[extropy-chat] Re: Re: John Wright Finds God

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

With no trace of irony, Mme. Yudkowsky writes
>Samantha, you are an inspiration to rationalists.

The argument that, since there are by definition no supernatural events, ergo
all reports of supernatural events must be false, is circular. Real skeptics do
not take conclusions as articles of faith.   

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't." said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the
stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of
mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" 


--- Original Message ---
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience at pobox.com>
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
CC: john-c-wright at sff.net
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 22:38:21 -0600
Subject: Re: John Wright Finds God

> 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