First I haven't investigated the issue beyond this one book. If you know of a good source arguing the opposite, I'm happy to look up your reference.

Secondly, I don't think that's useful to equate mainstream belief, with consensus belief. I think it's quite useful to have a term for ideas found in mainstream science textbooks compared to ideas that you don't find in mainstream science textbooks.

Science by it's nature isn't certain and science textbooks can contain claims that aren't true. If I'm discussing a topic like this I think it's useful to be clear about which ideas from me come from a mainstream science source and which come from other sources such as personal experience or a NLP seminar.

For the purposes of the point that I made it's also not important whether Homer in particular had a concept of beliefs or whether I find some African tribe who doesn't have a word for it. The point is to go back and question core assumptions and getting more clear about the mental concepts that one uses because one doesn't take them for granted.

Don't model human cognition in form of beliefs just because your parents told you that humans make decisions according to beliefs. I think that's a core part of the rationalist project.

At a LW meetup I made a session about emotions and asked at the start what everyone thought that the word meant. Roughly a third said A, a third said B and the last third had no opinion.

If you are not clear what you mean when you say "believe" and make complex arguments that build on the term, you are going to make mistakes and not see them because your terms are muddy and you are making a bunch of assumptions about which you never thought explicitely.

Hufflepuff isn't a natural category, Harry!Hufflepuff is an abstraction based on Harry filtering his personality through certain criteria and impulses

Depends on what you mean with natural. Persona's like that are probably as natural as beliefs are. Both aren't hard coded but develop over time. I would guess for most people on LW persona's like that aren't in their conscious awareness. That doesn't mean they don't influence decision making.

Especially the persona's that represents the parents often has a strong effect on people decisions in life.

Feelings of love and loyalty are not anathema to hate and violence.

Hate is usually felt in the midriff/gut/belly/stomach area and not where the heart is.

People also don't just go at random on killing sprees. It's the result of a longer process. Men often fail at approaching a hot woman because they have emotions that block them from doing so. It's necessary to process emotions first, before being able to approach a hot woman.

Simply being attracted to the woman isn't enough to overrule those other process that prevent that behavior. If it comes to behavior like killing another person, I would assume that the emotional barrier are even stronger.

To seek an example about WWII:

Only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy.

That suggest that you need a lot more than a bit oxytocin for increased ingroup/outgroup bias. I don't think that the US army failed at teaching it's solider the belief that shooting at the enemy makes sense.

The modern solution to how you get soldier to fire at the enemy is to do desensitation training.

I think I observed in the last year two persons who would qualify clinically as psychopathic. Both appeared to me very absent from their own bodies (description of a qualia that I have). Magnitudes more than the other people with whom I interacted in the year.

Let's say someone get's dumped by his girlfriend. His heart hurts very much. Enough that he rather doesn't listen to it to reduce the pain. He blocks out the feeling by disassociating it. The person also feel very angry in is midrif and wants to act out that anger. That person might kill his girlfriend in revenge. There are probably a bunch of other filters he has to overcome.

I think it would be far more useful for you to defend your belief with the best evidence you think favors it than to simply assert your belief.

I'm thinking you underrate the difficulty of communicating what the belief actually is and not expressing it in a way where you will think that I believe something that's different from what I actually believe. The Jayses example shows how a word like consciousness might be interpreted opposite from how it's meant.

I'm essentially trying to explain new phenomenological primitives. Telling someone who's not well educated in physics that a steel ball thown at the ground bounces back because of springiness in a way that you will be understood is not easy. The idea that the steel ball changes like a spring is not easy to accept. Even for students who believe that their physics teacher tells them the truth it takes time for them to accept that idea.

Some of the literature is very pessimistic about the idea of teaching new phenomenological primitives in physics classes instead of reorganising existing ones even if you are a teacher with authority over student and have plenty of time.

Attempting to do the same thing in an online discussion is ambitious.