Thanks. I think it’s important not to forget the path I’ve taken. It’s a major part of my identity even though I no longer endorse what were once my most cherished beliefs, and I feel that it helps connect me with the greater human experience. My parents and (ironically) my training in apologetics instilled in me a thirst for truth and an alertness toward logical fallacies that took me quite far from where I started in life. I guess that a greater emphasis on overcoming confirmation bias would have accelerated my truth-seeking journey a bit more. Unfortunately and surprisingly for a certain species of story-telling social primates, the truth is not necessarily what is believed and taught by the tribe. An idea is not true just because people devote lifetimes to defending it. And an idea is not false just because they spend lifetimes mocking it.
The one thing that held me back the most, I think, is my rather strong deontological instinct. I always saw it as my moral duty to apply the full force of my rational mind to defending the Revealed Truth. I was willing to apply good epistemology to modify my beliefs arbitrarily far, as long as it did not violate the moral constraint that my worldview remain consistent with the holistic biblical narrative. Sometimes that meant radically rethinking religious doctrines in light of science (or conflicting scriptures), but more often it pushed me to rationalize scientific evidence to fit with my core beliefs.
I always recognized that all things that are true are necessarily mutually consistent, that we all inhabit a single self-consistent Reality, and that the Truth must be the minimum-energy harmonization of all existing facts. However, it wasn’t until I was willing to let go of the moral duty to retain the biblical narrative in my set of brute facts that the free energy of my worldview dropped dramatically. It was like a thousand high-tension cables binding all my beliefs to a single (misplaced) epistemological hub were all released at once. Suddenly, everything else in my worldview began to fall into place as all lines of evidence I had already accumulated pulled things into a much lower-energy configuration.
It’s funny how a single powerful prior or a single moral obligation can skew everything else. I wish it were a more widely held virtue to deeply scrutinize one’s most cherished beliefs and to reject them if necessary. Oh well. Maybe in the next million years if we can set up the social selection pressures right.
Welcome! That’s an interesting path you’ve followed.
Thanks. I think it’s important not to forget the path I’ve taken. It’s a major part of my identity even though I no longer endorse what were once my most cherished beliefs, and I feel that it helps connect me with the greater human experience. My parents and (ironically) my training in apologetics instilled in me a thirst for truth and an alertness toward logical fallacies that took me quite far from where I started in life. I guess that a greater emphasis on overcoming confirmation bias would have accelerated my truth-seeking journey a bit more. Unfortunately and surprisingly for a certain species of story-telling social primates, the truth is not necessarily what is believed and taught by the tribe. An idea is not true just because people devote lifetimes to defending it. And an idea is not false just because they spend lifetimes mocking it.
The one thing that held me back the most, I think, is my rather strong deontological instinct. I always saw it as my moral duty to apply the full force of my rational mind to defending the Revealed Truth. I was willing to apply good epistemology to modify my beliefs arbitrarily far, as long as it did not violate the moral constraint that my worldview remain consistent with the holistic biblical narrative. Sometimes that meant radically rethinking religious doctrines in light of science (or conflicting scriptures), but more often it pushed me to rationalize scientific evidence to fit with my core beliefs.
I always recognized that all things that are true are necessarily mutually consistent, that we all inhabit a single self-consistent Reality, and that the Truth must be the minimum-energy harmonization of all existing facts. However, it wasn’t until I was willing to let go of the moral duty to retain the biblical narrative in my set of brute facts that the free energy of my worldview dropped dramatically. It was like a thousand high-tension cables binding all my beliefs to a single (misplaced) epistemological hub were all released at once. Suddenly, everything else in my worldview began to fall into place as all lines of evidence I had already accumulated pulled things into a much lower-energy configuration.
It’s funny how a single powerful prior or a single moral obligation can skew everything else. I wish it were a more widely held virtue to deeply scrutinize one’s most cherished beliefs and to reject them if necessary. Oh well. Maybe in the next million years if we can set up the social selection pressures right.