No, I think concepts like “belief in belief” or “belief in self-deception” have more to do with people who are slightly on the autism spectrum having difficulty understanding neurotypical brains than anything else. Yes, I am specifically thinking EY here.
Basically neurotypical brains are way more social. A religion is professed and that means there are statements repeated aloud, in company, basically like a password for gaining social acceptance. When done early enough from childhood and often enough, you learn to repeat them also inward, inside your brain. It becomes part of your inner voice. It also has a certain emotional effect, maybe reassuring, or frightening.
But at no point in the process does truth play much of a role. You don’t believe it in the sense you believe things that require immediate action. You just hear this inner voice saying it. And you repeat it aloud for other people.
The best parallel is probably music. Like song lyrics stuck in your ear. Do you really wonder what is the probability that Rick Astley is never gonna give her up? No, it is just a chain of words heard outside from the radio or inside your brain with a certain emotional effect.
People who are slightly autistic tend to think beliefs are private, you really, seriously decide if X is true or false. But for neurotypicals beliefs aren’t private and thus they are not really beliefs in this sense, they do not carry a big stamp putting “this is true” on their beliefs, it is passwords, word-memes repeated aloud for a social function and also heard inward. Since they do not require immediate action, they also do not require actually deciding if they are true.
This is why “I believe people are nicer than they actually are” makes perfect sense. It means “I enjoy hearing an inner voice telling me people are nice. I know it is not really true. But I enjoy this tape so I keep playing it. I will also say it aloud so that others can also enjoy hearing it.”
Human intelligence evolved as social intelligence. We are far better equipped to win political debates and get elected than to find truth. This is why Newton type truth-finders tend to be slightly autistic, having Asperger, you need to turn off the social in order to be really interested in truth.
This is so true! And if you buy into Julian Jaynes’s “Bicameral Mind” theory, then ancient religious commandments from god (which were in actuality lessons from parents/chiefs/priests ingrained in one’s psyche since childhood but falsely attributed to unseen spiritual forces) literally WERE heard in people’s minds like a catchy music tune played over and over.
I never really understood the concept of the individual i.e. an indivisible person. I always felt divisible, something like a Freudian superego/ego/id, but clearly when I face the dilemma of sticking to weight loss or eating a cake, it is not one indivisible person making a choice, but two agents arguing with each other inside me. It is more or less literally heard as an internal dialogue. Not for everybody?
I am fighting an ugly case of alcohol addiction. There is the Higher Self, the one with the low time preference, who wants to live in a healthy and a rational way until 75, and the Lower Self, who wants to indulge in every impulse now, and does not care if it dies at 50. I used to do what I guess is the common case, identify with the Higher Self, as it is far more respectable and feels good to identify with it, and consider the lower self an external demon. However, this means always having to fight the demon. And that is tiresome. So I turned it around, identified with the lower self, and basically accepted I am a pig with poor impulse control, and turned the Higher Self into an exterrnal entity I call The Boss. The advantage is that instead of fighting The Demon, it is now surrendering to The Boss. So it feels like I really want a drink, but cannot, because The Boss forbade it, and no use in fighting The Boss. Surrendering to an externalized internal agent is easier than fighting it. Later on I realized I basically reinvented half of AA’s 12-step program as they too build on a surrender to a higher being.
My point is to me the bicameral mind does not even feel weird, I am doing something like that on a daily basis, I just wonder why not everybody, and the only thing that feels weird about it is why only two? It is easy to have 3-4 conflicting ideas generating 3-4 conflicting sub-agents fighting it out. It is like in multithreaded programming, where every important function gets its own thread, every important idea gets an amount of selfhood, agency invested into it.
No, I think concepts like “belief in belief” or “belief in self-deception” have more to do with people who are slightly on the autism spectrum having difficulty understanding neurotypical brains than anything else. Yes, I am specifically thinking EY here.
Basically neurotypical brains are way more social. A religion is professed and that means there are statements repeated aloud, in company, basically like a password for gaining social acceptance. When done early enough from childhood and often enough, you learn to repeat them also inward, inside your brain. It becomes part of your inner voice. It also has a certain emotional effect, maybe reassuring, or frightening.
But at no point in the process does truth play much of a role. You don’t believe it in the sense you believe things that require immediate action. You just hear this inner voice saying it. And you repeat it aloud for other people.
The best parallel is probably music. Like song lyrics stuck in your ear. Do you really wonder what is the probability that Rick Astley is never gonna give her up? No, it is just a chain of words heard outside from the radio or inside your brain with a certain emotional effect.
People who are slightly autistic tend to think beliefs are private, you really, seriously decide if X is true or false. But for neurotypicals beliefs aren’t private and thus they are not really beliefs in this sense, they do not carry a big stamp putting “this is true” on their beliefs, it is passwords, word-memes repeated aloud for a social function and also heard inward. Since they do not require immediate action, they also do not require actually deciding if they are true.
This is why “I believe people are nicer than they actually are” makes perfect sense. It means “I enjoy hearing an inner voice telling me people are nice. I know it is not really true. But I enjoy this tape so I keep playing it. I will also say it aloud so that others can also enjoy hearing it.”
Human intelligence evolved as social intelligence. We are far better equipped to win political debates and get elected than to find truth. This is why Newton type truth-finders tend to be slightly autistic, having Asperger, you need to turn off the social in order to be really interested in truth.
Disagree -but up voted for the Rick Astley reference. And for a plausible and interesting hypothesis.
This is so true! And if you buy into Julian Jaynes’s “Bicameral Mind” theory, then ancient religious commandments from god (which were in actuality lessons from parents/chiefs/priests ingrained in one’s psyche since childhood but falsely attributed to unseen spiritual forces) literally WERE heard in people’s minds like a catchy music tune played over and over.
I never really understood the concept of the individual i.e. an indivisible person. I always felt divisible, something like a Freudian superego/ego/id, but clearly when I face the dilemma of sticking to weight loss or eating a cake, it is not one indivisible person making a choice, but two agents arguing with each other inside me. It is more or less literally heard as an internal dialogue. Not for everybody?
I am fighting an ugly case of alcohol addiction. There is the Higher Self, the one with the low time preference, who wants to live in a healthy and a rational way until 75, and the Lower Self, who wants to indulge in every impulse now, and does not care if it dies at 50. I used to do what I guess is the common case, identify with the Higher Self, as it is far more respectable and feels good to identify with it, and consider the lower self an external demon. However, this means always having to fight the demon. And that is tiresome. So I turned it around, identified with the lower self, and basically accepted I am a pig with poor impulse control, and turned the Higher Self into an exterrnal entity I call The Boss. The advantage is that instead of fighting The Demon, it is now surrendering to The Boss. So it feels like I really want a drink, but cannot, because The Boss forbade it, and no use in fighting The Boss. Surrendering to an externalized internal agent is easier than fighting it. Later on I realized I basically reinvented half of AA’s 12-step program as they too build on a surrender to a higher being.
My point is to me the bicameral mind does not even feel weird, I am doing something like that on a daily basis, I just wonder why not everybody, and the only thing that feels weird about it is why only two? It is easy to have 3-4 conflicting ideas generating 3-4 conflicting sub-agents fighting it out. It is like in multithreaded programming, where every important function gets its own thread, every important idea gets an amount of selfhood, agency invested into it.