[ExI] A science-religious experience

Thu Feb 20 22:18:42 UTC 2025

On Thu, Feb 20, 2025, 4:20 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 20/02/2025 20:10, Jason Resch wrote:
> > Surely you hold some beliefs, including those that you can't justify
> > with science or reason.
> >
> > 1. ... an external reality beyond your consciousness (non solipsism)
> > 2. ...  you will experience future events in your life (rather than
> > "you" being confined to this singular moment in time)
> > 3. ... physical laws that have held will continue to hold (a belief in
> > empiricism)*
> > 4. ... other people experience things and are neither automatons (sic)
> > nor figments of your imagination.
> > 5. ... the universe is old (rather than being created in its current
> > state in the last few minutes)
> >
> > You choose to not call these religious beliefs, but they are
> > nonetheless beliefs you accept as true and operate according to the
> > assumption of their truth. An assumption not justified by science.
>
>
> None of these are beliefs, and all are justifiable. They are null
> hypotheses, or working assumptions,

What justifies choosing these to be the null hypothesis rather than
choosing the converse to be the null hypothesis?

that are backed up by experience.

I chose these examples because there is no experience, no experiment, and
no empirical result that has ever justified them.

If you think there is an experiment that establishes any of them, could you
name it?

>

As
> long as no contrary evidence is presented,

But we have no evidence for them either. We believe these ideas "on faith".

we keep assuming they are
> true, because they are useful.

This is the very essence of science.
>

Choosing to assume something only because it is useful is pragmatism. I
don't see the connection with science (which is supposedly based on
evidence and experiments).

> The word 'belief' can be confusing, and I prefer to avoid using it (when
> I can remember to).
>
> If you define beliefs as 'working hypotheses', then ok, these can be
> called beliefs, but when someone says they have no beliefs, I think we
> can assume they mean 'big B' Beliefs, that often, but not exclusively,
> relate to religion.

Religion is a broad category, and includes beliefs about how we ought to
behave in the world, what things are good or bad, morality, ethics, where
we come from and where we are going. Everyone has these kind of beleifs
whether they consider themselves religious beliefs or not.

In my view, it doesn't matter how one arrives at their beliefs, be it an
assumption, a working hypothesis, out of pragmatism, an innate biological
idea, based on observations, rationality, because someone taught it to you,
or because you read it in a book. The source of a belief I see as
irrelevant to the fact that something is a belief.

I also see it as irrelevant how much or how little evidence one has
collected for a belief, since no matter how much evidence one collects, it
is never enough to reach 100% confidence. So when one acts on a belief they
must make a "leap of faith" to get from their justifiable confidence which
is somewhere in the range of (0%, 100%) to the effective 100% which is
implicit in taking action according a belief's assumed truth.

In other words, dogmatic assertions that are not
> tested against evidence (or 'Believing in' something).

My five examples could also be said to  untested things that you
nevertheless "believe in."

It's the
> difference between "I believe it's going to rain soon" (a testable
> hypothesis) and "I Believe in the holy trinity" (untestable gibberish
> that nevertheless has some emotional significance to the speaker).
>

I don't like categorizing ideas as religious or non religious, or
scientific or non scientific, because that implies science will never have
anything to say on those topics. It imposes an artificial restriction on
science that cheapens both science and religion.

Consider for example, the simulation hypothesis, and it's implications for
a creator, intercession in laws, and continuation of consciousness. One
should not write off discussion on these topics and their relationship to
the simulation hypothesis merely for the reason that they sound too similar
to traditional motions of God, miracles, and afterlives.

Scientists once wrote off the idea of a big bang because it sounded too
much like divine creation. Science shouldn't shy from entering any domain.

> I will sometimes say "I believe so" in response to a question, but it
> just means "I think so", not "I fervently cling to this opinion, despite
> any evidence to the contrary".
>

One can have beliefs without blind attachment to them. It is lack of
capacity to update one's beliefs that leads to problems (close mindedness),
not the having of beliefs.

> I think it's important to distinguish between an opinion that you're
> willing to change when evidence or logic shows that it's false, and one
> that nothing will persuade you to change.

Exactly. I think this is the important distinction to make.

I think that, for most people,
> the five points above all fall into the former category.
>

Possibly, but I don't know what form that evidence could take. They all
extend from the fact that we each inhabit a limited vantage point (being
confined to the perspective of a single being, in a single time). As such,
we can't see or know what will happen in the future, if the past was real,
if others are real, or for that matter, if anything beyond one's current
conscious state is real.

If somehow an alien from the fourth dimension came down and plucked us out
of this world to see the greater reality beyond our limited perspective,
that would convince a lot of people. But the same would happen if God
plucked you out of this world and showed you heaven and hell. For most
people, there is some amount of evidence that could convince them of just
about anything. The problem is that for many topics, there's a great
shortage of evidence one way or the other.

>
> *Empiricism has nothing to do with constancy of physical laws, it's just
> a view that knowledge comes from experience.
>

For past experiences to represent any knowledge of reality or have any
predictive power requires experimental repeatability: that given the same
starting conditions, the same outcomes follow. This requires constancy of
laws.

Jason

> --
> Ben
>
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