I had the personal experience of having the belief “If I wake up and the last time I remember going to bed was Tuesday today should be Wednesday, it shouldn’t be Monday” turn out to be false. Dealing with getting that belief challenged produced a huge amount of cognitive dissonance.
There are probably thousands of similar beliefs that I hold that are also mostly true but false in a few edge cases.
If you would go and throw out every false belief that you acquired between 0 and 5 years of age you would lose your way to relate to the world around you.
You would probably lose your sanity.
It’s also not easy to change beliefs. Getting Bob who believes that his ex-girl friend Alice is a bad person to drop his belief is a hard process even when Bob wants to change his belief.
There are emotions that have to be dealt with before Bob can successfully change his belief.
The same went for my “Tuesday → Wednesday but not Tuesday->Monday” belief. It’s not easy to drop a belief where a lot of emotions get attached.
Such a software has the danger that it let’s you ignore the emotional attachment that you have to various beliefs. If you let a new belief propagate through your belief network you actually have to change how you feel about the beliefs on an emotional level.
If your probability assessment of the subjective experience of a Tuesday following the subjective experience of going to sleep on a Monday were 0.00001, you would expect it to happen around once in a lifetime. Personally, I would assign a much higher probability than that.
I’m not sure if I understand how it would be dangerous to change how you feel about things based on evidence. We should strive to hold our beliefs lightly.
When I say belief, than I mean stuff that’s in your mind and that effects the way you act.
The question “What do I believe?” is a different question than “What’s resonable for me to believe?”.
I never consciously formed my “Tuesday → Wednesday but not Tuesday->Monday” belief. I just noticed the belief when I got it challenged. It produced a lot of stress. The fact that I can know intellectually that my memory isn’t perfect doesn’t change the fact that I belief on an emotional level in my memory.
It might not be the best example because a lot of people don’t have similar experiences of how it feels like to get such a belief challenged by empiric reality.
Then let’s take a different belief from the world of social dynamics.
A guy who thinks no girl likes him because he’s fat doesn’t suddenly drop his belief when you show him fat guys with girlfriends. It takes emotional work to change the belief.
If you just have a computer program with values in it, then I don’t think you can reasonable say that those values are what you belief if you haven’t actually integrated those beliefs in your mind.
I had the personal experience of having the belief “If I wake up and the last time I remember going to bed was Tuesday today should be Wednesday, it shouldn’t be Monday” turn out to be false. Dealing with getting that belief challenged produced a huge amount of cognitive dissonance.
There are probably thousands of similar beliefs that I hold that are also mostly true but false in a few edge cases. If you would go and throw out every false belief that you acquired between 0 and 5 years of age you would lose your way to relate to the world around you. You would probably lose your sanity.
It’s also not easy to change beliefs. Getting Bob who believes that his ex-girl friend Alice is a bad person to drop his belief is a hard process even when Bob wants to change his belief. There are emotions that have to be dealt with before Bob can successfully change his belief.
The same went for my “Tuesday → Wednesday but not Tuesday->Monday” belief. It’s not easy to drop a belief where a lot of emotions get attached.
Such a software has the danger that it let’s you ignore the emotional attachment that you have to various beliefs. If you let a new belief propagate through your belief network you actually have to change how you feel about the beliefs on an emotional level.
If your probability assessment of the subjective experience of a Tuesday following the subjective experience of going to sleep on a Monday were 0.00001, you would expect it to happen around once in a lifetime. Personally, I would assign a much higher probability than that.
I’m not sure if I understand how it would be dangerous to change how you feel about things based on evidence. We should strive to hold our beliefs lightly.
When I say belief, than I mean stuff that’s in your mind and that effects the way you act. The question “What do I believe?” is a different question than “What’s resonable for me to believe?”.
I never consciously formed my “Tuesday → Wednesday but not Tuesday->Monday” belief. I just noticed the belief when I got it challenged. It produced a lot of stress. The fact that I can know intellectually that my memory isn’t perfect doesn’t change the fact that I belief on an emotional level in my memory.
It might not be the best example because a lot of people don’t have similar experiences of how it feels like to get such a belief challenged by empiric reality.
Then let’s take a different belief from the world of social dynamics. A guy who thinks no girl likes him because he’s fat doesn’t suddenly drop his belief when you show him fat guys with girlfriends. It takes emotional work to change the belief.
If you just have a computer program with values in it, then I don’t think you can reasonable say that those values are what you belief if you haven’t actually integrated those beliefs in your mind.