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Swimmer963 comments on Positive Thinking - Less Wrong
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I think the idea that religion is "irrational" is overly simplistic. The disagreement between atheists and religious people is really over values. Eliezer often says that rationalists win. But rationalists are nearly the opposite - they are the people who would rather be right than win. The people who would rather win, than be right, are usually religious.
My desire to be right, even at the expense of winning, was probably once responsible for my interest in rationality. But today I would rather win than be right, and religion looks less appealing than ever.
I don't believe that anybody reading less wrong would rather win than be right. It isn't something you can even consciously choose. If you even get to the step where you ask yourself, "Would I rather win than be right?" it means you're one of those people who'd rather be right.
When I say you would "rather" be right, I mean that your mind operates in a way so that reason generally overrides other factors in choosing your beliefs.
Supposing you decided that becoming Mormon was a winning strategy. Could you make yourself believe in Mormonism? Not just act it out, but really believe in it? If not, your mind would rather be right than win.
No. But if you offered me a pill which let me believe in Mormonism, I would go for it, which I think is the relevant question.
The way you have phrased it, it seems to me that you could just as well argue "Suppose you decided that flying was a winning strategy. Could you fly?".
It isn't the relevant question. There is no such pill. You can't do it. Yet there are millions of people who are able to do it!
I believe this is because their subconscious, rational decision-making process can compute expected utility without being aware of their own operation, and thus being hindered from setting beliefs so as to maximize utility rather than correctness.
This isn't wrong - it's adaptative! If your decision-making were purely conscious, you would be unable to choose beliefs that are false but likely to lead to preferred outcomes.
It is far more likely that their subconscious hack of a decision making process executes a heuristic to rationalize as a conscious belief the belief being professed by high status people, that heuristic having evolved because it has been adaptive.
It's important to keep in mind that our subconscious isn't rational, isn't trying to maximize our utility function, and is frequently hijacked by a bunch of jury-rigged hacks put in place by generations of horny monkeys. Evolution is not on our side.
Our subconscious is "rational" if rational is defined as "winning". True, it's winning at something you don't identify as "your" utility function. But the claim I'm making is that subconscious mechanisms have some winning strategies open to them, that conscious strategies don't. The question whether it's implementing "your" utility function or not is a different question.
Our subconscious may be somewhat optimized for the task of increasing inclusive genetic fitness but I doubt it's optimal, evolution is stupid and gets stuck in local maxima all the time. There are probably points in the space of all possible subconsciouses that would do much better, especially since we are in quite a different environment to the one it was optimized for.
I disagree. I don't think the subconscious computes any expected utility at all. I think it's in large part a dumb set of heuristics and reflexes that isn't particularly good at 'winning' in its current environment. Sure, it's true that "subconscious mechanisms have some winning strategies open to them that conscious strategies don't", but that's a much weaker claim.
That it's using a different utility function is important to remember and nonobvious in the great-grandparent (we wouldn't say it's good to be taken over by a brainslug simply because the brainslug is better at achieving its goals than we are at achieving ours).
I have spent a long time trying to figure out what exactly works differently about my Christian friends' brains that allows them to really, truly believe without (apparent) cognitive dissonance. Not to say that I would choose to believe unconditionally if I had the ability, but I would like to understand.
Maybe. I wish there was a way of researching this without biasing the results.
[To clarify, I'm an atheist, and this is not intended as a defense of religion, only as an analogy which might possibly illuminate the nature of religious belief.]
Suppose you're framed. You know that you didn't commit that crime, but you've been perfectly framed. All the evidence points to your guilt. And yet, in the face of all the evidence, you know that you didn't commit it.
What's your evidence? You might say, "I remember clearly". But some psychologist might argue with you that you are in denial, that you have constructed a false memory, and so on. He might even show brain scans which he says proves that you've suppressed your memory.
Some of us will continue to believe that our memory is true and that we are innocent and that somehow we've been framed. We have a strong inner conviction about what happened - which conviction is nothing more or less than our own memory.
That conviction in one's own innocence in this scenario resembles religious belief in various respects. All the physical evidence points to guilt. You can show not a scrap of evidence in defense of your innocence. All you have is your own conviction that you are innocent. And, similarly, all the physical evidence points to the falsehood of your religion (we suppose for the sake of argument). You can't show a scrap of evidence in defense of your religion. All you have is your own conviction that your religion is true.
Of course, in this case (unlike with religion) you have a good reason to believe that your subjective personal conviction correlates with the truth - and even so you should be open to the possibility of being wrong.
From a religious person's point of view, why do they not have a good reason to believe that their personal convictions don't correlate with truth?
I was attempting to show that even with all the reasons taken away - with all the empirical evidence, with the experts telling him that his memories are false - with nothing left but his own naked feeling of conviction, a normal, healthy human being may very well retain his conviction.
Now, if a person wanted to state a reason for retaining his conviction, he might argue as follows: "this conviction in my own innocence is the consequence of the fact of my innocence, and is thus evidence of my innocence - the only evidence I have left". If A tends to cause B and not-A tends to prevent B, then B is evidence (though not proof) of A. Our brains are built so that facts tend (however imperfectly) to cause beliefs in those facts. Thus, if we find in ourselves a belief in some fact, then this is evidence (however imperfect) that the fact is true.
This, however, is all after-the-fact reasoning to support the simple psychological phenomenon of retaining one's own convictions. That phenomenon can be explained and justified, as I did in the paragraph above, but the phenomenon itself is simply the habit of sticking to one's convictions, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. The phenomenon is stubbornness in one's beliefs. Once one starts believing something, then one keeps believing it. Notice I'm not saying anything about this being a belief in a world they want to live in. I don't think that stuff is essential. Once you have a belief, however you got it, you tend to stick to it, even when the evidence goes against it. It's normal to do that. And, sometimes, it's the right thing to do.
The fact that they're better explained by other causes than the divine? The fact that people with similar experiences are objectively most likely to be factually incorrect in that specific domain? What good reason is there?
Edit: Consider all the people who have faith in some religion based on subjective personal conviction, and separate them into mutually exclusive groups. No one group is in the majority. Thus, your subjective personal conviction regarding religion is, best case scenario, more likely to be wrong than right.
Disappointing. If this is your reaction, my analogy failed. What I tried to create was a situation in which all you have is your conviction. I took away all your props, all the empirical evidence. All you have is your memory, which I argued here reduces to conviction, and I even threw in a battalion of experts telling you that your memories are false. My point is that with all this, with all the evidence pointing against his belief and with nothing left to him but his own conviction itself, a normal, healthy human being may very well maintain his conviction - in the face of everything.
Sorry! I think the analogy is great, though now I'm interested in asking a friend of mine to provide ones from his own (theistic) perspective. It might be stronger if there is no proposed mechanism for denial / false memories, and you're just being accused of lying, perhaps?
That describes it pretty well. I would argue that a lot of Christians do have some form of evidence, though; the experiences of transcendent joy that they call the 'presence of God'. I know they're not lying about that because I've felt that as well. I can induce it in myself fairly predictably by singing the right kind of music with a group of people...or even just thinking about things I find beautiful, like math. I just don't consider it evidence for God, per se.
I agree. I was deliberately pushing the lack of evidence as far as I could in order to make the point as strongly as I could. In my imagined scenario (someone perfectly framed of a crime who nevertheless knows perfectly well that he is innocent - though has absolutely no evidence to lean on), I find it completely realistic to be such a person and to have a strong conviction in my own innocence even though there is not a scrap of evidence for it and a lot of evidence against it. This, I think, may provide a basis for trying to imagine what it is like to have a strong belief in a religion despite no evidence, even in the face of contrary evidence. As you say, the religious actually do have certain kinds of evidence.
I think it's worthwhile to, if it is possible, try to understand people sympathetically, to try to understand them from the inside. I think that the ease of imagining myself as a perfectly framed person who remains firmly convinced of his own innocence in the face of zero evidence for and plenty against suggests that the difference between believers and nonbelievers is not as deep as it might have seemed. There is, necessarily, some difference, but I don't think it's a matter of the brain functioning drastically differently.
I don't think so either. From the explanations others have given me, belief seems to come from a) wanting the world to be a certain way, b) thinking (probably not consciously) that the world is this way if they believe it is, and c) interpreting observations about the world as evidence for the world being that way. Well, I have a) as well. It would be really freaking awesome if there was a God who talked to you and answered your prayers and never let anything bad happen. But I know that my believing that doesn't make it true, and so I interpret the same real-world observations as meaning different things.
I don't think one's own memories count as having no evidence.
The problem is that you can only be sure about the appearance of such. The cognitive dissonance just needs to be small enough so that it doesn't manifest in outward action.
Maybe. I've asked them, though, and they don't seem to find it a serious problem. They find ways to get around it...I could quote examples if I remembered the vocabulary better. In fact, a number of people seemed confused when I tried to explain my inability to believe.
Maybe this is key to the problem, such that they are able to build such a strong mental block between those two aspects of the brain so that the concept of the conflict of belief is actively rejected.
A strong mental block. Interesting. Plausible...