I’m amazed. I totally can’t understand this kind of thinking (which you believe to be human nature)....everything he says about religion is so self-evident to me that I find it astonishing that there are people in the world to whom it isn’t....In fact, I hold the belief in God for little less than a mental disease. That is because there is virtually no evidence to support the existence of God, and a lot of evidence that seems to suggest that God doesn’t exist....However, should I be shown proof that God exists, I would accept it without any resistance whatsoever.
If you really believe that then you can test this with hallucinogens; in a non-trivial fraction of users (in good settings), they induce mystical or religious experiences and so there’s a good shot they would do so for you. Have such an experience and still maintain your atheism, and maybe I will credit your claims to be atheistic based on purely rational grounds. Otherwise, you just look to me like, say, SF author John Wright: a strident atheist until he had some hallucinations after surgery and immediately flipped his views to become a strident theist.
Seriously. Standard hallucinogens like psilocybin or LSD are easily obtained, cheap, and safe for at least a few doses.
What’s stopping you? Don’t you believe your beliefs why you don’t believe?
I’m saying that if you have a psilocybin-induced hallucination of God and then become a theist, that’s a darn good piece of evidence that stuff like the argument from evil or argument from silence weren’t why you were an atheist. (And so if you were claiming previously that they were, you were either lying or badly mistaken.)
a darn good piece of evidence
that stuff like the argument from evil or argument from silence
weren’t why you were an atheist.
I don’t think my being an atheist has anything to do with the argument from evil or the argument from silence. (I can explain more if anyone’s interested.) I am an atheist because, based on my current knowledge, the hypothesis that God does not exist seems far more likely to be true than the hypothesis that God exists. That’s all there is to it.
you can test this with hallucinogens
I assume that hallucinogens cause hallucinations, that is, distort my perception of reality. Why should I want to do that?
they induce mystical or religious experiences and so there’s a good
shot they would do so for you. Have such an experience and still
maintain your atheism, and maybe I will credit your claims to be
atheistic based on purely rational grounds
If I were hallucinating and perceived something that convinces me that God exists, I would start believing that God exists. However, I assume that the effects of the drug would wear off sooner or later. When that occurs, I would recall the experience I had and give the “proof” I saw a serious thought. It is likely that I would realise that the perception was not real, I was merely hallucinating. So I would change my mind back to the belief that God doesn’t exist.
I am not atheist in the sense that I so badly want the God not to exist that should I see any evidence that He exists, I would reject it. I am an atheist in the sense that I consider it reasonable to base my actions on the assumption that God doesn’t exist, and I refuse to start believing in God without sufficient evidence that He exists.
The author of the article, though, seems to have some psychological problem with the possibility that God exists. That’s what my comment was about.
If I were hallucinating and perceived something that convinces me that God exists, I would start believing that God exists. However, I assume that the effects of the drug would wear off sooner or later. When that occurs, I would recall the experience I had and give the “proof” I saw a serious thought. It is likely that I would realise that the perception was not real, I was merely hallucinating. So I would change my mind back to the belief that God doesn’t exist.
That’s pretty much the question. Wright could have reasoned the exact same way… and he didn’t. Would you—really?
Wright’s pre-conversion writing gave me the impression of someone who really wants to base their life on unyielding and absolute moral axioms, so he’s not working that well for me as an ”it could happen to anyone” case. More as an example that the sort of people who like engineering and for some reason become dogmatic hardcore libertarians, communists or religious literalists can dramatically change allegiance after suitable neurological insult.
Mm, I’m not sure that group doesn’t embrace LWers as well. We may claim to be open-minded and uncertain, but are we? We have plenty of libertarians here, after all.
(I think that would be testable, though; IIRC, there are a number of psychological questionnaires measuring dogmatism or need for certainty/closure (from the old research into authoritarianism). Administer along with some sort of religious questionnaire before psychedelic use, see whether the high scorers on one become higher on religion afterwards as compared to the low scorers, and especially the high scorers who report a specifically religious psychedelic experience. Too bad the drugs are so controlled and there will probably never be any real studies on this...)
I’ve been wondering whether an unusual number of smart people these days are ones that were libertarians in their early twenties and have become less so later on. Possibly similarly as in an earlier generation an unusual number of smart people were communists in their early twenties and became less so later on.
There’s definitely a lot of background assumptions sympathetic to libertarianism on LW, but I haven’t seen much of the sort of absolutist first-principles stances I associate with the group of people I’m thinking of in grandparent comment. It’s the difference between thinking that free markets are a good starting metaphor for thinking about arranging human affairs and insisting that a strict adherence to a few easily listed axioms like absolute property rights can be pretty much the only thing you need to successfully run a human civilization.
Interesting datapoint: MacLean et al 2011 did a RCT of psilocybin. Those reporting a mystical experience saw a rise in their Openness, while those reporting no mystical experience show, if anything, a fall. See the graph on pg6. (It’s almost like they’re updating on their experience.)
Psilocybin can also induce suicidal despair in a non-trivial fraction of users. I would highly recommend against its use by anybody who isn’t extremely emotionally stable to begin with.
Cites or numbers for non-trivial? I looked for info on psilocybin and suicide, and the only review I found cited listed, after I jailbroke a copy, just one suicide and few deaths.
I haven’t looked into psilocybin in as much detail as LSD, but I had assumed it was considered very safe since it seemed to be the hallucinogen of choice in recent American research.
Personal experience. Psilocybin trips vary wildly, but everybody who uses it regularly eventually encounters an episode of extreme despair. (It’s not as bad as LSD, wherein you can very easily get caught in a mental loop—which if you’re thinking negative thoughts will send you into an emotional deathspiral—but it’s definitely a tangible risk)
It’s not that it induces despair, per se, but it heightens emotional response to stimuli considerably. (Particularly in the very high dosages necessary to induce hallucinations.) It’s necessary to strictly control your environment.
If you really believe that then you can test this with hallucinogens; in a non-trivial fraction of users (in good settings), they induce mystical or religious experiences and so there’s a good shot they would do so for you. Have such an experience and still maintain your atheism, and maybe I will credit your claims to be atheistic based on purely rational grounds. Otherwise, you just look to me like, say, SF author John Wright: a strident atheist until he had some hallucinations after surgery and immediately flipped his views to become a strident theist.
Seriously. Standard hallucinogens like psilocybin or LSD are easily obtained, cheap, and safe for at least a few doses.
What’s stopping you? Don’t you believe your beliefs why you don’t believe?
Wait… are you suggesting that psilocybin-induced hallucinations are proof that God exists?
I’m saying that if you have a psilocybin-induced hallucination of God and then become a theist, that’s a darn good piece of evidence that stuff like the argument from evil or argument from silence weren’t why you were an atheist. (And so if you were claiming previously that they were, you were either lying or badly mistaken.)
Ah. Yes, agreed with this.
I don’t think my being an atheist has anything to do with the argument from evil or the argument from silence. (I can explain more if anyone’s interested.) I am an atheist because, based on my current knowledge, the hypothesis that God does not exist seems far more likely to be true than the hypothesis that God exists. That’s all there is to it.
I assume that hallucinogens cause hallucinations, that is, distort my perception of reality. Why should I want to do that?
If I were hallucinating and perceived something that convinces me that God exists, I would start believing that God exists. However, I assume that the effects of the drug would wear off sooner or later. When that occurs, I would recall the experience I had and give the “proof” I saw a serious thought. It is likely that I would realise that the perception was not real, I was merely hallucinating. So I would change my mind back to the belief that God doesn’t exist.
I am not atheist in the sense that I so badly want the God not to exist that should I see any evidence that He exists, I would reject it. I am an atheist in the sense that I consider it reasonable to base my actions on the assumption that God doesn’t exist, and I refuse to start believing in God without sufficient evidence that He exists.
The author of the article, though, seems to have some psychological problem with the possibility that God exists. That’s what my comment was about.
That’s pretty much the question. Wright could have reasoned the exact same way… and he didn’t. Would you—really?
Wright’s pre-conversion writing gave me the impression of someone who really wants to base their life on unyielding and absolute moral axioms, so he’s not working that well for me as an ”it could happen to anyone” case. More as an example that the sort of people who like engineering and for some reason become dogmatic hardcore libertarians, communists or religious literalists can dramatically change allegiance after suitable neurological insult.
Mm, I’m not sure that group doesn’t embrace LWers as well. We may claim to be open-minded and uncertain, but are we? We have plenty of libertarians here, after all.
(I think that would be testable, though; IIRC, there are a number of psychological questionnaires measuring dogmatism or need for certainty/closure (from the old research into authoritarianism). Administer along with some sort of religious questionnaire before psychedelic use, see whether the high scorers on one become higher on religion afterwards as compared to the low scorers, and especially the high scorers who report a specifically religious psychedelic experience. Too bad the drugs are so controlled and there will probably never be any real studies on this...)
I’ve been wondering whether an unusual number of smart people these days are ones that were libertarians in their early twenties and have become less so later on. Possibly similarly as in an earlier generation an unusual number of smart people were communists in their early twenties and became less so later on.
There’s definitely a lot of background assumptions sympathetic to libertarianism on LW, but I haven’t seen much of the sort of absolutist first-principles stances I associate with the group of people I’m thinking of in grandparent comment. It’s the difference between thinking that free markets are a good starting metaphor for thinking about arranging human affairs and insisting that a strict adherence to a few easily listed axioms like absolute property rights can be pretty much the only thing you need to successfully run a human civilization.
Interesting datapoint: MacLean et al 2011 did a RCT of psilocybin. Those reporting a mystical experience saw a rise in their Openness, while those reporting no mystical experience show, if anything, a fall. See the graph on pg6. (It’s almost like they’re updating on their experience.)
Psilocybin can also induce suicidal despair in a non-trivial fraction of users. I would highly recommend against its use by anybody who isn’t extremely emotionally stable to begin with.
Cites or numbers for non-trivial? I looked for info on psilocybin and suicide, and the only review I found cited listed, after I jailbroke a copy, just one suicide and few deaths.
I haven’t looked into psilocybin in as much detail as LSD, but I had assumed it was considered very safe since it seemed to be the hallucinogen of choice in recent American research.
Personal experience. Psilocybin trips vary wildly, but everybody who uses it regularly eventually encounters an episode of extreme despair. (It’s not as bad as LSD, wherein you can very easily get caught in a mental loop—which if you’re thinking negative thoughts will send you into an emotional deathspiral—but it’s definitely a tangible risk)
It’s not that it induces despair, per se, but it heightens emotional response to stimuli considerably. (Particularly in the very high dosages necessary to induce hallucinations.) It’s necessary to strictly control your environment.