Yeah that is a way to look at it, another way is that sleep is like a state of non-believing in that a sleeper is in a state where the actor of the action of believing is at rest.

(I'm not been keeping up, but I also can't even see that PU exists when logged-in to do so. From scanning ATF it looks like Mat has come around tinkering again, which is sometimes fun and almost always interesting)

lol at not being able to see PU. You can browse without logging in.

I guess my excuse is I firmly believe in staying logged-in. Probably a good spot to segue to talk about beliefs as convictions.

I feel like a distinction between belief and action is necessary, impulsiveness is Just one factor.

In b4 VDZ "no such thing as action, just reaction.

Putting aside the idea that a belief itself can be considered a kind of action, and focusing on the more mundane kinds of action people usually associate with the word; similar to the difference between making a decision to do something and actually doing it.

We may believe in ideals on which we wish to base our actions while accepting we are human and unable to live up to the perfection of the ideal. We may believe in principles on which we want to base our actions but those principles may conflict in certain situations leaving it to our best judgement for how best to weigh them. This also leaves us open to charges of hypocrisy.

Finally, there is always a tension between our instincts and our beliefs. Being human, our instincts often have their way with us.

PairTheBoard

I think forming a belief may be considered a kind of action, and I suppose believing might be considered a kind of action (though I think my belief that p can be non-occurrent or dispositional, so that my believing that p need not be something I'm actually doing right now), but I'm not sure how a belief by itself could be considered an action. My belief that p doesn't seem like something I do, but more like a mental feature of me, at least in the way that analytic philosophers think of beliefs.

I'd argue all our beliefs are formed at the time of believing. They may be predictable but do not exist inside the brain in some dormant condition.

Believing is the result of an active (even if unconscious a lot of the time) process. That's different from the underlying neural links and weights that could be said to be beliefs but are passive and can exist even when we're dead so are not in themselves beliefs in any conventional meaning of the word.

Are you saying that my belief that 2+2=4 has to be occurrent in order for me to believe that 2+2=4?

I'd like to When it's not occurrent then it's a (particularly reliable) statement about what belief your brain will arrive at when it does some occurrent believing that involves 2+2=4.

Re actions it comes down to semantics as I'm not calling the hypothetical belief an action.

Yeah, an important frame of reference for beliefs is as part of a whole organism, rather than like separable machine parts.

It is easy using language to make it seem like belief and believing are some separate things easily removable from the believer, while really they become different things than a part of a whole organism when treated as such separable parts.

Generally, when people are describing the gap between actions and beliefs, it has nothing to do with maths.

Belief: I ought go for a nice healthy hike. Action: I will sit on my butt.

Belief: I can eat these cakes now because I'm going to go on a diet tomorrow.

That is believing the unbelievable. Quite advanced.

Only because I don't have any cake.

I have some cake for sale. Delivery by drone. Buy one now and get the second one free.

I think the link and the disconnect between beliefs and actions can be illustrated with a poker analogy. The belief part corresponds to the type of range you can put your opponent on and the types of actions you can anticipate them to have in response to your actions. The actions part corresponds to the decision to make a particular move (and this is a separate step).

For example, you are playing against a fish who limp/called preflop. You believe his most likely range is X. You believe the fish is going to call at least one cbet if they hit any part of the board. You hit second pair and you're in position. What do you do? Well, what you do is determined by the belief about the player I just described.

To connect it to the real world. You may believe very strongly that it's going to rain today. What do you do about it? If you had any plans to go out, do you cancel them? Do you just take an umbrella? Do you change the transport you were planning to use?

Bottom line, beliefs influence actions, but there is no 1-to-1 correspondence between the two. At least not always.