“Your beliefs causally determine with branch of the multiverse your conscious perception is aware of. If you believe in God (any God) you end up in a branch of the multiverse where that God exists. Of course, once you cement your beliefs and end up in a branch of the multiverse where there is a God or there is no God, you cannot then go back and retroactively change which branch “you” are in (except through quantum reversal, which is for all intents and purposes impossible). So if you don’t believe in God, you are in some sense “right”, but in a deeper sense you are wrong, because you had an opportunity to exist in a branch of the multiverse where God “really” exists, but you chose not to. Now that choice is irreversible, and you are condemned to live in this branch of the multiverse. Theologians call this branch Hell.”
lisper
I’m sorry this feels like a bait-and-switch. Let me try to state my claim as clearly as I can: some people believe in God because they have had first-hand subjective experiences for which the best explanation that they can come up with is that they were caused by God (for some value of “God’). The nature of these experiences cannot be fully rendered into words, but it is of a similar character to that which causes even rational people to characterize the subjective experience of listening to music as somehow fundamentally different from looking at the grooves in a record despite the fact that the information entering your brain is the same in both cases.
I don’t think there’s many physical media that can manage a few thousand years in the desert, short of a miracle.
The desert is actually quite good at preserving all manner of things. But this is neither here nor there. If God had wanted a video of the parting of the Red Sea so survive to modern times He could surely have arranged it because, well, that’s kind of what it means to be omnipotent.
So it’s not really prediction
No, it really is prediction: God will never again reveal Himself unambiguously the way he once did. He will forever be the god of the gaps, hiding in the fringes of statistical distributions and the private subjective experiences of believers.
- 23 Feb 2016 18:11 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by (
Or, to put it another way, some people believe in God because they have seen evidence of God.
Yes. Exactly.
Also, climbing them.
Religious people have a similarly intricate web of self-reinforcing evidence for their beliefs. The “evidence” of God’s handiwork is all around you, even in the trees. In fact, it is so difficult to see why all of the intricacies of nature are not evidence of an intelligent designer that it took humans many millennia to figure it out, and it is considered a major intellectual accomplishment. Evolution is only obvious in retrospect.
I think I’d be more interested in trying to convince them that the other side of the canyon exists
OK, but now consider this question: what evidence could your blind peers offer that would convince you that what you think you are seeing is not in fact real, but is actually just an epiphenomenon of some neurobiological process going on entirely inside your brain?
Hm, I searched for “ex machina” on the LW site search before I posted this and got no results.
That is indeed a third possibility, but I think it can be safely ruled out. If there were a shred of actual evidence that spiritual experience was anything other than a neurophysiological phenomenon then I’m pretty sure the rational community would welcome religious people with open arms. The problem is, there is no such evidence, so there’s a limit to how welcoming rationalists can be to someone who insists that God is an actual deity.
That surprises me. Why?
Please note that “spiritual” != “supernatural”. I’m using “spiritual” here to describe a particular kind of subjective experience that some people have and others don’t. So there’s no such thing as “rejection of the spiritual”—that’s a category error.
I’m not sure why their lack of imagination should influence my beliefs.
I’m not suggesting it should influence your beliefs about the world. I’m suggesting it should influence your beliefs about them.
supernatural bullshit
This is exactly what I’m talking about. By choosing to call it “supernatural bullshit” rather than “a not altogether unreasonable (though nonetheless mistaken) attempt to account for real subjective experiences that they have had and I have not (and in the absence of education and information that I possess that they might not)” you miss a very important truth: you are dealing with a fellow human being who might be making an honest attempt to make sense of the world in the face of subjective experiences and other background that may be very different from your own. By choosing to label their beliefs “supernatural bullshit” you might be shutting down possible avenues of communication and the opportunity to make the world a better place, even if it is supernatural bullshit.
I don’t see that as a controversial claim, it looks obviously true to me.
It seems obviously true to me too. And yet I seem to be having the very devil of a time convincing some people that it is true.
The “information entering your brain” is very much NOT the same in both cases.
Yes, it is. This is a technical claim, and it is demonstrably true. I mean “information” in the information-theoretical sense, i.e. the log of the number of distinguishable states a system can be in. That the information is the same in both cases can be shown by showing that either system can be reconstructed from the other. The grooves can be reconstructed from the audio (this is how the grooves were created in the first place), and the audio can be reconstructed from the grooves (this is what happens when you play the record.)
If you want to challenge this claim, please mount an argument. Don’t just proclaim that it’s false.
Thanks, Gunnar! Reading the other comments (and watching my karma sink below the threshold for future submissions) I was starting to feel some despair.
Do you truly think that most of spirituality is an attempt to communicate a feeling of belonging that one gets also when giving up after being bullied for a week? And that this feeling is both incommunicable and easily induced with some practice (you give meditation as an example)?
That’s a little bit of an oversimplified caricature, but yes, I do more or less believe that this is true. Moreover, I think there is evidence to support this position beyond just the intuitive argument I’ve presented here. The idea that religion evolved as a way of maintaining social cohesion is hardly original with me. I’m frankly a little bit surprised that I’m getting pushback on this; I had assumed this was common knowledge.
A “spiritual experience” is an altered state of mind, but not all altered states of mind are spiritual experiences.
I’ve gotten a lot of pushback on my use of the word “spiritual”, and I am mindful that this word has a lot of irrational baggage associated with it. And I’m open to suggestions, but so far no one has been able to come up with a suitable alternative.
- 10 Feb 2016 0:05 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Is Spirituality Irrational? by (
The serpent wasn’t an authority figure.
How could Eve have known that? See my point above about Eve not having the benefit of any cultural references.
Why do you think one is okay and the other one is not?
Because the kitten is acting in self defense. If the kitten had initiated the violence, that would not be OK.
Because it’s really boring
Seriously?
he sought to avoid what it from every other person in the world
No he didn’t. He was cursed by God (Ge4:12) and he’s lamenting the result of that curse.
he thinks they’d have reason to want to kill him.
Yes, because he’s cursed by God.
I’d always understood the Flood story as they weren’t just thinking evil, but continually doing (unspecified) evil to the point where they weren’t even considering doing non-evil stuff.
If that were true then humans would have died out in a single generation even without the Flood.
Simulate the algorithm with pencil and paper, if all else fails.
But that doesn’t work. If you do the math you will find that the even if you got the entire human race to do pencil-and-paper calculations 24x7 you’d have less computational power than a single iPhone.
perfect knowledge of the future—does not necessarily imply a perfectly deterministic universe.
Of course it does. That’s what determinism means. In fact, perfect knowledge is a stronger condition than determinism. Knowable necessarily implies determined, but the converse is not true. Whether a TM will halt on a given input is determined but not generally knowable.
I don’t actually know GW-the-myth.
Sorry about making that unwarranted assumption. Here’s a reference. The details don’t really matter. If you tell me your background I’ll try to come up with a more culturally appropriate example.
the question of whether two things are the same must also become fuzzy, and non-binary
None of this is original research on my part. My only contribution is pedagogical. QIT doesn’t make any predictions that QM doesn’t make because it’s an interpretation, just another way of looking at the math. But the reason it’s a better way of looking at the math is that it solves the measurement problem. It explains measurement in terms of entanglement. It reduces two mysteries to one. IMHO that’s progress.
It’s a really good analogy, and I like it very much.
Thank you! You just made my day.
Parting the Red Sea and dropping it on Pharoah’s army was hardly a subtle miracle.
Yeah, but those good old days are apparently behind us. It’s a shame that God didn’t think to make a video. Now that would have been cool!
it’s also possible, given current behaviour, that God will simply refuse to cooperate with any experiment intended to prove Her existence beyond doubt...
One of the things that I’ve often heard Christians say is, “God could do X and Y and Z (because He (they never refer to God as She) is omnipotent) but He chooses not to.” The idea of an omnipotent deity whose behavior is reliably predictable by mere mortals has always struck me as logically incoherent. But what do I know? ;-)
So, what you were suggesting was basically some form of mirage, then.
It was supposed to be ambiguous, that’s the whole point. It’s a thought experiment designed to get a non-believer to understand what it’s like to be someone who believes in God because they have had a subjective experience that, to them, is indistinguishable from hearing the Voice of God. Non-believers seem to have a really hard time imagining that (outside the context of mental illness), so I thought it might be easier to imagine being someone who believes in trees because you have had a subjective experience that is indistinguishable to you from seeing a real tree, but under circumstances where you cannot share that experience with anyone else except through testimony.
one merely needs to find a way to get close enough to touch it
Yes. Hence the canyon.
if He pushes some clouds aside and says “Look, everybody, here I am!”, then that’ll be pretty convincing evidence
Yes, if God wanted to prove Her existence She certainly could. But the theory is that She chooses to remain hidden because She wants us to make up our own minds about whether or not to believe. (Unless you’re a Calvinist, in which case you deny that humans have free will and things get rather bizarre.)
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ll just add that you don’t have to get anywhere near this level of improbability (converting wine to blood and bread to human flesh requires nuclear transmutation, not just chemistry) to get convincing evidence of the existence of a deity. It would be enough to show that people who prayed to a particular deity could produce any measurable effect that could not be accounted for by a placebo effect with statistically higher probability of success than those who prayed to some other deity. It can be something as prosaic as asking God to speak to two believers and tell them something—anything—but have it be the same thing in both cases. The two believers write down what God tells them without communicating with each other, and then you check to see if they match. If people who prayed to Jesus matched more often than people who prayed to Allah under otherwise identical circumstances, that would really get my attention.
When I suggest things like this to believers, the response is invariably a citation of Matthew 4:7 or some variation on that theme.
(BTW, Jesus actually got this wrong. It was not in fact written that thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. In fact, the Old Testament specifically calls on people to apply the scientific method to prophetic claims in Deuteronomy 18:21-22.)
I really don’t understand the problem here. In between “fantasies made up out of whole cloth” and “genuine communication with a deity” there is a broad range of possibilities, and I think the truth lies in that range rather than at either extreme. Spiritual experiences are real experiences, and they can feel like a genuine encounter with a deity without actually being a genuine encounter with a deity.
What you all seem to be missing is that on a T-shirt, “Real Men Wear Pink” is a pun. In this context, Pink is not a color, it’s a brand name: http://www.thomaspink.com/