Wow, I’m so glad I stumbled onto slatestarcodex, and from there, here!!! You guys are all like smarter, cooler versions of me! It’s great to have a label for the way my brain is naturally wired and know there other people in the world besides Peter Singer who think similarly. I’m really excited, so my “intro” might get a little long...
Part 1-Look at me, I’m just like you!
I’m Ellen, a 22 year old Spanish major and world traveling nanny from Wisconsin, so maybe not your typical LWer, but actually quite typical in other, more important ways. :)
I grew up in a Christian home/bubble, was super religious (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod), truly respected/admired the Christians in my life, but even while believing, never liked what I believed. I actually just shared my story plus some interesting studies on correlations between personality, intelligence, and religiosity, if anyone is interested: http://magicalbananatree.blogspot.com/2015/02/christian-friends-do-you-ever-feel.html
The post is based almost entirely on what I’ve come to learn is called “consequentialism” which I’m happy to see is pretty popular over here. I subscribe to this line of thinking so much that I used to pray for a calamity to strengthen my faith. I chose a small Lutheran school despite having great credentials to get into an Ivy, because with an eye on eternity, I wanted to avoid any environment that would foster doubt. My friends suggested I become a missionary, but to me, it made far more sense to become a high profile lawyer and donate 90% of my salary to fund a dozen other missionaries. (A Christian version of effective altruism?) No one ever understood!
Some people might deconvert because they can’t believe in miracles, or they can’t get over the problem of evil. These are bad reasons, I think, and based on the presupposition that God doesn’t exist. Personally, the hardest thing for me was believing that God was all-powerful. Like, if God were portrayed as good, but weak, struggling against an evil god and just doing the best he could to make a just universe and make his existence known, I probably would never have left the faith. It took me long enough as it is!
Part 2-A noob atheist’s plea for help
Anyway, now I’ve “cleared my mind” of all that and am starting fresh, but my friends have a lot of questions for me that I’m not able to answer yet, and I have a lot of my own, too. I’m starting by reading about science (not once had I even been exposed to evolution!) but have a lot of other concerns on the back burner, and maybe you guys can point me in the right direction:
Who was the historical Jesus? As a history source, why is the Bible unreliable?
How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?)
What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer? Like obviously, their experiences don’t convince ME to believe, but I hate to dismiss them as delusional and call it a wild coincidence...
Are rationalists just as guilty of circular reasoning as Christians are? (Why do I trust human reason? My human reason tells me it’s great. Why do Christians trust God? The Bible tells them he’s great.)
Part 3-Embarrassingly enthusiastic fan mail
Yay curiosity! Yay strategic thinking! Yay honesty! Yay open-mindedness! Yay opportunity cost analyses! Yay common sense! Yay tolerance of ambiguity! Yay utilitarianism! Yay acknowledging inconsistency in following utilitarianism! Yay intelligence! Yay every single slatestarcodex post! Yay self-improvement! Yay others-improvement! Yay effective altruism!
Ahhh this is all so cool! You guys are so cool. I can’t wait to read the sequences and more posts around this site! Maybe someday I’ll even meet a real life rationalist or two, it seems like the Bay Area has a lot. :)
My friends suggested I become a missionary, but to me, it made far more sense to become a high profile lawyer and donate 90% of my salary to fund a dozen other missionaries. (A Christian version of effective altruism?) No one ever understood!
That is awesome!
I’m starting by reading about science
If you haven’t heard of HPMOR, check it out here. Anyway, there’s this great sequence where Harry teaches the ways of science to Drako Malfoy… it’s great! And I think very worthwhile for a beginner to read.
How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong? + other things you mention
If you haven’t already heard of it, check out the idea of terminal values. Something tells me that you understand it (at least on some level) though. Anyway, Eliezer seems to say something about Occam’s Razor justifying our intuitive feelings about what’s moral. Personally, I don’t really get it. I don’t see how a terminal value could ever be rational. My understanding is that rationality is about achieving terminal values, not choosing them. However, I notice confusion and don’t have strong opinions.
Ahhh this is all so cool! You guys are so cool. I can’t wait to read the sequences and more posts around this site!
Welcome :) LessWrong has had a huge positive impact on my life. I hope and suspect that the same will be true for you!
I just read Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, and it was perfect and super relevant, thanks. “What else could I possibly use? Indeed, no matter what I did with this dilemma, it would be me doing it. Even if I trusted something else… it would be my own decision to trust it.” This is basically what I’ve been telling people who ask me how I can trust my own reason, but it’s great to have more good points to bring up. All the posts I’ve read so far have been so clear and well-written, I can’t help but smile and nod as I go.
I’m going to start with the e-book, and once I finish that, I’ll probably look into HPMOR! I’ve seen it mentioned a lot around here, so I figure it must be great, but um, should I read the original Harry Potter first? Growing up, I was never allowed to.
I clicked the terminal values link, and then another link, and then another, and then another… then I googled what Occam’s razor is… my questions about morality are still far from settled, but all this gives me a lot to think about, so thank you :)
Sorry for the late reply. Glad to be of assistance!
I’m going to start with the e-book, and once I finish that, I’ll probably look into HPMOR!
That seems reasonable. A thought of mine on the sequences: they could be a bit dense and difficult to understand at times. I think some version of the 20⁄80 rule applies, and I’d approach the reading with this in mind. In other words, there’s a lot of material and a lot of it requires a lot of thought, and so a proper reading would probably take many months. And it would probably take years to achieve true understanding. However, there’s still a lot of really important core principles that you could get in a couple of weeks.
Personally, I think that knowing the gist of the story is sufficient.
I saw some of your other comments and see that you still have a lot of questions and are a bit hesitant to post here before doing more reading. I think that people will be very receptive to any sort of comments and questions as long as you’re open minded and curious. And if you ever just don’t want to say something publicly, feel free to message me privately.
Thanks! I’m 30% through now. I’ve really been enjoying them so far, going back to reread certain chapters and recommending others like crazy based on conversations about similar but far less articulate thoughts I’ve had in the past. Even without knowing much about the content of HPMOR, I’m looking forward to it already just for its having been written by the same author.
Thanks for your offer, I will probably take you up on it some day! Although you’re right that people here seem pretty receptive to honest questions. I asked a question in another thread a few days ago, about ambition vs. hedonism, an issue I’ve always wondered about...no replies so far, but I did get some “karma” so that felt nice, haha :)
Occam’s Razor justifying our intuitive feelings about what’s moral
Wait, what? Do you mean Simplified Humanism? I hope that’s more of a description than a full argument. One could perhaps turn it into an argument by showing that our root values come from evolution—causally, not in the sense of moral reasons—and making a case that you would not expect them to have exceptions in those exact places.
Eliezer also makes a brief attempt to explain his opponents’ motives. This may be true, but I don’t think we should dwell on it.
I just wanted to welcome you and perhaps start a discussion. I have lurked around the Less Wrong boards for years (three, I think, recently made a new account because I forgot my username) and there is a lot of helpful and exciting discussion going on here and so long as you communicate clearly even dissenting opinions are valued.
You came from the jean-skirt Lutherans. I too came from a bubble, and I know it can be tough to find people around whom you feel comfortable talking about big questions like religion, metaphysics, and truth, and logic. But I believe once you start looking, you will find people who are curious about the world and want to increase their quality of life and mind too!
I don’t think atheism leads to nihilism. An atheist doesn’t have to be a strict materialist! For example, logic probably exists as part of the universe’s fabric whether or not humans are thinking or even exist. Yet logic is not made of brain matter or any material. It is mind-independent. So are all the qualities that help people achieve their goals, such as courage, perseverance, honest self-reflection, charity, or whatever else. These are part of the human universe, even though they aren’t essentially made of stuff. Well that’s my perspective. And I, like the other guys and gals here, am always up to discuss these topics further and try to deepen our understanding and practice of rationality.
Thanks for the welcome! :) You’re right, so many great conversations taking place here! I feel like I’m going to be doing a LOT more reading before I really post anywhere else, but I look forward to lurking too.
I guess when I think about nihilism, I don’t necessarily think about strict materialism. That’s an interesting point about logic being mind-independent though. I guess I just think about the simple definition of nihilism as meaninglessness. All my life, the “meaning” of life had come from Jesus, which in my mind, meant a relationship with God and eternity in heaven. Now, there’s no afterlife. Is there still meaning? Do I even care what happens after I die? I think I do, but why? I could just go out and do more good than bad and enjoy my meaningless days under the sun; is it really worth the mental energy to think about all this stuff, and if so, why? I’m realizing one thing people love about Christianity is how easy it is, once you can get past the whole childlike faith thing.
the problem of evil. These are bad reasons, I think, and based on the presupposition that God doesn’t exist. Personally, the hardest thing for me was believing that God was all-powerful. Like, if God were portrayed as good, but weak, struggling against an evil god and just doing the best he could to make a just universe and make his existence known, I probably would never have left the faith.
This puzzled me, since it sounds a lot like the problem of evil. I take it you were describing the argument you lay out at the link?
For completeness—since I’m about to bash Christianity—I should note that Paul does not write like he has even an imagined revelation on the subject of Hell. He writes as if people in the Roman Empire often talked about everyone going to Hades when they died, and therefore he could count on people receiving as “good news” the claim that belief in Jesus would definitely send you to Heaven. (Later, the Gospels implied that your actions could send you to Heaven or Hell regardless of what you believed. Early Christians might have split the difference by reserving baptism for those they saw as living a ‘Christian’ life.) Clearly one can be a Christian in Paul’s sense without believing in Hell.
Who was the historical Jesus?
We don’t know. I have some qualms about Richard Carrier’s argument (eg in On the historicity of Jesus: Why we might have reason for doubt). But plugging different numbers into his calculations, I come out with no more than a 54% chance Jesus even existed. We can’t answer every factual question; some information is almost certainly lost to us forever.
As a history source, why is the Bible unreliable?
This one seems fundamental enough that if people insist on the truth of miracles—and reports that you can move mountains if you have faith the size of a mustard seed—I don’t know what to tell them. But besides directing people to mainstream scholarship (which by the way places the date of Mark after the destruction of the Temple), I can note that Mark inter-cuts the story of the fig tree with Jesus expelling the money-lenders from the Temple. The tree seems like a straightforward metaphor. Then we have later Gospels openly changing the narrative for their own purposes. Mark says Jesus could give no sign to those who did not believe, and they would not have believed (says Jesus in a parable) even if some guy named Lazarus had returned from the dead. John says Jesus performed signs all the time, and as you would expect this led many people to believe in him, especially when he brought Lazarus back from the dead. Though the resurrected disciple who Jesus loved disappears from the narrative after the period John depicts, and even Acts shows no awareness of this important witness.
How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?
If you want to have morality, you can just do it. By this I mean that any function assigning utility to outcomes in a physically meaningful way appears consistent. But yes, I’ve come to agree that simple utility functions like maximizing pleasure in the Universe technically fail to capture what I would call moral. For more practical advice, see a lot of this site and perhaps the CFAR link at the top of the page.
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism?
This depends. I would normally use the term “nihilism” to mean a uniform utility function, which does not distinguish between actions. This is equivalent to assigning every outcome zero utility. As the previous link shows, plenty of non-uniform utility functions can exist whether Yahweh does or not.
If you mean the lack of a moral authority you can trust absolutely, or that will force you to behave morally, then I would basically say yes. There is no authority anywhere.
What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer?
Do they seem smarter and more worthy of respect than Gandhi? Perhaps he’s not the best example, but putting him next to the many people from non-Christian religions who have made similar claims to religious experience may get the point across. (Aleister Crowley made a detailed study of mystical experience and how to produce it, but you may find him abrasive at best.)
Are rationalists just as guilty of circular reasoning as Christians are?
Oh, oops, I can see why that would be puzzling. But yeah, you figured it out. Do you really think my link was an argument though? A lot of people have accused me of trying to deconvert my friends, but I really don’t think I was making an argument so much as sharing my own personal thoughts and journey of what led me away from the faith.
You correctly point out that not all Christians believe in hell, but I didn’t want to just tweak my belief until I liked it. If I was going to reject what I grew up with, I figured I might as well start with a totally clean slate.
I’m really glad you and other atheists on here have bothered looking into Historical Jesus. Atheists have a stereotype of being ignorant about this, which actually, for those who weren’t raised Christians, I kind of understand, since now that I consider myself atheist, it’s not like I’m suddenly going to become an expert on all the other religions just so I can thoughtfully reject them. But now that my friends have failed to convince me atheism is hopeless, they’re insisting it’s hallucinogenic, that atheists are out of touch with reality, and it’s nice (though unsurprising) to see that isn’t the case.
Okay, I know that I personally can have morality, no problem! But are you trying to say it’s not just intuition? Or if I use that Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem you linked, I’m a little confused, maybe you can simplify for me, but whose preferences would I be valuing? Only my own? Everyone’s equally? If I value everyone’s equally and say each human is born with equal intrinsic value, that’s back to intuition again, right? Anyway, yeah, I’ll look around and maybe check out CFAR too if you think that would be useful.
Oh! I like that definition of nihilism, thanks. Personally, I think I could actually tolerate accepting nihilism defined as meaninglessness (whatever that means), but since most people I know wouldn’t, your definition will come in handy.
Also, good point about Gandhi. I had actually planned on researching whether people from other religions claimed to have answered prayers like Christians do, but bringing up the other alleged “religious experiences” of people of other faiths seems like a good start for when my sister and I talk about this. Now I’m curious about Crowley too. I almost never really get offended, so even if he is abrasive, I’m sure I can focus on the facts and pick out a few things to share, even if I wouldn’t share him directly.
Thanks for your reply! Hopefully you can follow this easily enough; next time I’ll add in quotes like you did...
The theorem shows that if one adopts a simple utility function—or let’s say if an Artificial Intelligence has as its goal maximizing the computing power in existence, even if that means killing us and using us for parts—this yields a consistent set of preferences. It doesn’t seem like we could argue the AI into adopting a different goal unless that (implausibly) served the original goal better than just working at it directly. We could picture the AI as a physical process that first calculates the expected value of various actions in terms of computing power (this would have to be approximate, but we’ve found approximations very useful in practical contexts) and then automatically takes the action with the highest calculated expected value.
Now in a sense, this shows your problem has no solution. We have no apparent way to argue morality into an agent that doesn’t already have it, on some level. In fact this appears mathematically impossible. (Also, the Universe does not love you and will kill you if the math of physics happens to work out that way.)
But if you already have moral preferences, there shouldn’t be any way to argue you out of them by showing the non-existence of Vishnu. Any desires that correspond to a utility function would yield consistent preferences. If you follow them then nobody can raise any logical objection. God would have to do the same, if he existed. He would just have more strength and knowledge with which to impose his will (to the point of creating a logical contradiction—but we can charitably assume theologians meant something else.) When it comes to consistent moral foundations, the theorem gives no special place to his imaginary desires relative to yours.
I mentioned above that a simple utility function does not seem to capture my moral preferences, though it could be a good rule of thumb. There’s probably no simple way to find out what you value if you don’t already know. CFAR does not address the abstract problem; possibly they could help you figure out what you actually value, if you want practical guidance.
Now I’m curious about Crowley too. I almost never really get offended, so even if he is abrasive, I’m sure I can focus on the facts and pick out a few things to share, even if I wouldn’t share him directly.
Note that he doesn’t believe in making anything easy for the reader. The second half of this essay might perhaps have what you want, starting with section XI. Crowley wrote it under a pseudonym and at least once refers to himself in the third person; be warned.
Thanks a lot for explaining the utility theorem. So just to be sure, if moral preferences for my personal values (I’ll check CFAR for help on this, eventually) are the basis of morality, is morality necessarily subjective?
I’ll get to Crowley eventually too, thanks for the link. I’ve just started the Rationality e-book and I feel like it will give me a lot of the background knowledge to understand other articles and stuff people talk about here.
If “subjective” means “a completely different alien species would likely care about different things than humans”, then yes. You also can’t expect that a rock would have the same morality as you.
If “subjective” means “a different human would care about completely different things than me” then probably not much. It should be possible to define a morality of an “average human” that most humans would consider correct. The reason it appears otherwise is that for tribal reasons we are prone to assume that our enemies are psychologically nonhuman, and our reasoning is often based on factual errors, and we are actually not good enough at consistently following our own values. (Thus the definition of CEV as “if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together”; it refers to the assumption of having correct beliefs, being more consistent, and not being divided by factional conflicts.)
Of course, both of these answers are disputed by many people.
There is a set of reasonably objective facts about what values people have, and how your actions would impact them, That leads to reasonably objective answers about what you should and shouldn’t do in a specific situation. However, they are only locally objective,..what value based ethics removes is globally objective answers, in the sense that you should always do X .or refrain from Y irrespective of the contexts,
It’s a bit like the difference between small g and big G in physics,
There is a set of reasonably objective facts about what values people have, and hhow your actions would impact them, That leads to reasonably objective answers about what you should and shouldn’t do in a specific situation.
Nope. It leads to reasonably objective descriptive answers about what the consequences of your actions will be. It does not lead to normative answers about what you should or should not do.
Okay, I guess I’m still confused. So far I’ve loved everything I’ve read on this site and have been able to understand; I’ve appreciated/agreed with the first 110 pages of the Rationality ebook, felt a little skeptical for liking it so completely, and then reassured myself with the Aumann’s agreement theorem it mentions. So I feel like if this utility theorem which bases morality on preferences is commonly accepted around here, I’ll probably like it once I fully understand it. So bear with me as I ask more questions...
Whose preferences am I valuing? Only my own? Everyone’s equally? Those of an “average human”? What about future humans?
Yeah, by subjective, I meant that different humans would care about different things. I’m not really worried about basic morality, like not beating people up and stuff, but...
I have a feeling the hardest part of morality will now be determining where to strike a balance between individual human freedom and concern for the future of humanity.
Like, to what extent is it permissible to harm the environment? If something, like eating sugar for example, makes people dumber, should it be limited? Is population control like China’s a good thing?
Can you really say that most humans agree on where this line between individual freedom and concern for the future of humanity should be drawn? It seems unlikely...
I’m the wrong person to ask about “this utility theorem which bases morality on preferences” since I don’t really subscribe to this point of view.
I use the world “morality” as a synonym for “system of values” and I think that these values are multiple, somewhat hierarchical, and are NOT coherent. Moral decisions are generally taken on the basis of a weighted balance between several conflicting values.
By definition, you can only care about your own preferences. That being said, it’s certainly possible for you to have a preference for other people’s preferences to be satisfied, in which case you would be (indirectly) caring about the preferences of others.
The question of whether humans all value the same thing is a controversial one. Most Friendly AI theorists believe, however, that the answer is “yes”, at least if you extrapolate their preferences far enough. For more details, take a look at Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Okay, that makes sense, but does this mean you can’t say someone else did something wrong, unless he was acting inconsistently with his personal preferences?
Ah, okay, I’ve been reading most hyperlinks here, but that one looks pretty long, so I will come back to it after I finish Rationality (or maybe my question will even be answered later on in the book...)
That is definitely not the idea behind CEV, though it may reflect the idea that a sizable majority will mostly share the same values under extrapolation.
This is an impressive failure to respond to what I said, which again was that you asked for an explanation of false data. “Most Friendly AI theorists” do not appear to think that extrapolation will bring all human values into agreement, so I don’t know what “arguments” you refer to or even what you think they seek to establish. Certainly the link above has Eliezer assuming the opposite (at least for the purpose of safety-conscious engineering).
ETA: This is the link to the full sub-thread. Note my response to dxu.
Is that a fact? It’s true that the theories often discussed here , utilitarianism and so in, don’t solve the motivation problem, but that doesn’t mean no theory does,
Not necessarily subjective, in the sense that “what should I do in situation X” necessarily lacks an objective answer.
Even if you treat all value as morally relevant, and you certain dont have to, there is a set of reasonably objective facts about what values people have, and how your actions would impact them, That leads to reasonably objective answers about what you should and shouldn’t do in a specific situation. However, they are only locally objective,..
You are awesome! I wish I could radiate only half as much enthusiasm and happiness. Even though I feel it—I just can’t render it as much. I plan to learn from you in this regard!
You are welcome. I will also try to answer your questions. Some of them I ponderd myself and arrived at some answers. But then I had more time. I have a comparable background and I have a deep interest in children so you may also find my ressources for parents of interest.
But now to your questions:
My friends suggested I become a missionary, but to me, it made far more sense to become a high profile lawyer and donate 90% of my salary to fund a dozen other missionaries. (A Christian version of effective altruism?) No one ever understood!
Awesome. But it can be explained by the presence of memes in real-life christian culture that regulate such actions as misguided. See Reason as memetic immune disorder.
Who was the historical Jesus? As a history source, why is the Bible unreliable?
The Jesus Seminar may have answers of the kind you desire. If a historical Jesus can be found by taking the bible as historcal evidence instead of sacred text, then look there. The Jesus Seminar has been heavily criticised (in part legitimately so) but it may provide the counter-balance to your already known facts. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar
How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?
Well. What do you mean by “how”? By which social process does moral exist? Or due to which psychological process? The spiritual process apparently is out of business because it is ungrounded. There was a Main post with nice graphs about it that I can’t find.
You might also want to replace the question with “why do I think that I have morality?”
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?)
No. Atheism does remove one set of symbol-behavior-chains in your mind, yes. But a complex mind will most likely lock into another better grounded set of symbol-behavior-chains that is not nihilistic but—depending on your emotional setup—somehow connected to terminal values and acting on that. “symbol-behavior-chains” is my ad-hoc term. Ask if it is unclear.
What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer? Like obviously, their experiences don’t convince ME to believe, but I hate to dismiss them as delusional and call it a wild coincidence...
I feel with you. I have the same challenge. See my first link above. I respect them. I know how complex this migration is. I was free to explore. How can’t I not reciprocate. I don’t want to manipulate. I just want the best for them. And then extensions of the simulation argument might actually lead you back to theism (as least a bit).
Thanks for your reply :) You seem to radiate plenty of enthusiasm to me!
I’ll check out your links and save the Jesus seminar stuff for later; I’m going to finish the rationality ebook and then researching historical Jesus will be my next project, but it looks like a good resource!
As for your questions...when I wrote this original post, by “how” I was still hoping that some sort of objective morality might exist… one not related to the human subject (a hope I now see as kind of silly but maybe natural so soon after my deconversion). I was hoping for some solid rules to follow that would always lead to good outcomes and never cause any emotional disturbance, but I’ve come to accept that things are just a bit more complicated than that in the real world...
Who cares? Okay you obviously do, but why? If the religion is false and reports of miracles are lies, is there really an impotant difference between a) “Yes, once there was a person called Jesus, but almost everything that Bible attributes to him is completely made up” and b) “No, everything about Jesus is completely made up”?
In other words, if I tell you that my uncle Joe is the true god and performs thousand miracles every thursday, why would you care about whether a) I have a perfectly ordinary, non-divine, non-magical uncle called Joe, and I only lied about his divinity and miracles, or b) actually I lied even about having an uncle called Joe? What difference would it make and why?
As a history source, why is the Bible unreliable?
Because it was written by people who had an agenda to “prove” that they are the good ones and the divinely chosen ones? Maybe even because it contains magic?
I don’t fully trust even historical books written recently. It can be funny to read history textbooks written by two countries which had conflicts recently; how each of them describes the events somewhat differently. And today’s historical books are much more trustworthy than the old ones, because today people are literate, they are allowed to read and compare the competing books, they are allowed to criticize without getting killed immediately.
Sorry for the offensive comparison, but trusting Bible’s historical accuracy would be as if in the parallel universe Hitler would win the war, then he would write his own historical book about what “really happened” and make it a mandatory textbook for everyone… and then a few thousand years later people would trust his every written word to be honest and accurate.
the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?
Exactly. You already know what you care about. Atheism simply means there is no higher boss who could tell you “actually, you should like this and hate that, because I said so”, and you would have to shut up and obey.
On the other hand; people can be wrong about their preferences, especially when their decisions are based on wrong assumptions. But “being wrong” is different from “disagreeing with the boss”.
I can’t wait to read the sequences
I would recommend the PDF version. It is better organized; you can read it from the beginning to end, instead of jumping through the hyperlinks. And it does not include the comments, which will allow you to focus on the text and finish it faster (the comments below the original articles are 10x as much text as the articles themselves; they are often interesting, but then it is really extremely lot of text to read).
Why do I care about Historical Jesus? I actually wouldn’t, I guess, except that I absolutely need to have a really well thought out answer to this question in order to maintain the respect of friends and family, some of whom credit Historical Jesus as one of the top reasons for their faith.
It can be funny to read history textbooks written by two countries which had conflicts recently; how each of them describes the events somewhat differently.
Good point about the authors being biased, thanks, no offense taken! I still don’t like when people say miracles/magic definitively prove the Bible wrong though, since if a God higher than our understanding were to exist, of course he could do magic when he felt like it. Still, based on our understanding of the world, there is no good reason/evidence at all to believe in such a God.
I got the Rationality ebook, and it is great! Sooo well-written, well-organized, and well thought out! I just started today and am already on the section “Belief in Belief.” I love it so much so far that it’s a page-turner for me as much as my favorite suspense/fantasy novels. Definitely worth sharing and going back to read and re-read :)
I absolutely need to have a really well thought out answer to this question in order to maintain the respect of friends and family, some of whom credit Historical Jesus as one of the top reasons for their faith.
Yep. On the social level I get it, but on another level, it’s a trap.
The trap works approximately like this: “I will allow you not to believe in my bullshit, but only if you give me a free check to bother you with as many questions as I want about my bullshit, and you have to explore all of these questions seriously, give me a satisfactory answer, and of course I am allowed to respond by giving you even more questions”.
If you agree on this, you have de facto agreed that the other side is allowed to waste unlimited amounts of your time and attention, as a de facto punishment for not believing their bullshit. -- Today you are asked to make to make a well-researched opinion about Historical Jesus, which of course would take a few weeks or months to do a really serious historical research; and tomorrow it will be either something new, e.g. a well-researched opinion about the history of the Church, or about the history of Crusades, or about the history of Inquisition, or whatever. Alternatively, they may point at some parts of your answer about the Historical Jesus and say: okay, this part is rather weak, you have to bring me a well-researched opinion about this part. For example, you were quoting Josephus and Tacitus, so now give me a full research about both of them, how credible they are, what other claims they made, etc.
Unless the other side gives up (which they have no reason to; this games costs them almost nothing), there are only two ways this can end. First, you might give up, and start pretending to be religious again. Second, after playing a few rounds of this game, you refuse to play yet another round… in which case the other side will declare their victory, because it “proves” your atheism is completely irrational.
Well, you might play a round or two of this game just to show some good will… but it is a game constructed so that you cannot win. The real goal is to manipulate you into punishing yourself and feeling guilty. -- Note: The other side may not realize they are actually doing this. They may believe they are playing a fair game.
Good point, thanks!! I can’t get too caught up in this; there are things I’d rather be learning about, so I need a limit. I’d like to think I can win, though, but this is probably just self-anchoring fallacy (I’m learning!)
Just because I would have been swayed by an absence of positive evidence doesn’t mean everyone will be, even people who seem decently smart and open-minded with a high view of reason, like my old track coach and religion teacher. I just made a deal though, that I would read any book of his choice about the Historical Jesus (something I probably would have done anyway!) if he reads Rationality: AI to Zombies :)
No worries, I knew what you meant. I am pretty good at logic though, so no need to worry about illogical jumps here. I may not have very much background knowledge about terminology or history or science or anything (yet), and I may not be a very articulate writer (yet), but the one thing I can usually do very well is think clearly. I am even feeling a bit smug after finding the mammography Bayesian reasoning problem that apparently only 15% of doctors get correct to be easy and obvious. :)
How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?)
If these are the questions weighing heavily on your mind, then you would probably enjoy Gary Drescher’s Good and Real. I suggest reading the first Amazon review to get a good idea of the topics it covers. It is very similar to some of the content in the Sequences. (By the way, if you purchase the book through that link, 5% goes to Slate Star Codex.)
Also, the Sequences have recently been released as an ebook entitled Rationality: From AI to Zombies. (You can download the book for free in MOBI, EPUB, and PDF format if you follow the ‘Buy Now’ link at the bottom of that page and enter a price of $0.00. If you do this, it won’t request any payment information. If you pay more than that, the money will go to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.) I have found that Rationality is much, much easier to read than the Sequences.
Are rationalists just as guilty of circular reasoning as Christians are? (Why do I trust human reason? My human reason tells me it’s great. Why do Christians trust God? The Bible tells them he’s great.)
You may not yet have the background knowledge necessary to understand it, and if that’s the case then you can always return to it later, but I think that the most relevant post on this topic is Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom. It’s chapter 264 in Rationality. (That’s a daunting number but the chapters are very short. Rationality is Bible-length but you can hack away at it one chapter at a time, or more at a time, if you please.) To be frank, you’re asking the Big Questions and you might have to read a bit before you can answer them.
What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer? Like obviously, their experiences don’t convince ME to believe, but I hate to dismiss them as delusional and call it a wild coincidence...
When I read that, I’m reminded of something that Luke Muehlhauser, a prominent LessWrong user and former devout Christian, once wrote:
I went to church and Bible study every week. I prayed often and earnestly. For 12 years I attended a Christian school that taught Bible classes and creationism. I played in worship bands. As a teenager I made trips to China and England to tell the godless heathens there about Jesus. I witnessed miraculous healings unexplained by medical science. And I felt the presence of God. Sometimes I would tingle and sweat with the Holy Spirit. Other times I felt led by God to give money to a certain cause, or to pay someone a specific compliment, or to walk to the cross at the front of my church and bow before it during a worship service.
As you said yourself, “Yay tolerance of ambiguity!” Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains. It’s easy, nay, the default action, to view others with false beliefs in a negative light, but if rationalism were always intuitively obvious, then the world would be a very different place. I try not to make myself feel bad by overestimating my ability to convince others of the value of rationalism. That doesn’t mean that I keep my mouth shut all of the time, but I do take it a day at a time, and it seems to work; sometimes I talk about something and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and then a friend will bring it up days or weeks later and say something like, “You know, I was thinking about that, and I realized it made a lot of sense.” And then I privately jump up and down. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but for me, there’s definitely a middle ground between falling in line and abandoning All I Have Ever Known. I also often see Paul Graham’s essay What You Can’t Say linked here when new atheists ask about how to maintain ties with religious family members.
Thanks for the welcome!! Good and Real does seem like a good read. I’m going to read Rationality first, which I’m guessing will help me work through some of my questions, but I’ll definitely keep that one in mind for later.
Where Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom was really relevant, thanks for the link. I’m still digesting Occam’s Razor, I think that was the only concept completely new to me.
Thanks for the link to Luke’s story. It seems like we went through the same difficult process of desperately wanting to believe, but ultimately just not being able to. I find it super encouraging that his doubts stemmed from researching the Historical Jesus, since that’s one thing that my old high school track coach/religion teacher insists I have to look into. He claims no atheist has ever been able to answer any of his questions. The atheists I know all credit a conflict with science as the reason they left Christianity, and I credit...I don’t even know, my personal thoughts, I guess… but it’s great to know that researching history will also lead there. I’ll have to go through the same resources he used so I can better explain myself to Christian friends.
“Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains.” Thanks for that!! It does make me feel better.
Hahaha, wow, I haven’t even considered trying to convince others of the value of rationalism yet. Especially after my deconversion, I’ve been totally on the defensive, almost apologizing for my rationality. (“It’s not my fault; it’s the personality I was born with. If you guys really believe, you should feel lucky not just for having been born into Christian homes, but also, more importantly, for having been born with the right personalities for faith.” and “You think my prayers for a stronger faith weren’t answered because my faith wasn’t strong enough, but I was doing everything possible to strengthen my faith to no avail.” and “Believing isn’t a choice, no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t believe. So if any brand of Christianity is true, Calvinism is your best bet, and I wasn’t among the elect.”)
So far this strategy is doing remarkably, remarkably well in maintaining ties with friends and family. People understand where I’m coming from, and they feel just awful, sorry for me since they think I’m going to hell, but for the most part, not finding me at fault. Pity is slightly annoying when I’m so happy, but hopefully their pity will eventually lead them to find God unfair, which will lead them to dislike their beliefs, which will lead them to question why they bother believing something they don’t like...and then, they won’t find much reason at all aside from upbringing/community. Those were actually pretty much the steps of my deconversion process, only I didn’t need a personal connection with a particular unbeliever to get there. Anyway, if nothing else, the defensive strategy works wonders for relations. I helped a friend share her doubts with her family in this way, and she said it worked for her too.
I just thought to point out that there’s going to be a Rationality reading group; basically, it’s a planned series of posts about each Part in the book, where you have the opportunity to talk about it and ask questions. You clearly are very curious, (it’s the only way you could survive so many hyperlinks) so it seems like just the thing for you.
I credit...I don’t even know, my personal thoughts, I guess...
Just to give you words for this, and from what I read in the blog post that you linked to in your first comment (which I found very amusing), I think you’re trying to verbalize that Christianity was inconsistent. You don’t have to prefer consistency, but most people claim to prefer it, and apparently you do prefer it. (I know I do.) You didn’t like it as a system because it was a system that said that God was perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish (though the second statement was only implicit) at the same time. You can always look at other subjects like science and history and come to the conclusion that religion conflicts with those things when it shouldn’t; but you can also just look at religion and see how it conflicts with itself. I think that’s what you did.
I saw some of your other comments about meaning, and meaninglessness in the absence of God, and nihilism. Notice that when you ask “Does life have meaning in the absence of God?”, everyone says that it depends on what you mean, offers some possible interpretations, and shares their viewpoints and conclusions on what it means. The simplest way to give you a clue as to some of the problems with the question is something that you wrote yourself:
Oh! I like that definition of nihilism, thanks. Personally, I think I could actually tolerate accepting nihilism defined as meaninglessness (whatever that means), but since most people I know wouldn’t, your definition will come in handy.
Vagueness is part of the problem, but there are other parts as well. Even though I’ve never been religious and therefore don’t know what it’s like to lose faith, worrying about “meaninglessness” is something that I dealt with. I promise that atheists aren’t all secretly dead inside. (I actually used to wonder about that.) Rationality Parts N and P deal with questions like that.
I also want to say that I agree with Viliam_Bur’s comments on you doing research to defend your new beliefs: It’s a lot cheaper time- and resource-wise to act like a skeptic than it is to do research, and you never have to tolerate that awful feeling that you might be wrong. Even when you return with evidence contrary to their beliefs, their standards of evidence are too high for it to matter. I think it’s telling that your coach sat around waiting for unusually knowledgeable, atheistic passersby to tell him about the Historical Jesus instead of doing any research on his own.
Cool, thanks so much for mentioning the Rationality reading group!! I’m probably going to finish each section long before it’s discussed, but I’ll definitely go back to re-read and chat. I’ll bookmark it for sure! So exciting! I will try to bribe my sister and maybe a few other people to participate as well (self-anchoring again, maybe, but I’ll call it optimism, haha).
Ooh, I like consistency, and Christianity is inconsistent. Christianity conflicts with itself. A God can’t be both perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish. That’s why I rejected it. Yeah, that sounds nice, thanks for the words. :)
And yeah, good point about the standards of evidence being too high. Still, right now my only info about Historical Jesus is based off a few articles I’ve read on the internet, and I just feel like after 22 years learning one thing, I can’t just reject it and jump ahead to other things without being able to formulate basic, well-reasoned atheist answers to common Christian questions. I guess it’s not just about maintaining my friends’ respect, it’s also about my own self-respect. I can’t go around showing the improbability of every religion, but I want to be able to do so about the one I grew up in (maybe this is a cousin of the sunk-cost fallacy?). Luckily, all of the groundwork here has already been done by other atheists, it should just a matter of familiarizing myself with basic facts/common arguments.
Wow, I’m so glad I stumbled onto slatestarcodex, and from there, here!!! You guys are all like smarter, cooler versions of me! It’s great to have a label for the way my brain is naturally wired and know there other people in the world besides Peter Singer who think similarly. I’m really excited, so my “intro” might get a little long...
Part 1-Look at me, I’m just like you!
I’m Ellen, a 22 year old Spanish major and world traveling nanny from Wisconsin, so maybe not your typical LWer, but actually quite typical in other, more important ways. :)
I grew up in a Christian home/bubble, was super religious (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod), truly respected/admired the Christians in my life, but even while believing, never liked what I believed. I actually just shared my story plus some interesting studies on correlations between personality, intelligence, and religiosity, if anyone is interested: http://magicalbananatree.blogspot.com/2015/02/christian-friends-do-you-ever-feel.html The post is based almost entirely on what I’ve come to learn is called “consequentialism” which I’m happy to see is pretty popular over here. I subscribe to this line of thinking so much that I used to pray for a calamity to strengthen my faith. I chose a small Lutheran school despite having great credentials to get into an Ivy, because with an eye on eternity, I wanted to avoid any environment that would foster doubt. My friends suggested I become a missionary, but to me, it made far more sense to become a high profile lawyer and donate 90% of my salary to fund a dozen other missionaries. (A Christian version of effective altruism?) No one ever understood!
Some people might deconvert because they can’t believe in miracles, or they can’t get over the problem of evil. These are bad reasons, I think, and based on the presupposition that God doesn’t exist. Personally, the hardest thing for me was believing that God was all-powerful. Like, if God were portrayed as good, but weak, struggling against an evil god and just doing the best he could to make a just universe and make his existence known, I probably would never have left the faith. It took me long enough as it is!
Part 2-A noob atheist’s plea for help
Anyway, now I’ve “cleared my mind” of all that and am starting fresh, but my friends have a lot of questions for me that I’m not able to answer yet, and I have a lot of my own, too. I’m starting by reading about science (not once had I even been exposed to evolution!) but have a lot of other concerns on the back burner, and maybe you guys can point me in the right direction:
Who was the historical Jesus? As a history source, why is the Bible unreliable?
How can I have morality?? Do I just have to rely on intuition? If the whole world relied on reason alone to make decisions, couldn’t we rationalize a LOT of things that we intuit as wrong?
Does atheism necessarily lead to nihilism? (I think so, in the grand scheme of things? But the world/our species means something to us, and that’s enough, right?)
What about all the really smart people I know and respect, like my sister and Grandma, who have had their share of doubts but ultimately credit their faith to having experienced extraordinary, miraculous answers to prayer? Like obviously, their experiences don’t convince ME to believe, but I hate to dismiss them as delusional and call it a wild coincidence...
Are rationalists just as guilty of circular reasoning as Christians are? (Why do I trust human reason? My human reason tells me it’s great. Why do Christians trust God? The Bible tells them he’s great.)
Part 3-Embarrassingly enthusiastic fan mail
Yay curiosity! Yay strategic thinking! Yay honesty! Yay open-mindedness! Yay opportunity cost analyses! Yay common sense! Yay tolerance of ambiguity! Yay utilitarianism! Yay acknowledging inconsistency in following utilitarianism! Yay intelligence! Yay every single slatestarcodex post! Yay self-improvement! Yay others-improvement! Yay effective altruism!
Ahhh this is all so cool! You guys are so cool. I can’t wait to read the sequences and more posts around this site! Maybe someday I’ll even meet a real life rationalist or two, it seems like the Bay Area has a lot. :)
There’s now a portal into the meatspace Bay rationalist community if this is something you’re interested in.
Wow, you guys even play board games? Nice. Thanks!! I’ll try to come to the Friday meetup next Friday!
That is awesome!
If you haven’t heard of HPMOR, check it out here. Anyway, there’s this great sequence where Harry teaches the ways of science to Drako Malfoy… it’s great! And I think very worthwhile for a beginner to read.
Eliezer talks about a lot of this in the Metaethics Sequence, particularly in the post Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom.
If you haven’t already heard of it, check out the idea of terminal values. Something tells me that you understand it (at least on some level) though. Anyway, Eliezer seems to say something about Occam’s Razor justifying our intuitive feelings about what’s moral. Personally, I don’t really get it. I don’t see how a terminal value could ever be rational. My understanding is that rationality is about achieving terminal values, not choosing them. However, I notice confusion and don’t have strong opinions.
Welcome :) LessWrong has had a huge positive impact on my life. I hope and suspect that the same will be true for you!
Thanks for the welcome!!
I just read Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom, and it was perfect and super relevant, thanks. “What else could I possibly use? Indeed, no matter what I did with this dilemma, it would be me doing it. Even if I trusted something else… it would be my own decision to trust it.” This is basically what I’ve been telling people who ask me how I can trust my own reason, but it’s great to have more good points to bring up. All the posts I’ve read so far have been so clear and well-written, I can’t help but smile and nod as I go.
I’m going to start with the e-book, and once I finish that, I’ll probably look into HPMOR! I’ve seen it mentioned a lot around here, so I figure it must be great, but um, should I read the original Harry Potter first? Growing up, I was never allowed to.
I clicked the terminal values link, and then another link, and then another, and then another… then I googled what Occam’s razor is… my questions about morality are still far from settled, but all this gives me a lot to think about, so thank you :)
Sorry for the late reply. Glad to be of assistance!
That seems reasonable. A thought of mine on the sequences: they could be a bit dense and difficult to understand at times. I think some version of the 20⁄80 rule applies, and I’d approach the reading with this in mind. In other words, there’s a lot of material and a lot of it requires a lot of thought, and so a proper reading would probably take many months. And it would probably take years to achieve true understanding. However, there’s still a lot of really important core principles that you could get in a couple of weeks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9203769
Personally, I think that knowing the gist of the story is sufficient.
I saw some of your other comments and see that you still have a lot of questions and are a bit hesitant to post here before doing more reading. I think that people will be very receptive to any sort of comments and questions as long as you’re open minded and curious. And if you ever just don’t want to say something publicly, feel free to message me privately.
Thanks! I’m 30% through now. I’ve really been enjoying them so far, going back to reread certain chapters and recommending others like crazy based on conversations about similar but far less articulate thoughts I’ve had in the past. Even without knowing much about the content of HPMOR, I’m looking forward to it already just for its having been written by the same author.
Thanks for your offer, I will probably take you up on it some day! Although you’re right that people here seem pretty receptive to honest questions. I asked a question in another thread a few days ago, about ambition vs. hedonism, an issue I’ve always wondered about...no replies so far, but I did get some “karma” so that felt nice, haha :)
30% through the Rationality book?!! WOW!
I responded to your comment about ambition vs. hedonism.
Wait, what? Do you mean Simplified Humanism? I hope that’s more of a description than a full argument. One could perhaps turn it into an argument by showing that our root values come from evolution—causally, not in the sense of moral reasons—and making a case that you would not expect them to have exceptions in those exact places.
Eliezer also makes a brief attempt to explain his opponents’ motives. This may be true, but I don’t think we should dwell on it.
Honestly I don’t really know.
Hi els!
I just wanted to welcome you and perhaps start a discussion. I have lurked around the Less Wrong boards for years (three, I think, recently made a new account because I forgot my username) and there is a lot of helpful and exciting discussion going on here and so long as you communicate clearly even dissenting opinions are valued.
You came from the jean-skirt Lutherans. I too came from a bubble, and I know it can be tough to find people around whom you feel comfortable talking about big questions like religion, metaphysics, and truth, and logic. But I believe once you start looking, you will find people who are curious about the world and want to increase their quality of life and mind too!
I don’t think atheism leads to nihilism. An atheist doesn’t have to be a strict materialist! For example, logic probably exists as part of the universe’s fabric whether or not humans are thinking or even exist. Yet logic is not made of brain matter or any material. It is mind-independent. So are all the qualities that help people achieve their goals, such as courage, perseverance, honest self-reflection, charity, or whatever else. These are part of the human universe, even though they aren’t essentially made of stuff. Well that’s my perspective. And I, like the other guys and gals here, am always up to discuss these topics further and try to deepen our understanding and practice of rationality.
Hope you enjoy hanging around LW!
Cheers!
Thanks for the welcome! :) You’re right, so many great conversations taking place here! I feel like I’m going to be doing a LOT more reading before I really post anywhere else, but I look forward to lurking too.
I guess when I think about nihilism, I don’t necessarily think about strict materialism. That’s an interesting point about logic being mind-independent though. I guess I just think about the simple definition of nihilism as meaninglessness. All my life, the “meaning” of life had come from Jesus, which in my mind, meant a relationship with God and eternity in heaven. Now, there’s no afterlife. Is there still meaning? Do I even care what happens after I die? I think I do, but why? I could just go out and do more good than bad and enjoy my meaningless days under the sun; is it really worth the mental energy to think about all this stuff, and if so, why? I’m realizing one thing people love about Christianity is how easy it is, once you can get past the whole childlike faith thing.
This puzzled me, since it sounds a lot like the problem of evil. I take it you were describing the argument you lay out at the link?
For completeness—since I’m about to bash Christianity—I should note that Paul does not write like he has even an imagined revelation on the subject of Hell. He writes as if people in the Roman Empire often talked about everyone going to Hades when they died, and therefore he could count on people receiving as “good news” the claim that belief in Jesus would definitely send you to Heaven. (Later, the Gospels implied that your actions could send you to Heaven or Hell regardless of what you believed. Early Christians might have split the difference by reserving baptism for those they saw as living a ‘Christian’ life.) Clearly one can be a Christian in Paul’s sense without believing in Hell.
We don’t know. I have some qualms about Richard Carrier’s argument (eg in On the historicity of Jesus: Why we might have reason for doubt). But plugging different numbers into his calculations, I come out with no more than a 54% chance Jesus even existed. We can’t answer every factual question; some information is almost certainly lost to us forever.
This one seems fundamental enough that if people insist on the truth of miracles—and reports that you can move mountains if you have faith the size of a mustard seed—I don’t know what to tell them. But besides directing people to mainstream scholarship (which by the way places the date of Mark after the destruction of the Temple), I can note that Mark inter-cuts the story of the fig tree with Jesus expelling the money-lenders from the Temple. The tree seems like a straightforward metaphor. Then we have later Gospels openly changing the narrative for their own purposes. Mark says Jesus could give no sign to those who did not believe, and they would not have believed (says Jesus in a parable) even if some guy named Lazarus had returned from the dead. John says Jesus performed signs all the time, and as you would expect this led many people to believe in him, especially when he brought Lazarus back from the dead. Though the resurrected disciple who Jesus loved disappears from the narrative after the period John depicts, and even Acts shows no awareness of this important witness.
If you want to have morality, you can just do it. By this I mean that any function assigning utility to outcomes in a physically meaningful way appears consistent. But yes, I’ve come to agree that simple utility functions like maximizing pleasure in the Universe technically fail to capture what I would call moral. For more practical advice, see a lot of this site and perhaps the CFAR link at the top of the page.
This depends. I would normally use the term “nihilism” to mean a uniform utility function, which does not distinguish between actions. This is equivalent to assigning every outcome zero utility. As the previous link shows, plenty of non-uniform utility functions can exist whether Yahweh does or not.
If you mean the lack of a moral authority you can trust absolutely, or that will force you to behave morally, then I would basically say yes. There is no authority anywhere.
Do they seem smarter and more worthy of respect than Gandhi? Perhaps he’s not the best example, but putting him next to the many people from non-Christian religions who have made similar claims to religious experience may get the point across. (Aleister Crowley made a detailed study of mystical experience and how to produce it, but you may find him abrasive at best.)
That also depends on what you mean.
Oh, oops, I can see why that would be puzzling. But yeah, you figured it out. Do you really think my link was an argument though? A lot of people have accused me of trying to deconvert my friends, but I really don’t think I was making an argument so much as sharing my own personal thoughts and journey of what led me away from the faith.
You correctly point out that not all Christians believe in hell, but I didn’t want to just tweak my belief until I liked it. If I was going to reject what I grew up with, I figured I might as well start with a totally clean slate.
I’m really glad you and other atheists on here have bothered looking into Historical Jesus. Atheists have a stereotype of being ignorant about this, which actually, for those who weren’t raised Christians, I kind of understand, since now that I consider myself atheist, it’s not like I’m suddenly going to become an expert on all the other religions just so I can thoughtfully reject them. But now that my friends have failed to convince me atheism is hopeless, they’re insisting it’s hallucinogenic, that atheists are out of touch with reality, and it’s nice (though unsurprising) to see that isn’t the case.
Okay, I know that I personally can have morality, no problem! But are you trying to say it’s not just intuition? Or if I use that Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem you linked, I’m a little confused, maybe you can simplify for me, but whose preferences would I be valuing? Only my own? Everyone’s equally? If I value everyone’s equally and say each human is born with equal intrinsic value, that’s back to intuition again, right? Anyway, yeah, I’ll look around and maybe check out CFAR too if you think that would be useful.
Oh! I like that definition of nihilism, thanks. Personally, I think I could actually tolerate accepting nihilism defined as meaninglessness (whatever that means), but since most people I know wouldn’t, your definition will come in handy.
Also, good point about Gandhi. I had actually planned on researching whether people from other religions claimed to have answered prayers like Christians do, but bringing up the other alleged “religious experiences” of people of other faiths seems like a good start for when my sister and I talk about this. Now I’m curious about Crowley too. I almost never really get offended, so even if he is abrasive, I’m sure I can focus on the facts and pick out a few things to share, even if I wouldn’t share him directly.
Thanks for your reply! Hopefully you can follow this easily enough; next time I’ll add in quotes like you did...
The theorem shows that if one adopts a simple utility function—or let’s say if an Artificial Intelligence has as its goal maximizing the computing power in existence, even if that means killing us and using us for parts—this yields a consistent set of preferences. It doesn’t seem like we could argue the AI into adopting a different goal unless that (implausibly) served the original goal better than just working at it directly. We could picture the AI as a physical process that first calculates the expected value of various actions in terms of computing power (this would have to be approximate, but we’ve found approximations very useful in practical contexts) and then automatically takes the action with the highest calculated expected value.
Now in a sense, this shows your problem has no solution. We have no apparent way to argue morality into an agent that doesn’t already have it, on some level. In fact this appears mathematically impossible. (Also, the Universe does not love you and will kill you if the math of physics happens to work out that way.)
But if you already have moral preferences, there shouldn’t be any way to argue you out of them by showing the non-existence of Vishnu. Any desires that correspond to a utility function would yield consistent preferences. If you follow them then nobody can raise any logical objection. God would have to do the same, if he existed. He would just have more strength and knowledge with which to impose his will (to the point of creating a logical contradiction—but we can charitably assume theologians meant something else.) When it comes to consistent moral foundations, the theorem gives no special place to his imaginary desires relative to yours.
I mentioned above that a simple utility function does not seem to capture my moral preferences, though it could be a good rule of thumb. There’s probably no simple way to find out what you value if you don’t already know. CFAR does not address the abstract problem; possibly they could help you figure out what you actually value, if you want practical guidance.
Note that he doesn’t believe in making anything easy for the reader. The second half of this essay might perhaps have what you want, starting with section XI. Crowley wrote it under a pseudonym and at least once refers to himself in the third person; be warned.
Thanks a lot for explaining the utility theorem. So just to be sure, if moral preferences for my personal values (I’ll check CFAR for help on this, eventually) are the basis of morality, is morality necessarily subjective?
I’ll get to Crowley eventually too, thanks for the link. I’ve just started the Rationality e-book and I feel like it will give me a lot of the background knowledge to understand other articles and stuff people talk about here.
If “subjective” means “a completely different alien species would likely care about different things than humans”, then yes. You also can’t expect that a rock would have the same morality as you.
If “subjective” means “a different human would care about completely different things than me” then probably not much. It should be possible to define a morality of an “average human” that most humans would consider correct. The reason it appears otherwise is that for tribal reasons we are prone to assume that our enemies are psychologically nonhuman, and our reasoning is often based on factual errors, and we are actually not good enough at consistently following our own values. (Thus the definition of CEV as “if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished we were, had grown up farther together”; it refers to the assumption of having correct beliefs, being more consistent, and not being divided by factional conflicts.)
Of course, both of these answers are disputed by many people.
There is a set of reasonably objective facts about what values people have, and how your actions would impact them, That leads to reasonably objective answers about what you should and shouldn’t do in a specific situation. However, they are only locally objective,..what value based ethics removes is globally objective answers, in the sense that you should always do X .or refrain from Y irrespective of the contexts,
It’s a bit like the difference between small g and big G in physics,
Nope. It leads to reasonably objective descriptive answers about what the consequences of your actions will be. It does not lead to normative answers about what you should or should not do.
Okay, I guess I’m still confused. So far I’ve loved everything I’ve read on this site and have been able to understand; I’ve appreciated/agreed with the first 110 pages of the Rationality ebook, felt a little skeptical for liking it so completely, and then reassured myself with the Aumann’s agreement theorem it mentions. So I feel like if this utility theorem which bases morality on preferences is commonly accepted around here, I’ll probably like it once I fully understand it. So bear with me as I ask more questions...
Whose preferences am I valuing? Only my own? Everyone’s equally? Those of an “average human”? What about future humans?
Yeah, by subjective, I meant that different humans would care about different things. I’m not really worried about basic morality, like not beating people up and stuff, but...
I have a feeling the hardest part of morality will now be determining where to strike a balance between individual human freedom and concern for the future of humanity.
Like, to what extent is it permissible to harm the environment? If something, like eating sugar for example, makes people dumber, should it be limited? Is population control like China’s a good thing?
Can you really say that most humans agree on where this line between individual freedom and concern for the future of humanity should be drawn? It seems unlikely...
I’m the wrong person to ask about “this utility theorem which bases morality on preferences” since I don’t really subscribe to this point of view.
I use the world “morality” as a synonym for “system of values” and I think that these values are multiple, somewhat hierarchical, and are NOT coherent. Moral decisions are generally taken on the basis of a weighted balance between several conflicting values.
By definition, you can only care about your own preferences. That being said, it’s certainly possible for you to have a preference for other people’s preferences to be satisfied, in which case you would be (indirectly) caring about the preferences of others.
The question of whether humans all value the same thing is a controversial one. Most Friendly AI theorists believe, however, that the answer is “yes”, at least if you extrapolate their preferences far enough. For more details, take a look at Coherent Extrapolated Volition.
Okay, that makes sense, but does this mean you can’t say someone else did something wrong, unless he was acting inconsistently with his personal preferences?
Ah, okay, I’ve been reading most hyperlinks here, but that one looks pretty long, so I will come back to it after I finish Rationality (or maybe my question will even be answered later on in the book...)
That is definitely not the idea behind CEV, though it may reflect the idea that a sizable majority will mostly share the same values under extrapolation.
Do they have any arguments for this besides wishful thinking?
I told him “they” assume no such thing—his own link is full of talk about how to deal with disagreements.
Yes, I’ve read most of the arguments, they strike me as highly speculative and hand-wavy.
This is an impressive failure to respond to what I said, which again was that you asked for an explanation of false data. “Most Friendly AI theorists” do not appear to think that extrapolation will bring all human values into agreement, so I don’t know what “arguments” you refer to or even what you think they seek to establish. Certainly the link above has Eliezer assuming the opposite (at least for the purpose of safety-conscious engineering).
ETA: This is the link to the full sub-thread. Note my response to dxu.
Is that a fact? It’s true that the theories often discussed here , utilitarianism and so in, don’t solve the motivation problem, but that doesn’t mean no theory does,
Not necessarily subjective, in the sense that “what should I do in situation X” necessarily lacks an objective answer.
Even if you treat all value as morally relevant, and you certain dont have to, there is a set of reasonably objective facts about what values people have, and how your actions would impact them, That leads to reasonably objective answers about what you should and shouldn’t do in a specific situation. However, they are only locally objective,..
There’s also a Less Wrong meetup group in Madison, if you still live in Wisconsin! (They also play lots of board games.)
Thanks! I’m from Janesville, so not far from Madison. Maybe I’ll stop in next time I’m home for Christmas break!
You are awesome! I wish I could radiate only half as much enthusiasm and happiness. Even though I feel it—I just can’t render it as much. I plan to learn from you in this regard!
You are welcome. I will also try to answer your questions. Some of them I ponderd myself and arrived at some answers. But then I had more time. I have a comparable background and I have a deep interest in children so you may also find my ressources for parents of interest.
But now to your questions:
Awesome. But it can be explained by the presence of memes in real-life christian culture that regulate such actions as misguided. See Reason as memetic immune disorder.
The Jesus Seminar may have answers of the kind you desire. If a historical Jesus can be found by taking the bible as historcal evidence instead of sacred text, then look there. The Jesus Seminar has been heavily criticised (in part legitimately so) but it may provide the counter-balance to your already known facts. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar
Well. What do you mean by “how”? By which social process does moral exist? Or due to which psychological process? The spiritual process apparently is out of business because it is ungrounded. There was a Main post with nice graphs about it that I can’t find.
You might also want to replace the question with “why do I think that I have morality?”
No. Atheism does remove one set of symbol-behavior-chains in your mind, yes. But a complex mind will most likely lock into another better grounded set of symbol-behavior-chains that is not nihilistic but—depending on your emotional setup—somehow connected to terminal values and acting on that. “symbol-behavior-chains” is my ad-hoc term. Ask if it is unclear.
I feel with you. I have the same challenge. See my first link above. I respect them. I know how complex this migration is. I was free to explore. How can’t I not reciprocate. I don’t want to manipulate. I just want the best for them. And then extensions of the simulation argument might actually lead you back to theism (as least a bit).
Good luck and cheers!
Thanks for your reply :) You seem to radiate plenty of enthusiasm to me!
I’ll check out your links and save the Jesus seminar stuff for later; I’m going to finish the rationality ebook and then researching historical Jesus will be my next project, but it looks like a good resource!
As for your questions...when I wrote this original post, by “how” I was still hoping that some sort of objective morality might exist… one not related to the human subject (a hope I now see as kind of silly but maybe natural so soon after my deconversion). I was hoping for some solid rules to follow that would always lead to good outcomes and never cause any emotional disturbance, but I’ve come to accept that things are just a bit more complicated than that in the real world...
My two cents:
Who cares? Okay you obviously do, but why? If the religion is false and reports of miracles are lies, is there really an impotant difference between a) “Yes, once there was a person called Jesus, but almost everything that Bible attributes to him is completely made up” and b) “No, everything about Jesus is completely made up”?
In other words, if I tell you that my uncle Joe is the true god and performs thousand miracles every thursday, why would you care about whether a) I have a perfectly ordinary, non-divine, non-magical uncle called Joe, and I only lied about his divinity and miracles, or b) actually I lied even about having an uncle called Joe? What difference would it make and why?
Because it was written by people who had an agenda to “prove” that they are the good ones and the divinely chosen ones? Maybe even because it contains magic?
I don’t fully trust even historical books written recently. It can be funny to read history textbooks written by two countries which had conflicts recently; how each of them describes the events somewhat differently. And today’s historical books are much more trustworthy than the old ones, because today people are literate, they are allowed to read and compare the competing books, they are allowed to criticize without getting killed immediately.
Sorry for the offensive comparison, but trusting Bible’s historical accuracy would be as if in the parallel universe Hitler would win the war, then he would write his own historical book about what “really happened” and make it a mandatory textbook for everyone… and then a few thousand years later people would trust his every written word to be honest and accurate.
Exactly. You already know what you care about. Atheism simply means there is no higher boss who could tell you “actually, you should like this and hate that, because I said so”, and you would have to shut up and obey.
On the other hand; people can be wrong about their preferences, especially when their decisions are based on wrong assumptions. But “being wrong” is different from “disagreeing with the boss”.
I would recommend the PDF version. It is better organized; you can read it from the beginning to end, instead of jumping through the hyperlinks. And it does not include the comments, which will allow you to focus on the text and finish it faster (the comments below the original articles are 10x as much text as the articles themselves; they are often interesting, but then it is really extremely lot of text to read).
Thanks for replying!
Why do I care about Historical Jesus? I actually wouldn’t, I guess, except that I absolutely need to have a really well thought out answer to this question in order to maintain the respect of friends and family, some of whom credit Historical Jesus as one of the top reasons for their faith.
Good point about the authors being biased, thanks, no offense taken! I still don’t like when people say miracles/magic definitively prove the Bible wrong though, since if a God higher than our understanding were to exist, of course he could do magic when he felt like it. Still, based on our understanding of the world, there is no good reason/evidence at all to believe in such a God.
I got the Rationality ebook, and it is great! Sooo well-written, well-organized, and well thought out! I just started today and am already on the section “Belief in Belief.” I love it so much so far that it’s a page-turner for me as much as my favorite suspense/fantasy novels. Definitely worth sharing and going back to read and re-read :)
Yep. On the social level I get it, but on another level, it’s a trap.
The trap works approximately like this: “I will allow you not to believe in my bullshit, but only if you give me a free check to bother you with as many questions as I want about my bullshit, and you have to explore all of these questions seriously, give me a satisfactory answer, and of course I am allowed to respond by giving you even more questions”.
If you agree on this, you have de facto agreed that the other side is allowed to waste unlimited amounts of your time and attention, as a de facto punishment for not believing their bullshit. -- Today you are asked to make to make a well-researched opinion about Historical Jesus, which of course would take a few weeks or months to do a really serious historical research; and tomorrow it will be either something new, e.g. a well-researched opinion about the history of the Church, or about the history of Crusades, or about the history of Inquisition, or whatever. Alternatively, they may point at some parts of your answer about the Historical Jesus and say: okay, this part is rather weak, you have to bring me a well-researched opinion about this part. For example, you were quoting Josephus and Tacitus, so now give me a full research about both of them, how credible they are, what other claims they made, etc.
Unless the other side gives up (which they have no reason to; this games costs them almost nothing), there are only two ways this can end. First, you might give up, and start pretending to be religious again. Second, after playing a few rounds of this game, you refuse to play yet another round… in which case the other side will declare their victory, because it “proves” your atheism is completely irrational.
Well, you might play a round or two of this game just to show some good will… but it is a game constructed so that you cannot win. The real goal is to manipulate you into punishing yourself and feeling guilty. -- Note: The other side may not realize they are actually doing this. They may believe they are playing a fair game.
Good point, thanks!! I can’t get too caught up in this; there are things I’d rather be learning about, so I need a limit. I’d like to think I can win, though, but this is probably just self-anchoring fallacy (I’m learning!)
Just because I would have been swayed by an absence of positive evidence doesn’t mean everyone will be, even people who seem decently smart and open-minded with a high view of reason, like my old track coach and religion teacher. I just made a deal though, that I would read any book of his choice about the Historical Jesus (something I probably would have done anyway!) if he reads Rationality: AI to Zombies :)
Be careful about distinguishing two very different propositions:
(1) There was a preacher named Jesus of Nazareth who lived in a certain time in a certain place.
(2) Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead and was the Son of God.
Specifically, evidence in favor of (1) usually has nothing to do (2).
That doesn’t sound quite right to me, at least if you mean “nothing” literally”, given that not-(1) logically implies not-(2).
I think the much smaller posterior probability of (2) than (1) has more to do with the much smaller prior than with the evidence.
A fair point, though “normal” people have a strong tendency to jump from “not-(1) logically implies not-(2)” to “therefore (1) implies (2)”.
No worries, I knew what you meant. I am pretty good at logic though, so no need to worry about illogical jumps here. I may not have very much background knowledge about terminology or history or science or anything (yet), and I may not be a very articulate writer (yet), but the one thing I can usually do very well is think clearly. I am even feeling a bit smug after finding the mammography Bayesian reasoning problem that apparently only 15% of doctors get correct to be easy and obvious. :)
Ah, yes, the ever-popular fallacy of the inverse.
If these are the questions weighing heavily on your mind, then you would probably enjoy Gary Drescher’s Good and Real. I suggest reading the first Amazon review to get a good idea of the topics it covers. It is very similar to some of the content in the Sequences. (By the way, if you purchase the book through that link, 5% goes to Slate Star Codex.)
Also, the Sequences have recently been released as an ebook entitled Rationality: From AI to Zombies. (You can download the book for free in MOBI, EPUB, and PDF format if you follow the ‘Buy Now’ link at the bottom of that page and enter a price of $0.00. If you do this, it won’t request any payment information. If you pay more than that, the money will go to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.) I have found that Rationality is much, much easier to read than the Sequences.
You may not yet have the background knowledge necessary to understand it, and if that’s the case then you can always return to it later, but I think that the most relevant post on this topic is Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom. It’s chapter 264 in Rationality. (That’s a daunting number but the chapters are very short. Rationality is Bible-length but you can hack away at it one chapter at a time, or more at a time, if you please.) To be frank, you’re asking the Big Questions and you might have to read a bit before you can answer them.
When I read that, I’m reminded of something that Luke Muehlhauser, a prominent LessWrong user and former devout Christian, once wrote:
As you said yourself, “Yay tolerance of ambiguity!” Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains. It’s easy, nay, the default action, to view others with false beliefs in a negative light, but if rationalism were always intuitively obvious, then the world would be a very different place. I try not to make myself feel bad by overestimating my ability to convince others of the value of rationalism. That doesn’t mean that I keep my mouth shut all of the time, but I do take it a day at a time, and it seems to work; sometimes I talk about something and it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, and then a friend will bring it up days or weeks later and say something like, “You know, I was thinking about that, and I realized it made a lot of sense.” And then I privately jump up and down. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but for me, there’s definitely a middle ground between falling in line and abandoning All I Have Ever Known. I also often see Paul Graham’s essay What You Can’t Say linked here when new atheists ask about how to maintain ties with religious family members.
EDIT: Oh, and welcome to LessWrong!
Thanks for the welcome!! Good and Real does seem like a good read. I’m going to read Rationality first, which I’m guessing will help me work through some of my questions, but I’ll definitely keep that one in mind for later.
Where Recursive Justification Hits Rock Bottom was really relevant, thanks for the link. I’m still digesting Occam’s Razor, I think that was the only concept completely new to me.
Thanks for the link to Luke’s story. It seems like we went through the same difficult process of desperately wanting to believe, but ultimately just not being able to. I find it super encouraging that his doubts stemmed from researching the Historical Jesus, since that’s one thing that my old high school track coach/religion teacher insists I have to look into. He claims no atheist has ever been able to answer any of his questions. The atheists I know all credit a conflict with science as the reason they left Christianity, and I credit...I don’t even know, my personal thoughts, I guess… but it’s great to know that researching history will also lead there. I’ll have to go through the same resources he used so I can better explain myself to Christian friends.
“Although their beliefs are false, their experiences can certainly be real. Even if there exists no God, that doesn’t mean that the Presence-of-God Quale isn’t represented by the patterns of neural impulses of some human brains.” Thanks for that!! It does make me feel better.
Hahaha, wow, I haven’t even considered trying to convince others of the value of rationalism yet. Especially after my deconversion, I’ve been totally on the defensive, almost apologizing for my rationality. (“It’s not my fault; it’s the personality I was born with. If you guys really believe, you should feel lucky not just for having been born into Christian homes, but also, more importantly, for having been born with the right personalities for faith.” and “You think my prayers for a stronger faith weren’t answered because my faith wasn’t strong enough, but I was doing everything possible to strengthen my faith to no avail.” and “Believing isn’t a choice, no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t believe. So if any brand of Christianity is true, Calvinism is your best bet, and I wasn’t among the elect.”)
So far this strategy is doing remarkably, remarkably well in maintaining ties with friends and family. People understand where I’m coming from, and they feel just awful, sorry for me since they think I’m going to hell, but for the most part, not finding me at fault. Pity is slightly annoying when I’m so happy, but hopefully their pity will eventually lead them to find God unfair, which will lead them to dislike their beliefs, which will lead them to question why they bother believing something they don’t like...and then, they won’t find much reason at all aside from upbringing/community. Those were actually pretty much the steps of my deconversion process, only I didn’t need a personal connection with a particular unbeliever to get there. Anyway, if nothing else, the defensive strategy works wonders for relations. I helped a friend share her doubts with her family in this way, and she said it worked for her too.
I just thought to point out that there’s going to be a Rationality reading group; basically, it’s a planned series of posts about each Part in the book, where you have the opportunity to talk about it and ask questions. You clearly are very curious, (it’s the only way you could survive so many hyperlinks) so it seems like just the thing for you.
Just to give you words for this, and from what I read in the blog post that you linked to in your first comment (which I found very amusing), I think you’re trying to verbalize that Christianity was inconsistent. You don’t have to prefer consistency, but most people claim to prefer it, and apparently you do prefer it. (I know I do.) You didn’t like it as a system because it was a system that said that God was perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish (though the second statement was only implicit) at the same time. You can always look at other subjects like science and history and come to the conclusion that religion conflicts with those things when it shouldn’t; but you can also just look at religion and see how it conflicts with itself. I think that’s what you did.
I saw some of your other comments about meaning, and meaninglessness in the absence of God, and nihilism. Notice that when you ask “Does life have meaning in the absence of God?”, everyone says that it depends on what you mean, offers some possible interpretations, and shares their viewpoints and conclusions on what it means. The simplest way to give you a clue as to some of the problems with the question is something that you wrote yourself:
Vagueness is part of the problem, but there are other parts as well. Even though I’ve never been religious and therefore don’t know what it’s like to lose faith, worrying about “meaninglessness” is something that I dealt with. I promise that atheists aren’t all secretly dead inside. (I actually used to wonder about that.) Rationality Parts N and P deal with questions like that.
I also want to say that I agree with Viliam_Bur’s comments on you doing research to defend your new beliefs: It’s a lot cheaper time- and resource-wise to act like a skeptic than it is to do research, and you never have to tolerate that awful feeling that you might be wrong. Even when you return with evidence contrary to their beliefs, their standards of evidence are too high for it to matter. I think it’s telling that your coach sat around waiting for unusually knowledgeable, atheistic passersby to tell him about the Historical Jesus instead of doing any research on his own.
Cool, thanks so much for mentioning the Rationality reading group!! I’m probably going to finish each section long before it’s discussed, but I’ll definitely go back to re-read and chat. I’ll bookmark it for sure! So exciting! I will try to bribe my sister and maybe a few other people to participate as well (self-anchoring again, maybe, but I’ll call it optimism, haha).
Ooh, I like consistency, and Christianity is inconsistent. Christianity conflicts with itself. A God can’t be both perfectly benevolent and ridiculously selfish. That’s why I rejected it. Yeah, that sounds nice, thanks for the words. :)
Good point about vagueness. I like this slatestarcodex post” The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories Looking forward to parts N and P now too!
And yeah, good point about the standards of evidence being too high. Still, right now my only info about Historical Jesus is based off a few articles I’ve read on the internet, and I just feel like after 22 years learning one thing, I can’t just reject it and jump ahead to other things without being able to formulate basic, well-reasoned atheist answers to common Christian questions. I guess it’s not just about maintaining my friends’ respect, it’s also about my own self-respect. I can’t go around showing the improbability of every religion, but I want to be able to do so about the one I grew up in (maybe this is a cousin of the sunk-cost fallacy?). Luckily, all of the groundwork here has already been done by other atheists, it should just a matter of familiarizing myself with basic facts/common arguments.