Thinking Fast & Slow

https://bycommonconsent.com/2017/03/16/believing-fast-and-slow/

Such a great post! I too just read the book referenced in the post, and it was good, but I would have had a hard time summarizing it. Here are some things to think about:

Need is not quite belief.

–Anne Sexton

Conflation of need and belief seemed catastrophic to me at the time. Belief was about aligning my opinions and values with capital “T” Truth and ensuring both my terrestrial rightness and celestial glory. Need was just a pathetic form of self-delusion making me pretend to believer what wouldn’t mess up my life too much. It took me years to resolve this conflict, but resolve it I did, not by coming down on one side or another, but by rejecting the original premise. Need, it turns out, is pretty much the same thing as belief if you look at it from a certain perspective. This post is about that perspective.

System 1 is “fast thinking.” It “operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.” . . . System 2 is “slow thinking.” It “allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it” and is often associated with “the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.” . . . In most matters of subjective belief—religion, say, or politics—human beings make decisions based on System 1 thinking but spend almost all of their time explaining their decision (to other people and to ourselves) with System 2 justifications. Complex theological observations come entirely from the intellectual maneuvering of System 2. But the longing to believe, to align ourselves with something that connects us to something capable of providing purpose and meaning in our lives, comes from the deepest recesses of System 1.

So, how does this apply to our experience of need and belief? Look, for example, at the following sentences, any of which might occur in an LDS testimony meeting:

I know that the Church is true.

I think that the Church is true.

I have faith that the Church is true.

I believe that the Church is true.

I hope that the Church is true.

I want to believe that the Church is true.

I need to believe that the Church is true.

From the perspective of System 2, these are all very different statements. They contain shades of meaning, agency, motivation, and certainty. As intellectual positions, they are quite distinct.

From the more urgent and, ultimately, more powerful perspective of System 1—which represents our intuitive understanding of the world—they are identical.