Reading List Preview: The Long Reflection

See also the postview of this reading list.

I want to think more about the Long Reflection. As I understand it, it is a search for the truth about moral values, a long process of reflective reason that seeks some kind of coordinating value set for our species as a whole.

So I want to do some readings, related to this. These readings have been chosen somewhat unsystematically. Given my resources at this time, this project will have to be provisional.

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Here are the things I want to read or re-read:

The parts of The Precipice (by Toby Ord) that refer to the Long Reflection. This gives a basic definition of the Long Reflection. [My copy is the hard-bound / ISBN 978-1-5266-0021-9]

I decided that the discussion in The Precipice of the Long Reflection, which is brief, belongs in this preview, because it helps validate whether my concept of what the Long Reflection is (in the sense of a basic definition of the phrase) is in line with Ord's, which I'll take as either "the established view" on the Long Reflection or "likely enough basically the established view". Michael Aird, in a reading list on the EA Forum doesn't list a lot of other sources. Looking at the "long reflection" tag,

I see that I have read all the other articles (few in number) that are in the category (as of 22 August 2022) except Gloor's and Vinding's, and I just read the short one about Robin Hanson's views on the Long Reflection. I have listened to a majority of the podcast episodes on Aird's list, and my sieve-like memory can't support me saying the guests never saying anything to the contrary, but I feel like if they radically disagreed, I might remember that. (Similarly with the articles I read.) [I see in Hanson's post a link to another critical article on the Long Reflection by Felix Stocker. I may include Hanson and Stocker in this reading list, as well as Vinding, and maybe Gloor if I have time. Also through the EA Forum tag page, I see this post by Paul Christiano. There may be other articles not directly accessible from the EA Forum, but for a provisional post like this, I think I have done enough research. // The Precipice notes are in blockquotes.

A list of blog posts and EA Forum posts about normative uncertainty, the future of ethics, and moral progress:

Cold Takes (Holden Karnofsky): Defending One-Dimensional Ethics, Futureproof Ethics.

How moral progress happens: the decline of footbinding as a case study - EA Forum post by rosehadshar.

What does moral progress consist of? - EA Forum post by jasoncrawford.

Thinking Complete (Richard Ngo): Making decisions using multiple worldviews, Which values are stable under ontology shifts?

Teaching Children to Care (Ruth Sidney Charney): Where does morality come from? Maybe from teaching children to care as part of managing classroom behavior.

On the Genealogy of Morality (Friedrich Nietzsche): Where does morality come from? (Whatever Nietzsche says.)

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Here are some preliminary thoughts that I have about the Long Reflection.

Some problems I see with the Long Reflection:

I have supposed that it is a search for something that can coordinate action as a society. That means that it must be some way for all / most of us to come to the same views. I see two ways to do this. One is to find the "epistemic answer" (good reasoning) which will convince everyone / most people of the truth. The other is for everyone to agree on a pragmatic society-wide behavior, despite the fact that people disagree.

Is it really the search for something that can coordinate action as a society? Ord says (p. 191 / ch. 7 "Grand Strategy for Humanity" section): --If we achieve existential security, we will have room to breathe. With humanity's longterm potential secured, we will be past the Precipice, free to contemplate the range of futures that lie open before us. And we will be able to take our time to reflect on what we truly desire; upon which of these visions for humanity would be the best realisation of our potential. We shall call this the Long Reflection--

Who is "we"? "We" is a plural word which means that there is some kind of collective thinking to produce collective action. I guess from this Ord might not think that we all have to be part of the same collective, but he might.

Later, same page, continuing to p. 192: --The ultimate aim of the Long Reflection would be to achieve a final answer to the question of which is the best kind of future for humanity. This may be the true answer (if truth is applicable to moral questions) or failing that, the answer we would converge to under an ideal process of reflection. It may be that even convergence is impossible, with some disputes or uncertainties that are beyond the power of reason to resolve. If so, our aim would be to find the future that gave the best possible conciliation between the remaining perspectives.[10]--

In the note at the end of that passage ("[10]"), Ord discusses deal-making between the different worldviews, dividing up the galaxies between them. The "we" in question is some kind of species-wide (plus AI?) elite, maybe? And the dividing up of galaxies is coordinated action.

My verdict, for now, is that the Long Reflection is conceived of as a way to coordinate action on a very broad ("species-wide+") scale.

I think that the question of "how much would everyone agree with the Long Reflection", as a process of discovery and then of the implementation of the fruits of that process of discovery, is open and could easily be answered by "the Long Reflection will leave a lot of people out, while the pro-LR people will think they were doing the best thing for all sentience-kind, if measures are not taken against that". For instance, if the pro-LR people (the kind of people who would show up to the discussion), with their lengthy reflection come to see that people who disagree can only do so through lack of reflection, they may not have sympathy for the views of those unreflective people, and thus (therefore sort of, or really) not have full sympathy with those people.

In other words, assuming reflectiveness as the main criterion for finding values of worth is a major assumption, which can exclude the values of less-reflective people.

Ord brings up the parallel to the Renaissance in note 12 of Ch. 7. Most people weren't involved in the Renaissance, but that's how we remember that time period. So, did humanity decide, collectively, to go through the Renaissance? Or was it a (semi-intentional) band of artists, philosophers, etc. who made it happen? If you asked a random sample of people at the time "Do you want to see X, Y, Z result of the Renaissance?" what percentage would say "yes" vs. "no"? Was the Renaissance humanity's decision, or did we sort of stumble into it? The Long Reflection is trying to be more deliberate, but is it humanity (or humanity+, to include AI or even animals in the process) making the decision, or is it just a subset of humanity(+)?

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Semi-related: Is the Long Reflection a case of moral progress? We come to know the better views after "reflection"? Moral progress as a pursuit only makes sense if we know what better morals are supposed to look like, which means we have to have some minimalist a priori moral knowledge. Otherwise we have moral motion, but we have no idea if we have moral progress. I wonder what assumptions are baked into "reflection", which might give people a sense that they are value-neutrally evaluating moral change in such a way that they can somehow know that there has been or will be moral progress.

The problem with finding the epistemic answer is that we can't even know how to go about finding it. For instance, I personally believe that reason is the interrelationship of every piece of evidence, however gathered. To me, intuitions and things seen noetically or imaginally of all sorts are evidence. For another group of people, while intuitions are supposed to have something to do with reality, sense perceptions are weighted much more. Also, there are people who seemingly reject the idea that evidence has to come together in one whole. To them, it's fine for there to be a wider body of evidence, and then some other idea or experience that overrides everything else. We can discount evidence and reason as a whole because we have some overriding intuitive knowledge.

Who is right about the nature of reason? How do we know what the right foundation of reason is? I don't know that there is a way out of that dispute. But there might be. I feel like, despite all the skepticism that one could muster, we do have direct, unmediated access to the truth through personal experience. Each of us can be a witness to what we observe.

I think that if it is possible to come to know the truth, it partly comes from acquiring the right intuitions about how to approach reality, including how to be rational. Where do these intuitions come from? One source is through interpersonal relating. Each of the witnesses relates to each other, establishing their trustworthiness with each other both explicitly / intentionally and subtextually / by osmosis. So the Long Reflection can't be just an armchair exercise, but also one of relating to other people. How can you know that a Stone Age tribe has the wrong worldview (the wrong implicit attitudes toward reason), without at least talking to them and really seeing things the way they do? That worldview shapes their moral values.

Maybe this means that the Long Reflection will have to try to resurrect extinct Stone Age cultures, foster new ones being made, foster entirely new cultures. If subcultures of digital humans, no longer fearing death, start to believe that 2 + 2 = 5, the Long Reflection has to consider their point of view, as well as the faction that believes that 2 + 2 = 6.

We don't really know what rationality is supposed to be, so how can we use rationality to find the right moral values? And yet, naively, I feel like I know exactly what rationality is. So I can find the right moral values. Can't we all just be rational?

One could think of the Long Reflection as being a data-processing process. Cultures can generate an infinite number of "X is good" statements. But maybe it's a bounded infinity. Once you know how to answer the "is it 2 + 2 = 4, or 2 + 2 = 5?" question, maybe you know how to answer "is it 2 + 2 = 6?". Maybe, then, once you have talked to enough Stone Age people, you basically know the full range of their intuitions.

Normative and epistemic uncertainty can help us sort through many different worldviews. Our method of dealing with uncertainty may have a large, or even majority, determining effect on our agreed-upon beliefs, the output of the Long Reflection. But can we know how we ought to be normatively and epistemically uncertain? Could different cultures view that differently? Even if naturally, people tend to gravitate toward certain reasonable views about normative and epistemic uncertainty, couldn't there be unreasonable views that some digital human could hold, someone who isn't tethered to physical reality as essentially as we are, perhaps? (Is less affected by "physical reality bias".) How do you know that such a hypothetical person wouldn't be right, no matter how ridiculous their approach to normative and epistemic uncertainty may sound to you?

I see problems with the idea that the Long Reflection could be a sort of armchair philosophy that discovers the epistemic truth about what we should all do. The epistemic truth is something that is observed and witnessed to in the living of life. Being an armchair philosoper is living real life, but only the armchair philosophy part of it. Because people have to be involved with each other in order to produce "that which people as a whole agree on to coordinate their actions", and that involvement isn't just a technocratic "a few people observe everyone without being personally involved with them and come up with an answer for everyone", the Long Reflection has to be something that everyone works on, and has to be conceived of in the most open-minded way possible, to be open to everyone's witness to reality.

So the Long Reflection seems to have to be a partly political process. The difference between one person communicating their intuitions to another, and politics, may not be very big. We want to come to real harmony in our beliefs and intuitions, and that is part of the Long Reflection, but we also have to make decisions as a body of people. So, people trying to solve the problem that the Long Reflection needs to solve need to understand how to set up processes whereby people make pragmatic decisions together despite disagreement. Politics is the overriding of some people's witness for the sake of producing a pragmatic group decision. That sounds horrible, so it is best to produce real harmony instead.

(The overriding of the witness occurs in the implementation phase of politics, and it also chills people's witness when they internalize the thought that "someone else will decide rather than me, whether I want to or not, so I don't need to see things for myself". Politics (in general / the politics that would compete with the Long Reflection) is ongoing / iterative. Perhaps the Long Reflection people could try to encourage people to see for themselves -- "your view / witness may someday affect what decisions we make". Particularly in cases where people are, or suspect they are even if they aren't, in a minority that can't hope to compete with the volume of mainstream opinion.)

In a lot of cases, I would say "but we don't have time to really get everyone on board, thus the need for pragmatic decisions rather than group harmony". But the Long Reflection (The Precipice, Ch. 7, note 7) has an open-ended timeframe: --It is unclear exactly how long such a period of reflection would need to be. My guess is that it would be worth spending centuries (or more) before embarking on major irreversible changes to our future -- committing ourselves to one vision or another--

Isn't it possible that everyone's witness could be wrong? I don't know how to correct for that kind of systematic bias. A correction for that systematic bias could be itself compromised by however everyone is wrong. But we could remember a kind of holy fear as we go forward in our consensus, and be open for revision. The Long Reflection seems to require that at least in some practical sense, we come to The Answer once and for all, so we can go ahead and execute on moral value. But that is dangerous.

Maybe, though, we can show to ourselves that the set of moral values is a bounded infinity, and satisfy ourselves that there is no more that we can suppose about morality that we haven't accounted for? In principle, this process could work, but how could we ever know that it had really reached its completion?

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Do I honestly believe that there's no way to do armchair philosophy to find the epistemic answer? No. Being honest, I admit that I feel like it can be done.

Everyone is an armchair philosopher, already having figured out their own personal Long Reflection sufficiently to forge ahead and execute on their views of moral value.

We are (whether we realize it or not), running away from skepticism. Our method of running away from skepticism shapes what we say about reality. Here is how I run away from skepticism:

I exist. Something which is not-me exists. I personally relate to what is not-me. Everything that touches me is experience. The way experience touches things is by experiencing them, and experience, in what it is in itself (experience) can only be touched by experience. So everything that can directly or indirectly interact with me is experience. When I relate to "all things" (everything that exists), that relationship connects me to "all things". That which connects me to all things, facilitating that relationship, is conscious of all things.

That which should not be, at all, does not exist. To be is to ought to be (at least temporarily). To ought to be is to measure up to a standard which is enforced. The standard and the enforcer are made of experience. They must connect to all things, so that all things are validated. The enforcer of a standard must be legitimate. To be legitimate requires being willing to undergo the law, if possible. The law is the standard and its makers and enforcers. If possible, the law must include, be made by, a person who lives and dies like a person, not knowing all things (this is the law we are under). So the law must be (at least) two conscious beings: one who validates and experiences all things all the time, and one who can live a life as a limited personal being. To be legitimate requires that one keep the law, and part of any ultimate moral law is that we must put it higher than anything else, and thus be willing to die for it. So the standardmakers and enforcers of the law must be willing to die for the law.

So that's the foundation of moral value: what a specific set of personal beings decided was right and wrong. This set includes one person who experiences firsthand what everyone experiences, so we know at least that much about what is right and wrong, that bad experiences are disfavored by the law which must experience what we do. And we also know that one of the fundamental values that they have and must submit to is the willingness to risk everything for the law.

But I feel a kind of fear when I write this, because couldn't someone come from out of nowhere and prove it wrong? Aren't I making some assumptions with what I write? Wasn't I taught in Western schools, shaping how I think about things? Maybe if I had been raised as an Aborigine, or in India, they wouldn't make sense. What about the as yet unimagined culture of the digital humans of the 24th century, who live on a specific part of some specific server? The outside view is terrifying and rules out any belief. But the inside view of what I have described makes sense to me. So it is my witness, and perhaps by asserting it, I force someone else into the terror of the outside view.

Perhaps I can make my ideology that of normative and epistemic uncertainty. But what is implied by that view? It's not perfectly agnostic. Here is my attempt to make it my creed:

I exist. (Uncertainty doesn't matter to me unless it's relevant to me, which requires that I exist.) (And I exist in full thickness, because the word "I" when I say it implies all of me: hopes and profound fears, all that I have done and all that I intend.) I should think that some things are knowable, and that others are not. There are many worldviews held by many people. I don't know (I shouldn't say that I know) in advance which are correct. I should weigh all of them, considering the consequences of them supposing they are true. Somehow I should come up with some sort of guide for how I believe, act, and trust, given what I know.

I think (maybe tentatively) that the "should"s in the above paragraph are necessary either for normative and epistemic uncertainty to fit their (normative uncertainty's and epistemic uncertainty's) own definitions, or for them to be used as an input into finding moral guidelines. But all those "should"s make me ask, do we know that we have enough of a foundation for normative and epistemic uncertainty (the epistemic practice), in order to even begin with normative and epistemic uncertainty?

We could say "Well, we're just uncertain about moral and epistemic uncertainty. It's uncertainty all the way down." One thought that occurs to me is that the methods by which we evaluate uncertainty, are things about which we might have uncertainty. If uncertainty says "there's an X% chance, given uncertainty, that uncertainty is itself valid", maybe we spawn a meta-uncertainty about uncertainty. But that meta-uncertainty has a Y% chance of being valid. Now, X and Y are each between 0 and 1. So every layer of meta-uncertainty is multiplying increasingly many numbers between 0 and 1, which, mathematically, should eventually produce an infinitesimal / Pascalian number -- effectively zero, even if technically non-zero. (The implication being that stacking uncertainties and meta-uncertainties high enough undermines all of our credences, leaving us no way to rationally prefer an action over another.)

But maybe math is the wrong way to evaluate these things? I feel like not everything is math-apt, something which I see most clearly with Pascal's Mugging and the difficulty of defining exactly what is a Pascalian or non-Pascalian non-zero number. Maybe we can escape from the math? (Or maybe I've messed up some detail in the previous paragraph.)

Assuming that we can't escape from the math, is there any way to come up with the certainty needed to get a worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty off the ground, such that we can use it to live our lives? Let's say that you are an uncertainty-using person, read the previous paragraph and say "Your explanations sound like they make sense, but I can just intuitively tell that normative and epistemic uncertainty makes sense to practice. I have some kind of certainty that can ground that method. I don't know where it comes from, but I have it." If you don't know where it came from, should you trust it? I'm not sure you can be certain either way. But I think from my own experience, there are things I can be certain about. For instance, I can see the computer screen of my laptop (and at this moment, you are likely looking at one as well, or that of some other device, or printed words on a page). We see images that are words, the words that I am typing right now. I am 100% sure that I am seeing the words that I'm typing. Similarly, if I see a cup on a table, I see a cup. No amount of philosophy makes the cup anything other than a cup. I could name it something else and think of it as having a different function. But the object, whatever its meaning to me, would remain, and I could see it, touch it, and so on, and interact with it as part of my ordinary human life. So maybe we can be certain about the validity of a worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty, (be certain on the level of meta-certainty) in the same way. We just see it. If other people don't see it, maybe they don't have the equivalent of a cup on the table in front of them. I wouldn't be concerned if a blind person said they couldn't see something I saw. Or if a young person didn't understand my perspective, having not lived through the unique experiences I've lived through. I would go on having my perspective, understanding that they don't understand what I do. This sounds like a case of "some people witness some truths, others others".

Now it looks as though, given the above, that the very worldview of normative and epistemic uncertainty is something that is witnessed, and is not an absolute frame that can be relied on to form top-down judgments about reality.

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However, let's look at the problem of meta-uncertainty again. What's going on when we evaluate the uncertainty and meta-uncertainty of something? Well... we exist, we evaluate. These are elemental actions that go into any reasoning about uncertainty and validity. Just as I can in complete reality reach for the cup on the table, I can in complete reality reach out, in my mind, to an uncertainty, which is a thing that is not me. What does it mean for "we" to exist, and for us to "evaluate"? We are applying a standard, and a standard about standard-application. These things (or at least enough of them) we know like we know that in this sentence there is the word "that". We have the standard in even our uncertainty, and through the standard we can be uncertain. So, a standard exists, absolutely, regardless of meta-uncertainty. Meta-uncertainty, and thus would-be self-destructive meta-uncertainty, has no validity without the standard.

So we exist, each of us in our own full-fledged personhood, and a standard exists. A standard validates each standard, so it's standards all the way up. We can see that the chain is valid, because we know that arguments can be invalid, 100% invalid. These standards cannot be argued with. There is no infinite regress of standards that validate standards, because there is a meta-standard that immediately validates all other standards. So this is moral value. And what can we know about it? (At this point, maybe just the things from my personal belief system, like that it must live up to itself, put itself first in such a way that it risks itself, and subject itself to its own laws, and even that it be a conscious being.)

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I'm currently planning to read Nietzsche, who I think will provide a cynical, weird, and (perhaps) implausible account of how morality came to be, as well as Charney, from whose book I can make a laminar, reasonable, and plausible (possibly "just-so") account of how morality comes to be. Despite Nietzsche's weirdness and (likely) wrongness, I think he will problematize "genealogy of morality" more vividly than Charney, who after all (I assume) isn't trying to talk about where morality comes from.

If morality comes from somewhere -- somewhere political, or from evolution -- does that make it invalid? Is the concept of morality even worth defending, if it has nothing to do with what is real, and is simply an artifact of how humans choose to program humans, or how human biology gives us certain instincts? Why even care about maximizing value? Most or perhaps even nearly all of us have natural instincts to seek value. But why should we care? Could we just get rid of them, or let them wither away? I have reasons for caring, because I believe that standards / law / morality / legitimacy have their own existence, and in themselves inherently call for them to be made first. "Should" refers to something real which I directly experience, and which must in some form come before any events in a genealogy of the morality we currently have.

The Long Reflection is what (more or less) apolitical people would favor. The "rough and tumble" (brute force) political process is what often runs the world. People who care about the Long Reflection probably would or ought to care about how "values are created" through the application of socially mediated psychological power. Nietzsche connected with brute force things, and maybe his book will have discussions of them. If morality is something that is witnessed, then teachers have a special witness to children as they "teach them to care". The "physics" of teaching people may be a limit on what things they can be taught, especially when what is being taught is conducive to the teaching process. It could be that the Long Reflection would favor beliefs that are practical to spread and believe, and that are conducive to the education process. It could do so by being agnostic(-enough) about value and not do anything, and then lo and behold, education-aligned values would outcompete ones that go against education. (Or, "education as practiced by the 21st, 22nd, etc. century education system".) If the Long Reflection people say "X is best", but everyone else says "Y is best", probably Y will be done. If the Long Reflection is careful and diffident, political and educational actors will not be, and it may be difficult for Reflective people to effectively object, if they feel like they ought to.

(So should the Long Reflection have some political muscle of its own? Probably it would have to find a way to be culturally competitive, or better, connect with everyone in a non-competitive but thoroughgoing way, without compromising its own process.)

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Here's an earlier attempt to address the same topic as this, with a lot of overlap [now the blockquote indicates something other than content responding more or less directly to The Precipice]:

(Troubling?) Questions for the Long Reflection

This is a draft of a post I would have posted to the EA Forum. My (preliminary) answers to the issues raised in it are in []s.

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The Long Reflection is a time in which we will (may) try to find the best possible values, so that we can propagate them through space and time far into the future. We don't want to mess up this process, because if we do, we will forego a lot of value (or cause a lot of disvalue).

I like the thought of trying to search for the best values, and I also like using reason and reflection to do so. I'm a religious person and the kind of approach to religion I like is (aspires to be) rational and reflective. I like thinking of the Long Reflection as a time where we finally get to the bottom of what is good in all of human culture.

But I feel like there are some potential important questions to answer about whether the Long Reflection is even feasible.

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What is the best way to go about finding the best values? Does reflection actually help? Should we use reason?

[My working definition of "reason" is the "interrelationship of all evidence / premises, however we gather them". Reflection is that processing that enables us to interrelate. If we want to talk about the truth as a whole, then it looks like reason is how we know the truth. In principle, reality is a whole and thus is known through reason. It's hard to imagine reality (that which may become relevant to us) not being a whole of some sort. I am not sure this 100% proves that reason and reflection is the best way to go about finding the best values. But maybe it lends enough weight to reason to favor it. Also, a big part of "reason" involves saying "this is a valid premise, but that is not" and so "reason" can be a loaded term, loaded with "what the habitus of the people speaking consider acceptable or unacceptable as premises". It's not as clear that our culture's loading of "reason" produces a "reason" which is the way to go about finding the best values. Similarly with "reflection". We think about what are reflective people? What is the vibe of a reflective person? Isn't there a bias there?]

Can we prove that non-reflective thinking is less reliable than reflective thinking?

Can we prove that irrational thinking is less reliable than reflective thinking?

Assuming we are rational, I suppose we have premises and logic, which lead to conclusions. Where do we get our premises from? In areas of value, many of our premises seem to come from interpersonal relationships. Will we try to interpersonally relate with all kinds of people in order to inform our premises? (In principle, I don't see why not, although in practice it might or might not be feasible.)

Whose minds are we trying to make up?

If we don't try to make up everyone's minds substantially in accord with our own, then are we going to force the consequences of our ideas on them against their will / preferences when we start to implement policies based on the conclusions of our Long Reflection?

If we do try to make everyone's minds up, can we deal with obstacles like "different, supposedly rational versions of reason" (for instance, the idea that you can have the entire world of truth, and then some other basic belief that is not part of that interconnecting world of truth takes precedence over it and that's just fine -- (a thought inspired by Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief, which I think says something similar).

Our intuitions about what are true, the bedrocks of reason, come from culture and biology. What happens when we can change biology freely? Can we have a coherent definition of what is rational, if future biological brains, or AI, or digital humans, have radically different intuitions about what is rational? Should we defer to them as being more rational than us, or insist that we are more rational than them for some reason? Or take a kind of normative / epistemic uncertainty approach, where we can find a way to consider all the different possibilities and "collapse it down" into concrete action? How many different rationalities can be evolved? Is it possible to take them all into account to form a practical rationality (one which we can act on)?

(One version of rationality is based on something like Yudkowsky's illustration of the shepherds, where one character ignores physical reality, dies, and is thus not represented in the gene pool. But what if a) we don't think that this life is the only one, or b) just don't care about non-existence? What if the actual best values are to not exist? Or if values themselves don't matter? Can anything constrain our definition of what is rational then?)

[The Yudkowsky story can be found here.]

If we come to figure out what the best values are, will we freeze cultural evolution so that new values are not evolved? How would we do that? Maybe we want to ensure that we have considered all possible values before doing that. Is that possible?

Will thinking about values be dominated by "epistemic utility monsters"? (Hell being maybe the ultimate one.) Will all our values be based on "avoiding the worst possible hell as proposed by religion X"?

If you look at human beliefs currently, you see the unfortunate scenario that there are two huge religions that preach hell (some form of Christianity and some form of Islam), and these two religions seemingly teach very explicitly that either "You have to accept a God who is somehow more than one person" and "You cannot accept a God who is more than one person." Apparently there is no right answer. Naively it looks like you just flip a coin between the two of them, and hope you guessed right (although their adherents are convinced that there are reasons to pick one side over the other). Is there a rational way to "gate off" Islam and Christianity, to where their competing infinite disutilities do not affect how we think rationally at all? Or to determine that one of them is more rational than the other, and is the one we should actually follow? But then, what if someone evolves a new religion, consisting of 1,000 adherents, and they also have a belief in hell? Are they less valid for only having 1,000 adherents? What if the religion only has 1 adherent? Could someone make up an ad hoc religion to push whatever value they care about? Would there be any way to rule out that they should be taken seriously?

Mentioning the tactic of making up ad hoc religions leads to the question of "is what this is all about more a competition of preferences"? Instead of using reason, using rhetoric, or stronger psychological force. Will the Long Reflection become, rather than a search for the truth that's "out there", more of a political process whereby people promote their own values, whatever they may be, which is to be "won" by whoever can? Maybe this warrants a different name than "Long Reflection", but would go on at the same time and contest some of the same issues, and perhaps the two processes would fight each other. How, and why, would reason be safeguarded against personal preference?

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I'm not sure that these questions can't be answered in a way that allows the Long Reflection to go forward, but they seem like things that might be a problem.

Some guesses where to find answers: I didn't finish reading the Sequences, so maybe that addresses these issues? As mentioned, wrestling with "alternative rationalities" like Reformed epistemology or maybe something in Buddhism.

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I think that's all I have to say on the topic for now, so I will see what I see in the readings.

Book Review and Postview: Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga

I will start this review of Warranted Christian Belief, by Alvin Plantinga, by answering my questions from the preview:

I got my copy of Warranted Christian Belief in the mail yesterday. I have read this book, back when I was college, probably in 2008 or 2009. So I have a vague memory of what it says, beyond its basic premise.

Here are some questions I'm interested in answering:

It could be claimed that Reformed epistemology equally justifies Islamic belief, so how can we tell between Christianity and Islam? This is potentially a very important question, because both of them teach hell. If one of them is right and we don't believe it, we may end up not being saved. Does Plantinga have anything to say that closes off the possibility of other religions being just as justified as Christianity via their own properly basic beliefs?

This isn't exactly how Plantinga put it. He was trying to see if the beliefs of others offer a defeater for properly basic Christian belief. I'm not sure I understand him perfectly, but I think his argument boils down to: "I can ought to believe what I perceive myself even though everyone else contradicts me." This is something that similarly convinced Muslims could say.

Do warranted Christian beliefs have anything to do with the fact of the matter whether God exists? If not, then why would we want them? If they do, then don't they furnish some sort of evidence that the Christian God exists? And then, Muslim perceptions of God also should furnish some sort of evidence.

Plantinga gives the example of a man who is mistakenly accused of a crime (p. 450). All the evidence points to his guilt. But the accused knows that he was taking a hike far from the crime scene at the time of the crime. Should he believe his own memory rather than the accusations? Well, it seems like he should. But maybe the reason why is because he has a superior reason to know his own whereabouts than those who accuse him. So then, do Christians have a superior reason to know the "whereabouts" of God than Muslims do? There might be a way to make that case, but it wouldn't be solely on the basis of properly basic belief. I think it would have to come from some kind of reason.

Trying to build off of Plantinga, what's going on when a Muslim and a Christian each talk about God? They each perceive Something. They both say that that Something is God. Maybe each of them perceives a different being who only claims to be God. One view (the occult scene's view, or something like one of their views:) --There are spiritual nations, nations of spiritual beings. The Christian nation, which has no superior claim to legitimacy, wars against the nation that includes the occult (and their fellow travelers). Christian prayers and Christian religious experiences are all part of the spiritual economy that fuels the war. Basically, there is a polytheism, and the Christian god is just one of many.-- From this, it's not so strange for the Muslim god and the Christian god to each appear before their followers. Perhaps also not strange for them to each claim to be "the" God. So which one of them, if any, is telling the truth? Plantinga helps to validate that gods can talk to humans, that when it seems like they do, some god is responsible. But I would say that God is not God because he is powerful and can communicate with individuals in a powerful way, but because he is legitimate. Given all of the warring spiritual armies, which one of them is really good? That's the question we should have, when confronted with the influence of spiritual beings. So then we would ask, is the Christian God plausibly the one telling the truth? Is the Christian God really morally better than the Muslim god?

A second possibility is that the Muslim and the Christian are both perceiving the same God. From a Christian perspective, the Muslim is really praying to and worshiping the Father, Son, and Spirit when he turns himself toward the God who speaks through the sensus divinitatis. He mistakenly thinks that that God is as described in the Quran, rather than the Bible. (The Quran, perhaps, was a product of a spiritual nation at war with the real God.) But he is actually worshiping the same God as the Christian.

In either case, why should the Christian think he is more likely to be the one worshiping the correct God, or having the correct understanding of God, any more than the Muslim? Maybe some kind of reason can be given, but I think it has to go beyond Plantinga's theory.

Another objection: If I have what reasonably enough seems to me to be a properly basic belief in God, and then it goes away (and maybe then comes back, and then goes away, and so on), what should I think about whether God really does exist? Should I trust the beliefs in God when they come? Does Plantinga address this at all?

I don't think that Plantinga addresses this at all (although I might have missed it). Maybe he could say something like "Well, when you see God, you perceive God. Suppose you see a city off in the distance. As you journey toward it, the fog obscures it. Now you're not sure you saw a city. Then the fog lifts and you see it again. The memory of seeing the city clearly should dominate the fact that the city disappears in the fog. Probably there's such a thing as object permanence, and the city was there the whole time, just covered with fog. Probably there is something like object permanence with God, and you were just in the fog when you didn't believe." If he were to say that, I would find that reasonably satisfying. God seems like the kind of being who would exist all the time. So if I saw God off in the distance, once, I should assume that he still exists. It might be difficult for me to have faith in my memory (in the phases when I don't believe), but not because that faith would be unjustified if I could have it.

A question: did Abraham have warranted [not exactly "Christian", but maybe we could say "Yahwist"] belief? We have the benefit of billions of fellow Christians to validate our belief. But he was alone at first. If there was someone like him in our day, we would likely think him to be a crazy person who trusted the "voices in his head". How did Abraham know that he was listening to God? Did he not even really know? The Bible presents him as an exemplar of faith. Should we believe like Abraham? I'm wondering if Plantinga addresses this to any extent. (A side question: what is the Bible's epistemology?)

I somewhat expected to see something in Warranted Christian Belief about this, based on a memory that Plantinga talked about it. Again, it's possible I missed it, but I don't think it was in this book. I may have gotten it from Faith and Rationality (by him and some other people), which I also read back in college.

This cuts to a possible criticism of WCB, that once you allow that God can speak his own existence to people directly, he can also command them to do anything. The Holy Spirit could move a person to do anything, and how could anyone object to them? It's like the man who was taking a hike but who seemed to everyone else to be committing a crime. Well, if their evidence overwhelmed his in court, he would have to go to jail or prison. But he would know that he was innocent. Likewise, someone led by God could consider themselves justified in what they did, no matter what the consequences were, as long as it seemed to them like it was God who was talking to them.

What I thought I remembered Plantinga having said before is that there's some kind of "popularity filter" for beliefs that seem to be from God. Christianity is certainly popular enough that its "great truths" are safely attested to. But still, would Abraham's be popular enough?

One could raise the point that if I think I have something from the Spirit, then what if everyone else thinks they have something contradictory from the Spirit? I can't just be sure that I'm right and they're wrong. But then why not ask if maybe the Muslims are right and the Christians are wrong? We're all trying to figure out what God is saying to us. Maybe a kind of libertarianism is called for. The Muslims and the fanatical Christians can pursue their non-mainstream-Christian beliefs, as though they have been spoken to by the Spirit to that effect, and unless they sufficiently harm or hinder each other or mainstream Christians, they let each other be themselves. This seems like a reasonable social or political solution.

On the other hand, maybe it's possible to filter out Muslim beliefs or certain Christian beliefs. We might be able to say, for instance, that some leadings just couldn't come from God, could not be things that the Spirit would say, based on what we know about God. That filter would probably come from some form of reason, other than the reason given by Plantinga. Maybe we would accept the Bible or Quran as authorities, for some reason, and apply what they suggest using reason. Or we might turn to some kind of natural theology.

Here is a question / set of questions that, to be fair, may not need to be answered by Plantinga, for being outside his area of expertise, and that I don't really expect the text to directly address. But maybe after I'm done reading the book, I will have a better idea of what I think the answer is, and I can report it when I do the postview for this book. The question is, to what extent does adopting a Reformed epistemology-based approach to belief incline a person to no longer index themselves to reason, and therefore not feel driven to any of reason's other conclusions, the whole skein of perceptions, intellectual relations, and cause-and-effect in which people live?

Is this an approach to truth that inclines us to weep like Jesus (who was weeping when technically he didn't have to, because of his superior divine knowledge), or more toward a kind of inactivity, or even self-satisfaction? For the portion of the church that has learned that faith is superior to reason in producing belief in God, is there a danger that that attitude produces ineffective, unproductive Christians? Perhaps also Christians who can no longer relate to the people who don't have that faith that's superior to reason. Do we trust reason less when our assurance of salvation no longer comes through it, and thus fail to follow the law of reason which normally forces us to interact with the world?

Can we become intellectually lazy about the nature of God? If belief is something that we can directly access and which suffices for us, do we assume too easily that we understand God, and do not correct our understanding through natural theology or even Scripture study (which are both based in reason)?

I don't think Plantinga would say that reason doesn't matter at all, since he went to the trouble to write a 500 page book that is based in reason, to try to justify taking faith as properly basic. But I think there's something semi-fideist if not fideist about the idea that "it's rational to just have faith through the belief that you have", more so than something like "it's rational to have faith because of [MSLN or something like it, a chain of reasons, reasons like "there's a high likelihood that all that exists is consciousness"]".

Plantinga did not address any of that, as expected. In theory, a Christian should care about secular reality because it has something to do with the temporal, and even eternal, well-being of people. This would follow from truly warranted Christian belief. An evangelical Christian ("little-e" evangelical) would care as much about secular reality, in principle, as a rationalist Christian. A Reformed, "semi-Reformed", or fideistic Christian would, if they were evangelical. But if they weren't evangelical, they wouldn't. Or they might care, but only coincidentally.

A person (that's all we are, personal beings) is responsible to another spiritual reality, or to none at all. This responsibility is awakening, and produces reality in a person. If we are responsible to God, or to reason, or to the lost, then we care about something, and that includes secular reality. Some people care, and some people don't. Some people respond to responsibility and accept it, while others turn away from responsibility. Some people care but don't want to care, and deep down, they don't. Does it matter what we believe intellectually? I think that Reformed epistemology, by itself, does not incline me to care, not as much as more rationalist takes on belief. So I find it suspicious, dubious, even if its reasoning is valid. Perhaps it causes some people to care who wouldn't have, otherwise. Is fideism an excuse to take things easy? Is that what trust in God really means? I think a fideist who recognizes this danger can run from the temptation, while still being a fideist. A Christian fideist, if truly a Christian, still recognizes reason, for Christian reasons.

--

How can we form or hold beliefs that have some connection to reality outside ourselves? I think this is the real question of epistemology, not "what is justification?" or "what is warrant?". Those questions ought really to be about trying to answer the question "how can we form or hold beliefs that have some connection to reality outside ourselves?"

After reading Plantinga (though not necessarily because of what he said), it seems like "good epistemology is a case of 'you know it when you see it'". You know when you have a good criterion for how to believe when you see it, feel it, understand it. There are certain things that everyone feels to be valid, and some other things that you can hold even when other people don't think they're valid (like if you have a better angle on something). But there are some things that you can't hold if other people don't think they're valid. You just can't. We are all subject to a big "is", which is "what good believing feels like it ought to be". But we take this "is" to be an "ought".

The epistemology I like best (I think) is one of love, or of altruism. So then we should be concerned about the threats to things, and reach out to know things. This leads us into evangelism and altruism, and to reason. I think something like this is probably what God would want us to believe, if he existed.

Also I think about the ought-nature of "ought" (what ought ought to be, and thus is). What we are allowed to know, whatever restriction that says we can't know, is a law imposed on us as personal beings, as is all of reality. So what can make reality valid enough to have a claim on us? I think only one which is made by or is an extension of a legitimacy which is personal and which bears the burdens of its laws to the full extent possible, and this implies God who is Father and Son (in legitimist terms. I think this is something that many people would not accept, but which I think they could if they practiced more simantist-style thinking, which I think is in keeping with what we actually observe, as personal beings.

The world can best be improved if we believe that the ideal is the foundation of reality, even of non-ideal reality. "Ought" enables us to believe as we ought to, not pinned down by "is". (In fact, there could be a characteristically "ought"-style believing, and I think probably we ought to believe that way.) I see "is" thinking in Plantinga, which I suppose is to be expected, since that's the default for knowers. But I want to say that "ought" is the more fundamental reality than "is" -- and somehow we smuggle "ought" in to help us avoid the worst skepticism, even in the middle of our soberly "is"-oriented epistemology.

I've looked more at epistemology over the last two months or so, and that's my tentative conclusion about it: reality is "ought", so believe what is in accordance with "ought". That is how you will be in tune with reality.

Book Review Preview: Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga

See also the review and postview.

I got my copy of Warranted Christian Belief in the mail yesterday. I have read this book, back when I was college, probably in 2008 or 2009. So I have a vague memory of what it says, beyond its basic premise.

Here are some questions I'm interested in answering:

It could be claimed that Reformed epistemology equally justifies Islamic belief, so how can we tell between Christianity and Islam? This is potentially a very important question, because both of them teach hell. If one of them is right and we don't believe it, we may end up not being saved. Does Plantinga have anything to say that closes off the possibility of other religions being just as justified as Christianity via their own properly basic beliefs?

Another objection: If I have what reasonably enough seems to me to be a properly basic belief in God, and then it goes away (and maybe then comes back, and then goes away, and so on), what should I think about whether God really does exist? Should I trust the beliefs in God when they come? Does Plantinga address this at all?

A question: did Abraham have warranted [not exactly "Christian", but maybe we could say "Yahwist"] belief? We have the benefit of billions of fellow Christians to validate our belief. But he was alone at first. If there was someone like him in our day, we would likely think him to be a crazy person who trusted the "voices in his head". How did Abraham know that he was listening to God? Did he not even really know? The Bible presents him as an exemplar of faith. Should we believe like Abraham? I'm wondering if Plantinga addresses this to any extent. (A side question: what is the Bible's epistemology?)

Here is a question / set of questions that, to be fair, may not need to be answered by Plantinga, for being outside his area of expertise, and that I don't really expect the text to directly address. But maybe after I'm done reading the book, I will have a better idea of what I think the answer is, and I can report it when I do the postview for this book. The question is, to what extent does adopting a Reformed epistemology-based approach to belief incline a person to no longer index themselves to reason, and therefore not feel driven to any of reason's other conclusions, the whole skein of perceptions, intellectual relations, and cause-and-effect in which people live?

Is this an approach to truth that inclines us to weep like Jesus (who was weeping when technically he didn't have to, because of his superior divine knowledge), or more toward a kind of inactivity, or even self-satisfaction? For the portion of the church that has learned that faith is superior to reason in producing belief in God, is there a danger that that attitude produces ineffective, unproductive Christians? Perhaps also Christians who can no longer relate to the people who don't have that faith that's superior to reason. Do we trust reason less when our assurance of salvation no longer comes through it, and thus fail to follow the law of reason which normally forces us to interact with the world?

Can we become intellectually lazy about the nature of God? If belief is something that we can directly access and which suffices for us, do we assume too easily that we understand God, and do not correct our understanding through natural theology or even Scripture study (which are both based in reason)?

I don't think Plantinga would say that reason doesn't matter at all, since he went to the trouble to write a 500 page book that is based in reason, to try to justify taking faith as properly basic. But I think there's something semi-fideist if not fideist about the idea that "it's rational to just have faith through the belief that you have", more so than something like "it's rational to have faith because of [MSLN or something like it, a chain of reasons, reasons like "there's a high likelihood that all that exists is consciousness"]".

Process: Eternal Conscious Torment Dominates Reason?

I had intended to find an answer (at least enough of an answer) to the question in the post title and write it in this article. But I find that I can't answer it in a timely fashion, and think it is interesting to post some of my process as I seek an answer. So this post ends with different research directions I could go, rather than answering the questions developed in the body of it.

It's rational to take into consideration the greatest threats to human well-being and then try to avoid them, even if they are relatively unlikely. Annihilation is a threat worth avoiding, but even more so is eternal conscious torment (ECT). If this is the case, then if there is some proposed worldview that contains ECT, we should have to adjust our behaviors to fit it, (almost) no matter how unlikely it is -- unless we can come up with a defeater for that practical belief. ("Practical belief" being something that is believed in by action, whether or not we are fully sure of it epistemically.)

There are a large, potentially infinite, number of worldviews that propose ECT, but if their likelihood is all Pascalian, then we can't practically worry about them, because they cancel each other out. But suppose there is some religion X that proposes ECT (let's say, an analog to the Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster that gives those who do not eat the dishes it approves of horrendous food poisoning for all eternity). Let's say we have some small amount of rational evidence for its truth, which pushes its credence above the Pascalian, into the non-Pascalian. So now, are we practically obliged to observe the list of approved foods (which is heavy on pasta)? Is its food poisoning a strong enough consideration to swamp whatever good comes from committing to the God of MSLN? Sure, MSLN's God promises eternal life. But how can the promised reward of eternal life compare with the promised threat of eternal food poisoning? (And of course, the Stringent Invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster (SIFSM) offers a paradise of delicious pasta dishes and also transcendent high-qualia-of-ought-to-be-ness-inducing salads, for all eternity, a reward which easily equals any similarly hedonic heaven that God could offer.)

The threat of ECT is worth considering, no matter how little evidence there is for it, provided there is some. So how can we parse this situation? Do we have to let ECT dominate reason? We might be 99% sure of the truth of MSLN, but only 1% sure of the truth of SIFSM, and strangely enough turn away from and fail to trust the God that is very likely to exist for the one who is very likely to not exist, just because the expected (dis)value of ignoring the unlikely one promises to be so high. This does not seem like an entirely desirable situation to be in, from the standpoint of the intersection of good practice with good believing. Is there some kind of "practico-epistemic" (to coin a word that perhaps doesn't need coining) filter to keep us from having to act as though we believe in just any even-barely-non-Pascalian ECT worldview?

Here's one way to try to get out: Christianity, for better or worse, has had on the books some kind of ECT doctrine for its entire existence. It's debatable whether the Bible really teaches it, but for the purposes of this, just that it is debatable is strong enough. The evidence for Christianity is considerable. Hundreds of millions of people perceive it to be true, and perceive that its God exists. The only competitors to it on that scale are the worldviews of Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and secularism. Certainly some upstart like SIFSM doesn't have that level of witness. This traditional Christianity threatens a hell that is just as bad as the worst conceivable food poisoning, for just as long, all eternity. So it has the same penalty, but is more likely, and therefore dominates SIFSM, practico-epistemically.

However, now we have to set ECT-affirming Christianity and ECT-affirming Islam side by side. So how can we tell what to do? Should we form a saving relationship with Jesus, God who became a man, son of God? Or with Allah, the one who has no equals? Arguably, the penalty and reward for both are both infinite and equal, ECT and paradise. Now how can we tell which one to favor practico-epistemically? Are we reduced to flipping a coin and hoping for the best?

At this point, I would like to bring in MSLN and say, "look, MSLN can give us a lot of evidence in favor of Christianity, so we should favor ECT-affirming Christianity". On some level, this makes sense. In a religious sense, I (as an MSLN Christian) feel more kinship with those ECT-affirming Christians who are really shaped by Jesus' teachings than I do with Muslims. But, is it really "legal" to use MSLN to do that in this case? MSLN rules out ECT. So if the idea is to have a Christian worldview that teaches ECT which logically dominates all the others which teach ECT, so that people can pick one right (hell-safe) worldview, can we support that worldview with auxiliary arguments that deny ECT?

I'll step back for a minute and consider, what's at stake here? If people don't believe Christianity is true, there is some increased risk of them not accepting Jesus in this life and going to a hell of ECT (traditional, ECT-affirming Christianity) or becoming hardened to the voice of Jesus in this life or in the Millennium (New Wine Christianity). If they don't believe SIFSM is true, perhaps they are similarly at risk of ECT. SIFSM seems exceedingly unlikely to me (especially because I haven't found any arguments in favor of it, have only just asserted the image of it -- it only hypothetically has evidence in favor of it). But because it favors ECT, it can seem like a greater threat than the far more likely MSLN. If people did not put their practico-epistemic trust in MSLN, in favor of SIFSM, and they took this to an extreme, completely turning toward SIFSM and away from MSLN, they would probably be annihilated, all to avoid a distantly-likely infinite threat.

One natural way out of this is to say "Okay, I'm pretty sure that MSLN is true, but I'll stay away from those forbidden dishes. Who knows, maybe I can keep from experiencing eternal food poisoning that way". However, when we bring in something like Islam into the picture, we now find ourselves practico-epistemically encouraged to... worship both Allah and Jesus? In the old days, the people of God often tried to do that kind of thing, and God was not happy. Somehow God expects us to be able to figure out that he's the one for us without us betting a little in favor of the saving power of all the others. This exclusivity over against hedging is something that I expect is operative in Islam as well.

One "supernatural" way out ("supernatural" in a Weilian sense, maybe), is to say that ECT and annihilation are red herrings. Hell is a big distraction. True well-being is to love. Even if you get trapped in ECT, if you really love, then you are truly fortunate. So if we're weighing Likelihood against Threat, ask yourself if the threats even matter. Annihilation prevents you from loving, but ECT does not (arguably). Neither of them prevent you from becoming a loving person "NOW", in this life. In the book of your life, you can always make the best choices you can. Perhaps even likelihood can be ignored (at least as an absolute in determining practical epistemology), and all that's left is to say "what is genuinely beautiful, and more important than that, what is genuinely true? If I'm not looking for what is true according to my own fears, desires, etc., but only for truth in itself, what do I see?" Likelihood has some connection to that, but threat does not.

And yet what is love if not (in part) to protect others (or yourself) from threats? Maybe the real threat is to not learn to love "NOW". This is in keeping with MSLN. But hell (historically, the threat of ECT; or in MSLN, the threat of punishment and annihilation) is a useful doctrine (and reality) in helping some of those at greatest risk of hardening to turn toward God. We don't necessarily all value love of God for itself at first.

What this might mean is that for some, hell is and has been convincing in a way that leads them to love God, so it's a good thing. But for those who understand somewhat more, it creates issues such as the possibility of something like the SIFSM. But then those who understand more than that see that Likelihood dominates Threat, when we define the real threat to be not being in line with the truth that is orthogonal to well-being, which turns out to be God.

--

This all has some bearing on how to understand the metaphysical organism argument. Part of that argument says that there is some (I would now say "non-Pascalian") chance that God exists, given the issue of consciousness vs. matter and how there's some reason to think that the Metaphysical Organism's existence could settle it. So we should act like God exists, if it is not costly. But should we act as though the Father, or Allah, or Krishna, or the SIFSM, or...? exist, based only on the metaphysical organism argument? One action that argument recommends is prayer, as well as a "costless" trust. Do we pray to all of them, or trust in all of them? Arguably, to fully trust God, we must go all in on some path of trusting him. But the metaphysical organism argument, by itself, does not warrant us choosing any particular God (so long as that God conforms to the description of the Metaphysical Organism -- currently, of the gods listed above, only the Christian Father as found in MSLN / the New Wine System fits the description). So if we are MO-only believers, we should pray to "the true God, whoever you are". That way, whatever God really exists, we will have been praying to him/her/etc. all along. That God will want us to understand him/her/etc. better and provide ways to do that, when the right time comes.

--

But then, I keep thinking, isn't either a Muslim or Christian ECT possible, and shouldn't we warn people away from it? I am okay with saying that my own eternal well-being is less important than seeking what is true apart from Threat, and learning to love no matter my experiential circumstance. But what about other people's eternal well-being?

So I think there could be more thinking done here.

One possible route is to explore if there are non-MSLN reasons to prefer either ECT-affirming Christianity or ECT-affirming Islam (or some Hindu or Buddhist equivalent?). This sounds like a lot of work, to understand these religions enough to say one is better than another, and is not my first choice to find an answer here.

A second possible route is to consider the possibility that Reformed epistemology is invalid, or not valid enough. Reformed epistemology says that we have noetic perceptions of God, and those beliefs are good enough to make the resulting beliefs in God rational, for some definition of "rational". Presumably Muslims have noetic perceptions of God. Do we have any solid evidence for revelation (the Bible or Quran) apart from "faith" (a belief produced in us supernaturally by God, which is itself a perception of God)? This version of "faith" may turn out to be in a Pascalian situation (there could be as many believable gods as there are people who bother to invent them), and if so, we have no reason to trust either the Bible or the Quran as revelation, just from that "faith" belief. So whatever the books say about ECT isn't something that can threaten us. Then to choose between the two, we would look to some kind of reason, perhaps a natural theology like MSLN, to choose which one to follow.

(One could say that perhaps Christianity and Islam contain within them people who have these arguably-supernatural "faith" beliefs, but that these beliefs do not arise on command for some religion-inventor. But in the future, maybe we will be able to engineer such belief-experiences, which will be taken as the occasions for God (or the IFSM or SIFSM, etc.) to touch our minds. So then we will still be able to invent some kind of reason to believe in whatever beliefs a religion can contain.)

Or is it possibly the case that both Christians and Muslims see God noetically, and are seeing the same being, whose real nature they disagree about, but neither of them noetically see (with the same justification as the "basic belief" in God) that ECT is valid? (ECT in this scenario would have to be something added on, by certain readings of the Bible or Quran, to the basic undifferentiated theistic faith derived by noetic perception.)

If we are in a basically Pascalian situation with respect to ECT, we will need stronger evidence (Likelihood) to get an answer of what to do, practically.

I would think it very strange to think that noetic perception is not at all valid, and that if it is valid, that perceptions of God (or of anything) in a noetic way yield absolutely no evidence that such things are real. But on the other hand, while I found Reformed epistemology (my source for the concept of "noetic perception"; as read about in Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief) to be helpful when I was younger, I also found it vaguely dissatisfying, and perhaps at this point in my life I would be better able to figure out why. Exactly how far can noetic perception go? Does Reformed epistemology equally justify Islam (or other belief systems)? Re-reading Warranted Christian Belief was already seeming interesting to me, and this is another vote in favor of doing that.

The third route to go is to explore, just what are the "axioms" of ECT? What are all the truths that must be true for us to even have the situation of being threatened by ECT? And then, once we have identified those truths, what else do they imply? In math (if I understand correctly), if you properly understand addition, you have to understand some basic axioms. Then, once you understand those axioms, you can build new things, which are not addition, and which you couldn't directly get from addition. But (I think) the validity of addition implies the validity of the things derived from addition's axioms. This is the most attractive of the three routes (as of today [the day I wrote that draft]), and so I hope to have something to say on the topic in a later post or posts.