Asklemmy

44152 readers

1335 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

How do you differentiate between knowledge and belief? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

77 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm not interested in what the dictionary says or a textbook definition I'm interested in your personal distinction between the two ideas. How do you decide to put an idea in one category versus the other? I'm not interested in the abstract concepts like 'objective truth' I want to know how it works in real life for you.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I think everyone inhabits a sort of superposition of all possible worlds consistent with their sensory observations. But there are some of those possible worlds with which we identify more strongly—where we feel more ourselves. So belief is a kind of probability multiplied by self-recognition.

For example: “We believe these truths to be self-evident, that all [people] are created equal”, etc.—it’s not an assertion of objective truth, it’s a declaration of which world we choose to live in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So the stronger the feeling of identifying with a concept, the stronger the belief that it is true?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That’s one factor; objective (or Bayesian) probability is the other.

Like, there are too many things that might be true, or that might come to pass, for me to consider all of them at once. So I filter out most of them by dissociating myself from the worlds in which they’re true: saying “I don’t believe that will happen” isn’t saying it’s impossible, it’s saying “I don’t recognize myself in the person that would happen to”.

But the more you commit your sense of self to worlds that are tenuous or impossible, the greater the likelihood that you end up in a real situation where you no longer recognize yourself—and then you face an identity crisis.