Belief Systems and Value Systems (3-3:A)

[Note: What I am trying to do with this blog is to not only share my own opinions, but also to explain ideas that I feel are essential for those wishing to have integrity and reflection in their lives.  I always try to consider that I could be wrong in the explanation or that the ideas I've chosen aren't relevant or that it could be that my own opinions, biases and shortcomings have clouded my analysis so I want it to be clear, I am more than willing to admit where I have gone wrong and to publicly say so, I want this to be more of an open conversation.  Any sort of argument given as to why I am wrong on a certain topic should be able to pinpoint exactly where I have either committed the error or where I may have turned right when I should have turned left given a set of values, facts, and relevant concepts which then logically lead to your differing beliefs, simple assertions will simply be ignored (I really hope writing this might prevent 'some' of the abuse that occurs on the internet but I know its coming regardless).  I am certainly open to grammatical / spelling corrections, or if you think that a portion of the post might be better if it were to be rephrased without the meaning changed, please say something if you would care to.]

What is a system of beliefs?  Is a system of beliefs something that works together like normal systems or would it have contradictions at every turn where one belief doesn't seem to 'fit' when compared to another within the same system?  Well, as far as I have been able to work out, it appears that there are independent structures of 'beliefs' as opposed to one unifying web.  To use an analogy, it could be thought of like a city landscape where some beliefs are massively tall skyscrapers and other beliefs either build up the skyscrapers window by window or remain small mom and pop one story shoe stores or gas stations.  Some people have a full metropolitan area full of dozens and dozens of skyscrapers, shopping centers, and hundreds of smaller shops and restaurants, while other people who prefer a more simplistic sort of life maybe have a smaller farm town in the country side.  Some people have the traditional form where the city has a concentration of skyscrapers in one particular area while other people have a much more interdisciplinary city where there may be two or three skyscrapers but there aren't any buildings under 8 stories.  There could also be a much more shotgun feel to the city where there are a bunch of skyscrapers, but none of them are concentrated in one area and all of them are surrounded by much smaller buildings.  Some people have a much more organized city where it seems like there is a smooth flow of traffic throughout the city with wide four lane roads, and some cities are as disorganized and haphazardly put together as Rome.  

The building materials (facts) that eventually become the skyscrapers and buildings (beliefs) which are built and designed by the engineers (values) using tools and machines (concepts) makes up the city (belief system) that houses and meets the needs of the individual people and consumers (emotions).  

Some building materials are more abundant than others and some of the machines used are more capable than others, some engineers can design more efficient and more attractive structures than others and some skyscrapers are more useful in their function than others.  Sometimes, if a city hasn't been built in a particularly efficient fashion, such as Rome, in order to update and remodel an old and falling apart structure it might be necessary to have to remodel (or even demolish) some of the city in order for the proper machinery to be implemented.  Jumping out of the analogy for a second in order to keep this in perspective and to just remind people, some concepts are much larger than others such as 'Capitalism', while other concepts like 'cooking' for example, are much much smaller (can fit in the narrow haphazardly built streets).  Some designs (values) are flexible enough to where additions could be made (new beliefs) to structures, sorta like a lego building where the roof is made of more slots for more parts, while some less flexible designs were implemented that make future updates or additions much much more difficult.

The Value System (department of engineers) is structured more like the unifying web with core assumptions (senior executive staff of engineers) building up the center of the web with more idealistic and ambitious values located off of the center building links with one another in different directions and expanding outwards with the increase of reflection and complexity (new, creative, or experimental engineers).  As scenarios that were unforeseen or unprepared for present themselves (problems navigating the city or certain building materials failing), the more idealistic or vulnerable values are either proven to be adequate, re-evaluated or left behind.  It rarely occurs that there is a significant enough challenge to the core value system and emotional state that there is a full system re-evaluation (the population rioting and ripping apart their homes until a new team of engineers tackles the problems that the old team could not handle).  

The senior executive staff of engineers (core Values) is made up of several departments that are absolutely vital to the construction, maintenance and everyday function of the city.  First there is the building materials department who decides what is usable and what is not usable in construction (what Facts are and what Facts are not).  Next would be industrial equipment department who decides which machines are relevant for a particular job site and which machines are not relevant (which concepts are relevant to building up beliefs and which ones aren't).  Next would be the labor engineering department which oversee's the actual construction of a building (the arguments a person makes to try to convince others of the validity of a belief).  Finally the engineering design department where the structure of the system is analysed and drawn up for individual buildings one at a time to serve the cities inhabitants which includes a fluid integration with all of the other buildings (the personal analysis someone does in private to try to make a model of reality).  Each of these ideas (different departments) deserves their own blog entry so I will end here, I hope you enjoyed my colorful analogy and can have fun creating your own internal image :-)  

Foundations of Concepts (2-3:A)

[Note: This is part two of a three part introductory series to my blog, all three posts are prerequisites to every other post but for this post in particular, its important to have gone through the first entry and to have fully absorbed its implications for how you piece together the world in your mind, this took me months on my own with no real guidance however it is my hope that I was able to save you some time with my explanation. My experience was that almost every conclusion I had arrived at was flawed in this non-reflective way with the eventual arrival and ongoing process of examining my own foundations and the realization that there are always competing values to consider.]

Concepts are built up from values and facts, this INTERPLAY between the different parts of reality along with the way you choose to respond to those scenarios combines together on a lower level to form independent concepts that can be inserted or replaced with other concepts in someone's argument depending on the context.  This may seem self evident to most but the reason why I feel this is worth spelling out and more importantly drawing a distinction in the mind is how fluid individual concepts are, how a concept is not dependent on the much larger 'Belief System' or presented argument and can be adopted or examined in isolation which helps with bridging the differences between two individuals who seem to have no way to reconcile their differences.  Typically a concept is not broken down into its individual facts and values because the concept is widely accepted and overlooked for time purposes or because the concept is not vital to the much larger discussion of beliefs, so would only serve as a distraction however when a concept is vital to a disagreement it helps to break up the idea into its constituent parts to analyze its validity.  

There are concepts that are simple (like 'tree'), and concepts that are complex (like 'education'), there are also differing levels of importance between certain concepts.  Some concepts are vital to building up only one or two larger concepts before contributing to a larger belief/argument while other concepts are so important to the web of concepts and beliefs that it provides a core base to potentially hundreds of concepts and beliefs.  An example of one of these core concepts is 'computation' along with all of its supporting scientific knowledge and facts.  Computing is absolutely essential to things like 'research', 'satellite technology', 'the stock market' etc. (its important to make the distinction from computation and simply owning a computer which is the ability to access and to prevent access instead of what it is).  The computer is probably the best example of how, whenever someone makes a much larger argument that you disagree with and includes legitimate scientific information having to do with the capabilities of a computer, that it would be completely reasonable for someone to assess the individual points that build up the argument and be willing to adopt and promote those points that legitimately say something about computers and not feel obligated to endorse the nonsense.  

This last point seems to be the underlying assumption with most of scientific progress in academia (though might not be as rigorous as some would like), but is lost on the larger mainstream media outlets like fox news ;-) and since I am now adding my own form of media to the world of the interwebs I suppose it would make a good example about the importance of concepts.  Dreaming about what it would be like if the news wasn't sexified or used as a tool to indoctrinate is something I do from time to time though then there's always this voice in the back of my head saying that if the mainstream wasn't what it was then the those outlets wouldn't have nearly the amount of followers that they do which would mean they wouldn't exert the level of influence that they exert which would mean that those outlets wouldn't be called the mainstream anymore, but then some of the other independent outlets would be implementing their own indoctrination tactics since everybody seems to be trying to gain this 'competitive advantage' and then by defacto becoming the new mainstream making the dream previously thought possible incoherent.  It seems that in order to be 'competitive' in the media world, you need to indoctrinate your audience to the point where they stop asking certain questions that might challenge their level of influence including protecting those who hold power.  

My devils advocate now jumps in and says of course there is a huge incentive for those who do not have power to try to corrupt the image of those who do have power so maybe the truth of the situation is that I have been the one who is indoctrinated to believe that the mainstream is indoctrinating people into a web of manipulations when in fact they are the true proponents of truth, that I really don't know one way or the other and what is really happening is group selection as opposed to pattern recognition...  (Sorta the problem with an information war)

Those individuals who are either able to notice and calculate all of the different fallacies and manipulations propagated by the mainstream either don't need the explanation of how unhealthy it is or have decided to cut off already, or maybe they have decided to analyze the manipulations as a sort of exercise of their own defenses and to gain a first hand understanding of what is being propagated as opposed to being completely cut off and having others tell you whats going on.  I would love to get the thoughts of someone who has their own independent outlet as far as their 'activism' or someone who knows how the independent effort works, because it seems those who constantly attack the mainstream don't seem to be taking into account a typical persons 'defenses' or the concept of the 'competitive advantage'.  Instead what might be most pragmatic is to COMPLETELY ignore the mainstream in your own media and to work on the differing concepts such as 'logical fallacies', 'Humes Guillotine', 'devils advocates' or anything else that might have an effect on the sort of tactics used.  Making blanket statements like 'all mainstream media is just garbage' (which I have heard from many different outlets) doesn't seem to help your cause unless of course you are trying to create your own indoctrinated audience which is not something I value.  

My devils advocate is popping up again saying that I wouldn't be making the argument to focus on those specific concepts and that the point about completely ignoring the mainstream if it were not for all the complainers pointing out how unreliable CNN is.  Is my position really the effect of all those efforts?  Could you really make a point by point causal chain showing the effect or is it really just a type of faith that what your doing is paying off, and if you can't show that you are making any direct effect why would you continue?  

Anyways, one thing that I am absolutely sure of is that this particular topic is not over by a long shot and that there will be many people who have their own opinions on the subject which I more than welcome.  I would like to have the concepts of the mainstreams 'competitive advantage', 'indoctrination tactics', 'protection of the powerful', 'information war', 'group selection' and what it would mean to legitimately recognize 'patterns' be discussed either one at a time or all at once as well as the arguments presented by my Devils Advocate, IF people desire to engage in this topic :-)