[extropy-chat] Mature rationality

[Zero Powers]

Eliezer, very nicely put.  I know it takes time to put together (and
type) a well-thought-out, coherent message.  And it can be
disheartening at times to do so only to have people basically thumb
their nose and say "well I still think you're wrong, and your mother
dresses you funny."

But I just wanted to let you know I found your post thought provoking
and enlightening.

Take care
Zero

On Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:05:07 -0400, Eliezer Yudkowsky
<sentience at pobox.com> wrote:
> 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
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