Re: Evil ? (was: Hypostases (was: Natural Order & Belief)

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2006 15:05:44 +0100

Le 26-déc.-06, à 23:59, minsky.domain.name.hidden a écrit :

>
> I regard the idea of "believing" to be unsound, because it is a
> pre-Freudian concept, which assumes that each person has a "single
> self" that maintains beliefs.


Is this not a bit self-defeating? It has the form of a belief. Now I
can still agree, it depends of the meaning of "single self".




> A more realistic view is that each
> person is constantly switching among various different "ways to think"
> in which different assertions, statements, or bodies of knowledge keep
> changing their status, etc.


In that case I can completely agree. Even by modeling a machine's
belief by formal provability Bp by that machine, in the ideal case of
the self-referentially correct machine, like Peano Arithmetic, it will
follow that the "ontically equivalent" modalities Bp & p, Bp & Dp, etc.
obeys different logics so that they embodies different epistemological
status (and they are easy to confuse).
Now, when we are building a (meta)theory of "belief" we have to stick
on some possible sharable belief (in number theory, computer science,
perhaps physics: all that will depend on the hypotheses we accept) and
build from it. If not we could fall in exaggerated relativism.



> Accordingly our "sets of beliefs" can
> include many conflicts--and in different mental contexts, those
> inconsistencies may get resolved in different ways, perhaps depending
> on one's current priorities, etc.


OK. I would say that if someone can acknowledge the existence of a
conflict between beliefs, then he/she/it does acknowledge implicitly
that he/she/it bets on some *self*-consistency. If not he/she/it could
just accept its contradictory beliefs without further thoughts.

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/


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Received on Wed Dec 27 2006 - 09:06:11 PST

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