Is belief a choice?

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Is belief a choice?

Yes, belief is a choice.
15
43%
No, belief is not a choice.
20
57%
 
Total votes: 35

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didyoumythme
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Is belief a choice?

Post by didyoumythme » Tue Jan 30, 2018 9:53 pm

Is it?
When an honest man discovers he is mistaken, he will either cease being honest, or cease being mistaken. - Anonymous

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moksha
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by moksha » Tue Jan 30, 2018 10:16 pm

We have the ability to choose what to believe or not to believe and can revise and change our minds a myriad of times before the taking of toast and tea.

Some would say belief is a binary thing except for the NOM rule of the universe: You can sort of believe.
Good faith does not require evidence, but it also does not turn a blind eye to that evidence. Otherwise, it becomes misplaced faith.
-- Moksha

Reuben
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by Reuben » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:51 am

I'm pretty sure the answer is "it depends."

For things where there's a lot of evidence for or against, or for which we have a strong bias, no.

For everything else, yes, but humans don't seem to choose belief in those things unless they're seen as important.

Edit: The definition of "belief" I'm using is "confidence in a truth statement," as in "I believe there is a God." In particular, I don't take it to mean "trust" or "faith," which I think are almost always choices.
Learn to doubt the stories you tell about yourselves and your adversaries.

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Mad Jax
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by Mad Jax » Wed Jan 31, 2018 6:12 am

This is not an easy thing to answer. First off, it's a subset of the age old question between materialism and dualism. Is anything truly a choice? I still haven't made my mind up completely, yet...

Assuming there is such a thing as the ability to make a choice about anything, the mind still works almost entirely unconsciously. Think of unconscious thought as the machine code of the mind, subconscious thought as the assembly code, and conscious thought as the platform (also this is only one model of the mind, so there's always that to consider). The vast majority of the processes of the unconscious vs the conscious sits at a ratio somewhere close to 10,000 to about 40 neurons firing every second (at least according to one study I read, from what the researchers were able to discern). So choice in almost everything is severely limited. But time runs short so if there's interest, to be continued.
Free will is a golden thread flowing through the matrix of fixed events.

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deacon blues
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by deacon blues » Wed Jan 31, 2018 8:45 am

Yes belief is a choice, that is, we can make it a choice. We can choose to sustain and even enhance our biases, whether they be for a flat earth, white supremacy, or young earth creationism. We can also decide to follow the evidence, and have a life filled with the joy of discovery. This could be like taking the "Road Less Traveled."
God is Love. God is Truth. The greatest problem with organized religion is that the organization becomes god, rather than a means of serving God.

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LaMachina
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by LaMachina » Wed Jan 31, 2018 9:16 am

I "believe" it is clearly a choice although I find myself in the same dilemma as MadJax in that I'm not sure if anything is Truly a Choice...

I find I refer to Hitchens when those ideas start to make my brain hurt:
Yes I have free will; I have no choice but to have it
But of course, that little joke will just make it hurt more.

But anyways, I find when there is strong evidence for or against something that the choice to believe is even more clearly demonstrated. It's in those moments, in the face of cold, stark evidence where we see people choosing to believe anyways. They will even admit, when all arguments have been exhausted "Well...I choose to believe".

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wtfluff
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by wtfluff » Wed Jan 31, 2018 9:48 am

What is the definition of "belief" as it relates to this poll?



Oh, and:
Reuben wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:51 am
I'm pretty sure the answer is "it depends."
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GoodBoy
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by GoodBoy » Wed Jan 31, 2018 10:43 am

I challenge everyone to choose to believe in Santa Clause again.

Think of how magical Christmas would be again! Think of the excitement you would feel wondering if you actually got something good this year, or if you got a coal rock. It was truly wonderful trying to listen for the jingling of the reindeer when they landed on the roof. Think of the happiness and joy you would feel Christmas morning. The entire season is so much more delightful and magical! Life would be better if you could believe again. Choose to believe!

Maybe it would have been better for us to have chosen to be deliberately ignorant of the facts. Maybe you should have ignored all of the evidence. Maybe we should not have worried about how Santa can fit down the chimney, and then magically slide back up it. Maybe we should have closed our ears when our big brother explained the truth and forever ruined the holiday for us. Maybe we should be kind and allow those who still believe in Santa to believe as long as they can. Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Always been the good kid, but I wanted to know more, and to find and test truth.

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LaMachina
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by LaMachina » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:00 am

No challenge necessary. I DO believe in Santa!! Honestly, I think I believe more in Santa than I believe in Jesus.

Here's the catch though, I don't believe in him as a literal being but nonetheless I do choose to believe in him.

I think beliefs may evolve and change (hell, look at Joseph's evolving theology) but still we seem to decide what we believe in.

dogbite
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by dogbite » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:03 am

I think the question has some problematic assumptions about belief and choice.

Rather than a choice, I would say we evolved a set of responses that give us a predilection to what we term religion or belief. We are born with a first draft bias.
Then the nurture and individual experience factors come into play that refine the draft.

Velief is more cultural artifact or construct that one is inculcated in than an individual choice or innate aspect of life.

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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by dogbite » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:06 am

Now consider this quote from Scott Bakker.

The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?
Last edited by dogbite on Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

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GoodBoy
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by GoodBoy » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:11 am

LaMachina wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:00 am
I think beliefs may evolve and change (hell, look at Joseph's evolving theology) but still we seem to decide what we believe in.
I agree with you to some extent. And brain research also agrees with you. Most people don't use their logical minds to come up with answers. They use their emotional, primal, parts of their brains to choose what they basically WANT to believe in first, and then they use their logical minds to come up with justifications for those beliefs.
dogbite wrote:I think the question has some problematic assumptions about belief and choice.

Rather than a choice, I would say we evolved a set of responses that give us a predilection to what we term religion or belief. We are born with a first draft bias.
Then the nurture and individual experience factors come into play that refine the draft.

Belief is more cultural artifact or construct that one is inculcated in than an individual choice or innate aspect of life.

Right. Our brains were not evolved to find truth. They were evolved to do what is necessary to keep us in the good graces of our family and community and to enhance our status in that community. And if your whole life is Mormonism, denying Mormonism is bound to results in a fair amount of angst, or cognitive dissonance. Your subconscious mind WANTS to believe even though your logical mind can't make any sense out of it and knows that it is a farce.
Always been the good kid, but I wanted to know more, and to find and test truth.

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LaMachina
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by LaMachina » Wed Jan 31, 2018 11:17 am

That quote freaks me out a little dogbite...very interesting.

I guess I'd sum up my position as we choose and frame our beliefs but we do not necessarily choose reality. But even then, how we frame things does have some influence over our reality.

But of course, maybe we are in fact just slaves to the darkness.

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alas
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by alas » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:01 pm

I wanted a third choice that said,"it depends."

Let's start with the Santa thing mentioned above. No, once you stop believing in a false belief, you cannot choose to go against what you see as reality.

But back up to when you still believed in Santa. You thought, "We don't have a chimney. How can Santa get in?" And your parents winked as they explained that they gave Santa the numerical lock to the front door. You have a choice. Do you believe the subtle behavior of the wink and sound of your parent's explanation that tells you that this is some kind of secret game? Or do you take them at their word that they literally gave Santa a combination to unlock the door? Me, the four year old body language expert, I believed the behavior. My brother took them at their word. We both made a choice as to what part of reality to pay attention to.

We continue this same decision process of paying more attention to the things we want to hear all our lives. I found that I learned more by paying attention to how people act than by paying attention to what they say. So, when Boyd K.P. Pounded the pulpit, I saw his behavior and decided that what he said was something he had serious doubt about. His words said, "The Holy Ghost is male, male, male." And his behavior said, "I am so terrified that I am wrong." So, yeah, I believed his fear and not his words. So, there are constant choices in how we process reality.

Then, we have our biases of what we want to believe, which is another choice.

But say a doubt creeps past our confirmation bias. Then we experience cognitive dissonance. We have a forced decision of what we want to believe. Psychologists have studied in depth about what factors influence our choice, and sometimes it is little things, like this task had to be fun cause no way would I do a boring task and only get paid two bucks. So, the task was fun. Um, yeah, circling the letter p in a long document is fun? But the low pay makes them choose fun, where if the pay was high, they were for sure doing it for the money. So, again we have made a choice about what we believe.

Once things reach a point of no return, the decision was made a long time ago. So, no, us NOMS can't decide to believe in the church again. That choice is one we already made when we pursued our doubt. The cognitive dissonance was settled in favor of the doubt. Not a choice we can make without NEW evidence. Then we have to make a choice to pay attention to the new evidence, then go through the cognitive dissonance, and the evidence being enough to force a change of belief.

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Linked
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by Linked » Wed Jan 31, 2018 12:18 pm

This reminds me of one of my first posts on NOM 1.0, I asked if having a faith crisis was a choice. It got an interesting variety of responses and levels of passion.

I say belief is not a choice.

Belief is more of an emotion than a rational thought, and people don't get to choose their emotions. We can choose to put ourselves in situations where an emotion is more likely, e.g. choose to watch a sad movie, choose to be with people where we are usually happy, etc. Similarly we can choose to put ourselves in situations to sustain or challenge our beliefs. The LDS church constantly pushes members to participate in public and private activities that sustain belief in the LDS church. Read scriptures (especially the LDS specific ones), pray, attend church, Sabbath observance, choose friends who help you stay within the LDS mold, mission, tithing, etc... There is also a push against things that might challenge belief, like the push against intellectualism, feminism, and LGBTQ+.

A common and interesting situation in this model is where someone doesn't consciously know what their beliefs are, or what might challenge them. There are a lot of people who don't put in much time or effort in defining their beliefs, and don't know consciously what challenges them. Their beliefs are emotion and they go by emotion to protect them. My DW responds to my disaffection with all sorts of emotion and little argument. She does not want to get into the definition of what she believes or why. This provides a protective bubble around core beliefs. But it can also be dangerous to the belief because cracks can get in without realizing it. I thought that humility meant accepting reality, which was something that ended up working against my beliefs. Having leaders that do the dangerous thinking for you and guide you to avoid pitfalls without requiring you to grapple with them is a good way to avoid this.

That's not to say that someone who doesn't really know what their beliefs are doesn't have some conscious portion to their beliefs. People create a conscious and at least semi-rational framework for their beliefs, but the framework is a child of the beliefs, not the other way around. That framework may be accurate in some ways, but it doesn't have to be. This creature is a TBM, or any dogmatic person. The more the conscious framework is developed the more apologetic. A big problem with that is if the framework has holes and the person is intellectually honest with themselves then it collapses. It is safer for an unlikely belief to have a less developed framework. This is why the church fears intellectualism. Also, if the framework is proven wrong then the belief is in danger. This is why the white-washing of church history is so dangerous for the LDS church, and why church meetings focus so much on the primary answers and so little on history or developing a catechism.

My faith crisis developed as what I saw everyday didn't match up with my conscious framework of belief. My shelf broke in an instant when I finally internalized that they didn't match up. Now I try to let my beliefs be borne from reality, rather than my reality be borne from my beliefs. And I am far more open to the idea that my beliefs and framework could be wrong.
"I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order" - Kurt Vonnegut

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oliver_denom
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by oliver_denom » Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:11 pm

I have a question.

If belief isn't a choice, then what would it be?
“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.” - Vonnegut

L'enfer, c'est les autres - JP

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Jeffret
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by Jeffret » Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:39 pm

oliver_denom wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:11 pm
I have a question.

If belief isn't a choice, then what would it be?
Behaviorism. For a start.
"Close your eyes, for your eyes will only tell the truth,
And the truth isn't what you want to see" (Charles Hart, "The Music of the Night")

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alas
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by alas » Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:31 pm

oliver_denom wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 3:11 pm
I have a question.

If belief isn't a choice, then what would it be?
The result of several accumulated choices. As I explain above.

Or as Jeffret says, behaviorism. With behavioral psychology we can teach chickens what behaviorist so call superstitions. Best ally, with random reinforcement, the chicken "learns" a complex set of behaviors that it *thinks* change the outcome. But it works just like superstitions in humans. With human's for example, say Bob wears his blue shirt one poker game and has big winnings. A few weeks later, he is wearing the same shirt and again he wins. Now we have him wondering if the blue shirt is lucky. All it takes is one more poker game when he is wearing the blue shirt and wins and he might really believe that the shirt causes him to win. Behaviorism explains his belief.

Now, with this superstition, he is partly making a choice to believe it is a lucky shirt because he is choosing not to consider that it might be coincident and do a few more tests games of poker.

So, if you are a behaviorist, belief is the result of behavior, but if you are into cognitive models of psychology, then he has a faulty belief based on the faulty belief that a shirt could change the outcome in a poker game. It is his his belief in luck to begin with that leads him to other faulty beliefs.

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oliver_denom
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by oliver_denom » Wed Jan 31, 2018 5:47 pm

alas wrote:
Wed Jan 31, 2018 4:31 pm

So, if you are a behaviorist, belief is the result of behavior, but if you are into cognitive models of psychology, then he has a faulty belief based on the faulty belief that a shirt could change the outcome in a poker game. It is his his belief in luck to begin with that leads him to other faulty beliefs.
If this is the case, then is behaviorism not an explanation for all belief, not just supernaturalism? If we consider that it's not possible to prove causation, then it would suggest that all belief is determined by environment. Is there a version of this that preserves free will?
“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages--they haven't ended yet.” - Vonnegut

L'enfer, c'est les autres - JP

dogbite
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Re: Is belief a choice?

Post by dogbite » Wed Jan 31, 2018 6:10 pm

I grow more skeptical of free will all the time. Susan Blackmore is interesting on the subject.

https://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/free-will/

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