One point I've thought about extensively: this really goes to show that one is actually "off the hook" as far as strategic and tactical choices in beliefs, and that when it comes to matters of the ideological and memetic, the notion of truth/falsehood should be treated as individually hermeneutic. That is, for personal flourishing, best make the unconscious conscious.
Meaning: the natural question is: what do I do with this information in your article? One can talk about it endlessly but that would be playing the "nihilistic sarcastic hipster above it all" game, a game itself that often doesn't lead a person far, depending on milieu and circumstance. And since humans are hypersocial species, we can't really get away with never affirming some pseudobelief without social consequence. As Erving Goffman demonstrated extensively, social presentation is critical towards life outcomes including basic things like standard of living.
And so given that we have no choice but to play, the operational thinking regarding pseudobeliefs can be: 1) I am an ape that wants/needs high status 2) what are the games in which people of my set of natural advantages and disadvantages have a high chance of winning, then 3) what are the pseudobeliefs that people who are successful in those games espouse, then 4) learn the treatises and texts in and out of those pseudobeliefs to be the most rhetorically skilled at espousing them 5) go ahead and pseudo-believe them
I suppose you could do those things you listed, but if I’m right, you would have done them anyway. The only thing in the vicinity of a normative implication might be: since some pseudobeliefs are true, you might try to submerge yourself in a subculture / status game that socially incentivizes true pseudobeliefs as much as possible. A subculture in which saying reasonable-sounding or insightful-sounding things gets you status.
I think you are absolutely right about this currently, but I am not so sure that this was true in the hunter-gatherer era, or later, at least until the medieval period. Back then you really had to believe, because your survival depended on it. The status game wasn't like it is now—you just followed the rules, whatever they were, without question. Now the situation is completely different: we have to hold pseudobeliefs in order to be able to change them more often, because our well-being depends on it. We play this game, for example, to sell our products, stocks, crypto and so on, and in the case of the job environment, we have to be performatively woke to get the job. But conditions and timelines change quickly, so we must be ready to pivot when the time comes. Hence the pseudobeliefs. I don't know, I am thinking about it.
I mean, you could get killed for believing the wrong thing back then, and shamanism and other weird mythologies are common in forager societies. But if you dig up any evidence for this let me know.
I get the following error when trying to access your ChatGPT conversation link (https://chatgpt.com/c/6ab30f32-f8ec-83e8-a2be-e1d72223180e) - "You don’t have access to this conversation. Make sure you’re logged in to the right account, or ask the conversation owner to send you a share link."
Excellent!
One point I've thought about extensively: this really goes to show that one is actually "off the hook" as far as strategic and tactical choices in beliefs, and that when it comes to matters of the ideological and memetic, the notion of truth/falsehood should be treated as individually hermeneutic. That is, for personal flourishing, best make the unconscious conscious.
Meaning: the natural question is: what do I do with this information in your article? One can talk about it endlessly but that would be playing the "nihilistic sarcastic hipster above it all" game, a game itself that often doesn't lead a person far, depending on milieu and circumstance. And since humans are hypersocial species, we can't really get away with never affirming some pseudobelief without social consequence. As Erving Goffman demonstrated extensively, social presentation is critical towards life outcomes including basic things like standard of living.
And so given that we have no choice but to play, the operational thinking regarding pseudobeliefs can be: 1) I am an ape that wants/needs high status 2) what are the games in which people of my set of natural advantages and disadvantages have a high chance of winning, then 3) what are the pseudobeliefs that people who are successful in those games espouse, then 4) learn the treatises and texts in and out of those pseudobeliefs to be the most rhetorically skilled at espousing them 5) go ahead and pseudo-believe them
I suppose you could do those things you listed, but if I’m right, you would have done them anyway. The only thing in the vicinity of a normative implication might be: since some pseudobeliefs are true, you might try to submerge yourself in a subculture / status game that socially incentivizes true pseudobeliefs as much as possible. A subculture in which saying reasonable-sounding or insightful-sounding things gets you status.
I think you are absolutely right about this currently, but I am not so sure that this was true in the hunter-gatherer era, or later, at least until the medieval period. Back then you really had to believe, because your survival depended on it. The status game wasn't like it is now—you just followed the rules, whatever they were, without question. Now the situation is completely different: we have to hold pseudobeliefs in order to be able to change them more often, because our well-being depends on it. We play this game, for example, to sell our products, stocks, crypto and so on, and in the case of the job environment, we have to be performatively woke to get the job. But conditions and timelines change quickly, so we must be ready to pivot when the time comes. Hence the pseudobeliefs. I don't know, I am thinking about it.
I mean, you could get killed for believing the wrong thing back then, and shamanism and other weird mythologies are common in forager societies. But if you dig up any evidence for this let me know.
This I mean , they were real beliefs back then
I get the following error when trying to access your ChatGPT conversation link (https://chatgpt.com/c/6ab30f32-f8ec-83e8-a2be-e1d72223180e) - "You don’t have access to this conversation. Make sure you’re logged in to the right account, or ask the conversation owner to send you a share link."
Where is this link in the text?
CTRL + F "use much of the same neural machinery for inferring their own mental states as they do for inferring other people’s mental states".
So much good stuff in here.