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

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

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?

[ankh-f-n-khonsu.livejournal.com]

Ah! I'd misread those results! Now that I go back and look again, I should correct my previous statement: "Lastly, of all the results so far, the one that shocks - and displeases - me most is for "Is there underlying purpose in the universe?"

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You are the only one who thinks there is a purpose to the universe, I see.

Well, so far and among this cohort, but certainly not 'the only one'. ;)

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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?

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.