I claim that this example generalizes: insofar as Joe’s “fake thinking” vs “real thinking” points to a single coherent distinction, it points to thoughts which represent things in other worlds vs thoughts which represent things in our physical world.
This doesn’t feel quite right to me, or at least is missing something. When I think about Joe’s “fake thinking” vs “real thinking”, the main distinction is about whether you are “actually trying” or “actually care”.
When I was 20, I was well aware of the horrors of factory farming, I would said things like “future generations will look back and consider this among the worst moral crimes in history”. But I still ate factory farmed meat, and I didn’t take any actions that showed I cared. My thinking about factory farming was kind of “academic” or an interesting clever and slightly contrarian view, but it didn’t have any real weight behind it. This is despite me knowing that my thoughts referred to the real world.
I orient very differently to factory farming now. I don’t eat meat, and sometimes when I think about the scale, I feel awful, like I’ve been punched in the gut or that I want to cry, and knowing even then that this reaction isn’t at all sufficient for the actual scale. This feels much more real.
I think that maybe you could use this “fictional” vs “real” framing to say that previously I was thinking about factory farming in a kind of fictional way, and that on some level I didn’t actually believe that my thoughts corresponded to a referent in the real/physical world. But this seems a bit off, given that I did know that these things were in the real world.
It sounds like your gut was thinking of factory farming as living in a fictional world, and as a result your personal planning/behavior operated as though factory farming was in a fictional world. You talked about it the way people talk about e.g. Thanos’ evils in the Marvel movies, but didn’t do the physical things which would directly impact it through the physical world.
And sure, you may have verbally stated that it was in the physical world if asked, but human minds have parts and those parts can believe different things.
This doesn’t feel quite right to me, or at least is missing something. When I think about Joe’s “fake thinking” vs “real thinking”, the main distinction is about whether you are “actually trying” or “actually care”.
When I was 20, I was well aware of the horrors of factory farming, I would said things like “future generations will look back and consider this among the worst moral crimes in history”. But I still ate factory farmed meat, and I didn’t take any actions that showed I cared. My thinking about factory farming was kind of “academic” or an interesting clever and slightly contrarian view, but it didn’t have any real weight behind it. This is despite me knowing that my thoughts referred to the real world.
I orient very differently to factory farming now. I don’t eat meat, and sometimes when I think about the scale, I feel awful, like I’ve been punched in the gut or that I want to cry, and knowing even then that this reaction isn’t at all sufficient for the actual scale. This feels much more real.
I think that maybe you could use this “fictional” vs “real” framing to say that previously I was thinking about factory farming in a kind of fictional way, and that on some level I didn’t actually believe that my thoughts corresponded to a referent in the real/physical world. But this seems a bit off, given that I did know that these things were in the real world.
It sounds like your gut was thinking of factory farming as living in a fictional world, and as a result your personal planning/behavior operated as though factory farming was in a fictional world. You talked about it the way people talk about e.g. Thanos’ evils in the Marvel movies, but didn’t do the physical things which would directly impact it through the physical world.
And sure, you may have verbally stated that it was in the physical world if asked, but human minds have parts and those parts can believe different things.