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For other Christians on here, or seriously religious people, how do you handle the paradox of belief? I was talking to a friend today about my recent experience joining an Orthodox Christian church, and it's just so interesting. The 'logical' part of my brain relentlessly attacks what it sees as the foolishness of religion, ritual and sacrament.
And yet, when I partake and do my best to take it seriously, I feel healed. The spiritual water that Christ talks about in the Bible slakes my thirst. It's almost impossible to conceptualize, but damn it I've tried so many different ways to heal my inner wounds throughout my life, and this one works better than anything, by far.
How do you make sense of a serious religious practice, while keeping the ability to be seriously rational?
You don't, while rationality is independent of one's axiomatic beliefs, there's no way you can reconcile epistemic hygiene with "serious" religious practise.
At best you compartmentalize and delude yourself into having belief-in-belief.
Plenty of "serious" rationalists are simulationists; is it so much of a stretch to jump from there to belief that learning about and appeasing the simulator is important?
You yourself believe AI will soon achieve apotheosis, and that simulations theoretically look no different from reality from the inside--is it not thus vastly more likely that we are inside an AI's simulation than not?
I have no strong opinion on the matter, our decision theories are insufficient to the task of giving a firm likelihood of whether we're in a simulation or not.
Barring intentional contact by whatever might be simulating us, or our discovery of a way to break out of the simulation, it's not really possible to tell if they're competent. Any errors or glitches can be trivially retconned out of existence if they cared, assuming we could even recognize them as such. It's entirely possible that we might just assume they're new aspects of physics, in case of subtle anomalies in physical laws and such.
Further, it doesn't particularly change anything, I'm at least quite confident that consciousness is substrate-independent, in the sense that it doesn't matter if you're running the algorithms on meat or silicon. A Turing Machine is a Turing Machine, be it operated by an abacus or a supercomputer. Thus, unless I have concrete information on what the parameters or aims of the Simulation are, I choose to behave largely as I would in base reality.
We have pretty much zero information on if there's a warden operating the Simulation, what their goals and desires are. Assuming they care at all about our actions and aren't just watching how things play out with no desire to intervene. That makes attempts at appeasing them utterly useless in the face of Pascal's Wager.
Now, if the creators suddenly showed up and blazed the stars with fire to spell out "Yeah dog, that Jesus dude had a point" or "Minimize the rate of increase of entropy" or "Discover a means of FTL travel for the right to exit the Sim", then after due diligence, I think that's what our civilization will focus on. I don't find religious claims to be based in remotely enough evidence to count.
Given what we currently know, sure. But if we ever become capable of simulating consciousness, I'd argue we're much more likely inside a simulation than not.
Here we definitely disagree. All sorts of rules become much softer if we're in a simulation. The likelihood that at some point matter is created, or entropy decreases, or someone travels back in time, becomes much higher. Whatever rules we learn may change at a moment's notice. Last Thursday-ism becomes not just plausible, but imo just as likely as the alternative.
On a moral level there would also be implications. Solipsism would become much more popular and plausible. Anyone who thinks morality only matters in "real life" gets a free ticket to do whatever they want.
We have virtually limitless information. The nature of reality itself, and every little detail of it, provides us with clues. Understanding reality better is understanding the warden better. Surely the nature of the simulation matters to whatever entity set it up.
I am not a simulationist, nor do I believe God is literally all-powerful (in the sense that he invented the rules of reality), but the points I've made do apply to a sufficiently powerful God. Assuming God exists, you can look at how reality is built to determine his values. You can construct hypotheses, test them against reality itself, and thus determine how accurate your own idea of God is.
I don't find the idea of God compelling or attractive. I intuitively shy away from religion in general. It seems hokey and wrong. There are so many idiotic religious people, and even intelligent religious people seem to have decision-making processes that are totally bunk. They construct towering, highly technical edifices of logic (such as the first-mover argument) that seem totally worthless. Nevertheless, my own tests of God's nature have quite consistently supported a single conclusion, so I find myself forced to accept that conclusion, at least until sufficient contradictory evidence arises.
I agree on that front, but I don't think the degree of relaxation on our expectations is of a degree that you should change your typical behavior. Like hell yeah, invest trillions into doing our best to break physics and find loopholes, but for the average person, until that happens, you should live your life with the general expectation that things will remain as they are.
I'm a moral relativist and a moral chauvinist who happens to only be beholden to my own sense of ethics, so I couldn't care less what they do at the basement level universe. I deny even the ability of a nigh omnipotent entity to dictate an objective code of ethics any more than they can square a circle or make pi equal 3 (without manipulating whether space is Euclidean or not).
Sure, I agree with that in principle, yet I notice the religious doing their best to explain away discrepancies between observed reality and the properties they ascribe to their deities when they conflict. You cannot reconcile an Omnibenevolent deity with ichthyosis vulgaris.
As far as I can tell, the universe looks indistinguishable from how it would be if it ran like clockwork without external intervention, and even if there was an intelligent creator, they're not doing anything more than initializing the starting values.
I genuinely pity you for this, with no intention of being condescending. You seem like an intelligent and sane person, so it makes it particularly perplexing to me, as opposed to someone who believes because that's what they're taught to do, rather than reasoning into it or being convinced by personal evidence.
Ask yourself what sin I've committed that the clear light of God has been denied to me, I'm not so crazy that if an angel descended from the heavens with a proof of P=NP from the heavens with the blaring of trumpets that I wouldn't significantly relax my confidence in my atheism.
Miracles seem thin on the ground now that we have omnipresent recording devices and the scientific method. Maybe they'll be deepfaked back into existence, but none have happened where I can see them.
About the only way I could be convinced otherwise is with seriously strong evidence, and even then it would have to be distinguishable from just being at the whims of a superintelligence, then again that's godlike enough that you don't need to invoke the supernatural. I am leery of doing psychedelics precisely because they occasionally make people spiritual or religious, I consider that a bug and not a feature, scrambling your neurotransmitters provides no more real insight than bombarding a stick of RAM with ionizing radiation till it segfaults to a BSOD.
Besides, I asked you what anyone with say, a practically infinite number of dollars to use for experiments, could use to convince you otherwise, and you denied that you'd be open to them even in theory. Your beliefs seem infalsifiable short of performing involuntary neurosurgery or finding a way to hack into your brain, and I don't consider that to be on the table even with my worst ideological enemies, because I'd rather they didn't do the same to me. I'd rather kill them or have them kill me, not that my antipathy to the religious extends to that extent unless they're a jihadist or the like.
It's a big world, and I prefer to live and let live, but if I find myself at the Pearly Gates I'm going to try and kick God in the nuts and damn the consequences for my immortal soul.
Sure, depending on the nature of the simulation. If it's just you being simulated then of course you become far more likely to be able to break the rules.
I agree that it doesn't make sense for an entity to be able to just define morality however it pleases. However, this doesn't necessarily imply morality is entirely subjective and up to the individual. My own view of morality is that it's like logic. We know that logic itself is inherently arbitrary and fundamentally relies upon axioms, and you can technically have a logic system which rejects all axioms but is equally "valid", but if you do so you simply will not get very far. I think it's pretty self-evident that reality itself obeys modus ponens and many of the other fundamentals of logic. In a void, any system of logic is valid, but in reality we at least understand which of the basics are actually valid and which are just worthless theory.
Similarly, I think morality in the end may have an infinite array of theoretically valid possible systems, but only one which is actually valid in reality, given axioms which reality itself presents to us. I suspect a sufficiently intelligent being could take base-level axioms of morality (maybe "suffering bad", "pleasure good", and "meaning good") and build them out using logic into a provably correct moral system. Any divergence from such a system would provably create a contradiction at some more base-level principle--for example, maybe you think lying is justified in X case, but this proves you must either value suffering or disvalue pleasure. It's still possible to do so--to accept a contradictory moral system, or reject a base axiom--but that denies base reality in the same way denying modus ponens does.
Our moral theories are much less advanced than our logical theories, so I can't offer much evidence for this belief, save that morality just doesn't feel subjective to me. There is something objectively beautiful about the movement of planets around their stars, the capacity for a single cell to grow into trillions working in harmony, and the delighted laughter of babies. An empty universe feels objectively worse than one where complex and beautiful phenomena arise. The only totally objective reasoning I can offer in support of this position is that consciousness, and experience, seem to be more than just atoms following their predefined courses, and possibly operate by different rules as well (such as the rule that "suffering bad").
We've talked about this before, but I don't think knowledge of God is particularly helpful to most people at present. The point of our current situation is to learn to be good, and while believing in God does grant some advantages towards that end (more confidence that things will turn out alright, easier to put aside worldly concerns, etc.) there are also drawbacks (easy to do good things for the reward rather than because they are the right things to do, easy to avoid bad deeds to avoid punishment rather than because they're the wrong things to do).
There's a very strong reason that religious people generally also do not claim to have seen angels, and I generally discount even the ones who do. Too much evidence before you're ready is harmful.
I realize this is possibly an insane cognitohazard. "God hides from those who aren't ready for him. No I'm not ready for him. Yes I believe in him anyways. Of course controlled randomized studies don't produce evidence for God; we're not ready for that kind of evidence, and that method of finding evidence proves it." All I can say in my own defense is:
At times when I am morally stronger, I see quite a lot more evidence of God, in ways which are quite difficult to discount as placebo or confirmation bias
The religion I follow seems very well-designed to encourage moral growth. Moral growth is important to me, so it's not like my efforts in the meantime (before I have seen sufficiently strong evidence of God's existence) are wasted. Also, this gives me a good built-in sanity check. If I ever get to a point where I'm very morally capable, but I still don't have more evidence, then that is proof to me that my beliefs were misguided if not entirely incorrect.
I simply know myself well enough to know that I don't currently want to be constrained by perfect knowledge that my belief system is true. I like playing videogames, wasting time with friends, overeating, and otherwise not living up to my own potential, even though in at least some of those cases I know that I will personally regret those actions very soon after indulging in them. These actions are only possible at all because I don't yet know for sure
If (and hopefully when) I purge these suboptimal desires, I expect to quickly gain undeniable evidence of God's existence. And one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens, so that's my last resort for uncovering the truth.
The God I believe in is essentially a superintelligence anyways. I don't think magic or divine power exist separate from the laws of physics at all--if/when we learn them they will just be more laws of physics.
Agreed on psychedelics. They seem to make people spiritual in a very... suspect way, like they've just taken a hammer to whatever part of the brain handles skepticism and then latched onto the first idea that presented itself afterwards.
If it makes you feel better, I'd answer the same if someone were trying to convince me that my beliefs were correct, and did so when it mattered. I grew up in a religious household with very little exposure to contradictory ideas and still considered my family's belief system wrong and bad despite probably thousands of hours of close, trusted people trying to convince me otherwise. It may look to you like my beliefs are unfalsifiable, but really I just don't trust anyone else to evaluate the evidence for me. Statistics are helpful (it genuinely does give me some pause that RCT's don't support my beliefs) but in the end these beliefs can only be falsified, or confirmed, by me. It helps that nobody else seems even slightly capable of evaluating the question from an objective standpoint--everyone I know is either scientifically illiterate and generally unintelligent (most people I know IRL) or accepts things I currently consider self-evidently wrong (the belief that consciousness is nothing special, or that morality is subjective).
That's enough about me though. If you want to start gathering evidence, I'd suggest explicitly creating a model of the world without God, and one with God, and living for a day as if there's maybe a 1% chance the latter is the correct model. This might mean praying with real intent for 30 seconds and then noting the results, slightly modifying your system of ethics to do something virtuous you wouldn't normally consider worthwhile, or simply making an extra effort to be consistent about your own code of ethics. I guarantee the results will be positive and worth the effort.
This won't give you, as you say, "seriously strong evidence." I don't have that level of evidence myself. What I have is a path for investigating God's existence. The actual end of the path (where I know for sure) is a long ways away, but each step so far has gotten me closer to that end and made life much better besides. Take enough steps, note enough times that each step made under the assumption God is real has both made life better and provided a tiny piece of evidence in favor of that conclusion, and remaining on the path becomes the obvious course of action.
I appreciate the thoughtful answer, and I will apologize several months late for getting prissy with you in the last debate. From my perspective, you seemed to be intentionally obtuse, but in light of further interaction it was probably not intentional or just us unable to find a productive framework for discussion.
This assumes that things like privileging hypotheses that are compact in a computational sense and better describe available evidence is sensible for the purposes of navigating reality.
They are. That still doesn't remove the inherent subjectivity about caring about it!
That should be a blazing red flag the moment you bring worth into the picture! Taboo the term and its synonyms and I guarantee you'll flounder.
The fact that we both agree this is a good belief to have doesn't make it objective, nor does my further confidence that most intelligent entities capable of achieving their goals would agree too.
In other words ubiquity of a property in the set of entities likely to exist is not the same as objectivity. Nor does plain old utility.
I can see that you understand perfectly well that that the axioms themselves are arbitrary, and it confuses me that you don't take that to the logical conclusion here.
The Socratic Method never bottoms out, any more than you can manually count till infinity.
Some axioms are clearly better than others on metrics we care about, but they themselves do not determine said metrics after all. In maths the goal is to build the most complicated yet elegant edifice you can with as few axioms as you can get away with, because if an axiom turns out to be flawed in some manner, then you've just fucked everything over.
At most you can build a perfectly consistent model of morality, while Godel carefully watches and waits to jump your ass. It doesn't make it any more objective than simply stating that you believe because you believe. Nothing can.
Feelings are really not a good idea when it comes to navigating the world. The map must look at the territory from time to time, we can't sit in a dark room and develop an accurate idea of the world outside by going off vibes alone.
I am content in knowing my moral intuitions are inherently subjective, and that doesn't stop me from promoting them to others in the hopes they agree. I'm glad that's the case, because it simply can't be otherwise as far as I can see it.
A hole shaped like God as you metaphysically postulate can no more be filled than one requiring squares to have three sides. At most you can develop neurosurgery good enough to staple it shut.
This really looks unjustified to me, clear evidence that you're presuming the results of a thought experiment or hypothetical and then reasoning backwards to justify it.
The fact that I now believe you to be arguing in good faith makes this observation several orders of magnitude more confusing, and corrosive to my "soul" in the sense that it's almost Cosmic Horror that entities so similar to me in terms of intellect and origin can have such alien views. It's little consolation that I'm the moral mutant if you look at the set of all humans to exist, even if most of them would be utterly confused by why you had to resort to such complex arguments when as far as they were concerned, religion was true in the same mundane way we believe in gravity.
What exactly changed such that we lack the privilege to watch water turn to wine or the seas part? Are angels allergic to plates of silver salt or CCDs in digital cameras? It's not just that they ceased outright after Jesus was offed, miracles have been claimed to occur right until we can verify them.
The claim that we only deserve subtle theological arguments or personal revelations seems deeply silly when your religion abounds with the opposite, and it's more like the panicked justifications of a battered housewife claiming she deserved it rather than a convincing argument as far as I'm concerned.
If I ended up in such a scenario knowing what I know of biology and wider reality, I would put more stock in the notion I was going insane.
To get me to agree, find and replace objective with subjective.
You can't deny which side has the higher base rate and even includes their existence in their model of reality.
I am agnostic on the former, and everything I've said so far is an attempt to justify the latter, in good faith, not that I think you think that I'm not arguing from it.
God has plenty of baggage that a mundane Superintelligence as we can reasonably postulate would lack. Sure, from the perspective of their playthings, it makes little difference, but the gulf between being fuck off powerful and omnipotent is as large as that between 10^87 and infinity.
I am not sure I am even capable of doing the former any more than I can, at will, convince myself there's a 1% chance I'm hallucinating the sofa I'm sitting on. I think @FCfromSSC claims to be able to do things along those lines, but it's a power I lack.
I do a decent job of aligning to my own personal code of ethics, or at least there's nothing obvious I could do right now that I am not already trying to do, being bottlenecked more by my own ADHD and akrasia!
This is a fundamentally unsound approach in the same manner as convincing yourself you have an invisible bodyguard is. Sure, you might save time on your walk home by happily taking shortcuts through a deserted alley, and that might increase your overall QOL for a bit till you confidently refuse to hand over your wallet to a mugger.
Then you die, and don't get to find out much of anything at all because Heaven or Hell probably don't exist.
Given this all started as an argument about reconciling rationality with religion, I would claim this is an example of sacrificing epistemic rationality for instrumental rationality, it might even be a sensible tradeoff, but you pay the price eventually.
It's fine, I'm usually stuck in a superposition of 60% "my beliefs are correct" and 40% "my beliefs are utterly, hopelessly wrong" and my constant awareness of the latter possibility makes a lot of very dismissive behavior seem reasonable.
What I am trying to say is that logic is the map, and reality is the territory. The fact that logic cannot prove whether reality exists does not mean reality does not exist. If the map burns up, or omits an important detail, that won't actually affect reality. A better word choice than "worthless" would have been "inaccurate." Plenty of systems of logic are internally consistent, but only one actually describes reality.
From logic's perspective, sure, no system of logic is more valid than any other. From reality's perspective, only one system of logic is correct, and it is objectively correct.
And yes, I know this due to logic, so there's a chance I'm wrong, but causality flows from reality to logic, not the reverse.
This is why I compared morality to logic. Logic, and math, describe reality. It's not that some mathematical axioms are better than others because they lead to outcomes we prefer, it's that they are simply more accurate to reality. You could frame that as an outcome we prefer, I suppose, but that's somewhat misleading, because certain axioms would be more accurate to reality whether or not we're around to prefer them. 1+1 = 2 is primarily descriptive of the way things actually work, and what it describes remains true regardless of our preferences.
My belief is that morality works the same way. Suffering exists independent of our theories and beliefs about it. Thus, it's conceivable that morality exists too, as a descriptive and prescriptive map based on reality. Just like 1+1 = 2 in reality even if you choose axioms which state otherwise, suffering is objectively bad no matter your axioms.
An important caveat is that even if morality does objectively exist, and only a single moral system is objectively consistent (which is my assertion) that doesn't really fix the is/ought problem or obligate someone to value good above evil. So I'm not trying to say it's possible to prove that suffering is wrong, but I do think it's possible to collect all sorts of axioms like that into one objectively correct (i.e. accurate to reality and consistent) system and prove that rejecting one axiom means rejecting the whole system and morality in general.
That's fair. I don't want to start another tangent here; this discussion is already broad enough, but I have interacted with many people who believe in religion the same way you believe in gravity. They were generally uneducated, poor, extremely unintelligent people. I had a very hard time communicating even simple if-then statements with them. They take both religion and gravity on faith and I think that's much safer than asking them to apply skepticism to things their society says is true, haha.
Well, again, the theory I've expounded would pretty directly imply that angels are allergic to cameras, yeah. At least until they decide otherwise. If they visit someone then it's usually meant to be a visit just for that one person.
My own religion has always heavily emphasized personal revelation. This isn't exactly a new idea to Christianity though, it's contained in the Bible! Matthew 13:58 says that Jesus declined to perform many miracles in his homeland due to people's unbelief there. If miracles would have benefitted those people then Jesus would have performed them.
I don't think you would. The evidence I have in mind is generally along the lines of "I prayed for X and immediately got it, in a way highly unlikely to be coincidence." In the past I've gone so far as to list everything prayed for, things desired but not prayed for, expected probability of receiving each of those things, and expected time of arrival, then statistically analyzing the results. I didn't randomize which things were prayed for. I probably should have, but I got such strong results that continuing to test it felt ungrateful.
I only did that 2-3 times, but that meant that I had those times as frames of reference, which is how I know that when I'm more morally upright my prayers are way stronger.
I think many would see such behavior as insanity but not of the clinical sort, more of the "excessively neurotic" sort, which I think is appropriate given the nature of the question being investigated.
Sure, in fact I'd say that latter fact is the only one that matters. Of course if you believe strongly in something, you'll have more dreams (or "visions" which is what most angelic sightings are) about that thing, and attach more significance to them. You could describe that as a hallucination but I think it's more complex than that; healthy cognition involves some amount of seeing what you expect to see, because that's just how the brain works.
To be clear the idea wouldn't be to believe there's a 1% chance, but rather to act how you think you might if that were your belief, i.e. pretend there's a 1% chance. If you don't want to, that's fine, but I think everyone is capable of pretense; it's the only way to survive many social situations.
If I had reason to believe I had an invisible bodyguard, i would try and investigate, rather than being satisfied that there's a small chance of an invisible bodyguard following me around. Maybe I'd buy an infrared camera, or fly somewhere and watch for empty seats. The belief would merit further investigation. At some point, if I've seen him on the infrared, maybe I would take my chances in a mugging, but it would take a lot of evidence before then to convince me that that was the right course of action.
I think God's existence is worth investigating. If you think the chance he exists is small, then of course you shouldn't quit your job, sell your house, and donate everything to the church, but I think it does merit a small test, such as a randomized test of the efficacy of personal prayer, if only for curiosity's sake. Then if that result turns out positive, of course it doesn't mean much, but it does mean you should try a bigger and more powerful test. Once enough of these tests turn out positive, it's probably time to start taking the possibility a little more seriously, study it more, maybe find better testing methods than RCPs. This is the path I am describing.
My investigation has yielded evidence and also improved my life. You could describe this as instrumental rationality. I'm sure I'd be less excited to continue investigating if the evidence collection process did not also improve my life. Still, it's not "believe X because belief in X is beneficial." It's more, "I should be spending years investigating the truth of this anyways, because it's that important, but I'm just not that patient or determined. Thankfully I get paid for the investigation, which makes it much easier to keep going." I would never trade epistemic for instrumental rationality (at least at any reasonable exchange rate) but having both is best.
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