*Thought experiment: Belief in control

Discussion in 'General Philosophy' started by Simon Anders, Dec 5, 2008.

  1. Simon Anders Valued Senior Member

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    Imagine we are in a multiverse - something a reasonable % of physicists think is possible or likelly.
    So what we have is all possible worlds and universes.

    In one of these you are born and slowly come into consciousness in a world that looks very much like this one.

    Science and religion and history are very much like this earth, this universe.

    However in this world you have the nagging feeling you are almost like an amnesiac. You have a feeling there is something going on that does not fit well (ie. in the Coherence Theory of Truth this feeling/belief seems an anomaly) with what many people believe, especially rationalists and scientists.

    You have a nagging memory - without the images - that beliefs and desires once controlled the way things are.

    Rationalists and scientists respond to this by saying that if this were true you should be able to display this power.

    This makes you feel ashamed for a while until you realize that 1) you are in an environment that is dominated by certain beliefs (which therefore have limiting power) AND that beliefs are not so easy to change. You could call this a sense of how things are or an intuition.

    Slowly you begin to graw away on some of what seems SIMPLY TO BE THE TRUTH about the way things are. You notice that a lot of what is common sense, much of it not investigated or contradicted by science, is not necessarily true.

    You feel somewhat free of the domination of consensus beliefs, but still it is very hard to get at the roots of certain beliefs.

    Then you notice a pattern. The harder it is to change a belief, the more backlog of emotion, often traumatic emotions, is locked around that belief. IOW you have to face these emotions AND the judgments that are locked together.

    Now you really start making some headway.
    ________________________________________________________

    Here's the thing.

    In a multiverse, there will be a plethora of worlds where the rationalists and the scientists will come toward your belief with what they feel is a neutral stance and with 'open minds'.

    In some of these worlds they will be incorrect both about the unlikliness of your idea being correct AND about their own role in maintaining the universe the way it is, but does not necessarilly have to be.

    There is no neutral stance.

    Rupert Sheldrake has ideas that are in the family of this one. Anyone interested could read his article on Morphogenic Fields

    http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Morphic/morphic2_paper.html

    I find his ideas inspiring, though they are not the roots of my ideas, and he is a generous public person in that he has responded to emails personally with me and at length. I like the fact that he is a scientist and coming at these ideas from that direction. But I do not believe all the things he does or perhaps better put, how he does.

    I include the link for a potential fuller perspective on such an idea.
     
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  3. Mr. Hamtastic whackawhackado! Registered Senior Member

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    Why didn't you just say, "think of how things are"? Would have saved me some time...

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    If I exist in this part of the multiverse, then whatever I believe to be true is true for me, and what else matters? If I choose to exist within the constraints of society, then I will have to try to use whatever fakery is required to not be incarcerated or killed...

    I may not be understanding, was there an implied question I missed?
     
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  5. Simon Anders Valued Senior Member

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    I was translating it for others. I thought it would be less threatening in the hypothetical. People bear down under duress. Maybe you had the experience of telling your wife to breathe.
    Sure. But to belief is social. One must work very hard to extricate oneself from societal hallucinations. Also, not mentioned in my OP, is the idea that we too have be trained to believe certain things are not possible or are evil, etc. We have more than one belief at once. And many of our beliefs we are not aware of. We would probably deny them, even. So these are also working 'out there' and many of them limiting us or worse.

    What if we consider this a judgement. I think it is a common one. If I do not restrain myself I will kill or rape or no one will tolerate me.

    It was more of a suggestion, a suggest to think experimentally, than a question.
     
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  7. Mr. Hamtastic whackawhackado! Registered Senior Member

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    All I know is that things are happening that I am aware of. I don't know what they are specifically, but I am aware of their occurrence. This leads me to doubt all that I have been told, and to doubt all my superficial perceptions. There seems an undercurrent to things which occur. An unseen tug on events and experiences, too small to measure, but not necessarily logical appearing. Are my memories real? The things I have learned that were history? Did the mongols conquer western europe somewhen, and I have become aware of that somewhen in addition to the somewhen that involves the demise of Genghis Khan?
     

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