Research Program / Claims / beliefs-2
Thoughts and beliefs feed themselves, possessing an inherent impetus toward growth, development, and completion.
想法和信念本身会自我喂养，内部具有朝向成长、发展和完成的固有推动力。
Concept beliefs · Domain Belief Dynamics and Mind–Body Regulation · mechanism · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable
This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.
Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
About 400 people establish initial beliefs about an unfamiliar artificial environment, randomly assigned to no new information, balanced evidence, or self-selected information conditions for 6 weeks; confidence, active rehearsal, information selection, and goal relevance are recorded. Pre-registered comparisons pit Bayesian updating and confirmation bias models against a model with an autonomous growth term, with held-out prediction as the adjudication criterion; only if repeatable growth persists after controlling rehearsal, reward, and input is the stronger version supported.
Suggested paper title
Do Beliefs Strengthen Without New Evidence? A Pre-registered Longitudinal Test of Autonomous Confidence Growth
What it would overturn
If an independent growth term is confirmed, the mechanistic sufficiency hypothesis that 'belief strengthening is fully explained by evidence processing, memory rehearsal, and motivational feedback' would be revised.
Candidate labs / funders
Stephen M. Fleming，University College London，Metacognitive Neuroscience Laboratory：[实验室](https://metacoglab.org/)
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Self-feeding' resembles confirmation bias; only 'autonomous growth without feedback' would constitute an additional prediction, but this is an experimental operationalization not explicitly given in the original text.
Note
Belief strength, extractability, and content complexity need to be measured separately; repeatedly thinking about an idea does not equal believing it more, nor does it imply purposefulness.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim beliefs-2, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/beliefs-2