Comment on Everybody talks about beliefs like they're this big important thing.
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
if a belief is a model/theory/assumption that a person will not change regardless of evidence against it, it is by definition a delusion.
If a belief is an opinion, it is a personal statement. Statements like “Vim is the best IDE” are really conveying the information “I prefer Vim over all others IDEs” which is a true statement.
If a belief is a hypothesis then the person holding it will accept if it ends up being wrong.
Only in the first and second cases do people usually place importance on their beliefs, and typically, only the first case leads people to harm others or themselves with no way to convince them to stop.
DominatorX1@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
To generalize it, I’d call a belief “an idea that you are attached to”. And it bears upon your more general blob of beliefs, thoughts, memories, etc accordingly. Like a constant among variables in the midst of an algorithm.
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The word for established assumptions is “axioms”
Definitions are kind of the most fundamental axioms. Abstracting things helps us build with them and they’re true because you say they are.
We use axioms in models to derive new theorems/information. But that is often what makes us resist changing them. If you build your other assumptions on an axiom, you have to rethink all those assumptions or even throw them out when it gets proven wrong.
However, attachment to a belief, holding to an assumption even when it’s been proven wrong, is called “delusion” and yeah those beliefs tend to be the most destructive