One of my favourite posts here in a while. When talking with theists I find it helpful to clarify that I'm not so much against their God, rather my core problem is that I have different epistemological standards to them. Not only does this take some of the emotive heat out of the conversation, but I also think it's the point where science/rationalism/atheism etc. is at its strongest and their system is very weak.
With respect to untheistic society, I remember when a guy I knew shifted to New Zealand from the US and was disappointed to find that relatively few people were interested in talking to him about atheism. The reason, I explained, is that most people simply aren't sufficiently interested in religion to be bothered with atheism. This is a society where the leaders of both major parties in the last election publicly stated that they were not believers and... almost nobody cared.
So the universe was created by an intelligent agent. Well, that's the standard Simulation Hypothesis [...]
I've been thinking about a slightly different question: is base-level reality physics-like, or optimization-like, and if it's optimization-like, did it start out that way?
Here's an example that illustrates what my terms mean. Suppose we are living in base-level reality which started with the Big Bang and evolution, and we eventually develop an AI that takes over the entire universe. Then I would say that base-level reality started off physics-like, then becomes optimization-like.
But it's surely conceivable that a universe could start off being optimization-like, and this hypothesis doesn't seem to violate Occam's Razor in any obvious way. Consider this related question: what is the shortest program that outputs a human mind? Is it an optimization program, or a physics simulation?
An optimization procedure can be very simple, if computing time isn't an issue, but we don't know whether there is a concisely describable objective function that we are the optimum of. On the other hand, the mathematical laws of physics are also simple, but we don't know how rare intelligent life is, so we don't know how many bits of coordinates are needed to locate a human brain in the universe.
Does anyone have an argument that settles these questions, in either direction?
If you could show hunter-gatherers a raindance that called on a different spirit and worked with perfect reliability, or, equivalently, a desalination plant, they'd probably chuck the old spirit right out the window.
There's no need to speculate--this has actually happened. From what I know of the current state of Native American culture (which is admittedly limited), modern science is fully accepted for practical purposes, and traditional beliefs guide when to party, how to mourn, how to celebrate rites of passage, etc.
The only people who seem to think science conflicts with Native American belief systems, are New Age converts coming from a Western religious background. From the linked article:
A Minnesota couple who refused chemotherapy for their 13-year-old son was ordered Friday to have the boy re-evaluated... Brown County District Judge John Rodenberg found Daniel Hauser has been "medically neglected" by his parents, Colleen and Anthony Hauser, who belong to a religious group that believes in using only natural healing methods practiced by some American Indians.
Two points.
First, I've also heard antitheism defined as the position that religious belief is harmful (think Hitchens book). So that one could without logical contradiction be an antitheist and a theist.
Second, my understanding of the current experimental data is that humans have hardwired religious tendencies that would make an Untheistic society very unlikely to appear. Obviously it works for a thought experiment but but saying "Babies are natural atheists/untheists" is problematic because while that might be true strictly speaking babies are likely natural animists and possibly immortalists.
humans have hardwired religious tendencies
Remember, religion is adapted to the wiring, not the other way around. As I've said elsewhere, it's not a God-shaped hole, it's a hole-shaped God.
Do you live in the USA? Few people from Sweden conclude that religion is an unshakeably deep part of the human psyche.
hardwired religious tendencies
Hardwired anthropomorphic tendencies. Hunter-gatherer superstitions don't much resemble what we think of as religions. The gods are often stupid.
Could you be more precise than ontologically basic mental entities, I've read over the Carrier article on the subject and more and more the concept appears like a subtle rhetorical trick - where the term (especially what qualifies as mental) takes on slightly different meanings at different times.
As it is, I'm tempted to treat the whole idea as dangerously shaky - especially as depending on your ideas of "mental" and "basic" you could consider thermodynamics to be unambiguously supernatural and the medieval Christian God as natural.
I ...
"I don't need any evidence! I have faith!"
"You have what?"
And at this very moment the Untheists have become, for the first time, Atheists.
In another thread, someone called himself an "Afaithist". I think it's rather catchy, and much more to the point than atheist.
I changed my official religious status, funnily enough, from "atheist" to "antitheist" about a week after this was posted without reading it. What's more odd is I was attempting to spare the Goddists of the same ambiguity you're discussing. How about that?
"Atheism" is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call "untheism" and "antitheism".
This distinction is isomorphic to the traditional distinction between negative and positive atheism, respectively. Of course, the Catholics would use "positive atheism" in a slightly different sense, referring to those who believe in God but reject him anyway, so perhaps newer jargon is in order (not that this field of inquiry has any lack of distinctions)
Beliefs are procedural, you don't need them all written out explicitly. This allows to hold infinite number of beliefs, each of them equipped with a specific level of certainty. I never before thought about the question of what the value of 385+23 is, but I still have a belief that 385+23=408 and also that 385+23 is not 409.
"is there a single religious claim that a well-developed, sophisticated Untheist culture would not reject?"
I propose "suffering requires attachment" as a VERY well developed VERY non-obvious example. "Don't murder" is a very poorly developed and very obvious example. "It's bad to hate" is probably the most important idea that appears to me to have originated with Christianity, but its a pretty important idea. Another pretty important Christian idea, I think, is "literal truth is underrated", ironically, ...
...Xia: It should be relatively easy to give AIXI(tl) evidence that its selected actions are useless when its motor is dead. If nothing else AIXI(tl) should be able to learn that it's bad to let its body be destroyed, because then its motor will be destroyed, which experience tells it causes its actions to have less of an impact on its reward inputs.
Rob B: [...] Even if we get AIXI(tl) to value continuing to affect the world, it's not clear that it would preserve itself. It might well believe that it can continue to have a causal impact on our world (or on s
Is there a Russian translation of this article? I'd like to make one, wanted to double check in case if it already exists.
"What's left, when God is gone?" I'd assert that it might be pretty anti-climactic and people and societies might be very similar to how they would be without a God concept. I doubt that people would be any more motivated to understand their environment than they wouldve been and probably as irrational as ever, however without the excuse of religiosity. I see wars as being men's sexual frustrations in part and societies evolution happening in stages however the world is becoming less violent and induvidual rights becoming more universally accepte...
I don't remember whose comment that I read, but I can say I grew up without hearing about religion until the end of middle. And with saying that I didn't have a religion or even think about anything close to that. I was told to join different religions by different kinds of people when thay learned of that and I took the ideas as a childrens story and think of it like that. I don't really have a point, but just wanted to put out there that growing up without hearing about religion doesn't mean we don't believe they're just unaware and if it weren't told fr...
"What's left, when God is gone?" is greeted by a puzzled look and "What exactly is >missing?"
I think that this is a very important question to ask, and to really seek answers on, if this discussion is to advance any. Obviously, there are believers of all stripes who are in some sense getting a reward for their beliefs, be it socially rewarding for the culture or subculture they are in, psychologically rewarding by allowing them to be more hopeful about the future, etc. Saying their metaphysical beliefs are unlikely doesn't get at ...
the goal is an Untheistic society, not an Atheistic one - one in which the question "What's left, when God is gone?" is greeted by a puzzled look and "What exactly is missing?"
People will still ask, why do things work the way they do? Why should I (and why do I?) have faith in various things? And it is human nature to give a name to this mystery. The God that theists believe in is a mystery, not an "entity". (The "He" pronoun is just a convenient analogy, something that both theists and atheists misinterpret.)
In a...
Regarding the "anti-epistemology" of theism:
There is a difference between beliefs that are contradicted by good epistemology and those that are independent of it. And then, what criteria can you use, as rationalists, to differentiate between the epistemological soundness of epistemologically independent beliefs? If you accept some independent beliefs (and I believe that you must), doesn't this require that you cannot reject any epistemological independent beliefs on the grounds that they are not epistemologically dependent?
One occasionally sees such remarks as, "What good does it do to go around being angry about the nonexistence of God?" (on the one hand) or "Babies are natural atheists" (on the other). It seems to me that such remarks, and the rather silly discussions that get started around them, show that the concept "Atheism" is really made up of two distinct components, which one might call "untheism" and "antitheism".
A pure "untheist" would be someone who grew up in a society where the concept of God had simply never been invented - where writing was invented before agriculture, say, and the first plants and animals were domesticated by early scientists. In this world, superstition never got past the hunter-gatherer stage - a world seemingly haunted by mostly amoral spirits - before coming into conflict with Science and getting slapped down.
Hunter-gatherer superstition isn't much like what we think of as "religion". Early Westerners often derided it as not really being religion at all, and they were right, in my opinion. In the hunter-gatherer stage the supernatural agents aren't particularly moral, or charged with enforcing any rules; they may be placated with ceremonies, but not worshipped. But above all - they haven't yet split their epistemology. Hunter-gatherer cultures don't have special rules for reasoning about "supernatural" entities, or indeed an explicit distinction between supernatural entities and natural ones; the thunder spirits are just out there in the world, as evidenced by lightning, and the rain dance is supposed to manipulate them - it may not be perfect but it's the best rain dance developed so far, there was that famous time when it worked...
If you could show hunter-gatherers a raindance that called on a different spirit and worked with perfect reliability, or, equivalently, a desalination plant, they'd probably chuck the old spirit right out the window. Because there are no special rules for reasoning about it - nothing that denies the validity of the Elijah Test that the previous rain-dance just failed. Faith is a post-agricultural concept. Before you have chiefdoms where the priests are a branch of government, the gods aren't good, they don't enforce the chiefdom's rules, and there's no penalty for questioning them.
And so the Untheist culture, when it invents science, simply concludes in a very ordinary way that rain turns out to be caused by condensation in clouds rather than rain spirits; and at once they say "Oops" and chuck the old superstitions out the window; because they only got as far as superstitions, and not as far as anti-epistemology.
The Untheists don't know they're "atheists" because no one has ever told them what they're supposed to not believe in - nobody has invented a "high god" to be chief of the pantheon, let alone monolatry or monotheism.
However, the Untheists do know that they don't believe in tree spirits. And we shall even suppose that the Untheists don't believe in tree spirits, because they have a sophisticated and good epistemology - they understand why it is in general a bad idea to postulate ontologically basic mental entities.
So if you come up to the Untheists and say:
"The universe was created by God -"
"By what?"
"By a, ah, um, God is the Creator - the Mind that chose to make the universe -"
"So the universe was created by an intelligent agent. Well, that's the standard Simulation Hypothesis, but do you have actual evidence confirming this? You sounded very certain -"
"No, not like the Matrix! God isn't in another universe simulating this one, God just... is. He's indescribable. He's the First Cause, the Creator of everything -"
"Okay, that sounds like you just postulated an ontologically basic mental entity. And you offered a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Besides, where are you getting all this stuff? Could you maybe start by telling us about your evidence - the new observation you're trying to interpret?"
"I don't need any evidence! I have faith!"
"You have what?"
And at this very moment the Untheists have become, for the first time, Atheists. And what they just acquired, between the two points, was Antitheism - explicit arguments against explicit theism. You can be an Untheist without ever having heard of God, but you can't be an Antitheist.
Of course the Untheists are not inventing new rules to refute God, just applying their standard epistemological guidelines that their civilization developed in the course of rejecting, say, vitalism. But then that's just what we rationalist folk claim antitheism is supposed to be, in our own world: a strictly standard analysis of religion which turns out to issue a strong rejection - both epistemically and morally, and not after too much time. Every antitheist argument is supposed to be a special case of general rules of epistemology and morality which ought to have applications beyond religion - visible in the encounters of science with vitalism, say.
With this distinction in hand, you can make a bit more sense of some modern debates - for example, "Why care so much about God not existing?" could become "What is the public benefit from publicizing antitheism?" Or "What good is it to just be against something? Where is the positive agenda?" becomes "Less antitheism and more untheism in our atheism, please!" And "Babies are born atheists", which sounds a bit odd, is now understood to sound odd because babies have no grasp of antitheism.
And as for the claim that religion is compatible with Reason - well, is there a single religious claim that a well-developed, sophisticated Untheist culture would not reject? When they have no reason to suspend judgment, and no anti-epistemology of separate magisteria, and no established religions in their society to avoid upsetting?
There's nothing inherently fulfilling about arguing against Goddism - in a society of Untheists, no one would ever give the issue a second thought. But in this world, at least, insanity is not a good thing, and sanity is worth defending, and explicit antitheism by the likes of Richard Dawkins would surely be a public service conditioning on the proposition of it actually working. (Which it may in fact be doing; the next generation is growing up increasingly atheist.) Yet in the long run, the goal is an Untheistic society, not an Atheistic one - one in which the question "What's left, when God is gone?" is greeted by a puzzled look and "What exactly is missing?"
Yes, but not exactly. First, symmetry is a property of an object, whereas beauty isn’t. You can consider an object beautiful one day and not beautiful the next even though it hasn’t changed. Rather, if a creature observes something, “beauty” seems to be a perception the creature has about his perception of the object. But even though it's second-order or whatever the correct terminology is, yes, I am talking about beauty as a “real” thing. I don’t know much about neuroscience, but I suppose you could conceivably observe “beauty” with an MRI (?), trained to recognize the signature of that experience.
To the extent which beauty is a real thing, that’s science. What science doesn’t give us is that the experience of beauty is significant in and of itself. By significant ‘in and of itself’ I mean that it’s not just significant because it is useful in helping us select a healthy mate, but in some way inherently awesome. I'll use awesome here as possessing some significance additional to the significance that can be scientifically demonstrated. Of course the perception of awe could be recognized by the MRI. Theists describe this as feeling that the uinverse is purposeful and connected, but I will give a non-magical definition. If beauty is an inherently awesome thing, my thesis is that this awesomeness stems from its pattern in the natural world. Or rather, that the experience of awe comes from the perception of significant pattern but I'm afraid I'm being too meta already.
The following won't make sense unless you actually consider beauty some type of real thing. Beauty has resulted from the natural laws of the universe: these laws resulted in atoms, that resulted in molecules, that resulted in life, that resulted in sapient humans that resulted in the experience of beauty, observed by an MRI when a person observes something they consider beautiful. Consider the relationship of the real existing thing “beauty” with the laws of the universe – it’s analogous to some kind of mathematical structure because the laws of the universe are analogous to mathematical structures/equations. It's like some kind of sub-manifold in the phase space. This is what I’m calling “pattern”. Problematically, for us, everything that exists, including random noise, is a pattern and whether a pattern is awesome or not is interpretative, so it’s not verifiable of falsifiable. Nevertheless, humans are very good at identifying whether a pattern is awesome or not. Perhaps someone else could say more, but I just call this awesome-perception an aspect of “intuition” and know it must be contained within “good epistemology” because its what scientists and mathematicians use.
Finally, lets suppose that upon inspection, the pattern “Beauty” turns out to be just one of an infinite number of ways of solving the problem “P=motivate a creature to choose the healthiest mate”. I would then consider “beauty” real but arbitrary. On the other hand, suppose that “beauty” is a pattern that self-organizes in an infinite number of different contexts. Maybe, for example, it is present even among sapient creatures that are so unlike us they have no concept of evolution. Creating mammals and creating human minds was just one way that the universe was able to create the pattern “beauty”. And, therefore, “wow” – beauty is awesome. But this is just an illustrative example, I don’t claim to spell out what makes one pattern arbitrary and another pattern meaningful. My preference would be that significance doesn't come from the prevalence or persistence of the pattern, but in the properties of the solutions, things like critical points, asymptotes, etc. I don't care whether beauty is such a pattern, but I'd be very surprised though if "perception of truth" wasn't such a pattern among sapient creatures.
Mush. Reread the metaethics sequence. The disagreement seems to be illusory, you just need to reconnect the terminology.