Anonymous #1 2w

As a humanities major, the choice is in how we determine and allow something to become scientific fact - that doesn’t make it less factual, but there is no “truth”. You incorporate fact into your belief system because fact is something you value, not because you are forced to accept that fact. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen, but we named hydrogen and oxygen before we could quantify all of their atomic properties. 2+2=4 because we construct numerical symbols for plurals found in nature

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Anonymous #2 2w

We accept something as fact when we can prove it through the scientific method - which is relatively recently canonized in western academic ‘official’ science. And we first seek to prove the things that we first notice - gravity as an example (and sorry bc I can’t help getting wordy)

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Anonymous #2 2w

We think of gravity as a law - but this was before we had ever reached space travel in zero gravity. Falling may feel weightless, gravity feels reduced in water, but it’s still there. So why did we /need/ to specify that it was constant? Why couldn’t we know it without assigning a term for it? If we had evolved on a planet with less gravity, would we consider it to be a law, or would it be conditional? Anyway this is why the humanities are insufferable

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Anonymous #2 2w

Oh wait another one - if someone lived their whole life in a zero gravity condition like the ISS (ignore for now the developmental consequences that would have), would they /have/ to believe gravity? They might be reactionary against it, the way people are when faced with different cultural experiences, they could say, “well it’s fine that you believe in gravity, but I don’t”, and it might not be scientifically valid but we can see why they might be led to that belief. Anyway

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Anonymous #2 2w

Is this hypothetical person visiting earth?? I don’t think it would be very hard to convince them gravity exists because it would affect them so directly. smaller scale interactions between are also way easier to see on the ISS, so there’s a chance they would have just as good of an understanding already

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Anonymous #4 2w

The ISS is just what I thought of, it’s more like, if you were born in a zero gravity environment and never exposed to gravity until well into adulthood when your own personal beliefs have kind of been cemented

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Anonymous #4 2w

And it would effect them directly, but that doesn’t account for the cognitive dissonance that so many people’s beliefs already depend on

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Anonymous #2 2w

Idk, I feel like there’s not a conflict between not having experienced gravity before and then experiencing gravity. cognitive dissonance applies more to politics imo, where people are hoping for a particular outcome based on what they believe, with gravity, that outcome is already pretty obvious

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Anonymous #4 2w

It was an on the spot thing I don’t expect it to be water tight 🤷 but you’re welcome to come up with some other way to demonstrate it

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Anonymous OP 2w

Well how u choose to define the things around u is a choice. I don’t get to define god, but beliefs are formed based on how we feel about things imo- like at one point I believed god was this rigid human like dooming entity and now I believe that god is all loving and there’s a piece of god in every living being. in both circumstances I believed in gods existence but my world view and idea of religion were insanely different. It could just be semantics around the word “beliefs”

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Anonymous #5 2w

maybe I’m too drunk to get my point across rn

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