Belief and Reality

Belief is ultimately based on reality: the believers’ experiences, how they explain those experiences, and how much they trust their explanations. The experiences can be direct or shared by someone else. Explanations can be created by the believer or provided by others. Trust is based on how well explanations match with experience, and how well other explanations from the sources have matched with experience.

Explanations are used to craft expectations of what exists and what is likely to exist as a result of certain actions by oneself and others. Treating those expectations as reality is a fundamental outcome of belief, enabling action unhindered by doubt that could trigger diversion of resources into investigating the validity of the reasons for it. Belief thus increases the efficiency of attaining goals that depend on actions, with a maximum that is limited by how closely its basis matches reality.

Another outcome of belief is reduction of stress triggered by uncertainty, especially about what affects one’s survival. Belief masks the unknown with a fictional alternative that feels known, or at least knowable, often with a narrative that provides prescriptions for interpreting and dealing with its experiential manifestations. People have different tolerances for this kind of stress, and so will prefer to rely on belief to varying degrees and in different ways. 

Social pressure, partly due to dependence on others for surviving and thriving, can enforce a set of beliefs that supersedes personal preference in order to maintain group coherence that sustains that dependence, experienced by its members as part of a shared identity. In an increasingly unpredictable environment, where explanations underlying current beliefs cease to match current experience to an extent necessary for survival (and maintain tolerable stress), trust in the beliefs will necessarily erode; and for a group whose identity is strongly tied to its beliefs, that environment will be perceived as a threat to its existence.

Threats can be tolerated, escaped, or confronted. Changing beliefs is an approach to toleration. Changing location is a way to escape with beliefs intact. Confronting a threat might be successful with current beliefs; but if it isn’t, then developing new understanding of the threat is a critical first step that might require changing beliefs, especially if actions taken based on those beliefs are found to have contributed to the threat or could in the future.

Constant development and test of explanations based on growing collection of experience is an alternative to belief that attacks uncertainty directly and reduces stress by providing a realistic basis for identifying and managing both opportunities and threats. The consequences of actions can be better understood and predicted, increasing their efficiency in pursuit of goals that themselves can be better chosen in the pursuit of surviving and thriving, if that is what people want to do. This approach, in its most organized form known as science, treats alternate descriptions and explanations as means toward ultimately achieving a common set that accounts for all of experience: past, present, and future. Identity based on favored descriptions and explanations is considered counterproductive except to the extent that it promotes competition that can help in the process.

Quality of Understanding

The world is a complex place. Our ability to survive and thrive depends on our understanding of the parts of it we experience, as well as the power we have to change it, because our understanding determines how accurately we can predict the results of the actions we take. The better our understanding, the more likely our actions will have the desired results.

Understanding is an interpretation of observations that identifies what the parts of the world are, how those parts are related to each other, and how they and their relationships tend to change or stay the same. Its quality and usefulness is therefore highly dependent on the quality and amount of our observations, and our ability to correctly interpret those observations. Science is society's most successful means of building quality understanding, in large part because it uses strict rules of evidence which filter out observations that cannot be verified.

Technology has enabled a vast increase in the number and verifiability of observations, while logic and mathematics have enabled us to create and test interpretations of those observations that will have maximum accuracy and reliability. It has also, as a byproduct, enabled people to have more power, unfortunately without an associated requirement for understanding its full impact beyond its intended and very specific applications.

Alternative approaches to science for building understanding, such as religions, tend to depend heavily on hearsay, reported observations that cannot be independently verified; and their interpretations cannot be rigorously tested, if at all. That many people use the interpretations that result from them is evidence that the interpretations have enough quality to be useful in various situations, typically ones where success in surviving and thriving is not increased by having more quality.

Humanity is now at a point where our impacts on the world require a high quality of understanding to manage without extreme harm to us and other species. Those with the most influence (power) must either acquire that understanding, or reduce their power to a level they can manage safely. To do so voluntarily, they must also value the others they influence, and values are in large part a function of culture – especially religion. If our values do not motivate us to mitigate the harm we cause, and if we insist on holding onto power without adequately understanding the complex interrelationships and interactions that it can disrupt, then we will be entirely responsible for our doom as a species.

Science and Commons

In the book "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America" (which I reviewed on Goodreads.com), Sean Lawrence Otto describes how the U.S. is facing a major crisis brought on by its growing unwillingness to embrace the freedom of inquiry into objective reality, a basic prerequisite for science and democracy, and the use of its results to inform and ground discussions of public policy. With politicians and citizens alike increasingly unable to discern opinion from fact on a range of issues (not the least of which being greenhouse gas-induced climate change), our access to vast technological and economic power coupled with near-ideological pursuit of the tragedy of the commons on a global scale has made the U.S. a (if not the) key player in an unfolding disaster that may doom most of life on Earth.

Otto argues that the best way to deal with this is for scientists to actively promote awareness of the process of science, which would add credibility to the knowledge it produces and make it more meaningful and useful to the majority of citizens. I have no doubt that this is true: it was the basis of much of my work with my father on attempting to transform math and science education in the 1980s. If you can enable people to observe and respect objective reality, understand how it works, and appreciate the value of testing their most basic assumptions, then you are empowering them to achieve their maximum happiness without compromising the ability of others to do the same.

The role of government as protector of the commons is explored in the book, as a means to prevent the tyranny of the few, with the power to consume more, over the many who either cannot consume as much (or choose not to out of respect for others). I look at it as the equivalent of preserving enough resources for everyone to meet their basic needs, and enabling them to do so, with the remainder as open to basic market competition subject to personal ability and effort. Critical to this is the universal availability of knowledge about what people's needs are, what it takes to meet them, and what variables in nature and human behavior may change these; science is a valuable tool for providing this, and therefore should be nurtured.

In my own work, I've tried to be careful about identifying what is conjecture and what is fact. However, much of what I write, this entry included, is a mixture of both which I don't pretend is strict science, but rather a collection of ideas that can be used to spur further investigation into the areas I've explored. The freedom to hypothesize, to play with ideas, is as important as the freedom to test one's beliefs and identify how the Universe really works, but we must exercise both in order to create something truly worthwhile. If you're familiar with complex mathematics, I see it as the equivalent of operating on imaginary space to derive an object or relationship in real space that can actually be observed. Just as entertainment provides pretend experiences that can inform how we live our lives, we still have to live our lives and be able to understand the difference. This is a facility we appear to be in the process of losing, a process which must be reversed if we, and those who depend on us, are to survive and thrive.

Objectivity, Science, and Spirituality

It may seem paradoxical that science depends, for the good that it does, on the objectifying of Nature. Coupled with mathematics, and aided by technology, it enables us to convert vast amounts of information into usable forms, and to make reliable predictions of the consequences of our actions. It is the most useful tool we have to cope with the complexity of the Universe.

The evil of objectification comes from our confusion of abstraction with reality. Phenomena too complex (or different from experience) for us to grasp, with our senses and mental apparatus for processing sensory input, are all too easily relegated to the status of objects; and we naturally deal with objects by manipulating them. When those “objects” are other people and species, we can inadvertently hurt or destroy them.

Spirituality, often maligned by people who are comfortable with abstraction (until recently, me among them) can bridge the gap between the personal and the impersonal. Often defended as the “source of values,” spirituality (and its cultural manifestation, religion) allows us to as much as possible internalize the rest of Nature, partly by accepting, on an emotional level, the value of the parts of it that we cannot comprehend. It uses (and nurtures) faith, which, in this context, is the ability to live fearlessly with the unknowable.