![]() ![]() What does it mean to love conditionally? Well, ask yourself, why do you love someone? Maybe she is kind, funny or clever – you have your reasons! Maybe he has many lovable aspects, and you love him because of the person that he is and the way he makes you feel. What I will now show is how this can map on to rational conditional love and irrational unconditional love, where loving unconditionally is like having credence 1. So what the Bayesian theory shows us is that credence 1 cannot be rationally changed, but perhaps it could change irrationally. But we can also change our degree of belief in an irrational way, perhaps just randomly! To act rationally is to act according to reason, and to act without reason is to act irrationally. ![]() What I have described so far is rational changes to credences, as it is rational to change one’s degree of belief in something on the basis of relevant information. As such, it seems that credence 1 cannot be changed. No matter how strong the opposing information is, it will not detract you from credence 1, so the Bayesian says. Regardless of any information that might ordinarily sway someone’s attitudes, when your credence in something is a full 1, it does not waver. It cannot be updated in either direction – it cannot get stronger because it is already at maximum strength, and it cannot get weaker on the basis of evidence because it was not built on the basis of evidence in the first place. Now this sounds totally feasible – of course I should change my degree of belief in light of new evidence! But what if my credence is completely irresponsive to such evidence? What if it is forcibly unmovable? This is what it is like to have credence 1, in other words, a belief of certainty, which could not be any stronger and cannot be updated. A credence is conditional upon information when it is evaluated with regard to that information, such that the strength of the belief is sensitive to that information and is updated on the basis of it. Fair enough.īut how do you rationally alter your credence, and figure out how strong it should be, given the information that you have? Cue Bayesian probability theory to calculate conditional credences. Perhaps Aeon’s editors tell me that they will publish it with the warning sign ‘Read this article and get seven years of bad luck.’ On the basis of that new information, I revise my degree of belief in the success of the article from 0.8 down to something like 0.4, as I assume that some people are superstitious and would rather not risk seven years of bad luck to learn what I think about love. Though I cannot think of any reason why it would not be a hit, imagine I receive some information to suggest otherwise. For example, I believe that this article will be a hit! I am pretty confident of this, given the article’s awesome topic and the awesomeness of Aeon’s readership, and so my degree of belief might be somewhere around the 0.8 mark. Importantly, these values are not forever fixed, and can change when given reason to do so. These credences can be given numerical values between 0 and 1 (where 1 is being completely certain), to demonstrate how strong that degree of belief is. It is not that I take love to be a belief – rather, I take it that by looking at conditional/unconditional belief we can see a potentially helpful and illuminating analogy to conditional/unconditional love.ĭegrees of belief are called credences. What does it mean to love someone conditionally or unconditionally? Is it possible to love unconditionally, and if so, is it rational to do so? I will try to make sense of the confusing and complex emotion that we call love by creating a parallel between conditional/unconditional love and conditional/unconditional degrees of belief. Take two types of love: conditional and unconditional. But what is love? (Baby don’t hurt me.) In this article, I will articulate how I have come to understand what love is, with the unexpected help of Bayesian probability theory. ![]() Love is important, and many of us wait for it, travel for it, and build our lives around it. Right now, in millions of bedrooms across the land, people are sighing for love. ![]()
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