A fellow named Onid argues that we should be atheists because of Occam’s Razor. The idea that a universe with God is more complex than a naturalistic universe.
I agree with everything here, but I no longer try to debate atheists about the existence of God. I’ve rarely encountered one who argues in good faith, and with a mind open to the possibility of something larger than themself.
Hey, sorry I took a while to respond. I needed to organize my thoughts and then other stuff distracted me.
I think there’s a lot about the way you’re framing things that I wouldn’t quite agree with. For one thing, I’m not sure that just because your list of things is shorter, that means the total complexity of all of them is simpler. To give an extreme example, if my list is “two pebbles and a lump of charcoal” and yours is “the Milky Way Galaxy”, then that doesn’t make my list 3 times more complex just because it’s longer.
But more to the point, I think you have some inconsistencies here. You claim that there is no universe, only what exists in the mind of God. Yet in the next section, you claim that God’s mind is no more complex than a human mind. This seems like a contradiction to me, since the human mind cannot fit a second conscious entity, let alone 8 billion. Note that I’m not talking about something that would be fixed with mentioning, say, multiple personality disorder - we’re talking about fitting multiple full human lives into the same brain. Remember as well that I’m a physicalist, I consider these minds physical. They have to actually exist - the two-person brain would need to handle them in the way that a computer running two programs would need to contain both sets of code.
Also, I don’t really think your algorithm for a conscious mind is really an algorithm at all, in the technical sense. The closest things we have in the real world to algorithms for brains are LLM, which are obviously nowhere near as complex as human brains and almost certainly don’t even have what we would call a mind. Yet these are very complex things - there is no simple algorithm, in the K-complexity sense, that can generate an LLM; building a single LLM literally requires us to run our strongest super computers for months on end, running through code on the scale of all collected human knowledge (i.e. the internet).
Final thought: while I’m willing to call “mind” and “brain” 2 different things, and even willing to acknowledge that in some sense the brain is more than the mind, I don’t really think this is an accurate way to describe what I believe. As a physicalist, I believe that the mind is really more like a computer program run on the brain, so that phrasing is a little weird. And just as you need a computer to actually run a computer program, you need something like a brain to actually run a mind. So what I’d like to see is something like a brain which can run God’s mind.
Either way, thank you for taking the time to put together this thoughtful reply.
Surely there is a simple algorithm which can generate an algorithm that can run an LLM. You're committed to saying that there's a simple algorithm (the laws of physics) which created your brain, which could create a LLM.
That’s an interesting technical point. Yes, if the universe is simple, then you can generate anything by saying “first, generate the whole universe, then pick out this one thing.”
Of course, that would leave you with the problem of *finding* the thing you want within the universe you just created, which is definitely going to be much much harder than if you just created it directly. Imagine the complexity of an algorithm that gets a giant list of every particle in the universe and then sorts through them to find only the ones that make up your brain, and no others.
Nice. While I’m not an ontological idealist (yet), I believe that the physical universe is not the point, but is a context for the point to happen. We could never know anyway. Our stuff-detectors sure won’t work.
I agree with everything here, but I no longer try to debate atheists about the existence of God. I’ve rarely encountered one who argues in good faith, and with a mind open to the possibility of something larger than themself.
All atheists (and physicists, etc.) have to believe in one miracle.
Hey, sorry I took a while to respond. I needed to organize my thoughts and then other stuff distracted me.
I think there’s a lot about the way you’re framing things that I wouldn’t quite agree with. For one thing, I’m not sure that just because your list of things is shorter, that means the total complexity of all of them is simpler. To give an extreme example, if my list is “two pebbles and a lump of charcoal” and yours is “the Milky Way Galaxy”, then that doesn’t make my list 3 times more complex just because it’s longer.
But more to the point, I think you have some inconsistencies here. You claim that there is no universe, only what exists in the mind of God. Yet in the next section, you claim that God’s mind is no more complex than a human mind. This seems like a contradiction to me, since the human mind cannot fit a second conscious entity, let alone 8 billion. Note that I’m not talking about something that would be fixed with mentioning, say, multiple personality disorder - we’re talking about fitting multiple full human lives into the same brain. Remember as well that I’m a physicalist, I consider these minds physical. They have to actually exist - the two-person brain would need to handle them in the way that a computer running two programs would need to contain both sets of code.
Also, I don’t really think your algorithm for a conscious mind is really an algorithm at all, in the technical sense. The closest things we have in the real world to algorithms for brains are LLM, which are obviously nowhere near as complex as human brains and almost certainly don’t even have what we would call a mind. Yet these are very complex things - there is no simple algorithm, in the K-complexity sense, that can generate an LLM; building a single LLM literally requires us to run our strongest super computers for months on end, running through code on the scale of all collected human knowledge (i.e. the internet).
Final thought: while I’m willing to call “mind” and “brain” 2 different things, and even willing to acknowledge that in some sense the brain is more than the mind, I don’t really think this is an accurate way to describe what I believe. As a physicalist, I believe that the mind is really more like a computer program run on the brain, so that phrasing is a little weird. And just as you need a computer to actually run a computer program, you need something like a brain to actually run a mind. So what I’d like to see is something like a brain which can run God’s mind.
Either way, thank you for taking the time to put together this thoughtful reply.
Surely there is a simple algorithm which can generate an algorithm that can run an LLM. You're committed to saying that there's a simple algorithm (the laws of physics) which created your brain, which could create a LLM.
That’s an interesting technical point. Yes, if the universe is simple, then you can generate anything by saying “first, generate the whole universe, then pick out this one thing.”
Of course, that would leave you with the problem of *finding* the thing you want within the universe you just created, which is definitely going to be much much harder than if you just created it directly. Imagine the complexity of an algorithm that gets a giant list of every particle in the universe and then sorts through them to find only the ones that make up your brain, and no others.
Nice. While I’m not an ontological idealist (yet), I believe that the physical universe is not the point, but is a context for the point to happen. We could never know anyway. Our stuff-detectors sure won’t work.
Have you read what GK Chesterton said about this?