Considering I'm currently unemployed and have very little money left in my bank account, I would bet a thousand Canadian dollars that you can't find a real religious believer who will say those words and honestly mean them.
Okay, see, we're going in circles here: I'm trying to ask about the existence of someone who knows "it's all a load of garbage", heck, maybe even contributes to this very board, but cynically joins a church to get the social benefits.
And then you keep saying, no, such people don't exist, if you mean people who are also really religious. But that's the very point under discussion: how many people go through the motions of formal religions for the benefits, say the right applause lights, etc. for the social benefits while holding the conscious belief that there's no literally God in the sense the people there espouse, etc. ?
And if you were talking about people who completely fake being religious, well, in my experience most of them don't ever admit to themselves that they're really atheists in their heart of hearts. I suppose there must be exceptions, though.
I don't see the difference. If you take the LW rationalist position on God, doesn't that mean you're an atheist? So what does it matter if you admit it to yourself. Is there some internal psychological ritual now? If you believe you're a duck, you're a duck...self-believer.
Okay, see, we're going in circles here: I'm trying to ask about the existence of someone who knows "it's all a load of garbage", heck, maybe even contributes to this very board, but cynically joins a church to get the social benefits.
All right. I was misled by the fact that your first commend was a reply to Wei Dai, who was talking about real religious people. I thought you believed that (most?) intelligent people who say they're religious aren't really religious.
...I don't see the difference. If you take the LW rationalist position on God, doe
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?