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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday: a belief is an entry in our knowledge base that we know we have, and that we act on. A so-called alief is knowledge that we act on but don't know we have (Wiki gives the example of being scared when standing on a tall balcony with a glass bottom that you trust intellectually - you're safe, you know you're safe, the body is scared anyway). What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe? A policy? A trusted hypothetical? A religious law? This is a mode of thinking that I lean on a lot, that seems to be a lot more frequent than for most people.

I got to this thought by completing the 2-variable square, with "known to the process doing introspection" as one variable, and "used in actions in the world" as the other. Given the vague and brief description above, what other frameworks can we fit alief and belief into that reveal other kinds of -lief?

What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe?

Going in a few directions: faith? ideals? social fictions?

From the other discussion, I nominate "free will".

Intellectually, I know that human minds are messy things partly driven by drives hard-wired by evolution plus perhaps a bit of capacity to rationally consider hypotheticals and pick an option based on that in a very imperfect manner.

Yet when interacting with others, it is a very convenient frame of reference to assume that Bob was free to pick any option when he punched you instead of modelling him deterministically.

These don't actually exist. You can't act on disbeliefs. If it looks like you are acting on them, you're not, you're just acting on related beliefs which you do sincerely believe.

Or, maybe you think something is unlikely, but still dangerous enough not to risk. This isn't acting on disbeliefs either.

You can't act on disbeliefs.

Whenever someone uses the word "can't" when talking about the human mind, I get suspicious. What would you say about the following:

For my entire life I've had some relatively mild sub-clinical symptoms of OCD, particularly centered around the idea of keeping things symmetrical. Sometimes if I accidentally brush up against something with one hand for example, I'll suddenly be struck by the thought that if I don't touch it with the other hand as well, I'll die in my sleep that night. Of course I know and believe that this is false. I can even tell myself in the moment that it's false, and I believe what I'm telling myself. But nevertheless it really just feels like I should touch it with my other hand, so I do.

Rationally, I know that touching random benign ordinary objects in the environment can have no impact on my odds of sudden death. It's an absurd belief. I'm intelligent enough to recognize that there's no possible causal connection there. And yet I continue to act as though I do believe it.

I'll stand by my statement--I think it was accurate--but it was a bit of an oversimplification.

How much beliefs influence actions is a sliding scale.

  • Most actions are subconscious and do not rely on belief at all. Things like breathing and the individual muscle movements associated with any action.
  • Most of the remainder are semi-conscious and, while they rely on belief, do not involve a conscious decision in the moment. For example, if I decide to go to bed, I'll start the process of walking upstairs, brushing my teeth, etc., all actions which rely on my beliefs regarding where the stairs are, how to brush teeth, and so on, but which do not require conscious input.
  • A few of our actions are explicitly conscious to a large extent, but even then most of the beliefs involved in making the decision are subconscious. I don't need to consciously rehash modus ponens and all my other axioms before every decision.

Your example sounds like my second example. You have two conflicting beliefs, and while you believe one much more strongly, the other promises consequences dangerous enough that it cannot be ignored. It's possible to know something is false and yet believe in it (to a small extent) anyway.

Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday

You do realize that you're allowed to post in the existing thread, right? It still exists, it doesn't expire on Monday, it expires next Sunday when the next thread comes out.

Isn't it still "alief", just with ¬P instead of P?

It seems like there are three possible states to your knowledge variable: unknown, believed, and disbelieved.

Maybe I'd coin the word "delief" for that.

What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe?

From Zizek's How To Read Lacan:

For decades, a classic joke has circulated among Lacanians to exemplify the key role of the Other’s knowledge: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling. There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man”. “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?”

[...]Marx does not claim, in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity – what appears a mysterious theological entity – emerged out of the “ordinary” real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis)perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. In other words, when a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not “The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people” but rather, “You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers.”

This type of phenomenon is the bread and butter of psychoanalysis: "I know very well that is not true, but nevertheless..."

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