Subject: [extropy-chat] Engineering Religion

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 15:30:57 -0600

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky writes that the Jupiter Brains should not be taught
religion, merely a method for discovering truth, and the truth will take care of
itself. then this comment: 

>If you have even a droplet of honest belief left, not just empty excuses for a
 faith you lost long ago, you will not ask me to load an AI's dice in favor of
your pet theory. 

Beg pardon? I am the theist in this discussion; and you the atheist. You are
supposed to be accusing me of blindness and credulity, having too much faith,
not having a faith I lost. Is this a misprint? 

Also the question I posed was what to teach the Jupiter Brains when they are
still young, still under construction. The assumption here is that we, the
engineers, get to decide what goes into the basic structure of the psychology,
the early parts of the education. 

If you write into their basic program, let us say, a philosophy of behaviorism,
then they should end up believing that everything they believe is due to their
programming. If, on the other hand, you write into their basic program a
philosophy that believes in free will, I suppose they will either end up
believing in free will, or not, as they chose. 

Likewise, if the Jupiter Brain Engineers download the entire history of human
religious thought, and then write into the Brains' basic program that they
should adopt a rule of evidence to dismiss this all as delusion and fraud, you
will probably get a different result than if you write into their basic program
a belief in intuition or inspiration, or a rule of evidence that places weight
on authority and tradition. God knows what would happen then.

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From: Robin Hanson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:50:41 -0500

>on authority and tradition. God knows what would happen then.

I'm with Eliezer here - Jupiter Brains should just not be that stupid.  If you
knew that the people who built your brain had a certain agenda when they
started you, you will want to correct for that bias as best you could.  The
fact that your creators wanted you to believe certain things might itself be
taken as evidence for the truth of those things, but otherwise you should
not want your beliefs to depend their manipulations.

In fact, I have a forthcoming paper on exactly this topic:
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forthcoming in Theory and Decision, 2005.
http://hanson.gmu.edu/prior.pdf

                  Uncommon Priors Require Origin Disputes
                             by Robin Hanson

In standard belief models, priors are always common knowledge.  This prevents
such models from representing agents' probabilistic beliefs about the origins
of their priors.  By embedding standard models in a larger standard model,
however, *pre-priors* can describe such beliefs.  When an agent's prior and
pre-prior are mutually consistent, he must believe that his prior would only
have been different in situations where relevant event chances were different,
but that variation in other agents' priors are otherwise completely unrelated
to which events are how likely. Thus Bayesians who agree enough about the
origins of their priors must have the same priors.
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Robin Hanson  [email-masked]  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323