Anticipation vs. Faith: At What Cost Rationality?

That's ... not really accurate. With love, the question we in this community would ask is "would seeking to maintain or expand this relationship be a good idea?" With religion, it's "does this being with whom a relationship is suggested actually exist?"

To have the "pure rational" version serve the human one? Have it achieve goals that aren't defined by ownership (e.g., 'reduce total suffering'), because it's better at those things? This sounds reasonable and I don't see why we shouldn't do this - assuming it's easier or otherwise preferable to creating a GAI from scratch to achieve these goals.

Oh, come on. Show me a human whose actions aren't severely suboptimal for their belief set.

In the past I believed it, and was sad when "the flesh was weak" and I took actions severely suboptimal for that belief set. I wish I had only believed I believed it. I guess it's possible I only now believe I believed it and in fact in the past I merely believed I believed it, but I'm guessing no.

Humans are well known to be terrible at taking actions that aren't severely suboptimal for their beliefs, and for holding contradictory beliefs, and for holding beliefs which imply actions which are suboptimal for their other, contradictory beliefs.

I understand the point about how people can "only believe they believe something," but the way you phrased it sounded like they are consciously faking it, and I think that is in most cases not true.

Unless you are a person to whom faith ever came naturally, you should be very skeptical that your mind contains an accurate model of "that belief set" or of the minds that profess it.

Faith never came naturally to me. After long interaction with "faithful" people, I've developed some tentative hypotheses about how some of them think on some things. Cautious though these hypotheses are, they are enough to rule out the applicability of your characterization to most cases.

You are wrong. I was one of them. I really believed it. Some don't, but many do.

their actions are severely suboptimal for that belief set.

I agree that this is the case. However, that they don't really believe in the tenets from Christianity only follows from this if we have a strictly behaviorist definition of "belief". I doubt many people hold that view and I'm not sure why anyone should.

And there's the less ubiquitous Ethical Culture Society, which is even less religious than Unitarianism.

Ugh. The horrible music is the worst thing about church. Give me sermons about fire and brimstone any day.

I would say actual faith is a cognitive error more akin to deja-vu than double think, in that it is a feeling of knowledge for which adequate logical justification may not exist.

It looks to me like greater intelligence pulls people away from deja-vu faith and toward doublethink faith, but this is a generalization based on little data. Still, that little data seems to show that smart people who think about their religions end up with Escher-painting minds.

It isn't crazy at all. I was saying that your intelligent, religious, and very drunk friend would never say those words, because there's no religious person who believes them. All these reasons may be the ultimate cause of religious beliefs, but that doesn't mean religious believers are aware of them, consciously or even subconsciously.

I think when I wrote my previous response I may have missed your point somewhat. I guess what you're really saying is that, if anticipation is truly irrational, then once we sufficiently understand why it's irrational, we won't value it anymore, and it won't require any particular "effort" to give it up. Is this a better summary of your position?

If so, are you really sure it's true, that the human mind has that much flexibility and meta-rationality? Why? (Why do you believe this? And why would evolution have that much apparent foresight?)

So, it might very well be the case that "time" is something you can get rid of from fundamental physics equations and still get the right answers.

But clocks still work. Even if time is only an "emergent" phenomenon (tee hee), it's still something that's there...

If someone offered to tell me the Real Story, saying, "Once you learn the Real Story, you will lose your grasp of that which you once called 'anticipation'; the concept will dissolve, and you will find it difficult to remember why you ever once believed such a notion could be coherent; just as you once lost 'time'," I would indeed reply "Tell me, tell me!"

What about this situation:

"As a significant shortcut to developing an understanding of the Real Story, you can follow a formula which begins with a forced loss of your grasp of that which you once called 'anticipation'. I can promise that, once you do understand the Real Story, you will find it difficult to remember why you ever once believed the notion of 'anticipation' could be coherent. I have never found it useful to think about reversing the shortcut formula, so I cannot promise that the process is reversible"

The possibility of losing the natural feeling of anticipation, or time, isn't really on the table (yet). Knowing the real nature of things intellectually is always good, but does knowing that a feeling is an illusion remove its interference with comfort in the face of a rational decision?

Part of the thrill in bungee jumping is in the overriding. Are you saying that you can manipulate your decision making so that counterproductive instincts fade away?

You don't make a conscious decision to give up something like that, if it needs giving up.

I don't agree with this. I tend to make all other important decisions consciously. What's so special about this one? (ETA: Also, one potential way of giving it up is to edit my brain using some future technology. I think I definitely want to make that decision consciously.)

The rest of your comment seems to be saying that you're not yet convinced that anticipation is irrational. That's fair enough, but doesn't really address the main point of my post, which is that we regard some parts of our decision making process as having terminal values, and may decide to keep them (as luxuries, more or less) even if we come to believe that they no longer have positive instrumental value as decision subroutines.

I'd like to vote this up several times.

I'm pretty sure that everyone here who's considering giving up "anticipation", uses that term to mean not just any thinking about future experiences, but a consistent method of assigning concrete probabilities to future experiences. And the hypothesis about the irrationality of experiencing such anticipation, is merely a corollary of that factual hypothesis: If your probability estimates on some particular question consistently fail describe good bets, then binding emotions to those probabilities motivates bad decisions.