belief poll #1

[spoonless]

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]

Comments

[onhava.livejournal.com]

I'm also rethinking the "want to live forever" question. Saying no might have been too hasty.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

That's funny, because I was thinking I should have made my 3 a 2 on that one after I answered. I originally tried to make 2 questions, one about living for 1000 years and one about living forever. But lj cut me off at 15 questions, so I had to delete the one about 1000 years.

My personal answer is that I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy living 1000 years, and probably even 10,000 years, but am also pretty sure I would hate living forever. I tend to think that either I would be insanely bored, or I will have learned and grown so much that there is no meaningful sense in which the original person I was still exists after that long.

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

Good point.

I think it depends on some of the other answers, such as FTL travel and other intelligent life existing.

Also, if we assume you have the ability to remove memories at will (or just randomly) could make it bearable too.