You focus on pleasant misbeliefs, rather than what (in my opinion) is much more common, distressing misbeliefs.
For instance, you write, "Some misbeliefs about the universe at large may also yield benefits to individual believers or to society. A prime candidate, of course, is religion," begging the question that it's belief in God--a belief held to by virtually all humans ever--that's the comforting/evolved misbelief, and that atheism is the correct view; that all those many billions of humans who experience transcendence and have faith are the ones who are deluded, and that the tiny minority of atheists are the only ones seeing things clearly. And that could be the case--because the vast majority of people believe something, that doesn't make it true. But it doesn't make it false, either, and if everyone except me thinks something is true, then the burden of proof is kind of on me, not them. Why does the more cynical, but equally nonfalsifiable, belief that there is no God get the benefit of the doubt?
I think this is tied to something you've written about before, for instance in "Seven Laws of Declinism." In that essay, you summarize reasons why bad news has more salience than good news. But what happens when you try to disabuse someone of their negative false beliefs? Person: "There are more cancer deaths now than ever!" Me: "Well, insofar as way more people live long enough to get cancer, maybe...but age-standardized cancer rates are so much lower now than they were in the past, and plus we're so much better at curing and preventing a lot of different cancers, so, overall, no, we're doing pretty great on the cancer front." How does that person respond--"yay, awesome, I'm glad I was wrong about cancer" or "that can't be true, what about [reason]/[anecdote]"? Given what you write about, I suspect your experience with this scenario is the same as mine, and you know that people are, uh, not happy to learn that the world is better off than they thought.
People don't delude themselves into accepting comforting beliefs; they delude themselves into thinking the world is worse than it is.
I'm sure I'm not an exception to this, and I believe a lot of horrible things to be true that are false. So yeah, feed me the red pill. I'll likely believe way more comforting things, and be more sanguine about the disquieting ones.
- You're right that many misbeliefs are not uplifting and comforting at all but depressing or frightening. But such misbeliefs don't pose (or shouldn't pose) the moral dilemma I'm outlining: we should all be happy to be disabused of depressing misbeliefs! The reason why pessimists stubbornly and perversely hold on to pessimistic illusions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is an interesting psychological question in its own right, which I try to answer at the end of my "Seven Laws" essay: pessimism sounds smart and optimism sounds dumb and shallow.
- You're also right that in this piece I'm assuming, for the sake of the argument, that there is no God (and I'm not providing any arguments). The reason why I'm doing so is that many atheists have argued for the social and psychological utility of religious faith, while I'm not aware of any religious believers who think that atheism will make you happy. But both believers and atheists have to grapple with the doxastic Catch-22. If you believe in God, you can have to consider the hypothetical: suppose that God didn't exist, would you want to *know* about it? From where I'm standing as an atheist, I have to consider the opposite question: suppose that God really DID exist, would I want to know about it? (I definitely would, because it would be one of the most important truths about the world!)
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I think that the peculiar cold comfort that people get out of false upsetting beliefs is exactly what you describe: That we've decided that pessimism sound smart and optimism sounds dumb. This is its own weird social set of beliefs (why do both the writer of Ecclesiastes and so many modern atheists agree that "the heart of the fool is happy in the house of mirth"? but here we are). There's something deep in our human psyches or souls that wants to feel smart about how we know that everything is terrible, when those dumb Pollyannas think that everything is pretty okay, actually--which is why I think doggedly holding on to false negative beliefs does pose the same moral dilemma as what you're talking about here, just weirder, and with worse consequences.
The fact that you're not aware of the religious arguments for why atheism makes you happy (at least in the short run) kind of indicates to me how little you've seriously considered religious arguments (i.e., considered religious arguments from a religious perspective, not considering them from the perspective who does not believe and has no interest in believing.) The key religious argument for why atheism would be chosen by lots of people for their own comfort is that religion is hard: If I really believe that there is a God who commands me to love my enemy and welcome the stranger and turn the other cheek and sell all I have and give the money to the poor....well, even Peter Singer doesn't think I have to go that far. Atheism also opens the door to relativism, which can give me license to do a bunch of things that I want to do, and insist that others never even get to criticize me for it. Religion, on the other hand, asks me to reflect on my flaws, ask others for forgiveness, try to do better, and then reflect on those flaws again when one inevitably screws up. And all that sucks! Of course people wouldn't want to do those things.
This is where, as I understand it, the evolutionary psychology explanation dovetails with the religious explanation: Yes it sucks to reflect on my flaws, ask forgiveness, and try to do better, but only in the same way that eating your broccoli sucks as a child, or the way it sucks to go to the gym when you don't want to. So the evolutionary psych people and the theologians I think agree that religion can make a more functional society--because, unlike atheism, religion asks you to do a bunch of stuff you don't want to.
You're absolutely right that religious people have often described atheism as appealing and attractive (because of the moral license it provides), and have argued that religious belief takes sacrifices and is therefore hard. But still, they describe the allure of atheism as *dangerous* and harmful, or at least not beneficial. So I should rephrase my point: I'm not aware of any religious believers who have actively *advocated* for atheism because of its alleged social and psychological value. But the reverse is quite common: many atheists "believe in belief", as Dennett writes. They think religion is useful or even indispensable for the common people (but not for them, which is very paternalistic indeed), and it's wrong to take it away from them. Are you aware of any religious believers who have mirroedr that argument, so who "believe in disbelief"? I'm not.
Thank you. I'm much clearer on what you were arguing now.
I am also not aware of a theist's flipside to Dennett's "belief in belief"--that disbelieving in God has value. I speculate that that might be because it's clearly not true: the social/psychological benefit of religious belief is so empirically obvious that even many atheists see it. Indeed, the closest I can get to a claim about the social/psychological benefit of disbelief is from atheists claiming it will make people happier to not believe in sin and/or punishment for sin.
It's interesting to wonder whether atheism leads to relativism. I've heard that suggestion before from religious folk but almost everyone I know is an atheist and I can't think of a single one who is a relativist.
Also, atheists have to face some difficult truths like: when you die, it's all over. And, life has no intrinsic meaning. You have to decide for yourself what the meaning of life is.
I would say that atheism is harder than theism. I do agree that a religion can make a more functional society but I choose inconvenient truths. I don't think I could choose otherwise.
Of course you think that atheism is harder than theism, and more likely to be correct; you’re an atheist. :) Like Maarten argues in this original post, it would be weird if, as an atheist, you thought otherwise.
To be clear—I do not think that atheism inevitably leads to relativism. When I was an atheist, I was not a relativist, and almost all of the atheists I’ve met have not been relativists, either. But relativism is possible for an atheist in a way it just definitionally is not for a religious believer. Indeed, how does one get to “life has no intrinsic meaning” without opening the door to “life’s meaning is whatever we decide it to be, which could be literally anything, so do what you want, and no one can judge you for that, ever”?
Personally, I think “atheists choose atheism because they are relativists who want license to do whatever” is a strawman, the same way that “religious believers choose to believe because they want to be comforted that they live on after death” is a strawman. (As an aside, I’m bemused that believers are simultaneously accused by nonbelievers of believing merely for the comfort of believing in life after death, and also for being big meanies for endorsing the idea of hell. Um. “Your soul will live on after death and that could be extremely miserable forever” is not, in fact, comforting.) I was just a bit surprised that Maarten was unfamiliar with the religious arguments for why atheism would make one happy/be comforting.
I was a believer early on but have been an atheist (someone who lacks belief in a god) for decades. I do think that atheism is harder. Having a solid belief in a loving god and an afterlife would be a massive comfort. (At least if heaven was an interesting place where I could grow -- not a picture I get from any religion, except maybe Mormonism).
Religion tells you what is good and bad whereas atheists have to figure it out for themselves and never know if they are right. (Or if there is a right answer.)
Religious communities also clearly have some benefits. These can be replicated in non-religious communities but it's harder. I am not only an atheist but a transhumanist. That has always made it hard for me to find a community. It's been easier since the web arose but still difficult in physical space.
Hi, Max! As former atheist-turned-believer, I don't have a strong opinion about whether atheism or belief is "harder." What I think is interesting given this entire conversation, though, is the presumption that the harder path is the one more likely to be true--a trope that is positively religious in nature. Hard is the way, and narrow is the gate that leads to truth. I get why someone who thinks that Matthew 7:13-14 is true would agree to that statement, but not why an atheist--who, after all, came up with all his beliefs all by himself--necessarily would.
So I speculate that this goes back to a point of this original post, and a theme in Maarten's other work on the appeal of pessimism. A bunch of us, religious believers and atheists alike, want to believe that there are "hard truths" but not easy ones, and thus are practically in competition to show that our belief system makes our lives suck more. Which is....a little weird, right?
Really enjoyed this article. When I write or read about topics like this, I am often reminded of Richard Feynman's quote:
“You must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.”
I like to start at the whole "know thyself" principle and build outward from there. Does not always work and is filled with blindspots, but I think if someone is really dedicated to knowing themselves, they can work to minimize those blindspots through reflection, being held accountable by others, and the constant pursuit of knowledge.
I think where most fall short is not continuing to learn and instead do their research via confirming what they already know. The confirmation bias is a huge issue today, especially when Google/GPT can just give you exactly what you ask it.
It is *so much harder* to fight confirmation bias in a world of AI and algorithms trained to give the asker exactly what they want. So I guess I'm saying, I 100% agree with you, which I think makes us both right.....huh.
Yes, I think what is most useful about the new technologies, but what is lacking in the individuals using them, is to ask, say, GPT, to provide a counter to the argument, to review the argument for flaws, to look for blindspots that may be there--in other words, the search should/could be much more well-rounded and show multiple points of view, but most just look for what they want and live in confirmation bias.
Excellent point. It would be wonderful if the AIs would ask you: "After I provide you with arguments for one view, would you like to me provide arguments for differing views?" Or something like that.
I think that would be the ideal, but I agree that most people aren’t going to use these technologies this way first, because they’re not inclined to, as you note, and second, because they increasingly can’t, because algorithms are designed to pitch people what they want, and because AI is constrained by the views of its makers.
Famously, Google’s Gemini refused to generate images of white men in response to prompts like “draw a picture of the pope” or even “draw a picture of white men,” because it had been designed in a way to generate images that comported with the values of its designers. Similarly, ask ChatGPT to write an essay arguing why the right to an abortion is absolute, and you’ll get a pretty solid essay. Ask it to write an essay about how a human right to life begins at conception, though, and ChatGPT will tell you that as an AI, it can’t answer values questions. (Or at least that’s what happened when I’ve tried this paired set of prompts.)
So while I agree with you in theory that AI could be used to find the flaws in one’s own arguments, I am concerned that it will only do that effectively if your arguments are counter to what the AI’s designers already think. I fear that this problem will worsen over time, as AI pulls language from existing information posted on the internet. So as more AI-generated arguments are online, AI-generated arguments will be increasingly the source material for new AI-generated arguments. I think that then if you start out with a groupthink effect (like it seems already exists in AI responses to prompts), this will snowball, making it increasingly difficult for even the best-intentioned, most earnestly searching for the truth individual out there to find arguments that contradict their own.
This is one of the reasons I am grateful for Substack, and for being able to correspond with you, @D.A. DiGerolamo, and others like @Maarten Boudry. It is so good to have a space where we can engage in thoughtful disagreement.
Yes, I agree that the problem will worsen over time. I recently read an article that said Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a long-term plan to pump that data into his own AI model and have up-to-date data to train the machine. I think that, what I have found so far, it is a good jumping off point for research (such as give me some sources that argue X, give me some theories of Y, etc.) and then I go off and review the sources and see what i needed and what is relevant. It has provided me some good ideas for topics and concepts I had not previously known or thought about and I then go into research mode and allow my curiosity to take hold. But I don’t trust the AI to be accurate and not have its own blindspots.
Yes, I would prefer to live by the truth, no matter what. Happiness is not the ultimate value for me. I suspect that knowing the truth and nothing but the truth would be compatible with at least as much happiness as I experience now. The exception would be if I learned that -- for absolute certain -- I was not going to be able to drastically extend my life through life extension or cryopreservation. That would be awful. I would still prefer to know so that I don't waste what remains of my life. Besides, I already directly acknowledge that my odds are not great.
I have also been influenced by the book “Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite” by Roger Kurzban. Taking an evolutionary approach to the development of the mind, Kurzban argues that it would be valuable and important that parts of us know and understand things that aren’t made available to our conscious mind. In other words, keeping us living in some level of illusion is, evolutionarily speaking, a trait that would be favored to be passed on.
Chairmanship is powerful, being the means by which a discourse is selected, parameters, and dimensions are defined. Agenda setting skills really do matter.
Whoever (besides a bad screen play featuring Keanu Reeves) shaped the past 20 years of civil discourse for all humanity (one predicated on a mythical, binary option between magical Blue and Red pills), got a lot of work done that now seems impossible to undo.
There is always a certain amount of 'we are going to act as if this is true, whether or not we believe it is' going on. One example is the Divine Right of Kings. This doctrine gained strength in the 1600s in Europe. I do not believe for a moment that my ancestors thought that God really was ensuring that the person who deserved to be king -- the best person for the job -- was born to the role. People who honestly thought that God had given them the rulers they had, on purpose, would be calling on their citiizens to don sackcloth, fast, and repent their evil ways more or less non-stop until we deserved better rulers. But the experience of bloody wars over inheritance in the prior centuries taught everybody the downside of having a civil war every time the king died.
Right now you are questioning the 'honesty is the best policy' principle. That is another shared belief that we are probably better off acting as if it is true, instead of working out under what circumstances it is beneficial to deceive one another.
Also, you write, "Here’s what the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in his famous Pensées, counseled to those who are desperate to believe in God but can’t find the switch in their brain: just go through the motions.....But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing."
Ah, spoken like someone who's never seriously grappled with faith*, or with one's own belief in unbelief. Speaking as a former atheist, I think what Pascal is describing is a process more like learning how to dance than learning how to debate. When you first learn how to dance, you may consciously think that you can't dance, so you awkwardly try to do the moves. If you do them a lot, you get better at it, but you still have to constantly think about what you're doing. Until one day, you're just moving gracefully and in time without thinking about it at all. At some point, you can even reflect on dancing while you are dancing, and never miss a step. You can forget that you are dancing, while never forgetting how to dance. You can even think back on how it was true that once you couldn't dance, and now a different thing is true, because you are now a dancer. You just had to practice, and then your understanding of the truth changed. This isn't self-deception; it's a deeper kind of self-reflection.
*Forgive me if I'm wrong here. I don't mean to assume too much about your religious background.
Interesting to know! I apologize for my presumption and am happy to stand corrected.
I was a committed atheist as a teenager through much of my 20s, and started to consider religion seriously through an evolutionary psychology lens in my 20s (i.e., the "what are the selective advantages of faith?" kind of thing).
That's fascinating. But I presume you didn't embrace religious faith because of its social/evolutionary benefits? At some point you must've concluded that, regardless of its benefits, its metaphysical worldview is really true? (And no worries about your presumption, no offense taken).
In Sweden there are a lot of people right now advocating that one should become a part of the Christian community and behave like a Christian even though you don't believe in a God that cares for individual human beings, eternal damnation and whatnot. Attendance in the Lutheran Church is way up.
Yes. I did eventually come around to the idea that Christianity is really true--or at least, is the best approximation of the truth* that is available to me. This is both for personal experience reasons that inform the dancing metaphor above**, and for a reason derived from social/evolutionary benefits: belief works, and a key way humans have always been able to figure out what is true is that truer models of the world work (even when we do not understand them), and false models don't. For myself personally, I'll go a step further and say that I think Christianity is a better model than belief generically, in part because it works better, and in a more surprising way, than I think belief generically does.
*"Approximation of the truth" here is not the same thing as saying I think there are parts that are false; it's saying that humans are limited in their ability to understand things, and as such the models we have must be oversimplified. This is analogous to the orbital model of the atom or the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
**Which I get is deeply unsatisfying in an argument since we can't share experiences with other people except through the medium of language, and because people rewrite their memories and delude themselves about what they really experienced all the time. While all that is true, we obviously cannot dismiss all personal experience as being false, because then, um, where would this entire "let's know the truth" project even be?
You focus on pleasant misbeliefs, rather than what (in my opinion) is much more common, distressing misbeliefs.
For instance, you write, "Some misbeliefs about the universe at large may also yield benefits to individual believers or to society. A prime candidate, of course, is religion," begging the question that it's belief in God--a belief held to by virtually all humans ever--that's the comforting/evolved misbelief, and that atheism is the correct view; that all those many billions of humans who experience transcendence and have faith are the ones who are deluded, and that the tiny minority of atheists are the only ones seeing things clearly. And that could be the case--because the vast majority of people believe something, that doesn't make it true. But it doesn't make it false, either, and if everyone except me thinks something is true, then the burden of proof is kind of on me, not them. Why does the more cynical, but equally nonfalsifiable, belief that there is no God get the benefit of the doubt?
I think this is tied to something you've written about before, for instance in "Seven Laws of Declinism." In that essay, you summarize reasons why bad news has more salience than good news. But what happens when you try to disabuse someone of their negative false beliefs? Person: "There are more cancer deaths now than ever!" Me: "Well, insofar as way more people live long enough to get cancer, maybe...but age-standardized cancer rates are so much lower now than they were in the past, and plus we're so much better at curing and preventing a lot of different cancers, so, overall, no, we're doing pretty great on the cancer front." How does that person respond--"yay, awesome, I'm glad I was wrong about cancer" or "that can't be true, what about [reason]/[anecdote]"? Given what you write about, I suspect your experience with this scenario is the same as mine, and you know that people are, uh, not happy to learn that the world is better off than they thought.
People don't delude themselves into accepting comforting beliefs; they delude themselves into thinking the world is worse than it is.
I'm sure I'm not an exception to this, and I believe a lot of horrible things to be true that are false. So yeah, feed me the red pill. I'll likely believe way more comforting things, and be more sanguine about the disquieting ones.
You make some good points!
- You're right that many misbeliefs are not uplifting and comforting at all but depressing or frightening. But such misbeliefs don't pose (or shouldn't pose) the moral dilemma I'm outlining: we should all be happy to be disabused of depressing misbeliefs! The reason why pessimists stubbornly and perversely hold on to pessimistic illusions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is an interesting psychological question in its own right, which I try to answer at the end of my "Seven Laws" essay: pessimism sounds smart and optimism sounds dumb and shallow.
- You're also right that in this piece I'm assuming, for the sake of the argument, that there is no God (and I'm not providing any arguments). The reason why I'm doing so is that many atheists have argued for the social and psychological utility of religious faith, while I'm not aware of any religious believers who think that atheism will make you happy. But both believers and atheists have to grapple with the doxastic Catch-22. If you believe in God, you can have to consider the hypothetical: suppose that God didn't exist, would you want to *know* about it? From where I'm standing as an atheist, I have to consider the opposite question: suppose that God really DID exist, would I want to know about it? (I definitely would, because it would be one of the most important truths about the world!)
Thank you for your thoughtful response. I think that the peculiar cold comfort that people get out of false upsetting beliefs is exactly what you describe: That we've decided that pessimism sound smart and optimism sounds dumb. This is its own weird social set of beliefs (why do both the writer of Ecclesiastes and so many modern atheists agree that "the heart of the fool is happy in the house of mirth"? but here we are). There's something deep in our human psyches or souls that wants to feel smart about how we know that everything is terrible, when those dumb Pollyannas think that everything is pretty okay, actually--which is why I think doggedly holding on to false negative beliefs does pose the same moral dilemma as what you're talking about here, just weirder, and with worse consequences.
The fact that you're not aware of the religious arguments for why atheism makes you happy (at least in the short run) kind of indicates to me how little you've seriously considered religious arguments (i.e., considered religious arguments from a religious perspective, not considering them from the perspective who does not believe and has no interest in believing.) The key religious argument for why atheism would be chosen by lots of people for their own comfort is that religion is hard: If I really believe that there is a God who commands me to love my enemy and welcome the stranger and turn the other cheek and sell all I have and give the money to the poor....well, even Peter Singer doesn't think I have to go that far. Atheism also opens the door to relativism, which can give me license to do a bunch of things that I want to do, and insist that others never even get to criticize me for it. Religion, on the other hand, asks me to reflect on my flaws, ask others for forgiveness, try to do better, and then reflect on those flaws again when one inevitably screws up. And all that sucks! Of course people wouldn't want to do those things.
This is where, as I understand it, the evolutionary psychology explanation dovetails with the religious explanation: Yes it sucks to reflect on my flaws, ask forgiveness, and try to do better, but only in the same way that eating your broccoli sucks as a child, or the way it sucks to go to the gym when you don't want to. So the evolutionary psych people and the theologians I think agree that religion can make a more functional society--because, unlike atheism, religion asks you to do a bunch of stuff you don't want to.
You're absolutely right that religious people have often described atheism as appealing and attractive (because of the moral license it provides), and have argued that religious belief takes sacrifices and is therefore hard. But still, they describe the allure of atheism as *dangerous* and harmful, or at least not beneficial. So I should rephrase my point: I'm not aware of any religious believers who have actively *advocated* for atheism because of its alleged social and psychological value. But the reverse is quite common: many atheists "believe in belief", as Dennett writes. They think religion is useful or even indispensable for the common people (but not for them, which is very paternalistic indeed), and it's wrong to take it away from them. Are you aware of any religious believers who have mirroedr that argument, so who "believe in disbelief"? I'm not.
Thank you. I'm much clearer on what you were arguing now.
I am also not aware of a theist's flipside to Dennett's "belief in belief"--that disbelieving in God has value. I speculate that that might be because it's clearly not true: the social/psychological benefit of religious belief is so empirically obvious that even many atheists see it. Indeed, the closest I can get to a claim about the social/psychological benefit of disbelief is from atheists claiming it will make people happier to not believe in sin and/or punishment for sin.
So, solid point!
It's interesting to wonder whether atheism leads to relativism. I've heard that suggestion before from religious folk but almost everyone I know is an atheist and I can't think of a single one who is a relativist.
Also, atheists have to face some difficult truths like: when you die, it's all over. And, life has no intrinsic meaning. You have to decide for yourself what the meaning of life is.
I would say that atheism is harder than theism. I do agree that a religion can make a more functional society but I choose inconvenient truths. I don't think I could choose otherwise.
Of course you think that atheism is harder than theism, and more likely to be correct; you’re an atheist. :) Like Maarten argues in this original post, it would be weird if, as an atheist, you thought otherwise.
To be clear—I do not think that atheism inevitably leads to relativism. When I was an atheist, I was not a relativist, and almost all of the atheists I’ve met have not been relativists, either. But relativism is possible for an atheist in a way it just definitionally is not for a religious believer. Indeed, how does one get to “life has no intrinsic meaning” without opening the door to “life’s meaning is whatever we decide it to be, which could be literally anything, so do what you want, and no one can judge you for that, ever”?
Personally, I think “atheists choose atheism because they are relativists who want license to do whatever” is a strawman, the same way that “religious believers choose to believe because they want to be comforted that they live on after death” is a strawman. (As an aside, I’m bemused that believers are simultaneously accused by nonbelievers of believing merely for the comfort of believing in life after death, and also for being big meanies for endorsing the idea of hell. Um. “Your soul will live on after death and that could be extremely miserable forever” is not, in fact, comforting.) I was just a bit surprised that Maarten was unfamiliar with the religious arguments for why atheism would make one happy/be comforting.
I was a believer early on but have been an atheist (someone who lacks belief in a god) for decades. I do think that atheism is harder. Having a solid belief in a loving god and an afterlife would be a massive comfort. (At least if heaven was an interesting place where I could grow -- not a picture I get from any religion, except maybe Mormonism).
Religion tells you what is good and bad whereas atheists have to figure it out for themselves and never know if they are right. (Or if there is a right answer.)
Religious communities also clearly have some benefits. These can be replicated in non-religious communities but it's harder. I am not only an atheist but a transhumanist. That has always made it hard for me to find a community. It's been easier since the web arose but still difficult in physical space.
Hi, Max! As former atheist-turned-believer, I don't have a strong opinion about whether atheism or belief is "harder." What I think is interesting given this entire conversation, though, is the presumption that the harder path is the one more likely to be true--a trope that is positively religious in nature. Hard is the way, and narrow is the gate that leads to truth. I get why someone who thinks that Matthew 7:13-14 is true would agree to that statement, but not why an atheist--who, after all, came up with all his beliefs all by himself--necessarily would.
So I speculate that this goes back to a point of this original post, and a theme in Maarten's other work on the appeal of pessimism. A bunch of us, religious believers and atheists alike, want to believe that there are "hard truths" but not easy ones, and thus are practically in competition to show that our belief system makes our lives suck more. Which is....a little weird, right?
Really enjoyed this article. When I write or read about topics like this, I am often reminded of Richard Feynman's quote:
“You must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool.”
I like to start at the whole "know thyself" principle and build outward from there. Does not always work and is filled with blindspots, but I think if someone is really dedicated to knowing themselves, they can work to minimize those blindspots through reflection, being held accountable by others, and the constant pursuit of knowledge.
I think where most fall short is not continuing to learn and instead do their research via confirming what they already know. The confirmation bias is a huge issue today, especially when Google/GPT can just give you exactly what you ask it.
It is *so much harder* to fight confirmation bias in a world of AI and algorithms trained to give the asker exactly what they want. So I guess I'm saying, I 100% agree with you, which I think makes us both right.....huh.
Yes, I think what is most useful about the new technologies, but what is lacking in the individuals using them, is to ask, say, GPT, to provide a counter to the argument, to review the argument for flaws, to look for blindspots that may be there--in other words, the search should/could be much more well-rounded and show multiple points of view, but most just look for what they want and live in confirmation bias.
Excellent point. It would be wonderful if the AIs would ask you: "After I provide you with arguments for one view, would you like to me provide arguments for differing views?" Or something like that.
I think that would be the ideal, but I agree that most people aren’t going to use these technologies this way first, because they’re not inclined to, as you note, and second, because they increasingly can’t, because algorithms are designed to pitch people what they want, and because AI is constrained by the views of its makers.
Famously, Google’s Gemini refused to generate images of white men in response to prompts like “draw a picture of the pope” or even “draw a picture of white men,” because it had been designed in a way to generate images that comported with the values of its designers. Similarly, ask ChatGPT to write an essay arguing why the right to an abortion is absolute, and you’ll get a pretty solid essay. Ask it to write an essay about how a human right to life begins at conception, though, and ChatGPT will tell you that as an AI, it can’t answer values questions. (Or at least that’s what happened when I’ve tried this paired set of prompts.)
So while I agree with you in theory that AI could be used to find the flaws in one’s own arguments, I am concerned that it will only do that effectively if your arguments are counter to what the AI’s designers already think. I fear that this problem will worsen over time, as AI pulls language from existing information posted on the internet. So as more AI-generated arguments are online, AI-generated arguments will be increasingly the source material for new AI-generated arguments. I think that then if you start out with a groupthink effect (like it seems already exists in AI responses to prompts), this will snowball, making it increasingly difficult for even the best-intentioned, most earnestly searching for the truth individual out there to find arguments that contradict their own.
This is one of the reasons I am grateful for Substack, and for being able to correspond with you, @D.A. DiGerolamo, and others like @Maarten Boudry. It is so good to have a space where we can engage in thoughtful disagreement.
Yes, I agree that the problem will worsen over time. I recently read an article that said Musk’s purchase of Twitter was a long-term plan to pump that data into his own AI model and have up-to-date data to train the machine. I think that, what I have found so far, it is a good jumping off point for research (such as give me some sources that argue X, give me some theories of Y, etc.) and then I go off and review the sources and see what i needed and what is relevant. It has provided me some good ideas for topics and concepts I had not previously known or thought about and I then go into research mode and allow my curiosity to take hold. But I don’t trust the AI to be accurate and not have its own blindspots.
Yes, I would prefer to live by the truth, no matter what. Happiness is not the ultimate value for me. I suspect that knowing the truth and nothing but the truth would be compatible with at least as much happiness as I experience now. The exception would be if I learned that -- for absolute certain -- I was not going to be able to drastically extend my life through life extension or cryopreservation. That would be awful. I would still prefer to know so that I don't waste what remains of my life. Besides, I already directly acknowledge that my odds are not great.
On this topic, I found this talk interesting and challenging. https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is?showDubbingTooltip=true&language=en
I have also been influenced by the book “Why Everyone Else Is a Hypocrite” by Roger Kurzban. Taking an evolutionary approach to the development of the mind, Kurzban argues that it would be valuable and important that parts of us know and understand things that aren’t made available to our conscious mind. In other words, keeping us living in some level of illusion is, evolutionarily speaking, a trait that would be favored to be passed on.
Chairmanship is powerful, being the means by which a discourse is selected, parameters, and dimensions are defined. Agenda setting skills really do matter.
Whoever (besides a bad screen play featuring Keanu Reeves) shaped the past 20 years of civil discourse for all humanity (one predicated on a mythical, binary option between magical Blue and Red pills), got a lot of work done that now seems impossible to undo.
There is always a certain amount of 'we are going to act as if this is true, whether or not we believe it is' going on. One example is the Divine Right of Kings. This doctrine gained strength in the 1600s in Europe. I do not believe for a moment that my ancestors thought that God really was ensuring that the person who deserved to be king -- the best person for the job -- was born to the role. People who honestly thought that God had given them the rulers they had, on purpose, would be calling on their citiizens to don sackcloth, fast, and repent their evil ways more or less non-stop until we deserved better rulers. But the experience of bloody wars over inheritance in the prior centuries taught everybody the downside of having a civil war every time the king died.
Right now you are questioning the 'honesty is the best policy' principle. That is another shared belief that we are probably better off acting as if it is true, instead of working out under what circumstances it is beneficial to deceive one another.
Then perhaps narcissism and hedonism might be worth reconsidering as virtues? 😁
Also, you write, "Here’s what the 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, in his famous Pensées, counseled to those who are desperate to believe in God but can’t find the switch in their brain: just go through the motions.....But such a project of self-deception cannot tolerate too much in the way of self-reflection. You don’t just have to bring yourself to believe in God; you must also – and simultaneously – forget that this is in fact what you’re doing."
Ah, spoken like someone who's never seriously grappled with faith*, or with one's own belief in unbelief. Speaking as a former atheist, I think what Pascal is describing is a process more like learning how to dance than learning how to debate. When you first learn how to dance, you may consciously think that you can't dance, so you awkwardly try to do the moves. If you do them a lot, you get better at it, but you still have to constantly think about what you're doing. Until one day, you're just moving gracefully and in time without thinking about it at all. At some point, you can even reflect on dancing while you are dancing, and never miss a step. You can forget that you are dancing, while never forgetting how to dance. You can even think back on how it was true that once you couldn't dance, and now a different thing is true, because you are now a dancer. You just had to practice, and then your understanding of the truth changed. This isn't self-deception; it's a deeper kind of self-reflection.
*Forgive me if I'm wrong here. I don't mean to assume too much about your religious background.
As it happens, you are wrong on this count: I was a devout Catholic until I was about 13 years old. ;-)
Interesting to know! I apologize for my presumption and am happy to stand corrected.
I was a committed atheist as a teenager through much of my 20s, and started to consider religion seriously through an evolutionary psychology lens in my 20s (i.e., the "what are the selective advantages of faith?" kind of thing).
That's fascinating. But I presume you didn't embrace religious faith because of its social/evolutionary benefits? At some point you must've concluded that, regardless of its benefits, its metaphysical worldview is really true? (And no worries about your presumption, no offense taken).
In Sweden there are a lot of people right now advocating that one should become a part of the Christian community and behave like a Christian even though you don't believe in a God that cares for individual human beings, eternal damnation and whatnot. Attendance in the Lutheran Church is way up.
Very interesting!
Yes. I did eventually come around to the idea that Christianity is really true--or at least, is the best approximation of the truth* that is available to me. This is both for personal experience reasons that inform the dancing metaphor above**, and for a reason derived from social/evolutionary benefits: belief works, and a key way humans have always been able to figure out what is true is that truer models of the world work (even when we do not understand them), and false models don't. For myself personally, I'll go a step further and say that I think Christianity is a better model than belief generically, in part because it works better, and in a more surprising way, than I think belief generically does.
*"Approximation of the truth" here is not the same thing as saying I think there are parts that are false; it's saying that humans are limited in their ability to understand things, and as such the models we have must be oversimplified. This is analogous to the orbital model of the atom or the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium.
**Which I get is deeply unsatisfying in an argument since we can't share experiences with other people except through the medium of language, and because people rewrite their memories and delude themselves about what they really experienced all the time. While all that is true, we obviously cannot dismiss all personal experience as being false, because then, um, where would this entire "let's know the truth" project even be?