Q&A

Q: Why do I think probability is irrelevant when it comes to things like the existence of God and other peoples’ consciousness? Why is this talk of “likelihood” or “probability” meaningless, and why should I not be justified to say that it is more likely that individual consciousness of others exist than to say that God exists from an “evidential” standpoint?

A: So there are two things we need to get straight* here: probability and evidence. First of all, what is the probability of something? It is the number of a certain type of outcome divided by the number of all possible outcomes. What does it mean to talk about the probability of God existing? I would say it’s the number of possible models of the universe where a god exists divided by the number of total possible models of the universe. As for “models of the universe”, of course there are unfalsifiable ones as well as falsifiable ones - both of which there are an infinite number of. We disregard the falsifiable ones because they must all be false if they are falsifiable** and look at the unfalsifiable ones. Because there are an infinite number of possible unfalsifiable models for universes in which God either exists or doesn’t, it doesn’t seem to make sense to talk about probabilities with regard to this question. Same reasoning for the existence of other peoples’ consciousness.

Ok, now you’re going to say that there is evidence for the existence of others’ consciousness, and there is no apparent evidence for God’s existence. What do you mean by evidence? Is there really any evidence from which we can infer directly the existence of others’ consciousness or God? Behavior does not count! Sure, you can try and make an indirect inference, but you have to realize that you will never be able to find any sort of direct evidence for the existence of others’ consciousness unless you are that person (which defeats the point anyways). And then you might say that at least there’s indirect evidence of the existence of others’ consciousness, but there is none for the existence of God. And again, what are you counting as “evidence”? (Also see the real vs. imaginary people post.) Also more importantly, any talk of evidence vs. no evidence regards models that are falsifiable, and by virtue of the incompleteness theorem***, we already said that any sort of falsifiable model cannot be a complete model that describes the universe if we are describing it as an inhabitant inside the universe, so it’s unclear whether there is even a point in discussing “evidence”.

*I am always hesitant to bring in “definitions” because they mess things up a lot and turn things into war of words rather than meaning, as you know.

** Think about it. You can’t describe anything in its entirety from the inside (which is where we’re at, in the universe). i.e., incompleteness theorem.

*** The incompleteness theorem is indeed a wonderful thing, but we cannot forget that the validity of it as applied toward consciousness and/or the universe is entirely dependent on whether consciousness and/or the universe can be described as a formal system. The incompleteness theorem is a mathematical theory, and there is no reason why we should simply assume that anything can be described as a formal system.