Are delusions good for us?

Last night we discussed delusions at the Ideas Cafe.  Whether ignorance is really bliss, whether we should indulge ourselves, using temporary illusions to escape from the burdens of real life.

Dan quoted wikipedia's definition of delusion as a pathological condition. "A delusion is a false belief held with absolute conviction despite superior evidence."

We were more interested in the daily usage of the word rather than the psychiatric clinical condition so we started talking about false believes and illusions rather than using the word delusion itself.

The next term to define is "fact".  While a lot of us would see it as something like a believe that have agreed with observations in the physical world,  Mano suggested that fact is a belief that we have not been able to find false.

The philosophers in the group moved to an animated discussion of truth, coherence theory, and a few other terms that were inaccessible to us plain folks.

Dan offered that our thought process is one of forming a hypothesis (belief), testing that hypothesis, and using that hypothesis as a basis for our actions. In real life, we never get to completely prove the hypothesis before we need it to determine our actions so it is a continual process of verifying the hypothesis and depending on the best state of hypothesis that we have.

These hypothesis form the basis of our belief system or our knowledge base.  Our belief system is the decision engine where we put in input consists of our observations and ideas and provide output as to what action we should take or conclusions we should draw.

If our belief system is wrong, we will take wrong actions or come to wrong conclusions.

We identified a number of categories to divide belief into:

1.  Those that are trivial. If it is wrong, not much would come of it.

2.  Those that are highly interconnected and form the basis or other believes.  Far reaching understanding such as theory of evolution is the basis for a lot of other believes.  Therefore, if evolution turns out to be not true, quite a few other believes will also have to change.

3.  Those passed on to us by authority, likely true, but not always

Partly because we started our life with believes from our parents and other elders to start with, we never get to test our believes systematically. We infer from our observations as to whether it is consistent with what our believes would have predicted.  Therefore feeding back the accuracy of our believes applies to clusters of believes.

Mano also pointed out that the term "ignorance is bliss" tends to be used in a negative sense to describe people who are not in the know, rather than promoting ignorance as a preferred way of life.

However, if bliss is described in terms of a state of perfection, then ignorance or "letting go" is required to shield off the practical world for this perfection to happen.

Therefore bliss cannot happen for any extended period of time and then only with the mental filter to hold things off for the time being.

But we still lie to our kids about the existence of Santa Claus, that they will get presents from this overweight fellow through the chimney.  Is it because we think that kids should remain at this blissful state of childhood for as long as possible?

Ignorance is bliss may not be the way we should conduct our lives but we love our kids and we want them this way.  Strange.