Yeah, and that’s why realists who believe in an objective reality are stupid. They won’t admit they’re wrong no matter how much evidence is stacked against them.
I honestly don’t even think I get your position here. Do you somehow not believe that you live in some kind of objective reality together with the rest of us? Do you think this is all just going on in your head? Like… is this some kind of far-out simulation theory thing? Even if we do live in a simulation, that simulation itself must exist in some kind of “real world”.
Your perceptions are influenced by your beliefs, and your beliefs are influenced by your culture. So if someone can buy control of our cultural media, they can control reality for the general population. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. The owning class have literally constrained our ability to imagine and perceive a fair and just world. For example, they spent centuries silencing queer people, and as a result, most people became literally incapable of perceiving a nonbinary person. When they looked at someone like Me, they would see a man or a woman instead. Their foundational perception was and is distorted.
For a revolution against the owning class to be successful, we need not just to destroy the state apparati of physical control, but also of mental control. We need to destroy the belief in a capitalist cisheteropatriarchal reality. https://soulism.net
That doesn’t even remotely answer my question though? My impression was that you have some kind of belief that an objective reality doesn’t exist in the first place, and that just doesn’t make any kind of sense to me.
The belief in an objective reality is a prerequisite to the owning class’s control of reality. People let the media tell them what to believe, because they want to believe in objective reality. They don’t want to actively participate in creating their own subjective world.
And that’s exactly why the belief in an objective reality is a dangerous and corrupting technology. We shouldn’t leave such a powerful tool for control lying around where evil people can get their hands on it. We need to raise the next generation believing that the universe is subjective in nature, armed with the knowledge of all the horrible atrocities that realists have committed throughout history. The crusades. The slave trade. The stolen generations. The holocaust. All motivated by the belief in an objective reality, with objective reasons to oppress the weak. Realism is an evil technology.
What you’re saying makes no sense… you drawing an equivalence from the existence of an objective reality to some people controlling how that reality is perceived. If anything, you gotten it all flipped around: If reality is subjective (which itself is absurd) then any interpretation of it is equally valid. In that case, anyone is free to believe in their own reality, regardless of the objective facts that prove them wrong. This is basically what’s going on with the MAGA movement: A bunch of people deciding that “reality is what I want it to be”, and acting based on “alternative facts” in complete disregard for the objective, observable, facts around them.
The MAGA people are realists. They believe that they are thinking and acting in alignment with objective reality. You and I can think they’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t realists. When it comes to the question of objective reality, they’re on your side, not Mine. They don’t think their perceptions are subjective. They don’t think gender and race are social constructs. They don’t take responsibility for their perceptions like I do.
You’re making the mistake of conflating being wrong with being a subjectivist. Have a serious think, you believe they think gender is a subjective social construct? Not a chance!
Sure, why not? Here, https://multiverse.soulism.net/post/67924/comment/535398. This Lemmy user said if you believe in gods, you think you’re right and others are wrong, and that leads to a dogmatic mindset. Now, reality obviously has all the same qualities as a god in this context, so although I don’t personally believe religion leads to dogma, I’m happy to cite you at yourself and ask that you take your own advice and believe in no absolute truth.
believing you are right is requisite to belief. acknowledgement that you might be wrong, in the existence of doubt, that’s maturity but it does not preclude the belief that you are right.
I think you’ve just talked yourself into a circle. You can’t both believe something and doubt it. Doubt is the opposite of belief.
What you’re talking about is possibly belief in belief. That’s the belief that you should believe, or belief that you do believe. That is not the same as actual belief.
If your bar for believing something is that you’re 100% certain that it is true (i.e., a complete lack of doubt), then you’ve rendered the whole concept of belief useless as there is no proposition this applies to.
Me, if I see a cat sitting on a mat, I will believe there is a cat on the mat. But it might be that it’s a capybara wearing an incredibly convincing cat costume. Very low odds, but the possibility is there. It could also be that I was a bit careless in looking, and the cat is actually sitting on an especially mat-like section of the newspaper. There is always doubt. Sometimes there’s more (maybe the lights were off), sometimes there’s less (I spend a good hour examining the cat-mat situation, consulting biologists and mat experts), but there is always doubt.
Asserting you have no doubt is asserting you made no mistake in assessing reality, i.e., that you’re perfect. And call me a dick, but I don’t think you are.
There’s a big difference between having no doubt, and thinking you’re infallible.
I believe if I drop something it will fall to the ground because objects with mass produce gravity. It may be that some other completely different force is at work, besides gravity. But I don’t believe that to be true. But if there is evidence that it is true, I will change my mind.
A good way to check if you believe something is to look at how you act. You see the cat, you act like. It’s a cat, you believe it’s a cat. If you see the cat, and hesitate and doubt, then you don’t believe it’s a cat. You may do some thinking and then determine it is a cat, and start believing it. And then you will act accordingly.
And that’s why funerals disprove religious belief. If people truly believed in their religion, and believed in the afterlife, funerals would be happy not sad. But they don’t believe in their religion. They hope that they’re right. But they don’t believe it.
Your comment on funerals reminds me of my mother yelling at me for crying over my grandpa’s death (the first death I experienced as an adult/college student). She told me “Why are you so upset‽ You’ve been to church more recently than I have!”
Anyways, that thought lives rent-free in my head, even though I no longer speak with my mother.
(mini rant: she gave me exactly as much space to feel my feelings when my own dad died more recently. Yes, she sucks.)
My grandma’s funeral was not a sad occasion. She’d lived a long life and died very demented, so there was a bit of sadness, but mostly those feelings had been dealt with over the years as her mind changed. The primary feeling seemed to be relief. The sermon was very “we’re not burying her, we’re planting her, rejoice for she will be reborn” and I wanted to throttle the preacher because he said nothing specific to my grandma, it was very generic. My main feeling at the funeral was stress from navigating the disfunctional relationships of family members I hardly knew.
Ok, so I think our wires cross regarding terminology here. We’re roughly on the same page. So, when you believe something, you can put some probability on how likely it is to be true. I think we both agree that putting probability 1 is either mistaken or a lie. It is asserting that you’re infallible. And I think we both agree that asserting your infallibility is silly. So, to every belief you have you put some probability. If I look at the cat on the mat in broad daylight I will put 0.999, and I’ll put 0.99 if it’s a dimly lit room or whatever. In any case, despite believing the cat to be on the mat, I admit that I am human, therefore fallible, and I will assign some non-zero probability to the negation, namely 0.001 or 0.01. And here I think we’re still on the same page.
From this point I think we diverge, and it’s just a matter of definition. I’ve been referring to that small sliver of probability of the negation of my belief being true as “doubt”. So with my definition of doubt, you will agree, there is always some doubt. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it is always there. Let’s refer to my definition of doubt as “schmoubt”.
If feel like your conception of doubt is basically when schmoubt reaches a certain threshold, namely where you’re no longer comfortable saying you believe the proposition. So for example, we might dim the lights quite a lot, and maybe my schmoubt goes all the way up to 0.4 or whatever, and I no longer believe there is a cat on the mat. I’m pretty sure there’s something sitting on something, but my schmoubt for the statement “the cat is on the mat” is too high for me to justify my belief to myself. So clearly you believe schmoubt is real, but you wouldn’t call it doubt. What do you call it?
Regarding the funeral thing, I think you need to be a bit more critical of your analysis. It is perfectly consistent to believe in an afterlife but also be sad when someone passes. Because for the time being, you will be separated from them. You will be going at it alone, for quite some time in some cases. And that sucks. It’s the same as being sad when your significant other will work abroad for a while. You believe you will see them again, and that this is temporary, but you are sad because you will not be able to enjoy their physical presence for a while.
To keep things a bit on topic: equating the interests of the state of Israel with Judaism as a whole is anti-semitic, and the existence of Israel has by and large made the world less safe for jews, not to mention Palestinians.
I have beliefs about what I think is the most probable truth. That means I can both believe something is true, and acknowledge the probability that I’m wrong. Whenever my beliefs change, there’s necessarily a period where I gradually come to see the probability that I’m wrong as larger than the probability that I’m right, at which point my beliefs about what is right change. However, the acknowledgement that I may still be wrong remains.
Why would you believe anything if you were going to believe you were wrong?
And that’s why you shouldn’t.
Yeah, and that’s why realists who believe in an objective reality are stupid. They won’t admit they’re wrong no matter how much evidence is stacked against them.
I honestly don’t even think I get your position here. Do you somehow not believe that you live in some kind of objective reality together with the rest of us? Do you think this is all just going on in your head? Like… is this some kind of far-out simulation theory thing? Even if we do live in a simulation, that simulation itself must exist in some kind of “real world”.
Please explain
Your perceptions are influenced by your beliefs, and your beliefs are influenced by your culture. So if someone can buy control of our cultural media, they can control reality for the general population. And that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. The owning class have literally constrained our ability to imagine and perceive a fair and just world. For example, they spent centuries silencing queer people, and as a result, most people became literally incapable of perceiving a nonbinary person. When they looked at someone like Me, they would see a man or a woman instead. Their foundational perception was and is distorted.
For a revolution against the owning class to be successful, we need not just to destroy the state apparati of physical control, but also of mental control. We need to destroy the belief in a capitalist cisheteropatriarchal reality. https://soulism.net
That doesn’t even remotely answer my question though? My impression was that you have some kind of belief that an objective reality doesn’t exist in the first place, and that just doesn’t make any kind of sense to me.
The belief in an objective reality is a prerequisite to the owning class’s control of reality. People let the media tell them what to believe, because they want to believe in objective reality. They don’t want to actively participate in creating their own subjective world.
And that’s exactly why the belief in an objective reality is a dangerous and corrupting technology. We shouldn’t leave such a powerful tool for control lying around where evil people can get their hands on it. We need to raise the next generation believing that the universe is subjective in nature, armed with the knowledge of all the horrible atrocities that realists have committed throughout history. The crusades. The slave trade. The stolen generations. The holocaust. All motivated by the belief in an objective reality, with objective reasons to oppress the weak. Realism is an evil technology.
What you’re saying makes no sense… you drawing an equivalence from the existence of an objective reality to some people controlling how that reality is perceived. If anything, you gotten it all flipped around: If reality is subjective (which itself is absurd) then any interpretation of it is equally valid. In that case, anyone is free to believe in their own reality, regardless of the objective facts that prove them wrong. This is basically what’s going on with the MAGA movement: A bunch of people deciding that “reality is what I want it to be”, and acting based on “alternative facts” in complete disregard for the objective, observable, facts around them.
The MAGA people are realists. They believe that they are thinking and acting in alignment with objective reality. You and I can think they’re wrong, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t realists. When it comes to the question of objective reality, they’re on your side, not Mine. They don’t think their perceptions are subjective. They don’t think gender and race are social constructs. They don’t take responsibility for their perceptions like I do.
You’re making the mistake of conflating being wrong with being a subjectivist. Have a serious think, you believe they think gender is a subjective social construct? Not a chance!
Citation needed
Sure, why not? Here, https://multiverse.soulism.net/post/67924/comment/535398. This Lemmy user said if you believe in gods, you think you’re right and others are wrong, and that leads to a dogmatic mindset. Now, reality obviously has all the same qualities as a god in this context, so although I don’t personally believe religion leads to dogma, I’m happy to cite you at yourself and ask that you take your own advice and believe in no absolute truth.
believing you are right is requisite to belief. acknowledgement that you might be wrong, in the existence of doubt, that’s maturity but it does not preclude the belief that you are right.
I think you’ve just talked yourself into a circle. You can’t both believe something and doubt it. Doubt is the opposite of belief.
What you’re talking about is possibly belief in belief. That’s the belief that you should believe, or belief that you do believe. That is not the same as actual belief.
If your bar for believing something is that you’re 100% certain that it is true (i.e., a complete lack of doubt), then you’ve rendered the whole concept of belief useless as there is no proposition this applies to.
Me, if I see a cat sitting on a mat, I will believe there is a cat on the mat. But it might be that it’s a capybara wearing an incredibly convincing cat costume. Very low odds, but the possibility is there. It could also be that I was a bit careless in looking, and the cat is actually sitting on an especially mat-like section of the newspaper. There is always doubt. Sometimes there’s more (maybe the lights were off), sometimes there’s less (I spend a good hour examining the cat-mat situation, consulting biologists and mat experts), but there is always doubt.
Asserting you have no doubt is asserting you made no mistake in assessing reality, i.e., that you’re perfect. And call me a dick, but I don’t think you are.
Anyway, death to Israel.
There’s a big difference between having no doubt, and thinking you’re infallible.
I believe if I drop something it will fall to the ground because objects with mass produce gravity. It may be that some other completely different force is at work, besides gravity. But I don’t believe that to be true. But if there is evidence that it is true, I will change my mind.
A good way to check if you believe something is to look at how you act. You see the cat, you act like. It’s a cat, you believe it’s a cat. If you see the cat, and hesitate and doubt, then you don’t believe it’s a cat. You may do some thinking and then determine it is a cat, and start believing it. And then you will act accordingly.
And that’s why funerals disprove religious belief. If people truly believed in their religion, and believed in the afterlife, funerals would be happy not sad. But they don’t believe in their religion. They hope that they’re right. But they don’t believe it.
Your comment on funerals reminds me of my mother yelling at me for crying over my grandpa’s death (the first death I experienced as an adult/college student). She told me “Why are you so upset‽ You’ve been to church more recently than I have!”
Anyways, that thought lives rent-free in my head, even though I no longer speak with my mother.
(mini rant: she gave me exactly as much space to feel my feelings when my own dad died more recently. Yes, she sucks.)
My grandma’s funeral was not a sad occasion. She’d lived a long life and died very demented, so there was a bit of sadness, but mostly those feelings had been dealt with over the years as her mind changed. The primary feeling seemed to be relief. The sermon was very “we’re not burying her, we’re planting her, rejoice for she will be reborn” and I wanted to throttle the preacher because he said nothing specific to my grandma, it was very generic. My main feeling at the funeral was stress from navigating the disfunctional relationships of family members I hardly knew.
Ok, so I think our wires cross regarding terminology here. We’re roughly on the same page. So, when you believe something, you can put some probability on how likely it is to be true. I think we both agree that putting probability 1 is either mistaken or a lie. It is asserting that you’re infallible. And I think we both agree that asserting your infallibility is silly. So, to every belief you have you put some probability. If I look at the cat on the mat in broad daylight I will put 0.999, and I’ll put 0.99 if it’s a dimly lit room or whatever. In any case, despite believing the cat to be on the mat, I admit that I am human, therefore fallible, and I will assign some non-zero probability to the negation, namely 0.001 or 0.01. And here I think we’re still on the same page.
From this point I think we diverge, and it’s just a matter of definition. I’ve been referring to that small sliver of probability of the negation of my belief being true as “doubt”. So with my definition of doubt, you will agree, there is always some doubt. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but it is always there. Let’s refer to my definition of doubt as “schmoubt”.
If feel like your conception of doubt is basically when schmoubt reaches a certain threshold, namely where you’re no longer comfortable saying you believe the proposition. So for example, we might dim the lights quite a lot, and maybe my schmoubt goes all the way up to 0.4 or whatever, and I no longer believe there is a cat on the mat. I’m pretty sure there’s something sitting on something, but my schmoubt for the statement “the cat is on the mat” is too high for me to justify my belief to myself. So clearly you believe schmoubt is real, but you wouldn’t call it doubt. What do you call it?
Regarding the funeral thing, I think you need to be a bit more critical of your analysis. It is perfectly consistent to believe in an afterlife but also be sad when someone passes. Because for the time being, you will be separated from them. You will be going at it alone, for quite some time in some cases. And that sucks. It’s the same as being sad when your significant other will work abroad for a while. You believe you will see them again, and that this is temporary, but you are sad because you will not be able to enjoy their physical presence for a while.
To keep things a bit on topic: equating the interests of the state of Israel with Judaism as a whole is anti-semitic, and the existence of Israel has by and large made the world less safe for jews, not to mention Palestinians.
I have beliefs about what I think is the most probable truth. That means I can both believe something is true, and acknowledge the probability that I’m wrong. Whenever my beliefs change, there’s necessarily a period where I gradually come to see the probability that I’m wrong as larger than the probability that I’m right, at which point my beliefs about what is right change. However, the acknowledgement that I may still be wrong remains.
look who isn’t familiar with uncertainty
If there is uncertainty, there is not belief. There is hope.