But it was not a shift from the gods. You don’t have to deny God, or gods to believe in naturalistic or scientific processes, either good examples of these or bad. Beyond that, it is arguable that believing that god “just did it” is more useful. Even this atheist could make that case.
Honestly, Moreno, it’s this sort of stuff that makes me crazy. “Everything is useful in some way”.
It’s mind-numbing.
And yes, you are saying that. If SG is useful, then anything can be, for there is nothing in “science” more false. Or less false. It’s just false. It has no predictive power, doesn’t help generate probabilities - does nothing that science can do. If a scientific theory has zero predictive power, well, there is nothing less useful than that.
Why is SG not god’s agency? Why is quantum mechanics not God’s agency? Belief in God can exist with any other belief, just about. Certainly with any “scientific” belief.
And here I thought I was showing unusual restraint.
The second category is larger for obvious reasons; why choose useless, when you can choose useful? But, the other reason is that those who choose false useless beliefs aren’t usually going to admit the fact that they are useless; if they ever find out at all. The difference is that we’re speaking in terms of “beliefs” rather than simply “notions”; people will more readily admit to having a mistaken notion than belief.
Fixed Cross mentioned a belief in morality or God as false and useful, but I could give plenty of personal examples of how they are useless. By a useless belief I mean one that simply makes early death much more likely.
Then Fixed Cross went into the idea of belief making truth. It seems he’s never had a mind set outside of his own well being; or is naturally purely egotistical. I have more will than anyone I’ve ever known and I’ve willed false useless beliefs so hard that they all but killed me, and they remained false. And by false I mean anything other than pure nonsense fantasy, the kind that makes Mo’s “1+1=3” seem to be highly coherent, with a firm foundation.
In the days of yore, it was once an actual practice to decide some question by poisoning a chicken. If the chicken died, the answer was ‘yes’. If the chicken did not die, the answer was ‘no’. Something along those lines. And there was some system of beliefs about spirits that gave this a foundation. I am not saying that believing in spirits is false, only that this particular belief system in those particular spirits seems to be false.
Oh, sure, you will say… “but Mo, this belief system got them outdoors, gave them some exercise, etc, etc”. Yes, indeed. But the belief system was still useless because it had less use to them than abandoning it would have. Because people still practice the poisoned chicken system I believe, and some will eschew actual medicine because of it.
I would also like to add to the list everything that Stu-bones believes.
Yeah, that makes sense. I can see plenty of false beliefs being useless if we’re defining use by total utility as compared to some potential replacement, and not ‘does it serve some end or another’?
I place some belief in Mo, maybe he’s in my top 10. Is that belief false and will it prove useless; now that is up to Mo, not me; I’m not going to try to will him into use and truth; not that I could anyway.
I should point out the obvious, it seems, that this topic is about false beliefs that are useful. The topic is not about false beliefs that are not useful.
I Think, then, that a case could be made that a false belief that the thread is about false beliefs that are not useful could be useful belief, since it generates an potentially intersting line of discussion. Just to bring things back on topic.
I wouldn’t call that a belief system. that sounds like a belief. It is likely part of a broader belief system, perhaps involving deities, ideas about causation, time, perhaps chickens, Life,
but that’s more what I meant by system. It may not have been MM’s intention, but I took ‘system’ to be something more complex, a network of ideas tied together and believed as a whole.
Any number of false beliefs can be useful. Nietzsche was chiefly concerned with the comparison of two paradigms - the (non-Humean) “philosophical” method of attempting to ascertain an immutable metaphysical truth and then deducting all manner of nonsensical claims vs the odds-narrowing series of approximations used in science and in the commonsense rules of thumb utilized by many grandmothers.
Or you consider those beliefs true.
That newton was right about absolute space and time and Einstein was right when he said it was not the case. Pragmatists would be like Sharks, moving forward, Always moving.
(this doesn’t actuallly contradict what you said, however. If they are discussion the issue in the abstract I would Think they would have to agree with you, though they might find it a kind of wrongheaded discussion. But once we got into specifics, I Think they would then say, but it was true, then. I say ‘they’ though I suppose I am partly a pragmatist.)
(there are also different kinds of truth here. For pragmatists it is more or less what happens when one works with the truth. For others is is often a container of truth - the assertions contain truth.
and then I would just to add that there need not be a binary truth/falsehood. We could have kinda truths. Or stuff that is true given that a primate brain is like X.)
Nietzsche has said explicitly that he was a pragmatist. Not only that, but I have given you multiple direct quotes before, referenced in various places. The only time that Nietzsche is not a pragmatist about ‘truth’ is when he is talking about other people’s conceptions of ‘truth’, or else historical ones.
“We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’: we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day”. (Gay Science, Aphorism 354)
“The falseness of a judgment is for us not necessarily an objection to a judgment; in this respect our new language may sound strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating”. (Beyond Good and Evil, 4)
Over immense periods of time the intellect produced nothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helped to preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these had better luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny (Gay Science, 110).