xamdam comments on Which Parts Are "Me"? - Less Wrong

30 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2008 06:15PM

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Comment author: xamdam 01 July 2010 03:36:02PM 0 points [-]

Notably the rabbis of old made a step in the right direction: they created a vision of "the evil desire" as an external, anthropomorphic, force. This is already helpful to create a layer between the emotions and the "person", and muster the natural aggressive emotions against it. (and no, they did not think devil is an actual sadist with horns).

My criticism of this approach is that this framework is not fine enough to give you an advantage battling the "evil inclination": viewing the immoral desire as an external force, rather than a mechanism of the brain with its own set of rules, makes it a battle of will rather than a battle of wits. Since willpower is a scarce resource this is not a good strategy. To give them credit they did not have the advantage of modern psychology; I am only criticizing to emphasize the now more remediable weakness of their approach.