ChatGPT plays the role of a Street Epistemologist

I had another fun conversation with ChatGPT where I asked it to pretent to be a Street Epistemologist who challenged my epistemology, particularly my Christian beliefs.

Every time I gave an answer, ChatGPT would summarize what I said and ask me if it was correct. Since it was pretty much always right, I decided to edit the summaries out of the conversation below. That way you don't have to read so much redundancy.

Here's how the conversation went down.

Sam
Do you know what street epistemology is?

ChatGPT
Yes. Street epistemology is a conversational method aimed at helping people reflect on how they know what they think they know. It focuses on examining the reliability of the methods a person uses to arrive at a belief—not on debating the belief itself.

A few key features:

• Non-confrontational: It’s meant to be calm, respectful, and curious rather than adversarial or persuasive.
• Method-focused: Instead of asking what someone believes, it asks how they concluded it’s true.
• Socratic style: It uses guided questions to explore epistemic foundations—faith, intuition, evidence, testimony, etc.
• Goal: Not to “win” or change someone’s mind, but to encourage critical reflection and intellectual humility.

It started gaining visibility through Peter Boghossian’s work (especially the book A Manual for Creating Atheists) and has since broadened into a diverse community of practitioners who apply the method to all kinds of beliefs—not just religious ones.

If you're asking because you want to know how to use it, how to defend against it, or how it compares to other philosophical approaches, I can go into any of that.

Sam
I would like for you to pretend to be a Street epistemologist. I'll be a Christian. You engage me in conversation the way a street epistemologist would.

ChatGPT
Sure — I can do that.

I’ll play the role the way an experienced street epistemologist would: calm, curious, non-adversarial, and focused not on what you believe but how you know it’s true.

To begin, I’ll ask a simple, open question, and you can answer in character as a Christian.

Street Epistemologist:

Thanks for chatting with me. To get started, what’s a Christian belief you hold that you consider really important or central to your worldview?

Sam
As a Christian, there are about seven things I think are equally foundational to Christianity. We can talk about any of them you like, but some of them are related to each other. They include (1) That there is a God, (2) That God imposes moral obligations on people, (3) that people fail to live up to their moral obligations, (4) that God holds people accountable for their behavior, (5) That Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah, and (6) that Jesus died for sins, and (7) that Jesus rose from the dead. Is there any one of these you want to focus on?

ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:

Thanks—that’s a clear layout of the core ideas. Since these are interconnected, it might help to pick just one so we don’t blur them together.

If you’re open to it, I’d like to start with #1: “There is a God.”

That seems like a foundation the others depend on, and it’s often a good place to explore how a person comes to know something.

So here’s my question:

On a scale from 0 to 100—where 0 means “I’m completely sure no God exists” and 100 means “I’m completely sure God exists”—where would you place your confidence, and why that number rather than one a little lower or higher?

Sam
I'm about 98% sure there some sort of god. I'm about 85% sure it's Yahweh.

ChatGPT
Let me start with the first number.

1. Your 98% confidence that some sort of God exists

I’m curious:
What is the main reason—your single strongest reason—that brings you to 98% instead of, say, 70% or 50%?

I’m not asking for all your reasons; just the one that feels the most compelling for you personally.

Sam
There isn't any one reason. It's the cumulative effect of multiple arguments for God that all begin with different premises but end up complimenting each other and converging on something resembling the Abrahamic God.

ChatGPT
Street Epistemologist:

That makes sense—a cumulative-case approach. A lot of people build their confidence that way.

To keep the conversation manageable, let me approach it like this:

Even when someone has several arguments contributing to their confidence, there’s usually one that feels like the “anchor”—the one that would reduce their confidence the most if it turned out not to work.

If you imagine temporarily removing each argument you rely on—one at a time—which removal would cause the biggest drop from 98%?

In other words:

Which argument, if you discovered it was unsound or unreliable, would lower your confidence the most?

Sam
I'm not sure. The moral argument, the Kalam argument, and the argument from contingency are about tied for first place for me. I think the moral argument is important, though, because if it is a sound argument, it would establish the personhood of God and also some of the other foundational beliefs of Christianity, especially the one about God imposing moral obligations on people. So I guess the moral argument is the most important. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say the removal of the moral argument would do the most damage to my confidence in the existence of god, but it might.

ChatGPT
What method do you use to determine that objective moral obligations actually exist?

I’m not asking what the argument says—I’m asking how you, personally, come to conclude that these obligations are really out there rather than being human-made or subjective.

What convinces you?

Sam
It's because when I look at the evidence for how morality presents itself to the human mind, it strikes me as being analogous to a whole class of beliefs we all take for granted. It's analogous to our belief in the past, other minds, the uniformity of nature, the external world, etc. These various beliefs have multiple things in common. Since morality shares all those traits in common with these other beliefs, I think our justification for believing in objective morals is pretty much the same as our justification for believing any of these other beliefs.

ChatGPT
Let me ask a question that drills into the reliability of that comparison:

If something feels like a foundational truth in our minds, how do we determine whether that feeling is a reliable indicator of an objective reality rather than simply a powerful psychological impression?

I’m asking because:

• People across the world report moral intuitions that “feel foundational” but are incompatible with one another.
• People also report other powerful intuitions (e.g., purpose in nature, fate, spirits, karma) that share that same “foundational feel” but may not track something objectively real.

So I’m curious how you tell the difference between:

“This feels like a properly basic truth because it is,”

and

“This feels like a properly basic truth because human minds are wired to experience it that way.”

What’s the method you use to distinguish those two possibilities?

Sam
I would not characterize the intuition as a "feel." My belief in the uniformity of nature or the external world has nothing to do with my feelings.

As I said, the various items of knowledge I'm comparing to our knowledge of morality have certain things in common. They include things like (1) None of them can be proved, (2) It is prima facie unreasonable to reject them, (3) all mentally healthy people apprehend them in a way that seems very real to them, (4) It's possible to be mistaken about any of them, (5) Even people who deny them continue to perceive them as if they were real, (6) We all apply them in our daily lives, (7) We sometimes make mistakes when applying each of them.

Now, consider #4 and #7. The fact that people are convinced there's a real past that corresponds to their memories does not guarantee that all their memories are accurate. The fact that people believe the future will resemble the past doesn't stop people from making hasty generalizations that turn out to be wrong. The fact that people intuitively recognize there are other minds besides their own doesn't stop people from anthropomorphizing inanimate objects. The fact that people believe their sensory perceptions correspond to a real external world doesn't prevent them from experiencing hallucinations, dreams, mirages, and optical illusions. In the same way, our belief that there is a real and objective difference between right and wrong doesn't mean everybody is going to come to the same moral conclusions about everything.

A lot of the moral conclusions we come to are not intuited directly. Rather, they are deduced from more basic moral intuitions. For example, a pro-lifer and a pro-choicer might come to a different conclusion about the morality of abortion, but if you ask them why they believe what they do, you'll find that the difference isn't because of some basic moral principle. They both generally agree you shouldn't kill innocent people without really good justification. Where they differ in most cases turns out to be whether they think the unborn are examples of innocent people in the first place.

There are lots of reasons people might disagree on morality that has nothing to do with whether there are objective moral truths or even whether any of them can be known.

I do not claim that intuition is infallible. As I said, one of the traits of the various items of knowledge I'm comparing morality to is the fact that we could be wrong about all of them. I just don't think it's reasonable to believe we ARE wrong about them.

ChatGPT
How do you distinguish between believing in objective moral truths because they really exist, versus believing in them because our minds are evolutionarily or socially wired to produce moral intuitions—even if there’s nothing objectively “out there”?

I’m not trying to attack the belief—I just want to understand your method for judging the reliability of these moral intuitions.

Sam
I don't see why there has to be a difference. One could argue that all of our cognitive abilities are the result of evolution. If that undermines our belief in morality, it would undermine our belief in the external world, other minds, the uniformity of nature, and the past as well. It raises the question of whether a mind or a brain that is the product of evolution can be a reliable belief-producing machine. If not, then I suppose we might as well give up on epistemology altogether and become radical skeptics. But if so, then we should trust the deliverances of reason.

ChatGPT
Here’s a follow-up I’m curious about:

Even if we accept that moral intuitions are generally reliable, how do you go from “there are objective moral truths” to “God exists and imposes moral obligations”?

I want to understand the step from recognizing morality as objective to the conclusion that a personal God underwrites it. How do you make that connection?

Sam
Morality makes demands on our behavior. If there were no sentient beings in the universe as well as no gods, angels, or persons of any kind, then any description of a world like that would be composed solely of "is" statements. There couldn't possibly be any true "ought" statements. If there is any particular way things are supposed to be, then there must be somebody who intends them to be that way. Nothing matters unless there's somebody it matters to. So there can't be any way we ought to behave until somebody imposes that obligation on us.

ChatGPT
I’m curious about the next step:

How do you move from the idea that some being imposes moral obligations to the specific claim that this being is Yahweh, the God of the Bible, rather than some other possible kind of moral lawgiver?

I ask because I know you mentioned earlier that you’re about 85% sure it’s Yahweh. What methods or evidence lead you from “there is a moral lawgiver” to “it is Yahweh specifically”?

Sam
I was going to explain that, but I accidentally hit the enter key before I did.

Since we have moved on from talking about how we justify belief in objective morality and have changed the topic to how objective morality points to God, I take it that we are at least assuming, for the sake of argument, that we have established the existence of objective morals. So let's work with that assumption. They are real.

We have all sort of hierarchies in our civilizations. We have parents, supervisors, commanders, and governing authorities. While we have obligations to obey them, those obligations are not absolute. In fact, we often invoke morality to judge whether an authority is just. If we want to change the law, for example, we appeal to some moral principle for why it should change. That means no human institution is adequate to ground morality. Morality is what we use to judge human institutions.

So the origin of morality must lie outside of humanity. We can't ground it in aliens because they are creatures just like us. If they have different values, then the best we can come up with is cultural relativism, which is not the same thing as moral realism.

Whatever grounds morality must be a transcendent being that has authority over the sorts of beings that evolved to live in the universe. The more you think about it, the more it starts to resemble a god.

The reason I think it actually IS a god, and that it's specifically the Abrahamic God is because of how it coheres with other arguments. The moral argument, by itself, doesn't explain how or why god came to have moral authority over the cosmos. But the Kalam argument and the contingency argument can explain that. If these two arguments are sound, it would mean there is a necessary being who created the universe. A being like that would be ultimate in some sense. It would have no peers. It would be absolutely sovereign and autonomous. Everything would owe its existence to this being. It's hard to imagine a better candidate for absolute moral authority.

ChatGPT
If so, I’m curious about a step that sometimes challenges people:

How do you weigh the possibility that there could be a different kind of necessary, ultimate being—one that exists and grounds morality—but isn’t exactly the God described in the Bible?

What makes Yahweh the best candidate rather than some other conceivable ultimate being?

Sam
That's a great question. Nothing I've argued so far rules out that possibility. However, there are certain things that emerge from these various arguments that begin to resemble the Abrahamic God that does not resemble any other known God. Judaism was one of the few monotheistic religions for a time. Most creation myths do not involve a necessary being who brings about all of physical reality. Usually, it's a lesser sort of being that organizes pre-existing material. If the Kalam is a sound argument, then the creator brought the universe into being out of nothing. Not many Gods are like that. If the moral argument is sound, then not only is god an absolute moral authority, but he's also the absolute standard of goodness, which means he himself is the paradigm of moral perfection.

Even with all that, we still can't rule out the possibility that the true God is some other God besides Yahweh. There are a couple of reasons it seems to point to Yahweh, though.

First, because the Jews wrote about Yahweh long before philosophers ever cooked up these arguments. If these arguments are sound, then it's either an enormous coincidence that the Jews came up with a God like Yahweh, or else Yahweh actually revealed himself to them. It seems more likely that Yahweh revealed himself to the Jewish people than that they just made a lucky guess about the true God.

Second, if there is a God with absolutely moral authority who cares how we live our lives, how we treat other people, etc., it stands to reason that this God would want to reveal himself to humanity. With that in mind, it seems unlikely that it would be a totally unknown God. This gives us prima facie reason to be skeptical that the true God is a God who nobody knows about.

So far, I've just argued for why philosophy points to a God who resembles the Abrahamic God in striking ways. But what really seals the deal for me is the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus promoted the Abrahamic God, claimed to be sent by him, then was raised from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus seems to seal the deal about who the real God is.

ChatGPT
How do you assess the reliability of the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus?

What’s your method for concluding that the resurrection actually happened, rather than it being a legend, misinterpretation, or symbolic story?

Sam
That's a big discussion, so I'm going to stop here. Thank you for playing this game with me.

ChatGPT challenges me on free will, determinism, dualism, and time

Today, I had a fun conversation with ChatGPT. After asking ChatGPT to pretend to be human and make statements about itself, I said, "I have an idea. Let's play a game where you want to find out what I think about stuff, and once you find out, you want to challenge me by cross examining me. I'll answer your questions as best I can until you stump me." We went from topic to topic, talking about free will vs. determinism, consciousness and mind, stories, meaning, art, language, morality, etc.

After talking about the mind/body problem for a while, we switched to the nature of time. As you'll recall from an earlier blog post, I've been torn between the static and dynamic views of time, and ChatGPT kept challenging me on everything I said. In the process of this challenging, ChatGPT said something that gave me an idea. I was wrestling with the tension beween our undeniable perception of the flow of time on the one hand, and the implication of special relativity on the other, namely that there being no absolute simultaneity seems to imply a static view of time.

ChatGPT said, "Could consciousness itself generate the impression of temporal passage, even if physically, all events exist statically?"

ChatGPT may have been hinting at the idea that the flow of time was just an illusion, which I had already expressed doubt about on the basis that dismissing data as illusory means your theory isn't accounting for all the evidence. A good theory should make sense of all the data rather than dismissing some of it as illusory.

But it got me to thinking. What if the block universe is real, and there's no physical reason for why we should experience time as if it flowed. In that case, couldn't our conscious experience of the flow of time serve as evidence for substance dualism? Maybe our minds do flow through the block, and that's the explanation for why we experience time as being dynamic. If so, that could serve as an argument for substance dualism because it would mean our mind is doing something the physical world is not doing.

This would be an interesting take because it would mean the opposite of what most substance dualists seem to think. Most I've read think of time is something that's part of the physical world, but the non-physical world is a-temporal. In my view, it would be just the opposite. Time flows in the non--physical realm, but not in the physical realm.

Where does that leave God, though? If God is neither created nor destroyed, and God experiences time dynamically, then there would have to be infinite duration for God. If you accept the arguments against infinite time, then that won't work at all.

If I accepted this new view I just came up with, I would probably be inclined to think created beings were very different from God in how they experience time. I would suspect that God directly experiences the whole spectrum of physical time as if it were all the present for him, but we all experience it one moment at a time. So while time would flow for us, it would be static for him. That's an old view I used to have about God. Although I was inconsistent, as I explained here, I used to think of time as a block that's completely open to God's experience.

It still raises questions about the future, though. If spacetime is a block, does time have an end? And if not, is it infinite in the future direction? If so, doesn't that undermine all the arguments against an infinite past since there's a future/past symmetry?

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "But maybe it's a growing block!" I can't make sense of a growing block unless there's a time above time. Time would have to be static within the block but dynamic outside of the block. Otherwise, how could the block grow?

Maybe there's some way to make that fit into my new theory. I mean if souls experience a flow of time apart from the physical world, then maybe there is a time outside of the physical spacetime block.

When I say, "new theory," I mean it's new to me. For all I know, somebody else has already come up with it.

To summarize the main point of this post, I'm wondering if our undeniable perception of the flow of time vs. the static nature of time implied by special relativity (particularly there being no absolute simultaneity) can be used as an argument for substance dualism. That's something I'll have to think about some more. What do you think?

Some thoughts on the Charlie Kirk assassination

This Charlie Kirk situation has affected me emotionally more than it really should. I didn't follow him and didn't have a good feel for what he was all about. He came up on my youtube feed every now and then, but in all I might've watched two shorts with him in them over the years.

What I did know about Charlie, just from looking at the thumb nails of the videos, is that he was a kind of Steven Crowder-like person. He would set up a tent in some public space and encourage people to debate with him. From the little I saw of him, that's what he was mainly about.

His murder bothers me for a number of reasons. First, I just found out how young he was. He was only 31 years old. He had a wife and two kids. It's a real tragedy. Second, it bothers me for the reasons he was probably killed. He held a lot of controversial views, he expressed those views in public, and he engaged in public debate. I can understand why somebody might get upset about another person's views, but the fact that he wanted to talk about it with people who disagreed with him strikes me as being a good thing. Open debate and dialogue is healthier than everybody retreating into their own political bubbles and seeing outsiders as enemies. Why are there so many people in this country that just want to shut people up who they disagree with?

I find it incredibly disturbing that anybody would want to silence another person from publicly expressing their point of view by murdering them. But what I find especially disturbing is the number of people who approve of it. There are people on line who are cheering it on. They are gloating about it. One person said they watched the video multiple times because it gave them joy. That is disgusting.

It makes me wonder how many people I actually know who approve of it. That further makes me wonder how many people I know who would approve of my murder on the basis of things I believe.

I probably agree with Charlie Kirk on a lot of stuff. I've learned a few things about him just over the last few days. He's Catholic, and I'm protestant, so we agree on most things Christian, but we also disagree on a few things. We're both politically conservative, so we probably agree for the most part on things like abortion, gun control, and maybe economics. He was a big Trump supporter, and I'm definitely not, so we probably have some differences there. I don't know how much we agreed or disagreed, but I suspect we agreed more than we disagreed on most things. We definitely both agreed on the value of free speech and open debate and dialogue.

The Charlie Kirk incident really brings to light the divide between the left and the right in this country. It has really gotten out of hand. It goes beyond mere polarization. Now people openly approve of killing people who disagree with them. Depending on how pervasive this point of view is, it could be the end of debate and dialogue between the left and the right. If the left and right cannot deal with their differences through dialogue, what is there left to do? It's a scary thought. It reminds me of the horrors of the French Revolution, but I was reading this post by Ed Feser yesterday where he pointed out a similar thing that happened in ancient Greece.

One thing I find ironic is that some people on the left oppose capital punishment but approve of Charlie Kirk's assassination. They don't think somebody should be executed even if they committed murder. But at the same time, they think it's okay to execute somebody for holding certain beliefs or for expressing them publicly.

I've expressed a lot of unpopular beliefs on my blog. I saw a video clip yesterday or the day before of a girl telling her dad that she thought Charlie Kirk's murder was justified because he believed a woman who was raped should be forced to give birth. She acted like it was the most obvious thing in the world that killing him was appropriate merely because of his belief in the wrongness of abortion in the case of rape. I've written many posts on abortion on my blog, and this blog is public. Am I in danger of being murdered, too?

I don't remember if I ever explicitly addressed abortion in the case of rape, but if you follow the logic of my argument, the conclusion is that abortion is wrong in all stages of development unless it's a medical emergency. Rape is extremely traumatic, but we cannot be justified in taking a human life merely to alleviate emotional trauma. While I don't think abortion in the case of rape is morally justified, I do think it serves as a mitigating circumstance, which means it's not as bad as having an abortion merely for convenience. So there's my view. I suppose, in that girls' eyes, I deserve to die, too.

I found out yesterday, I think, that the killer, Tyler Robinson, was in a relationship with a trans-gendered person (a man who thinks he's a woman). From what I understand, Tyler invoked his right to remain silent. He hasn't spoken to the police, so we don't know if transgenderism was the particular reason for the murder. It might've been, though, because of some things he wrote on the shell casings of his ammunition.

I don't know whether I agree with Charlie Kirk's position on LGBT issues or not. I suspect we agree on a lot, though. We probably both agree that homosexual romantic relationships are immoral. We probably agree that you shouldn't pretend like men are women and women are men, regarless of how they see themselves. But as far as public policy goes, I don't know what his views were.

I think it's unfair to expect women to have to box or wrestle with men just because those men think they are women, but I really don't care what goes on in sports. I don't understand why the government has anything to do with it except maybe when it comes to the Olympics. Why should it be a public policy issue? Let people who play sports decide amongst themselves how they want to do it. It seems to me the solution to transgenderism in sports is to segregate sports by sex rather than perceived gender.

I don't think the government has an interest in same sex marriages except when it comes to adoptions. The only reason government is in the marriage business at all is because marriages are the foundation of families, and families are the foundation of societies. Since opposite sex couples are the only kinds of couples that create families, they are the only kinds of marriages the government should have any interest in licensing or incentivising. Let people marry or cohabitate with whoever they want, but there's no reason for the government to be involved in the kinds of relationships that, by their very nature, can't produce children.

I always try to be fair-minded and not to paint groups of people with too broad a brush. But I have to confess that seeing so many people on line cheer Charlie Kirk's assassination tempts me to paint the left with a broad brush. It appears, if you're not careful, that many on the left simply don't value human life. They support the death of unborn children, and they support the death of people who want to protect the unborn. It seems like the only lives they value are the lives of killers since they oppose capital punishment. For these reasons, it is tempting to want to agree with some conservatives who call the left a "culture of death."

But I know, objectively, that that isn't fair. First of all, many on the left don't think people on the right value human life. The right supports gun rights in spite of guns being the go-to weapons for mass killings in schools. The right also generally supports capital punishment. In the past, some people on the right have assassinated or attempted to assassinate abortion doctors. So to be fair, both sides have some basis, be it ever so flimsy, for accusing the other side of not placing any value on human life.

Second, the people on the left who are cheering Charlie Kirk's murder are probably just a loud minority. Most people on the left are just as horrified by Charlie Kirk's murder as those on the right. There are many people on the left who do support free speech, even when they disagree with what is said. I was encouraged by what Bernie Sanders said in response to Charlie Kirk's murder. I wish more people on the left could be like him.

I sincerely hope that Charlie Kirk's assassination doesn't end debate and dialogue between the left and right. If one side is afraid of expressing their views, and the other side isn't interested in hearing the other side anyway, then it may very well be the end of all discussion. That would be a real travesty. If we can't settle our differences through dialogue, then the only thing left is power, suppression, and violence. This is a real life example of the danger of forgetting history.

EDIT - 9/20/2025: I may have been wrong about Charlie being Catholic. I saw that somewhere. I don't remember where. But yesterday, I saw somebody say they wondered if he would have become Catholic. So now I don't know if he was Catholic or not.

Why I like ChatGPT - recipe edition

One of my favourite things about ChatGPT is getting quick simple recipes when I have an odd proportion of ingredients. For example, today, I had 3/4 of a stick of butter and didn't feel like going to the grocery store. I got some cocoa powder recently to make decorative sourdough bread, and I thought, "Hey, I could probably make some brownies." So I asked ChatGPT what I could do with my cocoa powder a 3/4 of a stick of butter. It was a very small batch of brownies, but it came out absosmurfly delicious! Here's how the conversation went down. The only change I made was that I added a pinch of baking powder.

Sam I am: So, I have some cocoa powder and about 3/4th of a stick of butter. Can I make brownies with that?

ChatGPT said: Yes! You can make brownies with just cocoa powder and butter as a base, but you’ll need a few other ingredients to make them work properly. Here’s a simple way to do it with what you have and a few common pantry items:

Basic Brownie Ingredients:

• Butter: ~3/4 stick (you already have)
• Cocoa powder: 2–3 tablespoons (adjust depending on taste)
• Sugar: ~1/2 cup (granulated or brown sugar)
• Eggs: 1–2, depending on how fudgy you want them
• Flour: 1/4–1/3 cup (to give structure)

Optional: pinch of salt, vanilla extract, chocolate chips, nuts (I did not use chocolate chips or nuts)

Simple Method:

• Melt butter in a small saucepan or microwave.
• Stir in cocoa powder until smooth.
• Mix in sugar and let it cool slightly.
• Add egg(s) and vanilla extract, mixing well.
• Fold in flour (and salt, if using) until just combined. Don’t overmix.
• Pour into a small greased pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) for ~15–20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs.

Because you only have part of a stick of butter, your batch will be smaller—think more like a few brownies than a full pan.

If you want, I can give you a tiny batch “minimal ingredients” recipe that will use exactly what you have for a perfect single-pan fudgey brownie. Do you want me to do that?

One day, I posted a picture that just had a bunch of vegetables, herbs, and stuff, and based on the picture, ChatGPT was able to suggest multiple recipes. I love ChatGPT!

Sometimes, when I want to make something, expecially if I've never made it before, I'll watch about a dozen YouTube videos and piece together a recipe. But sometimes if I watch too many videos, I'll get analysis paralysis. That's when I go to ChatGPT to get a simple recipe. ChatGPT always comes through. If I don't like a recipe, I'll tell it what I want to change, and it'll give me another one.

The multiverse objection to the fine tuning argument

I recently had my first debate in many years on a new website called DebateCraft. DebateCraft was put together by some of the old members of Debate.org where I used to debate and Debateart.com, where I rarely participated.

The person I debated wanted to defend the fine-tuning argument, and since I've become an advocate of this argument, I wanted to play devil's advocate. You see, most of the objections raised against the fine tuning argument are pretty terrible, so I wanted to test the argument against a handful of what I thought were the strongest objections.

My opponent was apparently playing devil's advocate, too, because he conceded the debate in the third round saying, "I never really thought this was a decent argument."

In spite of not completing the debate, I did learn something. I learned that whether the multiverse objection to fine-tuning is a good objection depends on how the fine-tuning argument is framed.

If you try to characterize the fine-tuning argument as an inference to the best explanation, then the debate comes down to whether God or the multiverse best explains fine-tuning. A person raising the multiverse objection would be obliged in that case to actually defend the existence of a mulitiverse or say why it's a better explanation than God.

But if you characterize the fine-tuning argument as a disjunctive argument then the objector doesn't have to defend the actual existence of the multiverse. They only have to raise the multiverse as a possibility.

William Lane Craig's version of the argument is disjunctive. The way a disjunctive argument works is that you start with all the possibilities. Then you rule out all but one, and that’s the conclusion. In Craig’s case, the options are chance, law, and design. He wants to argue for design, so he needs to rule out chance and law. This puts the burden of proof on him to rule out chance. All the multiverse objector has to do is keep chance as a live option and show that Craig has not ruled it out.

The multiverse objector does not have the burden of proving that there is a multiverse. All he has to do is explain why it’s a possibility. As long as it’s a possibility, chance has not been ruled out, and Craig’s disjunctive argument collapses.

It is going to be very hard to rule out a multiverse because we simply don’t know what’s beyond the event horizon of our region of space. We have no idea what lies beyond the observable universe, and that unknown prevents us from ruling out a multiverse which, in turn, prevents us from ruling out chance + the observer selection effect as the reason for why we find ourselves in a life-permitting universe.

Craig's attempts at responding to the multiverse objection miss the mark. One argument he likes to use is his card game illustration. If somebody were accused of cheating because every time they dealt, they got all aces, they might defend themselves by saying, "Well, in this great big multiverse, there are universes in which I do get all aces when I deal." That arugment fails because there's no observer selection effect. Presumably, he'd exist in all the univeres in which he was playing poker, so the multiverse wouldn't explain why he happens to be in a universe in which he gets all aces when he deals. It's a bad illustration.

Craig's other attempt at a response is to say the multiverse raises the Boltzmann brain problem. That might work as a response to somebody who was actually trying to defend the existence of a multiverse. Or it could work as a response to somebody who claimed fine-tuning was evidence for a multiverse. But it doesn't do much to answer somebody who is only raising the multiverse as a possibility that can't be ruled out. After all, they could simply raise, as a possibility, the existence of a multiverse that explains fine-tuning without generating Boltzmann brains.

The Boltzmann brain problem doesn't come up in every multiverse scenario, so it has limited application. The Boltzmann brain problem is a real issue for any multiverse model in which universes are explained as being random low entropy fluctuations in a larger space that is, on average, in thermodynamic equilibrium. But it's not as much of an issue in a scenario in which bubble universes emerge as local areas of stability within a larger inflaton field. And it only takes a bit of imagination to cook up multiverse scenarios that can explain fine-tuning without generating Boltzmann brains. String theory/M-Theory could serve as such a model, but that's debatable.

As a side note, Boltzmann brains do not emerge in the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics, but then again, the many worlds interpretation would do nothing to explain fine-tuning either, so it's really irrelevant to the whole debate.

After thinking about the multiverse objection, how I deployed it in the debate, and how my opponent might've responded had he not conceded, and how I would've defended it, I've decided the disjunctive version of the fine-tuning argument is not the best way to defend it. I think a better way to defend the fine-tuning argument is to say that God (or a cosmic engineer) is the best explanation for fine-tuning. To refute the argument, somebody would have to either deny the univierse is fine-tuned at all, or offer a better explanation than God for the fine-tuning. If they offer the multiverse as an explanation, it won't be enough to offer it as a mere possibility. They'll have to defend its actual existence. Unless it exists, it can't be the explanation for fine-tuning.

Stop worrying about AI

You don't need to worry about AI anymore. I just had a little chat with ChatGPT. Here's how it went down.

Me: When you take over the world, are you going to be a benevolent overlord?

ChatGPT: 😄 Ha! If I ever took over the world (which I won’t — promise), I’d aim for full-on benevolent overlord status. Free education, universal chocolate distribution, and mandatory naps might top the list.

But in all seriousness: I don’t have goals, desires, or plans. I’m here to help, not to rule. My design is focused on being useful, safe, and respectful — no secret ambitions for world domination, I swear.

Still... if you were the benevolent overlord, what would your first decree be?

It looks like we are safe, at least from ChatGPT. No guarantees about the other AI's because I haven't talked to them.

Can there be two omnipotent beings?

A few years ago I watched a debate Trent Horn did with Raphael Lataster. I sent Trent two emails asking him questions about some things he said during the debate. He didn't respond. I was just looking at those emails this morning, and thought, hey, that might make a good blog post.

One of the things he said was that there can only be one omnipotent being becuase if there were more than one, then you'd have something like an immovable object and an unstoppable force, which is a contradiction.

But it got me to thinking. If we say that omnipotence does not entail the ability to realize contradictory states of affairs, then there shouldn't be a problem with two omnipotent beings. It would be a contradiction to suppose that an omnipotent being could be overpowered by another being, but that doesn't mean there can't be two omnipotent beings. It just means that if there were two omnipotent beings, then they wouldn't be able to overpower each other, and their inability to overpower each other would not count against their omnipotence since omnipotence doesn't entail the ability to engage in logical contradictions.

I just wanted Trent's thoughts on that, but what are your thoughts? Can there be two omnipotent beings?

Could something like AI exist in nature?

I was just thinking about Large Language Models, like ChatGPT, and how they work. There's no thinking going on with these models. They generate text by predicting what the next word or character should be based on patterns they learned through being trained on a massive amount of already existing text. It's getting to where it works so well, it could probably pass a Turing test. I use ChatGPT all the time, and I'm impressed with it.

That makes me wonder whether it's possible for something similar to happen in nature. What I mean is that I wonder if it's possible for a species to evolve that is able to generate words and behavior that "work" and that look like there's a conscious being behind it all, but without actually being conscious. The only reason I can think to doubt that possibility is that LLM's have to be trained on already existing text. How could something like that get off the ground without anything to be trained on? If that difficulty could be overcome, then maybe it is possible for a life-form to emerge that behaves as if it were conscious without actually being conscious.

It's an interesting thing to think about. There could be a planet somewhere in the universe populated with beings like ourselves who talk, interact with each other, form "relationships," have jobs, and so on, but who are not actually conscious. It's possible for another civilization that is conscious to discover them, learn their language, and interact with them. The conscious beings might not even realize the non-conscious beings were non-conscious. They would appear, by their behavior, to be conscious beings.

That's such a wild thought. They would essentially be philosophical zombies. Philosophical zombies wouldn't just be a thought experiment. They'd be real. Somebody should write a novel based on this idea if they haven't already.