Internet epistemologies

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

People often say things that imply that I’m gullible because I hold certain beliefs garnered from the internet. Over the years I’ve learned it doesn’t really matter what the belief is, just that it’s from the internet. Like it’s so untrustworthy. This whole assumption got me thinking.

(Just for the record, obviously the internet is a collection of ideas published directly to the space, or into another medium, and then into the internet.)

Some people like to hold onto a staunch rejection of anything from the internet which they cannot verify by watching television or radio, or otherwise previously being exposed to the idea in (a library in) their lifetime. Because trusting someone over the internets is tantamount to believing in an invisible deity, obviously. The internet is place where no one really has a reason to lie comparative to any other medium - I mean, by far - and yet in actuality people treat either as the exact opposite. So that’s funny.

Most beliefs are faith-based. Alright. Let’s get that straight. 99% of the time people, for instance, are not practicing the scientific method; they are trusting the decree of someone who has told them that they practiced the scientific method. Sure, science is trustworthy - definitely - but that doesn’t change the fact that you hardly ever use it to formulate your beliefs. Using that hand is not a very strong one.

So if someone presents evidence intended to be evidence then should we continue to doubt it simply because they are not an authority? Or because they are from…DUM DUM DUM… the internet? Seems like we shouldn’t just doubt shit for no reason if we want to call ourselves thinkers. How do we differentiate between using ‘doubt’ as a psychological aid, and still having doubts after the evidence is presented? If there is no reason to doubt the evidence, is one any different than the other? Why not take evidence as such unless we are supplied us with a reason not to? Not supplied by our emotions, but more/stronger evidence? Instead of jumping ahead to a possibility that in no way has been really introduced, let alone proven, except by dislike of more of the impossible, and then actually -going- with that reason (someone would want to fake, say, a full documentary, or whatever it happens to be, because they are simply ‘a crazy person online’) as formative for a belief? Cause that, my friends, is ass backwards. It actually takes more faith to do that, ironically, and pretty ostensibly in my mind.

I want to avoid falling into an Orwellian black hole of never being about to connect with strangers. Of never being able to know beyond authority. Um… we want to be able to know beyond authority, right? Or did I get that wrong? The current method would have us believing authority with no qualms, but not someone from outside because we’re afraid of that being constituted as faith. Even though really, you (and me both) take sometimes less evidence to form opinions about other things. Most of the time all it takes is someone from authority saying it with confidence to a camera.

So we can put the ‘faith’ argument away now. We’ve established it’s total horseshit.

So like I said, the way people treat the internet in terms of its epistemological value is way, way off. It has the highest value. Having an admittedly blanket, lazy doubt with regards to things said from propaganda channels, and having more of an implicit trust in the channel that is comparatively interest-free is a bit more appropriate.

We all need to get over this seriously bizarre condition where anything which doesn’t jive with our worldview has to be coming from the 1.2 billion person army of people who are so insane that they simply make full-length documentaries based on nothing but their own complete, full-on delusions. There are not as many crazy/delusional people out there as there are things which you don’t think are possible, but in actuality are.

2

Internet information is more trust worthy than the news or the religious authorities.
The internet showed me allot of things that society never would have showed me.

TV isn’t about choice totally. You can choose some channels, but you only have very
limited options as to what you’re exposed to.

The internet let’s us choose what we are viewing.
There are only a very few shows i like on tv, and even then, i dont control what each
episode of the show is like or about.

Internet is about freedom of expression.
The mass media, on the other hand, is often about money.
Whatever sells the best is what sticks.
So we’re left with sensationalism and shows that have been controlled by money.

3

Yes. Television especially is the worst. It is very deliberate social programming. I mean, the shows are even called programs.

4

What about the fact that people lie, they lie every day, every hour on the internet, the ration of lie/truth on the internet I think is about 100/1. They lie because they are anonymous, no one can check their credibility. They lie to protect the arguments they argue and to impress their peers.

5

Not all tv is that way. Some of it is pretty subversive and counteractive to social, corporate “programming” of gullible minds. Even so, I think perhaps the best way to uncondition a programmed mind is to go to a good university and be around a variety of people and professors who like to talk and challenge basic assumptions that you got from childhood. The problem with that, of course, is whether you can afford it. I suppose that one way to keep people stoopid and indoctrinated is to make quality higher education expensive.

6

The expense of quality higher education is one way that many people are kept “stoopid and indoctrinated”. Are you really suggesting that this is the goal? I think the goal of universities is, in large part, to make money.

7

I’m a staunch believer in the idea that belief is not a matter of choice - that whether one adopts an idea as an affective part of their identity is not up to the person. At any given time we are bombarded with information and, looking inwards at how my mind operates and consequently generalizing about everyone, I see that at no point does the conscious mind make a decision about whether to adopt a belief. It happens on a subconscious level. If your core beliefs are compatible with a new idea and if that new idea compliments your core beliefs, then you will start to believe the new idea. You believe what you want to believe, whereby the want to believe is determined by whether believing will make you feel good (i.e., compliment and verify your beliefs/identity).

That said, I still think it’s a bad idea to disregard the medium by which we receive our information, to focus entirely on the substance, and make judgments about a person on whether they accept ideas regardless of how they’re exposed to them. Being a rational person means, in part, being disposed to automatically believing rational ideas when one encounters them, and to disbelieve irrational ideas when one encounters information that invalidates them. The problem is that this is a highly idealistic notion of man. In fact it’s unrealistic. It fails to take into account that a man’s identity is interwoven with his beliefs, and that an attack on his beliefs is an attack on his identity (which is why a philosopher is a achem higher order of man complete with a…weird form of identity/belief relationship, but this is another issue.) There have been studies that show encounters with ideas that contradict our beliefs causes actual suffering, and that ideas that validate our own cause feel good hormones to be released.

[tab]I lost my train of thought, and I don’t know where I was going with this but I’ve already written all that and so I’m posting anyway.

implying making sense is a requirement for posting[/tab]

8

lol :laughing:

9

Accoring to what? TV, or some acadimic programed by the mass media, which has a lie to truth ratio of 1000/1?

I’m sure TV does good and stuff but it is missused in general it would seem, perhpas in some countries less then others… But yeah, things like google have the capacity to allow only certain things to show up on searches…If they wanted…

10

Are you stuck in the 90’s, Abstract? No one watches TV nowadays, it’s all about Hulu and torrents. Those who watch wish to be misinformed and waste their lives on commercials every 5 minutes. I stopped watching TV about 7-8 years ago and I never even thought about going back. Yes, internet is a limitless, commercial free pool of useful information and you cannot compare the two, it’s like comparing an old IBM Desktop to an iPhone.

I can go to any forum, be literate, read some Wikipedia pages and call myself a Theoretical Physicist or an Oncologist, and spill out some antifactual bullshit, is that credible?

11

I actually did not advocate watching TV or suggest that you did or anything I don’t see how you were lead to saying this…

will in your statement you said, “spill out some antifactual bullshit” and then asked if that was credible, that is the same as asking…“If something is uncredible…is that credible?” to which the most logical response would be of course that is not logical. nonetheless it would seem to me that a person and a good few can educate themselves sufficiantly and avoid spilling out bullshit, especially if they properlly cite their sources and properly duggest the potenetials for flaw in information, and such. Though of course ,just like any medium their are plenty of people who throw fowl balls.

12

Right, the internet is just another medium to get something you want or to express yourself.

As long as what you want is feasibly attainable, there is always something or someone who can help you get it. Some pursuits are not so easily achieved, i.e. in conceptual, abstract matters. But there are mediums through which your ideas can be expressed, including the internet, colleagues, friends, etc.

13

Yeah, you’re right. It’s up to someone else…

I wonder what the difference is between someone who just lets emotions dictate their beliefs, and someone who lets facts dictate their beliefs.

Maybe when you say that we don’t decide our beliefs consciously we actually take in the evidence consciously, and then from the unconscious - like every single other thought - a feeling arises. Something we all know. Something that happens with like every thought or decision.

So what you chimed into say (yet again) was that thoughts come from the subconscious.

Uh… thanks for pointing that out.

14

My argument was based on my own observations. I said so. I’m also aware that I’m being redundant, but this is something that’s been on my mind lately and ILP is where I think out loud. You can always overlook my posts if you think they don’t speak to the issue or contribute anything significant.

I believe my room is blue for instance, but at no point did the idea that my room is blue ever ask for my permission to become a belief. My senses simply reported information to my brain and as far as I’m now aware, I believe the room is blue. It happened just like that. If that belief was up for choice or contingent on my conscious mind, then I should be able look at the blue walls and make myself believe they’re not blue, but I can’t genuinely do that.

Beliefs are like viruses. If you don’t have the right defenses, you will succumb to some of them. And they don’t affect merely what you think, but how you think. That’s the problem. Beliefs seem to have defense mechanisms. Once they’re in you, they fight to stay in you by repelling any potential belief that might not cohere or compliment them.

Being educated, or otherwise smart, means having developed some inner standard for belief. In other words, it means having built a moat around your inner belief sanctuary that only allows some to get through.

But as I said before, I forgot where I was going with this point.

One is human, the other doesn’t exist.

15

Oh, and I guess there’s a lot of bullshit online, so people’s guards are naturally up. This won’t change until the ratio of sensible stuff to bs changes in favor of sensible stuff.

[tab]lol but that’ll never happen. I’ll do my part to make sure of it.[/tab]

16

Beliefs are like ‘viruses.’ lol

Unless you wash your hands, the boogyman will get you.

Come on kids. Let’s all do our daily stretches!

Yay!!! Super happy sunshine time.

17

I have to admit that character you chose for your image…I forget the sereis name…hbo…ice monsters…kingdoms…crap I watched the whole thing why can’t i remember…or at least saw that season…

Anyways he has to be one of the coolest characters, of almost any show I’ve seen…i love him…

18

Tirion Lannister.

The imp.

19

Anyways, getting back on track, the difference between someone who lets facts decide him beliefs, and emotion, is the difference between a moron and someone a bit more intelligent.

XCZ is wrong, as one can certainly (temporarily) put emotion aside in favour of a rational calculation. One need only look at a drunk person next to a sober one, or the plentitude of other examples anyone could think of. A judge presiding over a case. etc. The opinion originates in the subconscious because everything does. That doesn’t mean it’s not a process which doesn’t involve the conscious. That process is called sleeping.

Beliefs can affect the way one thinks. Sure. I don’t think anyone is denying that.

We’re talking here about the belief that the only way to avoid a the longterm epistemic problem described above is to fix the lop-sided skeptical demands concerning anything which comes from the internet. It does not match up to the epistemic value I’ve presented: I’ve explained that the internet is the most accurate medium for information - no one has disproved that - so, again, why do we treat information from the internet the way that we do?

I put to you that people just use the unfounded assumption that everyone online is ‘crazy’ in some vague, convenient way, should be looked at more carefully. Other people don’t describe our beliefs. We do. It’s not an process which we have no control over. That is wrong.

20

I can see resistance to such a statement in so far as one might consider love something that should be followed, but I think I would agree in so far as to say that to be driven by emotion without any filter of thought is to act by instinct, and that is to be animalistic, it is fair to consider emotion, to take them into the calculation, but to simply blindly be pushed by them is to be blindly pushed by the environment that enlists them and thus would I guess not be a matter of thinking or in a sense intelligence.

Honestly i think there may be some dangers in the internet, and there is access to bad information, but generally, your right, the information is rather valuable, even wiki who English teachers tell you not to cite is actually better then many sites because it is edited by so many various people so it is like the creme of the crop, but then it does have errors of course, ultimately though so does any point of view expressed in a book and even academic papers… Most of whether it is valuable or not depends on the persons capacity to recognize such and of course it is important to have more than one source…but it would seem to me that if one follows the guidelines it can be just as valuable as anything else. The only problem i see is if one starts over quoting constant changing opinionated sites like political sites, (wiki is constantly changing i guess but it is not exactly so horrible it tend s to be reasonable, and noting the source allows subjective valuation anyways) but that is no different then trying to quote a magazine of that type…and finally i might worry that in the future with improved capacity to control the flow of info that an agency might gain control of the internet and start changing facts when people have moved away from more hard-copy forms like books…though that is a bit conspiracyish…now at least…