Belief Contradictions

Varied observations about incoherence

This is a follow-up to my previous post. In that post, I explained that we are all incoherent. Any complex thinking entity will contain unresolved contradictions, and ensuring this does not happen is too costly. This is why, instead of always trying to resolve our cognitive dissonance, we should pause and manage it however it makes sense.

There are two types of internal contradictions.

The first type is epistemic, which is to say, contradictions in beliefs. This is the main one I have discussed in my previous post. It describes the state of believing in two contradicting statements. Let me dig deeper into it here.

Sources

Belief contradictions can arise from forgetting our beliefs. Someone can tell us something that contradicts our memories without us noticing because we just forgot. If we pause and comb carefully through our memories, we can very often notice the contradiction. But until we have a reason to do so, we will hold contradictory beliefs about the same event.

Belief contradictions can arise from missing logical entailments. We are not logically omniscient; we do not know all the consequences of our beliefs. As a result, it is very easy to believe in two statements that do not necessarily immediately contradict each other but which conclusions do.

Dealing with Contradiction

Belief contradictions can often be dealt with on the fly. When two contradicting beliefs appear, one is usually stronger than the other and quashes it.

For instance, if someone tells us something that contradicts our direct experience, we can safely discard what they say as soon as we notice it.

This phenomenon makes living with contradictions much more manageable. We can deal with simple contradictions by tackling them whenever they are relevant. And if they never become relevant, who cares?

Belief contradiction is often hard to deal with. When both beliefs involved in a contradiction are strong, it is unclear what to make of them.

If we get evidence that someone is being malicious to us while they have always been nice up until that point, it is unclear how we should change our minds and resolve the contradiction. When we perform the same experiment twice and get different results, it is unclear which result was correct.

Dealing with such contradictions involves complex processes. The most famous is Hegelian dialectic, which is about finding a synthesis of the contradicting beliefs: building a new frame where the contradicting beliefs apply to different contexts. Suffice it to say that dealing with such situations involves a lot of reflection.

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It is difficult to recognise which contradictions can be dealt on the fly and which require more thinking. Given that we have limited time and energy, this difficulty is at the source of a lot of waste: people often focus too much on dissonance that can be dealt with later at no cost, and not enough on contradictions that will bite them later.

Reflection and Accumulation

Reflection mitigates belief contradictions, regardless of their source. And when I say reflection, I mean Taking Notes. By taking notes, we crystallise our beliefs. Our reflected beliefs transform from some intuitive feeling into something much sharper. Statements were written down, of which we explored the logical consequences and where we paused to ensure we did not miss anything big.

Those more advanced beliefs resulting from reflection are less contradictory.

Conversely, without reflection, contradictions accumulate quickly. This is why taking in much information without thinking about it is dangerous.

Sure, some of the information might be wrong, and we might not notice it. But being wrong is solvable. We can often find out which part of the information was wrong (or uncertain) after more or less careful consideration.

The true problem is that until we process it, most pieces of information are contradictory with our beliefs. Information is contextual, and taking any information at face value without examining it incurs incoherence.

Coherence and Incoherence both compound.

When a set of beliefs is mutually compatible, it forms a strong cluster. A new belief that contradicts such a cluster can more easily be discarded than one that contradicts an isolated belief. This means that as we work on making a cluster of beliefs more coherent, keeping it that way becomes easier over time.

Conversely, when contradictions accumulate over time, resolving the new ones becomes harder. It all becomes an entangled mess, and it is unclear which threads should be pulled to untangle the knots.

Mitigating Incoherence

Mitigating incoherency requires maintenance. Some incoherence is like Chip Damage. Even while being on the look-out, we still accumulate incoherence over time. We might be as rational as possible, nevertheless, we will unconsciously absorb new beliefs. This is because there is not enough time to pause and examine each new piece of information.

And as our sources of information are not perfect (including our senses!), we thus accumulate contradictions. Dealing with this natural increase in incoherency is grunt maintenance work. Work like regular introspection, reflection, reviewing notes, etc.

Mitigating incoherency requires spring cleaning. Sometimes, we learn things too quickly. We need time to let what we learnt sit and reflect on it. If we push through instead of taking this time, we accrue a lot of incoherence all at once.

This is one of the major ways I have seen people fail at learning. They learn too much in bursts and do not reflect on their learning. As a result, they do not notice all the content they missed and misunderstood.

This is very apparent when I talk to people who have not built strong foundations: they are acutely unaware of what they do not know. Their immediate reaction when asked about a thing they do not know is to make up pseudo-coherent shit that does not resist much probing. It just "feels true" to them, and it is unclear (both to them and to myself!) what the difference is between their irreflexive beliefs, hallucinated beliefs and uncertain beliefs.

Conclusion

Nothing more to say for now. Cheers, and have a nice day!