I think this post and the related ones are really hitting home why it is hard for our minds to function fully rationally at all times. Like Jon Haidt’s metaphor that our conscious awareness is akin to a person riding on top of an elephant, our conscious attempt at rational behavior is trying to tame this bundle of evolved mechanisms lying below ‘us’. Just think of the preposterous notion of ‘telling yourself’ to believe or not believe in something. Who are you telling this to? How is cognitive dissonance even possible?
I remember the point when I finally abandoned my religious beliefs as a kid. I had ‘known’ that belief in a personal god and the religious teachings were incompatible with rational thinking yet I still maintained my irrational behavior. What did the trick was to actually practice and live strictly for a set period of time only appropriately to what my rational beliefs allowed. After some number of days, I was finally completely changed and could not revert back to my state of contradiction.
In relation to this, think about why you can’t just read a math book and suddenly just get it (at least for us non math geniuses). You may read an equation and superficially understand that it is true, but you can still convince yourself otherwise or hold conflicted beliefs about it. But then, after doing examples yourself and practicing, you come to ‘know’ the material deeply and you can hardly imagine what it is like not to know it.
For people like the girl Eliezer was talking to, I wonder what would happen if you told her, as an experiment, to force herself to totally abandon her belief in god for a week, only adhering to reason, and see how she feels.
I think this post and the related ones are really hitting home why it is hard for our minds to function fully rationally at all times. Like Jon Haidt’s metaphor that our conscious awareness is akin to a person riding on top of an elephant, our conscious attempt at rational behavior is trying to tame this bundle of evolved mechanisms lying below ‘us’. Just think of the preposterous notion of ‘telling yourself’ to believe or not believe in something. Who are you telling this to? How is cognitive dissonance even possible?
I remember the point when I finally abandoned my religious beliefs as a kid. I had ‘known’ that belief in a personal god and the religious teachings were incompatible with rational thinking yet I still maintained my irrational behavior. What did the trick was to actually practice and live strictly for a set period of time only appropriately to what my rational beliefs allowed. After some number of days, I was finally completely changed and could not revert back to my state of contradiction.
In relation to this, think about why you can’t just read a math book and suddenly just get it (at least for us non math geniuses). You may read an equation and superficially understand that it is true, but you can still convince yourself otherwise or hold conflicted beliefs about it. But then, after doing examples yourself and practicing, you come to ‘know’ the material deeply and you can hardly imagine what it is like not to know it.
For people like the girl Eliezer was talking to, I wonder what would happen if you told her, as an experiment, to force herself to totally abandon her belief in god for a week, only adhering to reason, and see how she feels.