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Mark Force
Trad climber
Cave Creek, AZ
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Jan 22, 2015 - 03:34am PT
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The question underlying the question of the OP is whether we as individuals have the capacity to choose to change a belief.
Wiki on free will....
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
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Sierra Ledge Rat
Mountain climber
Old and Broken Down in Appalachia
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Jan 22, 2015 - 04:23am PT
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I used to be very religious and went to church every day.
Then I went to college for 14 years, got multiple degrees and a doctorate, and now I see that religion is just a crutch. It is a crutch for people who are trying to understand the Universe and their purpose in this life. I understand why people need this crutch, but it's not for me.
I accept the Universe for what it is, something that our puny brains will never understand. Humans trying to understand the Universe are like earthworms trying to understand calculus. It just ain't gonna happen. And I am educated enough to see that, just because we cannot fully understand the Universe, doesn't mean that the only explanation for the Universe is "God."
I also user to be a hard-core conservative, John Bircher, Reaganite. But the same thing happened, I became educated and developed an analytical mind and my political beliefs have reversed.
Education is a wonderful thing.
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Jan 22, 2015 - 05:02am PT
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Very selectively, Yes.
Flip flops are good approach shoes that are strudey and dependable, a good pair is indespenceable
You never get to climb every day.
I used to like to drink to get drunk but the weedgee wrbleer, scared me! so has the level of punk azz that the gyms have bred though there is nothing wrong with that. they are the future of the endeavor .
Let climbers climb and climbers will!
threads come and go quick, this one has some art to it!
so it has legs to stay, to stand and stab at our insanity.
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Dingus McGee
Social climber
Where Safety trumps Leaving No Trace
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Jan 22, 2015 - 05:40am PT
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Also, I've changed my mind on "free will" and moved into the mechanistic camp.
Jgill, here is a thought out update to your leanings on free will.
ScAm Jan 2015 Why We have Free Will pg 76. Eddy Nahmias
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 22, 2015 - 06:55am PT
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It's funny you should bring that up Mark Force, because what prompted me to start the thread was an offhand comment by Sam Harris in his response to Daniel Dennett's critique of Harris's book on free will. He was so exasperated with Dennett that he wondered whether scientists and philosophers who have a lot of career time invested in a position can ever be persuaded otherwise.
I would say that I've certainly changed an early position I had on global warming of more or less sitting on the fence. I knew that we were coming out of an ice age, so warming would be expected and I figured that a few decades of higher volcanic activity might obliterate any contributions by humans. Well, that was several years ago now, and it is obvious that the weight of evidence is on the side of human caused warming.
If I ever totally cast off my belief in free will (and I'm close), that will be the biggest change in a deeply-held belief that I have made since joining the ST community.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:35am PT
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Nice discussion and funny Dilbert.
I think our intention to have free will and our ability to exercise it are separate variables. Some people get stuck at their inability to exercise free will and take the easy road of believing that it doesn't exist. I think that "openness" (as a prerequisite to learning to exercise free will) is a trait that can be learned and developed if a person has a motivation to do so. My motivation down this road was to relieve myself of recurring negative experiences in my marriage that made life miserable for me. Most people don't see an immediate benefit in terms of bringing happiness/pleasure or removing pain, perhaps because fear of the unknown presents the risk of greater pain.
The conditioning of our childhood can introduce deeply etched patterns that aid in survival as a child but become onerous for adult interactions, presenting as an inability to exercise free will. Inquisitive people who value free will and want to exercise it may find that in certain situations their fight or flight responses are triggered and they become frustrated with robot-like reactions that are not consistent with the ideal of free will. This has been my personal experience as I struggled to understand my emotional make-up and how I respond in certain situations, even if I have spent time intellectually pre-analyzing and preparing for a situation. Years of failure using my intellect to deal with some situations led me to explore my emotional and spiritual development more deeply, and that led to a more satisfactory path to desensitize myself to certain triggers. Two analogies I often use to describe it are clearing emotional mine fields in my brain, or debugging the broken programming in my brain.
My intellect recognized the patterns, and eventually figured out the right direction to focus on for my development, but my intellect (as an abstract entity apart from my emotional or spiritual self) was not capable of resolving the problems. If you want to play with semantics and call all of this internal dialog and exploration as facets of one's intellect, fine. But in the path that I followed for development, making a distinction between intellect, emotions, and spirit and the different impulses and and nature of each, proved to be exceptionally valuable for me.
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Fish Finder
Social climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:35am PT
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SUPERTOPHILOSOPHY
Damn this site is getting deep
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Mark Force
Trad climber
Cave Creek, AZ
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:36am PT
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If the choice is between libertarianism (as a philosophy rather than politic) and determinism, I have to go with libertarianism. If all behavior is the result of determinism, we end up with some very sticky (icky?) posits regarding responsibility, will, vision, compassion, service, liberty, charity, love, and a number of other characteristics we as a whole tend to admire in others and cherish in ourselves. They all become rather hollow and meaningless in that they all mean nothing to the organism that produces their behaviors other than their physical outcome/utility.
Dingus McGee's suggestion of the article, "Why We Have Free Will," is quite good and a worthy read.
It is common when people are under duress to dissociate from being conscious in the present moment and default to behaviors that are determined by their conditioned responses in accord with BF Skinner. It is possible to train oneself to be associated under duress and use reasoned rather than conditioned responses to the environment. In that sense there are aspects of our behavior that conform to both determinism and libertarianism. Much of the ground between the two reflects an individual's ability to be self-aware, a trainable skill.
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Byran
climber
San Jose, CA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:39am PT
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I like the American practice of teaching kids to believe in Santa Claus, mainly because it provides an early lesson on the importance of changing ones beliefs in light of new evidence.
I also dropped my belief in free-will a few years ago, though not because of something I read on Supertopo. And I don't know if it qualifies as a "deeply held" belief because I hadn't actually spent much time thinking about it up until that point.
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Flip Flop
Trad climber
Truckee, CA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 07:51am PT
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They're called orcas.
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Byran
climber
San Jose, CA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:11am PT
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And since the topic seems to have changed to a discussion of free will:
The way I see it, you can't have free-will unless you place the brain beyond reach of cause-and-effect. Which is to say that all other matter and processes in the universe operate under the predictable laws of nature, but not the brain; the brain is magic and has some sort of soul or spirit or supernatural element to it which is impossible to detect or quantify.
It seems like a lot of people also conflate free-will with the basis of morality, which is nonsense. If an employee is late to work 5 times in two weeks, that's a good indication they will continue to be late to work in the future, so you fire them. More over, our actions regarding criminal laws and morality affect the actions of everyone around us. If you know that being late to work will get you fired, then you will be more likely to show up on time. Cause and effect, data in data out. If a tree falls on a house and kills someone, we don't hold the tree "responsible" for it's actions because moralizing to a tree doesn't alter the behavior of trees.
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:20am PT
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Humans are capable of changing deeply-held beliefs. Most will never walk the path required, however.
A teaching from the Tantra - looking for the Black Swan when you know all Swans are White - offered from my teacher helped me begin to walk this path. I'm probably not very far along but I know I'm walking it.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:32am PT
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The issue should be less about volition: mechanistic** or non-mechanistic? and more about can-do ability or can-do power, imo.
**"freewill" is a misnomer, a leftover from medieval times (re: demonic possession). It causes more confusion than clarity. Volition (eg, mechanistic volition) is a more elucidating, more useful term.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:41am PT
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"Volition" is simply the latin for "will" which is anglo-saxon - they are synonyms. Like "fornicate" and "f*#k," like "defecate" and "sh#t."
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eeyonkee
Trad climber
Golden, CO
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Topic Author's Reply - Jan 22, 2015 - 08:44am PT
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That was a funny Dilbert. I was hoping to hear from somebody who formerly did not believe in human-caused global warming. It's one thing to have this belief without having looked into it (most people who hold this view). It's another to retain this belief in light of the overwhelming evidence that has come out in recent years and that has been presented in several threads here. I would hope that somebody who's read through parts of the global warming thread would have changed their mind.
What I would be totally surprised at would be a change in position on a religious belief.
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little Z
Trad climber
un cafetal en Naranjo
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:46am PT
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I used to believe that the New York Yankees were evil. But then Ichiro put on the pinstripes and I was forced to change my deeply held belief.
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Jan 22, 2015 - 08:51am PT
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but Grug.... to the Deniers their belief is the equivalent of a religious belief. It's all about faith and being lied to.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Colorado, Nepal & Okinawa
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Jan 22, 2015 - 09:19am PT
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I think deeply held beliefs are in large part a function of age. Young people tend to be more open minded than older ones. I often remark at how much more open to new ideas my college students are than the people I debate on ST, myself included. Conversely, if you don't have some firm opinions by middle or late middle age, then something has failed in your development.I see also, that people who live to be very old, either stick with their opinions to the bitter end, usually condemning how the world is developing, or they become more philosophical at the immense changes they have witnessed in their lifetime and the plasticity of human culture. My 91 year old mother is at that point after having firm opinions through middle age.
I also agree with NutAgain! that beliefs are not just a matter of intellect but of emotion and spirit, no matter how rational we think we are.
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NutAgain!
Trad climber
South Pasadena, CA
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Jan 22, 2015 - 09:26am PT
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edit: I posted a thread drift on conservatism, but deleted it because I don't want to dilute this good discussion.
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