Transcript Belief vs. Skepticism

FreeThinkers Discussion
Belief vs. Skepticism
Presented March 22, 2016
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Belief vs. Skepticism
What is belief?
• A degree of conviction that a proposition is true.
• Essentially, it’s a feeling of certainty.
• That feeling unconsciously associates a weight.
– Examples of Weight or degrees of confidence: most
of us are 100% confident the sun will still be in the
sky tomorrow but we are only (depending on our
health) 50% to 90% confident we will be there to
enjoy it.
• Belief is justified psychologically, emotionally.
• Humans are pre-wired to believe, with a strong
emotional need to be right.
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Belief vs. Skepticism
What is knowledge?
• Awareness of a true proposition.
• A proposition is true if it can be verified as fact.
• Types of verification:
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Self-evident apprehension of fact
Corroborative evidence of fact
Consistent within a theoretical framework
Predictive, repeatable, testable
Authoritative pronouncements
• Knowledge is always personal, subjective, &
contextual.
• Knowledge is belief that happens to be true – that
is consistent within a wider, verifiable framework.3
Belief vs. Skepticism
Knowledge vs. Belief:
• The circularity of these two concepts
– Belief is the confidence that one is right
– Knowledge is belief that is “actionable”
– However, if one believes without doubt, one
claims “to know” regardless of actionability.
• Question: Is there anything we can know
with absolute certainty?
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Belief vs. Skepticism
Belief is never value-free:
• We are pre-wired to strongly desire to be right.
• People argue all the time over trivial facts.
• The desire to be right increases in intensity with the
significance of the belief relative to moral behavior.
• Can knowledge exist without emotion?
• Can knowledge exist without consciousness?
• Question: Is there such thing as objective
knowledge?
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Belief vs. Skepticism
“Belief is believing a believer.” -- Mark K.
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Beliefs are self-reinforcing.
Beliefs are tinged (or saturated) with righteousness.
“Core beliefs” can merge with personal identity.
Are we mentally free to choose beliefs?
How free are we to change our beliefs?
How much control do we really have over our core
beliefs and our ability to change them?
• Are beliefs essentially the spawn of the unconscious?
• Are beliefs self-perpetuating?
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Belief vs. Skepticism
Enter skepticism – the great Usurper:
• Regular beliefs usually have an element of doubt.
• Core beliefs can be absolute and doubtless.
– Absolute beliefs are “belief in belief”.
– Absolute beliefs are an endless feedback loop.
– Is there a trick to interrupting the feedback loop?
• Belief in skepticism:
– Skepticism is more than just simple doubt.
– Skepticism is a core belief that no beliefs are absolute.
– Humanity is divided into two fundamental types of intellect:
those who believe in absolutes and those who don’t.
– The true Believers vs. the true Skeptics
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Belief vs. Skepticism
Skepticism as a Core Belief:
• Anything and everything can & should be questioned.
• Obviously, it’s a challenge to others’ beliefs.
• More importantly, skepticism is a tool for the conscious
mind to challenge, overcome, and even change its own
unconsciously-constructed beliefs!
• As a core belief, skepticism is its own belief system.
• As a core belief, it is its own loop-ending mechanism.
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Belief vs. Skepticism
Obvious targets for skepticism:
• A personal god, dogmatic texts, religious
fundamentalism, the occult, political histrionics,
fear-mongering, bigotry, stereotypes, racial
supremacy, etc.
Less obvious targets:
• The scientific establishment, human rights,
liberalism, philosophical materialism, consensus
morality, consciousness as an emergent
phenomenon, the belief that the scientific method
is the only source for knowledge, and more.
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Belief vs. Skepticism
Some (more or less) relevant References:
• “The Righteous Mind – Why Good People are Divided by
Politics and Religion” by Jonathan Haidt
• “Doubt: A History” by Jennifer Michael Hecht
• Secular Buddhism (example of atheist spirituality)
• Anthropic Trilogy by Ed Fischer (another example of
atheist spirituality) also (Ed is one of our members)
• Belief – Wikipedia
• Skepticism – Wikipedia
• Gettier Problem – Wikipedia
• The Atlantic – “Science Faith Is Different from Religious
Faith” by Paul Bloom, Nov 24, 2015
• The core Intelligent Design position – FYI, Uncommon
Descent, Nov 4, 2014
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Personal Belief & Political Beliefs
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Our beliefs about the world lead us to specific political beliefs as we try to design a political system that
will provide the kind of society in which we want to live.
The Righteous Mind by Johnathan Haidt explores these connections:
Haidt’s book shows the foundations of various moral beliefs and the attraction they have for different political
philosophies, we can begin to see the form of a discussion that bridges the gap, and the differences, between:
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How we use our individually accepted moral codes to determine how we treat other individuals we
encounter in our daily lives and
– How we use our individual moral code to decide how to treat large groups of people as we express
our morality through our advocacy of the policies we want enacted by the government.
The Amazon summary of The Righteous Mind says:
– Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people
so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to
mutual understanding.
– His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other
people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously
certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ
across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research
findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral
domain.
– He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally
selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle
claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our
greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on
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ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about and why we need the insights of
liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.
Personal Belief & Political Beliefs
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The challenge: what morality best serves a community by providing a foundation that allows unrelated
people to live together peacefully and to enjoy the benefits of cooperation, specialization and the division
of labor?
Haidt proposes six potential foundations of morality. With some interpretation on my part the foundations
can be summarized as:
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Care/Harm: This foundation makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty
and want to care for those who are suffering.
Fairness as proportional reward: This foundation supports righteous anger when anyone cheats you directly
(when a car dealer knowingly sells you a lemon). But it also supports a more generalized concern with
anyone who “drinks the water” rather than carrying their share for the group.
• Fairness, important to all groups, nonetheless has subtypes: The left values fairness more when it is
presented as equality, particularly equality of outcomes between groups (which is at the heart of social
justice). The right values fairness more than the left when it is presented as proportionality — a focus
on merit, which includes a desire to let people fail when they are perceived to have been lazy or
otherwise undeserving.
Liberty/Oppression: Everyone cares about liberty but:
• To a liberal, liberty predominately means concern about the rights of certain vulnerable groups.
• Conservatives and Libertarians hold the idea of liberty as the right to be left alone.
Loyalty: This foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions.
It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is, or is not, a team player.
Authority: This foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will
benefit us within social hierarchies.
Sanctity: This foundation evolved initially in response to the adaptive challenge of the omnivore’s dilemma,
and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites.
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Personal Belief & Political Beliefs
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http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/donald-trump-supporters-think-about-morality-differently-other-votersheres
Next, we looked at how each candidate’s supporters prioritize each of the moral foundations compared with the
average American (Figure 1). Bars above zero indicate that the candidate’s supporters place more emphasis on
that particular moral foundation compared with the average voter. Bars that dip down below zero do not mean those
supporters do not care about the moral concern, only that they gave relatively lower ratings to it compared with the
rest of our nationally representative survey sample.
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Personal Belief & Political Beliefs
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1) Care (blue bars): The care foundation measures the psychological tendency to believe that morality requires caring for
and protecting the vulnerable. A sample survey item asks respondents if they agree that “compassion for those who are
suffering is the most crucial virtue.” Individuals who score high on this foundation tend to support a more activist government
with a more generous safety net.
– The most obvious thing to note is that supporters of the two Democratic candidates are high, whereas supporters of
most Republicans are low. This is consistent with most studies of the left-right dimension: The left values care and
compassion as public or political values more than the right does. (We note that all people, and all groups, value care to
some extent; we are merely looking at relative differences among groups.)
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Personal Belief & Political Beliefs
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Rand Paul’s supporters score particularly low. We have consistently found that libertarians score lower on care and
compassion compared with others — indeed, they score low on almost all emotions, while scoring the highest on
measures of reason, rationality, and intelligence.
– The Republican candidates who put forth a gentle Christian persona draw the most care-oriented Republican voters.
Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Jeb Bush supporters are the only Republican groups that are above the national
mean or right at it (hence the blue bars don’t show for Bush and Carson).
2) Fairness as proportionality (green bars):Proportionality is the desire for people to reap what they sow — for good deeds
to be rewarded and bad deeds punished. A sample survey item asks respondents if they agree that “people who produce
more should be rewarded more than those who just tried hard.”
– In practice, a strong desire for proportionality is highly predictive of a preference for small government and a dislike of
activist government and the welfare state. (We only asked about fairness as proportionality in our survey, not fairness
as equality — which is always higher on the left.)
– The green bars show a very high correlation with ideology: As you move to the right, the bars rise. Ted Cruz and Marco
Rubio supporters score highest on this foundation. This pattern is consistent with these candidates receiving the most
support from the Tea Party. In our earlier research, we have each independently reached the conclusion that Tea Party
supporters are highly motivated by the sense that the government routinely violates proportional fairness, by bailing out
well-connected corporations and by spreading a safety net of welfare benefits under people they see as undeserving of
help.
– Supporters of Democrats score the lowest on this foundation, particularly supporters of Bernie Sanders. This is
consistent with Sanders’s emphasis on income redistribution, which many on the right see as a direct violation of
proportional fairness carried out in the name of achieving equality of outcome.
3) Liberty (orange bars): The liberty foundation measures the psychological tendency to resist being controlled or
dominated. A sample survey item asks respondents if they agree that “everyone should be free to do as they choose, so long
as they don’t infringe on upon the freedom of others.”
– Not surprisingly, Rand Paul’s supporters rate this the most important foundation, by far. Although Paul has said he’s
a constitutional conservative, not a libertarian, his supporters reflect the moral profile of libertarians.
– More surprisingly, Bernie Sanders supporters also score high. Sanders seems to be drawing the more libertarian
elements of the left, consistent with his more libertarian views on personal freedom, gun rights, and dovish foreign
policy. Libertarian-minded voters seem to choose Sanders if they are on the left on economic policy, and Paul if they
are on the right.
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Personal Belief & Political Beliefs
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Clinton supporters, in contrast to Sanders’s supporters, score slightly below the national mean. This may be one of the
most important differences between the two candidates: Clinton attracts voters less concerned about individual
autonomy. For instance, Clinton opposes legalizing recreational marijuana and until recently opposed legalizing samesex marriage, while Sanders supports legalizing marijuana and voted against DOMA back in 1996 when President Bill
Clinton signed it into law.
– The most outwardly Christian candidates — Huckabee and Carson — draw supporters who score low on the liberty
foundation. This may reflect the fact that socially conservative religious voters tend to prioritize values of community
and group cohesion over individual autonomy.
– Notably, despite the frequent use of rhetoric about “liberty” on the right, only a few Republican candidates — Rand Paul
and Ted Cruz — attract supporters that score much above average on this foundation. These results suggest that the
Cruz campaign strategy to capture libertarian-leaning voters may be working.
4) Authority/loyalty/sanctity (red bars): For simplicity, we took the average of each respondent’s answers to all six
questions for these three foundations, because they tend to go together as the foundations of social conservatism, and in this
data set they generally tell the same story about each candidate. (See our supplemental blog post for graphs and extended
analyses of each foundation separately.) Authority shows up in political life in strong support for the police and a “tough on
crime” attitude; a sample question in our survey asked respondents whether it is relevant to moral judgment that “an action
caused chaos or disorder.” Loyalty shows up in political life in strong patriotism and a desire to protect the flag; a survey item
we used asked if it was relevant to morality that a person “showed a lack of loyalty.” Sanctity shows up in political life in
culture war debates related to sexuality (including same-sex marriage) and also to the sanctity of life (including abortion). An
item we used asked if respondents agreed that “some acts are wrong on the grounds that they are unnatural.”
– Supporters of the Republican candidates tend to highly rate authority/loyalty/sanctity. Supporters of Democrats and
libertarian-leaning Rand Paul do not.
– Huckabee supporters most clearly show the classic social conservative pattern — they have high scores on all three of
these foundations, as do supporters of Cruz, Carson, and Trump.
– Sanders supporters score the lowest on these foundations and are joined not by Clinton supporters but by Paul
supporters. Voters inclined to libertarianism tend to shun restrictions on individual action dictated by valuing
authority/loyalty/sanctity.
– Clinton supporters are more socially conservative than are Sanders supporters (although they are still slightly below the
national mean on these foundations).
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