[extropy-chat] Mature rationality

[Eliezer Yudkowsky]

Mike Lorrey wrote:
> Those who convince themselves that religion and the religious are
> purely or to a person irrational are themselves reaching irrational and
> unsupported conclusions. Your atheism is as much an irrational religion
> as the faith you left.
> 
> There are plenty of people who are completely rational in their daily
> lives, yet are religious about that which is unexplained and
> unexplainable. That you never were able to make the leap to that level
> of mature spirituality is not the problem of those who were able to do
> so.

Anyone who wishes to make a serious commitment to rationality, to learn it 
as an art the way that judo or fencing is an art, must commit to being 
rational all the time, every time, twenty four hours a day seven days a 
week, with not a single area of life reserved for relaxing with some 
comfortable nonsense, not one place left where that darned inconvenient 
rationality business can't stomp all over the things you want to believe.

Once upon a time the stars were mysteries, life was mysterious, matter was 
mysterious, unexplained and unexplainable.  But, once again, a blank spot 
on the map is not a blank spot on the territory.  There are mysterious 
questions, never mysterious answers.  People have no sense of history, no 
sense of how reasonable past errors seemed *at the time*.  If only I had 
*personally* postulated astrological mysteries and discovered Newtonian 
gravitation, *personally* postulated alchemical mysteries and discovered 
chemistry, *personally* postulated vitalistic mysteries and discovered 
biology.  I would have invented a mysterious explanation for consciousness 
and thought to myself, "No way am I falling for that again."  People don't 
assign history the same weight as personal experience, even if the universe 
repeats the lesson over and over and over.

There are human stories told around a campfire, full of mighty heroes and 
passionate gods and comforting resolutions; and there are the stories the 
universe whispers to itself, strange dreams of physics equations, an 
unbelievable style of storytelling in which things are explained by maths 
instead of morals.  It seems to me that the human style of storytelling - 
you know, the one that just plain doesn't work - is what people call 
"religious" or "spiritual".  It takes a mature rationalist indeed to live 
in the universe the Way it really is, one coherent unified mathematical 
process with not a single shred of human-style storytelling 
("spirituality") in it.  It may seem harsh - ungracious - for rationalists 
to demand so complete a triumph, to leave not a single shred of consolation 
for spiritualists; but the truth is not a compromise between political 
factions.  This is the way the universe has always been.  The rationalists 
did not invent this answer, only prove themselves mature enough to accept it.

Bayes' Theorem plus a Kolmogorov distribution over prior probabilities is 
complete.  It assigns a probability to everything.  The probability it 
assigns to complex unsupported hypotheses is extremely low.  And this 
coincides with humanity's experience, that when you have a blank area on 
the map you cannot just draw in whatever you like and magically get it 
right, even if, at the time, no one can "prove" you wrong.  No one can 
"prove" you won't win the lottery, in the sense of presenting contradictory 
evidence, but the prior probability assigned by probability theory is 
infinitesimal.  Probability theory is vastly more powerful than people 
clutching their imaginary maps would like to believe, and if you are the 
tiniest bit more confident in an unsupported complex hypthesis than the 
infinitesimal token probability the math calls for, you have departed the 
way of rationality.

Religion and the religious are irrational, in the sense that they assign 
higher confidence to certain propositions than probability theory calls 
for.  Ignorance of the math is, in some ways, an excuse - it means that at 
least some spiritual people have not knowingly turned against the truth, 
they honestly believe that it's okay to draw in whatever they like on blank 
areas of the map.  But that doesn't change the math, and so they're still 
irrational.

There is no God.  Thank you for asking.  Now get on with your lives, 
knowing that you alone are in charge.

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