Sorry, I was making an argument from analogy for what I now realize was for no apparent reason. I saw you mention the anthropic principle and got overexcited.
I agree that before the development of cheap widespread compute such a conclusion on the likely simplicity of the generating rules of the universe would be in the reverse (again with the Deism).
Understandable, analogical reasoning can be very powerful and I often want to apply it before I notice that the analogy might not be exact.
“I agree that before the development of cheap widespread compute such a conclusion on the likely simplicity of the generating rules of the universe would be in the reverse (again with the Deism).”
Indeed, people argued, as far as I know (from the Wikipedia page about Isaac Newton) that god was the only parsimonious explanation for the diversity and simultaneous ‘orderedness’ of lifeforms. I would guess that this is because minds were the only well known and appreciated ‘arenas/venues’ of computation [1], so it was thought to be necessary to posit that the creator of the universe must be some kind of mind, whereas today we understand that minds are not necessarily distinct classes of computation.
By ‘computation’ here, I really mean sources of partially comprehensible complex patterns, which we now know are often computational. So it would be more accurate to say that a ‘mind’ would be thought of in the past as something containing much more information than we now think it needs to in order to generate its complex outputs. Since these were the only known examples of such sources of complexity, they were considered to be necessary parts of its explanation.
I agree, but I think there’s another way to look at it.
I think the answer to the question, “Does complexity require complexity to come into existence?” is directly related to the nature of god, and the logical relationship between the two questions does more for explaining Deism’s existence in history.
If complexity requires complexity, then some form of complexity must have spawned the complexity of the world, and we can call this complex form ‘god’.
If complexity does not require complexity and rather can form from simple systems, then god is no longer implied. (This assumes we do not wish to worship a ‘simple’ system, denoting it some low-dimensional phase-space ‘god’)
What I’m getting at is that the existence of Deism was a product of the technology of the time, but in multiple ways simultaneously. The drawing of the equivalence between the mind and computation is one such way technology of the time produced Deism. Another way is how the understanding of complexity forming from simplicity requires simulation, and at the time only analog simulation was available. There was no reproducible or scalable way to test abstract systems for emergence.
What you said is the push, the cause of why (some) people of the 18th century were Deists.
What I’m pointing out is the pull, a reason why Deism as it was, no longer exists.
Sorry, I was making an argument from analogy for what I now realize was for no apparent reason. I saw you mention the anthropic principle and got overexcited.
I agree that before the development of cheap widespread compute such a conclusion on the likely simplicity of the generating rules of the universe would be in the reverse (again with the Deism).
Understandable, analogical reasoning can be very powerful and I often want to apply it before I notice that the analogy might not be exact.
“I agree that before the development of cheap widespread compute such a conclusion on the likely simplicity of the generating rules of the universe would be in the reverse (again with the Deism).”
Indeed, people argued, as far as I know (from the Wikipedia page about Isaac Newton) that god was the only parsimonious explanation for the diversity and simultaneous ‘orderedness’ of lifeforms. I would guess that this is because minds were the only well known and appreciated ‘arenas/venues’ of computation [1], so it was thought to be necessary to posit that the creator of the universe must be some kind of mind, whereas today we understand that minds are not necessarily distinct classes of computation.
By ‘computation’ here, I really mean sources of partially comprehensible complex patterns, which we now know are often computational. So it would be more accurate to say that a ‘mind’ would be thought of in the past as something containing much more information than we now think it needs to in order to generate its complex outputs. Since these were the only known examples of such sources of complexity, they were considered to be necessary parts of its explanation.
I agree, but I think there’s another way to look at it.
I think the answer to the question, “Does complexity require complexity to come into existence?” is directly related to the nature of god, and the logical relationship between the two questions does more for explaining Deism’s existence in history.
If complexity requires complexity, then some form of complexity must have spawned the complexity of the world, and we can call this complex form ‘god’.
If complexity does not require complexity and rather can form from simple systems, then god is no longer implied. (This assumes we do not wish to worship a ‘simple’ system, denoting it some low-dimensional phase-space ‘god’)
What I’m getting at is that the existence of Deism was a product of the technology of the time, but in multiple ways simultaneously. The drawing of the equivalence between the mind and computation is one such way technology of the time produced Deism. Another way is how the understanding of complexity forming from simplicity requires simulation, and at the time only analog simulation was available. There was no reproducible or scalable way to test abstract systems for emergence.
What you said is the push, the cause of why (some) people of the 18th century were Deists.
What I’m pointing out is the pull, a reason why Deism as it was, no longer exists.
Fun topic :)