This sounds like it’s just an emotional script, a trained mental routine to feel a certain way and fire a few mental nodes in reaction to certain types of events. IME, there doesn’t really need to be any real belief or even an alief in some “God” for someone to have the experience of being thankful towards (MentalNode-34223359 | Pointer error, no data at requested location), as a simple result of the way one’s brain has currently configured itself.
In many cases, I’ve felt something similar where to the best of my knowledge my brain is simply firing the exact same patterns as when I’m thankful to someone in particular (a real other human being) for a specific action (e.g. reminding me of something important), but without actually finding a referent for the (ThankfulTo()) function, simply as a matter of this being by default what my brain considered the appropriate follow-up pattern to my experiences.
I’m perfectly fine with these empty pointers/referents, which may be partially thanks to learning about Lojban and its grammar, but most people feel differently with them and this and similar mental experiences will often be tagged “spiritual”—from the inside, it feels like they’re actually thanking something, so there must be something to thank, and therefore this is evidence of a supernatural higher power (“God”). I’ve seen many (more than I care to count) instances of people having experiences I would pattern-match to this brain behavior claiming them as evidence for God or other spiritual entities. This was, in fact, one of the reasons I used to classify myself as “spiritual but not religious”, and believed in some kind of cosmic mental universe that could think about itself and which we lived inside of.
This sounds like it’s just an emotional script, a trained mental routine to feel a certain way
This makes sense. I’m just wondering whether this script (something/someone is responsible for the good/bad stuff that happens to me) is equivalent to an alief in supernatural.
it feels like they’re actually thanking something, so there must be something to thank, and therefore this is evidence of a supernatural higher power
Maybe I wasn’t clear. Of course I understand logically that the target of gratitude does not exist in this particular case. (On an unrelated note, I hate it when people use fancy words for simple ideas.)
I’m perfectly fine with these empty pointers/referents
The conscious me is fine with them, too. It’s the subconscious me who apparently wants to believe.
(On an unrelated note, I hate it when people use fancy words for simple ideas.)
(Any examples from my comment? These are the simplest terms I know to accurately convey the relevant ideas, any help would be appreciated.)
The conscious me is fine with them, too. It’s the subconscious me who apparently wants to believe.
Then it appears to me that your doubts / questions might be coming from somewhere else, as a first thought. My subconscious has no particular problem either, and doesn’t appear to want to believe anything—it just runs its scripts, and I’ve seen none of them that are attempting to generate an explanatory belief-system to fill in missing nodes and empty referents of other emotional scripts.
Of course, this is all assuming I’m not doing some sort of third-order motivated cognition, i.e. unknowingly deceiving myself about what constitutes evidence of me deceiving myself, and also that your mind works remotely similar to my own in these respects, which is itself a very shaky proposition.
If your mind is automatically attempting to resolve the discrepancy of a missing target, which might equivocate to an alief in supernatural (or “fate”) and eventually cause one (but still remains, so far, substantially different IMO), then my own next step would be… hmm, I started to write this down, and then realized that it relies on a very critical “Recompute Scripted Mental Behaviors” black-box skill that I trained at a young age, one that would probably take more reductionist skill than I have to properly describe and probably presents too much inferential distance at the moment. In fact, this realization is an important one that I should have made long ago, and it now explains quite a bit about the mysterious inferential distance I find popping up in various psychology-related topics.
Anyway, on topic, my current impression is that your current mind configuration is not as “bad” as you seem to question/wonder/fear (insofar as you consider alief in supernatural entities to be “bad”), but rather that the complex and impenetrable interaction of various thought patterns is making your brain do strange things that might lead to some alief or anti-epistemology not explicitly contained here, but are most likely a result of the brain passing non-typesafe parameters and pointers and being able to randomly stumble from one thought pattern to another, even as it plugs in other patterns as parameters to the current one. (Note: Gah, not using programming terms and concepts while talking about cognition is hard when you haven’t studied any real/formal neurobiology and whatever other topic(s) studies these things.)
ETA:Morendil’s suggestion seems like a very good first step approach for someone who doesn’t have my mental configuration and abnormal skillsets.
(Any examples from my comment? These are the simplest terms I know to accurately convey the relevant ideas, any help would be appreciated.)
Cf “target does not exist” with
MentalNode-34223359 | Pointer error, no data at requested location
without actually finding a referent for the (ThankfulTo()) function
and to a reference to an esoteric language Lojban.
As you pointed out, your other geeky analogies, like “brain passing non-typesafe parameters and pointers”, while understandable to a programmer like myself, also appear needlessly complicated.
my current impression is that your current mind configuration is not as “bad” as you seem to question/wonder/fear
I simply noticed the disconnect between a belief and an alief in this particular case. Whether it is possible/worthwhile to get them aligned, is another question.
and to a reference to an esoteric language Lojban.
I agree with the other needlessly complicated analogies, but I forgot / should have explained that Lojban has a very logical structure where a word can have certain specific required or optional complements, e.g. IIRC the “expressing thanks” word would have a complement slot for (Target), a second slot for (what the thanks is for) and then one for (who is thanking the target) (defaults to speaker or provided by context), and in Lojban it’s perfectly normal to leave some slots empty for deliberate ambiguity/vagueness (but explicit ambiguity, unlike most natural languages).
So the reason I mentioned it is that this may be where I got this lack of any particular issue with empty/confused targets and could also be why my mind doesn’t seem to generate any aliefs from it as it seems yours might. There are other plausible explanations, but I doubt a test for that is feasible or relevant.
I’m just wondering whether this script (something/someone is responsible for the good/bad stuff that happens to me) is equivalent to an alief in supernatural.
I’m not sure this is a meaningful question. “Alief” is a very fuzzy category.
This sounds like it’s just an emotional script, a trained mental routine to feel a certain way and fire a few mental nodes in reaction to certain types of events. IME, there doesn’t really need to be any real belief or even an alief in some “God” for someone to have the experience of being thankful towards (MentalNode-34223359 | Pointer error, no data at requested location), as a simple result of the way one’s brain has currently configured itself.
In many cases, I’ve felt something similar where to the best of my knowledge my brain is simply firing the exact same patterns as when I’m thankful to someone in particular (a real other human being) for a specific action (e.g. reminding me of something important), but without actually finding a referent for the (ThankfulTo()) function, simply as a matter of this being by default what my brain considered the appropriate follow-up pattern to my experiences.
I’m perfectly fine with these empty pointers/referents, which may be partially thanks to learning about Lojban and its grammar, but most people feel differently with them and this and similar mental experiences will often be tagged “spiritual”—from the inside, it feels like they’re actually thanking something, so there must be something to thank, and therefore this is evidence of a supernatural higher power (“God”). I’ve seen many (more than I care to count) instances of people having experiences I would pattern-match to this brain behavior claiming them as evidence for God or other spiritual entities. This was, in fact, one of the reasons I used to classify myself as “spiritual but not religious”, and believed in some kind of cosmic mental universe that could think about itself and which we lived inside of.
This makes sense. I’m just wondering whether this script (something/someone is responsible for the good/bad stuff that happens to me) is equivalent to an alief in supernatural.
Maybe I wasn’t clear. Of course I understand logically that the target of gratitude does not exist in this particular case. (On an unrelated note, I hate it when people use fancy words for simple ideas.)
The conscious me is fine with them, too. It’s the subconscious me who apparently wants to believe.
I’ve heard (sorry no source) that it takes three generations to make an atheist, which seems plausible to me.
Do you think that having some occasional moments of theist alief has a significant chance of making your life worse?
(Any examples from my comment? These are the simplest terms I know to accurately convey the relevant ideas, any help would be appreciated.)
Then it appears to me that your doubts / questions might be coming from somewhere else, as a first thought. My subconscious has no particular problem either, and doesn’t appear to want to believe anything—it just runs its scripts, and I’ve seen none of them that are attempting to generate an explanatory belief-system to fill in missing nodes and empty referents of other emotional scripts.
Of course, this is all assuming I’m not doing some sort of third-order motivated cognition, i.e. unknowingly deceiving myself about what constitutes evidence of me deceiving myself, and also that your mind works remotely similar to my own in these respects, which is itself a very shaky proposition.
If your mind is automatically attempting to resolve the discrepancy of a missing target, which might equivocate to an alief in supernatural (or “fate”) and eventually cause one (but still remains, so far, substantially different IMO), then my own next step would be… hmm, I started to write this down, and then realized that it relies on a very critical “Recompute Scripted Mental Behaviors” black-box skill that I trained at a young age, one that would probably take more reductionist skill than I have to properly describe and probably presents too much inferential distance at the moment. In fact, this realization is an important one that I should have made long ago, and it now explains quite a bit about the mysterious inferential distance I find popping up in various psychology-related topics.
Anyway, on topic, my current impression is that your current mind configuration is not as “bad” as you seem to question/wonder/fear (insofar as you consider alief in supernatural entities to be “bad”), but rather that the complex and impenetrable interaction of various thought patterns is making your brain do strange things that might lead to some alief or anti-epistemology not explicitly contained here, but are most likely a result of the brain passing non-typesafe parameters and pointers and being able to randomly stumble from one thought pattern to another, even as it plugs in other patterns as parameters to the current one. (Note: Gah, not using programming terms and concepts while talking about cognition is hard when you haven’t studied any real/formal neurobiology and whatever other topic(s) studies these things.)
ETA: Morendil’s suggestion seems like a very good first step approach for someone who doesn’t have my mental configuration and abnormal skillsets.
Cf “target does not exist” with
and to a reference to an esoteric language Lojban.
As you pointed out, your other geeky analogies, like “brain passing non-typesafe parameters and pointers”, while understandable to a programmer like myself, also appear needlessly complicated.
I simply noticed the disconnect between a belief and an alief in this particular case. Whether it is possible/worthwhile to get them aligned, is another question.
I agree with the other needlessly complicated analogies, but I forgot / should have explained that Lojban has a very logical structure where a word can have certain specific required or optional complements, e.g. IIRC the “expressing thanks” word would have a complement slot for (Target), a second slot for (what the thanks is for) and then one for (who is thanking the target) (defaults to speaker or provided by context), and in Lojban it’s perfectly normal to leave some slots empty for deliberate ambiguity/vagueness (but explicit ambiguity, unlike most natural languages).
So the reason I mentioned it is that this may be where I got this lack of any particular issue with empty/confused targets and could also be why my mind doesn’t seem to generate any aliefs from it as it seems yours might. There are other plausible explanations, but I doubt a test for that is feasible or relevant.
I’m not sure this is a meaningful question. “Alief” is a very fuzzy category.