Bentham's Bulldog Makes Silly Mistakes in His "Best Argument For God"

Here’s the OP

Here’s our original discussion of it on the podcast (starting at 1:44:19)

Here’s our conversation with Matthew. (Note - subscribers get the episodes a day early. It will go public early Wednesday) The conversation was enlightening in some aspects, but disappointing in how many things we didn’t get to. Maybe we can revisit and go deeper some day.

Unlike most people I talk to, I accept the Self-Indication Assumption. This being that if God flips a coin if it comes up heads he creates one person, but if it comes up tails he creates 100 people, and you know you’ve just been created, it’s 100x more likely that the coin came up tails.

Error in Argumentation - Assuming Infinite People Exist

Matthew asserts that since the universe is infinite, and we already have proof that sapient life can evolve somewhere in the universe (Earth) this logically means that there are infinite people that exist. I agree this follows from the assumption that the universe is infinite, and I’ve heard that many cosmologists say the universe is infinite. Matthew erred in never saying this part explicitly in this original essay. Even a link back to a previous post where he had said this would do.

This point does need to be defended, because I’m not sure those cosmologists mean “the universe is infinite” in the way that would result in “there are infinite people in existence, including infinite copies of myself that are slightly different exploring every possible way I could have lived, and infinite copies of myself doing the exact same thing I’m doing right now down to the sub-molecular level forever” being true.

Maybe they do! But if one of the foundations of your Best Argument For God is that literal infinite people exist, you darned well better both say this and defend it somewhere (even if just as a link pointing to someone else’s explanation that convinced you it is true). If you don’t defend it you won’t be taken seriously. If you don’t even say it explicitly you start to look charlatan-adjacent. Because if you were to say it explicitly you’d give someone the opportunity to say “Hold on, I’m not sure that’s valid” and a charlatan doesn’t want to ever let an argument be held up to scrutiny, and thus will avoid granting any such opportunities.

For example, if I had read that in the original argument, rather than having it dropped near the end of a 90 minute conversation, I would have said “This is too shaky a foundation to rest a Best Argument In Existence on. I often entertain the thought that infinite people exist, including infinite copies of me that diverge infinitely and infinite copies that never diverge even to a micron. I also entertain the thought that I am a brain in a vat living in the Matrix. I entertain the thought that I may in an ancestor simulation that saves resources by only fully simulating the most important people in history and thus the fact that I have self-awareness means that some time in my future I’m going to have some very important influence over historical events.”

I entertain all these thoughts as fun hypotheticals that could in principal actually be true! But that have literally no evidence to make them worth considering as anything other than fun hypotheticals. Meaning that in my opinion the Best Argument For God is already no more likely than us living in the Matrix for real right now, or me being future-Jesus/Hitler. Starting with this level of unlikelihood is kinda crippling, because further arguments based on it can only be equally or less likely than this premise.

Regardless, this is more of an error than a silly mistake. The silliness comes next:

Silly Mistake #1 - Smuggling In A Coin Flip

A key part of the Self-Indication Assumption is the fact that one knows that previous to their creation, God flipped a coin! The point of the thought experiment is to show that one has non-zero information about the probability of heads vs tails earlier based on my existence currently. That a coin was flipped is a premise we grant for the hypothetical. Whether there are 100 or 10,000 or 1,000,000 people created if the coin comes up tails is arbitrary and irrelevant. If you accept that one can infer coin-facing likelihood by this argument then yes, it increases the odds that the coin came up tails by 10x or 10,000x or 1,000,000x in the hypothetical. If an infinite number of people are created upon tails than the odds are infinity-minus-one that the coin is tails.

Matthew states that the fact(??) that there are infinite people provides “infinite evidence” that his god exists. In the hypothetical the fact that is given near-infinite likelihood is “the coin came up tails”, and we already posited that there was a coin that was flipped. In Matthew’s extension of the analogy, this means “my god exists” is the equivalent of “the coin came up tails.” Which smuggles in the idea that a coin exists and was flipped IRL.

What exactly is the coin that is being flipped IRL? It can’t be “does god exist or not?” because infinite people existing is equally likely in a natural universe. (In case this needs defending — Since our universe appears to be a natural universe, if we accept that it could be infinite in a way that allows infinite people to exist right now, then a natural universe obviously allows for infinite people to exist. (Note that in our podcast episode with Matthew he does explicitly state that his god wants to remain hidden, which is why the universe appears to be natural even if it actually isn’t.)) If either coin-facing can result in infinite people then the fact that infinite people exist doesn’t tell you anything about the coin-facing.

I call this a silly mistake because I don’t think Matthew even realizes that he’s done this. He’s so excited by the SIA argument that he forgot that the hypothetical is giving likelihoods to a god-flipped-coin that has no analog, and thus rests on nothing at all.

Bentham’s Mugging

Mostly as an aside - in his rejection of Eliezer’s writings it seems Matthew has even evicted the now-widely-popular Pascal’s Mugging. The argument “the fact(???) that infinite people exist provides infinite evidence for my god” is just a restatement of that mugging. Whether you say “3^^^3” or “Beth 2” doesn’t much matter.¹ I’m sorry Matthew got mugged. This is what happens when one has bad epistemics.² :( It’s hard to call having bad epistemics a “silly mistake,” it’s a personal tragedy with far-ranging consequences on one’s entire life. Let’s just call it unfortunate.

Silly Mistake #2 - Assuming Humans Are Fundamental Aspects of Reality

This takes a lot of digging, because as I said in my initial critique at the end of the On Dying podcast episode, Matthew never states this in his original argument, or clearly links to something that does. But based on our most recent conversation:

Matthew’s god is one that creates the maximum number of happy people.

He does this because creating happy people is good, and god is good.

But by “good” he doesn’t mean “a fact about the states of affairs that humans find themselves in” or anything similar to that. Matthew seems to believe (from what I can gather) that “goodness” is a fundamental aspect of reality, like Time or Space. I don’t know how many fundamental aspects of reality there are in Matthew’s view, but it seems to be at least four - Time, Space, Consciousness, and Goodness.

His god isn’t just a person that’s good, his god is something like the perfect embodiment of the fundamental aspect of the universe we call Goodness. But somehow his god isn’t just a physical force that is called Goodness (whatever the heck that could even mean to begin with), he’s ALSO a thing that has thoughts and makes decisions.

Since IRL goodness is a thing that relates to human values, this means that humans are necessarily a fundamental aspect of reality (through goodness) and always have been since before any universe(s) had ever existed.

This is a WHOLE HECKING LOT to smuggle into your argument that god exists without even acknowledging you’re doing so. This is not a serious argument by someone who cares about making valid arguments. It is, at best, someone taking notes on what argument he might make some day in the future after he’s established a lot of things that are currently considered ridiculous by serious people.

The fact that he published the post as it is and considers it “overwhelmingly powerful” says to me that he doesn’t even realize that he’s smuggling in a lifetime’s worth of nonsense. This isn’t just an error in argumentation, it’s downright silly.

A Personal Note

I want to thank Matthew for coming on the podcast to talk about this. It unearthed several things about the argument for me, so it was valuable to me in that regard, and the conversation was fun (which is always of high value to me personally). I think he’s more intelligent than I am in raw brain power. I hate to see it squandered (IMO) on such basic mysticism. The amount of intellect it takes to sufficiently obfuscate arguments to this level is formidable. It’s also indicative of how bad the basic idea is if that much work is needed to cloak it. The ontological argument was always drek, and adding an anthropic-principle pascal’s mugging doesn’t improve it.

It is, however, impressive to watch, and I suspect Matthew will continue to make waves in whatever field he pursues.

EDIT: Benthan responds in his well-named post “Eneasz Brodski Makes Silly Mistakes In 'Bentham's Bulldog Makes Silly Mistakes in His "Best Argument For God."'” :) I left a reply in the comments but at this point I think we’re at an impasse.

1. Which is why I don’t bother grokking how big Beth 2 is

2. Like, really bad epistemics. In his Book Review: Ethical Intuitionism he puts forward “think hard and then believe whatever is most obvious” as a good way to arrive at truth! He said similar things about intuition and ‘how things seem’ to be strong arbiters of truth in the podcast.