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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