Now you get it! That was one of the shorter paths to enlightenment I’ve seen.
Sadly, just because it’s a non-objective set of personal and societal beliefs, does NOT mean we can easily decide otherwise. There’s something like momentum in human cognition that makes changes of this sort very slow. These things are very sticky, and often only change significantly by individual replacement over generations, not considered decisions within individuals (though there’s some of that, too, especially in youth).
In addition to the stickiness of institutional beliefs, I would add that individually agents cannot decide against their own objective functions (except merely verbally). In the case of humans, we cannot decide what qualities our phenomenal experience will have; it is a fact of the matter rather than an opinion that suffering is undesirable for oneself, etc.. One can verbally pronounce that “I don’t care about my suffering”, but the phenomenal experience of badness will in fact remain.
Now you get it! That was one of the shorter paths to enlightenment I’ve seen.
Sadly, just because it’s a non-objective set of personal and societal beliefs, does NOT mean we can easily decide otherwise. There’s something like momentum in human cognition that makes changes of this sort very slow. These things are very sticky, and often only change significantly by individual replacement over generations, not considered decisions within individuals (though there’s some of that, too, especially in youth).
In addition to the stickiness of institutional beliefs, I would add that individually agents cannot decide against their own objective functions (except merely verbally). In the case of humans, we cannot decide what qualities our phenomenal experience will have; it is a fact of the matter rather than an opinion that suffering is undesirable for oneself, etc.. One can verbally pronounce that “I don’t care about my suffering”, but the phenomenal experience of badness will in fact remain.