Sep 13 JDN 2461297

I am writing this on the 25^th 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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