the collection of my beliefs..are false?

Mick · **#21** by **Mick** » Jan 11, 2012 6:02 pm

Zwaarddijk wrote:
Mick wrote:
VazScep wrote:Therefore: P(B1 & B2 & B3 & ... & B100) is roughly 0.00002656. The confidence in the conjunction of all your beliefs is very low indeed.

I find this rather droll. We'd be all walking around knowing that our worldviews are improbable, or at least that we'd lack confidence in them.

Why is that droll?

Partially because we think of our worldviews as true. They are our worldviews. They're what we think of the world-what is true of the world.

Paul G · **#22** by **Paul G** » Jan 11, 2012 7:28 pm

Mick wrote:
VazScep wrote:Therefore: P(B1 & B2 & B3 & ... & B100) is roughly 0.00002656. The confidence in the conjunction of all your beliefs is very low indeed.

I find this rather droll. We'd be all walking around knowing that our worldviews are improbable, or at least that we'd lack confidence in them.

No, you would. The rest of us would be fine.

ED209 · **#23** by **ED209** » Jan 11, 2012 7:52 pm

Indeed. If you hold beliefs without admitting any possibility of being wrong then multiplying probabilities does not work. Fortunately this describes only a very few theists and political party hacks.

The_Metatron · **#24** by **The_Metatron** » Jan 11, 2012 9:45 pm

logical bob wrote:Hey. Mick's come to the philosophy forum and raised a philosophical question without any reference to his religion. In what way does it help to follow him around calling his beliefs bullshit when that isn't what this thread is about?

Not what I did. It's his apparent lack of ability to detect said bullshit is what I highlighted.

Beatsong · **#25** by **Beatsong** » Jan 11, 2012 10:10 pm

And in answer to the OP...

Most certainly not. "The collection of my beliefs... IS false."

palindnilap · **#26** by **palindnilap** » Jan 12, 2012 2:22 pm

VazScep is right. The fallacy lies in assigning a 100% certainty to things that one should estimate at, say, 99% certainty. The brain does that all the time, it must have been adaptive in speeding up decisions. But when one uses propositional logic about near-certainties, one easily gets contradictions. That is why propositional logic is a bit overrated in its applications to the real world.

To illustrate the cognitive illusion, I know first-hand that some experienced backgammon players with a shaky grasp of probabilities do bad mistakes on that basis. For instance, option A gives you a 5% chance of winning the game by racing, while option B leads to a completely different game and gives you a 2% chance of winning the game by catching an opponent checker. Almost half of them will confidently play B because A is "hopeless anyway". Of course the same argument also shows that they should play A because B is "hopeless anyway". The only way around it is to use numbers instead of intuitions about certainties.

For the record, I also believe that the cognitive illusion that we can ever get a 100% certainty over what game theorists call "common knowledge of rationality" lies behind the paradox of the iterated prisoner's dilemma. But there is a 1% chance that it is a wrong belief. :grin:

SpeedOfSound · **#27** by **SpeedOfSound** » Jan 13, 2012 11:43 am

Mick wrote:
Zwaarddijk wrote:
Mick wrote:
VazScep wrote:Therefore: P(B1 & B2 & B3 & ... & B100) is roughly 0.00002656. The confidence in the conjunction of all your beliefs is very low indeed.

I find this rather droll. We'd be all walking around knowing that our worldviews are improbable, or at least that we'd lack confidence in them.

Why is that droll?

Partially because we think of our worldviews as true. They are our worldviews. They're what we think of the world-what is true of the world.

It is not necessary to even have a world view let alone one that is certain. Have you practiced hitting at baseball? You stand there and enter a state where you will swing at something you cannot be completely conscious of with expectations of a highly uncertain outcome. If you do this right, you hit better.

Sounds like you may be a religious guy. I am not. But this wisdom of uncertainty, this process of just 'being' at bat is what I call faith.

NilsGLindgren · **#28** by **NilsGLindgren** » Jan 13, 2012 11:53 am

Mick wrote:
VazScep wrote:Therefore: P(B1 & B2 & B3 & ... & B100) is roughly 0.00002656. The confidence in the conjunction of all your beliefs is very low indeed.

I find this rather droll. We'd be all walking around knowing that our worldviews are improbable, or at least that we'd lack confidence in them.

I have made a related statement earlier, I find it quite comforting:
1. Complete knowledge of world impossible.
2. Hence, comprehensive world view impossible.
3. Any existing world view therefore inherently flawed.
... admittedly, it serves as a reason to have a beer ...

Chrisw · **#29** by **Chrisw** » Jan 13, 2012 8:03 pm

A "worldview" is something a bit more specific than the mere colection of all my beliefs. Worldviews consist of a small set of interlocking beliefs, a system of belief that has a high degree of coherence and about which one usually feels pretty confident. Many of us have a number (possibly overlapping) worldviews. I'd admit to naturalism and political liberalism.

But the collection that is the sum total of my beliefs is vastly larger than any worldview and contains huge numbers of half-remembered, half-understood facts, many of which may not have crossed my conscious mind for years. I don't necessarily have a great deal of confidence about that mass (mess?) of information, in fact I wouldn't waste my time defending it as a whole. It's not any kind of a whole, not one thing, not a system or a theory, just lots of loosely connected (or unconnected) stuff.

If I felt committed to defending all my beliefs equally I'd never be able to learn anything new.

NilsGLindgren · **#30** by **NilsGLindgren** » Jan 13, 2012 8:28 pm

I think it stands to reason I would never defend all my opinions/beliefs/prejudices equally. I would, however, be wary of anyone claiming absolute certainty on anything except what was truistically true.

Mr.Samsa · **#31** by **Mr.Samsa** » Jan 15, 2012 6:27 am

Mick wrote:
VazScep wrote:Therefore: P(B1 & B2 & B3 & ... & B100) is roughly 0.00002656. The confidence in the conjunction of all your beliefs is very low indeed.

I find this rather droll. We'd be all walking around knowing that our worldviews are improbable, or at least that we'd lack confidence in them.

I don't think this leads us to believe that our worldviews are improbable, it leads us to believe that the totality of every belief we have being true is improbable. It could be that my belief that I had toast this morning for breakfast was false, and every single other belief I have is true. The important thing is not whether every single thing we've ever believed is true, but whether there is a reasonable probability that the important life-shaping aspects of our lives could be true.

To put it more simply, suppose you ask me to list how old I think all of the people I work with are. The ones I'm close with I might have an exact age, the ones I've talked to I'd have a decent guess, and the ones I don't know I might have a weaker guess. When we analyse whether the totality of my guesses are true or not, we would inevitably find that the totality is false (using your dichotomous approach to truth), or we'd find that the truth would be improbable (using Vazscep's approach). Does this mean that I might accidentally ask the 15 year old about his kids, or invite the 80 year old out clubbing in the weekend? Of course not.

Mick · **#32** by **Mick** » Jan 19, 2012 4:28 am

Suppose we have an infinite amount of beliefs: I believe P, P&P, P&P&P, P&P&P&P, etc. Could I have a conjunctive collection of my beliefs?

SpeedOfSound · **#33** by **SpeedOfSound** » Jan 19, 2012 4:57 am

Mick wrote:Suppose we have an infinite amount of beliefs: I believe P, P&P, P&P&P, P&P&P&P, etc. Could I have a conjunctive collection of my beliefs?

Not really.

SpeedOfSound · **#34** by **SpeedOfSound** » Jan 19, 2012 5:10 am

If you consider all of your beliefs what form would this consideration take? That your mind is a bucket with discrete beliefs stored in it somewhere somehow? Would you take them out and list them in a notebook?

I don't think there are beliefs in your mind. You have disposition to beliefs under certain conditions. The belief is generated by disposition and context. The generation of any one belief into consciousness probably changes both the context and the disposition.

So it's more dynamic then we think.

advaitya · **#35** by **advaitya** » Jan 19, 2012 6:04 am

SpeedOfSound wrote:If you consider all of your beliefs what form would this consideration take? That your mind is a bucket with discrete beliefs stored in it somewhere somehow? Would you take them out and list them in a notebook?

To take it a step further, not all beliefs are alike. There are testable beliefs and those that don't lend themselves to scrutiny. For the purposes of this thread, where we determine the truth value of beliefs, we can safely ignore the latter class. For a rational person, his set of such testable beliefs is never absolute. It's conditional and provisional - it changes and updates itself in the face of new evidence.

The latter class is the tricky one. By their very nature, they allow even rational beings to adopt an absolutist stance.

sennekuyl · **#36** by **sennekuyl** » Jan 19, 2012 10:21 am

Mick wrote:
Zwaarddijk wrote:
Mick wrote:
VazScep wrote:Therefore: P(B1 & B2 & B3 & ... & B100) is roughly 0.00002656. The confidence in the conjunction of all your beliefs is very low indeed.

I find this rather droll. We'd be all walking around knowing that our worldviews are improbable, or at least that we'd lack confidence in them.

Why is that droll?

Partially because we think of our worldviews as true. They are our worldviews. They're what we think of the world-what is true of the world.

Couldn't we perceive our worldview to be the best way we know how to think about the world without expecting any particular aspect to be necessarily true? Pessimistic, I agree, but I'd rather be pessimistically almost right than obliviously wrong.

For instance, holding of ideological stances may drop off as one learns more about that field, but one might still hold on to the hope that process is uncovered that sustains a kernel of the original intent. I used to be anarchist-esque in my perceptions of government and economics. As I grew up I realised the ideas might be suitable for an individual but as a society because of the way humans interact were unable to maintain coherency. So I personally work from the idea that governments should have the minimum control over individuals that is capable of sustaining minimal damage to society. I no longer oppose all governmental control but am wary of both too much and too little regulation. I don't believe my beliefs are necessarily true, but I don't know how to better society while balancing individual vs societal responsibilities.

I realise I haven't said this the above the best it could be said, but it is the best I know how.

Yeah, I'm a bundle of laughs.

sennekuyl · **#37** by **sennekuyl** » Jan 19, 2012 10:40 am

Well. Scrap what I said, Mr Samsa said it much better. :sigh:

andrewk · **#38** by **andrewk** » Feb 06, 2012 9:53 am

Mick wrote:But each belief is true if and only if the conjunction of those beliefs is true.
Hmmm.

That's why you need to go fuzzy Mick, which was what I did when you pointed out to me in this thread that the type of worldview I was describing sounded like a fuzzy set - an observation for which I am very grateful by the way :cheers:

.
In a fuzzy worldview, if you hold 1000 beliefs, in each of which you have 99.9% confidence, you will only have about a 0.36 confidence that they are all correct, assuming a multiplicative rule for conjunction. So there is no inconsistency.

Edit: Oh Bother, I just realised VazScep already said this.

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