I think it all comes down to "how" we make decisions. There is indeed lots of evidence that we, as a species, often make decisions based upon our personal belief systems, by that we mean AVB's (Attitudes,Values and Beleifs) rather than as you suggest through a reasoned approach.

We know that attitiudes affect actions and decisions and we often hear people being accused of making emotional decisions which could in fact be based upon irrational beleif systems.

How those belief sytams are established in the first place may just be a function of our modern society. OLO offers the opportunity to observe belief systems and judgement in action. For example, many contributors do their own research on a topic, sourcing raw data and making a reasoned and informed "judgment" on a topic. Others may have "adopted" a perception already and can refer a reader to any amount of commentary that supports that view.

It may also be the case that other forms of "intelligence" are influencing, or not influencing our judgement. We all understand IQ, our intellectual quotient, not much time is given to other forms that are now being more clearly understood. EQ, our Emotional Quotient, PQ, our Personality Type and VQ, our Value System.

Could it be the case that we are simply not equipped to make sense of a very complex world where even the disciplines we do understand seem to overlap?

"Religion and philosophy are one and the same.."

Well, no, because philosophy is open to argument. The history of philosophy is thinkers explaining why previous thinkers were wrong, no matter how right they sound. The history of religion is believers explaining why previous believers were right, no matter how wrong they sound.

And unfortunately the price of non-judgement is inaction and usually disaster. If I have to wait until I'm sure that there won't be an earthquake before I get up in the morning, then I will never leave my bed. We all have to make decisions on limited information. What distinguishes reason from unreason is whether we learn from getting them wrong.

Jon J, your right in the narrow context of philosphy as an intellecual pursuit but I think this context is more to do with individual philosophy which might refer to a way we conduct our lives and what personal belief systems we have developed.

Those of us who don't make decisions don't make bad ones and you're right about learning from them but we are talking about some people who don't learn or who are not interested in any form of reality. More important still is the issue of humans behaving "collectively" with no rationale, just faith.

I mentioned in my first post the issue of modern complexity. At the highest level in our world there are only five domains into which all human activity can be categorised, Social, Political, Economic, Religious and Ecological. I think of each as a pyramid, at the very top each seems well defined. The more we humans deposit into each pyramid, the more complex it becomes and the broader its base, each then begins to overlap with the next. I'm not sure that we have developed the skills to rationalise so much complexity.

The net result is that we often make bad judgements as individuals and collectively. You seem to have a good grip on things, are some people "phased" by the shear complexity of our societies?

Interesting post.

Common experience tells us that human beings will believe just about anything, even things that a moment's reflection would show are false, or things whose falsity is highly probable.

Yet what could be the selective advantage of false belief systems?

Of course, a belief system can be advantageous, even if it's false, especially if, as in politics or religion, the cost of it can be put on someone else. So long as we believe that the church can put in a good word for us with God, or that government can create wealth out of nothing by printing paper, those benefiting will continue to do it, and use their power and prestige to perpetuate the belief by indoctrinating the rising generations.

I think a fruitful way to look at it is to consider how man's reason evolved. Mises argues that the function of reason is to enable man to hypothesise relations of cause and effect, so as to form a judgement whether a particular action will generate benefit or loss. This has explaining power. It happens at the individual level. But the more complex is society, the more the relevant issues of fact are happening at the meta-mega-hyper-super-duper level, such as the existence of God, or the world economy, where error is much easier.

Still, not all belief systems are equally true. Whether we can make bread out of stones is not just a question of ‘ideology’. Reality cuts in at some stage, and some theories have more explaining power than others. We need a method for distinguishing them. One of the reasons the social sciences have floundered so lamentably is because they have inappropriately taken as their model the physical sciences. But as human action is purposive, and value is subjective, there are no constant quantities to measure and predict. The science of human action must be based on the logic of human action, not measurements of quantities and replication of experiments. Sensible action based on understanding based on sound theory is the best we can hope for. The abandonment of reason is not preferable to reason.

A few general comments on my article.
I have not mentioned anywhere on how decisions are made, rationally or otherwise. My reference to learning to think has nothing to do with rationality. It was in the context of learning to think rather than follow unthinking dogma. The one thing that I said that could be construed as how to make decisions was that in stead of making judgements we could decide what we wanted. That is hardly considered rational in today's world.
I was very careful to make it clear I was talking about two specific types of toxic judgement. Finding in the negative because we cannot prove the positive, finding in the positive because we cannot prove the negative, and in both case claiming our judgement to be true.
That hardly condemns us to inaction. It means we are aware that we are making decision as best we can, but as things change we can modify as we go along. Dogma does not allow this.
Religion and philosophy are the same in the context that they both attempt to give us identity. Christians, Jew, Muslims, Atheists and others all have dogma that builds towards identity, along with other factors such as job and money in the bank. All are judgments and say nothing about who the person is.
Yes the complexities of life do make it easier to drift along in an unthinking fog of dogma. But purely personal experience shows when it is possible to say 'I don't know' it is surprising how many of the 'I don't knows' link together into a greater pattern. It seems another characteristic of judgment that it separates and stops us seeing the connection between all things. That last bit was left out of the article, but since it has come up in discussion I will put it in now.
One thing that I have noticed in my twenty years of writing is how often what a writer writes and a reader reads are often very different. I put this down to the words being filtered through our belief system.

Daviy said "Religion and philosophy are the same in the context that they both attempt to give us identity. Christians, Jew, Muslims, Atheists and others all have dogma that builds towards identity"

What are you on about mate? As Jon J rightly said, they are nothing like each other. Philosophy attempts to, putting it crudely, answer the big questions. Unlike religion, it does not do this assuming, a priori, that The Book upon which it is based is true, as of course, philosophy has none. Philosophy and religion may have in common the aim of attempting to discover the way in which people should live, but that is where the similarity ends. What have you got against philosophy? You appear to misunderstand it utterly.

And for the record, atheism is not a belief system, it is the absence of one. It, in its purest form, simply states that "there is insufficient evidence for god, so I choose not to share your belief in whatever god you happen to believe in". That is not a belief system. To use your analogy, the reverse Hiroshima, organised religion claims that because the non-existence of god is unproveable, he therefore exists. Refer Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot for a neat rebuttal. Another example of philosophy consisting of reasoned argument, anathema to religion and the religious.

Daviy said "One thing that I have noticed in my twenty years of writing is how often what a writer writes and a reader reads are often very different. I put this down to the words being filtered through our belief system."

Are we to assume that this is the reader's fault, and not yours for insufficient clarity? And that you profess not to view the world through a belief system?

This can be disrimination specially when a judge states a persons crime incorrect when a jury has found the person not guilty , and i can prove that judgement

so there for that person should be compensated by the courts for lying in a judgement about a person

when in actual fact a jury found that person not guilty
of a said offence

if any lawyers are reading they will know what i mean or any victims

see the price of judgement is also a princalbe in fact

people are given judgement by the way they look or dress or talk

or by who they know or who they don't know

people make a judgement as soon as they open their eyes as to will i get out of bed or not when they awake

their are many who just make judgement on one person

its just like everything goes around in circle

The price of Judgement Put ones life a step back or forward

depends on who is giving the judgement say if its a judge of the court system , well they would and should be correct as they have a persons past sitting in front of them when knowing to give a judgement on a dission

a normal citezen is more less of an opinion of judgement

stickman
Daviy said "Religion and philosophy are the same in the context that …… all have dogma that builds towards identity"

(The central questions all attempt to answer are Who am I, How did I get here, Why am I here. In that fundamental level they are the same. Read 'are the same in the context that')

What are you on about mate? (Can we have a debate without cheap theatrics please?)

… What have you got against philosophy? (Reverse Hiroshima Principle. You make the judgment that I have something against philosophy. That is rubbish but I cannot prove it. ) You appear to misunderstand it utterly(RHP again. What am I writing here if it is not philosophy? Whether or not you agree with my philosophy is your choice.)

And for the record, atheism is not a belief system, it is the absence of one (Incorrect. To believe in the negative is as much a believe as to assert the positive.). ..I choose not to share your belief in whatever god you happen to believe in". That is not a belief system. (I agree. It is a statement of belief.)

To use your analogy, the reverse Hiroshima, organised religion claims that because the non-existence of god is unproveable, he therefore exists. (I do not know what you are arguing here. For or Against? Yes judging in the positive because you cannot prove the negative is RHP. I am saying that if you use RHP you will foul up. This particular argument for the existence of God is ridiculous.)

Daviy said "One thing that I have ... filtered through our belief system."
Are we to assume that this is the reader's fault, and not yours for insufficient clarity?(you may assume what you like, but it will be RHP.)

And that you profess not to view the world through a belief system? (Rubbish, but I cannot prove it. RHP)

I have had to cut more than I wanted because of word constraint. Could I have your permission to use your post as an example in an expanded version of the article?

Daviy, with the greatest respect, your follow-on comments are almost as obscure as the original article. That last one had so many parentheses that half the time I couldn't work out who was talking to whom.

Let's start by looking at your concept of "judgment".

"The most familiar version in the Christian paradigm is "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it"... I read this as judgment."

I think that's your first problem, right there.

Leave aside the fact that we are talking about an allegory, and imagine there is such a thing - "knowledge of good and evil" - that can be written down in a list. Good in the left-hand column, evil in the right.

Let's then assume that we perceive a particular behaviour. We look it up in the book - and lo! it falleth in one or other column.

That isn't judgment.

That is pre-judgment. Before any act has been committed, it has been predetermined into which column it falleth... err, falls.

My definition would actually be fully consistent with what follows:

"But if judgment is the problem then any answer to the problem must be free of judgment."

Substitute the word "pre-judgment", and it works perfectly.

Your version does not work, and cannot work, as you have not demonstrated judgment per se to be any sort of problem at all.

Whereas the man on the Clapham omnibus could describe many, many problems associated with prejudice.

Then there's:

"If a human does not know something they make a wild guess. They then claim their wild guess is true"

Evidence? Examples? Justification? Background thoughts, ideas, concepts?

None.

And that's where it all falls apart.

I, for one, enjoyed the article. While I don't think it offers a practical solution to problems (we will always have to use judgment and weigh up the odds if we are to make decisions in a timely manner), it certainly does give a possible explanation for the ways in which our judgment leads to errors.

As for the note that 'what a writer writes and a reader reads are often very different. I put this down to the words being filtered through our belief system': this reminds me of something I read in Pierre Bayard's "How to talk about books you haven't read". A good book.

The author talks about the idea of the "inner book". When we read something, the text we have in our head is detached from that which we find on paper. Our own experiences, beliefs and knowledge filter the contents of the text and create a new text within our heads. My "Tale of Two Cities" is undoubtedly different from yours, and both are different from that which lived in Dickens' head. The paper (or, in this case, online) text differs substantially from the texts that exist in people's heads. I don't think Daviy was being judgmental when he noted this - he was just accounting for the differences in understanding (jump in anytime if I'm wrong, Daviy!). Furthermore, he wasn't excluding himself from having a belief system - remember that the entire article to which we are responding stems from his beliefs!

You hit the nail on the head, though, Stickman, when you noted that atheism is not a belief system. It doesn't mean that one doesn't have a belief system, but it is not a belief system in itself. Atheists can still have views about the difference between right and wrong, they can have beliefs about the formation of the world; inevitably, we all have beliefs of some sort. But atheism is not a belief.

Pericles
I was careful to define exactly the form of judgment I was talking about. Examples? The Iraq war was given. Your post is a classic example of re-defining and attacking the re-defined. It seems inevitable that some will use this form of fallacious argument.
Pre-judgment is the definition of prejudice. If you want to redefine making wild guess and claiming them to be true to be prejudice that OK by me.
My previous post was an interlaced reply to stickman. Maybe addressing it to stickman didn't make that clear enough.

'I believe this is an original hypothesis, so if you try to research the contents the only likely reference that will come up will be my book The Fall of Man. Other may be working along similar lines but I am unaware of such works. If there are others working along similar lines I would be interested to see what they are doing.'

This comes directly from the Article. There is never any evidence for a new hypothesis. If there were all progress would cease. If you want background you could read my book. Anything new that challenges existing paradigms will be resisted so I am not surprised by opposition to my hypothesis.

The basic premise of the article is very simple.
' From there I looked for specific types of wild guess. I identified two types of wild guess that divorced us from reality:
1) finding in the negative because we cannot prove the positive; and
2) finding in the positive because we cannot prove the negative.

You may not agree, but it is not difficult to understand. And yet your rebuttal techniques appear to show little comprehension of the statements you are challenging. Notice here that that I am not using RHP to claim you do not understand. You may well understand, and your use of the technique of the redefine to suit your purpose could be deliberate. That I do not, nor can I, judge.

The techniques used by yourself and others in this 'debate' reinforces my original hypothesis. (Hypothesis meaning untested theory).

Well Daviy, you did, sort of, you know, stick your chin out on this one. I thought the feedback was mostly quite positive, there are some real thinkers out there and if you can't handle the heat, stay out of kitchen.

Sure your "hypothesis" got a bit re-worked, maybe bacause you were a bit obtuse in the first place, or perhaps the natural talent out there sensed you already had a percceived solution to your hypothesis?

I feel that the thrust of rebuttals are that each "philosophy", social, religious, political etc, etc. all carry their own "dogma", and as a direct consequence, drive the decision making process at both an individual and collective level. You may need to broaden the debate to get more "buy in".

Hi Otokonoko
Interesting you should use a 'Tale of Two Cities' in your post. I used it in the chapter that I condensed into this article. My premise was that it would be easy to show the Dickens knew someone who was related to ….etc. And in this way 'prove' a Tale of two Cities was a true story. Unlikely, but impossible to prove it is not.
Is atheism a belief system? If atheism is removed from the text does the meaning of the text change? I think not, so it is interesting, but a side issue.
What is the solution to the problem? I have no idea. But it could be helpful to understand what the problem is. That would be a beginning.
I did offer the suggestion that if we made decisions knowing that we had incomplete information then we could modify them as we went along. If we claim the truth of our judgments we are stuck in dogma and cannot modify our position. Those may not be the exact words but it is the essence.
There is a bit that was culled from the original because of space constraints that is a positive. Once I began to recognize HP and RHP I knew when someone was feeding me bull. It is a major step forward knowing who to listen to and who to pass by. It does not take much to learn how to recognize when someone is claiming truth by default.
I would like to claim that I do not have a belief system but that would be a judgment. One of the interesting things for me is the difference between what I think I am writing and what others are reading. If a commonality appears I will modify my explanation next time to avoid the error, but I still think it is largely judgment based (my belief system again).
spindoc.
Is your post just another example of 'what I write is not what you choose to read?'

Hi Daviy,

I agree that removing ourselves from "fact" can, at times, be beneficial. The "fact" that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction proved false, and dented the credibility of three governments. I seriously doubt that the highest powers in the US, UK and Aus firmly believed it, either. Nonetheless, the "fact" plunged a number of nations into a war and increased instability in the region. Certainly, there were grounds for the removal of Hussein, and doing so would have always caused strife in Iraq. Had the leaders, however, stated that "we believe Hussein is developing WMD; he won't give the UN unhindered access to the sites, so we're going to use force to have a look for ourselves", they would have caused strife in Iraq but, perhaps, would not have brought about trouble in their own countries. They would also have been able to change their position without egg on their faces. Had they simply said "we believe the world would be better off without Hussein, and here's why . . .", they would have at least acted on some level of reasoning rather than on rhetoric.

As for atheism being/not being a belief system, I think it is a feature of a belief system rather than a system of its own. In turn, the belief in a god is a part of a belief system: it is merely a feature of the beliefs that make up an individual. I believe in God and also believe in evolution; I follow many Catholic teachings but do not believe in a solitary path to salvation. Put together, these pieces make my belief system almost - if not entirely - unique to me. Similarly, others may be completely atheist and, to take an extreme example, believe the world is flat. That is a peculiar belief system.

Hmm . . . I don't know how much sense I have made but, as you pointed out, this subject is interesting but beside the point.

Davy, you've been writing for 20 years which would make you around 25? Very impressive your article from that context.

"The human race is in a mess because we make wild guesses and claim them to be true: we eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil."

Doesn't the latter part of the byline to this article refer to original sin: the way humans disregard their intuition when making decisions about what they do and replace it with their intellect?

I'd suggest this is the root cause of mankind's problems.

Otokonoko
Limited military strikes to find out the truth about WMD's in Iraq would probably been acceptable to me. People accepted that they existed because it could not be proved they did not. That is precisely what RHP is about.
The way you used the word 'fact' in your post was interesting. 'Fact' that claims truth (they, them, and a well know fact) when it is no more than judgment?
The question of God. I have no problem with God, and I hope that God has no problem with me (if God exists).
What I have a problem with is being told to follow certain rules by someone who claims to be God's lawyer dispensing God's law. I must 'believe' and have 'faith' that what I am being told is true when the only claim I can see to it being true is that I cannot prove that it is not. That is RHP.
I tried to be specific in the article about how I saw the believe system. A glob of judgments we claim to be true. This does not mean we cannot know or understand things, or have preferences.
We all have things that are true and right for us, but as soon as that becomes a judgment, that it is 'right' for everyone, it becomes part of the glob of judgments I have defined as the belief system.
The dividing line for me is before judgment we can learn and evolve. But Judgment is the End. How can you go past being right?
RobP. Judgment replacing intuition? I can live with that as an alternative way of explaining it.
spindoc. What heat? There has not been a rework. I want to focus the debate not broaden it. If this is sticking my chin out wait till you see the next article.
Gavan Iacono. If I told you my age you would say it was dementia. There is no defense against this sort of crap, but it does confirm how much work the human race still has to do.

Daviy said "What are you on about mate? (Can we have a debate without cheap theatrics please?)"

Sorry.. that wasn't meant to be read offensively.. it would have come across better verbally than in writing.. so anyway..

I have no qualm with your arguments about HP and RHP, I simply think this:

"Religion and philosophy are one and the same. They are systems that attempt to tell us how we got here and why we are here. They are both wild guesses about the unknowable."

... is demonstrably untrue. As other posters have commented, reigion and philosophy are poles apart by any rational analysis. This is a nice, succinct description of why:

http://atheism.about.com/od/religionnonreligion/a/philosophy.htm

Daviy said:

"Religion and philosophy are the same in the context that they both attempt to give us identity. Christians, Jew, Muslims, Atheists and others all have dogma"

So you agree with me that atheism is not a belief system.

Atheists do not have dogma either. How can they? Other than sharing an unbelief in something (atheism is a bad term in that it defines people in terms of their relationship to a concept that bears no relevance to a rational reality), what else would be the source of such a dogma? My limited data set would indicate that atheists have nothing in common other than an empirically testable view that reason and rationality is the best means by which human affairs can be conducted

My comment that religion and philosophy are the same was in the very narrow context of identity. They both seek to give identity.
The methods used are completely different. One seeks to define a 'creator' in some way, the other by exploring the human condition to say who we are. Aithests in their own way also seek to define their position, often by who they are not.
In the context of the article none of us has the definitive answer as to who we are and how we got here.
I am happy to leave it in which ever way any of the posts want because it does not change the arguement about judgment.
It is funny how a passing or connecting passage in a an article can become such a major issue.

Hi Daviy

Well.. as I said I have no qualm with the bulk of your argument, but when you committ yourself to "paper" and try to persuade people of your arguments, you have to be prepared to accept criticism of ALL of what you write. No point getting bent out of shape about it.

You said:

"My comment that religion and philosophy are the same was in the very narrow context of identity. They both seek to give identity."

So this is a clarification of what you originally wrote. Again I disagree, unless you are re-defining "philosophy" as "personal philosophy about life" which could be construed to confer identity. Capital P philosophy and capital R religion are chalk and cheese