Industrial Morality For The Ancestral Ape

It's not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right.

The folk conception of morality doesn't constrain behavior enough. People can see themselves as doing the right thing even while they behave ineffectually. Morality, as popularly conceived, is not a principle which leads people to prioritize efforts with a high return on investment. Morality, as we're used to thinking about it, offers no criticism of the unambitious man who is in all other ways virtuous.

Morality, as it should be conceived, tells us to not sit idly when we don't need to rest. Morality, when taken seriously, tells us to more fully employ ourselves in the pursuit of the good. Morality, when distilled to the conceptual potency of self-consistency, is manic to the degree that mania gets shit done.

....

That last paragraph is what I feel like saying to myself when I'm not getting enough done. And maybe it has some truth. But also, maybe the pressing issue of moral progress is not that we need to squeeze our hearts harder to wring out ever last drop of motivation. Rather, the issue we should consider presently is that we now have opportunities before us which are historically great, and yet our shared, historically-adapted sense of obligation doesn't seem to grok that the cognitive investment of evaluating policies can eclipse the muscular investment of working the earth and wiping the tears from each human eye in a K-mile radius.

The historical man of good character didn't have the economic advantages that we do. As Industry has raised our sense of what is possible, so too it should raise our sense of what achieved outcomes are morally sufficient.

It's still not enough to do the right thing unless you have an unusually good concept of what's right. But maybe good outcomes come more from financial consequentialism than from the emotional disposition characterized by mania and desperation and passion and tireless sacrifice. Or maybe that's my stupid immoral heart asking not to be wrung any tighter.

Priorities

I once spent an evening with a demented elderly woman who thought that she was still a hospital administrator. She was very adamant that something needed to be done or someone needed to be called to deal with the clear and present crisis of all the suffering patients. There weren't any patients around her. But she wasn't wrong.

The Religious Cognition Of Atheists

Religions exist across cultures and one explanation for their existence is that humans have cognitive architectures tending to confabulate and preserve the stuff of religions. I think I first heard it from Sapolsky that purifying rituals of religions might have been historically innovated by people with minds tending toward OCD and that the ideas of unseen spirits might have come from people tending toward schizophrenia. Given that some abnormal behaviors and beliefs are historically innovated, to understand the existence of religions we then need to look to more neurotypical incentives for why religious content is widely culturally adopted. Maybe individuals have needs for tribal culture which religious content provides to them, or maybe some religion-stuff is the right amount of weird and emotionally compelling to give people a sense of insightfulness or personal meaning, or maybe some religion stuff is mememtically virulent (which is the mind projected way of saying that that humans copy and repeat some things even without seeing value of doing so), or maybe part of the reason for individual adoption of religion is gullibility or acceptance of social authority, and probably other stuff.

So maybe the genesis of a religion proceeds like this: innovation of compelling nonsense by somewhat abnormal persons followed by pragmatic adoption by neurotypical people who are in need of some emotionally compelling weirdness. 

This is a nice narrative, but I think it's too easy on the normies. Watching people talk about their religion (or politics) is almost as terrifying to me as watching people who have been confabulated by dementia or traumatic brain injuries. Neurotypical religious thought might be normal, but it is not sound. The fuel which feeds the fire of religion isn't "pragmatic interest in communal narrative and ritual" or anything nearly so rational, it's the fact that people are cognitively misshapen and dysfunctional, universally, pathetically.

If the scary, sad, gross cognitive failures of neurotypical religious thought are human universals, as religion is a human universal, then we atheists should not be so proud as to think ourselves spared. We have the same disease, even if some of our symptoms have cleared.

This in mind, I wanted to identify some of the failures of human cognition which are associated with religions cross-culturally. Maybe I should have just started with a list of biases from Kahneman and Tversky, but that's not what I did.

One failing of religious thought is compartmentalization, which is mostly to say that people practicing a religion are unable to scrutinize the beliefs of the religion in a way that can successfully produce doubt. Questions of internal consistency can be raised, but somehow these questions don't seem to bear much on whether the person will continue to retain the conceptual edifice as a whole. Further, the edifice can be maintained in the mind with almost no explanatory or predictive connection to reality. For many people, "the suffering observed in the world" doesn't seem to enter the radar of "facts which might challenge a belief in a beneficent god". The philosophical discourses on the question of evil, plentiful as they may be, are not enough to discount this huge daily disconnect between the beliefs and sense data available to neurotypical religious people. I propose that any topic which you think would be controversial to bring up in polite multicultural company, such as cryonics or antinatalism or artificial singletons in my own case, are worth special scrutiny, of the sort that could successfully produce doubt, should the topic merit doubt. If this doesn't sound like an immense epistemic burden, think about the level of reflective scrutiny that it would take for a religious person to abandon their faith in the absence of new social incentives.

So much as the attribution of sacredness to a thing is associated with an unwillingness to quantify the value of the thing or to contemplate trades of the thing against mundane things, all sacredness attribution is a kind of compartmentalization and is deserving of special scrutiny. Maybe you know the dollar value of a human life, but there's probably something out there which you value emotively but still treat in an economically incoherent way. Spooky stuff, right? Someone get Night Vale on the line.

I want to write up the other religion-associated cognitive failings that I identified tonight in long-form, but it's getting late and I have a thing to do tomorrow, so in the interest of posting something at all, which has not been my strength, I'm going to paste the remainder of my twitter tweets on the subject with very little editing.

Another cognitive failing of religious thought is overestimating the causal power of categorization judgments? Or, no, I want to identify something more general than that. What's going on in humans such that they think prayer is a thing worth doing? We overestimate the power of linguistic utterances? That covers more behavior but it's less cognitively abstract. Maybe the core failure is that humans expect reality to condition its behavior socially on our social displays. This is kind of like attributing animacy widely to reality.

For the next failure of religious cognition that I want to talk about, consider divination, numerology, omens, and delusions of reference. Part of what's going on with these is an expectation of a natural cosmic order where the world is self-similar or self-describing, maybe? Divination and numerology are schools of thought for deriving predictions from principles that (the practitioners believe) operate throughout the universe structurally (like a folk notion of physics, but phrased directly in terms of the concepts and objects of daily experience, instead of being phrased in terms of particle-field-shaped math). So that's interesting. 

"Reality is self-similar" is, I think, a good guess; it feels close to one of the mistaken inductive principles which is common to lots of religious cognition cross-culturally, but it's also not quite the principle that I want to identify. Maybe the problem with it is that divination isn't just like reading the structure of the heavens in a spilled drop of cola, it's not just seeing the self-similar structure, but it also has a social component of requesting information before possibly receiving it. Like religious people think that the cosmos knows things and may choose to reveal info them if it thinks that they're ready? And the rituals and superstitions of divination are like a cargo cult for getting the attention of that Knowing Natural Order? Does that make sense? When people look for spiritually guiding signs in their daily lives, those signs are like communicative events to them. I think that makes sense. But to the degree that I see personally significant messages in the mundane events of my life, those signs don't really feel communicated to me, so maybe "there is a knowledgeable natural order which has a plan for you" isn't one of the core universal religious mental failings that I need to identify and be vigilant against in myself. I'll keep looking for other magical thinking that might be cognitively upstream of delusions of reference and which plausibly applies to me and other neurotypical people. And the same for prayer, because "expecting reality to respond socially to your social displays" isn't quite as persuasive an account of prayer as I'd like. That was the previous failure that I identified, remember? After compartmentalization and sacredness.

Finally, Zodiacs seem like evidence of another culturally pervasive religion-associated cognitive failure. Maybe the genesis of zodiacs happens like this: people have a general over-reliance on explanations of behavior in terms of stable personality traits, and some people prone to apophenia notice false patterns in who gets stuck with which stable traits (again, which traits the people may not have stably), and then people generally suck at knowing when to abandon named/reified concepts, and so the confabulated patterns of explaining how traits are allocated stay in discussion and eventually become common knowledge. 

Nothing in this explanation of zodiacs really rings of magical cognition. Maybe that's because zodiacs aren't all that religion-bound, or maybe it's because I haven't done a good job of finding a supernatural-inductive-bias-like cognitive failing which is upstream of people caring about zodiacs and which is also plausibly at work in my own mind to my detriment. Something something swearing, something something did you know that I hate the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator?

That's the end for tonight, folks. Be good to yourselves.

Edit 1: I just heard about thought-fusion beliefs as studied in abnormal psychology. One example is a person thinking that {an event is more likely to happen because they've been imagining the event happening}. Another class of thought-fusions beliefs is like when a person feels that it's roughly as blameworthy to perform a socially prohibited action as it is to imagine doing so. Are those two examples of religion-like cognition? I think they might be. I think thought fusion might be a kind of widely operating inductive bias which partly explains the cross-cultural genesis and retention of religious content and which also might afflict the minds of atheists. Rad. And maybe the first of those two thought fusion beliefs, where motivated focus on a topic alters the expectation that it will happen, maybe that's also part of the explanation of prayer. Prayer is a way to convince yourself of a desirable fiction through motivated focus. I like that explanation a lot. It's definitely something I can be on the guard against in myself.

Edit 2: I would like to add "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful" as a universal human cognitive failing that manifests equally in religious and non-religious people, and which might support the generation and adoption of religions cross culturally. I think that's an important one and it deserves a short name so that it's easier to call up from the depths of memory. I hesitate to call it a kind of optimism bias, because some things that sound cool are very pessimistic.

Perhaps nearby to "believing things because they sound cool or beautiful", there's a bias of believing things which flatter our self image in ways that we can believe. "I'm the most beautiful man on earth" falls flat as flattery, but "I'm one of a chosen people" is vague enough that everyone can believe it of themselves and not be disturbed that the tribe on the other side of the river also believes it. So that's one more thing to guard against.

I'm wondering now if my purpose in writing this post, deep down, was to find cognitive biases that I could want to be vigilant against. A lot of the Tversky and Kahneman stuff has a ring of either "this won't replicate" or "this is only called a bias when it happens to lead to bad outcomes, and isn't architecturally unsound", and it's hard to care about those. By finding biases that I can associate with religion, maybe I'm just trying to motivate myself to be unlike a negative role model. Is that bad? Is that what one of my negative role models would do? I don't know.