Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief

It turns out that for most people, the default intention of “holding your arm straight” by tensing your muscles and resisting your partner is not very effective.

Notice the presupposition that "tensing your muscles" is the default way most that most people hold their arm straight? Notice how in the video you linked he explicitly specified "really tight" and didn't just say "don't let me bend your arm", letting people do what actually comes by default? They seem to always specify to make the arm tense, which is unsurprising because if you're not told to resist wrong, you might not resist wrong and then their trick won't work.

I tried it with my wife, only instead of saying "Hold your arm really tight" I just said "Don't let me bend your arm". As a result, she didn't foolishly contract her bicep to help me, and was able to resist just as well as when I told her to visualize stuff. It's not that visualizing firehoses is unusually effective, it's that you're getting bamboozled into doing it unusually ineffectively to start with.

In Materialist Conceptions of God, I wrote about how one can interpret religious claims as hyperstititions, beliefs that become true as a result of you believing in them.

While this works for some religious claims, it doesn't work for many of the most important ones. If heaven doesn't exist, believing in it, and even acting as though you want to go there, won't get you there. And believing that the world was created in seven literal days, and acting thus, not only doesn't cause the world to have been created in seven literal days, it leads you to damage the society around you.

And if I stick purely to a pure scientific materialist understanding of the world, where anything I believe has to be intersubjectively verifiable, I’d simply lose access to this ability my body has, and be weaker as a result.

I agree with the point of "if your worldview forbids you from doing these kinds of visualizations, you'll lose a valuable tool". 

I disagree with the claim that a scientific materialist understanding of the world would forbid such visualizations. There's no law of scientific materialism that says "things that you visualize in your mind cannot affect anything in your body". 

E.g. I recall reading of a psychological experiment where people were asked to imagine staring into a bright light. For people without aphantasia, their pupils reacted similarly as if they were actually looking into a light source. For people with aphantasia, there was no such reaction. But the people who this worked for didn't need to believe that they were actually looking at a real light - they just needed to imagine it.

Likewise, if the unbendable arm trick happens to be useful for you, nothing prevents you from visualizing it while remaining aware of the fact that you're only imagining it.

I haven't tried any version of this, but @Valentine [LW · GW] wrote (in a post that now seems to be deleted, but which I quoted in a previous post of mine [LW · GW]):

Another example is the “unbendable arm” in martial arts. I learned this as a matter of “extending ki“: if you let magical life-energy blast out your fingertips, then your arm becomes hard to bend much like it’s hard to bend a hose with water blasting out of it. This is obviously not what’s really happening, but thinking this way often gets people to be able to do it after a few cumulative hours of practice.

But you know what helps better?

Knowing the physics.

Turns out that the unbendable arm is a leverage trick: if you treat the upward pressure on the wrist as a fulcrum and you push your hand down (or rather, raise your elbow a bit), you can redirect that force and the force that’s downward on your elbow into each other. Then you don’t need to be strong relative to how hard your partner is pushing on your elbow; you just need to be strong enough to redirect the forces into each other.

Knowing this, I can teach someone to pretty reliably do the unbendable arm in under ten minutes. No mystical philosophy needed.

(Of course, this doesn't change the overall point that the visualization trick is useful if you don't know the physics.)

Is the kingdom of heaven actually going to be as perfect as Christians imagine it? Is the lion really going to lie down with lamb? Is God really all-loving and omnipotent? Is that beam of light really infinite? That’s not really the point.

For believers (which I do not count myself among), leaving aside the beam of light, that very much is the point. That God really is up there/down here/in here and it is our duty to live as He has shown us. "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" (Micah 6:8.)

Another has commented that the Unbendable Arm demo is headology [LW(p) · GW(p)], and that you can just do the thing without tricking yourself into it.

I must wonder whether this "as if" conception of God will wear thin in adversity. Are you really going to put a life's work into building a cathedral for the glory of God on that foundation?

I remember that back in the 60's, the hippy era, the concept arose of the "earth mother", a woman fulfilling an ideal of bountifulness, nurturing, and attunement to Mother Nature. It did not take long for people — or at least, the women — to realise that this was a scam to get the women to do all the cooking and provide free sex (which was called free love, but that is another story). As a woman of the time put it, "there's only so many pounds of carrots you can scrub and still imagine you're having a valid spiritual experience."

I tried Unbendable Arm and it didn't work at all for me.

(I have successfully done Unbendable Arm after Valentine showed me in person, without explaining any of the biomechanics. My experience of it didn't involve visualization, but felt like placing my fingertips on the wall across the room and resolving that they'd stay there. Contra jimmy's comment [LW(p) · GW(p)], IIRC I initially held my arm wrong without any cueing.)

Strongly related: Believing In [LW · GW]. From that post:

My guess is that for lack of good concepts for distinguishing “believing in” from deception, LessWrongers, EAs, and “nerds” in general are often both too harsh on folks doing positive-sum “believing in,” and too lax on folks doing deception. (The “too lax” happens because many can tell there’s a “believing in”-shaped gap in their notions of e.g. “don’t say better things about your start-up than a reasonable outside observer would,” but they can’t tell its exact shape, so they loosen their “don’t deceive” in general.)

I feel like this post is similarly too lax on, not deception, but propositional-and-false religious beliefs.

See also Proper posture for mental arts [LW · GW], which also mentions the Unbendable Arm and explains how it works biomechanically, namely via the latissimus dorsi.

The Aikido visualization exercise reminds me a bit of "follow-through" (such as in tennis): it's weird how strongly the rest of your swing well after the ball has lost contact with your racquet affects its trajectory. 

tagged this post as self-fulfilling prophecies!

yes!! “focusing on what you want!” (i talk a little more about this and self-fulfilling prophecies here)

**aiming** at what you want. vector. (teleology, not etiology [LW · GW])

I've done some Aikido and related arts, and the unbending arm demo worked on me (IIRC, it was decades ago). But learning the biomechanics also worked. More advanced, related skills, like relaxing while maintaining a strongly upright stance, also worked best by starting out with some visualizations (like a string pulling up from the top of my head, and a weight pulling down from my sacrum).

But having a physics-based model of what I was trying to do, and why it worked, was essential for me to really solidify these skills--and incorrect explanations, which I sometimes got at first, did not help me. Could just be more headology, though--other students seemed to be able to do well based off the visualizations and practice.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rZX4WuufAPbN6wQTv/no-really-i-ve-deceived-myself [LW · GW] seems relevant.

I’m pretty sure I learned to do this based on a simple mechanistic description (without detailed physics) and practice. 

The experience of eternity is not analogous at all to a conscious visualization exercise of any kind, as popular as the idea might be. Rather, it is far more relatable in the example of cathedrals and artworks.

I also recommend faith, but not because it has any kind of hyperstitious benefit for manifesting strength or so on, but rather because of the theological argument of Occam's Fideism ringing true with my own personal mystical experience. The presumption that God, the very universe itself, should be coherent or rational and thus fit well to human conception is just an attempt to reassure ourselves that we are outside observers when we absolutely are not. What you call pure materialism, or what philosophers might call Platonism is indeed a form of profound faithlessness.