the god delusion chapter 3
Continuing my exciting following of the God Delusion, chapter 3 concerns common arguments for god’s existence and rebuttals. I quite liked this chapter, although anyone with an interest in the subject will already have heard the main arguments listed here.
The most interesting of these arguments are the ontological proofs, which are clever mathematical/logical (I’ll treat these two words as interchangeable in this entry) arguments which proceed as follows:
1) Imagine a super perfect who cannot be any more super-perfect
2) Suppose said god does not exist
3) Said god would be even more perfect if he did exist
(3) contradicts (1), meaning (2) lead to a contradiction so it must be false. Therefore god must exist.
Dawkins ridicules this a bit, which I find pretty weak, because he can’t actually find a flaw in it. If you study maths at all you’ll see proofs like this all the time, it’s a perfectly valid proof and technique, although Dawkins seems to dismiss it as immature. Even so, this proof isn’t awfully convincing. I think the problem with this particular one, which makes it distinct from ones we are happy to see as valid, is that we are granting a mathematical proof the power to tell us things about our world. This is not what they are supposed to do. They are supposed to tell us things about a mathematical system. Many people think that maths is somehow woven into the fabric of the universe, but I think this is just a fairly naive Platonist interpretation.
The result (god does exist) is actually contradicted again by the fact that being ‘perfect’ in every way is impossible. One cannot be perfectly evil and perfectly good, and if you’re not both, you’re not perfect. Nobody claims god is perfectly evil (of course), but they do claim he is omniscient and omnipotent, and these two properties seem necessary for perfection. These two properties also imply a contradiction: if god is omniscient he already knows the course of the universe which means he cannot later change it, which means he is not omnipotent (as mentioned in the book). As does perfectly merciful and perfectly just: just implies punishing everyone as they deserve, merciful implies being a bit soft and not (as mentioned on Wikipedia). The fact that our system apparently allows two contradictory theorems shows that there’s something a bit wrong. [Or actually that's being a bit generous. Since overall perfection is contradictory and the above argument depends upon it, the argument is vacuous anyway. Although you can loosen your definition of perfection]
I think the actual fallacy in these arguments is in the word ‘imagine’. If you imagine a god who does not exist then you’re not imagining the best god possible. I can imagine an elephant that flies, but that doesn’t bring it into existence, not even if I set up an argument analogous to the above where its nonexistence is contradictory … imagine a super perfect elephant, suppose elephant lacks the ability to fly, uh oh then it’s not perfect so it must be able to fly, now suppose the elephant doesn’t exist, uh oh then it’s not perfect so it must exist. So where’s my flying elephant? Just for geographical clarity I can define that ‘being in my room’ is necessary for perfection. And yet still no flying elephant. An exercise to the over-enthusiastic reader is to investigate what happens when you want to introduce a second god who’s better than the first.
And this basically highlights why this stuff works in maths and not in real life: because maths is pretty much imaginary. We can imagine something, whether it’s the number 14, the square root of minus one, a circle or a universal Turing machine, as long as we can define it in words or symbols, it ‘exists’ as much as it needs to for it to be a valid, usable mathematical entity. That doesn’t mean it really physically exists or that it needs to; you can argue that ’14′ exists by giving me 14 apples if you want1 but you will find it more difficult to show that (-1)1/2 exists because it’s a nonsensical operation on anything we can show physically (yet we can handle it just fine in maths), and you would definitely have trouble physically showing a number greater than the number of atoms in the universe2 really exists, but it would still be perfectly valid to use it. My flying elephant is imaginary so it exists and is usable as far as the proof is concerned, but the proof is not able to reach out and effect a flying elephant into the real world.
Therefore a proof like this can assert the existence of something and be entirely correct logically, but have no link to real life, hence you have to be a bit sceptical when someone uses supposedly infallible reasoning to ‘prove’ some less than obvious statement about the universe without worrying about empirical evidence; it’s a clear sign they have a naive view of maths/logic.
I believe this also addresses Gödel’s stronger and more rigorous ontological proof, but it’s a bit cryptic and I haven’t sat down and gone through it.
_________
1. I’d say this was rather missing the point, but we define natural numbers in terms of sets so maybe not. Although technically numbers are defined in terms the empty set so maybe it is. Actually this was a really big problem: what is a number? we have all these things and we never said what they actually were. How can our maths be truly rigorous if we’ve not addressed what these things are? The solution is bizarre, clever, and thoroughly brilliant, we define them in terms of NOTHINGS:
0 = {} [the brackets denote a set, and its contents are separated by commas. In this case, there is nothing between the brackets because the set is empty and we call it the empty set]
n+1 = n U {n} [the joining together of n and the set containing n,
e.g. {0, 1} U {2, 3} = {0, 1, 2, 3} ]
so,
0 = {}
1 = {} U {{}} = {{}} = {0}
2 = {{}} U {{{}}} = {{}, {{}}} = {0, 1}
3 = {{}, {{}}} U { {{}, {{}}} } = {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}} = {0, 1, 2}
and so on. Obviously it’s easier if you start substituting in the numbers rather than keeping the indecipherable lists of brackets, but I thought it was interesting to highlight that each natural number is defined by clever arrangements of nothing. This should convince you that maths is something quite separate from real life.
2. Assume this is finite. Even if it’s not, it is sufficient that the statement would be correct if the number was finite.
the boring delusion
you know, I’m not so sure I like this God Delusion book. I’ve read the first two chapters. Here are my notes so far.
1) Dawkins seems to place a lot of faith in the intellect of the average (wo)?man. He seems to believe that an absence of religion will suddenly right every problem that religion causes. I posit that this is not true! A religion is a mindset, the god and precise beliefs are rather unimportant. There’s an intrinsic human desire in there which will need more than a well reasoned argument to stamp out. God is a symptom, not the overall problem. He would accuse me of being condescending to the average man, but I would say he is too if he believes everyone’s an intelligent person who’s got taken in by a single silly idea. It’s deeper than that. Your overconfidence is your weakness. Your faith in your freinds is yours. etc. And plenty of people have a god without being problematic.
2) He seems to spend a lot of time worrying about the views of respectable dead and living figures. An argument from authority isn’t convincing or interesting whether he’s setting one up or trying to attack one. And it’s all a bit Americanised, Thomas Jefferson this and that … who cares. And he even used the word ‘pedophile’, which is what, a foot fetishist? I expect a little more from an Oxford professor. If there’s a ‘gotten’ I’ll scream.
3) He seems dead set on making god into a scientific hypothesis, which is all very well but it’s just plain not, at least not the god that most people believe in, who happens to be several billion subtly different gods. If you want to be able to have a reasonable chance of falsifying the idea if it’s not right (which is necessary for it being a scientific hypothesis) you have to work with a very well defined god, but if you try this you’ll find people are very happy to broaden their definition until their god is different to the one you’re working with, and they will do this until it becomes unfalsifiable. Some will happily start from that point. He doesn’t seem to address this, but if someone makes their god unfalsifiable then it’s plainly not a hypothesis. At worst making god in a broad sense into a hypothesis requires a straw man.
And I just don’t see what it achieves or why he possibly sacrifices some integrity for it. I don’t think failure to set up god as a falsifiable hypothesis in any way weakens his overall case or strengthens religion’s. An unfalsifiable claim is ‘not even wrong’; being wrong would be a step up. It’s just meaningless and probably doesn’t deserve serious consideration and certainly no one can convincingly claim to have more idea about it than anyone else. This is a perfectly effective attack. Even though I agree with the overall point he would attack me for saying that the question of god, when it comes down to it, is it outside of science and likely to remain so forever. I don’t really see what attacking my point of view achieves as I don’t feel exactly wowed by his insight on the matter.
I think the problem is that Dawkins wants to disprove god, which is not a practical aim, and he would be better off sacrificing some level of certainty of his conclusion for a stronger argument, which simply amounts to “there is no evidence for god”. Some people might not find that convincing reason to lack belief in god, but then you invoke Russell’s teapot and we have a winner. The conclusion is equivalent, the argument is stronger, although the book is shorter.
4) in chapter two he attacks agnosticism by invoking ‘probablity’, although it’s not frequentist probablity, it’s subjective probablity, which is actually a measure of personal confidence, which changes the tone of everything but he doesn’t bother to mention that. I’m still not sure if he has a problem with someone saying they’re agnostic or not. I think his point was that agnosticism is an incredibly imprecise word and it describes a broad range of opinions so it’s better to avoid it unless you really see no reason to lean towards yes or no, but it’s a really confusing read.
Overall so far this book has smidgens of interest but in general it’s been dull dull dull.
I’m sorry.
the god dullusion might have been a better title.
beep beep
SO
lately I have been reading the book Luminous by Greg Egan, as it was recommended to me. It is a collection of short (real-)science fiction stories.
I didn’t really understand the story ‘Transition Dreams’. It’s about an old man who wishes to transfer his consciousness into a robot (this is actually possible in the story). He is told that during the transition he will experience some dreams, and his fear of these dreams is the focus of the story. Towards the end he suffers a heart attack (or similar) and he ends up in a hospital and discovers his reality is suddenly different, he believes his memories prior to ending up in the hospital to be false. He requests to contact the robot-company to hurry things along and it turns out he never had an appointment with them and he seemingly imagined the whole thing. Then he seems to die although it’s a little bit fuzzy.
It’s a little confusing. I have an interpretation but I don’t know if it’s right: I may have missed it but I don’t think the story addressed the fact that the robot would merely be a copy of his consciousness; the robot would believe itself to be him, and indeed its mind (sh)would be indistinguishable from his at the point that the copying process completes, but from that point forward they are two separate beings and the human will continue to experience life through its biological sensors (eyes, ears, etc) and he is still going to die, at which point his consciousness will expire. His perception of his own existence will cease, but the robot will live on. As I understood it the biological human in the story had no future beyond being ‘transferred’ into the robot, as he was frozen in the process. Therefore it is likely that death (or at least some kind of ‘final shutdown’) will occur directly after the copying process.
I think the point at which he woke in the hospital was in fact his ‘transition dream’, because it’s set out in a slightly nightmareish fashion. The very final part of the story sees him apparently dying; I wonder if he did INDEED die, but there now exists a robot living his life. I don’t think this is correct because it was stated earlier in the story that the dreaming did not occur within the physical human brain, but I can’t make much sense of it otherwise.
Maybe I missed the point and it was more to do with knowing the existence of these dreams without anyone actually remembering experiencing them, it seems kind of analogous to the halting problem in the way it’s described. Or something to do with the fact he was terrified of them. Or maybe there wasn’t a point. Or maybe 2 seconds after the end of the story he wakes up in a robot and remembers nothing about the dream because it’s JUST A STORY. Who knows.
In any case this highlights why I am not at all enthusiastic about the idea of immortality by moving one’s mind into something more durable than our human bodies. If you told me I could be immortal then great, but if you told me you could spawn a clone of me which could be immortal, but I’ll still die, then … not so great; from my point of view it doesn’t solve the problem. It’s not even the old Trigger’s Broom problem because it wouldn’t be an incremental replacing of my parts, there’s only one that’s important to my consciousness and it would be replaced instantly.
But the bizarre thing is that to everyone around me, I would really exist in that other body/robot/whatever. Even worse, the robot would really think it was me! It would have all the same memories. Even after it awoke, it would look around in surprise and comment how different/surprisingly-similar these artificial hands are, as if it had ever experienced anything else.
In the (quite distant) future we could end up with an entire society of clones because people selflessly decide to sacrifice themselves so that a perfect copy may live on. It’ll start with parents who have terminal diseases allowing themselves to be copied so that the child will still have (what they see as) their parent, but then the (cloned) parent will far outlive their partner and child, so it will become something that the partner and child consider doing, by which time the child may have a partner and children of their own. And so on.
I suppose that soon after people reach this point that they probably won’t go down the biological route of reproduction and there would be some kind of baby-clones they could choose from to spawn; if the development was still similar to how humans develop now, the greatly varied experiences in childhood would prevent everyone from turning out the same. And eventually organic humans will die out entirely. MAYBE.
Of course what I assume with all this is that both consciousness and reality are continuous and that we are definitely the same person as we were last week, not just someone who exists RIGHT NOW who happens to have the same memories as the person who existed last week (plus a few since then). It’s hard to prove this and if it’s wrong the discontinuity between human and robot seems less relevant, and totally confusing.
