When Belief Stops Updating: A Resolution Theory Account of Ideological Capture

Entry point: Free Will Without Metaphysical Magic (++++ ≠ +++=) This paper offers a theoretical diagnosis of ideological capture within Resolution Theory: a failure mode in which agents continue to resolve into judgments and commitments, yet lose revisability—evidence no longer functions as information but is processed as threat, noise, or confirmation. The core claim is structural: ideological capture is marked by increasing predictability and belief entanglement, where positions arrive as packages rather than locally updated inferences. The paper distinguishes responsibility (binary, attaching where resolution occurs) from blame (scalar, mitigated by explanation), and argues that modern discourse often collapses explanation into absolution for in-groups and condemnation for out-groups. Capture is explained as a tragic optimisation under informational overload: rigid schemas reduce cognitive costs but can drive the system’s effective learning rate toward zero. The key environmental condition is high social exposure combined with low or intercepted empirical exposure (IEE), where adverse outcomes are pre-interpreted by ideological frameworks such that they cannot function as disconfirming feedback. The paper develops a “Goldilocks Zone” of belief decay rates across constraint, coordination, and identity beliefs, arguing for layered revisability rather than universal doubt. It also models why revision is socially punished—often more severely than error—especially for highly public, status-invested actors, and introduces complementary functions needed in plural societies: coordination enforcement (the Splitter), reality-tracking (the Calibrator), and long-horizon self-governance under exposure (the Telic Mind). The paper concludes by outlining speculative, testable implications—some overlapping existing findings under different labels, others requiring purpose-built tests.