![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
belief poll #1
I think I'm going to start taking a series of surveys about people's beliefs. I've always been fascinated by belief/epistemology, how beliefs form, how people justify them, how different they can be in different social groups, etc. I wanted to put many more questions in the first poll, but it limits the number of questions to 15 so I had to stop there. Another reason for doing this is that I want to get started thinking more about creating some kind of epistemology-net, where it's easier to track different cultural, scientific, and political beliefs and people can register their opinions about different subjects and their justifications for them, and any expert credentials they have on the subject. I think that people should share and talk about beliefs more in general, to help accelerate memetic evolution, and improve the quality of beliefs held by people across the world. You can't do much with a simple poll, but I at least made them each a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is "yes, definitely!", 1 is "no way!" and 5 is "don't know" or "haven't thought about it". These polls won't accomplish much in the way of the larger goal of getting an epistemology-net started, but they will hopefully at least give me more of a sense of what people's opinions are out there other than my own. (Even the questions one asks tend to be biased by your own perspective, as I'm sure mine are.) I'll try to put a mix of questions, some which I feel strongly about and others which I'm not so sure about. I tried to word them as clearly as possible, but obviously there is always ambiguity so some may depend on how you interpret the question... feel free to take whatever interpretation seems most appropriate to you.
[Poll #1412180]
[Poll #1412180]
no subject
* "Will humans ever develop the technology to be able to travel through time backwards (into the past)?"
I'm not sure we haven't got the ability already.
* "Can a person's consciousness continue for years after their body dies? (assuming only current day technology is available)"
In what form? As a separate yet incorporeal entity? Saying that I am confident consciousness continues for years after the body dies isn't the same as saying I imagine individualized consciousness continuing for years after death. Chances are, I've a very different concept of self and consciousness than were encompassed in this question.
* "Are there any properties of the world which are not determined by mathematical relationships?"
"Determined by"? This I object to outright. Math is a language and corresponds with relationships. It doesn't determine them.
* "Will it ever be possible for humans to travel faster than the local speed of light in a vacuum?"
"Travel"? We've already figured out a few ways of traveling without moving, and I imagine Universe has imagined a few more than we have...
Lastly, of all the results so far, the one that shocks - and pleases - me most is for "Is there an underlying purpose of the universe?"
no subject
"Determined by"? This I object to outright. Math is a language and corresponds with relationships. It doesn't determine them.
Very interesting objection. I found the results of this question the most fascinating of all of them. 12 people picked 1, 2 or 3, two people picked 10, one picked 8 and one 5, plus your objection to the whole question (which I think is basically a 10, but it was better that you explained it). When writing this question, it went through several different phrasings. It started out as "is materialism false?" and then went through several changes and elaborations because I imagined various objections to the phrasing of it, and wound up being what I feel like is the issue at the heart of materialism, but perhaps not strictly equivalent to it. It's basically the question of supervenience, but phrased in a way that I prefer so that it avoids speaking of "physical properties" and instead speaks of mathematical relationships. Also interesting is that the 2 people so far who picked 10 are the people with the heaviest philosophy backgrounds, whereas the 12 who picked 1-3 mostly have science or engineering backgrounds. I picked 3, but if you'd asked me a year or two ago I would have said 1 or 2... although I still debated whether to pick 2 or 3 for it. I'm getting significantly more open-minded I think!
no subject
Lastly, of all the results so far, the one that shocks - and pleases - me most is for "Is there an underlying purpose of the universe?"
You are the only one who thinks there is a purpose to the universe, I see. What about that pleases you? And also, if you're certain that it has a purpose, do you know what that purpose is and can you tell the all of the rest of us? And if you don't know what it is, then how can you be sure that it has a purpose?
no subject
Well, so far and among this cohort, but certainly not 'the only one'. ;)
On the surface, that seems like a very reasonable question, but appearances can be deceiving. Let's assume some means exists by way of which I (or others) could experience the purpose of Universe. Do you think I could convey that meaning through words and transmit it to another? Asking what the purpose of Universe is seems a lot like asking what love is. If you're silent and open to the experience, you stand a better chance of finding answers, but trying to confine that experience to words dooms us to misconstruals.
Like Buckminster Fuller and many others, I see teleology as a basic understanding rather than a matter of contention. It often seems like people try their best to avoid recognizing this underlying design... This might have something to do with the realization undercutting people's narcissism, and the ego doesn't typically go down without a fight.
Finally, it's interesting to note that many mathematicians have come to accept teleology through their experience of math and nature. For them, math doesn't refute teleology, it affirms it.