FAQ about the Meaning of Life is ©1999 and ©2000 by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky. All rights reserved.
| Up: | FAQ about the Meaning of Life. |
|
|
| Prev: | 3: Miscellaneous. | Monolithic | |
| Next: | 5: About. |
As Dave Barry once pointed out, the problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending extremely sincere people with machetes. All I can safely try to do is clear up a few places where thinking is confused - clarify what the question is, why the answer is important, and what the usual stances mean.
There's no such thing as science.
Your ability to watch things fall down, and thereby formulate the Simplified Theory of Gravitation ("things fall down"), is no different, in any way, from the thoughts that let a scientist understand why a star burns. Your ability to drop a rock from your hand, and thereby squash something using the Simplified Theory of Gravitation, is no different from the thoughts that let an engineer create a nuclear submarine.
There is a tendency, in twentieth-century culture, to view science and technology as some kind of magic. People talk about nuclear weapons as if they're some sort of dark sorcery. But they aren't. The laws of physics that make nuclear weapons go off are the same laws that make the Sun burn. It's the same laws, the same equations, that keep atoms from flying apart under ordinary circumstances. If you altered the physical laws that permit atomic weapons, not only would the Sun go out, but you yourself would dissolve into a cloud of less-than-dust.
Science is the same kind of thought that lets us survive in everyday life. Not a more powerful form, or a more distilled form - the same form, just as the same laws of physics underlie nuclear weapons and your own integrity on the atomic level.
I sure hope you understood that, because now I'm going to say something that I've never heard anyone - not theologians railing at science, not atheists railing at religion - dare to speak aloud.
The books of every religion record miracles of healing, and other great powers, worked by God or the prophets. The belief in that power underlies and upholds the religion. And the modern-day theologians don't have that power. And they look at science, with doctors who can heal the sick, and physicists who can destroy cities, and engineers who can put people on the Moon, and they see science as a competing religion. Hence the conflict. And yet, there's no such thing as science. Knowing how to make an atom bomb is absolutely no different from knowing how to drop a rock, and it is nothing more to marvel at.
So, yes, there's a real problem here. The problem is that modern-day theologians can't work miracles, and they feel insecure about it - rightly so, if you ask me - so they get upset at the people who can. This is not science's problem.
Of course, the other side of this is that of all the religions existing, at most one can be true. And all the false ones presumably are nothing but wishful thinking, and in the due course of time, the prophets of false religions will have written down a few statements that turn out to be testable and false. And then sometimes the quest for knowledge comes across a new fact that kicks a hole in a false religion, in which case all the theologians of that religion start screaming about the evils of science. This gets to be a habit, and then it gets seen as a property of religion and science in general, and then it gets on talk shows.
If there is no God, or if all of the religions currently existing on this Earth turn out to be false, then I suppose you could say that there is a real, fundamental, and irreconcilable conflict between religion and truth. And since science is the process of discovering truth, it would be possible to say that there was a conflict between religion and science... but equally possible, and more valid, to say that there was a conflict between religion and honesty, or religion and knowledge, or religion and reality.
I don't know.
What difference does it make, in terms of concrete choices? Would you suddenly stop trying to be a good person if it were revealed that there is no God? Would you suddenly become an altruist if you learned there was? What's right is right, whether or not God exists, and the qualities that make a good person are widely agreed upon in any case. Is there any reason to care, aside from pure curiosity?
The questions that do affect concrete choices have to do with the rather more general question, "Does an entity with the power and motivation to do X exist?" For example, selfish people considering a conversion to altruism want to know if God exists and will hold them to account. (1). Even if you knew whether or not God existed, it wouldn't answer the question. If you knew that God existed, you couldn't conclude God was interested in holding you to account. If you knew that God didn't exist, you couldn't conclude that no entity held the power of retribution.
When you know exactly why it matters whether or not God exists, when you know what choices depend on the question and why, and exactly which type of entity would satisfy the definition of "God" for that purpose, you will usually find that you already know the correct choice.
"Free will" is a cognitive element representing the basic game-theoretical unit of moral responsibility. It has nothing whatsoever to do with determinism or quantum randomness. Free will doesn't actually exist in reality, but only in the sense that flowers don't actually exist in reality.
Got it?
Okay, let's begin by defining what the problem is. The problem is that if all of reality is deterministic, if the ultimate state of the Universe at the end of time was determined in the first instant of the Big Bang - quantum physics says this is not so, but we'll plunge ahead - then presumably your own choices are predetermined, you have no say in the matter, and so you can't be held accountable for anything you do. This is, of course, a big fat fallacy. Morality, at least the way humans do it - "accountability" and so on - is an extremely high-level concept. If morality seems to be dependent on details of low-level physics, this is a clue that something's wrong.
The "paradox" of free will arises from a fundamentally flawed visualization of causality. Even if the future is determined, it's still determined by the present. That's us. That's our choices. That's our minds. If the present were different, the future would be different.
Let's say you punch me in the nose. Did you do it because you were evil, or because the laws of physics made you do it? Well, if the laws of physics had been different, you wouldn't have done it. And if you hadn't been evil, you wouldn't have done it. And if an asteroid had crashed into the house next door, we would both have been too busy running away. Asking which of these variables is "responsible" is like asking whether the cup is half empty or half full. Usually we find it easier to think of human motives as being variable, so usually we attribute causal responsibility to human motives.
The human conception of causality itself, like our conception of moral responsibility and free will, goes away if you look at it too closely. The human conception of causality is fundamentally "subjunctive" - it relies on what could have happened, rather than what did happen. When we say "A caused B", we mean "If A hadn't happened B wouldn't have happened." We use our conception of causality to find the connection between variables, and we use that connection to change A and thereby change B. Fundamentally, the human conception of causality is about how to change the future, not about how the past happened.
When you ask why some event happened, the only true and complete answer is "The Universe", because if any part of the Universe had been different (2), things would have happened differently. There's no objective way to single out a particular element of that Universe as being "most responsible" - the way the human mind handles it is by picking out the element that varies the most, the element easiest to manipulate.
You might say that even if all our choices are written in some great book, we are the writing, and we are still responsible for our choices.
Honestly? Well, yeah. Moral responsibility doesn't exist as a physical object. Moral responsibility - the idea that choosing evil causes you to deserve pain - is fundamentally a human idea that we've all adopted for convenience's sake. (3).
The truth is, there is absolutely nothing you can do that will make you deserve pain. Saddam Hussein doesn't deserve so much as a stubbed toe. Pain is never a good thing, no matter who it happens to, even Adolf Hitler. Pain is bad; if it's ultimately meaningful, it's almost certainly as a negative goal. Nothing any human being can do will flip that sign from negative to positive.
So why do we throw people in jail? To discourage crime. Choosing evil doesn't make a person deserve anything wrong, but it makes ver targetable, so that if something bad has to happen to someone, it may as well happen to ver. Adolf Hitler, for example, is so targetable that we could shoot him on the off-chance that it would save someone a stubbed toe. There's never a point where we can morally take pleasure in someone else's pain. But human society doesn't require hatred to function - just law.
Besides which, my mind feels a lot cleaner now that I've totally renounced all hatred.
Well, what about God?
Of course not. You cannot "serve" God. You don't serve entities. You serve purposes. Asking "What is the meaning of life?" and getting back "God" is like asking "What is two plus two?" and getting back "Spackling paste." It's not even a religious issue. It's a category error, pure and simple. When I ask what two plus two equals, I expect a number. When I ask what the meaning of life is, I expect a goal. That doesn't mean that God can't exist and be a goal in some sense I don't understand at all, because the Universe is a weird place; but it does mean that equating God with a goal will lead you to make a lot of silly mistakes by trying to "serve God" the way you'd serve another human being.
If you're religious and you want to be really hubristic, you can say: "Serve God? Of course not, but I serve the same purpose God does."
At present, nowhere, just like physicists don't invoke God while explaining General Relativity or quantum mechanics or the first minutes of the Big Bang. This explanation isn't intended to be a complete account of the Universe; there are a good many things that are far beyond its scope. I'm flattered you think I've gotten so close to the ultimate reality that God just has to be in there somewhere or the theory is wrong. But I haven't. If there's one thing my speculations have taught me about reality, it's that it goes on and on and on. If I slapped "God" on top of the parts I knew about, I'd just be refusing to look deeper - and wouldn't that be disappointing if there were just one or two more levels to go?
"I believe in God because there is nothing else to explain how the stars stay in their courses..."This happens all the time. Somebody comes up with an incomplete explanation of the Universe that doesn't include God; then, some theologian uses "God" as a sort of spackling paste to fill in the holes, and manages to convince others that that's part of the religion; then, when in due course the quest for knowledge discovers the real explanation, there's this big fight. It happened with astronomy and it happened with human evolution. Would you really want it to happen here?
- Maimonides, in his Guide to the Perplexed.
[I'm not sure this attribution is correct.]"Your Highness, I have no need of this hypothesis."
- Pierre Laplace, to Napoleon,
on why his works on celestial mechanics make no mention of God.
Why do you care?
Yes, I know. You want to live forever. But come on, either you will or you won't! If you want to cover all the bases, buy a cryonics insurance policy.
"Soul" is a blatantly overused term that conflates the following completely independent conceptual entities:
Depends on your starting assumptions, obviously, as well as your personal definition of self-continuity. (Virtually all religions believe that the important part of us survives, so if you're religious and you're using the basic tenets of your religions as starting assumptions, then the answer is obviously "Yes".)
Do we have intrinsically, physically immortal souls generated by, or attached to, the human brain? I dunno. Go open up a brain and take a look. At the current rate of technological progress in physics and neurology, we should be able to give a definitive answer to this question in about forty or fifty years CRNS (4).
Weird-physics neurology is almost certainly required, but not sufficient, for intrinsic immortality. I would strongly caution against assuming that proof of weird-physics neurology implies an immortal soul - unless you believe that the weird neurology was deliberately designed with that outcome in mind, there's no reason why one would imply the other. That said, there are some scientists of known competence, physicists and neurologists, arguing in favor of weird-physics neurology - Penrose and Hameroff, for example. See Shadows of the Mind, Chapter 7, for examples.
Is this Universe a computer simulation? If so, do the simulators care enough to yank us out of it when we die? I don't know. I don't think this world is a simulation, but I could be wrong. Are there aliens overhead, restrained by Star Trek's Prime Directive from intervention, but recording our every thought for posterity? Probably not, but that's just a guess.
What about the aliens, or our own descendants, armed with time cameras? I think time cameras should be possible. In fact, actual time machines should be possible. Certain physicists to the contrary, a blind prejudice against "global causality violations" is not an argument sufficient to overcome the fact that a closed timelike curve - time travel - is explicitly permitted by General Relativity. This one gets even more complicated than the Fermi Paradox or the Matrix Hypothesis, since we don't know any of the rules for time travel. It does appear that, under most theories, you can't go back to a time before you built the time machine, which is bad news for dead people; on the other hand, we might be able to find an existing time machine or a natural phenomenon (like a rotating black hole) that could be used to go back to before the dawn of human sentience.
Or if your definition of personal identity is based on similarity, "identity" of memories and personalities and motives, or even perfect similarity on the atomic level, it may be that the Reality is simply so huge that all your key characteristics will be duplicated somewhere - by pure quantum randomness, if nothing else. If the Reality has, say, 3^^^^3 Universes - those little arrows are Knuth notation - then any possible configuration of 10^80 atoms in a Universe 10^11 light-years wide would exist somewhere, not just once but duplicated an unthinkably vast number of times, with a probability that is, effectively, certainty. (Knuth notation creates some pretty impressive numbers.)
With all that exotic speculation going on, cryonics may seem diminished, rather un-glamorous. But in simple, practical, pragmatic terms, in the world known to today's science, without speculating about whatever weird things lie beyond, cryonics is the simplest, cheapest, most understandable, and in fact only way to increase your probability of personal immortality - aside from actually living directly into the Golden Age, of course. I haven't tried to figure out all the factors involved, but I believe I once read - quoting from memory - "For a hundred bucks a month, I figure I'm buying a 20% increase in my chances of living forever." I don't see any reason to dispute that. So if you care about immortality, make that backup.
| Next: | 5: About. |
| Up: | FAQ about the Meaning of Life. |
| Prev: | 3: Miscellaneous. |