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Rachel Zuber joins us to talk about hospice work, dying in America, and why she’s less optimistic about cryonics now.
LINKS
All the Living and the Dead
Caitlin Doughty on YouTube
CI cryonics case reports
Places of Death in the US
Prev Episodes – Cryonics pt 1 and pt 2 w Robert McIntyre, and Cryo with Rudi Hoffman
Bentham’s Bulldog on the Best Argument and also Miracles??
Skeptoid #247 on The “Miracle” of Calanda
0:00:17 – Dying and Cryonics
1:40:33 – Guild of the Rose Update
1:44:19 – Bentham’s Bulldog’s Terrible Best Argument For God
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2:08:25 – Less Wrong Posts
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Rationality: From AI to Zombies, The Podcast
LessWrong Sequence Posts Discussed in this Episode:
Next Sequence Posts:
Hi, it’s Bentham’s bulldog. I’d be happy to come onto the podcast and have a chat about the anthropic argument–my email is untrappedzoid@gmail.com. I was sort of annoyed by this because you spend a lot of time snarking about the argument but then don’t seem to have any idea what is going on with it. You say, for instance, that I spend a lot of the podcast saying that things that are strong evidence for things are strong evidence for that thing. No, I spent half the podcast arguing for the self-indication assumption which is quite specific, contestable, and contested. It’s not just that if something is strong evidence it happening should make you think it happens–it says that you should reason as if you’re randomly drawn from the pool of possible people in anthropic reasoning. Now it’s fine to not understand things, but it’s annoying to not understand things and then snark about them for minutes on end and claim that they’re unreasonably stupid.
I also think it’s funny that you say the first bit of the article is just me saying that you should think likelier things are likelier, when one of the cohosts just flatly disagrees with the probabilistic principle I lay out. I don’t make the same point over and over again, I give multiple arguments–4 mind you–for the self-indication assumption, rather than, as you do, just assert it.
You say I give no reason to think that a good God would create as many people as possible and assert that I don’t give any reason to think that. Question: did you read section 3.1 labeled “Would God create all people?” where I give lots of reasons. If God is good, and it’s good to create happy people (a standard assumption granted by most EAs and most people who have thought about population ethics), then God would make as many people as possible.
You say there are 5 reasons to think that is false. Let’s go through them in order.
“1. the world should be bigger.” Well, physics seems to point to the world being infinite in size. My claim, supported by the anthropic reasoning I give (which I think you agree with–as you call it trivial) is that there’s an infinite multiverse with a big cardinality of infinity people. I obviously don’t think they’d all be here on earth.
“2. the universe should be more habitable.” Well now you’re trying to infer the distribution of people. But I don’t think its’ obvious how God would distribute people across universes if he makes all possible people.
“3. Some significant percent of fertilized eggs result in miscarriages.” So??? Again, lots of eggs don’t become people. There are still infinite people, as is indicated by both physics and anthropic reasoning. You’re trying to infer the distribution of people again, rather than the number.
“natural disasters and death.” This is just the problem of evil which I agree is a very good argument. I’ve written about it https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil. But just pointing to the problem of evil doesn’t address an argument for theism–it’s just a separate argument against theism. I agree evil is evidence against God (I’m a Bayesian after all) and your existence is evidence for God!
You ask what evidence there is that God wants to create anything–much less infinite people. Well, God is, by definition, a perfect being, so if it’s good to create happy people, then God would want to make as many as possible (I make more points in the section of the blogpost about this, that you claim doesn’t exist, but I won’t repeat them all here).
You say I never say but imply that the maximum number of people exist. Again, I’m sort of doubting that you read the article. I say, for example, “From the fact that you exist, you get infinitely strong evidence that the number of people that exist is the most that there could be. Theism predicts that, because God would create all possible people, while atheism doesn’t.” I say similar things in lots of other places.
You note that Earth doesn’t have the maximum number of people. I obviously don’t believe there are infinite people on earth, hiding in holes. My claim is that the infinite people exist in the multiverse! I will note that while you two seem puzzled by the argument, lots of philosophers are quite happy with the argument–e.g. Philip Swenson, who is quite smart.
Re Calanda, if you so much as read the Wikipedia page about Calanda, you can see that the claims in the Skeptoid article are totally false https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Calanda#:~:text=The%20Miracle%20of%20Calanda%20is,and%20a%20half%20years%20earlier.. This is to be expected from the supposed miracle debunkers who frequently misstate the facts in totally egregious ways. You, for example, say there’s no evidence that he was missing a leg at any time. Now, I understand why you’d think this if you just read ignorant skeptic debunkers and have no familiarity with the facts, but if you are familiar with the facts you’d know there were lots of eyewitnesses reporting that the surgery had been done to amputate his leg, many of whom we have written statements from, AND we have lots of eywitnes reports of people saying they saw him without a leg AND to apply for a beggar card in Spain one had to undergo a thorough investigation, because the Spaniards at the time often killed those who applied for a begging card under false pretenses.
(Sorry if this is too snarky–there’s just something maximally infuriating about people accusing you of getting everything wrong while making basic, 101, didn’t check Wikipedia or even read your article level misunderstandings of your points and the facts).
Did you delete my old comment? I think it’s kind of dishonest to say lots of false things about a person’s work and then delete their comments correcting those falsehoods! (I saved a copy so I can repost it if it was an accident).
For reference, here was the original comment–given that this one went up, I assume deleting the first one was a misunderstanding:
Hi, it’s Bentham’s bulldog. I’d be happy to come onto the podcast and have a chat about the anthropic argument–my email is untrappedzoid@gmail.com. I was sort of annoyed by this because you spend a lot of time snarking about the argument but then don’t seem to have any idea what is going on with it. You say, for instance, that I spend a lot of the podcast saying that things that are strong evidence for things are strong evidence for that thing. No, I spent half the podcast arguing for the self-indication assumption which is quite specific, contestable, and contested. It’s not just that if something is strong evidence it happening should make you think it happens–it says that you should reason as if you’re randomly drawn from the pool of possible people in anthropic reasoning. Now it’s fine to not understand things, but it’s annoying to not understand things and then snark about them for minutes on end and claim that they’re unreasonably stupid.
I also think it’s funny that you say the first bit of the article is just me saying that you should think likelier things are likelier, when one of the cohosts just flatly disagrees with the probabilistic principle I lay out. I don’t make the same point over and over again, I give multiple arguments–4 mind you–for the self-indication assumption, rather than, as you do, just assert it.
You say I give no reason to think that a good God would create as many people as possible and assert that I don’t give any reason to think that. Question: did you read section 3.1 labeled “Would God create all people?” where I give lots of reasons. If God is good, and it’s good to create happy people (a standard assumption granted by most EAs and most people who have thought about population ethics), then God would make as many people as possible.
You say there are 5 reasons to think that is false. Let’s go through them in order.
“1. the world should be bigger.” Well, physics seems to point to the world being infinite in size. My claim, supported by the anthropic reasoning I give (which I think you agree with–as you call it trivial) is that there’s an infinite multiverse with a big cardinality of infinity people. I obviously don’t think they’d all be here on earth.
“2. the universe should be more habitable.” Well now you’re trying to infer the distribution of people. But I don’t think its’ obvious how God would distribute people across universes if he makes all possible people.
“3. Some significant percent of fertilized eggs result in miscarriages.” So??? Again, lots of eggs don’t become people. There are still infinite people, as is indicated by both physics and anthropic reasoning. You’re trying to infer the distribution of people again, rather than the number.
“natural disasters and death.” This is just the problem of evil which I agree is a very good argument. I’ve written about it https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-theres-evil. But just pointing to the problem of evil doesn’t address an argument for theism–it’s just a separate argument against theism. I agree evil is evidence against God (I’m a Bayesian after all) and your existence is evidence for God!
You ask what evidence there is that God wants to create anything–much less infinite people. Well, God is, by definition, a perfect being, so if it’s good to create happy people, then God would want to make as many as possible (I make more points in the section of the blogpost about this, that you claim doesn’t exist, but I won’t repeat them all here).
You say I never say but imply that the maximum number of people exist. Again, I’m sort of doubting that you read the article. I say, for example, “From the fact that you exist, you get infinitely strong evidence that the number of people that exist is the most that there could be. Theism predicts that, because God would create all possible people, while atheism doesn’t.” I say similar things in lots of other places.
You note that Earth doesn’t have the maximum number of people. I obviously don’t believe there are infinite people on earth, hiding in holes. My claim is that the infinite people exist in the multiverse! I will note that while you two seem puzzled by the argument, lots of philosophers are quite happy with the argument–e.g. Philip Swenson, who is quite smart.
Re Calanda, if you so much as read the Wikipedia page about Calanda, you can see that the claims in the Skeptoid article are totally false https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_Calanda#:~:text=The%20Miracle%20of%20Calanda%20is,and%20a%20half%20years%20earlier.. This is to be expected from the supposed miracle debunkers who frequently misstate the facts in totally egregious ways. You, for example, say there’s no evidence that he was missing a leg at any time. Now, I understand why you’d think this if you just read ignorant skeptic debunkers and have no familiarity with the facts, but if you are familiar with the facts you’d know there were lots of eyewitnesses reporting that the surgery had been done to amputate his leg, many of whom we have written statements from, AND we have lots of eywitnes reports of people saying they saw him without a leg AND to apply for a beggar card in Spain one had to undergo a thorough investigation, because the Spaniards at the time often killed those who applied for a begging card under false pretenses.
(Sorry if this is too snarky–there’s just something maximally infuriating about people accusing you of getting everything wrong while making basic, 101, didn’t check Wikipedia or even read your article level misunderstandings of your points and the facts).
This is Eneasz. Steven and me will be happy to have you on to talk about this! Although it likely won’t be a full-fledged episode, but rather a follow-up, and likely it’ll be partially paywalled (probably half the episode).
> You say, for instance, that I spend a lot of the podcast saying that things that are strong evidence for things are strong evidence for that thing. No, I spent half the podcast arguing for the self-indication assumption
I accept the self-indication assumption, and I consider it strong evidence for something. So a lot of the post for me was you arguing that the self-indication is strong evidence, which I already accept. That was my way of saying that. 🙂 Steven is less convinced. If you want to talk about SAI on the podcast you’d mostly be talking to him about it, cuz I’m already on your side.
> Question: did you read section 3.1 labeled “Would God create all people?”
Yes, I (Eneasz) read the full post twice actually, just to make sure I didn’t miss something. It contained nothing that even spoke to my concerns, much less did so convincingly.
> If God is good, and it’s good to create happy people, then God would make as many people as possible.
First, you didn’t say that in 3.1. If you did I would have poked fun at that instead. Because, secondly — that’s dumb. Both of the first two parts in that sentence are gigantic leaps that you have to justify. And before you can even justify either of them you have to give me some reason to believe A) any sort of thinking being that maps on to the “god” concept even exists, and B) I should think there’s some reason to believe you have privileged access to information about this being. That’s no less than 4 major steps you didn’t come close to addressing, 2 of which you don’t even acknowledge in that post.
> God is, by definition, a perfect being, so if it’s good to create happy people, then God would want to make as many as possible
Oh dear. We’re back to ontological argument here, which is famous for being one of the LEAST convincing to people who don’t already believe in god, which is very contrary to your early claims about this being one of the most convincing arguments.
I don’t think there’s any point in arguing about 16th century record-keeping, it’s flatly not convincing and not worth the time. If you’d like to talk on podcast I’m happy to do so sometime in early August. 🙂 We’ll reach out soon.
It was caught in the auto-moderation, which pauses the posting of any comment above a certain size or containing more than like 1 or 2 links. Since I only log in to the dashboard every two weeks when I upload another episode I didn’t see it until then. Sorry for the delay.
Hi, Bentham’s bulldog here, looks like the comments where I try to comprehensively reply are getting deleted for some reason (I assume it’s a website glitch because they disappear immediately while the other one goes through).
https://benthams.substack.com/p/8b5c0e7a-10ae-445c-a190-71f316c0413d
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