I agree and this is insightful: thinking in certain types of ways results in specific predictable emotions. The way I feel about reality is the result of the state of my mind, which is a choice. However, exercising the other set of muscles does not seem to be epistemically neutral. They generate thoughts that my critical faculty would be .. critical of.
Some of the mental muscles used by religion, OTOH, are appreciation, gratitude, acceptance, awe, compassion… all of which have more positive direct effects on quality of life.
For me, many of these muscles seem to require some extent of magical thinking. They generate a belief in a presence that is taking care of me or at least a feeling for the interconnectedness and self-organization of reality. Is this dependency unusual? Am I mistaken about the dependence?
Consider a concrete example: enjoying the sunshine. Enjoyment seems neutral. However, if I want to feel grateful, it seems I feel grateful towards something. I can personify the sun itself, or reality. It seems silly to personify the sun, but I find it quite natural to personify reality. I currently repress personifying reality with my critical muscles, after a while I suspect it would also feel silly.
I’m not sure what I mean by ‘personify’, but while false (or silly) it also seems harmless. Being grateful for the sun never caused me to make—say—a biased prediction about future experience with the sun. But while I’ve argued a few times here that one should be “allowed” false beliefs if they increase quality of life without penalty, I find that I am currently in a mode of preferring “rational” emotions over allowing impressions that would feel silly.
Nope. The idea that your brain’s entire contents need to be self-consistent is just the opinion of the part of you that finds inconsistencies and insists they’re bad. Of course they are… to that part of your brain.
I teach people these questions for noticing and redirecting mental muscles:
What am I paying attention to? (e.g. inconsistencies)
Is that useful? (yes, if you’re debugging a program, doing an engineering task, etc. -- no if you’re socializing or doing something fun)
What would it be useful for me to pay attention to?
Consider a concrete example: enjoying the sunshine. Enjoyment seems neutral. However, if I want to feel grateful, it seems I feel grateful towards something. I can personify the sun itself, or reality. It seems silly to personify the sun, but I find it quite natural to personify reality.
Is that really necessary? I have not personally observed that gratitude must be towards something in particular, or that it needs to be personified. One can be grateful in the abstract—thank luck or probability or the Tegmark level IV multiverse if you must. Or “thank Bayes!”. ;-)
For me, many of these muscles seem to require some extent of magical thinking. They generate a belief in a presence that is taking care of me or at least a feeling for the interconnectedness and self-organization of reality. Is this dependency unusual? Am I mistaken about the dependence?
Sure, there’s a link. I think that Einstein’s question about whether the universe is a friendly place is related. I also think that this is the one place where an emphasis on epistemic truth and decompartmentalization is potentially a serious threat to one’s long-term quality of life.
I think that our brains and bodies more or less have an inner setting for “how friendly/hostile is my environment”—and believing that it’s friendly has enormous positive impact, which is why religious people who believe in a personally caring deity score so high on various quality of life measures, including recovery from illness.
So, this is one place where you need to choose carefully about which truths you’re going to pay attention to, and worry much more about whether you’re going to let too much critical faculty leak over into your basic satisfaction with and enjoyment of life.
Much more than you should worry about whether your uncritical enjoyment is going to leak over and ruin your critical thinking.
Trust me, if you’re worrying about that, then it’s a pretty good sign that the reverse is the problem. (i.e., your critical faculty already has too much of an upper hand!)
This is one reason I say here that I’m an instrumentalist: it’s more important for me to believe things that are useful, than things that are true. And I can (now, after quite a lot of practice) switch off my critical faculties enough to learn useful things from people who have ridiculously-untrue theories about how they work.
For example, “law of attraction” people believe all sorts of stupidly false things… that are nonetheless very useful to believe, or at least to act as if they were true. But I avoid epistemic conflict by viewing such theories as mnemonic fuel for intuition pumps, rather than as epistemically truthful things.
In fact, I pretty much assume everything is just a mnemonic/intuition pump, even the things that are currently considered epistemically “true”. If you’ll notice, over the long term such “truths” of one era get revised to be “less wrong”, even though the previous model usually worked just fine for whatever it was being used for, up to a certain point. (e.g. Newtonian physics)
(Sadly, as models become “less wrong”, they have a corresponding tendency to be less and less useful as mnemonics or intuition pumps, and require outside tools or increased conscious cognition to become useful. (e.g. Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics.))
I agree and this is insightful: thinking in certain types of ways results in specific predictable emotions. The way I feel about reality is the result of the state of my mind, which is a choice. However, exercising the other set of muscles does not seem to be epistemically neutral. They generate thoughts that my critical faculty would be .. critical of.
For me, many of these muscles seem to require some extent of magical thinking. They generate a belief in a presence that is taking care of me or at least a feeling for the interconnectedness and self-organization of reality. Is this dependency unusual? Am I mistaken about the dependence?
Consider a concrete example: enjoying the sunshine. Enjoyment seems neutral. However, if I want to feel grateful, it seems I feel grateful towards something. I can personify the sun itself, or reality. It seems silly to personify the sun, but I find it quite natural to personify reality. I currently repress personifying reality with my critical muscles, after a while I suspect it would also feel silly.
I’m not sure what I mean by ‘personify’, but while false (or silly) it also seems harmless. Being grateful for the sun never caused me to make—say—a biased prediction about future experience with the sun. But while I’ve argued a few times here that one should be “allowed” false beliefs if they increase quality of life without penalty, I find that I am currently in a mode of preferring “rational” emotions over allowing impressions that would feel silly.
Is this conflict “real”?
Nope. The idea that your brain’s entire contents need to be self-consistent is just the opinion of the part of you that finds inconsistencies and insists they’re bad. Of course they are… to that part of your brain.
I teach people these questions for noticing and redirecting mental muscles:
What am I paying attention to? (e.g. inconsistencies)
Is that useful? (yes, if you’re debugging a program, doing an engineering task, etc. -- no if you’re socializing or doing something fun)
What would it be useful for me to pay attention to?
Is that really necessary? I have not personally observed that gratitude must be towards something in particular, or that it needs to be personified. One can be grateful in the abstract—thank luck or probability or the Tegmark level IV multiverse if you must. Or “thank Bayes!”. ;-)
Sure, there’s a link. I think that Einstein’s question about whether the universe is a friendly place is related. I also think that this is the one place where an emphasis on epistemic truth and decompartmentalization is potentially a serious threat to one’s long-term quality of life.
I think that our brains and bodies more or less have an inner setting for “how friendly/hostile is my environment”—and believing that it’s friendly has enormous positive impact, which is why religious people who believe in a personally caring deity score so high on various quality of life measures, including recovery from illness.
So, this is one place where you need to choose carefully about which truths you’re going to pay attention to, and worry much more about whether you’re going to let too much critical faculty leak over into your basic satisfaction with and enjoyment of life.
Much more than you should worry about whether your uncritical enjoyment is going to leak over and ruin your critical thinking.
Trust me, if you’re worrying about that, then it’s a pretty good sign that the reverse is the problem. (i.e., your critical faculty already has too much of an upper hand!)
This is one reason I say here that I’m an instrumentalist: it’s more important for me to believe things that are useful, than things that are true. And I can (now, after quite a lot of practice) switch off my critical faculties enough to learn useful things from people who have ridiculously-untrue theories about how they work.
For example, “law of attraction” people believe all sorts of stupidly false things… that are nonetheless very useful to believe, or at least to act as if they were true. But I avoid epistemic conflict by viewing such theories as mnemonic fuel for intuition pumps, rather than as epistemically truthful things.
In fact, I pretty much assume everything is just a mnemonic/intuition pump, even the things that are currently considered epistemically “true”. If you’ll notice, over the long term such “truths” of one era get revised to be “less wrong”, even though the previous model usually worked just fine for whatever it was being used for, up to a certain point. (e.g. Newtonian physics)
(Sadly, as models become “less wrong”, they have a corresponding tendency to be less and less useful as mnemonics or intuition pumps, and require outside tools or increased conscious cognition to become useful. (e.g. Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics.))