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.
Comment on Unconventional strategy.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 22 hours agoAnd that’s why you shouldn’t.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.
wpb@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
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.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
You can’t both believe something and doubt it.
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.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
look who isn’t familiar with uncertainty
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
If there is uncertainty, there is not belief. There is hope.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 12 hours ago
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.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 6 hours ago
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
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
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.
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Citation needed
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 7 hours ago
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.