Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

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Astro Cat
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Astro Cat »

One addition before I continue the rest tonight Leontiskos (lest I forget to say this then): if heroism is good, what makes it good? I intuit that it's good because it prevents or alleviates suffering. Do you have a different notion of what it's good? You say a person with heroism is better than a person without, that it's a virtue: but why?

If its goodness is entirely defined by preventing or alleviating suffering, then isn't this indeed saying it's worth it to have the disease so we can have the cure? Isn't that exactly what that would be saying?
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Leontiskos »

Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 12:48 am They are not ill-founded, for you have stripped the universe of all the most meaningful human interactions, good and bad. In your toy universe there is no murder, no martyrdom, no sacrificial love, no heroic virtue. The universe is effectively emptied of all meaningful interactions and all we are left with is banality. This does not strike me as an improvement on God's creation.

So sure, we could have a 'thin' and inconsequential instantiation of agency in the toy universe, but it seems obvious that a thicker instantiation of agency would be better qua agency, for in that case we would have control over not only unimportant things, but important things as well.
This may spiral into its own fully developed side discussion (as I guess happens in these things, right?), but I have several gut reactions that I need to decide between focusing on:

1) I could dispute that "all we are left with is banality." I cried yesterday, for instance; had what might be considered a vulnerable moment. But I wasn't sad, I was just listening to music after a night of work and research, and I was just deeply moved by the music: that's it. Granted I cry often when I listen to music, so this is a little tailored to my idiosyncrasies, but I didn't have to suffer to have a non-banal time (I don't know what an antonym would be: profound?)

I also happen to cry a lot when I read books, when I watch films, on the rare occasion that I look at art, when I just have a really good time with my friends and appreciate my connection with them... who says the absence of one type of suffering has to be banal?
I would say three things. First, this deviates from the question of agency, for presumably a profound and moving experience is not a particularly volitional act. Perhaps I should have specified, "Banality in the realm of agency." Second, the preclusion of physical harm really does limit agency in substantial ways, even if some examples of non-banal agency could still be found. Third, moving experiences--particularly those elicited by narrative art such as books, films, and classical paintings--often presuppose the very sort of physical suffering that you object to. For example, imagine how many great works of art would be rendered meaningless if death ("lethal suffering") did not exist. Death, finitude, precarity, and vulnerability are just a few examples of things that are intimately tied up with physical suffering.

Weeping is an interesting example, because although there does exist joyful weeping, one more commonly encounters a sorrowful weeping that is cathartic, consoling, and desirable, and this can be elicited by simple, non-discursive realities such as natural beauty or wordless music. It's not clear to me that this sort of weeping, which Christians call the "gift of tears," would exist in a world without suffering.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm2) I could make an argument that if it is good to have firemen that stop fires, which are bad; then wouldn't it be really good to have some kind of exotic evil-fighter, someone that alleviates some kind of really bad suffering, worse than any of the ones we know now? If a sacrifice hurts that much more, for longer, with a deeper sensation of pain, in order to alleviate some exotic source of suffering (that itself hurts worse, for longer, with a deeper sensation of pain), isn't that a better martyrdom and sacrifice? Must we ask, is God good enough, having not made this exotic torture and then overcoming good, if this line of thinking works?
The conclusion you did not draw, but which hides in the shadows, is that if it is good to have firemen then, a fortiori, it is good to have <Superman> (and an evil worthy of him). But note that we could also push in the opposite direction and say that if it is not good to have Superman and his corresponding antagonist, then why is it good to have firemen? I'm not a fan of this sort of linear limit-pushing, for I think the truth will lie at a point of moderation and balance that is not explicable in terms of a merely one-dimensional consideration.

As to the conclusion that you did draw, as a Christian I think God did overcome the supreme evil. If he had not done so then presumably he would not be "good enough," so to speak, for in that case he would have failed to come to terms with the darkness of his own creation, and would thereby be shown to be less than God.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm3) I could continue making an argument against the good-making (or, apparently soul-making; can you tell I'm not formally trained?) theodicy by either insisting it is absurd to hold that crime is worth it so that we can have police; or make a weaker argument that perhaps some audience of my argument would agree it's absurd and that this is a success?
A microcosm of your question exists concretely in the parent's choice of how to parent their child. As Jonathan Haidt has shown, in recent decades parents have decided to try to create a kind of "toy world" for their children, and the results have been quite bad. Of course we might say that the results are only bad because the real world is not a toy world, but the larger question still remains valid: As a parent, would you want your child to live in a toy world or in a non-toy world? I don't think the first answer is in any way obvious or uncontroversial. Indeed, if avoidance of physical pain is not an ultimate value then it's removal cannot be altogether uncontroversial, for it is in no way clear that realities of greater value do not supervene on physical pain.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 12:48 am
Astro Cat wrote: June 20th, 2022, 10:45 pmMy response to this sort of theodicy is that it's kind of like arguing it's "worth it" to invent smallpox because it would be "good" to cure smallpox. It's hard to articulate why this is absurd, but there it is, I hope you agree that this is absurd.
I don't think it is difficult to articulate. If the malady is introduced for the sake of the cure then presumably nothing has been accomplished, for the cure is nothing more than the negation of the malady.

But it would seem that you do not understand the good-making ("soul-making") theodicy. On such a theodicy smallpox is not good as a means to a cure; it is good as a means to good human beings. For example, it provides occasion for courage in the face of adversity, the courageous person is better than the non-courageous person, and the virtue of courage is not attainable in the absence of fear and adversity.
I believe that courage would still be required in a world without physical suffering: how else might we approach that person we admire that might reject us, or stand before a crowd to speak our mind while dealing with the notion that they might judge us, or stand up in the face of people with hurtful ideas (which would still exist in a Toy World, though I suppose we wouldn't have to worry about physical violence)?
That's true enough. I didn't mean to imply that courage only exists in the context of smallpox or physical pain. At the same time, your third example is helpful in showing how the threat of physical pain underlies many of the evils that are not at first sight a matter of physical pain. Heck, even the idea of a "hurtful idea" presupposes physical pain in all sorts of ways, the most obvious being suicide.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pmThe objection has always struck me as odd because obviously, if there is no physical suffering, why would we need to worry about our hand being on a hot burner?
Yes, but in the same vein: if there is no suffering then why would we need to worry about "hurtful ideas"?

An argument more common in academic literature is the one which situates the problem of evil in the context of natural evils: evils which cause human suffering but are in no way caused by free agents, i.e. hurricanes and tsunamis. This is presumably because the division between natural evil and moral evil is more plausible; where both effect human (or animal) suffering but their causes are distinct. Your distinction between human suffering caused by physical means and human suffering caused by non-physical means is a great deal more difficult to maintain.

But if we did try to maintain your distinction, then would you say that there is some reason to retain the suffering caused by non-physical means after the "physical suffering" has been removed?
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pmWhat good does courage of the "I'm not afraid of physical consequences if I take this risky action to do a good thing" sort do if there are no physical consequences?
But again, this sort of thing will very quickly come to cut against agency itself. Why not dispense with all consequences (and all agency) rather than stopping short at physical consequences (and physical agency)?
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pmWhy is it good to take the risky action to, say, save someone if the someone could have never been in danger in the first place? You say that the point isn't to have a disease just to have a cure, but I have a hard time seeing how that isn't exactly what this is! The disease is suffering, the cure is things like courage and strength through adversity, and the outcome is simply the alleviation or prevention of suffering that needn't have occurred in the first place: what a travesty if the suffering was instantiated just to attain those cures; particularly if things like suffering and strength through adversity can exist without physical suffering.
Oh, but things like courage and strength are not cures for suffering, nor do they produce its alleviation or prevention. What is accomplished through things like courage, temperance, justice, prudence, compassion, and all the rest, is much more than the mere reduction, cessation, or negation of suffering. You talk like a Buddhist. :P
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 12:48 am First I would note that it is fairly obvious that no fallacy is being committed. If you think a fallacy is being committed, then you should either name or explain the fallacy.

Second, the theist's argument is not only not fallacious, it is sound. If God has our best interests in mind and God's understanding and power far surpasses our own, then when God allows us to suffer something that we cannot make sense of, it is eminently reasonable to conclude that he has allowed it for a good reason that we do not currently understand. There is nothing here that should lead us to the non sequitur that God can never be questioned (cf. Book of Job).

For instance, consider the child who trusts their parents even during a confusing and painful time. It would be quite wrongheaded to tell them, "Once you adopt this trusting disposition, nothing will ever shake you out of it, and therefore you are committing a fallacy which must be disowned." Would this not be a silly and presumptuous thing to say to the child?
I don't have as much time to respond right now as I thought (I will continue this response tonight), but I'll cede that fallacy isn't the right word to have used. This aspect of the conversation deserves its own post in my estimation (which I'll still do in this thread). I am deeply troubled by the ability to use our epistemic limitations to believe something is true even in the appearance of the opposite. It feels like special pleading. I know that parents do this with children, but something doesn't sit right with me about it, and I need time to elucidate my thoughts on it. Later tonight, then. (I will also get to the rest of the post. Am needing to step away shortly for a dinner date)
Fair enough. No rush. Our pace is taxing and I don't expect it to hold up. :lol: I have some time off at the moment but soon I will be preoccupied again.

What is at stake here is faith; a kind of pragmatic argument from authority. It is not merely an epistemic limitation that furnishes us with the belief, but the epistemic limitation in conjunction with faith in someone we hold as an authority.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:37 pm One addition before I continue the rest tonight @Leontiskos (lest I forget to say this then): if heroism is good, what makes it good? I intuit that it's good because it prevents or alleviates suffering. Do you have a different notion of what it's good? You say a person with heroism is better than a person without, that it's a virtue: but why?

If its goodness is entirely defined by preventing or alleviating suffering, then isn't this indeed saying it's worth it to have the disease so we can have the cure? Isn't that exactly what that would be saying?
Well I spoke of heroic virtue, not heroism, and it would be hard to deny that I am an Aristotelian. But yes, I agree that it must be about more than merely preventing or alleviating suffering, and I think I spoke to this above. Feel free to inquire more about human virtue or human goodness in your next post.

Blessings,
Leontiskos
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Astro Cat »

This continues the response to the other post:
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 12:48 am First I would note that it is fairly obvious that no fallacy is being committed. If you think a fallacy is being committed, then you should either name or explain the fallacy.

Second, the theist's argument is not only not fallacious, it is sound. If God has our best interests in mind and God's understanding and power far surpasses our own, then when God allows us to suffer something that we cannot make sense of, it is eminently reasonable to conclude that he has allowed it for a good reason that we do not currently understand. There is nothing here that should lead us to the non sequitur that God can never be questioned (cf. Book of Job).

For instance, consider the child who trusts their parents even during a confusing and painful time. It would be quite wrongheaded to tell them, "Once you adopt this trusting disposition, nothing will ever shake you out of it, and therefore you are committing a fallacy which must be disowned." Would this not be a silly and presumptuous thing to say to the child?
Let me begin with a story. In 2050 extraterrestrials make themselves known to humanity. Turns out they've been all around us this entire time, we just couldn't see them because of cloaking technology so advanced that it even appears to our limited instruments to defy thermodynamics. As communication commences, it immediately becomes clear that the aliens possess vastly more intelligence than humans. They understand things that humans find difficult to understand easily, and when the alien physicists talk to ours, even when they try to dumb it down for us, we just don't get it. We fear we can't get it, and we can't even build a machine of our limited design that would get it, either, since we don't know how to tell the machine how. Aliens outstrip us in the sciences, mathematics, and importantly, philosophy.

Now say that Snort the Alien lands and just starts zapping people left and right, Mars Attacks style. (We could add in a comical "do not run, we are your friends!") Do you see where I'm going with this?

After murdering 67 people and maiming 23 more, laughing maniacally the whole time, stomping on puppies and kittens, Snort the Alien stops and says "phew, it's a good thing I did that." Snort is confused when the humans put him on trial. "But I had a good reason for doing it," Snort says. He tries to explain, but it's just fundamentally beyond humans to understand what Snort's even trying to say. He's acted with good behavior sometimes, the defense points out: just last year Snort cured every human on earth of leukemia.

Now as far as I see it, because of our epistemic limitations, there are some options. Maybe Snort does have an unimaginable, but good, reason to murder and maim people. We certainly have evidence of Snort's intellectual superiority and grasp of physics we don't understand. But maybe Snort is just a chaos goblin. How do we know Snort's grasp on ethical concepts exceeds ours? We can see the fruits of Snort's physics superiority, but how could we ever know for sure if Snort's claimed moral superiority is real (or if he's just a chaos goblin)?

If we trust that his moral superiority is real, it's not possible to justify our trust because we'd have to understand it to justify the trust. Furthermore, once we give this trust, it can never be taken away. Snort can do anything he wants with impunity, no matter how much suffering he causes, and those that trust in his moral superiority can only shrug and say "must have a good reason."

Isn't that a problem? I don't know how to philosophically make a syllogism or anything like that out of this, but doesn't that feel like a problem?

Is it reasonable for a person to doubt that Snort is morally superior based on what they are able to cognize? Is it reasonable for a person to say "maybe I should trust that his ethical philosophy is superior unless I can justify that trust?"
Leontiskos wrote: Lucky is mistaken. Suffering is not relative, it is just somewhat subjective, and "lethal suffering" is just as subjective as is general suffering, for some desire death.

Your OP is about improving the universe by removing physical pain. Physical pain is a bit hard to define, and it may be impossible to distinguish from psychological pain. Also, the physical order contributes to both pain and pleasure (as well as the alleviation of pain, which is arguably a form of pleasure). For example, if your 'simulation' allows knives to cut tomatoes but not humans, then the surgeon will not be able to perform his operations.

Nevertheless, none of this destroys the OP due to the fact that the OP is highly speculative. You could always just add another condition, "Knives are not allowed to cut humans for the sake of harming them," or again, "Knives are not allowed to cut humans for the sake of unjustified harm," etc. Even if the concept of suffering is a bit nebulous, all that is required for your OP is to identify some subset of pointless or gratuitous suffering, such as Ivan does in his conversation with Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.
For your first statement, perhaps a toy world has an out button for when someone is finished existing. Lethal suffering would be when they die and they're not ready to go.

As you correctly guessed, with the knife objection I would have indeed just added more conditions and then asked in general "do you agree we could probably always find another condition that could be added; and God would omnisciently be able to do this all at once?"

Lastly, if I tried to identify gratuitous suffering, the end result would always be the "it's unknowably good" objection, which is why I am trying to handle that first. It seems intuitive to me that things like children suffering before they can learn any lessons from it and then dying are good candidates for grossly gratuitous suffering, but I know exactly where that would go if I posited it: right back to "it's good for a reason known only to God," usually.
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Astro Cat »

Clarification, since there's no edit function.

I said:
Astro Cat wrote:Is it reasonable for a person to doubt that Snort is morally superior based on what they are able to cognize? Is it reasonable for a person to say "maybe I should trust that his ethical philosophy is superior unless I can justify that trust?"
I meant "shouldn't."
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Astro Cat »

Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm I would say three things. First, this deviates from the question of agency, for presumably a profound and moving experience is not a particularly volitional act. Perhaps I should have specified, "Banality in the realm of agency." Second, the preclusion of physical harm really does limit agency in substantial ways, even if some examples of non-banal agency could still be found. Third, moving experiences--particularly those elicited by narrative art such as books, films, and classical paintings--often presuppose the very sort of physical suffering that you object to. For example, imagine how many great works of art would be rendered meaningless if death ("lethal suffering") did not exist. Death, finitude, precarity, and vulnerability are just a few examples of things that are intimately tied up with physical suffering.

Weeping is an interesting example, because although there does exist joyful weeping, one more commonly encounters a sorrowful weeping that is cathartic, consoling, and desirable, and this can be elicited by simple, non-discursive realities such as natural beauty or wordless music. It's not clear to me that this sort of weeping, which Christians call the "gift of tears," would exist in a world without suffering.
I'll number the three things for ease of reference:
1) I could simply provide an example where we do seek a non-banal experience as a volitional act: offering an affirmation to a friend, choosing to go to a museum exhibit, etc.

2) Does the quantity of agency matter? Recall when I argued that I couldn't teleport to Mars, or walk on the ceiling. What if for every physical action we remove that causes suffering, we add one that's benign (or causes comfort and pleasantness!). Take away stabbing, give ceiling-walking?

I don't expect you to take that bargain because I expect it probably misses the point. It's probably not really about the number of possible choices. But it's hard to see how not from the way you phrased your second point.

3) I've considered this before, and I think that imaginary adversity would still excite and entertain us. I have never been pulled apart by chains, but I still shiver when Pinhead does this to someone. I have never slain an orc, but I still root for the good guys when Gimli and Legolas compete for their orc-neck count. Come to think of it, aside from some hair pulling and awkward kicking on playgrounds way too early to remember, I've actually never been in a violent encounter involving punches, but I still feel elation when Captain America punches gleeful Nazis.

I get that we could ask "could you imagine these things if it didn't exist in the first place to emulate," which would be a good question I guess. I'm trying to think of a fantastical example that isn't just an analogy to something that exists and the best I can come up with is maybe in various movies with psychokinesis where someone does their thing at someone else and they grab their head and scream in response. Now I have no idea what's going on there in that trope: is it giving them a headache? Are they experiencing a Lovecraftian moment of "too much awareness" sort of horror? I don't know, but I get that what's happening isn't good, it's adversity.

I feel like even in a universe where physical suffering didn't exist someone could be like "woah, you know how we have two arms? What if somehow something happened to one of them and you only have one now?" "What if something could make you not alive before you willed yourself not to be? Woah!" I feel like there would still be entertainment and adversity in media.
Leontiskos wrote: The conclusion you did not draw, but which hides in the shadows, is that if it is good to have firemen then, a fortiori, it is good to have <Superman> (and an evil worthy of him). But note that we could also push in the opposite direction and say that if it is not good to have Superman and his corresponding antagonist, then why is it good to have firemen? I'm not a fan of this sort of linear limit-pushing, for I think the truth will lie at a point of moderation and balance that is not explicable in terms of a merely one-dimensional consideration.
Actually, maybe it wasn't as obvious as I intended, but that was part of what I was getting at (the a fortiori side of the argument). I did intend to say "if fire existing is good because firefighters get to exist, then some great evil would be even better because some even more good thing could fight it. If we don't like the latter part of that, then why do we like the first?"
Leontiskos wrote:
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm3) I could continue making an argument against the good-making (or, apparently soul-making; can you tell I'm not formally trained?) theodicy by either insisting it is absurd to hold that crime is worth it so that we can have police; or make a weaker argument that perhaps some audience of my argument would agree it's absurd and that this is a success?
A microcosm of your question exists concretely in the parent's choice of how to parent their child. As Jonathan Haidt has shown, in recent decades parents have decided to try to create a kind of "toy world" for their children, and the results have been quite bad. Of course we might say that the results are only bad because the real world is not a toy world, but the larger question still remains valid: As a parent, would you want your child to live in a toy world or in a non-toy world? I don't think the first answer is in any way obvious or uncontroversial. Indeed, if avoidance of physical pain is not an ultimate value then it's removal cannot be altogether uncontroversial, for it is in no way clear that realities of greater value do not supervene on physical pain.
You guessed correctly that I'd just object that a false toy world for children that have to go into a non-toy world just obviously wouldn't work.

The way I would answer your question is by imagining two worlds: ours, and a toy world. In my head the toy world seems a lot better, but I understand that part of the problem is that humans imagine things sometimes and don't foresee hidden problems. That is the point of discussion, I guess. So far we've encountered "life would be banal," which I disagree with.

When I first used to think about these things it was in the context of specifically Christian beliefs (my childhood religion). I was always confused by some interpretations of the Adam and Eve story; it always felt like a kind of entrapment to me. My first analogies would go something like "well who's to blame if I put a loaded revolver in a baby's crib? Wouldn't I obviously share in that blame if something bad happens for having put the revolver there in the first place?" (Obviously in reference to the Fall and the apple. Keep in mind, I understand these were not very nuanced beginnings, dealing with explanations of the Fall that were themselves not very nuanced. I was a child. But you see where I was going.)

At some point my analogy had evolved to there existing this other world, a world without pain and suffering where people just went about their day enjoying themselves or at worst being bored during the in-betweens when they weren't doing something interesting. (I think this was when I first encountered the soul-making theodicy and other theodicies like it). So I imagined there was this other world of happy people just doing nice things, when suddenly, a portal to a universe like ours opens. A person walks through the portal to their dimension and starts handing out weapons (I imagined that weapons in their world couldn't harm people, but these weapons suddenly could... magical thinking, like they brought "our world's" physics with them).

Then I'd ask myself "did this person do that world a favor? After all, now they can have police! Now they can have doctors!"

My intuition screams no, it loudly says he did not do them a favor at all by bringing them death and violence where once there was none. You say that your intuition says otherwise?
Leontiskos wrote: That's true enough. I didn't mean to imply that courage only exists in the context of smallpox or physical pain. At the same time, your third example is helpful in showing how the threat of physical pain underlies many of the evils that are not at first sight a matter of physical pain. Heck, even the idea of a "hurtful idea" presupposes physical pain in all sorts of ways, the most obvious being suicide.
Leontiskos wrote: Yes, but in the same vein: if there is no suffering then why would we need to worry about "hurtful ideas"?
I don't know, maybe not being very good at crocheting and being made fun of would hurt. There's all kinds of ways people could be hurtful to one another that God wouldn't be culpable for. The point is simply that God is culpable for anything physical.
Leontiskos wrote: An argument more common in academic literature is the one which situates the problem of evil in the context of natural evils: evils which cause human suffering but are in no way caused by free agents, i.e. hurricanes and tsunamis. This is presumably because the division between natural evil and moral evil is more plausible; where both effect human (or animal) suffering but their causes are distinct. Your distinction between human suffering caused by physical means and human suffering caused by non-physical means is a great deal more difficult to maintain.

But if we did try to maintain your distinction, then would you say that there is some reason to retain the suffering caused by non-physical means after the "physical suffering" has been removed?
If free agency is one of the premises, I don't think even an omni-being can prevent all suffering while maintaining that premise. Actually, your soul-making is built into the concept: people would still have to learn that they don't have to care what someone else thinks if they're being mean. They have to develop into a more mature person not to be hurt by others' words. The difference between that world and this one is there are no innocent victims. In this world you can be hurt and it's entirely out of your control; in the toy world, it is a matter of choice whether you're going to be hurt.

In short, God is culpable for there existing innocent victims under the premises of the argument.
Leontiskos wrote: But again, this sort of thing will very quickly come to cut against agency itself. Why not dispense with all consequences (and all agency) rather than stopping short at physical consequences (and physical agency)?
Because that's not the premises we started with, I don't know what else to say to that :P A lot of people seem to value free agency, and the point is to construct an argument where they will agree with as many of the premises as possible and be forced to make uncomfortable conclusions.
Leontiskos wrote:Oh, but things like courage and strength are not cures for suffering, nor do they produce its alleviation or prevention. What is accomplished through things like courage, temperance, justice, prudence, compassion, and all the rest, is much more than the mere reduction, cessation, or negation of suffering. You talk like a Buddhist. :P
Lol ^_^

Ok, but I feel myself asking "go on?" If there is more to them than alleviating or preventing suffering, what is it?
Leontiskos wrote: Fair enough. No rush. Our pace is taxing and I don't expect it to hold up. :lol: I have some time off at the moment but soon I will be preoccupied again.
I snipped some below this that came up somewhere above to avoid too much bloat or redundancy so it continues to be easy to respond to one another. At some point we might need to bring it back in with a summarization of where we're at or something.

I'm really enjoying discussing these issues with you, thanks for that! There's no time limit for either of us, for sure. (Or so I hope. Stupid universe with stupid lethal potentialities ;P)
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Stonebear »

Astro Cat wrote: June 22nd, 2022, 12:00 am
Angelo Cannata wrote: June 21st, 2022, 8:31 pm I cannot see how you refuted it there.
Anyway, I think that, by saying that God has to obey logic, you are confusing God with your idea of God. Your idea of God might need logic, depending on your mentality, but God doesn't. I would say that even the ides of God doesn't need logic: as I ssid, it depends on your mentality.
Logic is an extremely limited and contradictory instrument, so, it is really difficult to me to understand why God should obey to such a ridiculous thing that logic is.
When you say God, what are you referring to?

"If you're referring to something specific, and not, say, a basketball or a cat, then that means the thing you're referring to is logical. It means it obeys limitation: it's limited to being what it is, and limited from being what it's not. If God is not a basketball, then God is logical and obeys logic.
"

Astro Cat, you seem to be making some wild assumptions in your above statement. There are many examples in history and philosophy where one made a logical argument from an erroneous premise; just because the argument is logical does not mean the conclusion is valid. It seems a lot for one person to say they understand the nature of God without any evidence, which means that your argument can only be subjective and therefore can only be believed by you. I am interested though in how you know what God is and what God is not?
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Leontiskos »

Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 10:37 pm Clarification, since there's no edit function.

I said:
Astro Cat wrote:Is it reasonable for a person to doubt that Snort is morally superior based on what they are able to cognize? Is it reasonable for a person to say "maybe I should trust that his ethical philosophy is superior unless I can justify that trust?"
I meant "shouldn't."
Ha, I had suspected as much.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 10:33 pm This continues the response to the other post:
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 12:48 am First I would note that it is fairly obvious that no fallacy is being committed. If you think a fallacy is being committed, then you should either name or explain the fallacy.

Second, the theist's argument is not only not fallacious, it is sound. If God has our best interests in mind and God's understanding and power far surpasses our own, then when God allows us to suffer something that we cannot make sense of, it is eminently reasonable to conclude that he has allowed it for a good reason that we do not currently understand. There is nothing here that should lead us to the non sequitur that God can never be questioned (cf. Book of Job).

For instance, consider the child who trusts their parents even during a confusing and painful time. It would be quite wrongheaded to tell them, "Once you adopt this trusting disposition, nothing will ever shake you out of it, and therefore you are committing a fallacy which must be disowned." Would this not be a silly and presumptuous thing to say to the child?
Let me begin with a story. In 2050 extraterrestrials make themselves known to humanity. Turns out they've been all around us this entire time, we just couldn't see them because of cloaking technology so advanced that it even appears to our limited instruments to defy thermodynamics. As communication commences, it immediately becomes clear that the aliens possess vastly more intelligence than humans. They understand things that humans find difficult to understand easily, and when the alien physicists talk to ours, even when they try to dumb it down for us, we just don't get it. We fear we can't get it, and we can't even build a machine of our limited design that would get it, either, since we don't know how to tell the machine how. Aliens outstrip us in the sciences, mathematics, and importantly, philosophy.

Now say that Snort the Alien lands and just starts zapping people left and right, Mars Attacks style. (We could add in a comical "do not run, we are your friends!") Do you see where I'm going with this?

After murdering 67 people and maiming 23 more, laughing maniacally the whole time, stomping on puppies and kittens, Snort the Alien stops and says "phew, it's a good thing I did that." Snort is confused when the humans put him on trial. "But I had a good reason for doing it," Snort says. He tries to explain, but it's just fundamentally beyond humans to understand what Snort's even trying to say. He's acted with good behavior sometimes, the defense points out: just last year Snort cured every human on earth of leukemia.

Now as far as I see it, because of our epistemic limitations, there are some options. Maybe Snort does have an unimaginable, but good, reason to murder and maim people. We certainly have evidence of Snort's intellectual superiority and grasp of physics we don't understand. But maybe Snort is just a chaos goblin. How do we know Snort's grasp on ethical concepts exceeds ours? We can see the fruits of Snort's physics superiority, but how could we ever know for sure if Snort's claimed moral superiority is real (or if he's just a chaos goblin)?
Well that is a fun and colorful scenario. :D I am afraid my response will be drier! Let me respond in three parts. First I will address the literal scenario you have constructed; second I will try to straightforwardly assuage a worry that you seem to have; and third I will attempt to address the scenario insofar as it is meant to be analogous to God.

As a preliminary point I should affirm the idea that trust must be grounded or "justified." When I said above that, "If God has our best interests in mind and..." I was presenting the first condition or premise for an act of trust, and of course the premises must be known if the practical syllogism is to have force. Yet it is worth noting that trust is something we can have rational grounds for, but not something that we can have demonstrative proof for. If we have demonstrative proof then trust becomes superfluous and pointless.

First, the literal scenario. At best, Snort is a vigilante. According to our laws, people cannot be executed willy-nilly by private citizens, and thus Snort has committed very serious crimes (since he is apparently attempting to act in the interest of the State without the State mandating him to do so). I think the literal scenario is pretty simple, and in a moral sense Snort is clearly violating the individual's right to life. Our morality and our law make no provision for private justifications for murder.

Second, the worry you seem to have:
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 10:33 pmFurthermore, once we give this trust, it can never be taken away. Snort can do anything he wants with impunity, no matter how much suffering he causes, and those that trust in his moral superiority can only shrug and say "must have a good reason."
But this isn't true. We give and revoke trust all the time. Trust is not a once-for-all sort of thing, nor is it unconditional or unlimited.

From your thread on presuppositional apologetics and your notion about trust being unconditional I deduce that you have been strongly influenced by encounters with Reformed Christians, who constitute about 3% of Christians worldwide, and not even all Reformed Christians will accept presuppositional apologetics or trust as an unconditional act.

So again, I would say that, "There is nothing here that should lead us to the non sequitur that God can never be questioned (cf. Book of Job)." The tension between evil and trust in providence will shift depending on the evils that one encounters and one's relationship with God.


Third, the scenario insofar as it is meant to be analogous to God. Since I am in no way Reformed, I don't think the analogy holds. Specifically, non-Reformed Christians will make a distinction between God's positive will and God's permissive will, and this depends on the idea that there are some things which God actively wills and some things that he merely allows or permits to occur.

Regarding trust, if someone is doing something which is prima facie evil, and you have no reason to believe their act is otherwise than evil--nor do they provide you with such a reason--then of course you are justified in judging that it is in fact evil. The key problem with the analogy is that we are provided with no reason which counteracts our prima facie assessment. Said differently, there are insufficient grounds for the level of trust needed to overlook such serious prima facie evils.

...Of course, the other issue is that scientific and moral authority are not the same thing, such that a technologically advanced alien race need not be morally advanced. I leave this to the side.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 10:33 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 12:48 am Lucky is mistaken. Suffering is not relative, it is just somewhat subjective, and "lethal suffering" is just as subjective as is general suffering, for some desire death.

Your OP is about improving the universe by removing physical pain. Physical pain is a bit hard to define, and it may be impossible to distinguish from psychological pain. Also, the physical order contributes to both pain and pleasure (as well as the alleviation of pain, which is arguably a form of pleasure). For example, if your 'simulation' allows knives to cut tomatoes but not humans, then the surgeon will not be able to perform his operations.

Nevertheless, none of this destroys the OP due to the fact that the OP is highly speculative. You could always just add another condition, "Knives are not allowed to cut humans for the sake of harming them," or again, "Knives are not allowed to cut humans for the sake of unjustified harm," etc. Even if the concept of suffering is a bit nebulous, all that is required for your OP is to identify some subset of pointless or gratuitous suffering, such as Ivan does in his conversation with Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov.
As you correctly guessed, with the knife objection I would have indeed just added more conditions and then asked in general "do you agree we could probably always find another condition that could be added; and God would omnisciently be able to do this all at once?"
Sure, but the question isn't whether it is possible, but whether it is desirable, and that question requires us to count the cost of the various conditions. I will leave this question for my response to your other post.
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Leontiskos »

Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm I would say three things. First, this deviates from the question of agency, for presumably a profound and moving experience is not a particularly volitional act. Perhaps I should have specified, "Banality in the realm of agency." Second, the preclusion of physical harm really does limit agency in substantial ways, even if some examples of non-banal agency could still be found. Third, moving experiences--particularly those elicited by narrative art such as books, films, and classical paintings--often presuppose the very sort of physical suffering that you object to. For example, imagine how many great works of art would be rendered meaningless if death ("lethal suffering") did not exist. Death, finitude, precarity, and vulnerability are just a few examples of things that are intimately tied up with physical suffering.

Weeping is an interesting example, because although there does exist joyful weeping, one more commonly encounters a sorrowful weeping that is cathartic, consoling, and desirable, and this can be elicited by simple, non-discursive realities such as natural beauty or wordless music. It's not clear to me that this sort of weeping, which Christians call the "gift of tears," would exist in a world without suffering.
I'll number the three things for ease of reference:
1) I could simply provide an example where we do seek a non-banal experience as a volitional act: offering an affirmation to a friend, choosing to go to a museum exhibit, etc.
Are you affirming the friend for doing some banal or non-banal? Are you interested in banal or non-banal museum artifacts? I think it will be hard to get away from the idea.

I think this then reverts to #3, where the idea is that limiting the human ability to cause suffering and to suffer will also limit human agency.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm2) Does the quantity of agency matter? Recall when I argued that I couldn't teleport to Mars, or walk on the ceiling. What if for every physical action we remove that causes suffering, we add one that's benign (or causes comfort and pleasantness!). Take away stabbing, give ceiling-walking?

I don't expect you to take that bargain because I expect it probably misses the point. It's probably not really about the number of possible choices. But it's hard to see how not from the way you phrased your second point.
Yes, I think that does miss the point because I don't think it is really about quantity (although quantity does form some part of the issue). The limitation is qualitative, and that is why I used banality as the criterion. It is about being able to do things which are substantial, impactful, memorable, life-changing, world-changing, etc. Perhaps I should suggest the principle that <if it is impossible to do bad things, then it will be impossible to do good things>, or more softly, <if it is impossible to do bad things, then the number of good things that can be done are severely limited>.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm3) I've considered this before, and I think that imaginary adversity would still excite and entertain us. I have never been pulled apart by chains, but I still shiver when Pinhead does this to someone. I have never slain an orc, but I still root for the good guys when Gimli and Legolas compete for their orc-neck count. Come to think of it, aside from some hair pulling and awkward kicking on playgrounds way too early to remember, I've actually never been in a violent encounter involving punches, but I still feel elation when Captain America punches gleeful Nazis.

I get that we could ask "could you imagine these things if it didn't exist in the first place to emulate," which would be a good question I guess.
Oh, it seems to me that this is a decisive objection. If there is no death then orcs cannot be slain, etc.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pmI'm trying to think of a fantastical example that isn't just an analogy to something that exists and the best I can come up with is maybe in various movies with psychokinesis where someone does their thing at someone else and they grab their head and scream in response. Now I have no idea what's going on there in that trope: is it giving them a headache? Are they experiencing a Lovecraftian moment of "too much awareness" sort of horror? I don't know, but I get that what's happening isn't good, it's adversity.
Isn't the person wielding psychokinesis simply causing physical pain? And isn't physical pain what you have precluded?
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pmI feel like even in a universe where physical suffering didn't exist someone could be like "woah, you know how we have two arms? What if somehow something happened to one of them and you only have one now?" "What if something could make you not alive before you willed yourself not to be? Woah!" I feel like there would still be entertainment and adversity in media.
Hmm, but this is a good middle case that helps illustrate why your distinction between physical and emotional suffering is questionable. When someone loses a limb we can say at least three things, all of which are true: 1) He suffered physical pain when he lost his limb, 2) He suffered the loss of his limb, and 3) He is experiencing emotional suffering from the loss of his limb. Looking at (2), I would say that to be deprived of a limb is to suffer physically. It is not to suffer physical pain, but it is to suffer a physical handicap.

Note again that if all forms of suffering were removed then most of the exceptions you brought forth would also disappear, and I take it that this is an indication that suffering is itself correlated to agency (and this includes physical suffering).
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm The conclusion you did not draw, but which hides in the shadows, is that if it is good to have firemen then, a fortiori, it is good to have <Superman> (and an evil worthy of him). But note that we could also push in the opposite direction and say that if it is not good to have Superman and his corresponding antagonist, then why is it good to have firemen? I'm not a fan of this sort of linear limit-pushing, for I think the truth will lie at a point of moderation and balance that is not explicable in terms of a merely one-dimensional consideration.
Actually, maybe it wasn't as obvious as I intended, but that was part of what I was getting at (the a fortiori side of the argument). I did intend to say "if fire existing is good because firefighters get to exist, then some great evil would be even better because some even more good thing could fight it. If we don't like the latter part of that, then why do we like the first?"
Okay, did you mean to make that argument? You threw me off when you said, "I could make an argument..." I took that to mean that you could make an argument, but for whatever reason chose not to make it, and were only interested in the bit about God being good enough. ^_^
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 5:29 pm3) I could continue making an argument against the good-making (or, apparently soul-making; can you tell I'm not formally trained?) theodicy by either insisting it is absurd to hold that crime is worth it so that we can have police; or make a weaker argument that perhaps some audience of my argument would agree it's absurd and that this is a success?
A microcosm of your question exists concretely in the parent's choice of how to parent their child. As Jonathan Haidt has shown, in recent decades parents have decided to try to create a kind of "toy world" for their children, and the results have been quite bad. Of course we might say that the results are only bad because the real world is not a toy world, but the larger question still remains valid: As a parent, would you want your child to live in a toy world or in a non-toy world? I don't think the first answer is in any way obvious or uncontroversial. Indeed, if avoidance of physical pain is not an ultimate value then it's removal cannot be altogether uncontroversial, for it is in no way clear that realities of greater value do not supervene on physical pain.
You guessed correctly that I'd just object that a false toy world for children that have to go into a non-toy world just obviously wouldn't work.

The way I would answer your question is by imagining two worlds: ours, and a toy world. In my head the toy world seems a lot better, but I understand that part of the problem is that humans imagine things sometimes and don't foresee hidden problems. That is the point of discussion, I guess. So far we've encountered "life would be banal," which I disagree with.
Would you at least agree that we would have less agency in the toy world?
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pmWhen I first used to think about these things it was in the context of specifically Christian beliefs (my childhood religion). I was always confused by some interpretations of the Adam and Eve story; it always felt like a kind of entrapment to me. My first analogies would go something like "well who's to blame if I put a loaded revolver in a baby's crib? Wouldn't I obviously share in that blame if something bad happens for having put the revolver there in the first place?" (Obviously in reference to the Fall and the apple. Keep in mind, I understand these were not very nuanced beginnings, dealing with explanations of the Fall that were themselves not very nuanced. I was a child. But you see where I was going.)

At some point my analogy had evolved to there existing this other world, a world without pain and suffering where people just went about their day enjoying themselves or at worst being bored during the in-betweens when they weren't doing something interesting. (I think this was when I first encountered the soul-making theodicy and other theodicies like it). So I imagined there was this other world of happy people just doing nice things,...
...Genesis 3:22 strikes me as interesting in relation to this...
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm...So I imagined there was this other world of happy people just doing nice things, when suddenly, a portal to a universe like ours opens. A person walks through the portal to their dimension and starts handing out weapons (I imagined that weapons in their world couldn't harm people, but these weapons suddenly could... magical thinking, like they brought "our world's" physics with them).

Then I'd ask myself "did this person do that world a favor? After all, now they can have police! Now they can have doctors!"

My intuition screams no, it loudly says he did not do them a favor at all by bringing them death and violence where once there was none. You say that your intuition says otherwise?
I would agree that bringing death, violence, and weapons to a peaceful culture is not a good thing to do. But it is crucial to Christian thinking to maintain the truth that the Fall was our doing, not God's.

Is a fair example the situation in Avatar when the humans arrive with their guns and ships and greed? If we want to think about this clearly, then I believe we must admit that the arrival of the humans changed the Na'vi's world, making it more dangerous and complex, and increasing their agency. There are pros and cons to such a situation, and while the pros outweigh the cons, no one--except those dastardly Reformed!--believe that death arrived by election.

The other thing to note, which is tangential, is that however much one dislikes mythical-etiological stories like Genesis 3, they reflect an important and undeniable fact about human existence. We are in an existential lurch. We are afflicted with various evils, including selfishness and death. I would hope that the atheist will not lose themselves in apologetics to the extent that they forget about these deeper realities, for we must face them whether we are religious or not. Of course, you don't strike me as the sort of person who is apt to forget about them, but I think it is important to maintain perspective.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm That's true enough. I didn't mean to imply that courage only exists in the context of smallpox or physical pain. At the same time, your third example is helpful in showing how the threat of physical pain underlies many of the evils that are not at first sight a matter of physical pain. Heck, even the idea of a "hurtful idea" presupposes physical pain in all sorts of ways, the most obvious being suicide.
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm Yes, but in the same vein: if there is no suffering then why would we need to worry about "hurtful ideas"?
I don't know, maybe not being very good at crocheting and being made fun of would hurt. There's all kinds of ways people could be hurtful to one another that God wouldn't be culpable for. The point is simply that God is culpable for anything physical.
No, I don't see why there is anything special about physical suffering. Your arguments would apply just as well to non-physical suffering. Why think God is more culpable for one than the other?
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm An argument more common in academic literature is the one which situates the problem of evil in the context of natural evils: evils which cause human suffering but are in no way caused by free agents, i.e. hurricanes and tsunamis. This is presumably because the division between natural evil and moral evil is more plausible; where both effect human (or animal) suffering but their causes are distinct. Your distinction between human suffering caused by physical means and human suffering caused by non-physical means is a great deal more difficult to maintain.

But if we did try to maintain your distinction, then would you say that there is some reason to retain the suffering caused by non-physical means after the "physical suffering" has been removed?
If free agency is one of the premises, I don't think even an omni-being can prevent all suffering while maintaining that premise. Actually, your soul-making is built into the concept: people would still have to learn that they don't have to care what someone else thinks if they're being mean. They have to develop into a more mature person not to be hurt by others' words. The difference between that world and this one is there are no innocent victims. In this world you can be hurt and it's entirely out of your control; in the toy world, it is a matter of choice whether you're going to be hurt.
Mmm, I think your metaphysics took a dive there. If words can hurt then suffering has not been excluded. Further, if words have an inherent or prima facie ability to hurt, then there will surely be innocent victims, for (as you say) the ability to steel oneself against words must be learned. Thus those who are hurt by words before they've had a chance to learn how to steel themselves will be innocent victims. Further, you are overlooking the parity between hurtful words and helpful words. Something like my principle above applies here as well (<if it is impossible to do bad things, then it will be impossible to do good things>). If we steel ourselves against hurtful words then we will inevitably also steel ourselves against (at least some) helpful words, and if we steel ourselves against hurtful people then we will inevitably also steel ourselves against (at least some) helpful people. If we pine for too many callouses then eventually we will become callous. The quest for invincibility is a fool's errand (Brené Brown is a good popular voice on this topic).
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pmIn short, God is culpable for there existing innocent victims under the premises of the argument.
Without innocent victims there are no guilty offenders, and so long as we can influence one another for good or for ill, there will be both. It is the evildoer's fault that evil exists, not God's.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pmOh, but things like courage and strength are not cures for suffering, nor do they produce its alleviation or prevention. What is accomplished through things like courage, temperance, justice, prudence, compassion, and all the rest, is much more than the mere reduction, cessation, or negation of suffering. You talk like a Buddhist. :P
Lol ^_^

Ok, but I feel myself asking "go on?" If there is more to them than alleviating or preventing suffering, what is it?
Well the first thing to point to would be human flourishing. In the arts, in the sciences, in the moral sphere, etc. Actualizing the full range and depth of human potential. Avoiding suffering is small potatoes. I don't know that you would like Feser in general, but I would recommend checking out <this post>.

Beyond that: transcending oneself, learning to love, learning to care, learning to appreciate existence and creation, and ultimately theosis and union with God. ...Those are some other things. :D
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pm
Leontiskos wrote: June 24th, 2022, 9:21 pm Fair enough. No rush. Our pace is taxing and I don't expect it to hold up. :lol: I have some time off at the moment but soon I will be preoccupied again.
I snipped some below this that came up somewhere above to avoid too much bloat or redundancy so it continues to be easy to respond to one another. At some point we might need to bring it back in with a summarization of where we're at or something.
I appreciate that and I agree. I can be bad at doing that.
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pmI'm really enjoying discussing these issues with you, thanks for that! There's no time limit for either of us, for sure. (Or so I hope. Stupid universe with stupid lethal potentialities ;P)
You're welcome. I am enjoying the discussions as well. :)

I am guessing the Dobbs decision slowed you down, and I am thankful for that because otherwise I doubt I would have been able to keep up - haha. I am also thankful for the Dobbs decision, being pro-life myself. But I am going to hold off discussing that with you, for I think the water needs to cool and emotions need to come down before the topic can be discussed fruitfully; I would want to build a stronger rapport before trying to bridge such a wide political and moral chasm; and I am certain that even the current conversations will be hard for me to keep up with!

Peace
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Astro Cat »

Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 9:39 pm
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 11:53 pmI'm really enjoying discussing these issues with you, thanks for that! There's no time limit for either of us, for sure. (Or so I hope. Stupid universe with stupid lethal potentialities ;P)
You're welcome. I am enjoying the discussions as well. :)

I am guessing the Dobbs decision slowed you down, and I am thankful for that because otherwise I doubt I would have been able to keep up - haha. I am also thankful for the Dobbs decision, being pro-life myself. But I am going to hold off discussing that with you, for I think the water needs to cool and emotions need to come down before the topic can be discussed fruitfully; I would want to build a stronger rapport before trying to bridge such a wide political and moral chasm; and I am certain that even the current conversations will be hard for me to keep up with!

Peace
Typing on a tiny screen.

It has certainly been hard as I’m sure you’re aware of the autonomy aspect of the debate, so you must know how it feels despite believing the unborn right to life nuances override them. I don’t begrudge you or pro-lifers for trying to support something believed to be right; I disagree with a pro-lifer completely differently than I would disagree with someone that was, say, defending explicit misogny or racism or anything like that. In my view, I find it a tragic case of doing what I think is the wrong thing for the right reasons, so it doesn’t lower my opinion of a pro-lifer like my opinion would be lowered for a racist. (And I am not comparing pro-life to racism, I’m hoping to show how they’re so different in explaining why it wouldn’t harm my rapport and friendship with someone).

That being said, yes, it’s still pretty raw emotionally for me, so that’s for another time. Just didn’t want you to fear rapport-harming down the line to discuss things.

I will try to look at our threads this week with responses and then try to give a “where we’re at, what’s still a loose end” sort of summary for ease. Don’t feel like you ever have to respond too quickly, I just have a lot of free time when I’m working my night job (which was the point: for studying and research :P)

If things ever get chaotic with many other posts appearing in between (such as if responses might take longer, which is fine), I believe I saw a one on one section where we can put things for easier organization with a more relaxed response pace ^_^
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Leontiskos »

One significant typo in that last post, Astro Cat:
Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 9:39 pmThere are pros and cons to such a situation, and while the pros outweigh the cons, no one--except those dastardly Reformed!--believe that death arrived by election.
It should have read, "...and while the cons outweigh the pros..."
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

Post by Astro Cat »

Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 1:02 pm Well that is a fun and colorful scenario. :D I am afraid my response will be drier! Let me respond in three parts. First I will address the literal scenario you have constructed; second I will try to straightforwardly assuage a worry that you seem to have; and third I will attempt to address the scenario insofar as it is meant to be analogous to God.

As a preliminary point I should affirm the idea that trust must be grounded or "justified." When I said above that, "If God has our best interests in mind and..." I was presenting the first condition or premise for an act of trust, and of course the premises must be known if the practical syllogism is to have force. Yet it is worth noting that trust is something we can have rational grounds for, but not something that we can have demonstrative proof for. If we have demonstrative proof then trust becomes superfluous and pointless.

First, the literal scenario. At best, Snort is a vigilante. According to our laws, people cannot be executed willy-nilly by private citizens, and thus Snort has committed very serious crimes (since he is apparently attempting to act in the interest of the State without the State mandating him to do so). I think the literal scenario is pretty simple, and in a moral sense Snort is clearly violating the individual's right to life. Our morality and our law make no provision for private justifications for murder.
Mustn't we distinguish between what is moral and what is lawful? I think we'd agree that it would be unlawful to stop Nazis with force in the 1930's/40's (sorry to go Godwin here), but wouldn't we both find it moral to do so? And that's what we're talking about, morality -- not lawfulness. So isn't it still possible that Snort is behaving in a morally superior way? Perhaps our laws are brutish and primitive if Snort is so ethically advanced as to be inscrutable.
Leontiskos wrote:Second, the worry you seem to have:
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 10:33 pmFurthermore, once we give this trust, it can never be taken away. Snort can do anything he wants with impunity, no matter how much suffering he causes, and those that trust in his moral superiority can only shrug and say "must have a good reason."
But this isn't true. We give and revoke trust all the time. Trust is not a once-for-all sort of thing, nor is it unconditional or unlimited.

From your thread on presuppositional apologetics and your notion about trust being unconditional I deduce that you have been strongly influenced by encounters with Reformed Christians, who constitute about 3% of Christians worldwide, and not even all Reformed Christians will accept presuppositional apologetics or trust as an unconditional act.

So again, I would say that, "There is nothing here that should lead us to the non sequitur that God can never be questioned (cf. Book of Job)." The tension between evil and trust in providence will shift depending on the evils that one encounters and one's relationship with God.
Ok, then I must admit I am confused if someone looks around them and partially or fully cognizes the amount of suffering in the world by disease, privation, birth defects, and so on; particularly in cases where children never grow out of it, and says "ah, I still have trust this is for a good reason." I don't know how to formally put this. I'm just incredulous at it. It seems like an undefeatable trust if this isn't enough to break it without more to go off of.
Leontiskos wrote:Third, the scenario insofar as it is meant to be analogous to God. Since I am in no way Reformed, I don't think the analogy holds. Specifically, non-Reformed Christians will make a distinction between God's positive will and God's permissive will, and this depends on the idea that there are some things which God actively wills and some things that he merely allows or permits to occur.

Regarding trust, if someone is doing something which is prima facie evil, and you have no reason to believe their act is otherwise than evil--nor do they provide you with such a reason--then of course you are justified in judging that it is in fact evil. The key problem with the analogy is that we are provided with no reason which counteracts our prima facie assessment. Said differently, there are insufficient grounds for the level of trust needed to overlook such serious prima facie evils.

...Of course, the other issue is that scientific and moral authority are not the same thing, such that a technologically advanced alien race need not be morally advanced. I leave this to the side.
Regarding positive vs. permissive will, I don't think there is a difference when talking about building the environment that free agents are going to live in. If I am an AI programmer and I can program truly sentient and sapient AI, yet I give them a Hellish environment in which to be free agents, I am culpable for that suffering if I knew how to do it differently, was able to do it differently, yet chose not to do it differently. If a carpenter builds a faulty staircase that they know might collapse, knew how to make it more sturdy, had the materials to make it more sturdy, but chose not to, the carpenter is to blame. Even if the stairs only collapsed because a child decided to hop up and down on them (so we might say "ah it was because of the child's choices, not the carpenter's), the carpenter is still culpable.

Since God is in charge of physics -- not humans, not anybody else -- God is culpable for what those physics allow; it's exactly the same thing as not making sure a set of stairs can bear the weight of a jumping child. God is more culpable than the carpenter, in fact, for having the luxury of perfectly knowing the creation's dangers, and infinitely having the power to correct those dangers (yet choosing not to).

So as the AI engineer, if I put my AI's in an environment where they're able to shoot guns at one another and kill one another, I'm culpable for that: I built their physics. Even though it was their choice to pull the trigger. Now we get into the nuances of psychological vs. physical suffering somewhere else (some other response), so we'll get to that there, but I can say that I'm culpable for what the physics of the world does to their bodies, even if it's the physics of their choices. I'm not culpable for them saying mean things to each other, or for two lovers breaking up, or for one of them telling a lie to another one. Do you think this difference in my culpability is meaningful?
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

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Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 1:02 pm ...Of course, the other issue is that scientific and moral authority are not the same thing, such that a technologically advanced alien race need not be morally advanced. I leave this to the side.
I missed commenting this: I don't think this can be left to the side, not for all theists. Some theists present evidence that God is so vast and so powerful that He must be good for similar reasons. I know you haven't espoused this, but just pointing out that this might be why I included similar things in the analogy.

In the analogy we see evidence that allows us to conclude that the alien probably is superior to us in some ways. I could have constructed an analogy whereby a regular person claims to have a good reason for killing 57 people but just babbles nonsense on the stand: I think we would have a hard time drawing that analogy to God even though it's technically possible that this person is some kind of savant with some kind of superhuman ethical superiority we just can't fundamentally understand.

So, this is why I included the bit about the aliens having some forms of demonstrable superiority: that's what it seems like to me with how we can evaluate God.

God can clearly demonstrate His power to us. He could do whatever if He were inclined to do so. I could ask for my name to be written in the stars and poof. I would have no question that God is superior to me in some way.

But if I asked God to demonstrate moral superiority, how could He do that if I don't understand? If God says "behold, I gave children leukemia" with a smile, and I'm like "wait, excuse me, what?!", then... well, you see? This is why I built the story of Snort that way. God can demonstrate His power, but how can we judge God's character except by what we know? Where does this trust in God's good character come from in the first place if God is culpable for more deaths and more suffering than all humans combined?
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

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Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:49 am If God says "behold, I gave children leukemia" with a smile, and I'm like "wait, excuse me, what?!",
And remember, I argue that when it comes to creators, there is little difference between being active and passively permitting. When you are omniscient and omnipotent, making it so that kids are able to get leukemia (when it's possible to build a world where they don't) is little different than directly pointing a finger at them to give it to them.
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

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Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 9:39 pm Are you affirming the friend for doing some banal or non-banal? Are you interested in banal or non-banal museum artifacts? I think it will be hard to get away from the idea.

I think this then reverts to #3, where the idea is that limiting the human ability to cause suffering and to suffer will also limit human agency.
I think there would still be non-banal things to affirm a friend over ("You're going to do great at your speech!"), and as I will argue below I think Toy Worlds can still have non-banal themes in art. A world doesn't have to allow murder and death for someone to dream up murder and death from which to enjoy drama from; I see no reason why a Toy World couldn't have Star Wars.
Leontiskos wrote:Yes, I think that does miss the point because I don't think it is really about quantity (although quantity does form some part of the issue). The limitation is qualitative, and that is why I used banality as the criterion. It is about being able to do things which are substantial, impactful, memorable, life-changing, world-changing, etc. Perhaps I should suggest the principle that <if it is impossible to do bad things, then it will be impossible to do good things>, or more softly, <if it is impossible to do bad things, then the number of good things that can be done are severely limited>.
I think it's obviously false that if it's impossible to do bad things that it would be impossible to do good things. I am willing to grant that "the number of good things that can be done are severely limited," though I might contest the "severely" qualifier. Again, I think this still all goes back to whether violent crime is worth it to have armed police officers, and I still frankly just don't think it is. I know you've argued otherwise (and perhaps I need to go find it again), but over and over again, it just feels like inventing smallpox just to say "yay, now we can invent the cure and we'll have heroes, this is so worth it!" I don't think there's inherent value in a smallpox cure if there's no smallpox to worry about. I don't think there's inherent value in an All-American Firefighter Hero™ if there are no fires to fight. Goodness that seems to only be defined by its response to badness isn't inherently good in my estimation, it's only good in a reactionary sense.
Leontiskos wrote:Oh, it seems to me that this is a decisive objection. If there is no death then orcs cannot be slain, etc.
I think this argument got confused somewhere. I was arguing that people wouldn't suffer banality because they could still be entertained by fiction. Murder would be entirely fictional, but it would still be fascinating.

For instance, like many children, as a little girl I'd pick up a stick or whatever and you'd better believe that in that moment of time, I was holding a sword. I imagined adventures fighting goblins (I read The Hobbit when very young) and all sorts of things. I didn't know what death was, but I could imagine this other world where I was on a dangerous adventure with imagined stakes and so on and so forth.

Now do you think for even a moment I wanted to really be in danger, to really fear Gollum was going to pop out of the darkness and strangle me with slimy hands? Of course not. So I think people in a Toy World could draw emotions and experiences from watching and reading fictional stories and still never want the worlds they see and imagine to be the real world.
Leontiskos wrote:Hmm, but this is a good middle case that helps illustrate why your distinction between physical and emotional suffering is questionable. When someone loses a limb we can say at least three things, all of which are true: 1) He suffered physical pain when he lost his limb, 2) He suffered the loss of his limb, and 3) He is experiencing emotional suffering from the loss of his limb. Looking at (2), I would say that to be deprived of a limb is to suffer physically. It is not to suffer physical pain, but it is to suffer a physical handicap.

Note again that if all forms of suffering were removed then most of the exceptions you brought forth would also disappear, and I take it that this is an indication that suffering is itself correlated to agency (and this includes physical suffering).
Here I was still talking about how Toy World people could still imagine and enjoy fiction. There would still be no amputations in the real world. But they could watch literally the same fiction we enjoy now, draw the same lessons from them (where there is one to be found), etc. I was combatting the notion that life would be banal. I reject the notion that life has to be dangerous to be non-banal. Meaningful things can be drawn from stories and imagination.
Leontiskos wrote:Okay, did you mean to make that argument? You threw me off when you said, "I could make an argument..." I took that to mean that you could make an argument, but for whatever reason chose not to make it, and were only interested in the bit about God being good enough. ^_^
I don't know, like I said I fire from the hip sometimes. I was thinking the argument because I do reject that firefighters are "worth it" to have fires, and I do think that some reasoning supporting that fires are worth it to have firefighters leads to absurdities like "well then super-bad thing is worth it to have super-good thing". I probably care more about that argument than asking "Is God good enough for not making Superman?" I think it was a tongue in cheek way of making the other argument, honestly.
Leontiskos wrote: Would you at least agree that we would have less agency in the toy world?
Yes, but I both don't think that's a problem (we could have "more" agency if God let us walk on the ceiling, yet we don't seem to mind too much) and think that if it is a problem then my playful proposition about adding a neutral or good agency for every bad agency taken away would become a serious proposition.
Leontiskos wrote: ...Genesis 3:22 strikes me as interesting in relation to this...
I'm familiar with the passage, but I'm unsure what you find interesting about it in relation to this? (Though this seems to be deviating from the topic, I'll post what I said just below so neither of us has to go finding it again):
Astro Cat wrote:When I first used to think about these things it was in the context of specifically Christian beliefs (my childhood religion). I was always confused by some interpretations of the Adam and Eve story; it always felt like a kind of entrapment to me. My first analogies would go something like "well who's to blame if I put a loaded revolver in a baby's crib? Wouldn't I obviously share in that blame if something bad happens for having put the revolver there in the first place?" (Obviously in reference to the Fall and the apple. Keep in mind, I understand these were not very nuanced beginnings, dealing with explanations of the Fall that were themselves not very nuanced. I was a child. But you see where I was going.)

At some point my analogy had evolved to there existing this other world, a world without pain and suffering where people just went about their day enjoying themselves or at worst being bored during the in-betweens when they weren't doing something interesting. (I think this was when I first encountered the soul-making theodicy and other theodicies like it). So I imagined there was this other world of happy people just doing nice things,...
Leontiskos wrote:I would agree that bringing death, violence, and weapons to a peaceful culture is not a good thing to do. But it is crucial to Christian thinking to maintain the truth that the Fall was our doing, not God's.
Humans didn't create the physics of the world, God did (on theism anyway). So that death, violence, and weapons are physically possible is something God is culpable for.
Leontiskos wrote:Is a fair example the situation in Avatar when the humans arrive with their guns and ships and greed? If we want to think about this clearly, then I believe we must admit that the arrival of the humans changed the Na'vi's world, making it more dangerous and complex, and increasing their agency. There are pros and cons to such a situation, and while the cons outweigh the pros, no one--except those dastardly Reformed!--believe that death arrived by election.
(Quote corrected based on a later correction by Leontiskos, emphasis added where corrected)

In Avatar, the Na'vi were capable of hurting each other before the humans arrived. Humans aren't culpable for the nature of physical reality on the planet. Good on the Na'vi if they all mutually decided not to hurt each other before the arrival of the humans, but humans could only be blamed so much for a Na'vi deciding to hurt another Na'vi (say resources plummet, and a Na'vi attacks another Na'vi for resources. Sure, it's the humans' fault that resources plummeted, but not that a Na'vi decided to attack another Na'vi). So this analogy is incomplete.

It would only cover the sort of thing I'm arguing about if the humans were somehow in charge of the Na'vi's physics. Say the Na'vi are instead an AI civilization living in a simulation where weapons can't hurt other Na'vi. Humans show up and look at the computer and go, "huh, let's turn off the safety protocols. Congrats! Now you can get diseases, become prey for predators, get born with birth defects, so on and so on. But don't worry, you're going to love this part: now you can have doctors! Now you can have police!" Did the humans really do the Na'vi a solid? I really don't think so.

In the situation you gave, people that don't control the physics of the environment simply interact. In the second example I gave, we have a more apt analogy because suffering by physics is literally not possible until someone shows up and says "oh here you go, here's physical suffering. But do enjoy your heroes you can have now." How is that better?
Leontiskos wrote:The other thing to note, which is tangential, is that however much one dislikes mythical-etiological stories like Genesis 3, they reflect an important and undeniable fact about human existence. We are in an existential lurch. We are afflicted with various evils, including selfishness and death. I would hope that the atheist will not lose themselves in apologetics to the extent that they forget about these deeper realities, for we must face them whether we are religious or not. Of course, you don't strike me as the sort of person who is apt to forget about them, but I think it is important to maintain perspective.
I am cursed with constant empathy. I will not readily forget the selfishness and death surrounding us all.
Leontiskos wrote:No, I don't see why there is anything special about physical suffering. Your arguments would apply just as well to non-physical suffering. Why think God is more culpable for one than the other?
Because given that God wants us to have agency, God can't stop something like unrequited love or a broken friendship (for instance) without simply preventing agency itself. Yet if God stops one of us from stabbing someone else (by way of creating physics a certain way), then agency is still preserved. God is culpable for stubbed toes and stab wounds but not for hurt feelings since God is in charge of physics. That's why there's a difference.
Leontiskos wrote: Mmm, I think your metaphysics took a dive there. If words can hurt then suffering has not been excluded. Further, if words have an inherent or prima facie ability to hurt, then there will surely be innocent victims, for (as you say) the ability to steel oneself against words must be learned. Thus those who are hurt by words before they've had a chance to learn how to steel themselves will be innocent victims. Further, you are overlooking the parity between hurtful words and helpful words. Something like my principle above applies here as well (<if it is impossible to do bad things, then it will be impossible to do good things>). If we steel ourselves against hurtful words then we will inevitably also steel ourselves against (at least some) helpful words, and if we steel ourselves against hurtful people then we will inevitably also steel ourselves against (at least some) helpful people. If we pine for too many callouses then eventually we will become callous. The quest for invincibility is a fool's errand (Brené Brown is a good popular voice on this topic).
Well, I spoke sloppily somewhat. I never meant to say God would prevent all suffering. This is why I've tried to use the qualifier "physical" this whole time. God is in charge of the physics, any suffering that doesn't come directly from physics, God may not be culpable for. All I'm concerned with doing in my original argument is demonstrating that God is culpable for the physical suffering if there is a premise that we want free agency.

So let me clarify that when I say "innocent victims" I guess I mean victims that can do nothing at all about their situation. Maybe I need another term. Someone that is hearing mean language can leave the area, for instance. Someone dying of cancer or in a hungry tiger's spotlight may have no feasible recourse at all.
Leontiskos wrote:Well the first thing to point to would be human flourishing. In the arts, in the sciences, in the moral sphere, etc. Actualizing the full range and depth of human potential. Avoiding suffering is small potatoes. I don't know that you would like Feser in general, but I would recommend checking out <this post>.

Beyond that: transcending oneself, learning to love, learning to care, learning to appreciate existence and creation, and ultimately theosis and union with God. ...Those are some other things. :D
But this was asked in the context of why fires are so good to have so that we can have firefighters. How do firefighters cause human flourishing when there could just be no fires in the first place? You mention arts, sciences, etc., but I have already argued that I think Toy World inhabitants could still fictionally draw non-banal things from stories about fires and firefighters.

Why good thing about firefighters is there that couldn't possibly exist without fires whatsoever? What makes fires worth it?
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Re: Toy Worlds and the Problem of Suffering

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Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:37 am
Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 1:02 pm Well that is a fun and colorful scenario. :D I am afraid my response will be drier! Let me respond in three parts. First I will address the literal scenario you have constructed; second I will try to straightforwardly assuage a worry that you seem to have; and third I will attempt to address the scenario insofar as it is meant to be analogous to God.

As a preliminary point I should affirm the idea that trust must be grounded or "justified." When I said above that, "If God has our best interests in mind and..." I was presenting the first condition or premise for an act of trust, and of course the premises must be known if the practical syllogism is to have force. Yet it is worth noting that trust is something we can have rational grounds for, but not something that we can have demonstrative proof for. If we have demonstrative proof then trust becomes superfluous and pointless.

First, the literal scenario. At best, Snort is a vigilante. According to our laws, people cannot be executed willy-nilly by private citizens, and thus Snort has committed very serious crimes (since he is apparently attempting to act in the interest of the State without the State mandating him to do so). I think the literal scenario is pretty simple, and in a moral sense Snort is clearly violating the individual's right to life. Our morality and our law make no provision for private justifications for murder.
Mustn't we distinguish between what is moral and what is lawful? I think we'd agree that it would be unlawful to stop Nazis with force in the 1930's/40's (sorry to go Godwin here), but wouldn't we both find it moral to do so? And that's what we're talking about, morality -- not lawfulness. So isn't it still possible that Snort is behaving in a morally superior way? Perhaps our laws are brutish and primitive if Snort is so ethically advanced as to be inscrutable.
It is true that law and morality diverge, but you said, "...the humans put him on trial," and law is the societal instrument with which we address problematic behavior. So I think that ambiguity between law and morality was already present in the story.

Nevertheless, I tried to appeal to principles of law that are also present in morality. In my moral judgment, free beings cannot be executed without at least knowing the crime or injustice they have been accused of. Thus the prohibition against vigilantism is moral as well as legal. The only morally justifiable species of killing is self defense (or arguably war, which is complicated). So yeah, if Snort is executing people without the moral equivalent of due process, then he is acting immorally. Truly, Snort seems to be treating people as a means to an end in an ethically unacceptable way.

The analogy I would give is rape. "Well Snort raped some women, but he said he had justifying reasons." But since there is no justification for rape Snort is out of luck. Granted, I am sure some consequentialists hold that there are legitimate justifications for rape or vigilante execution, but I am not a consequentialist (and Anglo law also tends to reject that degree of consequentialism).
Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:37 am
Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 1:02 pmSecond, the worry you seem to have:
Astro Cat wrote: June 24th, 2022, 10:33 pmFurthermore, once we give this trust, it can never be taken away. Snort can do anything he wants with impunity, no matter how much suffering he causes, and those that trust in his moral superiority can only shrug and say "must have a good reason."
But this isn't true. We give and revoke trust all the time. Trust is not a once-for-all sort of thing, nor is it unconditional or unlimited.

From your thread on presuppositional apologetics and your notion about trust being unconditional I deduce that you have been strongly influenced by encounters with Reformed Christians, who constitute about 3% of Christians worldwide, and not even all Reformed Christians will accept presuppositional apologetics or trust as an unconditional act.

So again, I would say that, "There is nothing here that should lead us to the non sequitur that God can never be questioned (cf. Book of Job)." The tension between evil and trust in providence will shift depending on the evils that one encounters and one's relationship with God.
Ok, then I must admit I am confused if someone looks around them and partially or fully cognizes the amount of suffering in the world by disease, privation, birth defects, and so on; particularly in cases where children never grow out of it, and says "ah, I still have trust this is for a good reason." I don't know how to formally put this. I'm just incredulous at it. It seems like an undefeatable trust if this isn't enough to break it without more to go off of.
It may be that many theists have "more to go off of than you do," but I think a second consideration will probably be more fruitful.

We seem to be revolving around this question of culpability for suffering, where you are apt to lay suffering at the feet of God because of his omnipotence, omnibenevolence, and omniscience. ...I am probably moving the conversation too fast, but in general the classical theist and the modern secular will view omnibenevolence in rather different ways, with the modern secular holding to a much simpler and less complex idea of omnibenevolence and by extension, goodness itself. (Note that this was not true for older atheists like Nietzsche, and that article I linked from Edward Feser highlights some of this.)

"Omnibenevolence" is a neologism that doesn't track classical theology, for it incorrectly implies a univocity of meaning between the goodness that is God and the goodness that we know day to day. In a long historical sense the Thomists defeated the Scotists and analogy won out over univocity in the God-human relation. In layman's terms the idea is that when we say "God is good" we mean something analogous but not identical to what we mean when we say, "Brian is good." A simple example of this would be 1 John 3:2, where the foretaste hints at what is to come but does not reveal it, and what is to come will substantially if not infinitely transcend what we now know.

...Soooo, the theist isn't nearly as surprised at confusion and mystery and aporia as the secular is, for the theist assumes an enormously greater distance between himself and his conception of God than the secular does between himself and his conception of "God" (and unlike the secular the theist believes he falls far short of the standard and knowledge of goodness). Further, since the theist believes that creation reflects its Creator, he will expect creation to contain much of the mystery and unfathomability that is present in God. For my part, the toy universe looks flat. Oddly enough, I am not sure I would want to live in a world that I could so easily understand and that presented so few difficulties to my human mind. Either my mind would be massively intelligent or that world would be massively simplistic, and since I know that my mind is not--absolutely speaking--massively intelligent, I would prefer a world that I could not altogether comprehend. I would rather live in a big world that is largely incomprehensible than a small world that is easily comprehensible.

Addressing this first:
Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:37 am ...but I can say that I'm culpable for what the physics of the world does to their bodies, even if it's the physics of their choices. I'm not culpable for them saying mean things to each other, or for two lovers breaking up, or for one of them telling a lie to another one. Do you think this difference in my culpability is meaningful?
If God is culpable for a stabbing because he chose the nature of physics, then why isn't God culpable for insults because he chose the nature of emotions? I still don't see the difference. I don't see why, on your view, God is only culpable for 'physical suffering'.
Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:37 am
Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 1:02 pmThird, the scenario insofar as it is meant to be analogous to God. Since I am in no way Reformed, I don't think the analogy holds. Specifically, non-Reformed Christians will make a distinction between God's positive will and God's permissive will, and this depends on the idea that there are some things which God actively wills and some things that he merely allows or permits to occur.

Regarding trust, if someone is doing something which is prima facie evil, and you have no reason to believe their act is otherwise than evil--nor do they provide you with such a reason--then of course you are justified in judging that it is in fact evil. The key problem with the analogy is that we are provided with no reason which counteracts our prima facie assessment. Said differently, there are insufficient grounds for the level of trust needed to overlook such serious prima facie evils.

...Of course, the other issue is that scientific and moral authority are not the same thing, such that a technologically advanced alien race need not be morally advanced. I leave this to the side.
Regarding positive vs. permissive will, I don't think there is a difference when talking about building the environment that free agents are going to live in. If I am an AI programmer and I can program truly sentient and sapient AI, yet I give them a Hellish environment in which to be free agents, I am culpable for that suffering if I knew how to do it differently, was able to do it differently, yet chose not to do it differently. If a carpenter builds a faulty staircase that they know might collapse, knew how to make it more sturdy, had the materials to make it more sturdy, but chose not to, the carpenter is to blame. Even if the stairs only collapsed because a child decided to hop up and down on them (so we might say "ah it was because of the child's choices, not the carpenter's), the carpenter is still culpable.

Since God is in charge of physics -- not humans, not anybody else -- God is culpable for what those physics allow; it's exactly the same thing as not making sure a set of stairs can bear the weight of a jumping child. God is more culpable than the carpenter, in fact, for having the luxury of perfectly knowing the creation's dangers, and infinitely having the power to correct those dangers (yet choosing not to).

So as the AI engineer, if I put my AI's in an environment where they're able to shoot guns at one another and kill one another, I'm culpable for that: I built their physics. Even though it was their choice to pull the trigger. Now we get into the nuances of psychological vs. physical suffering somewhere else (some other response), so we'll get to that there, but I can say that I'm culpable for what the physics of the world does to their bodies, even if it's the physics of their choices. I'm not culpable for them saying mean things to each other, or for two lovers breaking up, or for one of them telling a lie to another one. Do you think this difference in my culpability is meaningful?
The first thing I wonder is this: Do you think there are any evil acts which humans are culpable for and God is not? I realize you did give the examples of insults, breakups, and lying, but as I said above, all those things will also be dependent upon a "background physics."

More generally, tools tend to have a quality of neutrality. If I give you a knife you will be able to do all sorts of things with it, and it isn't necessarily my fault if you stab people with it. Ultimately I think this is going to run into the principles I gave in my other post about the way that the ability to do good is connected to the ability to do evil, so I will continue this conversation over there.

(I also tend to think that agent and environment are not as easily separable as you assume, and that the AI programmer will focus on the environment as much as the intelligence, but this is somewhat beside the point.)
Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:49 am
Leontiskos wrote: June 26th, 2022, 1:02 pm ...Of course, the other issue is that scientific and moral authority are not the same thing, such that a technologically advanced alien race need not be morally advanced. I leave this to the side.
I missed commenting this: I don't think this can be left to the side, not for all theists. Some theists present evidence that God is so vast and so powerful that He must be good for similar reasons. I know you haven't espoused this, but just pointing out that this might be why I included similar things in the analogy.
True, and that's a whole 'nother can of worms, but given our time limitations I will just say that I disagree with those theists (who are more apt to say that God is not beholden to any particular concept of goodness, even transcendent concepts. Again, this kind of thinking finds its peak in the Reformed, though it is also found in watered-down forms elsewhere).

The Neo-Platonic move--which influences Catholicism and Orthodoxy--has more to do with something like a mystical knowledge of God's goodness which is seen to be identical with his essence or power, and this is a bit different than an inference from power to goodness, such as we have in the case of Snort.
Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:49 amWhere does this trust in God's good character come from in the first place if God is culpable for more deaths and more suffering than all humans combined?
I am going to pick this quote out since it is a primary point at issue (and I do not grant that God is culpable).
Astro Cat wrote: June 27th, 2022, 10:49 amIn the analogy we see evidence that allows us to conclude that the alien probably is superior to us in some ways. I could have constructed an analogy whereby a regular person claims to have a good reason for killing 57 people but just babbles nonsense on the stand: I think we would have a hard time drawing that analogy to God even though it's technically possible that this person is some kind of savant with some kind of superhuman ethical superiority we just can't fundamentally understand.

So, this is why I included the bit about the aliens having some forms of demonstrable superiority: that's what it seems like to me with how we can evaluate God.

God can clearly demonstrate His power to us. He could do whatever if He were inclined to do so. I could ask for my name to be written in the stars and poof. I would have no question that God is superior to me in some way.

But if I asked God to demonstrate moral superiority, how could He do that if I don't understand? If God says "behold, I gave children leukemia" with a smile, and I'm like "wait, excuse me, what?!", then... well, you see? This is why I built the story of Snort that way. God can demonstrate His power, but how can we judge God's character except by what we know?
You have a wonderfully keen and searching mind and I wish I had more time in order to try to do these questions justice! :)

A complete answer would have to address these questions both from the vantage point of classical theism as well as revealed religion, and specifically in my case, Christianity. The short answer is that God ultimately revealed his moral goodness when he became Incarnate, and the New Testament is the record of this.

Now I am remiss for not saying more, and for not saying something about classical theism. ...The Neo-Platonists, after all, saw that the One and the Good were identical... ...But I am tired of writing so I am just going to leave that for another time. ^_^
Wrestling with Philosophy since 456 BC

Socrates: He's like that, Hippias, not refined. He's garbage, he cares about nothing but the truth.
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