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."
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 i...
Anticipation and faith are both aspects of the human decision process, in a sense just subroutines of a larger program, but they also generate subjective experiences (qualia) that we value for their own sake. Suppose you ask a religious friend why he doesn’t give up religion, he might say something like “Having faith in God comforts me and I think it is a central part of the human experience. Intellectually I know it’s irrational, but I want to keep my faith anyway. My friends and the government will protect me from making any truly serious mistakes as a result of having too much faith (like falling into dangerous cults or refusing to give medical treatment to my children)."
Personally I've never been religious, so this is just a guess of what someone might say. But these are the kinds of thoughts I have when faced with the prospect of giving up the anticipation of future experiences (after being prompted by Dan Armak). We don't know for sure yet that anticipation is irrational, but it's hard to see how it can be patched up to work in an environment where mind copying and merging are possible, and in the mean time, we have a decision theory (UDT) that seems to work fine, but does not involve any notion of anticipation.
What would you do if true rationality requires giving up something even more fundamental to the human experience than faith? I wonder if anyone is actually willing to take this step, or is this the limit of human rationality, the end of a short journey across the space of possible minds?