(August 21, 2023 at 11:00 am)Angrboda Wrote: I'm reminded of the situation in politics. We know from psychology that once a person believes something, the odds are greater that any input will strengthen that belief. So I look at conservatives as victims of human psychology. But at the same time, I must acknowledge that I, too, must be a victim of my beliefs. I don't know exactly what I should do with that information. We seem to have incredibly strong intuitions that we make our assessments rationally, that our lives have meaning, and that we have free will. It seems to require an effort to care that all of these things may be false. And it seems unnatural that we should come to believe that they are false. Which suggests there is some overriding reward for believing that these things are false. It strongly suggests that our attitude toward these questions is determined by what we find useful and rewarding more than what might or might not be true.
As to the questions themselves, I find no strong argument to be made one way or the other.
I guess the 'reward' is that I have a natural unconscious predisposition to seek what causes the least cognitive dissonance (an unpleasant sensation) and which appears to be most accurate (maybe an evolved mechanism for survival in that correct knowledge enable correct predictions and better chance at breeding, or something like that).
So I moved from holding to freewill to not holding to freewill because other knowledge which I found to be accurate entailed it, and thus I couldn't hold to both freewill and physicalism without dissonance or going against my predilection for accuracy. Underneath were no doubt unconscious factors that led me one way or another at various points in time.
