http://mashable.com/2016/06/02/elon-musk-simulated-reality/#sdLXHm2_jsqB
2,657 thoughts on “Elon Musk Thinks Evolution is Bullshit.”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
I’ve got logic (which is not God) on my side. So….sorry.
There’s speculation, and then there’s speculation. I mean, 500 million to 1 lottery ticket is a wild speculation. But that’s nothing like betting on whether or not we’re brains in vats. It’s not on the same continuum. We don’t sum up to such probabilities. You’re comparing apples to Corvairs.
I have never been impressed by the Drake equation.
God is logic whether you think so or not.
You just don’t have the authority to to be the decider on who God is.
That sort of thing is up to God.
peace
The probability of hitting it big with a 500 million to one shot is a known quantity not so with the existence of extraterrestrials or brains in a vat. In both those later cases the odds are all up in the air.
peace
I find it to be a good way to focus the conversation to tell us where we need to look.
peace
Remember brain in a vat is just one variable in the “fake” equation you can ignore it if you choose and look at some of the others.
peace
fifth:
Or God.
Of course you know I have to disagree.
God has reveled himself to everyone so that they are without excuse. The probability of his existence is 1.
Why do you all find it necessary to always bring God into these discussions? It’s like there is some sort of obsession
peace
fifth:
Says the guy who brought God into this discussion.
Please, fifth — more rational thought, less knee-jerk Godbotting.
If noone has the authority to tell another what god is, then stop telling us god is logic.
Thank you.
Rumraket, to fifth:
You can predict his Godbot response, right?
Revelation. “All men are without excuse”. How do you know? Revelation. How do you know the revelation is correct? Revelation!
Presuppositionalism is an infinite regression of unsupported assertions.
They are similar in the respect that we don’t know the numbers. They are dissimilar in the respect that wrt extraterrestrial life, we can at least theoretically GET that information through observation and experiment.
We can’t do that regarding brains in a vat, or simulations, or other solipsistic ideas. There is no way to even get numbers on anything, since anything we think we know about the probability of “being a brain in a vat” could itself be false information fed to us deceitful simulators. Or it could be information we just invented subconsciously. We simply can’t know and we have no way, even in principle, of verifying it.
Rumraket:
And of course, God himself, if he existed, could take on the role of a “deceitful simulator”. Due to chronic theostupefaction, fifth will not acknowledge this.
That’s not me that is God
quote:
John 1:1
“In the beginning was Logic, and Logic was with God, and Logic was God…. In logic was life and the life was the light of men.”
This paraphrase-in fact, this translation-may not only sound strange to devout ears, it may even sound obnoxious and offensive. But the shock only measures the devout person’s distance from the language and thought of the Greek New Testament. Why it is offensive to call Christ Logic, when it does not offend to call him a word, is hard to explain. But such is often the case. Even Augustine, because he insisted that God is truth, has been subjected to the anti-intellectualistic accusation of “reducing” God to a proposition. At any rate, the strong intellectualism of the word Logos is seen in its several possible translations: to wit, computation, (financial) accounts, esteem, proportion and (mathematical) ratio, explanation, theory or argument, principle or law, reason, formula, debate, narrative, speech, deliberation, discussion, oracle, sentence, and wisdom.
Any translation of John 1:1 that obscures this emphasis on mind or reason is a bad translation. And if anyone complains that the idea of ratio or debate obscures the personality of the second person of the Trinity, he should alter his concept of personality. In the beginning, then, was Logic.
end quote:
from here
http://www.trinityfoundation.org/journal.php?id=16
peace
No, God does not lie. To do so would be against his nature.
peace
We can do that if we have cognitive contact with objective reality outside our own subjective experience.
peace
Please give us more question begging assertions.
Estimating extraterrestrials does not involve questioning a basic category. It’s an entirely empirical question.Determining whether we are the tools of an evil demon isn’t like that at all.
An utter confusion to try to compare them.
No, it isn’t. It’s a function of language. It’s utterly beyond any God’s power to determine that He is logic.
I would disagree. To entertain the existence of intelligent extraterrestrials one has to commit ones self to certain ideas of Mind and consciousness that are not warranted by strictly empirical categories.
You have to decide that an alien organism that behaves in a certain way is in fact another mind. This is not an empirical question it can’t be
peace
But you don’t know whether you are in “cognitive contact” , that’s the point. If you are the brain in a vat, or in a simulation, then your experience of being in “contact” could just be another part of the simulation.
The simulators could have written a book full of gradiose but false claims of them having a perfect moral nature, and placed it in the simulation, and then been feeding their subjects internal “revelatory” experiences that are just more fictions.
You could be such a subject, thinking the bible is from a perfect moral god, but just be decieved by manipulative simulator programmers “revealing” things to you that are false.
Doesn’t matter–they’re fundamentally different kinds of estimates. One involves a thesis that puts in question our ability to make rational estimates at all. It’s, in Carnap’s words internal and external questions, or in Hall’s empirical and categorial ones.
You forget that God is a Trinity there is more than one person involved. The first person can determine what the second person is. If fact since God is omniscient the first person knows what the second person is by observation
peace
Exactly right. FMMs game is to constantly weave back and forth between internal and external uses of “revelation.” They tell him both that what is revealed to him must be right and that revelation itself is trustworthy. As I’ve said before, it’s a trick that shares fallacies with ontological arguments, which make God the best thing that could be, and require that anything that is the best thing that could be exists. It’s nothing but a pretty, substanceless dream.
sure you can if this has been reveled to you.
If that was the case then I could know nothing
I know this therefore it is not so
peace
You forget there is no God.
Wrong.
that is your presupposition not mine
😉
peace
There you go again playing the decider and not the demonstrator.
That job is beyond your pay-grade
peace
That is a good point. That is why this sort of exercise is not the same thing as Cartesian skepticism.
Funny comics aside
these are just two different ways of looking at the same thing
Revelation is trustworthy only if God is trustworthy and only reveals truth.
No it’s not an argument at all.
It’s the means and standard by which we evaluate arguments.
peace
Rather, it’s the same unsupported assertion repeated infinitely many times.
So God is a mindless mechanical robot. And Christians are attempting to emulate that mindlessness.
That explains everything.
Except if the revealers are revealing things that are actually false.
But what if the revelation comes from decieving simulators that just want you to think that? How would you distinguish between deceptive “revealers” and truthful “revealers”?
Yes. I stand corrected.
How do you know if god IS trustworthy, then?
True, even if, amazingly, it sometimes seems like even more times than that!
…says the simulation…
I know, I know. My beliefs all come from me,* yours all come from God. Handy, that theory.
*except the beliefs of mine that you agree with and that I deny I have. It’s a very silly little conceit.
Welcome to your Future in Robotics…
Ironically, that’s not exactly a joke either. Reformed Theology teaches that the chosen (those granted God’s Grace) will desire nothing more than to worship God and sing its praise in the afterlife. They will have no will to do anything else. So yeah…robotic existence at its best. Spiritual slaves would be another accurate term…
Sure it is. Even very bad arguments have a right to the title.
The question was ” how”.
I take FMM at his word when he says that he’s not attempting to present an argument. There’s no inference that relates a premise to a conclusion. Even Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen have arguments (though not, I think, good ones). FMM doesn’t.
Kantian Naturalist,
But can you have evolution in a fake world, created by computer programmers to do exactly as they program?
I suppose you could have ID .
He actually vacillates on that. There are obvious arguments, disguised arguments, and non-arguments. What they all have in common is that nothing actually follows from them.
I don’t think it makes any difference at all what ultimate reality consists of, if it’s not even possible for us to know it. If it’s not possible for us to know whether or not we’re living in a computer simulation, then the mere possibility is of no interest at all.
As this writer nicely puts it:
The argument becomes even murkier when you look past Musk’s musings and look at the original argument: “Are You Living in a Simulation?. Here’s the abstract:
For my part, I would say that since there’s no way to measure the probability of (1) and (2), there’s no way to measure the probability of (3). I also note that Bostrom’s argument for (3) relies on assumptions that we have no reason to believe are true (or false).
For example: we have no reason to believe that computers can be (or can’t be) conscious, because we simply do not have a theory of consciousness that would answer that question for us. But we could be living in a computer simulation only if it is possible for a computer to be conscious, since we are conscious. And since we don’t actually know if it possible for a computer to be conscious, we don’t actually know if it is possible that we are simulations.
We can’t even estimate the relevant probabilities, because we don’t know what the laws of physics are in the real universe in which our simulation is being run.
Perhaps in the real universe in which the simulation is being run, it is physically possible (and indeed actual) that there are conscious computers. But since we are unable to know, from our own perspective, whether or not it is possible for a computer to be conscious, we therefore cannot know whether it is possible for us to be conscious programs.
So I suppose I’m not too interested in a claim that (a) has a likelihood of being true that cannot be estimated and (b) wouldn’t make any difference if it were true.
KN,
Yesterday you were arguing that we know we are not being fooled:
keiths,
I don’t think I’m being inconsistent. On my view, we can’t be certain that we’re not being fooled, and we can’t be certain that we’re not living in a simulation — but we have no good reasons for thinking that we are and it would make no practical difference if we were.