Belief and Learning

From a Talk by Joscha Bach Computational Meta-Psychology.

About learning and belief.

When you study a complex subject like programming, at some point you might think that you know the truth about the subject.

But if you look back, you can see, you have changed your mind so often in the past, you are probably going to change it again in the future.

So there is no truth, but only a moving forward. you give up old beliefs and adapt new ones.

In order to move forward you can go in different directions which have a different gradient.

The gradient is the cost function - how expensive in terms of energy is it for you to adapt a new belief in this direction.

So if you are at the position that you belief object-oriented Programming in Java is a good, but you want to move in the direction of functional programming, there are diffent paths possible.

For example Kotlin or Clojure. In this case the gradient of the Clojure Path is higher for you, because you need to give up the belief that it is good to have code and data structured together in a class. So coming from the object-oriented belief, the Kotlin Path costs you less energy to move forward.

In order to understand the beliefs of other people, you must trace which paths they have taken.

The cost function is individual for you and is highly influenced by your current belief.

For example if you have started to belief in a religion and it says, if you give up the religion you are going to suffer in hell, it becomes very expensive for you to move forward to a diffent belief.

Joscha describes Religions as a Mind Virus. A well designed piece of software that runs on the mind of people and controlls them. The Virus replicates and evolves, which can be seen in the evolution of religion:

More details can be seen in the info graphic The Evolutionary Tree of Religion by Simon E. Davies