Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
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Notes -
I think you have. Consider the following:
When someone presents you with a belief, you can choose to either accept or reject it uncritically. Either is a conscious act of the will.
If you choose not to do either, you can instead inspect the proposed belief critically. This involves comparing it to the evidence available to you. The consensus model is that you collect the available evidence for and against the belief, weigh the two groups against each other objectively, and allow yourself to be guided by the result. There are serious problems with this model:
When we examine a proposed belief critically, what actually happens is that we collect the evidence that is immediately convenient to us, prune it subjectively to the subset that seems weighty and relevant by our subjective, personal standards, sort it into "for" and "against" piles, and then compare the two to get a preliminary result. We then assess this result, and if we decide we like it, we keep it and draw a conclusion. If we don't like it, we go looking for more evidence. Either is a conscious act of the will.
Nor does anything require that this process ever terminates. Even if no "sufficient" evidence can be found to justify the conclusion we desire, we are free to
assumeinfer the existence of such evidence from the conclusions we chose in previous iterations of this reasoning process. The end result is that we choose to search through a small portion of an infinite chain of evidence until we find the support we're looking for, and then we choose to stop.But what if we wanted to go deeper? What if we wanted to try for something beyond subjective, piecemeal assessment of evidence? The last option is to reason about evidence by way of axioms. A given chain of evidence can fit within or contradict a given axiom, logically speaking. This process seems to be objective, or as close to it as humans can get. But all it tells you is whether a given chain of evidence fits or contradicts a given axiom, not whether the axiom is actually correct. There are still infinite evidence-chains, meaning that there are an infinite number of evidence chains that fit neatly into a given axiom. Choosing an axiom is a conscious act of will, and choosing which evidence-chains to compare it to is likewise a conscious act of will.
All consequential beliefs any of us hold are formed by one of the processes described above. All of these processes involve a conscious act of will. Therefore, all beliefs are arrived at through conscious acts of will.
Again, you don't choose to accept it or not. You just do. Or at least I do. So possible inferential distance here. Someone tells me something and I FEEL whether I believe it or not instinctually. Way before I would try to work through why I do. And then wouldn't you know it, my rationalizations always support what i felt to be true. Quite the coincidence huh?
I didn't choose to not believe in God. One day I did and the next I did not. Suddenly all the contradictions and holes loomed large. The day before they did not. I didn't make a wilful choice. Now maybe somewhere in my subconscious evidence was being weighed but I don't seem to have access to that process.
Most people aren't rational from what I can tell, and what we believe isn't either. We build our beliefs off what feels true, not from rationally evaluating them. I am pretty sure this is how it works for myself and somewhat confident this is how it works for most other "normies". And acting as if this is true turns out to predict peoples actions better than not.
And indeed I think some of what you are saying actually supports my position. Why do people when weighing evidence weigh some more and discard some or going looking for more? So that the evidence supports the position they already hold, the position they already believed, before they started examining it "objectively". And the same for axioms, they pick those which support their pre-existing conclusion. Which is why people can hold beliefs that are contradictory, because the critical thought is downstream of belief. And why when confronted with contradictory believes they do no simply evaluate and change their axioms. They waffle, they prevaricate, they deflect. What they don't fo generally is willfully decide they are wrong and change their beliefs.
Indeed if they did, I would suggest there would be little need for the rationalist project at all.
There's definately significant inferential distance here. I have flat-out, explicitly, in-a specific-moment decided to change my beliefs twice: once to stop believing in God, and then about a decade later, to resume believing in God. In both cases, the choice was made for purely willful reasons, because I wanted to, not because of any conviction or certainty. In both cases the decision was made against a backdrop of personal crisis; the first time, I perceived myself to be a terrible Christian and this made me miserable, so I decided to just stop believing in it any more. Ten years and a great deal of drama and personal ruin later, I concluded that not believing in God hadn't actually made me any less miserable, and if I was going to be miserable either way I'd rather be miserable with God than without him, and so decided to begin believing again. Life has been much better since.
I've had this exact experience going both directions. When I decided not to believe any more, I have a strong memory of watching all the valences flip, and the same happened the other way when I decided to believe again. In both cases, it was absurdly obvious how good the new arguments were, and how ridiculous all my old commitments had been. It's definately not an experience one forgets.
More generally, thought, I observe that most of my belief-choices aren't a snap decision, but rather a process. There's one political topic in particular that I had very, very strong feelings, opinions, values, etc about. Because I cared a lot about it, I consumed a lot of news and analysis about the topic. After some years of this, I did some self-reflection, and noted that this topic appeared to be a self-licking ice cream cone: I cared about it because I was constantly reading news about it, and I was constantly reading news about it because I cared about it, but in fact none of the news was ever actually surprising, just endless repetitions of the same basic themes over and over ad nauseum. Consuming content on this topic was pointless, and caring about it had long-since become pointless emotional masturbation. So I took a lot of my cached thoughts and feelings about the subject, made a conscious decision to label them "compromised", decided that I would no longer have an opinion on the topic, stopped consuming all content on the subject, and pre-committed to no longer grant emotional valiance to any further material on the subject I was exposed to. This did not make the strong feelings, opinions, values and so on go away on the spot, but any time they popped up, I did my best to trample them right down again, and over the next few years, the feelings, opinions, values and so on shifted quite significantly.
Deciding to believe in God didn't make me Christian on the spot, and my current faith has been constructed by a large number of decisions of how to spend my time and attention, who I talk to and about what, whose opinions I give weight to, and so on. In the aggregate, these choices massively shape how I experience life and how I think about those experiences, and they have led to very significant changes in values, desires, and even personality over time. And to me, the connection between willful choice and results is obvious.
I've seen this a fair bit in my marriage, and now that I'm a father. I love my wife; she's by far the best thing that's ever happened to me, hands down, not even close. I am confident that the case for her excellence could be made objectively, but I don't actually care: things happen, and sometimes I get annoyed or frustrated with her, and when that happens I actively work to grant that frustration and annoyance as little space in my mind as possible. My goal is to love her more perfectly, and I make an effort to actively encourage thoughts and behaviors conducive to this goal, and actively prune thoughts and behaviors that impede this goal. Likewise with my children; I may not be able to control my emotional reactions to a situation, but I can certainly control how I feed or starve those reactions, allowing or denying them self-reinforcement.
Not only evidence, but status, competing desires, and a variety of other motives. Maybe it's a genuine difference in how our brains work, or maybe it's a skill you didn't learn, or an illusion I've bought into, but...
Have you ever lied to yourself? Like, you think "I want to do this thing, but it's bad and I shouldn't." and then you think "I'm going to anyway", and then you think something that isn't really words, but more a deliberate pointing of your consciousness in some direction other than "I have just decided to do something bad." If you do it right, the very real moment of decision doesn't really enter long-term memory, and in retrospect you doing the bad thing just sort of... happens. It's the internal monologue version of passive voice, and if you make a habit of it the moment of choice gets smaller and smaller until it seems to vanish completely, and you get a reflexive habit. From experience, it seems pretty easy to just not look too hard at that process, or at a lot of other processes within the mind, and average it all out to "things just happen, I don't know how."
I'm pretty skeptical that my own introspection is unusually strong; it might be typical-minding, but my guess is that most peoples' brains work pretty much like mine, one way or another.
...from your previous comment:
Dump your entire current social network, and surround yourself exclusively with Christians. Actively cultivate deep, meaningful relationships with them. Adopt the axiom that Christianity is correct, and apparent incorrectness is a problem with your perspective or assessment. Consume high-quality Christian arguments, actively work to adopt Christian perspectives, seek status from fellow Christians, focus on all of Christianity's good points and on all of non-Christianity's worst features. Actively work to contemplate your life and experiences through a Christian lens, and actively work to develop an understanding of Christianity that fits with your understanding of life and the world. Do this all day every day for several years, and see what happens. My guess is that if you did so, at the end of those years you'd be a whole lot more Christian than you are now. Do you think otherwise?
...And of course, you could swap Christianity out for Hinduism or Veganism or Objectivism or Communism or any other coherent worldview/value set. Those feelings about what is true and what isn't are totally real, but given that we observe them changing, and given that we can observe them being influenced by things like media consumption and social status, how they change over time can't be all that great a mystery, can they?
I have observed my own feelings of what is true shifting significantly based on media consumption and social desirability, among other influences.
If people have no control and beliefs simply self-reinforce, how do people change their minds about a thing? More generally, have you not observed yourself choosing between available reactions to a disruptive event? Have you not observed yourself choosing to adopt one attitude over another in response to a given situation?
Indeed it is, but that would not prevent the belief from being downstream of the will, would it?
My prediction isn't that people, when confronted by an opposing argument, decide to change their mind and adopt their opposite's position. My argument is that people have considerable control over the trajectory of their minds over the long-term, and they steer that trajectory through choices, some acute, some chronic, through exercise of their own will, decided by their own internal deliberations and competing desires and values. Those desires and values they choose to feed grow stronger, those they starve grow weaker, and through this process their mind changes as a consequence of their choices. How could it be otherwise?
I agree with that, except, it wasn't something I made a conscious decision on, but it was very much an overnight thing. Thing that had made sense no longer did and things that did not, now did.
I also agree here, while I don't think we (I'll use we for myself and may other's here, but not everyone clearly) can control our feelings or beliefs, we can control how we act on them. I get angry at my wife or my kids, and I think you can choose not to actively dwell on them, or to go do something else with that time and energy.
I do think otherwise, yes, because I was in that position, and that didn't stop my belief set changing and then I stayed in that network for years after with no sign of it switching back. I visited pretty much every church I could get my hands on (well except Catholic, back in those days in Northern Ireland, that would still have been an issue), from Quakers to The brethren, from Methodist to Pentecostals. I devoured Christian apologetics, talked to my parents (both Sunday School teachers), to vicars and deacons. None of it made a difference to my belief set. Things i had believed now appeared silly and superstitious. Arguments that made sense now had holes big enough to drive lorries through. And I don't think I am alone in that. When I moved to America I dated an ex-Jehovah's witness who recounted similar struggles to the extent she was shunned by her family after leaving the church, and how she had struggled and prayed and fought to, in her words "stay in the light" and that was within an insular community where she was immersed even more than I was back in the day.
I would agree that media consumption and social desirability can have an impact on my beliefs of what is true, but I have not been able to observe it happening in real time, I have just seen it happen in other's so it seems arrogant to assume it doesn't happen to me.
To an extent I think most people's mind is changed for them. Not by an outside force but by their own inner workings. for example I had an online argument a long time ago, where I argued point A and someone else argued B. Some weeks later I realized B to be true and no longer A. I didn't choose to change my mind, but presumably below the level of conscious thought my mind was still churning away on that argument and was convinced. I can certainly choose my actions, by managing my emotional state, but that doesn't mean I can control what emotions I feel in the first place.
Some of this I certainly agree with, and to be clear I am not advocating that people do not have responsibility for their beliefs still. The sub-conscious is still part of us, and who we are as a person, no-one else can be responsible for our actions based upon our beliefs whether or not we chose what to believe consciously or not. IRA bombers still chose to kill people even if they didn't consciously choose their belief system.
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Just an anecdote that I think is a good little microcosm of your point (with which I agree): I had a friend who once said that he could choose not to be angry about anything if it made sense to him. He argued that if the situation made sense, he would simply not be angry about it. He also, generally speaking, postured his entire life as if he had made only logical decisions, and held logical positions. He considered himself so immune to illogical positions that he began to block anyone who ever disagreed with him, even in passing. So much so that he broke reddit's block list.
Such a logical creature, naturally, regularly threw his controller across the room playing video games, or shattered his keyboard in rage. He would start out mad about something and then start an argument to explain why you were wrong. He was good at avoiding name-calling, and his brinksmanship over any accusation of him acting irrationally (his logic was that it was just going "u mad bro?") caused an extreme chilling effect on anyone actually taking him to task over being so vitriolic about what were either pet peeves or flavor-of-the-day political grievances.
I am no longer friends with this person, but my point in bringing him up is that he's the perfect exaggerated example of what you're talking about. I don't think he was so atypical mentally that he had an entirely different way of processing information and making decisions - he just built an elaborate justification around his instinctive reactions. For someone who claimed to control every aspect of his life so much, it is remarkable how little in control of himself he was. But then, that's how we all are. We're products of our environments and genetics. I consider myself to be well-regulated emotionally, but I owe the vast majority of my developed qualities to growing up in a supportive household, with parenting, education, and friends that nurtured such qualities in me. My development was quite literally determined by these things. I, as you say, react to stimuli in a very naturalistic way, before I've given it any deep thought. And very rarely will such deep thought contradict my initial decisions (unless we're talking about dietary choices!), which implies to me that my decision making is a streamlined biological process to which I do not have access. It's just patterns mapped onto my neurons over the course of my life, even if they're logical ones. I find it hard to believe some essence of logic, some soul lives separate from this and makes decisions contrary to the animal decisions I make on a much more numerous and much quicker scale. One would think they'd differ more.
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