[threefourteen]

Because his background strongly suggests that he's far from scientifically objective when it comes to sentience.

On another note maybe he saw an opportunity for his 15 minutes of fame here. My personal experience with religious (Christian) young people is that they find it very hard to control their special narcissisms. Very hard to even recognize them as such as they masquerade behind false humbleness and ethics and several other layers.

What I find really odd though is that, given his background, Google actually assigned him to such a task. I'd thought that of all companies they would be much better in posting the right people for the right roles.

[crawfordcomeaux]

This reads like an appeal for more religious discrimination in science. Is that what you're saying?

[threefourteen]

I'm just saying that I would think twice before agreeing on letting an alcoholic run a bar or a short-sighted person flying a fighter jet.

[deltaonefour]

Science is at odds with religion anyway. The two things are fundamental opposites.

You can set moral standards to not discriminate. But when you judge the situation dispassionately without polluting the logic with "morals" the discrimination makes factual sense. Religion is the opposite of science.

[tjs8rj]

Saying religion is the opposite of science is like saying philosophy is the opposite of science.

Religion is a philosophy, it’s an incredibly diverse, rarely entirely faith based, etc

Deep theoretical physics in some ways has more in common with religion or philosophy than with experimental and verified physics.

To the extreme: science itself is faith-based at the deepest levels. Like that experiments are replicable, that the universe behaves predictably, that anything exists in any real sense, that we can trust our own perception and observations at all, etc

Science is a useful construct that seems to work, it’s also deeply intertwined with philosophy (including the philosophy of religion)

[deltaonefour]

I hate philosophers and I think the entire field is illegitimate. Not to be insulting to you personally. It's just my opinion of the field in general. I have nothing against you.

I look at your entire field with very high disdain. To me it one of the most inconsistent, illogical and irrational and useless academic fields in existence. Useless is ok. Irrational is not ok.

I once gave a deep, complex and logical argument to a philosopher about why i thought philosophy was complete bullshit. He laughed at me and said my argument included elements of philosophy, and since my argument contained philosophy I was basically proving philosophy to be not bullshit. Seriously, if you cannot comprehend how stupid that argument is, then it's fine. I actually have nothing more to say on the matter. Agree to disagree.

[sweetbitter]

As opposed to what, science? That thing relying on the axiom that perception somehow lets us predict reality? No, science is nothing more than the arbitrary notion that a pattern perceived right 'now' will continue into the 'future', one after the other. This is not necessarily true, and hardly something to derive absolute truths from.

[deltaonefour]

See. This is another problem with philosophers. Did I say opposed to anything? You just pulled that notion out of your ass and assumed I don't understand science. You guys use big words but in actuality you make a lot of random irrational assumptions.

You cannot prove anything in science and therefore reality itself. This is a well known property of science and you can explain this property without utilizing pretentious vocabulary and concepts like "patterns." You already know what science is, so we won't get into it.

Even though science can't prove anything, it's still a valiant attempt at proof. Can't say the same for philosophy.

[crawfordcomeaux]

https://josephnoelwalker.com/139-david-deutsch/

Philosophy is currently reshaping science and math. I'm curious what your take is on the discussion in this link.

[deltaonefour]

My take is it has absolutely nothing to do with why I think philosophy is complete garbage.

Think of it this way. If let's say a cultist religious sect believes in science and contributes to science then at the same time this cultist religion also believes that the universe is a bubble sitting on the nose of a cosmic hippo.... Then despite the good science, the entire cultist religion is still utter bullshit.

That being said it is still highly questionable how large and how meaningful philosophies contributions are to math and science. Historically they may have been one in the same field, but today there is clearly a category error.

I would say philosophy contributed nothing to math and science. It only seems that way. What's actually going on is if a philosopher contributes something to math, he is actually doing mathematics, he is not doing philosophy. Same with science. If a philosopher reshapes science he is doing science, he is not doing philosophy. Because philosophy is a bullshit category that literally encompasses everything under the sun I dismiss it entirely.

I didn't read the article or listen to the audio you sent me. I may if I have time later on in the week. But in my opinion, that is an article on math, not philosophy. Nothing is philosophy it's all bullshit to me.

Also please don't tell me my argument here is philosophical and therefore contradictory. Absolutely please don't sink that low.

[alexvoda]

I will very much contradict you on this. Religion is absolutely not a philosophy.

No philosophy ever had immutable scripture that must be defended.

No philosophy ever had a hierarchical social structure with the aim of preserving the purity of that philosophy.

No philosopher ever sentenced other people to death for not complying to their philosophy.

Religion is a much more perverse disease.

[tjs8rj]

Religion by definition is a subset of philosophy. It’s a particularly old form of it, and has very ardent supporters, but it’s philosophy all the same.

[deltaonefour]

There's a thing called philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. Every single thing on the face of the earth falls into the purview of philosophy. It's harder to see but the field is just as ludicrous as religion itself.

No doubt some of it's ideas are mind bending and complex. But that attribute is independent of legitimacy which philosophy lacks.

[timthorn]

They really aren't. Some religions or sects might be, but it isn't a fundamental dichotomy. If you look at the history of Christianity and Islam, much good science was done by the faiths.

[deltaonefour]

It is. Religion is faith based. Science is evidence based. They are opposites. But people can be contradictory. They can believe both are the same without realizing it. You are such a person.

The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence. Science is more complex, but at a simple level you can say the premise of science is to believe things that have strong evidence. Opposites. Everyone knows this on an intuitive level. Let us assume for arguments sake that religions are all true.

Let's take Christianity for example. If Christianity was evidence based and very likely to be true... Why isn't Christianity called a science?

Why isn't biology called a religion? What is the fundamental difference in categorization if both biology and Christianity (or any other religion you want to put in place of Christianity) are real concepts?

What is it in our subconscious that is causing us to categorize some things as science and other things as religion when both are true and real aspects of reality? Why does this categorization exist? If physics is true and biology is true and Christianity is true, how come only Christianity falls into the religion categorization and physics and biology fall into science?

The answer is trivial. It is because on some level all humans, including you know that religion is "less true" then science. You can see the difference. You know that mythological beliefs like walking on water or coming back from the dead are on Shakey less evidence based grounds.

Everything in science has a high bar for verification. We trust it because it lets our engines run and our planes fly, and every human knows that religious claims have a much lower bar and are less trust worthy.

Again my claim is that the fact that you can categorize aspects of the world as either religion or science, it shows that at a subconscious level you are aware of this dichotomy even when you believe both science and religion are real.

So what I'm saying is you already know that science and religion are contradictory. But your surface level beliefs and behavior are masking this subconciouse awareness.

[timthorn]

> Religion is faith based. Science is evidence based.

No argument with that.

>The premise of religion is to believe in things without evidence

But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things. Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science. A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

[deltaonefour]

>But this isn't fully accurate - the premise of religion is to believe in /certain/ things without evidence, specifically unknowable things.

No. This is CATEGORICALLY WRONG. There are tons of instances of religion making claims on Knowable things. You make the statement yourself about clay and adam and eve. There is ZERO dichotomy between knowable and unknowable things in the category of religion.

What you're talking about is how some people try to reconcile the contradiction. They try to believe a subset of things Science makes no claim about. However THIS IS NOT the premise of RELIGION, it is your personal premise. The overwhelming majority of people and religions believe in things that contradict with things that are knowable.

Additionally EVEN if you choose to define religion as the belief of things that are unknowable (which is not true) there's STILL a problem with contradiction. The contradiction is different religions make different claims that conflict with each other. Because that "domain" has no evidence the claims are random and arbitrary and easily contradict each other.

>Science and religion deal in different domains, and it is quite possible to hold a faith-based religion while fully subscribing to evidence based science.

No it is the SAME domain. The domain is reality as we know it. Again this is categorically wrong. You may personally try to reconcile the contradiction by adjusting your domain and definitions but the global definition of religion and science as we know it operate on the domain of ALL of reality.

>A contradiction only arises if the religion makes doctrinal claims about scientific matters - for example, there are those who believe that the Earth is 4000 years old.

See. You state there is a contradiction above, at the same time you claim that there isn't one as if there's two definitions of religion. Your personal definition and a global definition. If the above applies to the definition of religion, then none of your claims are true.

>However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

You have to also realize that what is unknowable is a MOVING target. Many people have held your philosophy of merging science and religion be dividing reality into two subsets of knowable things and unknowable things. Then they make absolute statements on things that are unknowable like the earth is the center of the solar system. See the problem here? At one point in time the centrality of the solar system was a thing that was just as mysterious as the nature of god.

When science advanced and the unknowable becomes known. The religion changes. It makes an absolute statement then it renegs that statement. If religion is suppose to make ABSOLUTE claims about realiy, then the fact that science will constantly cause religion to reneg those ABSOLUTE claims displays a fundamental incompatibility.

One of the last questions about reality is whether their is a deity. It is only currently unknowable, but may be knowable in the future.

One thing I've noticed as that people of your type still believe in some sort of soul or afterlife. This sort of thing is actually knowable and already contradicted by science and basic logic.

[alexvoda]

> However, belief in a deity whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means that by definition the pursuit of science is compatible with religion.

If you believe in a "whose primary act of creation wasn't modelling Adam & Eve from clay but instead defining the laws of physics & mathematics means" and still claim to be a Christian, then you are a heretic. That is fine. Actually most religios people, are heretics of their own religion.

You can try to be compatibilist (I was for a long time), and try to metaphorically reinterpret chapters of scripture so that they do not contradict reality, but all you are doing is cutting out parts of your religion. Believe me, compatibilism leads nowhere and all theodicies are empty of actual meaning.

I would say that the dichotomy of religion vs science goes way beyond just fiction (faith) vs reality (evidence). Religion is amorphous yet rigid and complete while science is sharp yet flexible and forever a work-in-progress.

Religion is amorphous because it is full of self-contradictory parts. Yet as long as no one pays attention those self contradictions can live happily in the minds of believers. Being self-contradictory is essential because it allows a religious person to always find a relevant fragment to suit their viewpoint on anything therefore making it complete. It is rigid because by design, religions protect their scriptures. Being complete is essential because it enables a religious person to have a unique type of hubris where their religious beliefs are sufficient to compensate for their ignorance in any other field.

Here is an example: If you are a Christian and hate sexual minorities there are plenty of fragments that will allow you to feed your hate. If you do not hate them, there are plenty of other fragments about how you should love your peers. You can see this very distinction as a gradient across Europe, and how churches approach the topic depending on how socially accepted those minorities are in their societies. Being inconsistent and self-contradictory is essential because this way a priest will always be able to use some fragment that is socially accepted. The goal of the church is not to provide a framework to understand reality. Instead, the role of the church is to preserve is own authority and the social hierarchy it imposes and influence society in a way that benefits those at the top of that hierarchy.

To contrast, science acknowledges the contradiction between competing theories and seeks proof for either of them or seeks better more encompassing theories. Science is flexible because it is capable of self-updating. If a theory that describes reality better is created, it replaces other theories because it has a higher explaining power. And science is a work-in-progress because it is able to acknowledge that some things are not yet known.

I would go even further and call religions, especially Abrahamic ones, to be a Stockholm syndrome pandemic.

[threefourteen]

Much good science was done in spite of the faiths as Galileo would testify. The Church was accepting the science when there was absolutely no other way.

[ecshafer]

Galileo was imprisoned for insulting the Pope in his book. This had nothing to do with religion, but rather good old fashion, people with power don't like having that power abused. There's a reason other astronomers weren't so persecuted for their ideas, it was how they presented them, not the idea itself.

[morelisp]

We're discussing specifically mysticism here, which has a much stronger claim to have a fundamental dichotomy with science. (Regardless of which creed it's associated with.)

[crawfordcomeaux]

All that's needed is alignment with the cosmos. A model need only be able to commute with reality to provide a useful metaphorical explanation. And then the challenge becomes decoding the metaphor to figure out the literal alignments and misfits. This is why every religious/spiritual perspective needs more investigation and experimentation, not less.

Once science is more shaped by applied category theory, this will become a common understanding.

Speaking as someone who made a joke design-your-own-religion religion that's a creative packaging of neuroscience, math, computer science, and psychology, I was very surprised to start being able to connect deeper with people carrying deeply-held religious/spiritual beliefs and to start identifying wisdom from their perspectives. This also allowed both parties to at least open up to considering each others' perspectives and sometimes shifting them.

And believing a model is literally true or metaphorically commutative isn't a necessary distinction for a model to be useful, though it does seem to impact the depth to which it can be embodied.

Turning belief on and off is a skill I see discussed way more in mystic circles than in science circles, where belief denial seems to be the norm.

[morelisp]

Hey, I'm an epistemic anarchist, you don't have to convince me mysticism is a good idea. I'm just saying that "personal subjective spiritual revelation" is about as far as you can get from "objective or intersubjective repeatable results."

It's not "this guy is responsible for evaluating our AI work and also goes to church on Sunday", it's "this guy is responsible for evaluating our AI work and also thinks God is speaking to him personally and directly about the quality of that work." If you think your code reviews are bad now, imagine if the reviewer thought they only needed to answer to God.

[toponaut]

"the discrimination makes factual sense."

I can't figure out what you mean. Examples?

You seem to be linking religion with "moral standards" and science with "facts". Neither of those are appropriate.

Not all religions teach morality and, if there is such a thing as "fact" on some topic, there is no need to do science on it.

Science and religion are both about our "best guesses". They can point in different directions but that happens within each domain too (Islam vs Buddhism / string theory vs standard model) and doesn't make them incompatible tools.

[deltaonefour]

I never linked religion and morality. Morality wasn't even a topic that was covered. It's just you and your bias.

>Science and religion are both about our "best guesses".

No. One is a better guess then the other. Science assumes logic and probability and mathematics are axiomatic concepts and builds upon that. It provides the ability to falsify a hypothesis given that you assume those axioms are true.

Religion is a mess. No axioms, no logic, no foundational rules are assumed.

[deltaonefour]

You can't be scientifically objective about sentience.

First of all sentience is a loaded word it's not even fully defined. Is a mouse or a bug sentient but this AI clearly is not? It's not clear, but that an artifact of the word "sentient" which itself is just a word that is ambiguously defined.

Second, what exactly is the scientific test you would run to judge if something is sentient? It's hard to test, especially given the fact that the word isn't even formally defined.

>What I find really odd though is that, given his background, Google actually assigned him to such a task.

This would be a form of discrimination and is illegal if they assigned him jobs based off of his religious background. They assigned him jobs while ignoring his religious background which makes sense.

[Konohamaru]

> My personal experience with religious (Christian) young people is that they find it very hard to control their special narcissism.

American Christianity is absolutely not reflective of historical Christianity, especially not in its theology. If you want to see a good take-down of American Christianity, read Samuel Clemens.

And no, American Christianity did not change one bit since the time Mr. Clemens flourished (mid-late 19th century).

[Bud]

Of course it changed. It got even worse.

[lupire]

You're supposed that Google does not discriminate on the basis of religious belief? In a country where that is explicitly illegal?

[crawfordcomeaux]

Also, where's the scientific approach Google's putting forward?