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#3736·Knut Sondre Sæbø revised 1 day agoInteresting! Getting ideas to jibe/cohere seems like a more and more fundamental idea the more I think about it. Has anyone explored whether the collection of ideas in a person's mind must have a specific structure?
When discussing virtues, you seem to suggest a hierarchical organization of ideas, as opposed to ideas competing horizontally for attention and salience. It appears that ideas organize vertically in a hierarchy, where activating "higher-level" ideas automatically resolves conflicts among lower-level ones. For example, if a snake suddenly appears next to you, all previous internal conflicts dissolve because self-preservation is among the most dominant (highest) ideas in their value structure.
However, individuals can construct even higher-order values that override self-preservation. The structure seems hierarchical: when a top-level idea is activated, there seems to be some alignment in lower level ideas.
Getting ideas to jibe/cohere seems like a more and more fundamental idea the more I think about it.
Agreed. There’s more to it than meets the eye. For example, maybe capitalism can be thought of as society-wide common-preference finding (#3013). Rationality might work the same way across minds as it does within a single mind. Capitalism as an expression of rationality in society.
As for virtues, I think some virtues are more fundamental than others. There are some virtues I think people should adopt. Like, rationality depends on them. But the core functionality of the mind as a whole does not. There’s a difference between creativity and rationality. Which virtues someone adopts and why and how they prioritize them in different situations is downstream of creativity as a whole.
I don’t know if activating higher virtues always resolves conflicts between ideas. But it could put them on hold for a while, yeah. If I see a venomous snake, my main priority is to get to safety (life as the ultimate value, as objectivists would say).