Jonathan Reeves wrote:
>
> The point Hal is trying to make ( and you are missing, or being
> deliberately obtuse) is this:
>
> Believing that Powers exist and are interacting with us is just as
> irrational as believing in Gods and miracles.
>
> Powers _may_ exist and _may_ be interacting with us but, given the
> available evidence, this is extremely unlikely and therefore we use
> Occams razor to dismiss this possibility.
>
> Gods and miracles _may_ exist, but rational people generally discount
> this possibility for exactly the same reason as above.
No, Hal didn't say that. Hal said that *admitting the possibility* was a horrible thing because then he couldn't go around saying that miracles were *absolutely impossible*. I'm the one advocating the view that you use Occam's Razor and probabilities.
> What Hal is saying (IMHO) is that accepting the premise of
> interventionist Powers leads on to a strong possibility that these
> same (or other) Powers have intervened in the past in ways just like
> have been 'reported' in the Bible and elsewhere.
If he's saying that, then he's wrong. Unless you can come up with a coherent (informationally compact) set of motives that would lead to a given set of interventions and non-interventions, then the fact that interventionist Powers exist certainly does not imply the possible existence of a particular kind of (humanly visible) intervention, much less the truth of any given set of accounts.
> He is, therefore pointing out the contradiction in people who strongly
> support one and strongly disagree with the other.
Once again: This is entirely possible; all it takes is Occam's Razor.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way