What is it like to be a bat?

You know what it is like to be a bat. To be a bat is to be a mammal like no other. You spend half the day dozing in caves, and then you all leave together. You flap about, in order to get anywhere. You find out where you are by seeing how the sounds you make come back to you. You are where all the others are. Each of you is there because everyone else is there. Everyone else is a bit batty. You know what it is like to be a bat.

Red Dragon

This is a picture from Carl Jung's Red Book (which I just heard about via the blog that nobody reads); here is the picture in the book:

Failing the Turing Test

If a computer develops self-awareness, could it be distinguished from an actual human?

Yes: if you ask it about itself, then it will know about itself (that is what "self-awareness" means), but if you ask a human about herself or himself (or themselves or itself), then she or he (or they or it) will not really have much of a clue (not really).

Definitive Selections?

Are definitive selections too odd?
      When we think of some things, and various combinations of them, it seems clear that all those combinatorial possibilities are there already, awaiting our consideration. And yet I am asking you to imagine that when a Creator, some such brilliant mind, considers some things, all those possibilities are blurred together (although none so blurry that it cannot be picked out); or am I?
      I am suggesting that for selections of selections of ... of selections, from some original collections, each possible selection from those will be a particular possibility only as it is actually selected by our Creator, independently of whom no collections of things would exist, were there such a Creator (as there provably is). The possible selections that make S(N) bigger than N (to use the terminology in my Cantorian diagonal argument) are those endless sequences of ‘I’s and ‘O’s that are pseudorandom; to make them, infinitely many selections have to be made, each one of which involves some arbitrarily large finite number of selections. They might be made instantaneously by our Creator, of course; and if so, then typical selections from S(N) could be made arbitrarily quickly.
      What about S(S(N)), which contains more things than infinite space contains points? Well, a Creator might be able to do all of that instantaneously. And similarly for selections from U, and UU, and maybe UUU; but still, you see how our Creator would have to do much more, and much, much more, and so on and so forth, without end. It is therefore quite plausible that for selection-collections that it would take me far more than mere trillions of pages to describe, our Creator would be unable or unwilling (and thence unable) to make all such selections instantaneously. After all, it is logically impossible for all possible selections to be made instantaneously. To will an incremental development of such abstract mathematics, as a necessary aspect of the creation of any things, might be regarded as a price worth paying for some such creations. And it is also quite plausible that were the Creator unable to do something (even as a consequence of such a choice) then that thing really would be impossible, given that the very possibility of it derives from that Creator.
      Solid things are solid; but mathematical properties related rather abstractly to their individuality can be works in progress; why not? Modern mathematics has a weirder story to tell of such matters! It is relatively straightforward to think of Creation as dependent upon a Creator who transcends even its mathematics. So, it may not be too odd to think of a Creator creating number by definitively adding units: 1, 2, 3 and so forth; is that any weirder than a Creator creating something ex nihilo? Number is paradoxical, so that the ultimate totalities of numbers are indefinitely extensible, and so numbers just do pop into existence, somehow; and what more reasonable way than by their being constructed by a Creator? What would be very weird indeed would be their popping into existence all by themselves, what with them being essentially structural possibilities rather than concrete things. It makes some sense to think of us creating them, as we think about the world around us, but there is something very objective about numbers of things. And again, if it makes sense for us to do it, then how can it be too odd to think of a Creator doing it, in a Platonistic way?
      There will be better ways to think of definitive selection, I am sure; but, it is the case that such weaselly words are the norm nowadays. For example, how can simple brute matter (just atoms, in molecules of atoms, each just some electrons around a nucleus) have feelings, such sensitive feelings as we have? How is that possible? Am I asking for a description of a possible mechanism? Perhaps; but a common enough answer is: Well, it must be possible, because we have such feelings, in this physical universe; although I don't know how sensitive we humans really are, looking at our world! Such answers are accepted by many scientific people, as they "work" on possible mechanisms!

Is very high credence belief?

Imagine holding an almost spherical die with thousands of tiny faces. Each of them is highly unlikely to end up on top when you roll the die. For each face, you have a very high credence in the proposition that it will not end up on top. But when one of them does end up on top, you would not be surprised.

When something that we believe turns out not to be the case, we are surprised. So you did not, for any of those faces, believe that it would not end up on top (you believed that it very probably would not). Very high credence is not belief (despite what many philosophers believe).

I see a red car outside my window, and I can see that its red colour is out there, where the car is. If you told me that the red colour that I was seeing was on the surface of the car, where its paint was, I would not believe you: your saying that would remind me that the red that I see is only in my perception, that it is not actually out there where the car is. Still, I would feel some surprise at that thought, for all that it would be a very familiar surprise. Even though I have a very low credence in the proposition that the red that I see is out there, where the car is, I cannot help believing, each time I look at the car, that its colour is out there. Seeing that it is out there is, at least momentarily, believing that it is out there. That is just the way my perception works. And yours? What about when you look out of a window. Consider any particular arrangement of cars, leaves et cetera that might be outside some window that you could easily get to. Presumably the chance of there being that particular arrangement is very low. You would be surprised if that was the view, were you to look out of that window.

It would be like putting a tiny red dot on one of the faces of that almost spherical die, rolling the die and seeing the red dot on top of it when it stops rolling.

Still, it would also be surprising if you had been able to imagine the view from that window in very much detail before you looked. So, suppose that you go to that window and look through it: you would probably have an unsurprising view. And you could then ask yourself whether you believed, before you looked, that that view was not going to be what you saw. Look now. I think that before you looked, if you did look, you did not believe that you would not have that view. Had you had such a belief, would you not have been much more surprised? Perhaps you were surprised (perhaps, for example, there was a red car there, and you were not expecting there to be one); but even then, your surprise would not, I think, have been like the surprise that we feel when something that we believe turns out not to be the case. It would be less, I think, than your surpise at the red of the car not actually being out there where the car is.

If I believed, of each of that die's faces, that it would not end up on top, then I would believe that none of them would end up on top.

That is how my beliefs appear to me (if I believe that an object is a car, and I believe that it is red, then I believe that it is a red car). How do yours appear to you? Beliefs are what they are, and what they are is not a million miles away from us. We can find out for ourselves what our beliefs are, our particular beliefs, and also beliefs in general (beliefs of various kinds) if we are philosophically inclined, and sufficiently logical. I wonder if philosophers who say that belief is very high credence are confusing belief with a mathematical model of belief.

Something like Fake Barns

What is adequate justification for holding a belief? It depends on one's context. A true belief that was well-justified when it was formed might cease to count as knowledge within a stricter setting, such as a court-room or a laboratory. And the famous Fake Barns involve unusual contexts. And of course, one needs to be sufficiently rational. Suppose that I see a red car, in a normal road (no fake cars), for example, and so form the belief that there is a red car. But, I also have a lot of irrational beliefs that there are various objects. When there is a red car, I believe that there is, and I am unlikely to have the belief that there is a red car if there is not a red car, although I am quite likely to have some belief that there is something when there is nothing. (It is easy to think of other examples of true beliefs that might seem at first glance to be justified but which do not count as knowledge because they are held by someone who is in some way unqualified.)

Putting the green back in the greenery

......There is certainly some greenery in the world. And the green of it seems to be out there in the external world, with that greenery. And yet, what is out there are surfaces sending electromagnetic waves toward our eyes. That is a scientific fact. The colours are in the pictures of the world that our brains construct from data obtained via our sensory organs. And maybe the shapes are too (maybe the world is made of 10-dimensional strings, with our brains imposing upon the numerous sensations that come from our 10-dimensional sensory organs the 2- and 3-dimensional shapes that we see in the world around us). Perhaps we should not be surprised that some philosophers think that ordinary objects don’t exist in reality. Does the world (what we usually mean by ‘the world’) only exist in our heads? There are certainly some ordinary objects in reality: what we mean by ‘reality’ is whatever space it is that includes the people whose language includes such expressions. You and I are two people, whatever we are made of.
......And there is a sense in which the greenness really is out there, on the surfaces of such objects as leaves: we learn the meaning of ‘green’ by being shown various green objects (or pictures of green objects) and being told that they are all green. It hardly matters whether you and I have the same sensations when we see them. Green is something that ordinary objects can be. Still, green is also a sensation. And a very mysterious one: do you have the same sensation as I do, when we both look at the same leaf? We have similar eyes and brains, but we know nothing about how sensations arise in our brains. Still, something is green if its surface is such that under normal lighting conditions, it would give rise to the same sort of sensations in those looking at it as they had when they learnt the meaning of ‘green’ whatever those sensations are. If your sensation, when you see green, was exactly the same as mine, when I see blue, I would be wrong if I thought that you were seeing blue.
......Or would I? It seems to me that the meaning of ‘blue’ is the sensation that I have when I see blue things. Could I be wrong and right? Well, there is something like an equivocation here, for all that it is probably unavoidable: our references to things in our external world are only possible via our sides of our interactions with those things. Would it be any different in the land of the blind? Maybe they use sticks there, to feel their way around, so suppose that one of their sticks hits an unexpected obstacle. The person holding that stick might be able to tell that the other end of it had hit a bouncy object. And their word for such bounciness in an object might be the same as their word for the way that that stick had felt in that hand. But they would of course not think of the world as being full of such feelings. They would think of it as being full of objects, mysterious objects, some of them bouncy (in some non-visual sense of ‘bouncy’).

When a tree falls in a forest at night, and there is no one around to hear it, does it make a sound?

I suppose that it does not. And those trees do not look green: it is dark, and there is no one there to see them anyway. But they are green in the daytime. They are green trees. Are they green in the dark, with no one there? They are green trees. Suppose that you have a colour photograph of those trees on your wall. You do not think that those trees are there, in your room, but the green of those trees is there. Is it still there when you turn the light off and leave the room? Is it still a green photograph? Suppose that you return with a strange little light bulb: you change the bulb, turn the light on, and in that light the photograph looks blue. Is it a green photograph that looks blue? Is it still green, even though it looks blue in the strange light? And did other people learn words like ‘green’ in such a way that they would give similar answers to such questions?

What is clear is that a green alarm clock that goes off in a vacuum makes no sound.

And if the clock is painted black, then it is no longer green. And such rooms exist in houses that are quite distinct from each other. Your house and my house are two houses, in a very precise way. When we reason logically about the world, our thoughts are as complicated as our relationships with the world. But the simplest thing to reason logically about ought to be arithmetic.

A Linguistic Puzzle

Where, in ‘my tabletop is flat,’ is the meaning of that string of letters? Any meaning that it has must be read into it (it is not a string of magical sigils). You read those words, which are about the flatness of the table at which I am sitting, and perhaps you think of something like the tables that you know. You might think of such a thing being flat, and it being my table (whoever I really am). You get that string of letters, and you put your meanings into it. But the meaning of that phrase is, I think, the thought that I expressed with it, my thought that my tabletop is flat. And that is not the only mysterious thing about reading, of course. When we read something truly meaningful—e.g. a great novel—we do not seem to be getting out of it some rearrangement of what we already know. We seem to learn something about the world around us. Are we fooling ourselves?

Cartesian dualism, ii

I’ve yet to find a good philosophical argument against such substantial dualisms as (for the commonest) that our psychology results from the interaction of spiritual souls with the physical brains in which (so to speak) they’re incarnated. The two commonest arguments are (i) asserting the closure of the physical and (ii) failing to see how the spiritual could interact with the physical. Both are clearly fallacious as I’ve stated them, but I’ve yet to find a substantially fuller, non-fallacious expression of either. Now, I’ve blogged on (i) already, and have little to say about either anyway, but I’ve just been reading Lowe (Erkenntnis 65, 5–23), who put (ii) as follows (2006: 7, 11):

[...] according to Descartes, whereas the mind has beliefs, desires, and volitions, but no shape, size, or velocity, the body has shape, size, and velocity, but no beliefs, desires, or volitions. [...] it is often complained that it is completely mysterious how an unextended, non-physical substance could have any causal impact upon the body – the presumption being, perhaps, that any cause of a physical event must either be located where that event is, or at least be related to it by a chain of events connecting the location of the cause to the location of the effect.

As put, the problem seems to be one of mere conceptual possibility, which is easily answered. By typing into your keyboard you can make virtual beings move about in cyberspace. Clearly you don’t have to be where they are, in cyberspace, to be able to move them about. So it isn’t so very mysterious how such things are possible. And even if it were, why presume that would be a problem for dualism, rather than a personal failing?
......As Lowe notes, people said that Newtonian action-at-a-distance was completely mysterious, and maybe it was, and is, but there was hardly any argument there against Newtonian physics (except in the minds of some philosophers). The truth turned out to be far weirder again, and it was to be had by working through Newtonian physics. There is that other problem, of how exactly the interaction works, but the way towards answering that is the relatively hard way of science, and why should it not go through Cartesian dualism?
......My analogy only worked because of the causal link between your fingers moving on the keyboard and the consequent virtual motion (as expressed in actual space on the screen), which goes via continuous paths in space (if we include force-fields in our ontology), but still, it did work. It suggests that a possible Cartesian response is to give the body, not only a spatial location, but also another, non-spatial location, at which the soul acts. How plausible is that? In the natural theistic context of Cartesian dualism, it’s very plausible, since God created space, and is himself located elsewhere.
......And suppose that Cartesian dualism is false. Then there’s some other true theory of mind. Somehow the physical brain, which changes its form and its atomic constituents continually, is associated with a subjective unit (the mind, which we know directly), which is continuously the same person. So if there could be a non-Cartesian theory, then there’s some way of associating with the physical brain a unique continuant of some sort. It is only to that that the Cartesian theory has to associate a soul. And a very simple and natural (in the Cartesian context) way to do that would be by divine stipulation, God associating each such brain-correlate with a unique soul.
......In many ways that’s far simpler and more natural than the sort of Humean regularity approach to scientific laws that philosophers are often led to by considering how mysterious are nomological necessities (a consideration that most scientists rightly ignore). If souls are possible, then they would have individual existences, in some logical space (say heaven), and would interact in some way (say via spiritual bodies). And if so then matter would’ve been created to be such as could be used in such ways (for some reason). The details are for scientific discovery, but the mere possibility is not really so mysterious.

The Pope and the Archbishop

On the TV, the Pope is talking about homosexuality; and a few days ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury was talking about our borrowing our way out of a mess that we got into via greedy borrowing. That mess was more about who the City employed and why, imho; but still, why did we let them get away with it, and why will we continue to? Now, I'm sure that the Pope isn't unaware that he's pandering to homophobia, even if he talks about the sin and not the sinner. After all, a similar sin is thinking lustful thoughts about a woman other than one's wife, e.g. when watching a movie (which a lot will be doing this xmas). Marriages tend to break up because they are felt to be falling short of the dream, not because gays come out of closets. And a worse sin is pride, of course; especially pride in such trivia as being straight... or white. Homophobia is obviously like racism, and antisemitism etc. People, even straight people, often feel insecure about their sexuality (as the Church has traditionally encouraged them to), and a way to feel better about it with very little subjectively obvious psychic cost (if one is straight) is to think to yourself that at least you're not one of those disgusting gays. The similarities with racism and poor people's views of their own social positions are obvious (not to mention the Church's traditional role in antisemitism). A man can know that he's sexist and letcherous, but comfort himself with the thought that at least he fancies women. And a woman can know that she's fat and lazy, but comfort herself with the thought that at least she's a woman. The irony is that the Church traditionally regarded marriage as second-best to the monastic life (and another irony is that the latter attracted homosexuals, of course... I could go on, but I'll just wish you a merry xmas :)

How We Reason

Either Jane is kneeling by the fire and she is looking at the TV,
or else Mark is standing at the window and he is peering into the garden.

Jane is kneeling by the fire. Does it follow that she is looking at the TV?

Most individuals say, “yes”, see Walsh, C., and Johnson-Laird, P.N. (2004: Co-reference and reasoning, Memory and Cognition 32, 96–106). Given the first premise, they think of two possibilities: in one, the first conjunction is true; and in the other, the second conjunction is true. They overlook that when the second conjunction is true, the first conjunction is false, and that one way in which it can be false is when only its first clause is true, i.e., Jane is kneeling by the fire but not looking at the TV. Hence, the correct answer to the question is: “no”.

The above is from ‘How We Reason: A view from Psychology’ in The Reasoner 2(3), 4–5.
......Philip Johnson-Laird’s book How We Reason is out in paperback next month.
That was an example of a fallacy; there’s a nice list of fallacies in The Reasoner 2(5), 7–8, incidentally.

The Possibility of Free Will

Consider a real object in the world around you, e.g. a brown chair. Maybe the chair is really made of atoms, but if so then that underlying chair is not so much brown as capable of reflecting photons in certain ways. And since there is only one chair not two, out there in the real world—where you can see that the brown chair is—so there is no atomic chair. But of course, we need not become Idealists for that reason.
......Why should there not be many different but equally sound ways of regarding things? That there appears to be a puzzle may just be due to our being in the world that we are thinking about. So we might expect greater puzzles when thinking about ourselves, due to our being them identically. Therefore the following argument—that we couldn’t have morally significant free wills—shouldn’t convince us that we don’t.
......The argument is that, whatever a free choice between at least two alternatives—say, X and Y—is, either something beyond one’s power to choose determines that choice or else nothing does. One chooses, say, X; but why? If some reason for choosing X appealed to one, then something in one’s nature must have been predisposed to be so appealed to (and if that thing was chosen, then the regress just goes one step back, to why one so chose), but if nothing does then one’s choice was made randomly, irrationally, irresponsibly and so forth.

The Action of Free Will

Materialism, in its most plausible forms (e.g. property dualism, cf. this old crosspost), implies that something like micro-psychokinesis should be observable, via the likelihood of Gaia as a self-aware wielder of such of its parts as us, self-aware and language (and other tool) using as we are; because if we are purely material, if matter is such that amongst its properties it includes those that give rise to us as we are—much as sunlight is such that amongst its properties it includes those that allow lasers to blast rocks to smithereens—then it is surely indicated, by our existence, that a more complex and unitary structure such as the Earth’s ecosphere would be more like the goddess Gaia than, say, a car or a crystal.
......Similarly theism, in its most plausible form (e.g. as indicated by the most plausible theodicy), indicates that something akin to micro-psychokinesis would occur within living brains, if not elsewhere, as the soul-brain interaction. Reports of such things as micro-psychokinesis are therefore most interesting philosophically, because their empirical details should have—or so one might expect upon reflection upon what we know pretty well nowadays—the potential to discriminate between the most plausible materialisms (not, e.g., Humean supervenience) and theisms (not, e.g., Islamist fundamentalism). It is therefore sociologically interesting that there is so little professional interest in making rigorously objective observations of such things, even though there are reports by scientists of such things.
......How many other ways are there, whereby 'collapse' and 'no-collapse' interpretations of Quantum mechanics could be distinguished (the true from the false) empirically? If there was micro-psychokinesis then minds would not just be occupying slices through a world described by the wave function, since in that latter case the external events would have to seem random to us. A possible reason why there is a lack of professional scientific interest in such experiments is that 'collapse' interpretations seem to need an observer external to the entire physical universe, e.g. a God, and many scientists prefer to presume that there is no such being. They would say that since there is no such being, so 'collapse' interpretations are false, and hence there is no micro-psychokinesis to look for. Really a rather unscientific attitude (hardly letting the world itself tell you what is true of it).

Being there

She couldn't just tell him to go away, or ignore him. That would have been so much easier for her. But he was a seventeen-year-old human being with feelings; just like everyone else he had never asked to be born – no matter the strange nature of his birth. He deserved to be treated with consideration and respect.

That's from The Temporal Void (p. 721), but I'm wondering about the implicit implication: had we asked to be born, would we not deserve consideration and/or respect? Or is it that nothing can ask to exist, since there is nothing anything can do before it exists, and everything deserves consideration? (I wonder because I think I can show that it is likely that we did ask to be born, if not for whatever bad luck has befallen us.) And what if someone did ask to be born (e.g. Jesus, maybe), would they not deserve consideration (e.g. if they fell victim to malice)?

Presuming Personhood

Watching WALL-E, the best thing at the cinema this summer (and a decent argument against slavish adherence to 700-year-old authority), I suddenly noticed how the humans in it (who resembled jelly-beans) were just cartoons.
......It had been easy to see the cartoon robots as robots to begin with, and as WALL-E clowned around he was touching, e.g. when watching a video of realistic humans, and imitating them. But when the cartoon captain saw the same video I suddenly noticed how he was less than the blob he was in the film (which at that point in the film, he was transcending) and was an ‘it,’ was just lines and colours; and so I became involuntarily aware that I was just watching cartoons (fortunately only fleetingly aware). That dissociation being quasi-trippy, I winded up recalling how we naturally presume that something is a fellow person, when we are young.
......When we grow up, we may think of that as naive, as wrong; but is it? It is not that we ever apply positive criteria for personhood; we rather learn when things fail to be people. Inanimate things fail by being unconscious, and some animals may fail by being amoral, for example. The problem is that if we could know enough about the mechanical or random sources of anyone’s behaviour, we would stop thinking of that one as a person (fortunately we would blink, and involuntarily represume personhood, whatever we knew).
......I’m left wondering if we should define ‘person’ so, what do you think? If atheism is true, we would (probably) have evolved some vague and fluid criteria for personhood, and if theism then the fundamental entity is (probably) a perfect person, and personhood an objectively indefinable primitive (for us).

Russell was Wrong

Russell thought that we could base a logical view of the world around us on our direct perceptions because we could not be wrong about a patch of colour being a certain colour. However, we cannot even guarantee being right about whether a square on a checkerboard is black or white, as this amazing picture shows: checkerShadow.

Go with the Flow...

...it's what a dead fish would do! Speaking of fishy things, what would a Naturalistic picture of the mind look like? Would the mind be, basically, the brain processing information about the body's surroundings; that information being a bit like the copy (not the paint) in some painting of some external pattern caused by the (bearer of the) latter, much as I see the Moon because that image was caused by the Moon?
......But the Moon also causes the tides, whose patterns therefore resemble those of the Moon's orbit; and while the brain processes its information, estuaries do channel tidal waters between banks that are shaped, in part, by those very waters. And while the brain has evolved, to be a relatively stable system, so have land masses (without river-dragons perceiving pearls, presumably). The thing is, the structure of a physical process is just a set (of spatio-temporal correlations)...
......So we could find isomorphic structures (e.g. of a brain's mind momentarily believing that, since there is believing, hence there is a believer) physically instantiated within land masses (e.g. as a subset of the chemical structure); and so it seems that the only reason why materialistic theories of mind are not in serious trouble is that they don't actually exist (as actual theories). And since they don't, we can't actually apply Occam's razor to the extra-physical bits (not without losing a lot of predictive power).
......Now, there are other approaches to mind, but the scientific way to judge between property and substantial dualism would be to compare what they suggest (about the extra aspects of the world) with what the world itself indicates (we should test apposite aspects, of course; psychical and parapsychological researchers have tended not to). So, whereas property dualism seems to suggest a lot of empathic communion, a natural ease to telepathic exchanges of information (at least wherever brains had not evolved to block it), such as should be noticable were it there, do we actually find that?
......No, whereas substantial dualism suggests (since our quantum-mechanically physical brains are somehow affected by our choices) that we should expect micro-psychokinetic effects (more than telepathic ones, if our souls are as distinct as they seem to be) in living brains, which would naturally be more obscure. Maybe such effects could also be observed (less naturally, but then we are creative creatures) in other physical systems, although such things (unlike spoon-benders and poltergeists) have yet to be investigated properly (even though such effects are essentially controllable); but why? (Is it that Naturalism is unscientific?)

Blue Sky Thinking

Look at the blue of the sky and say to yourself “How blue the sky is!”—When you do it spontaneously—without philosophical intentions—the idea never crosses your mind that this impression of colour belongs only to you. And you have no hesitation in exclaiming that to someone else. And if you point at anything as you say the words you point to the sky.

That’s from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 1953, para 275; cf. Kevin Ayers, 1970—"Blue is the colour of sky, and I won’t even try to explain how or why, I’ll just show you the sky."

The Gap of Creation

Swinburne's explanatory argument is basically that while Naturalism cannot explain the origin of minds (e.g. he asks, "how far could the science of the future explain the evolution of souls," in his 1997, p. 174), Monotheism can explain the world's evils (e.g. via my theodicy), whence the latter is the best explanation... but of course, that is so only if Monotheism can explain the origin of souls (otherwise it would be rather like postulating a pork chop to explain crop circles).
......In particular, Swinburne postulates a perfect person as a simple hypothesis (with a correspondingly high prior probability) to explain the world, but that is only explanatory if creating worlds is conceivably something that a person could do. Now, we know that people can rearrange things, but so can evolution. We know that people dream (can even deliberately daydream), so maybe people can create lower sorts of being (if dreams have a sort of being-in-themselves; if we do indeed create them, rather than just experience them), whence a transcendent person might create a physical world; but if God makes people like us (as souls, with free will) as a lower sort of being (not just an imperfect or finite sort), then we seem to lose our sense of God as a perfect person, and the high prior probability without which the God hypothesis isn't even contending...

We seem to, but the criterion of simplicity itself stands in need of justification (or explanation). Maybe what we really want are, to begin with, a few hypotheses that promise to be worth looking into and which seem fairly exhaustive (the alternatives being clearly too odd); hypotheses that we can hope to work with easily enough (simplicity), which promise enough of a pay-off (if they win) and which are naturally unweighted to begin with (prior to the evidence). I'm not suggesting that a big reward for belief can make us believe (Pascal's Wager is off) but after all, the reason why we value truth that highly is, under Naturalism, that genes for such valuations were rewarded, with reproductive success (while under Monotheism truth relates us to God; and incidentally were we made in God's image, simpler concepts would be more likely to resemble those behind creation).
......So Monotheism remains a contender... And while creation remains mysterious, so do mind and matter given Naturalism; and if it's conceivable that matter could spontaneously appear in a Big Bang, and that minds like ours could (somehow) arise from such material, then surely it's similarly conceivable that a sufficiently unlimited person could cause such things deliberately (and incidentally the substance dualism that is our common sense experience is more explicable given Monotheism).

On knowing that One is Irrational

Can one know that one is irrational? It seems contradictory; but suppose I believe that I'm the product of billennia of natural selections—that my most basic concepts, and ways of reasoning (and of judging, and so forth), were probably just the normal ways in which human brains happen to make sense of sensory information, having been selected (from random variants) for not being ways that led more primitive brains (of apes, rats, fish and so forth) into inviability; and also that knowledge was one such concept, one fuzzily orientated towards experts (social authorities) and what they tell us, rather than infallibility. I might then believe that I knew that I was irrational.