I’m reading The Laws Governing Belief. This note is on Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences).

The fundamental idea here is precisely the title of the post. More specifically, there are two ideas:

• For anything that I believe, ask “what specific things will happen because of this belief?”
• For anything that I believe, ask “what specific things won’t happen because of this belief?”

I’m slightly unclear on what precisely belief and experience mean. I want to say something that I ‘believe’ is something that I think is true, but for most things that I think are true, I straightforwardly describe them without prepending ‘I believe that…’ to them. Belief, in this sense, seems to be some sort of uncertainty marker. And if nothing else, asking what specific things will happen because of what I believe will make me sharpen them.

I’m also not sure what experience is. The post talks about sensory experience, which is clear enough. But surely there isn’t just sensory experience in the world? The purest edge case I can think of is the belief “I will achieve Jhana later this afternoon”; Jhana is almost completely an inner mental experience (although the beginning Jhanas do have Piti associated with them, which is a bodily sensation). Beliefs which are about states of mind don’t seem to map to direct sensory experience.

This is far worse when it’s about other people’s states of mind instead of my own. The mapping is (what I think about what they think)->(what I think about how they’d act based on how I think they’d think). Think about the belief “he feels annoyed when he talks to me”. What sensory experience do I anticipate? Him avoiding instances of talking to me? Microexpressions that I can observe? But all of that evidence has competing hypotheses, not just a feeling of annoyance.

Nevertheless, sensory experience is a lot of experience, and the uncertainty about states of mind I’ll likely be able to pierce through with further thought. So, a restatement would be something like “make beliefs verify and falsify themselves through an inferential chain that leads to direct sensory experience”. Which the post title, somewhat more pithily, captures.

Some examples:

• “The cab will come to pick me up in 15 minutes.” The anticipation is the experience of being in the cab in 15 minutes. The antianticipation (cipation?) Is still being where I am (which, given that it’s been rare that cabs have been late on me, isn’t particularly strong).
• “Most people are good.” Anticipation: I’m…not sure, something like “most people will help other people if asked”. Cipation: “most people won’t actively hurt other people”. (what is good? What sort of people do other people help? What does actively hurt mean (does intentionality count? Does hurt because of insufficient thought count?)). This belief serves as an optimism engine, but I don’t find myself easily being able to think about anticipated experiences.
• “I’m disabled, therefore I need to be better than other people around me to be seen as having worth.” This is a big one, and I’m going to keep coming back to this. The first pass is to decompose the belief into “being disabled leads to having less worth”, “worth is relative”, “being good at things grants worth”, and “the worth that is acquired by being good at things is usable to offset the decrease in worth that disability gives you”.