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.