[extropy-chat] Re: Faith-based thought vs thinkers

[Dan Clemmensen]

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:

> Russell Wallace wrote:
>
>>
>> I'm not a religious man, but I believe in love and life and laughter. 
>> I believe in beauty and truth and goodness, and I believe these 
>> things are worth protecting, even though neither I nor anyone else 
>> can prove it; at some point I, like any civilized man, must resort to 
>> belief in the absence of evidence; for people who don't believe in 
>> beauty produce ugliness; people who don't believe in truth produce 
>> falsehood; and people who don't believe in good produce evil.
>
>
> http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-consequences.html
>
> You're conflating empirical propositions with moral choices, mixing up 
> probability theory and decision theory.  Perhaps you are confused 
> because English uses the same word "believe in" to indicate both your 
> hypotheses and your ethics.
>
> I *choose* love and life and laughter, beauty and goodness.  I also 
> choose truth.  I strive to attain the map that reflects the territory; 
> to believe based solely on evidence, and to abjure any shift of 
> credence whatsoever which is not based on evidence.  For you cannot 
> draw an accurate map of a city by sitting in your living room and 
> having great faith in your doodles.  You must go outside and walk down 
> streets, and keep your eyes open, and look around, and make lines on 
> paper that correspond to what you see, and resist the temptation to 
> draw in a few extra lines just for fun.
>
> P.C. Hodgell said:  "That which can be destroyed by the truth should 
> be."  I have never heard a declaration of rationality which is both 
> simpler and better than this.  If a wire approaches, and I believe it 
> to be electrified, and it is *not* electrified, then the truth opposes 
> my fear.  If a wire approaches, and I believe it is not electrified, 
> and it *is* electrified, then the Way opposes my calm.  I wish to 
> attain those feelings and ethics and emotions and principles which I 
> would aver if I saw truly, being the person that I am.  Where is the 
> false statement I must believe, to choose love and life and laughter?
>
Now we are getting close.
    Discard that which is provably false.
    Accept that which is provably true.

But even in formal logic, certain propositions are provably undecidable. 
By analogy, There are propositions in a practical belief structure that 
must be treated as axioms, not subject to formal proof in terms of other 
axioms.

I take as axioms:
   formal logic
   The Paeno postulates
    Occam's razor

I accept
   Reproducible observation

 From there, it gets messy. I think  can see paths to the singularity 
based only on the above, but perhaps I'm delusional. As a practical 
matter, I operate on a set of assertions that we may call "beliefs." 
These assertions are thing that I (perhaps subconsciously) think are 
derivable from the above, but for which I cannot cite an explicit 
derivation.

Using this definition, I "believe:"
   Accumulation of "public knowledge" is good.
   Self-preservation is good
   The "extended golden rule" is good. (Do unto others as they would be 
done by.)
   Waste is bad.

Sorry if this is trite.