[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Samantha Atkins wrote:
> 
> Is it "overwhelming evidence" or overwhelming Experience of Meaning, 
> Love, Truth, Power, Knowing?    Why this over-the-top Experience but 
> without filling in the thought and reason and questions fully?   Why 
> this occasional perfect spiritual storm but not solid understanding?  
> Why would the Divine arrange things like this?   Why have the purported 
> Truth go gamboling among us to occasionally knock one of us who seek it 
> or not flat on our ass?    Why not share this awesome truth of the 
> way-it-really-is across the spectrum with all human beings?   Why this 
> capricious hide-and-seek and cosmic peek-a-boo?
> 
> This looks deeply suspicious to me.   And yet please understand that I 
> to this day feel like a lout to say so after the Depth of what I have 
> experienced.

Samantha, you are an inspiration to rationalists.

I considered John Wright's dilemma, not quite in the form he posed.  I 
asked myself:  "If I was overpowered by religious ecstasy, would my 
rationality survive?  Am I that strong?"  I've previously considered 
this question, in the form of wondering whether any conceivable 
discipline could enable a trained rationalist to defeat schizophrenia. 
Religious ecstasy is a lesser test.

If my future self had an overpowering religious experience, one obvious 
reaction of my future self might be, "Hm, I must be having a temporal 
lobe mini-seizure."  But that feels to me like cheating; what if I 
hadn't studied neurology?  I thought of arguments that my hypothetical 
slightly more ignorant future self might consider:

"When I was an atheist, I knew that people had deep religious 
experiences, but I did not think it likely that the experience reflected 
reality as the retina reports a flower.  Now that I have had such an 
experience myself, my best estimate of the underlying cause should not 
change.  I was content to be an atheist when I knew that other people 
had religious brainstorms; should this change if one of the 'other 
people' is myself?  For they and I are both humans; the causal analysis 
is the same in either case."

"Far down the tale of science goes; from quarks to atoms to molecules, 
from molecules to proteins to cells to humans, physics and evolution and 
intelligence, all a single coherent story.  To the best of all human 
knowledge, since the beginning of time, not one unusual thing has ever 
happened.  A thousand generations have learned to their astonishment and 
dismay that there are mysterious questions, but never mysterious 
answers; that the universe runs on math, not heroic mythology.  The 
science that I know is too solid, the laws of rationality too strict, 
the lessons driven home too many times, to be overturned so lightly."

"Let us suppose that the experience is caused by something external to a 
simple brain malfunction.  Just because an entity is capable of inducing 
an overpowering religious experience in me, does not make the entity 
morally superior.  I have seen people sell their souls for the price of 
a book.  God in the Bible kills and tortures anyone who won't worship 
Him properly, or even innocent bystanders, such as Egyptian children 
during the Ten Plagues.  If we had pictures of such a thing, occurring 
in any modern country, we would never forgive the perpetrators; we would 
hold them in less esteem than Nazi Germany.  Kindhearted rabbis read 
tales of dead Egyptian children, killed to impress their parents with 
God's might, and the rabbis somehow fail to take moral notice.  Is there 
no end to the human ability to ignore the failings of one's favored 
political leaders?  Killing children is wrong, period, end of 
discussion.  And yet all it takes to make people endorse a God that 
commits torture-murder of children, is to hand them a book.  People sell 
their moralities so cheaply.  They don't even demand that the book be 
given to them directly by God.  They sell their moralities and give over 
their sense of judgment just because someone else handed them a book and 
told them God wrote it.  Even if God speaks to me directly, I should 
demand *reasons* before handing over my moral judgment.  I have studied 
evolutionary biology.  I know that there are forces in the universe 
capable of producing complex plans and designs, yet utterly nonhumane. 
If this "God" wishes me to do something, let It tell me Its reasons, and 
see if I agree.  As it stands, I have no reason whatever to believe that 
God is good.  I will not sell myself so cheaply, into bondage to who 
knows What."

And:  "Why should some people have these experiences and not others? 
Why jerk us around?  Why work blatant, showy miracles in front of desert 
nomads, for the explicit purpose of providing proof, and then 
mysteriously change policies after the introduction of skeptical 
thinking and video cameras?  If I am told all these spiritual truths, 
why not give me next week's winning lottery numbers, to help me convey 
these truths to my friends?  If I am given no solid proof because the 
experience is meant to convince me personally, then, leaving aside the 
unfairness, why not tell me ten digits of pi starting at the 1000th 
decimal place?  Why is it that not one factual assertion brought back 
from the grip of religious ecstasy has been surprising, checkable, and 
right?"

I thought of these arguments, Samantha, and yet it occurred to me that 
if I was caught in the grip of such a powerful religious experience, I 
might not *want* to think them.  And then I would be defeated without 
ever getting a chance to draw my blade.  Intelligence, to be useful, 
must be used for a purpose other than defeating itself.  I have trained 
myself to be wary of knowing my desired conclusion before I begin to 
think; explicitly emphasized the impossibility of asking a question 
without being genuinely unsure of the answer.  It ain't a real crisis of 
faith unless it could go either way, as a wise man once said.

Having a powerful religious experience isn't quite as bad as going 
schizophrenic.  The religious experience happens and then goes away and 
you can think about it rationally.  Schizophrenia is constant and 
defeats the frontal lobes of reflectivity, destroying both emotional 
balance and the ability to use reason to correct it.  But I have 
wondered whether my mental discipline and my explicit understanding of 
rationality would be powerful enough for me to win through, either the 
almost impossible test of schizophrenia, or the lesser test of religious 
ecstasy.

I now know that it is possible for a rationalist to cut through to the 
correct answer even after suffering a religious ecstasy.  For you won 
through, Samantha, traveling from a wrong belief to the correct one, and 
you even permitted (forced?) yourself to think of arguments like those 
that occurred to me - me, sitting here easily at my desk, imagining a 
hypothetical future and hoping I *wouldn't* be persuaded.

Samantha, you are an inspiration to rationalists.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence