http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
newton can vouch for the fact that we discussed this long before you piped in with the heresy charge. I made it clear way back then that there was some miscommunication between us as to this topic.
I will admit that anytime one involves himself in theological speculation often opponents are quick to jump in with threats of the inquisition.
That is the problem that Dembski ran into with those other reactionaries.
peace
RB:
fifth:
Whoosh. Right over fifth’s head.
He’s talking about the way you numbered your statements, fifth:
Just so you know, this is actually evidence for people having wide ranges of interest in weird things that people believe, not for the claim that we actually believe in God. Maybe you are only interested in discussing stuff that benefits you personally, but others may not share that trait.
I thought that we established that FMM is terrible at detail but I don’t see any evidence that Yahweh a Se is hindered by the same handicap
😉
fifth:
That’s quite melodramatic, but pointing out that your position is heretical is hardly tantamount to threatening you with the inquisition. That’s a job for your fellow theists.
I disagree with this line of reasoning.
Bostrom’s scenario depends on certain assumptions that, from what I can tell, cannot be assigned a determinate truth-value.
Perhaps I invited certain misunderstandings when I put my objection in terms of likelihoods. If so, I would put the point in terms of indeterminacy of truth-value, rather than in terms of assigning probability.
In particular, I would say that we can’t know if consciousness is substrate-neutral (though it is easy enough to imagine that it is, as Bostrom does), and we also can’t know much about whether the emergence of sapience in the universe is tied to technological progress.
Since that’s my assessment of the scenario, it would be inconsistent for me to endorse it. That is why I reject it.
I’ve given reasons for why the scenario lacks justification, and that’s all I need in order to say that, as far as I can tell, I know I’m not in a simulation.
Of course it’s possible that I am in a simulation after all, which is just to say that I lack certainty, but since I don’t think knowledge requires certainty (in fact I think certainty and knowledge are contraries!), the absence of certainty is no barrier to knowledge.
KN,
A lack of justification for belief X does not automatically constitute justification for belief not-X.
fifth,
Arrange the following events in chronological order for us; that is, the order in which they occurred within time:
Moses gets mooned by God
Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus
The creation
The incarnation
Adam and Eve talk with God
Exactly, that is why there are Top Ten lists.
I do recognize the need for a much more positive and richer account of perception than anything I’ve given here so far. At times I’ve argued that perception has a normative weight to it that is distinct from the normative authority that accrues to assertions and other speech acts. There has to be (contra Dennett) a distinction between experience and judgment, or all is lost.
In what I (now) call “two-dimensional intentionality” — with ‘sentience’ and ‘sapience’ being the two ‘dimensions’ — I have something like this in mind: we share with other animals rich, complex, flexible, and adaptive habits and skills for embodied/embedded perceptuo-practical coping in our environments. The emergence of capacities for argumentation and conversation has a ‘trickle-down’ effect that transforms those perceptuo-practical coping into epistemic authority.
Thus, feeling a draft can be, for one of us, evidence a window is open — thus one can ask (of another or even to oneself), “I feel a draft. Is the window open?” Conversely, although a non-linguistic animal can feel a draft and thus infer that a window is open (one can imagine that this is well within the cognitive capacities of a great ape), it can’t reflect on its own inference, ask if the inference is correct, or take its own sensations as evidence for or against a hypothesis.
In short, we not only defend a distinction between perception and judgment (contra Rorty, Dennett, etc), which we need to do for epistemological purposes, but we can also understand that distinction in thoroughly naturalistic terms, thereby defeating the anti-naturalistic objections advanced by Van Til and Plantinga.
walto,
For the fourth time, I am not talking about numerical probability estimates, though they qualify. I am talking about subjective likelihood assessments, whether or not they involve numerical probabilities.
Take belief X. Some things (facts, arguments, realizations) increase the subjective likelihood of X’s truth; other things decrease it.
To claim knowledge of X makes sense only if you regard X as likely to be true — that is, if the subjective likelihood is high enough, whether the threshold is explicit or implicit. If you think that X is unlikely to be true, or if you lack the knowledge or resources required to decide whether it is likely true, then a knowledge claim is inappropriate because you lack justification — you can’t confirm that X is likely to be true.
I never said it does. My justification for what I think is true has nothing at all to do with my evaluation of Bostrom’s simulation scenario. My evaluation of the scenario is my reasons for thinking it is false.
keiths:
KN:
Yes, you did:
That’s bad reasoning.
Let X be the claim that there are an odd number of dollars in Dinesh D’Souza’s checking account right now (ignoring any cents). I lack justification for believing X, but that hardly entitles me to claim that I know that Dinesh D’Souza doesn’t have an odd number of dollars in his account. I simply don’t know either way.
No, that claim is inappropriate because you don’t believe X, not because you’re not justified in believing X. I’m not going to respond to this confusion a sixth time.
That’s completely confused, but I’ll let KN do his own defense from this point.
Long before, Telic Thoughts. My recollection was even then you had the effect preceding the cause which seems logically problematic. Not sure if non temporal logic makes sense.
Speculation ,fifth? Sounds subjective.
True ,for atheists it is often just an intellectual exercise for the religious it is a threat to the hegemony of their view.
peace
keiths:
walto:
If my vignette is “completely confused”, you should be able to point to an error (or errors) in it. What are they?
No, it’s you insisting on injecting your unsupported, insulting beliefs into nearly every thread here. There’s no rule against that. Fortunately, there’s no rule against pointing it out.
I’ll just say this and let you figure out the rest:
Of course if you lack justification for believing X you can’t claim that you know X. Nobody has suggested otherwise. The whole post makes no sense.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
If you have an example of where fifthmonarchyman has supported his claims with reason or evidence, please provide a link. As far as I can see he ultimately grounds his beliefs solely in what he perceives as revelation.
As I see it, all judgment is perceptual judgment.
Yes, of course we make logical inferences. But we are perceiving ourselves making those inferences, and it is by virtue of perceptual judgment that we are able to judge whether we used our logical tools correctly.
I see this as a difference from logic done in a computer. The computer does logic by switching. There really isn’t any perceptual judgment involved at all when the computer does logic. It is just brute mechanism at work.
Our experience of making logical inferences is our experience of carrying out perceptual judgment.
walto,
That’s not what I wrote. Read it again:
In other words, lack of justification for X does not entitle me to claim that I know not-X. I repeat, not-X.
KN thinks it does:
That’s bad reasoning.
I agree with that. (Sorry for the misquote.) You need positive justification for not-X to know not-X. I don’t know where KN is on this.
ETA: In my own view, if we have justification for X, we have justification for not-not-X and we have justification for X (which, as said, does not require any probability estimate).
In this situation, you have no reasons to believe the claim is true but you acknowledge that the claim could be true. One way of expressing that would be, as you seemingly prefer, “I don’t think so, but I don’t know.” In this context, “know” is functioning as “certain” (cf. “I don’t believe so, but I’m not certain”).
That’s fine as ordinary language goes, but I have philosophical scruples, of a pragmatist stripe, for wanting to tease knowledge and certainty as far apart as I can.
In any event, the analogy is inapt — in the case of “there are $N.M dollars in D’Souza’s bank account” I can make perfectly good sense of the claim. I know it has a determinate truth-value (it is true or false) even though I don’t know whether it is true or false, because I have a lot of background information I can draw upon about D’Souza and about money and about bank accounts and so on. A whole holistic system of general and particular beliefs is at work here, and the specific claim about how much money D’Souza has fits into that broader framework. That’s how I’m able to specify what would be required in order to verify that claim, even if I never actually verify it.
But in the case of “we might be living in a computer simulation” it’s much harder to figure out what would be involved in verifying it one way or the other. It’s epistemically much murkier, and that raises the burden of proof on the person who is making the assertion. Bostrom, in his article, just stipulates some assumptions. That’s fine. He’s perfectly free to say, “if we assume X, then possibly Y”. It’s a fine argument. But to which I say, “I don’t accept X, because Z.”
This doesn’t mean that I’m entitled to assert that Y is impossible, but it does mean that I’m not obliged to accept the possibility of Y. I can say that the possibility of Y has indeterminate truth-value. You seem to think that I’m not entitled to say “I know that not-Y” simply because I am committed to saying “the possibility of Y has indeterminate truth-value”. That may be. It all turns on the normative pragmatics of the word “know”, and I don’t think that’s obvious or easy.
very well,
I again suggest you read Edwards’ unpublished essay on the Trinity.
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/trinity/files/trinity.html
Short of taking the time to read the Scripture it is the best way that I know to get a handle of my concept of God A se.
It’s short and to the point and it’s a good introduction to the greatest philosopher this continent has ever produced.
I’ll warn you it’s seeped in Scripture and it assumes the truth of Christianity so it might sound a tad foreign to your ears.
If you truly want to understand what I beleive this is a good place to start
peace
walto,
Well, not-not-X is just X, so your statement is equivalent to:
…which is pretty hard to disagree with.
Not a numerical probability estimate, but certainly an assessment of subjective likelihood.
mockery aside
The chronological order of those things from our perspective in time is just as recorded in scripture.
From a timeless God’s perspective they occur all at once.
If “at once” is even a coherent concept from the perspective of a God outside the universe and time.
peace
My working out of it is subjective. The fact of the matter from God’s perspective is objective.
The trick is making sure the two correspond. That is where revelation comes in.
When dealing with theological speculation revelation is at times indirect. And God does not reveal everything to us
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
Thanks.
You’re not quite getting my point. I’m saying we move from
1. Jones has evidence that there is a real tree before him.
to
2. Therefore Jones has evidence that he is not being deceived.
The assignment of a positive subjective probability to there being a tree in front of him just means that he believes there is a tree in front of him. It doesn’t do anything in the way of knowledge that wasn’t already achieved by the believing. So the question is whether Jones in fact DOES have evidence of there being a tree in front of him, even if that means he is not being deceived. I say he does, and I think KN agrees. Your own mileage may vary, but, again, if you say Jones doesn’t have such evidence, then I think you’re stuck with the Cartesian possibilities of either solipsism or being saved by some kind of miraculous supernatural thingy.
Apparently Dembski lost his job for believing in an old earth and also a literal fall.
He tried to explain that animal death logically followed the fall even though it chronologically proceeded it from our perspective in time.
Like you those other reactionaries failed to grasp his argument. instead of asking questions for clarification and giving the benefit of the doubt they jumped to an unwarranted conclusion.
Tell me how your approach is different than theirs?
peace
fifth:
So you agree with the following order, correct?
1. The creation
2. Adam and Eve talk with God
3. Moses gets mooned by God
4. The incarnation/Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus
from who’s perspective?
peace
fifth,
I can’t make it much clearer than this:
keiths:
Do you agree with my order?
1. The creation
2. Adam and Eve talk with God
3. Moses gets mooned by God
4. The incarnation/Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus
walto,
Or you simply accept and acknowledge that we don’t know whether we’re being fooled.
Here’s how I explained it to fifth:
fifth:
keiths:
keiths:
KN:
I would simply say “I don’t know.”
No, because I’d be willing to say that I know X even in situations where I’m not absolutely certain of X. For example, suppose I hack into D’Souza’s account and find that the reported balance is an odd number. In that case I’d be willing to say that I know X, even though there’s a slight chance that the reported balance is incorrect.
The same is true of Bostrom’s claim, which draws on our knowledge of computers and simulations and Cartesian demons, etc., and has a determinate truth value, even if that value is inaccessible to us.
That’s the whole point of Cartesian skepticism.
The truth-value of Y is unknown but not indeterminate.
Y doesn’t have an indeterminate truth-value, but even if it did, the negation of “indeterminate” is not “true”.
Actually, it is pretty obvious and easy. Just look at the way people use the word. You won’t hear native English speakers saying things like “I know X, and I have no idea whether X is true.”
I don’t hate that. You could say that my difference with it is one of emphasis only, I guess. I think I’d say that what you’re calling an assumption here is part and parcel of any empirical estimate that it would be possible to make in any case. We can’t make sense of the world–of anything, really–under any other “assumption.” So I don’t think it makes sense to be talking about it as some sort of added codicil as in: I know there’s a tree in front of me, you know, so long as I’m not a brain in a vat.
So it’s not really that I think that what you have above is wrong, it’s just that I think there being an external world is categorial, not an additional assumption, like that we didn’t forget to take some pill this morning. There’s a sense in which skepticism is a theoretical possibility, but then, as KN has suggested, nothing really would makes much sense at all. We can’t take skepticism seriously and still know what the hell we are talking about. And to the extent we DO take it seriously, no one else will take US seriously.
So I say we know there’s a tree in front of us. We have evidence that there is, and no evidence that there’s not. The possibility that we could be wrong is neither here nor there.
Note that in this D’Souza case you’re simply suppressing the relevance of your non-skepticism assumption. We either know stuff of we don’t. If we have sufficient evidence in the D’Souza case then we have it elsewhere, if we don’t have it elsewhere, we can never have it in the D’Souza case.
Right, that’s crucial to how I was parsing the difference between knowledge and certainty.
I like that bit especially. Is that from Hall?
Agreed.
That strikes me as basically right, too. The possibility of being wrong is ineliminable from all cases of putative knowledge.
This is how I see it. From our perspective “in time”
1. The creation……………adumbration
2. Adam and Eve talk with God……………adumbration
3. Moses gets mooned by God……………adumbration
4. The incarnation/Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus…………..culmination
I hope that helps
since I’m in a particularly generous mood here is some more Edwards to help unpack what I’m talking about.
check it out
https://www.monergism.com/dissertation-concerning-end-which-god-created-world-jonathan-edwards
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
Everything I say that is of any interest ultimately derives from Hall (or the Tractatus or Quine)–except the stuff that I say that’s both interesting and wrong. I make that up all by myself. Hall’s Our Knowledge of Fact and Value, which is available free on-line, has a chapter on warrant as well as some material on categories. His book Philosophical Systems has much more stuff on the nature of categories and categorial claims, but you have to buy that one. (Maybe Mung will sell you his!)
Did you catch my answer to keith’s? In which I said that I had no problem with his asterisk but in my worldview it would read
*Assuming the Christian God exists.
I think the two asterisks are functionally equivalent but that mine is simpler and according to Occam’s razor would be the preferred one.
peace
They aren’t equivalent.
They are functionally equivalent for the purposes of epistemology
peace
Yes, I see what you mean. It’s why I’ve said keiths is treading a dangerous line if he wants to say we know stuff.
walto,
I promise, at some point this summer I’ll read Sellars’s essay on Hall and the scales will fall away from my eyes!
In closely related news, I started reading The Metaphysics of Perception (review here). Coates defends a Sellarsian theory of perception, according to which perception involves two “components”: a conceptual component that accounts for perceptual intentionality and a purely non-conceptual component that accounts for perceptual consciousness.
I am not yet completely sure of how to transpose those Sellarsian (père et fils) notions in the framework of embodied/embedded cognition, though I am confident that it must and can be done. I made one attempt already but that was before I started reading Coates and now that I’m reading his criticisms of Noë I see that botched things up pretty badly.
FWIW, I haven’t cared for what I’ve read by Coates. OTOH, the Sellars paper on Hall is really good.
walto:
walto,
The quote you’re responding to is actually from KN, not me.
walto,
I very much disagree. The world continues to make sense under brain-in-vat or Bostrom-type assumptions. They certainly alter our interpretations of sensory data, but they don’t thereby render them nonsensical.
For example, in a Bostrom-type scenario, the Standard Model of particle physics still makes sense. It’s just that we interpret it as telling us something about the Simulation, not about objective physical reality.