Amazing! You were around, watching me and Henry all our lives? And we never saw you! Yet you claim to know our entire histories...both of us.iambiguous wrote: ↑Tue Aug 02, 2022 3:15 pm I maintain that, like me and you, henry lived a particular life and, given his own personal experiences, he came to acquire one set of moral and political and spiritual prejudices regarding the "big stuff" rather than another.
Are you a god?
This is a trivial thought.And, thus, given new experiences, he might come to change his mind about the "big stuff" again.
It amounts to, "People can learn stuff." Wow.
I don't know what you might have thought was the case, otherwise: that we pop into existence with all our "big ideas" fully formed, and then afterward never process anything?
But learning has another aspect: it's only really "learning" if your views are, at least in some way, getting better, more accurate to reality, more truthful, more perceptive. If they're otherwise, you're "unlearning," or "being propagandized," or "being deceived or misled."
So what's the big surprise if somebody gets smarter as he gets older, and changes his views?
Of course, the opposite can happen, too: people can willfully choose a path of ideological devotion that prevents further learning, as when one becomes a Communist or a cultist, for example. But what should be happening, in a healthy mind, is that learning continually sharpens understanding to a sharper and sharper point. The 25 year old Biggie should be existentially smarter than the 10 year old one. And the 50 year old Biggie ought to have more refined views than either of them.
That would mean that as Biggie gets older, he needs to change his mind less often and less radically. His views should be better formed, more well-considered, and closer to reality than at the beginning -- unless, as I say, he takes an indoctrinatory turn into ideology along the way, which will wreck that, of course.
But if you find Henry more cautious about radically throwing over all his views at age 55 say, than he would have been at 14, that should surprise you not at all. It should signal to you the possibility that he has a healthy mind and an appropriate learning process. That's not a guarantee, of course, because he could simply be indoctrinated; but a certain reluctance to change should also characterize every person with sharpened, well-formed views.
He should appear more "objective" as time goes on, if he's learning. if he's not, of course, he'll seem blankly "open minded," quick to drop his views and pick up new ones, devoid of rational arguments, and generally stupid. But I don't think any of us think that's how he is.
The Big Stuff is usually the last to change, because in a healthy mind, it's the thing that's been thought through the hardest already. It's also been serving as the foundation of knowledge, so changing those things has chain effects on other understandings and learnings. So what should we expect, but that it will take substantial persuasion to shift a thoughtful person from his foundational understandings to new ones?
And should we whine when we find that task daunting?
But Henry has already, with circumspection and careful consideration, shifted his foundations somewhat, and been frank enough to say so. I would say the guy's in good order. What's your problem?
