Jonathan,
I was going to get out of this for a while, but you tempt me...
>It seems you have turned around Pascal's payoff matrix so that the payoff
>for believing in
>God (although with a somewhat different interpretation of "God") is higher
>than
>for not believing,
>whether or not God exists.
Not for "believing" as most people understand the term.
Let me try to clarify. The way my mind works is that I tend to entertain
hypotheses by immersing myself in them and "believing" them temporarily,
but I'm easily dislodged from them. This has caused me to be accused of
"jumping to strong conclusions and vacillating," which is, I guess, one way
of putting it. I prefer the analogy of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo system,
where I bounce around from model to model, approximately in proportion to
their probability to me. This permits me to seriously entertain much more
complex hypotheses than I could if I entertained them all simultaneously,
but it's easy to get "lost" and forget to "bump out."
I've turned around Pascal's wager so that the payoff to me is higher for
staying at the "conversation was real" hypothesis for more cycles than
actually warranted by its "real" probability to me, whether or not the
conversation was real. THAT is what I mean by "choose to believe."
Perhaps I need to stay there longer than warranted because the rest of the
population stays there less than is warranted, and someone has to think
about it.
>Suppose somehow (don't ask me how) you received conclusive (to you) proof
>that God does not exist.
>Would it change your belief? Would you change your behavior?
Yes, and yes.
>Or would you continue on what is a productive and rewarding path regardless?
I'd probably go on a somewhat different and I hope productive and rewarding
path.
>(Or if the position of God is vacant, might you decide to fill
>the position with a God of
>your own invention, who would always exist for you?
Absolutely not! I am committed to intellectual honesty.
> I find it difficult to talk about "deciding to believe",
Think of my MCMC analogy. When I'm "in the model" I believe it, but some
part of my consciousness always knows it's only a hypothesis.
The best course I had as an undergrad was Bio 2. It was my first formal
exposure to science as distinct from rote memorization of facts. He gave
us tests you couldn't study for. He would describe empirical data from a
biological phenomenon not covered in the book and ask us to articulate
explanatory hypotheses and devise empirical tests. I loved it. Most of
the students were angry. They thought it wasn't fair to be tested on
material that wasn't covered in the book or in class.
In my probability class the next semester the instructor wrote on the board,
ESP
Definitely true
Probably true
Probably false
Definitely false
and took a class poll. Fresh out of Bio 2, most of us voted probably false
and expected to be congratulated on our open-minded skepticism. Instead he
lit into us. We were addle-brained pre-scientific gullible fools. If we
understood what he'd been trying to teach us about probability we would
understand that ESP had been definitively debunked. We walked out
shell-shocked, but talking about it afterward, the realization slowly
dawned on us that we were right and the PROFESSOR was wrong.
There are people who wrote back to me saying zero without qualifying it
with "for all practical purposes" or "very nearly." This concerns me.
Aren't we scientists?
Before someone starts arguing with me, let me clarify a possible
misconception. That the Bohr atom is "really" the way things work has
probability zero for me. So does any of our current instantiations of the
atomic hypothesis. Nevertheless, something "close" in theory space to our
best instantitation of an atomic theory is an excellent representation of
reality for the purposes we put it to. It is in that spirit that I place
high "probability" on the "truth" of quantum mechanics. So if you start
telling me that what you were taught in third grade about God has
probability zero, I will agree wholeheartedly with you, but tell you that
you are missing the point.
Millions of intelligent, thoughtful people have risked their lives and the
lives of their loved ones to keep a religious framework that worked for
them from dying out. I have learned, when an intelligent person seems to
be intransigently arguing an outrageous viewpoint and not listening to
reason, to look inside myself for the problem, and then to try to tease out
what it is about their position that is right and true.
One of my respondents said if it makes me happy and effective to believe in
falsehood, far be it from him to dissuade me. It is very difficult for
someone who has done time in a mental institution and has committed myself
to science and to absolute honesty with myself to hold open the hypothesis
that I am deluding myself.
But that is what I must do.
Aren't we all deluding ourselves about some things? Isn't helping each
other to "bump out" of models we've forgotten are only models, a big part
of what science is all about?
Kathy
p.s. You know, this is funny. In high school I was always the one
challenging the Jesus freaks. Always the iconoclast.
