Claremont Theist Embarrassed By Theology

In the conservative Claremont Review, Spencer Klavan uses the Marvel multiverse to launch a survey of many-worlds theory that starts well but stumbles badly halfway through.

Klavan ably summarizes the Marvel multiverse and the related science of quantum physics. He touches on the idea of possible intelligent design in the life-friendly fixing of our universe's two-dozen fundamental constants. He even admits that we can dispense with a designer if we take the simple but breathtaking step of considering all possible universes to be equally real. But his stumbling begins when he posits that this step is just hubris from physicists, instead of exploring the academic philosophy behind the idea: Modal Realism.

Klavan is trivially correct to complain that multiversal realism should not pretend to be a scientific/empirical truth, on par with quantum physics or Big Bang cosmology. But he uses this strawman to ignore the possibility that a multiverse theory can be epistemologically superior to his preferred theory (involving a loving God who "invites" humankind to know "His glory"). Klavan simply shrinks from the challenge of comparing two philosophical theories: 1) that all universes are equally real, or 2) our universe was created and fine-tuned by a loving superhero of unknown origin, operating via unknowable mechanisms, and who reportedly has an obsessive interest in H. sapiens.

Here is the closest he can bring himself to a bake-off between those two theories:

They are competing theologies—one of them handed down to us through ancestral wisdom, the other dictated to us by scientistic pseudo-clerics and by the spirit of our fractious age. One way of adjudicating between theologies, though, is to ask whether they can inspire art that expresses the full range of man’s nature in a satisfying way. 

That's it. No discussion of parsimony. No discussion of the epistemological trade-offs in the two offerings. Just a fawning hand-wave toward "ancestral wisdom", coupled with a drive-by ad-hominem against "scientistic pseudo-clerics". And then a silly attempt to use artistic track records as a way to adjudicate the truth-value of competing theories.

The giveaway, of course, is that Klavan calls them "competing theologies" instead of "competing epistemologies". In doing so, he circularly smuggles into his argument his foregone conclusion: that any fundamental explanation of existence should be considered a "theology". With his unquestioned assumption that any theory of reality must posits gods (or their equivalents), it's easy to shill for your society's traditional sky-fathers.

The subtext here is amusing: Klavan recognizes that the crutch of "theology" is embarrassing for any modern philosophy, and his only defense of it is to allege that the other side is guilty of it too. Only a few centuries ago, theologians were proud of their vocation, and claimed to have multiple independent proofs of the existence of their god. (Aquinas had five!) Now, even theists accidentally use "theology" as a kind of intellectual slur. Game over.

Claremont is supposed to represent the pinnacle of current intellectual conservatism. Is this really the best they've got?

Paranormality Flees Our Sensors

The brilliant XKCD called it in 2013. But this percentage graph underplays the story. Try this:

Note that the red scale on the right is 10X the scale on the left.  So really that graph looks like this:

And even that vastly underestimates the deployed imaging capacity, because smartphone pixel counts increased 10X in just the ten years after the iPhone launched:

And all the above is only about smartphones. It doesn't even consider security cams, traffic cams, weather cams, doorbell cams, dash cams, helmet cams, and trail cams. (Only the latter 3 cam types apply to Sasquatch, but all except trail cams apply to UFOs.) Such cams have also exploded in the last twenty years. And unlike smartphones, they patiently record without human intervention. I couldn't find data for deployment of such cams, but we can safely assume it's up at least 100X since 2000. 

Nor do I have data about the vast increase in military imaging capacity, which gave us the three (quite debunkable) Navy UFO videos. We'll ignore this category, since believers would claim that the military suppresses such imagery anyway.

[2021-06-13: A commenter points out: "The amount of SAR radars, satellite imagery, IR satellites observing earth and atmosphere has exploded. Sonic booms can be detected using seismic devices. L-band SAR can detect ionospheric fluctuation in resolutions of hundreds of meters to a couple of kilometers. All-sky imaging of meteor trails can be made using long wavelength arrays on earth detecting almost 10,000 trails per hour. Even grain of sand sized meteor leaves a shockwave."]

The above analysis yields a 20-year increase in deployed imaging capacity of at least 10,000X. So if UFOs are real, we should have expected to see a 10,000X improvement in the combined quantity and quality of UFO imagery. 

So where is it?

When Iran shot down its own airliner, it was caught on both security cam and dash cam. When Sully landed in the Hudson, two security cams caught it. "Caught on camera" is a genre you could watch 24/7 now, but it didn't really exist 20 years ago. If you search YouTube for "top meteor videos", they are amazing -- and mostly from the last decade, and mostly from dashcams and security cams. 

But search for "top UFO videos", and you will be very disappointed. I find no data on counts of UFO imagery, so a good proxy should be UFO witness reports. They increased a meager 3X since 2000 while deployed camera count increased by 100X in smartphones alone.

I also lack data for Sasquatch image counts, but squatchers have an extra problem: drone-mounted FLIR rigs are now quite affordable, and they can easily pick out warm-blooded megafauna in a forest at night. Sasquatch should now be as easy to find as these two deer:

Is it really a coincidence that paranormal phenomena retreat exactly to the blurry edge of humanity's sensor grid, even as that grid suddenly expands its capacity by a factor of thousands in just a couple decades? Either UFOs and Sasquatches are somehow clever and motivated enough to dynamically fine-tune how much ankle they show us, or maybe they are just part of the noise that is inevitable at the periphery of our sensor capacity.

Or maybe Mitch Hedberg is right: Bigfoot and UFOs are blurry in real life, and all the "blurry" pictures of them are as clear as such pictures could possibly be. So we will never ever see a picture like this:

Or, we could get such a picture tomorrow, and I will switch teams. Is there anything that could happen tomorrow to make a UFO or Sasquatch believer switch teams?

2021-06-13: Mick West wrote about this subject in 2019: the "Low Information Zone".

Paranormal Claims Need Quality Not Quantity

There is an endless quantity of eyewitness reports for UFOs, alien abductions, Sasquatch, Loch Ness monster, Lake Champlain monster, chupacabra, ghosts, faith healings, miracles, blessed virgin sightings, ESP, demonic possession, exorcism, stigmata, precognition, clairvoyance, chakras, Tarot, homeopathy, haunted houses, auras, karma, dowsing, palm reading, witchcraft, afterlife previews, reincarnation, angels, demons, vampires, werewolves, faeries, energy healing, remote viewing, magic, voodoo, etc. 

For none of these phenomena will I be tipped from skepticism to belief just by adding to the existing pile of normal-quality eyewitness reports.

Take UFOs. We all agree that alien craft are not the only thing that can generate eyewitness reports of alien craft. We all agree they can sometimes be generated by: aircraft, rockets, satellites, drones, balloons, kites, flares, birds, insects, planets, moonlight, meteors, clouds, fog, ice crystals, fallstreak holes, sun dogs, crown flashes, contrails, lights, lighthouses, fires, smoke, reflections, inversions, mirages, St. Elmo's fire, auroras, autokinesis, eye spots, dreams, hallucinations, delusions, hysteria, and hoaxes. So adding more average-quality eyewitness UFO reports to the pile does not significantly increase the likelihood that some of the reports are really alien craft. 

What matters is the quality of the best, not the quantity of the rest. 

And so far, the best are not very compelling.

There are surely more reports of divine intervention -- miracles, answered prayers, healings, blessings, etc. -- than of UFOs. But if reports of everyday divine intervention spike, I don't think that the likelihood of gods has increased. Indeed at some point, the quantity becomes evidence against the quality. If the quantity of normal reports of UFOs doubles, but the quality of the best reports (e.g. with imagery) doesn't increase at all, then that strongly suggests that the extra reports are from the many known spurious channels listed above.

If you evaluate paranormal phenomena using the quality of reports instead of the quantity, then each day you face a massive risk of your disbelief being disproven. Each day, a report could arrive with 100 credible witnesses who all video-recorded the same paranormal phenomenon in broad daylight up close on their megapixel smartphones. As a skeptic, you're high up on a tightrope with no net.

But if you instead set your beliefs by the quantity of reports, and assume that some small irreducible fraction is likely to be true, then you're at no risk of ever having to change your mind. What morning headline could possibly do it? It would have to be something like: 

Project Blue Book Revealed As Massive Hoax
Prankster Group Releases Cache Of 12,618 Affidavits
Every UFO Report Was Part Of Multi-Decade Prank

When a belief is based on quantity over quality, it is pretty much unfalsifiable. There is nothing that can significantly shrink the pile of half-baked evidence after the pile's size has convinced the believer. Their belief is debunk-proof because it is evidence-proof -- i.e. safe from contradiction by any possible new evidence.

This is because the quantity method seems to work in only one direction. It doesn't matter how big is the associated pile of debunked reports. It doesn't even matter if a random sample of the primary reports are 100% debunkable. All that matters is that the haystack of reports is assumed to contain undebunkable needles, no matter that those needles are never found.

Note also that every paranormal phenomenon listed above is in principle verifiable through a repeatable lab or field experiment. But there is always some excuse why the phenomenon has never held still long enough for such experiments. So these theories wear the emperor's new clothes of someday-maybe verifiability, because we can all imagine an experiment that would verify them. But the emperor is naked, because there is always an excuse why the experiments don't work, and there is no schedule for when the theory could ever be falsified.

(Some scientific theories are not yet testable because the experiment can't be run yet. Examples are Einstein's General Relativity before the 1919 eclipse, or the Higgs particle before the Large Hadron Collider had generated enough data. But what is the schedule for testing UFO theories? On what date will we be able to say that the UFO hypothesis has failed?)

Nobody is immune from confirmation bias. Every truth-seeker is personally invested in their current worldview. Complaining about another truth-seeker's motives or practices may feel good and may even be valid, but it's pointless if they can reverse the complaint back at the complainer.

However, the complaint of unfalsifiability is not reversible. We skeptics of the two dozen paranormal phenomena listed above could be proved wrong on any of them tomorrow morning. Like this:

Flying Saucer Filmed Hovering Low Over Central Park

Dozens Of Daytime 4K Videos Confirm Beyond-Human Technology
Silent Craft Disappears Through Apparent Wormhole

What headline could announce that UFO believers have been proved wrong? That's about as imaginable as a headline saying that some gods had been proven not to exist. So how is UFO belief different from a religion?

AI + Simulations Solves The Fermi Paradox and Doomsday Argument

 There have been two big new developments in the Fermi Paradox in the last few years:

• A 2018 paper showing that the Drake Equation misled us into thinking technological civilization is more likely than it is. (The mistake was shocking. Everybody was focused on the average number of civilizations that should exist across all scenarios, rather than on the number of civilizations in the median scenario. Basic probability theory!)
• A new paper two days ago by Robin Hanson arguing that a hard-steps model of development places the nearest expansionist technological civilization roughly half a billion light-years away. (See videos here and here.)

So I need to get on the record with an idea that hit me a few years back, that I haven't seen elsewhere.

If you take seriously any or all of the Doomsday Argument, Simulation Hypothesis, Modal Realism, and the Fermi Paradox, then the Copernican Principle should make you question why we seem to be such an unlikely/early draw from the space of all possible intelligent observers.

A plausible answer is that we are in a category of simulation designed to explore the rise of artifactual intelligence, and that this would be one of the most frequently-run kind of simulation in a universe dominated (as ours will likely be) by artifactual intelligence.

By "artifactual intelligence" I mean not only the traditional AI of enthusiastic singularitarians, but more importantly the emulated intelligence popularized by Robin Hanson.

This theory answers several questions:

Q: Where is everybody? A: The universe is otherwise uninhabited because alien civilizations elsewhere are irrelevant to simulating the rise of AI here.

Q: Why are we in the kind of universe that seems to allow artifactual intelligence? A: In any base reality that allows AI, the vast majority of its universe simulations would also allow AI. (If the Simulation Argument feels somewhat circular here, throw in some Modal Realism and Anthropic reasoning to see that this answer biases the distribution of possible observers towards our kind.)

Q: Of the likely quadrillions of possible observers among our descendants, why has our sample observation been drawn from so early in the distribution? A: The dawn of AI is intensely interesting to AIs with resources for running simulations.

Tyler Cowen came close to this idea in 2012 when he wrote that "the Fermi Paradox raises the likelihood we are in a simulation." But he didn't point out that simulations would be run by AIs who would specifically be interested in simulating the dawn of AI.

A related idea is Roko's Basilisk, which has been called the world's most dangerous thought experiment, and so I won't describe it here. 

9/11 Conspiracy Confirmation Futures Contract

Consider the many conspiracies in history that have enjoyed sudden revelation/confirmation, such as

• 1920: player confessions reveal the 1919 World Series was fixed
• 1957: Apalachin Raid confirms the existence of the mafia
• 1967: Ramparts Magazine exposes Operation Mockingbird
• 1971: burglarized FBI files expose COINTELPRO
• 1974: White House tapes confirm Watergate cover-up
• 1975: Church Committee exposes MK-ULTRA and CIA assassination plots
• 1986: Congress exposes Iran-Contra
• 1997: National Archives reveals Operation Northwoods

The 9/11 conspiracy and cover-up would have required hundreds of operatives to execute, and thousands of co-conspirators to cover up -- far more than any of the conspiracies above that eventually broke open.  How long before somebody inside the conspiracy flips or slips?

There are allegedly almost 1700 architects and engineers who support the controlled-demolition findings of Architects And Engineers For 9/11 Truth.  AE911T claims that "most of those who take the time to examine this evidence acknowledge that the official story can’t be true".  If AE911T is right about how compelling their evidence and arguments are, then the truth of controlled demolition will spread inexorably in the technical community, and will eventually reach a tipping point and become the consensus view.

Here is an opportunity to profit handsomely from your personal insight and conviction that truth of 9/11 controlled demolition is obvious and compelling and must eventually triumph in the marketplace of ideas.

Bostrom's Simulation Argument

The only time I've touched on this topic is in the exchange below with Bostrom back in 2002.  I soon learned that the idea I was asking about is called modal realism, which encompasses all of the most interesting philosophical implications of the Simulation Argument.

From more recent reading on quantum physics, I no longer have such a firm intuition that a non-zero Planck Constant makes the universe easier to simulate, especially in light of the hacks and optimizations that Bostrom describes. However, I'm still fond my insight -- perhaps true, perhaps even original -- that classical physics should allow in principle for infinite information density.

As a technologist, I tend to think there isn't an interesting possibility of our sort of physics being able to support a simulation of a universe of our sort of physics. The hacks and optimizations that Bostrom talks about -- monitoring a simulation to see what its inhabitants "notice" -- can be recognized as nigh-impossible by anyone who's tried to debug their own software (let alone the simulated mental operations of minds that nobody programmed).

So I think that element (2) -- simulations won't happen -- of Bostrom's disjunct is the most probable, but as a modal realist I already feel sort of like how I'd feel if I believed we were in a simulation.

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Holtz [mailto:brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 2:36 PM
To: nick@nickbostrom.com
Subject: anthropic reasoning re: "why is there something rather than nothing?"

Hi. Two quick questions from someone who's enjoyed for several years your work on anthropic and transhumanist topics:

1. Has anyone ever applied anthropic reasoning to the perennial philosophical question of "why is there something rather than nothing?"?

2. Has anyone ever noticed that Planck's Constant being non-zero (i.e. that our universe is quantum rather than classical) could be construed as evidence that our universe is a simulation?

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Some details:

On the latter question, the point would of course be that simulating a classical universe to arbitrary precision would be much more computationally expensive (indeed, perhaps impossible) compared to simulating a quantized universe.

On the former question, I notice of course that it is closely related to anthropic cosmological reasoning like that discussed in Ch. 2 of your upcoming book. I'm just wondering if anyone has ever applied applied anthropic reasoning to the logic-motivated "multiverse" of logically-possible universes, as opposed to the quantum-theory-motivated multiverse of physically parallel "universes".

Here is a relevant excerpt from a book (see http://humanknowledge.net) I'm writing:

A possibly meaningful (but unparsimonious) answer to the Ultimate Why is that the universe exists (more precisely, is perceived to exist) roughly because it is possible. The reasoning would be as follows. Absolute impossibility -- the state of affairs in which nothing is possible -- is itself not possible, because if nothing truly were possible, then absolute impossibility would not be possible, implying that at least something must be possible. But if at least one thing is possible, then it seems the universe we perceive should be no less possible than anything else. Now, assuming that physicalism is right and that qualia and consciousness are epiphenomena, then the phenomenology of a mind and its perfect simulation are identical. So whether the universe we perceive existed or not, it as a merely possible universe would be perceived by its merely possible inhabitants no differently than our actual universe is perceived by its actual inhabitants. By analogy, the thoughts and perceptions of a particular artificial intelligence in a simulated universe would be the same across identical "runs" of the simulation, regardless of whether we bothered to initiate such a "run" once, twice -- or never.

An earlier exploration of this idea is this:

Consider gliders in Conway's game of Life.  Even if nobody ever wrote
down the rules of Life, gliders would still be a logical consequent of
certain possible configurations of the logically possible game of
Life. It has been proven that Life is rich enough to instantiate a
Turing machine, which are of course known to be able to compute
anything computable. So if mind is computable, consider a
configuration of Life that instantiates a Turing machine that
instantiates some mind.

Consider the particular Life configuration in which that mind
eventually comes to ask itself "why is there something instead of
nothing?".  Even if in our universe no such Life configuration is ever
instantiated, that particular configuration would still be logically
possible, and the asking of the Big Why would still be a virtual event
in the logically possible universe of that Life configuration.  The
epiphenomenal quality of that event for that logically possible mind
would surely be the same, regardless of whether our universe ever
actually ran that Life configuration. So the answer to that mind's Big
Why would be: because your existence is logically possible.

So pop up a level, and consider that you are that mind, and that your
universe too is just a (highly complex) logically possible state
machine.  In that case, the answer to your Big Why would be the same.

Note that, while the Life thought experiment depends on mind being
computable, the logically possible universe (LPU) thought experiment
only assumes that our universe could be considered as a logically
possible sequence of (not necessarily finitely describable)
universe-states.  The LPU hypothesis also depends on the thesis that
physicalism is right and that qualia and consciousness are
epiphenomena. The LPU hypothesis is of course unparsimonious (sort of
like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory), but parsimony
is perhaps inconsistent with *any* answer to the Big Why.  The LPU
hypothesis is incompatible with strong free will (which itself may be
incoherent), but is compatible with weak free will (perhaps only if we
assume there are rules governing the transitions among
universe-states).

The idea that the world might be a dream is of course not new.  But I
don't recall ever hearing that the world might be just a logically
possible dream for which no dreamer exists.

-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Bostrom [mailto:nick@nickbostrom.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 1:26 PM
To: Brian Holtz
Subject: Re: anthropic reasoning re: "why is there something rather than nothing?"

Hi Brian,

Hi. Two quick questions from someone who's enjoyed for several years your work on anthropic and transhumanist topics:

1. Has anyone ever applied anthropic reasoning to the perennial philosophical question of "why is there something rather than nothing?"?

Derek Parfit touched upon this topic in some lectures he gave in London a few years ago. There is also a mailing list, the everything-list, where this topic has been discussed extensively.

2. Has anyone ever noticed that Planck's Constant being non-zero (i.e. that our universe is quantum rather than classical) could be construed as evidence that our universe is a simulation?

Yes (I think Hans Moravec might have been first, but I'm not sure). My view (see the Simulation Argument paper) is that it is not good evidence for that because the apparent ultimate physics of our universe could easily be an illusion if we are living in a simulation. That is, our simulators could create the appearance that our physics is quantum or classical without actually having to go to the trouble of simulating our world down to such find detail.

All best wishes,
Nick

World Philosophy Day

Yo dude, thanks for the link.  I didn't know it was World Philosophy Day. Your BBC article covers four classic questions, each of which I've written about before.

1. This is called the Trolley Problem, and I use it on fellow libertarians a lot. The crucial consideration is how much freedom you have in choosing who is the one who will be sacrificed to save the many.  If circumstances (or a bad guy) picks the one, then the right answer should be clear. Otherwise, you need to set up a lottery, and you need to weight things according to expected lifespans, objective quality of life, impact of the losses on others, risk of setting precedents, etc.  Luckily, these tragic "lifeboat" scenarios pretty much never happen, and that is why we're not used to making the hard choices involved in them.  The choices would be emotionally hard, but they're not philosophically paradoxical.

2. This is called the problem of Theseus' Ship.  The answer I give in my book is: "A given entity is identified through time with its closest close-enough continuous-enough continuer. A continuer is an entity which is similar to a previous entity and exists because of it. A continuer is close enough if it retains enough of the original entity's properties. A continuer is closest if it retains more of the original entity's properties than any other continuer. A continuer is continuous enough if there is no extraordinary discontinuity in its relationship to the original entity."  This whole topic of identity (including forked and joined identities) is covered in one of the best philosophy books I've ever read: The Metaphysics of Star Trek.  If I haven't bought you a copy before, then you're getting one for Xmas.

3. Yep, there is no absolutely certain synthetic (i.e. empirical) knowledge.  We've known this since Hume.  As I say in my book: "All synthetic propositions (including this one) can only be known from experience and are subject to doubt."  The crucial thing is to understand the level of confidence to assign to synthetic propositions, and to understand the ways in which they might be false.

4. The problem with free will is that people think of their mind/soul as something apart from the universe, rather than as a subset of the universe.  I write: "Free will is either of the doctrines that human choices are a) determined internally rather than externally (volitional free will) or b) not pre-determined at all (indeterminate free will).  Determinism is incompatible with indeterminate free will, but is compatible with volitional free will if agents have internal state that influences (and thus helps determines) their actions."

These are great classic problems.  Another really good mind-twister related to free will is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox.  Infinity is also a great mind-bender, such as the way it lurks in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox.  I bet you would like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument.

Yes, I've tivo'd Parallel Universes, can't wait to watch it.  I'm a big fan of modal realism -- the theory that possible universes are just as "real" as this one.  It's related to the biggest of all philosophy questions: why is there something instead of nothing?  My answer: "A merely possible universe would be perceived by its merely possible inhabitants no differently than our actual universe is perceived by its actual inhabitants. [Modal Realism says "actual" just means "in this universe", and so is redundant when talking about our universe.] Thus, our universe might merely be the undreamed possible dream of no particular dreamer."

Conspiracy Theories Are Weeds

Conspiracy theories are weeds growing at the periphery of the currently-best-available explanatory web, finding sunlight only because of the gaps and tensions in the web. Conspiracy theorists forget the basic epistemological fact that such gaps and tensions are inevitable in any explanatory enterprise, and that empirical truth is defined only provisionally as the web of theories that currently has the most explanatory power and least amount of contrary evidence. Conspiracy buffs almost never attempt to set forth a coherent and consistent theory with anything like the explanatory power and conceptual economy of the theory they criticize. They see an accumulation of curiosities and one-sided criticisms and just-so stories and mistake them for the sort of dispositive Popperian falsifying evidence that is pardigmatic in the laboratory sciences but is so rare in the social and historical sciences.