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A day in a psych ward will disabuse you of the notion that there's a bright line between sanity and insanity.
Just to start, we have distinctions between a true delusion, a fixed belief and an overvalued idea. Said distinction is incredibly subjective and often artificial.
The overvalued idea is the most familiar. Someone becomes absolutely convinced their neighbor is sabotaging their career, or that 5G towers are causing their migraines. The belief is wrong, probably, and they hold it with more intensity than the evidence warrants.
However: if you corner them and argue carefully enough, they squirm a little. They might say "well, I suppose I could be wrong, but..." There is still some kind of cognitive negotiation happening. The belief is upstream of their reasoning, but their reasoning is not entirely offline. Lots of people you know have overvalued ideas. You might have some. I might have some. Most of the time, they're like the mites that live on your skin, not beneficial, but not so debilitating you'll inevitably run face first into the consequences of your poorly founded beliefs.
The fixed false belief turns the dial up. Now there is no squirming. The person is simply certain. A deeply depressed patient knows, with the same confidence you know your own name, that they are a fundamentally evil person who has ruined everyone around them. You cannot argue them out of it because it does not feel like a belief to them - it feels like a perception, like reporting what they can plainly see. The fixedness is the thing. Evidence just bounces off.
I emphasize false fixed belief, because you might well believe that you have 5 fingers per hand. Someone might show up and make a really convincing argument to the contrary. Maybe they claim to show that Peano arithmetic is flawed, or that you have somehow grossly misunderstood what the number 5 means, or what counts as a finger. You are unlikely to give a shit, and for good reason.
(There are the usual "proofs" that pi is equal to 4, or that 1=2. The mathematically unsophisticated might never be able to find out the logical error, but they usually do not actually end up convinced.)
The true delusion (what Karl Jaspers called the primary delusion) is something stranger still. It is not just a fixed false belief. It has a particular quality of being un-understandable from the inside out. A man wakes up one morning and suddenly knows, with crystalline certainty, that he has been chosen to decode messages hidden in highway signs. There is no paranoid personality that led here, no trauma that makes it psychologically legible. It arrived fully formed, like a piece of foreign software running on his brain.
(Look up autochtonic delusions for more)
Psychiatrists following Jaspers say you can't empathize your way into it. You can understand a depressed person thinking they're worthless, but you cannot really follow the phenomenological path to "the license plates are speaking to me specifically."
Other than that, delusions are completely immune to evidence, and also culturally incongruent. Put a pin in that till I come back to it, it's very important.
The clinical rule of thumb: overvalued ideas yield under pressure, fixed beliefs are immovable but emotionally coherent, and true delusions feel less like conclusions the person reached and more like axioms that were simply installed.
You know, I tried my hand at writing a few Koans about psychiatry a while back. I might as well share one I'm fond of:
A patient who had recovered from psychosis came to Master Dongshan and said, "For two years I believed the government had implanted a transmitter in my skull. I was as certain of this as I am now certain it was a delusion. The feeling of knowing was identical in both cases. How am I to trust any of my beliefs ever again?"
Master Dongshan said, "You are asking perhaps the most important question in all of epistemology, and I notice you arrived at it not through philosophy but through suffering."
The patient said, "True enough, but forgive me for not finding your statement very helpful."
Master Dongshan said, "No. That's why you paid me to prescribe you meds, not for a lecture on philosophy. But consider: everyone around you walks through life with that same unjustified feeling of certainty. They've just never been given reason to doubt it. You now know something that most people do not. You know that the experience of being right and the fact of being right are completely different things."
The patient said, "I have.... issues with framing this as some kind of gift. It feels more like a nightmare. I can no longer trust my own experience."
Master Dongshan said, "You have described the starting point of all genuine inquiry. Most people never reach it. They are too comfortable inside the feeling of knowing to notice it is only a feeling."
The patient was not comforted, but was, in a way he found no use for, enlightened.
Okay. You can take the pin out now.
Notice the emphasis on culture context. If you've ever mindlessly scrolled TikTok or Insta reels, you might have seen a "prank" where this second-gen Nigerian citizen in the UK follows random older first-gen immigrants, introduces himself, then declares that "he was sent from Nigeria to kill you."
He then makes some weird gesture with his hands, takes out a pinch of salt from his pocket and throws it at the victim. They immediately panic, though the response varies from running away screaming, running at him screaming with the intent to do bodily harm, or to pull out a Bible and chant verses while weeping.
(Hardly a once-off. It seems a concerningly large number of elderly Nigerians carry a convenient pocket Bible for such occasions)
He doesn't pull out a knife, he's unfailingly polite, he just throws salt at them, which I'm given to believe is supposed to represent some kind of black magic curse.
Can a pinch of salt hurt you? Not unless you're a slug.
You might feel like laughing at these silly, superstitious fools. Haha, they think witch doctors can hurt them!
If you (for a general you) are a Christian, or any other religious denomination, you are exactly as laughably deluded from my perspective. You hold what, to me, is a clearly unfounded belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. That saint who rolled their eyes and spoke in tongues? You don't see people getting beatified for that these days, after we've got EEGs and research on temporal lobe epilepsy.
Unfortunately, if we used this perfectly reasonable standard for insanity, the patients in the psych ward would outnumber those outside. Grudgingly, we keep track of whether the delusions you hold are common, especially for your cultural milieu, and whether they are causing you disproportionate harm. Also, can we do anything about it? Is there a drug I can give some deeply religious pensioner that'll stop them from believing in God? Not that I'm aware of. If they're peeling off their skin to get at the hidden chip inserted by MI6, then I at least have some hope that risperidone will help.
Wait till you see the nonsense involved with evaluating delusional disorder. Othello syndrome involves feelings of immense jealousy and suspicion that your partner is cheating on you, based on little evidence. Simple enough?
And then you see someone who has a seemingly sweet, loving and faithful wife, who gets diagnosed with Othello syndrome, and then discover that said wife was actually cheating on them all along. It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you.
How the fuck is a psychiatrist supposed to know for sure? We simply persevere, and it mostly works. When it doesn't, it makes the papers and we get served lawsuits.
If someone has Othello syndrome and makes their partner so annoyed that they end up cheating, does that retroactively invalidate the diagnosis? You can tell me, after you find a time machine. I'm sure plenty of philosophers have made a living writing about Gettier cases, but I'm not a professional philosopher, and I don't let philosophy get in the way of fixing people.
Delusions about the universe sending you messages are not that weird.
All it requires is for you to perceive meaning in coincidences, and then to anthropomorphize the universe. And you surely know that human beings love their anthropomorphization.
Just a little bit of anxiety, and people start noticing when digital clocks around them say 12:34 and other such patterns. From there, we have lucky numbers (like 7), magical numbers (like 3), and unlucky numbers (13 in the west, 4 in parts of Asia). And you probably know about the significance of 12 and 36 from your chinese novels. Add a little bit of weirdness and you get angel numbers and sacred geometry and such. The word "omen" is fairly well known, even to sane people, and an omen is a coincidence that one regards as a sort of message about the future. The distance from these normal human quirks and to "This traffic sign is speaking to me" is not very far.
Being religious is not a sign of insanity, since sanity isn't defined as the degree to which one is logical. Even if rationalists on the internet tell you otherwise, human beings are not logical, and this is not actually a flaw.
There is a difference between noticing a pattern, and then ascribing it significance or meaning. Especially when the pattern is generated by a random, non-agentic process.
As I have said repeatedly, sanity and insanity are not binary states. Maybe "all" humans are biased, for evo-psych reasons, to have an overactive agent detector. Maybe this genuinely was adaptive in the ancestral environment. Maybe it serves some minor positive functions today, what of it?
At least Wikipedia says that:
That sounds like a "sane" definition to me. You have claimed that your definition doesn't rely on logical reasoning, without forwarding what you actually think it relies on.
Since the definition I've endorsed itself relies on health, consider that health is also a spectrum. Being chubby with creaky joints and BO is, with minimal assumptions necessary, bad health.
But I wouldn't diagnose that person with "fat stinky slob disease" and have them involuntarily committed. I wouldn't apply for a detention certificate so I could force them to take ozempic.
Similarly, the average religious person is, per my operational definition, clearly insane. They are not maximally insane, like someone who thinks the lamp posts are speaking to them and ordering them to rip off their skin. Also, there is no pill to cure religious conviction, though we might be able to do something about temporal lobe epilepsy.
I am a rationalist on the internet. Who exactly is claiming that humans are perfectly logical in the first place?? Have I heard of them?
It is also clearly a "flaw". You have no given me any reason to believe otherwise. You might as well claim that "most cars have dents in the bodywork, therefore a car that was hit by a bus is not flawed". I can see glaring flaws in that argument, and I would not buy that car.
Human beings see meaning in noise. When we lack information, we "fill in the gaps", and this makes us able to perceive things even with limited information, but it also makes us hallucinate when we go too long without sleep, and to see faces where they do not exist (pareidolia). The "overactive agent detector" is built into our perception, it likely aids with sympathy, and results in strange things like "Mono no aware". I think 'minor positive' is putting it too lightly, but I also don't subscribe to the belief that only truth has utility and that all bias is wrong (and darwinism doesn't select as if it's true, either).
Wikipedias definition of rationality refers to normality/typicality, it differs from the rationalist definition, which refers to an inhuman level of objectivity only seen in modern western cultures and in certain outliers. I'd say "health of the human mind" is a better definition, of course implying that rationalist communities aren't any more healthy than the average farmer. Insanity can occur in highly logical people, with little negative effect on their productivity (e.g. Terry Davis made his own operation system despite being a Skizophrenic), so they are not opposites.
The reason such a person shouldn't be diagnosed is because physical health isn't mental health. The two can relate, but they don't necessarily. Also, the system of diagnosis is crude, so it's a poor authority outside of clearly defined boxes.
"Religious conviction" cannot be cured because it's not a disease. It's the mind functioning exactly how it's meant to. You may assume the mind ought to prioritize truth, but that's not how the mind works and neither is it how it's meant to work. The sense of self which is capable of reasoning identifies as the entire being, but it's actually just a small part of the brain, and the majority of the brain uses associative reasoning rather than logic. Rational people notice the conflict between their higher order thinking and their animalistic nature, and consider this a mistake to be corrected, after which they self-tyrannize, calling this process improvement, maturation or learning.
Religious people have better mental health on average (I can dig up the source if you want, it was one of Emil Kirkegaard's articles). And I meant that rationalists want to reduces biases, and turn human beings into something that they're not, and that they naively assume that this is an improvement, because they naively assume that truth seeking is superior. You probably know that depressed people tend to have more accurate worldviews, and I'd consider this an argument against the value of truth seeking, but I don't expect you to agree. This is likely because it's an axiom of yours, and one cannot argue against an axiom, and neither can one defend an axiom. Moreover, even if I say "truth seeking is not optimal", and this were true, then you could say "since the statement is true, truth is still optimal". So despite my belief being something like "disillusionment is bad for your health and there's many hidden costs to what you're doing to yourself", the position I end up having to defend is "truth is not truth", which I obviously won't.
I can give arguments like "Sharks lack intelligence and have lived for around 450 million years without issue, while humans, who have been somewhat truth seeking for about 200 years, are on the path of self-destruction", making irrationality more meta-rational. I could also point out issues with the assumptions of rationalists, for instance, they think "more knowledge is better in itself", but what's actually true is that relative knowledge offers an advantage over another person. They incorrectly conclude "X is good for me, so X is good in general", and then they make "X is good" part of the concensus, and then everyone seeks more X. But despite the increase in X, the system as a whole does not seem to benefit any (Easterlin paradox is one example of this)
But I have made 100s of such observations, and I don't feel writing all of them, and neither do I think you'd want to read them. I can't counter all of rationalism in just a few pages of text, I can only point at a few flaws and hope you teach yourself how to discover the rest of the flaws I've seen by reverse engineering the process which I used to find these few examples.
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If the Christian delusion increases social cooperation and buffers against social stressors, then it decreases the sum total delusion in a civilization and protects against those delusions which are acutely harmful to individual and collective wellbeing. A Noble
LieDelusion, if you will, necessary for any society that is serious about ameliorating suffering, which is the ultimate aim of the medical profession and possibly humanity itself (anything else is just collecting useless information, and there are now video games for that). Maybe one day, in a more enlightened era, doctors will prescribe medicinal midnight masses and meditations on the Love of God to treat the world-weary.See, I know plenty of ways to improve wellbeing that do not necessitate believing in clearly false things. Not social fictions, not coordination schema, I mean believing in claims that are, as far as I can tell, factually incorrect.
Moreover, I think that the cognitive distortions and irrational decision making induced by religious belief has deleterious longterm consequences. Science, technology and empiricism also make our lives better without having to believe in false propositions. If there was a pill that made me happier at the cost of becoming irrational, I wouldn't take it unless the tradeoff was very favorable. I would rather be sane and sad than happy in delusion.
Organized religion, specifically the institutional kind with the lobbying arms and the political coalitions, has repeatedly and successfully obstructed things like embryonic stem cell research, IVF access, gene therapy trials, and HPV vaccination uptake. These aren't edge cases - these are tractable causes of preventable suffering that got derailed because a sufficiently large number of people believe things that aren't true about ensoulment and the sanctity of gametes. The wellbeing benefits of religious belief, to the extent they're real, accrue mostly to the believer. The costs of organized religious epistemology are frequently externalized onto people who never opted into the belief system. And those costs are significant.
I think even basic utilitarian calculus would demonstrate that it is absolutely worth bulldozing the religious edifice when honestly accounting for the lost potential.
The juice is not worth the squeeze. I will not drink the Kool-aid.
I haven’t noticed any treatment or social movement develop which shows the ability to mitigate social stress and drug use while reducing the risk of early life adversity like religion. And these are the big cofactors for psychosis. So the science-y things which increase wellbeing probably won’t help the demoniac as well as as Jesus.
But there are religious people at the forefront of science and technology. If you want to maximize for science, you need more than rationality. You also need to maximize for (1) social cooperation and trust, (2) honesty, (3) general prosperity, and (4) status-free interest. Atheism is hamful here. Religion is helpful. You want to know that the research you’re reading isn’t wholecloth invented by some status-obsessed person who does not engage in any prosocial ritual. This is necessary for science to progress. Perhaps someone can use AI to check the religious practices of the worst “science defectors” in recent memory; perhaps I am wrong. But religion uniquely reinforces intrinsically honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief. (Other rituals can plausibly do this, like Maoism, but they do not currently exist). And a fictive belief will always be stronger and recruit more of a person’s interest and commitment than an empirical belief.
But you win no extra points for doing so; all mortal flesh will be turned to dust and forgotten forever.
It is very beneficial for an atheist to be surrounded by theists who are +1 in the trustworthy, cooperative, industrious, selfless, and rule-following skill tree. In this sense, the atheist is a free-rider, because only the theist is sacrificing some % of his self-concern on the altar of civic beneficence. The atheist gets to self-benefit-maxx while making fun of the silly theist, but he doesn’t thank the theist when the cashier is particularly polite, or when the nurse shows more love when you’re hurt, or when you didn’t get into a car accident by a high driver. The Invisible God brings myriad invisible benefits to those with eyes to see them.
Denmark and Sweden are among Europe's least highly religious countries by Pew's 2018 typology, yet the Nordic countries continue to place near the top of global wellbeing rankings. That doesn't prove secularity causes better mental health. It does undercut any simple story that widespread disbelief is socially catastrophic.
"Religious people are at the forefront of science." Okay. Also, a Pew survey of AAAS scientists found 33% believe in God, 18% in a higher power, and 41% in neither, which is already substantially less religious than the general population. If you want the sharper number, Larson and Witham's survey of National Academy of Sciences members found roughly 92% rejected belief in God or a higher power. Individual religious scientists exist, obviously. Mendel was a friar, Collins ran the NIH. But that's the exception being abused to do the work of a rule.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/
If being smarter and more scientifically capable makes you less religious, or vice versa, that is really not a point in favor.
More to the point: "religion uniquely reinforces honest behavior through the cultivation of unquestioning belief." I want you to sit with that sentence and poke at it for a bit. You have just identified the exact mechanism I object to - unquestioning belief - and presented it as a feature. That same cognitive substrate is what has driven documented obstruction of embryonic stem-cell research, explicit Catholic institutional opposition to IVF, and religiously motivated vaccine hesitancy in certain communities.
You can't neatly extract "unquestioning belief makes people cooperative and honest" while quarantining "unquestioning belief obstructs gene therapy trials." It's the same cognitive operation applied to different objects. To the extent that religious belief is not incompatible with leading a normal life, that is by virtue of the remarkable human ability to compartmentalize and ignore the annoying ramifications of their "sincere" beliefs.
The free-rider argument proves too much, and you've already spotted this. you mentioned Maoism in the same breath. Any sufficiently coercive ideology with strong ingroup enforcement produces cooperative, rule-following, trust-generating behavior. That's a point in favor of strong social institutions generally, not religion specifically. You're essentially arguing: "false beliefs that produce prosocial behavior are net positive." Fine. Then show me that religion is the uniquely optimal vehicle, not merely the incumbent with path-dependent lock-in. You haven't shown that. I doubt you can show that.
Give me a few tens of billions of dollars (that's pocket change), and I promise I will likely find a way to make humans more pro-social through merely physical interventions. Give me a few hundred billion (now we're talking about real money) and I'll stake my head on it.
I'm not collecting points. I'm trying to have accurate beliefs about the world. An epistemically broken tool is a broken tool regardless of whether using it feels good. If I'm wrong about something, I want to know. You're describing a pill that makes me feel better by making me systematically worse at determining what is true. I've already told you I wouldn't take that pill unless the tradeoff was very, very favorable. You have not demonstrated the tradeoff is favorable. What. You have done is demonstrated that the incumbent system has measurable benefits while largely declining to engage with the costs I enumerated.
Even in Nordic cohorts, there are gains from religious participation in the forms of charitable giving and civic engagement. There is also a twin study showing that prosociality is increased by religiosity in a US sample. It stands to reason that even the Nords benefit from religion. I don’t think we should extrapolate “humanity doesn’t need religion” from “Nords do quite well without religion”, because we ought to be concerned with maximizing the Good, not being comparatively better than peers, and there may be some other factor that leads to Nords having a high floor of prosociality. Perhaps both Nords and Namibians benefit from prosocial rituals, but starting from a different floor of behavior. (In the same way that the East Asian appears to have a low ceiling of violent criminality, while there is still likely some intervention that would either decrease or increase the rate).
It makes sense that the cohort who is hyper-selected for rational ability would have some reduction or deficiency in other kinds of social-cognitive processing. I imagine if you surveyed the best artists and musicians, you’d find that they make fewer rational decisions than their STEM peers. Would these scientists cease being rational about science if the state enforced religious belief? Probably not. If these scientists believed that they would be judged by how truthfully they relay findings, would they produce more trustworthy data? Probably. Should we change the fabric of society because of research scientists, who compose like 0.001% of all citizens? Probably not. Consider that there have been losses to the mathematical community due to antisocial behavior, like what caused Grigori Perelman to flee academia from a sense of injustice. This affects the very best at the very top of cutting-edge science.
It really is possible that religious social technology which reduces scientific fraud is the new frontier of science. We have National Academy of Science members causing billions of dollars in lost progress through fraud. The National Academy of Science itself believes that fraud is a serious issue that is increasingly rampant in the field.
We already have all this external stuff! The peer review process and academic accreditation system have “coercive ideology” and “ingroup enforcement” and “strong social institutions”. The problem is that it’s easy to fake through all this, and there is no supernatural motive to care about honesty. What’s missing is the internal stuff. Western religion does not really do in-group enforcement but is predicated on introducing intrinsic commitments to behavioral proscriptions. The reason you don’t fabricate results isn’t because you’ll get caught (this will only lead to more subtle fabrications), but because behaving honestly is supernaturally pleasant and honorable and supernaturally socially-reinforced through a supernatural peer, while dishonesty is detested as being cataclysmic. “My university mentor would be ashamed if he found out I committed fraud” is much weaker than “my universal mentor who perceives the most subtle movement of my heart as if it were an entire solar system is counting on me to be absurdly trustworthy”. It is really easy to get people to believe the second, if just requires forgetting rationality in favor of a God Delusion.
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Bouncing off of this idea, I'd also suggest that religion actually does a sort of neat trick when it comes to making science "work" because pure rationality has a hard time really getting out of the solipsism trap, but even if you manage that, science in particular is vulnerable to the problem of inductive reasoning. Having a (reasonable, not irrational) faith that the universe is created by an orderly Being really makes science fall into place easily, since it provides a reason why the universe would be ordered the way that it is.
Obviously that's not the only way to get to believing in an understandable universe, and I am not saying "science is impossible without God," but other ways to do this end up having to take something on faith. And even handwaving the problem of solipsism and assuming the observable world is in some sense real, using scientific reasoning to prove its own validity end up having to argue that we can adequately perceive truth because it's evolutionary advantageous for us to do so, or that "truth just means what works" – a pragmatic approach. Which is all very well and good, but seems (at least to me) mostly to lead back around to pointing towards religion, which "works," pragmatically speaking, and if humans evolved to seek out the truth because it is evolutionarily advantageous, and religion is both something humans have a natural instinct for and something that seems evolutionary advantageous...well, you can do the math.
On that note, I would suggest that freeing science and reason from the fairly tedious business of "proving that we exist and that reality is real" (which, it seems to me, has really bogged down philosophy for a few hundred years) really unleashes them to do their best work.
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This is a bit misleading. A lot of the ways that religion benefits individuals has a positive social effect. Off the top of my head, so I might mess a couple of these up, but regular religious practice tends to be correlated with increased fertility, increased fostering/adopting, decreased crime/recidivism, increased mental health, increased physical health, longer, happier marriages, and an increased history of charitable donations and/or volunteer work.
All of these have positive benefits for society as a whole that ripple beyond the believer.
On the flip side, we've seen that an decline of religious faith seems to generate a bunch of "nones" who don't really gain the supposed benefits of irreligiosity (they still often believe in ghosts, or God, or astrology, or whatever) but they miss out on the very real benefits of regular religious practice.
However, it's also worth pointing out that the benefits of mere religious belief are weak. Where you see these tangible benefits of religion is in people who practice it. (This isn't, like, a cheeky tautological statement, it's more that if you want to see the above effect in scientific research you want to look for e.g. frequent religious attendance rather than merely identifying with a faith tradition.)
Now, I am speaking here of the United States. It's entirely possible that things are different somewhere else.
(Interestingly, as I understand it, there's at least some research that suggests at least some of these health benefits conferred by religious belief only benefit the believer in a religious environment, and that stripping the broader religious culture removes some of those benefits. From a utilitarian analysis, I suppose this has harsh implications for people who try to remove that religious culture. But I'm not sure if I trust a what's likely a vibecoded gravestone analysis to get that right.)
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This makes me think there might be a cleaner line between "true delusion" and the other two proposed categories than I had initially expected. Why not consider the "you can't empathize your way into it" criteria as a (if not the) major boundary of the concept?
Considering both the Christians and the salt-based curse believers, both seem to be engaged in perfectly normal cognition - that is, I suspect that what both groups are doing is reasoning off of the apparent beliefs of people they trust at some point in their pasts. This is partially captured in the cultural congruity aspect, but seems distinct.
We could imagine my friends and family conspiring to convince me that my wife is cheating on me. They may use weak arguments and no evidence, but I would certainly still update in the direction they're pushing (unless, of course, I was aware of the conspiracy). Keep this up for long enough and deny me any opportunity to see evidence to the contrary (a notable feature of most popular supernatural beliefs, they are not easily and obviously falsifiable) and I expect I would have a strongly fixed, false, unjustified, non-culturally-determined belief that my wife is cheating on me.
Conversely, I could imagine a devout Christian hitting his head and suddenly losing all belief in the immaterial. Despite his beliefs coming closer to what I expect to be correctness, I find it very easy to rate him as less sane than the curse believers - something has clearly gone wrong with his cognition in a way that I cannot model as reasoning in the normal sense.
I expect also that this distinction is materially useful - the ways in which I'd interact with someone with strongly held false beliefs obtained via ordinary methods are very different from how I would interact with the truly delusional (at least concerning the areas of their maps that clearly have holes). As you say, the former can be pressed.
Because the ability to empathize is subjective, helplessly so. And just because you think you can empathize with someone doesn't mean you are accurately simulating their inner cognition.
I can try and empathize with an octopus. I can try and imagine having tentacles, but I do not think I could capture the qualia of an octopus even if I tried my best. I can dream of being a butterfly, but that is not the same as actually being a butterfly.
Alternatively, a society of autistic people might be fully functional (if they're high functioning autists). They might have severe deficits of theory of mind and can't actually understand the way that a neurotypical person in their midst actually feels. They might well call him broken or insane. Or a religious enclave might consider an unbeliever in their midst to be the crazy one, and feel very confident in their belief.
The autists might be able to, after a great deal of empirical research, be able to accurately predict the behavior of neurotypical people. Actually autistic people do often learn how to "mask", but passing as neurotypical does not necessarily make them neurotypical. Similarly, psychiatrists can predict the behavior of the psychotic (to a degree), even if we do not "understand" them in the Jasperian sense.
I am not an expert on phenomenology, but I do not fully agree with Jasper and his supporters. I think I can empathize with the insane or the religious, at least to some degree, even if I do not agree with them. Am I right? I don't know. Who does? On what grounds?
It is still a kludge. I would say that the our understanding of the universe is at a point where we can look at both the salt-aversive and the typical Christian and confidently say that both are incorrect. The world simply does not behave the way their beliefs would imply it does. The evidence is abundant, there are anti-cathedrals everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
Now, social consensus is evidence, in the Bayesian sense. It makes holding erroneous beliefs more defensible, or at least more understandable, than when they arise in a vacuum. A black person in America might well believe that thousands of black people are unjustly shot by the popo on an annual basis, because of media bias and their own in-group consensus. I would not call that a central example of delusion, it is possible for people to just be plain old wrong because of the bad luck of existing in an environment that does not optimize for truth. I just think that the evidence against the claims of the typical religion is even stronger, but that is more of a quantitative difference than a qualitative one.
("What evidence filtered evidence?")
If I was less lazy, I'd expand on the implications of/for Bayesianism. But the delusional, in the standard psychiatric sense, can be modeled as having stuck priors that do not update on new evidence. Scott has discussed this with more depth and rigor than I can ape.
I disagree! I see it as the equivalent of percussive maintenance, sometimes a sufficient shock to the system can break it out of a maladaptive pattern.
Within psychiatry, consider ECT. Let's say you're depressed and think you're an awful human being who deserves to die. I take you, put you under anesthesia, then induce seizures in your brain through the application of electric voltage.
You wake up, you no longer feel depressed, and you no longer want to kill yourself. Do you think that an electric shock is a valid argument against their position? Nonetheless, they're doing better, they're more functional at the very least. I would happily say that the process has made them more sane.
This is true, and important if we're trying to come up with rules that we can directly audit, but this objection also applies any time we are reasoning outside of a formal system - the fact I can believe falsely does not mean I shouldn't use my beliefs in downstream reasoning. If "my estimate of how reasonable the origin of a belief is" produces useful clusters I'll probably have a hard time selling it to a journal, but it will still be useful.
Also true, but also I think overstated - we can say quite a bit about how it is to be a bat, and statements like this can't be thrown out immediately - especially when the difference in cognitive architecture is as minor as that between (in the religiosity case, I'm sure we can find at least once instance) a pair of identical twins. We can think about questions like this and achieve certainty to our own satisfactions because this is what we have to do constantly - if everyone believed they had to have absolute certainty to make a statement only the insane would speak.
I mean, again I largely agree, but I think you're discounting the sheer space of possible belief that's been selected away for being too falsifiable. In the salt case, I would be extremely surprised if anyone involved was highly confident that some immediately visible malady would occur. If that was the belief, it would have been falsified enough times in enough communities that the idea would be have been outcompeted. Even the very religious do respond to evidence. For an example, we see this with new religious movements / cults (Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”) - interesting how major, long-lived religious movements tend to avoid these kinds of situations. It's hard to say that membership in a flying saucer cult selects for especially good epistemology. These priors don't look stuck exactly, more insensitive.
More broadly, almost all evidence is filtered evidence. This is good and necessary - "we" understand a ton about the world, whereas I understand only what I have the time/energy/ability to really look into. All the rest is impressions filtering through my peers and favored media. I'm surprised it works as well as it does! Somehow we've created a system where global understanding increases while almost no one understands almost anything - "someone seems moderately too insensitive to evidence against their favored belief" is the default.
If we phrase the distinction as a stuck prior, sensitivity to evidence, etc like Scott tends to, the difference does seem quantitative rather than qualitative. We do also have within the rat canon 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities, which makes the opposite point. If a few of our parameter choices lead to vastly different behavior than all of our others, we really want to point that out! The reason I want to draw the line at "true delusion" is because of this quantitative difference.
This does, however, require you to assume that they weren't sane to begin with. To be clear, being stuck in a negative-feedback loop of affect is a pretty good reason to believe someone isn't sane, but in the examples I brought up that's the entire point in contention. We could easily imagine analogous scenarios where a direct improvement in affect would make one markedly less sane.
Fair points. If I was less lazy, I would have linked Yudkowsky's post myself, it was definitely in my head.
That's why I throw up my hands and argue for a pragmatic approach instead of some clearly defined mathematical framework. Bayesian agents are, as far as I'm aware, allowed to have axiomatic priors. Reasonable ones will be exceedingly careful regarding which priors they accept as axiomatic or even those they contingent treat as axiomatic unless truly walloped with evidence.
(Mathematicians use axioms, but are open to reconsidering said axioms. Some things are merely axiom-ish)
I do not contest that religious people are capable of changing their minds. Conversions or apostasy does happen, albeit on the margin. The reason for my disdain is that largely that they started with little evidence and do not sufficiently update with the enormous amount of evidence to the contrary.
It would be trivial to find someone who is "high functioning religious", in the sense that they are devout, successful and also willing to consider empirical arguments when said arguments aren't directly opposed to their core religious beliefs. They might acknowledge the power of science and empiricism by default, but I shake my head when they I present them with RCT evidence of the inefficacy of prayer and they keep praying. At that point, I am content in noting the enormous amount of cognitive siloing involved, and washing my hands of the matter.
As I often do, I bring up the example of an uncle of mine who is an accomplished microbiologist while also believing in homeopathy (I think he's a bit religious, but let's ignore that for now). He applies standards of empiricsms rigorously in one context, and is specifically trained to apply it everywhere. He, however, does not apply it at home. If that's not irrational, I don't know what is.
There are many other kinds of cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning: the same people who claim that the question of God is indecidable through material evidence often happily accept what they deem as physical evidence in favor. Separate and non-overlapping magisteria? Only when convenient. The logically consistent stance would be that even an incontrovertible miracle is null evidence in favor.
No substantive disagreement from me, I certainly don't think the average (or, well, any) human is an ideal reasoner. I agree we have the ability to do better even.
I just can't feel that disdain - any mistakes I can catch others making are mistakes I've made and will continue to make. It's no fun being a finite being
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In a timeless perspective there is no non-cheating female, so the answer is yes.
@Sloot please come to the head of the queue, we've found your long-lost twin.
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Could you provide a definition of "delusion" that you're working from here? You describe people whose beliefs cause them to act in what appears to be a very silly, very irrational way when presented with a simple stimulus. If we're as laughably deluded from your perspective, what's the equivalent prank you can pull on us? If there isn't one, why do you believe we are exactly as laughably deluded from your perspective?
You guys are dropping a lot of words right here and I am smooth brained right now because I'm doing a caffeine hiatus, so either of you may have teased this out, but usually we try and dodge most of the definition of a delusion problems by noting things like - fixed and false, and not shared by others in the culture (which knocks of religion, Epstein conspiracies, and so on). Importantly falsehood can be tough to evaluated but fixation is pretty easy "is it at all possible this could be wrong" "what would happen if I showed you evidence to the contrary?"
Outside of heat in political arguments you can get people to say something like "well if that's true Trump/Biden is an idiot, but it isn't true" contrast with "no, all Republicans are robots and if you see one bleed that's a lie they don't bleed because they are robots."
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The definition I'm working from is the one I laid out above: an incorrect fixed belief that is immune to updating on empirical evidence. Of course, the sufferers from said delusion often will claim to have empirical evidence in favor, but said evidence is, shall we say, scanty.
If you want me to believe in the existent of an Omnipotent, Omnipresent, Omnibenevolent Deity, then firstly, I would expect the world to look rather different than it does. If you want to explain away the discrepancies, then I expect more than a book compiled from the accounts of questionably educated Bronze Age nomads. How convenient, that the miracles dry up when cameras and the internet arise. Maybe AI video will cause a second Renaissance. I live in hope.
See. I'm a rather nice person, if I say so myself. I have no intention of making a viral TikTok channel. I also do not, to the best of my knowledge, pull "pranks" on the delusional. I do not convince manic patients to give me their money, grannies with dementia to write me into their will or ask hot women with BPD to sleep with me while they're splitting and consider me the best doctor to ever live (with one notable exception, but let's not talk about my ex).
Must I imagine some? Very well. I might consider opening a church and appoint myself pastor. I might make the (reasonable) case that God rewards devotion with material reward, including money and success. I might even call it a prosperity gospel.
I might then convince my eager, gullible flock that God demands that they pay for my private jet. Trickle down economics backed by theological currency, as we say in the business.
Oh.
Wait.
You mean to say that my entirely hypothetical prank is... real? In the year of your lord 2026? Huh.
I guess I'll fall back to my backup plan, finding a few gold tablets and asking ChatGPT to translate ancient Egyptian papyri to support claims of ancient Jewish settlement in the Americas. Surely no one's thought of that one. If all else fails, I'm sure describing a very real journey around the world on the back of a flying horse will do the trick. I might not even need to leverage my mild fame as a niche scifi author.
I hope you get my point. I don't know if the kinds of people who found and spread religion are more likely to be grifters or mentally ill, or maybe both.
I could elaborate further, I could do this all day, but you have a distressing tendency to vanish whenever I make an effort post calling out a bad argument you make, for n>>1. Why bother? You can go read some archived Atheist vs Theist Grand Debate, or watch something on YouTube. I'm too old for this shit, I just sigh at perceived silliness and get on with my life while doing my job as best as I can. If your God did his job, I wouldn't have to do mine, and I could definitely use a break.
[EDIT] - I'll leave the below for clarity, but I think I can make things even simpler.
Here are three beliefs:
someone throwing salt at you is casting a lethal curse.
Some guy you've just met has had a divine revelation and now speaks for God.
Someone two thousand years ago was God, and we have a ~1900-year-old book laying out his teachings.
Let us presume that all three of these beliefs are wrong. Your argument, as I understand it, is that they are wrong in the exact same way, such that all three will result in essentially identical behaviors. Am I understanding you correctly?
That seems like a reasonably good definition. You should apply it rigorously.
Walls of text are unnecessary here. This is really quite simple. Based on the following paragraph, you pretty clearly believe one of the following:
That all Christians here are members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch, or are initial converts to mormonism, or both
That those of us who are not members of a financially-exploitative tele-evangelist-style megachurch or are initial converts to mormonism, nonetheless fall victim to similar forms of grifting.
Both of these examples appear very different from your salt curse example, being far more abstract and elaborate. But then, I'm fairly confident that most Christians you converse with here have never been initial converts to mormonism, and also have never donated money to a tele-evangelist or similar. Your position appears to be that we must be falling for some other, unspecified grift. Only, why not specify it?
The straightforward explanation is that you can't. You want to claim that we are delusional. You claim that our beliefs are exactly identical to an obvious delusion. I ask for examples, you give much weaker examples that do not actually apply, and then handwave.
I certainly agree that someone has a habit of making bad arguments. Sadly, I have much, much less time to write than I used to.
But here, specifically, you do not need to elaborate further, because you have not actually elaborated at all. Nor does God even come into the argument in any substantive way. I asked you for an example of how my delusion might be exploited in an obvious, empirical fashion. You have failed to provide one. This isn't some pedantic gotcha; you are making a very strong claim that is in fact indefensible, when a small amount of moderation would put you on much firmer ground. You appear to be doing this because you are failing to parse the details of your own statements in anything like a rigorous fashion.
Suppose I argued that Atheists are all bloodthirsty murderers, and when questioned pointed to the 75-100 million murders from atheist regimes in the last century, and claimed your beliefs were exactly identical to theirs. I do not think you would consider this a valid argument, but if there's a difference between such an argument and what you're presenting here, I'm not seeing it. Perhaps you could point it out? While both they and you were atheists, is there perhaps some notable set of differences between how their atheism and yours operated? If such differences can exist between their atheism and yours, why would you suppose that no differences exist between how my belief in God operates, and how the belief in God of first generation Mormons or African salt-fearers operates?
See, FC, I don't have the time, nor do I care to write a 5 million word polemic that addresses the irrationality of every single religious, sect or cult on the face of the Earth. I think I have pointed out the mechanisms through which hundreds of millions or billions of people have been bilked or fleeced, and my conscience floats as light as a feather.
... Religion. Religion itself is the grift.
Since you will obviously disagree, I chose to start with examples that even you would find examples you would agree with.
Just because I can do this all day doesn't mean I want to do this all day. I have bodily needs that aren't rehashing the usual arguments ad-nauseaum, with a probability of you changing your mind that is a floating point error away from 0.
You seem to accept my operational definition of delusion. Then you ask me to apply it "rigorously".
Good rhetoric. Take a point. I think the implied argument is something like: "Your definition, applied consistently, would classify your own beliefs as delusions too."
But once again, you enjoy the benefit of implication, without making an argument I can engage with it. I can't rebut an argument that hasn't been stated. If you wants to argue that my belief in, say, scientific consensus on some contested empirical question constitutes a "fixed belief immune to updating," I'm genuinely happy to hear that case. Until it's made, I'm going to file this under "ominous foreshadowing that didn't pay off."
I gave examples of religious exploitation you claim don't apply to the Christians you know personally on this forum. Therefore I've "failed to provide" an example of how their delusion could be exploited. Therefore my claim that they are deluded (in the same sense as my clinical examples) is indefensible.
But this conflates two things that should be kept separate: exploitability and having been exploited.
Here's a toy analogy. Suppose I claim that a certain class of people systematically overestimate their driving ability - this is actually a well-documented cognitive bias where the majority of drivers rate themselves as above-average. Now suppose you respond: "Oh yeah? Show me an accident that I specifically caused due to overconfidence in my driving." This would be a strange objection. The point is about the cognitive architecture, not about whether any individual instance of the bias has caused identifiable harm to the specific person you're addressing.
Similarly, my point is not that every Christian has donated to a televangelist or converted to Mormonism. My point is that the cognitive mechanism that generates and sustains religious belief - specifically, the acceptance of extraordinary empirical claims on the basis of testimony, tradition, and subjective experience, with a fairly robust resistance to revision - is the same cognitive mechanism that makes people vulnerable to those exploits. The exploit is diagnostic of the mechanism. The absence of the exploit from your specific history doesn't mean the mechanism isn't there. How exacy am I supposed to know if you've done anything stupid because of your particular, potentially idiosyncratic beliefs? Do I look like God to you? I would have hoped he was more handsome, albeit not quite as articulate.
Would I consider that a bad argument?
Yes, duh. But here's the asymmetry: the claim about atheist regimes is a claim about what certain atheists did, not about a cognitive property that atheism itself entails.
Atheism is the absence of a belief - specifically the absence of theism. It doesn't, by itself, generate any positive empirical commitment that could be exploited. The Soviet state didn't murder people because atheism makes you susceptible to believing false things about kulaks. It murdered people for a complex of political, ideological, and economic reasons that were in no way entailed by the mere absence of belief in God. Nor is insane mass murder exclusive to atheism, because... most of history. I invite you to demonstrate that the average atheist is more likely to murder people than the average religious person. You will fail, but I would enjoy seeing you try.
Whereas my claim about religious belief is precisely about a cognitive property that religious belief does entail - namely, the acceptance of empirical claims (miracles, revelation, answered prayer etc etc) via methods that systematically bypass the kinds of verification we'd demand in other contexts.
This isn't an incidental feature of religion; it's constitutive of it. You can't be a Christian while remaining genuinely, symmetrically skeptical about the Resurrection in the same way you're skeptical about, say, claims for homeopathy. The belief structure requires differential standards of evidence. Religion stripped of unfounded empirical claims is simply philosophy, which is far less exciting.
So the analogy doesn't hold. One is a claim about behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit. The other is a claim about a structural feature of the belief system itself.
I also agree with your agreement about bad arguments, and I sympathize with a lack of time. And yet here you are, yet here I am. I must say that I do appreciate you attempting to take a stand instead of vanishing when challenged, I would be happy if you kept doing this, or at the very least acknowledge that you no longer wish to continue the debate.
I didn't ask you to. I asked you to admit that, even accepting that we are deceived, different sorts of deception operate in different ways and have different consequences, on a purely materialistic level.
Unless I am mistaken, I have not ever attempted an argument with you in which I claimed God was real and you should believe in him. Every one of these discussions, from my perspective, has been about how logic and reason operate, and all of my arguments appear to me to work equally well if one assumes that there is no God at all. And yet, it does not seem that you have ever recognized this, so let me make it as explicit as possible: for the purposes of this conversation, there is no God and my faith in him is in fact delusional.
I don't. See above.
What I object to is your apparent belief that my faith makes me irrational in obvious exploitable ways, which is why I asked you to explain what those might be. At no point have I argued that my belief is correct, nor do I do so now. You are certain I am irrational, and that is well enough and cheerfully reciprocated. But then you go further and claim that my irrationality is of the sort that imposes immediate, obvious, unnecessary costs. This does not appear to me to be true, and I do not think I am being unreasonable to point out that you are arguing well beyond your actual evidence to make such claims.
If my beliefs are irrational, they are irrational in a way that does not appear to significantly reduce my fitness even from a materialist perspective. Certainly it does not impose costs on me of the sort that you seem to be arguing are typical of religious belief. I do not fear salt curses, nor do I donate to tele-evangelists, nor do I join novel cults. I do believe in a two-thousand-year-old religion, and shape my life by it, but even assuming that I am deceived to do so, it is not obvious where this deceit cashes out in terms of concrete, material loss, in the way your examples center on.
Is that a sufficiently engageable argument?
It seems obvious to me that you have a firm belief that Christians or other believers, being delusional, must suffer significant material consequences as their delusions wreck against material reality, while those such as yourself who do not suffer from such delusions do not incur similar costs. Would you agree that this is an accurate summary of your argument?
Your definition of delusion:
You appear to have a belief that the religious, as a class, are delusional, and that their delusions make them particularly exploitable. You appear to believe that this is an intrinsic characteristic of all religion, such that I myself must be increasingly susceptible to exploitation. Even if I and (most? All?) others here do not appear to have been exploited in any specific way you can identify, this should not be considered contrary evidence to your claims, because your theory takes precedence over our reported facts.
Sure. You can measure the people's self-assessment, and compare it to the accidents they've been in, and note the disparity. If 90% of people believe they're in the top 10% of good drivers, at least eight in ten of them are wrong. So what's the analogous measure of material outcomes for the relatively-intellectual religious mottizens?
If you say "people like you overestimate their driving ability", and I note that I think I'm actually pretty bad at driving, there's likewise a disconnect there, no? If I don't in fact overestimate my skill at driving, in what sense are these people "like me"? Alternatively, if I think I'm a top-10% driver, and can back it up with my actual driving record, there's a disconnect again, isn't there?
If you claim I or people like me are exploitable, the way to back that up is with examples of how we have or plausibly might be exploited, in the same way that overestimation of one's driving ability is demonstrated by comparison to population-level driving outcomes. If your claim is that we're exploitable despite not having been exploited, where do you think the conversation should go from there? If you've rejected empirical evidence, what would you prefer?
That is exactly the question I am trying to get you to engage with. You appear to believe that you can know that I've done, or will do, or am prone to do something stupid because of my particular, potentially-idiosyncratic beliefs. As I understand it, that's your entire thesis!
Atheism in its modern form has routinely and strongly correlated with a particular strong antipathy toward Christianity in particular, the exultation of "reason" that has consistently proved to be fantastically unreasonable, and support for revolutionary social and political changes that have proved disastrous. I'm pretty confident that Atheists as a population much more positive attitudes toward both Communism and Fascism than non-atheists of the same societies.
Soviet atheism does indeed have been upstream of their mass-murder, as evidenced by their pro-murder arguments relying heavily on atheist moral frameworks; contemplate how the term "liquidate" came to be applied to large-scale murder. I would argue that the actual flow went Enlightenment principles/exultation of human rationality > atheism > mass murder.
Explicitly atheist states produced unusually concentrated forms of it, in sharp contrast to contemporary non-atheist states. Appealing to "most of history" doesn't get you around the unusually-appalling nature of ideological totalitarianism in the twentieth century, nor the prominent role atheism played in those ideologies, nor the prominent role the Religious played in opposing them.
You are claiming that structural features of one belief system naturally incline it toward particular outcomes, even in cases where those outcomes can't be demonstrated. Then you are claiming that particular outcomes that can be demonstrated, repeatedly, at horrifying scale, are only "behavior that some members of a group happened to exhibit." You know what a Russell's Conjugation is. I am pretty sure you understand that you are not drawing a rigorous line from first principles here.
My entire point here was that it would be quite bold to claim that atheism leads to mass murder, even with the ton of examples of atheism actually leading to mass-murder that we actually have, and even with the evidence we have that the atheism does in fact appear to have been a significant part of the causal flow. Even with that evidence, I don't claim all atheists are prone to mass murder because it's a whole lot more complicated than that. But you have no problem doing that the other way, on much weaker evidence. This is foolishness.
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Is that better or worse than staying around long enough to declare the conversation over due to difficulties in your position and then insulting people to dismiss them when other difficulties are found in related positions?
Ah. You. You do not have the power to make me engage with you after you've annoyed me.
I think it is abundantly clear that I am unusually willing to engage in debate and spend an immense amount of effort in elaborating on my arguments, usually in good faith. That includes people I earnestly disagree with or those who dislike me.
I think that is evidence that someone who still manages to annoy me into disengaging is more likely to be in the wrong than I am. I think I was sufficiently clear and took great pains to make my position clear, but as Yudkowsky said, you can't win an argument with a rock, at least not if you expect a written concession. You can't even get the rock to admit that your position is internally consistent and coherent, even if it disagrees with the premises. I would still rather argue with the rock.
But what do I know? Let the court of public opinion be the judge, and let it make a ruling in-absentia. I'm not interested in showing up for this hearing. I hang out and chat here because I like to, not because I am obliged to.
I would also like to note that if we are inferring characteristics of our interlocutors from our own demonstrated efforts, I find it conveniently-timed that it is hard to say that I am unwilling to put in significant effort in good faith to understand vague terminology. I actually often thrive in environments where we don't have strict technical definitions, and we're trying to work through how to construct terminology that most closely matches our vague intuitions. I have one particular term at work that I've been saying I only have a "working definition" for for the past 4-5 years, because it still has plenty of vagueness around the edges and we're still learning stuff about it.
I am perfectly happy working with you on some amount of vagueness in your terms. But, as stipulated above, the natural inference is that you've given me nothing to work with. Not even an attempt.
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It's kind of hard to admit that something is consistent and coherent when you can't even say what the terms mean. How would one check? "Blurfs are bleep." Is that consistent and coherent? How can one know, unless they know what those things are? At least when rocks use words, we know what they mean. (Heh, trivially true, since rocks don't use words.)
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