# Is there a word for an atheist that doesn't believe but hopes God exists? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 20, 2018, 3:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789 "2018-04-20T15:54:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 10
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2018, 6:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/181 "2018-04-26T18:47:11Z")
I’d call the person a “TW”. People who believe in a god are wishful thinkers. People who don’t but wish they did are thinkful wishers. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2018, 7:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/182 "2018-04-26T19:56:40Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I’m sorry, but you’re just repeating some tired old canards nobody has taken seriously in centuries (if ever). No theist will be convinced by them, and frankly, it’s a bit embarrassing to witness an intelligent atheist repeat them as if they constituted some sort of knockdown ironclad argument. I’ve read a recent book by an academic philosopher with these arguments, which are hardly original to me. Sure theists have been rejecting them for ages. And most theists don’t care. But they at least give a definition of god, which is better than most of the arguments. > [@](#): > > I brought up necessary being; I didn’t bring up ontological arguments, or perfect-being theology. As I said, necessity by itself is circular. Your cite derives it from the definition of god as the greatest possible entity. > [@](#): > > This still doesn’t quite get at what I mean. Do you have to resort to evidence in order to decide whether your knowledge is of your experience of a headache, or a brain fart? No, of course not. The notion is incoherent: having a headache is knowing you have a headache. In the same way, participating in the knowledge of god is knowing there is a god. There’s no mediating step here, as there is with knowledge of external objects, which are known only through experience, which can be faulty, and hence, caused by something else than we think it is. This is the third time I’ve gone through this. A headache is defined as pain in the head. No, you don’t need external evidence that you have a headache. You will need external evidence to diagnose the cause of a headache. You don’t need external evidence for an experience that feels like a god experience. That is also purely internal. But unlike the headache, you are not certain if the experience is of god or just feels like it is of god but is actually due to something else. Which is not far fetched because it is possible to induce a god experience. A “god” experience needs no evidence - a God experience does. Yes, knowledge of external things can be faulty. But mapping internal states to external causes can also be faulty. And god is an external cause of a true god experience. > [@](#): > > What the Turing test tells you is whether a machine acts intelligently; as intelligence is defined behaviorally, this is sufficient to judge it intelligent. Consciousness, however, is another matter: it’s very hard to define, in behavioral terms, the subjective experience of redness, say. Think about how you would explain that experience to a blind person: if it could be objectified in the behavioral sense, this should be possible in principle. After all, every task performed intelligently could be explained to them (about as well as to any other person, at least). So it’s not straightforward to argue for consciousness from behavioral data. There have been intriguing arguments, and counter arguments, and counter-counter arguments made, but to even scratch the surface here would lead too far. That’s precisely what I was getting at when I noted that it might not be obvious that another entity is conscious, machine or no. Let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Turing tests can ask about internal states. Answers matching a human’s answer does not prove they exist, though. > [@](#): > > Perhaps to build intuition, consider that a sufficiently large lookup table could perform flawlessly on every Turing test you ever care to chuck at it. But does it strike you as plausible that the rote act of looking up entries in a table could lead to subjective experience? Look up tables are stateless and are not going to hack it. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2018, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/183 "2018-04-26T19:57:43Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > A loving god would not have allowed this thread to go on for four pages. > > QED. If Liberal were still around (and I wish he was) it would be at 8 already. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 26, 2018, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/184 "2018-04-26T20:30:31Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > As I said, necessity by itself is circular. Your cite derives it from the definition of god as the greatest possible entity. The Stanford Encyclopedia article lists this as one of the possible reasons god could be necessary, but the one it discusses in most depth is the necessity of abstract objects: [ > [@SEP](#): > > A final reason for thinking that God exists necessarily is one that we will consider in-depth in the next section of the essay: Abstract objects depend on God for their existence, and abstract objects exist in every world; therefore, God exists in every world. ]([God and Other Necessary Beings (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/)) Now, this isn’t something I’m prepared to defend. But it goes to show that god’s necessity can be argued for in different ways than from his perfection. > [@](#): > > This is the third time I’ve gone through this. A headache is defined as pain in the head. No, you don’t need external evidence that you have a headache. You will need external evidence to diagnose the cause of a headache. OK. Then tell me: what evidence do you need to know you have a headache? How could you be wrong about that, i.e. either have a headache without knowing, experiencing it, or not having a headache while believing to? As I think you accept, there is no such evidence: having a headache entails knowing that one has a headache. Hence, there is a kind of knowledge that is intrinsic and unquestionable, derived from your privileged access to your own experiences. That’s all I’m claiming: this sort of knowledge exists. Do you agree? Then, it is at least possible to have that sort of knowledge of god. You claim it isn’t, because god must be an external cause of a god-experience—but that’s a misunderstanding. I’m not claiming that one has a god-experience caused, in whatever way, by god. I’m claiming that one has a certain sort of knowledge, not a certain sort of experience, and that this knowledge is like the knowledge we have of experiences. It isn’t knowledge of experience; it’s knowledge of god. It’s merely _like_ knowledge of experience in that it is direct and immediate. You know of god just like you know you have a headache. Again, think of the knowledge ‘channels’ I proposed earlier on. There’s a channel through which experiential knowledge is present to us; the knowledge that comes through this channel is direct, and incorrigible. Now, I propose there may be a similar channel through which knowledge of god is present to us. Like knowledge of experience, it is immediate, not mediated by evidence, and incorrigible. But it’s not knowledge of experience; it’s knowledge of god. So into the one channel, experiences get fed, causing us to have the particular privileged knowledge we have of our experience (not, I reiterate, of their causes). In the other channel, god is fed, causing (some of) us to have privileged knowledge of god. This is very much not having a god experience that might have been caused by something else. Besides, it’s not clear that god is external. On most conceptions, god is immanent; on some, we are in some immediate relation with god, as on Berkeleyan idealism. > [@](#): > > Look up tables are stateless and are not going to hack it. Sure. At every request for an answer, the entire chat history is used as input to look for an appropriate reply. That’s all you need to pass a Turing test. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2018, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/185 "2018-04-27T01:56:57Z")
Well, I _want_ to believe in the female orgasm, but the is no empirical evidence for it. They _say_ that happens, and they act like it happens, but I can only guess that they are being truthful. There is no way to be absolutely certain. I mean, they tell us things to make us feel good (“_size doesn’t matter_”), so maybe it is all a fiction. There is significantly less evidence for any deity, and not as good a reason to believe. ---
**Author:** ![Biffster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/biffster/32/339_2.png) [@Biffster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Biffster)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2018, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/186 "2018-04-27T02:38:41Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > If Liberal were still around (and I wish he was) it would be at 8 already. Using Tapatalk, I get one continuous page. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2018, 6:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/187 "2018-04-27T06:01:53Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > The Stanford Encyclopedia article lists this as one of the possible reasons god could be necessary, but the one it discusses in most depth is the necessity of abstract objects: > > [URL=“[God and Other Necessary Beings (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/)”] > > Now, this isn’t something I’m prepared to defend. But it goes to show that god’s necessity can be argued for in different ways than from his perfection. I’m glad you don’t want to defend it, because it is more circular than the previous one. (And not in the way discussed in section 3.) Basically they assume abstract objects depend on god, which assumes god, which implies necessity, which implies God. And then he spends a long time describing God’s relationship to abstract objects, and ignores the initial assumption, saying only that many theists posit this, which is no doubt true. > [@](#): > > OK. Then tell me: what evidence do you need to know you have a headache? How could you be wrong about that, i.e. either have a headache without knowing, experiencing it, or not having a headache while believing to? > > As I think you accept, there is no such evidence: having a headache entails knowing that one has a headache. Hence, there is a kind of knowledge that is intrinsic and unquestionable, derived from your privileged access to your own experiences. > > That’s all I’m claiming: this sort of knowledge exists. Do you agree? I’ve agreed all along. It might be interesting to consider whether, if we are simulations, simulated pain causes a real headache. I kind of think it would. More interesting is the pain amputees experience in missing limbs. I’d say that pain was real. A headache is real even if you think it is in the front of your head but a scan showed it was in the back. I’ve had a bottom tooth kill me when the cause was a bad top tooth - and the pain went away when the top tooth was fixed. But it was still pain, and I still agree with you. > [@](#): > > Then, it is at least possible to have that sort of knowledge of god. You claim it isn’t, because god must be an external cause of a god-experience—but that’s a misunderstanding. I’m not claiming that one has a god-experience caused, in whatever way, by god. I’m claiming that one has a certain sort of knowledge, not a certain sort of experience, and that this knowledge is like the knowledge we have of experiences. It isn’t knowledge of experience; it’s knowledge of god. It’s merely _like_ knowledge of experience in that it is direct and immediate. You know of god just like you know you have a headache. You must have missed my distinguishing “god” - experienced in the god experience -with God - an actual deity which is one possible cause of the god experience. “god” is there but does not necessarily imply the existence of God. Just like a painful leg does not necessarily imply the existence of the leg. I absolutely accept the “god” experience though I’ve never had it. Self reports of it are convincing enough to me. So you have knowledge of “god” but not of God. > [@](#): > > Again, think of the knowledge ‘channels’ I proposed earlier on. There’s a channel through which experiential knowledge is present to us; the knowledge that comes through this channel is direct, and incorrigible. Now, I propose there may be a similar channel through which knowledge of god is present to us. Like knowledge of experience, it is immediate, not mediated by evidence, and incorrigible. But it’s not knowledge of experience; it’s knowledge of god. So into the one channel, experiences get fed, causing us to have the particular privileged knowledge we have of our experience (not, I reiterate, of their causes). In the other channel, god is fed, causing (some of) us to have privileged knowledge of god. This is very much not having a god experience that might have been caused by something else. I don’t think the “god” channel needs a lot of explanation, though I suspect we will someday understand the brain state that causes it, and why some people have it and some people don’t. If you are saying that the “god” experience might not be caused by anything, then we definitely agree. > [@](#): > > Besides, it’s not clear that god is external. On most conceptions, god is immanent; on some, we are in some immediate relation with god, as on Berkeleyan idealism. Or god is life like the new thread. Lots of these things are not falsifiable and are therefore not very interesting. > [@](#): > > Sure. At every request for an answer, the entire chat history is used as input to look for an appropriate reply. That’s all you need to pass a Turing test. And the tester is going to have to wait several days for the response? And be talking to a machine whose memory would be kind of large? The infinite tape is a simplification of a concept, not an actual hardware feature. I don’t think so. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2018, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/188 "2018-04-27T06:04:07Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > Well, I _want_ to believe in the female orgasm, but the is no empirical evidence for it. They _say_ that happens, and they act like it happens, but I can only guess that they are being truthful. There is no way to be absolutely certain. I mean, they tell us things to make us feel good (“_size doesn’t matter_”), so maybe it is all a fiction. Maybe an excellent simulation? [Cite.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098635/) ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 27, 2018, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/189 "2018-04-27T16:59:39Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > A headache is real even if you think it is in the front of your head but a scan showed it was in the back. This is exactly where our problems lie. This sort of thing isn’t possible: the headache is what you feel, so if you feel it in the front of your head, you have a front-of-your-headache. Whether what’s usually correlated to a headache occurred in a different part of your brain doesn’t matter: we’re not talking about correlates, or causes, of experiences, but of the experience themselves. You have a front-of-your-headache, and know it to be so; it can’t ‘actually’ be in the back of your head, because there’s no further fact to the headache but your having it. This isn’t something you could be wrong about. Likewise, people with phantom pain may be wrong about having the leg the pain ‘resides’ in, but they’re not wrong about the kind of pain they experience. They may be wrong about the cause of their experience (the leg they no longer have), just as you were with the tooth, but they’re not wrong about the experience themselves. They manifestly do have that pain; it’s the knowledge of that pain—not the knowledge of its cause—that I’m interested in. > [@](#): > > You must have missed my distinguishing “god” - experienced in the god experience -with God - an actual deity which is one possible cause of the god experience. I’m not talking about any sort of ‘god-experience’ at all. I’m talking simply about _god_, and proposing that knowledge of god may be like knowledge of experience. But that doesn’t mean one must have some kind of god-experience. Whenever you start talking about the causes of some experience, you’re veering down the wrong path. The causes don’t matter; I’m interested in solely the experiences, and how we know about those. Think about how Descartes found he could be deceived about everything in the world, but not about his own existence. It’s just not a coherent proposition to say ‘I don’t know if I exist’—after all, who’s the ‘I’ that is having these doubts? It’s basically the same with experiences (there are some added wrinkles here, but let’s shoot for a first approximation first, before coming to higher-order corrections). You have privileged access to knowledge of yourself, and knowledge of your experiences. So all I’m saying is that there’s two things we have privileged access to: ourselves, and our experiences. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate reason there couldn’t be a third: god. Knowledge of god would then be like knowledge of experience—not knowledge of whether the pain in your toe was caused by a dropped hammer, or was a phantom pain since the toe had to be amputated because you dropped a hammer on it, or due to an electrical stimulus to the right nerve cluster. All of this is a level we’re not concerned, at all, with right now. It’s about the experiences themselves. > [@](#): > > Or god is life like the new thread. Lots of these things are not falsifiable and are therefore not very interesting. Why on Earth would only falsifiable things be interesting? Why does this one criterion have such currency? It applies to a specific problem, which we’re miles away from, namely, the demarcation of science (and even there, it’s a far too simplified idealization). Yet for some reason, every debate on the internet, and if it’s about which flowers go best with your curtains, will eventually contain somebody trying to dismiss something for not being falsifiable, applicability be damned. > [@](#): > > And the tester is going to have to wait several days for the response? And be talking to a machine whose memory would be kind of large? The infinite tape is a simplification of a concept, not an actual hardware feature. I don’t think so. We’re talking about a logical implication here: that passing the Turing test implies consciousness. It’s enough to propose a logically possible counterexample to show that implication to be false. We can freely stipulate that the device has the speed, or the interrogator the patience, that’s needed, and likewise with memory. A better counter is that each such lookup table would have to be created in some way, and that we’re really entering into a sort of canned dialogue by proxy with the process or entities that made the table, examining _their_ capacities; it might then be that those creators necessarily were conscious beings (this is a popular objection to Ned Block’s ‘Blockhead’ thought experiment, which is often considered the locus classicus for this sort of argument). But even then, this does not really invalidate the claim made earlier, that the Turing test does not ascertain consciousness in the object passing the test; and furthermore, there are again counter arguments, for instance that one might create each entry using a machine that itself could not pass the Turing test, and hence, wouldn’t be judged conscious, or more simply that the lookup table could arise by blind chance. The latter is spectacularly unlikely, of course, but again, we’re simply looking at the logical implication from Turing test to consciousness: if an exception exists, no matter how unlikely, then that suffices to say that not in all imaginable cases, a device passing the Turing test necessarily is conscious, and hence, that it’s not generally permissible to conclude consciousness from Turing-test-passing. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2018, 6:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/190 "2018-04-28T06:55:49Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > I’m not talking about any sort of ‘god-experience’ at all. I’m talking simply about _god_, and proposing that knowledge of god may be like knowledge of experience. But that doesn’t mean one must have some kind of god-experience. Well, if you assume god you can just about say anything about him. Sure he can create god experiences as a way to perceive him. He can show up to me looking like George Burns. He can inspire dreams like in the Bible. > [@](#): > > Whenever you start talking about the causes of some experience, you’re veering down the wrong path. The causes don’t matter; I’m interested in solely the experiences, and how we know about those. And now you’ve disconnected the experiences from god. To paraphrase Dylan, them old experiences are only in your head. And we can study them, seeing what is going on in the brain as people have these experiences, and even inducing them. To be sure, being able to induce a god experience does not prove that people who have the experiences aren’t in contact with god, but it sure gives an alternate explanation which we atheists will consider more plausible than a supernatural one. > [@](#): > > Think about how Descartes found he could be deceived about everything in the world, but not about his own existence. It’s just not a coherent proposition to say ‘I don’t know if I exist’—after all, who’s the ‘I’ that is having these doubts? > > It’s basically the same with experiences (there are some added wrinkles here, but let’s shoot for a first approximation first, before coming to higher-order corrections). You have privileged access to knowledge of yourself, and knowledge of your experiences. Yes - and you can be wrong about anything beyond the fact that you have the experience. > [@](#): > > So all I’m saying is that there’s two things we have privileged access to: ourselves, and our experiences. There doesn’t seem to be any immediate reason there couldn’t be a third: god. Knowledge of god would then be like knowledge of experience—not knowledge of whether the pain in your toe was caused by a dropped hammer, or was a phantom pain since the toe had to be amputated because you dropped a hammer on it, or due to an electrical stimulus to the right nerve cluster. All of this is a level we’re not concerned, at all, with right now. It’s about the experiences themselves. You’re right - there is no reason it couldn’t be god, except that god probably doesn’t exist. But there is no reason to think it god either. A natural explanation is testable, and has been tested, and is plausible. A supernatural explanation is testable also, if God agrees to give a sign. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, right? A supernatural explanation is an extraordinary claim. > [@](#): > > Why on Earth would only falsifiable things be interesting? Why does this one criterion have such currency? It applies to a specific problem, which we’re miles away from, namely, the demarcation of science (and even there, it’s a far too simplified idealization). Yet for some reason, every debate on the internet, and if it’s about which flowers go best with your curtains, will eventually contain somebody trying to dismiss something for not being falsifiable, applicability be damned. Interesting in a scientific and philosophical sense. I assume you find arguments about ice cream flavors and Kirk vs. Picard interesting. Me too, sometimes, but they are not worth very much. For instance, theistic evolution says that God nudged the evolutionary process to produce humans in his own image, but did it in a way that is indistinguishable from evolution without a god. You tell me if that is interesting to study. It’s a hell of a lot better than creationism, of course, but does not contribute anything except keeping god in the game. > [@](#): > > We’re talking about a logical implication here: that passing the Turing test implies consciousness. It’s enough to propose a logically possible counterexample to show that implication to be false. We can freely stipulate that the device has the speed, or the interrogator the patience, that’s needed, and likewise with memory. > > A better counter is that each such lookup table would have to be created in some way, and that we’re really entering into a sort of canned dialogue by proxy with the process or entities that made the table, examining _their_ capacities; it might then be that those creators necessarily were conscious beings (this is a popular objection to Ned Block’s ‘Blockhead’ thought experiment, which is often considered the locus classicus for this sort of argument). > > But even then, this does not really invalidate the claim made earlier, that the Turing test does not ascertain consciousness in the object passing the test; and furthermore, there are again counter arguments, for instance that one might create each entry using a machine that itself could not pass the Turing test, and hence, wouldn’t be judged conscious, or more simply that the lookup table could arise by blind chance. The latter is spectacularly unlikely, of course, but again, we’re simply looking at the logical implication from Turing test to consciousness: if an exception exists, no matter how unlikely, then that suffices to say that not in all imaginable cases, a device passing the Turing test necessarily is conscious, and hence, that it’s not generally permissible to conclude consciousness from Turing-test-passing. I think you are confusing the Turing test with the question of whether consciousness is Turing computable. The latter question does not ride on how long the computer takes, but no entrant in a Turing test which takes a week to answer deep in the conversation is going to fool anyone. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2018, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/191 "2018-04-28T17:16:38Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Sure he can create god experiences as a way to perceive him. OK, you’re just winding me up now. The very line you’re quoting explains that I’m not talking about god experiences! I am not saying that you have a certain kind of experience—a god experience—and through that, you acquire knowledge of god. I am saying that you have a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge of god, that is similar to knowledge of experiences in its privileged nature. I don’t know any more ways to try to make the difference clear to you, so it probably doesn’t make much sense to continue this. > [@](#): > > Yes - and you can be wrong about anything beyond the fact that you have the experience. You also can’t be wrong about the kind of experience you’re having. If you have a headache, you can’t falsely believe it to be the taste of red wine, since if you have the experience of the taste of red wine, then that’s the experience you’re having, and not a headache. You can, of course, be mistaken about the causes of experience. You could be having a red-wine experience without drinking red wine, for instance. But this has nothing at all to do with what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is rather the way in which you can’t be wrong about what kind of experience you’re having. > [@](#): > > Interesting in a scientific and philosophical sense. Again, falsifiability applies to a narrow view of scientific epistemology. That’s it; otherwise, there’s nothing distinguished, say in philosophy general, about it. Metaphysical statements aren’t falsifiable, moral and aesthetical judgments aren’t, virtually nothing that interests us is. ‘It’s not falsifiable’ has become an empty slogan, and demanding falsifiability of anything and everything without considering the applicability of the criterion threatens to even rob it of the utility it has in legitimate cases. > [@](#): > > I think you are confusing the Turing test with the question of whether consciousness is Turing computable. The latter question does not ride on how long the computer takes, but no entrant in a Turing test which takes a week to answer deep in the conversation is going to fool anyone. The conversation could be carried out by mail. However, this is simply not an issue: we can imagine the computer to have any speed needed. The question is one of logical possibility, not of physical implementability. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2018, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/192 "2018-04-28T17:49:42Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > OK, you’re just winding me up now. The very line you’re quoting explains that I’m not talking about god experiences! > > I am not saying that you have a certain kind of experience—a god experience—and through that, you acquire knowledge of god. I am saying that you have a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge of god, that is similar to knowledge of experiences in its privileged nature. I don’t know any more ways to try to make the difference clear to you, so it probably doesn’t make much sense to continue this. Isn’t realizing (or thinking) that you have knowledge of something an experience? When I realize I understand something it seems to be to me, definitely more pleasurable than a headache. So wouldn’t knowledge of god be a god experience? I’m not assuming such an experience has angels singing, after all. > [@](#): > > You also can’t be wrong about the kind of experience you’re having. If you have a headache, you can’t falsely believe it to be the taste of red wine, since if you have the experience of the taste of red wine, then that’s the experience you’re having, and not a headache. When I said “the” experience I meant this, so I agree. > [@](#): > > Again, falsifiability applies to a narrow view of scientific epistemology. That’s it; otherwise, there’s nothing distinguished, say in philosophy general, about it. Metaphysical statements aren’t falsifiable, moral and aesthetical judgments aren’t, virtually nothing that interests us is. ‘It’s not falsifiable’ has become an empty slogan, and demanding falsifiability of anything and everything without considering the applicability of the criterion threatens to even rob it of the utility it has in legitimate cases. Sure, falsifiability does not apply to those cases, which might be why we haven’t converged on answers to these kinds of questions. Which is not to say I think there are answers. One problem with god, I’m sure you will agree, is that believers think there is some sort of moral absolute defined by god. > [@](#): > > The conversation could be carried out by mail. However, this is simply not an issue: we can imagine the computer to have any speed needed. The question is one of logical possibility, not of physical implementability. You might just as well say that a perfect chess playing machine is possible by enumerating all possible moves. But I have to thank you, since your talking about the list of possible answers in the context of a Turing machine gave me insight into something. (Warning - off topic discussion ahead.) Your scenario is much like the Chinese Room problem. I think you are saying that the Chinese Room, which has responses to inputs the same as you have on the tape, can become conscious. I agree that computers can become conscious, or that there is no blockage to it, but not a Chinese Room. A Turing machine can read and write its tape. The way the Chinese room is set up it cannot write an equivalent of a tape. The person in the room must sort through the potential responses to either inputs or sequences of inputs, as you propose. Thus the Chinese room is not a Turing machine equivalent. The debate is whether a Turing machine (or a computer) can be conscious, or whether something else is needed. But our brains/minds can definitely emulate a Turing machine. If the Chinese Room is not a Turing machine, then it can’t emulate our minds, and can’t become conscious. But it doesn’t matter because the problem statement cripples the supposed agent of consciousness to not raise to the minimal computing level required. I think we all agree that a Turing Machine is a minimum requirement. The problem comes from the fact that the people who came up with the analogy don’t understand computing very well, and fundamentally see computers as big adding machines, not as entities which can reprogram themselves based on experience as represented by inputs and states. I never thought to think of whether the Chinese Room was a Turing Machine before (though I wandered around the subject) so your comment was really helpful. ---
**Author:** ![Baal\_Houtham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baal_houtham/32/13604_2.png) [@Baal\_Houtham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baal_Houtham)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2018, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/193 "2018-04-28T17:54:20Z")
> [@DavidwithanR](#): > > I’d call the person a “TW”. > > People who believe in a god are wishful thinkers. > > People who don’t but wish they did are thinkful wishers. 🙂 I smiled. If that was yor own creation, I tip my hat. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 28, 2018, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/194 "2018-04-28T18:27:18Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Isn’t realizing (or thinking) that you have knowledge of something an experience? _Realizing_ one has knowledge is an experience, yes (or at least, plausibly has an experiential component). _Having knowledge_, however, isn’t. When you have a headache, you don’t have to realize you have knowledge of having a headache to know you have a headache; you simply have the headache, and know you do because you have it. > [@](#): > > So wouldn’t knowledge of god be a god experience? Again, knowledge isn’t an experience. It’s knowledge. > [@](#): > > You might just as well say that a perfect chess playing machine is possible by enumerating all possible moves. Indeed, yes; and if you were asking whether it’s in principle possible for a machine to play chess, I could use this example to show that yes, it’s in principle possible. > [@](#): > > (Warning - off topic discussion ahead.) Your scenario is much like the Chinese Room problem. I think you are saying that the Chinese Room, which has responses to inputs the same as you have on the tape, can become conscious. The Chinese Room, I think, is a flawed way of deriving a true conclusion. That is to say, I don’t believe something can become conscious by executing a program, but I also don’t think that the Chinese Room actually establishes this (more concretely, I hold the ‘systems reply’ to be valid). > [@](#): > > I agree that computers can become conscious, or that there is no blockage to it, but not a Chinese Room. A Turing machine can read and write its tape. The way the Chinese room is set up it cannot write an equivalent of a tape. The setup of the Chinese Room includes a limitless supply of ‘scratch paper’, so a Chinese Room could emulate a Turing machine. > [@](#): > > If the Chinese Room is not a Turing machine, then it can’t emulate our minds, and can’t become conscious. But it doesn’t matter because the problem statement cripples the supposed agent of consciousness to not raise to the minimal computing level required. I think we all agree that a Turing Machine is a minimum requirement. Brains (or anything built in the real world) aren’t really Turing machines, though; they’re finite state machines, since they have a finite memory. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2018, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/195 "2018-04-29T21:56:06Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > The Chinese Room, I think, is a flawed way of deriving a true conclusion. That is to say, I don’t believe something can become conscious by executing a program, but I also don’t think that the Chinese Room actually establishes this (more concretely, I hold the ‘systems reply’ to be valid). > > The setup of the Chinese Room includes a limitless supply of ‘scratch paper’, so a Chinese Room could emulate a Turing machine. [Here](https://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/) is the first definition of the problem I found. It does not mention scratch paper, just a stack of responses to the Chinese input. It does not explicitly state that a response could be based on the last n inputs, but I think that is not in violation of the premise. Given that the person in the room is supposed to use a simple “program” to give responses, writing and learning would violate the premise. Yes computers can learn, exactly the thing the problem misses. > [@](#): > > Brains (or anything built in the real world) aren’t really Turing machines, though; they’re finite state machines, since they have a finite memory. Brains aren’t Turning machines, but they can simulate Turing machines. If a Turing machine has access to an infinite tape, so does a brain. BTW there is nothing to say that a FSM cannot have infinite state elements and thus infinite states, as long as you have a state transition table for it. Never seen it considered as it is not very practical, to put it mildly, but not against the way they work. Could you find an example of the Chinese Room problem with scratch paper? As for the main point, experiencing a headache give you knowledge that you’ve experienced a headache. I think that is what you are implying. I’d say realizing you know something is an experience also. Perhaps a meta-experience, if you wish. As for god experiences, or knowledge, I see a few possibilities. 1. You have an experience of god that god has somehow inspired. 2. You have an experience of god which god has not inspired. 3. You have an experience that you don’t think of as a god experience which god has inspired anyhow. 4. You have an experience you don’t think of as a god experience which god has nothing to do with. I think both 2 and 4 are possible. What about you? And do you have another possibility. In all cases you know you have the experience, but having the experience is the important part. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2018, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/196 "2018-04-29T23:07:47Z")
Does the above list apply if the “experience” is an hallucination and/or gives false information? Is it still importance that you at least had this experience then? ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2018, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/197 "2018-04-29T23:53:33Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > Does the above list apply if the “experience” is an hallucination and/or gives false information? Is it still importance that you at least had this experience then? Yeah, you definitely have had the experience. None of the above necessarily implies any information has been gathered. I’d say class 2 is primarily hallucinations - whether induced by brain chemistry, by drugs, or by intervention by a brain specialist. You’re never going to get real information about something which does not exist, after all. Unless you count the experience itself as information. I’ve never done drugs so I don’t have an opinion on that. ---
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2018, 8:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/198 "2018-04-30T08:11:18Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > [Here](https://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/) is the first definition of the problem I found. It does not mention scratch paper, just a stack of responses to the Chinese input. Look to [Searle’s original paper](http://cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf) (link to pdf version): > [@Searle](#): > > The person has a large ledger in front of him in which are written the rules, he has a lot of scratch paper and pencils for doing calculations, he has ‘data banks’ of sets of Chinese symbols. (Granted, he mentions this as part of the ‘systems reply’ he then tries to reject, but he raises no objection to the description of the setup.) > [@Voyager](#): > > Brains aren’t Turning machines, but they can simulate Turing machines. If a Turing machine has access to an infinite tape, so does a brain. Brains can only approximate TMs for finite stretches of time; even if you were to keep a brain alive indefinitely, it would run out of memory eventually. > [@](#): > > BTW there is nothing to say that a FSM cannot have infinite state elements and thus infinite states, as long as you have a state transition table for it. Never seen it considered as it is not very practical, to put it mildly, but not against the way they work. It would falsify many theorems about FSMs, though, such as that their halting problem is always decidable, so it’s not how one typically understands them. They are, after all, _finite_ state machines. > [@](#): > > I’d say realizing you know something is an experience also. I’ve already granted that, and explained how it’s not relevant. > [@](#): > > I think both 2 and 4 are possible. What about you? And do you have another possibility. I think that since after spending walls of text trying to explain to you that I’m not talking about experiences, that once you find you’re talking about experiences, you’ve veered down the wrong way, you still insist in talking about experiences, the only possibility I see for myself right now is to give up on the topic, since evidently nothing of what I write is getting through to you. ☹ ---
**Author:** ![kaylasdad99](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/32/3398_2.png) [@kaylasdad99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kaylasdad99)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2018, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789/199 "2018-04-30T14:23:13Z")
> [@Czarcasm](#): > > I’m sorry if different atheists have different opinions about different subjects. Maybe we should organize and form a church or something so that all atheists could reach a consensus on what we believe about various subjects-That way we could tell you the one official opinion on any/all subjects. Dibs on Pope! [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-there-a-word-for-an-atheist-that-doesnt-believe-but-hopes-god-exists/812789.md?page=9)