What We Should Believe - Sound Foundations For Any Belief System
A belief system is at the core of defining who we are and determining what we will do. Developing your belief system and making sure it's sound should be a top priority to enable directed sensible action. There are several simple premises or foundations upon which I propose any belief system can safely rely. None of these are particularly complex or difficult to understand, yet many leave this area of thought largely unexamined and fall into unhelpful beliefs that could be avoided with this understanding.
Truth
Truth is the basis of thought and reason itself: to reject the existence of truth is to assert as true that all truth is invalid, which is a contradiction. The reality that assertions may be either true or false permeates every topic we can examine, and without recognizing this any discussion of belief systems is superfluous.
Volition
Volition is the ability to introduce original change into reality, or to deliberately alter which of multiple possible futures is realized. Without volition, life would be on rails and we would be powerless to change anything, including our own belief systems and belief or disbelief in our own volition. It is safe to assume volition because without it we can have no power over our assumptions: we have nothing to lose.
Causality
Causality is the set of properties that enable predictable interactions between things. Laws of physics are causal properties, and without such causal properties there could be no order or pattern to reality. Our volition would be rendered irrelevant because there could never be any real correlation between intent, action, and consequence.
Value
Value is simply the idea that certain possibilities can be superior or preferential to other possibilities from a given perspective. Without applying a value framework any attempt to exercise volition is necessarily arbitrary.
Property Dualism
Belief systems that recognize both causality and volition are categorized as dualism. Substance dualism is the belief that the two qualities are isolated and attributed to entirely distinct types of substances (physical and spiritual or physical and mental). Property dualism is the belief that both qualities are properties of the same substance and can coexist as attributes of it.
Using the much-loved billiard table model of causality we can demonstrate the problems with substance dualism and the superiority of property dualism as an explanation. In the traditional model, billiard balls are seen as having only causal properties, while the cue stick is the wielded by an outside volition. Because of the balls' causal properties (mass, volume, velocity, inertia, friction coefficients...) they react and interact in predictable ways when struck with the cue. Suppose a special volitional billiard ball were introduced on the table. With no causal properties, its behavior would be entirely independent of the others. It could not causally receive or transfer inertia, and could have no influence on the paths of the other balls. In order to act deliberately on the system the cue wielder must first have his perception causally altered by the layout of the table and balls, then volitionally decide on a desirable change to that layout and a means of bringing it about, and finally must causally act by transferring the appropriate inertia to realize that plan. None of this is possible if volitional and causal properties are confined to their own substances.
Nice... a couple things to add, though nothing to disagree with.
Today Belief can become static. It is important that it be dynamic and able to change. I have decided I am going to write something about this today. Thank you for the inspiration.
Resteemed.
Definitely true. I've been frustrated recently with people close to me who reach a point in discussion at which they have no argument, but are unwilling to seriously consider changing. People get very deeply entrenched in their ideas, and will often refuse to give them up even after basically admitting that they know they're wrong. It terrifies me seeing people so completely blind to their own inconsistency or hypocrisy, because as much as I try it's impossible to prove to myself that there are no areas in which I'm the same way.
We all are going to have this issue. The fact that you are even willing to look at yourself and question yourself is a step in the right direction.
We are all going to have issues. Pretending they don't exist and being unwilling to look for them in ourselves means the problems that we DO have will go unchanged. We must see them before we can change them.
We must be willing to be introspective and look at ourselves for this to happen.
It sounds like you are willing. So I'll say it now... Like me, there is undoubtedly some screwed up things in your mind that you'd like to improve. This is normal. At least you are willing to look. This can make you hopefully a better person in your own mind in the future, and likely in the minds of others.
As to those who lock everything into paradigms and rigid belief systems... (Religion, Political party, treating science like religion, etc.)
That's a tough nut to crack. My approach has been to write a lot about critical thinking, and try to write about it a little differently and from different perspectives (at least the ones I can come up with).
If they gain the tools of critical thinking then many of the things we hold rigid begin to fall apart when confronted with those tools.
They do not teach these tools in school. I've therefore chosen it as that battlefield where I can potentially make a difference. I'd welcome more people like you standing beside me, fighting the hard fight, of getting people to actually THINK for themselves, and understand the beauty of debate, being right, being wrong, and being fine with change.
I think volition is the product of a hell of a lot of background processing and accumulated data from experience, most of it not conscious. There has been experiments that have shown that decisions are already made before we think we have made a decision.
I think that 'free will' is an illusion created by the fact we do not have direct access to see the source of our own decisionmaking. Probably it is too complex and certainly in imperative situations it could not be made visible without rendering the processing worthless by delays that ensure failure.
I didn't know that dualism was about the combining of the contradictory deterministic and acausal ideas about action. I thought it was about how opposites form a dialectic.
I've seen those experiments, but I don't think they mean much. The fact that we don't understand the processes by which we make decisions and aren't capable of indicating exactly when they occur is no proof that volition is an illusion. Belief in volition doesn't even require that it occur at the level of the self-aware individual. Our consciousness could be a higher level product of low level interaction between the causal and volitional properties of the stuff we're made of.
As I pointed out above, we have nothing to gain by acting as though free will is an illusion if we are capable of believing otherwise. In other contexts dualism means other things. Any belief system constructed based on the idea that we can't change anything will be utterly useless, since by definition it can't properly inform any constructive change or action.
Dualism means different things in different contexts, but this is how I've seen it used in the context of metaphysics.
I gain a lot by recognising that my process is largely autonomous from my will. Conscious decisions are very slow, and don't matter in short terms, in longer terms, the evidence of the benefits of making the right decisions becomes obvious. The benefit of believing in determinism is that you can forgive your mistakes. You simply did not have the information absorbed that would have produced it.
I have believed this for quite a long time, after really intensively thinking about it. One of the things that you learn to accept when you believe that you ultimately are not in charge, is to be more passive and observe more. This leads to you making better decisions, and for exactly the reason I say - good decisions come from good information.
So you might say that I apply volition towards observation, but I prefer to say that it is because it is in my constitution to be curious and to act on every question that pops into my head in order to gain more information. So this viewpoint is not without benefits, and thus I hold to it.
I don't dispute what you wrote here. You did inspire me to post an addition to this of sorts. It was something I've wanted to write about for awhile, but I kept forgetting.