Increasingly, the 2008 Presidential campaign is taking on the form of some sort of weird competitive theology stand-off. “My faith is stronger than yours!” “Yeah, well, my God can kick your God’s ass any day of the week! Except on Sunday, when He rests.” Not that you can really blame the candidates; when Americans put atheists just above child molesters in terms of electability, savvy politicians are happy to put their faith in the Big Guy on public display.
Which provides us with an excuse to fire up the Wayback Machine and revisit last May, which brought to us this delicious circumlocution by Karl Rove, of all people:
Karl Rove is not a believer, and he doesn’t shout it from the rooftops, but when asked, he answers quite honestly. I think the way he puts it is, “I’m not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.”
That’s courtesy of Christopher Hitchens (of all people).
The “I’m not fortunate enough” phraseology raises two questions. One is, “Is Karl Rove congenitally capable of telling the truth?” I’m guessing no. If he is not a person of faith, then he believes that people of faith are wrong. So he’s saying that he’s not fortunate enough to be wrong. Which is the sort of transcendently twisted conflation of condescension and disingenuousness that only a true political genius is able to achieve, and even then only when all the stars are properly aligned.
The other question is, “Should atheists feel regretful that God doesn’t exist?” To reformulate it in a more operational language, imagine that you are given the choice of a Red Pill and a Blue Pill. If you choose the Red Pill, you suddenly and with 100% certainty live in a world which is purely materialistic, governed by impersonal and ironclad laws of nature, in which we human beings are nothing other than complicated chemical reactions, and there is no realm outside the physical. If you choose the Blue Pill, you suddenly and with 100% certainty live in a world which shares the same gross features and known laws of physics as our world, but in which there exists an all-powerful supernatural deity who cares about us humans and is the origin of our lives and consciousness. Which do you choose?
Not only would I unhesitatingly choose the purely-materialist cosmos in which I actually believe, I would have guessed that almost all atheists would do so. But Ezra Klein provides at least one counterexample, so there you go.
On the face of it, the notion of a higher power that somehow cares about us can be attractive. (Also potentially attractive is the handing-down of rules from on high, helping one decide what actions are right or wrong — there’s something reassuring about being told what to do, rather than working out the rules of the game as you play.) It’s nice to have someone looking over you, in precisely the same way that it’s nice to have parents that care for you when you’re growing up. When it becomes unattractive, I think, is when you try to think seriously and consistently about what kind of deity could possibly be consistent with the world in which we live. One that is purportedly pretty darn powerful, but that allows all sorts of pain and suffering. One that, if the majority of scriptures are to be believed, not only “cares” about us, but is quite willing to punish us when we go wrong, despite handing down somewhat muddled instructions. One that, despite all that power, seems to be pretty darned parsimonious when it comes to actually intervening on our behalf. And one that, when it comes to giving moral guidance in the tangible form of the teaching of various religions, seems to hew suspiciously closely to the prejudices of the local tribes that wrote them down.
When taken to their logical conclusions, the consequences of a supernaturally powerful deity that judges us from on high are not really ones that I would prefer to live with. I know that some people would feel a sort of cosmic disappointment that they and their loved ones simply represent the workings-out of a few physical laws when applied to some particularly complicated chemical structures, but I don’t share the feeling. None of that prevents me from loving them just as fiercely, or caring just as much about justice or beauty in the world. I’m stuck in a universe where the rules of right and wrong and good and bad are for me to decide, on the basis of reason and evidence and consultation and negotiation with my fellow chemical reactions. I like it that way; give me the Red Pill any day.
Aggie, and et al: I wish you could take what really deserves to be called the “red pill”, and consider the argument: if a “program” doesn’t die just because the machine it first (?) ran on is gone, then your mind doesn’t have to either. If we have a multiverse (and why should such an expanse just happen to contain only the sort of “universes” that physicists like to model and that resemble this one?) there can be interesting “platonic computers” and etc. for disincarnate minds to “run” on. Look around for discussion on this Matrix like stuff, it is very hip and more plausible than you may want to believe. Finally, see the arguments I have reviewed above, that the meat making for the current incarnation isn’t so clearly “real” after all, anyway.
Neil, the laws of physics that one needs to describe the relavant processes in the brain are well known. So, our conscious experiences can be formally described in principle.
I define the qualia as the things we can experience, but we can descibe them using a formal description of te brain.
You wrote earlier:
You need to define a measure on the set of all possible formal descriptons that prefers worlds with lower complexity. Otherwise the principle of Occam’s Razor would not work.
See here for a proposal that does work
Iblis:
That is an interesting site, but still flawed by focusing on “programs” instead of the broader model-world notion of “descriptions.” Note that I don’t think this stuff works, I am trying to do a reductio on it. We can’t really frame the issue of possible universes with precision, so the argument is a matter of degree (all that is needed to show implausibility when the case is strong enough.) I am saying that the measure, the range of the possible, prefers worlds with greater inconsistency and messiness of how things work. Therefore our expectation of the sun shining later in the Sahara would be unfounded in a model world we’d be likely to be members of. We do have such expectations, so we didn’t find ourselves in a random possible description (talk of “programs” being a slick way to imply necessary orderliness that wouldn’t reliably be there.) I say we found ourselves in an “intended” world, make of it what you will.
BTW: Do you believe time is real? It, like “existence,” can’t be defined in purely logical terms. All we get when trying is a sort of “distribution” of points or descriptions, with structural differences in the world lines etc. We can’t state the qualitative essence of “duration” itself.
Your point about the brain is a common misconception. There being laws concerning the constituents does not necessitate a formal computational scheme. Note that much of what happens is not really a “law” but probability, which is only “lawful” in an informal, unreliable, bastardized sense (which few admit.) It’s not just probability concepts applied to an otherwise crisp framework anyway, since “what’s there” can’t really be properly described (all those electrons etc.) as anyone reading and appreciating quantum mechanics (collapse of the wave function, what is really moving out there) readily admits. Many good thinkers have posited that the mind is more needed to keep the universe coherent than the other way around.
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I would take the Blue (God) pill on the condition that God were actually omnipotent and omnibenevolent, and therefore the world was not partially cruel and horrific as it is now. In fact, with a “omnibenevolpotent” God, existence would be paradise, or, if that is somehow logically impossible, at least we wouldn’t have the kinds of egregious cruelty and horror that we do have, either man-made or natural.
You’d have to wonder about anyone who wouldn’t take that kind of blue pill.
What if the choice for president was between Karl Rove and Mitt Romney? I would vote for the Mormon over the atheist. Better the devil I know than the devil who claims he doesn’t even exist!
Neil, as long as the measure falls of faster than 2^(-program length) you’ll exponentially supress “messy worlds”…
I don’t buy your argument about the brain not being equivalent in principle to a program that can be run on a computer. Brain processes can be described well by classical laws of physics…
About time, I don’t think that time really exists in the sense of a pointer making the “now” real and the past and the future not real. I think that the past, this moment and the future are all equally real. The description of what is happening today can be extracted, in principle from the description of the events in the early universe.
If our universe had magically disappeared one second after the Big Bang we would still have experienced being alive 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang. This is because our mental experience can, in principle, be defined in terms of quantum fields and reformulated in terms of fields at any time in the history of the universe, using a unitary transformation.
Strong AI implies that it doesn’t matter how you generate a particular person. You could just as well replace a brain by an ants nest, if the ants perform the same tasks as the neurons, neurotransmitters etc. Therefore “today” also exists in a hidden way in “yesterday” and thus also in the early universe. To me all this suggests that the notion of a physical universe is bogus.
“Not only would I unhesitatingly choose the purely-materialist cosmos in which I actually believe, I would have guessed that almost all atheists would do so.”
Sean, knowing you, there is a high probability that you have already read it, but if you have not you are bound to enjoy it: Miguel de Unamuno wrote the book, literally, on this subject above (El Sentido Tragico de la Vida). Hopefully the English translation does justice to the original.
(Trivia: If you have seen the Oscar winning “Belle Epoque”, the priest hangs himself and is found holding a book in his hand. This is it. I guess that tells you something)
Big hug from Chicago,
Juan, I haven’t read it, but I’ll take a look. If I’m found holding a book in my hand hanging from a rope, we can blame you.
Blake Stacey wrote:
That just cracked me up… I feel much better. Give them my apologies, though, and tell them to read Wikipedia before bed instead.
Iblis,
I can’t imagine that the orderly universes would be more numerous than the disorderly ones (consider which is more numerous: orderly possible arrangements of pixels, or disorderly ones….) but in any case, please explain “…as long as the measure falls of faster than 2^(-program length) you’ll exponentially supress “messy worlds”…” Well, maybe “as long as”, but why should it be so, and could you take a minute to justify the conditional, since I am not really hip on that sort of framing of the issue.
I like this blog lots (Jill at Eye Level Pasadena mentioned it).
I’m adding you to my blog roll.
Neil,
I think that Schhmidhuber explains it in this article.
You could also reason heuristicaly like this. Clearly not all worlds can be equally likely, because there are an infinite number of possible worlds. You cannot define a correctly normalized probability distribution that is constant over an infinite set.
Suppose that the probability of a world, which in our setting is just a program or algorithm, depends only on program length. Then the probability that you will find yourself in a particular world will be the proportional to the probability of that world multiplied by the number of copies of you that exist in tat world.
For any given program P, you can consider the program P(n) which just runs P n times. Then the probability that you’ll find yourself in
P(n) is n times the intrinsic probability of
p(n). But this means that the probability of P(n) has to fall of faster than 1/n. otherwise you can’t properly normalize the probability.
Now, the program p(n) will have to have
Log(n)/Log(2) extra instructions compared to P just to program the number n into it. The n-dependence of the program size will thus be
Log(n)/Log(2)
And you see that 2^(-program length) is proportional to 1/n.
Iblis,
That’s all very interesting, but I don’t think it makes the right point about how likely a universe in which beings could develop and comment, would be orderly in the future. I don’t really care how many copies there are of “me” anyway, and that’s not even definable since the variations are graduated. It just isn’t what matters. What matters is the overall picture of “someone/s” and “how many universes” of different kinds can they end up in, even temporarily. Also, you still seem stuck on “programs” and don’t realize that the descriptions themselves are the larger field of platonic realms. The programs come up with descriptions, but why not just think of the descriptions directly … Programs are a biased and limiting concept, since you will imagine rules specifying outcomes, but really any description (configuration of distributions, characteristics, events, etc.) is a part of the platonic omniverse. That omniverse is too large for us to have any hope sans “controlling authority” of randomly ending up in a universe with a predictable continuation, no matter what “happened” in that world up to the time of asking the questions (and regardless of how you conceptualize time.)
BTW, considering the delicate timing of synapse firings and how they come together to influence another neuron to fire, not in a specific classically predictable way (or explain that it is), the brain is not like a computer. Each neuron is on an edge of maybe firing and maybe not, depending on a rough and sloppy sensitivity to the frequency of other signals arriving at about the same time. The butterfly effect and indeterminacy of electrons etc. ruins any attempt to make either individual neurons or the brain into computing machines, and aside from whether specific speculations like QM in microtubules pan out.