> the idea that our moral beliefs are imperfect perceptions of moral truth. That requires the existence of a moral reality separate from physical reality. The existence of something not explainable as part of physical reality makes that belief more plausible.
I would think that moral beliefs may not be 'real' the same way physical reality is, and therefore do not provide reason to postulate some parallel meta world, but that does not mean that the model of moral perception approximating moral truth, at least as briefly sketched here, is illegitimate. One can think of moral beliefs as being perspectives on physical reality. Perspectives may be part of an internally significant system, but they do not require some shadow realm to exist.
E.g. since you gave the example of preferences of chocolate vs. vanilla, I think that taste is actually a good example, although the *example* chocolate vs. vanilla is trivial, so it obfuscates the point.
Taste is a perspective on physical phenomena, but that is therefore not as "real" as the phenomena themselves, but it hardly arbitrary.
Considering the respective taste of chocolate and poop may be instructive. Although not as objective as say, the charge of an electron, the bad taste of poop does need to be an individual axiom - it fits logically within a larger web of deeper preferences, and could probably be deduced from them, just as the properties of a physical object could be deduced from the rules governing physical reality.
It may not be 'wrong' to murder someone the same way it is wrong that an apple falling off a tree will fly off into space instead of towards the ground, but murder could still be wrong the same way poop, or corpse flower are untasty. This is perfectly meaningful to a person interacting with reality, even if it is not as 'real' as reality itself.
More to the point though, I don't see why the mystery of consciousness should necessarily affect the "mystery of morality." Even if there exists an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, why should relate to a model of moral realism?
As you yourself note in that post, even positing a god, which could be an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, does not preclude the need for independent moral axioms - even if the god instructs them, you still need an axiom that states that the divine should be obeyed.
Consider moral intuitions as just another kind of preference or desire, right alongside hunger and sex and status. Then notice that these preferences play the role of inner alignment to evolution's outer alignment. In this framing, our moral intuitions are approximations to the ideal drives that would maximize our evolutionary advantage, but these approximations are optimized for an ancestral environment. We are OOD - outside the training distribution - and our inner optimizations don't serve the outer purpose very well anymore. Just as we know that eating ice cream is bad but can't help craving it, so, also, we know that the smell of a corpse flower can't hurt us but can't help fleeing. And so, also, we know that pulling the lever saves more lives but we can't help loathing the act.
I'm not saying it's the ultimate moral theory, but much is solved by this view of morality as a part of the inner alignment we've developed as an attempt to achieve the true ends towards which evolution guides us.
Except that moral intuitions are not, at all, universal. Ask someone in 1920 if gay marriage should be a thing, and it would be obvious to them that morally it shouldn't.
Well, I wouldn't expect them to be universal. Fitness is a function of environment, and you'd expect moral intuitions, whose fitness is so closely tied to social environment, to change along with society. In the ancestral environment, where tribes that produced more children tended to out-compete tribes that didn't, you'd expect moral intuitions to fall along child-rearing and "traditional family" lines. In the modern environment, where (at least temporarily) producing children doesn't lend much competitive advantage, you'd expect moral intuitions to start deviating along that degree of freedom.
I don't know, it seems to me that they're all situational. I can imagine someone who lives off of IV nutrition and has many children. I can even imagine an environment where that's preferable to eating. Ultimately, all these drives are instrumental, in that they only exist in service to a larger goal. What goal? That's a different question, but as we theorize about the purpose of evolution (or God or whatever prime motive you'd like to discuss) it's pretty clear that moral intuitions no less than hunger are "good" only insofar as they serve a larger purpose.
I have thought about this. I think the best argument for what you are saying is that it boils down to moral relativism. Just because humans find poop disgusting, does not mean that it is not tasty to flies. (You can catch even more flies with poop than with honey or with vinegar. Source: I have chickens.)
In other words, suppose you succeed in breaking down religion into perfectly logical bits, or converting spirituality into mathematics, or settling on a universal morality, you can never be sure if you are a person or a fly.
>It seems likely that the mind depends on the brain and dies when the body dies. The effect on the mind of things happening to the brain short of dying — alcohol or other drugs in the bloodstream or a blow to the skull — supports that conjecture. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the nature of consciousness is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain.
More trivially, one could say that as long as anything remains unknown in the universe, that we cannot be certain of anything, since that unknown thing in the universe might affect anything. But this is trivially true about anything and therefore does not reflect any actual uncertainty with a given proposition.
Regarding the specific proposition at hand, I don't see why the existence of questions about consciousness in general should be a reason to consider the proposition that consciousness is not dependent on physical hardware and processes, given the stated evidence that it is.
This seems equivalent to saying "It seems likely that Tylenol depends on physically interacting with the body to work, so one person taking a Tylenol could not cure a different person's headache. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the mechanism of action of Tylenol is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain." [Note that this is about *my knowledge of the MOA of Tylenol - it is not dependent on someone else knowing the MOA.]
Am I missing some reason why the point about consciousness is different?
Sorry for being late to respond. His other point - that many smarter people have indeed believed in religion, is a good one. It would be overconfident to say that we are enlightened compared to everyone prior. I make fun of this whenever I reference the University of Shinar.
What makes other people so sure? Why didn't technology develop before it did? People did not, overall, get smarter. Jews, for example, were smart before they were allowed to enter institutions of higher learning and do well.
I hypothesize, please quote it as Isha Yiras Hashem, that the line between the spiritual and physical world has become wider since the creation of the world, and technology developed when it became divided enough to clearly identify what the rules were. For instance, in the book of Samuel, when Saul is depressed, one could easily read this as clinical depression. Or perhaps, in an age when Angels were still visible, it really was a spirit of God that made him sad.
Having *conscious* control over our actions makes no sense. Thoughts necessarily must think themselves. There's no logical alternative. If you think we consciously control our thoughts or actions, that would require you to think about something before you've thought about it, resulting in infinite regress. Thoughts, desires, intentions all simply enter our consciousness from deeper level non-consciously experienced cognitive processes, and the illusion of free will results from the (usually) very high correspondance between our consciously experienced intentions and our behaviors, this congruence not requiring in any way the existence of free will.
Sam Harris has excellent lessons (both in his podcast feed and through the Waking Up app) that can show, with just a little introspection, that we are actually not the thinker of thoughts. There and can be no free will, given that the laws of physics (quantum physics included) are running the show. It is very useful, IMO, to do the mindful work to recognize this. I write about that in various chapters in my latest.
Physics doesn’t run the show in software. The software as it runs follows the laws of physics only in that all the electrical gates and wiring has to, but how the electrons move around is determined by the software that is running.
Your point about determinism and belief in determinism seems mistaken to me. I don't think that "I am merely a spectator" follows from "my behavior is deterministic."
Consider a simple thermostat, one that turns on a heat pump to cool a room when the temperature rises above 72°F, and turns it off when it falls lower. It's macroscopic enough so that questions of quantum mechanical indeterminacy can be disregarded; that is, we can treat it as a deterministic system. And the same is true of the heating and cooling of the room. So we could write a deterministic model of the thermostat's behavior. But does that mean that the thermostat is merely a passive sensor of the room's heating and cooling? Not at all! The causal sequence that gives rise to that history includes the behavior of the thermostat itself; were it not there there would be a different history. The thermostat controls the temperature, within certain limits.
I am able, through the use of language and conceptual thought, to form an image of the probable future outcome of my actions. Since I can do so now, before the actions take place, if that image is unattractive, my forming it can disrupt my performance of those actions, and lead me to envision a different set of actions with different consequences. And that process can continue till it converges on a set of actions whose consequences I find acceptable, or least unacceptable. My own thoughts about the future are part of the causal sequence that creates the future.
In fact, this ability to describe the future creates a form of self-referentiality that invites paradoxes. I think that the assumption that my future is completely predictable and I am only a passive spectator is one that it would be paradoxical for me to make. Alan Turing showed that an ideal computer cannot predict its own future behavior—and neither can I. But Turing's argument did not require the assumption that the computer was indeterministic.
Im not sure if youve engaged with Aristotle-Thomistic philosophers on these topics before but I have seen little overlap between the libertarians, atheists, critical rationalists (not necessarily linked) and that school of thought but they are very much in the logic/rational end of theology and I dont think most current atheists seriously address their arguments.
Moral intuition cannot be tied to fitness in the same way eating or sex drive can. Else slavery would have won evolution, as the winners of genetic passing on.
What if you saw and clearly understood a mechanism by which your conscious experience could arise? I.e., an explanation that allowed you to build an entity that you would expect to be conscious, and which exhibits all the hallmarks, and which, when varied in certain ways, varies its conscious-like behavior just as the explanation would predict. Would that dissolve the mystery of consciousness? (It certainly wouldn't dissolve the mystery of induction, of the universe's apparent regularity. That's a different question.)
Sent response by accident. Personally, I find that the best way to discover spirituality is to practice it. I had a student who did not understand why Rashi commentary would be important. After 6 months of learning the weekly portion with Rashi, she was amazed at how brilliant he is.
Similarly, spirituality is indeed perceivable by human beings. The problem is, it requires a different sort of sight. I believe that anyone can access this. You see the people in India access it.
I conflate spirituality with consciousness, because I believe that that is the missing piece.
Just as I believe that God created the world and that answers the fundamental how of existence.
Also, I am a humble mortal fallible human being, I am not infinitely intelligent, and ultimately the real truth is always in humility. You don't know what you don't know.
The fact that I am certain consciousness exists but cannot fit it into my scientific world view reduces my confidence in the picture of the world linked to that view. It opens a crack in the painting through which other possible worlds can be seen.
> Since I do not believe that I am smarter than all of them, I should assign some probability to their being right
This seems to overstate the significance of intelligence in knowing the truth about something. This is most apparent when comparing to the beliefs of people in the past.
A hypothetical person with an IQ of 200 or some other number much higher than my own, living millennia ago might have thought, not without reason, that various physical phenomena like earthquakes were activity of gods, but meager IQ me can look up 'earthquake' on Wikipedia and have a view of reality that is much closer to the truth than theirs.
Even when comparing to people in the present, how much should one really update their priors in favor of religion on the basis of smart religious people? Are there not an even greater number of very smart not-religious people?
Or alternatively, are not very smart people more likely to leave religion than to adopt it?
But more significantly, intelligence is a tool that *could* be used to search for truth, but most people don't systematically honestly search for truth in the first place, let alone apply all their cognitive abilities to the task, so we would not expect a large correspondence between the veracity of beliefs and the intelligence of those who hold them.
In the case of religion in particular, we don't need to rely on pure heuristics based on the intelligence of those who hold given beliefs - we can look at the actual arguments put forth in favor of religion and see how compelling they seem...
Frankly, intelligence is such a broad term as to be useless. Someone who is color blind may search for truth their entire life, but they would conclude that there is no practical difference between the color red and the color green. This result is completely true according to their perception. It would take an amount of humility for them to say, my perception, does not have the ability to perceive everything.
You may not find the evidence convincing (I do), but there is positive evidence of consciousness operating separately from the physical body. If you do not find the UVA body of evidence persuasive, then you have to ask yourself what evidence you would find persuasive. Standard science cannot deal with the problem of consciousness, so if you require evidence coming out of, say, a physics department that adheres to the ground rules and paradigms of said department before giving more credence to the possibility of consciousness after death of the body, then you’ve created an impenetrable fortress of unfalsifiability, haven’t you?
Cryonics is worth considering, also the more interesting the person the greater chance of future creatures emulating your mind is and creating duplicates, perhaps this is a argument for living a more interesting life with the hope that your mind is emulated granting you immortality and or signalling to future creatures your worth simulating. If we are say sophisticated NPCs in some sort of game or history sim or fiction or something my guess is that players and or the main character is either a Elon Musk type or some 20th century dictator type or some sort of serial killer or other "bad guy", playing as someone who makes money to donate it all to the AMF to save NPC children seems boring. A ultra realistic version of essentially GTA where you can harm simulated minds however sounds like it would be a best seller, assuming future creatures share our instincts.
How accurate do you think a simulation of you would be, based on what will exist to record your life after you are gone? Or even someone super famous, like a president, supreme court justice, or celebrity movie star?
I think it's reasonable that a simulation could provide a good approximation of how someone acted or presented themselves during a period of their life. You could make a simulation of Rick Moranis based on his 1980s movie career that would fulfil our desire to recreate that memory of him. But that wouldn't include what he's done since then in his life, or what he did before becoming famous, or even the *real* him from when he was acting (noting that most of what we think of Rick comes from watching him pretend to be something he really, truly, is not).
In what sense would a version of you created to appear, only to outside observers, to be you actually fulfil that objective from the inside perspective? Maybe this simulation would even think that it was you. But it's not possible such a simulation would include all of your memories (nobody is writing that down now, I assume), including memories that are formidable experiences for you. Perhaps a relationship with an adult that shaped your impression of the world, or encouraged you to pursue a path in life.
All that to say, that such a simulation would not be you. It would be a type of puppet, pretending to be you, maybe even believing it was you, but fundamentally not you in any useful sense from that inside perspective.
Simple answer would be brain em based on brain scans, so cryonics would help, another route would basically involve simulating everything and turning back the clock so to speak, as for the part about it not being you, I'm not sure, but would you say that 2yo you is the same you as you even though in terms of memories both new and forgotten and brain size and physical matter etc etc. you are different. Perhaps personal identity is an illusion of sorts, maybe the you part of your mind is small and flexible. I should also add that even if you don't think it's "the real you" you don't know what you you are, and in both cases it seems as if being preserved makes sense. The first case is due to confidence in your belief, the second is due to the fact "they" could be running brain ems based either on real or invented minds and then choose the minds they want to duplicate and continue to run, the fact that this might not be the "real you" or even a new mind entirely doesn't change the fact that they could continue to simulate you if you are of interest.
If we discover that there is a separate part of reality that we sense through moral intuition, wouldn’t physicists start theorizing about it and trying to observe it? It would be a part of reality not described by their existing theories and abstractions in a specific way.
But the idea of separate realities is incoherent. That which is real is part of reality. No one thinks that light and sound are parts of separate realities, although ordinarily we don’t hear light or see sound, much less taste them. Having two realities doesn’t make sense. It would mean something was real in one realm and unreal in the other.
Dividing reality into the parts we sort of understand and those we don’t makes sense, but it doesn’t establish that they are incapable of interacting, separate. Even if we convince ourselves that there is no connection, for “reality” to make sense, there can only be one.
This seems like a purely terminological issue to me. What are the observations we are trying to explain or predict?
OTOH, if moral intuition is an evolutionary strategy rather than a way of sensing reality directly, then the reality we are sensing is not separate.
It seems like there ought to be a way to test this empirically, but it is not occurring to me.
> the idea that our moral beliefs are imperfect perceptions of moral truth. That requires the existence of a moral reality separate from physical reality. The existence of something not explainable as part of physical reality makes that belief more plausible.
I would think that moral beliefs may not be 'real' the same way physical reality is, and therefore do not provide reason to postulate some parallel meta world, but that does not mean that the model of moral perception approximating moral truth, at least as briefly sketched here, is illegitimate. One can think of moral beliefs as being perspectives on physical reality. Perspectives may be part of an internally significant system, but they do not require some shadow realm to exist.
E.g. since you gave the example of preferences of chocolate vs. vanilla, I think that taste is actually a good example, although the *example* chocolate vs. vanilla is trivial, so it obfuscates the point.
Taste is a perspective on physical phenomena, but that is therefore not as "real" as the phenomena themselves, but it hardly arbitrary.
Considering the respective taste of chocolate and poop may be instructive. Although not as objective as say, the charge of an electron, the bad taste of poop does need to be an individual axiom - it fits logically within a larger web of deeper preferences, and could probably be deduced from them, just as the properties of a physical object could be deduced from the rules governing physical reality.
It may not be 'wrong' to murder someone the same way it is wrong that an apple falling off a tree will fly off into space instead of towards the ground, but murder could still be wrong the same way poop, or corpse flower are untasty. This is perfectly meaningful to a person interacting with reality, even if it is not as 'real' as reality itself.
More to the point though, I don't see why the mystery of consciousness should necessarily affect the "mystery of morality." Even if there exists an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, why should relate to a model of moral realism?
As you yourself note in that post, even positing a god, which could be an ethereal consciousness divorced from the physical world, does not preclude the need for independent moral axioms - even if the god instructs them, you still need an axiom that states that the divine should be obeyed.
Consider moral intuitions as just another kind of preference or desire, right alongside hunger and sex and status. Then notice that these preferences play the role of inner alignment to evolution's outer alignment. In this framing, our moral intuitions are approximations to the ideal drives that would maximize our evolutionary advantage, but these approximations are optimized for an ancestral environment. We are OOD - outside the training distribution - and our inner optimizations don't serve the outer purpose very well anymore. Just as we know that eating ice cream is bad but can't help craving it, so, also, we know that the smell of a corpse flower can't hurt us but can't help fleeing. And so, also, we know that pulling the lever saves more lives but we can't help loathing the act.
I'm not saying it's the ultimate moral theory, but much is solved by this view of morality as a part of the inner alignment we've developed as an attempt to achieve the true ends towards which evolution guides us.
Except that moral intuitions are not, at all, universal. Ask someone in 1920 if gay marriage should be a thing, and it would be obvious to them that morally it shouldn't.
Well, I wouldn't expect them to be universal. Fitness is a function of environment, and you'd expect moral intuitions, whose fitness is so closely tied to social environment, to change along with society. In the ancestral environment, where tribes that produced more children tended to out-compete tribes that didn't, you'd expect moral intuitions to fall along child-rearing and "traditional family" lines. In the modern environment, where (at least temporarily) producing children doesn't lend much competitive advantage, you'd expect moral intuitions to start deviating along that degree of freedom.
Right, so they are situational. Unlike, say, hunger. Anyone who doesn't eat will not reproduce.
I don't know, it seems to me that they're all situational. I can imagine someone who lives off of IV nutrition and has many children. I can even imagine an environment where that's preferable to eating. Ultimately, all these drives are instrumental, in that they only exist in service to a larger goal. What goal? That's a different question, but as we theorize about the purpose of evolution (or God or whatever prime motive you'd like to discuss) it's pretty clear that moral intuitions no less than hunger are "good" only insofar as they serve a larger purpose.
I have thought about this. I think the best argument for what you are saying is that it boils down to moral relativism. Just because humans find poop disgusting, does not mean that it is not tasty to flies. (You can catch even more flies with poop than with honey or with vinegar. Source: I have chickens.)
In other words, suppose you succeed in breaking down religion into perfectly logical bits, or converting spirituality into mathematics, or settling on a universal morality, you can never be sure if you are a person or a fly.
Bookmarking this comment. I cannot respond now. In fact, I don't have a good response. But it's a fair point.
>It seems likely that the mind depends on the brain and dies when the body dies. The effect on the mind of things happening to the brain short of dying — alcohol or other drugs in the bloodstream or a blow to the skull — supports that conjecture. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the nature of consciousness is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain.
More trivially, one could say that as long as anything remains unknown in the universe, that we cannot be certain of anything, since that unknown thing in the universe might affect anything. But this is trivially true about anything and therefore does not reflect any actual uncertainty with a given proposition.
Regarding the specific proposition at hand, I don't see why the existence of questions about consciousness in general should be a reason to consider the proposition that consciousness is not dependent on physical hardware and processes, given the stated evidence that it is.
This seems equivalent to saying "It seems likely that Tylenol depends on physically interacting with the body to work, so one person taking a Tylenol could not cure a different person's headache. I know of no positive evidence against it. But as long as the mechanism of action of Tylenol is a mystery to me, I cannot be certain." [Note that this is about *my knowledge of the MOA of Tylenol - it is not dependent on someone else knowing the MOA.]
Am I missing some reason why the point about consciousness is different?
Sorry for being late to respond. His other point - that many smarter people have indeed believed in religion, is a good one. It would be overconfident to say that we are enlightened compared to everyone prior. I make fun of this whenever I reference the University of Shinar.
What makes other people so sure? Why didn't technology develop before it did? People did not, overall, get smarter. Jews, for example, were smart before they were allowed to enter institutions of higher learning and do well.
I hypothesize, please quote it as Isha Yiras Hashem, that the line between the spiritual and physical world has become wider since the creation of the world, and technology developed when it became divided enough to clearly identify what the rules were. For instance, in the book of Samuel, when Saul is depressed, one could easily read this as clinical depression. Or perhaps, in an age when Angels were still visible, it really was a spirit of God that made him sad.
>His other point - that many smarter people have indeed believed in religion, is a good one.
Seems very questionable. See my other comment: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-puzzle-of-consciousness/comment/13929720.
Apologies for being all over the place. If you like I will rewrite more clearly.
Having *conscious* control over our actions makes no sense. Thoughts necessarily must think themselves. There's no logical alternative. If you think we consciously control our thoughts or actions, that would require you to think about something before you've thought about it, resulting in infinite regress. Thoughts, desires, intentions all simply enter our consciousness from deeper level non-consciously experienced cognitive processes, and the illusion of free will results from the (usually) very high correspondance between our consciously experienced intentions and our behaviors, this congruence not requiring in any way the existence of free will.
I’ve just refuted that by consciously raising my hand.
Sam Harris has excellent lessons (both in his podcast feed and through the Waking Up app) that can show, with just a little introspection, that we are actually not the thinker of thoughts. There and can be no free will, given that the laws of physics (quantum physics included) are running the show. It is very useful, IMO, to do the mindful work to recognize this. I write about that in various chapters in my latest.
https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Religions-half-failed-airplanes-basketball-ebook/dp/B0BGJGC5D3/
Thanks for this post. One of my fav topics (and probably one of, in not the most important question).
Physics doesn’t run the show in software. The software as it runs follows the laws of physics only in that all the electrical gates and wiring has to, but how the electrons move around is determined by the software that is running.
Your point about determinism and belief in determinism seems mistaken to me. I don't think that "I am merely a spectator" follows from "my behavior is deterministic."
Consider a simple thermostat, one that turns on a heat pump to cool a room when the temperature rises above 72°F, and turns it off when it falls lower. It's macroscopic enough so that questions of quantum mechanical indeterminacy can be disregarded; that is, we can treat it as a deterministic system. And the same is true of the heating and cooling of the room. So we could write a deterministic model of the thermostat's behavior. But does that mean that the thermostat is merely a passive sensor of the room's heating and cooling? Not at all! The causal sequence that gives rise to that history includes the behavior of the thermostat itself; were it not there there would be a different history. The thermostat controls the temperature, within certain limits.
I am able, through the use of language and conceptual thought, to form an image of the probable future outcome of my actions. Since I can do so now, before the actions take place, if that image is unattractive, my forming it can disrupt my performance of those actions, and lead me to envision a different set of actions with different consequences. And that process can continue till it converges on a set of actions whose consequences I find acceptable, or least unacceptable. My own thoughts about the future are part of the causal sequence that creates the future.
In fact, this ability to describe the future creates a form of self-referentiality that invites paradoxes. I think that the assumption that my future is completely predictable and I am only a passive spectator is one that it would be paradoxical for me to make. Alan Turing showed that an ideal computer cannot predict its own future behavior—and neither can I. But Turing's argument did not require the assumption that the computer was indeterministic.
Im not sure if youve engaged with Aristotle-Thomistic philosophers on these topics before but I have seen little overlap between the libertarians, atheists, critical rationalists (not necessarily linked) and that school of thought but they are very much in the logic/rational end of theology and I dont think most current atheists seriously address their arguments.
It isnt easy going but Edward Feser seems to be a very popular gateway into it all. http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/road-from-atheism.html
As a biased observer I love both sides but find there is much talking past each other and little good faith front on discussion between the two.
Moral intuition cannot be tied to fitness in the same way eating or sex drive can. Else slavery would have won evolution, as the winners of genetic passing on.
What if you saw and clearly understood a mechanism by which your conscious experience could arise? I.e., an explanation that allowed you to build an entity that you would expect to be conscious, and which exhibits all the hallmarks, and which, when varied in certain ways, varies its conscious-like behavior just as the explanation would predict. Would that dissolve the mystery of consciousness? (It certainly wouldn't dissolve the mystery of induction, of the universe's apparent regularity. That's a different question.)
David Friedman - Calvinists believe that everything is predetermined.
Sent response by accident. Personally, I find that the best way to discover spirituality is to practice it. I had a student who did not understand why Rashi commentary would be important. After 6 months of learning the weekly portion with Rashi, she was amazed at how brilliant he is.
Similarly, spirituality is indeed perceivable by human beings. The problem is, it requires a different sort of sight. I believe that anyone can access this. You see the people in India access it.
I conflate spirituality with consciousness, because I believe that that is the missing piece.
Just as I believe that God created the world and that answers the fundamental how of existence.
Also, I am a humble mortal fallible human being, I am not infinitely intelligent, and ultimately the real truth is always in humility. You don't know what you don't know.
The fact that I am certain consciousness exists but cannot fit it into my scientific world view reduces my confidence in the picture of the world linked to that view. It opens a crack in the painting through which other possible worlds can be seen.
I absolutely loved this quote.
> Since I do not believe that I am smarter than all of them, I should assign some probability to their being right
This seems to overstate the significance of intelligence in knowing the truth about something. This is most apparent when comparing to the beliefs of people in the past.
A hypothetical person with an IQ of 200 or some other number much higher than my own, living millennia ago might have thought, not without reason, that various physical phenomena like earthquakes were activity of gods, but meager IQ me can look up 'earthquake' on Wikipedia and have a view of reality that is much closer to the truth than theirs.
Even when comparing to people in the present, how much should one really update their priors in favor of religion on the basis of smart religious people? Are there not an even greater number of very smart not-religious people?
Or alternatively, are not very smart people more likely to leave religion than to adopt it?
But more significantly, intelligence is a tool that *could* be used to search for truth, but most people don't systematically honestly search for truth in the first place, let alone apply all their cognitive abilities to the task, so we would not expect a large correspondence between the veracity of beliefs and the intelligence of those who hold them.
In the case of religion in particular, we don't need to rely on pure heuristics based on the intelligence of those who hold given beliefs - we can look at the actual arguments put forth in favor of religion and see how compelling they seem...
Frankly, intelligence is such a broad term as to be useless. Someone who is color blind may search for truth their entire life, but they would conclude that there is no practical difference between the color red and the color green. This result is completely true according to their perception. It would take an amount of humility for them to say, my perception, does not have the ability to perceive everything.
I continue this response below, but on the wrong comment thread.
It seems to me there are at least two things, then, that theists can account for that you cannot -- consciousness and a grounded belief in induction.
Why does theism account for induction?
On any of the standard monotheistic religions, God made the world to be regular and our minds to know it.
“I know of no positive evidence against it.”
Are you familiar with the work of the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies? https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/
You may not find the evidence convincing (I do), but there is positive evidence of consciousness operating separately from the physical body. If you do not find the UVA body of evidence persuasive, then you have to ask yourself what evidence you would find persuasive. Standard science cannot deal with the problem of consciousness, so if you require evidence coming out of, say, a physics department that adheres to the ground rules and paradigms of said department before giving more credence to the possibility of consciousness after death of the body, then you’ve created an impenetrable fortress of unfalsifiability, haven’t you?
Cryonics is worth considering, also the more interesting the person the greater chance of future creatures emulating your mind is and creating duplicates, perhaps this is a argument for living a more interesting life with the hope that your mind is emulated granting you immortality and or signalling to future creatures your worth simulating. If we are say sophisticated NPCs in some sort of game or history sim or fiction or something my guess is that players and or the main character is either a Elon Musk type or some 20th century dictator type or some sort of serial killer or other "bad guy", playing as someone who makes money to donate it all to the AMF to save NPC children seems boring. A ultra realistic version of essentially GTA where you can harm simulated minds however sounds like it would be a best seller, assuming future creatures share our instincts.
How accurate do you think a simulation of you would be, based on what will exist to record your life after you are gone? Or even someone super famous, like a president, supreme court justice, or celebrity movie star?
I think it's reasonable that a simulation could provide a good approximation of how someone acted or presented themselves during a period of their life. You could make a simulation of Rick Moranis based on his 1980s movie career that would fulfil our desire to recreate that memory of him. But that wouldn't include what he's done since then in his life, or what he did before becoming famous, or even the *real* him from when he was acting (noting that most of what we think of Rick comes from watching him pretend to be something he really, truly, is not).
In what sense would a version of you created to appear, only to outside observers, to be you actually fulfil that objective from the inside perspective? Maybe this simulation would even think that it was you. But it's not possible such a simulation would include all of your memories (nobody is writing that down now, I assume), including memories that are formidable experiences for you. Perhaps a relationship with an adult that shaped your impression of the world, or encouraged you to pursue a path in life.
All that to say, that such a simulation would not be you. It would be a type of puppet, pretending to be you, maybe even believing it was you, but fundamentally not you in any useful sense from that inside perspective.
Simple answer would be brain em based on brain scans, so cryonics would help, another route would basically involve simulating everything and turning back the clock so to speak, as for the part about it not being you, I'm not sure, but would you say that 2yo you is the same you as you even though in terms of memories both new and forgotten and brain size and physical matter etc etc. you are different. Perhaps personal identity is an illusion of sorts, maybe the you part of your mind is small and flexible. I should also add that even if you don't think it's "the real you" you don't know what you you are, and in both cases it seems as if being preserved makes sense. The first case is due to confidence in your belief, the second is due to the fact "they" could be running brain ems based either on real or invented minds and then choose the minds they want to duplicate and continue to run, the fact that this might not be the "real you" or even a new mind entirely doesn't change the fact that they could continue to simulate you if you are of interest.
If we discover that there is a separate part of reality that we sense through moral intuition, wouldn’t physicists start theorizing about it and trying to observe it? It would be a part of reality not described by their existing theories and abstractions in a specific way.
But the idea of separate realities is incoherent. That which is real is part of reality. No one thinks that light and sound are parts of separate realities, although ordinarily we don’t hear light or see sound, much less taste them. Having two realities doesn’t make sense. It would mean something was real in one realm and unreal in the other.
Dividing reality into the parts we sort of understand and those we don’t makes sense, but it doesn’t establish that they are incapable of interacting, separate. Even if we convince ourselves that there is no connection, for “reality” to make sense, there can only be one.
This seems like a purely terminological issue to me. What are the observations we are trying to explain or predict?
OTOH, if moral intuition is an evolutionary strategy rather than a way of sensing reality directly, then the reality we are sensing is not separate.
It seems like there ought to be a way to test this empirically, but it is not occurring to me.