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SilasBarta comments on Anticipation vs. Faith: At What Cost Rationality? - Less Wrong
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No, they don't really believe it; their actions are severely suboptimal for that belief set. They might have a greater belief that they believe it, however.
Oh, come on. Show me a human whose actions aren't severely suboptimal for their belief set.
Fair point, but here the difference is the most obvious, if the professed beliefs accurately represent their internal predictive model of reality, which I claim it doesn't.
In the past I believed it, and was sad when "the flesh was weak" and I took actions severely suboptimal for that belief set. I wish I had only believed I believed it. I guess it's possible I only now believe I believed it and in fact in the past I merely believed I believed it, but I'm guessing no.
Humans are well known to be terrible at taking actions that aren't severely suboptimal for their beliefs, and for holding contradictory beliefs, and for holding beliefs which imply actions which are suboptimal for their other, contradictory beliefs.
I understand the point about how people can "only believe they believe something," but the way you phrased it sounded like they are consciously faking it, and I think that is in most cases not true.
Unless you are a person to whom faith ever came naturally, you should be very skeptical that your mind contains an accurate model of "that belief set" or of the minds that profess it.
Faith never came naturally to me. After long interaction with "faithful" people, I've developed some tentative hypotheses about how some of them think on some things. Cautious though these hypotheses are, they are enough to rule out the applicability of your characterization to most cases.
If I'm right and they're just cynically going through the motions, do you think they're going to tell you that? Do you think they're even going to give evidence consistent with that? Of course not! They'll just keep up the charade. They'd only admit it if you were a close friend, and they were drunk at the time, like in my example.
The social benefits break down when you make your genuine beliefs become public knowledge.
If it's as hard to gather evidence as you claim, then you should be all the more skeptical of your own conclusions.
ETA: And if it's so crucial to avoid letting the slightest hint of doubt creep out, then we should expect evolution to find the simplest way to keep that from happening: Make a mind with the capacity to genuinely believe this stuff.
When anthropologists study religion, they focus mostly on the rituals, the social cohesion, the punishment of defectors (in the PD sense), and formation of authority structures, and not so much on the factual content of the adherents' purported beliefs.
My position is just: do that.
I'm not suggesting that you rely only on their portrayal of their own beliefs. On the contrary, I'm suggesting long and careful observation of their behavior (including professions of belief) before you reach any confident conclusion.
And even after you've gathered many such observations, you will still be misled if you use the wrong approach in incorporating those observations into a model. Many natural-born atheists use the following fallacious approach to understanding the religious: They think to themselves, "What would it take to make me act like that and say those things? Well, for that to happen, I'd need to have the following things going on inside my mind: <...>. Therefore, those things must also be going on in the minds of theists (or at least of the intelligent ones)."
The flaw with this approach is that you're modeling the mind of a theists using the mind of a natural-born atheist, a mind which almost certainly works differently from a theist's mind when it comes to theological issues, almost by definition. That is why you should be skeptical that your mind contains an accurate model of a theist's mind.
Well, I'm already relying on a large data set, and I was born into a Catholic family. My theory still makes more sense. Here are some more data points:
-The parallels between religion and politics: how they force people into teams, say whatever it takes to defend the team, look for cues about whether you're on their team when they ask about your beliefs,
-The history of religious warfare. It makes no sense to view these people as going out to die for inscrutable theological doctrines, but complete sense to view their motives the same as they would be if you replaced the religion with some other memetic group.
I'd say that this data point supports my position. Get an extreme left-winger or right-winger drunk and you're not going to hear them say, "yeah, those extreme political positions I espouse, I don't really think they're true. I just pretend to because of the social benefits I reap." On the contrary, you're going to hear them spout even more extreme views, views that they'd realize they ought to keep to themselves had they been sober.
I agree. I'm not saying that every action ostensibly justified by religious beliefs is really done because of those beliefs. But that says nothing about whether those beliefs are sincerely held.
It's not necessary for my claim that they think about it in those terms. But they:
a) enjoy the bonding with people "on their team" (yeah, aren't those Republican's so greedy, heh heh, not like us nosiree)
b) would take back more extreme things they said to "support their team", e.g., "Yeah, I don't really think Obama's health plan is the best thing in the world, I just want policy to move in sorta that direction and this is best I can hope for -- of course there are flaws". Now, if you steer the conversation into a duel from the beginning, I'm sure you can get one.
No, that would be evidence that the belief in belief is sincerely held, not the belief itself. An actual belief (zeroth level) that "God's divine essense is embedded in children even before baptism" would correspond to some noticeable activity other than "let's kill the people who think God's divine essense isn't embedded in people until baptism". Yet in the history of religious wars, you saw exactly that.
Why would you think that? I see little reason to think so. I suspect that you think so because you reason, "Were I to believe that God's divine essence is embedded in children even before baptism, I would never kill people for thinking that God's divine essence isn't embedded in people until baptism. Therefore, anyone who holds that belief wouldn't kill people for that reason."
I've already tried to explain why I think that this reasoning is invalid. You're modeling how your own mind would behave under certain circumstances, and you're then extrapolating to how other minds behave under those circumstances. The problem is that the other minds are theistic, so, by definition, they differ from your mind in a way that's obviously highly relevant to how they will behave in the circumstances under consideration.
No; then you would have done that, rather than making an assertion about what they believed.
Perhaps you only believe that you believe that. :)
Well, I am doing that in the sense of judging religions by the factors anthropologists study rather than focusing on how I can well I can disprove the claim that the earth is 6000 years old.
Yes. Confucianism is the prototypical example of a "religion" which has no cosmological beliefs per se, but still provides for community cohesion (i.e. protection from perceived threats), an ethical code (the analects of Confucius are often quoted as proverbs/dogmas), a focus on authority figures and so forth.
Beware of generalising across people you haven't spent much time around, however tempting the hypothesis. Drawing a map of the city from your living room etc.
My first 18 years were spent attending a Catholic church once a week. To the extent that we can ever know what other people actually believe (whatever that means), most of them have genuinely internalised the bits they understand. Like, really.
We can call into question what we mean by 'believe', but I can't agree that a majority of the world population is just cynically going with the flow. Finally, my parish priest is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, and he believed in his god harder/faster/whatever than I currently believe anything. Scary thought, right?
I agree that this is the case. However, that they don't really believe in the tenets from Christianity only follows from this if we have a strictly behaviorist definition of "belief". I doubt many people hold that view and I'm not sure why anyone should.