Believe Whatever You Want

One of the longest running gags in my mind staples of what I write here is that human reason is incapable of understanding a lot of what it’s purported to understand. This is exemplified best when we believe we’re being “reasonable” or “rational” concerning large, distant, complex events, involving lots of actors…basically anything seen or read in a news story. We cherry-pick, from filtered information, our bits of data and form our views based on that, but we fill in the many cracks of our reasoning with other things in order to conform to our most-identified-with tribe. We adopt beliefs about such remote events more to maintain social homogeneity than an endless, fairly trivial, “quest for truth.” Scott Adams has some interesting blog posts like this one that touch upon this kind of subject, although he doesn’t approach it from a spiritual perspective.

The two “hard” ways we interact with the material world—the senses and deductive logic—are best used in compartmentalized, localized, easily-identifiable chunks. Think of things like fixing a car or programming a piece of software. As the system with which are interacting with gets larger, we are more prone to error, or, when there are non-inanimate objects involved, like humans, we incorporate other methods of gathering information, like inductive logic, heuristics and pattern-recognition, memory, and sympathy. There comes a point, I don’t know where, where any conclusions we can come up with are really blind guesses, which is where our tribal mental firmware comes heavily into play. The wiser ones among us don’t hold strongly to such conclusions.

Forget about being able to “prove” conclusions to others; you first have to satisfy your own standards. You may be fulfilling a philosophical due diligence in a certain belief, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s your pure intelligence or reasoning skills that lead you to your beliefs—we can thank the last 500 years of Western philosophy for beating that idea into our heads. There’s plenty of other factors that have nothing do to with hard evidence.

I sense I’m going to be mentioning a lot of this idea in the near future, so this is just the beginning of something I’m going to get really obnoxious about.