Ideas which is purely mental in nature, and copy of the perceived impression cannot have weights. Your thoughts? — Corvus

I am not sure that we can not weigh our thoughts. A thought about fairies and unicorns would not weigh much. However, the thought of a nuclear war that is recorded in pictures and written accounts of what happened would have a lot of weight, both emotionally and logically, because of being supported by facts. You know, as in "weigh the evidence carefully". And the scales by which we judge.

There might be a cultural bias favoring physical weight only, but this would be too limited for an understanding of weights and our experience.

However, within a few days, they discarded this tool for assessing scientific validity as unsuitable for them, preferring astrology. — Astorre

They will probably outgrow their preference for the mystical. I will quote one fact from AI to add weight to what I have said. "Younger adults (18-30s) tend to identify as more superstitious." Those over 65 are more likely to have lost their sense of wonder and be more grounded in empirical information. However, those of us who have not grown old and retain our child-like thrill to discover, might have an advantage. That is totally my opinion. I would also argue that a love of superstitious notions is most likely to catch the imagination of adolescents. 18 is way too old.

I like what I read in a very old book about logic. The author said we can never be so well informed that we can be absolutely sure of what we think we know.

There might be a cultural bias favoring physical weight only, but this would be too limited for an understanding of weights and our experience. — Athena

Good point. I suppose ideas could have their properties, hence idea of gold would be heavier than idea of paper for the same mass and size. However, it would still be our faculty of reasoning which investigates, and can make the judgement. Ideas themselves would be still unable to present the knowledge of their own properties just by entering into mind.

Those over 65 are more likely to have lost their sense of wonder and be more grounded in empirical information. — Athena

I have great respect for your age and really enjoy your comments on this forum. They always convey a sensitive nature, tempered by a strong sense of self-control and self-discipline. That's why I'd like to elaborate a bit on what I'm writing here.

So, I'm not going to claim anything, but it certainly seems that everyone has a certain hierarchy of ideas. When making decisions, most of us would rather be guided by what we accept as fact than by what's written in the tabloids or on a fence (though this isn't necessarily true in all cases).

But what do we accept as fact? I'll give you a real-life example from history. Before the modern heliocentric model of the solar system, there was a geocentric model (the Ptolemaic model). People thought the sun revolved around the earth. The astronomy of that time accepted this as fact. Astronomers calculated the motion of the stars based on the earth being at the center. And you know, they were quite successful at this. Calendars were compiled and lunar cycles were calculated using this model.

However, due to the retrograde motion of the planets (natural to the heliocentric model), the geocentric model constantly required the addition of epicycles (circles within circles).

By the 15th and 16th centuries, there were already about 80 of these epicycles. Developing navigation and trade demanded incredible precision from astronomy to stay on track. But the existing model had become so cluttered that it required incredible calculation efforts.

Nevertheless, everyone liked it, and the church accepted this model as the truth. Geocentrism was the truth. Just imagine that. From within this model, it was impossible to revise it until Copernicus came along and said, "What if...?" He went beyond what was generally accepted as fact. How difficult it was for him and his followers to revise geocentrism. But it was revised.

Today, we look upon people who believe the Earth is flat, or upon geocentrists, as cranks. The same applies to adherents of other "facts" considered true in earlier times.

Imagine that perhaps our descendants will look upon us the same way in 300-500 years.

That is, everything we scientifically verify, compare with logic, and study factually will perhaps seem bizarre to our descendants.

Hence, I conclude that what we call "facts" may be nothing more than a trick of our minds.

Based on this reasoning, I constructed and proposed the model at the beginning of this post. I think you'll find it interesting to reread it.

Now I'm just guessing, not deducing logically: most likely, the ineffective tool needs to be discarded quickly (not everyone will experience this behavior; some will become stupefied and frustrated). It's also necessary to quickly find a new assessment tool. Another prejudice immediately pops up: "An animal that runs at you and growls is aggressive" (this isn't necessarily true, it's just an example).
— Astorre

Agreed. This is more the morality of knowledge and inductions. Whereas the hierarchy of inductions is a rational evaluation, the 'morality' of what should be used in a particular context can be swayed by other potential outcomes such as death. — Philosophim

There's a crucial point here that we haven't sufficiently addressed. In real life, it often happens that our ideas, even when confronted with reality and not verified by it, are nonetheless not discarded, but rather strengthened. Let's look at an example.

Let's say we hold the idea "bears are kind" at Level 2 (this could be for various reasons, but we simply believe it). Then we encounter a reality in which a bear runs toward us aggressively and growls. But the mind refuses to reject the idea "a bear can be aggressive," because you have blind "faith." It seems like it's simply the wrong bear. Or perhaps your enemies sent it to undermine your beliefs.

In psychology, this is called "confirmation bias"—a type of cognitive distortion.

What must happen for a person to begin to re-evaluate their Level 2 ideas in line with reality (Level 3 facts)? Maybe the bear should bite the bearer of the idea or someone close to them? In real life, things can be more complicated.

When a person (or society) refuses to accept refutation, they begin to expend colossal energy maintaining their idea.

You need to come up with thousands of interpretations to justify why the "kind bear" just bit off someone's leg.

You need to censor those who witnessed the bite.

You need to convince yourself that the wound is a "form of hug."

As you understand, we're not talking about wild animals here. The bear example is used as an illustrative example.

So, what's clear at this stage of the research is that if you're stuck within a belief paradigm, it's quite difficult to break out of it. On the other hand, if you constantly react to any noise that contradicts the paradigm in small ways, then nothing good will come of that either. After all, a person is shaped by the ideas they accept on faith (if I'm not mistaken, the author of this was A.P. Chekhov).

Nietzsche criticizes such dogmatism. He suggests becoming "who you are." He argues that there are no facts, only interpretations. Therefore, they must be verified and independently understood.

However, this isn't always the case. Not everyone is ready for this.

In this regard, my question is not "what should I do?" or "what's the right thing to do?", but rather, how does this mechanism work? What motivates a person to reconsider their views or defend their ideas to the end, even to the death?

Good point. I suppose ideas could have their properties, hence idea of gold would be heavier than idea of paper for the same mass and size. However, it would still be our faculty of reasoning which investigates, and can make the judgement. Ideas themselves would be still unable to present the knowledge of their own properties just by entering into mind. — Corvus

Yes, ideas do have properties, and if we could use AI, I would gladly do so. I can not use AI, so I will ask you to Google "properties of ideas". The first time I googled that, I got an explanation of property rights. The second time, I got an explanation of the properties of ideas that are the subject of this post.

Instead of the "property of thoughts, try using the term "quality of thought". That will get a more profound explanation.

The classics that were the foundation of education in the US are heavier reading than Captain Underpants, which has nothing to do with character development, and is only about amusing children, so they will read the book. While the classics have been left out of school libraries because they require deep thinking, and children accustomed to being amused and junk food, no longer read the classics.

Astorre, thank you for the compliments. I will try to live up to them.

Imagine that perhaps our descendants will look upon us the same way in 300-500 years. — Astorre

Hopefully that will be so.

So, I'm not going to claim anything, but it certainly seems that everyone has a certain hierarchy of ideas. When making decisions, most of us would rather be guided by what we accept as fact than by what's written in the tabloids or on a fence (though this isn't necessarily true in all cases) — Astorre

I wish most of us wanted facts, but that is not what I see. I love your notion of a hiarchy if thoughts. I have never thought of what you are talking about until you brought it up. I think our hierarchy of thoughts begins with how we feel, not exactly how we think. We desperately need to feel like we belong to something bigger than ourselves and to be accepted and valued. However, it is not easy to have the feeling in our huge populations where we are strangers in a crowd. On top of that, we are running our lives on what we individually want and not a shared culture with shared beliefs and values. Media and commercials have seriously disrupted the human social experience.

To cope with today's reality, we seek a group that we may or may not personally know the members of this group. This is an identity thing and how we "feel" about who we are and who they are. Our group may be the individuals who accumulate a lot of guns and walk into a public place and shoot as many people as possible. A person may feel these people are like them, and the killers give them permission to be killers. This is especially so if somehow these mass murders look like a heroic act for some reason. :lol: I have to learn more about Jung to explain. Anyway, we are breaking up and then uniting in new ways.

Maybe we are among the beautiful-haired people who use the best product for our beautiful hair. Maybe we are against abortion and belong with those who struggle to prevent abortions. Or the new one, maybe we look like a girl but feel like a boy. The point is we are getting our identities by imagining we are members of groups, and some of these groups believe ridiculous things, such as we are told that we have to wear masks because the government wants to control us. Don't get vaccinated because.....? :brow: I am sorry, but we are not seeking truth. We want to be loved and accepted and valued, and that means finding the group that best fits us, and boy, oh boy, can some of these people be radical.

On the other hand, colleges are tightly controlling what professors say. The professor must be technologically correct and can be sued for saying something politically incorrect. Kind of like Galileo. On all levels, education is manifesting intense concern about technological correctness. This is a totally different mindset from education using the classics to produce good citizens and a strong democracy.

Today, we look upon people who believe the Earth is flat, or upon geocentrists, as cranks. The same applies to adherents of other "facts" considered true in earlier times. — Astorre

Yes, the adherents of other "facts" can feel strongly about what they believe, and we can feel strongly about them. It really gets difficult when someone would be a very good friend, if only she didn't believe what she believes. Seriously, one person has destroyed friendships and even torn apart families, as happened during the civil wars in the US and UK. It would be so wonderful if we could agree on what is true and with reason live together happily forever after.

That was a hope of the Enlightenment, and I am puzzling about why that is so hard. Thinking the government wants us to wear masks because "they" want to control us is just nuts. Failing to understand what oil has to do with US military actions and the US having enemies is shameful. We can not achieve our potential if we do not base our lives on good moral judgment and correct reasoning. How can we build a better hierarchy of thinking?

What must happen for a person to begin to re-evaluate their Level 2 ideas in line with reality (Level 3 facts)? Maybe the bear should bite the bearer of the idea or someone close to them? In real life, things can be more complicated. — Astorre

This I never got an answer to. I have a feeling its a variable scale. There's likely a mean and median, but not anything universal. I believe that's for psychology to discover.

Maybe we are among the beautiful-haired people who use the best product for our beautiful hair. Maybe we are against abortion and belong with those who struggle to prevent abortions. Or the new one, maybe we look like a girl but feel like a boy. The point is we are getting our identities by imagining we are members of groups, and some of these groups believe ridiculous things, such as we are told that we have to wear masks because the government wants to control us. Don't get vaccinated because.....? :brow: I am sorry, but we are not seeking truth. We want to be loved and accepted and valued, and that means finding the group that best fits us, and boy, oh boy, can some of these people be radical. — Athena

This is a very important detail in the formation of beliefs. It is precisely this desire to belong to a group, so simple and stubborn, that dictates many of our prejudices (ideas). Rarely is anyone willing to declare something true, despite the community or group to which they belong.

This has long been a restraining factor and a powerful tool in the hands of "social engineers."

It stems from the feeling of security that group membership provides. The desire to be understood and included. The notion of a shared identity and the need to fit in. However, the modern world and the internet, as well as large metropolitan areas, have slightly altered this in people. Now you can find like-minded people online. There's no longer any need to know your neighbors or stick together in extended families. The world has become more individual. AI has further exacerbated this: now, even for a heart-to-heart conversation, you don't need to maintain a close relationship with someone. After all, you have a wonderful, flattering companion in your pocket, ready to share your every experience, offer wise advice, and adapt to you in a way no one else has before.

Echo chambers or global villages. At the same time, despite the new format of society, even the most extreme form of individualism does not provide the mobility to reconsider ideas. It does not refine the cognitive lens to a philosophical degree of purity. Still, this desire to conform to prevailing ideas remains within us, even if the communities that share them are already a figment of our imagination.

What awaits us next? Deepening relativism and the destruction of old dogmas and the overthrow of "gods"? Or perhaps such a structure is completely unsustainable, and the decayed (due to the lack of a unified ideology) society will be replaced by other, more united ones? One can only guess.

In exploring this topic earlier, I introduced an additional factor in the evaluation of an idea into my model: intersubjectivity.
Intersubjectivity is the number of minds in which an idea has been accepted as dogma.

However, when analyzing the hierarchy of personality, it is not as universal as when analyzing society. Some beliefs (ideas) can even be found only once in a single individual and still guide their actions.

Therefore, at the current stage, we have four tools for assessing the "weight of an idea":

1. Universality
2. Accuracy
3. Productivity

4. Intersubjectivity

But I still think this is insufficient. There must be
something else.

How can we build a better hierarchy of thinking? — Athena

A great method for this was suggested by Popper, previously mentioned in this thread:

As for your first 3, I would add one more: Testability. We often easily come up with concepts that are fine constructs of logic and deduction, yet utterly untestable. Testability includes 'falsification', which is not, "That its false," but that we can test it against a state in which it would be false, yet prove that its still true. For example, "This shirt is green." Its falsifiable by it either not being a shirt, or another color besides green. A unicorn which cannot be sensed due to magic is not falsifiable. Since we cannot sense it, there can be no testable scenario in which the existence of a unicorn is falsifiable. — Philosophim

However, as he later noted, and I agree with him, the method is somewhat clumsy:

I too have found explaining falsifiability to be 'clunky'. — Philosophim

I propose this approach, although it's more laboratory and philosophical than widespread.

It's called the "inversion filter." The essence of the method is this: Take any Level 2 statement and flip it backwards. Then, we check to see if the statement becomes more effective.

For example: take the statement "All bears are kind." We flip it backwards: "All bears are mean." Both resulting statements are false, but that's good—they could both be dogmas. Next, we check which of these two statements would generate more productivity for us if we found ourselves in a forest with wild bears. Based on our knowledge of bears, the latter, of course. From the perspective of someone who knows nothing about bears other than that they are kind—this would at least make us doubt its truth.

Try it yourself with other Level 2 ideas. What do you come up with?

Instead of the "property of thoughts, try using the term "quality of thought". That will get a more profound explanation. — Athena

But can thoughts reflect the nature of the reality in the external world? Or are thoughts purely mental states of conscious beings?