>TT worries next that perfection isn’t simple. It’s just one word in English, but a single word can express a complicated concept. But perfection just means unlimited goodness, and goodness is simple and fundamental, so perfection is simple. The fact that something can be described easily in English doesn’t mean it’s simple, but the fact that it has an unlimited amount of some fundamental property does.
Based on the moral realism post you link to in this paragraph, this is again confusing moral goodness with the sort of "goodness" - i.e., what some philosophers call "greatness" - that involves knowledge and power. Maximal quantities of the former might be simple (though I doubt it, since moral realism is in fact false), but maximal quantities of latter definitely aren't, and it's what you need to get most of your theistic arguments off the ground compared to competing hypotheses.
Why doesn't your view collapse to modal realism? Seems like if an unboundedly infinite number of people exiost, one would expect an unboundedly infinite number of people to exist who have had the exact same experiences as you but for whom induction suddenly implodes.
>But even if two actions both involve creating the same cardinality of people, if one of them involves creating a proper subset of the people of the other, then the other is better.
Haven't made my way through the whole post but it's littered with nonsense statements like this. The odd numbers are a proper subset of the integers, but there's no coherent sense in which the infinite set of odd numbers is "more odd" than the infinite set of integers. Their cardinality is the same, so any multiplicative operation performed on both sets will be equivalent. That's just what cardinality is and how it's used to construct measures of things. I.e the measure of oddness of the odd numbers is infinity * 1 = infinity, and the measure of oddness of the integers is infinity * .5 = infinity.
I think your intuitions about infinities are flat out wrong and probably the biggest hole in the argument. I don't see how you can conclude that googolplex/infinity is actually different from 1/infinity. If you're going to claim that then I think you need a lot more explanation.
Similarly, your argument hinges on the claim that even though the number of possible people is too large to be a set, it's still possible for God to create "all" of them. This seems pretty incoherent to me. And this isn't just a random throwaway statement, you insist that there is a point where God could not possibly create more. I'm no mathematician so maybe I'm wrong, but I would really like to see what a mathematician would say about this specifically.
Sorry if I'm missing something in your argument here, but your reliance on unrestricted SIA and perfect being theism feels... far too speculative. USIA seems to predict that I would know of existence of much more being that I currently do, that our universe would be full of life, which I don't observe. Perfect being theism makes even worse predictions. I can't imagine a perfect being creating a world of suffering like ours.
I know a part of your argument is that we should believe those things with probability one. But if such an argument contradicts everything I know about this world, I don't throw out my empirical observations, even though I'm less than absolutely sure of them. I suspect the argument is wrong, even if I don't know how exactly. There prior probability of the argument being somehow wrong, after all, is pretty high.
> Objections to SIA (most of these he claims are not objections to SIA, but if they were right they would imply that one shouldn’t reason in accordance with SIA).
> Reasons that theism wouldn’t predict a huge number of people being created.
> But this means that even if most of what he says is probably right, as long as you have some credence that God would create either all possible people or some huge number, theism is majorly supported on anthropic grounds.
I don't see how this makes sense. If TT arguments are correct, then you shouldn't have high credence that God would create all possible people and should think that SIA is a wrong approach to anthropics. Either of this points would be enough to refute the claim that theism is supported on anthropic grounds. Were you trying to say that your prior in favor of SIA and its implying theism is so high that no argument can persuade you otherwise?
> TT’s argument, if successful, would totally jeopardize anthropic reasoning. If SIA is correct but impossible to do if there are infinite possible people, and there are infinite possible people, that means all anthropic probabilities end up being undefined and anthropic reasoning becomes impossible. Clearly, this is wrong!
It would jeopardize SIA in particular, not every possible approach to anthropic reasoning. And considering that SIA implies that you can blackmail reality into winning a lottery by creating copies of yourself, can be born with arbitrary high probability if your parents are infertile at the moment of your conception, and, apparently, also implies the existence of God for the mere fact that a particular human exists, it's very much not clear that discarding SIA is wrong.
The fact that SIA simultaneously implies that infinite people existing is the most probable case and breaks in this case, in particular, is a huge problem. You can't dismiss it by saying that many other theories also break in infinity cases - these theories can still be true if infinities are impossible. But SIA can't. Either it's wrong because there actually are infinite number of people and then all of SIA's math stop making sense or it's wrong because there are not infinite number of people, while SIA is very confident that there are.
>TT worries next that perfection isn’t simple. It’s just one word in English, but a single word can express a complicated concept. But perfection just means unlimited goodness, and goodness is simple and fundamental, so perfection is simple. The fact that something can be described easily in English doesn’t mean it’s simple, but the fact that it has an unlimited amount of some fundamental property does.
Based on the moral realism post you link to in this paragraph, this is again confusing moral goodness with the sort of "goodness" - i.e., what some philosophers call "greatness" - that involves knowledge and power. Maximal quantities of the former might be simple (though I doubt it, since moral realism is in fact false), but maximal quantities of latter definitely aren't, and it's what you need to get most of your theistic arguments off the ground compared to competing hypotheses.
Why doesn't your view collapse to modal realism? Seems like if an unboundedly infinite number of people exiost, one would expect an unboundedly infinite number of people to exist who have had the exact same experiences as you but for whom induction suddenly implodes.
>But even if two actions both involve creating the same cardinality of people, if one of them involves creating a proper subset of the people of the other, then the other is better.
Haven't made my way through the whole post but it's littered with nonsense statements like this. The odd numbers are a proper subset of the integers, but there's no coherent sense in which the infinite set of odd numbers is "more odd" than the infinite set of integers. Their cardinality is the same, so any multiplicative operation performed on both sets will be equivalent. That's just what cardinality is and how it's used to construct measures of things. I.e the measure of oddness of the odd numbers is infinity * 1 = infinity, and the measure of oddness of the integers is infinity * .5 = infinity.
Yup.
I think your intuitions about infinities are flat out wrong and probably the biggest hole in the argument. I don't see how you can conclude that googolplex/infinity is actually different from 1/infinity. If you're going to claim that then I think you need a lot more explanation.
Similarly, your argument hinges on the claim that even though the number of possible people is too large to be a set, it's still possible for God to create "all" of them. This seems pretty incoherent to me. And this isn't just a random throwaway statement, you insist that there is a point where God could not possibly create more. I'm no mathematician so maybe I'm wrong, but I would really like to see what a mathematician would say about this specifically.
Sorry if I'm missing something in your argument here, but your reliance on unrestricted SIA and perfect being theism feels... far too speculative. USIA seems to predict that I would know of existence of much more being that I currently do, that our universe would be full of life, which I don't observe. Perfect being theism makes even worse predictions. I can't imagine a perfect being creating a world of suffering like ours.
I know a part of your argument is that we should believe those things with probability one. But if such an argument contradicts everything I know about this world, I don't throw out my empirical observations, even though I'm less than absolutely sure of them. I suspect the argument is wrong, even if I don't know how exactly. There prior probability of the argument being somehow wrong, after all, is pretty high.
> Objections to SIA (most of these he claims are not objections to SIA, but if they were right they would imply that one shouldn’t reason in accordance with SIA).
> Reasons that theism wouldn’t predict a huge number of people being created.
> But this means that even if most of what he says is probably right, as long as you have some credence that God would create either all possible people or some huge number, theism is majorly supported on anthropic grounds.
I don't see how this makes sense. If TT arguments are correct, then you shouldn't have high credence that God would create all possible people and should think that SIA is a wrong approach to anthropics. Either of this points would be enough to refute the claim that theism is supported on anthropic grounds. Were you trying to say that your prior in favor of SIA and its implying theism is so high that no argument can persuade you otherwise?
> TT’s argument, if successful, would totally jeopardize anthropic reasoning. If SIA is correct but impossible to do if there are infinite possible people, and there are infinite possible people, that means all anthropic probabilities end up being undefined and anthropic reasoning becomes impossible. Clearly, this is wrong!
It would jeopardize SIA in particular, not every possible approach to anthropic reasoning. And considering that SIA implies that you can blackmail reality into winning a lottery by creating copies of yourself, can be born with arbitrary high probability if your parents are infertile at the moment of your conception, and, apparently, also implies the existence of God for the mere fact that a particular human exists, it's very much not clear that discarding SIA is wrong.
The fact that SIA simultaneously implies that infinite people existing is the most probable case and breaks in this case, in particular, is a huge problem. You can't dismiss it by saying that many other theories also break in infinity cases - these theories can still be true if infinities are impossible. But SIA can't. Either it's wrong because there actually are infinite number of people and then all of SIA's math stop making sense or it's wrong because there are not infinite number of people, while SIA is very confident that there are.