Hold on there, hoss. I never made any claim about it being instant. That’s your insertion.
It was the clear message of your posts. Now you are clarifying yourself.
How long did it take you to stop believing there are people and to believe instead that there are none (other than you)? Please describe the process by which you did it. And please tell me what the difference is between believing something and pretending to believe it.
ETA: It certainly took you less than three minutes.
Anyway, “instantly” is about the least important word in my post. I deny the veracity of your claim that you switched at will from believing the one to believing the other. Especially not in an interval smaller than three minutes. I maintain that anyone reading this conversation knows that your claim is not true.
…such that even if you don’t change your line on this, I am certain all others reading who might have thought you can choose beliefs would, on doing the experiment for themselves, see that I’ve got the right of it.
These classes were decades ago and I don’t remember any research that was described. I’ve also tried to find anything more recent to back it up and haven’t found anything.
I am in agreement with you that it is illogical that a person can arbitrarily change beliefs back and forth without real reason to change the beliefs. I don’t believe that self-hypnosis could accomplish that even though I have been successful in using self-hypnosis for pain control. Maybe it’s possible that someone else could hypnotize you and convince you otherwise, but I remain skeptical.
I don’t ever remember choosing to believe something. I learned things in school and accepted them as fact and I’m certain that some of these things weren’t always true. So I’ve had to change my mind because of scientific updates. But that’s not the kind of thing we’re talking about.
Well, you’re wrong, sir. At least one – me! – holds that smiling bandit is right and you are wrong.
(The Straight Dope embraces people holding widely diverse points of view. It is nearly always an error to assume that “all others reading” agree on anything. Why, we’ve even had members who didn’t like bacon! Can you imagine?)
In my opinion, one of your errors is insisting on “a simple act of will.” People change their minds on things, usually over time, and often against a counter-potential of resistance. By nature, humans don’t like to change their beliefs. It feels awkward. But we are a remarkably versatile species: some people pierce themselves, or brand themselves, or cut themselves, or do other things that are against our natural instincts. Some people contort their bodies into difficult yoga positions.
And some of us are able to contort our minds into difficult “belief” positions.
Now: in general, I agree with you. It is difficult – next to impossible – for most people consciously to choose their beliefs. I would warrant that very, very few people actually do this.
I just think you are not being fair in your a priori denial of smiling bandit’s exercise.
Trinopus
I don’t think you do–see below.
I haven’t insisted on this. (This is why I say above I don’t think you believe what you say you believe–because it appears you haven’t understood the claims at issue between me and Smiling Bandit.) Instead, I have backed off on that phrasing–in my last post I said that what I disbelieve is that in the course of less than three minutes, Smiling Bandit successfully willed himself to switch from believing there are people besides himself to believing there are no such people.
Nothing confusing in there about a “simple act of will” or “instantaneous” switching or anything like that.
So now that that’s become clear–tell me, do you really believe that at time 1, Smiling Bandit believed there were other people in the world, and that at time 2, Smiling Bandit believed there were no other people in the world, and that between time 2 and time 1 there lay less than three minutes, and that the best explanation for the switch is “Smiling Bandit decided to switch beliefs in order to demonstrate that he is able to switch beliefs”?
As I’ve said, though it’s true I am denying it pretty “a priori,” the thrust of my argument isn’t “You, Bandit, are wrong because I can’t believe you’re right,” but rather, "Readers of this thread who think people choose to believe things, I invite you to try to change one of your beliefs at will. You’ll notice you can’t do it. Here’s a guy who claims he can, but you know from your own introspection that he’s not doing what he claims to be doing.)
I don’t even think it’s coherent to suppose Bandit is doing what he claims to be doing, but I haven’t done a good job of offering an argument for that, I’ll admit.
The constant logical error most people make when they ask the same kind of question (in the number of hundreds on this forum alone) is that the are already accepting a fallacy and then try to justify the outcome of a hypothetical.
The hypothetical is:
If gods exist, then <insert your statement here>
You can’t assume gods exist and then ask your question. Since no gods exist, then the IF part of the above statement is false, therefore the THEN part can be whatever it wants… and the statement would be logically true.
For example:
If my umbrella is yellow, then there are 25 suns in the earth’s solar system.
My umbrella is not yellow, therefore the above statement is logically consistent and even “true” from a logic analysis point of view.
Your statement above boils down to this:
If there are gods then we can’t be in control of choosing our beliefs.
If you already assume the premise is true “there are gods”, then you can’t expect to make a logical argument to verify your assumption by examining and analyzing the conclusion “we can’t be in control”.
Start with establishing a true premise first… then you can examine hypothetical or conditional statements based on a premise that has been proven true beyond any doubt.
In arguments like this one, there are typically modal concepts intended in statements like “If a god existed then…”
Supposing it true that there is no God in the actual world, it’s still meaningful to argue that if there were a God (not “if there is,” but instead “if there were”) then such-and-such would follow, but such and such is not actual, therefore God is not actual.
I don’t want to spend the time to go into why the above method is not recommended for these types of arguments… not that I think you are wrong, which you are, but your analysis above lands the argument in a very gray area of what is true and what isn’t.
You can’t qualify the truth value of a “if there were” statement that you made. It will have to come back to "if gods exist, then … ".
And we do know no gods exist, therefore any hypotheses based on a falsity are impossible to verify as true.
The question is, what is intended when someone says “If God existed, then such and such would be the case?”.
The reason this is the question is, your first post assumed that the material conditional is intended. If that’s not what was intended, then your first post is based on an error.
And the material conditional is almost never intended in arguments like this. (In fact, the material conditional is almost never intended in any English utterance of the word “if” but I digress…)
In any particular discussion, if P is the proposition being disputed, then it would be silly for either participant to offer P -> Q as a premise in an argument with intended interpretation as the material conditional–precisely because it is known by both participants that one of them believes P to be false, and so that person will find the premise to be merely trivially true, not informatively true.
So when we see them putting a conditional after that P, we should assume (and we’re pretty much always correct to do so) that they intend it to be some kind of modal conditional. Not “If P is true” but rather “If P were to be true.”
Nothing.
Here’s an example:
If 3 yellow butterflies controlled a human’s behavior, then a turtle crawling in the dirt will hot have any grass to eat for 4 days.
Try to find out what is “intended” with the above statement.
In short, dump all hypothetical statements in the trash if the person who makes the initial statement is unwilling to prove the truth value of their premise.
In this particular case, no gods exist, therefore all statements based on “if gods existed, then…” are false, by definition.
Haha! I can’t believe this thread is still kicking around. I thought it died out shortly after I posted it.
Thanks for everyone’s thoughts on the matter. I apologize if I engaged in any logical fallacies as some of you have pointed out.
I don’t really have much more to add, and no one has really asked me any questions to answer, but I just wanted to say that I apologize for any logical fallacies I may have indulged in. Perhaps my use of the word “paradox” was a bit clumsy. Obviously if my initial assumption is wrong, then I can’t really establish a paradox. I guess I should have said “the problem with religion and beliefs” or something like that.
So let me just say that while I accept that SOME of you MAY be able to choose your own beliefs, I guarantee you that I lack this ability. I can no more choose to believe in God than I can choose to be straight or choose to be angry. My beliefs are essentially emotions based on sensory input and memory, backed up by my present awareness. Given everything I have experienced in life, I do not believe in God. This was not a conscious choice…
And I guess I just cannot understand people who say that their belief in God is a choice. It just… makes no sense to me… I guess because I lack the ability to choose my beliefs. In the same way it would be impossible for a person blind from birth to imagine what it would be like to see, I am incapable of understanding the ability to choose my own beliefs. If God does exist, and he didn’t bless me with the ability to believe in him, why should I be punished or not atoned for, or not forgiven, or not allowed into Heaven, or WHATEVER Christians believe happen to people who don’t believe in God. It’s not within my ability to believe in him given my life experiences and my innate capabilities.
Do you know what I’m talking about when I mention a distinction between the material conditional and various modal conditionals?
No.
What I know is that what I said above is - hopefully - good enough to be a legitimate answer in the OP question.
I think you technically answered the question I DID ask, but didn’t respond at all to the question I intended to ask… See my last post.
Anyway, this is a bit of a red herring.
No matter how you interpret the conditional, Modus Tollens is a valid argument form.
The fact that, supposing God doesn’t exist, any statement beginning with “If God exists” (with a material conditionla) is true, doesn’t invalidate modus tollens.
If God exists, then he periodically makes himself plainly known.
He doesn’t periodically make himself plainly known.
Therefore, he doesn’t exist.
Valid argument. Someone who thinks God exists has to show that one of the premises is false. He either has to show that God exists and doesn’t periodically make himself plainly known, or else he has to show that God does periodically make himself plainly known. Nothing meaningless or even very confusing about any of the above–just standard flow of argument.
I really appreciate it when you guys are breaking down what is or is not a valid logical argument, and I probably should not have used the word paradox as flimsily as I did, as a true logical paradox has to meet strict criteria. If you could maybe, more eloquently lay out the exact argument I am making in an easy to understand logical way, I’d really appreciate it.
I can’t get into specifics again… for the xxxx time… all the above is wrong.
Please do get into specifics. You can start another thread…
I started a fairly lengthy rebuttal…but since this is really a sideshow, I’ll simply aver that I do. Really. I can see how someone could do this, and I take smiling bandit’s word for it. I respect your dissent, but…well… Anyway, it’s an impasse anyway… (Um…anyway…)
But, like I said, this is all a silly side-issue, because you’re right! in that most people don’t do this, and most people are not capable of choosing their beliefs in a conscious fashion. Most people aren’t capable of jumping a motorcycle over fifteen parked cars…but some are! But even those who can very rarely do!
This is a really powerful example, and I’m not sure how to address it. I could ask, “Is the wife choosing to believe?” Or is she simply following a kind of unthinking tropism? Or something in between? It’s highly unlikely she ever consciously assessed the issue: “I could doubt my husband, or I could maintain faith in him… The former pains me, ergo I will stick with faith in his fidelity.”
In some ways, it’s as if we “are of two minds.” The old cartoon image of having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is weirdly accurate. Humans are very good at “doublethink.” We’re also highly accomplished at a kind of functional blindness. The wife probably manages not to see much of the evidence of her husband’s infidelity.
I’m a BIG believer in the unconscious mind and its power to filter perceptions and guide thoughts. The unconscious is a damn weird place. (You should see my dreams!)
Trinopus