Belief Formation-Initial thoughts

I recently found myself stuck on the idea of belief formation, and while i’ll spare you the details of how that conundrum came up, I will just express my initial thoughts about the issue.

In order to delve further into this issue, I will have to accomplish the monumental task of defining belief:

A belief, as far as I am using it here, is simply something we take to be true.

A belief I have would be “the sky is blue”, or “Coffee is an amazing elixir of life”, or even “cats are the most non-chalant creatures on this planet”. I believe all those sentences are true, and therefore are beliefs that I have. Hopefully that is satisfactory.

The problem i am trying to grapple with at this point is whether or not beliefs can be formed through some sort of authentic inspiration, or whether beliefs are only formulated through some sort of complex relation of already present beliefs coming together and formulating a new belief via some process.

Basically, the simple thing I am asking is whether or not this can exist:

(inspiration hits)-> new belief

or if the only way we can obtain a new belief is through a method similar to this:

(set of present beliefs)+some process-> new belief

The main roadblock in answering this question involves the fact that we aren’t exactly aware of our belief formation process. Every now and then we might get a belief through some sort of logical proof, but for the most part we just sort of formulate beliefs without being aware of how they came to be (which is where the idea of inspiration formulating belief comes from).

However, if most of our beliefs came from inspiration, then technically there should be occasions and times when we get beliefs that are completely unrelated to beliefs that we already hold, and that can contradict them greatly. I don’t know about the rest of you, but that hardly ever happens for me, which pushes me towards the idea that much of our belief formation comes through a complex process where our present beliefs come into play in the creation of a new belief.

Anyways, those are my initial thoughts about belief formation, I’m actually about to go read some theories on it, and hopefully gain some insight on it. CLEARLY i’m pretty ignorant on the whole field, so corrections and comments would be very helpful.

Edit:

I realized that this analysis is probably unhelpful in so far as describing what i’m talking about. So i’ll try to create an example: Say a person enters a house, he sees shoes (a belief that there are shoes there) and believes that someone took their shoes off and entered the house, therefore formulating a belief that there is someone else in the house.

Is this logical process the only method in which someone formulates a belief? Or are there cases in which there is no interaction of beliefs with the formulation of the new belief? (aka the inspired belief)

Edit 2:

A few things:

1. I take the point of this post to be bringing out a notion of “genuine inspiration” in the formulation of belief, and considering whether or not it is plausible. Otherwise, we only have a system of creating beliefs that builds off old beliefs. Which leads us to the next point…

2.The “genuine inspiration” idea is something like a miraculous belief formulating in your mind without any kind of apparent cognitive process involving beliefs bringing it about. For instance, perhaps something fantastically crazy happens with your brain and causes your brain to just generate a belief. Such a belief is formulated without the need to appeal to other kinds of beliefs.

I’ve returned…also, game theory.

Well, it’s been a while since I posted on this blog of mine. Upon the advent of thoughtfulapples.com, I primarily shifted my posting endeavors to that site. But alas, the site is no more, and now I have returned to this blog of mine (with no viewers at all).

Anyways, as such, I should probably announce a few things that have happened since I last posted (which was a while back): First of all, I graduated my undergrad and am not scrounging about looking for things to do.

I’ve actually tried to look into going into the criminal investigation circuit, as I have had an interest in criminal investigations for some time, but upon reading the procedure and what the job involves, I realized that my current state is not able to become the “great detective” I want to strive to be. So as such, I’m actually going back and reading about game theory and strategy in depth (it’ll make sense, just give me a second).

The fact is, I have brown a bit bored of some philosophical questions, and now my interest is heavily embedded in studying game theory and decision-making (which is actually highly philosophical if you study it in a specific way). What interests me in it, is that it provides a form in which we can model interactions between people, help understand how and why people make the decisions they do, and also find equilibrium points of which interactions will constantly return.

The unfortunate aspect is that game theory is not a psychic tool, and cannot predict things in whole. However, it is a useful tool if you know how to apply it, and specifically, if you know how to construct a game theory model out of certain situations. You have to be able to understand the choices offered to each of the actors, their utility, and the way they choose their choices (this might be a bit redundant, because traditional or classical game theory suggests that people will choose the choice with the highest expected utility, however, in the light of altruism and other qualities, I don’t think that is an adequate assumption). So while I won’t be able to use game theory on its own to masterfully predict how things will turn out or how people might behave, I believe that it is a useful tool in aiding me on the way.

In addition to game theoretic modeling techniques, I’m also looking into criminal profiling (which is admittedly on shaky ground as far as support goes), as well as gambits. By gambits, I am referring to tactics or strategies that employ small safe gambles that survey the situation and obtain more information. For instance, a gambit would be employing the “erronous conclusion” technique during an interview. Essentially, you make an erroneous conclusion as a sort of lure, and judging by the response you get, you can obtain information about the situation, REGARDLESS of the way the person responds (a non response also counts as a response). An erroneous conclusion would be to assert something that is clearly false about the interviewee, such as “you are from california.”, to which the interviewee would typically respond with a denial and a correction- netting you information at the cost of “looking like you are wrong” (which is a small cost in most circles, just look at Columbo). If the person does not deny it, you might be able to reach a few conclusions about that, such as the guess that they are uncooperative, don’t want to respond in one way or another…etc… The gambling part of the gambit is centered around the fact that it is a commitment to something which is not certain, or the results are vague. Gambits are a type of strategic employment.

Anyways, I meant this to be a sort of re-introductory post, but it turns out to be an exposition of methodology. I’ll stop for now.