i'm with you. i remember reading plato for the first time, about half an hour before the exam, and thinking, but Everybody knows this. which was very smart and very dumb, both.

as for thinking is much harder and less immediately rewarding than rehearsing a belief's strong points?

ohhh grrrl.


Edited at 2012-06-19 07:19 pm (UTC)

I had almost exactly the same brainfuck when I realized that muflax and Mitchell Porter make sense. I am currently working through this.

But I don't have the willpower to study radically different thinking from my own for years, so I'll just go with whatever you end up with on the other side of this. Make sure you get the right answer!

"… I need to learn more about Catholicism and the scholastic world view in order to further explore this alternative maximum, and I also need to be more diligent in pursuing the trivial problems with my own maximum since they're the ones that would convince an opponent that it was wrong."

Why do alternative maxima and the convincing of opponents motivate you? Where do they fit into your own local maximum/worldview? I'm not seeing a connection to "reductionist atheist consequentialism with a Bayesian epistemology and a reduction of metaphysics to cognitive science".

I feel weird encountering people like muflax and WN and MP after they appear to be crazy, but hearing from people like you that they used to be awesomely sane. I don't know whether to hope to level up to WN's level of meta-sanity or that he wins his way back to whatever my own level is.

What fightens me in this context is the intermediacy, if that's a word, of a position in which you end up after the people who seemed sane end up where they are, and you can't recall, which part of their ideas you checked for consistency, and which you took for granted.

I guess, the above-referenced mindfuck is the appropriate description.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ik/one_argument_against_an_army/ comes to mind as being fairly important in avoiding this. I occasionally poke and genuinely *engage* with people I disagree with, and make sure that the discussion results in *cumulative* changes in my beliefs. It's left me with access to a large number of perspectives, "local maxima" if you will, that I can call on.

Over time, I've found that different models are useful for different situations, and different goals (for instance, do I want to guarantee myself a mild success, or am I willing to risk it all for a grandiose success?) Having these other models in my head means that I'll often realize "Hey, Paganism actually produces more useful predictions for me." It doesn't mean I abandon my "Atheist maxima" in other situations, or that I think Paganism is "The Truth" - it just means that it happens to handle the current situation best.

Of course, if I hadn't engaged with Pagans and let that model develop in the first place, I never could have said "hey, this model works best for me!"

I try to avoid claiming I run any single model as "The Truth", although if pushed I'll immediately jump to the LessWrong-style maxima as being the obvious candidate. Part of that is that it's the only maxima I have that looks at my other models and asks "Okay, Catholicism seems to be generating Useful Outputs, how can I benefit from that without actually converting?"

I just decided a while back that I don't care if I'm right or wrong so long as I still have something to eat.

Getting things to eat doesn't seem challenging enough to be interesting.

If I were a weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist, converting to Catholicism would probably be my next step too. And if I were a weird quasi-Platonist Catholic, perhaps I would feel a need to follow virtue ethics. And if I were a quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist Catholic, I might well follow it up by becoming weird. So that's one local maximum / attractor. And I'm pretty happy as a reductionist atheist consequentialist, so that's a good local maximum too.

I suspect that you might not be taking this far enough.

If I read you correctly, you seem to be basically presuming that the outcome is order-dependent - that if somebody has adopted belief X, it makes sense for them to adopt Y next, and so on. And if that same person would instead have first adopted A, it would have made more sense for them to adopt B next, and so on. And if they could fit both worldviews in their head at once, they might find the one that's actually globally optimal.

And that is probably true for some people. But suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that there were only two worldviews, A and X. I think that there might be both smart, reasonable, rational people who believe A and would continue to do so even if they could consider all of X, and equally smart, reasonable, rational people who believe X and would continue to do so even if they could consider all of A.

Why do I think this? Because the decision of which worldview to adopt might ultimately not depend on anything that we consider a question of intelligence. Rather it depends on which axioms you base everything on, and the choice of those axioms is ultimately an arbitrary decision. Psychologically it reduces to going down to the level of "black box" intuitions - ones which simply declare one axiom as nonsensical and another as obviously correct, and that's it. No amount of analysis is going to change those intuitions. And, well, why would all of us have to have black box intuitions that agreed with each other?

As an extreme example, some negative utilitarians believe it obvious that no amount of pleasure can ever justify any amount of suffering, and find the very thought of anything else absurd. Everyone else tends to find the negative utilitarians as being obviously wrong. As a less extreme example, many of the differences in what's considered "trivial" in philosophy might also be due to differences in axiomatic black box intuitions.

(Related on LW: No Universally Compelling Arguments, Created Already In Motion.)

Also, can has linkz to intelligent Catholic bloggers with good senses of humor and good insight and interesting personalities and in some cases even a good understanding of rationality and bias?

I consider "unreachable" positions possible in morality (though even there I'm not sure, and I still hold out hope that most people's CEV would converge). I'm less accepting of them in factual questions like whether there's a God or not, especially since I expect those positions to be very overdetermined (ie if there is no God, I would expect multiple lines of valid argument to all converge on that fact, and same if there were one).

I don't think we base most of our reasoning on "axioms" anyway, though I can't explain entirely what I mean by that. And I also think that given the amount of, well, stuff in philosophy, it would be pretty hard to come up with totally screwy axioms that don't lead to any contradictions or bullet-biting.

Aside from Leah herself I really liked The Last Conformer, who had a discussion on Eliezer's "can't distinguish elementary particles" post that I was totally unable to follow but who generally seemed quite interesting.

This blog is having HTML problems, so I can't do links properly. Here they are improperly:
Leah's blog "Unequally Yoked": http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/
The Last Conformer blog: http://last-conformer.net/

Well, if you find the secret knowledge, please be the first to share.

"So I guess what I've been thinking the past three months is that I need to learn more about Catholicism..."

Why Catholicism specifically? There's no way that's the only local maximum in beliefs that smart people congregate toward; I'm even willing to bet a small amount of money that Catholicism doesn't have the highest concentration of those smart people with consistent and logical-ish worldviews per thousand adherents. There are oodles of intelligent, highly-educated Presbyterians, and Jews, and Muslims, and Hindus, and adherents of all sorts of alien religions that none of us have heard of.

Catholicism seems to have the highest percent of converts among smart people I know. Not a great heuristic, but the one I'm using.

>a few virtue ethicists who when I poke them enough will probably turn out to just be operating at a different meta-level than I am

This is what I'd been assuming. Virtue ethics, like deontology, is just a good hack for implementing consequentialism on a human brain.

I just wish those darned virtue ethicists would figure that out!

Couple of points. (And I may have double-posted them, and I'm now trying to split this tl;dr comment to get it posted. LJ doesn't give me feedback, so sorry for unintentional spam.)

First, yay! You blogging more is a big win. If several crazy people ranting about Catholicism gets you to do that, I'm fine with that. (I'm also fine with you putting your energy into more useful stuff, but I'm also selfish and immensely enjoy your writing. So not gonna stop you either.)

Second, I can't help but laugh about this. The Discordian in me is truly delighted that others are getting the "your whole framework and its internal consistency are much less robust than you think!" point about different "reality tunnels", as RAW called them. I'm putting "mindfucked several smart people" on my resume, right next to "convinced someone Uwe Boll is a genius".

Also, I'm totally ignoring the religion trip thing for now (because once you get hooked on Catholicism, you're never getting off this stuff ever again), mostly because I don't have the time to say anything meaningful about it right now. Some other points, though.

I find it very helpful to actually just suspend my disbelief for a while and take other positions seriously, see how they work.

For example, up to fairly recently, I agreed with Benatar that utilitarianism is broken because you can't actually put benefit and harm on the same scale (http://muflax.com/morality/antinatalism/#comparable). That's like, duh! Shut up and multiply is just crazy! I had heard all the utilitarian arguments, but I found them all silly and unconvincing. One day, out of curiosity, I asked myself, ok, let's take this seriously. Benefit and harm *aren't* on the same scale. Then how *do* they work? Could we build a multidimensional utility function, one that outputs a vector instead of a real number, in a way that still obeys the VNM axioms? So I tried that, thought about various formalization for a few hours, read a bunch of papers and then concluded, *damn*, sure you can do that, but the most straightforward, sane and even biologically plausible way will be equivalent to a real-valued utility function!

So I went, *fuck*, the utilitarians are right, their stuff does make sense (in this regard). But *no* utilitarian I ever read talked about that, even though this criticism isn't particularly obscure. (It crops up quite frequently in the yearly Dust Specks vs. Torture debate.) For them, I suspect, it was always a "trivial" problem.

(Old comment deleted for being kind of dumb.)

Could we build a multidimensional utility function, one that outputs a vector instead of a real number, in a way that still obeys the VNM axioms?

Can you explain what you mean by this? VNM axioms assume a total preorder. I assume what you mean here is not "replace real numbers with vectors of real numbers" -- note that if you already have real numbers I doubt you need the full strength of the VNM theorem, since getting real numbers out of it is the hard part! -- but "replace total preorder with some other sort of thing". (I was going to say "relation", but then I realized it might be e.g. a vector of relations.)

Also, only going back to VNM, not all the way to Savage's Theorem? Lightweight. :)

(Part 2)

So similarly, I currently take Mitchell's stuff seriously. I mean, I *don't* know how a causal closure of the world gets you consciousness. That's a non-trivial problem, and I have no idea why the materialists don't acknowledge that, as Mitchell says, they are crypto-dualists or eliminativists. Sure, they may not be, and materialism might actually be right and I'm just missing some background information or I misunderstand an argument somewhere, but *right now*, I don't see how a causal description of the universe actually includes the perception of seeing red. And most importantly, I *don't* see how re-reading the Sequences for the fifth time or torturing myself with Dennett or any of that stuff, or re-hashing the same arguments is gonna help me through this problem.

So instead, ok, let's assume physicalism *is* false. Then what *else*? How would you do it? What would a non-physicalist world look like? Can you actually tell a difference? And to answer that question, I at least have to actually seriously engage non-physicalist positions, and learn about monads and quantum physics and supervenience and non-causal attributes and all that. It might turn out that I find that this is all just equally confused, or actually equivalent in practice and just uses a more intuitive language (to me), or anything like that. Or maybe the Catholics are exactly right, as always. (semi-kidding) But for now, I found that these positions often have a lot of good points that at least aren't addressed elsewhere, once you get used to the different framework and language. (And because of this, for me Mitchell went from "ugh the quantum crap again, downvote" to "excellent point, why is no one talking about this?!".)

Similarly much of the other crazy stuff I do.

(Also, I at least have the decency to not post the same novel-length arguments or emotional ranting to LW every time these topics come up, like some other people I won't name and actually like, but who annoy me just as much. And because there are more important things than obscure metaphysics and theology. Like ice cream.)

A last point is that I think different frameworks are actually much more similar than adherents of any particular one might realize, due to very different jargon and intuitive starting points (and sometimes instrumental goals). For a simple example, see David Chapman's latest post (https://meaningness.wordpress.com/2012/06/19/passionate-connections/) on Buddhist Tantra, especially the first section. If it weren't for the word "tantra", this could easily have been written by someone in what you call the "reductionist atheist consequentialism" attractor. Yet Aro, the Tantra variant David belongs to, traces its lineage to the various visions of various reincarnated gods. Heck, all the most influential Aro teachers right now claim to be reincarnations of those gods and to have various magic powers. Is this bullshit? Probably. Do we *really* need a framework of gods and rebirth and "emptiness", whatever the fuck that is, to live decent lives? No. Does this framework actually help people learn the lessons in David's post? *Yes*.

All models are wrong, some are useful. Someone else's model might just hijack different mental capacities and shortcuts. They aren't necessarily crazy. (Even the Catholics.) And I suspect, some people get this and so become framework polyglots who jump from computationalism to monads to transubstantiation in the same argument because they see it's about the same kind of thing. (Or we're borderline schizophrenics. Will and I likely are. Don't take us too seriously.)

(And I don't think anyone has secret knowledge or different reasoning facilities. Maybe time constraints and undisclosed background information, sure, but not "God told me how the Fake Sky actually works and He made me sign an NDA".)

I need someone to explain monadology with the same clarity as Eliezer and Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan &c explained reductionism. My memories from my undergrad studies of Leibniz are hazy, but seem to involve someone saying that a table wasn't just a bunch of atoms, it was actually a Unified Table Monad, and me then deciding it was not worth further study. If you know of such a good explanation that avoids such an issue, let me know.

It wouldn't surprise me at all if Buddhists and atheists were talking about the same thing. I'm from California and that's been common knowledge there for like thirty years :)

I am not convinced that "all models are wrong, some are useful" is a useful model to have. And don't get me started on RAW. He set my intellectual development back by about three years when I accidentally took him seriously, which even he doesn't do.

"Consciousness can't currently be explained in a reductionist materialist universe" strikes me as having the same structure as "Consciousness can't currently be explained in a universe without Bigfoot". Both statements are correct, but unless adding Bigfoot produces a better explanation of consciousness, the latter isn't even a little bit of a reason to believe in Bigfoot. I have yet to see any non-reductionist explanation of the mysterious redness of red that gets much beyond the phlogiston or res cogitans level. But I admit I don't understand half the things non-reductionists are saying (three quarters if the non-reductionist involved is Mitchell Porter)

Well said.

I can sort of get why one would subscribe to strange-sounding ideas after getting acquainted with anthropics, Big Worlds, acaual deicison theories, simulators, et cetera, but I could never understand how one could sidestep the massive lack of evidence of actual supernatural influence in this world, in the course of converting to whatever religion.

Yeah, without actually seeing it, the bit about "If I were a weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist, converting to Catholicism would probably be my next step too." seems pretty implausible. I have to wonder what kind of argument could follow that, except for the classic argument by equivocation, which shouldn't convince anyone of sense.

Tangentially, I'm also of the opinion that going with "timeless physics" over "block universe" is kind of insane; but (assuming I'm correct in calling it an error) that's a pretty isolatable error, not like whatever the hell Will Newsome is claiming. (Also, if we assume "block universe" is the correct way of thinking about things, then what Eliezer writes is, in a sense, almost right, even though it's in another sense drastically wrong. The fact that what he writes about how to think about time fits nearly perfectly with the block universe way of thinking, almost makes me suspect that he got confused somewhere along the way and argh, what the hell? Eliezer Yudkowsky wouldn't fall to an elementary confusion like that! I'm still confused about this.)

This has been an entertaining thread!

Perhaps there is an absolute truth, but how can we, as finite beings perceive it perfectly?

There is a belief I have picked up from some indigenous people that there is a unique piece of the truth in each person's heart that nobody else has. Hawaiians acknowledge and show respect for this unique truth when they thank people for sharing their mana'o (message, point-of-view, perspective)--whether or not they agree with the person or the mana'o. But they also show respect for mana'o when they do not share every opinion they have. It also means that they can be very uncomfortable with people who disagree in a confrontational way.

I quit worrying about who was right, stopped fearing that I might convert to something, and started asking myself, "What can I learn from this person?" Then I really enjoyed the company of so many interesting people. And now I get to teach the Big 5 World Religions to kids, in a way that I was never taught until I attended a church college. I hope that they will be a little more enlightened about people of other faiths (or lack of the same) than my generation was, but there is never any guarantee at all.

xuenay has it, I think: there's certainly the possibility that "you can't get there from here" for any given "here" and "there" (and "you").

In the case of Leah Libresco's conversion to Catholicism, it certainly seems pretty odd, but she's promised some more posts covering her reasons, so maybe we'll learn some more. As an ex-evangelical, I'm not that worried that I might be wrong because someone clever has done this, though, because I think I've seen the best arguments in favour of Christianity (I'm sure you don't need a link to the relevant Less Wrong posts on argument and authority). If she's got better ones, I'm all ears.

I vaguely knew Will Newsome's name from LW but didn't have any particular ideas about him. I read the first blog entry and I knew what the individual words meant, but, well...

I think that very intelligent people are prone to a flaw where they'll take on a system which appears to solve all their problems without considering all the burdensome details, especially if that system is cognitively "rich", which seems to be true of philosophical Catholicism (though I can't really make head or tail of Aquinas). I suspect that might be what happened with Libresco, but we'll see.

21:52 < beets> SCOTT HAD TIME TO WRITE THIS, BUT COULDN'T GET BACK TO ME ABOUT SATURDAY?!
21:52 < beets> NOT THAT I EVEN NEED TO KNOW BEFORE FRIDAY, BUT STILL!!!!

Ahem.

Man, I totally forgot to organize all the tasks I had for this week in reverse order of how long they were going to take and then do them exactly in that order.

Charmingly expressed thoughts. I wonder if the author might have abandoned Aristotle rather too quickly, before understanding what the guy was really on about. Substance is important, but it's really being that is the key. And it's the general point about the need to start at the beginning - in one's justification of the truth, not in one's discovery of it - in order to have any real (claim to) knowledge, as opposed to accepting a bunch of assumptions one is comfortable with, and then half-heartedly considering the abstract possibility of jumping to some other organized pile of assumptions, for whatever reason. Great observation about the default reaction thing though (reminiscent of William James' reflections on "the will to believe"). Is the reaction of "and I just don't care" really a satisfying one though? Obviously it is (in some sense) for some people, but you? Just from reading this one post I would say that you seem rather more intellectually committed than that.
DavidM

I see no way to log in to your blog as one of my normal accounts, so I'll admit up front to being Theodore M. Seeber from Oregon (to separate me from my Dad, Theodore F. Seeber, who is too old to learn how to use Web 2.0 anyway), who got here from Mark Shea linking to Leah, who linked to you, and I'm a cradle Catholic who stayed Catholic precisely because I find it makes more rational sense than any other religion out there, including atheism.

Enough introduction. You said above:
"If I were a weird quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist, converting to Catholicism would probably be my next step too. And if I were a weird quasi-Platonist Catholic, perhaps I would feel a need to follow virtue ethics. And if I were a quasi-Platonist virtue ethicist Catholic, I might well follow it up by becoming weird. So that's one local maximum / attractor. And I'm pretty happy as a reductionist atheist consequentialist, so that's a good local maximum too. "

I think that what you're missing here is that for the billion or so Catholics in this world, quasi-Platonist virtue ethic-ism isn't weird, it's normal. And that it was normal for 2000 years or so prior to the so-called "enlightenment" at which point philosophers seem to have lost anything close to a Compass of Virtue- and following the wind rather than a map seems to me to be a rather bad and irrational way of doing things.

But then again, like you say, that's a local maximum. I'm not sure I can imagine a world where that local IS a maximum, so I'll leave with the thought that without rules, there can be no rules to discover.

I may well be taking my prejudices out for a stroll, but I'm still not convinced I'm wrong, so here goes.

Catholicism's historical record isn't exactly excellent, and there've been some recent embarrassments as well.

If it's the one true religion, or at least the truest available religion, shouldn't it do a better job of encouraging moral behavior?

Well, why should it?

Anyone developing a taste for this sort of iconoclasm needs to go read the works of Celia Green. The Human Evasion is the most readily available, but Advice to Clever Children is also important, if you can find it.

Scott, what a great read. And your commenters too.

>>pursuing the trivial problems with my own maximum since they're the ones that would convince an opponent that it was wrong

I expect those "trivial" roadblocks for the non-Unitarians aren't necessary in whatever fuel is powering that group's Virtue Ethics.

Sure go investigate the roadblocks to adjust your confidence level, but look into the different fuels if you're interested to find which arguments result in conversions.

Surveys might show you which demographics are converting to where, and suggest reasons why.

On intelligence, psych is telling us it builds confidence levels. Especially for conservatives. Quick thinkers defending loyally and righteously. They won't change their minds, they might change yours ;) A shout out to Leah, where I blew in from.

Atheists level-jumping to wrestle with Catholics seems like an odd choice. Surely go after your nearest neighbours. And convince others to start doing the same.

Edited at 2012-06-21 07:11 am (UTC)

"So I guess what I've been thinking the past three months is that I need to learn more about Catholicism and the scholastic world view in order to further explore this alternative maximum, ..."

Noo, don't do it!

Why care about consistency? It is a necessary consequence of truth so lack of consistency indicates that you are missing something, but rather than trying to beat your beliefs into a consistent shape, its best to try and find more truth.

In terms of your post, rather than making balloon trips to different mountains in the consistency landscape, learn to breathe the nasty air at low elevations, that is make yourself more comfortable with inconsistency and confusion. Then, when Catholics have some specific improvement to offer you will be able to consider it without cognitive dissonance.

I think you've missed the point that the author believes that truths are established inferentially but that the truths at the bottom (axioms) are neither demonstrable nor self-evident - and it is the problem of the truths at the bottom which is the crux of the matter, since you can't just 'find' more of them. He thinks one just has to posit these based on the fact that they seem to support some conceptual edifice that seems to one to be 'maximal' somehow or other.
-DavidM

One of several things I don't understand: Are the Platonic theory of forms, the Aristotelian theory of forms, and categorization theory actually different attempts to answer the same question? If so, what is that question? If not, why does Scott write as if they are? Or what else could he be trying to say in that fourth paragraph?
-DavidM