“Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.”
Have you talked to any religious people lately? “Oh, the tornado ripped my neighbors house off the foundations, but we were spared. I guess God was looking out for us!”
Could anyone say that without willfully blinding themselves? Do they really think they are better people than their neighbors, and that God moved the tornado away from their house? Yet you hear stuff like this all the time. And I think they really believe it.
The ability to delude ourselves seems to be one of our main survival traits. Rational people would never take the stupid chances that result in progress. Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets.
One can have two pictures in a room: one of a man leaping into a sure-death trap labeled 3/4/11, the other of the same man sitting with his family labeled 3/5/11. The picture is not the thing itself and so unless one attempts to force homogeneity on the depictions there will be no laws of reality wrathfully reaching out and destroying one of the photos.
Have you ever used Prolog? It is easy to tell a program (or a mind) conflicting information. Once something is recorded, it is ‘believed,’ because no matter what, that data exists on it’s own as a subset of whatever it was recorded with and thoughts regarding that information and so on.
I mean to say that I struggle with this article at an even more fundamental level than counter-evidence on this point. I tend towards disbelief that anyone can wholly believe anything. Isn’t it just that given the associations in their brains they ‘tend’ to think of a particular set of data first, or that if they do recall the other set of data first there is a good chance they will also recall the association of that data with determinations about its falsification?
If I am correct, perhaps things which we determine are important to us should be carefully re-iterated to ourselves. Furthermore, there may be a great deal of potential for people described as ‘irrational’ to act rational when it suits them if a need inspires a different pattern of thought than their norm.
“Leaving the morality aside, I doubt such a lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen.”
Have you talked to any religious people lately? “Oh, the tornado ripped my neighbors house off the foundations, but we were spared. I guess God was looking out for us!”
Could anyone say that without willfully blinding themselves? Do they really think they are better people than their neighbors, and that God moved the tornado away from their house? Yet you hear stuff like this all the time. And I think they really believe it.
The ability to delude ourselves seems to be one of our main survival traits. Rational people would never take the stupid chances that result in progress. Evolution has favored a species that buys lottery tickets.
One can have two pictures in a room: one of a man leaping into a sure-death trap labeled 3/4/11, the other of the same man sitting with his family labeled 3/5/11. The picture is not the thing itself and so unless one attempts to force homogeneity on the depictions there will be no laws of reality wrathfully reaching out and destroying one of the photos.
Have you ever used Prolog? It is easy to tell a program (or a mind) conflicting information. Once something is recorded, it is ‘believed,’ because no matter what, that data exists on it’s own as a subset of whatever it was recorded with and thoughts regarding that information and so on.
I mean to say that I struggle with this article at an even more fundamental level than counter-evidence on this point. I tend towards disbelief that anyone can wholly believe anything. Isn’t it just that given the associations in their brains they ‘tend’ to think of a particular set of data first, or that if they do recall the other set of data first there is a good chance they will also recall the association of that data with determinations about its falsification?
If I am correct, perhaps things which we determine are important to us should be carefully re-iterated to ourselves. Furthermore, there may be a great deal of potential for people described as ‘irrational’ to act rational when it suits them if a need inspires a different pattern of thought than their norm.