Faith, Risk, and Uncertainty

http://esthertsai.com/essaypages/faith_risk_and_uncertainty_essay.html

by epkann • 17 years ago

1 1 17 years ago

There's an awful lot of waffle in there about free will and choosing to do things and what if other things happened instead. As usual, I have someone else's brilliant content to link to and recommend:

"""We've previously discussed how probability is in the mind. If you are uncertain about whether a classical coin has landed heads or tails, that is a fact about your state of mind, not a property of the coin. The coin itself is either heads or tails. But people forget this, and think that coin.probability == 0.5, which is the Mind Projection Fallacy: treating properties of the mind as if they were properties of the external world.

So I doubt it will come as any surprise to my longer-abiding readers, if I say that possibility is also in the mind.

What concrete state of the world - which quarks in which positions - corresponds to "There are three apples on the table, and there could be four apples on the table"? Having trouble answering that? Next, say how that world-state is different from "There are three apples on the table, and there couldn't be four apples on the table." And then it's even more trouble, if you try to describe could-ness in a world in which there are no agents, just apples and tables. This is a Clue that could-ness and possibility are in your map, not directly in the territory."""

- http://lesswrong.com/lw/rb/possibility_and_couldness/

Also, from the original submitted article,

"""Even if the outcome is partly fixed by our free decisions, the fact that God infallibly foreknows - and has always foreknown - whether we will fail or succeed, is really frustrating."""

"""I often wish for a similar promise. If God said to me, one day in this life you will produce great work that touches a lot of people, then I would be very happy with that."""

Aren't these two sections contradictory? She doesn't want God to know for sure if she will succeed or fail, yet she does want God to promise that she will succeed?

"""I often wish for a similar promise. If God said to me, one day in this life you will produce great work that touches a lot of people""" - and after all that, what if the 'great work' turned out to be medical?

And what if the whole point turns out to be that God sent her to exist on earth to spend a lifetime as a makeup artist who ultimately isn't successful at being a makeup artist but does learn an awful lot about other stuff from trying? Her simple summary of "So maybe what I really want to know is that God doesn't infallibly believe I will definitely fail as an artist" leaves out that 'failing as an artist' is not the only outcome of a life of trying to be an artist.

Faith, Risk, and Uncertainty

Related Stories