Maybe. The main counter-argument concerns the side-effects of self-deception. Perhaps believing X will locally help me achieve Y, but perhaps the walls I put up in my mind to maintain my belief in X, in the face of all the not-X data that I am also needing to navigate, will weaken my ability to think, care, and act with my whole mind.
Honestly, this sounds to me like compartmentalization to protect the belief that non-compartmentalism is useful, especially since the empirical evidence (both scientific experimentation and simple observation) is overwhelmingly in favor of instrumental advantages to the over-optimistic.
In any case, anticipating an experience has no truth value. I can anticipate having lunch now, for example; is that true or untrue? What if I have something different for lunch than I currently anticipate? Have I weakened my ability to think/care/act with my whole mind?
Also, if we are really talking about the whole mind, then one must consider the “near” mind as well as the “far” one… and they tend to be in resource competition for instrumental goals. To the extent that you think in a purely symbolic way about your goals, you weaken your motivation to actually do anything about them.
What I’m saying is, decompartmentalization of the “far” mind is all well and good, as is having consistency within the “near” mind, and in general, correlation of the near and far minds’ contents. But there are types of epistemic beliefs that we have scads of scientific evidence to show are empirically dangerous to one’s instrumental output, and should therefore be kept out of “near” anticipation.
The level of mental unity (I prefer this to “decompartmentalization”) that makes it impossible to focus productively on a learnable physical/computational performance task, is fortunately impossible to achieve, or at least easy to temporarily drop.
Honestly, this sounds to me like compartmentalization to protect the belief that non-compartmentalism is useful, especially since the empirical evidence (both scientific experimentation and simple observation) is overwhelmingly in favor of instrumental advantages to the over-optimistic.
In any case, anticipating an experience has no truth value. I can anticipate having lunch now, for example; is that true or untrue? What if I have something different for lunch than I currently anticipate? Have I weakened my ability to think/care/act with my whole mind?
Also, if we are really talking about the whole mind, then one must consider the “near” mind as well as the “far” one… and they tend to be in resource competition for instrumental goals. To the extent that you think in a purely symbolic way about your goals, you weaken your motivation to actually do anything about them.
What I’m saying is, decompartmentalization of the “far” mind is all well and good, as is having consistency within the “near” mind, and in general, correlation of the near and far minds’ contents. But there are types of epistemic beliefs that we have scads of scientific evidence to show are empirically dangerous to one’s instrumental output, and should therefore be kept out of “near” anticipation.
The level of mental unity (I prefer this to “decompartmentalization”) that makes it impossible to focus productively on a learnable physical/computational performance task, is fortunately impossible to achieve, or at least easy to temporarily drop.