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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Small-scale shower thought, since I don't want to wait until Sunday: a belief is an entry in our knowledge base that we know we have, and that we act on. A so-called alief is knowledge that we act on but don't know we have (Wiki gives the example of being scared when standing on a tall balcony with a glass bottom that you trust intellectually - you're safe, you know you're safe, the body is scared anyway). What, then, is something we don't believe but take action as though we do believe? A policy? A trusted hypothetical? A religious law? This is a mode of thinking that I lean on a lot, that seems to be a lot more frequent than for most people.

I got to this thought by completing the 2-variable square, with "known to the process doing introspection" as one variable, and "used in actions in the world" as the other. Given the vague and brief description above, what other frameworks can we fit alief and belief into that reveal other kinds of -lief?

From the other discussion, I nominate "free will".

Intellectually, I know that human minds are messy things partly driven by drives hard-wired by evolution plus perhaps a bit of capacity to rationally consider hypotheticals and pick an option based on that in a very imperfect manner.

Yet when interacting with others, it is a very convenient frame of reference to assume that Bob was free to pick any option when he punched you instead of modelling him deterministically.