what compartments?

For good reason, compartmentalization is considered to be a typical description for how a lot of people think. This means that they have isolated compartments in their minds for storing the claims they accept. Each claim is strictly limited to that suitable area of relevance. Outside its area it has no effect on anything, and nothing outside its area has any effect on it. Imprisoning claims in closed areas frees them to be as opposite as night and day. None are forced to simply be thrown out, and none are allowed to inconveniently collide.

The cost is that defining and maintaining the fine distinctions can be exhausting sometimes. But the reward is a complex arrangement that can be thoroughly comprehended, productively discussed, and flexibly applied. By design it satisfies a variety of needs and situations. Not only are contradictions avoided within a given compartment, but there are also prepared excuses for the contradictions between compartments.

It's such a tidy scheme that it's tempting to assume that this form of compartmentalization is more common than it is. Career philosophers, theologians, scholars, and debaters probably excel at it. Yet I highly doubt that everybody else is always putting that much effort into achieving thoughtful organization, self-coherency, and valid albeit convoluted reasoning. It seems to me that many—including some who offer peculiar responses to surveys—don't necessarily bother having consistent "compartments" at all. The territories of their competing claims are more fluid.

Theirs are more like the areas (volumes? regions?) of water in a lake. The areas are hardly separate but are touching, pushing, exchanging contents, shrinking, growing. People in this frame of mind may confess that their ideas about what's accurate or not aren't anchored to anything solid. Their felt opinion is endlessly shifting back and forth like the tide. Their speculations bob around on the unpredictable currents of their obscure intuitions.

Even so, the areas can be told apart. The areas aren't on the same side of the lake or aren't the same distance from the shore. The analogy is that, if prodded, the believer may roughly identify the major contrasting areas they think about. The moment that their accounts start to waver is when the areas' edges and relative sizes are probed. Tough examples help to expose this tendency. Would they examine pivotal claim Q by the rules of A or B? Perhaps they're hesitant to absolutely choose either option because they sense that committing would imply a cascade of judgments toward topics connected to Q.

In effect, the boundaries they use aren't like compartment walls but like water-proof ropes that run through a spaced series of little floats. These ropes are positioned on the surface of the lake to mark important areas. Unlike the tight lanes in an indoor swim race, if they're tied too loosely they move around a bit. Similarly, although believers may be willing to lay out some wobbly dividing lines on top of their turbulent thoughts, their shallow classifications could be neither weighty nor stable. They may refuse to go into the details of how they reach decisions about borderline cases. They can't offer convincing rationales for their differing reactions to specific claims.

This fuzzy-headed depiction raises a natural question. They certainly can't have consciously constructed all this for themselves. So how did it develop? What leads to "informal compartmentalization" without genuine compartments? The likely answer is that ideas from various sources streamed in independently. Close ideas pooled together into lasting areas, which eventually became large enough to be a destination for any new ideas that were stirred in later. The believer was a basin that multiple ways of thinking drained into. As their surroundings inevitably changed, some external flows surged and some dried up. Whether because of changing popularity or something more substantial, in their eyes some of their peers and mentors rose in trustworthiness and some sank. Over time, the fresh and stagnant areas were doomed to crash inside them.

The overall outcome is like several selves. The self that's most strongly activated in response to one idea isn't the self that would be for some other idea. This kind of context-dependent switching is actually a foremost feature of the brain. Its network structure means that it can model a range of varying patterns of nerve firings, then recall the whole pattern that corresponds to a partial signal. It's built to host and exploit chaotic compartmentalization.

A recurring metaphor for this strategy is a voice vote taken in a big legislature. The diverse patterns etched into the brain call out like legislators when they're prompted. The vote that emerges the loudest wins. The result is essentially statistical, not a purely logical consequence of the input. The step of coming up with a sound justification could happen afterward...or never. The ingrained brain patterns are represented by the areas in the lake. Overlapping patterns, i.e. a split vote, are represented by the unsteady area boundaries.

The main lesson is that a many-sided viewpoint can be the product of passive confusion or willful vagueness, not mature subtlety. Unclear waters may be merely muddy, not deep. Arguing too strenuously with someone before they've been guided into a firm grasp on their own compartmentalization is a waste. It'd be like speaking to them in a language they don't know. One can't presume that they've ever tried to reconcile the beliefs they've idly picked up, or they've noticed the extent of the beliefs' conflicts. It might be more fruitful to first persuade them to take a complete, unflinching inventory of what they stand for and why. (Religious authorities would encourage this too. They'd prefer followers who know—and obey—what their religion "really" teaches.)

placebo providence

It might be counterintuitive, but I've found that in some ways the broad topic of religion abruptly became more interesting after I discarded mine. I stopped needing to be defensive about the superiority of my subset of religion and the worthlessness of others. Seeing all of them as mainly incorrect—albeit not all equally awful or decent—grants a new kind of objectivity and openness. Each item is a phenomenon to examine, rather than an inherent treasure or a threat. Additionally, the shift in viewpoint converted some formerly easy questions into more intriguing puzzles. One of these is "How can people sincerely claim that they've experienced specific benefits from their religion's phantoms?"

The answer "the phantoms exist" doesn't sound convincing to me now. But some alternatives are suggested by a longstanding concept from another context: the placebo. Although placebo pills or treatments don't include anything of medical relevance, recipients may report a resulting improvement in their well-being. Placebos famously illustrate that it's not too unusual for something fake to leave a favorable impression. The analogy almost writes itself. In terms of actual causes and effects, earnest belief in a generous spirit is superficially like earnest belief in a sugar pill.

Without further discussion, however, borrowing a complicated concept is a bit of a cheat. To do so is to gloss over too many underlying details. If something is said to work because it acts like a placebo, then...what is it acting like, exactly? The first possibility is that it's truly acting like nothing. As time goes on, people are continually affected by countless things, and the mixture of various factors churns and churns. So cycles occur depending on which things are dominant day by day. Good days follow bad days follow good days follow bad days. With or without the placebo, a good day might still have been coming soon. The good day was a subtle coincidence. This is why testing only once, on one subject, shouldn't be conclusive. Or the subject could've had an abnormally unpleasant day not long ago, and then they had a very average day. 

A second possibility of placebo activity is that the subjects' awareness of it cued them to spend extra effort seeking, noting, and recalling good signs, as well as brushing aside bad signs. It's like telling someone to look up and see a cloud that's shaped like a horse; they might have said the cloud looked like something else if they'd seen it first. Or it's like asking them whether they're sure that they didn't witness a particular detail in the incident that happened yesterday. Their expectations were raised, so perception and memory were skewed. This tendency works by indirectly coloring their reactions to stimuli. So of course it's applicable to subjective outcomes, i.e. just generally feeling better. As anyone would expect, placebos score consistently higher in medical trials for subjective outcomes such as temporary pain relief than in trials for objective outcomes such as shrinking tumors. 

On the other hand, placebos' subjective gains point to a valuable principle. When root causes don't have swift solutions, enhancing the quality of someone's experience of the symptoms is still both feasible and worthwhile. Regulating attention and maintaining a balanced perspective are excellent mitigation strategies. Deflecting consciousness in a productive direction is an ability that can be developed. If that's too ambitious, then at least indulging in positive distraction will help. Shrewd choices about what to minimize and what to magnify lead to a definite, often underrated boost in mood. And it doesn't require lies and placebos.

The last possibility of a placebo's inner workings is that it affects the subject's brain, and then the alteration in the subject's brain adjusts the behavior of other organs. Unfortunately, the amount of control by this route is frequently misunderstood. For example, mental pictures and verbal affirmations don't "will" the immune system into doubling its effectiveness (though an overactive immune system would be a problem too). Keenly wanting doesn't telekinetically rearrange the relevant particles to match.

Nevertheless, a few types of crude brain-body governance are undeniable. These are called...emotions. The body rapidly responds to calm, agitation, fear, aggression, sadness. It's stressed or not stressed. Regardless of the cause being fictional or not, large or small, sudden or ongoing, vivid or abstract, the effect is that comparable signals flow instinctively from the brain to the rest of the body. On the basis of stopping and/or starting the flow of disruptive signals at the source, a placebo's power to bring about a tangible change isn't a total mystery. It'd be more surprising if a substantial reduction in emotional chaos didn't have desirable consequences for the subject and their lives.

These possible explanations for placebos correspond to categories of why people are apparently satisfied by the interventions of their preferred incorporeal entities. The first corresponds to lucky timing. Circumstances were about to brighten with no intervention, so a nonexistent intervention was simply sufficient. The second corresponds to slanted judgment. The thought of the intervention prods the believer to fixate on the upsides and rationalize the downsides. They look harder because they presume that the intervention they believe in had to have done something. The third corresponds to the physical side effects of believing in the intervention. If holding to the belief makes the believer more centered, slower to jump into unhealthy and unwise decisions, and closer to a group of supportive believers, then its rewarding side effects for the believer are substitutes for the missing rewards of the unreliable content of the belief.

One final comment comes to mind. Of all the statements made about placebos, the most curious is the proposal to try to achieve the "placebo effect" in regular clinical practice. To make the prescriptions be ethically acceptable, the recipient is fully informed about what they're getting! This is like the question of why I didn't keep participating in my religion after I realized that it wasn't, um, accurate. The retort is that I lost my motivation to bother taking a pill that I knew was only a placebo.