[Original post: Why I’m Staying Out Of The Substack Religion Debate]
Ben Smith writes:
This post sure reads like participating in the object level debate, not just "writing a post about how I won't participate".
I did joke about this at the end, but I also want to defend calling this a post about how I won’t participate.
This essay presented a kind of hand-wavey heuristic for why I’m not spending lots of time examining the details of every individual argument. This is fine, everyone has to do this or be overwhelmed, but I think it’s important to keep hand-wavey heuristics for not participating in arguments, vs. actual participation in arguments, distinct. Little annoys me more than when I spend weeks carefully gathering citations and making a substantive contribution in a domain, and somebody responds with “well that’s obviously all bullshit because it vaguely reminds me of something I have negative affect towards”. It’s not necessarily wrong to deprioritize a topic because it vaguely reminds you of something that you have negative affect toward, but I would prefer these people admit they’re dismissing/ignoring it rather than claim to be engaging with it. I’m working on a longer post about this topic.
Chaotic Neutral writes:
I think Scott presents a great summary of the default skeptical position here.
But I would like to remind him that in his first Fatima article he accused me of having a trapped prior for following the exact same logic in explaining my casual dismissal of the miracle discourse. Seems a little inconsistent to me.
In any case, I think Scott and anyone who enjoyed his article would also enjoy
[Onid]excellent and relevant[essay](using Kolmogorov complexity!) to attack the idea of a “simple” infinity god.
I can see why Chaotic Neutral would think I’m being hypocritical or at least inconsistent, but let me offer a few defenses.
First, I used “trapped prior” in a specific way there, referring to Chaotic not feeling surprised by Fatima. My point was that the miracle Fatima, if we can’t explain it, provides some evidence for Catholicism (let’s say it should update us 10% towards it). We may say, after updating, that Catholicism still seems unlikely on net. If that’s true, then Fatima must be fake somehow. However, even though that should be our bottom line, we can’t go back and say “therefore, Fatima isn’t surprising at all, and shouldn’t even update us 10% of the way to Catholicism”, because that’s double-counting. The correct action imho is to continue thinking of Fatima as a weird unexplained creepy anomaly in our worldview, which we have some other reasons to think will get solved eventually. I thought there was a missing mood in some of the Fatima posts where people didn’t keep it open as a weird unexplained creepy anomaly.
(by analogy, suppose that you time travel back to meet Napoleon, and you notice that there’s a UFO hovering above his camp headquarters. You might, in the end, assume that, given the implausibility of aliens, you must have been hallucinating, or that it must have been a very weird cloud, or something like that. But you wouldn’t think “ah, nothing to see here, this doesn’t worry me in any way”. The fact that it was worrying and you genuinely didn’t know how to explain it would coexist with the fact that it didn’t fully move you towards the alien-Napoleon conspiracy theory and so you assume it must have some natural explanation.)
This doesn’t apply to this post, because I’m not using my atheism to dismiss or explain anything else, I’m just asserting it.
Second, as I said above, I was careful to claim this was a dismissal of the debate, and not a participation in the debate. I think it would be fine to say “I’m not wading into the miracles debate, because miracles are nonsense”. I think it’s worse to claim to have participated in the debate by saying that. I still get a trickle of DMs, maybe one or two per month, by people who are terrified of Fatima and want me to reassure them that it doesn’t prove they’re going to Hell (I’ve tried to help some of these people, but others are too compulsive about it, or strike me as not likely to be productive to talk to). I think that considering the people in this bin makes it easier to distinguish between a dismissal of the debate and a solution to the debate.
Finally, the charge of inconsistency would be stronger if I criticized CN but didn’t criticize myself. But I did criticize myself. In my post, I said things like:
“I admit this [argument] is dangerous. It risks degenerating into . . . the absurdity heuristic.”
“There’s an embarrassing element of respectability and defensibility in the argument above.”
“The whole thing feels a bit midwit, as if I’m saying you’re not allowed to consider this because it sort of looks like other things that give me the creeps.”
I hope this was enough self-criticism to free me of the charge of hypocrisy.
I enjoyed this, and broadly concur—but I’m a bit suspicious of the airplane argument.
On one hand, I can’t quite refute the “adding a limit is like adding an incapacity” point: it
doesseem equivalent, and equivalently illegitimate. On the other hand, I wonder if—in reat least the airplane bit, specifically—we might not be conflating two things: viz., (1) how many bits it takes tospecifysomething, vs. (2) how much effort and time etc. it takes tobuildsomething.That is, the one does not (have to) bear upon the other at all; we cannot necessarily reason from “the more-limited biplane is easier to construct than is the less-limited starship” to “the biplane must be simpler”. E.g.: “a sphere” is undoubtedly simpler than “a
smallsphere”, conceptually/semantically speaking—but that surely doesn’t require that constructing a sphere of unlimited (= unspecified?)² size will be easier than building a small one!Or, put another way:
isit a valid general principle that “an object with a simpler description ought be easier to construct than will be a like object with a more complex description”, such that “it’s harder to go ‘starship → biplane’ than the converse” is evidence for latter’s simplicity?Well, it might be
someevidence—i.e., simpler things probablyaremostly easier to make—but seems to me that so many factors beyond complexity can go into “ease of construction” that it can be, at best, onlysuggestiveof simplicity.
I agree I didn’t do a great job with this part. I was trying to avoid having to describe Kolmogorov complexity too, uh, complexly, and that made the explanation too basic to hold up to full scrutiny. Let me try again.
A starship might be simpler to describe in English than a biplane. The starship is “aircraft without limits”, and the biplane is “aircraft that can only go fly at X miles and hour, go to Y altitude, will tear apart if subjected to Z stress, etc”.
But a starship is harder to draw schematics for than a biplane. The biplane has fewer components and requires less precision; the blueprint could fit in a smaller file. Popular misinterpretations of simplicity rely on English-language description; Kolmogorov complexity is closer to schematics: it asks how long a working program that describes or simulates the object would be.
I think this passes Kveldred’s counterexample. A 3D graphics file describing a sphere of indeterminate size could be shorter than one describing a sphere of size n, because it doesn’t need to include a size parameter, and this holds even if size n is very small.
But hopefully it illuminates why I find “mind without limits” to be fake simplicity: it’s not a schematic; it’s not a file capable of simulating such a mind.
There’s a file capable of simulating a nematode mind; nematodes have only a few hundred neurons, and the file (depending on how you measure) is only a few hundred kilobytes. When you run it, the simulated nematode brain on your computer will try to do nematode things like wiggle and . . . whatever else nematodes do. Some sci-fi envisions a future where we can run emulated human brains on computers. Since human brains have billions of neurons, this would require a much larger file - gigabytes or terabytes - but if you had such a thing, you could do anything a human could do - solve math problems, write a novel - by running the program.
In the real world, the closest equivalent is AI. GPT-1, a very simple AI with few capabilities, is about 100 MB; GPT-5, a modern AI with many more capabilities, is about 10 TB. Again, these are the literal sizes of the weights; once you have this 10 TB file (plus the program to read it), you can run the AI on your computer and ask it questions.
All of this suggests that it takes kilobytes to megabytes to describe very simple minds, and gigabytes to terabytes to describe more complex minds with human-level capabilities.
But IIUC, Adelstein is claiming it takes only 19 bytes - the English language string “mind without limits” - to describe God. Or maybe even 1 byte (the number one, representing maximal everything) or 0 bytes (pure unconditioned existence). On the Kolmogorov complexity interpretation, this is false: you can’t type “mind without limits” into a Python terminal, run it, and get a perfect simulation of God who can answer all your questions for you. It’s also common-sensically false; if small weak minds are 100 MB, and powerful human-level minds are 10 TB, it’s unlikely that the most powerful and perfect mind of all is 0 - 19 bytes.
So my claim is that if you use “mind without limits” as an entity in your explanation, the penalty is however many bytes it would take to fully schematicise a mind without limits - for example, the size of the weights file of a superintelligent AI that has infinite capabilities and knows everything.
This is a known and common argument for atheism; the theist counterargument is that Kolmogorov complexity is meaningless without describing the language/interpreter of the schematic/program, and if it naturally privileges minds, then the description of mind could be very short. As an analogy, if you were using a programming language with a library for God, then the code for a simulated God that knows everything God knows could just be the one-line program “import God”. Or, as per Adelstein’s model:
> import Mind;
> limits = 0;
…and the reason this works for Mind but not aircraft is that there isn’t a library called “aircraft” which the interpreter can import.
This is why I then have Part III where I argue against computational dualism. If you could do this, you would expect our brains to try the “import Mind” trick, but they definitely don’t - they build it up laboriously, neuron by neuron. If “Mind” is an existing function in your library, this is terrible coding technique!
Imagine if I said that the universe was created by a universe-creating factory using skilled German union labor. A natural objection would be “how did that exist before the universe?” The counterobjection “I’ve decided that universe-creating factories and Germans might be infinitely simple, and you can import them with a one-line command” would sound hollow, because all the factories we know are very complex, and there’s a whole long geologic/biologic/evolutionary/civilizational history for why factories, unions, and Germans exist. This is my objection to “mind” as a one-line primitive too.
**Reginald K writes: **
Stephen Barr says (I think in Modern Physics, Ancient Faith) that there’s little anthropological evidence that gods were originally posited as explanations for natural phenomena that couldn’t otherwise be explained, and that in the last couple of millennia, where we have better evidence, it shows the opposite: Religious natural philosophers/scientists were typically inclined to first reach for natural reasons for unexplained phenomena instead of immediately claiming God did it. (Newton and mutual planetary perturbations was a notable exception.) Anyone know how much truth there is to this vs. the standard “God of the gaps” argument?
I don’t find this convincing. Reginald seems most interested in arguing that classical philosophers and medieval/Renaissance Christians didn’t do this, which fine, whatever. But the two examples I gave (the Storm God, the Sun God) were both pagan.
Trying to generalize from modern primitive people to the original condition of humankind is always fraught, but modern (and historical) primitive people seem to do this, to the point where individual animals and terrain features are regularly mythologized. Snakes often lose their legs because a god punished a primordial snake committed some infraction (in Chinese myth, the Jade Emperor punished a snake for hunting humans; in African myth, a generic Creator punished a snake for boasting about its beautiful legs too much). Australian aborigine tribes have myths about how various Dreamtime spirits created each watering hole and mountain in their ancestral territory. Just the myths about thunder and lightning could fill an entire book: in Norse myth, thunder is Thor throwing his hammer Mjolnir at giants; in Shinto myth, it’s the god Raijin playing his drums; in Finnish myth, it’s the creator Ukko making love to his wife.
Even the more “sophisticated” traditions like Greek and Jewish religion have plenty of these. The story about Persephone and the pomegranate doesn’t make sense outside a context of trying to explain the existence of seasons. Judaism’s “how the snake lost its legs” story is that God punished it for tricking Eve into eating the apple (pain during childbirth is also a punishment for Eve’s transgression). Babel explains why people have different languages. Even the story of Lot’s wife looking back at Sodom is plausibly an attempt to explain a particular pillar of salt that stands on that spot.
Given all this, I don’t find it relevant that Leibniz or whoever was good at preferring natural explanations to divine ones.
archsine writes:
What would you say is the fundamental difference between a theism with a god, and the chance that we are living in a simulation? What criteria for this argument against God existing would not also apply to the simulators existing?
Other people asked similar questions about superintelligence. Sorry, I don’t like to make fun of commenters, but to me this sounds kind of like “You don’t believe in ghosts? But ghosts are just pale white people who are dead and dress in sheets, so what’s the difference between that and believing in ancient Romans?” Yes, if you squint the results look similar, but they get there in different ways that overturn different amounts of our previous worldview!
To me the two biggest differences are:
First, neither simulation theory nor AI make any claim about dualism, mind as independent from matter, or the simplicity of mind or “perfect mind”. They posit completely normal minds, made of matter like ours, created because of some specific history. That’s totally different from claiming that Mind is a primitive of the universe and “without limits” is a predicate you can cheaply apply to it, and I think Matthew Adelstein and nearly every philosopher of religion would agree on this point.
Second**, **neither simulation theory nor AI are conspiracy-theory-like attempts to explain features of the world. “The superintelligent AI build the Pyramids” or “the simulators orchestrated the rise of Napoleon” would be powerful-hidden-entity explanations for specific otherwise-inexplicable anomalies. But the evidence for superintelligent AI (existing in the future) or simulators (existing now) doesn’t go through that kind of abductive reasoning. In the AI case, it goes through reasoning that if AI continues gaining capabilities at the current rate, we would expect it to eventually become very capable. In the simulator case, it goes through reaso…
