The Evil Demon

Why we should take the evil demon hypothesis seriously.

0:00 - skepticism and the evil demon
1:41 - taking skeptical hypotheses seriously
3:47 - arguments for a creator
6:11 - pain and suffering
10:41 - the deceptive world
14:55 - deception resistance as a pragmatic virtue
22:48 - conclusion

[low]

Love you Kane. Your videos have made me more neurotic.

[samsklair]

I find the videos when you're talking to the camera oddly comforting. Even when you're talking about the ubiquity of pain and deception.

[GottfriedLeibnizYT]

Liked the monologue. The "pain and suffering" segment reminded me of the experience machine and why one should immediately hob into it.

[mauvaisepoire]

an additional argument from my point of view: an evil demon is totally the kind of little bastard that would make me watch this video and, in the face of such glaring evidence that I should believe in its existence, rejoice at my inability to do so

it would also rejoice at my second order inability to draw the correct conclusion from this very argument and so on

the ultimate higher-order deception

[AhmedDahshan_]

“If I were to think in terms of teleology, I’d be inclined to think the universe is aimed for suffering and pain”
Spot on!

I really love this video, not least because it provides a formidable challenge to all those asserting that ultimately reality is omnibenevolent.

[frasertierney]

Great, you've strengthened a position that I really dislike. It doesn't at all strike me as implausible that I'm being decieved, that my surroundings are perhaps simulated, or maybe I'm just having a bizzare dream. I have an on-going issue where reality just sort of feels very surreal to me. There is definitely an experiential side to this, but you eloquently identify some of the other issues that have been bothering me. Namely, the asymmetry of suffering and the sort of evasiveness of 'reality'. Another issue that tends to support this feeling for me is that many of the motivations and interests that others seem to have in life just don't resonate with me at all. I look at their choices and the way they live often just strikes me as bizzare - I fail to appreciate their decisions in life.

I wonder if there is a possible argument here to support the existence of others. If I'm not really buying into this whole deception thing, then, why would the evil demon continue to try to decieve me? Would it make more sense that the deception continues because I'm not all that important and there are others that also need to be decieved? Or maybe the demon is more evil than deciever.

Excellent video Kane, thanks for the content.

[wenaolong]

One problem with these sweeping skeptical propositions is that the basic substrate of reality is questioned just as if one had a contrasting state of reality by which to assess it, but that would be subject to a similar skepticism, undermining the initial skepticism's basis point and requiring a new basis point from which to assess the reality of something. It's a self-defeating proposition. For example, in order to suspect that I am dreaming, I have to have a means to distinguish a dream state from another state from which to see it as the dream state (the waking state, the one we are in right now, presumably). In that waking state I posit a quality which states that all along what I thought were "dream states" were just dream states within another set of dream states that have a different cognitive structure and sense of self and reality than do "dream" states, but this is "also" a dream state. But with reference to what sort of waking state or other state? Also, oblivion would do as the "other state". Oblivion is what there is, then by some unknown means it dreams itself to "be these states" that we experience as our own, and then ceases dreamingi n oblivion again. It makes just as much sense as asserting another state more wakeful than our supposed wakeful state (which is really a dream). Perhaps there is a superstate of consciousness which is as much more "lucid and awake" or whatever quality it is that we constrast with "dreaming". In which case it is not unreasonable to think we are dreaming, if it is not unreasonable to think that this wakeful state is like a dream compared to a more wakeful state. So ironically, the skeptical approach has a possibly positive result, if this is the heuristic (or something like it) which is needed to discover that one is dreaming. One must be able to take that intuition and model it rationally. So it's a good exercise of thought if nothing else.

[justus]

You are now officially my favorite ytber

[КотВаська-ию]

Кукеч с вами не согласился! но я уважаю ваше мнение

[unknownknownsphilosophy]

You’re welcome for the “deception resistance as an epistemic virtue” idea. See more on this in my new book coming out August 2023. Foreword by Kane Baker.

[DeadEndFrog]

You are on a sceptical roll! Great video as always.
What options do we have to etablish something on sceptical grounds?
1. be born, learn one human langauge, learn to read, read some books, learn to philosophize, use what you learned to question if learning it ever happened in the first place.
2.See some phenomena, use the metaphors of the phenomena to come up with a 'real' world where this word of phenomena is just illusery.
3.Invent concepts such as brains, invent vats, invent being inside something, use it to come up with an imagined world where you are a brain in a vat.
hope it makes sense, any other approaches?
Buddists, the nothingness of the self, solipsism the oneness of all with the self? Some Fichte style egoism?

Whats your opinion on Kant?

[veganphilosopher]

How about the case of an evil demon vs the case of insanity?
Perhaps no one is deceiving us but we are, in fact, insane.
I am not aware of a critical argument giving a satisfactory answer to this question.

[realSAPERE_AUDE]

I read Blackburn’s book *”Think”* and he seemed pretty dismissive of the Cartesian skeptical scenario; pretty much just said, “your senses have to be reliable in some sense in order for you to argue that your senses can be unreliable/deceived/etc, ” or something like that. What do you think of this, @Kane B? It’s sort of an unsatisfactory response in my view, not that I’ve necessarily described his view accurately. Maybe I missed his point entirely.

I’m not exactly sure how to use this phrase properly but I think I heard it on Majesty of Reason maybe; either way I like it:

“You’re putting DesCarte before the horse!”

[InventiveHarvest]

In the video, when distinguishing between an evil creator and a good creator, you are examining the data and saying that it doesn't look very benevolent. Looking at the data in this way is what the skeptical arguments lack when compared to the common sense hypothesis.

When examining models we use to look at the world, it is important not to confuse the map with the terrain. No statement or model is going to be without hidden lemmas that falsify it, as Lakatos point out. But this does not mean the models are deceptive. The reason we use models is for their ability to point us in the right direction - and they can even help show answers to counter-intuitive situations that we wouldn't be able to solve without models.

One such situation comes up with the utility of avoiding being wrong - or deception avoidance. Let's say there is a hypothetical game where a die is rolled. If the player guesses "six" and the die lands on six, the player wins $10. If the die lands on any other number and the player guesses that number, the player wins $1. Otherwise, if the player guesses wrong, they lose $.01. Obviously, the expected value of guessing "six" is well worth it - 1/6*$10 - 5/6*$.01 - a positive value. However, if the die comes up "5", people will say "oh! I should have guessed "5". They often say "I should have bet on the other team" after losing a sports wager. With the expected value model tho, we can see that "5" is never the optimal bet.

With pragmatic arguments, the model of expected value says that we need to include some percentage of likelihood in the calculation. While skeptical arguments are not justified by the data, we should not assign a likelihood of zero to them. And even though the benefits of discovering the deception (as you point out) are high, this is diminished by the lack of data driven justification.

With William James' argument for Pascal's wager (forgive me if I misstated that) - the question arises "well which God or Demon are you going to believe in?". This is because the benefits are great for getting the right one correctly. It would be a shame to worship Jesus, when it turns out that Vishnu was the right God.

Someone might say "well, I don't know which evil Demon constructed the world, but I can say that SOME evil Demon created the world." With this, the belief in some Demon is the sum of all the beliefs in specific Demons - it is all of them. There are an infinite number of skeptical hypothesis and an infinite number of potential evil Demons.

What percentage of skeptical hypothesis are evil Demon hypothesis depends on whether or not the infinities are countable or not. For example, half of the countable numbers are even, even though there is an infinite amount of both even numbers and countable numbers. However, the percentage of real numbers that are even is zero.

The set of evil Demons is uncountably infinite because there is no next more evil Demon. For any Demon you give me that is slightly more evil than MALFJOTENON, I can create a demon whose evilness is between the two.

Now, this would seem to contradict my previous statement that our belief in evil Demons should not be zero.

It should not be zero because Feyerabend is correct that creativity and thinking outside the box often lead to new ideas and knowledge. Indeed, when Lakatos describes progressing a research programme, he is pointing out examples of creative refutations and creative theory modification. Creativity is essential for the progression of a research programme and we do not need to tear down all of its confines in order to be creative with it.

That's all for now - I have to go post a picture of a dog outside your house.

Sincerely,

The Evil Demon

[TheKingWhoWins]

Guys, I figured it out. Kane is the evil demon. It was right under all of our noses this whole time

[zauberkeit]

I defenitely going to respond to this, and in a compementary way. Such a good video

[brandonsaffell]

Good stuff. Lots of arguments and types of arguments I rarely see elsewhere.

I'd be curious if you've developed any thoughts on what believing in some sort of demon might entail. I would go with 100% credence on some sort of demon/simulation/whatever, but I don't find that practically entails a lot. Though rejecting the idea of true belief is one entailment that I think is extremely meaningful, though perhaps it shouldn't be.

I think there is one interesting argument for the simulation fans. We can make simulated environments. We can make simulated environments with intelligent agents. These simulated agents are capable of (in theory, e.g. arbitrary code execution) of escaping these virtual environments. Thus we should invest in creating these agents, and studying them.

[itstandstoreason]

A very similar argument caused me to be antinatalist. Especially the asymmetry between our sensitivity to pain/suffering vs pleasure/happiness.

[tudornaconecinii]

Hey Kane, there's something I've been thinking about recently and I was curious about your take on it.

P1. As a radical skeptic, I cannot gain knowledge about the external world.
P2. The minds of other people are part of the external world.
C1 (P1&P2). I cannot gain knowledge about the minds of other people.
P3. Whether it can gain knowledge about the external world is a property of a mind.
C2 (C1&P3). I can't know whether other people can gain knowledge about the external world. It's entirely possible.

Does this line of reasoning have a trivially obvious flaw? Most radical skeptics I'm aware of either posit that other people don't exist, or posit that *nobody* can justify true beliefs, or posit that most entities can't justify true beliefs except for like, one random god or mind-at-large. So I'm curious if this logical possibility (the speaker can't gain knowledge, the speaker has to conclude that other regular-ol' humans totally could) is super easy to counter somehow.

[martinbennett]

Kane: I think you are misreading Descartes. Having established that empirical sense data are inherently prone to error, Descartes moves on to consider whether logic and reasoning can be similarly questioned. It is sufficient at this point that Descartes can postulate that reasoning processes can be messed up.

For this, the 'mauvais génie' can be as much metaphorical as actual (in any case the génie is certainly hypothetical). Although there would be examples of people losing mental faculties in Descartes time, today these are better documented; we can accept the génie as a metaphor for conditions in which basic mental processes (like a computer with a hardware fault) no longer function in a way that accords with reasoning or logic.