I’ve argued rather extensively against religion on this website.
That was my impression as well, but when I went looking for those arguments, they were very difficult to find. Perhaps my Google-fu is weak. Help from LW readers is welcome.
I found plenty of places where you spoke disrespectfully about religion, and quite a few places where you cast theists as the villains in your negative examples of rationality (a few arguably straw-men, but mostly fair). But I was surprised that I found very few places where you were actually arguing against religion.
Name a single one of those arguments which is equally effective against simulationism.
Well, the only really clear-cut example of a posting-length argument against religion is based on the “argument from evil”. As such, it is clearly not equally effective against simulationism.
You did make a posting attempting to define the term “supernatural” in a way that struck me as a kind of special pleading tailored to exclude simulationism from the criticism that theism receives as a result of that definition.
This posting rejects the supernatural by defining it as ‘a belief in an explanatory entity which is fundamentally, ontologically mental’. And why is that definition so damning to the supernaturalist program? Well, as I understand it, it is because, by this definition, to believe in the supernatural is anti-reductionist, and a failure of reductionism is simply inconceivable.
I wonder why there is not such a visceral negative reaction to explanatory entities which are fundamentally, ontologically computational? Certainly it is not because we know of at least one reduction of computation. We also know of (or expect to someday know of) at least one reduction of mind.
But even though we can reduce computation, that doesn’t mean we have to reduce it. Respectable people have proposed to explain this universe as fundamentally a computational entity. Tegmark does something similar, speculating that the entire multiverse is essentially a Platonic mathematical structure. So, what justification exists to deprecate a cosmology based on a fundamental mental entity?
...
I only found one small item clearly supporting my claim. Eliezer, in a comment, makes this argument against creationists who invoke the Omphalos hypothesis
Never mind usefulness, it seems to me that “Evolution by natural selection occurs” and “God made the world and everything in it, but did so in such a way as to make it look exactly as if evolution by natural selection occured” are not the same hypothesis, that one of them is true and one of them is false, that it is simplicity that leads us to say which is which, and that we do, indeed, prefer the simpler of two theories that make the same predictions, rather than calling them the same theory.
I agree. But take a look at this famous paper by Bostrom. It cleverly sidesteps the objection that simulating an entire universe might be impossibly difficult by instead postulating a simulation of just enough physical detail so as to make it look exactly as if there were a real universe out there. “Are you living in a computer simulation?” “Are we living in a world which only looks like it evolved?” Eliezer chose to post a comment answering the latter question with a no. He has not, so far as I know, done the same with Bostrom’s simulationist speculation.
I’ll chime in that Eliezer provided me with the single, most personally powerful argument that I have against religion. (I’m not as convinced by razor and low-prior arguments, perhaps because I don’t understand them.)
The argument not only pummels religion it identifies it: religion is the pattern matching that results when you feel around for the best (most satisfying) answer. To paraphrase Eliezer’s argument (if someone knows the post, I’ll link to it, there’s at least this); while you’re in the process of inventing things, there’s nothing preventing you from making your theory as grand as you want. Once you have your maybe-they’re-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent. Especially the vigorous head-nodding in the congregation.
I don’t have so much against pattern matching. I think it has it’s uses, and religion provides many of them (to feel connected and integrated and purposeful, etc). But it’s an absurd means of epistemology. I think it’s amazing that religions go from ‘whoever made us must love us and want us to love the world’—which is a very natural pattern for humans to match—to this great detailed web of fabrication. In my opinion, the religions hang themselves with the details. We might speculate about what our creator would be like, but religions make up way too much stuff in way too much detail and then make it dogma. (I already knew the details were wrong, but I learned to recognize the made-up details as the symptom of lacking epistemology to begin with.)
Now that I recognize this pattern (the pattern of finding patterns that feel right, but which have no reason to be true) I see it other places too. It seems pattern matching will occur wherever there is a vacuum of the scientific method. Whenever we don’t know, we guess. I think it takes a lot of discipline to not feel compelled by guesses that resonate with your brain. (It seems it would help if your brain was wired a little differently so that the pattern didn’t resonate as well—but this is just a theory that sounds good.)
I also would like to see a link to that post, if anyone recognizes it.
I’ll agree that to (atheist) me, it certainly seems that one big support for religious belief is the natural human tendency toward wishful thinking. However, it doesn’t do much good to provide convincing arguments against religion as atheists picture it. You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.
Once you have your maybe-they’re-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Pity I can’t turn that around and use it against simulationism. :)
I found it: this is the post I meant. But it wasn’t written by Eliezer, sorry. (The comment I linked to in the grandparent that was resonates with this idea for me, and I might have seen more resonance in older posts.)
You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.
I’m confused. I just want to understand religion, and the world in general, better. Are you interested in deconversion?
Pity I can’t turn that around and use it against simulationism. :)
Ha ha. Simulationism is of course a way cool idea. I think the compelling meme behind it though is that we’re being tricked or fooled by something playful. When you deviate from this pattern, the idea is less culturally compelling.
In particular, the word ‘simulation’ doesn’t convey much. If you just mean something that evolves according to rules, then our universe is apparently a simulation already anyway.
You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.
I’m confused. I just want to understand religion, and the world in general, better. Are you interested in deconversion?
Whoops! Bad assumption on my part. Sorry. No, I am not particularly interested in turning theists into atheists either, though I am interested in rational persuasion techniques more generally.
“I think we can discern religion’s origins in superstition, which grew out of an overactive adoption of the intentional stance,” he says. “This is a mammalian feature that we share with, say, dogs. If your dog hears the thud of snow falling off the roof and jumps up and barks, the dog is in effect asking, ‘Who’s there?’ not, ‘What’s that?’ The dog is assuming there’s an agent causing the thud. It might be a dangerous agent. The assumption is that when something surprising, unexpected, puzzling happens, treat it as an agent until you learn otherwise. That’s the intentional stance. It’s instinctive.”
The intentional stance is appropriate for self-protection, Dennett explains, and “it’s on a hair trigger. You can’t afford to wait around. You want to have a lot of false positive, a lot of false alarms [...]”
He continues: “Now, the dog just goes back to sleep after a minute. But we, because we have language, we mull it over in our heads and pretty soon we’ve conjured up a hallucinated agent, say, a little forest god or a talking tree or an elf or something ghostly that made that noise. Generally, those are just harmless little quirks that we soon forget. But every now and then, one comes along that has a little bit more staying power. It’s sort of unforgettable. And so it grows. And we share it with a neighbor. And the neighbor says, ‘What do you mean, a talking tree? There’s no talking trees.’ And you say, ‘I could have sworn that tree was talking.’ Pretty soon, the whole village is talking about the talking tree.
Seeing patterns in noise and agency in patterns (especially fate) is probably a large factor in religious belief.
But what I was referring to by pattern matching was something different. Our cultural ideas about the world make lots of patterns, and there are natural ways to complete these patterns. When you hear the completion of these patterns, it can feel very correct, like something you already knew, or especially profound if it pulls together lots of memes.
For example, the Matrix is an idea that resonates with our culture. Everyone believes it on some level, or can relate to the world being like that. The movie was popular but the meme wasn’t the result of the movie—the meme was already there and the movie made it explicit and gave the idea a convenient handle. Human psychology plays a role. The Matrix as a concept has probably always been found in stories as a weak collective meme, but modern technology brought it more immediately and uniformly in our collective awareness.
I think religion is like that. A story that wrote itself from all the loose ends of what we already believe. Religious leaders are good at feeling and completing these collective patterns. Religion is probably in trouble because many of the memes are so anachronistic now. They survive to the extent that the ideas are based on psychology but the other stuff creates dissonance.
This isn’t something to reference (I’m sure there are zillions of books developing this) or a personal theory, it’s more or less a typical view about religion. It explains why there are so many religions differing in details (different things sounded good to different people) but with common threads. (Because the religions evolved together with overlapping cultures and reflect our common psychology.)
In lieu of an extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions, I’ll simply note that having God create the world 5,000 years ago but fake the details of evolution is more burdensome than having a simulator approximate all of physics to an indistinguishable level of detail. Why? Because “God” is more burdensome than “simulator”, God is antireductionist and “simulator” is not, and faking the details of evolution in particular in order to save a hypothesis invented by illiterate shepherds is a more complex specification in the theory than “the laws of physics in general are being approximated”.
To me it seems nakedly obvious that “God faked the details of evolution” is a far more outre and improbable theory than “our universe is a simulation and the simulation is approximate”. I should’ve been able to leave filling in the details as an exercise to the reader.
This just means you have a very narrow (Abrahamic) conception of God that not even most Christians have. (At least, most Christians I talk to have super-fuzzy-abstract ideas about Him, and most Jews think of God as ineffable and not personal these days AFAIK.) Otherwise your distinction makes little sense. (This may very well be an argument against ever using the word ‘God’ without additional modifiers (liberal Christian, fundamentalist Christian, Orthodox Jewish, deistic, alien, et cetera), but it’s not an argument that what people sometimes mean by ‘God’ is a wrong idea. Saying ‘simulator’ is just appealing to an audience interested in a different literary genre. Turing equivalence, man!)
Of note is that the less memetically viral religions tend to be saner (because missionary religions mostly appealed to the lowest common denominator of epistemic satisfiability). Buddhism as Buddha taught it is just flat out correct about nearly everything (even if you disagree with his perhaps-not-Good but also not-Superhappy goal of eliminating imperfection/suffering/off-kilteredness). Many Hindu and Jain philosophers were good rationalists (in the sense that Epicurus was a good rationalist), for instance. To a first and third and fifth approximation, every smart person was right about everything they were trying to be right about. Alas, humans are not automatically predisposed to want to be right about the super far mode considerations modern rationalists think to be important.
For many people the word “God” appears to just describe one’s highest conception of good, the north pole of morality. Such as: “God is Love” in Christianity.
From that perspective, I guess God is Rationality for many people here.
This conception lets you do a lot of fun associations. Since morality seems pretty tied up with good epistemology (preferences and beliefs are both types of knowledge, after all), and since knowledge is power (see Eliezer’s posts on engines of cognition), then you would expect this conception of God to not only be the most moral (omnibenevolent) but the most knowledgeable (omniscient) and powerful (omnipotent). Because God embodies correctness He is thus convergent for minds approximating Bayesianism (like math) and has a universally very short description length (omnipresent), and is accessible from many different computations (arguably personal).
To me it seems nakedly obvious that “God faked the details of evolution” is a far more outre and improbable theory than “our universe is a simulation and the simulation is approximate”. I should’ve been able to leave filling in the details as an exercise to the reader.
Trusting ones ‘gut’ impressions of the “nakedly obvious” like that and ‘leaving the details as an exercise’ is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when you have a well-tuned engine of rationality in your possession and you just need to get some intellectual work done.
But my impression of the thrust of the OP was that he was suggesting a bit of time-consuming calibration work so as to improve the tuning of our engines. Looking at our heuristics and biases with a bit of skepticism. Isn’t that what this community is all about?
But enough of this navel gazing! I also would like to see that digression on Solomonoff induction in an anthropic situation.
I found plenty of places where you spoke disrespectfully about religion, and quite a few places where you cast theists as the villains in your negative examples of rationality (a few arguably straw-men, but mostly fair). But I was surprised that I found very few places where you were actually arguing against religion.
Thx. But I don’t read that as arguing against religion. Instead it seems to be an argument against one feature of modern religion—its claim to unfalsifiability (since it deals with a Non-Overlapping MAgisterium, ‘NOMA’ using the common acronym). Eliezer thinks this is pretty wimpy. He seems to have more respect for old-time religion, like those priests of Baal who stuck their necks out, so to speak, and submitted their claims to empirical testing.
Can this attitude of critical rationalism be redeployed against simulationist claims? Or at least against the claims of those modern simulationists who keep their simulations unfalsifiable and don’t permit interaction between levels of reality? Against people like Bostrom who stipulate that the simulations that they multiply (without necessity) should all be indistinguishable from the real thing—at least to any simulated observer? I will leave that question to the reader. But I don’t think that it qualifies as a posting in which Eliezer argues against religion in toto. He is only arguing against one feature of modern apologetics.
The other part of the argument in that post is that existing religions are not only falsifiable, but have already been falsified by empirical evidence.
It cleverly sidesteps the objection that simulating an entire universe might be impossibly difficult by instead postulating a simulation of just enough physical detail so as to make it look exactly as if there were a real universe out there.
A “Truman Show”-style simulation. Less burdensome on the details—but their main application seems likely to be entertainment. How entertaining are you?
That was my impression as well, but when I went looking for those arguments, they were very difficult to find. Perhaps my Google-fu is weak. Help from LW readers is welcome.
I found plenty of places where you spoke disrespectfully about religion, and quite a few places where you cast theists as the villains in your negative examples of rationality (a few arguably straw-men, but mostly fair). But I was surprised that I found very few places where you were actually arguing against religion.
Well, the only really clear-cut example of a posting-length argument against religion is based on the “argument from evil”. As such, it is clearly not equally effective against simulationism.
You did make a posting attempting to define the term “supernatural” in a way that struck me as a kind of special pleading tailored to exclude simulationism from the criticism that theism receives as a result of that definition.
This posting rejects the supernatural by defining it as ‘a belief in an explanatory entity which is fundamentally, ontologically mental’. And why is that definition so damning to the supernaturalist program? Well, as I understand it, it is because, by this definition, to believe in the supernatural is anti-reductionist, and a failure of reductionism is simply inconceivable.
I wonder why there is not such a visceral negative reaction to explanatory entities which are fundamentally, ontologically computational? Certainly it is not because we know of at least one reduction of computation. We also know of (or expect to someday know of) at least one reduction of mind.
But even though we can reduce computation, that doesn’t mean we have to reduce it. Respectable people have proposed to explain this universe as fundamentally a computational entity. Tegmark does something similar, speculating that the entire multiverse is essentially a Platonic mathematical structure. So, what justification exists to deprecate a cosmology based on a fundamental mental entity?
...
I only found one small item clearly supporting my claim. Eliezer, in a comment, makes this argument against creationists who invoke the Omphalos hypothesis
I agree. But take a look at this famous paper by Bostrom. It cleverly sidesteps the objection that simulating an entire universe might be impossibly difficult by instead postulating a simulation of just enough physical detail so as to make it look exactly as if there were a real universe out there. “Are you living in a computer simulation?” “Are we living in a world which only looks like it evolved?” Eliezer chose to post a comment answering the latter question with a no. He has not, so far as I know, done the same with Bostrom’s simulationist speculation.
I’ll chime in that Eliezer provided me with the single, most personally powerful argument that I have against religion. (I’m not as convinced by razor and low-prior arguments, perhaps because I don’t understand them.)
The argument not only pummels religion it identifies it: religion is the pattern matching that results when you feel around for the best (most satisfying) answer. To paraphrase Eliezer’s argument (if someone knows the post, I’ll link to it, there’s at least this); while you’re in the process of inventing things, there’s nothing preventing you from making your theory as grand as you want. Once you have your maybe-they’re-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent. Especially the vigorous head-nodding in the congregation.
I don’t have so much against pattern matching. I think it has it’s uses, and religion provides many of them (to feel connected and integrated and purposeful, etc). But it’s an absurd means of epistemology. I think it’s amazing that religions go from ‘whoever made us must love us and want us to love the world’—which is a very natural pattern for humans to match—to this great detailed web of fabrication. In my opinion, the religions hang themselves with the details. We might speculate about what our creator would be like, but religions make up way too much stuff in way too much detail and then make it dogma. (I already knew the details were wrong, but I learned to recognize the made-up details as the symptom of lacking epistemology to begin with.)
Now that I recognize this pattern (the pattern of finding patterns that feel right, but which have no reason to be true) I see it other places too. It seems pattern matching will occur wherever there is a vacuum of the scientific method. Whenever we don’t know, we guess. I think it takes a lot of discipline to not feel compelled by guesses that resonate with your brain. (It seems it would help if your brain was wired a little differently so that the pattern didn’t resonate as well—but this is just a theory that sounds good.)
I also would like to see a link to that post, if anyone recognizes it.
I’ll agree that to (atheist) me, it certainly seems that one big support for religious belief is the natural human tendency toward wishful thinking. However, it doesn’t do much good to provide convincing arguments against religion as atheists picture it. You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Pity I can’t turn that around and use it against simulationism. :)
I found it: this is the post I meant. But it wasn’t written by Eliezer, sorry. (The comment I linked to in the grandparent that was resonates with this idea for me, and I might have seen more resonance in older posts.)
I’m confused. I just want to understand religion, and the world in general, better. Are you interested in deconversion?
Ha ha. Simulationism is of course a way cool idea. I think the compelling meme behind it though is that we’re being tricked or fooled by something playful. When you deviate from this pattern, the idea is less culturally compelling.
In particular, the word ‘simulation’ doesn’t convey much. If you just mean something that evolves according to rules, then our universe is apparently a simulation already anyway.
Thx. That is a good posting. As was the posting to which it responded
Whoops! Bad assumption on my part. Sorry. No, I am not particularly interested in turning theists into atheists either, though I am interested in rational persuasion techniques more generally.
Dennett tells a similar “agentification” story:
I think that is usually called Patternicity these days. See:
Seeing patterns in noise and agency in patterns (especially fate) is probably a large factor in religious belief.
But what I was referring to by pattern matching was something different. Our cultural ideas about the world make lots of patterns, and there are natural ways to complete these patterns. When you hear the completion of these patterns, it can feel very correct, like something you already knew, or especially profound if it pulls together lots of memes.
For example, the Matrix is an idea that resonates with our culture. Everyone believes it on some level, or can relate to the world being like that. The movie was popular but the meme wasn’t the result of the movie—the meme was already there and the movie made it explicit and gave the idea a convenient handle. Human psychology plays a role. The Matrix as a concept has probably always been found in stories as a weak collective meme, but modern technology brought it more immediately and uniformly in our collective awareness.
I think religion is like that. A story that wrote itself from all the loose ends of what we already believe. Religious leaders are good at feeling and completing these collective patterns. Religion is probably in trouble because many of the memes are so anachronistic now. They survive to the extent that the ideas are based on psychology but the other stuff creates dissonance.
This isn’t something to reference (I’m sure there are zillions of books developing this) or a personal theory, it’s more or less a typical view about religion. It explains why there are so many religions differing in details (different things sounded good to different people) but with common threads. (Because the religions evolved together with overlapping cultures and reflect our common psychology.)
In lieu of an extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions, I’ll simply note that having God create the world 5,000 years ago but fake the details of evolution is more burdensome than having a simulator approximate all of physics to an indistinguishable level of detail. Why? Because “God” is more burdensome than “simulator”, God is antireductionist and “simulator” is not, and faking the details of evolution in particular in order to save a hypothesis invented by illiterate shepherds is a more complex specification in the theory than “the laws of physics in general are being approximated”.
To me it seems nakedly obvious that “God faked the details of evolution” is a far more outre and improbable theory than “our universe is a simulation and the simulation is approximate”. I should’ve been able to leave filling in the details as an exercise to the reader.
Extended digression about how to adjust Solomonoff induction for making anthropic predictions plz
This just means you have a very narrow (Abrahamic) conception of God that not even most Christians have. (At least, most Christians I talk to have super-fuzzy-abstract ideas about Him, and most Jews think of God as ineffable and not personal these days AFAIK.) Otherwise your distinction makes little sense. (This may very well be an argument against ever using the word ‘God’ without additional modifiers (liberal Christian, fundamentalist Christian, Orthodox Jewish, deistic, alien, et cetera), but it’s not an argument that what people sometimes mean by ‘God’ is a wrong idea. Saying ‘simulator’ is just appealing to an audience interested in a different literary genre. Turing equivalence, man!)
Of note is that the less memetically viral religions tend to be saner (because missionary religions mostly appealed to the lowest common denominator of epistemic satisfiability). Buddhism as Buddha taught it is just flat out correct about nearly everything (even if you disagree with his perhaps-not-Good but also not-Superhappy goal of eliminating imperfection/suffering/off-kilteredness). Many Hindu and Jain philosophers were good rationalists (in the sense that Epicurus was a good rationalist), for instance. To a first and third and fifth approximation, every smart person was right about everything they were trying to be right about. Alas, humans are not automatically predisposed to want to be right about the super far mode considerations modern rationalists think to be important.
For many people the word “God” appears to just describe one’s highest conception of good, the north pole of morality. Such as: “God is Love” in Christianity.
From that perspective, I guess God is Rationality for many people here.
People might say that, but they don’t actually believe it. They’re just trying to obfuscate the fact that they believe something insane.
This conception lets you do a lot of fun associations. Since morality seems pretty tied up with good epistemology (preferences and beliefs are both types of knowledge, after all), and since knowledge is power (see Eliezer’s posts on engines of cognition), then you would expect this conception of God to not only be the most moral (omnibenevolent) but the most knowledgeable (omniscient) and powerful (omnipotent). Because God embodies correctness He is thus convergent for minds approximating Bayesianism (like math) and has a universally very short description length (omnipresent), and is accessible from many different computations (arguably personal).
Delicious delicious metacontrarianism...
It’s like Scholastic mad-libs!
Preferences are entangled with beliefs, certainly, but I don’t see why I would consder them to be knowledge.
What is your operational definition of knowledge?
Trusting ones ‘gut’ impressions of the “nakedly obvious” like that and ‘leaving the details as an exercise’ is a perfectly reasonable thing to do when you have a well-tuned engine of rationality in your possession and you just need to get some intellectual work done.
But my impression of the thrust of the OP was that he was suggesting a bit of time-consuming calibration work so as to improve the tuning of our engines. Looking at our heuristics and biases with a bit of skepticism. Isn’t that what this community is all about?
But enough of this navel gazing! I also would like to see that digression on Solomonoff induction in an anthropic situation.
Seconding Kevin’s request. Seeing a sentence like that with no followup is very frustrating.
The post you are looking for is Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
Thx. But I don’t read that as arguing against religion. Instead it seems to be an argument against one feature of modern religion—its claim to unfalsifiability (since it deals with a Non-Overlapping MAgisterium, ‘NOMA’ using the common acronym). Eliezer thinks this is pretty wimpy. He seems to have more respect for old-time religion, like those priests of Baal who stuck their necks out, so to speak, and submitted their claims to empirical testing.
Can this attitude of critical rationalism be redeployed against simulationist claims? Or at least against the claims of those modern simulationists who keep their simulations unfalsifiable and don’t permit interaction between levels of reality? Against people like Bostrom who stipulate that the simulations that they multiply (without necessity) should all be indistinguishable from the real thing—at least to any simulated observer? I will leave that question to the reader. But I don’t think that it qualifies as a posting in which Eliezer argues against religion in toto. He is only arguing against one feature of modern apologetics.
The other part of the argument in that post is that existing religions are not only falsifiable, but have already been falsified by empirical evidence.
A “Truman Show”-style simulation. Less burdensome on the details—but their main application seems likely to be entertainment. How entertaining are you?