Spinoza’s view seems on the face of it much more likely than Descartes’s, because it is much easier to implement. Anyone who has programmed knows that the easiest way to write a program to deal with an input is just to accept it, and that a check can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, how is one to understand a sentence without at least modeling the belief that the sentence is intended to elicit, so that one might at least understand what it means (the sentence itself is merely a character/phoneme string and so does not yield meaning intrinsically), and the obvious and readily available way to model such a belief is to actually enter it. Much easier simply to enter into that actual brain state associated with the belief and add maybe a flag to mark it as nonserious, than to enter into a wholly different state. We may infer from child studies that the higher order skill of contemplating a belief without holding it is not immediately acquired, for it is only at age 4 or so (I think) that a child is able to understand that others have beliefs that differ from reality.
Spinoza’s view seems on the face of it much more likely than Descartes’s, because it is much easier to implement. Anyone who has programmed knows that the easiest way to write a program to deal with an input is just to accept it, and that a check can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, how is one to understand a sentence without at least modeling the belief that the sentence is intended to elicit, so that one might at least understand what it means (the sentence itself is merely a character/phoneme string and so does not yield meaning intrinsically), and the obvious and readily available way to model such a belief is to actually enter it. Much easier simply to enter into that actual brain state associated with the belief and add maybe a flag to mark it as nonserious, than to enter into a wholly different state. We may infer from child studies that the higher order skill of contemplating a belief without holding it is not immediately acquired, for it is only at age 4 or so (I think) that a child is able to understand that others have beliefs that differ from reality.
Sure, you have to catch the baseball, but that doesn’t mean you have to eat the baseball