I’ve been asked to assess a bizarre argument for God published recently in Metaphysica (“Proving God without Dualism: Improving the Swinburne-Moreland Argument from Consciousness,” by Ward Blondé and Ludger Jansen, March 2021). I have already rather conclusively refuted the so-called Argument from Consciousness for the existence of a god. But do Blondé and Jansen offer anything new to consider? They aim to make their argument without the crucial step of presuming disembodied souls, claiming instead that even if mind-brain physicalism is true, it is still the case that some sort of God is a more probable explanation of it. Which is certainly a novel approach. And their paper does a useful job of explaining why the traditional Argument from Consciousness (particularly but not only as articulated by Christian apologists Richard Swinburne and J.P. Moreland) doesn’t work.
Their treatment does drop the ball at the end of their section on problems with the traditional argument, however, when they confuse Bostrom-style computational consciousness arguments for nonphysicalist theories during their survey of the full range of available alternatives to theism; they should have discussed theories of emergent supernaturalism at that point instead. For example, even if minds are (or require?) “souls” in some supernatural sense, they could be physically generated and caused to exist by brains, and thus no intelligent engineer is required to explain their existence—and indeed the enormous imperfections and largely ad hoc and bad design of these “souls” would, as I have pointed out already, strongly argue for that alternative, and thus against theism as an explanation. Of course physicalism already carries a far higher empirically-established prior probability as an emergentist explanation of consciousness, so such silly ideas about emergent magical souls are wholly unnecessary (and not even logically plausible). But the reasons both these ideas still prevail over theism are the same: theism is simply explanatorily useless in the face of the actual facts of consciousness. And indeed, this is actually where the Blondé-Jansen argument also collapses into ruin.
This is actually typical of god-apologetics: it completely ignores all pertinent science, asks a bunch of “How do you explain that?” questions that in fact have already been answered by science, and then moves from that motivated declaration of ignorance, exploiting the comparable ignorance of their audience, to “dupe” themselves and their audience into thinking only “their” completely bonkers pseudoscientific explanation can answer the question they just asked (never mind that it has already been answered, and without their completely bonkers pseudoscientific explanation). At best they might instead find genuine gaps in scientific knowledge (such as they identify as the Hard Problem of consciousness) and deploy a God of the Gaps fallacy on that instead, but that’s just as scientifically illiterate. Because vast evidence confirms that explanatory gaps never get filled with the supernatural and have consistently been filled by natural (indeed wholly physical) causes, thousands and thousands of times across hundreds and hundreds of years. They are betting on the wrong horse. And fooling themselves into thinking “this time it might win!” And then, even worse, they propose no test whatever by which to even run their chosen horse in the race (and like any race: you can’t win if you never run). That’s apologetic methodology in a nutshell.
And that is here in full display. Which is how we know most philosophy is garbage: philosophy journals have no discernible standards by which to reject fallacies and pseudoscience. They will publish any bullshit with coherent sentences, a relevant bibliography, and nice formatting. Truth, logic, facts? Not a concern.
The Science
For example, Blondé and Jansen ask the stupid questions (gullibly assuming, I will charitably assume, that Richard Swinburne actually knows what he is talking about—pro tip: he does not):
How can it be explained that the mind of the first person remains correlated with a brain (or a part of a brain) that changes over time both in its internal structure and in its relations to other brains (or brain parts)? What decides, in this situation, which elementary brain components (such as brain cells) are experienced (or correlated with experience) and which remain unexperienced for the first person?
Blondé & Jansen, “Proving God,” p. 4
Um. The brain decides. It’s a computer. It evolved specifically to make decisions like this. We already know this. It’s established science. This is one of those things even Blondé and Jansen identify as the “easy problems” of consciousness (p. 3; no, seriously, they even list this among those easy problems, evidently unaware of what their own words mean: “the integration of information by a cognitive system, the reportability of mental states, the focus of attention, and the deliberate control of behaviour”). Strangely they cite several good summaries of the philosophy of consciousness that explain this, which contain bibliographies full of further detail; they clearly did not read any of this, or in fact any pertinent science whatever. This practice should be banned from academic philosophy journals. Philosophers should be required to not only address the actual science, but correctly describe it, before asserting any premises regarding matters of fact. No paper should ever pass peer review that does not. But this is not, alas, any standard philosophy has adopted. Hence, garbage. (Oh, it gets worse. Wait for it.)
Here is the current empirical state of cognitive science (consult any current-edition college textbook on the subject):
First-person consciousness is a construct. Much of it is illusory and invented; the brain “guesses” at what is going on inside and outside of it, and chooses to “represent” that in various ways. For example, most of your visual field is not what you are seeing, but what your brain, out of computational economy, “assumes” you are seeing, relying on previous imprints of familiar data. Because your first-person experience is a construct, it is the computational circuitry in your brain that is deciding what to include in that construct: in some cases out of economy, e.g. our brains evolved to not waste energy and time on increasingly unnecessary processing, in other cases out of necessity, e.g. our brains simply can’t integrate all of its computational contents in the first-person model it builds. For instance, it simply would be dysfunctional to attempt to be conscious of all your memories and feelings and thoughts across your entire whole life at once. So our brain is selective: it makes decisions about what information to integrate into an ongoing model, and what to leave out. Most gets left out, because consciousness wouldn’t work otherwise—as in, it would provide no evolutionary advantage to be selected for and thus even exist now. Our brain does this both for modeling a first-person awareness of an external world, and for modeling a first-person awareness of oneself. In other words, your consciousness of yourself is also a construct. And it is built using the same brain-driven computational decisions of economy, evolved utility, and practical limitations. (And the model of the self indeed changes as the self changes—because it is a scientific fact that people change over time, as they learn, rethink things, acquire skills, and shift in their beliefs, interests, and personality; identity is a property of a unique causal history, not a “stagnant absence of change.”)
Anyone who knows this would know we already have sufficient answers to Swinburne’s questions and therefore those questions are simply ignorant—not insightful—and therefore have no place driving the argument of a published paper. And pretty much any cognitive scientist on Earth knows all this; which is why they, or a philosopher well enough versed in their science, should be mandatory peer reviewers of any paper purporting to make claims about their science. That would prevent ignorant pseudoscience like this ever getting published and making a mockery of the entire field of philosophy. But instead, we get this. Sigh.
Instead, Blondé and Jansen cite Swinburne claiming that “only a soul can determine to which physical brain components a person remains correlated through time.” But that’s false. Computers can make correlation decisions like that. And the brain is a computer that does that. And science well establishes this as a fact. So Swinburne’s declaration is just ignorant whackadoo pseudoscience. It should not be publishable in any respectable academic field. And it is to their discredit that Blondé and Jansen do not even know this. They make no arguments against Swinburne’s nonsense other than to argue it relies “problematically” on thought experiments. No. It relies problematically on completely ignoring all the relevant science pertaining to the very processes he is attempting to explain. That’s what makes it pseudoscience. Claptrap, in the popular parlance.
The Blondé-Jansen Turn
Because Blondé and Jansen confess Swinburne’s argument leaves them too much in the weeds, they propose an alternative way to frame his argument, which they call “the exceptional-point-of-view problem.” This is different, they say, from “the single-point-of-view problem,” which they identify as the qualitative nature of subjective experience. They don’t know this apparently, but science has almost completely explained this already as a constructed computational model; e.g. per Daniel Dennett (rather than recent Integrated Information Theory), it is simply logically impossible to process information this way and not experience it in the way we do (in other words, the philosophical zombies that Blondé and Jansen mention are logically impossible). The only gaps left here are in connecting specific neural circuits to specific qualia, and thus generating a predictive causal model of qualia generation; but all evidence strongly indicates the answer will be physical and not supernatural (least of all intelligently engineered). There is zero case to be made otherwise. Likewise, Blondé and Jansen distinguish their “problem” from what they call “the specific-point-of-view problem,” which is, basically, that it is impossible to experience life as someone else (much less some other species, like “a bat”), which requires no explanation, because it follows automatically from physicalist theories of consciousness: the only way to experience exactly the same things is to be exactly the same computer, and thus you would have to be a bat to know what it was like to be one. That this is the case is therefore no mystery; it’s a predictive outcome of mind-brain physicalism.
Blondé and Jansen do not indicate exactly why they are moving past those two problems (least of all that the reason is because science has already solved the second one and has already solved the first one to enough of a degree to assure us no soul will likely be needed to complete any theory consciousness). But move past them they do, on to their “exceptional-point-of-view problem,” which they identify with the question, “How can it be explained that there is a first person who is lucky enough to experience the point of view of a relatively tiny, intelligent brain amidst a giant universe that is indifferent about which physical entities it brings about according to the laws of physics?” This is another non-mystery; this already follows necessarily as an inevitable predicted outcome of evolutionary mind-brain physicalism: the first-person is explained by computational modeling (and lo and behold, all empirical evidence confirms there is a complex model-building computer inside our skull), the luck is explained by evolution by natural selection in a vast randomizer (and lo and behold, all empirical evidence confirms that that computer is the product of billions of years of evolution by natural selection in the vast randomizer that is the whole known cosmos), and both of those facts explain in turn why (a) we are so tiny and limited and (b) the rest of the cosmos is so giant and indifferent. There is no need here for any further explanatory epicycle. God just doesn’t factor in. “We have no need of that hypothesis.”
Ignorant of all these scientific facts, Blondé and Jansen foolishly claim “it is far from clear how this first-person experience can be incorporated into an ‘objective’ physicalist worldview.” If they knew any of the relevant science, they would know it is actually quite reasonably clear how first-person experience probably arises in an objective physicalist world: computers are physical machines that can produce computational models; first-person experience is a computational model; human brains are model-building computers that evolved by natural selection over billions of years from extremely simple computers (e.g. bacteria) to gradually ever-more-complex biological computers (from the brains of worms and fish, to lizards and mice, to cats and monkeys, to apes and humans). Evidence that the computers in other animals also engage in similar environmental model-building is extensive, as also for the fact that their sophistication at it increased over time in direct correlation to the increased complexity of the biological computers carrying it out. Evidence that human self-awareness is just another model, one now derived by turning attention inward toward the brain’s own activity rather than the external environment, is extensive. And transitional species are observed: e.g. monkeys exhibit meta-cognition, which means they were already developing the ability to model other minds (and connect those models to things going on in their own minds), before evolving the more sophisticated capacity to model their own mind in a fully integrated way, thereby developing a coherent and continuous self-model. That ability first evolved in a variety of primates called hominins of which we are the last surviving species. What is unclear about any of this?
And Then To the Batshit Crazy
So, they display nothing but ignorance of all the science. And then, out of the blue, Blondé and Jansen declare “the world is predominated by intelligent matter with respect to sheer mass” and “the existence of God is the best explanation for our living in such an intelligence-dominated world.” This is full-on bonkers. Like, literally psychotic. Sure, if the majority of matter in the universe were intelligent (if we were having intelligible, actual, two-way conversations with stars and black holes and interstellar dust and the earth and trees and every rock we stumble across), then I might be leaning toward a god hypothesis too (given the right epistemic conditions, e.g. I’ve ruled out alternatives to a reasonable degree). But only an actual lunatic would believe we were having intelligible, actual, two-way conversations with stars and black holes and interstellar dust and the earth and trees and every rock we stumble across. So how do these god-apologists get from that is not even at all true to “this is an established premise”?
With some semantic trickery, and fallacious logic. First they define “intelligent matter” as “physical, spatiotemporal matter that is correlated with an intelligent mind,” and they give as examples human minds and (hypothetical) sentient microchip-based computers. And when they say “predominated” they do indeed mean “more than 50 percent of the world’s matter is intelligent matter” (that’s a direct quote). So they really do assert most of the matter in the universe actually consists of intelligent beings! This would of course be one of the most incredible, Nobel-prize winning discoveries of science in the whole of human history, so if they had any evidence for this, we should expect them to be publishing this claim in a science journal—instead of a philosophy journal happy to publish full-on pseudoscientific poppycock. But alas. They dodge this by pulling a bait-and-switch later on, changing what they mean by “intelligent matter” several pages later, after producing some hilariously bogus math.
Okay. So, you might ask, what possible evidence do they have for this absurdity? (Their paper’s peer reviewers, we should hope, should believe evidence is a required component of any fact-claim, particularly one so extraordinary.) The answer is: none. They present no evidence for this. They admit that on current science most mass by far is not intelligent, and thus as presently observed facts establish, their premise is blatantly false. In lieu of “evidence” they try a bizarre fallacy-laden speculation instead. It goes like this…
And on to Gobsmacking Incompetence
Blondé and Jansen reassert their scientific ignorance by insisting, “The observation that we experience the conscious activity of some particular intelligent brain reveals an unexplained choice that has been made in the otherwise objective, naturalistic worldview.” This is false. In any vast randomizer of sufficient randomized complexity, such a choice is statistically inevitable. This is provably the case. Biogenesis in any universe capable of randomly assembling sequences of chemically active matter has a probability of ~100% given enough time, space, and matter (and lo and behold, we observe we are in just such a universe—which is in turn also 100% expected, as there is nowhere else we could be if there is no God, yet this is actually the last place we should be if there is). And given enough time in its own locus (billions of years being more than sufficient, as, lo and behold, we have indeed had here on Earth), such life will evolve cognitive self-model-building computers eventually, again by statistical inevitability, as natural selection is the product of inevitable, unstoppable physics, and proceeds extremely fast owing to basic geometric progression inherent in the very phenomenon of reproduction (making it solely a question of how long it will take; not whether it will get there, given that span of time).
So when they ask, “How should we determine the probability that this choice has been made in favour of some intelligent brain?” the answer is simple: in any purely physical universe of sufficient size, age, and content, the probability always approaches 100%. There is literally no way to stop it. One can only quibble over how long it will take. And that’s that. Since Blondé and Jansen do not present a fine-tuning argument, i.e. they never argue it is improbable on any scientific naturalism that a purely physical universe of such kind would exist, they simply have no coherent argument against naturalism here. What they do instead is use completely the wrong math to calculate the probability of intelligent observers in any given universe or multiverse: “we use the ratio of the mass of a physical entity versus the mass of the world…as the measure of the probability of [that world] being experienced.” This is so outrageously math illiterate I cannot honesty understand how this paper passed peer review here. I can only assume their peer reviewers were just as ignorant of math as Blondé and Jansen. Which means philosophy truly is a bankrupt field with no credible standards.
It is simply not the case that the probability of a system producing an intelligent observer equals the ratio of the amount of matter in that system that is intelligent and that is not. This is a jaw-droppingly incompetent proposal. It would be like saying the probability that my computer can run a spreadsheet equals the ratio of the mass of my computer’s microcircuits and all the rest of the mass of my computer (housing, power supply, cooling system, display, a/v components, wireless transceivers, desk stand, power cord). Gosh, that ratio is like thousands or even millions to one against! It must be impossible for my computer to run spreadsheets! How does such idiocy get into a respectable journal? Sane minds want to know. The actual, correct procedure is to calculate the probability of the required assembly (which in this case means, for us, a chunk of sequenced DNA; and for any intelligence whatever, the sum of all causally comparable structures that could arise or evolve, here or on other planets or moons), given the causal forces operating on its assembly (e.g. biogenesis and natural selection) and the number of “tries” (how many times random molecular assemblies arise over the available time and space, and how many subsequent reproductions per unit time selection forces get to act upon). Blondé and Jansen don’t even know you are supposed to do this; that’s how ignorant they are. They are therefore not only profoundly science illiterate, they are profoundly math illiterate. As were, we now know, their paper’s peer reviewers. Metaphysica is thus proved to be a junk journal with no meaningful standards.
So when they conclude that therefore “naturalism fails to explain statistically the first-person experience of an intelligent consciousness,” we have to wonder if this is a satire. Are they testing the incompetence of Metaphysica’s editors and reviewers with a deliberately joke argument? Because if not, both they and those editors and reviewers are among the most incompetent people on the planet (not counting children and the mentally disabled…and people in comas). In actual fact the probability of this universe producing an intelligent observer by physics alone can be calculated to be approximately 100% owing to the available tries and the empirically known (and entirely mindless) causal forces. Likewise the probability that intelligence would constitute only the most minuscule fraction of the universe’s matter is also approximately 100%. Because one thing Blondé and Jansen are right about: “if we live[d] in a world in which most of the mass [was] correlated to some intelligent mind” then the probability would be low that mere indifferent physics was the cause of that observation. And this is how real math works: if P(majority-intelligent|indifferent-physics) is, say, 0.001, then it is mathematically necessarily the case that P(~majority-intelligent|indifferent-physics) is 1 – P(majority-intelligent|indifferent-physics), which is 1 – 0.001, which equals 0.999. Their own proposition entails it is 99.9% likely that if all there is is indifferent physics, we should observe the universe’s contents to not be “majority intelligent.” Lo and behold, that is exactly what we observe. Therefore, their own proposition proves naturalism is a better explanation of the observed facts! Because gods have no need of any of this wastage (billions of almost entirely lifeless years, trillions of almost entirely lifeless galaxies, and the whole of everything almost entirely a lifeless vacuum, as well as millions and millions of years of the slow evolving of a fragile and fallible physical brain), so it is not very probable that this is how an actual God would go about producing us. Certainly it’s not 99.9% expected!
Correct math, therefore, gets exactly the opposite conclusion. Welcome to god-apologetics. Blondé and Jansen conclude “it is rational to believe that we live in a world that is predominated by intelligent matter” (sic), not because there is any evidence of that (in fact we observe ourselves to be in a world that is almost entirely not intelligent matter, so in fact they are rejecting all empirical evidence whatever), but because, analogously, the ratio of my computer chip’s mass to the mass of the rest of my computer equals how likely my computer can compute anything, therefore the rest of my computer must “secretly” be composed of functioning microchips, even though all evidence confirms otherwise. This is their argument. And it’s not only illogical, it’s batshit crazy.
And Then Down the Rabbit Hole
Okay. Now that they have convinced themselves most of the matter in the universe must consist of intelligent beings… (And yes, that is what they just did. At this point it is my moral duty to tell you that if you Paypal me $500 with a delivery address, I’ll send you a personally-signed tinfoil hat that will protect you from most of those invisible beings. Guaranteed.) …they proceed to argue for how this universe is full of all those beings. Actually, they forget what they just proved, and only think to contemplate from here on how the universe could consist of mostly just one intelligent being (they never explain why that’s the only scenario they consider). Maybe, they suggest, “the whole world consists of one large, physical, intelligent brain, and nothing else,” but now, suddenly, they rediscover empiricism and point out that “this model has no resemblance to our empirical world,” and so our world must be a computer simulation (even Nick Bostrom is face-palming at this point). Of course, this would mean God does not exist; except as a fallible, material, manifestly evil supercomputer. Needless to say, Blondé and Jansen gloss right over that, and skip right to, instead, “God.”
“God,” they propose, “not only creates but also governs and guides the world” and therefore “the whole world is correlated with God’s infinite mind” and “thus all the matter in the world is correlated with an intelligent mind and is thus intelligent matter.” Oh. Dear. Me. How this fallacy passed peer review is even more peplexing than the pseudoscience and bonkers math. Philosophers are supposed to at least be good at logic, right? I hope I don’t have to explain why what they just wrote is a non sequitur. But I’ll take the trouble anyway. If God consists of no mass (as they just proposed), and just makes and uses mass as his tools (like we do), then still by far most of the mass that exists is not intelligent. They have just described a world in which almost all matter is non-intelligent! Exactly the opposite of what they purport. Here they are acting like someone arguing that my hammer and the desk I made are all intelligent beings, because “I” made and use them and therefore they “correlate” with an intelligent mind. Um. That is not what being intelligent means. My hammer and desk are not intelligent beings. Blondé and Jansen have descended into nonsense at this point.
This hardly matters, though, since even with this new covert definition of what counts as intelligent (where everything used or made by an intelligence is “intelligent”), their math still doesn’t lead to their conclusion that most of the universe must “correlate with intelligence.” Because what they tried to calculate was the probability that there would be intelligence, not that all the matter in the universe would be in the employ of an intelligence. And (as I just showed in the previous section) they didn’t use any math capable of calculating either. The probability that everything in the universe is in the employ of an intelligence is not the probability of there being an intelligence in the universe; and the probability of there being an intelligence in the universe is not the probability that any particular clump of matter in the universe is intelligent. These are both outrageously fallacious non sequiturs—bordering, frankly, on idiocy.
They go on to propose maybe “the world [itself] is an intelligent being” and “matter itself could be intelligent,” but again neither hypothesis bears any prior or posterior probability. There is simply no evidence for either, and ample evidence against both. Ironically, now they rediscover logic and reject these hypotheses on the grounds that on their definition “we need to claim that all elementary particles…do not only have (proto-)mental properties, but are in fact intelligent,” a conclusion they conveniently “forgot” when describing their God hypothesis, where it is not the case that every clump of matter God made and controls “is in fact intelligent.” So, it’s okay for matter to be wholly unintelligent, as long as some intelligence controls it all; and somehow (?) this makes it unlikely that a universe full of unintelligent matter and a scattering of incidentally caused intelligences could exist because…the ratio of the unintelligent matter and intelligent matter is too high (?)…even though that is exactly the expected ratio on any science-based godless naturalism (and not, again, the expected ratio on any God hypothesis the like of which they are proposing). This is just a convoluted, illogical mess.
And Lying
One thing that certainly should not pass peer review (and indeed even earn a retraction of any paper that slipped by it) is a blatantly false claim. And making a claim you know is false, or should have known is false if you actually read a source you purport to have read, is lying. In other words, either they are lying about what their source said, or they are lying about having actually determined what that source said. Given all the other evidence of their catastrophic incompetence, I’d entertain the hypothesis that they just made a mistake in reading that source; but as we’ll see, that is in this case simply not possible. Lying is, after all, a common tactic of god-apologists. And Blondé and Jansen deliver us one of these lies when they claim cosmological physicist Alexander Vilenkin said that “in order to get the odds straight” for “fine-tuning” we “need” a multiverse to “consist of 10^500 universes.” This is a lie. For this they cite Vilenkin’s 2007 article “A Measure of the Multiverse.” The fine-tuning argument is never discussed in that article. Nor does it ever mention a “need” for that many universes to explain anything about physical constants. They even lied about what that is even a number of in his paper—which is not universes, but kinds of universes. In other words, there could be 10^1,000,000 universes, let’s say; but, Vilenkin says, they would still all sort into maybe as many as only 10^500 kinds (each “kind” having more or less the same initial “physical constants”). And he did not calculate this; he is citing previously published science (so they haven’t even given the primary source for that statistic).
In Vilenkin’s paper that figure comes from a pair of sentences about a fact unrelated to the fine-tuning problem: “String theory,” Vilenkin writes, “appears to have a multitude of solutions describing vacua with different values of the low-energy constants. The number of vacua in this vast ‘landscape’ of possibilities can be as large as 10^500.” Which means there are inevitably 10^500 ways to fold spacetime into different superstring landscapes. He immediately explains that this is because a simple inflationary Big Bang model entails this outcome—not because it is needed to produce observers. To the contrary, Vilenkin outright says he will make no attempt to calculate the frequency of observer-containing landscapes (“the number of observers who will evolve per unit [of] comoving volume…is of course a challenging problem; I will not address it here”), and that he is not attempting to find a number of universes either, but only how to mathematically define the frequency of observers independently of how many universes there are—by instead running the math on the kinds of universes that are possible if superstring theory is in any sufficient sense true.
It really pisses me off when apologists lie about what their expert sources said. It pisses me off even more that philosophy journals don’t check these things and just willingly publish lies (and never retract them!). What use is a journal that does that? But the most embarrassing thing here is that this lie was not even necessary to their train of argument. So why did Blondé and Jansen insert it into their paper? It serves no function. The only point they wanted to make with this fake datum (apart from a half-hearted attempt to “sneak in” a fine-tuning well-poisoning fallacy) was that even given multiverse theory, on physicalism, most matter even across the multiverse is nonintelligent (indeed, most whole universes will not even have any intelligences in them at all), which naturalists openly affirm. In fact, this is an observation that confirms naturalism. The only way intelligences can exist in a purely indifferent physical universe is if almost none of the resulting contents of that universe is intelligent. That we observe exactly that is proof of naturalism, not theism. Theism does not predict that observation at all.
Summary
The Blondé-Jansen Argument is incompetent to the point of lunacy. They present no relevant mathematical calculation of the probability of intelligent observers on physicalism (they substitute a joke calculation instead, which has no logical connection to such a conclusion). They present no relevant mathematical calculation of the probability of the univerrse (or any specific content of the universe) being as we observe it to be on theism, either. And they present no evidence (none whatsoever) that “most of the universe” is intelligent, or even that it should be expected to be on any observed fact. To the contrary, all scientific facts in evidence entail that the probability that the observed universe will produce intelligent observers unaided (and of the very kind we have observed it to make) approaches 100%, given the billions of years it actually took; physicalism predicts that a vast quantity of time will have passed and that a vast quantity of unintelligent mass and space will outweigh the minuscule amount molded into any intelligences anywhere; theism predicts none of this; and in consequence of all three facts, observation confirms physicalism over theism. Blondé and Jansen have no intelligible response.
Does Swinburne even try to robustly defend the idea that only a soul could match a brain to a consciousness? Like, thinking about it: My memories are a result, generally (when they’re not deranged or false or I’m not dreaming about having different memories and pasts – apparently my soul is doing a really inconsistent job), of me having been in a location and doing stuff. Not only does it make no sense that a disembodied soul in some kind of Platonic space could keep track of that stuff, but it also makes a lot of sense that a physical thing that was there when something was experienced would be pretty good at remembering that thing and only that thing.
Similarly, as tempting as it is for creative people to think about their “muse”, anyone who is being sincere has to recognize that there’s a reason their creative output has consistent patterns. There’s a reason Quentin Tarantino makes films with naked female feet and lots of violence with grindhouse homages. It’s not a soul or some floating object.
Why is all of my internal dialog in English? Do souls learn the language their matched bodies were exposed to, and never any other?
And why should we ever expect a soul to never share information across space and time? We see over time that people only ever seem to get the perceptions that are available to their own physical eyes and ears. I don’t get reliable feelings from a Chinese woman from the 13th century. That’s perfectly understandable from a naturalist perspective, but the only way it is sensible from the supernaturalist perspective is if we do an ad hoc backfill and never expect souls to do anything that embodied minds wouldn’t.
You tend to point to the fear these people have of dying when their brain goes away, but I really wonder how much of it is just the unwillingness to be honest enough about our cognitions to recognize how narrow, parochial and limited they are.
You’re right of course. Swinburne made no effort to understand any of the science. So he goes all whackadoo about “it must be souls that do all that.” It’s crazy (or just embarrassingly incompetent, whatever adjectives you want to use). He literally is trying to say that souls are needed as some sort of command unit making all the decisions about what to pull out of the neural network and when, and that magically “know” to cling to the right brain and not float around randomly to other brains, and thus “will” choose which brain to cling to in the hypothetical case of brain duplicating or brain splitting, and so on. It’s like some primitive tribal man from ancient Carpacia trying to explain how the sun must dissolve into the Earth every evening, because that’s the only thing that can explain how it disappears, while a Greek emissary is trying to explain to him an “orbit” and he’s having none of it.
Blondé: Here you confuse the objective facts with the subjective facts. In a larger universe the probability of finding an objective, third-person intelligence increases, while the probability on a (my) subjective, first-person intelligence might decrease. It is perfectly possible to have a naturalistic universe with many intelligent and conscious third persons, but without any first person. If 99,999…% is not me, then certainly 100% might not be me.
Blondé: Again, you confuse the objective and the subjective reality. The running of a spreadsheet by a computer is something that can be investigated entirely objectively, just like the emergence of consciousness in an intelligent third person. It has nothing to do with the probability on a subjective, first-person experience.
Blondé: That is your worldview. It does not follow from the Blondé-Jansen argument that all this non-intelligent matter and space exists. My first-person experience might very well be run directly by God’s mind (brain).
Blondé: And again, this calculation is irrelevant because it is a calculation about the objective reality only. Blondé and Jansen are interested in the probability of a subjective, first-person, intelligent consciousness. Clearly, you do not understand how subjective facts undermine your worldview.
Blondé: Your position comes with a lot of unanswered questions. If mass ratio is not a good criterion, how would you explain I do not have the experience of an insect? There are many more insects than intelligent human beings. Does your ‘cognitive self-model-building computers’ play a role here? I assume dinosaurs and mammals also have such cognitive computers. Then how come I am not a dinosaur or monkey? Where do you draw the line between animals with and without these mysterious cognitive self-model-building computers? As far as I can see, any cognitive self-model building can only start when an exceptional point-of-view has already been selected. But who or what makes the selection on naturalism? And finally, we start off as embryos, when self-model building cannot exist yet. It is then when the selection of who I am was made, I assume.
And now the tinfoil hat begins.
Okay. By the numbers:
Yeah. That’s not the probability you want. You want the probability that there will be an intelligence in a universe, not the probability you will hit one when you swing a cat. The probability that I am in any square foot of my home right now is maybe 1%. But the probability that I am in that home right now is 100%. Do you comprehend the difference? Because your failing to comprehend that is what led to your completely incompetent joke calculation that you continue to incompetently defend even here.
Indeed. Just as we can objectively investigate whether the universe is predominately filled with intelligent matter. Results? It’s not. End of program.
Your incompetent argument is going against all evidence to argue that, analogously, my computer “must” therefore be made entirely of microchips because of the ratio between its observed microchiops and the rest of its mass. Calling this a “subjective” calculation does not rescue you from the mistake. The ratio of masses simply has no bearing whatever on how much intelligence (“how many microchips”) we should expect in the universe (“in my computer”). To the contrary, naturalism predicts the observation that almost none of the matter in the universe will be intelligent. And lo, that’s what we observe. The evidence is virtually 100% expected, not below 1% as you aver, because the probability here is how likely we are to get that result if the theory is true; the ratio of masses is the predicted result, thus not evidence the probability is low, but that it is high. In other words, that ratio is what is predicted by the theory, not evidence against the theory. Your incompetence lies in confusing these two things. Calling it “subjective” does not make that any less incompetent, because it doesn’t make your argument any less a non sequitur.
Wow. I continue to be flabbergasted by how incompetent you are. In your argument you purport to deduce how likely it is there will be intelligent observers in the universe, P(EXPERIENCE|NATURALISM) and compare P(EXPERIENCE|PREDOMINANCE). But you miscalculate P(EXPERIENCE|NATURALISM) as the probability of a given part of the universe being intelligent (the probability I am in any given square foot of my home right now), which is not P(EXPERIENCE|NATURALISM); P(EXPERIENCE|NATURALISM) is the probability of there being an intelligence in the universe (the probability I am in my home right now). You can’t compare the probability of naturalism being true using the bonkers math you do. What you need to compare is the relative probability of observations: how probable is it on naturalism that we would observe almost none of the universe is intelligent but that small bits of it are; the answer is: 100% (or near enough); vs. how probable is that same observation on theism (the answer is: well below 100%).
You instead compare that with an unrelated probability: P(EXPERIENCE|PREDOMINANCE); but the probability that there would be someone experiencing the universe without predominance is the same probability (both are 100%). To the contrary, “predominance” itself has an extremely low probability based on observation, which means on correct math P(EXPERIENCE|PREDOMINANCE) must be multiplied by P(PREDOMINANCE), which ends up necessarily low, by the rules of dependent probability: since we observe most of the universe is unintelligent, the probability of predominance on observation is near 0. For convenience I’ll absurdly-charitably say it’s one in a thousand (or 0.001). This means P(EXPERIENCE|PREDOMINANCE) x P(PREDOMINANCE) is 1 x 0.001 = 0.001. The only way to avoid that outcome is to literally ignore all evidence whatever.
This is like saying the probability of leprechauns given faeries exist is close to 100%. Fine. But that doesn’t get you to a high probability that faeries exist. Just as your math can’t get you to a high probability that predominance exists. And while observing leprechauns would be evidence for faeries, and thus could (the other way around) get you to a high probability that faeries exist, this also is not what you are doing. You are instead looking for whether intelligences exist, but it is not the case that intelligences can only likely exist on predominance. Predominance has no effect on the likelihood of intelligences existing. That’s like saying that having a hundred athletes in a hall makes it more likely you have athletes in the hall than having ten athletes in the hall does. That’s bonkers. But that’s your incompetent argument in a nutshell.
Continuing to repeat your mistake does not correct it. I know what you are trying to calculate. What I am telling you is that you have used completely the wrong math to calculate it.
OMG. Are you insane?
Did you not read my article’s whole section answering exactly that question? (Using bats, as you did; but still)
The reason you do not experience an insect brain is that you do not have an insect brain. And the reason you do not have an insect brain is that you were output from a human womb not an insect egg.
If you then want to ask “what is the probability that someone would be born from a human womb not an insect egg” the answer is, observationally, 100% (billions of people are so born; billions more insects are born as well). It is childishly stupid to argue that you cannot have won a lottery you just won because those are a million to one against; because the actual probability that someone would win is 100%, ergo the probability that someone is experiencing having won is 100%. You therefore need no explanation for why there is someone experiencing having won a lottery and someone else not experiencing that. That outcome is 100%. At most you might try to show too many people have won lotteries, but when you observe only one in a million have, exactly as predicted, your theory is refuted. End of program. That’s the correct math.
Um. Seriously?
Do you really not know how natural selection and genetic causation work?
Causes set in motion billions of years ago produced lines of progeny continuing to churn out embryos today, each molded by natural selection. Tons of them are humans. Tons of them are other species. The probability that some of them will be humans and not insects is therefore 100%. The probability, therefore, that someone will observe themselves to be a human and not an insect is therefore 100%. Science has fully explained this. So your stupid question has been answered. That you think it hasn’t, though, does illustrate everything my article just said: apologists operate by asking stupid questions, ignoring the fact that science has already answered them, and then act like only their whackadoo pseudoscience can answer them. Argumentum ex Ignorantia.
This has nothing to do with your paper, but the answer is no. Your science illiteracy is once again profound.
It is established science that a “person” (a developing and evolving self-model-generator) is half determined by genes and half determined by environment. Thus, you are not “made” into who you are in the womb. You get a starter kit in the womb. Your lived experience (and your decisions and their consequences) after that then make you into who you are. Which, as my article explains, and as science has proved, will change over time; people do not remain statically unchanging. That is factually false; and we don’t have to explain facts that don’t exist. Other than to explain why they don’t exist; which science has fully done.
And nice try pretending my section about the lie you told about what Vilenkin said doesn’t exist. We didn’t forget to notice you have made no response to that.
Blonde: Can I say that when someone says “That is your worldview”, that sounds very much like someone throwing in the towel? I am reminded of how often Craig tries that nonsense, arguing that others are just making different metaphysical assumptions. In response to things like “The supernatural, even if it exists, is rare, so it’s actually much less reasonable to infer a supernatural cause than a natural one if you don’t have evidence otherwise”, which even most modern Christians need to concede.
You could say that God is running the world in his mind, I guess, but you could also say that I am running this world in my mind, or that a panoply of souls are, or the Trimurti, or a Cartesian devil. The problem is that it doesn’t match observations, so you actually fall afoul of Richard’s point. Why did God boot a program into my head that puts me into a universe that is full of empty matter, exactly as I would expect if there was no God? Whatever God is running my experiences, why is there no indication of that? I don’t have to assume the Christian God here, but that’s illustrative. If there’s a God that wants a relationship with me, why is It running a program of my subjective experiences where that relationship is one-sided, weird and abusive? (And if It is running my subjective experiences, doesn’t that mean it’s running my free will, either totally or to an alarming extent, in contradiction with a ton of Christian dogma?)
You can make all sorts of excuses for why this could be the case, but there’s a bunch of weird facts about the universe that don’t fit your theory. If God was running my subjective experiences, I wouldn’t expect my subjective experience to change so much between when I have my coffee and when I don’t, or if I’m in pain or not. That is totally predictable under naturalism: 100% of naturalist universes will have brains that do these really weird things like have visual illusions and see mirages and fail in bizarre ways. How many Godly universes should have those kinds of minds? How many universes with the kind of God you want us to believe in and worship? Is it 100%? Any honest theist would have to admit it’s nowhere near to 100%. Not least because Heaven is an example of such a universe where minds can operate without any of these weird problems.
The problem that people like you keep having is that, as we discover more about the universe we’re in, the evidence mounts that it doesn’t look like the universe that theists ever predicted. You can complain about worldviews all day long, but unless you are ready to admit that your worldview is fixed a priori and you won’t change your mind, you have to admit that what we find out has to count. It has to change the relative probabilities we are estimating for various theories. The idea of a soul was a very good theory back before we had anything like modern science. Now we can identify an entire evolutionary history in our consciousness. There’s no place we’re identifying some gap between what our brain seems to do and what our mind seems to do. If a soul performs such critical functions, that’s really weird, right?
Oh, and as I pointed out in my comment: The notion that a soul has to pick which consciousness is running in each brain is just… gibberish. I have my mind because I have my brain. I can’t even have the mind of a family member because of my brain. Again, that’s obvious even by looking at various talents that people seem to have from a combination of genetics and early childhood experiences. If you were honest, you’d admit that it would actually be evidence for souls if, for example, I could ever “Freaky Friday” into another body. The fact that this never, ever happens is only the absolute logical conclusion of a universe where minds are never, ever disembodied. That’s not a matter of worldview; that’s a matter of evidence.
I’m a pantheist, and yet I’m rejecting your arguments here. This isn’t someone being intolerant to your worldview. Your arguments just aren’t very compelling.
Panpsychism on steroids?
Aren’t Swinburne and Plantinga champions of Properly Basic Belief–the penultimate apology: God Just Is. No need for evidence, explanation, logic or reason. So there. What geniuses theists have in their cohorts.
That’s Plantinga, yes; but Swinburne is actually a critic of that idea (now hilariously called Reformed Epistemology). Swinburne is the guy who tried using Bayes’ Theorem to prove God existed and Jesus rose from the dead (a tactic other apologists, like William Lane Craig, quickly soured on because they saw the writing on the wall on that one).
Blondé: This proves again that you limit yourself to what can be investigated scientifically. You fail to incorporate subjective facts in your worldview. P(FIRST-PERSON-EXPERIENCE|NATURALISM) should be different from P(THIRD-PERSON-CONSCIOUSNESS|NATURALISM). Your proposal is to simply put the first probability equal to that of the latter. You have no arguments why this is allowed.
Blondé: Ok, so you do confess that having an intelligent experience is like winning a lottery on naturalism. I am glad you confess that. So it follows that P(INTELLIGENT-EXPERIENCE|NATURALISM) is not 100% but in fact one in a million. Join our argument. It makes the probability more than 50 percent (in fact it can be 100% if God’s brain is infinitely large).
Blondé: Natural selection has nothing to do with the selection of a first-person consciousness from the vast universe around us. Genetic causation even less. Both are your self-invented pseudoscience in an attempt to explain what you cannot explain: a subjective, first-person experience. Let alone that you can also explain that it is intelligent.
Blondé: It is absolutely clear that most of the 10^500 universes mentioned in our paper are entirely lifeless. The round number of 500 also indicates that we have to make wild guesses. But I do not claim that this number cannot be improved. After all, the much more solid number of 10^28 is more than enough to exclude coincidence and even lottery winning. It is therefore beside the point of the argument. Certainly no good reason to withdraw a paper. Which you know. Even though you pretend not to know.
No. I am explaining to you that you are using the wrong math to get the results you claim.
That’s a matter of logical fact, not “what can be investigated.”
No, you are incorrectly incorporating subjective facts in your math.
I’ve explained this to you twice now.
It’s not my proposal. It is a fact of mathematics. And yes, I gave several arguments. You ignoring all my arguments is not the same thing as my having no arguments.
I not only acknowledge this, I have written extensively on it, and why it is, in fact, evidence for naturalism.
You have been linked to that material several times now. I can’t help you if you just ignore it all.
No, you dumb-ass. That is mathematically incorrect.
I’ve explained this to you multiple times now.
The probability that there will be intelligence in any volume of space is not the ratio of intelligent to unintelligent things in that volume. Just as the probability someone will experience winning a lottery is not the probability of one specific person winning the lottery. Even when the probability of one specific person winning the lottery is one in a million, the probability someone will experience winning a lottery is ~100% (just check public records: there have been thousands of lottery winners, because millions of people play! Ergo, that thousands of people will have experienced winning one is ~100%, not one in a million).
Yes, it does. Consciousness only exists because it evolved. It only evolved because of natural selection. We can trace the entire historical causal process from cells to brains, spanning billions of years, explaining why there are billions of sentient beings now, and therefore why there are beings who experience being sentient.
And indeed, if there is no God, then this requires most of the universe to be void of intelligence. And lo and behold, that is exactly what we observe. It is not what we expect on theism however. Ergo this ratio is evidence for naturalism, and against theism; not the other way around.
Acting like an idiot does not recover you from your ignorance. I did not “invent” the entire fields of evolutionary biology and evolutionary cognitive science. I am the one who is looking at vast empirical scientific evidence for how and why there are subjective, first-person experiences. That is called explaining it. You are idiotically ignoring the entirety of that scientific evidence and replacing it all with a ridiculously fallacious mathematical calculation that doesn’t even get the results you claim because it is completely the wrong math for the purpose.
OMG. You really are this incompetent aren’t you?
Please pay attention and actually read what you claim to be responding to:
(1) Vilenkin did not say 10^500 universes. Those are kinds of universes, not counts of universes. And this difference is absolutely fundamental to your point.
This distinction is another example of not only your dishonesty (you continue to lie about what Vilenkin said), but your mathematical illiteracy. For example, Vilenkin has actually proposed based on chaotic inflation there can be expected to be infinitely many universes. But let’s suppose he meant just 10^1000 universes. If even just one of those 10^500 kinds of universes is intelligence-producing (only one of them), and there are 10^1000 universes, there will be on average 10^500 universes with intelligent life in them. So the probability that there will be universes with intelligent life in them is ~100%.
[The precise calculation is 1-(1-(1/10^500))^(10^1000), which most calculators can’t compute, but to give you an idea how close to 100% this is: 1-(1-(1/10^2))^(10^3) = (1-(1-(1/100))^(1000) = 1-(1-0.01)^(1000) = 1-(0.99)^(1000) = 1-0.000043171247411 = 0.999956828752589, which would give us 99.996% chance of a first-person experience, and 10^2 is only a factor of 10 away from 10^3; 10^500 is a factor of 10^500 away from 10^1000, thus the percentage would be even closer to 100%, by an extraordinary degree.]
(2) Vilenkin made no calculation regarding how many of the 10^500 kinds of universes would produce intelligent life. So by continuing to claim he did, you are continuing to lie to us all. That makes you a liar.
Um. No. This is actually a precise calculation made from basic principles in the peer reviewed literature (it is actually a minimum, which you would know if you actually did what you lied about and didn’t do, which is actually check the literature forming the basis of this number).
You present no valid calculation to that effect in your paper. And 10^28 is vastly lower than 10^500 anyway, so would reduce the probability of intelligent life, not increase it. Thus showing you literally have no clue whatever as to how to do the relevant math.
The correct calculation for “the probability that there will be anyone experiencing a first-person consciousness” equals the converse of the probability there will be none (a converse, for the math illiterate, is 1-x). The probability there will be none equals the converse of the probability that there will be one, to the power of the number of “tries” (the number of randomly generated universes). At no point do you calculate the probability that life will arise by accident in any universe. So by claiming you did you are lying. Or else, are so gobsmacking incompetent you literally don’t even know this.
Let’s assume that probability is 1 in 10^25 (so, out of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 randomly generated universes, on average, only one will randomly generate a first-person intelligence, as ours has done). It then follows that the probability that across those 10^28 universes there will be someone experiencing a first-person awareness (without any god or any other intelligence having to exist) equals. 1-(1-x)^n = 1-(1-1/10^25)^(10^28). You’ll need some really fancy computing to run that equation. But what will come out of it is a number extremely near 1. Because 10^25 goes into 10^28 a full 10^3 times; so on average, there will be in this scenario 1000 universes out of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 universes with first-person observers in them, so the probability there will be instead none is as near to zero as makes all odds.
It is clear you understand none of this. You literally have no idea how to do any of the relevant math. So what you did instead is publish a paper with completely bogus joke math. And now you are trying to “sell” me on it being legit. It’s not. And your stupidity or dishonesty here is galling.
BLONDÉJANSEN: An acronym in the Kaixana language meaning “lunacy.”
Blondé: You are calculating the probability that there are objective, third-person awarenesses. In an honest calculation, the probability of having a first-person experience should increase if there are more conscious beings. In your math, it does not even matter how many conscious beings there are. If, in your math, there is just one conscious being in all of reality, some mysterious mechanism will find that being and bless it with a first-person experience. Such mechanism, whatever it is, is clearly not a natural thing. And then you still have to win your lottery in order not to be a fruit fly. Two vast improbabilities that work against naturalism.
I am calculating the probability of the observation that “there will be a first-person consciousness observing itself”, the very same observation you claim argues for theism over naturalism; in fact I am even calculating the probability that “there will be a first-person consciousness observing itself in a universal almost all of whose content isn’t intelligent,” the precise observation you claim. That is the only probability relevant to the probability that naturalism or theism is true. You choose a different probability that has no bearing whatever on whether naturalism or theism is true. That’s my point: your argument is illogical. You are using the wrong math. Your conclusion literally does not follow from the premises. That you still can’t comprehend this really does confirm you are catastrophically incompetent.
You are objectively (= scientifically) describing the beliefs of a third person, including his or her claimed belief to be a/the first person. That makes the distinction between first and third person useless. The claimed belief remains only a claim, not the truth. In our terminology, we have already conceded that consciousness can be objectively described, in accordance with the claims of interrogated persons, but it does not follow that first-personness is also objective. This means that claiming first-personness is not sufficient evidence for being it. After all, there is only one first person!
Imagine there are two parallel universes A and B, and nothing else. In universe A there are finitely many persons. Universe B is infinitely larger than A and has infinitely many persons. Then the probability that the first person is in A is reduced to zero. If at all there is a first person, he or she is with certainty in universe B. That’s the math compatible with both my ideas and, as far as I can see, your lottery math.
In conclusion: being a first person is subjective, not objective. So forget your scientific approach, because science is limited to the objective realm. You have to think like a solipsist, using your subjective facts. For example, ask yourself the question why you was selected as first person, and not somebody else.
No, Ward, this is not what is happening here.
You are claiming it is unlikely there will be a first person experience in a world when most matter in a world is not having a first-person experience. That is mathematically false. It does not matter what you say about third person beliefs. It is an objective and logically inescapable fact that the probability that there will be a first person experience in a world has no logical or mathematical connection whatever to how much material in a world is having such an experience (other than in exactly the opposite way: most matter in a godless universe statistically must be nonintelligent, ergo that most matter in this universe statistically is nonintelligent is evidence for this being a godless universe).
Therefore you are using the wrong math. Your entire argument is a non sequitur. As revealed by your false dichotomy, “why you [were] selected as [a] first person [observer], and not somebody else.” There is no “either me or somebody else.” There are billions of first-person observers. That explains why I am one of them. The probability that there will be a first-person observer when there are billions of first-person observers is literally, exactly, 100%. Always. In every logically possible universe. There is literally no possible universe in which P(FPO|1,000,000,000FPOs) < 1.
If you refuse to grasp this, you are insane.
And I cannot help the insane.
As for your new argument, in accordance with your demonstration of complete insanity, that is not an argument found anywhere in your paper. And it is also batshit bonkers and not even at all logically coherent. If there are infinitely many people in A and infinitely many people in B, there is no ratio between them: the probability of a person being in A or B is either even (50/50) or indeterminate (owing to difficulties peculiar to transfinite arithmetic). So your conclusion there is also mathematically incorrect (and you should know this, because your paper cites Bostrom, who makes the very point I am now making here). But it’s also not the argument in your paper, so it is not at all relevant here.
As for having to “think like a solipsist,” this sounds even more insane: on solipsism, by definition, there is only one first-person experiencer—you. Solipsism thus logically entails not only the non-existence of God, but of all other persons. Ergo if solipsism is true, your paper’s conclusion is false. Maybe you don’t know what “solipsism” means, which would in that case be due to your absolutely gobsmacking incompetence. But it’s starting to look like you are just a lunatic.
The author (Richard Carrier) repeatedly talked about evidence in this article. It seems to me he is not aware of the problems with evidentialism.
In general, we might say that anyone who says that “evidence is reliable and it’s never rational to believe anything without it” is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Where is their evidence for their claim that evidence is reliable? If they have none, then they merely assume it and thus believe it by faith (that is, without evidence) and break their own rule. If they try to provide evidence, they argue in a circle and thus fail to meet their own criteria for believing their own claim.
To paraphrase Bill Alston, evidentialism is infected with circularity.
It is your reasoning that is circular. You have to presume evidence is all fake in order to conclude it is not cumulatively indicative. An evidentialist does not. All they have to do is see if it works. And when it does, the method has been validated. The only way to escape this conclusion is by the invention of a Cartesian Demon, an even more improbable supposition than any required by the evidentialist. Evidentialism is therefore left as by far the most probable explanation of experience.
See my discussion of the inherent (as in: self-defining) improbability of any Cartesian Demon (including solipsism, which is just another kind of Cartesian Demon theory) and my discussion of how evidentialism derives entirely from undebiable facts as the most probable explanation of their organization, without any circularity or infinite regress.
Aside from what Richard said: Then all you’ve done is get it back to 50-50. Or, rather, you’ve get it back to having to argue all theories must be equally true.
The problem that people who want to reject evidence have is that you can’t decide among which logically possible state of affairs you happen to be in without it. On the basis of faith, you can believe absolutely any logically internally consistent hypothesis. Faith can never help you discriminate between possibilities. Only checking what facts are around you can do that.
Is your spouse cheating on you, yes or no? Both are logically possible: There’s no contradiction inherent to either infidelity or its lack of existence. You could live in a universe where s/he is cheating or s/he isn’t. If your goal is to determine which universe you live in, you need to, for example, determine if the pilates class s/he goes to late at night is actually a pilates class.
Now, it is true that, once you’ve determined that it actually is a pilates class, your spouse has made a fake pilates class to cover up what she’s doing, or anything else. But that assumption is itself fraught: it assumes that the number of universes where you could be in that situation is equal to the number of universes where the pilates class is just a pilates class. And at that point, things as basic as Occam’s razor will do you just fine.
See, the reason why people who care about evidence do that (we call them “honest” people, since everyone cares about evidence when they’re not defending their woobies for which the evidence they have is inconvenient) isn’t some a priori commitment. We didn’t wake up and say “I’m a positivist!” or something. We recognized that, even as flawed as our senses and memories and what not can be, the best indications that we have are that the conclusions that we arrive at based off of better evidence seem to be more reliably accurate. It’s a posteriori conclusion. It’s not absolute: Any honest person has to admit that mere evidence doesn’t exclude the possibility that we’re brains in jars and all the evidence we’ve accumulated is misleading even about the simulated universe we live in. But those explanations are actually low probability, not only due to the evidence (which actually can help you determine what kind of universe you’re likely to be in: the Matrix, for example, isn’t actually realistic because there actually isn’t a reason to run a simulation of the late 90s, such that even the movie had to make several hand-waves to get there) but also due, again, to basic logic.
In short, if evidence did not correlate with facts, we would observe it not correlating with facts (we see this happen for the schizophrenic, for whom what they experience fails to correlate with reality, resulting in their every effort to effectively obtain their goals fails, which they then observe, increasing their frustration from observing their continued failures).
Thus, we conclude evidence correlates with facts, because of the success of that thesis in obtaining all our objectives (from walking across the room successfully to acquiring food and shelter and good company). Evidentialism is therefore self-validating. It begins with undeniables (raw uninterpreted experience, which cannot not exist when it is experienced; denying it did would be an immediate self-contradiction), proposes hypotheses to explain the patterns observed therein, and tests those hypotheses against future undeniables. The success of this procedure leads to the well-advised adoption of evidence-based hypotheses (where the undeniables then become evidence of probables, i.e. an external reality that operates a certain way), and so on from there.
The only way to get to any other conclusion (other than by abandoning all logic, not just evidence) is by proposing some alternative theory to explain this pattern of experience. The only alternatives logically available are all Cartesian Demon scenarios. In which there is no reason to believe (evidence or otherwise), and ample reason to disbelieve (purely from the greater improbability of the required proposed parts for which no case can be made are probable—a conclusion that follows not from evidence but inescapable logic).
Thus, evidentialism is the only rational condition to land in. Every other is either illogical or logically necessarily improbable. Even if any Cartesian Demon scenario were true (e.g. even in The Matrix, evidentialism is correct, as you’ll notice Neo sticks with it all throughout, and does quite well on account of that—and if you even grasp the course of the film’s narrative, everything he learns about the Matrix he learns evidentially).
See my discussion of exactly this problem for all “non-evidentialists” in Sense and Goodness without God, II.2.1.2, “Meaning, Reality and Illusion” (pp. 31-32).
Richard Carrier wrote that “if evidence did not correlate with facts, we would observe it not correlating with facts…”
So, are you saying that your observation is direct evidence that evidence correlates with facts? Isn’t that circular reasoning?
He, then, went on to write: “The success of this procedure leads to the well-advised adoption of evidence-based hypotheses…”
One adopts the evidence-based hypotheses because they have evidence that such hypotheses work (i.e., the fact that they supposedly worked in the past). Again, that’s circular reasoning.
Finally, he wrote: “evidentialism is the only rational condition to land in. Every other is either illogical or logically necessarily improbable.”
So, if the alternative is illogical, then isn’t that logical evidence that evidence necessarily indicates that a belief has an intrinsic and non-arbitrary link to truth? If that’s correct, then aren’t you presenting evidence for the reliability of evidence? That’s called circular reasoning, sir. It is like trying to prove the reliability of your senses by using your senses. And circular reasoning logically entails that your theory is invalid.
Read the articles you were directed to.
Your questions are answered in those.
That’s why you were directed to them.
If you have a question about the argument in those articles, then ask it here. But please show that you actually read the article you are asking questions about, by quoting any statement in the article you want to ask about. And don’t ask a question about it that is already answered further down in the same article. If you pull a stunt like that, I will use that to demonstrate you have no sincere interest in really discussing this. That you already didn’t read those articles suggests you are just being a disingenuous troll. So please prove me wrong by taking this seriously.
Max: It really doesn’t make you seem like you’re honest when people explain why they see your point as flawed and you just say it again.
As Richard pointed out, evidentialism isn’t rooted in the evidence. It’s rooted in Cartesian certainty. You start with your uninterpreted experiences, which cannot be wrong because otherwise you are saying that you are not experiencing what you are experiencing which is literally saying A is not A (or that agent A is both doing and not doing thinking act X). You keep finding that your uninterpreted experiences keep correlating with the evidence. This isn’t a claim from absolute deductive logic, it’s inductive. (Though I actually think there’s an argument to be made that you can argue that evidentialism isn’t circular for another reason: It’s like you keep pulling out objects from an urn, namely evidence, and then deducing what’s left in the urn as a result of it, which is based on deductive reasoning and is not circular).
Imagine a truly solipsistic universe. Literally the only “real” thing in it is one person. Everything else is their construct. In that universe, how would such a person make that universe? How would they have more data than they have? How would they both make it and not know that they made it? It poses problems that I suspect are based in basic logic.
I know that I don’t live in that universe not because I think it’s literally impossible, but because I notice that I experience things I never would have and could have imagined. I can never get things to change even one iota by merely idly wishing it. The things I encounter have no correlation with my desires, anxieties, fears, or anything about me. There seems to be absolutely no two-way connection between any kind of ontology and any kind of my phenomenology. Yes, that is a probabilistic conclusion, but it’s one rooted in inductive and deductive logic.
In other words, we didn’t just decide to pick evidence as the criterion for how we sort ideas, arbitrarily. We picked evidence because it stands to reason that if you’re in any kind of space and you’re having experiences in it those experiences aren’t totally arbitrary, unless you’re experiencing them as such. And once we realized that we need to pull balls from the evidence urn, and that’s what we’re checking, it’s not illogical to infer what’s left in that urn from what we’ve pulled, and it’s not circular. Even if the urn is biased in a way we didn’t anticipate it was, that bias has to start showing up as we pull more things out of it.
Another way of thinking about it is this. Everyone who is making truth claims is actually making claims about what they anticipate they will or would experience. When we say “It’s raining”, we don’t mean that it’s raining in some mystical other place and dry here, we mean that water is coming from the sky. Except when people have reasons to defend their delusions, they’re always talking about what they expect the world they actually live in to be like. Which means we’re all grabbing from the evidence urn and deducing things about that urn. If you disagree with me about something and you’re not talking about the evidence urn, I don’t really care. And it’s not circular to measure a particular variable because that’s what you care about.
And to add to Fred’s point about how we non-circularly rule out solipsism (through logic and probability theory), see my article on Michael Rea, where I discuss, for example, why the hypothesis that microwaves exist outperforms the hypothesis that we are solipsistically inventing them.
Bayesian Epistemology also explains what Fred is talking about vis-a-vis the deductive foundation of inductive reasoning: per the formal proof long since published, it is logically necessarily the case that P(h|x)/P(~h|x) = P(h)/P(~h) * P(x|h)/P(x|~h), and this combined with undeniable uninterpreted experiences (Cartesian knowledge, which is logically necessarily true), produces the logically necessary conclusion that P(h|x) > P(~h|x) for the x we happen to have observed.
It could have gone the other way, e.g. we could have been gods over our own universe or our experience stream could have been an arbitrarily random chaos, etc. Instead, x assembles in a peculiar way such that only h renders it most probable without reducing the probability of h with additional posits that have no reflection in x; and what has no reflection in x logically necessarily cannot have a probability close to 1, and thus logically necessarily reduces the probability of h. This is all deductively certain. The only thing that isn’t is the “truth” of h, as that can only be deductively assigned a probability based on the pattern found in x (human experience). Which is why knowledge is predominately inductive.
I discuss this fact more in Chapter 6 of Proving History.
You keep equating first person and third person. It is possible to count the number of third persons in the universe, but there is no way science can know how many persons had a reasonable chance of becoming the first person, or how many people have a first-person experience. You cannot find out by interrogating people. This fact is called the hard problem of consciousness. Enter Chalmers. This results in the possibility that P(FPO|1,000,000,000TPOs) < 1.
Jansen does not believe in solipsism, and our argument does not depend on it. Instead of asking the question: “Why me?” we ask the question: “Why an intelligent conscious being?” in our paper.
But let’s take a closer look at your own lottery math to tackle that question. Imagine you have two urns filled with billions of balls: an atheistic urn and a theistic urn. A ball in the atheistic urn represents a conscious being and one in a million is an intelligent being. The theistic urn is filled with intelligent conscious being balls only. You draw a ball and you do not know from which urn. However, the outcome is an intelligent conscious being. If the probability for the atheism urn was 50% a priori, then your a posteriori probability becomes about one in a million. Hence, the ball was drawn from the theistic urn with 99,9999% certainty. So the math you use still refutes atheism.
No, Ward. Your paper purports to make a claim about objective reality external to a first-person observer. You chose that framework. I am telling you you used the wrong math for that framework. And that is that.
Hence: Instead of asking the question: “Why me?” we ask the question: “Why an intelligent conscious being?” in our paper. So am I. My explanation leads to a 100% expectancy of billions of first person observers and a universe almost entirely devoid of them; exactly what we observe. My theory thus fully explains observation. I’ve explained this to you so many times now I am tired of trying. You clearly do not comprehend a word I am saying.
“This results in the possibility that P(FPO|1,000,000,000TPOs) < 1.” Um. OMG. You don’t even know this is logically impossible. You clearly don’t know what FPO|1,000,000,000TPOs means. And that’s laughably hilarious because I explained it in plain English right before.
You must be the most profoundly stupid man I have ever encountered on the internet.
Case in point:
Actually, in the scenario you describe in the paper, almost all the balls are God, not me or you. So the odds are billions to one any draw from that urn gets God. I’m not God. So, evidently, by your reasoning, I’m not in that urn. Maybe now you might start to see the problem with your reasoning?
For the last time: this is not correct. You are using the wrong math. The probability I am in urn A or B is not the probability of drawing “just any” intelligent being from either urn. It simply is not. There is no logical basis for your thinking it is. None whatsoever. You are simply not doing correct math here.
If I were in urn A, the probability I am in A would be 100%. Literally. There is zero probability that I am not in there; because you can drain the whole urn and you will find a ball representing me. Thus you cannot determine the probability that I am in A by randomly drawing balls from it, because urn A by definition predicts most balls you draw won’t be me. So there is no way to determine the probability I am in A from drawing balls at randomly from it. Just as there is no way to determine the probability that someone won the lottery this week by randomly asking people on the street if they won the lottery. That simply isn’t how the math works. And it’s completely batshit bonkers to think it does.
Meanwhile, nearly every draw from urn B is “God,” according to your paper, which is not the urn we observe ourselves to be in. So those draws actually are evidence we are not in urn B. Whereas urn A predicts most draws should be inanimate matter, so when we get a few million draws from A and it’s all inanimate matter, that is evidence we are in A, not B. That is the correct math. And I cannot help you if you do not understand this.
Blondé: For you. Because you can’t understand the difference between FPO and TPO.
Blondé: It would be more accurate to say that almost all are conscious, intelligent beings whose experience is brought about (computed/thought) by God’s enormously large brain. You cannot exclude that your experience is in that position. Instead, because of our argument, you should believe this is the case. And being brought about by God doesn’t make you God.
Blondé: That’s a tautology. It doesn’t help you any further. And the rest of your argument (if there is any) not either. For example, you don’t even seem to notice that the balls in A were supposed to be conscious beings. No inanimate balls in there. A = conscious experiences brought about by the atheistic universe. B = conscious, intelligent experiences brought about by the theistic universe + God’s brain. The urn example is not in our paper. I made it here to expose how your own lottery math refutes atheism. It still stands as a rock.
No, you moron. You never defined TPO. But it is logically necessarily the case that one million TPOs constitutes one million FPOs. So you don’t get anywhere swapping the terms. There are either one million people experiencing their existence or there are not. It does not matter whether you formulate that statement as TPO or FPO. This is my fucking point.
No, you moraon. That is less accurate. Evidently you do not know the difference between being specific and being vague. I am pointing out the problem with your being vague: it results in a false representation of the facts. Being precise reveals your error. This is my fucking point. That you just ignored that point illustrates once again how either insane or incompetent you are.
No, you moron. On your paper’s stated theory any random piece of matter I grab in the universe will be God’s mind, not my mind (or any mortal’s mind). Period. That is what you described. That you can’t even correctly explain what your own paper says is more evidence of your insanity or incompetence.
That’s my point, you moron. If I am in A, I am in A. The probability is 100%. You cannot get it to be less than 100% (without presupposing I am not in A). That you think you can is why you are a moron.
No, you moron. In your paper you said most of the material in an atheist (naturalist) world would be neither conscious nor intelligent (in fact in your paper you drew no distinction between those states; this is a distinction you are now just making up, that has nothing to do with the argument in your paper, as I already noted). To say that all the material in urn A is “conscious” is simply no longer anything to do with correctly describing naturalism or anything you proposed in your paper. This is my fucking point.
And you just ignored that point. Again.
This is beyond incompetence at this point. This is lunacy.
Blondé: TPO means Third-Person Observer. A third-person observer is objectively conscious, and is referred to as he or she. A first person consciousness is your own consciousness, and is referred to with I. A TPO will claim to be conscious, respond to pain when hurt, appear to be conscious during a brain scan, and behave very similar to the first person. Scientific investigation therefore determines objetively that he or she is conscious. In order to know whether a person is a first-person observer, there is only one way: be that person. Only by being that person will you have the required subjective facts to be sure that that person is an FPO.
Blondé: “Brain” is the most accurate term here, rather than mind. Your brain, according to our argument, is most probably a proper part of God’s brain. Even multiple times, unless God does not want to compute you too much. And we draw randomly from all of reality, which is universe + God.
Blondé: We do presuppose you might not be in A, because we are trying to find out whether atheism or theism is true. Presupposing the ball can originate from either urn is how a balls and urns experiment works.
I know. And it is logically impossible for there to be a TPO and not be an FPO. Likewise it is therefore logically impossible for there to be a million TPOs and for there not to be a million FPOs.
You seem not to be getting this.
I know you think that. But my point is that you have never presented any evidence of this. Evidence for a proposition is a fact (an actual fact, something we have actually observed; not a speculation or a supposition) whose existence increases the probability of that proposition over alternative propositions (which are alternative explanations of that same observed fact). Nowhere in your paper do you ever produce such a differential in probability by any mathematically valid equation or approach.
You are missing the point.
If there are no FPOs in A, then A is not a possible world I could ever be in. So you would be presupposing I am not in A. Therefore you must be allowing I could be in A, but if I could be in A, then you cannot determine if I am in A by randomly drawing balls from the urn. Because if I am in A the probability I am in A is 100% no matter what balls you draw at random from it. And since almost none of the balls in that urn will be “me,” merely drawing one that isn’t me is incapable of being evidence I am not in A.
Until you understand this point, you will never understand the math you need to determine whether any FPO is in A or B, or even whether a specific FPO is in A or B (like, say, “me,” as opposed to “you,” or “God”). Your procedure is literally incapable of answering this question. I am done trying to explain this to you. You’ve had your chance. You’ve failed to grasp even rudimentary math or logic and have no conception how evidence works. And that is simply the story of you now.
Blondé: So how do you take the subjective facts into account? By equating TPO to FPO you neglect the subjective facts entirely. There are very many TPO’s not experienced by me. So, on atheism, it must be possible that no observer is experienced by me. By definition of FPO, there cannot be more than one FPO. This is a reserved term for the subjective experience. For the objective experience, we use conscious(ness) = TPO. Your approach fails to give an answer to Chalmer’s hard problem of consciousness.
Blondé: Ok, I’ll try to be constructive. Let’s suppose you are in A, and that, instead of drawing one ball, all the balls are drawn. Then, if we neglect the personal identity problem, you have indeed 100% chance of having your personal experience. But how can you explain such a mechanism on atheism? This would require that the atheistic universe is replayed very many times. That seems like a supernatural phenomenon to me.
No, Ward. Admitting that you can’t have a TPO without an FPO is a logical fact. Not the neglecting of subjective facts. It is logically impossible to have a TPO and not an FPO.
And no, it is not possible to “observe” no observers (you can only observe something if there is an observer).
And no, it is not the case that “there cannot be more than one FPO.” There are billions of FPOs. You are one. I am one. And so on. And naturalism can explain why (brains generate FPOs, and brains evolved over billions of years, and are now reproduced at a rate of millions a year: these are all confirmed empirical facts). Maybe you want to posit as a hypothesis that only you exist (and thus there is only one FPO), but that’s a hypothesis you have to prove with evidence, not a logically necessary fact you can simply assert as established. And your paper presents no evidence for that hypothesis. Moreover, even if there is only one FPO, there then cannot be more than one TPO. Because it is logically impossible to have one and not the other. An observer is an observer. We either exist or we don’t. We either are observing the universe or we are not.
And no, we are not talking about “the hard problem” of consciousness. That problem is no more solved by the proposal that only one observer exists than that billions do. In fact naturalism has, so far, a much better hypothesis (explaining more aspects of qualitative experience) than any form of solipsism or Cartesian Demon. But this is not anything your paper deals with. It contains no theory of qualia (as in, a theory that explains the specific content and range and localization of qualia experienced, and can predict what qualia will be experienced under what physical conditions). Cognitive science does. And that theory is not only wholly naturalistic, it depends on (because it predicts) the observation that qualia are only ever observed in biologically evolved brains and that most of the universe is inert matter. This is not theory. This is what we observe to be the case.
Naturalism thus predicts and therefore explains observation better than any theory you have proposed. And at no point in your paper is this addressed. You instead substitute for evidence the completely illogical claim that if most matter in a universe is not an FPO, that therefore FPOs are more likely to exist in another universe. But I keep telling you: the amount of matter in a universe that is not an FPO has no logical connection whatever to the probability that FPOs exist in that universe (except in the one sense I have shown: the ratio should be huge if atheism is true; and lo and behold, that is what we observe). And this is simply a fact. You continue to ignore this fact even after having it explained to you half a dozen times. Probably because you are insane.
Um. What?
This is babbling nonsense. I cannot even fathom what you even think is logically being stated here.
What explains why there are billions of FPOs in this world (as we observe in fact there are) has nothing whatever to do with counting up the matter in the universe (and thus drawing all the “balls” from urn A can never tell you why A and six billion other FPOs are in that urn, as in fact you will find there are once you’ve emptied it). The “why” has nothing to do with counting masses in the universe. It has to do with looking at the observed causal structure and historical imprints of this universe (billions of years of evolution on Earth, leading to billions of self-replicating organisms with brains of sufficient integrated complexity as to generate one FPO each).
There is no way to “disprove” that or even render it improbable by counting the balls in urn A. To the contrary, that almost all the balls in A are not FPOs is exactly predicted by naturalism and is actually therefore evidence for naturalism. So that that is what we find is evidence we are in urn A. The failure to find any God or that most of the matter in the universe is a sentient God is evidence against our being in B.
Your paper ignores this—the actual, correct, logical relation between evidence and explanation—and adduces instead the completely bonkers, wholly illogical argument that because most matter in the universe is not an FPO, that therefore all the matter in the universe is an FPO. That’s bastshit crazy. There is exactly nothing whatever logical about that. It’s just lunacy.
I can observe the subjective fact that I do not observe your experience. Moreover, it is logically possible that a transcendent being observes the whole universe, without being part of the universe. If that being is the first person, then, again, it observes the subjective fact that there are no FPOs in the universe.
I wonder whether you would subscribe to the following math rule: in an atheistic universe (without anything transcendent or supernatural) an observer A exists precisely once, while an observer B exists 100 billion times. (B can exist, for example, in a digital setting with 100 billion identical supercomputers. Or the universe is so large that B and B’s environment exists 100 billion times as an exact copy.) Then the probability to be born as B is 100 billion times higher. In other words, being B requires less explanation than being A. Would you admit that?
If you really want an answer why we observe what we observe, I will have to refer you to the combination of evolutionary conservation and cosmological natural selection, as explained in my two earlier papers. It predicts that the FPO’s eternal life starts evolving in a world that has the minimum fine-tuning for intelligent life (and, lo and behold, that is precisely what I observe):
https://wardblonde.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/20161007_PhilosophyCosmology_Eternal_Life.pdf
https://wardblonde.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/20191206_Symposion_EMAAN.pdf
Yet you are observing. That’s my point. You cannot observe a universe with no observers in it. Changing the definition of “universe” does not escape this point.
For example, a God who observed a universe would have to be in the same meta-universe as it, because then by definition he is causally interacting with it. You can’t escape this point by deploying an equivocation fallacy regarding what counts as a “separate universe.” A multiverse is a universe in this application. Otherwise your argument makes no sense. Because you are not arguing there is some “other” universe than ours that contains a God while ours lacks one. But I suspect you are too incompetent and insane to understand this point.
What you can do instead is compare competing hypotheses regarding other persons—whether I (and every other person) am a fake automaton or having a subjective experience like you—but nothing in your paper relates to testing these hypotheses against each other. Simply counting up how much matter is in a universe tells you nothing about which of those hypotheses is more likely (except in exactly the opposite way I’ve told you is actually correct).
You keep ignoring this. I will not keep explaining it to you. Conversations with lunatics are a waste of time.
Your new lunatic math question only illustrates this futility. We observe no universe in which 100 billion copies of me exist, so that has no relevance to anything. We already know we are not in that universe. “The probability” that I was “born as B” is therefore entirely refuted by observation. This is how evidence determines the probability of a proposition. You are operating like we can ignore evidence, and conclude there “must” be 100 billion hidden copies of me in this universe, and therefore all the evidence this is not true should be ignored. That’s batshit crazy. There is no mathematical logic here at all.
The correct math is to ask between two competing hypotheses (“I am here because there are 100 billion copies of me here,” e.g. I won the lottery because everyone won the lottery, vs. “I am here because evolution maintains billions of people at any given time and I am merely one of them,” e.g. I won the lottery because there is always someone who won the lottery and the odds are equal that it would be anyone playing who won), both of which predict a 100% probability I would be here (e.g. that I would have won the lottery), we need to look at the evidence: is the evidence we observe more likely on one of these theories, and which one?
The answer is: the evidence is vastly more likely on the theory that I am a chance product of evolution (e.g. that I happen to be the one who by chance won the lottery). Because we observe: there is only one of me, and all evidence that exists supports the evolutionary theory of my existence (e.g. we observe: everyone did not win the lottery; only the expected few did; ergo those who won won by chance, and not because “everyone won”). You can’t “skip” the evidence as if it doesn’t matter and just “conclude” everyone wins every lottery they play, “because” that would make it more likely that anyone who won would have won. That’s lunacy.
And neither of the two papers you now cite have anything to do with this. They are the same insane ranting I already refuted before.
Whether a godlike being “can” evolve in a multiverse is not relevant to determining whether one has or is anywhere around in our universe. And I already told you none of the science in that paper is legitimate; there is no evidence complex structures can survive Big Bang events or that entities in separate universes in any plausible multiverse can ever even communicate with each other much less travel between universes, rendering your theory about possible gods pseudoscientific. Previous iterations of minds cannot survive to accumulate attributes into our universe. With respect to complex intelligences, Big Bangs are extinction events. And we have no evidence whatever that supports the contrary conclusion.
Meanwhile I have already told you, in fact twice, that your EAAN paper’s argument is scientifically and philosophically illiterate and only published in a crank journal out of Romania—and you, being totally insane, ignored everything I said those times too, and attempted to respond by directing me to this new paper in Metaphysica, so you are playing a circular game of whack-a-mole here, citing one refuted garbage paper in defense of another, and ignoring all the evidence presented that they are garbage, as if this was never explained to you seven times from Sunday.
This is something I was thinking about earlier as well. If we want to talk about everything that exists, whether we define that word as “cosmos” or “universe” or “meta-universe” or whatever else (I just use the word “universe” because that’s what the term means), then either God is in it or It isn’t. And that applies to everything else. Even if God is omnipresent and thus is everything, that just means God is the universe, including the parts of it we can’t see, including the heavens. “Outside the universe” is just an equivocation fallacy. Even if I grant that talking about things that are “somewhere else”, where there is no causal effect whatsoever, is coherent and isn’t just describing a universe with impassable gaps in it, if God is there It isn’t relevant. It’s indistinguishable from fiction.
So the only argument that can be made, an argument that is made all the time from microscopic organisms to atoms, is that what we see in the universe around us is somehow misleading. But bridging that gap, for honest people, requires evidence. We believed in atomic and cellular theory first because there were actually really specific predictions made, and then started either seeing these previously invisible things and directly confirming their existence or getting very close (i.e. microscopes).
Blonde’s approach is totally inadequate for that task.
You seem to exclude complex structures with more than three spatial dimensions. You need just one extra spatial dimension to observe a reproduction cycle of our big bang universe from the outside. And there not being empirical evidence of such complex structures is predicted by my EMAAN theory.
No, Ward. Not a single thing I said has anything to do with extradimensionality. I am a string theorist. I believe there are many more dimensions than the observed four. Cosmological science still entails nothing survives transition points like a Big Bang. There is no “magical” dimension that can contain any complex structure, remain attached to our universe, and survive a maximal density inflationary event. More importantly, not only is there no theoretical basis for your nonsense (and I told you all this before, but you are insane, so I am sure you don’t remember), there is no evidence whatever for it.
Hence that there is zero evidence of any secret dimension that survives Big Bangs and holds super brains inside it that can interact with our world is why that theory is crank bullshit, and of no use to you. What is “logically possible” has no bearing on what is probably the case.
Just to be sure, I am talking about non-compactified extra dimensions. Infinitely many of them. Not 11 or 26 or so. And obviously the creatures in them do not stay attached to a big bang event. Moreover, the so-called singularity of a big bang is only a mathematical model. Compare it to a biological egg cell that is fertilized and starts to grow. Without the necessary knowledge about cell biology, mathematicians would also model the birth of a human as a singularity. So string theory is just an approximation of what really happens. In fact, there is lots of room for universe DNA that is smaller than the Planck-length. Even space itself can be considered as universe DNA, in accordance with the theory of cosmological natural selection of the physicist Lee Smolin.
In fact I do have empirical evidence for my belief in cosmological natural selection and our evolutionarily conserved roles in it. The reason why this evidence was granted to me is that, according to my own theory, I am not prepared to share it with you.
Non-compactified dimensions would be observable to us now. By definition. The only dimensions we would not experience are dimensions too compact to be visible. So we know for a fact there are no extra “non-compatified” dimensions. If any pre-existed the Big Bang, they were collapsed by it.
But that’s moot, as all dimensions are compatified at a Big Bang (everything is crushed to a near singularity, on a Planck scale). So there is no possible way a “non” compactified dimension can survive a Big Bang transition event. More importantly, nor can anything in it. All your precious lunatic-fever-dream secret alien DNA would be melted into random photons by hundreds of trillions of degrees of heat. Any complex structure even in a compactified dimension would be disintegrated. The only properties that can survive transition states are simple macro-parameters (e.g. physical constants), not complex structures.
Beyond that, nothing can survive transitions; not even in principle. That’s current science.
That you don’t know this is more evidence of your incompetence to even be discussing this subject.
But that last line? Aliens are talking to you. Got it. You are a lunatic. Already figured that out by now.
Richard, you’ve said elsewhere that if given enough information about a specific (conscious) brain, then even if that brain were completely destroyed, the consciousness that it produced could continue on, elsewhere, through a simulation made from the data about it.
If there is a multiverse, and there are other, very advanced beings in various other universes running a sufficiently large number of simulated brains, would it be possible for the conscious mind of a person who died in our own universe to ‘wake up’ and continue living, so to speak, by being recreated in a different one?
Information can’t think (a blueprint of a brain is not conscious).
But yes, if you can take a complete enough set of instructions and assemble a working brain from them, then that consciousness would resume (complete with memories, skills, personality, and so on it had at the time of dissolution). This also means you can make cognitive twins (currently not a thing in our experience, but an inevitable future possibility), wherein two people are identical cognitively up to time t, and afterwards diverge as numerically separate people (with their own unique and independent experiences and development thereafter).
However, this business about “other universes” is a different question.
That depends on how you are defining “different universe.” In cosmological science, “another universe” usually means by definition a universe informationally isolated from ours (we no longer causally affect it; nor it, ours).
For example, a universe formed at the same time as ours from the same Big Bang event: we can never go there, nor can they ever come here. Our universes (in that model) are only connected in the past, and during an event of such intense heat that neither matter nor signals could survive until cooling. We can’t go back in time now and fly into that other universe, nor send any signal back in time to it. Even if time travel in that sense were possible (it’s not), neither a ship nor a signal would even be able to get through the Big Bang thermal horizon; either would be completely destroyed. Likewise any future universe-budding incident would similarly be impassable (if a new Big Bang occurred, we could neither send a signal nor fly through it; if anything even came out the other end, its entropy would be so high nothing of it could be reconstructed there).
So, no, in that sense, on current science, we can never wake up in “another universe.” We could wake up in a distant state of our present universe, including in a simulated world within it. But that’s about it. And even that requires (a) that all that data was recorded before it desintigrated (so, can’t be much longer after your death at the latest; and no technology presently is capable of doing this—cryogenics might buy you some time on this, but we aren’t really sure) and (b) some artifact of sufficient complexity storing that data remains intact (and the data in it remains intact) long enough to be implemented and (c) someone is around to implement that. Since all probabilities approach 100% as t approaches infinity, at some point (b) or (c) will fail (there will be no (c) and/or (b) will decay unrecoverably), so there is always and only a finite window in which this can occur (however large, e.g. maybe trillions of years), after which its probability drops to exactly zero.
But even when it “occurs” (if luckily it does), it will still be “in” some future version of the same universe we started in.
Dr. Carrier, would you mind taking a look at the Digital Physics argument for the existence of God? It’s an argument by InspiringPhilosophy.
You’d have to point to some adequate articulation of the argument. Ideally the best, e.g. any peer reviewed paper defending it. Lacking that, then the most competent blog article or some such. If it exists in no written form, I’m not interested. But if there is a decent write-up, link the best one in here.
“If it exists in no written form, i’m not interested”
That is unfortunate indeed, to my knowledge, there only exists video form of it.
https://youtu.be/v2Xsp4FRgas
Generally anything out of left field like this that exists only on video, is crank.
If you find a serious write-up anywhere (as we have, for example, from Bostrom, which I’ve already addressed; my blog search window is on the right margin), let me know.
Alternatively, you can steel man the argument into a syllogism here and ask me to assess that.
Otherwise, generally, on topics like this from sources like this, video is a waste of time; massively inefficient and designed for rhetoric-over-rigor. You should generally just dismiss anything like it, until its proponents take their own argument seriously enough to concisely articulate it outside infotainment.
Richard,
If the Universe is cyclic, due to quantum fluctuation eventually producing repeated big bangs, then copies of ourselves would, at some point, be generated in one of those future universes long after we (and the present universe) were destroyed, correct?
But would it be our specific consciousness experiencing that regeneration? Even if we didn’t remember it, would we still be conscious again? Or would it be impossible, perhaps because it would require information to, essentially, travel from one universe (this one) to the new one, and multiverse travel, even of information, is impossible?
There are a few semantic problems in there.
First: a “copy” normally means a causally related replication (like a photocopy: the original causes the replication’s content; likewise if you transferred your mind into a virtual universe; etc.). That isn’t what a “Boltzmann Sean,” for example, would be (on Boltzmann events see my discussion in The God Impossible); there would be no causal connection at all. It would just be a random accidental similarity. There would be no connection between you. And no guarantee you’d be identical or share the same exact environment, and even if you did, it wouldn’t matter, because you’d never meet.
Second: identity normally requires a numerical causal-historical unity. So an accidentally identical Sean in another universe would not be you in any meaningful sense. The most you could say is they’d be identical to you in every respect except being in the same place and living the same life; you’d be in different universes, living wholly unconnected lives. You’d thus still be different people.
Third: as for whether your histories proceeded identically, that would require an entire Boltzmann universe, i.e. not just the accidental assembly of someone just like you, but of the entire identical cosmos around you, from the very first moment. Otherwise, your lives would proceed differently, as all the external causes will have changed. (I’m assuming causal determinism holds in all universes. That can be challenged. I’m just personally skeptical of nondeterministic universe models.)
Fourth: it is a mistake of mathematical logic to assume that an infinite array of randomized assemblies will necessarily infinitely duplicate each other. We actually don’t have the math to determine the probability of that, or even to ascertain if that probability is even high. It’s possible an infinite array will contain infinite sub-arrays of every result. It’s also possible it won’t. We don’t know. For example, an infinite collection of numbers could contain just one of every number. It does not follow automatically that it will contain an infinite number of each number. Maybe it will. But determining that requires an axiomatic proof inaccessible to present mathematical knowledge.
That last point also has a physical correlate: assume my proposal is true that the number of universes that will randomly arise from a perfectly indeterminate state (see The Problem with Nothing) is randomly selected from all possible numbers of universes. There will be a nonzero probability the number thus selected with be finite, not infinite. And therefore all suppositions requiring a premise of infinite universes are nullified.
One might then suggest that, well, yes, the initial array is finite, but each universe will continue cycling randomly by quantum mechanical eventuality an infinite number of times (in fact, even classical thermodynamic laws would have the same result; this is a common misunderstanding of what actually follows from the statistical derivation of the second law: in fact on an infinite timeline, perfect and total entropy reversals have a nonzero probability even on classical mechanics). But that’s not certain. Because if there is a nonzero probability of termination (if there is any probability of a quantum mechanical event ending a timeline, e.g. by permanent collapse or zeroing out all potentialities or ending up stuck in a finite eternal loop), no universe will cycle infinite times (the probability of that would be akin to infinity to one against, because all nonzero probabilities approach 100% as t approaches infinity). So even on that supposition, you still end up with a finite array of universes.
This is not to say that that is the case, but rather, we don’t know it is not the case. And we have no way presently of finding out. So we cannot assume on present physics that there are or ever will be infinitely many universes. The number is certain to be unfathomably large, but that can still be finite for all we presently know.
But as to your intended question: no, Boltzmann versions of you are not you and never have any connection to you. You will never share any experience or know anything about each other. And nothing you do, no decision you make, nor anything that happens around you, will ever affect them any more than the other way around. So no form of immortality can be realized that way.
Very informative! Thanks for your reply, and I just want to make sure I’ve got this down right:
A Boltzmann version of me, appearing in another universe after I was dead, would NOT be like me just ‘waking up’ in a different brain, correct? I’d still remain dead, with no consciousness, even if it was an atom-for atom precise ‘replication’, right?
A Boltzmann version of me, almost accurate, except NOT having a copy of my memory of my past, would NOT be like, say, a person stricken with amnesia waking up with no memory of the past, but still conscious and self aware. A Boltzmann version cannot be my specific, continuing consciousness at all, even with slight variations of the original mind, correct?
That is the fact of the matter for Boltzmann brain-replications (or near-replications) in another universe, but is it ALSO the same for ones that happen in the same universe?
Yes. Even if it’s a Bolztmann “Sean” that coincidentally forms a second after you die, in a Boltzmann universe otherwise likewise identical to one second after your death (these are two extreme improbabilities on top of the extreme improbability of “just any” Boltzmann Sean), it’s still not this Sean. This Sean won’t experience that one. Nor will that Sean even know about this one.
Worse, that Boltzmann Sean will be a fake, i.e. unlike you all their memories will correspond to nothing that ever actually happened to them, they will all be fake implanted memories that arose by chance accident not by historical causation, much like “replicants” in Blade Runner—yet even their memories causally came from someone; Boltzmann memories won’t even have that claim. Boltzmannsean’s memories won’t have any causal connection even to anything that happened to you (their correspondence will be purely a chance accident).
You might notice that vastly more Boltzmann Seans will be substantially different in their random memory implants. Because the number of variant Sean-memories is infinite compared to the singular Sean-memory-set that constitutes you, so the odds of getting a non-exact-replicant are infinitely higher than getting an exact one. This is the math that confounds us. We are stacking infinities upon infinities of variations to randomly select from. There is no known way to calculate if that entails any probability all of them will be realized even in an infinite array of universes of infinite ages.
Stacking yet further is the need of an entire Boltzmann universe close enough to this one that Othersean can even continue living beyond a few seconds in it, and that would even be at all familiar to the one in their fake memories. This is more infinities stacking on infinities—an infinitely precise randomly accidental universe corresponding infinitely precisely with an infinitely precise randomly accidental Sean replicant’s age of death.
Otherwise, the moment Boltzmann Sean arises, he will die in the random chaos of a radiation filled vacuum of space. Because randomly choosing where a Boltzmann Sean will arise, infinitely more “possible places” will be random chaoses of a radiation filled vacuum, not organized, self-sustaining, life-sustaining planetary environs—much less ones identical to the Earth of Heresean’s familiarity.
And so on.
You might start to see the problem.
And all that still has no causal connection to you. They’ll never know anything about you; nor you them (see my article on Gettier Problems for epistemic perspective: accidental knowledge isn’t real knowledge). And nothing about you, will have caused anything in them. They will be even less related to you than someone of a completely different genetic lineage today who just “by accident” could pass as your impostor from happenstance similarities of appearance.
That would be logically impossible, yes. In their complete hyper-dimensional description, two objects of different spacetime locations, with no distinctive causal links between them (in either direction or at either end), can never be the same object. That is actually in fact the definition of being completely different things.
Nor can such things be copies of each other, because a copy is a causal construct: the original causes the structure of the copy. Thus the copy meaningfully preserves something of the original, and can even meaningfully be spoken of as in some limited sense the same thing. This is not so in Boltzmann cases.
Of course. Which patch of spacetime it happens in is irrelevant. As long as there is no meaningful causal connection between them. If there were a meaningful causal connection, we’d be talking about Copysean and not Boltzmannsean. But a Boltzmannsean is by definition a random accident, not a causal copy.
Though a Boltzmannsean in this universe will wake up in a lethal radiation-filled vacuum and thus immediately die. Unless an entire new (similar?) universe also formed around them again after this one died out; and then we are really talking about a different universe again, and not this one, except insofar as one could trace its history back to this one, though one almost certainly couldn’t: our part would be hidden behind another Boltzmann Big Bang, the one those in that next universe will see as 14 billion years in their past—lest they find themselves in a radically different universe, and thus not one identical to the one you know.
It’s even worse than that, too. Even insofar as a Boltzmannsean is truly in pattern identical, they are not at all the same in a very crucial respect: most of Boltzmannsean’s memories will be entirely fake; whereas Copysean’s will be more real (they will causally trace back to things that actually really did happen to Originalsean). Thus copying yourself is a meaningful way to attempt immortality (and really, is the way we live at all: you are always just a virtual-quark-replaced copy of the you that existed yesterday).
Notice how less this makes Boltzmannsean than, for example, Duplisean: another universe that spun off the same Big Bang as ours and had identical initial conditions and followed the exact same causal trajectory, and thus deterministically duplicated everything that happens in this universe. This Sean will be fully born, raised, and living and dying in that universe never knowing about you; and you will be fully born, raised, and living and dying in this universe never knowing about Duplisean.
Of course that means you’ll both die at exactly the same time and in exactly the same way and so on, so there’s no chance even for an analogy to an afterlife. Yet Duplisean will be more really a Sean than any Boltzmannsean, most of whom will be actually fake.