I believe so for reasons you wouldn’t find compelling, because the gods apparently do not want there to be common knowledge of their existence, and thus do not interact with humans in a manner that provides communicable evidence. (Yes, this is exactly what a world without gods would look like to an impartial observer without firsthand incommunicable evidence. This is obviously important but it is also completely obvious so I wish people didn’t harp on it so much.) People without firsthand experience live in a world that is ambiguous as to the existence or lack thereof of god-like beings, and any social evidence given to them will neither confirm nor deny their picture of the world, unless they’re falling prey to confirmation bias, which of course they often do, especially theists and atheists. I think people without firsthand incommunicable evidence should be duly skeptical but should keep the existence of the supernatural (in the everyday sense of that word, not the metaphysical sense) as a live hypothesis. Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance. (I think LessWrong is especially prone to this kind of arrogance; see IlyaShpitser’s comments on LessWrong’s rah-rah-Bayes stance to see part of what I mean.)
As for me, and as to my personal decision policy, I am ninety-something percent confident. The scenarios where I’m wrong are mostly worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience that humans are for some reason blind to. I’m not talking about normal human memory biases and biases of interpretation, I’m saying some huge fraction of humans would have to have a systemic disorder on the level of anosognosia. Given that I don’t know how we should even act in such a world, I’m more inclined to go with the gods hypothesis, which, while baffling, at least has some semblance of graspability.
Can you please describe one example of the firsthand evidence you’re talking about?
Also, I honestly don’t know what the everyday sense of supernatural is. I don’t think most people who believe in “the supernatural” could give a clear definition of what they mean by the word. Can you give us yours?
Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance.
Psychologically “5%” seems to correspond to the difference between a hypothesis you’re willing to consider seriously, albeit briefly, versus a hypothesis that is perhaps worth keeping track of by name but not worth the effort required to seriously consider.
Do you have any thoughts about why, given that the gods apparently do not want their existence to be common knowledge, they allow selected individuals such as yourself to obtain compelling evidence of their presence?
I don’t have good thoughts about that. There may be something about sheep and goats, as a general rule but certainly not a universal law. It is possible that some are more cosmically interesting than others for some reason (perhaps a matter of their circumstances and not their character), but it seems unwise to ever think that about oneself; breaking the fourth wall is always a bold move, and the gods would seem to know their tropes. I wouldn’t go that route too far without expectation of a Wrong Genre Savvy incident. Or, y’know, delusionally narcissistic schizophrenia. Ah, the power of the identity of indiscernibles. Anyhow, it is possible such evidence is not so rare, especially among sheep whose beliefs are easily explained away by other plausible causes.
Do you think the available evidence, overall, is so finely balanced that somewhere between 5% and 95% confidence (say) is appropriate? That would be fairly surprising given how much evidence there is out there that’s somewhat relevant to the question of gods. Or do you think that, even in the absence of dramatic epiphanies of one’s own, we should all be way more than 95% confident of (something kinda like) theism?
I think I understand your statement about social epistemic rationality but it seems to me that a better response to the situation where you think there are many many bits of evidence for one position but lots of people hold a contrary one is to estimate your probabilities in the usual way but be aware that this is an area in which either you or many others have gone badly wrong, and therefore be especially watchful for errors in your thinking, surprising new evidence, etc.
No, without epiphanies you probably shouldn’t be more than 95% confident, I think; with the institutions we currently have for epistemic communication, and with the polarizing nature of the subject, I don’t think most people can be very confident either way. So I would say yes, I think between 5% and 95% would be appropriate, and I don’t think I share your intuition that that would be fairly surprising, perhaps because I don’t understand it. Take cold fusion, say, and ask a typical college student studying in psychology how plausible they think it is that it has been developed or will soon be developed et cetera. I think they should give an answer between 5% and 95% for most variations on that question. I think the supernatural is in that reference class. You have in mind a better reference class?
I agree the response you propose in your second paragraph is good. I don’t remember what I was proposing instead but if it was at odds with what you’re proposing then it might not be good, especially if what I recommended requires somewhat complex engineering/politics, which IIRC it did.
worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience
What sort of hallucinations are we talking about? I sometimes have hallucinations (auditory and visual) with sleep paralysis attacks. One close friend has vivid hallucinatory experiences (sometimes involving the Hindu gods) even outside of bed. It is low status to talk about your hallucinations so I imagine lots of people might have hallucinations without me knowing about it.
I sometimes find it difficult to tell hallucinations from normal experiences, even though my reasoning faculty is intact during sleep paralysis and even though I know perfectly well that these things happen to me. Here are two stories to illustrate.
Recently, my son was ill and sleeping fitfully, frequently waking up me and my wife. After one restless episode late in the night he had finally fallen asleep, snuggling up to my wife. I was trying to fall asleep again, when I heard footsteps outside the room. “My daughter (4 years old) must have gotten out of bed”, I thought, “she’ll be coming over”. But this didn’t happen. The footsteps continued and there was a light out in the hall. “Odd, my daughter must have turned on the light for some reason.” Then through the door came an infant, floating in the air. V orpnzr greevsvrq ohg sbhaq gung V jnf cnenylmrq naq pbhyq abg zbir be fcrnx. V gevrq gb gbhpu zl jvsr naq pel bhg naq svanyyl znantrq gb rzvg n fhoqhrq fuevrx. Gura gur rkcrevrapr raqrq naq V fnj gung gur yvtugf va gur unyy jrer abg ghearq ba naq urneq ab sbbgfgrcf. “Fghcvq fyrrc cnenylfvf”, V gubhtug, naq ebyyrq bire ba zl fvqr.
Here’s another somewhat older incident: I was lying in bed beside my wife when I heard movement in our daughter’s room. I lay still wondering whether to go fetch her—but then it appeared as if the sounds were coming closer. This was surprising since at that time my daughter didn’t have the habit of coming over on her own. But something was unmistakeably coming into the room and as it entered I saw that it was a large humanoid figure with my daughter’s face. V erpbvyrq va ubeebe naq yrg bhg n fuevrx. Nf zl yrsg unaq frnepurq sbe zl jvsr V sbhaq gung fur jnfa’g npghnyyl ylvat orfvqr zr—fur jnf fgnaqvat va sebag bs zr ubyqvat bhe qnhtugre. Fur’q whfg tbggra bhg bs orq gb srgpu bhe qnhtugre jvgubhg zr abgvpvat.
The two episodes play our very similarly but only one of them involved hallucinations.
I’ve sort of forgotten where I was going with this, but if Will would like to tell us a bit more about his experiences I would be interested.
You are arguing, if I understand you aright, (1) that the gods don’t want their existence to be widely known but (2) that encounters with the gods, dramatic enough to demand extraordinary explanations if they aren’t real, are commonplace.
This seems like a curious combination of claims. Could you say a little about why you don’t find their conjunction wildly implausible? (Or, if the real problem is that I’ve badly misunderstood you, correct my misunderstanding?)
It is possible the beings in question could have predicted such advances and accounted for them. But it seems some sufficiently advanced technology, whether institutional or neurological, could make the evidence “communicable”. But perhaps by the time such technologies are available, there will be many more plausible excuses for spooky agents to hide behind. Such as AGIs.
Incommunicable in the anthropic sense of formally losing its evidence-value when transferred between people, in the broader sense of being encoded in memories that that can’t be regenerated in a trustworthy way, or in the mundane sense of feeling like evidence but lacking a plausible reduction to Bayes? And—do you think you have incommunicable evidence? (I just noticed that your last few comments dance around that without actually saying it.)
(I am capable of handling information with Special Properties but only privately and only after a multi-step narrowing down.)
There might be anthropic issues, I’ve been thinking about that more the last week. The specific question I’ve been asking is ‘What does it mean for me and someone else to live in the same world?‘. Is it possible for gods to exist in my world but not in others, in some sense, if their experience is truly ambiguous w.r.t. supernatural phenomena? From an almost postmodern heuristic perspective this seems fine, but ‘the map is not the territory’. But do we truly share the same territory, or is more of their decision theoretic significance in worlds that to them look exactly like mine, but aren’t mine? Are they partial counterfactual zombies in my world? They can affect me, but am I cut off from really affecting them? I like common sense but I can sort of see how common sense could lead to off-kilter conclusions. Provisionally I just approach day-to-day decisions as if I am as real to others as they are to me. Not doing so is a form of “insanity”, abstract social uncleanliness.
The memories can be regenerated in a mostly trustworthy way, as far as human memory goes. (But only because I tried to be careful; I think most people who experience supernatural phenomena are not nearly so careful. But I realize that I am postulating that I have some special hard-to-test epistemic skill, which is always a warning sign. Also I have a few experiences where my memory is not very trustworthy due to having just woken up and things like that.)
The experiences I’ve had can be analyzed Bayesianly but when analyzing interactions with supposed agents involved a Bayesian game model is more appropriate. But I suspect that it’s one of many areas where a Bayesian analysis does not provide more insight than human intuitions for frequencies (which I think are really surprisingly good when not in a context of motivated cognition (I can defend this claim later with heuristics and biases citations, but maybe it’s not too controversial)). But it could be done by a sufficiently experienced Bayesian modeler. (Which I’m not.)
do you think you have incommunicable evidence?
Incommunicable to some but not others. And I sort of try not to communicate the evidence to people who I think would have the interpretational framework and skills necessary to analyze it fairly, because I’m superstitious… it vaguely feels like there are things I might be expected to keep private. A gut feeling that I’d somehow be betraying something’s or someone’s confidence. It might be worth noting that I was somewhat superstitious long before I explicitly considered supernaturalism reasonable; of course, I think even most atheists who were raised atheist (I was raised atheist) are also superstitious in similar ways but don’t recognize it as such.
The specific question I’ve been asking is ‘What does it mean for me and someone else to live in the same world?’
As best I can tell, a full reduction of “existence” necessarily bottoms out in a mix of mathematical/logical statements about which structures are embedded in each other, and a semi-arbitrary weighting over computations. That weighting can go in two places: in a definition for the word “exist”, or in a utility function. If it goes in the definition, then references to the word in the utility function become similarly arbitrary. So the notion of existence is, by necessity, a structural component of utility functions, and different agents’ utility functions don’t have to share that component.
The most common notion of existence around here is the Born rule (and less-formal notions that are ultimately equivalent). Everything works out in the standard way, including a shared symmetric notion of existence, if (a) you accept that there is a quantum mechanics-like construct with the Born rule, that has you embedded in it, (b) you decide that you don’t care about anything which is not that construct, and (c) decide that when branches of the quantum wavefunction stop interacting with each other, your utility is a linear function of a real-valued function run over each of the parts separately.
Reject any one of these premises, and many things which are commonly taken as fundamental notions break down. (Bayes does not break down, but you need to be very careful about keeping track of what your measure is over, because several different measures that share the common name “probability” stop lining up with each other.)
But it’s possible to regenerate some of this from outside the utility function. (This is good, because I partially reject (b) and totally reject (c)). If you hold a memory which is only ever held by agents that live in a particular kind of universe, then your decisions only affect that kind of universe. If you make an observation that would distinguish between two kinds of universes, then successors in each see different answers, and can go on to optimize those universes separately. So if you observe whether or not your memories seem to follow the Born rule, and that you’re evolved with respect to an environment that seems to follow the Born rule, then one version of you will go on to optimize the content of universes that follow it, and another version will go on to optimize the content of universes that don’t, and this will be more effective than trying to keep them tied together. Similarly for deism; if you make the observation, then you can accept that some other version of you had the observation come out the other way, and get on with optimizing your own side of the divide.
That is, if you never forget anything. If you model yourself with short and long term memory as separate, and think in TDT-like terms, then all similar agents with matching short-term memories act the same way, and it’s the retrieval of an observation from long-term memory—rather than the observation itself—that splits an agent between universes. (But the act of performing an observation changes the distribution of results when agents do this long-term-memory lookup. I think this adds up to normality, eventually and in most cases. But the cases in which it doesn’t seem interesting.)
As for me, and as to my personal decision policy, I am ninety-something percent confident. The scenarios where I’m wrong are mostly worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience that humans are for some reason blind to. I’m not talking about normal human memory biases and biases of interpretation, I’m saying some huge fraction of humans would have to have a systemic disorder on the level of anosognosia.
Can you explain why you believe this? To me it doesn’t seem like complex hallucination is that common. I know about 1% of the population is schizophrenic and hallucinates regularly, and I’m sure non-schizophrenics hallucinate occasionally, but it certainly seems to be fairly rare.
Can you describe your own experience with these gods?
ETA: To clarify, I’m saying that I don’t think hallucination is common, and I also don’t believe that gods are real. I don’t see why there should be any tension between those beliefs.
I agree complex recurrent hallucination in otherwise seemingly psychologically healthy people is rare, which is why the “gods”/psi hypothesis is more compelling to me. For the hallucination hypothesis to hold it would require some kind of species-wide anosognosia or something like it.
I think you misunderstood me.… My position is: Most people don’t claim to have seen gods, and gods aren’t real. A small percentage of people do have these experiences, but these people are either frauds, hallucinating, or otherwise mistaken.
I don’t see why you think the situation is either [everyone is hallucinating] or [gods are real].” It seems clear to me that [most people aren’t hallucinating] and [gods aren’t real.] Are you under the impression that most people are having direct experiences of gods or other supernatural apparitions?
Same as with Bigfoot/Loch Ness Monster. People (especially children) are highly suggestible, hallucinations and optical illusions occur, hoaxes occur. People lie to fit in. These are things that are already known to be true.
It looks to me as if the two of you are talking past each other. I think knb means “it doesn’t seem to me like things that would have to be complex hallucination if there were no gods are that common”, and is kinda assuming there are in fact no gods; whereas Will means “actual complex hallucinations aren’t common” and is kinda assuming that apparent manifestations of gods (or something of the sort) are common.
I second knb’s request that Will give some description of his own encounters with god(s), but I expect him to be unwilling to do so with much detail. [EDITED to add: And in fact I see he’s explicitly declined to do so elsewhere in the thread.]
I think hallucination is more common than many people think it is (Oliver Sacks recently wrote a book that I think makes this claim, but I haven’t read it), and I am not aware of good evidence that apparent manifestations of gods dramatic enough to be called “outright complex hallucination” are common enough to require a huge fraction of people to be anosognosic if gods aren’t real—Will, if you’re reading this, would you care to say more?
Upon further reflection it is very difficult for me to guess what percentage of people experience what evidence and of what nature and intensity. I do not feel comfortable generalizing from the experiences of people in my life, for obvious reasons and some less obvious ones. I believe this doesn’t ultimately matter so much for me, personally, because what I’ve seen implies it is common enough and clear enough to require a perhaps-heavy explanation. But for others trying to guess at more general base rates, I think I don’t have much insight to offer.
Why do you believe that there are god-like beings that interact with humans? How confident are you that this is the case?
I believe so for reasons you wouldn’t find compelling, because the gods apparently do not want there to be common knowledge of their existence, and thus do not interact with humans in a manner that provides communicable evidence. (Yes, this is exactly what a world without gods would look like to an impartial observer without firsthand incommunicable evidence. This is obviously important but it is also completely obvious so I wish people didn’t harp on it so much.) People without firsthand experience live in a world that is ambiguous as to the existence or lack thereof of god-like beings, and any social evidence given to them will neither confirm nor deny their picture of the world, unless they’re falling prey to confirmation bias, which of course they often do, especially theists and atheists. I think people without firsthand incommunicable evidence should be duly skeptical but should keep the existence of the supernatural (in the everyday sense of that word, not the metaphysical sense) as a live hypothesis. Assigning less than 5% probability to it is, in my view, a common but serious failure of social epistemic rationality, most likely caused by arrogance. (I think LessWrong is especially prone to this kind of arrogance; see IlyaShpitser’s comments on LessWrong’s rah-rah-Bayes stance to see part of what I mean.)
As for me, and as to my personal decision policy, I am ninety-something percent confident. The scenarios where I’m wrong are mostly worlds where outright complex hallucination is a normal feature of human experience that humans are for some reason blind to. I’m not talking about normal human memory biases and biases of interpretation, I’m saying some huge fraction of humans would have to have a systemic disorder on the level of anosognosia. Given that I don’t know how we should even act in such a world, I’m more inclined to go with the gods hypothesis, which, while baffling, at least has some semblance of graspability.
Can you please describe one example of the firsthand evidence you’re talking about?
Also, I honestly don’t know what the everyday sense of supernatural is. I don’t think most people who believe in “the supernatural” could give a clear definition of what they mean by the word. Can you give us yours?
Thanks.
I realize it’s annoying, but I don’t think I should do that.
I give a definition of “supernatural” here. Of course, it doesn’t capture all of what people use the word to mean.
Why not?
Where does the 5% threshold come from?
Psychologically “5%” seems to correspond to the difference between a hypothesis you’re willing to consider seriously, albeit briefly, versus a hypothesis that is perhaps worth keeping track of by name but not worth the effort required to seriously consider.
(nods) Fair enough.
Do you have any thoughts about why, given that the gods apparently do not want their existence to be common knowledge, they allow selected individuals such as yourself to obtain compelling evidence of their presence?
I don’t have good thoughts about that. There may be something about sheep and goats, as a general rule but certainly not a universal law. It is possible that some are more cosmically interesting than others for some reason (perhaps a matter of their circumstances and not their character), but it seems unwise to ever think that about oneself; breaking the fourth wall is always a bold move, and the gods would seem to know their tropes. I wouldn’t go that route too far without expectation of a Wrong Genre Savvy incident. Or, y’know, delusionally narcissistic schizophrenia. Ah, the power of the identity of indiscernibles. Anyhow, it is possible such evidence is not so rare, especially among sheep whose beliefs are easily explained away by other plausible causes.
Do you think the available evidence, overall, is so finely balanced that somewhere between 5% and 95% confidence (say) is appropriate? That would be fairly surprising given how much evidence there is out there that’s somewhat relevant to the question of gods. Or do you think that, even in the absence of dramatic epiphanies of one’s own, we should all be way more than 95% confident of (something kinda like) theism?
I think I understand your statement about social epistemic rationality but it seems to me that a better response to the situation where you think there are many many bits of evidence for one position but lots of people hold a contrary one is to estimate your probabilities in the usual way but be aware that this is an area in which either you or many others have gone badly wrong, and therefore be especially watchful for errors in your thinking, surprising new evidence, etc.
No, without epiphanies you probably shouldn’t be more than 95% confident, I think; with the institutions we currently have for epistemic communication, and with the polarizing nature of the subject, I don’t think most people can be very confident either way. So I would say yes, I think between 5% and 95% would be appropriate, and I don’t think I share your intuition that that would be fairly surprising, perhaps because I don’t understand it. Take cold fusion, say, and ask a typical college student studying in psychology how plausible they think it is that it has been developed or will soon be developed et cetera. I think they should give an answer between 5% and 95% for most variations on that question. I think the supernatural is in that reference class. You have in mind a better reference class?
I agree the response you propose in your second paragraph is good. I don’t remember what I was proposing instead but if it was at odds with what you’re proposing then it might not be good, especially if what I recommended requires somewhat complex engineering/politics, which IIRC it did.
What sort of hallucinations are we talking about? I sometimes have hallucinations (auditory and visual) with sleep paralysis attacks. One close friend has vivid hallucinatory experiences (sometimes involving the Hindu gods) even outside of bed. It is low status to talk about your hallucinations so I imagine lots of people might have hallucinations without me knowing about it.
I sometimes find it difficult to tell hallucinations from normal experiences, even though my reasoning faculty is intact during sleep paralysis and even though I know perfectly well that these things happen to me. Here are two stories to illustrate.
Recently, my son was ill and sleeping fitfully, frequently waking up me and my wife. After one restless episode late in the night he had finally fallen asleep, snuggling up to my wife. I was trying to fall asleep again, when I heard footsteps outside the room. “My daughter (4 years old) must have gotten out of bed”, I thought, “she’ll be coming over”. But this didn’t happen. The footsteps continued and there was a light out in the hall. “Odd, my daughter must have turned on the light for some reason.” Then through the door came an infant, floating in the air. V orpnzr greevsvrq ohg sbhaq gung V jnf cnenylmrq naq pbhyq abg zbir be fcrnx. V gevrq gb gbhpu zl jvsr naq pel bhg naq svanyyl znantrq gb rzvg n fhoqhrq fuevrx. Gura gur rkcrevrapr raqrq naq V fnj gung gur yvtugf va gur unyy jrer abg ghearq ba naq urneq ab sbbgfgrcf. “Fghcvq fyrrc cnenylfvf”, V gubhtug, naq ebyyrq bire ba zl fvqr.
Here’s another somewhat older incident: I was lying in bed beside my wife when I heard movement in our daughter’s room. I lay still wondering whether to go fetch her—but then it appeared as if the sounds were coming closer. This was surprising since at that time my daughter didn’t have the habit of coming over on her own. But something was unmistakeably coming into the room and as it entered I saw that it was a large humanoid figure with my daughter’s face. V erpbvyrq va ubeebe naq yrg bhg n fuevrx. Nf zl yrsg unaq frnepurq sbe zl jvsr V sbhaq gung fur jnfa’g npghnyyl ylvat orfvqr zr—fur jnf fgnaqvat va sebag bs zr ubyqvat bhe qnhtugre. Fur’q whfg tbggra bhg bs orq gb srgpu bhe qnhtugre jvgubhg zr abgvpvat.
The two episodes play our very similarly but only one of them involved hallucinations.
I’ve sort of forgotten where I was going with this, but if Will would like to tell us a bit more about his experiences I would be interested.
You are arguing, if I understand you aright, (1) that the gods don’t want their existence to be widely known but (2) that encounters with the gods, dramatic enough to demand extraordinary explanations if they aren’t real, are commonplace.
This seems like a curious combination of claims. Could you say a little about why you don’t find their conjunction wildly implausible? (Or, if the real problem is that I’ve badly misunderstood you, correct my misunderstanding?)
Could a future neuroscience in principle change this, or do you have a stronger notion of incommunicability?
It is possible the beings in question could have predicted such advances and accounted for them. But it seems some sufficiently advanced technology, whether institutional or neurological, could make the evidence “communicable”. But perhaps by the time such technologies are available, there will be many more plausible excuses for spooky agents to hide behind. Such as AGIs.
Incommunicable in the anthropic sense of formally losing its evidence-value when transferred between people, in the broader sense of being encoded in memories that that can’t be regenerated in a trustworthy way, or in the mundane sense of feeling like evidence but lacking a plausible reduction to Bayes? And—do you think you have incommunicable evidence? (I just noticed that your last few comments dance around that without actually saying it.)
(I am capable of handling information with Special Properties but only privately and only after a multi-step narrowing down.)
There might be anthropic issues, I’ve been thinking about that more the last week. The specific question I’ve been asking is ‘What does it mean for me and someone else to live in the same world?‘. Is it possible for gods to exist in my world but not in others, in some sense, if their experience is truly ambiguous w.r.t. supernatural phenomena? From an almost postmodern heuristic perspective this seems fine, but ‘the map is not the territory’. But do we truly share the same territory, or is more of their decision theoretic significance in worlds that to them look exactly like mine, but aren’t mine? Are they partial counterfactual zombies in my world? They can affect me, but am I cut off from really affecting them? I like common sense but I can sort of see how common sense could lead to off-kilter conclusions. Provisionally I just approach day-to-day decisions as if I am as real to others as they are to me. Not doing so is a form of “insanity”, abstract social uncleanliness.
The memories can be regenerated in a mostly trustworthy way, as far as human memory goes. (But only because I tried to be careful; I think most people who experience supernatural phenomena are not nearly so careful. But I realize that I am postulating that I have some special hard-to-test epistemic skill, which is always a warning sign. Also I have a few experiences where my memory is not very trustworthy due to having just woken up and things like that.)
The experiences I’ve had can be analyzed Bayesianly but when analyzing interactions with supposed agents involved a Bayesian game model is more appropriate. But I suspect that it’s one of many areas where a Bayesian analysis does not provide more insight than human intuitions for frequencies (which I think are really surprisingly good when not in a context of motivated cognition (I can defend this claim later with heuristics and biases citations, but maybe it’s not too controversial)). But it could be done by a sufficiently experienced Bayesian modeler. (Which I’m not.)
Incommunicable to some but not others. And I sort of try not to communicate the evidence to people who I think would have the interpretational framework and skills necessary to analyze it fairly, because I’m superstitious… it vaguely feels like there are things I might be expected to keep private. A gut feeling that I’d somehow be betraying something’s or someone’s confidence. It might be worth noting that I was somewhat superstitious long before I explicitly considered supernaturalism reasonable; of course, I think even most atheists who were raised atheist (I was raised atheist) are also superstitious in similar ways but don’t recognize it as such.
Sorry for the poor writing.
As best I can tell, a full reduction of “existence” necessarily bottoms out in a mix of mathematical/logical statements about which structures are embedded in each other, and a semi-arbitrary weighting over computations. That weighting can go in two places: in a definition for the word “exist”, or in a utility function. If it goes in the definition, then references to the word in the utility function become similarly arbitrary. So the notion of existence is, by necessity, a structural component of utility functions, and different agents’ utility functions don’t have to share that component.
The most common notion of existence around here is the Born rule (and less-formal notions that are ultimately equivalent). Everything works out in the standard way, including a shared symmetric notion of existence, if (a) you accept that there is a quantum mechanics-like construct with the Born rule, that has you embedded in it, (b) you decide that you don’t care about anything which is not that construct, and (c) decide that when branches of the quantum wavefunction stop interacting with each other, your utility is a linear function of a real-valued function run over each of the parts separately.
Reject any one of these premises, and many things which are commonly taken as fundamental notions break down. (Bayes does not break down, but you need to be very careful about keeping track of what your measure is over, because several different measures that share the common name “probability” stop lining up with each other.)
But it’s possible to regenerate some of this from outside the utility function. (This is good, because I partially reject (b) and totally reject (c)). If you hold a memory which is only ever held by agents that live in a particular kind of universe, then your decisions only affect that kind of universe. If you make an observation that would distinguish between two kinds of universes, then successors in each see different answers, and can go on to optimize those universes separately. So if you observe whether or not your memories seem to follow the Born rule, and that you’re evolved with respect to an environment that seems to follow the Born rule, then one version of you will go on to optimize the content of universes that follow it, and another version will go on to optimize the content of universes that don’t, and this will be more effective than trying to keep them tied together. Similarly for deism; if you make the observation, then you can accept that some other version of you had the observation come out the other way, and get on with optimizing your own side of the divide.
That is, if you never forget anything. If you model yourself with short and long term memory as separate, and think in TDT-like terms, then all similar agents with matching short-term memories act the same way, and it’s the retrieval of an observation from long-term memory—rather than the observation itself—that splits an agent between universes. (But the act of performing an observation changes the distribution of results when agents do this long-term-memory lookup. I think this adds up to normality, eventually and in most cases. But the cases in which it doesn’t seem interesting.)
Can you explain why you believe this? To me it doesn’t seem like complex hallucination is that common. I know about 1% of the population is schizophrenic and hallucinates regularly, and I’m sure non-schizophrenics hallucinate occasionally, but it certainly seems to be fairly rare.
Can you describe your own experience with these gods?
ETA: To clarify, I’m saying that I don’t think hallucination is common, and I also don’t believe that gods are real. I don’t see why there should be any tension between those beliefs.
I agree complex recurrent hallucination in otherwise seemingly psychologically healthy people is rare, which is why the “gods”/psi hypothesis is more compelling to me. For the hallucination hypothesis to hold it would require some kind of species-wide anosognosia or something like it.
I think you misunderstood me.… My position is: Most people don’t claim to have seen gods, and gods aren’t real. A small percentage of people do have these experiences, but these people are either frauds, hallucinating, or otherwise mistaken.
I don’t see why you think the situation is either [everyone is hallucinating] or [gods are real].” It seems clear to me that [most people aren’t hallucinating] and [gods aren’t real.] Are you under the impression that most people are having direct experiences of gods or other supernatural apparitions?
So how do you explain things like this?
Same as with Bigfoot/Loch Ness Monster. People (especially children) are highly suggestible, hallucinations and optical illusions occur, hoaxes occur. People lie to fit in. These are things that are already known to be true.
Well the miracle of the sun was witnessed by 30,000 to 100,000 people.
How many people witnessed this?
It looks to me as if the two of you are talking past each other. I think knb means “it doesn’t seem to me like things that would have to be complex hallucination if there were no gods are that common”, and is kinda assuming there are in fact no gods; whereas Will means “actual complex hallucinations aren’t common” and is kinda assuming that apparent manifestations of gods (or something of the sort) are common.
I second knb’s request that Will give some description of his own encounters with god(s), but I expect him to be unwilling to do so with much detail. [EDITED to add: And in fact I see he’s explicitly declined to do so elsewhere in the thread.]
I think hallucination is more common than many people think it is (Oliver Sacks recently wrote a book that I think makes this claim, but I haven’t read it), and I am not aware of good evidence that apparent manifestations of gods dramatic enough to be called “outright complex hallucination” are common enough to require a huge fraction of people to be anosognosic if gods aren’t real—Will, if you’re reading this, would you care to say more?
Upon further reflection it is very difficult for me to guess what percentage of people experience what evidence and of what nature and intensity. I do not feel comfortable generalizing from the experiences of people in my life, for obvious reasons and some less obvious ones. I believe this doesn’t ultimately matter so much for me, personally, because what I’ve seen implies it is common enough and clear enough to require a perhaps-heavy explanation. But for others trying to guess at more general base rates, I think I don’t have much insight to offer.