3 ms·

Right, it's just a belief.

• deltaonefour 5y ago
  What is a belief. If there is not enough information to determine whether something is true or false what does it mean to "believe" it? Also what if there is overwhelming evidence that something is untrue. You trust the evidence but you still "believe" the thing the evidence contradicts? How do you explain this? I cannot identify with this interpretation of the world. Say I'm looking at a rock and you're looking at a rock. But despite All evidence on the contrary I "believe" the rock doesn't exist. How would I explain my reasoning?
  • bigdict 5y ago
    A belief is an act of conjuring complete information from incomplete information. I think all beliefs must come from some nonzero amount of evidence. They seem absurd when evidence from one domain is transferred to a different domain in order to support some statement. I think everything is deterministic because I can't imagine true randomness. It's a concept we use to represent lack of information. I don't have a good grasp of quantum physics and I think every process described as random is like a coin flip: the outcome seems "random", but in reality you would be able to predict it if you had 1. enough information about the initial conditions 2. sufficiently accurate knowledge of the presumably deterministic physical laws governing the process.
    • 8bitsrule 5y ago
      Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business. — Tom Robbins
    • tommiegannert 5y ago
      My pet question with quantum physics (of which I know very little) is related. It seems simpler to assume we just don't know, rather than attributing it to the unusual property of true unpredictability. We already know that a chaotic dynamic system is difficult to predict, and even encryption algorithms we conjure up have very high entropy. So why isn't that enough here?