Amanojack comments on Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 March 2009 08:03AM

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Tags: self_deception antitheism doublethink reflectivity

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Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 09 March 2009 06:31:42PM 19 points [-]

I hope that Kurige comes back to verify this, but I'll bet that when he said

I chose to believe in the existence of God - deliberately and consciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existence of God.

he did not mean, "My belief isn't correlated with reality". Rather, I'll bet, he meant exactly what you meant when you said

telling yourself X doesn't make X true

By saying that his choice had no effect on reality, I expect that he meant that his control over his belief did not entail control over the subject of that belief, i.e., the fact of the matter.

His attribution of Orwellian doublethink to himself is far more confusing. I have no idea what to make of that. Maybe your advice in this post is on point there. But the "absolutely zero effect" quote seems unobjectionable.

Comment author: kurige 10 March 2009 09:15:45AM *  5 points [-]

His attribution of Orwellian doublethink to himself is far more confusing. I have no idea what to make of that. Maybe your advice in this post is on point there. But the "absolutely zero effect" quote seems unobjectionable.

From the original comment:

One thing I've come to realize that helps to explain the disparity I feel when I talk with most other Christians is the fact that somewhere along the way my world-view took a major shift away from blind faith and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Orwellian double-think.

I don't have the original text handy, but a quick search on wikipedia brings up this quote from the book defining the concept:

The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. … To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.

The first sentence and the first sentence alone is the definition I had in my mind when I wrote the comment. It has been quite a while since I last read 1984 and I had forgotten the connotation that to "double-think" is to "deny the existence of objective reality." This was not my intention at all, although, upon reflection, it should have been obvious.

This was bad homework on my part; I should have looked the quote up before writing the comment. Instead of focusing on the example of morality that I used in the original comment I'm going to try to step back a bit to clarify my original point... Instead of blind-faith in religious tenants, my world-view currently accommodates two traditionally exclusive systems of belief: religion and science.

These two beliefs are not contradictory, but the complexity lies in reconciling the two.

If one does not agree with the other then my understanding of one or the other is flawed.

Comment author: Amanojack 14 March 2010 05:43:53AM 1 point [-]

Instead of blind-faith in religious tenants, my world-view currently accommodates two traditionally exclusive systems of belief: religion and science.

In other words, it seems you meant "doublethink" in the collective sense based on traditional sentiment, rather than in the actual sense of a logical contradiction between any one specific religious tenet A and any one specific scientific theory B. If there are no actual contradictions, "doublethink" was just an (unfortunate) turn of phrase and there is nothing to be reconciled.

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