I don't mean to seem like I'm picking on Kurige, but I think you have to expect a certain amount of questioning if you show up on Less Wrong and say:
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.
"If you know it's double-think...
...how can you still believe it?" I helplessly want to say.
Or:
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.
If you know your belief isn't correlated to reality, how can you still believe it?
Shouldn't the gut-level realization, "Oh, wait, the sky really isn't green" follow from the realization "My map that says 'the sky is green' has no reason to be correlated with the territory"?
Well... apparently not.
One part of this puzzle may be my explanation of Moore's Paradox ("It's raining, but I don't believe it is")—that people introspectively mistake positive affect attached to a quoted belief, for actual credulity.
But another part of it may just be that—contrary to the indignation I initially wanted to put forward—it's actually quite easy not to make the jump from "The map that reflects the territory would say 'X'" to actually believing "X". It takes some work to explain the ideas of minds as map-territory correspondence builders, and even then, it may take more work to get the implications on a gut level.
I realize now that when I wrote "You cannot make yourself believe the sky is green by an act of will", I wasn't just a dispassionate reporter of the existing facts. I was also trying to instill a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It may be wise to go around deliberately repeating "I can't get away with double-thinking! Deep down, I'll know it's not true! If I know my map has no reason to be correlated with the territory, that means I don't believe it!"
Because that way—if you're ever tempted to try—the thoughts "But I know this isn't really true!" and "I can't fool myself!" will always rise readily to mind; and that way, you will indeed be less likely to fool yourself successfully. You're more likely to get, on a gut level, that telling yourself X doesn't make X true: and therefore, really truly not-X.
If you keep telling yourself that you can't just deliberately choose to believe the sky is green—then you're less likely to succeed in fooling yourself on one level or another; either in the sense of really believing it, or of falling into Moore's Paradox, belief in belief, or belief in self-deception.
If you keep telling yourself that deep down you'll know—
If you keep telling yourself that you'd just look at your elaborately constructed false map, and just know that it was a false map without any expected correlation to the territory, and therefore, despite all its elaborate construction, you wouldn't be able to invest any credulity in it—
If you keep telling yourself that reflective consistency will take over and make you stop believing on the object level, once you come to the meta-level realization that the map is not reflecting—
Then when push comes to shove—you may, indeed, fail.
When it comes to deliberate self-deception, you must believe in your own inability!
Tell yourself the effort is doomed—and it will be!
Is that the power of positive thinking, or the power of negative thinking? Either way, it seems like a wise precaution.
I don't think so. He is advocating telling yourself something on the condition that telling it to yourself causes it to be true.
It's not equivalent to telling yourself "I'm attractive to the opposite sex." Say that you doubted this prior to uttering it. Then, yes, after uttering it, you might have reason to think that it is marginally more likely to be true. But you almost certainly wouldn't be justified in believing it with high confidence. That is, you still shouldn't believe the statement, so telling it to yourself is dishonest.
In contrast, Eliezer is suggesting that perhaps regularly uttering the statement
does alter you so as to make itself true. If that's right, then, conditioned on your having uttered it, you are justified in believing what you uttered, so you are not being dishonest.
It's not a matter of being outside of reality. The utterance is part of reality. That's precisely why it may have the power to cause itself to be true.
Of course, it may be that this particular statement just doesn't have that power. If the probability of that were above a certain threshold, I expect that Eliezer wouldn't advocate saying it unless it's true already.
What evidence is there that yelling at yourself like this is going to make a difference? Let us imagine two kinds of people: those who cannot fall into Moore's paradox (believing the map but not the territory) and those who can. People in the first class, who are immune to the problem, will gain no benefit from reciting these mantras. People in the second class, for whom there is a real risk of making these kinds of errors, are supposed to vigorously tell themselves that there is no such risk! They are supposed to lie to themselves in the hope that the lie... (read more)