I remember being twelve or so, staring intently at the communion tabernacle of our Catholic church, going through the following reasoning:
The priest physically transmutes the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ during the sacrament of Communion. This much is an article of faith and thus will be treated as a fact. The transubstantiation occurs at the moment that the gong is struck.
Will any empirical test verify that the bread has been transformed into flesh? I must assume no, because the appearance, taste, and other apparent physical properties are unchanged.
Therefor, there must be some spiritual essence inherent to all objects which imbues those objects with a kind of metaphysical identity beyond the apparent identity one would derive from the object’s physical properties!
...
I tell this story to illustrate that there are many different values of “I have always thought this way.” This story demonstrates what happens when a natively reductionist mind finds itself in an epistemically hostile environment; the mind ties itself in knots trying to justify what it believes and its up basically reinventing Dualism, explaining a priori why you won’t find the dragon that I know is in my garage. I have always been sharply aware that a little rationality and intelligence are a dangerous thing. In order to be anything like an “operational rationalist” I needed access to the full toolkit which I would summarize as “reductionism with some kind of parsimony prior, ethical consequentialism, a cultivated reflex toward dissolving questions, a cultivated gag-reflex against as improper use of language, aggressively checking that my beliefs pay rent, a Bayesian Positivist stance if not necessarily complete certainty in the framework, and a healthy appreciation of the fact that System 1 is really doing all the work anyway and System 2 is, at best, high level consistency checker.”
I’m not even sure of any of these things I put in that list. Maybe in ten years I’ll read this again and say, “Oh, stupid, that’s why I made so many mistakes when I was younger.” It just seems from my current point of view that all these mental tools interlock and help with “winning.”
I remember being twelve or so, staring intently at the communion tabernacle of our Catholic church, going through the following reasoning:
The priest physically transmutes the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ during the sacrament of Communion. This much is an article of faith and thus will be treated as a fact. The transubstantiation occurs at the moment that the gong is struck.
Will any empirical test verify that the bread has been transformed into flesh? I must assume no, because the appearance, taste, and other apparent physical properties are unchanged.
Therefor, there must be some spiritual essence inherent to all objects which imbues those objects with a kind of metaphysical identity beyond the apparent identity one would derive from the object’s physical properties!
...
I tell this story to illustrate that there are many different values of “I have always thought this way.” This story demonstrates what happens when a natively reductionist mind finds itself in an epistemically hostile environment; the mind ties itself in knots trying to justify what it believes and its up basically reinventing Dualism, explaining a priori why you won’t find the dragon that I know is in my garage. I have always been sharply aware that a little rationality and intelligence are a dangerous thing. In order to be anything like an “operational rationalist” I needed access to the full toolkit which I would summarize as “reductionism with some kind of parsimony prior, ethical consequentialism, a cultivated reflex toward dissolving questions, a cultivated gag-reflex against as improper use of language, aggressively checking that my beliefs pay rent, a Bayesian Positivist stance if not necessarily complete certainty in the framework, and a healthy appreciation of the fact that System 1 is really doing all the work anyway and System 2 is, at best, high level consistency checker.”
I’m not even sure of any of these things I put in that list. Maybe in ten years I’ll read this again and say, “Oh, stupid, that’s why I made so many mistakes when I was younger.” It just seems from my current point of view that all these mental tools interlock and help with “winning.”