The Sacred Mundane

42 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 March 2009 09:53AM

Followup toIs Humanism a Religion-Substitute?

So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads dialogue with him.  Adam Frank's book is about the experience of the sacred.  I might not usually call it that, but of course I know the experience Frank is talking about.  It's what I feel when I watch a video of a space shuttle launch; or what I feel—to a lesser extent, because in this world it is too common—when I look up at the stars at night, and think about what they mean.  Or the birth of a child, say.  That which is significant in the Unfolding Story.

Adam Frank holds that this experience is something that science holds deeply in common with religion.  As opposed to e.g. being a basic human quality which religion corrupts.

The Constant Fire quotes William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience as saying:

Religion... shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude; so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.

And this theme is developed further:  Sacredness is something intensely private and individual.

Which completely nonplussed me.  Am I supposed to not have any feeling of sacredness if I'm one of many people watching the video of SpaceShipOne winning the X-Prize?  Why not?  Am I supposed to think that my experience of sacredness has to be somehow different from that of all the other people watching?  Why, when we all have the same brain design?  Indeed, why would I need to believe I was unique?  (But "unique" is another word Adam Frank uses; so-and-so's "unique experience of the sacred".)  Is the feeling private in the same sense that we have difficulty communicating any experience?  Then why emphasize this of sacredness, rather than sneezing?

The light came on when I realized that I was looking at a trick of Dark Side Epistemology—if you make something private, that shields it from criticism.  You can say, "You can't criticize me, because this is my private, inner experience that you can never access to question it."

But the price of shielding yourself from criticism is that you are cast into solitude—the solitude that William James admired as the core of religious experience, as if loneliness were a good thing.

Such relics of Dark Side Epistemology are key to understanding the many ways that religion twists the experience of sacredness:

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BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on "religious experience"

14 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 23 March 2009 01:33AM

BHTV episode with myself and Adam Frank, author of "The Constant Fire", on whether or not religious experience is compatible with the scientific experience, or worth trying to salvage.

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Raising the Sanity Waterline

112 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 March 2009 04:28AM

To paraphrase the Black Belt Bayesian:  Behind every exciting, dramatic failure, there is a more important story about a larger and less dramatic failure that made the first failure possible.

If every trace of religion was magically eliminated from the world tomorrow, then—however much improved the lives of many people would be—we would not even have come close to solving the larger failures of sanity that made religion possible in the first place.

We have good cause to spend some of our efforts on trying to eliminate religion directly, because it is a direct problem.  But religion also serves the function of an asphyxiated canary in a coal mine—religion is a sign, a symptom, of larger problems that don't go away just because someone loses their religion.

Consider this thought experiment—what could you teach people that is not directly about religion, which is true and useful as a general method of rationality, which would cause them to lose their religions?  In fact—imagine that we're going to go and survey all your students five years later, and see how many of them have lost their religions compared to a control group; if you make the slightest move at fighting religion directly, you will invalidate the experiment.  You may not make a single mention of religion or any religious belief in your classroom, you may not even hint at it in any obvious way.  All your examples must center about real-world cases that have nothing to do with religion.

If you can't fight religion directly, what do you teach that raises the general waterline of sanity to the point that religion goes underwater?

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Don't Believe You'll Self-Deceive

15 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 March 2009 08:03AM

Followup toMoore's Paradox, Doublethink

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.

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Moore's Paradox

47 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 March 2009 02:27AM

Followup toBelief in Self-Deception

Moore's Paradox is the standard term for saying "It's raining outside but I don't believe that it is."  HT to painquale on MetaFilter.

I think I understand Moore's Paradox a bit better now, after reading some of the comments on Less Wrong.  Jimrandomh suggests:

Many people cannot distinguish between levels of indirection. To them, "I believe X" and "X" are the same thing, and therefore, reasons why it is beneficial to believe X are also reasons why X is true.

I don't think this is correct—relatively young children can understand the concept of having a false belief, which requires separate mental buckets for the map and the territory.  But it points in the direction of a similar idea:

Many people may not consciously distinguish between believing something and endorsing it.

After all—"I believe in democracy" means, colloquially, that you endorse the concept of democracy, not that you believe democracy exists.  The word "belief", then, has more than one meaning.  We could be looking at a confused word that causes confused thinking (or maybe it just reflects pre-existing confusion).

So: in the original example, "I believe people are nicer than they are", she came up with some reasons why it would be good to believe people are nice—health benefits and such—and since she now had some warm affect on "believing people are nice", she introspected on this warm affect and concluded, "I believe people are nice".  That is, she mistook the positive affect attached to the quoted belief, as signaling her belief in the proposition.  At the same time, the world itself seemed like people weren't so nice.  So she said, "I believe people are nicer than they are."

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Belief in Self-Deception

51 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 05 March 2009 03:20PM

Continuation ofNo, Really, I've Deceived Myself
Followup toDark Side Epistemology

I spoke yesterday of my conversation with a nominally Orthodox Jewish woman who vigorously defended the assertion that she believed in God, while seeming not to actually believe in God at all.

While I was questioning her about the benefits that she thought came from believing in God, I introduced the Litany of Tarski—which is actually an infinite family of litanies, a specific example being:

  If the sky is blue
      I desire to believe "the sky is blue"
  If the sky is not blue
      I desire to believe "the sky is not blue".

"This is not my philosophy," she said to me.

"I didn't think it was," I replied to her.  "I'm just asking—assuming that God does not exist, and this is known, then should you still believe in God?"

She hesitated.  She seemed to really be trying to think about it, which surprised me.

"So it's a counterfactual question..." she said slowly.

I thought at the time that she was having difficulty allowing herself to visualize the world where God does not exist, because of her attachment to a God-containing world.

Now, however, I suspect she was having difficulty visualizing a contrast between the way the world would look if God existed or did not exist, because all her thoughts were about her belief in God, but her causal network modelling the world did not contain God as a node.  So she could easily answer "How would the world look different if I didn't believe in God?", but not "How would the world look different if there was no God?"

She didn't answer that question, at the time.  But she did produce a counterexample to the Litany of Tarski:

She said, "I believe that people are nicer than they really are."

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No, Really, I've Deceived Myself

55 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 March 2009 11:29PM

Followup toBelief in Belief

I recently spoke with a person who... it's difficult to describe.  Nominally, she was an Orthodox Jew.  She was also highly intelligent, conversant with some of the archaeological evidence against her religion, and the shallow standard arguments against religion that religious people know about.  For example, she knew that Mordecai, Esther, Haman, and Vashti were not in the Persian historical records, but that there was a corresponding old Persian legend about the Babylonian gods Marduk and Ishtar, and the rival Elamite gods Humman and Vashti.  She knows this, and she still celebrates Purim.  One of those highly intelligent religious people who stew in their own contradictions for years, elaborating and tweaking, until their minds look like the inside of an M. C. Escher painting.

Most people like this will pretend that they are much too wise to talk to atheists, but she was willing to talk with me for a few hours.

As a result, I now understand at least one more thing about self-deception that I didn't explicitly understand before—namely, that you don't have to really deceive yourself so long as you believe you've deceived yourself.  Call it "belief in self-deception".

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The Uses of Fun (Theory)

14 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 January 2009 08:30PM

"But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia?  On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygenic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive.  A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create."
        —George Orwell, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun

There are three reasons I'm talking about Fun Theory, some more important than others:

  1. If every picture ever drawn of the Future looks like a terrible place to actually live, it might tend to drain off the motivation to create the future.  It takes hope to sign up for cryonics.
  2. People who leave their religions, but don't familiarize themselves with the deep, foundational, fully general arguments against theism, are at risk of backsliding.  Fun Theory lets you look at our present world, and see that it is not optimized even for considerations like personal responsibility or self-reliance.  It is the fully general reply to theodicy.
  3. Going into the details of Fun Theory helps you see that eudaimonia is actually complicated —that there are a lot of properties necessary for a mind to lead a worthwhile existence.  Which helps you appreciate just how worthless a galaxy would end up looking (with extremely high probability) if it was optimized by something with a utility function rolled up at random.

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Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun

27 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 17 December 2008 11:33PM

Followup toJoy in the Merely Good

Raise the topic of cryonics, uploading, or just medically extended lifespan/healthspan, and some bioconservative neo-Luddite is bound to ask, in portentous tones:

"But what will people do all day?"

They don't try to actually answer the question.  That is not a bioethicist's role, in the scheme of things.  They're just there to collect credit for the Deep Wisdom of asking the question.  It's enough to imply that the question is unanswerable, and therefore, we should all drop dead.

That doesn't mean it's a bad question.

It's not an easy question to answer, either.  The primary experimental result in hedonic psychology—the study of happiness—is that people don't know what makes them happy.

And there are many exciting results in this new field, which go a long way toward explaining the emptiness of classical Utopias.  But it's worth remembering that human hedonic psychology is not enough for us to consider, if we're asking whether a million-year lifespan could be worth living.

Fun Theory, then, is the field of knowledge that would deal in questions like:

  • "How much fun is there in the universe?"
  • "Will we ever run out of fun?"
  • "Are we having fun yet?"
  • "Could we be having more fun?"

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Excluding the Supernatural

36 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 September 2008 12:12AM

Followup toReductionism, Anthropomorphic Optimism

Occasionally, you hear someone claiming that creationism should not be taught in schools, especially not as a competing hypothesis to evolution, because creationism is a priori and automatically excluded from scientific consideration, in that it invokes the "supernatural".

So... is the idea here, that creationism could be true, but even if it were true, you wouldn't be allowed to teach it in science class, because science is only about "natural" things?

It seems clear enough that this notion stems from the desire to avoid a confrontation between science and religion.  You don't want to come right out and say that science doesn't teach Religious Claim X because X has been tested by the scientific method and found false.  So instead, you can... um... claim that science is excluding hypothesis X a priori.  That way you don't have to discuss how experiment has falsified X a posteriori.

Of course this plays right into the creationist claim that Intelligent Design isn't getting a fair shake from science—that science has prejudged the issue in favor of atheism, regardless of the evidence.  If science excluded Intelligent Design a priori, this would be a justified complaint!

But let's back up a moment.  The one comes to you and says:  "Intelligent Design is excluded from being science a priori, because it is 'supernatural', and science only deals in 'natural' explanations."

What exactly do they mean, "supernatural"?  Is any explanation invented by someone with the last name "Cohen" a supernatural one?  If we're going to summarily kick a set of hypotheses out of science, what is it that we're supposed to exclude?

By far the best definition I've ever heard of the supernatural is Richard Carrier's:  A "supernatural" explanation appeals to ontologically basic mental things, mental entities that cannot be reduced to nonmental entities.

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