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".
When this woman was in high school, she thought she was an atheist. But she decided, at that time, that she should act as if she believed in God. And then—she told me earnestly—over time, she came to really believe in God.
So far as I can tell, she is completely wrong about that. Always throughout our conversation, she said, over and over, "I believe in God", never once, "There is a God." When I asked her why she was religious, she never once talked about the consequences of God existing, only about the consequences of believing in God. Never, "God will help me", always, "my belief in God helps me". When I put to her, "Someone who just wanted the truth and looked at our universe would not even invent God as a hypothesis," she agreed outright.
She hasn't actually deceived herself into believing that God exists or that the Jewish religion is true. Not even close, so far as I can tell.
On the other hand, I think she really does believe she has deceived herself.
So although she does not receive any benefit of believing in God—because she doesn't—she honestly believes she has deceived herself into believing in God, and so she honestly expects to receive the benefits that she associates with deceiving oneself into believing in God; and that, I suppose, ought to produce much the same placebo effect as actually believing in God.
And this may explain why she was motivated to earnestly defend the statement that she believed in God from my skeptical questioning, while never saying "Oh, and by the way, God actually does exist" or even seeming the slightest bit interested in the proposition.
Eliezer's post focuses on the distinction between two concepts a person can believe (hereby called "narratives"):
"God is real."
"I have something that qualifies as a 'belief in God'."
Either narrative will be associated with positive things in the person's mind. And the person, particularly with narrative #2, often forms a meta-narrative:
3. "My belief in God has positive effects in my life."
But: Unlike the meta-narrative, our analysis should not proceed as if the relationship between narrative and effects is a simple causal link.
The actual cognitive process that determines the narrative might go something like this:
Notice that the desirable aspects of life enjoyed by religious people in the community conflict with undesirable properties (e.g. falsehood, silliness, uselessness) of religious beliefs.
Trigger a search: "How do I make the undesirable properties go away while keeping benefits?"
Settle on a local optimum way of thinking, according to some evaluation algorithm that is attracted by predictions of certain consequences and repulsed by others.
The search can have a very different character from one individual to another. For example, if the idea of not having a defensible narrative isn't repulsive, then the person says: "I'm happy in my religious community, so I don't think too hard about my religion." The kind of thing they are actually repulsed by would be "for me or my peers to believe that I am not a fully committed member of my in-group".
Or, if the person is given to conscious reasoning, then it would be extremely repulsive to not have a defensible narrative. What their search evaluation algorithm is actually repulsed by might be something like, "the self-doubt that I am not a capable reasoner", or "the loss of respect and status among other intellectuals". So the quick fix is: Add more layers of justification and arguments surrounding religion, so that both you and your peers can plausibly feel that you are a capable reasoner occupying a justifyable stance on a complex issue.
So regarding Eliezer's post, it's not surprising that someone with narrative #2 can get a "placebo" version of the positive effects that come with narrative #1. The narrative doesn't independently cause the positive effects; the narrative is shaped by a cognitive algorithm that predicts the benefits of believing it.
Great point! Very insightful of you.
I wonder if there are other examples of this that can be found in human psychology.