[ExI] A science-religious experience
Ben Zaiboc
ben at zaiboc.net
Tue Feb 25 14:11:31 UTC 2025
On 25/02/2025 01:00, Jason Resch wrote:
On Mon, Feb 24, 2025 at 2:12 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
On 24/02/2025 10:49, Jason Resch wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 23, 2025, 1:52 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
> A long time ago, I came up with an idea called 'relativity of
> importance'...
>
>
> That's a nice idea!
>
> Do you think it is possible to rationally justify an ordering?
> E.g., would you expect two superintelligences to arrive at a
> roughly the same ordering?
Well, I'd expect each individual to come up with their own list, and
their own ordering. It doesn't matter if they are a village idiot,
an average human or a superintelligence. The point is to come up
with your own list, and your own ordering. This is in keeping with
the (or rather, my) answer to the meaning of life: You Decide.
> I guess what I was asking is whether you see any possibility that
goal prioritization could be made an objective science.
No. It is subjective.
> If not, then I think this supports what Einstein said about goals not
coming from science. If science can't decide it, then what is its source?
I am.
And if you decide to adopt this method, you are.
> Note that charity ranking services (like GiveWell) struggle with
this: how do you weigh and compare lifting someone out of poverty vs.
saving someone's life, vs. restoring sight to a blind person, vs.
avoiding a bout of severe illness?
There's a good reason for this. These are subjective priorities. The
answers will be different depending on who you are, or which group you
belong to.
> Is there a way to measure these in units of "utils"?
Probably, but the results will be different for each person.
>
> Lots of 'Einstein quotes' are apocryphal.
>
>
> That's true. I checked the validity of this quote many times to be
> sure.
>
> It comes from his 1954 article Science and religion.
>
> https://einsteinandreligion.com/scienceandreligion.html
>
> Here is the full context:
>
> "Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves
> are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist
> between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies.
> Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has,
> nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what
> means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set
> up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly
> imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This
> source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion.
> To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the
> regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that
> is, comprehensible to reason.
>
> I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound
> faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without
> religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
>
>
> What, specifically, do you think is wrong in what he said?
All of the above. It's written from the pespective of someone
brought up in a society where the local religion is taken seriously,
as if it had some essential wisdom and wasn't a pack of lies
designed to make people do what they're told by a group of other
people who were originally clever enough and unprincipled enough to
trick everyone into being afraid of some stuff they just made up.
It's just fundamentally wrong.
"I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound
faith" says it all. For someone who came up with two theories of
relativity, it shows a disappointing lack of imagination.
> To be clear though, the "profound faith" Einstein was referring to
was not a profound faith in god, or creed, but the profound faith that
the universe is comprehensible and amenable to human reason.
'Faith' can have several interpretations, but the most common one is "a
firm belief in something for which there is no proof". Another one is
'trust'. There's a clear difference between faith and 'something you
think is probably true, based on the available evidence'.
I /think/ that the universe is probably comprehensible, and may be
amenable to human reason (which I take as meaning that humans are
capable of comprehending it), but it's also possible that humans are
currently incapable of understanding it. due to it being more complex
than our minds can cope with. But that's another rabbit hole, because
you can consider a single average human, a particular human, a
collection of humans, all humans, etc., and also considering that we
don't know how deep 'the universe' goes, how big it is, how uniform,
even what are the most basic elements that it's composed of.
(I'm starting to change my mind! perhaps the universe is intrinsically
incomprehensible, in total, to any mind. I certainly do think that at
least parts of it are amenable to being understood by human minds,
though. In fact we already know that)
Of course, what Einstein meant by "a genuine scientist" and what I mean
by it could well be different things.
>
> And for me, religion is pretty much the worst way of deciding
> on our goals. That's basically just letting some priests tell
> you what
> you should be doing. And we're all familiar with the tragic
> consequences
> of that.
>
>
> Not all religions are those told to us by priests. The belief that
> science is the best (or only) tool for finding the truth is a
> belief (one some might call a religion (scientism)). I think you
> just have an impoverished conception of what religion can be.
I have a realistic conception of what religion is, in practice, in
the main. I'm sure there are some religions which can be fairly
inoffensive, but they are by far in the minority.
> Nascent medicine was quite bad. But that didn't mean all treatments
were bad, nor that the entire field should have been written off and
never improved.
That's not a very good analogy. Medicine has, largely, improved over
time, mainly because of the application of rational thought and
empirical methods. It also has a clearly defined, unambiguous goal.
Religion is not like that at all.
> If you think science is the best tool to refine, improve, discard,
and revise ideas, why not apply it to refine, improve, discard, and
revise ideas that originated in the sphere of religion?
That's pretty much what I have done, for myself. With the inevitable
result: No religion left.
Try this with most of the population of the world, though, and see how
far you get. In quite a few parts of the world, you probably wouldn't
even survive the attempt.
Religions, on the whole, are based on superstition, and are a tool
for controlling people.
> Would you agree then, that modifying those that are, such that
they're not based on superstition, and not used as tools of control,
would be a net positive?
Absolutely.
I'm reminded of this: "What do you call alternative medicine that works?
- Medicine!"
What do you think that a religion not based on superstition, and not
used as a tool to control people, would look like?
Let me take a stab at it:
"There is no god, and you won't burn in hell, but be nice anyway"
(stolen from Ricky Gervais)
How about rewriting the 10 commandments of christianity?
1 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.
2 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness
of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or
that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor
serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the
iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth
generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to
those who love Me and keep My Commandments.
3 “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the
Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.
4 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall
labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the
Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your
daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your
cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the
Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day
and hallowed it.
5 “Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long
upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.
6 “You shall not murder.
7 “You shall not commit adultery, unless your significant other is
ok with it
8 “You shall not steal, unless you have a really good reason (not
applicable to non-tangible items).
9 “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall
not tell lies, unless you have a good reason, or are asked 'does my bum
look big in this?'
10 “You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet
your neighbour's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor
his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour's.”
That leaves only 3, totally common-sense rules. Do we really need
religion to tell us these things? Aren't they already common to all
human societies?
Anything else might really be called 'recommended suggestions' rather
than commandments. And you can find lots of them in books written by
people like Dale Carnegie, Steven Covey, Anthony Robbins, etc.
> It also implies that there are only those two options, science
> and
> religion, which is far from true.
>
>
> He didn't frame it as either or, he thought both had
> interdependent relationships.
He is only presenting those two, and not mentioning anything else,
implying there is nothing else.
> His article is titled "Science and Religion"; it's not meant to cover
other topics.
So it was a silly idea right from the start. A bit like writing an
article about "Ramps and Lifts ('Elevators', if you're american)" when
you want to discuss methods of moving around vertically, that only
focuses on those two methods.
Do you think that transubstantiation, the holy trinity, original
sin, immortal souls, the infallibility of the pope, just to pick
some examples from the most familiar religion in the west, are
amenable to logical thinking?
> Yes, I think so. One could work to clearly define those ideas,
I suspect that 'clearly defining those ideas' might be a long-term
project, to understate things. You might have better luck clearly
defining what a unicorn's tail looks like.
> and consider whether those definitions are logically consistent or not.
"If an infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin, then
angels must be infinitesimal" is a consistent logical argument. So is
"All nuxmargs are gronsh, except frampian nuxmargs. Therefore all
frampian nuxmargs are not gronsh, and all non-gronsh nuxmargs are frampian".
Do you see my point?
> If we cannot find any logically consistent definition, we can abandon
the idea. If we do find a logically possible one, then we can further
consider if it is nomologically possible, if there is evidence for or
against it within this universe,
So that rules out my four examples above, and at least 90% of ideas
contained in almost all religions (this may well be by design. If you
could find evidence for or against the main ideas in most religions,
they wouldn't be much use, as you wouldn't need 'faith' (which basically
means "don't ask questions, just do what I say")).
> and whether its existence (or non-existence) would lead to any
observable consequences.
I'm not sure how that's relevant. The existence of Jinn would lead to
observable consequences, but we have already discounted them because
they are logically impossible. The non-existence of Mohammed (who very
probably did exist) would definitely have observable (and beneficial)
consequences. But so what?
--
Ben
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