“Established a useful new habit”
(Background: I have a tendency to experience peak excitement about a new idea early on and then drop it entirely once the excitement wanes.) I have surprised myself by continuing to use HabitRPG for over a month now. I am very happy with the software; it really seems like it works for me.
“Established a useful new habit”
I have been thinking for a while that I wish I was reading more philosophy, but I never quite got around to doing it. I finally decided that I would commit to just reading something—I created a daily task in HabitRPG that would be satisfied by even a single paragraph. That task is now my longest running streak, and I usually read much more than a single paragraph.
“Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief”
For a long time I approached the notion that minds are material things with mild scorn—“what sort of misguided a priori commitments would motivate someone to believe that?” At any rate, it was not an issue that I thought about with any frequency. This past month, I found myself encountering some of the brain damage/stimulation research again, and this time my reaction was, “this seems terribly more probable in a world where minds are what brains do.” I then went through a whole series of questions in this way (viz., “on which approach is aspect X of thinking more likely?”) and came up with the same answer each time. I also realized that the idea of a non-material mind feels kind of goofy to me, and I asked myself, “why would I need to posit that? what do I lose without that?”, coming up empty-handed. I have no dramatic level of confidence in my new belief, because I haven’t done the real research, but I am perfectly happy with the level of confidence I have. So it is not really a matter of having found new evidence, but of approaching the issue in a new way. Honestly, I think the biggest factor is all the time I have spent over the past few months working through the sequences: I just think about things differently on some basic levels.
Sorry for the wordiness; it was an interesting and pleasant experience to watch myself work through that process.
“Established a useful new habit” (Background: I have a tendency to experience peak excitement about a new idea early on and then drop it entirely once the excitement wanes.) I have surprised myself by continuing to use HabitRPG for over a month now. I am very happy with the software; it really seems like it works for me.
“Established a useful new habit” I have been thinking for a while that I wish I was reading more philosophy, but I never quite got around to doing it. I finally decided that I would commit to just reading something—I created a daily task in HabitRPG that would be satisfied by even a single paragraph. That task is now my longest running streak, and I usually read much more than a single paragraph.
“Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief” For a long time I approached the notion that minds are material things with mild scorn—“what sort of misguided a priori commitments would motivate someone to believe that?” At any rate, it was not an issue that I thought about with any frequency. This past month, I found myself encountering some of the brain damage/stimulation research again, and this time my reaction was, “this seems terribly more probable in a world where minds are what brains do.” I then went through a whole series of questions in this way (viz., “on which approach is aspect X of thinking more likely?”) and came up with the same answer each time. I also realized that the idea of a non-material mind feels kind of goofy to me, and I asked myself, “why would I need to posit that? what do I lose without that?”, coming up empty-handed. I have no dramatic level of confidence in my new belief, because I haven’t done the real research, but I am perfectly happy with the level of confidence I have. So it is not really a matter of having found new evidence, but of approaching the issue in a new way. Honestly, I think the biggest factor is all the time I have spent over the past few months working through the sequences: I just think about things differently on some basic levels.
Sorry for the wordiness; it was an interesting and pleasant experience to watch myself work through that process.