Month: September 2026

Heaven and Hell, or how to hack a hedonic mind

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, current events, ethics, heuristics and biases, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 13 JDN 2461297

I am writing this on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, perhaps the most vivid moment in recent history in which religious beliefs directly caused horrific violence. Yes, there were political motivations for the attacks as well; but the way that the conspirators spoke of Islam and the afterlife and the fact that they were willing—eager, even—to sacrifice their own lives in the service of their cause shows that religion was also a very important motivating factor.

I’m not going to spend this post re-litigating the American and international response to the attacks, except to say what I already said over a decade ago: we sacrificed vital civil liberties for more or less nothing. (I would also like to note how prescient this line reads today, written in 2015: “If we’re worried about millions of people dying, it is far more likely that there would be a repeat of the 1918 influenza pandemic”)

Instead, I’d like to talk about how religion made 9/11 a rational behavior.

If you allow the premise that there is a Heaven in which we will receive eternal bliss if we do the right thing, and a Hell in which we will receive eternal suffering if we do the wrong thing, and then posit that the right thing God wants you to do is to crash an airplane into a skyscraper, it is rational for you to crash an airplane into a skyscraper.

If Heaven and Hell are at stake, any action can be made rational.

In order to avoid this conclusion, you either need to deny the rationality of religion itself, or you need to somehow ensure that whatever actions are prescribed by religion are good ones. But people don’t always agree on what actions are good—especially if they come from different religions—and if you already know which actions are good… what did you need religion for?

Is the idea perhaps that most people are too stupid to understand what is really good, and so instead we have to motivate them with lies? The people who are smart enough to understand ethics come up with the rules, and then they pass down these rules to the priests so that the priests can convince everyone else that following those rules leads to Heaven and breaking them leads to Hell? Is that why religious people seem so afraid of atheists undermining the authority of religion? You think most people can’t handle the truth? That if you stopped telling people that they are ruled by an almighty totalitarian who is willing and able to inflict eternal suffering on the disobedient, they wouldn’t understand why murder is wrong?

The better answer is to deny the rationality of religion itself.

This is the problem with Pascal’s Wager: If you are motivated by expected utility (which, most philosophers agree, is the rational way to behave), and you allow that there are outcomes which result in infinite utility, then only those outcomes matter, and you can be convinced to do literally anything in order to achieve those outcomes, as long as their probability of occurring is not exactly zero.

And if there are two different possible outcomes with infinite positive and negative utility attached (e.g. maybe Christianity is true, or maybe Islam is true)? Then your decision becomes undefined. Every possible action results in infinity minus infinity expected utility.

But it actually makes perfect sense that people would try to motivate you this way.

Given that you are a hedonic mind, that is, one which is motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and I want to give you some belief that will make you do whatever I want, how can I have the best possible chance to convince you to do whatever I want you to do?

The answer, of course, is to convince you that doing what I want will result in infinite positive utility—eternal bliss—while doing whatever I don’t want will result in infinite negative utility—eternal suffering. I should tell you that doing what I want sends you to Heaven and not doing what I want sends you to Hell.

If I can convince you of that, I can make you do whatever I want. Once you hold that belief, obeying my every command is the only rational action for you to take, for whatever harms it may cause, they could never be as bad as eternal suffering, and whatever benefits you must forgo to do them, they could never be as good as eternal bliss.

Heaven and Hell are an optimal hack for a hedonic mind.

They are like the sudo command in Linux: Promising Heaven and threatening Hell grants full root access and allows you to make any possible command with absolute authority. In Linux operating systems, you need to already have administrative privileges to use sudo; in religion, I suppose what you need is the spiritual authority of a religious leader (or enough charisma and skill at deception to found your own cult).

Or to make it a little more concrete: They are like a gun held to your head, a gun that is so powerful it can make you suffer for all eternity.

And hey, maybe you’ll get lucky, and what whoever is in control of your beliefs (your priest? your holy book? your church community as a whole?) will actually motivate you to do good things! Maybe it won’t be so bad to be a mindlessly obedient automaton as long as you are programmed for good!

But what if you don’t get lucky? What if the person holding an infinite gun to your head orders you to do something bad? You’ll do that instead. The moment you accepted the belief that certain actions result in infinite happiness or infinite suffering, you gave up all your rational autonomy. As long as that belief remains in your head, the only rational thing to do will always be whatever sends you to Heaven and keeps you from going to Hell.

This is what Voltaire was talking about when he said:
“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

The answer, of course, is to never accept that belief.

There are various tricks you could use to do that: One would be to temporally discount the future so that bliss millennia from now means almost nothing to you. Another would be to assign some sort of arbitrary cap on how high or low the utility from a given outcome can be.

Alternatively, you could insist upon assigning a probability of zero to any belief that would result in infinite utility—just categorically say that you will never believe such a claim. This could actually be accomplished with a nice, smooth prior that is a normal distribution over outcomes, for while any particular positive utility has a positive probability, there is no probability of an infinite outcome. And the larger the utility that is promised, the lower the probability you’ll accept it—as I previously suggested as a reply to Pascal’s Wager (and Pascal’s Mugging).

In practice, I think people sort of do this.

I think that, deep in their minds, most people have some sort of “reasonableness checker” heuristic that tries to ensure that nobody is able to convince them to behave in horrible ways by making them adopt crazy beliefs. I believe that the reason most people do not commit atrocities is that they cannot really be convinced to believe absurdities—not completely. They can believe in believing them, but they can’t really believe them.

But then, there are the people who don’t have that heuristic, or for whom it has malfunctioned in some way, and those people actually believe the crazy beliefs they were told to believe. And those people can be motivated to commit atrocities—and so several of them did, 25 years ago.


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For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a weird relationship with gender.

PNRJ personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have always appreciated how weird gender is as a concept, and always felt like being considered a boy (and later, a man) wasn’t so much wrong as arbitrary, like okay, sure, I have certain anatomical features, and maybe there are some good reasons to keep track of that sort of thing (e.g. for medical or sexual purposes), but it sure seems odd what a big deal everyone seems to make about it.

It seemed about as weird to me that our culture puts all this baggage on having penises versus vaginas as it would to do the same thing with brown versus green eyes, or straight versus curly hair. In fact, I once wrote a dystopian YA novella about a society where people are categorized by their eye color and one deviant green-eyed person wants to act like a brown-eyed person and date other green-eyed people. (Yes, I realize this is a bit cliché; in my defense, I was 12, so more the expected age to read rather than write YA fiction.) Yes, people can be categorized that way, and maybe you care sometimes; but why all the time? Why is it built into your pronoun declension? (Yes, the story had separate pronouns for brown and green-eyed people; if I recall correctly, they were bro/bris/bron and gre/gris/gren pronouns, and were kind of painful to read—but maybe that was part of the point?)

Even as a young child, I didn’t even like gendering my parents; I consistently referred to them as “guys” rather than “Mom and Dad” because it felt weird to me that I was supposed to gender them all the time. (In hindsight, this was going a little far.)

I also independently discovered “ey/em” Spivak pronouns in my undergraduate years, writing a blog post about them on Xanga before ever having heard that they already existed. I started using them for myself for awhile, but didn’t get enough traction from other people and ultimately sort of gave up and defaulted back to masculine. (I also have some other naive views expressed on that blog which I would no longer stand by, but that is what it means to learn and change in a world where your thoughts can be published forever.)

Of course, my perspective on this was certainly shaped by being bisexual/pansexual (I don’t care which word you use, I just want the arguments to stop), such that even when it came to sex and romance, gender wasn’t nearly as important to me as it was to almost everyone else. The word “sapiosexual” has always sounded arrogant and pretentious to me (maybe because lots of people find intelligence attractive—and if that hadn’t been true for millions of years, we probably wouldn’t be the species that we are), but it has in fact always been genuinely the case that I am more attracted to an intelligent person of whatever gender than to an unintelligent person of whatever gender.

I also have a shockingly large number of friends who are trans or nonbinary; I think they constitute about 30% of my friends, a further 10% are cis queer, and that leaves only 60% cishet. (10% queer is pretty close to the population baseline—but 30% trans/enby is about ten times the population level!)

Long story short, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised that I now want to adopt a nonbinary gender identity.

Honestly, I feel like I’ve sort of wanted to do this for a very long time (as in I think it first occurred to me in kindergarten), but never quite felt like it was worth the effort—like, yes, I would obviously prefer this, but gender seems so important to everyone else, and I’m largely apathetic toward it, so insisting that I need a specific gender (or lack thereof) just felt like making a fuss with very little justification. Even now, I am hesitant to put this out there, not because I’m afraid it will have some negative consequence for me, but because it feels like I’m just being difficult. I feel like I’m putting unnecessary work on everyone else asking them to use Spivak pronouns or singular “they” (the latter of which is older than singular “you”, by the way) instead of the “he” they default to. Maybe I have some thin sliver of anxiety that this will somehow affect my future employment prospects? But let’s be honest: I was already going to be limited to LGBT-friendly employers. (It’s possible that an employer could be okay with gay or bi and not okay with trans or enby, but that seems like kind of a weird edge case, and surely not very common.)

I started this with a kind of soft launch; first I grew my hair out, but that was plausibly deniable; lots of men do that these days. Then, I started introducing myself to new people as “Pat” rather than “Patrick”, as I happen to be fortunate enough to have the sort of first name that has readily-available variants which are of each gender or gender-neutral. (Other good examples: Alex/Alexander/Alexandra, Sam/Samuel/Samantha, Charlie/Charles/Charlene; borderline cases: Eddy/Edward/Edwina, Bobby/Robert/Roberta, Andy/Andrew/Andra, Jo/Joseph/Josephine, or Danny/Daniel/Daniella. But most names can’t do this.)

I’ve also always liked going by “PJ”, which I do with my closest friends (and this is also a surprisingly big part of why I didn’t want to change my last name when I got married). For most trans and enby people, choosing a new name is a major decision; for me it was sort of an obvious default that I could slip into with people barely even noticing.

On the other hand, I don’t really see “Patrick” as a deadname, as that has very harsh connotations that I don’t feel apply to me. I still recognize it as my given name; I still answer to it; I still use it as a byline on my writing.

Up until recently, I would have said I don’t experience gender dysphoria related to appearing or being perceived as masculine, but upon reflection I think I do experience it specifically regarding my facial and body hair. I have always hated needing to shave, and I don’t like wearing shorts because it shows my hairy legs. I think I didn’t really pay attention to this before because I chalked it up to the sort of body-image issues nearly everyone has, and also because I had far more severe sources of dysphoria in my life—especially rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Lately I’ve been going through laser hair removal on my face; it’s not exactly cheap, but it’s affordable, and hopefully after a few rounds of it I will never have to deal with the unpleasantness of stubble or the sensory misery of shaving my face ever again. And every time I get a laser treatment, the actual session is painful, but I feel more confident and upbeat afterward, having taken another concrete step toward a more authentic gender presentation. (My legs, I’m probably just gonna shave, or maybe wax; covering that big an area with laser treatment is expensive.)

I also recently started on estradiol. It has done absolute wonders for my depression in a way that’s honestly hard for me to explain. I feel more energetic, more creative, more resilient. And unlike antidepressants that took weeks to do this (if they did it at all—several I tried did not), estradiol did it in a couple of days. It honestly felt like the difference between a treatment that maybe allows your body to do something that will eventually maybe help—and a treatment that just fixes what needed to be fixed.

That’s the upside. The downside is that it has also clearly made my migraines much worse—my frequency of severe migraines is double what it was before the treatment, and my mean pain score has risen from 3.9 to 5.3. (Please understand: My 6 may be your 10. I know what a real 10 feels like—a spinal tap headache—and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.)

But, honestly, I can’t be too surprised, because I had read research about what estradiol treatment does for people with migraines. Trans women on estradiol get migraines about as often as cis women, and trans men on testosterone get migraines less often than cis women but still more often than cis men. (So estradiol makes them worse, and testosterone makes them better, but more the former than the latter.)

I had been holding out hope for maybe experiencing a different result: There is some evidence that a very low, steady dose of estradiol administered via patch (such as what I’m on right now) can actually be good for migraines, but it’s mainly been tested in menopausal or perimenopausal women. (I find it vaguely disturbing that if I were a cisgender woman, I would in fact probably be perimenopausal at this point. I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be that old yet. Shouldn’t I be further along in my career by now?)

Of course, it may be too soon to say what estradiol really does to me; I’ve only been on it a little over a week now. My doctor thinks that my migraines may settle down in a month or two—but that feels like a very long time right now.

I’m considerably more worried about migraines than I am about growing breasts, which honestly I’m mostly indifferent toward (plus, I figure I could always bind them or even have them removed later if I decided to). I am quite certain I do not want to get on testosterone blockers, both because of their effect on migraines and their effect on sexual function. I am interested in some of the feminizing effects of estrogen; I would like to look more androgynous, with wider hips, a softer face, and softer hands. But at this point, honestly the biggest reason I want to stay on estradiol is that it has turned out to be an extraordinarily potent antidepressant.

Now, if I could just get rid of these damn migraines….

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