tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post8211104752403569730..comments2024-03-27T20:51:11.303-04:00Comments on Accepting Ignorance: VPPZMM Debate Notes 3Alrenoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-74160902236413572342011-11-02T15:24:32.771-04:002011-11-02T15:24:32.771-04:00Could you kindly explain how this artificial selec...Could you kindly explain how this artificial selection works, and what it is selecting for?Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-81284878081162352652011-10-31T23:45:31.378-04:002011-10-31T23:45:31.378-04:00On the silver foxes bit: Humans are under artific...On the silver foxes bit: Humans are under artificial selection and we have been ever since we wiped expanded out of Africa. We impose our own artificial selection processes through civilization and war. Both of these processes are much more dominate than our normal environmental selection process.<br /><br />Groups that don't adapt either of these 2 processes have long ago perished from the earth. Any group that abandons such processes dies very quickly.rednoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-41525191815723792972011-10-04T09:08:16.386-04:002011-10-04T09:08:16.386-04:00I like it.
Considering how consistent it is, it s...I like it.<br /><br />Considering how consistent it is, it seems atheism is pretty well correlated with affluence. <br /><br />Lapsing suppression allowed latent atheism to appear, around the same time everyone was getting richer - not a coincidence, groups could afford to let up on group norm enforcement. The drawbacks of overt atheism were ameliorated at the same time unrelated wealth surges were attributed to atheism. <br /><br />Then, at this point, maybe actual epistemology enters the picture. Without serious training, people justify their beliefs, they don't find their beliefs by justification. Humanism seems more plausible as compared to theism the more mastery over nature we achieve - the more superhuman we get.<br /><br />I can't help linking this back to my sophistry obsession, though. Sophistry weakens the mind in the face of absurdity. The reasonably solid antivirus that is Christianity got weakened exactly at the same time new viruses were spreading and developing rapidly. <br /><br />Or: most atheists are secular by default. They don't consider the divine at all, so in the absence of someone telling them to go to church, they don't do anything. The next largest group are just anti-Christian, and believe all sorts of essentially pagan crap...that happens to make other people a lot of money. <br /><br />Considered atheists of the kind I'm like (I'm technically agnostic) are essentially the theologians of these groups. They antecede it. <br /><br />Tipping the balance for atheism in particular over other forms of anti-Christiandom would be the doctrine of separation of church and state, again as per Moldbug. <br /><br />Double check:<br />1. I don't do antiviruses, I just work it out or default to intuition.<br />2. I'm rich enough to spend lots of time sitting around thinking.<br />3. I attribute good results to this thinking.<br />4. If I couldn't have a polite conversation about it, I'd at least stop being obviously skeptical. <br /><br />I'd say atheist mistakes are pretty much like theist mistakes, but I'm likely to make them in favour of atheism. (I'm technically agnostic - though as 'can't know' not 'don't.') I'm likely to commit them because I identify with the scientist archetype. <br /><br />Hmm. I used to believe in a God, but didn't much like it. I seem to be okay with an impersonal authority but not a personal one.<br /><br />(Ooh, test! If I get poor, do I become more sympathetic to theism? We do know that the poverty-stricken often turn to religious groups for help, so I'ma go with yes.)<br /><br />I rag on Christians for it...but would I convert? Well...under certain conditions I'd at least admit I <i>should</i> convert. Though I don't know if I'm so intuitively sure I wouldn't because I know how unlikely those conditions are, or just because I can't stomach actually doing it. <br /><br />For illustration: I'd have to check whether the conversion experience discriminated between Islam and Christianity, and if so, all the other ones. It'd be a bit stupid to convert to regular theism and then pick the wrong one. <br /><br />The cross-examination would probably be rough on all of them. My general principle is that from a pure philosophy perspective, basically nobody knows what they're talking about because they don't care that much. <br /><br />Why should atheists be any different just because they explicitly claim to be? In politicians, I consider that evidence to the contrary.Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-39196229492975980052011-10-04T04:39:13.558-04:002011-10-04T04:39:13.558-04:00Growth of atheism. I've thought a bit and gene...Growth of atheism. I've thought a bit and generated four partial reasons:<br /><br />1) Christianity as a vaccine.<br />What Aretae calls "<a href="http://aretae.blogspot.com/2010/03/cognitive-antivirus.html" rel="nofollow">cognitive antivirus</a>". Imagine that Christianity jams mental processes in a comparatively benign way. The increase in population between 1000AD and 2000AD gave us more outlying smart people (more precisely: people with at least a minimum of smarts, and a high estimation of their own intelligence) who decided that they didn't want or need this. Combined with the increase in human welfare (at least for some people) and the time to sit around and do philosophy a lot, these people tried to unjam their mental processes by themselves (and got rid of Christianity, but a lot of them probably screwed themselves over worse), then moved on to removing Christianity from other people.<br /><br />2) Atheism as a luxury good.<br />Shares several features with reason 1. Increased population, specialization, welfare, technology, free time, etc. Combine with some arrogance. People say "We don't need Christianity any more" and avoid dying. Different from reason 1 in that reason 1 posits growth of atheism due to growth of available atheist-hours, but reason 2 is that previous atheists crashed and burned while modern ones can survive their fuckups better due to being in a more affluent society. Atheists (at least the stupid ones) may be ruinous, but there's a lot of ruin in a nation.<br /><br />3) Atheism riding the bandwagon.<br />Mencius Moldbug has argued that democracy spread in part by being on an upsurge around the time of the Industrial Revolution and stealing credit for the nice things that happened. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, so if we make countries democratic they'll become modern and advanced! Progressivism, believed even by conservatives. Similar thoughts apply if atheism is having a good day around the same time period as things start going well.<br /><br />4) Christians being less violent and more charitable to atheists.<br />This raises an obvious recursion: why did Christianity change that way? I have the impression that most of the world did. But the Christians are the relevant ones because they were suppressing atheism.<br /><br />Common thread through all of these: life got better.<br />Short versions:<br />1) Life got better, so people had the time and energy to reject Christianity.<br />2) Life got better, so people could afford to go without Christianity.<br />3) Life got better, and people attributed this to atheism.<br />4) Life got better for atheists.<br /><br />Let's see if keeping this comment short and on one topic will avoid the spam filter.Eriknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-78050601992088503372011-10-04T00:25:24.785-04:002011-10-04T00:25:24.785-04:00Okay, the consciousness machine.
First, we rule o...Okay, the consciousness machine.<br /><br />First, we rule out epiphenomenalism. Because we don't pretend to doubt in philosophy what we don't doubt in our hearts.<br /><br />So consciousness is causally connected with physics. (It can be physics, or it can interface with physics.) I additionally assume that Newton's Third generalizes. There is no action; only interaction.<br /><br />So consciousness interacts with physics. That means certain physical systems are not causally determined on physics alone and vice-versa. <br /><br />What this means in detail is that there is some physical system that would be contradictory for physics to decide the outcome for. <br /><br />I can't remember if I figured this out beforehand or if I found a possible example and worked backward.<br /><br />Quantum mechanics is meta-deterministic. The probability distribution is deterministic but the exact outcome is not. This indeterminism can be amplified, by designing a machine to violate the laws of probability, negating the meta-determinism. Specifically, the idea that probabilities can be independent; just make a machine that makes them dependent, and you're set. <br /><br />However, an outcome will still occur. <br /><br />So physics says it's not only indeterminate, but purely spontaneous: the event occurs for no reason at all. If my example or some equivalent can be verified, then causality implies dualism. <br /><br />Once the mechanism is understood, the machine can be located in the brain or manufactured for a computer. <br /><br />This ties into my research on consciousness, which is special in that I'd prefer to discuss it over email at present.Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-34335598999855392742011-10-04T00:10:40.489-04:002011-10-04T00:10:40.489-04:00"I'm convinced there's something.&quo...<i>"I'm convinced there's something."</i><br /><br />Hahahaha! Beautiful. I am also convinced there's something! Sometimes, I like to guess at what and see where that guess leads me. <br /><br />That would make a good tag line for this blog. <br /><br />We seen to agree that the club/magnet argument is conclusive for the Ignorance Hypothesis. <br /><br /><i>"wherever this obligation comes from (since presumably it wasn't imposed), a creator might source other obligations."</i><br /><br />Ah, yeah my phrasing is...interesting.<br /><br />The obligation comes directly from the laws of logic, which are imposed. Imposing in addition a moral obligation is logically contradictory. You have to accept the idea of obligation to do it, but so imposing contradicts the idea of obligation. <br /><br />This is my own research, so you can't confirm it except by thinking about it yourself. (Unless I'm right about intuition and many people get this at a gut level.) <br /><br /><i>"Alternatively, consider this: you and a creator might have internally consistent and self-reinforcing but differing moral systems."</i><br /><br />I'll try to consider, but I think it's logically impossible. <br /><br /><i>"neither finds any purchase, you complain that God is immoral, and God sentences you to Hell for immorality."</i><br /><br />Ha, nice image. <br /><br />I can reconstruct most of his duty-system in my value system. Where I cannot it is because it is self-contradictory. I'm happy to actually execute this construction for you, if you'd like. <br /><br />But, short version: He values duty. I value values. <br /><br /><i>"I think there should be a term for such a case where people have a root difference that disjuncts their closed paradigms. "Mutual solipsism" perhaps?"</i><br /><br />It's a failure of agreement on axioms.<br />Reason is finite, like everything else. It has to start somewhere. This somewhere is called 'axioms' or 'assumptions.' <br /><br />My core axioms are the laws of logic, though I do have a tightly-related skin on those as well. It's impossible to argue me out of those laws, because argument implies logic. <br /><br />Similarly, if we look at my tightly-related skin, it's impossible to argue me out of them without begging the question. They're not based on anything I'm conscious of, and this isn't fixable because I gotta start somewhere. I repeat myself, but: if you find a fulcrum to change my mind on these, it must be a more fundamental axiom I wasn't previously aware of.<br /><br />Mutual solipsism is then the term for people who disagree on base assumptions. I don't like the connotations, but yeah a term's necessary. I suggest something that implies that the evidential immunity occurs and isn't supposed to be avoidable in these cases.<br /><br /><i>"and leaves me uncomfortable."</i><br /><br />They can falsify the coercion-justifying hypothesis by not promoting coercion. <br /><br />As long as they promote coercion, I'm uncomfortable <i>not</i> being epistemically unforgiving.Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-80195777873019526592011-10-04T00:10:24.984-04:002011-10-04T00:10:24.984-04:00The parents reason seems most plausible, but doesn...The parents reason seems most plausible, but doesn't cover the cases I'm interested in. I take as self-evident that people didn't change much between 1000AD and 2000AD, so if that were the explanation, atheism should be constant per capita in those two time periods.<br /><br />The explanation reason does better, but again I want to know why really bright, well-informed people would still hold to it. Because I'm really bright and well-informed, and I want to know what kind of mistakes I can expect myself to make. Either I'm mistaken and I can expect atheist-like mistakes, or they're mistaken and I can expect theist-like mistakes. <br /><br />I agree the fact that the ChiComs credit Christianity is forceful evidence. However, their philosophy and hence epistemology isn't as advanced as ours. Specifically, their methodology cannot distinguish between annihilating Christianity to promote a better substitute and annihilating it because vandalism is fun. And in reality, both processes are at work.<br /><br />-<br /><br />So it seems you understand what I mean about Christianity being effectively unfalsifiable. I have learned I need to work on making myself clearer. <br />I can objectively define war - group attempted murder. So if all groups gave up planning or attempting murder on all other groups, war would end. This is statistically impossible even if Christianity is false. From another angle: Christians are quite wise, but not because of Jesus, rather because their ancestors weren't stupid. <br /><br />Your point about gravity interests me. I should have thought about that, but didn't.<br /><br />I somewhat hesitantly propose:<br />Gravity can be falsified by finding edge cases. Differing theories will predict things will fall differently. For example, Mercury's Newtonian orbit compared to its Einsteinian orbit. Or that gravity could be shielded, like magnetism. The mechanism is falsified, even if many of the explanations are retained. <br /><br />Things are epistemically useless when <i>no</i> explanations/predictions differ. This is essentially the case for Christianity. <br /><br />And yeah, what I want is to know what Christians would accept as proof they should stop being Christian. Once found, I then require myself to check that it is epistemically sound proof. So far I've found neither.<br /><br />By 'stop being Christian' I mean stop using Christian social norms when they are contrary to reason. Theologians don't change those either. And I wouldn't care - they have the right to believe nonsense - but one of them is to try, in various ways, to impose those norms on me. <br /><br /><i>"Should I perhaps get a blog of my own, or start writing email to you instead?"</i><br /><br />I prefer these comments be public. If you strongly prefer not, I'll pass my email along. <br /><br />Blogger obviously wants you to get your own blog. I think that's rude of them. On the other hand, they do have the power to limit comments so much it's not worth it anymore, denying that they have that power only hurts yourself. <br /><br />I'm rather tempted to post this as a post, myself.Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-38271662063434127672011-10-03T17:06:56.378-04:002011-10-03T17:06:56.378-04:00This is terrible. All your stuff is getting caught...This is terrible. All your stuff is getting caught in the spam filter. Really wish I could turn it off.Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-19292906112609914902011-10-03T05:16:18.739-04:002011-10-03T05:16:18.739-04:00Continued because my previous comment hit the 4096...Continued because my previous comment hit the 4096-character limit. Should I perhaps get a blog of my own, or start writing email to you instead?<br /><br /><i>"I suspect the club argument goes both ways. I'm unsure: you are unconvinced there is a soul or that there isn't?"</i><br />I'm unconvinced that there isn't WRT these particular experiments, though I'm separately ignorant what exactly "soul" refers to, so you can also put me down for unconvinced that there is a soul WRT most uses of the word. I'm convinced there's something.<br /><br /><br /><i>"You need to define morality for this to work. I think you're making a category error."</i><br />I'm making a loose analogy at least, and it may be a category error. What leaped out to me was your assertion of "by symmetry" against a creator, and I'm still working on pinning down and verbalizing what I think about this. It's something along the lines of a creator being able to make an "ought" or a "should" as things that are underived. You say <i>"Everyone has an obligation not to impose obligations"</i>; wherever this obligation comes from (since presumably it wasn't imposed), a creator might source other obligations.<br /><br />Alternatively, consider this: you and a creator might have internally consistent and self-reinforcing but differing moral systems. The only thing to be gained from a dialogue between the two of you is understanding and not agreement. For instance, you derive your moral system from values. In the case of the Christian God, He might derive His from duties. The two of you say to one another "You should derive your moral system from duties." and "No, you should derive your moral system from values", neither finds any purchase, you complain that God is immoral, and God sentences you to Hell for immorality.<br />(I think there should be a term for such a case where people have a root difference that disjuncts their closed paradigms. "Mutual solipsism" perhaps?)<br /><br />But if one were to attempt to hold further discourse here, it risks becoming infinitely recursive - you start asking why one meta-should hold an opinion about what one should. "You shouldn't hold your moral system-1." "Actually, according to my moral system-2, I should hold my moral system-1." "Yes, but you shouldn't hold your moral system-2 either, according to my moral system-3."<br /><br /><br /><i>"...there are clear incentives to create sophistries justifying it. This puts the bias in the Christian's court and with it most of the burden of proof."</i><br />I can see a valid point here, but it feels vaguely like Bulverism (accusing someone of holding a belief for nonevidentiary reasons) and leaves me uncomfortable.<br /><br /><i>"(I even know the necessary properties of the machine, if you're curious.)"</i><br />I am.Eriknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-22900494870141417252011-10-03T05:14:58.825-04:002011-10-03T05:14:58.825-04:00I appreciate the compliment.
Another item from th...I appreciate the compliment.<br /><br />Another item from the original post:<br /><i>"Nevertheless, I'd hoped to discover why Christians believe in Christ. I'm afraid I must still hold to the Ignorance Hypothesis on that one."</i><br />Suggestions:<br />-Because their parents told them to. (More generally, peer pressure explains a lot of why people believe in anything.)<br />-Because they want to be on the winning team. (Whether true or not, even <a href="http://ionainstitute.ie/index.php?id=1336" rel="nofollow">Communist China has produced a similar opinion.</a> This surprised me, so I paid attention to it.)<br />-Because they find Christianity to be the best match for an unusual experience they had. (From a very short list of offered matches, since most people are bad at generating alternative explanations.)<br /><br /><br /><i>"The disproofs are as unlikely as the hypothesis, if not more so. They're not epistemically useful."</i><br />I went and looked up what else Vox offers:<br />-The linguistic unification of humanity (may still be unlikely, but seems the best of the list)<br />-An external recording of the history of the human race provided by aliens (caveats about the recording covering appropriate time periods and the honesty of the aliens go here - this point also leaps to mind as something that could falsify Jesus)<br />-The end of war (going to be a bitch to define, but the other day I heard that there's been at least three Wikipedia-recognized wars ongoing every year for the past hundred years)<br />-Functional immortality technology (if war was a bitch to define, this is going to be a bigger bitch to verify)<br /><br />A related issue comes to mind. I was once asked to consider what would falsify [the theory of] gravity, and had it pointed out to me that whatever explanation replaced it would still have to do gravity's job of making everyday objects fall at 9.8 m/ss, pushing balloons up, keeping planets in orbit, etc. Similarly, Newtonian mechanics are accurate if you approximate the speed of light* as being infinity. <br /><br />*[Technical: It's more that Newton is Einstein with gamma, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor" rel="nofollow">the Lorentz factor</a>, set to 1 as though the c element were infinite, and the speed of light can still be lower than this. Or c can just be arbitrarily large so that gamma is within our precision limit from 1, which is how it was for much of history.]<br /><br />What I'm getting at is that for some theories, the falsification conditions may unavoidably be seen as epistemically useless because the theory is a description of what's happened so far and we rarely expect things to happen that haven't happened before.<br /><br />In other words: If the universe is one way, the corresponding hypothesis will have a falsification condition like "The universe is another way", which will seem like a cop-out to everyone who intuits that the universe isn't that way.<br /><br />This ties back to your statement:<br /><i>"Moreover in the past when Christianity as she is believed has been falsified, Christians didn't go atheist, they re-interpreted the Bible and carried on as before."</i><br />In the past when Newtonian mechanics as they were believed were falsified, people didn't go a-gravitist, they added a footnote about high velocities and carried on as before.<br /><br />Falsification of obscure Christian points of doctrine may only matter to the professional theologians, similar to how falsification of certain applications of Newton only mattered to e.g. GPS satellites, not Formula 1 cars.<br /><br />I think it would be unfair to say that <b>theologians</b> have always carried on as before, though I may well be proven wrong as I have no idea which specific disproofs of earlier interpretations you are referring to. I can agree that the laity have generally carried on as before.<br />(Unless you mean to generalize that they've always been spewing mostly-incomprehensible verbiage that almost nobody gives a fuck about, though that's rude.)Eriknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-55622903730454484622011-10-02T16:42:09.046-04:002011-10-02T16:42:09.046-04:00Erik, I want to mention a meta-point. While I have...Erik, I want to mention a meta-point. While I have yet to agree with you, I have respected all your objections. They're serious and I need to have answers. I don't want to give any contrary impression. <br /><br /><br /><i>Vox offered several falsification conditions for Christianity in his book.</i><br /><br />Ah, I overstepped again. These are indeed falsification conditions.<br /><br />Discovery a specific 2000 year old body is basically impossible, like looking for the fossil of a particular, individual dinosaur. <br /><br />End to poverty we know won't happen for independent reasons: it's basically impossible whether Jesus exists or not.<br /><br />The destruction of the Jews counts. But it's not like we can run that experiment.<br /><br />The disproofs are as unlikely as the hypothesis, if not more so. They're not epistemically useful.<br /><br />Moreover in the past when Christianity as she is believed has been falsified, Christians didn't go atheist, they re-interpreted the Bible and carried on as before. <br /><br /><i>A parallel argument applies if you argue over consciousness instead of the soul. Anyway, this argument seems unconvincing to me.</i><br /><br />I suspect the club argument goes both ways. I'm unsure: you are unconvinced there is a soul or that there isn't?<br /><br />For clarity: I'd say Descartes was right and the soul hooks into the brain using some machine. (I even know the necessary properties of the machine, if you're curious.) <br /><br /><i><b>locate</b> either a <b>moral organ</b> or an area of the brain devoted to moral reasoning have thus far <b>proven fruitless</b></i><br /><br />On the contrary, just a couple weeks ago they reported finding <a href="http://www.google.ca/search?q=transcranial+liar" rel="nofollow">what makes people lie</a>. I believe I can dredge up more of these, too. <br /><br /><i>"Possible symmetry breaker: the creator makes/sets physical laws [...] and moral laws"</i><br /><br />You need to define morality for this to work. I think you're making a category error. You can't actually violate physical law. Moral law must be different, because if you can't violate it, it's meaningless.<br /><br />I derive morality from a more fundamental thing, 'value.' My values are not different from Jesus' values. When we don't get what we want, we feel the same way about it. <br /><br />The laws of values are as they are, so either I'm right and you can derive morality from them...or I'm wrong, and you can derive a different morality, which may or may not be Christian morality. <br /><br />If I'm right, Jesus is responsible for creating me, which means if I'm running around not worshipping Him and He doesn't like it, <i>He's</i> morally responsible, not me.<br /><br />It's wildly immoral for Him to create me knowing I might go to torture-Hell. (Less so annihilation Hell.) So that's out. <br /><br />Using extra-temporal omniscience, He'd know if I'll worship Him or not. So if He creates me anyway, on balance I exist because He wants me to. So that's out. <br /><br />I can keep going, but the point is it can be moral to create me, but you don't end up with a particularly Christian Jesus. <br /><br />From a second angle, it's obvious how obligation-to-creator works to uphold a coercive power structure, so there are clear incentives to create sophistries justifying it. This puts the bias in the Christian's court and with it most of the burden of proof.Alrenoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11119846531341190283noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5204863782883637837.post-50595739828374766022011-10-02T09:19:12.685-04:002011-10-02T09:19:12.685-04:00"Christians don't even know enough about ...<i>"Christians don't even know enough about Jesus to know what constitutes evidence for or against Him. He has no falsification condition."</i><br /><br />Disagree. Vox offered several falsification conditions for Christianity in his book. (Discovery of Jesus' earthly remains, the complete destruction of the Jews, and an end to poverty among them.) Vox could probably offer falsification conditions for Jesus too.<br /><br /><br /><i>"Vox is apparently unaware of the experiments involving trans-cranial magnetic fields."</i><br /><br />I'm not sure if I'm thinking of the same ones as you are (I'm thinking of one that inhibited compassion and another that could force minor bodily movements), but I found these experiments to show very little compared to what they were claimed to show. They seemed to be little more than sophisticated versions of an argument that could have been carried out several thousand years ago:<br /><br />A Christian asserts that such a thing as a soul exists and is attached to a body and has other properties, etc.<br />An atheist takes out a big club and asks what will happen if he clubs the Christian over the head with it.<br />The Christian replies that he will die and his soul will depart.<br />The atheist asserts that this implies that either his club is a spiritual, soul-scaring weapon or else the soul has a material component, otherwise the soul should be unaffected by the club. He then proceeds to claim this as a <i>reduction ad absurdum</i> that disproves the soul.<br /><br />A parallell argument applies if you argue over consciousness instead of the soul. Anyway, this argument seems unconvincing to me. It may be convincing to others, but I don't see what the magnetic field experiments prove that a club experiment wouldn't.<br /><br /><br /><i>"Even if they made me, I cannot agree they deserve worship when I don't exist. After I exist, if they can impose an obligation to worship upon me, by symmetry I can impose such an obligation upon them."</i><br /><br />Possible symmetry breaker: the creator makes/sets physical laws and constants* like "force 1: gravity equal to nine point eight metres per second per second. force 2: magnetism etc" and moral laws like "obligation 1: sapient creatures shall pay homage to creator".<br /><br />*(yes, I'm aware that the appropriate constant to set for a universe is something like six point seven newton-metres-kilograms-squared, but this more accurate figure is less helpful in conveying my meaning)Eriknoreply@blogger.com