Doubt: Good And Bad Use Cases

Also, something about whether believing in God is similar to believing that the earth is flat.

I spent some formative years as part of the San Francisco Bay Area Rationality community. Doubt is one of Rationality’s favorite tools. We used to think of it as a kind of superpower, something that allowed us to escape delusions the rest of society seemed captured by. Hameed, on the other hand, thinks doubt is a form of hatred. This has me thinking about doubt, what it is, how it operates, what’s good and what’s bad about it. Here are some of these thoughts. 

Tldr: Doubt is a kind of questioning thought that undermines belief. Doubt is a good thing inasofar as its being used to question one’s own mainline beliefs, thus inducing a state of openness to reality. Doubt can also be used to undermine contrary and challenging beliefs, leading to closedness and stagnation. This is less good. 

Part of what’s happening is that the word doubt is being used to describe different internal motions that have something in common, but have opposite effects. I think what’s in common is that doubt is thought that questions. When doubt functions well it brings mainline (egoic) embodied and enacted belief into question to induce openness. It’s asking “This is how it has seemed to me all my life, but is it really so?” Or “This sure seems true, but what if it isn’t? How would I be able to tell?” Or even “We all say it is so, but are we right?” When this works well it is accompanied by a sense of openness and opening. The beliefs are opening up to reveal the splendor of raw underlying experience of reality. It feels like a light shining through, like a parting of clouds to reveal the splendor of the sun. I think with enough subtle attention you can directly feels this “parting of beliefs”, it feels like structure moving out of the way, creating an opening. There is a lightness, a joy that comes with the motion of opening, a sense of wonder and delight at reality and its fundamental goodness. 

The word doubt can also be used to describe questioning thought used to defend against other people’s belief. “You sure seem convinced this is true (and it has some pull on me), but is it really?” Or (similarly to above) “Everyone says it is so, but are they right?”. Sometimes this is good, even when it’s not about opening. Which, I guess, just goes to say that even openness isn’t always a good thing. Sometimes, defense against other people’s energy is necessary. Other people’s expression of belief can team up with our own inner critic to undermine us and to undermine beliefs that are serving us. “Oh, you thought you had reason to think you were good at something?” “You thought your feelings mattered?” That kind of thing. This kind of motion feels like a pushing away of something negative, like pushing out a negative energy. The pushing itself feels neutral, or even good. It’s like a counter-doubting of the bad kind of doubt. 

Bad kind of doubt also exists. The kind that comes with an unfriendly, disgusted, superior feeling tone. (Like, for example the inner critic attacks above). 

“Oh, you believe in God? You must be delusional.” 

“But lots of people believe in God.” 

“Well, people also used to believe the earth was flat, didn’t they. They even persecuted Galileo, when he tried to tell them otherwise.”

Here, there is also questioning of what “everyone”, or at least many people believe to be true. Which invites a detour. How does one interact with the evidence provided by lots of people believing something? Contrarianess is a real superpower if used correctly. Knowing what’s true, in particular when most people don’t, can be a big strategic advantage. What kind of evidence is in the fact that most people, for most of human history, seemed to have believed in God, or gods, or other spiritual phenomena? I often hear people argue against evidence from humans believing something for most of history with “Yes, but humans also all used to believe the earth was flat”. This is useful inasofar as it counterexamples the idea that anything that humans believed for most of history must point towards truth. Which nobody actually believes. In fact, believing the earth to be flat seems like a very elegant, natural interpretation of one’s direct experience. Sort of similar to believing time to be linear and spatially uniformly distributed. (Which most modern humans falsely believe.) In fact, absent long distance sea travel, it takes sophisticated reasoning to convince someone that the earth is round(-ish). How many of you could do it? 

So flat earth is a natural interpretation of direct experience. (It sure seems flat.) Is that similar to believing in God or spiritual phenomena? I don’t think there’s anything obvious in our direct experience that works like that. One could maybe argue that we like to believe that things that exist are created, or that things have a cause. But many things that exist don’t actually seem obviously created, at least not by us. It seems more elegant to me to simply believe that some things are “just there”. (Sort of what modern humans believe about time and space.) And causal thinking seems potentially more of a modern phenomenon. (I happen to believe that causal type thinking is one of the core tenets that underly modernity.) Or maybe humans just don’t want to believe that death is final and thus invented a god? But that type of reasoning could go many different ways. And many of the gods of antiquity didn’t really come with ideas of heaven or rebirth. So I don’t think it’s fair to say that beliefs in God, or gods, or spirituality naturally arise this way.

Which, interestingly enough, makes people believing in them more evidence, rather than less. Sure, some people just believe things like that because authority figures tell them its true. (Much of what people believe comes from being told by authority figures after all.) But where does such belief originate? Maybe belief in spirituality arises from people trying to gain power or trick others by telling them something false? That definitely happens too! But is it enough to explain the origins, the specificity, the depth of belief we observe? I don’t think so. I think what we’re left with as the most elegant story is that a substantial portion of humans throughout history must have had direct experiences that are most elegantly interpreted through spiritual explanation forms. Those people then worked to convince others that this was true. And the prevailing belief in spiritual truth then gave rise to deceptive forms as well. This also accurately matches many direct reports of people talking about their spiritual experiences. (It also happens to match my personal experiences, so there’s that.) One relatively contrarian belief I hold is that probably Moses, Mohammed et al did have direct experiences that are most elegantly interpreted as talking to God. 

Does that make it true? Not necessarily. After all, the earth isn’t flat. But it does provide quite a bit of evidential weight that points at a big hole in the modern belief system. The proposed absence of direct spiritual experiences, most elegantly interpreted as spiritual rather than as meaningless noise. And that hole does tend to be defended by the kind of doubt that is directed at closedness, rather than openness. The kind of doubt that feels like a subtle form of hatred indeed.