WHAT IS BELIEF? written in 1996
Myself in 2018 age 65
Belief is indeed an inscrutable conception, or so it may seem. In this short essay, I will explore the concept and its applications in many aspects of our lives. I hope to show it is more than just a conception, but the bedrock of far-reaching notions in modern philosophy and science. Though the title of this essay seems to indicate it's all about belief, what we consider could just as well be entitled: What Is Knowledge? The two ideas are so intertwined.
The Philosophic View
Belief is an idea that is virtually inseparable from our everyday lives. It is not necessarily the result of perception, though it can be, as when I look at a chair and believe it to exist, because of the visual perception of it. Ordinarily, I claim to know it exists because of seeing it. Silly though it sounds, the question--what if it's an illusion?--was raised and answered by philosophers in the past. The consensus in the last century was that perception was a very special kind of belief, and it must be classified as the source of all reliable information we derive from our environment. Going back to the chair analogy, I see the chair and believe it to exist because my visual perception tells me so. Most beliefs are the result of this kind of phenomenon.
We perceive something, and from that perceptual experience, we come to have certain definable ideas about the experience. This process is called ideation. The importance of this process is in its result: Belief. That is a conceptual belief. I mean by this that we come to hold ideas that are well beyond the scope of what our sensate experiences have conveyed. For example, a person exposed to a cold winter day can form an idea of what it means to lack heat. This idea of 'cold' after this experience can then be applied in numerous other ways. One can form an idea of cold objects, cold places, cold times of the year, intensity of cold, etc. Thus, 'cold' becomes a concept of which one has a well-defined picture.
He needn't experience cold to invoke the concept. He has now developed a belief of what it means to be cold, and what, in the abstract, cold is. This would be called a rational belief. Rational, because it (the belief) has gone through a process of abstraction and then it has been generalized to apply to a universe of experiences, ideas, and logical constructions. Most beliefs are of this form, but as we shall see, some are quite the opposite. As I mentioned earlier, belief does not have to come directly from our perceptions. Many rational beliefs are not
the result of our experiences at all. This is most evident in the beliefs that are attached to scientific pursuits. Yes, it seems strange to apply the word 'belief' to anything having to do with science, but as it was framed above, that is just what many elements of the most basic sciences are! However, they refer to them as hypotheses. There is a popular misconception that belief implies something unprovable or just plain unsubstantiated. Not true. All that a rational belief lacks is absolute proof. That is to say, it can't be established that a rational belief is true in every possible construction. Most concepts can not be shown to have this kind of endurance. Even some of the most simplistic notions we have. For example, take the mathematical concept of infinity. It was thought by most mathematicians well into the 19th century to be the absolute truth. This idea was tacitly understood by the public to be something that could not be exceeded. Until Georg Cantor, a man virtually unknown outside of mathematical circles of the 19th century, proved the existence of sets of objects bigger than infinity. He also helped to establish the special field of set theory in the process. But here again, we are faced with a belief.
Rational Belief from Deduction
One way that science differs from our perceptual source of belief is in its notion of deductive proof. Here we have a belief that results not from some experience, but from certain assumptions we make based on a formal set of rules. With this system of belief, we need not experience the conclusions to give credence. Relativistic physics provides an example in the General Relativity Principle (GR). One conclusion of GR is that the universe is curved. This conclusion is not the result of someone traveling throughout the cosmos and finding it curved. Rather, it is the product of a series of rational abstractions based on a few assumptions. An exposition of GR is well beyond the scope of this essay, but an oversimplified example should suffice for our purposes. The principle of Equivalence in GR leads to the assertion that gravity and matter are in a continuous,non-discrete relationship known as the space-time continuum (which, by the way, sets up a big problem for it with quantum mechanics). Each affects the other. Matter deforms space, or better put, curves space. To put it simply, the larger matter deforms the space the smaller occupies, and a curvature is formed. If we have one large unit of matter and another smaller one, the larger one curves more space, and the smaller space is forced to travel in the larger curved space, i.e., orbits it.
We also know this as gravitational attraction. If this idea is expanded to a universal scale, and we consider what all matter would do to all space, it's not hard to see that universal matter would cause a universal curvature. Whether space is infinite by the way is irrelevant since the result would be the same. The universe is an immense ball, and if you travel in a straight line through it, you eventually end up where you started.
Now, this hypothesis required no perception of any kind to derive. It was solely based on deductive reasoning from a set of agreed-upon assumptions. Yet, it is still a belief. It can change if the data are in contradiction to it. Scientific beliefs are not only deductive (in most cases, inductive) but also rational. They follow a set of conventional rules that allow for revision.
But there is another form of belief that is not so mutable. This kind of belief is ever-popular and sometimes pernicious: irrational belief.
Irrational Belief: Religion
There are irrational beliefs. This is an issue of great concern in our worldwide socio-political conflicts. There are many examples, but I won't cite any; it should be obvious to readers. An interesting point here is that the irrationality of belief is a reversal of the usual logical progression I outlined above. Ideation can turn back to affect perception. The belief, once formed, can direct and control how one perceives. Our senses make for ideas, and those ideas give rise to our beliefs, all quite clear. But when our ideas determine what we see, feel, and think, they've gone too far. They are irrational and possibly dangerous to us and others.
The religious term for irrational belief is faith. The origins of faith are obscure. To modern thinkers, its roots are buried in the rise of religious dogmas, which were themselves derived from pre-existing mythologies. It's here that we get to the perceptual root of irrational belief. The dogmas themselves in many cases resulted from the perceptual experiences of select individuals, who in turn became the sole interpreters of their experiences for their followers. There are prophets in many religions who undergo profound personal revelations and espouse their belief in these ideals to a gathering multitude of followers. These followers, in turn, spread the faith in codified rituals and practices to others, and a cascading process ensues. The process eventually became more coercive. True believers required that new converts dispense with reasoning to accept the tenets of their religion. The faithful accepted their beliefs without questioning their veracity. It is not a matter of substantiating the content of the prophetic figure's beliefs to his believers, but how one adheres to them. They practice their respective beliefs without a doubt. It is not a question of being correct for the faithful, but being true to their beliefs. This is the major fault of irrational belief. It provides no room for doubt. There is no way to question the validity of their beliefs.
The Limits of Belief
We have beliefs in two forms: rational and irrational. We know it is singular, as when I believe in a notion, conception, or ideal, and plural, as when a group of people embrace a conception or philosophy. Furthermore, we know that beliefs are not limited by our desires or perceptions. Therein lies a far-reaching question in its scope and near-unanswerable in its depth: Why do we have this concept of belief? Some would be quick to answer this question with a modern brand of relativism. They would counter with self-assured cool--Beliefs depend on the environment from which they spring and to which they apply. Likewise, their validity is predicated on the context in which they apply. There are no beliefs that can be applied outside their respective context. As may be obvious now, others would argue just the opposite, stating that there must be a universal context for at least some beliefs. Religionists would say this of moral values, scientists would say that of certain laws (particularly those of physics). The list of opposing views can be enumerated ad infinitum, but let's make a simple dichotomy here. In the former group, we have one of the 20th century's most prominent schools of thought, Existentialism. In the latter, we have a host of philosophies that may diverge within their theories but affirm the universality of belief. However, at the bottom of this towering mountain of thought is one 18th-century philosopher who proposed a different answer to the question: Why do we have Belief? By which I mean the concept of Belief.
Kant and Belief
In the middle of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant wrote an idealistic mammoth work entitled Critique of Pure Reason. While this work is difficult for anyone, even an expert in the field, to decipher, in the Transcendental Logic portion of this treatise, he made an understandable argument about the extent of human knowledge. For instance, he poses the question of knowing something, anything, from our perceptions vis-a-vis the object being unperceived and thus unknown. What he eventually concludes is that knowledge and perception are not good bedfellows. That is, to know something is to be one step removed from it. Moreover, your knowledge of what you perceive is always incomplete. To know something, you must be that something. For example, I saw the keyboard before me as I wrote this sentence; I know it exists because I used my senses of sight and touch to experience the keyboard. Yet, I can never be sure that these perceptions through my senses are truly the keyboard. I must be the keyboard itself to know that! Of course, I can't do that. Nor can I be a glass, another person, or anything other than myself. All my experiences are one step removed from me. I only know what my senses will permit me to know (or what contrived extensions of them will permit). I know reality second-hand, if you will. This is a profound conception. It means there are things we can never know. Kant named this philosophic bombshell ding-in-sich in English thing-in-itself. This is the a priori that lies just beyond mortal reach. Of course, you might guess whose reach it did lie in. How does this relate to belief? Quite simply, our perceptions are based on false notions of certainty. We think we're coming to know the true state of reality when this certainty is denied us by our state of being.
Belief and Mind
The above comments don't prevent us from using our knowledge of reality to do things. This is what we do when we apply scientific concepts to reality, e. g. technology. The application of our knowledge to affect the world in many different capacities is what technology does. However, even these accomplishments don't take us any closer to having certain knowledge of our reality. Recent constructions in theoretical physics cast doubt on the use of instruments to verify their conclusions. For instance, the quantum mechanical theory of the universe's origin rests upon the notion of non-existence before the commencement of a singular point of infinite density that leads to the Big Bang. This hypothesis (of course, another belief) can't be verified by any empirical test. We certainly can't know it in the Kantian fashion I described above, that is, first-order, as if we were here, before the beginning of the universe. In the end, this notion, while well-founded, is just a conjecture. What about our beliefs concerning our sentience? We take for granted that we are conscious, reflective beings. In general, people maintain certain common-sense beliefs concerning themselves. They believe they are aware of themselves in a very intimate sense. A person takes for granted that he or she knows who he or she is. This assumption of self-awareness is virtually universal, and again, a form of belief. It may not be evident that we develop a belief about our sentience and a persistent sense of self. That is only because it comes about over a long time, and happens as a result of our interaction with an external world. The existential viewpoint challenged this notion several decades ago. It questioned the idea of self-awareness on several grounds, but the principal objection has to do with the Kantian idea of the order of experience. When I reflect on some event from a few days ago, am I not treating myself as an object of my reflection, thus removing my awareness of myself as the subject of awareness?
In this case, the I that's thinking is treating itself as if it weren't itself. In Kant's terms, I'm viewing myself second-order as if I were someone else reviewing my actions. This paradox of
Self-awareness has been known to cognitive scientists for some time, and there have been many attempts to characterize it and even determine the source of the paradox. Computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, explores the vagaries of this phenomenon from a different point of view. He sought to establish what the self-awareness notion meant to the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the early 1980s. Today, in the late 1990s, these phenomena are still not completely understood. AI practitioners have fractured into different opposing schools (Strong AI vs Weak AI, Connectionists, etc), based in part on how one defines self-awareness in machines. As a final word, Belief the noun and to believe, the infinitive verb are alike in one special way. They are born and endure when we have no well-defined, demonstrable answers to our many questions about the natural world.
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