on one hand, you have something you believe in, but don't know if it's true or not because you either don't know the facts, or there are none. and on the other, you have all the heaps of evidence that exist, and know them, and therefore, own knowledge.

i believe you are correct.

this is not to say that belief is not sometimes correct. but relying on gut feelings and emotions are not a trustworthy way of being correct in life.

if the object of knowledge in question does indeed exist, do you feel/reason that it makes a difference how you arrive at that knowledge?

i think what you're talking about here is intent. in terms of which is more noble, the lifelong pursuit of knowledge seems more noble than does a lifetime of willful ignorance. i would surely respect more a believer who has studied text upon text than a believer who has pushed away information because he's sure he's right. i think we can all agree we judge how people live and place different lifestyles on different shelves of respect.

Are you talking specifically about metaphysical beliefs? Defining knowledge can be less than obvious. Is knowledge gathered through the senses? Can knowledge be expanded through abstract reasoning? Through computation?

Should we believe the information gathered through our senses that becomes the basis for our knowledge? We tend to believe that what we observe is true. And we also tend to believe that the extrapolations made from basic facts are true as well. So when early man was looking at the horizon and saw what looked like an end to the horizon, he believed that the earth was flat and that one could fall off of it. He believed that he knew this.

Here is a practical example. My father was severely red-green colorblind, so he couldn't distinguish between the colors of traffic lights. He believed that they were different colors because he was told which light was which and the people around him behaved in ways that would indicate that this was true. But he had no first-hand knowledge that the lights were really different colors.

There is the skeptical school of thought that says that the only thing that we can know is that we don't really know anything for sure. We just presume to believe things.

I guess I'll post my Carl Jung quote again,


"...nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves. Yet anyone with even a smattering of psychology can see how limited this knowledge is. Rationalism and doctrinairism are the disease of our time; they pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible."

no, material knowledge. reasoning and senses can be used (if they are properly functioning, and they must be clear of belief filters).

So when early man was looking at the horizon and saw what looked like an end to the horizon, he believed that the earth was flat and that one could fall off of it. He believed that he knew this.[/quote]

he believed he knew that as much as anyone believes they know god exists today. to rely on your senses too much can be damaging in the grand scheme of things, yes. this is called not making assumptions based on things you cannot have definitive information on. but if you see and smell smoke so heavily it's choking you, i wouldn't stop to think about whether it's a fire, or your imagination.



but he knew he wasn't seeing the correct colors, right? even though he never saw red, yellow (orange) or green, he knew that billions over the past half decade or more have testified in life to seeing those three colors, and that his view of the world was a physical condition?

well the two (belief and knowledge) go hand and hand for people, i would hope. you study a subject, and then your consciousness is constantly shaping. to use your spot-on signature, human knowledge is contantly adapting according to facts.

whether or not we win the respect of other people probably isn't nearly as important as winning the respect of your own conscience.

you can keep posting that in every thread, or you can post and let me know why you think jung's quote holds any merit. clearly, you think it important enough to post in different threads.

if you don't have the time to defend it at length, however, i would surely feel obliged to apologize, and would hope your viewpoint gets represented.

True. It's very easy to jump to conclusions that may be wrong based on limited information. However, believing that a limited horizon exists and believing that one knows God exists aren't exactly the same thing. We have never observed God, unless we define God as the sum total of all natural laws. Which was certainly the case for some.

And if you smell smoke in your house and evacuate it, it is of course the practical solution, but the smoke might also be your neighbor burning leaves in his yard and the smoke entering through an open window.



Interestingly, he only discovered that he was colorblind at the age of 18, when he joined the Army. Prior to that, he just assumed that the lights were based on position, not color. He believed that he had a medical condition because someone told him so, and that the lights were actually colored because someone told him so. It's actually not too dissimilar to having faith in the existence of God, whether you think that God intervenes in human existence or not. He was an atheist by the way.

im just continuing to bridge knowledge and belief because I believe it's possible. The evidence I give is not in a glass jar and can't be studied in a controlled environment. So I don't know if I'm wasting my time debating or not.

No, it's not a waste of time, but there are different types of both belief and knowledge. For example, I can know how an airplane works, but that doesn't mean that I know how to fly it. The two sets of knowledge are not necessarily related.

Similarly, I can believe that the sky if blue because it looks blue to me, but if I believe in God, it's not through my direct observation of God. That kind of belief system is not related to the practical world.

one day, im gonna come up with all the ways C_B tells us that he doesnt believe in god.

you've made a very good counterpoint here. i've been thinking about this since it was posted. i suppose i would say that if the smoke is so enveloping your home, even if it is your neighbor's leaves, it may be -- and actually, most likely is -- threatening your wellbeing. but there's probably more to be said here.

the point i was making before was that depending on senses can be wrong. i suppose the issue i brought up is both proof it can be good, and it can be bad.

I know what you were trying to say. It is logical to depend on ones senses in order to determine the state of one's being. However, the information from our senses is only a first approximation of our characterization of the physical world. Here is another example. If I look at a colored liquid, I can determine that it is, say, blue. And if I look at a series of colored liquids that are different shades of blue, I can distinguish between all of them. However, I can't by looking determine the wavelength of the light being absorbed by the liquid. I need instrumentation beyond my eyes in order to do this.

You've got some terrible eyesight if you can't distinguish between 460 and 461 nm wavelengths.

Sure I can distinguish between 460 and 461 nm. I just can't tell without a reference what the wavelengths are.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opini ... ei=5087%0A

Your Brain Lies to You

FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering only gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took some weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.

Even if they do not understand the neuroscience behind source amnesia, campaign strategists can exploit it to spread misinformation. They know that if their message is initially memorable, its impression will persist long after it is debunked. In repeating a falsehood, someone may back it up with an opening line like “I think I read somewhere” or even with a reference to a specific source.

In one study, a group of Stanford students was exposed repeatedly to an unsubstantiated claim taken from a Web site that Coca-Cola is an effective paint thinner. Students who read the statement five times were nearly one-third more likely than those who read it only twice to attribute it to Consumer Reports (rather than The National Enquirer, their other choice), giving it a gloss of credibility.

Adding to this innate tendency to mold information we recall is the way our brains fit facts into established mental frameworks. We tend to remember news that accords with our worldview, and discount statements that contradict it.

In another Stanford study, 48 students, half of whom said they favored capital punishment and half of whom said they opposed it, were presented with two pieces of evidence, one supporting and one contradicting the claim that capital punishment deters crime. Both groups were more convinced by the evidence that supported their initial position.

Psychologists have suggested that legends propagate by striking an emotional chord. In the same way, ideas can spread by emotional selection, rather than by their factual merits, encouraging the persistence of falsehoods about Coke — or about a presidential candidate.

Journalists and campaign workers may think they are acting to counter misinformation by pointing out that it is not true. But by repeating a false rumor, they may inadvertently make it stronger. In its concerted effort to “stop the smears,” the Obama campaign may want to keep this in mind. Rather than emphasize that Mr. Obama is not a Muslim, for instance, it may be more effective to stress that he embraced Christianity as a young man.

Consumers of news, for their part, are prone to selectively accept and remember statements that reinforce beliefs they already hold. In a replication of the study of students’ impressions of evidence about the death penalty, researchers found that even when subjects were given a specific instruction to be objective, they were still inclined to reject evidence that disagreed with their beliefs.

In the same study, however, when subjects were asked to imagine their reaction if the evidence had pointed to the opposite conclusion, they were more open-minded to information that contradicted their beliefs. Apparently, it pays for consumers of controversial news to take a moment and consider that the opposite interpretation may be true.

In 1919, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court wrote that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Holmes erroneously assumed that ideas are more likely to spread if they are honest. Our brains do not naturally obey this admirable dictum, but by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.

Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, and Sandra Aamodt, a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”