If Magick Exists (was RE: Ideological blinders)

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 00:58:02 MST

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    Eliezer writes

    > Damien Sullivan wrote:
    >
    > > I've got a consilient skeletal view of
    > > the universe, and while it could take a god on the outside, there ain't no
    > > room for souls and magick and psi, they just won't *fit* without a lot of
    > > damage. So fuzzy little things on the edge of statistical significance get
    > > ignored. Now if Talia Winters comes up and reads 10-digit numbers out of my
    > > head I'll start paying attention...
    >
    > What happened to good-old-fashioned "This universe is a computer
    > simulation"? I have a consilient view of everything, but it's
    > very hard to conceive of a humanly simple set of perceptions that
    > would break the consilience; the Kolmogorov complexity of anything
    > I come up with is never going to be any higher than "Eliezer tries
    > to think of a set of sensory perceptions that would boggle Eliezer",
    > which isn't very complex at all.

    Yes, if I'm following you, then you are imagining what your
    experiences would be like under situations that you can't
    imagine. A worthy pastime.

    > I don't expect to see magick in operation. I assign it a
    > tiny prior probability; not quite the not-worth-tracking
    > infinitesimal, because specific people have made the claim
    > and I've put specific cognitive effort into evaluating an
    > rejecting it;

    Regardless of the logic of simulations, like you, I've never
    seen anything to make me suspect that I'm living in one.
    Of course, I also happen to believe that the best physical
    theories provide for the *possibility* I'm living in one;
    but those same theories also provide alternate universes
    in the MWI sense, and other Hubble volumes where what I
    experience is *not* a simulation. (Thus the tricky case
    I like to talk about where the word "this" becomes a
    multiple-valued pointer, e.g., as when someone refers to
    the possibility of "*this being a simulation".)

    > To see magick *as magick*, it would have to have a consilient explanation
    > that fit in with everything else, an explanation that did *not* invoke an
    > enclosing simulation translating a human fiction into reality.

    Yes, quite so! The most familiar case (after age 7) is that
    God exists. (Before age 7 Santa Claus is the most credible
    example.) How long would it take God, playing fairly, to
    actually persuade you that He exists, and that all the
    traditional stories in the Bible are true (up to consistency)?

    Me, about fifteen minutes.

    > Presumably if magick did exist, as magick, then there would exist a valid
    > deconstruction of my information-theoretical objections to it, and after
    > hearing the explanation I'd slap myself on the forehead and go: "Duh!
    > What a simple pattern! It's clear that you can't have a universe like
    > this one without ritual spellcasting that uses spoken Latin phrases and
    > virgin's tears...

    I'm not sure I'm following you here. After all, why would there
    *have* to be an explanation? In the scenario I just spoke of,
    God would have a very simple retort to my ultimate question of
    "Why?".

    "Because," He'd say, "that's how it is."

    Lee

    > it'd be like having a periodic table that was missing
    > the element of mercury but was otherwise exactly the
    > same. I'm especially embarrassed about mistaking the
    > human rationalizations and distortions of this
    > phenomenon for anthropomorphic inventions."
    >
    > Now *that* is hard to imagine.



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