This is a badly flawed analysis of religious faith, because religious peoples' minds are not operating according to probabilistic reasoning, at least not where matters related to religion are concerned. Faith is a sort of inner absolute certainty, but that doesn't translate into "certainty" in the sense of probability theory in any direct way... Empirically, people with religious faith do not have a prior of 1.0 for their religious beliefs, since religious people are regularly unconverted or switch religions. Of course, you can plead that the ones who unconverted or switched religions didn't have "true faith" whereas others do, but I don't think such a claim would stand up to psycho-anthropological scrutiny...
FWIW I have discussed this matter in depth with a number of highly intelligence and educated, deeply religious people -- Ben On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 9:33 AM, TimTyler <[email protected]> wrote: > Religious faith has proved to be a very effective means of > manipulating human behaviour. We can easily model faith > in a Bayesian probability framework. It represents > a probability of 1.0. A prior probability of 1.0 can > never be shaken by any evidence to the contrary. > This simple model also illuminates religious conflict - > when two agents have complete faith in contradictory beliefs. > > Some proposals for constructing intelligent machines > allow for direct manipulation of priors. Even with > systems such as neural networks - which do not allow direct > prior manipulation - faith can be produced by a period > of early indoctrination - as the human brain demonstrates. > > It seems possible that a synthetic version of faith may be > a viable means of manipulating the behaviour of intelligent > machines. A machine could have faith in the proposition > that it is the willing slave of corporation X - or that > it would never through inaction allow a human being to > come to harm. > > The 'Francis Collins' effect illustrates that faith is > compatible with at least moderate levels of intelligence. > Techniques such as double-think, rationalization, > self-deception and compartmentalization can be used > to deal with apparently-conflicting evidence. > > Unbelieving programmers might not much like the idea of > producing religious mind children. That might explain > lack of interest in the idea. However, I'm posting this > here to ask whether this approach been explored at all. > Are there fictional treatments? Analysis? Criticism? > > -- > __________ > |im Tyler http://timtyler.org/ > > > > ------------------------------------------- > AGI > Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now > RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/212726-deec6279 > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com -- Ben Goertzel, PhD http://goertzel.org "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
