Certain beliefs, taken with proper seriousness, are self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, if you think nobody would ever want to be your friend, you rationally stop meeting anyone, and thus even if someone would want to be your friend, they don't know you exist.
These self-fulfilling prophecies are some of the most important things you can believe. If you really are immune to friendship, attempting to make friends is enormously wasteful. As always, what causes pain is false beliefs: if you falsely doubt this particular belief, you are in for an enormous amount of pain.
Yet, because this category is self-fulfilling, you cannot afford to credit its members.
Were you paying attention? Did you put 2 and 2 together? Epistemic incomptence per se is a direct source of near-limitless pain.
This dynamic is plausibly the primary reason to attain epistemic competence. Self-fulfilling prophecies, handled with sufficient expertise, are no longer self-fulfilling. Once skill at self-falsification rises enough, it becomes safe to reach these conclusions.
3 comments:
As you said earlier, many lies are functional, or least, lies go in pairs, where if you un-believe just one, you are worse off. For most, as the popular saying goes, "the truth is bitter". One cannot in good faith recommend "epistomological competence" to anyone, given that for a long time, the journey makes one's life unstable (as you say too!).
Those who do go on this path go for an entirely different reason: it is the heroic impulse! Our curiosity and desire for danger and adventure gets the better of us. Are we to stay set in our dull, drab house when there in a jungle full of strange beasts all around us? No, we set out!
A long Nietzsche quote is on its way. (By the way, Nietzsche has much more to say about this issue.) And in the Antichrist he says, "knowledge is a form of asceticism".
[From Nietzsche, the Gay Science, 110:]
Origin of Knowledge. —
Throughout immense stretches of time the intellect produced nothing but errors […]. It was only very late that the deniers and doubters of such propositions came forward,—it was only very late that truth made its appearance as the most impotent form of knowledge. It seemed as if it were impossible to get along with truth, our organism was adapted for the very opposite; all its higher functions, the perceptions of the senses, and in general every kind of sensation, co-operated with those primevally embodied, fundamental errors. Moreover, those propositions became the very standards of knowledge according to which the "true" and the "false" were determined—throughout the whole domain of pure logic. The strength of conceptions does not, therefore, depend on their degree of truth, but on their antiquity, their embodiment, their character as conditions of life. Where life and knowledge seemed to conflict, there has never been serious contention; denial and doubt have there been regarded as madness. The exceptional thinkers like the Eleatics, who, in spite of this, advanced and maintained the antitheses of the natural errors, believed that it was possible also to live these counterparts […]. To be able to affirm all this, however, they had to deceive themselves concerning their own condition: they had to attribute to themselves impersonality and unchanging permanence, they had to mistake the nature of the philosophic individual […].
The subtler sincerity and scepticism arose wherever two antithetical maxims appeared to be applicable to life, because both of them were compatible with the fundamental errors; where, therefore, there could be contention concerning a higher or lower degree of utility for life; and likewise where new maxims proved to be, not necessarily useful, but at least not injurious, as expressions of an intellectual impulse to play a game that was like all games innocent and happy. The human brain was gradually filled with such judgments and convictions; and in this tangled skein there arose ferment, strife and lust for power. Not only utility and delight, but every kind of impulse took part in the struggle for "truths": the intellectual struggle became a business, an attraction, a calling, a duty, an honour—: cognizing and striving for the true finally arranged themselves as needs among other needs. From that moment, not only belief and conviction, but also examination, denial, distrust and contradiction became forces; all "evil" instincts were subordinated to knowledge, were placed in its service, and acquired the prestige of the permitted, the honoured, the useful, and finally the appearance and innocence of the good. Knowledge, thus became a portion of life itself, and as life it became a continually growing power: until finally the cognitions and those primeval, fundamental errors clashed with each other, both as life, both as power, both in the same man.
The thinker is now the being in whom the impulse to truth and those life-preserving errors wage their first conflict, now that the impulse to truth has also proved itself to be a life-preserving power. In comparison with the importance of this conflict everything else is indifferent; the final question concerning the conditions of life is here raised, and the first attempt is here made to answer it by experiment. How far is truth susceptible of embodiment?—that is the question, that is the experiment.
Very eloquent.
Problem: mathematical proofs.
&c.
It would be a lovely dream if falsehood weren't so disgusting.
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