| Your stance is completely true. In theory. In practice the situation is very different, because noone knows (or has any way of knowing) what objective reality is, and whether one's beliefs are "false" or not.
Yes, we do have the scientific method and some ways of trying to figure things out, but ultimately it's a question of choice of right mindset. The right framework. An experiment might get some data within a framework. It cannot give you a framework. With the belief "africans are humans" example, we might all agree on that.
However on the beliefs like "if it feels hard to learn this skill, it just means I'm not cut out for this" versus "I can learn anything, universe is friendly and will ultimately give me what I need, I'll keep trying to learn this" - something like that will give you hard time if you're doing solely by scientific method and if you think that you can even know whether the belief is truthful to some "objective reality" or not. Both of the stances can be shown to be "truth" or "false", and they they will yield so different results in the personal life of a human that chooses to acquire them.
Is believing one of them is self-deception? Maybe it's believing the other that is self-deception? >> I'm very wary of interpretation motivated for pleasure as opposed to clarity and truth. And it's very interesting how that has been working out for you? In most people that I've studied it does not lead to a particularly happy life. (Not just stable, but happy.) I think the core issue here is that in the internal world of humans' souls, there is no such thing as "clarity and truth". It does not work that way. Something like pleasure (but concepts of love, compassion, greatfulness, and others can give even better results) are just better suited. Because in the areas where they are used (the happiness and enlightenment) those things are just easier to find. Concepts of "truths" on the other hand are notoriously elusive and in many ways simply non-existant. What is your life, a tragedy of stoicism? A pointless nihilistic movie? An enlightened miracle? Which one is the "truth"? |