While I appreciate your perspective, the construct you described allows one to invalidate others' beliefs as being "wrong" because they don't adhere to the same reference point as yourself.
> All of my beliefs would be self-serving
This is not a true statement.
Why cannot one choose what one feels to be the most appropriate construct after careful inspection and introspection?
the construct you described allows one to invalidate others' beliefs as being "wrong" because they don't adhere to the same reference point as yourself
Belief based in empirical evidence is at least bound to that evidence.
Belief unmoored from empiricism --- blind faith or revelation --- suffers no such limits. Your criticism would apply all the more so to same, with the further failing that others' beliefs are "wrong" because they ... are simply revealed or adopted faiths. Which is frequently observed.
If my evidence-based belief differs from your evidence-based belief, then we can compare evidence. Evidence does not have to be directly experienced (though for various reasons of psychological evolution we tend often to more highly weight that which is); we can also rely on evidence presented by other trustworthy witnesses. There are numerous social institutions dedicated to precisely this (science, courts, journalism, politics, ...)
The factory owner and the factory worker can look at the same set of data and arrive at completely different world views.
The Empire Did Nothing Wrong™
Was Lucifer actually incorrect in his position in the Garden of Eden?
I'm pointing out how completely different and valid perspectives can be derived from the same set of data, the same circumstance.
The problem arises when one claims their perspective was "inflicted" upon them by some uncompromising, external agent, which implies there is no choice in the matter, which is absurd because there most certainly is.
I don't think you're wrong, by the way, I just see things a little differently.
But many sidedness is not the any sideness which revealed or blind-faith belief permits. Experiential understanding is bound to and by that experience. Further, the cases you're referring to largely discuss social relational worldviews which are informed by status, standing, and affiliation within a society or culture. There are of course non-social instances of multiple interpretations, such as wave-particle duality, in which how one looks at a phenomenon influences the model arrived. at.
Factory owner and worker at least have beleif and understanding grounded in experience, and might be convinced of or sympathetic to the validity of views generated by the alternate experience. Your "which implies there is no choice" is reading meaning to my comment I did not intend and disagree with strongly.
The fact that people see things differently, that is, arrive at different conclusions based on different empirical evidence or experience is in fact my point.
It might be more ... useful to think of models, understanding, and/or knowledge (largely interchangeable terms) as having use value rather than truth value.
That is, good models are useful, in some way.
Usefulness, like value, is itself relative and depends on intent, goals, and starting positions.
That said, there are models with greater or usefulness over a wide range of circumstances. Holding to a model which is demonstrably inferior in this regard might well be considered "wrong", in this sense.
Absolutely. This is exactly what I do, actually. I argue from the perspective of many models at once, assign weights and priorities and then arrive at some conclusion with an estimated probability of effectiveness or usefulness depending on use case. Truth simply is and is also unknowable at the same time.
Personally, I would only make one modification here for my own purposes:
> Holding to a model which is demonstrably inferior in this regard might well be considered "wrong" to me.
I know what is right and wrong for me and to me, but stop short of extending that judgement outside my person. That's just me though.
Once you realize you know way less about everything than you thought you did, and much of what is “known” is future conjectures with many parts, you realize you can select the optimistic view.
I'm not sure I follow. I agree with what GP wrote. Their second paragraph is written in the first person. It's not a claim that everyone would do the self-serving thing. I would do the same as GP. I'd choose a set of beliefs that help me sleep at night and that make me a hoot at dinner parties instead of a Debbie Downer. I can't simply choose to do that, because those beliefs come from my experience with and observations of the world along with my deeply-held values.
To delve a little deeper, this statement shows that it's still a _choice_, even though the choice is apparently a refutation of choice, which is interesting. Asserting that this construct simply _is_, where choice isn't there or doesn't exist, doesn't pass the smell test.
The fact that one may choose to live a life only for oneself were one left to one's own devices is simply commentary about that individual. But again, one may choose not to do that.
> To delve a little deeper, this statement shows that it's still a _choice_, even though the choice is apparently a refutation of choice, which is interesting.
Worldviews and beliefs are answers we come up with to the difficult questions that life asks. If you've done any work to come up with those answers, then your beliefs are built on top of a lot of observations, introspection, and analysis. For me to change my beliefs I would need to discover some kind of mistake I've made in my work or some important piece of information I was missing. How can you casually choose a different belief set unless your original beliefs were not built on anything substantial to start with?
Your perspective is totally valid to me. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong, because you're not. At least not in the "I'm right and you're wrong" way.
I don't casually choose a belief set. I've deliberated this for decades. My beliefs, or more accurately the code that I live by, is just that, my code. I have a choice in the matter, it doesn't come from somewhere else where it's inflicted upon me. I formulated it.
> For me to change my beliefs I would need to discover some kind off mistake I've made in my work....
Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice.
> Not to beat a dead horse, but I think that this again speaks to the fact that it's a choice.
Your choice here is to live by a code, and more specifically the code you formulated. That's exercising control over your actions, which I don't dispute is a choice.
But why do you follow that code? Do you feel that that code is good for society? Good for your family? Good for you personally? The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?
And if you do encounter that invalidates those beliefs and makes it obvious that they are wrong - can you still hold them? Definitionally I would say once you know that they're false they are no longer your beliefs.
Suppose I believe that humanity is facing incredible social, economic, technological, and environmental threats and yet our governments and societies cannot even agree that these are threats and when they do their reactions are half-hearted; that I believe the economic system we in has provided lots of powerful people and lots of ordinary people with a vested interest in protecting the most destructive parts of our status quo; and that I think most of these problems are incredibly time sensitive and if we can't address them in the next half-century then we will see cascading failures in the environment and human civilization that cause incredible amounts of death and hardship.
This all sounds very bleak, so you have to imagine that seeing peoples' comments about how pessimism is bad for your mental state, how we should be optimistic about the future because theoretically all our problems are solvable, and how we've solved problems in the past so we'll definitely solve these ones too just bounces off of that. It often feels like people are talking around the major structural problems that are not on trajectory to being solved by focusing on little bits of tech that seem like maybe they'd help in a way or extrapolating lines out from the last that can't obviously be extrapolated.
> The answers to those questions are your beliefs. Absent some kind of new insight, could you flip a switch and choose to believe that that code is deeply harmful?
These beliefs, from your example, are something I arrived at through reason. They are always subject to change.
I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.
I do share your concerns, your beliefs, as you described them. There are many, many different perspectives at play there, which is one reason why it is such a difficult problem to solve, from a grand-scheme-of-things perspective. We are only human, after all.
> I could just as easily have devised a moral construct which allowed me to adopt maximal behaviors for accumulating money and wealth, for instance. However, I did not choose that path, in the end. I very easily could have, however. And that was purely my choice.
You don't choose your beliefs. You choose your actions. You don't choose to believe generosity is good; you choose to follow a code of generosity. Conversely you don't choose to believe that your own interests and self-preservation are paramount; you choose to follow a code that reflects that belief. It is not a could-have-gone-either-way single choice you make in a single moment. If you try to follow a code that is deeply discordant with your actual beliefs you will struggle with it forever. Which is why "choose optimism", which seems to be the dominant opinion in TFA and this thread, is such garbage advice. Frankly I think a much better avenue of advice to give is telling people who are deeply afraid about the future of the world how to productively cope with it instead of telling them to pantomime a belief that everything's gonna turn out swell.
In my life I've made the conscious choice not to worry too much about the existential problems that I believe will utterly destroy civilization as we know it. I did this because I need to function in society - make friends, pay the bills, marry the husband, buy the house and so on. But this is not optimism; it's not even productive pessimism; it's a selfish decision to ignore the bleak future and focus on living my own happy life and insulating myself from the worst of what's to come.
> All of my beliefs would be self-serving
This is not a true statement.
Why cannot one choose what one feels to be the most appropriate construct after careful inspection and introspection?