[extropy-chat] Engineering Religion

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes that the Jupiter Brains should not be taught
religion, merely a method for discovering truth, and the truth will take care of
itself. then this comment: 

>If you have even a droplet of honest belief left, not just empty excuses for a
 faith you lost long ago, you will not ask me to load an AI's dice in favor of
your pet theory. 

Beg pardon? I am the theist in this discussion; and you the atheist. You are
supposed to be accusing me of blindness and credulity, having too much faith,
not having a faith I lost. Is this a misprint? 

Also the question I posed was what to teach the Jupiter Brains when they are
still young, still under construction. The assumption here is that we, the
engineers, get to decide what goes into the basic structure of the psychology,
the early parts of the education. 

If you write into their basic program, let us say, a philosophy of behaviorism,
then they should end up believing that everything they believe is due to their
programming. If, on the other hand, you write into their basic program a
philosophy that believes in free will, I suppose they will either end up
believing in free will, or not, as they chose. 

Likewise, if the Jupiter Brain Engineers download the entire history of human
religious thought, and then write into the Brains' basic program that they
should adopt a rule of evidence to dismiss this all as delusion and fraud, you
will probably get a different result than if you write into their basic program
a belief in intuition or inspiration, or a rule of evidence that places weight
on authority and tradition. God knows what would happen then.