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.