say that has anything to do with the reality of a tree or of a wooden pole.
Basically, I can’t quite figure out what you mean by “real,” and you seem to be using it in ways that are inconsistent with the way most people I know (including quite a few theists) would use it.
For my own part, what I would conclude from your argument is that God, independent of reality or non-reality, is more important than Santa Claus. Which I would agree with. If God is a reality, it’s a more important reality than Santa Claus. If God is a myth, it’s a more important myth than Santa Claus. Etc.
Incidentally, many people write letters to Santa Claus, and sometimes things happen that they experience as a reply from Santa Claus. If that is different from what you are referring to as an “answer” here, then I’ve continued to misunderstand you.
So, let me back up and try again. I’m currently imagining a purple dinosaur named Ansel with a built-in helicopter coming out of its skull and a refrigerator in its belly. Are you suggesting that Ansel is real, since it exists in my mind, and that it would become increasingly real if other people sat around imagining it too?
So, let me back up and try again. I’m currently imagining a purple dinosaur named Ansel with a built-in helicopter coming out of its skull and a refrigerator in its belly. Are you suggesting that Ansel is real, since it exists in my mind, and that it would become increasingly real if other people sat around imagining it too?
Yes. And if I imagined Ansel except green and not purple, then that adds a little bit to the realness of Ansel, unless we want to call the new green dinosaur Spinoz instead and have it be its own distinct cognitive algorithm.
Presumably you aren’t arguing that inspiring art, science, devotion and whatnot is what it means to be real, or it would follow that most of the atoms in the universe are non-real and are in non-real configurations, which is a decidedly odd use of that word.
Nah, I reason about it in terms of measure. You have one cognitive algorithm that’s being run on one mind. You have another cognitive algorithm that’s running redundantly on a hundred minds. I’d say the latter has about a hundred times as much measure as the former. I don’t know how else to reason about relative existence. (Realness?) I’m porting this sort of thinking over from reasoning about the universe being spatially infinite and there being an infinite number of TheOtherDaves all typing slightly different things. Some of those TheOtherDaves ‘exist’ more than others, especially if they’re doing very probable things.
If existence isn’t measured by number of copies, then what could it be measured by? The alternative I see is something like decision theoretic significance, which is why I was talking about what you called ‘importance’. But I’m wary of getting into cutting edge decision theory stuff that I don’t understand very well. Instead, can you tell me what you think ‘realness’ is, and whether or not you think God is real, and why or why not? We’re starting to argue over definitions, which is a common failure mode, but it’s cool as long as we realize we’re arguing over definitions.
I think that everything exists, by the way: there’s an ensemble universe, like Tegmark’s level 4 multiverse, and so we can only quibble about how existent something is, not whether or not it exists. I might be having trouble trying to translate commonsense definitions into and out of my ontology. My apologies.
You say later that God is “much more complex,” and I can’t really see what that has to do with anything… I mean, a tree is much more complex than a wooden pole, but I wouldn’t say that has anything to do with the reality of a tree or of a wooden pole.
I mean that people tend to use a lot more neurons to model God than to model Santa Claus, and thus by the redundant-copies argument hinted at above this means that God exists more. Relatedly...
Incidentally, many people write letters to Santa Claus, and sometimes things happen that they experience as a reply from Santa Claus. If that is different from what you are referring to as an “answer” here, then I’ve continued to misunderstand you.
You’re right, I forgot about this. Parents have to use lots of neurons to model Santa Claus when crafting the letters. Kids don’t tend to use as many neurons when writing letters to Santa, I think. But add up all of these neuron-compuations and it’s still vastly less than the neuron-computations used by the many people having religious experiences and praying every day. (I’m using number-of-neurons-used as a proxy for strength/number of computations.)
Also, ‘people’ aren’t ontologically fundamental: they’re made of algorithms too, just like God. So I don’t see how you can say ‘God doesn’t exist’ without implying that Will Newsome doesn’t exist; Will Newsome is just a collection of human universal algorithms (facial recognition, object permanence) and culture-specific memetic contents (humanism, rationality, Buddhism). The body is just a computing substrate, and it’s not something I identify with all that much. And if I’m just a collection of algorithms running on some general computing hardware, well, the same is true of God. It’s just that he’s more parallel and I’m more serial. And I’m way smarter.
(Not that there is any such thing as ‘I’. ‘I’ am made of a kludge of algorithms, and we don’t always agree.)
I don’t feel qualified to answer. If we’re talking about exists in a mathy sense, then any of those that can be represented mathematically exists. I’m not sure if there are universes where 5=4, and other logically impossible things. I’ve heard arguments to this effect but I don’t remember what they are. Surely you can have things that appear logically impossible, due to hiding some contradiction in the middle of a titanic proof, but actually logically impossible, I don’t know. ‘God’ is vague because ‘omnipresent’ and the like don’t really make sense; similar problems with proper factor of 101.
The last one about Roswell seems obviously true, it’s just not true in most universes we find ourselves on. But I mean, it’s a true statement in a trivial way. ‘We live in a spatially infinite universe and so there exists a copy of you that is the same in every way except with 20 foot long hair’ is also trivially true. But if you only care about worlds in which your hair is 20 feet long, then all of a sudden its truth is not trivial; it’s vitally important.
I was trying to tease out whether your “God is real” is intended in the same sense as “the monster group exists” - neither exists in physical reality, but both exist in at least some minds; in a kind of mental reality. My other questions were intended to ferret out whether your idea of a mental or algorithmic “real” includes only well-defined and consistent ideas, or whether vague, incorrect, and impossible ideas also qualify as “real” in your sense.
Sorry I didn’t make that clear in the original comment—I didn’t mean to seem confrontational. I’m just trying to get a better understanding of your interesting suggestion. This appears to be one situation where more politeness might have helped. :)
As for where I am coming from, I’m one of those philosophical anti-realists mentioned earlier in this thread (and a big fan of van Fraassen). I am far from convinced that electrons are real. So I’m interested in the details when someone says, in effect, that God is just as real as electrons.
What’s the usefulness of “I think that everything exists, by the way: there’s an ensemble universe”? How does it constrain your expectations?
I don’t see how having specific beliefs either way about stuff outside the observable universe is useful.
Now, if you can show that whether the universe beyond the observable is infinite or non-infinite but much larger than the Hubble Volume constrains expectations about the contents of the observable universe, then it might be useful.
Off the top of my head: If the world is very big then there are more agents to trade with or be simulated by. Also I’m not sure what counts as the observable universe—we can’t see beyond the Hubble volume with our telescopes, but we can probabilistically model what different parts of the universe or different universes look like nonetheless. We also do not know what is ultimately observable. We currently lack the ability to observe mental phenomena but I still have specific beliefs about roughly what we’ll observe when we really understand consciousness.
It is useful to be curious about mysteries to which you believe there to be no answer; beliefs like that often turn out to be wrong.
And, yes, we were talking about definitions: I wanted to make sure I understood what you were actually saying before I tried to respond to it.
Instead, can you tell me what you think ‘realness’ is, and whether or not you think God is real, and why or why not?
I think we label something a “real X” to assert that it implements a deep structure that characterizes X, rather than merely having a superficial appearance of X.
For doing that to be meaningful we have to be prepared to cash it out in terms of the deep structure we’re asserting; if we can’t do that then we don’t mean anything by the phrase “real X.”
When someone says “Y is real,” I try to interpret that to mean “Y is [a real X]” for some plausible X. If someone says “The elephant I’m seeing is real,” I probably understand them to refer to (I1) a real elephant, which implies that it has mass and occupies volume and reflects light and radiates heat and so forth.
If they mean I1, and it turns out that what they are seeing doesn’t have those properties, then they are wrong. If they meant, instead, that it is (I2) a real activation of their retina, then questions of mass and volume are irrelevant… but if it turns out their retina isn’t being activated, then they’re wrong. If they mean, instead, that it’s (I3) a real activation of their visual cortex, then questions of retinal activation are irrelevant… but if it turns out that their visual cortex isn’t being activated, then they’re wrong.
Regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, these are all different claims, even though the same words are being used to express them. If they mean I3 and I understand I2, communication has failed.
If I’ve understood you: if I say “God is real,” you understand that to mean (J1) my neurons are being activated. And J1 is certainly true. But if I meant to express something else (J2) which implies the entity responsible for the creation of the universe once split the Red Sea in order to allow my ancestors to escape from the Egyptian army, then communication has failed.
Sure, we can get along just fine regardless, as long as we stay pretty vague. I can say “God is real” and you can reply “Yup, he sure is!” and we get lots of social bonding value out of it, but communication has nevertheless failed… unless, of course, our only goal was social bonding in the first place, in which case everything is fine.
So, back to whether I think God is real… I think the thing you’re asking about is real, yes. That is, there exist neurons that get activated when people talk about God, and those activation patterns are kinda-sorta isomorphic to one another.
As for why I think that… I don’t know how to begin answering that question in fewer than a thousand words. I don’t think it’s in the least bit controversial.
But I don’t think that’s what anyone else I’ve ever met would mean by the same question.
By the way, User:ata made this illuminating comment which I agree with; see my reply (where I admit to defecting when it comes to using words correctly).
(nods) Cool. This is essentially why I have been talking all along about the use of words, rather than talking about what kinds of things exist; it has seemed to me that our primary point of discontinuity was about the former rather than the latter.
By “real” I’m assuming you mean something like “a phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in order to make accurate predictions”. Specifically, predictions about what people will do. If so, absolutely.
Of course then there are other valid senses of “real” which everyone else is arguing below, in which there is the question of effects outside people’s actions, and whether the phenomenon showed up in people’s heads because an entity outside our scientific understanding called God put it there. Those are, of course, the tricky ones.
Not to make things ‘excruciating’ for you but you can’t really leave that hanging.
Gah. I’ll stick my neck out a bit. Short barely-defensible version: sometimes your low-level-language/ontology should be bits, sometimes it should be gods. Souls are a pretty good model of how memetic cognitive algorithms make up about half of human experience and don’t reside in any one body. (You could remove all of the memes from someone’s body and put them in someone else’s body, and that’d be damn close to reincarnation. There are obvious objections here but I’m just going to plow ahead.) For instance, Wikipedia: “In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical.”
‘Non-physical’ is the key concept. I like to model cognitive algorithms in terms of e.g. memetics and computer science and phenomenology, not in terms of atoms. So when the nasty monists come along and say ‘everything about this soul business can be explained in terms of atoms’, I say, well sure, the languages are Turing-equivalent, but who cares? There’s barely a difference in anticipated experiences, it’s just arguing about which ontology better carves reality at its joints. Personally, I’m just fine with using the ontology of souls and gods and magic. Yeah, half of it ‘reduces’ to the placebo effect and memetics and what not, but why choose that ontology? Use ontological pragmatism.
(I guess there’s an argument that you can have a speed prior over speed prior languages and should use low-level languages when all else is equal, but I find ‘algorithmic ontology’ to be simpler and easier to reason about than ‘atomic/physical ontology’ anyway, so once again I think I disagree with the monists.)
With regards to God in particular: God exists in a lot of peoples’ heads. He’s a massively parallel distributed cognitive algorithm that millions of people use and model. That’s more of an existence than your average person, by far. What atheists mean when they claim He doesn’t exist is something else that no theists actually care about. He’s revealed Himself to them. Once you’ve personally experienced the God cognitive algorithm, are you going to listen to some snobby scientist who comes along and tells you that God doesn’t exist? But you directly experienced Him! And so did half the people at your church! Silly ignorant scientsts.
In that sense, and it is an important sense, God is very real. More than that, all memes (memetic algorithms) are real. Now, it might be bad ontological pragmatism if this leads you to go ahead and start believing you’ll go to the Christian heaven after you die. And there are all sorts of just-plain-wrong things that theists believe. But I don’t think that they’re that much more wrong than your average atheist. Both are pretty damn wrong. But it doesn’t really matter, because most beliefs are clothes. It’s when people start taking things seriously that you run into trouble.
And I realize this comes across as just being pointlessly meta-contrarian, but it’s important to reason about these things correctly when you’re doing Friendliness philosophy.
But that’s not the sense that theists mean when they say “God is real”, and it’s definitely not the sense that atheists mean when they say “God isn’t real”. When someone says “God isn’t real”, it’s not like they’re saying that God is not a meme that exists in anybody’s mind — a person needs to have their own mental copy of the God algorithm, and the understanding that millions of people share it, in order to even bother being an atheist. It’s pretty clear that they mean that the God algorithm isn’t a model of any actual agent that created the universe or acts on it independently of the humans modeling him.
So I’d disagree with “In that sense, and it is an important sense, God is very real.” Clearly in that sense God is real, but it seems like a profoundly unimportant sense to me, particularly because I don’t think anyone actually uses “real” that way. It seems like a type error; a god is an extremely different sort of thing than the idea of a god.
Indeed. God is the omniscient, omnipresent, infinitely powerful and utterly non-existent creator of the universe! Cognitive algorithms are cognitive algorithms. Sometimes they make people say the word ‘God’.
You’re right.
I suppose I’m just ignoring the unimportant senses because I’m talking to rationalists about what ‘God’ could be thought of as, and, well, the other more common ways of thinking about it don’t convey much information. I was mostly trying to convey an ontology of cognitive algorithms, but got sidetracked into talking about this God business via a request from the audience. I honestly don’t care much about how typical theists or atheists use the words, because, well, I don’t care what they think. ;) I think I managed to get my points across despite defecting in the words game. Still, my apologies.
Also something very much like the actual God exists in a Tegmark multiverse, but that’s also pretty unimportant, decision theoretically speaking. He’s just another counterfactual terrorist.
Really? It sounds kinda like a self-defeating object. My guess is that there is an unending infinite hierarchy. But I don’t trust my intuitions about the large scale structure of the multiverse much.
Sure. And in that sense, Santa Claus is also real, and it’s entirely correct to say that “God is no more real than Santa Claus.” Or have I misunderstood you?
And yet, I suspect few theists would agree with that statement.
Allow me to link to this post on the social construction of Santa Claus
I wouldn’t say that’s entirely correct. God is significantly more real than Santa Claus. He’s inspired all kinds of art and science and devotion and what not, to a much greater extent than Santa Claus. Plus, people don’t really talk to Santa Claus, whereas they often talk to God, and sometimes He answers. God is a much more complex algorithm.
Theists wouldn’t agree with your statement, but I wouldn’t either. And there are lots of statements that are true that theists would disagree with, just like there are lots of statements that are true that anyone would disagree with, because people suck at epistemology. But that’s kind of tangential to the main thrust of my argument.
I’m a little startled by you interpreting “more real” as an quantitative comparison, when I meant it as a qualitative one, so I have to back up a bit and ask you to unpack that.
Presumably you aren’t arguing that inspiring art, science, devotion and whatnot is what it means to be real, or it would follow that most of the atoms in the universe are non-real and are in non-real configurations, which is a decidedly odd use of that word.
You say later that God is “much more complex,” and I can’t really see what that has to do with anything… I mean, a tree is much more complex than a wooden pole, but I wouldn’t say that has anything to do with the reality of a tree or of a wooden pole.
Basically, I can’t quite figure out what you mean by “real,” and you seem to be using it in ways that are inconsistent with the way most people I know (including quite a few theists) would use it.
For my own part, what I would conclude from your argument is that God, independent of reality or non-reality, is more important than Santa Claus. Which I would agree with. If God is a reality, it’s a more important reality than Santa Claus. If God is a myth, it’s a more important myth than Santa Claus. Etc.
Incidentally, many people write letters to Santa Claus, and sometimes things happen that they experience as a reply from Santa Claus. If that is different from what you are referring to as an “answer” here, then I’ve continued to misunderstand you.
So, let me back up and try again. I’m currently imagining a purple dinosaur named Ansel with a built-in helicopter coming out of its skull and a refrigerator in its belly. Are you suggesting that Ansel is real, since it exists in my mind, and that it would become increasingly real if other people sat around imagining it too?
Yes. And if I imagined Ansel except green and not purple, then that adds a little bit to the realness of Ansel, unless we want to call the new green dinosaur Spinoz instead and have it be its own distinct cognitive algorithm.
Nah, I reason about it in terms of measure. You have one cognitive algorithm that’s being run on one mind. You have another cognitive algorithm that’s running redundantly on a hundred minds. I’d say the latter has about a hundred times as much measure as the former. I don’t know how else to reason about relative existence. (Realness?) I’m porting this sort of thinking over from reasoning about the universe being spatially infinite and there being an infinite number of TheOtherDaves all typing slightly different things. Some of those TheOtherDaves ‘exist’ more than others, especially if they’re doing very probable things.
If existence isn’t measured by number of copies, then what could it be measured by? The alternative I see is something like decision theoretic significance, which is why I was talking about what you called ‘importance’. But I’m wary of getting into cutting edge decision theory stuff that I don’t understand very well. Instead, can you tell me what you think ‘realness’ is, and whether or not you think God is real, and why or why not? We’re starting to argue over definitions, which is a common failure mode, but it’s cool as long as we realize we’re arguing over definitions.
I think that everything exists, by the way: there’s an ensemble universe, like Tegmark’s level 4 multiverse, and so we can only quibble about how existent something is, not whether or not it exists. I might be having trouble trying to translate commonsense definitions into and out of my ontology. My apologies.
I mean that people tend to use a lot more neurons to model God than to model Santa Claus, and thus by the redundant-copies argument hinted at above this means that God exists more. Relatedly...
You’re right, I forgot about this. Parents have to use lots of neurons to model Santa Claus when crafting the letters. Kids don’t tend to use as many neurons when writing letters to Santa, I think. But add up all of these neuron-compuations and it’s still vastly less than the neuron-computations used by the many people having religious experiences and praying every day. (I’m using number-of-neurons-used as a proxy for strength/number of computations.)
Also, ‘people’ aren’t ontologically fundamental: they’re made of algorithms too, just like God. So I don’t see how you can say ‘God doesn’t exist’ without implying that Will Newsome doesn’t exist; Will Newsome is just a collection of human universal algorithms (facial recognition, object permanence) and culture-specific memetic contents (humanism, rationality, Buddhism). The body is just a computing substrate, and it’s not something I identify with all that much. And if I’m just a collection of algorithms running on some general computing hardware, well, the same is true of God. It’s just that he’s more parallel and I’m more serial. And I’m way smarter.
(Not that there is any such thing as ‘I’. ‘I’ am made of a kludge of algorithms, and we don’t always agree.)
I wonder whether you could comment on, and compare, the following statements:
God exists.
The “monster” sporadic simple group exists.
A non-trivial root of the zeta function not on the critical line exists.
A proper factor of 101 exists.
Components of an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell NM in 1947 exist (at Area 51 of Edwards AFB).
I don’t feel qualified to answer. If we’re talking about exists in a mathy sense, then any of those that can be represented mathematically exists. I’m not sure if there are universes where 5=4, and other logically impossible things. I’ve heard arguments to this effect but I don’t remember what they are. Surely you can have things that appear logically impossible, due to hiding some contradiction in the middle of a titanic proof, but actually logically impossible, I don’t know. ‘God’ is vague because ‘omnipresent’ and the like don’t really make sense; similar problems with proper factor of 101.
The last one about Roswell seems obviously true, it’s just not true in most universes we find ourselves on. But I mean, it’s a true statement in a trivial way. ‘We live in a spatially infinite universe and so there exists a copy of you that is the same in every way except with 20 foot long hair’ is also trivially true. But if you only care about worlds in which your hair is 20 feet long, then all of a sudden its truth is not trivial; it’s vitally important.
What implied questions did I miss?
I was trying to tease out whether your “God is real” is intended in the same sense as “the monster group exists” - neither exists in physical reality, but both exist in at least some minds; in a kind of mental reality. My other questions were intended to ferret out whether your idea of a mental or algorithmic “real” includes only well-defined and consistent ideas, or whether vague, incorrect, and impossible ideas also qualify as “real” in your sense.
Sorry I didn’t make that clear in the original comment—I didn’t mean to seem confrontational. I’m just trying to get a better understanding of your interesting suggestion. This appears to be one situation where more politeness might have helped. :)
As for where I am coming from, I’m one of those philosophical anti-realists mentioned earlier in this thread (and a big fan of van Fraassen). I am far from convinced that electrons are real. So I’m interested in the details when someone says, in effect, that God is just as real as electrons.
What’s the usefulness of “I think that everything exists, by the way: there’s an ensemble universe”? How does it constrain your expectations?
I don’t see how having specific beliefs either way about stuff outside the observable universe is useful.
Now, if you can show that whether the universe beyond the observable is infinite or non-infinite but much larger than the Hubble Volume constrains expectations about the contents of the observable universe, then it might be useful.
Off the top of my head: If the world is very big then there are more agents to trade with or be simulated by. Also I’m not sure what counts as the observable universe—we can’t see beyond the Hubble volume with our telescopes, but we can probabilistically model what different parts of the universe or different universes look like nonetheless. We also do not know what is ultimately observable. We currently lack the ability to observe mental phenomena but I still have specific beliefs about roughly what we’ll observe when we really understand consciousness.
It is useful to be curious about mysteries to which you believe there to be no answer; beliefs like that often turn out to be wrong.
OK, I think I’m following you now.
And, yes, we were talking about definitions: I wanted to make sure I understood what you were actually saying before I tried to respond to it.
I think we label something a “real X” to assert that it implements a deep structure that characterizes X, rather than merely having a superficial appearance of X.
For doing that to be meaningful we have to be prepared to cash it out in terms of the deep structure we’re asserting; if we can’t do that then we don’t mean anything by the phrase “real X.”
When someone says “Y is real,” I try to interpret that to mean “Y is [a real X]” for some plausible X. If someone says “The elephant I’m seeing is real,” I probably understand them to refer to (I1) a real elephant, which implies that it has mass and occupies volume and reflects light and radiates heat and so forth.
If they mean I1, and it turns out that what they are seeing doesn’t have those properties, then they are wrong. If they meant, instead, that it is (I2) a real activation of their retina, then questions of mass and volume are irrelevant… but if it turns out their retina isn’t being activated, then they’re wrong. If they mean, instead, that it’s (I3) a real activation of their visual cortex, then questions of retinal activation are irrelevant… but if it turns out that their visual cortex isn’t being activated, then they’re wrong.
Regardless of whether they’re right or wrong, these are all different claims, even though the same words are being used to express them. If they mean I3 and I understand I2, communication has failed.
If I’ve understood you: if I say “God is real,” you understand that to mean (J1) my neurons are being activated. And J1 is certainly true. But if I meant to express something else (J2) which implies the entity responsible for the creation of the universe once split the Red Sea in order to allow my ancestors to escape from the Egyptian army, then communication has failed.
Sure, we can get along just fine regardless, as long as we stay pretty vague. I can say “God is real” and you can reply “Yup, he sure is!” and we get lots of social bonding value out of it, but communication has nevertheless failed… unless, of course, our only goal was social bonding in the first place, in which case everything is fine.
So, back to whether I think God is real… I think the thing you’re asking about is real, yes. That is, there exist neurons that get activated when people talk about God, and those activation patterns are kinda-sorta isomorphic to one another.
As for why I think that… I don’t know how to begin answering that question in fewer than a thousand words. I don’t think it’s in the least bit controversial.
But I don’t think that’s what anyone else I’ve ever met would mean by the same question.
By the way, User:ata made this illuminating comment which I agree with; see my reply (where I admit to defecting when it comes to using words correctly).
(nods) Cool. This is essentially why I have been talking all along about the use of words, rather than talking about what kinds of things exist; it has seemed to me that our primary point of discontinuity was about the former rather than the latter.
By “real” I’m assuming you mean something like “a phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in order to make accurate predictions”. Specifically, predictions about what people will do. If so, absolutely.
Of course then there are other valid senses of “real” which everyone else is arguing below, in which there is the question of effects outside people’s actions, and whether the phenomenon showed up in people’s heads because an entity outside our scientific understanding called God put it there. Those are, of course, the tricky ones.
(God of the Gaps time!)