[ExI] Holding contradictory beliefs is very common

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Thu Apr 6 16:26:43 UTC 2023


I can't argue with any of that.  But what we are leaving out is the
strength of the contradictions.  Little ones, like occasionally eating ice
cream while on a diet, are not going to generate a lot of dissonance.

STronger ones, like being a SUnday school teacher and not really believing
any of the miracles, or heaven and hell, etc. create lots of dissonance.  I
had this one and it was excruciating (pun intended).  I finally quit the
church, and it caused a huge reaction, with members trying to get me back
and so on, which I anticipated and which made it harder.  This one was
impossible to repress or ignore.

bill w

On Wed, Apr 5, 2023 at 3:51 PM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 5 Apr 2023 at 21:21, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks! But if they say that a person can walk around with conscious
> cognitive dissonance and just ignore it with no consequences, I will
> disagree with them.  Dissonance is a feeling of conflict,and therefore
> there is no such thing as unconscious dissonance.  Dissonance only occurs
> when the conflict is conscious.  Anxiety is usually there, and that is
> something you physically feel.  I do think that your unconscious can
> overlook your conscious mind and produce some memory/belief that leaks into
> your conscious mind, like something trying to escape for repression a la
> Freud.  But the last time I looked (quite a while) repression still had no
> experimental evidence for it.  The idea of unconscious conflicts, the
> resolution of which was the goal of psychoanalysis, was that mental energy
> was tied up in the fighting ideas.  I don't think that idea has any
> physical basis.  Energy just doesn't sit there.  Neuron centers don't just
> idle like reverberating circuits, trying to get expressed.  bill w
> >
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> I didn't quote the complete article where they go into a bit more detail.
> (And probably in the book the article comes from as well).
> They say -
> One is to follow the “it depends” strategy: You make a mental note
> that your beliefs aren’t really contradictory. Instead, one belief
> holds in one set of circumstances, and the opposite holds in other
> circumstances. This has the benefit of being cognitively true.
> ----------
>
> So they do talk a bit about how the brain rationalises holding
> contradictions.
> They probably explain more in their book, though it seems to be
> intended for a popular audience rather than a science audience.
> <
> https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Briefs-Answers-Pressing-Questions/dp/1454919078/
> >
>
> BillK
>
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