Choosing your beliefs seems to me like choosing your volition: it undermines the concept itself or it leads to contradictions.
Each brain/computer creates it’s own simulation based on perceived experience. Each has a unique ‘reality’.
What I’ve learned from this pandemic is that people don’t form conclusions from evidence, they jump to a conclusion FIRST and then come up with “evidence” to support their conclusions after the fact.
Many anti-maskers were anti-mask no matter what. Whatever facts you gave them, they rejected. And they searched low and high for any “facts” they could scrounge up for their anti-mask stance.
Yes, logic is the process of rationalizing conclusions.
Maybe in an abstract sense I suppose, but until there’s evidence to the contrary, we are all physical beings in a physical universe that operates under the same physical laws, and while our perceptions may have some variation (especially among those with intentional or unintentional chemical imbalances) that doesn’t change the fundamental nature of reality. Facts are facts, and there is no “alternative truth” any more than A can equal Not-A.
An example:
The last time I got on an airplane, did I know ahead of time that the plane was in good working order and that the pilots were competent to fly it, or did I just believe these things to be the case? I certainly didn’t attempt to verify them. On the other hand, you could argue that I did know these things, based on inductive and/or deductive reasoning and what I know about commercial air flight in general.
And, to the extent that I believed these things, did I choose to believe them? Could I, instead, have chosen to doubt them, which might have involved trying to somehow check up on them, or spending the flight in a state of worry and uncertainty, or skipping the flight altogether?
I agree that facts are facts and they don’t change. But facts are seldom an entire story. For example it is a fact that over 1,000,000 died from the corona virus.but it says nothing about an individuals risk depending on his age and health. I can’t think of a single issue in today’s world where facts are not picked and chosen to support a particular position, leaving out a multitude of other facts that would not support that same position.
You believed them based on the evidence of previous experience, knowledge of how commercial aviation works, statistics, etc., as you mentioned. Doubting it wouldn’t necessarily be disbelief per se, I think, but something more indirect, basically ignoring evidence against your position in favor of evidence for it, regardless of merit. So maybe it’s better to say you can’t choose to change that belief, but you choose to interpret the evidence in a way that leads you to the conclusion you prefer?
That gets back to the what vs. why question in the OP. What really matters here is the methodology or epistemology that you use to arrive at your beliefs. If they’re rational then there’s justification that can be used to convince others. If not, then you need to examine why you’re being irrational, and why should anyone else bother to listen to you? Only after those questions are answered can we move on to the “what”.
You, for instance, chose to state that
but you picked and chose that number not to support a particular position (you are, of course, a paragon of neutrality and objectivity), but because you believe that the world ends at the border of the USA.
Several million have died from Covid, not just one. Facts change a lot when you speak from your parrochial POV or of the whole wide world. Perspective changes facts.
And sometimes, very seldom, facts change perspectives.
It’s sorta like the adage about giving someone a fish bath teaching them how to fish
My beliefs are fish. Why I believe them is how I catch the fish.
I would suggest that religion specifically avoids being objectively quantifiable. It is pretty much a defining characteristic of theology whereas the opposite is true of the scientifc method.
I disagree, a fact is independent of any individuals perspective otherwise how can you call it a fact?
It is very much like computers:
The WHY:
The why is the operating system that each brain constructs by accumulating experience.
The WHAT:
The what is the set of simulations (apps) that will run on each operating system. We all run our simulation of reality but can easily switch to another simulation. Like when we become involved in a play or TV story. Or when we accept a reality in church that is different from the one we run day to day.
Relativity disagrees with you, if I understood it correctly. Can you give me an example of a fact? One where no metter how you change perspective will remain a fact for sure, where everybody will always agree?
I don’t see the relevance of this. Can you elaborate?
No, I can’t guarantee that everybody will always agree with any given fact but that does not change the the validity of said fact. Flat earthers will not agree with an oblate spheroid earth but that does not change the fact that the earth is demonstrably an oblate spheroid.
Relativity states that a fact will be measured differently depending on your speed, among other things (a big mass close by also changes things, for instance). Two observers, one resting, one travelling a 90% of the speed of light, will measure two different values for the lenght of a rod or the weight of a stone, and both will be right in their frame of reference. You cannot say one is right and one is wrong, both are right from their POV (what I called perspective, perhaps a bit simplistically). So perhaps what you consider a fact is not really such for someone else, and I am not talking about fools like flat-earthers.
I use “Believe in” where I don’t have factual knowledge. Nobody claims to believe in the #21 bus line. And frankly, I don’t always trust my own reasons why I believe X or Y. I think the “why” comes afterwards. A post-conclusion rationalization. Beliefs are often emotional in nature, which is inadmissible when discussion belief with rational thinkers.
For more ordinary conjectures, I might be able to state why I believe that it was Neighbor 1 who knocked my plants over even if I didn’t see them do it.
But “Why we believe” applies to beliefs both important and not. And it’s not just a matter of us trying to convince others to change. Others may be trying to get us to change.
If you understand why you believe X, you have some basis for knowing what would make you change that belief, to Not-X, or at least, X+Y.
“I believe that fire is hot because I burned my hand on a fire once. I believe the Bible is true because my mother told me that when I was young.” One belief is much more founded than the other one, and so would be harder to argue against.
If you didn’t mean an individual’s perspective then you shouldn’t have used that term.
Steven Pinker has an interesting discussion on this topic in his latest book, Rationality. He says there are two modes people use when thinking about the world: the reality mindset and the mythology mindset.
We use the reality mindset whenever we deal with stuff that directly affects our lives: Our jobs, our coworkers, our immediate supervisors, our close family, our friends, the bills we need to pay, the stores we visit to get the supplies we need, etc. Very rarely are people irrational about this part of our lives.
We use the mythology mindset whenever we deal with things beyond our direct experience: Distant places, times long gone by, people in much higher or lower positions, remote corridors of power, the cosmic, the microscopic, etc. The word “mythology” in this context should not be taken to mean false. They may be true, we just have no direct experience of it, we have to depend on others and take their word for it.
Pinker argues that for most of humanity it was not important whether beliefs within the mythology mindset were true or false. They didn’t affect you anyway, so it made no difference. The important thing was whether you believed the same thing as people around you, because that marked you as part of the tribe.