Learn Anything Yet?

[Angrboda]

How has your participation on AF influenced your beliefs? Other members have prompted me to reflect more deeply on my beliefs causing me to change certain beliefs. Please share.

For the purpose of this thread, please save debate for other threads and hold your criticisms in check.

So I'll start: When I first joined I considered panpsychism to be the best theory of consciousness. As a result of my participation, I briefly considered property dualism before settling on property dualism.

I think you erred in your typing here.


I don't share a lot of my thought here on AF, in part because I'm not sure I want to share some of it in this context, and part because some of it is difficult to communicate, and I have no interest in developing an effective pedagogy for it (I don't consider doing anything with the ideas to be my business, I'm primarily interested in the thinking itself). There are also tactical and strategic reasons; I may not share something until such a time as it will be useful to do so, or because sharing it may otherwise expose other vulnerabilities.

I can't think of anything that I've explicitly learned from AF, but being involved and just reading the thoughts of others, I think, improves my thinking. About 2-3 years ago, I started participating in book clubs and discussion groups locally, and for much of that time on the forums. Most of my participation in serious discussions on the forums has been confined to the last year or year and a half. During that time, I've made substantial progress on numerous questions which for much of my life had just lain there inert, without my making any real progress on them. My most concentrated thinking, that on questions of cognitive science, occurred outside of the forums, as a philosophy group as well as several atheist or humanist groups have focused on philosophy of mind. (That's actually the cause of my being here. A few years back, I was dreadfully depressed, and looking for something to help me through it, so I started by re-reading the articles at talkorigins.org, because I find doing so enjoyable. Somewhere along the line, I got to reconsidering John Searle's Chinese Room problem, and it occurred to me that there must be philosophy groups at the local university that discuss such things, so I started looking online and discovered meetup.com [actually, rediscovered]. Meetup.com provides a website where people can host and organize special interest groups around whatever topic they like. I chose a philosophy group and started attending. Eventually, this led to atheist, skeptic, and humanist groups, and from there to looking to forums along similar lines.)

Anyway, I may just be forgetting things, but I don't recall specific influences, beyond being springboards for my own thinking. I think it has done a lot to increase the overall sharpness and general activity level of my mind, and I rather doubt I would have made the progress on these questions if not for that. Indeed, I originally spent most of my time on a forum that concentrates more on frivolity and personal relationships. Over the past year, I've found myself more and more drawn to participating in the serious discussions here (or just reading them; I read substantially more of the threads than I actually participate in). So my time here at AF has yielded handsome dividends, even over and above the simple enjoyment of having things to think about and an opportunity to be social. I just can't draw a line between specific AF experiences and those questions which preoccupy me; being here at AF has definitely given me food for thought, grist for the mill, and kept those wheels turning, and that has led to considerable learning on its own.

So, I guess the answer is, "yes."