It is also deeply concerning. But that is human nature unfortunately, when we don't have a reasonable explanation for something we just tend to stick to a bad one.

LlamaNamedOsama

United States1900 Posts

February 01 2012 16:07 GMT

#62

On February 02 2012 00:10 FractalsOnFire wrote:

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It is also deeply concerning. But that is human nature unfortunately, when we don't have a reasonable explanation for something we just tend to stick to a bad one.

Actually, that's not as problematic as you think, I think it's just a badly articulated form of the core idea that people believe because of elements of intuition and foundational ideas that ground human consciousness that form their deepest "want," not the typical modern connotations of "wants" as whimsical, arbitrary, or shallow fluctuations of desire. Of course, it's important for the posts that state this to be conscious of this distinction and to make sure they differentiate the two, which is most certainly a problem with posts that advocate "belief because they want to".

Eywa-

Canada4876 Posts

February 01 2012 17:50 GMT

#63

On February 02 2012 00:07 IgnE wrote:
It always amazes me how many people are willing to believe something is true just because they "want to."

I don't see why it would. It's among the most fundamental things in the nature of humans. Let me make an analogy, a person wants to hunt, however, if they always caught their prey in the first couple minutes of hunting, the sport would bore them. At a fundamental level, the hunter is not interested in the prey, he is interested in the hunt. Same can be said about gambling, if someone loves to gamble, you give them the money they would earn from their daily gambles in the morning and tell them they don't have to gamble, the person is unhappy. Why? Because he loves to gamble. Also, as applies to both situations, the reward is not the point of doing it, it just creates the excitement because even if you know the reward isn't what you really seek, it's easy to distract your mind to think that way. This gives you a certain thrill for doing something with the possibility of reward - Once you lose the belief about the reward, it's less thrilling.

Pholon

Netherlands6142 Posts

February 02 2012 12:12 GMT

#64

I don't understand that analogy at all lol.

IgnE

United States7681 Posts

February 04 2012 07:59 GMT

#65

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/03/opinion/brooks-how-to-fight-the-man.html?_r=1&src=rechp

David Brooks doesn't know what he's talking about 99% of the time, but I thought it was a pretty lulzy coincidence that he wrote an editorial about this.

duckett

United States589 Posts

February 04 2012 14:07 GMT

#66

Beliefs are mathematically representable as values mapped to propositions that are evaluated at decisions; this is how we make decisions that rely on complicated decision frameworks in the presence of otherwise crippling epistemological uncertainty about, well, everything (Do you *know* that the earth revolves around the sun?, brain in a vat, etc).

So it's ok to believe in what makes you happy, because that's what everybody does, provided that you generalize the notion of happiness to encompass any (isomorphic) one dimensional metric.
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Alternatively, we can explicitly generalize this and say every person takes a proposition P to be true when it returns a positive decision value x, where decision value is defined as the one dimensional metric which resolves the decision they are making. Decision value thus defined is like utility but emerges organically from a data driven view of decisions unlike utility, which is usually presented as a model driven decision selector function in roughly the same way.

Study of utility is in general crippled by the inability to evaluate it, but the study of decision value as a philosophical matter is not because its properties as a one dimensional metric are sufficient to lend insight to a number of issues.

Terms used problematically without definition in this thread: exists, is, rationally, perspective, know, truth, should, would, could (subjunctives have much nonexplicit meaning, and should carries a one dimensional metric in an indirect and often misleading way). I'd get into this but it would take a while.

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What emerges ultimately after you look at how things are represented and resolved and use consistent definitions, is that all perspectives are representable as logically consistent (where we say a perspective is a combination of propositions held to be true by an individual), but clearly (as it must be) no perspective can be represented as good or bad without a choice of a metric to determine what good or bad means, which cannot be done objectively.

So, take a proposition to be true if it makes you happy, knowing that what makes you happy and what makes you sad encodes all of your knowledge about the world. If you are able to make any decision make you happy, then you can bend reality to your will (but then you wouldn't have a will).

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Of course, I speak authoritatively somewhat arbitrarily. I take these things to be true but I cannot verify their "truth" for you (that is, that taking them to be true will provide utility (decision value) to you). I write in this tone because I've spent a lot of time looking at the issues and breaking them down into mathematical language because it avoids the linguistic problems presented by using non minimal representations of ideas. I encourage you to try and do the same, and see where you end up. Just work through the structure of reality, first partitioning propositions into those that require a one dimensional metric and those that do not; look at different choices and try to figure out what space they come from; and then generalize things to frameworks of interacting propositions and decisions. I consider religion a solved thought problem (and I am Roman Catholic) but human action in general is some sort of intractable inverse problem. I'm working on empiricism.

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Good background reading: preference based utilitarianism (utilitarianism is shitty because the mathematical framework for rational expectations is extremely poor, but there's some good stuff in the lit regarding decision spaces, continuity etc), statistical decision theory, contextualism.

Mstring

Australia510 Posts

February 04 2012 15:14 GMT

#67

On February 04 2012 23:07 duckett wrote:
Beliefs are mathematically representable as values mapped to propositions that are evaluated at decisions; this is how we make decisions that rely on complicated decision frameworks in the presence of otherwise crippling epistemological uncertainty about, well, everything (Do you *know* that the earth revolves around the sun?, brain in a vat, etc).

So it's ok to believe in what makes you happy, because that's what everybody does, provided that you generalize the notion of happiness to encompass any (isomorphic) one dimensional metric.
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Thanks for sharing. "Crippling epistemological uncertainty" sums up all I have to say. I certainly believe that people believe that all their beliefs can be proven true.

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