byrnema comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 12:18AM

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Comment author: byrnema 22 January 2011 03:49:23AM *  8 points [-]

Help from LW readers is welcome.

I'll chime in that Eliezer provided me with the single, most personally powerful argument that I have against religion. (I'm not as convinced by razor and low-prior arguments, perhaps because I don't understand them.)

The argument not only pummels religion it identifies it: religion is the pattern matching that results when you feel around for the best (most satisfying) answer. To paraphrase Eliezer's argument (if someone knows the post, I'll link to it, there's at least this); while you're in the process of inventing things, there's nothing preventing you from making your theory as grand as you want. Once you have your maybe-they're-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent. Especially the vigorous head-nodding in the congregation.

I don't have so much against pattern matching. I think it has it's uses, and religion provides many of them (to feel connected and integrated and purposeful, etc). But it's an absurd means of epistemology. I think it's amazing that religions go from 'whoever made us must love us and want us to love the world' --which is a very natural pattern for humans to match -- to this great detailed web of fabrication. In my opinion, the religions hang themselves with the details. We might speculate about what our creator would be like, but religions make up way too much stuff in way too much detail and then make it dogma. (I already knew the details were wrong, but I learned to recognize the made-up details as the symptom of lacking epistemology to begin with.)

Now that I recognize this pattern (the pattern of finding patterns that feel right, but which have no reason to be true) I see it other places too. It seems pattern matching will occur wherever there is a vacuum of the scientific method. Whenever we don't know, we guess. I think it takes a lot of discipline to not feel compelled by guesses that resonate with your brain. (It seems it would help if your brain was wired a little differently so that the pattern didn't resonate as well -- but this is just a theory that sounds good.)

Comment author: Perplexed 22 January 2011 04:22:11AM 4 points [-]

I also would like to see a link to that post, if anyone recognizes it.

I'll agree that to (atheist) me, it certainly seems that one big support for religious belief is the natural human tendency toward wishful thinking. However, it doesn't do much good to provide convincing arguments against religion as atheists picture it. You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.

Once you have your maybe-they're-believing-this-because-that-would-be-a-cool-thing-to-believe lenses on, it all seems very transparent.

Yeah, I know what you mean. Pity I can't turn that around and use it against simulationism. :)

Comment author: byrnema 22 January 2011 03:48:29PM *  1 point [-]

I found it: this is the post I meant. But it wasn't written by Eliezer, sorry. (The comment I linked to in the grandparent that was resonates with this idea for me, and I might have seen more resonance in older posts.)

You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.

I'm confused. I just want to understand religion, and the world in general, better. Are you interested in deconversion?

Pity I can't turn that around and use it against simulationism. :)

Ha ha. Simulationism is of course a way cool idea. I think the compelling meme behind it though is that we're being tricked or fooled by something playful. When you deviate from this pattern, the idea is less culturally compelling.

In particular, the word 'simulation' doesn't convey much. If you just mean something that evolves according to rules, then our universe is apparently a simulation already anyway.

Comment author: Perplexed 22 January 2011 04:53:40PM 1 point [-]

I found it: this is the post I meant.

Thx. That is a good posting. As was the posting to which it responded

You need convincing arguments against religion as its practitioners see it.

I'm confused. I just want to understand religion, and the world in general, better. Are you interested in deconversion?

Whoops! Bad assumption on my part. Sorry. No, I am not particularly interested in turning theists into atheists either, though I am interested in rational persuasion techniques more generally.

Comment author: timtyler 22 January 2011 09:09:51AM *  3 points [-]

Dennett tells a similar "agentification" story:

"I think we can discern religion’s origins in superstition, which grew out of an overactive adoption of the intentional stance,” he says. “This is a mammalian feature that we share with, say, dogs. If your dog hears the thud of snow falling off the roof and jumps up and barks, the dog is in effect asking, ‘Who’s there?’ not, ‘What’s that?’ The dog is assuming there’s an agent causing the thud. It might be a dangerous agent. The assumption is that when something surprising, unexpected, puzzling happens, treat it as an agent until you learn otherwise. That’s the intentional stance. It’s instinctive.” The intentional stance is appropriate for self-protection, Dennett explains, and “it’s on a hair trigger. You can’t afford to wait around. You want to have a lot of false positive, a lot of false alarms [...]” He continues: “Now, the dog just goes back to sleep after a minute. But we, because we have language, we mull it over in our heads and pretty soon we’ve conjured up a hallucinated agent, say, a little forest god or a talking tree or an elf or something ghostly that made that noise. Generally, those are just harmless little quirks that we soon forget. But every now and then, one comes along that has a little bit more staying power. It’s sort of unforgettable. And so it grows. And we share it with a neighbor. And the neighbor says, ‘What do you mean, a talking tree? There’s no talking trees.’ And you say, ‘I could have sworn that tree was talking.’ Pretty soon, the whole village is talking about the talking tree.

Comment author: timtyler 22 January 2011 09:05:53AM *  0 points [-]

I think that is usually called Patternicity these days. See:

Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise

Why the brain believes something is real when it is not - By Michael Shermer

Comment author: byrnema 22 January 2011 03:13:10PM *  2 points [-]

Seeing patterns in noise and agency in patterns (especially fate) is probably a large factor in religious belief.

But what I was referring to by pattern matching was something different. Our cultural ideas about the world make lots of patterns, and there are natural ways to complete these patterns. When you hear the completion of these patterns, it can feel very correct, like something you already knew, or especially profound if it pulls together lots of memes.

For example, the Matrix is an idea that resonates with our culture. Everyone believes it on some level, or can relate to the world being like that. The movie was popular but the meme wasn't the result of the movie -- the meme was already there and the movie made it explicit and gave the idea a convenient handle. Human psychology plays a role. The Matrix as a concept has probably always been found in stories as a weak collective meme, but modern technology brought it more immediately and uniformly in our collective awareness.

I think religion is like that. A story that wrote itself from all the loose ends of what we already believe. Religious leaders are good at feeling and completing these collective patterns. Religion is probably in trouble because many of the memes are so anachronistic now. They survive to the extent that the ideas are based on psychology but the other stuff creates dissonance.

This isn't something to reference (I'm sure there are zillions of books developing this) or a personal theory, it's more or less a typical view about religion. It explains why there are so many religions differing in details (different things sounded good to different people) but with common threads. (Because the religions evolved together with overlapping cultures and reflect our common psychology.)

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