Peterdjones comments on Belief in Belief - Less Wrong

66 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 July 2007 05:49PM

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Comment author: Peterdjones 05 January 2013 11:16:50PM -2 points [-]

As if the human brain only had enough disk space to represent one belief at a time!

If you think of belief as something like "representing the world as being a certain way", then a belief in Real Beliefs might have followed from profound ignorance of neursicence. But there are plenty of other ways of getting there. For instance, if one thinks of belief as expalaning actions, then the Real Belief is the one attested by action. Someone who does not giove to charity does ot Really Believe in chaity even if they say they do. Actions either occur or do not: one cannot perform contradictory actions , so one cannot entertain contradictory Real Beliefs. For reasons that have nothing to do with the number of neurons in the brain.

Yet again, a Philosophers are Idiots claim turns out to be poorly founded.