In many cases, a person doesn’t feel anything in their body for an alief. An alief is likely going to trigger a felt sense, but it’s useful to have different concepts for both to talk clearly.
I would not distinguish aliefs in the chest vs. aliefs in the abdomen but those categories make sense for felt senses.
Huh, pretty surprised that you agreed readily to that – I think the connotations of alief and felt sense are pretty different. (I think of “aliefs” as still fairly “propositional”, i.e. “I don’t belief my dad hates me, but apparently I alieve it.” Where felt senses include things that are sort-of-propositional but also things that don’t really have a clearcut meaning at all. Looking at your own post on The Felt Sense where you introduce it with the difference between the steampunk and forest artwork, the difference I get looking at each of them is very subtle and pretty unlike a lot of other experiences I have. It felt more to me like a sense-in-terms of “5 senses” than “meaning.”)
Hmm, maybe I’m just so used to thinking in terms of felt senses that I interpret all aliefs as being felt senses? :) E.g. when I hear the word “alief”, I usually think of Scott Alexander’s haunted house story, as well as these examples from Wikipedia:
For example, a person standing on a transparent balcony may believe that they are safe, but alieve that they are in danger. A person watching a sad movie may believe that the characters are completely fictional, but their aliefs may lead them to cry nonetheless. A person who is hesitant to eat fudge that has been formed into the shape of feces, or who exhibits reluctance in drinking from a sterilized bedpan may believe that the substances are safe to eat and drink, but may alieve that they are not.
And all of these aliefs feel like they would have distinct felt senses associated with them, e.g. if you cry at a sad movie because one of the characters died or lost something important to them, you probably have some kind of a felt sense of loss. If you’re afraid or disgusted, you have felt senses corresponding to both the general emotion as well as the more specific anticipation. It feels a little hard for me to imagine an alief that wouldn’t have a felt sense associated with it.
Though you could argue that while an alief implies a felt sense, a felt sense doesn’t necessarily imply an alief, and that steampunk vs. forest pictures differ in their felt senses but not their aliefs. I guess that depends on how exactly we’re defining an alief. I’m thinking of it as something like “a belief embedded in an implicit predictive model of the world”.
In that frame, the felt senses evoked by different kinds of pictures reflect unconscious beliefs about what kinds of things are associated with the specific things in the pictures E.g. there was relatively little specifically Victorian in the steampunk pictures, but that was a word that popped to my mind anyway when trying to describe the vibe in them, because of the more general steampunk <-> Victorian association. Aesthetics such as “steampunk” also seem to encode more complicated belief networks and predictions, as you’ve argued yourself. :)
There’s also the consideration that aliefs seem to activate not just beliefs, but also behavioral dispositions. E.g. if you’re standing on a transparent balcony or spending the night in a mansion that’s supposedly haunted, your aliefs may activate flight-type responses. (That was the most top-voted response to Scott’s haunted mansion post: that it’s less about there being a secret belief about the mansion really being haunted, and more about the mind being semi-hardwired to activate fear responses when you’re alone at night in an unfamiliar place with lots of weird sounds.) I think some of the more subtler changes you’re referencing to are something like changing activation levels in subsystems responsible for behavioral dispositions. E.g. looking from the steampunk pictures to the forest ones may cause the predominant input to be registered as “more safe”, which slightly downgrades the priority of systems with an objective of making yourself small in order to hide from threats, which may be subjectively experienced as a subtle sense of the mind opening up. And I think of those kinds of changes in behavioral dispositions as being driven by predictions (e.g. an environment being safe vs. unsafe) made on an alief level.
Okay, I guess the issue was I never actually had a clear definition of alief. But usually when I hear some say alief it’s in the context of ‘I alieve X’, where x is something propositional.
A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively-linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated – consciously or nonconsciously – by features of the subject’s internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurrent or dispositional.
… alief – so-called because alief is associative, action-generating, affect-laden, arational, automatic, agnostic with respect to its content, shared with animals, and developmentally
and conceptually antecedent to other cognitive attitudes[18].
So… “alief”?
In many cases, a person doesn’t feel anything in their body for an alief. An alief is likely going to trigger a felt sense, but it’s useful to have different concepts for both to talk clearly.
I would not distinguish aliefs in the chest vs. aliefs in the abdomen but those categories make sense for felt senses.
That seems right to me.
Huh, pretty surprised that you agreed readily to that – I think the connotations of alief and felt sense are pretty different. (I think of “aliefs” as still fairly “propositional”, i.e. “I don’t belief my dad hates me, but apparently I alieve it.” Where felt senses include things that are sort-of-propositional but also things that don’t really have a clearcut meaning at all. Looking at your own post on The Felt Sense where you introduce it with the difference between the steampunk and forest artwork, the difference I get looking at each of them is very subtle and pretty unlike a lot of other experiences I have. It felt more to me like a sense-in-terms of “5 senses” than “meaning.”)
Hmm, maybe I’m just so used to thinking in terms of felt senses that I interpret all aliefs as being felt senses? :) E.g. when I hear the word “alief”, I usually think of Scott Alexander’s haunted house story, as well as these examples from Wikipedia:
And all of these aliefs feel like they would have distinct felt senses associated with them, e.g. if you cry at a sad movie because one of the characters died or lost something important to them, you probably have some kind of a felt sense of loss. If you’re afraid or disgusted, you have felt senses corresponding to both the general emotion as well as the more specific anticipation. It feels a little hard for me to imagine an alief that wouldn’t have a felt sense associated with it.
Though you could argue that while an alief implies a felt sense, a felt sense doesn’t necessarily imply an alief, and that steampunk vs. forest pictures differ in their felt senses but not their aliefs. I guess that depends on how exactly we’re defining an alief. I’m thinking of it as something like “a belief embedded in an implicit predictive model of the world”.
In that frame, the felt senses evoked by different kinds of pictures reflect unconscious beliefs about what kinds of things are associated with the specific things in the pictures E.g. there was relatively little specifically Victorian in the steampunk pictures, but that was a word that popped to my mind anyway when trying to describe the vibe in them, because of the more general steampunk <-> Victorian association. Aesthetics such as “steampunk” also seem to encode more complicated belief networks and predictions, as you’ve argued yourself. :)
There’s also the consideration that aliefs seem to activate not just beliefs, but also behavioral dispositions. E.g. if you’re standing on a transparent balcony or spending the night in a mansion that’s supposedly haunted, your aliefs may activate flight-type responses. (That was the most top-voted response to Scott’s haunted mansion post: that it’s less about there being a secret belief about the mansion really being haunted, and more about the mind being semi-hardwired to activate fear responses when you’re alone at night in an unfamiliar place with lots of weird sounds.) I think some of the more subtler changes you’re referencing to are something like changing activation levels in subsystems responsible for behavioral dispositions. E.g. looking from the steampunk pictures to the forest ones may cause the predominant input to be registered as “more safe”, which slightly downgrades the priority of systems with an objective of making yourself small in order to hide from threats, which may be subjectively experienced as a subtle sense of the mind opening up. And I think of those kinds of changes in behavioral dispositions as being driven by predictions (e.g. an environment being safe vs. unsafe) made on an alief level.
Okay, I guess the issue was I never actually had a clear definition of alief. But usually when I hear some say alief it’s in the context of ‘I alieve X’, where x is something propositional.
“Alief and Belief” (Gendler 2007) [PDF]