But then the responsibilities that you deprioritize are a matter of your limited resources. Not a matter of floating high above, serene and Wise.
My reply to Paul Graham’s comment on Hacker News seems like a summary worth repeating:
There’s a difference between:
Passing neutral judgment;
Declining to invest marginal resources;
Pretending that either of the above is a mark of deep wisdom, maturity, and a superior vantage point; with the corresponding implication that the original sides occupy lower vantage points that are not importantly different from up there.
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1. Paulo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1985), 122.
16
Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable
The earliest account I know of a scientific experiment is, ironically, the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal.
The people of Israel are wavering between Jehovah and Baal, so Elijah announces that he will conduct an experiment to settle it—quite a novel concept in those days! The priests of Baal will place their bull on an altar, and Elijah will place Jehovah’s bull on an altar, but neither will be allowed to start the fire; whichever God is real will call down fire on His sacrifice. The priests of Baal serve as control group for Elijah—the same wooden fuel, the same bull, and the same priests making invocations, but to a false god. Then Elijah pours water on his altar—ruining the experimental symmetry, but this was back in the early days—to signify deliberate acceptance of the burden of proof, like needing a 0.05 significance level. The fire comes down on Elijah’s altar, which is the experimental observation. The watching people of Israel shout “The Lord is God!”—peer review.
And then the people haul the 450 priests of Baal down to the river Kishon and slit their throats. This is stern, but necessary. You must firmly discard the falsified hypothesis, and do so swiftly, before it can generate excuses to protect itself. If the priests of Baal are allowed to survive, they will start babbling about how religion is a separate magisterium which can be neither proven nor disproven.
Back in the old days, people actually believed their religions instead of just believing in them. The biblical archaeologists who went in search of Noah’s Ark did not think they were wasting their time; they anticipated they might become famous. Only after failing to find confirming evidence—and finding disconfirming evidence in its place—did religionists execute what William Bartley called the retreat to commitment, “I believe because I believe.”
Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion’s being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for . . .)
Back in the old days, saying the local religion “could not be proven” would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, “Yeah, it’s all true.” From a Bayesian perspective that’s some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity. (Although it doesn’t prove that the entity is God per se, or that the entity is benevolent—it could be alien teenagers.) The vast majority of religions in human history—excepting only those invented extremely recently—tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they’d actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn’t even know the difference.
The Roman Empire inherited philosophy from the ancient Greeks; imposed law and order within its provinces; kept bureaucratic records; and enforced religious tolerance. The New Testament, created during the time of the Roman Empire, bears some traces of modernity as a result. You couldn’t invent a story about God completely obliterating the city of Rome (a la Sodom and Gomorrah), because the Roman historians would call you on it, and you couldn’t just stone them.
In contrast, the people who invented the Old Testament stories could make up pretty much anything they liked. Early Egyptologists were genuinely shocked to find no trace whatsoever of Hebrew tribes having ever been in Egypt—they weren’t expecting to find a record of the Ten Plagues, but they expected to find something. As it turned out, they did find something. They found out that, during the supposed time of the Exodus, Egypt ruled much of Canaan. That’s one huge historical error, but if there are no libraries, nobody can call you on it.
The Roman Empire did have libraries. Thus, the New Testament doesn’t claim big, showy, large-scale geopolitical miracles as the Old Testament routinely did. Instead the New Testament claims smaller miracles which nonetheless fit into the same framework of evidence. A boy falls down and froths at the mouth; the cause is an unclean spirit; an unclean spirit could reasonably be expected to flee from a true prophet, but not to flee from a charlatan; Jesus casts out the unclean spirit; therefore Jesus is a true prophet and not a charlatan. This is perfectly ordinary Bayesian reasoning, if you grant the basic premise that epilepsy is caused by demons (and that the end of an epileptic fit proves the demon fled).
Not only did religion used to make claims about factual and scientific matters, religion used to make claims about everything. Religion laid down a code of law—before legislative bodies; religion laid down history—before historians and archaeologists; religion laid down the sexual morals—before Women’s Lib; religion described the forms of government—before constitutions; and religion answered scientific questions from biological taxonomy to the formation of stars. The Old Testament doesn’t talk about a sense of wonder at the complexity of the universe—it was busy laying down the death penalty for women who wore men’s clothing, which was solid and satisfying religious content of that era. The modern concept of religion as purely ethical derives from every other area’s having been taken over by better institutions. Ethics is what’s left.
Or rather, people think ethics is what’s left. Take a culture dump from 2,500 years ago. Over time, humanity will progress immensely, and pieces of the ancient culture dump will become ever more glaringly obsolete. Ethics has not been immune to human progress—for example, we now frown upon such Bible-approved practices as keeping slaves. Why do people think that ethics is still fair game?
Intrinsically, there’s nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs. And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you’re crazy. But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you. Most people’s concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible’s moral problems. Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time.
Maybe someday, humanity will advance further, and anyone who endorses the Bible as a source of ethics will be treated the same way as Trent Lott endorsing Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign. And then it will be said that religion’s “true core” has always been genealogy or something.
The idea that religion is a separate magisterium that cannot be proven or disproven is a Big Lie—a lie which is repeated over and over again, so that people will say it without thinking; yet which is, on critical examination, simply false. It is a wild distortion of how religion happene
d historically, of how all scriptures present their beliefs, of what children are told to persuade them, and of what the majority of religious people on Earth still believe. You have to admire its sheer brazenness, on a par with Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. The prosecutor whips out the bloody axe, and the defendant, momentarily shocked, thinks quickly and says: “But you can’t disprove my innocence by mere evidence—it’s a separate magisterium!”
And if that doesn’t work, grab a piece of paper and scribble yourself a Get Out of Jail Free card.
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17
Professing and Cheering
I once attended a panel on the topic, “Are science and religion compatible?” One of the women on the panel, a pagan, held forth interminably upon how she believed that the Earth had been created when a giant primordial cow was born into the primordial abyss, who licked a primordial god into existence, whose descendants killed a primordial giant and used its corpse to create the Earth, etc. The tale was long, and detailed, and more absurd than the Earth being supported on the back of a giant turtle. And the speaker clearly knew enough science to know this.
I still find myself struggling for words to describe what I saw as this woman spoke. She spoke with . . . pride? Self-satisfaction? A deliberate flaunting of herself?
The woman went on describing her creation myth for what seemed like forever, but was probably only five minutes. That strange pride/satisfaction/flaunting clearly had something to do with her knowing that her beliefs were scientifically outrageous. And it wasn’t that she hated science; as a panelist she professed that religion and science were compatible. She even talked about how it was quite understandable that the Vikings talked about a primordial abyss, given the land in which they lived—explained away her own religion!—and yet nonetheless insisted this was what she “believed,” said with peculiar satisfaction.
I’m not sure that Daniel Dennett’s concept of “belief in belief” stretches to cover this event. It was weirder than that. She didn’t recite her creation myth with the fanatical faith of someone who needs to reassure herself. She didn’t act like she expected us, the audience, to be convinced—or like she needed our belief to validate her.
Dennett, in addition to suggesting belief in belief, has also suggested that much of what is called “religious belief” should really be studied as “religious profession.” Suppose an alien anthropologist studied a group of postmodernist English students who all seemingly believed that Wulky Wilkensen was a post-utopian author. The appropriate question may not be “Why do the students all believe this strange belief?” but “Why do they all write this strange sentence on quizzes?” Even if a sentence is essentially meaningless, you can still know when you are supposed to chant the response aloud.
I think Dennett may be slightly too cynical in suggesting that religious profession is just saying the belief aloud—most people are honest enough that, if they say a religious statement aloud, they will also feel obligated to say the verbal sentence into their own stream of consciousness.
But even the concept of “religious profession” doesn’t seem to cover the pagan woman’s claim to believe in the primordial cow. If you had to profess a religious belief to satisfy a priest, or satisfy a co-religionist—heck, to satisfy your own self-image as a religious person—you would have to pretend to believe much more convincingly than this woman was doing. As she recited her tale of the primordial cow, with that same strange flaunting pride, she wasn’t even trying to be persuasive—wasn’t even trying to convince us that she took her own religion seriously. I think that’s the part that so took me aback. I know people who believe they believe ridiculous things, but when they profess them, they’ll spend much more effort to convince themselves that they take their beliefs seriously.
It finally occurred to me that this woman wasn’t trying to convince us or even convince herself. Her recitation of the creation story wasn’t about the creation of the world at all. Rather, by launching into a five-minute diatribe about the primordial cow, she was cheering for paganism, like holding up a banner at a football game. A banner saying GO BLUES isn’t a statement of fact, or an attempt to persuade; it doesn’t have to be convincing—it’s a cheer.
That strange flaunting pride . . . it was like she was marching naked in a gay pride parade. (Not that there’s anything wrong with marching naked in a gay pride parade. Lesbianism is not something that truth can destroy.) It wasn’t just a cheer, like marching, but an outrageous cheer, like marching naked—believing that she couldn’t be arrested or criticized, because she was doing it for her pride parade.
That’s why it mattered to her that what she was saying was beyond ridiculous. If she’d tried to make it sound more plausible, it would have been like putting on clothes.
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18
Belief as Attire
I have so far distinguished between belief as anticipation-controller, belief in belief, professing, and cheering. Of these, we might call anticipation-controlling beliefs “proper beliefs” and the other forms “improper beliefs.” A proper belief can be wrong or irrational, as when someone genuinely anticipates that prayer will cure their sick baby. But the other forms are arguably “not belief at all.”
Yet another form of improper belief is belief as group identification—as a way of belonging. Robin Hanson uses the excellent metaphor of wearing unusual clothing, a group uniform like a priest’s vestments or a Jewish skullcap, and so I will call this “belief as attire.”
In terms of humanly realistic psychology, the Muslims who flew planes into the World Trade Center undoubtedly saw themselves as heroes defending truth, justice, and the Islamic Way from hideous alien monsters a la the movie Independence Day. Only a very inexperienced nerd, the sort of nerd who has no idea how non-nerds see the world, would say this out loud in an Alabama bar. It is not an American thing to say. The American thing to say is that the terrorists “hate our freedom” and that flying a plane into a building is a “cowardly act.” You cannot say the phrases “heroic self-sacrifice” and “suicide bomber” in the same sentence, even for the sake of accurately describing how the Enemy sees the world. The very concept of the courage and altruism of a suicide bomber is Enemy attire—you can tell, because the Enemy talks about it. The cowardice and sociopathy of a suicide bomber is American attire. There are no quote marks you can use to talk about how the Enemy sees the world; it would be like dressing up as a Nazi for Halloween.
Belief-as-attire may help explain how people can be passionate about improper beliefs. Mere belief in belief, or religious professing, would have some trouble creating genuine, deep, powerful emotional effects. Or so I suspect; I confess I’m not an expert here. But my impression is this: People who’ve stopped anticipating-as-if their religion is true, will go to great lengths to convince themselves they are passionate, and this desperation can be mistaken for passion. But it’s not the same fire they had as a child.
On the other hand, it is very easy for a human being to genuinely, passionately, gut-level belong to a group, to cheer for their favorite sports team. (This is the foundation on which rests the swindle of “Republicans vs. Democrats” and analogous false dilemmas in other countries, but that’s a topic for another time.) Identifying with a tribe is a very strong emotional force. People will die for it. And once you get people to identify with a tribe, the beliefs which are attire of that tribe will be spoken with the full passion of belonging to that tribe.
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19
Applause Lights
At the Singularity Summit 2007, one of the speakers called for democratic, multinational development of Artificial Intelligence. So I stepped up to the microphone and asked:
Suppose that a group of democratic republics form a consortium to develop AI, and there’s a lot of politicking during the process—some interest groups have unusually large influence, others get shafted—in other words, the result looks just like the products of modern democracies. Alternatively, suppose a gro
up of rebel nerds develops an AI in their basement, and instructs the AI to poll everyone in the world—dropping cellphones to anyone who doesn’t have them—and do whatever the majority says. Which of these do you think is more “democratic,” and would you feel safe with either?
I wanted to find out whether he believed in the pragmatic adequacy of the democratic political process, or if he believed in the moral rightness of voting. But the speaker replied:
The first scenario sounds like an editorial in Reason magazine, and the second sounds like a Hollywood movie plot.
Confused, I asked:
Then what kind of democratic process did you have in mind?
The speaker replied:
Something like the Human Genome Project—that was an internationally sponsored research project.
I asked:
How would different interest groups resolve their conflicts in a structure like the Human Genome Project?
And the speaker said:
I don’t know.
This exchange puts me in mind of a quote from some dictator or other, who was asked if he had any intentions to move his pet state toward democracy:
We believe we are already within a democratic system. Some factors are still missing, like the expression of the people’s will.
The substance of a democracy is the specific mechanism that resolves policy conflicts. If all groups had the same preferred policies, there would be no need for democracy—we would automatically cooperate. The resolution process can be a direct majority vote, or an elected legislature, or even a voter-sensitive behavior of an Artificial Intelligence, but it has to be something. What does it mean to call for a “democratic” solution if you don’t have a conflict-resolution mechanism in mind?
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 9