I think this is an interesting question! If rationalists speculated about the origin of the universe, what would they come up with? What if 15 rationalists made up a think-tank and were charged to speculate about the origin of the universe and assign probabilities to speculations? It would be a grievous mistake to begin with the hypothesis of theism, but could they end up with it on their list, with some non-negligible probability?
I don’t think so. The main premise of the theistic religions is that an entity (a person? a mind?) created us and that this entity is like a person and like a parent: it chose to create us (agency), wants the best for us, and authoritatively defines what is good behavior. This is too obviously an artifact of human psychology. Being children with parents is such an important part of our biology it’s certainly going to be an important component of our psychology. (Don’t various psychological theories claim that ‘growing up’ means internalizing the authority of parents as part of our psyche?)
The simulation hypothesis? This is also an anthropomorphic, privileged hypothesis, but with the advantage of being quite possible. So humans could do it or could have done it. (Being human, they could do something anthropomorphic like that.) But the rationalists in my think-tank aren’t charged with the probability of the simulation hypothesis. Deciding we might be in a simulation only pushes the question further out—what’s the origin of the universe that’s simulating the others?
Given how ‘weird’ it must be to create the universe (to create everything), I think we must decide that this creator is outside our comprehension. This creator (agent or thing or mechanism) not only created everything, it contains the explanation for why there is anything at all rather than nothing, and what ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ even mean*.
I think that the rationalists would come out of their conference with the conclusion that any adjectives that have ever been used to describe the creator—omniscient, benevolent, omnipotent; or even ‘agenty’ don’t make any sense in the context of such a thing.
In particular, it seems just silly to be concerned about whether this thing has a ‘mind’. What would it do with this mind? Other than create the universe, exactly as it has done / been doing. It seems like a mind is useful thing humans have to think through stuff and make decisions. To make computations about causality given limited information. A mind would be irrelevant outside causality and information. Probably ‘intention’ would be too, so that challenges ‘agency’.
… I can’t think of anything interesting that the rationalists could even apply, speculatively, to the entity: creator that would make any sense.
* Even ‘creation’ doesn’t make sense outside of time, but I mean the ‘mechanism’ at whatever level of abstraction that would explain the universe to a mind that could understand it.
I’ll develop my thoughts about not being able to sensibly apply the description ‘agenty’ to the creator because wondering why agency should be a key question is what originally motivated my above comment.
You can search ‘agenty’ and find many comments on this page that discuss whether we should speculate that the creator has agency. I found myself wondering throughout these comments what is specifically being meant by this. If the creator is ‘agenty’, what properties must it have and are those properties necessarily interesting?
I could probably look around and find a definition I would like better, but my definition of ‘agenty’ when I first start thinking about it is that this has meaning in a specifically human context.
Broadly, something ‘agenty’ is something that makes decisions according to a complex decision tree algorithm. This is a human-context-specific definition because “complex” means relative to what we consider complex. A mammal makes complex decisions and thus is ‘agenty’ while a simple process like water makes simple decisions (described by a small number of equations and the properties of the immediate physical space) and is not agenty. A complex inanimate thing (like ‘evolution’) and a simple animate thing (like a virus) would give us pause, straining our immediate, concrete conception of agency.
I’m willing to say that evolution has agency (it has goals—long term stable solutions—and complicated ways of achieving these goals) and water has simple agency. This because in my opinion what was really meant when we made the agency dichotomy between humans and water is that humans have free will and water doesn’t. But finally with a deterministic world view, this distinction dissolves. Humans have as much agency as anything else, but our decision algorithm is very complex to us, whereas we can often reliably predict what water will do.
Then to apply this concept of agency to the mechanism of creation of the universe… All the rules and steady states of the universe could be interpreted as its ‘intentions’ and, as such, it would have very complex agency. Another person may have a different set of meanings that they associate with agency, intention, etc., and consider this a terrible anthropomorphism if my words were mapped to their meanings. However, I don’t think it reflects an actual difference in beliefs about the territory.
If someone reading this has a different ontology, what would you specifically mean by the creator having agency, if it did?
I think this is an interesting question! If rationalists speculated about the origin of the universe, what would they come up with? What if 15 rationalists made up a think-tank and were charged to speculate about the origin of the universe and assign probabilities to speculations? It would be a grievous mistake to begin with the hypothesis of theism, but could they end up with it on their list, with some non-negligible probability?
I don’t think so. The main premise of the theistic religions is that an entity (a person? a mind?) created us and that this entity is like a person and like a parent: it chose to create us (agency), wants the best for us, and authoritatively defines what is good behavior. This is too obviously an artifact of human psychology. Being children with parents is such an important part of our biology it’s certainly going to be an important component of our psychology. (Don’t various psychological theories claim that ‘growing up’ means internalizing the authority of parents as part of our psyche?)
The simulation hypothesis? This is also an anthropomorphic, privileged hypothesis, but with the advantage of being quite possible. So humans could do it or could have done it. (Being human, they could do something anthropomorphic like that.) But the rationalists in my think-tank aren’t charged with the probability of the simulation hypothesis. Deciding we might be in a simulation only pushes the question further out—what’s the origin of the universe that’s simulating the others?
Given how ‘weird’ it must be to create the universe (to create everything), I think we must decide that this creator is outside our comprehension. This creator (agent or thing or mechanism) not only created everything, it contains the explanation for why there is anything at all rather than nothing, and what ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ even mean*.
I think that the rationalists would come out of their conference with the conclusion that any adjectives that have ever been used to describe the creator—omniscient, benevolent, omnipotent; or even ‘agenty’ don’t make any sense in the context of such a thing.
In particular, it seems just silly to be concerned about whether this thing has a ‘mind’. What would it do with this mind? Other than create the universe, exactly as it has done / been doing. It seems like a mind is useful thing humans have to think through stuff and make decisions. To make computations about causality given limited information. A mind would be irrelevant outside causality and information. Probably ‘intention’ would be too, so that challenges ‘agency’.
… I can’t think of anything interesting that the rationalists could even apply, speculatively, to the entity: creator that would make any sense.
* Even ‘creation’ doesn’t make sense outside of time, but I mean the ‘mechanism’ at whatever level of abstraction that would explain the universe to a mind that could understand it.
I’ll develop my thoughts about not being able to sensibly apply the description ‘agenty’ to the creator because wondering why agency should be a key question is what originally motivated my above comment.
You can search ‘agenty’ and find many comments on this page that discuss whether we should speculate that the creator has agency. I found myself wondering throughout these comments what is specifically being meant by this. If the creator is ‘agenty’, what properties must it have and are those properties necessarily interesting?
I could probably look around and find a definition I would like better, but my definition of ‘agenty’ when I first start thinking about it is that this has meaning in a specifically human context.
Broadly, something ‘agenty’ is something that makes decisions according to a complex decision tree algorithm. This is a human-context-specific definition because “complex” means relative to what we consider complex. A mammal makes complex decisions and thus is ‘agenty’ while a simple process like water makes simple decisions (described by a small number of equations and the properties of the immediate physical space) and is not agenty. A complex inanimate thing (like ‘evolution’) and a simple animate thing (like a virus) would give us pause, straining our immediate, concrete conception of agency.
I’m willing to say that evolution has agency (it has goals—long term stable solutions—and complicated ways of achieving these goals) and water has simple agency. This because in my opinion what was really meant when we made the agency dichotomy between humans and water is that humans have free will and water doesn’t. But finally with a deterministic world view, this distinction dissolves. Humans have as much agency as anything else, but our decision algorithm is very complex to us, whereas we can often reliably predict what water will do.
Then to apply this concept of agency to the mechanism of creation of the universe… All the rules and steady states of the universe could be interpreted as its ‘intentions’ and, as such, it would have very complex agency. Another person may have a different set of meanings that they associate with agency, intention, etc., and consider this a terrible anthropomorphism if my words were mapped to their meanings. However, I don’t think it reflects an actual difference in beliefs about the territory.
If someone reading this has a different ontology, what would you specifically mean by the creator having agency, if it did?