martinguerre

I, for one, am not saying that belief and the ideal system you describe are the same.

what i am saying is that it cannot be done. i've seen no evidence to the contrary...and as has been said many times on this board, logic is not compelled to consider possibility of the impossible.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

Suave

Whatever you do, it must be based in belief, as I said earlier. I wasn't saying that your "working hypotheses" are beliefs.

It might first help if you tell us exactly what you define "belief" as, in this context. It's pretty useless to discuss something when I'm not even sure exactly what the concept being discussed is.

wilbjammin

You're living in a theoretical world that I can't really respond to. I would imagine I'm more likely to form wildly different beliefs out of a response to living in severe crisis. As for discussing "beliefs", I suppose I should go further and say that what I have that I would consider to be "beliefs" rather than "values" or "views" are more along the ways of asthetically approaching life, rather than concrete/literal "beliefs".

I'm afraid that I could adopt certain new beliefs if I was faced with a life crisis, or if I began suffering from a fit of rebellion from my own identity for some reason. I'm not likely to form much in the way of "beliefs" now due to my education, experiences, and decisions I have already made in the past. A good person to ask would be one of those former drunkards you find that tell you that they used to be atheists and then became Born Again and found Jesus and now everything is wonderful. There is a classic example of someone choosing a belief.

If you showed me that my foundation for interpreting reality was totally false, I would have to re-evalute many things including how I feel about beliefs.

And, isn't that the point? To change beliefs, one would have to have a serious change of heart which doesn't come from nowhere. That doesn't mean that you don't have a choice whether to change or not, it means that you felt that you had a good reason to. Many people struggle with their beliefs, see contradictions, and continue to hold on tightly to those beliefs anyway because they choose to hold on to those old beliefs that has become strongly meshed with their identity. I have worked hard to avoid getting into such identity crises by avoiding putting myself in situations where I have beliefs that can put me into existential dilemmas about my identity.

Again, at this point, I can think of no reward for such a thing. Only a mental breakdown of sorts is likely to get me there now.

Well, it isn't easy often, esp. since we find it easy to just take what we've been given or what we've figured out and hold onto it. But when I think back to my first efforts into deciding how I felt about things like God and reincarnation in middle school, I was making some active choices about what I believed and didn't believe. It went back and forth until I had some philosophical breakthroughs, and I feel now that I have little need to change my "beliefs". You're getting me at a point in time that leaves me with the ability to make choices about what I belief, and yet no desire to change. This certainly isn't true for everyone, and it may not always be the same for me, but I can clearly remember making choices about beliefs and why I made those choices. And every day I reconsider those choices on some level - and because of thise continuing re-evaluation I am choosing on a conscious level all of the time.

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MacGuyver

Question: Are beliefs a choice?

My Straight yes or no answer: Of course they are a choice.

My Why: Wether or not the choice is a conscious one, it is still exactly that, a choice. As humans, we have the power of choice. Some people are free to weild that power as they may, these people think for themselves and not necessarily for society. Others still choose belief, but they dont have the will power to resist pressure from the politcal correctness of the modern society. Thus they choose to not make a genuine choice of thier own, and to not put any serious decision making thought process into what they believe in. Personally, I search for answers. Until I get legitimate answers to the unanswerable questions of this world, then I will not believe. Many people are afraid to make choices becuase of things like regret, wrong decisions, etc. But I think it is a virtue to be able to have the power to control all of your choices, which is why no matter what I chose in life, I stand behind it 100%, because as a human, I have the power to control my own choices, and I admire the fact that I am able to make such choices. I guess my answer is partially along the lines of ART's in his first post, but it runs on a little bit of a different parallel and perspective.

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---Aristotle

Deeds, not words, shall speak [for] me.
---John Fletcher

ratiocination

MY belief in my religion was forced on me . I did not have a choice on whether I wanted to believe in the same religion that my parents believed in, or whether i wanted to follow some other religion. The point is that despite the fact that I was not given a chioce, my belief in my religion is extremelely strong. The answer to the question depends on the situation and circumstances. For example, you can choose to believe that man did indeed land on the moon, on the other hand you may have reasons to believe that it was a hoax.

zen_tom

This is a good point - We know how some people as you say have their beliefs (or non-beliefs) strongly meshed with their identity. In fact, it might be difficult to define the point where ones identity begins and the way one approaches life (based on certain ideas which are held to be true or untrue) ends. We interpret ourselves and our experiences within the bounds of some set of tenets or (a priori assumptions) that we believe have some (if only working) value.

Some people are unlucky enough to have belief systems that are either self-contradicting, or at least fail to stand up to the evidence their experience provides. Hanging on to a belief system such as this because it defines what that person feels themselves to be - despite the evidence, can cause them to develop elaborate explanations, and in advanced cases, paranoia, split-personalities or delusions of persecution.

The archetypal Psycho who failed to accept the death of his mother (on whom perhaps he built-up a highly parochial world-view on which was based the sense of his own identity) is a good example instance.

A worldview is built, life events are sorted, measured and placed into the scaffolding that worldview provides, building it and developing it further. Then suddenly something on which the worldview is based on is kicked away, bringing everything else with it.

In the case of Norman Bates, he's unable to deal with this inconsistancy, and in times of stress, he takes on the role of his mother, required by his worlview to keep up the scaffold of his life.

Has Norman Bates chosen to believe his mother is still alive despite all the evidence to the contrary? Has Norman chosen to be a psycho?

On less extreme ground, this is often seen to be the reason for a personal or mental breakdown. The basis on which someone has built their life is etched away by experience until it no-longer is able to support someone's operation. During this period the person is trying to reconcile their beliefs with experience.

At this point, the option is to continue to hold the belief, or to allow it to slide.

- and then, like a house of cards, the system breaks down. The person has to somehow re-interpret their life-history and daily experience without anything solid as a foundation. Without doing so makes it difficult to assign any meaning or value to new experience.

I agree the process of forming, holding and then rejecting beliefs is one that we are conciously aware of. Maybe some of us can choose what to believe, but there are certainly others who would appear to have no choice at all.

ARTelevision

Thanks for the good discussion.
I think we covered the territory pretty well.
The dictionary is good enough as far as definitions go.
I don't engage semantic questions.

I think folks have fleshed out the various aspects of the original question and there's some ongoing discussion that continues. Personally I wanted to pose the question. I've done that.

Thanks again.

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roachboy

i really do not see how the opposition between bellief and experience works, outside of a totally unjustifiable empiricist framework.

your experience is heavily mediated--obviously--from the categories you use to bundle data to the assumptions you inhabit with reference to the nature of space, of movement, of time....are these assumptions amenable to being formalized? to an extent yes....does that formalization mean that you are somehow stepping outside them, and by doing that are able to work out the extent to which they are simply beliefs? not really, because you would build elements of that register into your analysis itself.

does the fact that your field of vision presents you with what appears to be an "objective" view of the object world mean that you in any way have unmediated acceess to that world? well no, because as you focus your attention on any given object and make judgements about that object--what is this thing---you enter directly into the space of explicit mediation--and your field of vision is itself constituted across a whole series of assumptions.....

if you cannot claim that experience provides you with immediacy, then on what basis could you oppose it to questions of belief? it seems more logical that your experience is simply another register across which your beliefs are deployed.

montaigne was at least consistent about this--what he looked to was not the object world, not individual experience, but rather history in that for him history was the result of a kind of collective working-out of relations to the world...for montaigne, however, the question of history was not a gateway to immediacy, which to an extent it was for his conservative epigone, edmund burke....both of these positions explain why i understand this question of belief as being properly political....because it involves a shift in relation to history and arguments about the nature and meaning of that shift.

questions of religion are easier to address, but for that are (to me at least) less interesting.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

No, roachboy, there is nothing objective about my experience.

I don't explain things beyond my ability to do so. I think the current language that is in common usage is sufficient to address current experience. I attempt to use it to negate or short-circuit itself as much as possible - to create unanswerable questions, to report as best I can on the mysterious thing I'm calling my experience. It is mysterious to me because I can not explain it. Ultimately, I do prefer that situation.

So I type what I think can be handled with common language and am content to leave things as they are - unresolved and even unresolvable. By raising questions I think I am doing something significant in itself.

As for the manner of proceeding conceptually through a process of negation - I am aware of the cognitive notion that by negating a frame one calls the frame up for cognition (thereby short-circuiting the process of negation - at least conceptually), however - , there is enough of a historical and philosophical history of employing it, including Vedic and Buddhist methodogogies and other instances of the via negativa that I think this procedure is comprehensible enough to suggest it. The fact that it doesn't seem many are familiar with proceeding through concepts by a process of negation doesn't deter me from putting it out there as an example of how what I propose differs from the "scientific method"...

In other words, it is neither "this" nor "that"...

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martinguerre

it seems to me its only a one-off situation.

there are two possible ways of structuring reality, imo.

meaninglessness and confusion
questions of perception of reality (possibly marred by proximity to meaningless and over-deconstruction)
questions of interpretation of reality
ultimate reality

or

ultimate reality
questions of perception of reality
questions of interpretation of reality (possibly marred by proximity/reliance on empty conceptional frameworks)

confusion and meaninglessness

each proceeds from micro to macro. i'd say "simple to complex" but i think that may not clarify what i'm saying. to me, it's more important to be self-critical at the point of interpretation. i can see the world, but what does it mean. am i chosing to look away from some things? should my attention be here or there? what is the nature of things, put together?

i see you saying that it's more important to question the perceptual level. do you see the world as it is? is the sky blue? what is nature of things, taken apart?

each is an aesthtic, a worldview. i don't see how either is some how more "pure" than the other in terms of assumptions made, or beliefs held. we have proof that neither is more important. to chose one over the other is an act of faith.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

ARTelevision

If experience and explanations of experience were the same thing - or even remotely equal to each other - these discussions would have ultimate value and significance.

IMO, discussions are a means toward indicating the limits of what is discussable...nothing more.

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Suave

I disagree with the former, and am unhappy about the latter, but that's just how it goes.

zen_tom

I don't know about that, I'm still trying to figure out whether you have a cat or not.

martinguerre

reading this again, i think i can see why you insist the "map isn't the territory"

a refusal to engage in a discussion of definitions and a faith that the dictionary is a self-interpreting text that merits no discussion...that would pretty much entail the map not being the territory.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

ARTelevision

That's correct.
I think we can only go so far in using words to examine words.

I'm always aware of those limits. And I think it would be most useful for us to accept a simple list of definitions. Hence, my preference for "common usage"

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zen_tom

Just to help out, the following comes from Websters Online Dictionary:

Suave

Of course that would be most useful, but no one operates on the same premise as everyone else. One can have a two hour long argument and be agreeing with the other party, all based on a semantic difference of a concept.

martinguerre

which begs yet another question.

of all the possible deployments of language, why choose "common usage" which is a standardized (by one authority) version of a language that some odd fraction of the world's population speaks? what faith prompts the belief that that particular deployment is best, and is beyond criticism?

if you're so convinced that language is the limitation of thought, why chose to narrow the language?

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

ARTelevision

It's just an arbitrary choice.

Easy to look up and cross-reference.

The alternative is to spend the rest of our lives in endless circular discussion and never really proceed beyond setting out terms.

There are many who will find those endless circular paths interesting. I'm just not one of them.

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Suave

They're only circular if people are stubborn about it.

martinguerre

to add to that, it's only circular if people don't learn from each other. that's a whole problem unto itself. static definitions don't solve it, they just confine it to a different place.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

ARTelevision

I'm open to other definitions of belief, or anything else. I just don't have anything to discuss about how words are defined. I'll accept your definition as "your definition" and if I am asked for a definition myself - I refer the questioner to the dictionary.

How would you prefer to define "belief" and "choice" then?

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zen_tom

Art, these are some of your more fascinating responses during this discussion (which by the way appears to have derailed itself now) You use circular arguments, then deride those who find them interesting, you state that you prefer to use common language, then you state that you like to negate and short circuit it. It ends up coming across as highly contradictory, almost belligerent. I know you don't mean to do this, but it would help keep things on track if you avoided making vague and unusual statements and then getting all stroppy when people reasonably request clarifications or start pointing out inconsistencies with your curious ideas.

ARTelevision

There is a complete absence of derision in those statements.

Period.

There is no "almost" belligerence in those statements either.

Period.

I conduct philosophical discourse by negation, contradiction, and short-circuit for the reasons I have already stated above. To restate the essential reason in its most simple terms: words are the problem. Once a philosophical discussion devolves toward a discussion of words it is no longer interesting to me.

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zen_tom

OK thanks Art - Sorry if I appeared belligerent myself. For me I find that once a topic goes into semantic mode, it can be useful to step back, and try to find a common thing on which to agree before going forward again. The best discussions should be a vehicle for the shared exploration of ideas and it is often possible to negotiate the semantic hurdles that stand in the way of everyone's mutual understanding by adopting a flexible outlook.
If a topic devolves into a circular discussion of words it can be beneficial to sit it out for a while untill a shared consensus emerges. Stating a lack of interest can be less disruptive if it's done implicitly by not posting.

ARTelevision

Your previous posts to me required responses, did they not?

Indicating a lack of interest in certain directions does seem appropriate. I'll await any new submissions of working definitions and then respond accordingly.

Thanks...

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roachboy

i was trying to figure out how the notion of choice functioned if you cannot seperate yourself from what amount to (from the subjective viewpoint at least) arbitrary committments.

via negativa helped--we are in a purely nominalist problematic.

so the preference you express--that beliefs in general are functions of choice--is about a desire to assert a degree of autonomy at some level. it is starting point rather than result. as such, the question of defending the position gets shifted away from problems of method/standpoint (which would assume it was result) to a more slippery place---i can see why they would derail/develop into semantic debate....which by the way, i am not at all hostile to, primarily because they usually provide me an excuse to wander away into the curious world of the oed, which means that they are ends in themselves.....better dictionaries for better digression.

so i think i have an idea of where this starts from--yes?

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ARTelevision

yes exactly. we're on the same page. I was driving down to my local convenience emporium this morning forming and reflecting upon this thought:

If belief is not a choice then we are automata.

As you know, In general, I do think we are automata.

However, I think there is also a scant, slight, very small, and very rare possibility for "free" execution. Therefore, I think it's necessary for me to create constructions that allow for that possibility.

Hence the assertion that belief is a choice...

Thanks, roachboy.

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la petite moi

Your beliefs are made based on your examination of things around you. Many people tend to live their life without examining it, so they take on the beliefs of their culture, society, or parents. Of course, as Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

welshbyte

If you have a strong enough mind you can believe in whatever you want to believe in. But having a strong mind does not necessarily mean having a wise mind.

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Suave

I do not think that belief is a choice, nor do I think that this makes us automata. Belief is a fundamental dimension of sentient cognition, but there is still the ability to choose within that framework, as to how one wants to formulate and focus one's beliefs.

martinguerre

if you won't have anything to say, then i won't have anything to say either.

my whole point is you're shorting an important conversation. you're naturalizing your own assumtions, and placing others in opposition to that.

you don't have to use my definition...this i realize. but your definition does have to be in conversation with others. when you talk about belief, you're bringing in a whole set of assumptions, decisions, working hypothesii (sp).

but what i'm trying to convey here is that the dialouge has to be comprehensive. ultimately, the translation from another brain to mine isn't going to be perfect. quite simply, if you aren't going to try to define terms, i don't know how much you're going to be able to say.

the negotiation of meaning is not an optional part of communication. normatizing a single deployment of language is a barrier to discussion.

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For God so loved creation, that God sent God's only Son that whosoever believed should not perish, but have everlasting life.

-John 3:16

Mantus

Well here is a scenario concerning beliefs:

Say you just saw a scary movie and went to bed. You hear a noise in your room and your imagination starts running wild. Your heart rate goes up, your senses sharpen and your breathing becomes shallow. Your body certainly thinks that there is something going on.

Now you tell yourself that you are being silly and to go back to sleep, yet feel like you are lying to yourself. What if you are wrong, what if it’s real? Doubt is still there and then you hear another noise. At this moment your mind stop doubting the validity of your fear and you end up cautiously listening for something. For a few seconds you “believe” in something and you really don’t care if the evidence is bogus or not.

You can blame this on our instinctive autopilot but the mind was never shut off, in fact it was assisting in accessing the possible threat.

Now one has to wonder just how often our instincts and emotions make us believe things we would not in a normal mental state. How many times have we convinced ourselves that we wont be able to make it though the day if we don’t hit snooze on the alarm clock? How many times has our sex drive got the better of use and made us say or do things that are against our values? There are many forces out there that can apply pressure on the mind to make it think in one way or another. Some of those forces are even created by the mind itself, such as habits.

sandinista

This goes down to nature vs. nurture. Look up Rousseau, Descartes, and some other enlightenment thinkers - they've all gone over this subject quite thoroughly, and it's also a good read.

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Mantus

ART, this is a very odd thread.

I agree that we can choose our beliefs.

Your idea of not believing in anything is intriguing but I feel that it is nothing more then semantics. Replacing “beliefs” with “useful tentative hypotheses” doesn’t change much. We wont end up poking our cup of tea every morning to make sure that it is in fact what we believe it is.

“Beliefs” are not always “laws” or truths. Yet though the act of faith we treat certain “beliefs” as truths because doing otherwise would make life very difficult. Evidence generally re-enforces faith. Yet evidence itself also has to be based on faith. There are concrete beliefs though. Things we can be sure off. Existence and experience are two firm concepts we can believe in.

In the end it is my opinion that beliefs are a useful tool. I am aware that they can complicate things or even cause grief but everything comes at a price. The key is not abstinence but education and caution.


I am afraid that will not happen. Your choice to denounce beliefs is based on fate. Your life experience determined that you would reach such a choice.

ARTelevision

Mantus, evidently my assertions do not work for you.
They work well for me.

Thanks for your views.

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zen_tom

What about the Norman Bates question? If all people can choose what they believe, then are they responsible if they act on those beliefs? If they are responsible, then is it logical to remove the legal distinction between the sane and the insane for the purposes of punishment vs treatment?

ARTelevision

I'd say by definition, the insane do not choose their beliefs.

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zen_tom

Ah now that is interesting.
So beliefs ARE a choice, but not for the insane.

So the next hypothetical question is; What is it in the make-up of someone suffering from delusions (and who therefore has had NO choice in what they believe) that's different from someone who is perfectly sane (and HAS chosen what they believe)

And how does one tell which group one falls into?

ARTelevision

I'm satisfied with current psychological definitions of insanity. I'm not a professional psychologist. I am also aware that insanity is a culturally defined parameter. So I am talking about definitions of insanity that are culturally appropriate to the case in question.

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