Killing the Devil inside of me, with the help of Descartes?

Silmarien said:

That is really the opposite of what I am saying. Pascal's Wager is always about one side of the equation having potentially infinite rewards and punishments, and the other side being basically neutral with no real reward or punishment at all. There's no reason why infinite rewards shouldn't encompass finding happiness in the here and now, but that is a secondary aspect of it. Picking whatever feels good without factoring in the possibility of eternity would be a poor wager.



But how do you know that a stranger is genuinely "mean" rather than lashing out because of some sort of personal circumstance? I don't know how you could possibly determine that someone is a "mean person" and therefore worthy of being treated poorly without actually being inside their head.



I haven't mentioned "doing good" at all, so I'm not sure where you're getting this from. I suspect that you're reinterpreting everything I say through some sort of subjectivist, consequentialist framework, which doesn't work because this is at heart an argument for rejecting subjectivism. You're not going to understand it unless you can really grasp the possibility that subjectivism is false.

Click to expand...

I think we need to be careful with the use of the term subjectivism here. Folks are going to get the impression that Subjectivity in all of its forms is nothing but subjectivism (or worse, nothing but solipsism). We might want to be a little more taxonomic with it and differentiate between forms of Subjectivity from pure subjectivism, just as we would differentiate between relativity and relativism.

Moral Orel said:

Of course I agree that intent is the moral aspect. What I'm saying is that the things I've described thus far don't automatically imply an intent to deceive. The goal of the being with these "powers" hasn't come into question yet.

Click to expand...

From which angle? Because I was fairly sure ... although I could be blind to my own ideas ... that my OP is fairly specific. Then again, I did say something about giving the ok to going off on tangents. I might have to rethink my laxity in making that allowance.

...OR, it could be that the whole concept of "deception" is alluding me, cuz' when I think about it, it fully implies some intent of malice, hence the whole reason that Descartes then followed up his evil demon god scenario with a rational defense (however questioned it has been by other philosophers) of the Goodness of God and how it couldn't be that God, the Holy Divinity of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (and Jesus) is Himself perpetrating a diabolical scheme over humanity.

That depends on whether I think the person is nice or not, though. I can be a malicious little [blessanddonotcurse]

Click to expand...

Oops! I missed that last part. Could you repeat that?

Of course, I just wanted to see where your personal story fell into things. It sounds like it didn't really fall within my guess that you would have found loving your enemies more appealing from the start than the Darth Vader approach.

Click to expand...

... I have to admit that when I finally had the strength to do the Daredevil kind of thing and knock the bully who was bullying me into the wall and see the look on his face when I finally did so, it did give me a taste of gratified empowerment. (Father, forgive me, for I have sinned ... !)

Moral Orel said:

I know you asked, I meant that I'm still building to that point.

Well, the point of what I've been saying so far is that deception isn't inherent in our perception of the world even though our ability to experience things is entirely dependent on the person who created us and the world around us.

Click to expand...

You may have to explain this a little more fully to me since I'm not quite in sync with your point. I may be misunderstanding what you're getting at.

But I gotta add, that deception doesn't imply malice automatically either. Every joke that exists is deception. When I tell you a joke, I am deceiving you to accept a premise (the setup) and then follow that by surprising you with the fact that the premise was erroneous all along (the punchline). So my intent when I deceive in that regard is to make you laugh, which isn't malicious, but jokes wouldn't be funny without the deception. I could be telling one of my "bad" jokes, in which my intent might be to offend you, but I don't personally do that sort of thing anymore.

Click to expand...

I'm thinking that, like the term subjectivity, we should be careful with the possible degrees of meaning and the context that may apply when any of us uses the term 'deception' here. It might mean one thing if a comedian applies it, another if an illusionist/magician applies it, and another thing altogether if and when a Christian theologian refers to what sounds like the same word.

Moral Orel said:

When I speak, I swear worse than a sailor. I drop the F-Bomb like it's a comma. When I write it doesn't come up as much, but there are still times that I honestly think a bad word is necessary to convey something more emotionally powerful than just saying "doo-doo" so I write out [blessanddonotcurse] instead of actually typing the bad word or doing any of that "put a period in the middle of the word" avoidance of the profanity filter. If I actually typed the bad word, the filter replaces each letter with [blessanddonotcurse] and makes a real mess of my paragraph.

Click to expand...

Also, I found this following article (not that you need to read it all), but I thought that it might apply. Maybe I can find another source which reflects similar analysis within the field of Comedy:

A psychologically-based taxonomy of misdirection

Moral Orel said:

I know you asked, I meant that I'm still building to that point.

Well, the point of what I've been saying so far is that deception isn't inherent in our perception of the world even though our ability to experience things is entirely dependent on the person who created us and the world around us.

But I gotta add, that deception doesn't imply malice automatically either. Every joke that exists is deception. When I tell you a joke, I am deceiving you to accept a premise (the setup) and then follow that by surprising you with the fact that the premise was erroneous all along (the punchline). So my intent when I deceive in that regard is to make you laugh, which isn't malicious, but jokes wouldn't be funny without the deception. I could be telling one of my "bad" jokes, in which my intent might be to offend you, but I don't personally do that sort of thing anymore.

Click to expand...

Ok. To your credit, and in thinking about your own field of study, I suppose we might say that Turing's "Imitation Game" would be an example of the kind of reverse deception you're referring to. Perhaps?

Moral Orel said:

I dunno, we might have to go down what look like long unrelated rabbit trails to get my ideas across.

The only essential ingredients to a deception is a second party intentionally causing someone to believe something that is not true. The goal of the deception, which needs to be stated separately, is what makes it naughty or nice. That can be a hard concept to accept if you believe all lies are bad, another topic you and I touched on long ago.

Click to expand...

Then I guess the next thing to consider is what kind of goal could be pursued by an evil scientist, an evil demon god, or the biblical Devil, right?

By the way, I found the following short article. I thought maybe it would tie into the OP, even if just a tad?

Does comedy kill? A retrospective, longitudinal cohort, nested case-control study of humour and longevity in 53 British comedians. - PubMed - NCBI

Moral Orel said:

I thought about this more. I think if we were to try and determine the goal of an evil scientist, that would be extremely hard to pin down. That could be almost anything. I mean, some fallible, human-esque experimenter could be deceiving for simple curiosity's sake.

Click to expand...

It might be difficult to pin down the exact goals of an evil scientist, but if the scientist we're thinking about is truly 'evil,' then I'm guessing his goals likely won't result in the ultimate benefit of the people he's manipulating. If he's truly evil, then his goals won't look like those of someone like Alan Turing, right? You said you've thought about this some more, so I suppose you have some other thoughts on this?

If we were talking about the biblical Devil, I think we'd have to assume the NT is wrong from the get-go. If the NT is right and Jesus is God and all that, I don't think God would let the Devil commit trickery on that a grand scale. Or, at least, simply praying about it would clear it up. However, I'm not sure that there can't be a case made that God gave up on the Jews after they broke their covenant with Him too many times and moved away, leaving the world to the Devil. You might be able to show me why that hypothetical is wrong pretty easily, I've never really bothered looking into before.

Click to expand...

I'd have to say that I am at another position on this and I don't see any necessary problem or dilemma when confronting a scenario where God allows His angels, or His people, to have some form of moral autonomy, along with most of the moral culpability that goes with that, and thus fall away from 'the Order' He's prescribed. From what I can tell, the God of the Bible seems to want to allow autonomy as an aspect of the operating system of the 'matrix' He's placed us in (if we really want to call it that). Unfortunately, it just so happens that since the world is a painful place to live in due to all of this ongoing angelic and human autonomy, we're all kind of chagrined about it, especially when we get frustrated by what seems to us to be useless(?) acts of prayer.

As to the exact nature and limits of the autonomy God has given to the Devil, I'd say your guess is as good as mine since neither of us is in a scientific position to find out more about it. All we can do is respond Axiologically [i.e. ethically AND aesthetically] to what we surmise about the Devil from our reading of the bible and then attempt to evaluate the extent to which there may be anything in the world reflecting those comments.

...and no, none of this is easy to show. From what I can tell of the biblical epistemology, none of this was ever intended to be 'easy' for us to figure out in a simple, deductive manner. So, why should I assume the N.T. is wrong from the get-go? I'm sure I could be missing something in my evaluation, but something doesn't add up with your approach, I think. What am I missing?

If we were talking about an evil demon god then that would basically be the topic of my old thread "The Evil God Challenge" and I seem to remember you didn't want to engage that topic before. Too much "God of the Philosophers" and not Christianity-specific enough for your tastes, if I remember correctly.

Click to expand...

Yes, you remember correctly. I'm not much of one to bother with either the god of the philosophers or with their evil demon god hypotheses. Besides, even Descartes, as rational as he was, still ultimately subscribed to Christian argumentation in order to (attempt to) wipe away any apparent epistemological or metaphysical cogency that might seem to be exuded by such skeptically malicious hypotheses.

Moral Orel said:

What were Turing's "goals"? I remember he decoded military stuff during WWII, that he was gay, and he had the idea of the Turing test for AI.

Click to expand...

You likely know more about Turing than I do since his work falls squarely within your field of expertise, but just thinking back to one of the central ideas in the movie, The Imitation Game, Turing thought it was vastly important to be able to not only decipher and anticipate the choices of one's opponents (the Axis Powers, in this case), but to do so without tipping them off that one has the technology to do so. In this way, the Allies could maintain the upperhand. And that's all I was alluding to earlier: some of what Turing was designing implies (to me) the use of a form of deception.

Ex Machina was an excellent movie about a Turing Test being performed, by the way. Quite a bit of bad language and nudity, but no sex. It ties into this thread pretty well too, and since I thought it was a great movie, I won't even spoil it for you!

Click to expand...

You won't spoil it since my wife and I have already seen it. I'd have to review the plot to remind myself of exactly what happened in that movie, but I do remember that it didn't quite end on a happy note.

But if we're thinking of an evil scientist who's goals aren't for the benefit of the people he's deceiving, then that's still a pretty much infinite list of possibilities.

Click to expand...

I'm not so much concerned to discern exactly which goal an evil scientis is chasing as much as I am in understanding what his full intent is, whatever the means. We can discern the nature of it by asking: does his intent benefit people or take advantage of them for the sake of either oppressing or destroying them?

As long as he's using humans, without concern for them, to advance his goals, that's evil, I guess.

Click to expand...

… This isn't exactly what I was focusing on above, really. We're not talking about means to an end; we're talking praxis, the praxis that an evil scientist would use. The tangent you're presenting now isn't one that I'm not going to chase at the moment since I can clearly see that the biblical God is being implicated, but it isn't clear to me that God is evil by any stretch of the imagination. So, let's just stick with evil scientists, evil demon god scenarios, and Matrices, all of which do not have human well-being or significance in mind.

I'm not suggesting I have a reason you should assume the NT isn't true, just that I think you'd have to assume it isn't in order to discuss the Devil of the Bible deceiving on the scale of a matrix.

Click to expand...

… as I've said in places in this thread, I'm not under the assumption that God will allow the Devil to deceive to a total level; it may approach something like that, but it will fall short. I don't see anything in the N.T. implying that Satan's power can be totalized to a Matrix level. Although, on a practical scale, this isn't to say that the Devil's modes of operation won't be compelling or convincing to many or most people who engage it.

I mean, OT God laid down his laws, and occasionally had his prophets, but for the most part people didn't interact with Him, right? Once Jesus came along, simply praying to him (sincerely) would be a red pill, wouldn't it?

Click to expand...

Can I respond with a “no” or "not necessarily" to each of these questions?

I still think the Evil God Challenge shows God's nature to be inscrutable, though. Whatever argumentation you can give to show a god that is benevolent I can switch the words around to show him to be malevolent.

Click to expand...

No, I don't think so. I'd think there'd be an “error” in your overall coherence if you keep going far enough in deriving deductions from this proposition. You can't just switch words around since different words have different connotative contexts and are rarely exchangeable within the system of language. Think about your programming languages; what can you "change" in a line of programming without crashing the program.

The only argument I got in that thread was a semantic one in which "good" was defined as whatever god wants, so it would be impossible for him to be "evil" even if he wanted to cause suffering and terror on a massive scale for his own amusement. Jason Delisle (I think it was, and I know he's changed his username since then) tried to define "good" as "fulfilling its purpose" like a knife is a good knife if it cuts well, but I don't think that works either.

Click to expand...

Yeah.......about that. I'm not a Divine Command theorist, so I don't have to worry about this problem. [And Jason has changed his name? I didn't know that. No wonder I haven't "seen" him around here lately. ]

We can get into the whole "evil god hypothesis" if you want; I think that's exactly the sort of thing you're asking about in this thread.

Click to expand...

No thank you, Nick. Getting into that will just detract from my focal points in this thread, and I just can't see how the biblical Trinity could ever be considered as morally “evil,” except by application of the most distorted or incoherent axiomatic ethical assumptions.

Moral Orel said:

More than you probably think, and the more you bring it up, the better an analogy it seems to me.

See, you write a chunk of code, and then you give it a name like, doThisThing. That's called a function. You write a bunch of those and then you write another chunk of code that "calls" those functions.

doThisThing();
doThatThing();
doThatOtherThing();
alsoThisThing();

Sometimes you "call a function" that's part of the language you're using that you didn't actually write, like:

print("Hello world!");

I don't even have to know what is written inside that function to use it, I just know that calling that function will display:

Hello world!

on the screen.

With the Evil God Challenge, I think that we can simply swap which functions we call because God's real nature is buried inside those functions and they aren't visible to us.

So if:

doThisThing();
doThatThing();
doThatOtherThing();
alsoThisThing();

is a program that leads to a good God, then:

doSomeThing();
doSomeThingElse();
doSomeOtherThing();
alsoSomeThing();

leads to an evil God.

The output is the same: an accurate description of the world as we are able to perceive it. But the contents of those functions is what really drives the good/evil, and we just aren't capable of seeing them.

Click to expand...

You may have to spell out the implications all of this computer language more for me, because it almost sounds like I could take a statement from the bible, like:

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," replace just one word so as to instead read:

"In the beginning Satan created the heavens and the earth," and then claim that the output is somehow the same. But surely, I'm not understanding this point correctly, because one sentence doesn't equal another, right?