The Case For Gods
[this is a repost from my personal blog explanationing.wordpress.com. Look there for posts explaining my priors.]
I’ve been playing with belief in God since I was a child.
During my adolescent years, when I started really digging the catchphrases of pseudo-rational-types like Terry Goodkind, I became a staunch atheist. It wasn’t until after my last grandparent died and I really came face-to-face with the living faith of my family that I suspected there might something more to belief in God than had previously met my horny-for-evidence hormone-blinded eye.
So, in order to make sense of this glimmer of an intuition that there’s something to faith, I joined a Bible study in my first year at university. I talked with other young Christians about what they believed. I teased out the little glowing thread of my own experience of divinity, the divinity I saw and felt in the room at my Oma’s funeral service. By the end of my winter semester, I felt as though I had a fairly close relationship with God, and I had a good working understanding of my fellow Bible-studiers as well. However, as the semester came to a close, I gave up on the project of Christianity in favour of something else that caught my fancy, who can remember what.
Two years later, (ie., this past week), a friend of mine wondered in passing at my faith in God. The word “faith” rankled, because even when I was trying on the hat of Christianity, I never made use of faith. While I loved the people in my Bible study, and respected their personal relationships with God, my long-abiding sternly-atheistic dismay at faith persisted.
I believed then and I believe now that God can be explicitly modeled in a way that preserves both rationality and the essential sense in which spiritual people mean “God.”
Return to the idea that our brain is playing a game of “interpret reality-data into predictively useful systems of symbols.”
If that’s the game, what’s winning? If the game is as described above, winning is “correct prediction.” However, within conscious experience, our sense of winning-at-life and correct prediction are rarely equivalent.
For example, when I look at my girlfriend’s eyes while she looks into mine, and the euphoria of love bubbles up inside of me, prediction is the farthest thing from my mind. That’s not to say the predictive model of cognition can’t, at some level, capture why I love my girlfriend. However, at the level of consciousness, if I’m trying to cultivate that love, the predictive model will be next to useless. This is because I don’t experience my own predictions directly, I experience them symbolically. Love is an unitary cognitive symbol emergent from an immense tangle of countless different predictions about my girlfriend. Trying to parse that tangle of predictions on its own terms is beyond my cognitive abilities.
It seems to me that, when the win-condition shifts from “correct prediction” to “the experience within consciousness of correct-predictions-as-symbols (eg., love and its accompanying euphoria),” we need to rephrase the operation of the game. The game pieces are no longer predictions, but symbols, with all the emotional freight attached to them.
The way to play this game is to maximize your access to the most euphoric possible symbols.
To return to the idea of God. When I say “God,” what I mean is “the set of all euphoric symbols.” This captures most of what God is to most of the Christians I’ve met, setting aside their zany metaphysical claims.
This treatment of God raises a question: why treat the set of all euphoric symbols as though it were a person? Why make it a character with a personality at all? Why not just take the set as it is?
This taps into the heart of why anyone believes in gods at all. My theory is as follows. Symbols and systems of symbols are far more palatable to our brain if they come in the form of a person. We are exceptionally good at mirroring the behaviours, emotions, and underlying structures of other people. Our brains are built for it.
So, if you want to mirror “the set of all euphoric symbols,” call it “God” and treat it like a person. If you want to mirror “the set of all euphoric symbols relating to a tree,” call it “dryad” and treat it like a person. If you want to mirror “the set of all euphoric symbols relating to masculinity, sex, life, death, and the cycles of nature,” call it “The Horned Lord,” or “Pan,” and treat it like a person.
Spend enough time with these people, and their symbols will come easy to you.
This is what fiction is for. A principle can be presented as a character which personifies it to explain it better, but that’s different than telling people that the character is a real person rather than a fictional symbol meant to demonstrate a point.
A good example of a fictional deity character meant to demonstrate a point but which is not meant to be believed as real would be the Goddess of Everything Else. I will admit that the Goddess of Everything Else represents rationalist/transhumanist values much better than the Christian deity. Reality is often very harsh and takes a lot of courage to face sometimes. Most people probably don’t have what it takes to be able to see the full scope of the darkness that our species faces without flinching. If you feel you need to believe in a God for a while, it would be best to pick one that doesn’t require you to compromise too many of your other principles nor to sacrifice all of the skills you’ve learned here, and one for which there is minimal if any social penalty for changing your mind about later.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MFNJ7kQttCuCXHp8P/the-goddess-of-everything-else
Also, have you considered joining a Unitarian-universalist church?
I agree that it’s important to be conservative when talking about gods. I would never tell anyone that God is a real person who exists within physical substrate (except in my own brain-meat).
But, I also think that “fiction,” while technically accurate, fails to capture the way in which I use God. While a “set” of anything is technically a fiction (in that it doesn’t exist in the physical substrate), set theory can be a powerful tool. If you were to dismiss any given set as a fiction without first appreciating the details of its use, you would be losing important details.
E: I’m not familiar with Unitarian Universalists. What’s their credo?
You should be wary of believing something because you think it’s useful to believe it, rather than because it’s true. For every useful untrue belief, it should be possible to get the same or greater benefit from believing something that’s true instead, if you have developed the skills, qualities, attitudes and habits necessary to handle the truth in a sane and healthy manner.
That’s the thing. Unitarian-universalist churches accept everyone as members no matter what they believe. They don’t require their members to have a particular belief system. So if you change your beliefs at any point you won’t have to leave.
Not every belief is about truth. You may hold X to be useful because it’s useful, and Y to be true because it’s true. The mistake is to automatically hold X to be true as well, or Y to be useful. Restating that as “X being useful is true” erases the distinction or invites unnecessary rigor. In the same vein, there are judgements of falsehood or necessity or need, and these are about falsehood or necessity or need and not about truth.
I agree entirely. What I am arguing is that gods can be a part of “skills, qualities, attitudes, and habits necessary to handle the truth in a sane and healthy manner.”
They don’t require belief in any untruths, merely interpretation of the truth into a euphorically beautiful form. No where in my post do I advise believing anything untrue, and nowhere do I advise deliberately ignoring true things.
Except that you’re using “useful to believe” as a criteria for determining whether something is true or not. Also, if you had developed the skills, qualities, attitudes, and habits necessary to handle the truth in a sane and healthy manner, you wouldn’t need to believe in a God, because you would know how to live with the knowledge that there is no God and not be broken by it. If you truly had developed the ability to handle the truth safely, it wouldn’t matter what the truth was, you’d be able to handle it regardless. That is to say, if a God does not exist, you would be able to handle that just as well as if a God does exist.
Also, it’s not very polite to deliberately take someone else’s words out of context. I think you probably knew on some level what I actually meant by “skills, qualities, attitudes, and habits necessary to handle the truth in a sane and healthy manner,” and you also probably know what I meant by “true”. I’m not sure how someone could frequent this site without ever hearing about map-territory distinction. Correct me if I’m wrong, but map territory distinction is mentioned right on the front page of the site.
If you want others’ cooperation in avoiding breaking through your cognitive dissonance about religion so that you don’t get overwhelmed by grief or something, then just say you don’t want to talk about it and no one will question you. Not everyone needs a belief in God to deal with their grief. Furthermore, trying to persuade grieving people to join your particular religion while they’re in a vulnerable state of mourning would likely be seen as predatory in certain ways. You’d be taking advantage of someone’s pain to trick them into believing and doing things they wouldn’t normally believe or do if they weren’t in a vulnerable state.
And those on this site who aren’t religious and aren’t currently grieving won’t be convinced. They will see the flaws in your arguments and argue with you, which puts your precious belief at risk of falsification.
So really, trying to proselytize here is a lose-lose situation.
Even as a form (such as predictive reasoning) doesn’t usually describe your movements, you may decide to adhere to it, ensuring that it will in the future. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you can. This is how you build clarity in your thinking (and learn to dance).
Does your “belief in god” cause you to make meaningful changes in your behavior? Would you avoid medical treatment because you believe prayer will cure you? Would you pray for next weeks lottery numbers and then buy a ticket?
If no, then you don’t have a belief in god, you just have a pleasant fiction that makes you feel nice every time you talk about it. A verbal behavior. Beware that human minds don’t have good sand-boxing, making correct decisions requires a careful balance of judgment, which is easily skewed.
If yes, then your going to make worse decisions because of it. Is the warm happy feeling worth it? You can’t know. There is no second order rationality, just willful ignorance. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hs3ymqypvhgFMkgLb/doublethink-choosing-to-be-biased
I agree that God (in the sense I use it) is often polluting of rationality, but that’s only because it’s so often accompanied with specious metaphysical claims. I don’t pray, except in the sense that I meditate on the shape of God.
“A pleasant fiction that makes you feel nice every time you talk about it” captures some of what I mean by God. These systems of symbols are “fictional” in that they don’t exist within consciousness and not the external world. However, “pleasant” is underselling it. Having encountered life long spiritual people of all walks of life, I believe that the transformative love, compassion, and openness made possible by building a relationship with a god (or any other spiritual construct) should not be undersold. Personally, I use gods in concert with my meditative practice to cultivate love and joy. “God” can be a terrifically useful and fun move in the consciousness game.
As I said, you can preserve the essential spiritual sense of God while preserving rationality, as long as you’re clear that the God you’re believing in will not grant wishes, does not have his hand on the pulse of the universe, and never ressurected anyone.
E: having gonw back and read Eliezer’s article on doublethink, I think I see why you’re concerned.
I’m not advocating for the “happiness of stupidity.” It is essential to my view that the game of predicting reality is compatible with the game of maximizing love (I’ll shift to “love” rather than “euphoria” because “love” is less suceptiible to decay into damning-with-faint-praise-words like “pleasant.”)
Consider this passage in the article you linked: “All that is left to you now, is to aspire to such happiness as a rationalist can achieve. I think it may prove greater, in the end. There are bounded paths and open-ended paths; plateaus on which to laze, and mountains to climb; and if climbing takes more effort, still the mountain rises higher in the end.”
Think of spirituality as an exceptionally beautiful mountain on the path of rationality. There is a huge subset of possible human experiences, among which are the best and most valuable, that are captured within spirituality.
I understand being wary of it, because historically spiritual people are often rationally lazy. But refusing to engage with it entirely would be throwing one of the best babies we have out with the bathwater.