By beliefs, I am not, strictly speaking, referring to religious beliefs. Rather, I am thinking about things like conspiracy theories, belief that obesity is completely the fault of Big Soda, belief in homeopathy, etc. In my admittedly limited experience, adherents seem to feel attacked personally when these beliefs are challenged. With religion, I understand it a little better because one’s identity is often bound up in his or her family’s and/or community’s religious practices.
Thanks,
Rob
Most people are human. The population of Vulcans resident on Earth is quite low, and that of androids even lower.
Cite? And define ‘low’.
Hold on while I shoot Tuvok and B-4 in the face. Faces.
:: commits usual brutal murders ::
My post is my cite. There are no 0 Vulcans on Earth and negative 13 androids.
(Checks forum.) Wow, and I get mod-smacked for making snarky comments thirty posts in…
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Skald has it right, if brief and then undercut. People are human, and being human means each of us constructs his or her own world-view, which then becomes a major element of our personality and lives. Vulcans and droids aside, I suppose there are people who have such a rigid grip on reality that there’s no aspect of it you could bother them by questioning. But for most of us, what we choose to believe becomes part of us, so if you question a person’s beliefs - religious, political or woovian - it becomes a questioning of the self.
If you deeply believe in, say, Christianity, a rejection of your religious tenets means you either question the tenets yourself (which can be disturbing) or you question/reject the person asking. The latter is much easier, even when it’s something as trivial as your selection of breakfast cereal.
For things that are almost certainly unsupportable, it becomes an us-v-them mindset and the us’s band together for protection, reinforcing the beliefs about UFOs or woo medicine or black helicopters or whatever.
The poor teaching of critical thinking in the last few decades has only magnified the tendencies to find a ‘truth’ and cling to it against all doubts and questions.
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Whereas prior to that it was much better, and most people were really good at critical thinking ??
No, but the world got a lot more complex and the number of entities manipulating the average person’s thinking went way up.
Being able to analyze, reason and think skeptically has gone from a useful tool set for a scientist, researcher or professional to a life skill.
Being right about something is rewarding. This is built into us by natural selection. (Those who don’t care whether they’re right or wrong tend not to reproduce.) This means that the feeling of being right is pleasant. Conversely, any suggestion that we are not right produces a feeling of unpleasantness, a drive state that we are motivated to reduce one way or another.
I, to a large extent, AM my beliefs (with a helping of past choices thrown in).
Define yourself:
Odds are, once past sex, race, and age (I’ll give you nationality, although that is often part of core personality).
You start using words to describe your political, religious, sexual, and philosophical positions.
Those characteristics are central to your self-definition.
Attack my core definitions, and you are attacking me. That is why we are taught to never discuss religion or politics - too central to our cores.
We can discuss favorite movies, and preferred gardening techniques - those are throw-away beliefs we are likely to change several times during our lives.
Those things we picked up as children are off-limits.
I think this has a lot to do with the western belief / thought system started by the three Greek Dudes - Socrates/Aristotle/Plato. It is the search of or belief in one truth that explains the situation to the exclusion of other beliefs and truths.
In many eastern philosophies - perception/perspective is given higher priority and it is very well accepted that someone else can have a different perspective / interpretation that jives with them and are equally valid.
For example : The Vedas in Hinduism question the very existence of God and the properties of such a God and terms it UNKNOWABLE. Then it goes on to provide various interpretations of what some may believe as god.
It’s deeply ingrained in our instincts to look for patterns and then feel happy when we see evidence that our pattern is correct. Most of the time, that instinct increases our survival rate. Of course, it’s not a perfect system. Sometimes it leads you to stubbornly believing in things that aren’t true, if the evidence is split, some that fits your pattern and some that doesn’t.
I remember reading a book by Victor Frankl “Man’s Search For Meaning”. After detailing his time in a WWII concentration death camp, he tears apart Freud’s fantasy about sex motivating human behaviour. He posits a different and more logical explation why people act and think the way t hey do.
People search for meaning in life. In order to do so, they construct internally a logical framework of how the world works, as they perceive it. They become invested in this framework, and it is what gives their life “meaning”. As a result, they have difficulty dealing with situations or even facts that contradict their world view. Hence, people who believe the world works because of behind-the-scenes grand conspiracies, or religious beliefs, or in the power of the working class, will become very emotional or go into denial or exhibit other irrational behaviours when confronted with situations that contradict their view of the world - because they would have to fundamentally alter their mindset to accept the new data.
That fundamental change is never easy. For example, if you think the world is mechanical/rational, and someone presents you with evidence of yogis levitating or mind-reading… your first thought is - “it’s a lie or a magician trick, it’s not real.”
As to why someone would take conspiracy theories so seriously? They see it as a rational explanation in their mind as to why the world works the way it does. Humans always look for explanations, even when there is none; we look for patterns in random noise. We see faces in the random shadows in the dark. Explanations are more comforting than random, sometimes.
When you have to defend your beliefs, they become stronger and reinforces them. If you don’t have to defend them, they are less emotionally entrenched.
e.g. I believe that the car I bought is a great value. I have never been challenged on this, nor have I entered into a discussion where this has come up. If someone raised the issue to me that maybe another vehicle would have been a better value, I might believe them, as I haven’t really vested myself in the value of my car.
OTOH, (hypothetical) my alma mater didn’t make the college football playoff and I think they got screwed. I have watched them play all season and I think they deserved to get in, despite what media pundits have said. I am very emotionally invested in this position, because I have defended it for days, neigh weeks, now.
I think part of it is that when you’ve made major past decisions according to those beliefs, you feel you must defend them to the death.
When your parents die, if you don’t have them cryopreserved and let them rot in the ground because you believe they are now with Jesus, if someone challenges your beliefs and points out your parents are in fact dead forever, and that you should save yourself by being cryopreserved, abandoning your beliefs means acknowledging your error.
Note I’m using cryopreservation as an example only because it makes the chance of surviving death non-zero. The scientifically accepted answer is that death is absolute and utter oblivion, many scientists are skeptical that cryopreservation could work but the chance is greater than a perfect zero.
I’m also using this as an example because if human beings were rational actors, they would be spending large fractions of their total production - several percent of GDP - developing methods to preserve or scan human brains in order to defeat death. Even if there’s a significant chance that the research will never succeed over 1000 years, it’s still a better use of resources (because we don’t *know *it won’t succeed, there’s a chance breakthroughs are made) than wasting them on medical care that never will succeed in more than delaying death by diminishingly small gains.
My only rational explanation for this bizarre, inexplicable behavior is that humans are shitty decision makers and many of them, even atheists, are actually quietly clinging to ideas and beliefs originally from religion.
I think a lot of poorer, lower on the socioeconomic ladder people tend to believe in conspiracy theories. It is a reaction to the theories of a large part of the population that the poor/lower SE people are entirely responsible for their lot in life. It fulfills their desire to creat a world (albeit only in their mind) in which they are worthwhile human beings.
I think this thread is going to be a glorification of current ideas about rationality and science and an exercise in condescension toward human beings who appear to come to conclusions differently.
“Beliefs” are simply what what a person uses to explain the world. For example, “love” is a word humans use to describe some thoughts plus some physical feelings, both of which may be dissected down into molecules. We believe that we love certain people. But rationally, is there a basis for such a belief?
The OP is shooting fish in a barrel, picking some shallow beliefs that are easy to show do not have a lot of justification. But there is no true dichotomy between these and any others.
If one had no emotional attachment to one’s beliefs, one would have no emotional attachments. How amusingly sociopathic that would be.
That’s my belief and I’m sticking to it.
Another rational explanation is that this is a decision based on a number of subjective values:
-the value of living my current life with ample funds
-the value of living my current life with a dearth of funds (because of efforts to develop brain preservation technology)
-the value (to me) of contributing to the advent of successful brain preservation tech 1000+ years from now
Even if we suppose there is a non-zero chance of developing the technology within my lifetime (thus enabling my own immortality), the decision requires a subjective assessment of the probability of successess, and a subjective valuation of just how undesirable it is to be dead.
One need not harbor belief in an afterlife in order to say “I’d prefer to enjoy the here-and-now rather than give massive amounts of my wealth to an endeavor that will probably not succeed at developing immortality in the foreseeable future.”
maybe their beliefs come from emotion in the first place, as opposed to reason
Yeah, but the value of potentially extending your life to thousands of years should be a huge number. Even if the chance of it actually happening is low, it’s a lot better than having no chance whatsoever.
You’re right, though. Perceived value may be the problem here and less so religious memes. Most people are ignorant of concepts like “information theoretic death” and other criteria that make this problem a lot less impossible than it sounds. See, in order for you to be revivable, it only needs to be possible to reconstruct most of your neural states with a perfect, atom by atom scan of your entire preserved brain.
Furthermore, there’s varying states between “perfect revival” and “vegetable”. Even the laziest freezing of a person’s brain after wrecking it with embalming chemicals still probably leaves some recoverable data about your personality and memories. Future science probably couldn’t bring you back as you were but they could get something out of your corpse.
So this problem is a lot more tractable than most people realize. If billions of dollars were put into improving the technology, it would probably be possible to freeze brains using such high quality means that the finest atomic level details were preserved, and that the neurons themselves could be reheated in small samples and they would return to viable life.
Actually getting to working emulations of once living humans on artificial substrates might take trillions, sure, but once people are no longer dying, you can afford to take your time with the research.
That argument approaches (but does not equal) the Slacker Superhero threads in absurdity.
Death is the final emperor, because entropy always wins. Nothing mortals can do is going to change that. Your cryoperservation thing isn’t about being a rational actor; it’s about having a frankly neurotic fear of death and oblivion.
My mother died eight years ago. She probably isn’t “rotting” in the ground yet, as I was outvoted by my siblings and father in acceding to the funeral directors’ scammish suggestion of a steel vault inside an over-ornamented coffin. But I had more control about the disposition of my son’s remains a decade earlier, so he was placed in an ordinary pine box that, along with his body, has hopefully been largely reclaimed by the earth at this point. But I’d not call that rotting; it is recycling. He has become part of the soil around him, the grass and flowers growing n that soil, the birds and small animals that feed on the vegetation, et cetera. I don’t believe either of them are with Jesus or that I’ll see them again outside my dreams, but while that is sad, it is better than the pretense that some technological advance could restore them and me to anything approaching human form.
You talk of spending several percentage points of GDP on cryoperservation research. Taking several to mean about five, that’d come to something like 840 billion smackers for the U.S. Money like that is far better spent on basic medical research, trying to cure diseases like diabetes and leukemia and Taye-Sachs. No, curing those won’t cure death–but it will delay it for individuals, and reduce suffering overall, and those, I’d say, are the true purposes of medicine. Hell, that money would be better sent on the arts, on football, on Bernadette Peters albums, because more of any of that would increase joy. That’s all any of us can hope for: less suffering and more joy.