Part of a four-part series of essays on human nature:
What is the Meaning of Life?
Free Will: Fact or Wishful Thinking?
Belief: Are We Just Fooling Ourselves? (you are here)
Ethics: Do They Work Anymore?
Belief: Are We Just Fooling Ourselves?
(Click here for related posts on belief)
Belief in free will raises questions about the overall nature of belief
We, like all sentient animals, notice the warmth of the Sun, thunder and lightning, sudden movement in tall grass, and the darkness of night… to name a few things. How does such raw perception differ from belief? While a horse perceives the phenomena just listed, it does not believe that the Sun warms. Only we do.
Belief requires language. Language allows us to categorize perceptions, store them in memory, and recall them when needed. The acquisition of language begins in infancy to fulfill various emotional and physical needs relating to food, fear, fun, and family. Each word a baby learns becomes a solid block for building all its subsequent beliefs. To serve this purpose, word meaning must be immutable. For example, when we know water is that liquid thing we perceive, that word embeds itself in our sub-conscious experience. We believe water is water. We believe water is water… but is it really?
We establish our worldview during childhood, adopting our culture’s paradigm through language, not withstanding how the particulars often change. For example, we can hold liberal views in our youth and replace them with more conservative ones as we age. However, we always know and believe that water is water.
While particular words retain their meaning throughout life, our higher-level beliefs can shift according to changing circumstances. We might believe in God as a child, but drop the belief as an adult, or vice versa. Either way, need and pleasure are the motivating forces. If believing in God makes you feel better, you will continue to believe in God. If a certain point of view ceases making you feel good, you will be open to other points of view, and will likely adopt one that feels better.
In effect, the need to feel good is just survival biology. This is what causes humans and horses to seek shade when it is hot. For humans, this need also determines how steadfast we hold a belief. Indeed, we will sacrifice life and limb in the cause of a belief. Our illusion of self and belief are cognitively interdependent, rooted in the biology of survival.
Belief has nothing to do with whether something is true or not. Indeed, what is truth? Don’t our beliefs determine what we hold to be true? If you believe ‘this clear liquid’ is ‘water’, then it is true for you that water is water. Similarly, if you believe the Earth is flat, then it is flat for you. Clearly, our belief in the truth of word meaning forms the foundation for all subsequent higher-level belief systems. Not so for the horse – true and false mean nothing to him or to the rest of nature. There is no water and the Earth is neither flat nor round. There is simply the sensory experience of these things. As chapter 1 says, The name possible to express runs counter to the constant name.
Belief may be irresistible
All animals possess an innate sense of cause and effect. When they experience pain, danger, or difficulty, they react by either eliminating the cause or fleeing. We react similarly to such stimuli. However, we part company with other animals vis-à-vis our belief in various causative forces we imagine being ‘out there’. We live life acting and reacting to two realities, one real and the other imagined.
Our hyperactive mind naturally elaborates on the innate sense of cause and effect that we share with other animals. Not only do we observe and react to stimuli, we think and dwell on it. When causes are not obvious, we conjure up a plausible scenario to resolve our uncertainty, which quiets the mind. For example, we once knew that the god Apollo carted the Sun across the sky. Now we know that Earth actually rotates, which produces the illusion of the Sun carted across the sky. The facts — Apollo or Earth’s rotation — are less significant than the secure sense of the knowing we experience when we think we have the answer. This makes chapter 71’s observation the most important, bar none: Realizing I don’t know is better; not knowing this knowing is disease.
Our visceral feelings, especially fears and needs, stir up thoughts that give these feelings intellectual form. These thoughts are the corollary – the reflection – of those feelings. From this, a feedback process begins, shuttling back and forth between thought and emotion. The ensuing box of belief about what is and is not, paints us into a perceptual corner. The more narrow our focus, the less perceptual room we have to maneuver.
The good news is that this provides us with a sense of emotional stability and security. Deeply held belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, so to speak. Such belief proves itself true — belief and truth become subjectively synonymous. The bad news is that this becomes a vicious circle preventing us from considering another way out of any predicament, whatever it might be. We can’t see outside belief’s box.
Examining deep belief
♦ We need a solid example to examine deep belief. How about a deep personal belief you hold to be true. Got one? Okay, now keep it in mind as we proceed. ♦
First, consider the personal belief you’ve selected in relation to the need it satisfies within you. How would you feel if you found it to be utterly false? Would you feel some sense of loss—even a loss of life meaning perhaps? Now try to entertain a point of view that contradicts your belief. It can be nearly impossible to do because belief imparts existential meaning. If nothing else, belief brings ‘closure’ to the unknowable timeless void that haunts the human subconscious. Belief is the final resting place for thought. Belief is both a personal castle to protect us from the unknown, yet also a personal prison that prevents venturing out into the yet to be known unknown.
The psycho-emotional dependence on a belief makes questioning it virtually impossible. The greater the dependence, the less you’re able to conceive of alternate ideas. Indeed, your mind tends to filter out what goes against your belief and only lets through what supports it. Belief conveys a strong sense of emotional security by giving you a stable worldview. Belief and the visceral need for emotional security form a closed loop, each supporting the other.
The unintended consequences of belief
As I pointed out earlier, the belief process begins with the categorizing of experience. Words are the foundation of this process. Affixing names and words to the phenomena we experience makes language possible, and language allows us to mull experiences over and over. By pigeon holing experiences, language enables us to feel we have some control over them. This has definite survival advantages over non-language using species. However, this comes at a price.
Belief works similar to the blinders they put on a horse to prevent it from being spooked. Belief makes reality less spooky for us, which affords us a degree of emotional and psychological comfort and security. However, believing that things are a certain way has the unintended consequence of preventing us from seeing them as they might truly be. Also absent is the adventure of experiencing the open-ended mystery of reality… profound sameness as chapter 56 hints.
Our brain’s unique functionality—high-level cognition—is what makes us human. While not a problem by itself, too much of a good thing easily becomes problematic. In particular, beliefs hamper us from seeing any more of the whole that lies outside our particular set of beliefs. For example, either believing that God exists, or does not exist, will hinder impartial consideration of alternative possibilities. Impartiality is crucial, as chapter 16 points out.
The question before us now is how can we free ourselves from the shackles of thought and belief, and in the process, rise beyond oneself.
Freedom from our addiction to intelligence
The more emotionally dependent we are to a particular belief, the less able we are to consider anything else. Ironically, we easily recognize such obsessive blind spots in those whose beliefs we deem to be false. Yet, we are unable to see how such blindness also applies to the beliefs we hold so dear and true. Clearly, emotional dependence is profoundly blinding, no matter the object of dependence, i.e., dependence on alcohol, on love, on food, on drugs, and beliefs. Indeed, beliefs may be the strongest of all dependencies.
How can we liberate ourselves from the chains of belief dependency? How can we disconnect from the emotional dependence that underpins our thoughts and judgments? If only we had free will! As it is, we are pretty much stuck where we are. We can only live out our ‘beliefaholic’ lives, repeatedly hitting bottom until we come to realize that beliefs, like promises, are empty. To chip away at the root of belief, check out the Tools of Taoist Thought: Correlations and Couplets, p.565.