Belief

Originally posted by FMF... In the last couple of months we have been discussing belief - as in faith - right? ...

Also as in knowledge, which is justified belief.

Originally posted by apathist
Also as in knowledge, which is justified belief.

Faith is belief in something that can not be proven. I think that religious packages of doctrine appeal to some people who have gut feelings about divine entities, or who were inculcated/socialized with certain notions since they were young, or who found solace after traumatic experiences, or who enjoy a sense of belonging and identity - all quite emotional circumstances in many ways.

What is and isn't "justified" in terms of belief in supernatural phenomena is - by its very nature - a fuzzy and wholly subjective area and it seems to me to be bizarre that a divine entity, who supposedly wants everyone to live forever, would set up such a fuzzy and seemingly man-made mechanism for this "salvation" to be apportioned and then having followers - equipped with no proof or evidence - making endless assertions about how their faith in something that cannot be proven is "justified" is "justified" is "justified" is "justified" is "justified" etc. etc. and - get this - you can just somehow "decide" to believe it! If it were a piece of human behaviour, it could be characterized as pernicious.

You are aware how silly the christian god is. I'd say don't let that prejudice you against the possibility that there is a reason behind mankind's tendency to invent gods.

Originally posted by apathist
You are aware how silly the christian god is. I'd say don't let that prejudice you against the possibility that there is a reason behind mankind's tendency to invent gods.

I think mankind's proclivity to seek (or settle for) supernatural answers and worship gods is part and parcel of the human condition and may even be - in some way - hard wired into us. I am not - I don't think, anyway - prejudiced against the possibility that there might one day be a revelation, or not, as the case may be.

Originally posted by apathist
You are aware how silly the christian god is. I'd say don't let that prejudice you against the possibility that there is a reason behind mankind's tendency to invent gods.

I am sure there is a reason. The most likely reason is that it is a psychological side effect.

Originally posted by Fetchmyjunk
There are some people on here who think we can't choose any of our beliefs. They say that you can only believe something that you find believable and that you can't choose to believe something that you don't find believable. This seems to indicate that we do not have the ability to decide whether something is believable or not. The way I see it, we are t ...[text shortened]... o light. Also I believe that even if something is 'convincing' we have the ability to reject it.

This topic has already been discussed many, many times on this forum. Here was a recent entry on the same topic, where I already gave my thoughts on this: Thread 167924. Again, my view is that, generally speaking, deliberative belief formation is handcuffed to cognitive verisimilitude; and, again generally speaking, that is in turn not within one’s control.

The way I see it, we are the ones who decide whether or not something is believable, and then we choose to believe that which we have decided is believable. Hence we have the ability to change our minds and our beliefs when new evidence comes to light. Also I believe that even if something is 'convincing' we have the ability to reject it.

So, then on your account, "belief" building involves two levels of deliberation about some proposition: first a decision on whether or not it is believable, followed by a choice whether or not to believe it. Then, it follows there are 4 different situations, for some proposition P:

(1) You decide P is believable and choose to believe it.
(2) You decide P is believable and yet choose not to believe it.
(3) You decide P is not believable and choose not to believe it.
(4) You decide P is not believable and yet choose to believe it.

If these are all live options for you, then please provide an example of each case. That is, please provide some specific P that instantiates each case (1)-(4) for you. Or do you go out of your way to avoid some of the cases listed?

Presumably right now, you hold all the following beliefs (or maybe not if it’s simply your choice):

(a) "I am looking at a computer screen right now."
(b) "I have hands."
(c) "The sun will rise tomorrow."
(d) "One and one make two."
(e) "God exists."

I'll provisionally assume, for each of these propositions, you first decided it is believable and then you choose to believe it (case 1). When exactly did you choose to believe each one? Since, on your account, you have the control to simply choose not to believe it (even if you have already decided that it is believable), we are to assume then that it is within your ability to simply choose to stop believing each of these (convert it to case 2)? Or within your ability to simply decide that it is no longer believable to begin with (case 3 or 4)?

Sorry, you'll have to excuse me if your view simply strikes me as totally implausible. In fact, I don't think I could decide it is believable or choose to believe it even if I desperately wanted to….

Also, if you're going to tell me that (e) is somehow different from mundane examples like (a)-(d) and that what you are talking about here as "belief" involves something like (e) but not (a)-(d); then I would say there's no reason to think you are talking about belief at all. You probably mean to say something about 'faith' and that your endorsing something like (e) is an act of faith. In that case, your thesis here is not very interesting: we already know that faith has a volitional dimension and one that can allow one to have faith in something more or less willy-nilly.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I am sure there is a reason. The most likely reason is that it is a psychological side effect.

That's a possibility of course. But how'd you come up with weighted odds? Sounds like we found an unjustified belief of yours.

Originally posted by LemonJello... Again, my view is that, generally speaking, deliberative belief formation is handcuffed to cognitive verisimilitude; and, again generally speaking, that is in turn not within one’s control. ...

Pardon me, if you don't mind, but what?

I have to look up 'verisimilitude' but that's not helping. I guess its the idea of getting closer to truth, even if still wrong? But 'deliberative belief formation' is certainly within one's control. What does 'cognitive verisimilitude' mean, and how does it make 'deliberative belief formation' become non-deliberative?
.

Originally posted by apathist
That's a possibility of course. But how'd you come up with weighted odds? Sounds like we found an unjustified belief of yours.

I came up with weighted odds based on my knowledge of the situation. No, it is not an unjustified belief. Now your belief that my belief is unjustified, without knowing anything about what I know about the weighted odds - that was unjustified.

Originally posted by apathist
Pardon me, if you don't mind, but what?

I have to look up 'verisimilitude' but that's not helping. I guess its the idea of getting closer to truth, even if still wrong? But 'deliberative belief formation' is certainly within one's control. What does 'cognitive verisimilitude' mean, and how does it make 'deliberative belief formation' become non-deliberative?
.

Verisimilitude literally means truthlike; deliberative belief formation means "Thinking about it". So LJ's sentence "Deliberative belief formation is handcuffed to cognitive verisimilitude" can be paraphrased as "You aren't going to believe something if it doesn't have a ring of truth to it". If someone claims to be able to jump to heights of 100 ft you're going to treat their claim with some skepticism, it's essentially impossible to believe something like that. You can choose to listen or not listen, but belief formation must involve the proposition being believable to you.

When one makes a judgement one is not exercising free will. One can choose to take a proposition seriously and devote energy to reflection on the matter, but one cannot just choose to believe something. If you are told that one thing weighs more than the other then you can exercise free will in choosing to test this with some scales to see which is heavier, but have absolutely no free will in the outcome of the measurement. That depends on which is heavier.

Originally posted by twhitehead
I came up with weighted odds based on my knowledge of the situation. ...

So share the facts and evidence which convinces you that the human tendency to create gods is more likely to be due only to a psychological effect and not due to any other cause.

originally posted by DeepThought
...belief formation must involve the proposition being believable to you.
That is circular. But I think I agree. There is a feedback process involved.

When one makes a judgement one is not exercising free will. ...
I agree with the rest of that paragraph, but not with this. We are not logic machines. We get to choose what justifications we will accept when we make judgements.

Originally posted by apathist
So share the facts and evidence which convinces you that the human tendency to create gods is more likely to be due only to a psychological effect and not due to any other cause.

It would take quite a lot of writing that I am not prepared to do today. I am not even sure I could articulate it all. But it is knowledge that I have.

Originally posted by FMF
Faith is belief in something that can not be proven. I think that religious packages of doctrine appeal to some people who have gut feelings about divine entities, or who were inculcated/socialized with certain notions since they were young, or who found solace after traumatic experiences, or who enjoy a sense of belonging and identity - all quite emotional circ ...[text shortened]... " to believe it! If it were a piece of human behaviour, it could be characterized as pernicious.

Are you saying that everything that is necessarily true can be proven? Can you prove that you have a gut feeling? It is true isn't it? Only you know that it is. But how do you prove that it really is?

Originally posted by apathist
Pardon me, if you don't mind, but what?

I have to look up 'verisimilitude' but that's not helping. I guess its the idea of getting closer to truth, even if still wrong? But 'deliberative belief formation' is certainly within one's control. What does 'cognitive verisimilitude' mean, and how does it make 'deliberative belief formation' become non-deliberative?
.

As should have been obvious enough, 'deliberative' in my original claim denotes the involvement of deliberation. There are, of course, different flavors of deliberation. One can deliberate about what to do, evaluating practical reasons in relation to action-guiding. One can deliberate about what descriptively is the case, evaluating theoretical reasons in relation to propositional truth. We should be concerned here with the latter, inasmuch as belief is a propositional attitude wherein one takes some proposition to be true, or at least likely true beyond a certain level of credence. First thing to note here: even if such a state of deliberation implies intentional effort to focus one's cognitive efforts,** there's nothing conceptually indicating that the outcome of such effort is of one's choosing. This alone should be sufficient to clear up whatever misconception plagued your thinking on this: there need not be any inconsistency in claiming that a deliberative product is not within one's control.

‘Verisimilitude’ in a restricted, technical sense is a philosophical concept dealing with various interpretations of truth as a coarse-grained property. I am using the term here in a more general sense, in the sense of being verisimilar. And 'verisimilar' means having the appearance of truth. So, I am talking about the appearance of truth as the outcome of one's cognitive processing. There's a reason why I would choose this phrasing, since I think it tends to elicit some apt perceptual analogs. Compare, for example, visual processing. One can choose to engage in a visual processing event and, say, exert control in focusing one's eyes in a particular direction with the intention to make out what is there. But, of course, that control does not generally extend to the end result of that event. Even if one makes an intentional effort to see what is there, the result is not a matter of choosing what one sees there but rather a matter of one's seeing what's there on a basis of being thusly appeared to. Well, I’m claiming something similar about belief. One can choose, say, to engage in deliberation about what is the case, but that control does not generally extend to belief outcomes. Just as what one ends up seeing is handcuffed to visual appearance as the outcome of perceptual processing, what one ends up believing is handcuffed to the appearance of truth as the outcome of cognitive processing. Just as the perceptual processing provides sensory representation of our surroundings, in providing beliefs, the cognitive processing is providing a type of mental representation. Think about why a standard view of belief is as a representation. A representation is such that it stands in for something else, either as a likeness or in specific virtue of something external to itself. Our mental representations are not our own unconstrained creative projects, they are strongly bound to how external things present themselves to us and generally result from our being thusly presented to.

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**This is very far from strictly correct: one can simply find oneself in a state of such deliberation with no prior intentional effort, which happens regularly as an automated response to one's situational environment. The fact, however, is that even if we restrict attention to cases which should give the proponent of choice-based belief the best benefit of the doubt (cases where theoretical deliberation is precipitated by an explicit choice to enter such deliberation), their argument still goes nowhere.