[extropy-chat] Re:John Wright Finds God

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

>I do have one question for you, people have been claiming supernatural
>experiences for thousands of years but not one has ever been verified; If 
>it's real why do you suppose this is the one area of knowledge that is not
>amenable to the scientific method?

The scientific method is concerned with measureable aspects of our
sense-impressions. 

--- 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