I've just nominated Skeptigirl (who let's face it i have argued with as much as anyone) for this post, not for language exactly, but because with great modesty she has raised some critical issues for the ideas I am exploring, and really given me new interest in the thread. Her insight here is extremely perceptive, and I welcome it.
This is such a complex issue and I have no expertise other than personal observation with great interest over the years, but it seems to me the first problem is making an assumption our brains perceive reality. Some brains perceive the Universe more closely to its real nature than others.
We have examples of people whose perceived reality is clearly pathologic. That would be someone who is experiencing psychosis. But then it is assumed psychosis is an either or condition, when the evidence suggests there may be more of a continuum from accurate perception of reality to grossly inaccurate perception.
Sure: most mental health issues strike me as falling on a continuum. To take the two major proposed categories of mental disorder, psychoses and neuroses, and think about them in terms of my little OP proposal...
Psychoses is if I understand it, and I'm terribly out of date, nearly fifteen years out of the business, well many psychotic disorders actually feature distorted sense perceptions, which can manifest as obviously as hallucination, or more subtly. The chemical imbalances result in the mind being fed corrupted data from the external world so to speak, and that will in turn impact on belief structures I guess. Garbage in, garbage out to use a computing analogy.
With neuroses I'm guessing what we have is a set of badly constructed programmes or beliefs. The actual rules may be sound, but they are applied to generally. So one might develop a contamination phobia, based on a real risk but magnified beyond reasonable application, or anxiety, and so forth. What often struck me about patients with thinking disorcers was how many of them seemed to be victims of a poor application of probability - they were prone in some category or other to massively overestimate risk, or took a reasonable enough caution and applied it to a unrealistic extent. I may be talking nonsense here, but this did appear central to many thought disorders.
Now I don't think the two categoris are mutually exclusive, but I would be very careful about ascribing psychoses to those who merely have a different perception of reality to me. Let's face it most [posters on thsi board have a different perception of reality to me!
To get to the bottom of irrational beliefs, (which I call non-evidence based beliefs), there are two things then to consider. 1) Is the person even perceiving the evidence rationally to begin with, and 2) How good are that person's critical thinking skills?
OK, a few random thoughts in response in no particular order --
i) most beliefs are evidenced. It's quite hard to have a completely unevidenced belief. Even the severely deluded can muster evidence for their beliefs - and they do. What is important is the weight which a normal person would ascribe to that evidence. If I believe Zeus is telling me to become a shepherd, and I hear the voice of Zeus saying it in my head I have evidence, but no one else is going to impart much weight to it. I might though! So the issue is hardly ever evidenced beliefs versus non-evidence belief, but the qualitative weight one applies to the evidence - and that always remains a question of judgement.
ii) the majority of people who I know who you would i feel regard as holding non-evidenced ideas, from both the parapsychological community and my faith, strike me as astute intelligent critical thinkers. I don't actually believe i am devoid of critical reasoning. (Feel free to disagree!) I feel my thinking is evidentially led -- I am (very) familar with the parapsychological literature, and feel I have made a reasonable critical evaluation. I finf it faintly amusing that many vehement critics of the parapsych discourse are actually not familar with the literature --- with some extremely honourable exceptions like James Alcock and Ray Hyman.
iii) if I am at all right with my little proposal in the OP, all beliefs systems will become ultimately self fulfilling, as we interpret subsequent data in the light of our existing "rules". To change the rulkes is indeed possible - just as a scientific paradigm can be overthrown by massive new evidence. However generally I suspect our minds will resist new ideas strongly which run against existing "rules" making change either gradual, or radical, sudden and potentially devasting. This leads me to a strong principle of mine - scepticism begins at home, and our duty is primarily to critically examine and test our own beliefs and argue against them, and to find the best possible critics we can and expose ourselves as much as possible to dissentinmg voices. I personally find RD.net and here serve this purpose well.
I separate these because they influence beliefs in different ways. Someone who doesn't understand evidence of causality, for example, may perceive reality correctly but draw erroneous conclusions from what they perceive. While someone else may draw erroneous conclusions because they distort the incoming messages before they get around to analyzing them.
Yes, and I think it's a very important distinction.
cj x
