Constant2 comments on Do We Believe Everything We're Told? - Less Wrong

36 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 October 2007 11:52PM

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Comment author: Constant2 11 October 2007 12:40:48AM 17 points [-]

Spinoza's view seems on the face of it much more likely than Descartes's, because it is much easier to implement. Anyone who has programmed knows that the easiest way to write a program to deal with an input is just to accept it, and that a check can be computationally expensive. Furthermore, how is one to understand a sentence without at least modeling the belief that the sentence is intended to elicit, so that one might at least understand what it means (the sentence itself is merely a character/phoneme string and so does not yield meaning intrinsically), and the obvious and readily available way to model such a belief is to actually enter it. Much easier simply to enter into that actual brain state associated with the belief and add maybe a flag to mark it as nonserious, than to enter into a wholly different state. We may infer from child studies that the higher order skill of contemplating a belief without holding it is not immediately acquired, for it is only at age 4 or so (I think) that a child is able to understand that others have beliefs that differ from reality.