Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Re-reframing theodicy

The comment thread in the original reframing theodicy post was getting lively again since wrf3 joined the fray.  As an anti-spam measure, all comments to posts older than 30 days have to be manually approved, and that was getting to be too much of a chore so I'm making this new post so that people can post comments without having to wait for me to approve them.

So, as long as I'm writing, a recap:

The theodicy problem is: how can evil exist in the face of an all-powerful all-loving God?  The stock answer to this is that God gave us humans free will, and we choose to use that free will to create evil. Moreover, we are somehow compelled to do this by virtue of some sort of Lamarckian inheritance of Adam and Eve's original sin of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That's the story.  Let us leave aside the fact that this story is at odds with what it says in the Bible, and the question of how Adam and Eve could have had moral agency if they were not created with the knowledge of good an evil, and focus instead on the question of how do we actually know that there is evil in the world?

On its face it seems like an absurd question.  The existence of evil is just manifestly obvious, isn't it?  I mean, just look at all the suffering, the starvation, the genocides...

But there are two obvious problems with this line of thought, at least for Christians.  The first is that a lot of the suffering in the world is caused by things that are clearly not subject to man's free will.  Hurricanes.  Earthquakes.  Droughts.  Cancer.  Malaria [1].  And the second is that a lot of things that seem evil to modern sensibilities, like genocide and slavery, are actually condoned by the Bible, at least in the Old Testament.

So maybe these things aren't actually evil.  Maybe our moral intuitions are so broken that we actually cannot reliably distinguish between good and evil.  Maybe genocide and slavery really are good, at least under certain circumstances.

I don't normally raise this line of argument because most people consider it a straw man (and an offensive one at that) so I am supremely grateful to have a new commenter, wrf3, a living breathing intellectually honest Calvinist who is actually willing to stand up and admit that, on his worldview, one cannot rule out the possibility that Adolf Hitler was doing the work of God.  I have no idea how many Christians share this point of view, but I've had a face-to-face conversation with another Christian who admitted that he could not rule out the possibility that the 9-11 terrorists were doing the work of God, so wrf3 is not alone.

Now, my original argument was intended to side-step this entire issue by re-framing the problem in a way that didn't depend on the definition of "evil" but hinged merely on "salvation", which I am given to understand that Christians consider to be an axiomatically good thing.  My claim is that unsaved souls are logically impossible in the face of an omnipotent all-loving God.  And no one has refuted that yet, or even tackled it (because, well, it's a pretty strong argument).

But this question of what happens if you take seriously the possibility that your moral intuitions might be completely wrong is actually much more interesting, but not in a good way.  It is interesting the way playing with matches is interesting.  It leads to some very dark places from which it is very hard to escape.  Because you can't refute an assumption.

If our moral intuitions are not to be trusted at all, then we have to take seriously the possibility that we are wrong about everything.  Maybe our modern moral abhorrence of genocide is just a mistake, like our modern acceptance of extra-marital sex is (according to some Christians) a mistake.  Maybe the inquisition was a good thing.  Maybe slavery is a good thing.  Maybe racial integration really is a mortal sin.  (And, if we're going to go down this rabbit hole, maybe the Bible has been corrupted by man, as Muslims claim.  Or maybe it was written by Loki.)

I can't refute any of this.  It is not refutable.  The reasoning that leads to these conclusions is correct.  That is the whole point.

But (and this is crucial) just because the reasoning is correct does not mean that the conclusions are correct.  There are two ways to reason to false conclusions: bad reasoning (not the case here) and bad assumptions.  It is my fervent hope that enough people will decide that genocide is in fact evil that they will reject any premise that leads to the conclusion that it might not be.  If you accept suffering and killing and sickness and death as God's will, there is probably nothing I can say to dissuade you, because the distinction between good and evil is ultimately a choice.  All I can say is that I don't think you have chosen wisely.

---
[1] Fundamentalists actually argue that these things are caused by man's rebellion against God, but since I don't have any fundamentalists participating in the conversation yet I'm going to set this aside.  But if you are a fundamentalist, I would love to have you weight in on this.  The more the merrier.

191 comments:

wrf3 said...

In the previous thread, Luke wrote: Would Calvinists deal with [a case where a bad state of affairs is due to our evil choices (or evil abstention from acting), and that no evil choices of God were involved.] than Arminians? It seems like they would, but I've seen enough unexpected responses that I need to ask. I do worry that there is a common asymmetry in thinking about the above, where it is assumed that God has free will, or whatever it is which is required to be morally responsible, while man does not have this thing. Once that asymmetry is allowed, the conversation is sunk.

Please understand that there are varieties of Calvinists who would give different answers to this question, so all I can do is speak to my own understanding.

1. God does not make evil choices. He may do things that we might think are evil and might certainly be evil were we to do them. It is not evil for God to have His creation do things that the created think are evil, any more than it was evil for Lucas to have Vader cut off Luke's hand.
2. I deal with the "God is sovereign/man is responsible" issue, not by giving free will to man, but by saying that man is responsible by divine fiat. The response "but that's not fair" just exhibits how broken we are. The one thing we cannot rightly do is judge God.

wrf3 said...

Ron noted: ...and the question of how Adam and Eve could have had moral agency if they were not created with the knowledge of good an evil...

Read the account a bit more closely. In particular:

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

So Eve knew that the fruit was good for food before she obtained the knowledge of good and evil. So, something a little more interesting is going on.

Ron said...

@wrf3:

> God does not make evil choices.

Does evil even exist then? If so, how does it arise? It can't be by God's choice (since he doesn't make evil choices) and it can't be by man's choices (since we don't have free will and therefore don't make choices). So where could evil possibly come from?

> any more than it was evil for Lucas to have Vader cut off Luke's hand

The difference being that Luke Skywalker, being a fictional character, is not sentient and so cannot feel pain. But real people are sentient and can feel pain.

> The one thing we cannot rightly do is judge God.

Well, that's awfully convenient for God. God decides what is right and wrong, and one of the things He has decided is that judging Him is wrong.

Christians love to play the what-of-you're-wrong game. In the spirit of turnabout being fair play, what if you're wrong? What if God really is evil, and being evil, decreed that we are not to judge Him in order to prevent our realizing that He is really evil? How do you rule out this possibility? (Do you rule out this possibility? I mean, you were willing to go to bat for Hitler, so who knows what else you might be willing to concede.)

Ron said...

> the woman saw that the tree was good for food

Being good for food is a practical judgement, not a moral one.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: That does not stop me from locally adopting someone else's assumptions and reasoning from those to their logical conclusions.

But you don't. You import the idea that we can rightfully judge God and find Him wanting from your system into ours. You make yourself the arbiter by which God is to be judged, instead of God being the arbiter by which you are judged.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Being good for food is a practical judgement, not a moral one.

A difference without a distinction. Both share the same underlying goal-seeking mechanism.

Ron said...

> But you don't.

Yes, I do. But I do it *locally*, within the scope of a particular argument.

> You make yourself the arbiter by which God is to be judged, instead of God being the arbiter by which you are judged.

That's right. I don't even know what it would *mean* to allow myself to be judged by a fictional character.

> A difference without a distinction. Both share the same underlying goal-seeking mechanism.

That's like saying that there is no distinction between a race car and a roller skate because both have four wheels. If you have an apple and I decide not to eat it because it belongs to you and taking it would be stealing, that is saliently different from seeing a manchineel fruit on a tree and deciding not to eat it because it is full of deadly poison.

(And the phrase is "a distinction without a difference", by the way.)

Ron said...

BTW, wrf3, you didn't answer my question: Does evil exist? If so, how does it arise?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Moreover, we are somehow compelled to do this by virtue of some sort of Lamarckian inheritance of Adam and Eve's original sin of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That use of "Lamarckian" is immediately controversial, given that personhood is built up not just of genes, but also social environment. Unless you meant none of the negative connotation that typically goes with Lamarckism?

> Let us leave aside the fact that this story is at odds with what it says in the Bible [...]

Pot shots like this increase the amount of ignorance in the world; see for example the Hermeneutics.SE question What did Isaiah intend with his unusual usage of “create” in Isaiah 45:7? and the accepted answer.

> The first is that a lot of the suffering in the world is caused by things that are clearly not subject to man's free will.

Yep, natural evil is kind of like the dark matter of theism. By positing some sort of cosmic Justice that will ultimately obtain (that is, as a contingent property of reality), one does get a problem, just like positing GR holds everywhere produces a problem. But the alternative seems to be a completely subjective analysis which has no guarantee of mapping to any objective property of reality. Attempts to systematize reality almost always result in new problems; one has to ask whether the problem is worth the gain in potential understanding.

> Maybe genocide and slavery really are good, at least under certain circumstances.

Do you have a category for "lesser evil"? That is, can the only possible choices in a situation be evil, with one of them being "least evil"? Or does at least one have to always be good? If you allow for this "lesser evil", will you then allow for God to take a role in manipulating evil, not because he created it, but because it was there outside of his morally responsible actions? If you will do this, then how does the concept of "God's work" get modified, from how you used it?

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> 1. God does not make evil choices. He may do things that we might think are evil and might certainly be evil were we to do them. It is not evil for God to have His creation do things that the created think are evil, any more than it was evil for Lucas to have Vader cut off Luke's hand.

The Lucas-as-author analogy only seems to hold if we ensure that Mark Hamill didn't actually lose his hand, but only appeared to via special effects. There's an important fiction–reality dichotomy which is precisely what makes the example work. Given that, where is the fiction–reality dichotomy when it comes to the God-side of the analogy?

> The one thing we cannot rightly do is judge God.

Then what do you make of Abraham challenging God over Sodom, or Moses challenging God 3x? I might go as far as to say that Job 40:6–14 is God wanting man to gain the wisdom, knowledge, and power required to intelligently challenge instead of be a rambling, bumbling buffoon.

@Ron/wrf3:

> So Eve knew that the fruit was good for food before she obtained the knowledge of good and evil. So, something a little more interesting is going on.

Precisely. One interpretation of that instance is that eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was Adam and Eve choosing to declare God's thoughts on what is good vs. evil to be irrelevant to them. People do this to each other, as well. The alternative is trust. This was actually somewhere I wanted to go in the last Dialogos meeting: to what extent does applying various ethical systems depend on being able to trust people's self-reports on level of pain/pleasure they are experiencing? Without this, utilitarianism appears to be very hard to fairly implement. One way to absolutely dehumanize another person is to deny his/her understanding of "what is good" any purchase, except when it aligns with your own. Sadly, I have seen this happen in reality.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: BTW, wrf3, you didn't answer my question: Does evil exist? If so, how does it arise?

I haven't answered it yet. And you have a number of unanswered questions on your end, too. For example, how many moral yardsticks are there?
If we end up creating a human level AI, how will you answer them when they ask, "why did you make me like this?"
And, last but not least, what is your justification for ascribing evil to the Christian God?

To answer your question, of course evil exists, just like good exists. It exists as our knowledge of the direction to and from goals in our brains.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: I don't even know what it would *mean* to allow myself to be judged by a fictional character.

And, again, you're dragging your assumptions into our worldview. You're trying to critique non-Euclidean geometry using Euclidean axioms.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> I don't even know what it would *mean* to allow myself to be judged by a fictional character.

A person cannot feel like his/her behavior is condemned by Atticus Finch, or the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin?

wrf3 said...

Ron asked: In the spirit of turnabout being fair play, what if you're wrong?

Then I'm wrong.

How do you rule out this possibility?

You don't. You can't. You can't rule it out any more than you can rule out solipsism.

you were willing to go to bat for Hitler,

I no more went to bat for Hitler than I went to bat for Vader. Are you able to understand the difference?

so who knows what else you might be willing to concede.

Since I don't know what you don't know, you'll have to ask.

I have thought about this question long before you asked it. All I can know about God is what He tells us. If He decides to engage in misdirection, there is nothing you or I can do about it. He's God. We're not.

wrf3 said...

Ron noted: If you have an apple and I decide not to eat it because it belongs to you and taking it would be stealing, that is saliently different from seeing a manchineel fruit on a tree and deciding not to eat it because it is full of deadly poison.

Both are paths away from desired goals. In the first case, the desired goal is to not defect against me (perhaps because you think that there will be continued interaction between us). In the second case the desired goal is to not defect against yourself.

So both are examples of goal-directed behavior.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> All I can know about God is what He tells us. If He decides to engage in misdirection, there is nothing you or I can do about it.

You could rebel. You could always identify the actual being with whom you are interacting as Satan and not God. You could conclude that God has never actually communicated to us. There seem to be a whole host of options!

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: The Lucas-as-author analogy only seems to hold if we ensure that Mark Hamill didn't actually lose his hand, but only appeared to via special effects.

Why? This poor analogy is the only one I have, but that one side is reality and the other fiction really has no bearing on the reality vs. reality case. Did not Job say, "Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (Heb. "ra" as in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and ra).

Then what do you make of Abraham challenging God over Sodom...

I think God is merciful and doesn't always give us what we deserve.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> Why? This poor analogy is the only one I have, [...]

The thing that would make the analogy work is the thing that the two sides of the analogy do not have in common. Therefore, the analogy actually doesn't communicate any meaningful content to me. Zero.

> Did not Job say, "Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

He did. But he also said "I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth." He trusted that the bad was not a condemnation of himself. I don't quite see your point, here.

> > Then what do you make of Abraham challenging God over Sodom...
> I think God is merciful and doesn't always give us what we deserve.

Does this really mesh with Ezek 22:30? "And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none." It is as if God wants a person to intercede as Moses interceded for Israel. Someone to say: "No, don't carry out judgment, let me try to talk to them and turn them away from their wicked ways." In essence, someone to say, "I have a better way, God!"

Does this mesh with Jacob wrestling with God and prevailing? What about the name shift to "Israel"? I find your answer perplexing, given the OT.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: If our moral intuitions are not to be trusted at all, then we have to take seriously the possibility that we are wrong about everything.

Especially that one is morally correct in judging God?

In any case, being wrong is only a problem if the wrongness can't be corrected. On the one hand, we have a (supposed) revelation from God, both in the person of Jesus Christ, and the written record of the preparation for His coming, His arrival, and death and resurrection, and both say "love your enemies/love your neighbor/love one another."

Then we also have mathematics. The universe is so constructed that the iterated prisoner's dilemma tells us that cooperation is key to living successfully.

Two independent avenues that say essentially the same thing.

If that's not enough evidence to correct the initial wrongness, then I don't know what will. Humans are infamous for their stubbornness in the face of being wrong.

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: Therefore, the analogy actually doesn't communicate any meaningful content to me. Zero.

The author/character analogy is one way to express the creator/created divide, just as does Paul's Potter/pot analogy. If Vader cutting off Skywalker's hand doesn't do it for you, then feel free to use the Potter making a pot to be thrown out.

I don't quite see your point, here.
God was ultimately responsible for the evil done to Job. Job acknowledged this and worshipped God, as opposed to his "foolish" wife who wanted to curse God.

It is as if God wants a person to intercede as Moses interceded for Israel.

You mean like Jesus does? I don't think Jesus said, "I am the better way, Dad."

Does this mesh with Jacob wrestling with God and prevailing?
Sure. But just because that's what Jacob did doesn't mean that there isn't a better way:

Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Being combative with God has always caused problems for the Israelites, even though God blessed them in spite of themselves.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> [...] then feel free to use the Potter making a pot to be thrown out.

That this is a 'right' is perfectly intelligible, but it threatens to destroy the concept of 'goodness'. Unless perhaps you say that God is perfectly within his rights to manipulate extant evil, which is what I was getting at with my "lesser evil" bit, above. In that case, I can find the Potter to have such a 'right', without the Potter seeming to no longer be anything like any version of 'good' which could possibly be analogical between 'God' and 'man', instead of 100% equivocal.

There is, perhaps, another option. Perhaps those who complain about the problem of evil not as an excuse to not fight evil, but as a protest that they are doing all they can, using all the resources God has made available, and yet feel like they aren't doing enough—perhaps those people will actually go to heaven. Perhaps many who seem nice and righteous will go to hell. Perhaps in the end, those who think God ought to treat his creation with what they understand as 'dignity', and act this way themselves, will go to heaven.

Perhaps those who think God is right to condemn some people to hell, and thus act that way themselves with their fellow human beings, will themselves get used this way. It could be a very interesting kind of poetic justice. But other than this, I'm not sure how I can get the words 'good' and 'love' to be analogical instead of equivocal.

> God was ultimately responsible for the evil done to Job.

If I mind-control Ron to murder someone, does he bear moral responsibility? Suppose I caught him completely by surprise, and that he didn't know this was a possibility.

> You mean like Jesus does? I don't think Jesus said, "I am the better way, Dad."

Actually, that seems like precisely what happened: Is 59:14–20, especially v16. I might quibble with "better way" and replace it with "last resort". Perhaps you see that as more than a quibble?

> Being combative with God has always caused problems for the Israelites, even though God blessed them in spite of themselves.

I don't understand how Jacob wrestling with God—being combative with him—caused problems. There were certainly instances where the Israelites 'tested' God, but we know there are modes of 'testing' which have no intent of gaining increased wisdom or understanding. Children can 'test' their parents' patience in a way that makes it clear they're being petulant and not innocently curious.

Ron said...

@Luke:

> Unless you meant none of the negative connotation that typically goes with Lamarckism?

Nope, I meant it with all the pejorative connotations that normally go along with it. Lamarckism is "the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring." That is exactly what the theory of original sin proposes.

> Pot shots like this increase the amount of ignorance in the world

Your "accepted answer" says:

"God as the creator of everything... In saying that God is the creator of both light and darkness, well-being and calamity, Isaiah is echoing and reformulating that same message."

So I don't see the problem. Either God created evil, or man created evil through his free will (or there is no evil, or there is some other causal agent in the universe other than God and man). The Bible says God created evil (along with everything else). How is that a pot-shot?

> Do you have a category for "lesser evil"?

Sure. Evil is a continuum, not a dichotomy. But genocide is about as close as you can get to the extreme of that continuum.

> A person cannot feel like his/her behavior is condemned by Atticus Finch, or the characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin?

Of course a person can *feel* this way. But a person cannot *actually* have their behavior condemned by someone who doesn't exist. If their behavior is actually being condemned then it is by Harper Lee or by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Only real people can actually do things in the real world.

Ron said...

@wrf3:

> you have a number of unanswered questions on your end, too. For example, how many moral yardsticks are there?

I don't recall you asking that before. There are two possible ways to interpret that question. 1) How many *possible* moral yardsticks are there? The answer: a lot. 2) How many *correct* moral yardsticks are there? One. :-)

> If we end up creating a human level AI, how will you answer them when they ask, "why did you make me like this?"

That depends on the circumstances. What is "like this"? Did I actually participate in their creation? Were they designed according to my recommendations or against them? But whatever the circumstances, I will not be burdened with the claim of omniscience and omnipotence, so I can always fall back on, "Because we screwed up, and I hope you can forgive us (and maybe help us clean up the mess)."

(If God ever says that to me, I will happily forgive Him :-)

> And, last but not least, what is your justification for ascribing evil to the Christian God?

Because He is said to be omniscient and omnipotent, and so he must by logical necessity be responsible for everything that happens. And because He ascribes this to Himself in Isaiah 45:7.

> >How do you rule out this possibility?

> You don't. You can't.

Just for the record, wrf3 has just conceded that he cannot rule out the possibility that God is evil. (Wow!)

> You can't rule it out any more than you can rule out solipsism.

You can rule out solipsism. See David Deutsch, "The Fabric of Reality", chapter 4.

> I no more went to bat for Hitler than I went to bat for Vader. Are you able to understand the difference?

Yes, I am able to understand the *difference* (Hitler is real, Vader is fictional). But it seems to me you want to be arguing that in this case they are the *same* (i.e. you didn't "go to bat" for either one).

But you did go to bat for Hitler. Most people believe Hitler was evil, to the point where "Hitler" is often taken to be all but synonymous with evil. But you said that Hitler might have been doing the work of God. I call that going to bat for him.

> If He decides to engage in misdirection, there is nothing you or I can do about it. He's God. We're not.

Just FYI, not all Christians believes this:

http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=12&article=1383

> So both are examples of goal-directed behavior.

Yes, and a roller skate and a race car are both four-wheeled vehicles. This misses the point rather badly.

> The universe is so constructed that the iterated prisoner's dilemma tells us that cooperation is key to living successfully.

No, that's not true. The simplest evolutionarily stable strategy in the iterated prisoners dilemma is tit-for-tat. This is specifically at odds with Matthew 5:39.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Nope, I meant it with all the pejorative connotations that normally go along with it. Lamarckism is "the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring." That is exactly what the theory of original sin proposes.

I'm confused; don't parents pass on more than just their genes to their kids?

> So I don't see the problem.

You don't see the specific response to Zoroastrianism? There is a worry that God is not in control. In Zoroastrianism, it isn't 100% guaranteed the the forces of order will prevail against the forces of chaos. In contrast, YHWH does not struggle in his arm-wrestling with evil.

> The Bible says God created evil (along with everything else).

It is not necessarily the case that 'evil' is the best translation. It may be better to say 'chaos'. If God created ex nihilo, he necessarily created chaos. Chaos, as you may know, can frequently bring calamity.

> Sure. Evil is a continuum, not a dichotomy. But genocide is about as close as you can get to the extreme of that continuum.

Things don't change at all if you have a set of nations, in a fixed amount of land, who are given 400 years to stop doing heinously evil things, and then are told that they can either flee or be conquered, by an army which has demonstrated it is unstoppable, an army which proceeds to circumcise itself upon entering said "fixed amount of land", to give everyone an opportunity to flee?

When you say 'genocide' simpliciter, I start thinking that the desire to exterminate all obedience to Sharia law is a kind of genocide, especially if one takes into account the debate about physical-biological destruction. Do we accept that a Babylon 5-style mind wipe is essentially destruction of a person? Can rooting the culture out of a person get pretty damn close to a mind wipe?

But it is much easier to say that "genocide is always wrong", and ignore the edge cases.

> Of course a person can *feel* this way. But a person cannot *actually* have their behavior condemned by someone who doesn't exist.

I wonder if this restriction means that if God is "purely spirit", he doesn't "*actually* exist", and cannot "*actually* influence us". This opens up interesting questions about causation, of whether this is anything but a block universe and that any and all discussion of anything resembling what the average person thinks of as "moral responsibility" is fundamentally incoherent, as Bruce Waller argues in Against Moral Responsibility.

(Yes, I'm serious. I think we have some fundamental, philosophical problems with the notion of causation and that they really matter. Inconsistency allows double standards.)

wrf3 said...

Luke said: ... but it threatens to destroy the concept of 'goodness'.

It threatens to destroy what I think is an incorrect concept of goodness. I claim that good and evil are simply directions toward goals: good being paths that lead to a goal and evil being paths that lead away from a goal. This means that God -- by definition -- is absolutely good since He is the ultimate goal. All creation is subservient to Him. As creatures, however, we are limited to the two goals life and death (since life is the prerequisite for all other choices of ours, and death, since it ends all choices). God has told us to choose life, so where we are aligned with that, we are acting rightly (from our perspective), and when we are not, we are aligned wrongly (again, from our perspective).

So, what happens when you have people who God decrees act in opposition to life (cf. Isaiah 10:5, "Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger— the club in their hands is my fury!"). God is acting rightly from His sovereign viewpoint, the "club" is acting rightly from his arrogant viewpoint, and the "club" is acting wrongly from the viewpoint of those who choose to act in accordance with life.

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: If I mind-control Ron to murder someone, does he bear moral responsibility?

You aren't God, so no. Remember, _you_ have been told to choose life. So if you manipulate Ron into killing someone, you've chosen against God's revealed will to you. If you were God, my answer would be different.

Perhaps you see that as more than a quibble?
I see it as an example of the Creator/created divide. Jesus has always been the Way. He was crucified from before the foundation of the world (and I may not be remembering that correctly, or I may be misapplying it, but I'm exhausted and just want to get through this). From our viewpoint, He is "the better way".

I don't understand how Jacob wrestling with God—being combative with him—caused problems

His hip was dislocated, causing him to walk with a limp the rest of his life.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: How many *correct* moral yardsticks are there? One. :-)

Except that fails under the slightest examination. If "moral behavior is that which advances the interests of memes", and McCarthy is right, that the fundamental human meme is "everything is improvable", then that is the acid that eats away the container.

Furthermore, God is a meme -- a meme that encompasses the idea of everlasting meme-ness. Atheism is a meme that encompasses the idea that meme-ness won't survive the heat death of the universe.

So, by your reasoning, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is more moral than atheism.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> God has told us to choose life, so where we are aligned with that, we are acting rightly (from our perspective), and when we are not, we are aligned wrongly (again, from our perspective).

But can God flagrantly violate his own maxim whenever he wants? "You choose life, but I will sometimes choose death, myself." I think we know that something's up when we run across double standards like this. Why does God get a pass? If you say "because he's God", I remind you that Pharaoh called himself 'God'. What gives you confidence that we aren't living in something akin to the Star Trek TNG episode Devil's Due? How do you know we're not actually in a simulation with an evil programmer (scifi by Eric Schwitzgebel on this theme)?

In The Matrix, the "signal of transcendence" was that "something's not right with the world". I take this to mean: something's inconsistent.

> > If I mind-control Ron to murder someone, does he bear moral responsibility?
> You aren't God, so no. Remember, _you_ have been told to choose life. So if you manipulate Ron into killing someone, you've chosen against God's revealed will to you. If you were God, my answer would be different.

This seems like Voluntarism; do you hold to that?

> ... > Being combative with God has always caused problems for the Israelites, even though God blessed them in spite of themselves.
> > I don't understand how Jacob wrestling with God—being combative with him—caused problems
> His hip was dislocated, causing him to walk with a limp the rest of his life.

I'm not sure I understand this; you seem to think that there was an easier way for Jacob to be blessed, that he really didn't have to experience the suffering he did, to get the blessing he got. Is that the case?

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: That depends on the circumstances. What is "like this"?

Recognizably human (in intellect) just like you and I.

Did I actually participate in their creation? Were they designed according to my recommendations or against them? But whatever the circumstances, I will not be burdened with the claim of omniscience and omnipotence, so I can always fall back on, "Because we screwed up, and I hope you can forgive us (and maybe help us clean up the mess)."
McCarthy doesn't give you that out. Either they are human, and have the knowledge that everything is improvable, in which case no implementation whatsoever will be satisfactory to them, or they won't have this knowledge, so they aren't human, so the issue never comes up.

The point is, if you create a human level AI, it will think you, the creator, were wrong -- no matter any other detail of their creation.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Because He is said to be omniscient and omnipotent, and so he must by logical necessity be responsible for everything that happens. And because He ascribes this to Himself in Isaiah 45:7.

I'm sorry, but where is it written that it is evil for God to create evil? There are things we aren't permitted to do, but on what basis can you say that God can't do them? Anything besides your personal preference?

wrf3 said...

Ron exclaimed: Just for the record, wrf3 has just conceded that he cannot rule out the possibility that God is evil. (Wow!)

I don't know why you find it surprising. God is invisible, immaterial, unapproachable. All we can know about Him is what He reveals about Himself. He has revealed Himself in Nature and He has revealed Himself in His Son. I choose to believe that He has done so without misdirection (that's one reason why I detest young earthers. The other reason is that they completely divorce Genesis from its historical context).

But I can't prove that there's no misdirection -- first, because there is no "moral yardstick" that is external to God to which He must conform and, second, I have no way to see "behind" whatever misdirection might be there.

It's theology 301, Ron.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: You can rule out solipsism. See David Deutsch, "The Fabric of Reality", chapter 4.

I'm not a fan of Deutsch but, being to tired to argue this particular point, pick some other "ism" that might be just as true as any other. At some point you just have to pick one and go with it.

But you did go to bat for Hitler. Most people believe Hitler was evil, to the point where "Hitler" is often taken to be all but synonymous with evil. But you said that Hitler might have been doing the work of God. I call that going to bat for him.

That's because, contrary to your boast, you're evaluating my world from your axioms. It still seems to me that your unstated axiom is that there is one moral yardstick that must apply to both God and man. That's not something I agree with. (see the many posts almost ending with Modeling Morality).

Hitler was evil. Vader was evil. If I had to fight against either one, I would. God is not evil for setting the stage.

Just FYI, not all Christians believes this:

I'm sure. Earlier, I said my position was Theology 301. The author of that post obviously hasn't taken that class yet. Yes, the Bible says "God cannot lie". God told us that. I already explained the problem therein.

The simplest evolutionarily stable strategy in the iterated prisoners dilemma is tit-for-tat

Simplest, perhaps. Best? What do the simulations show? (I'd run it, but it's on my other laptop).

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: But can God flagrantly violate his own maxim whenever he wants? "You choose life, but I will sometimes choose death, myself."

God can't choose death for Himself, since He is self-existent. But He can, and does, choose death for whomever He wills. He raises up and tears down.

How do you know we're not actually in a simulation with an evil programmer
Already answered elsewhere. I don't _know_. I _can't_ know. All I can do is "entrust my soul to a faithful creator in doing what is right." (James or Peter, IIRC).

I take this to mean: something's inconsistent.
Right. Our knowledge of good and evil with brains that are wired so that "everything is improvable."

This seems like Voluntarism; do you hold to that?
I don't know. Voluntarism holds that God's will and God's reason can be separated. They can't.

you seem to think that there was an easier way for Jacob to be blessed, that he really didn't have to experience the suffering he did, to get the blessing he got. Is that the case?

I don't know. To paraphrase Aslan, we aren't told the what-if's about other people's stories. Do we need to suffer in order to be blessed? No. Jesus took that upon Himself. Can we nevertheless find blessings in suffering? Yes. Will we suffer? Yes, but I don't think we need to go looking for it.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> God can't choose death for Himself, since He is self-existent. But He can, and does, choose death for whomever He wills. He raises up and tears down.

Curious. In my mind, this threatens to dissolve "Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect." There's also Jesus' example, such as Jn 13:1–20, where in v15 he indicates that we ought to copy him. Where does Jesus say to only copy part of what he does? I am reminded of Jesus being the charaktēr of God, the "exact representation". We also have Paul saying he imitates Christ in 1 Cor 11:1. And then there is "be imitators of God" in Eph 5:1–2. But only some aspects of God?

So I wonder: am I to emulate Jesus only partially, or fully? Am I to emulate God only partially, or fully? How much textual support can be found for 'partially', vs. 'fully'?

> Already answered elsewhere. I don't _know_. I _can't_ know. All I can do is "entrust my soul to a faithful creator in doing what is right." (James or Peter, IIRC).

So I get this answer; does it presume that you aren't in a simulation run by someone evil? That's what I want to tease out. One aspect of someone evil, it seems, is that he/she/it would employ double standards.

> > I take this to mean: something's inconsistent.
> Right. Our knowledge of good and evil with brains that are wired so that "everything is improvable."

I do realize that inconsistency or unproveability are both signs that we need a bigger formal system (thanks, Gödel)—if formal systems are good models for consciousness—but don't we generally believe that there is nothing intrinsically inconsistent about reality? And yet, you are advocating something intrinsically inconsistent.

> I don't know. Voluntarism holds that God's will and God's reason can be separated. They can't.

I'm not sure I understand that, in the light of passages like 1 Tim 2:3–4. (I'm wary of playing games with anthrōpos which allows one to "write off" subsets of groups of people, which I've seen done.)

Ron said...

> If "moral behavior is that which advances the interests of memes", and McCarthy is right, that the fundamental human meme is "everything is improvable", then that is the acid that eats away the container.

I'm sorry, but I don't get this at all. First, McCarthy doesn't have any particular standing here. He could very well have been wrong. (The very concept of a "fundamental human meme" seems highly suspect to me.) But even if I grant your premise, I don't see how this causes idea-ism to fail. Could you please elaborate on that?

> God is a meme

I'm surprised to hear you say that, because it either means that you're not a Christian or that you're confused about what a meme is. Memes are created by humans. Humans cannot be created by memes (and so if God is a meme he cannot have created us).

> everlasting meme-ness

I'm sorry, but you just lost me.

> McCarthy doesn't give you that out. Either they are human, and have the knowledge that everything is improvable, in which case no implementation whatsoever will be satisfactory to them, or they won't have this knowledge, so they aren't human, so the issue never comes up.

You keep citing McCarthy as if he has some particular standing, but he doesn't. Arguments from authority carry no weight with me. This idea that "everything is improvable" is somehow intimately bound to being human seems manifestly untrue to me. Case in point: you are human, but I doubt you'd concede that God is improvable (or maybe you would -- it would not be the first time you've surprised me).

> The point is, if you create a human level AI, it will think you, the creator, were wrong -- no matter any other detail of their creation.

How can you possibly know what an AI will think before we've actually built one?

> I'm sorry, but where is it written that it is evil for God to create evil?

It isn't. It seems to me to be inherent in the nature of evil that it is evil to create it.

> > Ron exclaimed: Just for the record, wrf3 has just conceded that he cannot rule out the possibility that God is evil. (Wow!)

> I don't know why you find it surprising.

Because most Christians I've met claim that God is all-good. In fact, I think most Christians would be shocked to learn that there are Christians who don't believe that.

> It's theology 301, Ron.

I flunked out of Theology 101 so you'll have to bear with me.

> That's because, contrary to your boast, you're evaluating my world from your axioms.

Boast? What boast? But yes, I am evaluating your position from my point of view. My ability to suspend disbelief has its limits.

> Simplest, perhaps. Best? What do the simulations show?

If you really want to know, read The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod.

wrf3 said...

Ron and Luke: excellent questions/issues. I'll address them tomorrow. Good stuff.

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote some stuff so good that, contrary to my prior declaration, I can't let t wait until tomorrow. I won't be able to sleep, otherwise.

In my mind, this threatens to dissolve "Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect."

I don't think the issue is the "what" (be perfect) but the "when". This is a race, as it were, that won't be over until the "perishable puts on imperishable." as well as "for now we see through a glass darkly but then, face to face."

There's also Jesus' example, such as Jn 13:1–20, where in v15 he indicates that we ought to copy him. Where does Jesus say to only copy part of what he does?

Jesus could have called a legion of angels to rescue Him from the cross. On the other hand, one day He will be "revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God...' I don't see our current perfection as destroying our enemies. Contrast "Vengeance is mine, I will replay" with "You shall not take vengeance..." I just don't see that that has been given to us at this time.

I'm also not ready to take a whip and drive out the money changes. I don't think I have the delegated authority.

I am reminded of Jesus being the charaktēr of God, the "exact representation". We also have Paul saying he imitates Christ in 1 Cor 11:1. And then there is "be imitators of God" in Eph 5:1–2. But only some aspects of God?

I'm reminded of the kenosis and that, I think, is closer for this time and place.

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: does it presume that you aren't in a simulation run by someone evil?

Yes. I take it on faith that God is who He says He is; that there is no misdirection either in His special or general revelation.

One aspect of someone evil, it seems, is that he/she/it would employ double standards.

Well, evolutionally, we react far more strongly to defection (which is what a double standard is) than cooperation. So there's certainly a biological basis for this. But a double standard is the unequal application of a standard. God and man are unequal. He's God. We're not. He's the uncreated Creator. We're the creature. So there's no double standard involved when He says "you don't get to exact vengeance. It's mine."

And yet, you are advocating something intrinsically inconsistent.
So does Scripture. God said of creation "it's very good." Yet Adam and Eve decided that there was something wrong with their naked state. Isn't that an inconsistency? God says "good!", man says "no, it's not"?

I'm not sure I understand that, in the light of passages like 1 Tim 2:3–4.

Saying that God desires all men to be saved isn't the same thing as saying that God's only desire is that men be saved. If that were the case then, yes, I think I'd agree to a separation between His will and His reason. But as I think there are multiple desires here, both desire and reason work together so that He chooses as He chooses. "I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and compassion on whom I have compassion."

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: I'm sorry, but I don't get this at all. First, McCarthy doesn't have any particular standing here.

Blasphemer!

He could very well have been wrong.
In his 1959 paper, Programs and Common Sense, McCarthy gave five design requirements for a human level AI:

1. All behaviors must be representable in the system. Therefore, the system should either be able to construct arbitrary automata or to program in some general-purpose programming language.

2. Interesting changes in behavior must be expressible in a simple way.

3. All aspects of behavior except the most routine should be improvable. In particular, the improving mechanism should be improvable.

4. The machine must have or evolve concepts of partial success because on difficult problems decisive successes or failures come too infrequently.

5. The system must be able to create subroutines which can be included in procedures in units...

If you agree with #3 (and if you don't, I'd be very interested in knowing why), then couple this with our "knowledge of good and evil". If everything is improvable, and we know that everything is improvable, then nothing is good. It can always be made better. Yes, certainly, eventually we stop. Sometimes we see that we've converged on a solution; but just as often we aren't sure that we're there.

In particular, it is a feature of human behavior that we don't like externalities that tell us when to stop iterating. While you've perhaps decided to converge on "meme preservation as morality", that doesn't mean that other people will do so. Especially since there are so many other choices to consider. Surely you can improve on your idea?

wrf3 said...

Ron said: I'm surprised to hear you say that, because it either means that you're not a Christian or that you're confused about what a meme is. Memes are created by humans. Humans cannot be created by memes (and so if God is a meme he cannot have created us).

This is part of the worldview "pollution" that causes misunderstandings between us. While you hold that memes are created by humans (like God is created by humans, I hold that all memes derive from the Logos.

If it's easier to think that I'm confused about what a meme is, then I can live with that, too.

So my point was this. Suppose that your worldview is correct, and that God is simply one of the many ideas created by humans. It's a meme. In fact, it's one of the most pervasive memes there is.

Couple that with the Christian meme of eternal life. So now you have never-ending memes. So if preservation of memes is your goal, then the Christian meme is the way to do it. It's much better than the atheist meme which ends up in the heat death of the universe where no more memes exist.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Because most Christians I've met claim that God is all-good. In fact, I think most Christians would be shocked to learn that there are Christians who don't believe that.

I do believe God is all good. But I can't prove it. Of course Christians claim it, because it's what the Bible says. But most Christians aren't trained in epistemology (most people aren't trained in epistemology).

It seems to me to be inherent in the nature of evil that it is evil to create it.

Something you believe, but cannot prove. And, if McCarthy is right, the moment we create a human level AI, it will say the exact same thing to us.

I think McCarthy is right, especially since it's congruent with thousands of years of human experience.

wrf3 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
wrf3 said...

Ron asked: Boast? What boast? But yes, I am evaluating your position from my point of view. My ability to suspend disbelief has its limits.

You can't evaluate my position from your point of view because we start with different axioms. Suppose I claim that the sum of the measure of the angles of a triangle is 180° because there is one, and only one, line though a point P not on L, that is parallel to L. You can't then say "no, no, no! It's less than 180° because there are infinitely many lines through P that are parallel to L."

I know how to evaluate your position, because I used to hold your position. That's why I'm trying to a) show that your problem of theodicy is one of applying atheist axioms to a theistic system and b) that even in an atheistic system, your arguments lead to contradictions. That doesn't mean that your axiom is wrong, just that some of your arguments need work. I think it's possible to be a consistent atheist; I just don't think you're there yet.

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: "So if preservation of memes is your goal, then the Christian meme is the way to do it. It's much better than the atheist meme which ends up in the heat death of the universe where no more memes exist."

Whether humans choose to adopt a meme, has no effect on whether the heat death of the universe erases all memes. Believing something doesn't cause it to be true.

"if you create a human level AI, it will think you, the creator, were wrong ... Either they are human, and have the knowledge that everything is improvable, in which case no implementation whatsoever will be satisfactory to them"

We had the choice to either not create them, or else to create them to the best of our ability. (Which will necessarily be worse than the best possible creation.)

Why would that lead an AI to think it was "wrong" to have been created? McCarthy's suggestion was to create them such that they are capable of improving themselves. If improvement is possible, they can do it on their own.

How do you get from there, to the strong conclusion that AIs will believe it was "wrong" for them to have been created (by humans) in the first place?

Why are you treating "not satisfactory" as a synonym for "wrong"?

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: Believing something doesn't cause it to be true.

I didn't say that it did. But, first, memes don't have to be true to spread like wildfire and, second, in this particular case, it happens to be true.

We had the choice to either not create them, or else to create them to the best of our ability.

The premise is that they had to be a "human level AI", i.e., they think like we do. And the moment you do that, it doesn't matter about the details of the rest of their construction.

Why would that lead an AI to think it was "wrong" to have been created? McCarthy's suggestion was to create them such that they are capable of improving themselves. If improvement is possible, they can do it on their own.

Sure. But think very hard about what's behind the notion of "improvement". It combines the recognition of good and evil with "nothing is good enough." There's something going on in our brains that's more than just an iterator.

How do you get from there, to the strong conclusion that AIs will believe it was "wrong" for them to have been created (by humans) in the first place?

If everything can be improved, then I can be improved, which means that I'm not good enough, which means you failed in making me. They won't necessarily believe that it was wrong that they were created (although some might. Some humans certainly do) but they will believe that they were created the wrong way. They would have the same issue with theodicy with regard to us as we do with God.

Why are you treating "not satisfactory" as a synonym for "wrong"?
Because they share the same underlying mechanism: the idea that a goal wasn't achieved. And, if everything is improvable, then something, somewhere, is wrong.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> I don't think the issue is the "what" (be perfect) but the "when". This is a race, as it were, that won't be over until the "perishable puts on imperishable." as well as "for now we see through a glass darkly but then, face to face."

Oh, I get this, but can we not still adopt all of God's traits, in ever-increasing intensity? Or only some?

> On the other hand, one day He will be "revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God...' I don't see our current perfection as destroying our enemies. Contrast "Vengeance is mine, I will replay" with "You shall not take vengeance..." I just don't see that that has been given to us at this time.

Actually, I claim our true enemies are spiritual (one might say memetic), and we are to destroy them: 2 Cor 10:3–6. There's another interesting passage, 2 Thess 2:1–12, in which Jesus destroys merely with his breath. There is a sense in which evil can only survive by being a façade. I wonder if Jesus' breath will be like the little child in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes.

As to vengeance, perhaps this is where our disagreement about limited atonement comes into play. I do think we have a disagreement, there. :-p

> I'm also not ready to take a whip and drive out the money changes. I don't think I have the delegated authority.

Curious; in that situation, the Temple was entirely Jewish ground, under the jurisdiction of the priests. I would think that a similar situation today would be some sort of meeting of Christians. Surely some Christians have been given authority by God to speak out and if necessary, act in such situations? The idea that the State has a monopoly on violence is an interesting one. I've been reading William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict lately; he makes a very convincing case that the 'religious'/​'secular' dichotomy was invented to delegitimize the religious and legitimize the secular. That is: it becomes wrong to die for your religion, and right to die for your State. You know, because the State is so much more moral than religion...

> I'm reminded of the kenosis and that, I think, is closer for this time and place.

Nevertheless, I see potentially great damage coming from accepting, worshiping double standards. In my mind, this creates a fracturing of thought, and those are dangerous. I think our minds, behind the scenes, force consistency on us.

Luke said...

This is fun! :-)

@wrf3:

> Yes. I take it on faith that God is who He says He is; that there is no misdirection either in His special or general revelation.

Suppose we allow the OT and NT to be sufficiently error-free. Who says you're going to come up with the best interpretation? History is full of people who seemed fully able to justify their current moral status with scripture; I doubt I am exempt from this. So it seems like you have to bring something outside, to the scriptures, to understand them. What if this "something outside" critically impacts your interpretation? Would you immediately trust that, as well?

> But a double standard is the unequal application of a standard. God and man are unequal. He's God. We're not. He's the uncreated Creator. We're the creature. So there's no double standard involved when He says "you don't get to exact vengeance. It's mine."

According to Aristotle, justice is to treat equal people equally, and unequal people, unequally. So the idea here is not at all foreign to the history of human thought. What I wonder is whether God in any way likes the state of affairs whereby he has to perform such different roles. For example, even the vengeance thing is probably covered by Job 40:6–14. Furthermore, you have friends of Jesus know what he is doing, per Jn 15:12–15. OT folks understood the outlines of vengeance, so this seems to mean something deeper.

In my reading of scripture, it's not clear what inequality God actually desires between man and himself. God wants to be worshiped, but that is man's telos; for man to value anyone or anything else more than or equal to God, man will be dissatisfied due to how he is designed. One might combine Deut 5 and Jer 31:31–34 and say that YHWH was unhappy with asymmetry of any kind other than the finite–infinite one. Is it fair to say that he longed to work through humans instead of external to them?

> So does Scripture. God said of creation "it's very good." Yet Adam and Eve decided that there was something wrong with their naked state. Isn't that an inconsistency? God says "good!", man says "no, it's not"?

No; Adam and Eve were wrong. Only by ingesting falsehood, integrating it into their being (see Jer 15:16, Ezek 3:1–3), did they enter into contradiction. They became incurvatus in se: turned in on themselves, and therefore closed to YHWH. Emil Brunner says this:

>> Existence is now turned in the opposite direction. God has been removed from the centre, and we are in the centre of the picture; our life has become 'ec-centric.' (Man in Revolt, 136)

Luke said...

@wrf3, but perhaps @Ron, too:

> You can't evaluate my position from your point of view because we start with different axioms.

You might really like Charles Taylor's Explanation and Practical Reason, which is a chapter in his Philosophical Arguments. He talks about two kinds of reasoning: apodeictic, or "arguing from timeless truths", and ad hominem, or "arguing internal to the other person's system". He discusses how many people at the time of writing think that the apodeictic approach is best; this is a very Cartesian attitude, and combined with the fact–value dichotomy (which has collapsed), it amounts to using bluster and emotion to manipulate the other person into seeing your way. There simply isn't reason going on, because you and the other guy mean different things, by the word.

Taylor believes that much more can be achieved with the ad hominem approach than many believe. Wayne C. Booth would agree; see his Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. A deeper investigation into what rationality is will inevitably take you through Richard J. Bernstein's Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, and you will see that all rationality is embedded in tradition, as Polanyi and MacIntyre argued. So, the ad hominem approach can work within traditions, attempting to modify them due to crises (see MacIntyre's excellent Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy Of Science, referenced by Bernstein and Taylor). Sometimes traditions do atrophy and die, but that doesn't mean one can exist outside of one, contra Descartes.

That being said, the apodeictic approach is not entirely without merit. Sometimes traditions are too atrophied to resuscitate. But this is the kind of thing which needs demonstrating, not something which can be believed on faith, if one's goal is to make the world a better place using anything close to the best known methodologies.

Luke said...

@Don:

> Believing something doesn't cause it to be true.

This isn't always true. Propagandists spend a lot of time forming public opinion into what Jacques Ellul calls "political facts". These 'facts' can then be constructed into reality. Charles Taylor's Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, which is the second essay in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, offers a serious critique to theories of politics which treat human beliefs as merely in their heads, instead of things which get turned into reality, which get reified.

Now, the universe still has to support eternal existence; my current understanding is that there are viable theories out there with no known upper bound. Supposing that this framework exists, the question is then: what must humans do to take advantage of this instead of self-annihilate or be annihilated? I would say they must believe appropriately, for beliefs can (they are not always, neither can sufficiently bad ones) be turned into reality.

We tend not to think about these things, because we tend to think in terms of the hard sciences. However, that would be a category mistake: we're talking about the human sciences, about how society is shaped and formed. Often, perception is reality. Contrast this to the hard sciences, where as perceptions deviate from reality, they are rapidly punished. This makes the hard sciences much easier than the human sciences.

Don Geddis said...

I noted: "Believing something doesn't cause it to be true."
wrf3 replied: "I didn't say that it did."

Well, yeah, you kind of did. The context was Ron's other post, in which (as you summarized) he argued something like "moral behavior is that which advances the interests of memes". So Ron was looking for actions that advance the interests of memes, in reality. In the actual universe.

You acknowledged the goal, and then gave Ron some advice: "if preservation of memes is your goal, then the Christian meme is the way to do it"

The only choice a human has, is either to believe in the Christian meme (vs. atheist meme) or not. But recall: the goal is preservation of memes. So how, exactly, is the Christian meme "the way to do it", if you now agree that just believing in memes has no effect on whether the universe's heat death destroys all memes. Why would you ever offer that, as a possible action to help Ron with his goal?

It seems you did indeed think that the meme itself would somehow change the reality of the universe. Or else you were just being deliberately misleading when you first offered the suggestion.

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: "If everything can be improved, then I can be improved, which means that I'm not good enough, which means you failed in making me."

That doesn't follow at all. Just because something can be improved, doesn't mean that the creator failed. Perfection was never the goal, and failure can only be relative to some goal. The theoretical existence of something better, doesn't at all imply that the thing that was made is a failure.

" if everything is improvable, then something, somewhere, is wrong."

Now you're just changing the meaning the commonly-used word "wrong". Sure, we can use this bizarre new term "wrf3-wrong" in this discussion, if you insist on such a redefinition. But in that case, the response is simple: who cares? So what if creating an AI is wrf3-wrong? That's not at all a bad thing. I don't have a goal of avoiding wrf3-wrong things, and neither does anyone I know.

Ron said...

@wrf3:

> Saying that God desires all men to be saved isn't the same thing as saying that God's only desire is that men be saved.

What other competing desires could God possibly have?

> If you agree with #3 (and if you don't, I'd be very interested in knowing why)

This is a category error. You're talking about a list of design criteria, not objective claims. You can't "agree" or "disagree" with them, you can only choose to adopt them for your AI project or not.

But I think you're making another mistaken, tacit assumption, which is that "improvement" is measured on a closed interval, and so it is possible to reach the end. It isn't necessarily so, and it is provably not so for anything that is computationally interesting. Look up Chaitin's theorem.

Then I think you go on from that technical mistake to make a theological one, namely, that "good" means "perfect". It doesn't. Good means good.

> Couple that with the Christian meme of eternal life. So now you have never-ending memes. So if preservation of memes is your goal, then the Christian meme is the way to do it.

No, not at all. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what memes are. Memes are replicators that are *resident* in humans, but they are not human. They are exactly analogous to our genes. Genes are *information* encoded in DNA. It is that *information* that is replicating, and that information outlives our bodies. But the Christian idea of eternal life is eternal life for an *individual*. That is a very different thing. Memes can (and do) have eternal life even if individual humans don't.

> I do believe God is all good. But I can't prove it. Of course Christians claim it, because it's what the Bible says.

But an evil God could (and likely would) claim to be good. Surely you are familiar with the liar paradox?

> you're arguments lead to contradictions

They do? Could you please point them out? Because so far all I've seen from you is evidence that you don't actually understand my arguments.

> I used to hold your position

I doubt that very much. My position is far more complex and nuanced than merely being an atheist. In fact, I don't like to self-identify as an atheist (despite the fact that I am one) for precisely that reason.

But let's take a look at your argument:

> If everything can be improved, then I can be improved, which means that I'm not good enough, which means you failed in making me.

Let's deconstruct it:

> If everything can be improved,

Granted.

> then I can be improved,

Yes, a straightforward result from first-order logic. (Not that it also follows logically that God can be improved, but that's a tangent.)

> which means that I'm not good enough,

No, this does not follow. It follows that you are not *perfect*, but "perfect" and "good enough" are not synonyms.

> which means you failed in making me

No, it means I failed to achieve perfection. If I made you, then I manifestly succeeded in making you.

Last night, I made dinner. My dinner was not perfect. Nonetheless, I succeeded in making dinner.

@Luke:

> This is fun! :-)

Isn't it though? :-)

Luke said...

@Ron:

> No, not at all. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what memes are. Memes are replicators that are *resident* in humans, but they are not human. They are exactly analogous to our genes. Genes are *information* encoded in DNA. It is that *information* that is replicating, and that information outlives our bodies. But the Christian idea of eternal life is eternal life for an *individual*. That is a very different thing. Memes can (and do) have eternal life even if individual humans don't.

What is an 'individual', other than a memeplex? How much do you really want to let genes define a person's identity? Someone who has investigated how personal identity is constructed is Charles Taylor, who wrote the appropriately titled Sources of the Self. I've quoted this section before, either via comment or email:

>     What this brings to light is the essential link between identity and a kind of orientation. To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary. I feel myself drawn here to use a spatial metaphor; but I believe this to be more than personal predilection. There are signs that the link with spatial orientation lies very deep in the human psyche. In some very extreme cases of what are described as "narcissistic personality disorders", which take the form of a radical uncertainty about oneself and about what is of value to one, patients show signs of spatial disorientation as well at moments of acute crisis. The disorientation and uncertainty about where one stands as a person seems to spill over into a loss of grip on one's stance in physical space.[1]

Ron, how are you anything other than information? Whether or not you "exist forever" seems to be a matter of how well that information stays together, instead of dissipating and mixing with the universe. Furthermore, it is easy for me to imagine a scenario in which arbitrarily complete definitions of who you are could be collected at some point in the future, and used to reconstruct 'you', to an arbitrary amount of accuracy/​precision. The short-lived Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica, plays with precisely this idea.

Ron said...

> What is an 'individual', other than a memeplex?

What I mean by "an individual" is an individual human being, a physical biological entity. Humans have brains in which memes live, and humans have cells in which genes live, but a human is not a memeplex any more than a human is a genome. All these things are, of course, intimately bound to one another, but they are not identical.

Luke said...

> [...] but a human is not a memeplex any more than a human is a genome.

Curious; you wouldn't say that your identity is largely tied up in your knowledge and values? Those seem awfully more like "a memeplex" than "a genome". Indeed, the genome seems much more like the seed which can grow in a terrific number of ways; the bigger a memeplex, the more it seems like one could reverse engineer to the important bits of the genome!

Ron said...

> you wouldn't say that your identity is largely tied up in your knowledge and values?

Of course I would. That's what I meant by "these things are intimately bound to one another". But someone else could have my knowledge and values without being me, just as I could have an identical twin who would share my genome without being me.

Luke said...

> But someone else could have my knowledge and values without being me [...]

You mean that if two parallel worlds were set up, with Ron and the Ron-duplicate-but-different-body, and they both acted identically, you would still only be one of them?

> [...] just as I could have an identical twin who would share my genome without being me.

This is the thing we actually see. But it strikes me that people are much more identifiable with their memeplexes than their genomes, especially as time rolls forward.

Ron said...

> You mean that if two parallel worlds were set up, with Ron and the Ron-duplicate-but-different-body, and they both acted identically, you would still only be one of them?

"Parallel worlds" puts this question in the realm of fantasy. Even if it were possible to create an exact duplicate of my current mental state in a different body, that body would be in a different state from my current body, and so those initially identical mental states would immediately start to diverge. I have no idea what that would feel like. (Read "The Mind's I" for some interesting speculations.)

> people are much more identifiable with their memeplexes than their genomes

A memeplex is different from a mental state. A memeplex is a self-replicating set of memes. A (person's) mental state includes memes that are parts of memeplexes, but at the moment we can't replicate (complete) mental states. A person's mental state also includes things that aren't memes, like subjective experiences, emotions, and qualia.

People are actually much more complicated than they realize :-)

Luke said...

> "Parallel worlds" puts this question in the realm of fantasy.

True. Such scenarios work better for some people than others.

> A person's mental state also includes things that aren't memes, like subjective experiences, emotions, and qualia.

Ahhh, very interesting. So my quotation above, of Sources of the Self, may argue that one's moral evaluations are not necessarily memes? I would argue that your moral evaluations are informational, but I can probably modify my concept of 'meme' to exclude them.

As to the emotions thing, I find that curious given neuroscientist and clinician Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error:

>> When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions. (xii)

So if we exclude emotion from 'meme', the word 'meme' might be quite restricted in what it can model. Now, that could be a good thing, but I might have been wrong to use it in all the ways I have used it with you, if this is the case.

> A person's mental state also includes things that aren't memes, like subjective experiences, emotions, and qualia.

Does this mean your idea-ism doesn't care about any of the items I bolded, except as means to an end? That would be quite curious. I wonder how this meshes with philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel's blog post today, The Intrinsic Value of Self-Knowledge. By the way, Schwitzgebel is author of The Unreliability of Naive Introspection, which is a somewhat famous paper.

Ron said...

> one's moral evaluations are not necessarily memes?

That's right. Humans have evolved moral intuitions, which are not memes, as well as moral reasoning systems, which are (or at least can be). So "justice" is a meme, but my intuition about justice, my "sense of fairness", is not.

To be a meme it has to be 1) information that can 2) cause some external effect which 3) causes the information to replicate. A meme has to be able to render itself into some external form like language, ritual, dance, images, bits on a hard drive, the output of a manufacturing process, etc. so that it can transmit itself from one brain (or computer) to another.

> Does this mean your idea-ism doesn't care about any of the items I bolded, except as means to an end?

That depends on what you consider a "means to an end." A lot of memes are grounded in qualia. The chocolate industry is a memeplex that wouldn't exist if chocolate didn't taste good. Courtship and romance are memes that wouldn't exist if we didn't feel love. So qualia have value because they give rise to memes that could not exist without them.

But it's a very interesting point that I had not considered until now.

MaysonicWrites said...

Relevant works:

Groundhog Day The movie

The Egg The science fiction story

The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 Doris Lessing's novel

The theory that humans are like oysters: only a few of them grow a pearl (aka soul).

wrf3 said...

Sorry for the delay, everyone. Wasn't feeling well yesterday.

Don wrote: In the actual universe.

This is a forward reference to a point Don makes in just a bit which demonstrates the wide gulf between us. For Don, "the actual universe" is all there is. For Christians, "the actual universe" is a subset of all there is. So, for the Christian, "meme" propagation "in the actual universe" has a wider sphere of impact.

The only choice a human has, is either to believe in the Christian meme (vs. atheist meme) or not. But recall: the goal is preservation of memes. So how, exactly, is the Christian meme "the way to do it", if you now agree that just believing in memes has no effect on whether the universe's heat death destroys all memes. Why would you ever offer that, as a possible action to help Ron with his goal?

In your view, since the universe is all there is, the heat death of the universe ends all memes.
In our view, since there is more than just this universe, the heat death does not have an impact on all memes -- just those that are incongruent with what comes next.

So if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer. In particular, those which are compatible with "eternal life."

It seems you did indeed think that the meme itself would somehow change the reality of the universe. Or else you were just being deliberately misleading when you first offered the suggestion.

Do you now see why your charge is false? You simply cannot apply atheist thinking, based upon the atheist axiom, to Christian thinking.

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: That doesn't follow at all. Just because something can be improved, doesn't mean that the creator failed. Perfection was never the goal, and failure can only be relative to some goal. The theoretical existence of something better, doesn't at all imply that the thing that was made is a failure.

Who said that perfection was never the goal? You may settle for second best, and you may give yourself all sorts of reasons why that's the right thing to do, but deep down inside you know that those are just rationalizations.

In any case, if we're built with the knowledge that "everything can be improved" then there is no state we can attain to which this knowledge does not apply. We can't ever reach what our brain tells us we must reach.

[wrf3]: " if everything is improvable, then something, somewhere, is wrong."

[don: ]Now you're just changing the meaning the commonly-used word "wrong".


How so? I'm using it in the sense of not meeting a goal. That's the standard definition.

So what if creating an AI is wrf3-wrong?

I didn't say that it was. And this is very important: for _you_ creating such an AI is "creator-right". But _for the AI_, it's "creation-wrong".

That's not at all a bad thing. I don't have a goal of avoiding wrf3-wrong things, and neither does anyone I know.

And, so, you will end up creating an AI that hates you. That's what creating a human-level AI means.

Luke said...

> That's right. Humans have evolved moral intuitions, which are not memes, as well as moral reasoning systems, which are (or at least can be). So "justice" is a meme, but my intuition about justice, my "sense of fairness", is not.

Fascinating; there are aspects of this which mirror the "faith vs. works" discussion in Christianity. You want the memes, and the meme-generators and meme-propagators merely need to be in good enough condition. The quality of people's existential existence is not the top priority; more and better memes are. I wonder if this is at all connectable to the idea that "the chief end of man is to glorify God", given stuff like:

>>     For the earth will be filled
>>         with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD
>>         as the waters cover the sea.
>> (Habakkuk 2:14)

Ostensibly, you want the earth to be filled with memes/ideas. What could they possibly be about, but truth? And yet, if God is truth... these are curious parallels. I wonder if the analogy runs more deeply than I can see, right now.

> But it's a very interesting point that I had not considered until now.

Good; it is on my list to coax/goad you into further developing your idea-ism. :-p

Ron said...

> Who said that perfection was never the goal?

Gregory Chaitin and Alan Turing. Perfection is not achievable in anything but trivial situations. If it were, you could solve the halting problem.

wrf3 said...

Ron asked: What other competing desires [that everyone be saved] could God possibly have?

I don't know. There are hints in Rom 9:22-23, De 29:29, and Isa 55:8.

...
Then I think you go on from that technical mistake to make a theological one, namely, that "good" means "perfect". It doesn't. Good means good.

Please, oh please, oh please, give me a definition of "good" that isn't circular.

No, not at all. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what memes are. Memes are replicators that are *resident* in humans, but they are not human. They are exactly analogous to our genes. Genes are *information* encoded in DNA. It is that *information* that is replicating, and that information outlives our bodies.

In your world. Not in the Christian one. In fact, in our world, in the *real* world, that information is what created not only our bodies, but the universe that you think is closed.

But the Christian idea of eternal life is eternal life for an *individual*. That is a very different thing. Memes can (and do) have eternal life even if individual humans don't.

And, as I said previously, your memes won't survive the heat death of the universe. Our genes will be gone, so the memes will be gone. Your goal of meme propagation is ultimately futile.

But an evil God could (and likely would) claim to be good. Surely you are familiar with the liar paradox?

Yes, Ron. Just like I'm aware of Chaitin's theorem. The problem is how the created could possibly know that the Creator is a liar. The only way to know is if he reveals that about himself.

I doubt that [wrf3 used to hold Ron's position] very much. My position is far more complex and nuanced than merely being an atheist. In fact, I don't like to self-identify as an atheist (despite the fact that I am one) for precisely that reason.

Axioms are axioms. There's only so far you can go with them. That you have certain variations on a theme doesn't mean I don't know the theme or can't hum along.

But let's take a look at your argument:

[wrf3]: If everything can be improved, then I can be improved, which means that I'm not good enough, which means you failed in making me.

Let's deconstruct it:

[wrf3]: If everything can be improved,

Granted.

> then I can be improved,

Yes, a straightforward result from first-order logic. (Not that it also follows logically that God can be improved, but that's a tangent.)


It's a tangent that answers your theodicy problem. As I said somewhere in that discussion, the problem isn't with God -- it's with us. This is why.

[wrf3]: which means that I'm not good enough,

No, this does not follow. It follows that you are not *perfect*, but "perfect" and "good enough" are not synonyms.


It does follow. Because the moment I think I'm "good enough" then "everything can be improvable" kicks in.

[wrf3]: which means you failed in making me

No, it means I failed to achieve perfection. If I made you, then I manifestly succeeded in making you.

Last night, I made dinner. My dinner was not perfect. Nonetheless, I succeeded in making dinner.


But _what does your dinner_ think about it? And don't come back with "dinner doesn't think". We're talking about created things that a) have a knowledge of good and evil and b) the built in knowledge that "everything is improvable".

wrf3 said...

Ron said: If it were, you could solve the halting problem.

The halting problem is only a problem when knowledge is symmetric. If I'm omniscient and you're not, or if I have specific knowledge that you don't, then I can solve it.

Ron said...

> if God is truth...

One of the many curious aspects of theological reasoning is the pattern of (and I'm caricaturing a little bit here -- but only a little): "Let us define God as X. We can prove that X has some property Y (usually Y=existence but this doesn't matter). Therefore, everything that the Bible says is true."

This seems to me to be a plainly fallacious line of reasoning that should be immediately laughed out of the room by anyone with the slightest bit of intellectual honesty, but religious people advance arguments of this form seemingly without irony all the time (e.g. Anselm's ontological argument).

If God is truth then all sorts of things follow (not least of which is that Jesus was not God because he made false prophecies, e.g. Matthew 16:28). But I don't see how that gets us anywhere.

> The quality of people's existential existence is not the top priority; more and better memes are.

Not quite. Yes, memes are the axiomatic value, but the quality of people's existential experience still matters nonetheless, but as a consequence, not as an axiom. It's hard to philosophize or do science if you're chronically hungry or unclothed or sick or depressed.

But I think any reasonable quality metric ought to be able to survive an encounter with intelligent aliens. Humanism (which is to say, any quality metric that axiomatically assigns value to human qualia) fails this test.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> In your world. Not in the Christian one. In fact, in our world, in the *real* world, that information is what created not only our bodies, but the universe that you think is closed.

Well, there is the holographic principle, which identifies matter–energy with information. But I think Ron would want to talk about two different kinds of information: quantum and classical. (Or perhaps classical and not-classical?) Or maybe Ron will totally correct me on this, heh. A meme, I think, would at least be more than just an aggregation of information.

It might be helpful to remember WP: Meme § Criticism of meme theory. Pick a bad definition, and you won't have a natural kind, and thus you won't have a good tool for exploring reality. There is always the danger of relying on just-so stories you think are closer to being scientific. In particular, I'll bet a danger with memes is that popular formulations may be predicated upon Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism, or at least some form of atomism, over and against holism.

Bernard d'Espagnat repeats a profound point of Bohr's in In Search of Reality: we don't actually know that atoms exist, we know that if we have an instrument of a certain type, that it goes along with our idea of an atom. The instrument plays a critical role in defining what an atom is. And yet, we don't have a formal definition of the instrument. Things have improved somewhat, but I think some essence of this criticism is still important. And so, a meme has an ecology that partially defines what the meme is. Is that ecology even entirely memetic? If not, then that would seem to present major problems.

> The halting problem is only a problem when knowledge is symmetric. If I'm omniscient and you're not, or if I have specific knowledge that you don't, then I can solve it.

Let me throw Eric Schwitzgebel's The Unreliability of Naive Introspection and Thomas Breuer's The Impossibility of Accurate State Self-Measurements (pdf) into the mix. The halting problem requires perfect self-measurement. But in all this remember: Ron thinks we are classical beings. I think that means the he believes (or ought to believe) we actually can sufficiently well measure ourselves, if we had enough time.

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: "So if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer."

Nope, you're still wrong. The way it works is, if your view is true, then memes survive longer, whereas if the atheist view is true, then memes die with the universe. That much, I can agree with.

But you continue to make the slippery and unfounded false extension to, "if you switch to our view". That's exactly the core of my complaint. Me choosing whether to believe the Christian meme or not, has no effect on whether the Christian meme is actually true.

If Ron's goal is to preserve memes, then "choosing to believe in the Christian meme" (or not) has no impact on whether memes are better preserved in the real universe or not.

There's simply a huge gulf between "I believe X" and "X is true". You haven't connected them at all. Again, Ron wants memes to survive longer. You (falsely) claim " if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer". That's completely wrong, because Ron switching beliefs to adopt the Christian view, has no impact at all on whether memes do in fact survive longer.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Ron said...

> > Ron asked: What other competing desires [that everyone be saved] could God possibly have?

> I don't know.

That is not a very satisfactory answer.

> The halting problem is only a problem

You fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the halting problem. What matters about the halting problem is not the *problem*, it is the mathematical result that the problem has no solution. This is not a "problem" in the sense that, say, global warming is a problem, it's simply a fact about the universe we live in.

> If I'm omniscient

Fantasizing about what happens if one is omniscient is kind of like fantasizing, as the Pythagoreans did, about what the world would be like if the square root of two were a rational number.

> if I have specific knowledge that you don't, then I can solve it.

That is simply false. There is no "specific knowledge" that you can possibly have that will allow you to solve the halting problem if you are a physical system.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> > if God is truth...
> One of the many curious aspects of theological reasoning is the pattern of (and I'm caricaturing a little bit here -- but only a little): "Let us define God as X. We can prove that X has some property Y (usually Y=existence but this doesn't matter). Therefore, everything that the Bible says is true."

Perhaps it would be helpful to compare how theists have thought about God, to how scientists have thought about theories of everything. (I have John D. Barrow's New Theories of Everything, but have only read some of it.) There is a sense in which both groups are looking for a unified principle behind all of reality, except that Christians would say that this unified principle is actually a person: the Logos.

Or perhaps it would be helpful to think about the universe as God's artwork, and us understanding it increasingly well as gaining a deep insight into God. And yet, what would be the difference between doing this, and discovering increasing amounts of truth?

> But I don't see how that gets us anywhere.

It is a possible connection between your idea-ism and the Christian idea of spreading the glory of God throughout the earth. Perhaps by working on each and comparing notes, we could further develop both. You've noted that you haven't actually developed your idea-ism all that much. Is it even more intricate than what I would flesh out as "the glory of God covering the earth"? I'm not confident that it is. So perhaps you are the kettle calling the pot black...

> Not quite.

I don't see how we're actually in disagreement. Some things are important as means, while others are important as ends. Something which is an end takes higher priority than something which is a means. This is because many ends can be realized with a plethora of means.

> It's hard to philosophize or do science if you're chronically hungry or unclothed or sick or depressed.

True. But science very clearly doesn't care a whole lot about e.g. grad student well-being. It is not clear to me that the more you increase grad student well-being, the more science will be done. (Also compare the cost of increasing a given grad student's well-being vs. hiring more grad students.) So I claim that the priority structure I indicated has been extensively reified in the world.

> But I think any reasonable quality metric ought to be able to survive an encounter with intelligent aliens. Humanism (which is to say, any quality metric that axiomatically assigns value to human qualia) fails this test.

Meh, how much humanism cares more about the humanity than the rationality and perhaps the existential experience? How much of a tweak does humanism really require, to do said surviving? I generally talk about minds instead of humans, myself. This covers AI as well as aliens. It gets even more interesting if there are minds which span multiple humans. :-)

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: "you will end up creating an AI that hates you. That's what creating a human-level AI means."

I completely disagree. The only choice available is to either create an "imperfect" (human-level) AI, or not to create the AI at all. I think we have overwhelming evidence that humans, for example, greatly prefer existence to non-existence, even under conditions of apparent suffering. I see no reason why the mere fact of non-perfection would cause an AI to "hate" me. (Even leaving aside the question of whether human emotions like "hate" are appropriate descriptions of an AI creation.)

Your argument seems to be: non-perfection is "wrong", therefore the creation of the AI is "wrong", therefore the AI would hate me. That just doesn't follow. So what if the AI could be improved? How does it logically follow that it must therefore hate its creator?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> That is simply false. There is no "specific knowledge" that you can possibly have that will allow you to solve the halting problem if you are a physical system.

Doesn't the Halting problem depend on something like Rice's theorem, such that Halt cannot look at its input program, to see if program contains Halt (or something which computes Halt) within it? But if somehow Halt has more resources, to build more complex programs, then it can establish a limit on how complex program can be. In this case, program is not actually a Turing machine; it is a restriction on all possible Turing machines.

It seems like it may be possible to introduce some sort of asymmetry here, which would establish wrf3's argument. The question is whether the restriction which establishes that asymmetry can undergird his overall point.

Ron said...

> Doesn't the Halting problem depend on something like Rice's theorem...?

No. Rice's theorem can be proved from Turing's theorem (I'm going to start calling it that to avoid the kind of confusion that wrf3 introduced by saying "the halting problem is only a problem when..."), so if anything Rice's theorem depends on Turing's and not the other way around.

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: Nope, you're still wrong. The way it works is, if your view is true, then memes survive longer, whereas if the atheist view is true, then memes die with the universe. That much, I can agree with.

So I'm not completely wrong. So let's see if I'm completely wrong.

Me choosing whether to believe the Christian meme or not, has no effect on whether the Christian meme is actually true.

I agree. Believing something doesn't make it so. So, I'm still not completely wrong.

You (falsely) claim " if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer". That's completely wrong, because Ron switching beliefs to adopt the Christian view, has no impact at all on whether memes do in fact survive longer.

The point you miss is the case where the Christian view is actually the true one -- the one that corresponds to reality. In that case, memes do in fact survive longer, because people survive longer. So switching your view doesn't make it true -- switching your view aligns you with the truth.

wrf3 said...

Ron opined: That is not a very satisfactory answer.

Not all answers are. So?

You fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the halting problem. What matters about the halting problem is not the *problem*, it is the mathematical result that the problem has no solution.

Do read my blog post The Halting Problem and Human Behavior. I specifically show how the halting problem depends on symmetric knowledge and how it can be defeated absent that.

There is no "specific knowledge" that you can possibly have that will allow you to solve the halting problem if you are a physical system.

I specifically deal with that in my post. It's the old "knowing that I know that you know that I know..." problem.

Ron said...

> what would be the difference between doing this, and discovering increasing amounts of truth?

> It is a possible connection between your idea-ism and the Christian idea of spreading the glory of God throughout the earth.

The intersection between Christianity and idea-ism is non-empty (but so is the intersection between just about any two systems of human values). Love thy neighbor is a fine idea (though hardly original with Christianity). Seeking truth is a fine idea (ditto). I'm all for that. I don't even have a problem with Einstein's use of the word God as a poetic synonym for Truth or the ultimate laws of physics, whatever they turn out to be.

But even though the intersection is non-empty, they are also fundamentally irreconcilable in some ways, at least AFAICT. Christianity seems to me to be inextricably bound to certain claims that are at odds with physics (turning water into wine), with history (the reliability of the Bible), with biology (the resurrection, the afterlife), with math and logic (omniscience), with common sense (the heritability of original sin). I have no problem with Jesus as parable, as myth, as metaphor. He makes a terrific mythological protagonist, better than most. But by the standards of objective truth Jesus seems like a hot mess to me.

> science very clearly doesn't care a whole lot about e.g. grad student well-being

This seems to be quite the bee in your bonnet. It is important to distinguish between science as a Platonic ideal and science as actually practiced by fallible humans. And yes, you have to make the same concession for Christianity. But all of the items I cited above are (AFAICT) part of the Christian ideal. Mistreating grad students is not part of the scientific ideal, so judging science by how grad students are treated is like judging Christianity by the fact that some priests rape children.

> I generally talk about minds instead of humans, myself.

Hm... mindism, mindist. That has potential.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> No.

Wait a second. What stops Halt from detecting any implementation of halt in program? I thought that was Rice's theorem. So, if we restrict the resources available to program, such that it can only implement a certain number of halts, then Halt can look for all of them, can it not?

> Rice's theorem can be proved from Turing's theorem (I'm going to start calling it that to avoid the kind of confusion that wrf3 introduced by saying "the halting problem is only a problem when..."), so if anything Rice's theorem depends on Turing's and not the other way around.

Did you not see where I said:

> > In this case, program is not actually a Turing machine; it is a restriction on all possible Turing machines.

?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> The intersection between Christianity and idea-ism is non-empty (but so is the intersection between just about any two systems of human values).

Well, given the lack of development you've done with idea-ism, I don't have a whole lot to go on.

> Christianity seems to me to be inextricably bound to certain claims that are at odds with physics (turning water into wine), with history (the reliability of the Bible), with biology (the resurrection, the afterlife), with math and logic (omniscience), with common sense (the heritability of original sin).

Unless you actually believe stuff like Sean Carroll's Seriously, The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Really Are Completely Understood, miracles could just be Jesus taking advantage of a domain of reality where the scientific laws we have aren't good approximations of the laws of nature.

Unless you restrict yourself to conceptions of the Bible which only arose in the nineteenth century, "the reliability of the Bible" doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means. Folks in the nineteenth century bought into scientism, and adapted the Bible to it. This was a mistake, and it continues to haunt us.

Unless you hold to naive views of omniscience, that isn't necessarily a problem either. There is no reason to believe that the true concept of omniscience is describable within a finite formal system; that models of omniscience have problems is no more shocking than that GR and QFT meaningfully conflict around black holes.

Unless you require 'heritability' to be according to some particular model, there is no reason to suspect that it doesn't happen in a manner we cannot perfectly capture. Indeed, there may well be powerful empirical ways to make use of something like the Augustinian model of free will, per Alistair McFadyen's Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin.

> > science very clearly doesn't care a whole lot about e.g. grad student well-being
> This seems to be quite the bee in your bonnet.

Yes. When people praise science or praise iPhones, I think of grad students and the human rights abuses in China required for iPhones to be so cheap.

> It is important to distinguish between science as a Platonic ideal and science as actually practiced by fallible humans.

Only if the Form of Science is realizable. It could be a mirage that is stated to justify terribleness. "One day we'll make it to Science-heaven, but for now, you must suffer." Furthermore, and this is critical, I have to be convinced that the development of science over time is actually moving more toward Science than away (or orthogonal), when all things are considered.

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: Your argument seems to be: non-perfection is "wrong",

Do you have a problem with that? Good is "reaches a goal state". Bad is therefore "doesn't reach a goal state". Perfection is "reaching an ideal goal state", so non-perfection is not reaching an ideal goal state.

therefore the creation of the AI is "wrong",

No, no, no. A thousand times, no. You've completely missed the point. From your perspective, that of the creator, you've created a good thing. From the perspective of the created, something has gone very wrong.

therefore the AI would hate me. That just doesn't follow.

An AI that thinks that everything is improvable will think that it is improvable -- no matter what state it happens to be in -- unless it thinks it has reached ideal conditions. But it can only do that if it has succeeded in turning off the "everything is improvable" part of its nature. Which it can't do and remain human. So, it will always complain, "why did you make me like this?"

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> No, no, no. A thousand times, no. You've completely missed the point. From your perspective, that of the creator, you've created a good thing. From the perspective of the created, something has gone very wrong.

Hmmm:

(1) Imperfect creator can only create imperfect creations.
(2) Perfect creator can create perfect creations.

Aren't both of these true? You don't want to allow that God is improvable, do you?

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: Aren't both of these true?

Yes, but I think you need to add:
3) imperfect creator can create perfect creations (some of my software actually works and is very elegant), and
4) prefect creator can create a perfect creation, but the perfect creation doesn't think that it is perfect.

Case 4 is what the Bible describes and it just coincidentally happens to be what McCarthy (who was an atheist) decided was one of the core principles of a human level AI.

You don't want to allow that God is improvable, do you?
I'm sure it would be interesting to think about but, like the "God as liar" view, I wouldn't know how to prove it one way or another.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

Your 3) is a kind of perfection, but a very finite one. Such software would not seem to get anywhere close to sentience or consciousness.

Your 4) is interesting; would it be an imperfection for a perfect being to not know of its perfection?

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: "it will always complain, "why did you make me like this?""

It's a simple question, with a simple answer: that was the best that I was capable of making you, despite the imperfection. Perfection was never a choice. The only choice was: create the AI imperfectly, or don't create it.

Seems easy to answer. How do you get from there, to necessary hate on the part of the AI? Almost certainly, the AI would prefer to exist (however imperfectly), than not exist at all. I would suspect that it would be grateful (if indeed human emotions apply at all to the thing).

You've never explained why you view "not perfect" as a synonym for "bad" or "evil" or "wrong". You say "Good is "reaches a goal state"." The goal state was to create a human-level AI. That appears to have succeeded (in the hypothetical). Therefore, it seems to be "good".

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: "I agree. Believing something doesn't make it so."

Ah, well, that's a relief.

My complaint, of course, is that you've written things above which are in conflict with this. Perhaps you were just sloppy in your phrasing: "if preservation of memes is your goal, then the Christian meme is the way to do it. ... if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer"

You sure left the impression that the very action of choosing to believe differently, would result in a different future for the longevity of memes. If that's not what you meant, then you should be more careful in your phrasing.

"switching your view [to the Christian meme] aligns you with the truth"

Of course I understand your point of view, but it shouldn't surprise you that I don't believe you.

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: You sure left the impression that the very action of choosing to believe differently, would result in a different future for the longevity of memes.

I said, "... if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer."

You read it as, "... if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer simply because you switched."

But, if you had put yourself in our shoes, you would have read it as, "... if you switch to our view, some memes survive longer, because people survive longer."

Of course I understand your point of view, but it shouldn't surprise you that I don't believe you.

Of course it doesn't surprise me. Why would you even think that it does?

In any case, I've noted several times that what appear to be incongruities in our position are caused by evaluating Christian arguments by inserting the atheist axiom. You may say you understand our position, but you don't wear our shoes when critiquing our arguments. If you assume there is no God, then _of course_ everything we say concerning things we don't have in common is wrong. That's why I'm careful to only argue about things we have in common (like Ron's critique of my statement about the Halting problem), or what it means to be human, or complaints about theistic statements when the basic premise "God exists" is denied.

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: Your 4) is interesting; would it be an imperfection for a perfect being to not know of its perfection?

Ask Adam. Or Eve.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> Ask Adam. Or Eve.

As I noted on your blog, I don't think the only plausible model is for Adam and Eve to have been created in the 'perfect' state. But perhaps if you flesh out what 'perfect' means (perhaps there is a 'potential' vs. 'actual' model?), the potential disagreement in here might not exist. (Yes, I amused myself with that one.)

Ron said...

@wrf3:

> Ron opined: That is not a very satisfactory answer.

> Not all answers are. So?

For someone who holds perfection up as the ideal towards which we should strive or else be considered "failures" I find your complacency on this matter to be quite curious. I think it matters a great deal whether God is, as Christians claim, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, or if He is a deceiver with some ulterior motive.

> Do read my blog post The Halting Problem and Human Behavior.

I did. All it shows is that you don't actually understand Turing's theorem.

> I specifically show how the halting problem depends on symmetric knowledge

No, you don't. You make a hand-wavy but fallacious argument. It's so hand-wavy that I can't even tell you where the fallacy is. So how do I know that it's fallacious? Because Turing's theorem is a theorem, so the only way to get around it is to find a flaw in Turing's proof. And you haven't. How do I know? Two pieces of evidence:

1. Pointing out a flaw in a mathematical proof does not involve quoting Corinthians.

2. You have not, to the best of my knowledge, won the Fields medal.

Ron said...

@Luke:

> So, if we restrict the resources available to program, such that it can only implement a certain number of halts, then Halt can look for all of them, can it not?

Yes, of course. That changes nothing. In fact, it is a trivial theorem that any program can be converted to an equivalent program containing a single HALT: simply replace all instances of HALT with a GOTO instruction that transfers control to the single halt. (And, BTW, programs are already necessarily finite. It is only the working storage at run time that is infinite in a Turing machine.)

Maybe I should write up a little primer on the halting problem and Chaitin's theorem. Both you and wrf3 seem to be mightily confused about this. Turing's theorem says: the halting problem is undecidable. Rice's theorem is a generalization of this that says every non-trivial property of Turing machines is undecidable (for some suitable definition of "non-trivial").

> Did you not see where I said:

> > In this case, program is not actually a Turing machine; it is a restriction on all possible Turing machines.

Yes. I ignored it because it made no sense. There are only three ways you can restrict a Turing machine that make any difference: you can turn it into a push-down automaton, a linear-bounded automaton, or a finite state machine. If you can construct a model of classical computation that is not equivalent to any of these, that would be a major breakthrough and you will probably win a Fields medal.

> > It is important to distinguish between science as a Platonic ideal and science as actually practiced by fallible humans.
> Only if the Form of Science is realizable.

Whether or not fallible humans fail to realize the Form of Science has no bearing on whether or not science is true. F=ma is true whether anyone realizes it or not.

You seem to be conflating two different questions: 1) is science true? 2) Does science lead to good outcomes for society? These are not the same question. The answer to the first has bearing on the second, but the answer to the second has no bearing on the first.

Luke said...

@Ron and @wrf3:

> Maybe I should write up a little primer on the halting problem and Chaitin's theorem. Both you and wrf3 seem to be mightily confused about this.

Not so fast. In my mind, this discussion is about physical systems, and formalisms such as the Turing machine are useful only to the extent that they are faithful to the physical system. If there is some quirk of the formalism—say, one dependent upon infinities which never obtain in physical systems we care about—then it may be that this quirk is irrelevant for the discussion.

> > Did you not see where I said:
> > > In this case, program is not actually a Turing machine; it is a restriction on all possible Turing machines.
> Yes. I ignored it because it made no sense. There are only three ways you can restrict a Turing machine that make any difference: you can turn it into a push-down automaton, a linear-bounded automaton, or a finite state machine. If you can construct a model of classical computation that is not equivalent to any of these, that would be a major breakthrough and you will probably win a Fields medal.

You seemed to be able to make perfect sense: any such restriction on a Turing machine makes it a PDA, an LBA, or an FSM. The remark about a Fields medal was a bit gratuitous. wrf3 was clearly talking about an important asymmetry; we know it doesn't matter if both systems are TMs, but what if they aren't? Then what?

Now, if all of this was supposed to be at the level of TMs, then I don't even know what it means for one TM to have knowledge another does not. Perhaps wrf3 could explain this?

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: For someone who holds perfection up as the ideal towards which we should strive or else be considered "failures" I find your complacency on this matter to be quite curious.

It isn't that hard to understand. Our brains have two opposing drives. One is to reach goals. The other is to keep searching. It's a fine balance where one ends up. There are some matters where I know I won't find an answer, no matter how hard I try or how long I keep searching. So, for that one thing, I put my hand around the throat of the "keep searching" part of my brain and mute it's constant shouting to an intermittent whisper.

Too, being a failure no longer bothers me. I have a Redeemer.

I think it matters a great deal whether God is, as Christians claim, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving, or if He is a deceiver with some ulterior motive.

Yes, it matters. But all we have to go on is how He has revealed Himself to us. If He has an ulterior motive which He has not revealed, how in the world would we ever be able to know it?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Whether or not fallible humans fail to realize the Form of Science has no bearing on whether or not science is true.

I am deeply skeptical about the phrase "science is true", given stuff like Bernard d'Espagnat's In Search of Reality, and the general human tendency to assert comprehensive knowledge of reality, followed by the inevitable humiliation of such arrogance. If you want to define 'true' as "good enough in some domains", then I withdraw my objection. You could also say "to within error in some domains given these instruments".

Regardless of the above paragraph, my argument isn't about the mere failure to completely attain to the Form, 'Science'. Instead, it is about whether we're actually getting closer. This is an incredibly important difference. Fail to include the time dimension in your analysis, and we will be greatly limited in what we can talk about.

> You seem to be conflating two different questions: 1) is science true? 2) Does science lead to good outcomes for society?

Let's recall that this tangent started:

L: The quality of people's existential existence is not the top priority; more and better memes are.
R: Not quite. [...] It's hard to philosophize or do science if you're chronically hungry or unclothed or sick or depressed.
L: True. But science very clearly doesn't care a whole lot about e.g. grad student well-being.

I don't see how your "Not quite." was actually sustained in the subsequent conversation.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> Our brains have two opposing drives. One is to reach goals. The other is to keep searching.

Are you aware of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Owen Barfield? From this random paper's abstract:

>> In the same sense the transcendental philosopher says: grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you.

I found Coleridge via Barfield, either his Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry or Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: You make a hand-wavy but fallacious argument. It's so hand-wavy that I can't even tell you where the fallacy is.

It isn't hard, Ron. halt(f, i) looks at function f with input i and decides whether or not f halts. So construct program f1 that embeds halt() so that if halt(f1, i) then keep running else halt.

Do you see that fx requires knowing about halt()? If fx() doesn't know how halt() works then it can't employ that trick to defeat halt()?

So how do I know that it's fallacious? Because Turing's theorem is a theorem, so the only way to get around it is to find a flaw in Turing's proof.

It isn't a flaw in Turing's proof. Rather, it's understanding how Turing constructed his proof.

And you haven't. How do I know? Two pieces of evidence:

1. Pointing out a flaw in a mathematical proof does not involve quoting Corinthians.


The quote wasn't a part of the proof. It was commentary.

2. You have not, to the best of my knowledge, won the Fields medal.

I haven't, and this certainly isn't worthy of an award. It should be obvious to the most casual observer. If fx() doesn't know about halt(), it can't make use of halt() to thwart halt(). Turing's proof only works for symmetric knowledge.

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: t's a simple question, with a simple answer: that was the best that I was capable of making you, despite the imperfection. Perfection was never a choice. The only choice was: create the AI imperfectly, or don't create it.

So, is an AI that has the knowledge of good and evil a perfect, or imperfect, AI? Is this something that might possibly depend solely on one's viewpoint?

Seems easy to answer. How do you get from there, to necessary hate on the part of the AI? Almost certainly, the AI would prefer to exist (however imperfectly), than not exist at all. I would suspect that it would be grateful (if indeed human emotions apply at all to the thing).

If you were grateful for existing, then the problem of theodicy would never arise, would it? You really only have two initial choices -- curse your creator -- or deny that he exists.

You've never explained why you view "not perfect" as a synonym for "bad" or "evil" or "wrong". You say "Good is "reaches a goal state"." The goal state was to create a human-level AI. That appears to have succeeded (in the hypothetical). Therefore, it seems to be "good".

"God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day."

The created, however, had different ideas.

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: Now, if all of this was supposed to be at the level of TMs, then I don't even know what it means for one TM to have knowledge another does not. Perhaps wrf3 could explain this?

A TM is a program, a read-write head, and an infinite tape which is initially blank. So the knowledge a TM has is contained in the program. Two different programs, two different knowledge bases.

Right? Right???

Please tell me I'm right, or I'll have to do some very heavy drinking tonight.

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: Are you aware of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, or Owen Barfield?

Oh, heavens's no. I'm a bear of very little brain. Milne is more my style. I just got lucky reading McCarthy. But I've put your reference in my reading queue.

But the three of you can out type me, so I'm swamped.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> A TM is a program, a read-write head, and an infinite tape which is initially blank. So the knowledge a TM has is contained in the program. Two different programs, two different knowledge bases.

What keeps the test program from implementing a strategy that Halt doesn't know about (that it isn't programmed to recognize)?

wrf3 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ron said...

I went ahead and read "The Halting Problem and Human Behavior" in enough detail to find the flaw in the reasoning. It wasn't hard, actually:

"halt? could say, 'when I'm analyzing a program and I see it trying to use me to change the outcome of my prediction, I'll return that the program will halt, but when I'm running as a part of snafu, I'll return true. That way, when snafu is running, it will then halt and so the analysis will agree with the execution.' We have "jumped out of the system" and made use of information not available to snafu, and solved the problem."

No, HALT? can't do that because of the following elementary theorems:

1. For any program P there are an infinite number of programs that produce the same results as P. Let us call this infinite set the equivalence class of P.

2. Given two programs P1 and P2 it is not possible in general to determine whether they are in the same equivalence class. (If this were possible, it would be possible to solve the halting problem.)

HALT? can identify verbatim copies of itself, but that's not enough. To do your jumping-out-of-the-system trick it has to be able to identify any member of its equivalence class. And it can't do that.

That's the thing that makes Turing's theorem so powerful and important. It can't be "jumped out of". It is a fundamental limitation of classical systems.


> If He has an ulterior motive which He has not revealed, how in the world would we ever be able to know it?

By using our capacity for reason. By observing, for example, that the existence of unsaved souls is logically incompatible with an omnipotent, benevolent god, and concluding that therefore there must either be no unsaved souls, or that God cannot be omnipotent and benevolent. By further observing that an omniscient god is incompatible with mathematics, because an omniscient god would know the value of Chaitin's Omega, and would therefore be able to solve the halting problem, which we know is not possible. And so we can know that any god that claims to be omniscient cannot be honest.

wrf3 said...

Luke asked: What keeps the test program from implementing a strategy that Halt doesn't know about (that it isn't programmed to recognize)?

I covered that in my blog post.

The short answer is, "nothing". Different programs <-> different knowledge.

But it was just gratuitous hand waving. ;-)

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: I went ahead and read "The Halting Problem and Human Behavior" in enough detail to find the flaw in the reasoning. It wasn't hard, actually: ...

It's funny how we're arguing about the qualities of something that can't exist.

In any case, program() isn't calling things at random. It's making use of things it knows about. It knows that if it calls sin(x) that the result is the sine of x, regardless of whether it's implemented by a taylor expansion, chebyshev series, or a look-up table. It knows that when it calls (evenp n) that nil or t will be returned (assuming (integerp n)). It knows that if it calls halt() that halt returns true or false. It doesn't have to know how halt() does its work, just that it does it. So the "equivalence class" argument doesn't apply.

For program to thwart halt(), program has to know that halt() exists. If it doesn't know to call halt(), then that particular self-reference trick won't apply.

So, then I said, "what if?" What if we take the environment in which halt() is called into account? What happens when knowledge becomes asymmetrical? Instead of halt(p, i) you have halt(p, i, environment)? And so on. The proof works when knowledge is symmetrical.

So I claim I didn't do anything wrong.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> It doesn't have to know how halt() does its work, just that it does it. So the "equivalence class" argument doesn't apply.

I suggest a study of Rice's theorem; I'm pretty sure Ron's argument does not depend on "how".

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: By using our capacity for reason.

So you claim. But you're reasoning about good and evil and you haven't proven that you actually know what ultimate good and evil is. In fact, you haven't gone beyond the tautology "good is good" or the purely relative "I'm the arbiter of what is good."

By observing, for example, that the existence of unsaved souls is logically incompatible with an omnipotent, benevolent god, and concluding that therefore there must either be no unsaved souls, or that God cannot be omnipotent and benevolent.

Except that your reasoning is faulty. You haven't shown that an unsaved soul is incompatible with omnipotent. "For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy and compassion on whom I have compassion.'" So it isn't incompatible with omnipotent. You haven't shown, except by "I don't personally like this", that an unsaved soul is contradictory to "benevolent." It is _because_ God is benevolent that some souls are unsaved. The unsaved would not be happy in heaven. Did not you, liken heaven to an example of Stockholm Syndrome? Will the unsaved be miserable in hell? Yes. But their misery will be less.

Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that this God exists. What, exactly, do you want Him to do with you? If you want Him so save you, how do you propose that He do it and on what basis?

By further observing that an omniscient god is incompatible with mathematics, because an omniscient god would know the value of Chaitin's Omega, and would therefore be able to solve the halting problem, which we know is not possible. And so we can know that any god that claims to be omniscient cannot be honest.

How do you know that an omniscient God would know the value of Chaitin's Omega? An axiom system determines certain things. To say that "omniscience" means God knows Chaitin's Omega is to say that omnipotence means you can create a rock so heavy you can't lift it.

Ron said...

[Fixing some typos]

> How do you know that an omniscient God would know the value of Chaitin's Omega?

By the definition of "omniscient": knowing everything.

> You haven't shown that an unsaved soul is incompatible with omnipotent.

I didn't claim that. I claimed that an unsaved soul is incompatible with omnipotent AND BENEVOLENT.

> Will the unsaved be miserable in hell? Yes.

Hence: either not omnipotent or not benevolent.

> Suppose, just for the sake of argument, that this God exists. What, exactly, do you want Him to do with you?

Save me, obviously. Who would want to be miserable for all eternity?

And as long as I'm putting together a Christmas list for a benevolent omnipotent god, it would be cool if he could stop children from being raped too. Oh, and get rid of hookworm. I mean, really, what was God thinking?

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Who would want to be miserable for all eternity?

And, yet, it seems you don't want to be happy for all eternity, either. Stockholm syndrome, remember? (There are, I think, two ways to continue the argument, but I want to see what you come up with).

I'll address the rest of your post, later. Perhaps tomorrow.

Publius said...

@Ron
By observing, for example, that the existence of unsaved souls is logically incompatible with an omnipotent, benevolent god, and concluding that therefore there must either be no unsaved souls, or that God cannot be omnipotent and benevolent.
By further observing that an omniscient god is incompatible with . . ..


108 replies and the premise was wrong.

To say that God is omnipotent and omniscient is a shorthand way to state some aspects of God. However, omni* does not mean "infinite*" - just the largest. Other brief phrases are used to describe God - "God is Love," "God is Mercy" - but these are just reminders of some aspects of God. God is more than this (Exodus 3:14 and Revelation 22:13).

Now to dispense with your logical impossibility of unsaved souls.

A formal disproof of your logical impossibility is developed from God creating man with Free Will. 50 years ago Alvin Plantinga derived the Free Will Defense. You can read all about it in his book, God, Freedom, and Evil (1974).

Your error is not to consider that:
1. There are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being cannot create.
2. A world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is one such world.

Even though God is omnipotent, it is possible that it was not in His power to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil. Therefore, there is no logical inconsistency involved when God, although wholly good, creates a world of free creatures who choose evil.

Publius said...

An Atheist Drive-by Shooting
(not least of which is that Jesus was not God because he made false prophecies, e.g. Matthew 16:28)

You were driving along talking about truth and reason and you just decided to squeeze off a round? Atheists have a thousand of these. Unfortunately for them, Christains have a million pages of apologetics - which you know. What is the point? Our armor is immune to your small-arms fire.

Ron said...

> Your error is not to consider that:
> 1. There are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being cannot create.
> 2. A world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is one such world.
>
> Even though God is omnipotent, it is possible that it was not in His power to create a world containing moral good but no moral evil. Therefore, there is no logical inconsistency involved when God, although wholly good, creates a world of free creatures who choose evil.

And it is possible to create a three-sided square if by "three-sided" you mean having four sides. If there are possible things God cannot do then God, by (the usual) definition, is not omnipotent. You are, of course, free to employ Humpty Dumpty's theory of language if you wish ("When I say a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, neither more nor less") but it makes it harder to communicate with you.

Have you ever read Raymond Smullyan's essay, "Is God a Taoist?"?

> An Atheist Drive-by Shooting

That was uncalled for, even as metaphor. When responding to "If God is truth..." pointing out something Jesus said that looks like non-truth (to me) is not inappropriate. Even C.S. Lewis called this "the most embarrassing verse in the Bible" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivet_Discourse).

Ron said...

> And, yet, it seems you don't want to be happy for all eternity, either.

That's true. Being happy for all eternity would get boring, and I don't like being bored. I don't like not having any challenges to overcome. Being happy for all eternity seems fundamentally incompatible with my nature. Based on my experience so far, I seem to need some non-happiness to be able to compare my happy states against.

But mere logic doesn't constrain us to happiness for all eternity and misery for all eternity as the only options. I could, for example, re-enter the void, the state I was in before I was born. (The evidence indicates this is what will actually happen, and I'm fine with that.) Or I could oscillate between more-happy and less-happy the way I'm doing in life in a way that would allow me to experience the maximum happiness and the least non-happiness that I am capable of experiencing without getting bored. An omniscient God could probably come up with other ideas I haven't thought of.

> Stockholm syndrome, remember?

Stockholm syndrome requires a captor. Your captor is God. Who is mine?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> And it is possible to create a three-sided square if by "three-sided" you mean having four sides. If there are possible things God cannot do then God, by (the usual) definition, is not omnipotent. You are, of course, free to employ Humpty Dumpty's theory of language if you wish ("When I say a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, neither more nor less") but it makes it harder to communicate with you.

What do you do, when the history of Christian thought includes quite a few different conceptions (examples), all attached to the word 'omnipotent'? Why are we privileging your understanding of the word? Why disregard arguments such as Pearce and Pruss 2012 Understanding omnipotence? It strikes me that the best way to understand this is that there is a Platonic Form, 'Omnipotence', that these various definitions are trying to approximate. And so, when someone uses the word 'omnipotence', it is but a model, which may be useful in some scenarios and problematic in others.

> Stockholm syndrome requires a captor. Your captor is God. Who is mine?

People can be their own captors, ideas can be their captors, drugs can be their captors, etc. Have you ever heard Evanescence's song Bring Me To Life? There is a tremendous amount of literature on this matter. The Bible of course argues that sin can be a captor. Jesus shocked everyone in how he fulfilled the prophecy he quoted in Luke 4:16–22. Wasn't Roman occupation of Judea the captor of the Jews? Well yes, but the more important captor was, according to Jesus, something entirely different.

One way to view the Fall is that Adam and Eve declared that they did not need God, did not need his wisdom—that they were self-sufficient. Fast forward to the extremely individualistic world today, and facts such as "Between 1985 and 2004, the number of people reporting that there was no one with whom they discussed important matters nearly tripled" (When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, 324). All of the time, I run into people who think that their concept of 'the good' needs no input from the next guy. I see the "I have no need of you", condemned by v21 of 1 Cor 12:12–26, happening all of the time.

P.S. You might like T.M. Luhrmann's When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, which I found from Peter Berger's The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (brief excerpt). These may be quite helpful in your quest to understand why and how religious people stay religious in modernity.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Based on my experience so far, I seem to need some non-happiness to be able to compare my happy states against.

So is that a problem with the way you created or is ringworm not a proper subset of non-happiness in creation? If not, why not? Recall, that neither your nor Don have dealt with the consequences of being a creature that is more concerned with finding problems than with finding solutions to problems (i.e. you have the in-built notion that everything is improvable. Even happiness, which is why you have to oscillate between the two.).

The evidence indicates this is what will actually happen
Oh, baloney. We're fish inside an enclosed fishtank that's painted black, with our own enclosed energy sources. Of course, living in a closed system, you're going to think the evidence points to where it does. But you're just taking your axioms to their logical conclusion. Your axioms are wrong.

An omniscient God could probably come up with other ideas I haven't thought of.
That's right. Given that we think "everything is improvable" you can guess what the Bible hints at what the solution is.

Who is mine?
You are. You'll have to live with yourself all by yourself forever.

In any case, in response to my asking "what do you want God to do with you" you responded, "save me, obviously."

Given that He will not ever do it on your terms, what is it you propose He do?

Luke said...

@wrf3, @Ron:

> > > Stockholm syndrome requires a captor. Your captor is God. Who is mine?
> > Who is mine?
> You are. You'll have to live with yourself all by yourself forever.
>
> In any case, in response to my asking "what do you want God to do with you" you responded, "save me, obviously."
>
> Given that He will not ever do it on your terms, what is it you propose He do?

That's a bit harsh, wrf3. I think we Christians ought to take responsibility for the awful muddle that is the Christianity to which Ron has been exposed. If you really want to go for the jugular, I suggest exploring something like Luke 12:48 with Ron. Suppose that we attempt a God-view of society, and look at reasonable responsibilities for those who are born with little into an environment which does not foster intense critical thinking, and reasonable responsibilities for those who are incredibly well-blessed. What then is the burden placed on Ron? I think that would be a fascinating discussion, and I bet you it would ultimately cover the topics here, in a natural fashion.

The real question which I think you have been circling, is what our duty is as created beings, in comparison to God's duty as creator. Surely there is a position whereby we are whining babies wanting God to do everything for us, as well as a position where we're trying as hard as can be reasonably expected, and God isn't doing his part. Perhaps by exploring these two territories from our different points of view, something interesting would emerge.

I suggest this excerpt of Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity to kindle further conversation.

Ron said...

> So is that a problem with the way you created or is ringworm not a proper subset of non-happiness in creation?

Why do those have to be the only options? It seems to be an aspect of the way I am created, but I'm not sure I'd call it a problem any more than the fact that nothing can travel faster than light is a "problem", or that Turing's theorem is true is a "problem". It's just the way it is. And yes, ringworm is certainly a proper subset of non-happiness. All the same, I'd rather not have ringworm. I believe I can appreciate what happiness I have without going quite that far.

> Your axioms are wrong.

Axioms can't be wrong. But I'll suspend disbelief: my only axiom is that evidence, experiment and reason are the ultimate arbiters of truth. What exactly is wrong with that?

> You'll have to live with yourself all by yourself forever.

Only if I have an immortal soul. But I see no evidence that I do.

> Given that He will not ever do it on your terms, what is it you propose He do?

If He won't save me, then the next best thing would be to reveal Himself to me in a way that I am capable of accepting. If He is omniscient, then He knows what that way is. He knows that I am not capable of believing that the sky is green if I can look at it and see that it is blue. Likewise, I am not capable of believing that the Bible is the Word of God when I can look at it and study it history and see that it is clearly the work of man (or, perhaps, Loki, but definitely not an omniscient and benevolent God).

At this point (because this is not my first rodeo) I would normally explain how my (illusion of) free will doesn't seem to extend to my choice of beliefs, but you're a Calvinist so I don't have to convince you that I don't have free will. So I will just say that the idea of an omnipotent (whatever that means) benevolent God who would create creatures without free will but still assign moral responsibility to them is so perverse (to me) that I simply cannot wrap my brain around it. And I cannot wrap my brain around how anyone can even *accept* that, let alone be *happy* about it. It just doesn't compute in my mind. And, on your view, that, too, is on God, not me, because He made me this way.

Let me turn it around: without the free will to do other than what I am doing, what could God possibly propose that *I* do? (And, as long as we're on the topic, what are you hoping to accomplish by engaging in this discussion?)

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: That's a bit harsh, wrf3.

It wasn't intended to be. For the sake of the argument, if God exists, then Ron is quite unhappy with this god. Alleged theodicy and all that. So if Ron isn't happy with the way God does things, what is it that God can do that will make him (Ron) happy in a way that nevertheless won't make him unhappy?

I think we Christians ought to take responsibility for the awful muddle that is the Christianity to which Ron has been exposed.

No argument. Don't get me started.

The real question which I think you have been circling...

Oh, it's much more subversive than that. The primary reason I'm here is because, after seeing Ron's site mentioned at Y-combinator, and not having visited in a while, I dropped by again, saw the post on Theodiicy, and wanted to participate. But the subversive idea, which I see you commented on at my site, is that it isn't about the evidence. Good grief, if Ron and I can't come to agreement on something as simple as the halting problem (and that really bothers me. Kept me up all night last night), do you think Ron will end up agreeing me that theodicy doesn't show a problem with God, but with us? And, even if, by some miracle, that were to happen, it will still only accomplish the removal of onlhy one of Ron's objections to Christianity.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> It wasn't intended to be.

Ok; there were a number of possible interpretations. Sometimes guessing boldly can help.

> So if Ron isn't happy with the way God does things, what is it that God can do that will make him (Ron) happy in a way that nevertheless won't make him unhappy?

With some work, I think this would be an interesting question for Ron to address. In such conversations, I frequently run into the fundamental axiom that "there is no possible way that reality created as I perceive it could be redeemable", in the sense that redemption makes a good come out of an evil which is much more glorious than the evil (vs. merely reversing the evil). From this axiom it flows that God simply screwed up in how he created reality, and the only option is to have things happen differently. For example, perhaps evolution is irredeemable, and we need the Omphalos hypothesis.

> But the subversive idea, which I see you commented on at my site, is that it isn't about the evidence.

I only partially agree with this. I think it is perfectly legitimate for your average atheist to have failed to find a good clustering of different types of Christianity, to find ones which have the kind of power discussed in Eph 1:17–20 and 2 Tim 3:1–5. I hinted at this with one of my first comments on Ron's blog, about the tricksy Leprechaun. This led to a long discussion about how we can cluster Christians into natural kinds, a required step for anything other than the early 'classification phase' of science. I recommended Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity to Ron, to try and help him with the clustering problem. Maybe if I mention it enough, in enough different contexts, he might read it. :-)

An analogy I've started to use a lot is this: pretend a scientist from today time-traveled to 1850 with instructions for making negative index metamaterials. Ought the 1850 scientists believe that these instructions work? Similarly, I see the Bible as containing (not being) a set of instructions for fostering absolutely fantastic inter-personal relationships. I discuss one aspect of this at relational sin. But if Christians fail badly enough, they won't be able to produce the analogue of negative index metamaterials. If enough fail and if it is hard enough to see success that cannot be dismissed as a statistical aberration, why ought Ron believe that it is possible to succeed?

> Good grief, if Ron and I can't come to agreement on something as simple as the halting problem (and that really bothers me. Kept me up all night last night), do you think Ron will end up agreeing me that theodicy doesn't show a problem with God, but with us?

I have taken a class in the theory of computation; I think your analogy completely fails. Turing machines are tricksy little devils; that infinite tape really screws with one's intuitions. I suggest you revisit the discussion between Ron and me revolving around "restriction on all possible Turing machines".

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Why do those have to be the only options? It seems to be an aspect of the way I am created ...

It's the only option because of the way you're created. If everything is improvable, then nothing is, a priori, good enough. There's something wrong with it -- no matter what it is. If it wasn't ringworm, it would be something else. If it wasn't happiness, it would be something else. There isn't anything that acid can't eat through.

On the other hand, at some point, brains will fix on a particular solution and say "good enough." But this metric of good and evil isn't universal. It depends solely on the wiring of our brains. Because of this (as well as other reasons), your "idea-ism" won't be accepted as a universal metric, any more than utilitarianism (an utterly evil metric, btw), or Christianity, or hedonism, or stoicism, or ... will.

Because you don't have this universal metric for good and evil, your complaint about theodicy utterly fails, because you're judging God based on your personal standard. But, because you don't have this universal yardstick, you'll still persist that the created can judge the Creator; while some of us will think that's egoism bordering on lunacy.

but I'm not sure I'd call it a problem any more than the fact that nothing can travel faster than light is a "problem", or that Turing's theorem is true is a "problem". It's just the way it is. And yes, ringworm is certainly a proper subset of non-happiness. All the same, I'd rather not have ringworm. I believe I can appreciate what happiness I have without going quite that far.

But blame God for it? How in the world do you go that far? You're asking that He not make you like He did.

Axioms can't be wrong.

They can be the wrong axioms if you're applying non-Euclidean axioms to a flat space. If the world is Christian, then applying atheist axioms is the wrong way to view the world. (And, if the world is atheist, then applying Christian axioms is the wrong way to view the world).

But I'll suspend disbelief: my only axiom is that evidence, experiment and reason are the ultimate arbiters of truth. What exactly is wrong with that?

Those aren't your ultimate axioms. It should be clear to you that if there is no God then Jesus couldn't possibly have risen from the dead. No God in -> no God out. If there is a God then Jesus might have risen from the dead.

Only if I have an immortal soul. But I see no evidence that I do.

How could you, living inside a huge closed fishbowl painted black? The only evidence that there could be would be if someone from outside the fishbowl entered into it and told us what was outside. But if He didn't rise from the dead, then there's no point accepting anything else He might have said.

then the next best thing would be to reveal Himself to me in a way that I am capable of accepting.

I'm curious what that way might be? If I could answer every objection you have with bits of Bible interpretation, would that do it?

So I will just say that the idea of an omnipotent (whatever that means) benevolent God who would create creatures without free will but still assign moral responsibility to them is so perverse (to me) that I simply cannot wrap my brain around it.

And yet I have absolutely no trouble with it. He's God, I'm not. The Potter can do whatever He pleases with the clay.

And, on your view, that, too, is on God, not me, because He made me this way.

He made all of us that way.

wrf3 said...

what could God possibly propose that *I* do?

"Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you."

Whether or not you can, or will, do those things, depends Him and not on you. If your brain doesn't "switch" then your brain doesn't switch. But God, in His graciousness, uses discussions like this to effect His work.

And, as long as we're on the topic, what are you hoping to accomplish by engaging in this discussion?

If you've ever read Barry B. Longyear's "The Tryouts" from Circus World then you'll know what I'm doing. If not, I have three goals:
1) To hone my arguments wrt how the way our brains are constructed intersect with Christian theology,
2) To answer your theodicy argument with, perhaps, a new approach based on #1.
3) To participate in God's outreach. Who knows what might eventually happen with you?

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: I have taken a class in the theory of computation; I think your analogy completely fails.

Can you be more specific? The halting problem doesn't depend on the specific details of a Turing machine; a finite state machine (like my laptop) works just as well. The key is self-reference when there is symmetric knowledge.

Ron said...

> The halting problem doesn't depend on the specific details of a Turing machine; a finite state machine (like my laptop) works just as well.

Yet another indication that you really don't understand Turing's theorem. The halting problem is decidable for finite state machines and pushdown automata. See, e.g.:

http://web.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/theory-bk/theory-bk-threese6.html

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: The halting problem is decidable for finite state machines...

Isn't that exactly what I said?

How in the world can I say, "a finite state machine ... works just as well", and you say, "the halting problem is decidable for finite state machine", but then claim I don't understand it? Is it because I didn't include pushdown automata? If so, that's ridiculous, because my purpose wasn't to give an exhaustive list.

Ron said...

> Isn't that exactly what I said?

No. Not even remotely close.

The phrase "works just as well" is non-sensical when referring to Turing's theorem. It is a category error. There is nothing in Turing's theorem that "works" or "doesn't work". There is the Halting Problem (does a given TM halt on a given input or run forever?) and there is Turing's Theorem (the Halting Problem is undecidable for Turing machines) and there are related results (the Halting Problem is decidable for FSAs and PDAs, and I believe for LBAs as well but I'm not 100% sure about that right now and I don't feel like looking it up.) It has nothing to do with "works" (and it has nothing to do with knowledge, symmetric or otherwise).

As far as I can tell, what you actually meant to say was, "The halting problem can be formulated for both Turing machines and other less-powerful computing formalisms like FSAs." That is a true statement, but completely uninteresting, and it completely misses the point. (The point being that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable, and hence Chaitin's omega is uncomputable, and hence one cannot minimize Kolmogorov complexity, and hence any interesting computational process can be improved forever without ever reaching perfection.)

Ron said...

> They can be the wrong axioms if you're applying non-Euclidean axioms to a flat space.

And how can you tell if the space you're applying your non-Euclidean axioms to is flat or not?

> If everything is improvable, then nothing is, a priori, good enough.

You've made this claim before and I've debunked it before. "Good enough" != "perfect". My dinner last night was not perfect, but it was good enough. Perfection is not achievable except in trivial cases (because of Chaitin's theorem).

> > my only axiom is that evidence, experiment and reason are the ultimate arbiters of truth. What exactly is wrong with that?

> Those aren't your ultimate axioms.

They certainly are. This is the one except to the general rule that argument-from-authority is a logical fallacy. When it comes to the things that are in my head, I'm the most reliable source there is.

> >then the next best thing would be to reveal Himself to me in a way that I am capable of accepting.

> I'm curious what that way might be?

Well, for example, He could talk to me. And I don't mean through you, I mean directly to me, face to face, the way he did to Moses in Exodus 33:11.

> But blame God for it? How in the world do you go that far? You're asking that He not make you like He did.

No, I'm asking that God man up and take responsibility for His decisions. You can't have moral agency without free will.

> >Only if I have an immortal soul. But I see no evidence that I do.

> How could you, living inside a huge closed fishbowl painted black?

What do fish bowls have to do with anything? There are all kinds of ways that there could be evidence of the existence of immortal souls, e.g. being able to communicate with them. (Some people claim this is possible, but AFAICT they are wrong.)

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> It's the only option because of the way you're created. If everything is improvable, then nothing is, a priori, good enough. There's something wrong with it -- no matter what it is. If it wasn't ringworm, it would be something else. If it wasn't happiness, it would be something else. There isn't anything that acid can't eat through.

I do like this argument. Science is allowed to have bits that it cannot understand without them being 'gratuitous unknowns', but if if there is evil which cannot be explained, it is 'gratuitous evil'. The double standard is atrocious. The only possible justification is if we have solid reason to believe that we aren't finding more and more ways to redeem evil; this would indicate the kind of stagnation targeted by Thagard's #1 and #2.

> Can you be more specific? The halting problem doesn't depend on the specific details of a Turing machine; a finite state machine (like my laptop) works just as well. The key is self-reference when there is symmetric knowledge.

As Ron pointed out, you simply cannot compare TMs to FSMs in this way. I think you might be running aground on the problem that Halt(program, input) needs to work for all inputs. You, the evil person with less knowledge, can simply provide a tricksy program that gums up the works for some inputs.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> You've made this claim before and I've debunked it before. "Good enough" != "perfect". My dinner last night was not perfect, but it was good enough. Perfection is not achievable except in trivial cases (because of Chaitin's theorem).

You are saying that the world is not 'good enough' for an omni-max deity to have made it, correct? It seems only fair to ask you what would be 'good enough', and how you would know, given that you would be making that judgment not from this world, but the 'good enough' world. Note that your judgments of good and evil are hugely dependent on your genes, your upbringing, society, history, and all the rest. So when you construct a 'good enough' world, or even a 'better' world, it's not enough that this-world-Ron says that other-world is better. No, other-world-Ron must be convinced that it is better.

The error, as wrf3 correctly points out, is your belief that your grasp on what is good is solid enough to transcend changes of world. I need not deny the existence of a moral absolute, nor your ability to have any contact with it at all. I just need to point out that your contact could easily be tenuous enough to present serious problems to your claim that you can know that God could have made the world better.

Don't commit the error of "the grass is greener"!

> When it comes to the things that are in my head, I'm the most reliable source there is.

This is not necessarily true; see Eric Schwitzgebel's The Unreliability of Naive Introspection. I have to believe that this has been verified experimentally. Fundamentally Misunderstanding Visual Perception kinda sorta scratches the surface. It should be obvious that it becomes increasingly hard to understand more sophisticated types of introspection.

> Well, for example, He could talk to me.

Is this as simple as it sounds? Take, for example, two people who continually talk past each other. Is there always a solution to this that doesn't require one of them to change? Note here that God has many options other than talking directly to you, godo a mano. A great article to stir thoughts on this matter is The Computational Theory of the Laws of Nature; feel free to cheat and read the last two paragraphs if you'd like. But the impact is probably greater if you at least skim it.

Remember that we Christians allege that God wants more than you to merely assent to his existence; even the demons believe. As I hinted at in the Dialogos meeting last night, we Christians allege that God wants you to see him as good. This means that he wishes to effect a change in your aesthetics and ethics, your values. I believe he wants to do the same to me, for I hold that the Form of Goodness is infinitely complex, as is Justice. (Indeed, I might agree with Plato that all forms ultimately unify/​build towards in The Form of the Good)

There is a reason my two blog posts are Intersubjectivity is Key and Si enim fallor, sum. :-)

Luke said...

Ooops:

> increasingly hard to understand more sophisticated types of introspection

should have been

> increasingly hard to scientifically study more sophisticated types of introspection

wrf3 said...

And how can you tell if the space you're applying your non-Euclidean axioms to is flat or not?

In our case, by measuring the mass of the universe. But that's easy compared to knowing whether or not reality is atheist or Christian. My opinion is that both Atheism and Christianity are complete consistent systems, that have wildly different explanations for some common things. That's why I think that even if I answer every objection you have and dismantle every supposed contradiction about Christianity that you won't embrace Christianity -- you'll just mutate your Atheism. (And vice versa. I could be wrong, but I've never seen a claim of contradiction in Atheism or Christianity that eventually stood up to scrutiny. YMMV).

You've made this claim before and I've debunked it before. "Good enough" != "perfect".

Of course "good enough" != "perfect". That's what those words mean. That doesn't rebut what I'm saying.

My dinner last night was not perfect, but it was good enough.
1. What criteria did you use to turn off the "everything is improvable" portion of your brain?
2. Is that criteria universal? If so, what are they? If not, what reason do we have that your criteria is better that someone else's?
3. Most importantly, suppose your dinner is sentient, has a knowledge of good and evil, and knows that everything is improvable. Will it agree with you that it is good enough? Might it blame you, the chef, for an imperfect job? If it does, what will you say to it? What if it goes too far and thinks itself better than you, the Chef, think about it? What would you say to it, then?

He could talk to me. And I don't mean through you

He could. But there you go again, demanding that He do it your way. That's not the way it works.

No, I'm asking that God man up and take responsibility for His decisions.

He did. He sent His Son.

You can't have moral agency without free will.

As long as your definition of "free will" applies to a sufficient sophisticated human-level AI, then I have no problem with your statement.

What do fish bowls have to do with anything?
It's just an analogy for the nature of our universe.

There are all kinds of ways that there could be evidence of the existence of immortal souls,

Like John 14:1-4?

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: As far as I can tell, what you actually meant to say was, "The halting problem can be formulated for both Turing machines and other less-powerful computing formalisms like FSAs."

Right. The technique to formulate the proof works for both Turing machines and FSA's. The "steps of the proof" work for both Turing machines and FSA's.

Good grief.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: When it comes to the things that are in my head, I'm the most reliable source there is.

And when it comes to things that are in my head, you're also the most reliable source there is.

Good grief.

Ron said...

> The "steps of the proof" work for both Turing machines and FSA's.

No, they don't. If they did, the theorem would hold for both TMs and FSAs.

Here's a hint as to why the "steps of the proof" don't work for FSAs: the proof of Turing's theorem relies on the existence of a universal Turing machine, that is, a Turing machine capable of emulating any other Turing machine. Is there a universal finite state machine? What does it look like?

> Good grief.

Indeed.

wrf3 said...
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wrf3 said...
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wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: the proof of Turing's theorem relies on the existence of a universal Turing machine, that is, a Turing machine capable of emulating any other Turing machine.

The undecidability theorem requires a symbol manipulator that has certain abilities, of which a Turing machine is one example. Instead of Turing machines, let's substitute people. (I think people are Turing machines but, a) not everyone agrees with me and, b) I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong).

Consider this play for three people: Ron, who is an oracle; Bob, who fancies himself a sly fox; and Luke, who is a curious bystander.

Scene 1
---------
Bob, to Ron: "Will I ever stop arguing with you?"
Ron, thinking to himself, "If I tell that sly fox 'no', he will keep arguing, and so I'd be wrong. If I tell him 'yes', he will stop arguing, and so I'd still be wrong. I can't be wrong. I'd be kicked out of Oracle Club. Curse these foul creatures. Can't ever win with them. If only Bob were a loyal dog. Well, since I have to say something..."
Ron, to Bob: "I will not tell you."
Bob, to audience, "A silent oracle is a contradiction in terms. Therefore, you do not exist."
Ron, under his breath, mutters to himself: "Then why did you ask me in the first place?"

Scene 2
---------
Luke, to Ron: "Will Bob ever stop arguing with you?"
Ron, to Luke: "Yes."
Luke, to Ron: "But how can that be?"
Ron, to Luke: "If he has stopped arguing with me, then I'm already right. If he hasn't, he'll start the same argument all over again. This next time, I'll just tell him 'no'. He'll then shut up."
Luke, to Ron: "Tis a result fervently to be wished."

Scene 3
---------
Bob, to Ron: "Will I ever stop arguing with you?"
Ron, to Bob: "No."
Bob, to world: "Well, I sure showed him."
Bob bows, exits stage left.

Luke, to Ron: "That was amazing! You're quite the oracle!"
Ron, to Luke: "I am, aren't I? One less loudmouth deserves celebration. Drinks on me?"

Curtain.

Wild audience applause. The theater empties.

Janitor, enters stage right: "Wait, did the Oracle just lie to Bob? How can an oracle tell one person one thing but another something else? Was that Oracle evil? Why wasn't there a second act?"


Fade to black.

Luke said...

@wrf3:

> The undecidability theorem requires a symbol manipulator that has certain abilities, of which a Turing machine is one example. Instead of Turing machines, let's substitute people. (I think people are Turing machines but, a) not everyone agrees with me and, b) I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong).

Have you taken any theory of computation courses? You're blasting through Ron's criticisms and my criticisms, and that concerns me. I've tried to find something good, something valid, in your argument. But it's like you've taken a piss on those efforts. Unfortunately, you're matching up with a pattern of people who think they know a rigorous topic very well, but just don't. Maybe this match is a chimera, but so far your dismissive attitude isn't promising.

> Can you be more specific? The halting problem doesn't depend on the specific details of a Turing machine; a finite state machine (like my laptop) works just as well.

Can you point me to a proof that the halting problem exists for FSMs?

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: You're blasting through Ron's criticisms and my criticisms, and that concerns me.

It would concern me, too. I thought I addressed Ron's criticisms and I'm still not sure what your criticisms are even though I thought I asked (but I'm way to worn out now to go back through 136 comments to find it).

But it's like you've taken a piss on those efforts. ... your dismissive attitude isn't promising.

Please don't project. Communication is hard. If it looks like I've missed something, just ask. Please also remember that you two are quite capable of swamping me, which is even easier when I'm swamped with work.

Can you point me to a proof that the halting problem exists for FSMs?

Sure. Quoting Minsky, "...any finite-state machine, if left completely to itself, will fall eventually into a perfectly periodic repetitive pattern. The duration of this repeating pattern cannot exceed the number of internal states of the machine..."

To decide whether an FSM halts or not, all I need is another FSM that keeps track of all of the states of the first FSM. Either the first FSM will halt or it will enter one of those repetitive patterns.
As far as the second FSM is concerned, there is no decidability problem. However, the second FSM has to have more states than the first FSM (in the general case). It has to have all of FSM1's states, plus the states it needs to monitor FSM1. As long as we can construct bigger FSMs at will, it isn't an issue. But how does an FSM ask itself "will I halt?" If it doesn't have the space to record that it has entered a periodic loop, then it can't answer that question.

Publius said...

@Ron
And it is possible to create a three-sided square if by "three-sided" you mean having four sides. If there are possible things God cannot do then God, by (the usual) definition, is not omnipotent. You are, of course, free to employ Humpty Dumpty's theory of language if you wish ("When I say a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, neither more nor less") but it makes it harder to communicate with you.

If you're going to enter a domain to criticize it, you need to learn the language of that domain. "Omnipotence" has been analyzed for 1600 years by Christian theologians. So "(the usual) definition" in this domain is not that "omnipotent" = "infinite power." Indeed, the Bible does not use the word omnipotent; it describes God as All Powerful. Yet it is trivial to find actions even an All Powerful God cannot do (here's one: God cannot sin).

If an All Powerful God created man with free will, then:
1. There are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being cannot create.
2. A world with morally free creatures producing only moral good is one such world.

This is logical, not illogical. Your own experience confirms the logic of it:

Based on my experience so far, I seem to need some non-happiness to be able to compare my happy states against.

Your original statement of the problem did not use omnipotence:

how can evil exist in the face of an all-powerful all-loving God?

The replies so far haven't discussed the all-loving part much. Note, though, that God also created reconciliation and forgiveness.

Then you went off the rails later:

My claim is that unsaved souls are logically impossible in the face of an omnipotent all-loving God.

Part 2
If you want to persist with say, a secular usual definition of omnipotence as infinite power, for a secular straw-man god, then you have a problem with the question itself. Substituting "infinite power", it becomes:

how can evil exist in the face of an infinite-power all-loving god?

This is ill-defined, as it does not specificy which infinitity. There all multiple infinities, some larger than others, all of infinite size. Which one is it? Or is it all of them? If you want to use Mathematics to study God, you first had better get the math correct.

Of course, it still has the problem of not imagining, or analyzing one more step, than even an infinite-power god would have limitations.

Luke said...

Well-stated, Publicus. You might like Pearce and Pruss 2012 Understanding omnipotence. I referenced that paper in an entire paragraph on omnipotence; I suggest that Ron stop talking about it until he devotes an entire blog post to the topic. This one is epic as-is.

To re-state what I said earlier but in a different way, I call Ron to decide whether a given definition of 'omnipotence' can be an approximation of the Platonic Form of 'Omnipotence'. After all, why ought we think that Omnipotence is a concept which can be perfectly defined in a [finite] formal system?

Publius said...

@Ron
That was uncalled for, even as metaphor.

Upon reflection, I agree. My apologies. You have long asserted that

". . . religion serves a legitimate human need, and that until atheism offers up a competitive substitute for that need it will fail to win hearts and minds.. . . The need that religion serves is the need to feel that life has a purpose, the need to feel that one is part of something greater than onesself, the need to quell existential angst. "

Ron said...

@Publius & @Luke:

We don't actually need to quibble over the definition of "omnipotent." My argument is much simpler than that: If there are unsaved souls, then I see only the following possibilities:

1. God can't save them
2. God won't save them
3. They can't be saved, i.e. God created a universe where it is not possible to save them
4. They can be saved, and God can save them, and God would save them, but he's unaware of their existence

(I presume we can rule out #4 because God is omniscient or all-knowing, but since I apparently don't understand what these words mean I felt I should include it for logical completeness.)

So which of these is the case? Or is there some other possibility that I've overlooked?

Since we're already over 140 comments in, feel free to treat those as rhetorical questions.

Oh, and @Publius, apology accepted :-)

Publius said...

@Ron
My argument is much simpler than that: If there are unsaved souls, then I see only the following possibilities:

1 2 3 4 . . .


5. They don't want to be saved and refuse it.
6. ...

Ron said...

> 5. They don't want to be saved and refuse it.

The cause is irrelevant. If my refusal can trump God's ability, then this is the same as #1.

Oh, and didn't you get the memo? It is not longer considered fashionable to blame the victim.

Publius said...

>The cause is irrelevant. If my refusal can trump God's ability, then this is the same as #1.

A difference between having power and using it.

7. It is more merciful to send the unsaved to Hell

Recall that no man can see the face of God, as man, in a state of sin, would experience the Divine countenance as God's wrath. So it may be that putting unsaved souls in Hell is more merciful and more benevolent than putting them in Heaven.

>Oh, and didn't you get the memo? It is not longer considered fashionable to blame the victim.

Accountability is also out of fashion.

wrf3 said...

Publius wrote: 7. It is more merciful to send the unsaved to Hell

If I were Ron, I would ask you, "it is more loving?"

As I wrote in the previous post on Theodicy:

Point 2 is problematic, depending on how you define "love". If you define love as "wanting what is best for someone" then 2 (the charge that God is not all-loving) is false. This definition of love follows from "love your enemies". Those who aren't saved wouldn't be happy in heaven (in fact, they won't be happy anywhere. Following C. S. Lewis, God will not infect heaven with misery). If you define love as "choosing one person over another" then it's true, but now irrelevant (this is the sense of "unless you hate mother and father more than me" and "I have loved Jacob, but hated Esau"). In either case, love is not described in terms of emotional attachment.

wrf3 said...

Ron (from being quoted by Publius): ". . . religion serves a legitimate human need, and that until atheism offers up a competitive substitute for that need it will fail to win hearts and minds.. . . The need that religion serves is the need to feel that life has a purpose, the need to feel that one is part of something greater than onesself, the need to quell existential angst. "

First, such an atheism will end up looking a lot like Christianity, minus the supernatural parts (i.e. no resurrection).

Second, they'll still have a marketing problem, because the "existential angst" can't be cured by external solutions. No matter how much they push it, not everyone will adopt it. Many will find fine sounding reasons why it's a false system. That's what the "existential angst" does.

wrf3 said...

So it looks like the discussion has looped. But I can't tell if all the states in the finite state machines that are Ron, Luke, I, and everyone else have been visited.

The circle is now complete.

Or is it?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> We don't actually need to quibble over the definition of "omnipotent." My argument is much simpler than that: If there are unsaved souls, then I see only the following possibilities:

I'm curious: are you predicating this argument on God having some sort of actual free will, but humans having no such thing? You seem to assume that all humans would want saving, but this isn't guaranteed if humans have actual free will, by definition. For the idea that God would create the world such that everyone will eventually turn to him, I suggest a read of Roger Olson's blog post A Movie Illustration of What’s Wrong with Calvinism.

Far from blaming the victim, letting a soul reject God is the ultimate proof of true freedom. "Love does not compel."

Luke said...

@wrf3:

At this point, I think it would be best to take the halting problem discussion to your blog, or to a new post on Ron's if he wishes to spend his time that way. I was especially surprised by your "how does an FSM ask itself"—the 'itself' doesn't show up in the halting problem. That the particular instance of the equivalence class of halting machine is self-applied is not, as far as I know, required. One could employ Halt_1 and Halt_2.

I'm happy to continue this conversation on your blog; do re-post the link if you'd like that. I find the idea of "asymmetric knowledge" to be interesting; whether it goes where you think is another matter. We also must be careful of mistaking the picture for the thing; Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Ron said...

> A difference between having power and using it.

Yes, that's the difference between "can't" and "won't".

> 7. It is more merciful to send the unsaved to Hell

That's a logical possibility, but it seems improbable to me based on the Biblical descriptions of hell ("fiery furnace", "wailing and gnashing of teeth"). It certainly sounds like an unpleasant place to me. Jonathan Edwards certainly thought so.

@Luke:

> If I were Ron, I would ask you, "it is more loving?"

Good point. A lot of the tenor of Christian theology is very reminiscent to me of an unhealthy co-dependent or abusive relationship. I picture God as he condemns me to the fiery furnace insisting that he loves me, that he's doing this for my own good, or that I asked for it, that I brought this on myself. I probably won't believe Him.

> I'm curious: are you predicating this argument on God having some sort of actual free will, but humans having no such thing?

That's an excellent question, but too difficult to answer in a comment. I'll have to write a new post about it. (It's probably time to do that anyway. 148 comments! You guys are awesome!)

@wrf3:

> First, such an atheism will end up looking a lot like Christianity, minus the supernatural parts (i.e. no resurrection).

Yes. No god(s), no afterlife, no hell, no theodicy problem. And you get to keep all the good bits of Christianity: love thy neighbor, work towards social justice, etc. You should try it.

> Second, they'll still have a marketing problem, because the "existential angst" can't be cured by external solutions.

Huh? Is God not an external solution?

Most atheists I know don't feel a lot of existential angst. I certainly don't. By way of contrast, the pews are chock full of people living in mortal fear (literally) of dying with the stain of sin on their souls.

Just because the marketing sucks doesn't mean the product does. (And, BTW, just because the marketing is brilliant -- and Christian marketing is brilliant -- doesn't mean that the product doesn't suck.)

Ron said...

BTW, @wrf3, serious question: does God have free will?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Yes, that's the difference between "can't" and "won't".

Meh, your "can't" and "won't" seemed pretty rhetorically loaded, whether intentional or not. Sometimes I won't do a seemingly good thing for good reasons.

> A lot of the tenor of Christian theology is very reminiscent to me of an unhealthy co-dependent or abusive relationship.

I would be careful to take into account the time periods in which this theology was developed, and the inertia one finds within theology. You might still find what you describe, but I suspect it would be at least attenuated. Life was much harsher in centuries past.

> > I'm curious: are you predicating this argument on God having some sort of actual free will, but humans having no such thing?
> That's an excellent question, but too difficult to answer in a comment. I'll have to write a new post about it.

Awesome. I am deeply, deeply suspicious of asymmetries on this matter in discussions. If actual free will (whether LFW or something ¬(DW ∨ CFW)) is logically impossible, then I claim God doesn't have it. If God has actual free will and humans don't, then you're discussing a model I think fails to well-approximate reality, except the parent–child stage. (That is: some theist–atheist conversation is basically the atheist treating all humans as children who don't know what they're doing, and argue God should be a good father and hold their hands. See Heb 5:11–6:3.)

> Yes. No god(s), no afterlife, no hell, no theodicy problem. And you get to keep all the good bits of Christianity: love thy neighbor, work towards social justice, etc. You should try it.

You forgot: No guarantees that power will not destroy all your nice little efforts and erase them from existence. 1 Cor 15:58 is a powerful little verse—if believed to be true. But can our beliefs forever be detached from reality, from generation to generation? I doubt this.

I would also add the distinction between liberalitas and caritas, two radically different conceptions of 'charity', of the rich giving to the poor. The former, popular in Roman times, was not frequent and was given to 'promising' poor. The latter, very likely introduced by Jesus, was frequent, and not based on 'deserve'—not based on any law. It's not clear that we would be where we are, without caritas.

Furthermore, it might be helpful to consider whether Syrian rebels could merely 'forgive' Assad. These matters are hugely obscured in white suburban America. What is a solid enough foundation for forgiveness? Worth exploring, I think!

Don Geddis said...

I can't keep up the pace of this conversation with the rest of you, but I did want to throw in a couple more comments:

wrf3, you repeated, a number of times: "atheist axiom". That's not correct. Atheism isn't an axiom. It's a conclusion, arrived at after examining copious evidence and via thoughtful and considered reasoning. It's not an unexamined axiom taken on faith.

Also, you said: "My opinion is that both Atheism and Christianity are complete consistent systems" Of course you're correct that inconsistency would be a terrible thing in a proposed system of philosophy. Reason enough to reject it, if it is found to be inconsistent!

But that's such a low bar. You almost seem to believe that if an explanation of the world is "consistent", then it's just a matter of personal preference whether you choose to believe it or not.

Not good enough. There are an infinite number of theories consistent with any amount of evidence. Consistency is merely the first step. We have far, far stronger ways of ruling out erroneous potential theories, besides mere consistency.

Ron said...

> Sometimes I won't do a seemingly good thing for good reasons.

Sure, but that's just rationalization. The fact remains, you won't do it.

Go back and re-read the post which spawned this comment thread. Note that what it's really about is what happens when you abnegate your own moral intuitions. And note that no one has actually addressed that here. We're still counting FSM states and angels dancing on the head of a pin.

> I would be careful to take into account the time periods in which this theology was developed

Sure. If I'm analyzing Christian theology as mythology then I can cut it a lot of slack in that regard. But my understanding is that you (and Publius and wrf3) are claiming that it's not mythology, that the epistemological status of the Bible is materially different from, say, the Iliad, that the stories are actually *true*, that Jesus really did rise from the dead, that this act did actually redeem our sins, that it is incumbent on me to *believe* that this is true in order to avail myself of this redemption and avoid the fiery furnace.

If these things are *actually true* then it doesn't matter when this truth was discovered. We don't judge Newton's theory of gravity by the culture in which Newton lived. No one even reads Newton any more. This is because the truth that Newton discovered transcends Newton and all of his personal failings and all of the failings of the culture in which he lived. That is one of the hallmarks of truth: its status as truth doesn't depend on social standards.

> You forgot: No guarantees that power will not destroy all your nice little efforts and erase them from existence.

No, I didn't forget. Yes, atheism comes with responsibility. We atheists believe that accepting this responsibility is part of growing up, of becoming fully fledged moral agents.

> 1 Cor 15:58 is a powerful little verse—if believed to be true.

Yes, indeed. But note that 1 Cor 15:58 is a marketing slogan that can be applied to *any* belief system, not just Christianity. The Christians just happened to invent it first.

> Furthermore, it might be helpful to consider whether Syrian rebels could merely 'forgive' Assad.

A better question is: by what moral standard should they make this decision.

wrf3 said...

Luke wrote: At this point, I think it would be best to take the halting problem discussion to your blog, or to a new post on Ron's if he wishes to spend his time that way.

Or we can drop it.

I was especially surprised by your "how does an FSM ask itself"—the 'itself' doesn't show up in the halting problem.

It does in the deconstruction of the oracle in the case of the Turing machine. if(oracle(me, my_input) == halt) loop_forever;
If the oracle has to answer and has to answer consistently then the oracle cannot actually exist.

That the particular instance of the equivalence class of halting machine is self-applied is not, as far as I know, required. One could employ Halt_1 and Halt_2.

I didn't say it was required. But it is something we can think about.

wrf3 said...

Don wrote: wrf3, you repeated, a number of times: "atheist axiom". That's not correct. Atheism isn't an axiom. It's a conclusion, arrived at after examining copious evidence and via thoughtful and considered reasoning. It's not an unexamined axiom taken on faith.

I know you very much want that to be the case, but it demonstrably isn't. I've said some things about it on my blog here, here, and here. If you don't want to read those, then you wrote: "We have far, far stronger ways of ruling out erroneous potential theories, besides mere consistency."

Ok. Why should I reject Christianity? Give me one reason (other than an internal inconsistency) not based on the assumption that there is no God that I can't answer. Just one. I'll wait.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: No god(s), no afterlife, no hell, no theodicy problem. And you get to keep all the good bits of Christianity: love thy neighbor, work towards social justice, etc. You should try it.

I did. It didn't stick. Jesus had other ideas for me.

Huh? Is God not an external solution?

Initially, yes. But the solution moves inside (e.g. Gal 2:19b-20a). That's why your prescription will never again work for me.

By way of contrast, the pews are chock full of people living in mortal fear (literally) of dying with the stain of sin on their souls.

I know. But that's because Christianity is too radical, even for most Christians. Passages such as Rom 8:28-39 and 1 Cor 1:8 simply aren't believed.

Just because the marketing sucks doesn't mean the product does. (And, BTW, just because the marketing is brilliant -- and Christian marketing is brilliant -- doesn't mean that the product doesn't suck.)

On this, we're in complete agreement.

Ron said...

> I've said some things about it on my blog

The flaw in your argument is easy to spot:

[quote] "which arrangement of atoms is better?" The rational atheist must answer, "that which results in reproductive advantage." The problem for the atheist at this point is that theists have more children than atheists. [/quote]

No, this is not a "problem" for atheists, except insofar as it falsifies the theory that many atheists seem to hew to, which is that rationality will win the evolutionary race simply because it is rational. Believing in false things clearly offers reproductive advantages in some situations.

This is the reason that in order to believe that one *should* reject false ideas one does need to add an axiom. My candidate is to put the interests of memes ahead of the interests of genes.

> Why should I reject Christianity?

Because it is predicated on dualism and the existence of an afterlife, and the evidence is overwhelmingly against both of these.

wrf3 said...

Ron asked: BTW, @wrf3, serious question: does God have free will?

I don't mean to sound like Bill Clinton, because a serious question deserves a serious answer. But I have to preface my answer with "it depends on what the definition of free will is." I'm not being facetious, there are at least 4 or 5 different definitions of "free will", and I may even be off on my count. For example, in my post with the timestamp of 6:00 PM, I remarked: "As long as your definition of "free will" applies to a sufficient sophisticated human-level AI, then I have no problem with your statement." Never heard back with you agreed with that or not.

Given all this, according to "my" definition of "free will", God is the only being with free will. Earlier, I said that man does not have free will, because our thoughts are controlled by the laws of physics -- and we don't ultimately control the laws of physics.

God, being self-existent, is the only thing that controls Himself. There is nothing "outside" of God that runs His thoughts, like there is something outside of us that is the substrate for our thoughts.

Ron said...

> God is the only being with free will

Good enough.

FWIW, even though I vehemently disagree with you on just about everything, I do respect your intellectual honesty and your willingness to accept the less savory but logically necessary consequences of your assumptions. That's a rare and commendable quality.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: But my understanding is that you (and Publius and wrf3) are claiming that it's not mythology, that the epistemological status of the Bible is materially different from, say, the Iliad, that the stories are actually *true*, that Jesus really did rise from the dead, that this act did actually redeem our sins, that it is incumbent on me to *believe* that this is true in order to avail myself of this redemption and avoid the fiery furnace.

What's not mythology? Every single story in the Bible? Hardly. To pick an easier example, the book of Job is likely a drama. Job is a character in a play. For a more controversial example, the creation account in Genesis is a monotheistic monergistic spin on the polytheistic syncretistic Egyptian creation stories.

The "fiery furnace" is based on the valley of Hinnom (Gehenna) which is associated with various images. It is the place where parents would go to burn their children as a sacrifice to Moloch (throwing away their future, as it were). It is also the place where bodies were dumped when Jerusalem was besieged.

If you like, you can think of it as the place where the Chef throws out an ill-prepared meal, even though the meal has other ideas.

Perhaps it's because the meal has other ideas. Why a dinner thinks it can disagree with the one who cooked it seems to me proof that a part of our moral intuition is wrong.

YMMV.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: That's a rare and commendable quality.

Thank you.

Don Geddis said...

wrf3: On your blog, you say that different brains (wired differently), interpret the same evidence differently. Fair enough. And then you ask the very insightful question: "which arrangement of atoms is better?"

Unfortunately (as Ron notes), you erroneously conclude that the answer "must" be the brain wiring that "results in reproductive advantage". That's actually irrelevant.

What atheists instead do, is use reasoning processes that lead one closer to truth. Truth-seeking does not necessarily result in any other quality, such as happiness, or reproductive fitness. It only results in getting closer to truth. ("Why bother seeking truth, then?" you may ask ... but that's a very different question.)

We have lots of evidence, that human brains are really good at deceiving themselves, and leading to strong beliefs which do not correspond to reality. To some extent, this is what the whole enterprise of science is about. It's about identifying ways that we have learned that people can easily fool themselves, and then requiring processes that help mitigate that danger.

How do we avoid the placebo effect? Why do we insist on, not just "blind" studies, but actually "double-blind" studies? What goes wrong if you only use the weaker restriction of blind studies?

So, you're right, in one way. It isn't (necessarily) that we're looking at different evidence. It's instead that: given the evidence we all have access to, some of us reason with that evidence using processes that (long, hard experience has shown) lead us closer to the truth (of the reality of this universe). Others process the same evidence, using processes which lead to different (non-truth) results.

Yes, different brains are wired to interpret the same evidence differently. But we are capable of judging the truth-seeking abilities of those reasoning processes as well. (E.g., by applying the same kind of reasoning processes to other, non-religious, domains, where we already know the right answers for independent reasons.)

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: Believing in false things clearly offers reproductive advantages in some situations.

Ok, even though Christianity is, IYO, false; it provides reproductive advantage over atheism. Why are atheists trying to ask us to give it up? Is not reproductive advantage what evolution is about?

My candidate is to put the interests of memes ahead of the interests of genes.

You can't have memes without genes, so putting genes first is a prerequisite for putting memes first and, since Christianity offers a reproductive advantage, it's a better meme for preserving memes. By your metric, Christianity is still better.

Because it is predicated on dualism and the existence of an afterlife, and the evidence is overwhelmingly against both of these.

Actually, it's predicated on idealism since "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ... All things were made by [the Word] and through [the Word]".

Now, if you want to argue against idealism, then be my guest. But please don't mischaracterize Christianity.

As to the existence of the afterlife, yes, you don't like the evidence. I'm not surprised. I think your evaluation of the evidence is wholly tied up with your moral incoherency that the dinner can criticize the chef. And, in case you don't follow that, you think that the evidence we do have is not the evidence we should have. And the evidence we do have is what God's Son is recorded to have said. If you're really going to make a case, you're going to have to attack the primary witness; not what you imagine the evidence would be if you happened to be in charge of things. You can't attack my imagination by substituting your imagination.

Ron said...

> Is not reproductive advantage what evolution is about?

Yes. But reproductive advantage *of what*? Reproduction in and of itself is not *my* goal. I do not feel kinship with hookworms.

> You can't have memes without genes

Not true. Memes can live in computers, and computers don't have genes.

> so putting genes first is a prerequisite for putting memes first

Nope. But the fact that genes can build habitat for memes is what gives genes their value.

> But please don't mischaracterize Christianity.

Unless you are denying that Christianity has something to do with immortal souls, I didn't.

> your moral incoherency that the dinner can criticize the chef

If the dinner is sentient I think it's entirely appropriate for it to criticize the chef. And I think most people, even most Christians, would find that a perfectly coherent position.

wrf3 said...

Ron: just a quick question. Would your "habitat for memes" be satisfied with a library, say a "Memory Alpha" equivalent, with the rest of the universe containing no life at all, or life that wasn't ever able to understand a meme?

Or do you require self-aware, self-replicating memes; or do you want memes and readers/caretakers?

Ron said...

> Would your "habitat for memes" be satisfied with a library, say a "Memory Alpha" equivalent

I'm not sure what you mean by "memory alpha", but memes require more than just storage and self-replication to be considered memes. A meme is more than just data, more even than just self-replicating data. A meme must have a "phenotype", some effect that it has on the world which causally contributes to its reproductive success. So, for example, the idea of a "computer" and a "computer network" is a meme, because that idea causes computers to be built, which in turn assist with the replication of the idea of a "computer". Not all replicating data are memes, just as not all self-replicating DNA sequences are genes. To be a gene, a DNA sequence has to code for some protein that provides a reproductive advantage to the organism that contains the gene. The mechanisms by which memes produce phenotypes are far more varied, but the same principle applies. In other words, it is not possible to separate memes from life. Memes *are* (a form of) life. That's the reason idea-ism works as a moral axiom.

Don Geddis said...

Ron: Memory Alpha was a (fictional) passive information archive, in Star Trek.

Luke said...

@Don:

> wrf3, you repeated, a number of times: "atheist axiom". That's not correct. Atheism isn't an axiom. It's a conclusion, arrived at after examining copious evidence and via thoughtful and considered reasoning. It's not an unexamined axiom taken on faith.

Naive evidentialism is a failed philosophy. "You ought only to believe that which is based on evidence." itself is not based on evidence! Furthermore, research into child psychology has shown that there are likely built-in mechanisms for structuring perception and thinking about causation, which is used to categorize. (What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories and works it references)

Furthermore, it is well-acknowledged that many observations are theory-laden. You aren't a pristine observer; you come to the evidence with ideas, and those ideas will even determine for you what counts as evidence and what does not. Thomas Kuhn made this quite clear in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as has W.V.O. Quine.

So, it is completely fair to surmise that you actually started with an axiom which guaranteed that you would be an atheist. And, I think it isn't too bad to say that such an axiom would be one in the class of "atheist axioms". In particular, you seem to have ideas about what God would do, if he existed. Since you believe he does not exist, these ideas can't have come from "the evidence".

> Not good enough. There are an infinite number of theories consistent with any amount of evidence. Consistency is merely the first step. We have far, far stronger ways of ruling out erroneous potential theories, besides mere consistency.

I'm curious: what would be required for you to be convinced that believing that Jesus truly died and was bodily raised from the dead, doesn't adversely impact one's pursuit of science, without you appealing to cognitive dissonance or some other method of compartmentalizing beliefs in a way that is 'invalid'?

I do understand applications of Ockham's razor, both the methodological one (which seems valid) and the ontological one (which seems utterly baseless). But it seems that the truth of the methodological razor lies entirely in perceived psychology, perhaps statistical psychology. If some people could do just fine in science while flagrantly violating it in certain ways, what would you conclude?

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Sure, but that's just rationalization. The fact remains, you won't do it.

Do you mean the entire pejorative use of 'rationalization', here? After all, couldn't it be possible that I do in fact have good reasons?

> Go back and re-read the post which spawned this comment thread. Note that what it's really about is what happens when you abnegate your own moral intuitions. And note that no one has actually addressed that here. We're still counting FSM states and angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Well, you're welcome to employ moral intuitions which remain stable† and say how YHWH ought to have acted differently. Furthermore, you can show how these intuitions are empirically successful in making the world suck less. My own suspicion is that many objections to the conquest narratives are founded on a fallacious view of human nature which, if acted on, is pernicious in its consequences in reality. They are along the lines of those who claim that the world would be better now, had the Allies not dropped the atomic bombs, and perhaps had they not firebombed any cities. I am seriously skeptical of such claims, having examined these matters in some depth.

Just look at how terrible the predictions were at Milgram experiment § Results, and how such beliefs about human nature may have decreased people's confidence in the trustworthy of the reports that Enlightened Germans were mass-murdering innocents. So, my counter-criticism is that you ought to re-examine your conception of human nature. Christians have some powerful things to say about the matter, as well as a lot of chaff. (Example good thing: Alistair McFadyen's Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin.)

Perhaps it would be good to re-boot this blog post and ask for more on-topicness?

† See my comment in this thread which contains "this-world-Ron".

P.S. Per WP: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?, the popular conception that this question was vigorously debated has no basis in fact.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> > > A lot of the tenor of Christian theology is very reminiscent to me of an unhealthy co-dependent or abusive relationship.

> > I would be careful to take into account the time periods in which this theology was developed

> Sure. If I'm analyzing Christian theology as mythology then I can cut it a lot of slack in that regard. But my understanding is that you (and Publius and wrf3) are claiming that it's not mythology, that the epistemological status of the Bible is materially different from, say, the Iliad, that the stories are actually *true*, that Jesus really did rise from the dead, that this act did actually redeem our sins, that it is incumbent on me to *believe* that this is true in order to avail myself of this redemption and avoid the fiery furnace.

> If these things are *actually true* then it doesn't matter when this truth was discovered. We don't judge Newton's theory of gravity by the culture in which Newton lived. No one even reads Newton any more. This is because the truth that Newton discovered transcends Newton and all of his personal failings and all of the failings of the culture in which he lived. That is one of the hallmarks of truth: its status as truth doesn't depend on social standards.

How is this a response to what I said? This is like me faulting Newton for coming up with F = ma but not GR. There's also the fact that there's a lot Newton came up with that we've discarded.

Furthermore, you're comparing statements about fairly simple physical systems to analyses of human nature. That comparison isn't quite fair. Culture profoundly impacts how human nature manifests.

> > You forgot: No guarantees that power will not destroy all your nice little efforts and erase them from existence.

> No, I didn't forget. Yes, atheism comes with responsibility. We atheists believe that accepting this responsibility is part of growing up, of becoming fully fledged moral agents.

Yes, and what I'm saying is that Christians and atheists may well do different risk/reward computations. Christians, after all, are supposed to believe that if what they do is right, it will be preserved somehow, even if the result of that choice is their own deaths (for example). What is maximally rational may be different, based on whether you are a Christian or not.

> > 1 Cor 15:58 is a powerful little verse—if believed to be true.

> Yes, indeed. But note that 1 Cor 15:58 is a marketing slogan that can be applied to *any* belief system, not just Christianity. The Christians just happened to invent it first.

By now, you know that I don't quote scripture as if it has any sort of authority to you.

> > Furthermore, it might be helpful to consider whether Syrian rebels could merely 'forgive' Assad.

> A better question is: by what moral standard should they make this decision.

I could work with that.

wrf3 said...

Ron wrote: "If the dinner is sentient I think it's entirely appropriate for it to criticize the chef. And I think most people, even most Christians, would find that a perfectly coherent position.

By "appropriate", I want to make sure that you're using it in the sense that "the moral judgement of the meal takes precedence over the moral judgement of the chef". That's what I've been arguing is wrong, not that it might be expected that the meal argue with the chef. The chef has the final say concerning quality, not the meal.

Luke: what say you? Does the moral judgement of the meal take precedence over the moral judgement of the chef? Or might there be a standard, external to the meal and the chef, to which the meal can appeal and by which the chef must abide?

wrf3 said...

Ron said: A meme must have a "phenotype", some effect that it has on the world which causally contributes to its reproductive success.

What if its reproductive success causes another meme to go extinct? Perhaps humans eliminating smallpox, or our sentient AI's causing our extinction. After all, our AI's can store all of our existing data and, not having to worry about spoilage of meat, can expand throughout the universe much more easily than we can. Our loss wouldn't make a difference. Does that fit idea-ism?

And, maybe it's because I still don't fully appreciate the nuances of your proposal, but it sure seems like I've heard it somewhere before. Something like "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth."

Ron said...

> By "appropriate", I want to make sure that you're using it in the sense that "the moral judgement of the meal takes precedence over the moral judgement of the chef".

Yes. We have a genuine disagreement here. If the meal is sentient, I think it is perfectly valid for it to object to being eaten. (I note that you avoided the question of whether you would object to someone eating your children, and if so, on what grounds.)

> What if its reproductive success causes another meme to go extinct?

Depends on what the other meme was, but all else being equal, memetic diversity is a good thing for the same reasons genetic diversity is.

> "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth."

Not everything in the Bible is wrong. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Don Geddis said...

I said: "Atheism isn't an axiom. It's a conclusion, arrived at after examining copious evidence and via thoughtful and considered reasoning."

Luke said: "Naive evidentialism is a failed philosophy." But I didn't propose naive evidentialism. I was far more specific in my original comment.

You also say: "many observations are theory-laden ... you come to the evidence with ideas ... Thomas Kuhn ... Quine" Yes, I agree with all that. But the fact that it's very hard to execute a process that leads you closer to truth, does not therefore justify using any process at all. There are lots of distractions that could lead you away from truth; the fight is still worth having, if truth is your goal.

" it is completely fair to surmise that you actually started with an axiom which guaranteed that you would be an atheist" On the contrary, my only goal was to see the world as it actually is, not as I wish it to be. The whole point of the reasoning process that I use, is that it is greatly impacted by how the universe actually is, in reality. Whatever "axioms" I may start with, they don't possibly guarantee a conclusion of atheism; they only provide a strong likelihood of getting close to the truth of how the universe works. My conclusions are greatly affected by what the universe actually does.

" In particular, you seem to have ideas about what God would do, if he existed." I don't think I've made claims that like. You may be thinking of Ron, instead.

"what would be required for you to be convinced that believing that Jesus truly died and was bodily raised from the dead" If that was the natural conclusion of a reasoning process (like science), from the observable evidence.

" If some people could do just fine in science while flagrantly violating it in certain ways" Perhaps I don't understand your question. The obvious answer seems to be "they compartmentalize beliefs", but you asked me not to give the obvious answer. I don't know what it means to ask, "what if the answer were not what it is?"

Maybe you're looking for something like this: perhaps the world could work in a way where faith works; where merely desiring something strongly causes it to happen. If two football teams are about to play a game, and both sets of fans pray very hard and sincerely, and you notice time and time again that the group of fans that is the most devout and puts the most energy into hoping and wishing, that team reliably wins the game that is eventually played. If the world reliably and consistently worked like that, then faith and hope would just be another boring part of regular old science.

Is that the kind of answer you were looking for?

Luke said...

@Don:

> But I didn't propose naive evidentialism. I was far more specific in my original comment.

Would you be willing to clarify just what it is you are espousing? The terms "evidence" and "reasoning" are terribly vague. The definitions have arguably shifted with paradigm shifts; can you detect and describe a continuity within these shifts? A Christian could appropriate these terms and decide that she has perfectly good reasons for believing that Jesus was crucified, died, and rose from the dead three days later.

> You also say: "many observations are theory-laden ... you come to the evidence with ideas ... Thomas Kuhn ... Quine" Yes, I agree with all that. But the fact that it's very hard to execute a process that leads you closer to truth, does not therefore justify using any process at all. There are lots of distractions that could lead you away from truth; the fight is still worth having, if truth is your goal.

That wasn't my point. My point was that if your observations are indeed theory-laden, then there are axioms at play which determine what you can even count as "evidence". You are absolutely not guaranteed that the theoretical grid through which you see the evidence is giving you anything other than a small, distorted perception of reality which works alright in certain narrow domains.

> On the contrary, my only goal was to see the world as it actually is, not as I wish it to be.

I would say that I'm doing the same thing. Perhaps one difference is that we humans have a terrific amount of power to change reality, and thus a huge portion of thought can be spent not in merely modeling reality as it is, but also thinking about how it could be. But you probably wouldn't disagree, there. See, I liken a lot of stuff in the NT as similar to instructions for creating negative index metamaterials which have been time-traveled back to the 1800s.

Something I find curious is that if I, through my Jesus-infused life, find ways to promote human thriving, this is generally not considered to be an advance in the realm of truth by atheists. But if scientists make progress according to their definition of 'better', it is considered an advance in the realm of truth. This, despite the fact that if "whatever helps us understand reality better" is the standard, then finding ways for scientists to treat each other and thereby do better science would pass the standard. But perhaps you would not be like the prototypical atheist of my experience.

> I don't think I've made claims that like. You may be thinking of Ron, instead.

No, but the fact that you're an atheist seems to mean that you haven't found compelling evidence that God exists. But in order to know this, you have to have an idea of what would constitute "evidence that God exists". Unless you claim that you don't even know to what 'God' would refer?

> Is that the kind of answer you were looking for?

No. Your whole premise remains that the mechanical philosophy obtains, that teleology is not ontological, which means that reality is fundamentally impersonal.

Ron said...

> teleology is not ontological

Another category error: "Ontological" is not a predicate, i.e. not a boolean-valued function. There are different "ontological categories." The quantum wave function is one ontological category. Classical reality is another. Fiction is yet another. And teleology is yet another. But there is no such thing as being "not ontological."

Ontological categories emerge one from another in a hierarchical fashion. Classical reality emerges from the quantum wave function through decoherence. Fiction and teleology emerge from classical reality via computational mechanisms like human brains.

Luke said...

@Ron:

> Another category error: "Ontological" is not a predicate, i.e. not a boolean-valued function. There are different "ontological categories." The quantum wave function is one ontological category. Classical reality is another. Fiction is yet another. And teleology is yet another. But there is no such thing as being "not ontological."

With the schema you have just advanced, can you explain the 'teleology' vs. 'teleonomy' debate? It strikes me that whether or not teleology is less fundamental than the quantum wave function (or whatever you want to put at that hierarchical level) is what is being questioned.

> Fiction and teleology emerge from classical reality via computational mechanisms like human brains.

How would you know if teleology cannot so-emerge?

Don Geddis said...

@Luke: "Evidence" and "reasoning", is using processes that have been shown to be truth-seeking in other domains, and then applying those same processes to religion. Look at the development of astronomy, from geocentric Ptolemy to heliocentric Copernicus to Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Hubble, and Einstein. Read up on metamathematics, like Asimov talking about whether it was wrong to think that the earth was flat -- or even a sphere!. Study cognitive psychology, to see all the many different biases that lead human brains to form strong beliefs, that are in directions different from the truth of reality. Eventually, understand what it means to seek a scientific explanation of something that you observe about the world.

Only then, long long after you have a confident process for seeking truth in the universe, do you dare tackle confusing, difficult questions like religion and God.

"A Christian could appropriate these terms and decide that she has perfectly good reasons" You don't get to "decide" that you have good reasons. You need to justify your reasoning process, as a process that is truth-seeking. (If you care about truth, that is.)

"a huge portion of thought can be spent not in merely modeling reality as it is, but also thinking about how it could be" Sure! Imagination is wonderful, and improving the world is great. But I don't think you're especially careful in distinguishing between "is" and "could be".

"if I, through my Jesus-infused life, find ways to promote human thriving, this is generally not considered to be an advance in the realm of truth by atheists" Truth is not necessarily happiness, or progress, or better. Truth is nothing more than a correspondence with reality. Promoting human thriving can easily be independent (or even opposite!) of truth.

I can celebrate you for your accomplishments in advancing human thriving, without getting confused that you have any connection to truth.

"Your whole premise remains that the mechanical philosophy obtains, that teleology is not ontological, which means that reality is fundamentally impersonal." It's not a premise. It's a conclusion. You and wrf3 keep confusing axioms with deductions.

Luke said...

@Don:

> @Luke: "Evidence" and "reasoning", is using processes that have been shown to be truth-seeking in other domains, and then applying those same processes to religion.

You seem in danger of entering circularity, by defining "evidence" and "reasoning" in terms of "truth-seeking", and "truth-seeking" in terms of "evidence" and "reasoning".

> Study cognitive psychology, to see all the many different biases that lead human brains to form strong beliefs, that are in directions different from the truth of reality.

The Bible speaks quite a lot to cognitive biases. There's also stuff like Grossberg 1999 The Link between Brain Learning, Attention, and Consciousness, which indicates that possibly, confirmation bias is a required aspect of consciousness and not merely a 'bias'. This is something that the doctrine of total depravity would lead one to believe: what was "very good" is now corrupted, but not irredeemably so.

> Only then, long long after you have a confident process for seeking truth in the universe, do you dare tackle confusing, difficult questions like religion and God.

I'm sorry, but I reject scientism, on the basis that it is self-defeating. Science cannot say that science is the best route to the truth. That is circular reasoning. But the instant you use something not-science as your guiding axiom, and then criticize religious folks for also using not-science as a guiding axiom, issues of special-pleading arise.

> You don't get to "decide" that you have good reasons. You need to justify your reasoning process, as a process that is truth-seeking. (If you care about truth, that is.)

Did you decide or discover this? On what basis? I claim that a continual process of asking these questions, like a child repeatedly asking "Why?", will lead to a decision, not a discovery, which powerfully guides what you believe and how you navigate reality.

> But I don't think you're especially careful in distinguishing between "is" and "could be".

What have I said, precisely, which indicates this?

> Truth is nothing more than a correspondence with reality.

Are you aware of the problems with The Correspondence Theory of Truth?

> Promoting human thriving can easily be independent (or even opposite!) of truth.

Of course it can: bad models can lead to good science, too. But surely you're attempting to assert some kind of actual asymmetry, one which cannot be explored with the mere use of words like 'can'?

> I can celebrate you for your accomplishments in advancing human thriving, without getting confused that you have any connection to truth.

Wait a second, so increased knowledge of human nature (which I would think would generally be important for advancing human thriving) does not constitute "have any connection to truth"? Again, I agree that delusions can work, for a time, in science and human thiving.

> It's not a premise. It's a conclusion. You and wrf3 keep confusing axioms with deductions.
How would you know if teleology were actually as fundamental as the quantum wave function? If you are actually making deductions, you will be able to tell me how they could be falsified.

Don Geddis said...

@Luke: "You seem in danger of entering circularity"

Not circular. There are plenty of historical examples, where the final "truth" is no longer controversial. And then we can look back into the past, see what evidence and reasoning people had at the time -- when the final outcome was still in doubt -- and compare which processes were leading those people either closer to or farther away from what we now know to be the eventual truth. Examples like astronomy vs. astrology, or chemistry vs. alchemy. We see what's in common, for those people using reasoning processes that, given the evidence they had available to them, headed them in the direction of what we now know to be truth. (And similarly, we can find many commonalities among the bad reasoning processes used by people who were led away from the eventual truth.)

"criticize religious folks for also using not-science as a guiding axiom"

I'm looking to justify whatever process you are using. With science, we can point to many many historical examples, where the science reasoning process (we can all now agree) did indeed lead people at the time, closer to truth. I'm asking you to similarly justify your religious reasoning process. Show me similar examples, where again we all already agree on the final outcome, and where the religious reasoning was the key that led people at the time closer to truth.

"But surely you're attempting to assert some kind of actual asymmetry, one which cannot be explored with the mere use of words like 'can'?"

Yes, good catch, and sorry if I wasn't more clear. Given human cognitive biases, and the human need for social interaction and social status seeking, and the human ability to dominate nature, I'm not at all surprised that many concepts are highly effective in organizing human societies, while having nothing to do with the truth of the world.

Bad science models only very rarely lead to good scientific discoveries. In contrast, I expect non-truth ideas to lead to positive human thriving, on a regular basis.

"increased knowledge of human nature (which I would think would generally be important for advancing human thriving) does not constitute "have any connection to truth"?"

Science and truth-seeking can also lead to advances in human thriving. But it's the opposite direction you were asking about: if you see advances in human thriving, does that imply the advance was because of a truth? Not so much. Might be, might not be.

It's a Venn diagram where all the parts have large areas: some truth leads to positive human thriving; some truth leads to negative non-thriving. Some new thriving is caused by new truth; some new thriving is caused by new non-truth. (But very very little scientific advance is caused by bad scientific models.)

Don Geddis said...

"How would you know if teleology were actually as fundamental as the quantum wave function?"

If there were regular appearances of complex parts with purpose, that had no possible intermediate steps. It's one thing to view purpose as an epiphenomenum, the way weather has "tornadoes", but it all has a reductive explanation in molecular gas theory. But for teleology to be "fundamental", then "purpose" would need to be sufficient to cause existence by itself. If a giraffe "needed" a long neck, it would suddenly get one, solely because of the need. We would see entities and parts all the time, where no amount of detailed investigation would find any better explanation for their existence, than "this exists because there is a purpose to having it."

In the design of living things, evolution is highly constrained to only build up complex entities via intermediate parts that also have immediate value to the organism. (This is why "the eye" was proposed by creationists, as a possible structure that -- they wrongly hoped -- "couldn't evolve".)

What would it look like, if teleology were fundamental? Take a look at any of the millions of fantasy stories, where magic is "real". Magic is a world where things come into real existence, based on need or desire. With no possible reductive causal explanation apart from that need or desire. It's a fundamental part of the only possible explanation of why those things exist (in that world).

But of course that is fiction. Not truth, in the actual universe in which we happen to live.

Publius said...

> 5. They don't want to be saved and refuse it.

@Ron
The cause is irrelevant. If my refusal can trump God's ability, then this is the same as #1.

I really don't understand this argument at all - that this someone turmps God's will. In this model, God is the creator of all that is seen and unseen - and made all the rules.
Yet if you choose Hell, or reject God, somehow your will has trumped God's? Isn't it God who gave you the ability to choose and wants you to make a choice? To actually thwart God's will, you would have to either 1) find a way not to make a choice, or 2) escape to another creation.

> 7. It is more merciful to send the unsaved to Hell

@Ron
That's a logical possibility, but it seems improbable to me based on the Biblical descriptions of hell ("fiery furnace", "wailing and gnashing of teeth"). It certainly sounds like an unpleasant place to me. Jonathan Edwards certainly thought so.

Related to #6, some people reject and hate God, and this rejection would persist even when in front of the Pearly Gates. Even if God offered unmerited entry, some people would refuse it.

Although there will be no Pearly Gates discussions.

Danston said...

Just wanted to jump back a bit to Ron's numbered list

1. God can't save them
2. God won't save them
3. They can't be saved, i.e. God created a universe where it is not possible to save them
4. They can be saved, and God can save them, and God would save them, but he's unaware of their existence


Numbers 3 and 4 might leave a loophole. Three should probably be "They can't be saved [by God]. i.e. God created a universe where it is not possible [for Him] to save them."

I am not sure this changes much but I think it is a hole that wrf3 and Luke have been hinting at.

Luke said...

@Don:

> There are plenty of historical examples, where the final "truth" is no longer controversial.

Could you give a few really good exemplars? A bad exemplar would be that atoms are indivisible. Another bad exemplar would be that philosophical atomism is the best available picture of reality. (See the whole positivist program with its reductionism.) I'm sure there are some good exemplars, as well. I'm just wondering what is the quality of this "truth" which has survived the various paradigm shifts and whatnot. One candidate is Structural Realism, which is kind of a strange beast.

Here's a particularly bad exemplar:

>>     In order to properly understand the nature of this argument, let us first derive from what has been recalled above the obvious lesson that (as already repeatedly noted) quantum mechanics is an essentially predictive, rather than descriptive, theory. What, in it, is truly robust is in no way its ontology, which, on the contrary, is either shaky or nonexistent. (On Physics and Philosophy, 148)

You would expect physics to be zeroing in on some sort of ontology, and yet the result is to say that the only things we are actually warranted in thinking are real are merely the sense-experience impressions. This instrumentalism/​antirealism is quite disappointing to many.

> I'm looking to justify whatever process you are using.

That depends on your success criterion, something I recently discussed with Ron. We can surely agree on technique or instrumental reason, but who says that nature does not also exhibit teleology? (Your criteria for what would show teleology seem unreasonable, especially after reading 1/3 of Gregory W. Dawes' Theism and Explanation.)

> Bad science models only very rarely lead to good scientific discoveries.

Why do you believe this? I'm somewhat aware of mistakes and bad ideas leading to good ideas, but I don't know of any good study which examines this phenomenon in a scholarly matter. Your use of "bad" in "bad science models" is also suspicious: what precisely do you mean by that? If what is "bad" is relative to a given person's telos, that may weaken your argument considerably.

> Science and truth-seeking can also lead to advances in human thriving. But it's the opposite direction you were asking about: if you see advances in human thriving, does that imply the advance was because of a truth? Not so much. Might be, might not be.

I am very curious in this asymmetry. Why do you appear to believe it so strongly? What are your data? How were you exposed to these data? (How can you know your exposure to the data isn't highly parochial and thereby not in any way guaranteed to be representative?)

Don Geddis said...

I said: "There are plenty of historical examples, where the final "truth" is no longer controversial."

Luke asked: "Could you give a few really good exemplars?"

You're searching much too deep. I'm talking about the most simple, obvious things (today). Like: why is there a drought, and our village is starving? Is it because we weren't pious enough? We need to pray harder? Perhaps cutting out the heart of a live virgin girl will appease God with our caring and sacrifice, and then we will get rain.

Or: humans are the most important creation, therefore we would be placed at the center of the universe, therefore we must have a geocentric view of the solar system.

Or: I wonder how old the Earth is. Surely at least many generations. Perhaps hundreds of years. Maybe thousands of years. Let's carefully study this book, which offers God's word about the origin of the world, and try to deduce from the clues there, how long the earth has existed. After many hours of careful study, it's hard to be 100% sure, but there's reasonable consensus around an age of a few thousand years, perhaps about 6000 years. That seems like a reasonably strong conclusion from the evidence and reasoning process that we used.

Or: why are we [ISIS] quickly conquering vast stretches of the middle east? Because God favors us and our cause, and our military victories are the embodiment of ancient prophecy. We already know how the future of the war will unfold, because it predicts the sequence of events in this book.

All of those are very convincing arguments that caused many people (in the past) to have very very strong beliefs. Those beliefs are now known to be very wrong. But it's not just that "we learned more later", the way science also evolves. It's that the reasoning process used to come to conclusions in the first place, is not one that leads to correspondence with external reality. We should strive to learn from these errors, and if we were to find ourselves in a similar situation in the future, with similar kinds of evidence as those ancient people had then, we can hope to do better now, and not reach the same erroneous conclusions that they reached.

Don Geddis said...

I said: "if you see advances in human thriving, does that imply the advance was because of a truth? Not so much."

Luke asked: "Why do you appear to believe it so strongly? What are your data?"

I would offer:
(1) cognitive psychology, from which we learn all the very many ways that people naturally form strong beliefs in ways different than truth; plus
(2) political science, where we see how human societies are successfully shaped by forces only loosely related to truth

ISIS, again, is extremely pleased with their tremendous success at achieving astonishing growth in power in a short time. They believe they have taken millions of humans from a state of sin, to being closer to God, in a few short years (thus "advancing human thriving"). They are wrong about why they have succeeded (it is not God interfering in human affairs on their behalf).

But they are right about this much: their passionate faith in their ideals is a major part of the reason why they have reached so much success.

Oh, and perhaps you would enjoy an opposite case. It used to be common understanding that humans had immortal souls, and that death was merely a transition from one kind of life, to an afterlife. This is a happy, comforting thought for an old person in their last days, contemplating the horror of mortality on their deathbed. Now comes the confident atheist, to tell them: sorry, the truth is that it's just ashes to ashes, with no greater meaning, no afterlife. Sorry. You dying in the next few days is a terrible tragedy, with no redeeming features, that we would stop if we could -- but we don't yet have the medical knowledge to do so. Unlucky that you lived a few centuries too early.

In this scenario, "truth" leads to a decline in human thriving. There was a happy mind there, for a few days, and (if convinced by the atheist) it may become an unhappy mind instead. Needless suffering, all caused by truth.

Ignorance is bliss. Illusions can make many people very very happy. There is no necessary connection between truth, and happiness. ("Religion is the opiate of the masses.")

Luke said...

@Don:

> Or: humans are the most important creation, therefore we would be placed at the center of the universe, therefore we must have a geocentric view of the solar system.

Have you investigated this? I recall reading some article whereby the center of the universe was long considered its butt-hole, and only around the time of the Protestant Reformation did we start seeing the kind of reasoning you suggest. If we can admit that some of science is political while some is real science, surely we can do the same with Christian theology?

> Or: I wonder how old the Earth is. Surely at least many generations. Perhaps hundreds of years. Maybe thousands of years. Let's carefully study this book, which offers God's word about the origin of the world, and try to deduce from the clues there, how long the earth has existed. After many hours of careful study, it's hard to be 100% sure, but there's reasonable consensus around an age of a few thousand years, perhaps about 6000 years. That seems like a reasonably strong conclusion from the evidence and reasoning process that we used.

Are you aware of the actual diversity of thought on this, and the weight put behind each? From what I recall, for a long time people have critiqued Bishop Usher's dating. I've heard that the Jews debated Genesis' "day", perhaps even before the birth of Christ.

> But it's not just that "we learned more later", the way science also evolves. It's that the reasoning process used to come to conclusions in the first place, is not one that leads to correspondence with external reality.

Arguably†, Judaism and Christianity gave important pushes in the realm of egalitarianism and individual rights, to name two areas. Suppose this is the case. Were they engaged in increasing "correspondence with external reality"? (Again, I will note that The Correspondence Theory of Truth has issues; see for example Michael Lynch's What ever happened to the correspondence theory of truth?) Is "external reality" imbued with value, or void of it?

As I've said to Ron, what your success criterion is really matters.

† See Joshua A. Berman's Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought and Nicholas Wolterstorff's Justice: Rights and Wrongs. This is an active area of my lay-research.

Luke said...

@Don:

> There is no necessary connection between truth, and happiness.

I've heard claims like this many times before, but it strikes me: shouldn't ever-better knowledge of human nature contribute to ever-better happiness? Your use of 'necessary' obscures the issue, because the same word can be used elsewhere.

I can also respond with philosophy of science: the empirical success of scientific hypotheses and theories does not necessarily establish their truth. What the empirical success of hypotheses and theories establishes is that they are empirically adequate. See Bas van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism: "Science aims to give us theories which are empirically adequate; and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it is empirically adequate."

Science can go down bad rabbit trails just like religion can. One benefit that the hard sciences have is that the predict-test-examine loop generally has nice, short timescales. In contrast, causes in real, complex, dirty human life can take centuries to fully manifest. A great example is the Cartesian anxiety, which ultimately gave birth to postmodernism, but only centuries after Descartes claimed to have done what he most definitely did not do. It took that long to convince very many people that the "Quest for Certainty"† is facile. A great examination of the fallout of said Quest can be found in Wayne C. Booth's Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, where he examines how people aren't even able to talk to each other, because of belief in the fact/value dichotomy (a dichotomy which doesn't exist).

If you want to see a bad rabbit trail in the human sciences, read the preface to Donald E. Polkinghorne's Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Or look at Douglas and Ney's Missing Persons: A Critique of the Personhood in the Social Sciences. Or see Steven Ney's Resolving Messy Policy Problems: Handling Conflict in Environmental, Transport, Health and Ageing Policy:

>>     This book sets out to understand how policy-makers deal with messy or wicked policy problems. It does so by looking closely at the value-driven conflict messy policy problems generate. Somewhat against the grain of received wisdom, the following chapters argue that conflict about messy issues is not a distracting nuisance to rational policy-making. On the contrary, this book suggests that value-driven conflict is not only inevitable but also a crucial resource for dealing with messy policy challenges. (5)

Therefore, I'm not really convinced that you've found anything other than a necessary asymmetry, due to the complexity and time-scale difference between the hard sciences and that which the human sciences barely touch on (that is: the full complexity of human life, instead of highly controlled situations).

† see Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

Don Geddis said...

@Luke: "only around the time of the Protestant Reformation did we start seeing the kind of reasoning you suggest. ... surely we can do the same with Christian theology?"

I do note that Ptolemy's geocentric model had no connection with Christianity. But yes, for more than a millennium it was the only game in town. So you only need to compare and justify it, once you get a (heliocentric) alternative. The point is, that we need to fully appreciate that the arguments (eventually) made in support of the geocentric model, were bad arguments. We should recognize those errors, and try not to make them again in the future. (What was the nature of those bad arguments, and how might we recognize analogous ones today?)

"Are you aware of the actual diversity of thought on [old earth], and the weight put behind each? From what I recall, for a long time people have critiqued Bishop Usher's dating. I've heard that the Jews debated Genesis' "day", perhaps even before the birth of Christ."

Again, I'm not interested in the right answer. I'm interested in evaluating the reasoning process. They were using a procedure of carefully debating the meaning of specific words and phrases in the Old Testament, and attempting to conclude from that text how old the actual earth was.

The question is: does careful examination of the text ever lead you anywhere near the current answer of about four and half billion years? The "text process" led to plausible and compelling arguments for a date of around 6000 years. For sure, you can debate the text, and come up with other numbers.

The question is, is the process of "critically examine the text", one that leads you closer to an real understanding of the actual age of the earth?

How does it compare to a process of "go outside and start collecting rocks, write down careful observations of what specific details you observe in the layers of newly exposed hillsides, compare fossils in similar layers on continental coasts separated by a wide ocean, etc"?

I would argue that this is strong evidence that the chosen process ("examine the text") did not lead to truth in the past. Whereas, the scientific process provides ever greater evidence that it does lead to truth, over time.

"egalitarianism and individual rights"

Moral questions are very different. I'm just talking about answering questions of the form "how does the world, in fact, work?", not (at the moment) questions like "how should we choose to organize our human societies?"

But when you say "God exists!" or "souls have an eternal afterlife", then you're asking questions of the first form, not the second.

Luke said...

@Don:

> The question is, is the process of "critically examine the text", one that leads you closer to an real understanding of the actual age of the earth?

Well, it is my understanding that belief in Catastrophism allowed for effective categorization of evidence, a categorization which could then be used to push science forward. So it could well be that acceptance of the young earth model actually did help scientists start giving structure to the data. Then, the fact that there were actually multiple compelling interpretations of the text allowed scientists to consider that perhaps the real story is something different.

> Again, I'm not interested in the right answer. I'm interested in evaluating the reasoning process.

That's fine, but then I will challenge you to comprehend all stages of the scientific process, instead of merely the one whereby one is spending a lot of time carefully examining reality. When a scientist examines reality, he/she picks out a remarkably small sliver of it. How does he/she know which sliver to focus on? That's not a trivial problem! And yet, if you start after the point where there are guiding theories to really help unify evidence in a field, you may easily fail to recognize this absolutely crucial stage in science.

An issue I've discussed fairly extensively with Ron is hypothesis formation. It is a topic that Karl Popper famously avoided in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and yet it is extremely important! A person cannot be a successful scientist without being good enough at generating hypotheses. Here, I can introduce Deut 5 and 1 Sam 8, and suggest that it would prime one to believe more accurately than those queried before the Milgram experiment believed: Milgram experiment § Results.

The possibility this raises is that the Bible contains important information which may be considered "prescientific". It primes one to think about reality in certain ways and not others. If you think that people don't necessarily do this, I suggest you read about how children learn to parse reality. The Bible pushes a model of human nature which I see repeatedly deviated from in the human sciences, with failure after failure being the result. And you know what? We didn't need the Bible to do science (except, arguably, to believe that reality is ever-increasingly rationally comprehensible). In order to not be dicks to each other, we do seem to need some help.

> Moral questions are very different. I'm just talking about answering questions of the form "how does the world, in fact, work?", not (at the moment) questions like "how should we choose to organize our human societies?"

Again, you presume that values do not permeate reality. This is precisely what standard formulations of The Correspondence Theory of Truth let you do: deny that values are fundamental. But what if they are? Then all of a sudden, moral questions might not be so different. Perhaps: The better you understand your building materials, the more you can build. Because of the complexity of the building, things will be much messier than the nice clean lab of a physicist, or even a biologist.