15 Comments

This is a well argued opening statement. Good job. The biggest problems from my atheistic perspective IMO are:

1. Extreme overestimation of the simplicity of God, on the basis of the notion "perfection." We have a simple English word for it, but it's not clear it's a particularly coherent property; it doesn't seem to play any general role in any of our theories about the world other than to argue for God in debates like this, so the atheist is free to challenge its indispensability without much cost. Moreover, it seems the description "maximally perfect," while short, is extremely highly multiply realizable, and more importantly any such realization is going to make an infinite number of arbitrary choices, since some "perfections" conflict with others. This doesn't bode well.

2. It's not clear simpler, non-life permitting laws should be given a higher prior than our own, or even non-zero priors. If my own existence is given a high prior, this is going to be incompatible with a non-zero prior on the fundamental laws of reality that generate and govern my existence. Nor, in saying so, will I fall victim to firing-squad-case-type objections about how this kind of reasoning proves too much. If the firing squad unexpectedly misses, I can't just say, "the prior I exist now is high, so the probability they missed is 1, so there is nothing for the deliberate vs. accidental miss hypothesis to explain, so I have no evidence either way." This is because there are alternate (low probability) theories of biology and physics on which they successfully shoot me and I still continue to exist; "I exist after the squad fires" is not actually synonymous with "the squad misses." But you, by contrast, are talking about fundamental laws on which my existence is truly impossible.

3. If the multiverse hypothesis merely pushes the problem back a step, it's not clear why theism doesn't, too. If theism is true, then the true "laws" of "physics" are something like, "if God wills X, then X; if God wills Y, then Y;, etc." Why did we end up with those laws? You can't appeal to simplicity - setting aside the disputed nature of God's simplicity, "simple" helps us epistemically adjudicate between explanations, but does not itself explain anything. You can appeal to necessity, but so can the multiverse theorist. The source of the disanalogy will need to be spelled out.

A few other things as well, but this comment is probably already too long. Looking forward to seeing how this exchange goes.

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1. Well I gave a reason to think that perfection is simple. It just entails maximal goodness which is a property of a very simple sort. You take a fundamental thing--goodness--and make it exist to an unlimited degree.

2. Your existence shouldn't be given a high prior because it requires a life permitting universe, which as a low prior. Your firing squad thing is confused because we could imagine a scenario where if the firing squad fires and their gun doesn't jam there's no chance you survive. Or to give an analogy, on this view your existence isn't evidence that your parents didn't use effective contraception, which I think is crazy.

3. Theism solves the problem by being simple and more unified. Because of this, theism has an advantage over the multiverse, and then fine-tuning considerations knock out most competitors. There also are principled reasons to think theism has a high prior from, e.g., the Godelian ontological argument.

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Thanks for the response!

1. I'm not sure I'm understanding you here. If by "goodness" you just mean "moral goodness," then of course that's not enough. Moral goodness does not explain universe-creation (you need power/knowledge to do that), and more importantly a property P (here, maximal perfection) entailing some other, simple property Q (here, maximal moral goodness) does not ipso facto make P simple. On the other hand, if you're using "good" in a more robust sense - where greater power and knowledge are counted as "better" even if you hold an agent's moral benevolence fixed - then you're running into the exact same objections I outlined in my comment, only with the term "perfection" replaced with "good." "Goodness" in this robust sense is arguably a completely dispensable concept, and "maximally good" runs into the serious worry of "you can't specify any one realization of this property without making an infinite number of arbitrary choices."

2. I'm saying that your own existence should be given a high prior no matter what - indeed, it's not clear what possibly *could* have a high prior, if not that. Thus, you have it backwards, and it's the world (or fundamental laws of physics) being completely life-impermissible that should always have a low prior. The point of my mentioning the standard firing squad case was that granting this claim about priors does not entail absurd conclusions about using anthropic reasoning to rule out obvious evidence. This is what you're attempting with the contraception thing here, which fails for the reasons I outlined: even with an enormous prior on my own existence, I still have plenty of evidence that my parents didn't use effective contraception, because the epistemic possibility exists that they're not my parents, or I miraculously have no parents, or whatever. (And by ruling these possibilities out, I get strong evidence for no-contraception.) You can't mirror this maneuver in the dialectical context of a universe you've stipulated is totally life-impermissible.

3. It seems false to me that theism is simpler than "every possible mathematically describable universe exists." The latter has an extremely short description that doesn't invoke any arbitrary limits (as you call them), and doesn't involve any extremely high-level concepts like agency (like theism). Whether it's unified or not doesn't seem like a problem.

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1. Goodness isn't just like personal goodness but how good something is. World peace is better than a tsunammi, for instance, even though they both lack personal goodness. Theism is just the hypothesis that there's a single hting of unlimited goodness.

2. I think your existence is something you update on which favors hypotheses not something you get to have a high prior in when most ways reality could be don't have you.

3. I think they're both simple, but that theory doesn't explain any of the other data and also undermines induction because there are mathematically describable counterinductive worlds.

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1. Cool, thanks for clarifying. I guess I'd just repeat what I said in my last two comments on the issue, which I feel still apply. Either I don't believe "good" in this extremely robust sense really picks out anything (just like the adjective "aesthetically cool," which is more a psychological attitude with a hidden indexical than an objective property), or else it picks out something but "maximally good" is really complicated due to complexity of its many, many mutually incompatible realizations.

2. OK, this is an interesting view, but perplexing to me nonetheless. What exactly would it mean to have a low prior on your own existence? Usually we'd want to cash that out in terms of some Dutch book argument, or in terms of talking about the sensitivity of your belief "I exist" to evidence, or on your willingness make bets before you acquire evidence. But I can't think of any scenario in which any evidence or any lack thereof (maybe I wake up one day in a sensory deprivation chamber with no memories) leads me to want to make bets that I probably don't currently exist. It seems like the overwhelmingly most straightforward way to interpret this observation is that my prior on self-existence is very, very high.

3. I'm sympathetic to the inductive skepticism argument, but I'm not sure it holds (the cardinalities involved make it difficult to say "most" versions of you are in anti-inductive universes). Moreover, as you've argued that God creates every possible person, or maybe every possible universe full of people living above a total aggregate threshold of goodness or whatever, you're going to be facing an identical worry. There will be an infinite number of psychological copies of you who are at least temporarily living in skeptical scenarios.

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"If my own existence is given a high prior, this is going to be incompatible with a non-zero prior on the fundamental laws of reality that generate and govern my existence."

Oops, the way I wrote this sentence didn't make sense. It should be, "If my own existence is given a prior of 1, this is going to be incompatible with a non-zero prior on the fundamental laws of reality being such that they rule out my existence."

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I think I have a solution to psychophysical harmony (at least for non epiphenominalists), but let me know if I'm not understanding something here. Under any philosophy of mind theory that holds that some experience in the mind (pleasure from eating an apple) motivates one to do an action AT ALL (you eat the apple), there would be evolutionary pressure (and therefore more surviving descendants) for those who have that normative harmony. This is, of course, on the condition that you also grant that those who have certain states of mind-body interaction (like better or worse harmony) are at all more likely to have offspring more similar to them (for example, the odds of an individual with non harmonious states are more likely to have children with non harmonious states than children with harmonious states). I think there is great reason to think that there is some sort of motivating factor in our mental to physical states, but I think this video will do a better job explaining it than I: https://youtu.be/GrG6SdJzozc?si=St6HMc9knbeCQX7Y (I'm particularly talking about the inverted experiences part). This seems to me like it narrow down who the argument applies to. 

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But it’s unlikely that your desires in particular would be physically efficacious

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Presumably, if the desire influences your actions at all (which seems intuitively likely to me—in fact, intuitively at least, under self reflection it seems like my desires almost entirely guide how I act), that would push evolution towards reaching harmony. Even if you don’t buy that, the argument seems now to be conditional on this not being true (which I presume you give some probability to that).

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The entire puzzle is explaining why your desires influence your actions in a harmonious way. The vast majority of pairings between the mental and the physical wouldn't have your causal influence come almost exclusively from your desires.

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There isn't a vast number of possible mental and physical.pairings unless you assume dualism.

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If your commenting about the degree to which pleasure as opposed to other mental mechanisms (try saying that 10x fast) actually effect behavior, it seems if it even effects it a little there would be an evolutionary push towards harmony

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Solipsism subsumes all of these arguments as well—if not better than—theism.

Why are there incredibly finely tuned laws and constraints? There aren’t.

Why is there psychophysical harmony? Because there is no external world which could disagree with our conscious minds. (I will also note that there is no am evidence for psychophysical harmony which does not assume the question)

I will confess I find the argument about a priori knowledge absurd, but it is also explained by solipsism: if you are the only thing that exists, it’s easy to get a priori knowledge without sensory experience because all knowledge ultimately comes from yourself. I assume this is a similar argument to your unsubstantiated assertion that theism supports apriori knowledge.

Solipsism also supports your existence vastly more than God. If there is only one person, and everything flows from that person, then the chances of that one person existing is 100%. The question “why me” doesn’t even make sense! There is no other person besides “me”.

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What? No. It doesn't explain why, out of the possible things, there's something as weird and complicated as my mind. It doesn't explain psychophysical harmony, which ahs nothing to do with the external world--it's just about correlations. It doesn't explain how you get reliable sensory experience. Solipsism is also bad on SIA where you should think there are more people.

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Following the idea of the universe having N possible people who could exist, I can comprehend that the probability, or likelihood, of any particular person existing in the universe would be:

P(any particular person existing in the universe) = (n) number of people who have, or will exist / N

This would mean the existence of myself, you, or anybody, becomes more likely if 'there are more people', meaning n is increased.

If this is denied, well I am not sure what that means, but I am not even sure I have followed your meaning correctly: 'If there are more people, I'd more likely be one of them.' I don't really follow how, at least, that in denying this, you get to the (probably) absurd result that the world will probably end soon.

You say:

'Secondly, if you deny this, you get absurd results. For instance, you get the result that the world will probably end soon, because if a universe with more people is no more likely to have me, while a universe with fewer people guarantees that I’d be earlier in the universe, then I should think the universe won’t last long.'

Why would a universe with fewer people guarantee that I'd be earlier in the universe? You know, where does the total lifespan of the universe, and my position within it, come into the equation? In my formulation above, if the total number of people who have already existed is approaching n, the total number of people who will ever exist, I suppose that could signal the end of the universe is close. But I don't see why this would be implied, or even likely, by denying, 'If there are more people, I'd more likely be one of them.'

Sorry if what I've written is either too long for the comments section or just not easy to follow, but in my opinion, it's not worse or more unclear than what you have written in your original post. For now I'll go find something more brainless to do than read philosophical writings on Substack.

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