Quasi-Transhumanist Charismatic Christians

April 18, 2012 By leahlibresco 12 Comments

This post is part of Patheos’s book club for T.M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. I recieved a review copy free of charge.

This was a fascinating book to read right on the heels of Thinking Fast and Slow, because both books seemed to be mostly about changing our intuitions and heuristics. Luhrmann is embedded in a charismatic sect of Christianity.  No snake-handling, but plenty of two-way dialogue with Jesus and what Luhrmann calls ‘sensory overrides’ that might more commonly be called hallucinations.

The visions and auditory overrides don’t come unprompted.  Luhrmann describes a variety of techniques that parishoners use to be more open to hearing God.  Believers are encourage to keep a prayer journal and organizing it into their own pleas and God’s replies.  One of the four keys in a prayer guide Luhrmann reads recommends “writing down the dialogue so it appears real to you.”

Members of this church also practice focused visualization exercises, imagining themselves as witness to the Gospels or at dinner with Christ and trying to feel what they would have felt.  The deliberate cultivation of brushes with the divine reminds Luhrmann of psychotherapy — the goal is to remap your emotional responses.  And it tends to work.

After living with these charismatic Christians, Luhrmann did an empirical study where she assigned Christian to one of three prayer practices: kataphatic (intense, focused visualization of the Gospels), listening to academic discussion of the New Testament, and centering prayer (listening to pink noise while focusing on a particular world or phrase).  The people in the kataphatic group did report that their mental imagery (in prayer and elsewhere) had gotten sharper and they were most likely to be excited about their practice and to report sensory overrides that seemed to come from God.  (And one person in the kataphatic group said the prayer tapes cured her acne.)

These results couldn’t be a surprise to Luhrmann.  After all, in a previous research project, she had been following Wiccan visualization exercises and had a visual sensory override where she ‘saw’ a group of Druids in her house.  This vision felt indistinguishable from normal sensory perception.  After reading the book, I’m pretty confident that Luhrmann’s found and formalized a sensory feedback loop that has the power to change our perceptions.

Now, as a transhumanist, I’m really interested in how people decide when it’s appropriate to use a feedback loop to hack their brain in the first place.  The parishioners Luhrmann interviews seem to have made a deliberate choice to alter themselves and their minds, in conformance with what God wants for them.  These prayer practices let them short-circuit their thought process — it’s the same kind of tactics I might use to subvert an inaccurate intuition or a cognitive behavioral therapist might use with a patient to alter a habit.

The trouble with these feedback loops is that we’d don’t know for sure whether they’re right, we just know that they work.  And signing on to change your mind this way will make it harder to change it back or recognize that you’re wrong.  How confident should you be before you start trying to hack your intuitions?

Some intuition subversions are easy to justify, you can just do the math out on the Monty Hall problem and realize you’ve been thinking about it wrong.  In other cases, aggregated data might teach you that most people who think they’re an exception to a moral rule are wrong and you should be really suspicious of those thoughts.  These seem like sufficient reasons to kill (or maim) your ordinary ways of thinking, but I don’t think the charismatic prayer clears those hurdles.

 

What criteria/data make it less dangerous to change your thinking than to remain as you are?

Is kataphatic prayer or meditation only an unreasonable gamble for skeptics?  If you believe in God is the marginal harm a lot lower?

What other kinds of feedback loops work even if you know you’re trying to hack yourself?

 

Patheos will be hosting a live chat with the author on Friday, April 27th at 2pm EST.

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: , , , , , 12 Comments

When Do You Reject Your Intuitions?

April 16, 2012 By leahlibresco 8 Comments

A while ago, a commenter emailed me to ask if I could recommend any books to read on human cognitive bias, and now that I’ve finished Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, I can, with great enthusiasm.  When we study flaws in human reasoning, we usually start with glaring ones, and find out that they’re just the most obvious examples of a broader problem (and the subtler errors are the more pernicious ones).  In the book, Kahneman has a really interesting riff on the Müller-Lyer illusion.

All the lines are the same length, but the different orientations of the arrows trick you into thinking the middle one is longest.  Kahneman writes:

Now that you have measured the lines, you–your System 2, the conscious being you call “I”– have a new belief: you know that the lines are equally long. But you still see the bottom line as longer… To resist the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your impression of the length of lines when fins are attached to then. To implement that rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about it. Of you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. But you will still see one line as longer than the other.

Learning that we err isn’t enough to fix our flaws.  It’s a constant struggle against a part of our nature to not get fooled by our heuristics.  And, as Kahneman points out, sometimes we’re never going to beat them, we’re just going to be able to remember we’re wrong in time to not act on them.

I have mild prosopagnosia (face-blindness) and I have a lot of trouble recognizing people.  My junior year of college, I had a lot of trouble telling my roommate (GirlOne) apart from a different girl who had a leadership position in the debate group I was running (GirlTwo).  This meant that, about once a week, I’d come back to the suite, or go from my room into the common room, and be convinced that GirlTwo was in my dorm — and since there was no reason she’d be there casually, this presumably meant the debate group was having some kind of political crisis, and I’d start feeling panicky.

It was never the case that GirlTwo was lying in wait for me in the common room — it was always just my roommate, GirlOne.  I couldn’t stop making the visual error, but I got a lot better at remembering that my intuition was pretty much always wrong, so I felt less jumpy.  I had to learn to stop privileged my flawed reactions and actively practice overriding my senses.

Eliezer Yudkowsky highlights a different sphere where we have to strive against our intuitions in the introduction to his sequence on quantum mechanics.  He writes:

I am not going to tell you that quantum mechanics is weird, bizarre, confusing, or alien. QM is counterintuitive, but that is a problem with your intuitions, not a problem with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has been around for billions of years before the Sun coalesced from interstellar hydrogen. Quantum mechanics was here before you were, and if you have a problem with that, you are the one who needs to change. QM sure won’t. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts; and if a model is surprised by the facts, it is no credit to that model…

In the coming sequence on quantum mechanics, I am going to consistently speak as if quantum mechanics is perfectly normal; and when human intuitions depart from quantum mechanics, I am going to make fun of the intuitions for being weird and unusual. This may seem odd, but the point is to swing your mind around to a native quantum point of view.

The trouble is that, in a lot of cases, it’s not as obvious that our intuitions are wrong as it is in the optical illusion or my faceblindness or quantum mechanics.  The challenge is trying to figure out which intuitions need to be subverted, and how confident we need to be to override them.  Because fighting intuitions can sound a lot like brainwashing.  In my experience with my roommate, I was literally trying to unsee what my eyes were telling me I did see.

Heuristics and reflexes aren’t bad in themselves, so how do we decide when the errors don’t outweigh the convenience, or when we want to try and subvert them in particular circumstances, or when we want to burn them out entirely.  This kind of problem is going to come up in a more specific way for tomorrow’s post for the Patheos Book Club, so I’d be interested in your general principles (and intuitions, if you trust them!) today.

Filed Under: Epistemology/Philosophy, Reviews/Recommendations Tagged With: , , , , 8 Comments

Heaven Can Wait (in your debate arsenal)

April 3, 2012 By leahlibresco 18 Comments

A treacly portrait of heaven

Greta Christina and a different Christina at Freethought Blogs both recently came to the conclusion that the Christine doctrine of Heaven is coercive.  It’s so dangerous that Greta Christina called it “almost as evil a doctrine as Hell.”  Here’s their reasoning:

The promise of Heaven is the biggest reward of all. The promise of Heaven is infinite. It is the promise that you will get to live forever, and will never have to die. It is the promise that you will get to live forever in perfect ecstatic bliss, entirely free from suffering or fear. It is the promise that you will get to see everyone you most dearly love, forever, and will never have to say goodbye to them again.

This promise is so enormous, it can get people to do just about anything. It can get people to get out of bed early one day a week and go sit on an uncomfortable bench, even though they only have two days off in a week… It can get people to stand up when you tell them to, sit down when you tell them to, kneel when you tell them to, say magic words in a language they don’t understand when you tell them to… It can get people to fly airplanes into buildings and kill thousands of people. Just because you promised them they’d go to Heaven if they did what you asked.

I think this is an unfair knock on Christianity.  The objection to ‘too good to be true’ promises is that they’re false, not that something that awesome would be unfairly coercive.  The best critiques of Hell are set within Christian theology, arguing that eternal punishment or torture are incompatible with some other, higher premise of Christian thought.

I suppose one could argue the coercive power of Heaven is analogous to the coercive power of miracles.  If God won’t heal amputees, because such a showy act would abridge our free will, then how can He proffer a much greater reward and expect us to remain free?

But I don’t think the analogy holds up.  A description of Heaven doesn’t compel belief in Heaven (remember, I don’t buy Lewis’s argument that every desire is evidence that something exists to fulfill that desire), and it’s promise shouldn’t have much of an influence on your will at all.  The promise of Heaven is a knock on effect of believing in a Christian God, and it stands or falls with that belief.

A belief in Heaven is prima facie irrational unless you already believe in a omniscient and omnibeneficent God, so any atheist critique needs to be tuned to why you believe in that authority.  There’s enough variation in Christianity that it’s hard to write broad debunkings.  Heaven could be incompatible with some conceptions of a God that had the simple power to supply one, but you’d need to engage that specific idea of God (and be sure that the Christians you’re addressing actually believe in that one).

It’s also worth keeping in mind that not all Christian ideas of Heaven are comfortable.  C.S. Lewis’s allegory, The Great Divorce imagines that in Heaven we are most fully what we ought to be.  But reaching your telos involves hard, painful work to burn off what doesn’t fit.  These images of heaven go way beyond halos and harps.  Far from being illogical, they are tautologically true.  They claim the greatest happiness comes from being most free to do and love the Good.  Heaven is just the name given to that state of being.  And it’s not coercive to say that happiness will make you happy.

Image of Heaven inspired by Dante's Paradiso

Essentially, almost all critiques of heaven should slide back a step to what they’re really attacking: the basis for trust in God’s power and goodness.  Unless you’re pretty conversant with your interlocutor’s reasoning on that score, an argument against Heaven won’t get you very far.  You’re better off sticking with the main question of trust or trying to find flaws in their model of human telos or the Good that Heaven fulfills.

Filed Under: Apologetics, Atheism, Debate Tactics Tagged With: , 18 Comments
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