Belief
I was reading Pinker the other day, and he wrote something that seems rather obvious when you think about it. "To hear or read a statement is to believe it, at least for a moment." And "Any statement that is untagged is treated as true."1 Here, tagging is with a label of true or false. For some, I think it is even the inner voice that is heard and believed, which is possibly another too obvious statement to bother with writing down. That is, until you stop to think about the implications and downstream consequences of this belief that are so important to understand.
I haven't much time, so I'll be rather brief. I'm sure others have already written about this; I suspect it is in "Thinking Fast and Slow", and I'm sure also that Feynman has had something to say about it. Maybe I've read this idea before and that's why it seems obvious. I will find those later and add another note if it make sense to do. It's still profound.
Inwardly, it is most difficult. We are easily fooled, and most easily fooled when we trust the origins of the statement. There are so many levels to this when that origin is ourselves. It has been grappled with for ages and ages. The theory of knowledge, it's a whole discipline.
I do not wish to be distracted by the more esoteric aspects of theories of knowledge, just the practicalities. It is very difficult though, so I must form a good question and make a passable experiment, I think. Too many questions occur to me at the moment, so I will have to come back to it. Just to put a concrete idea here though: obviously we don't need to question the existence of our own thoughts, those surely exist if anything does. It's the next step after that where everything is lost in an inky un-solid blackness.
Outwardly, it is somewhat less difficult but I wouldn't say it is easy. So much of the outside world is either very concrete stuff, or maps onto concrete things. Almost any abstract thing, from energy fields to game theories, eventually causes a movement of something physical. (What are counter examples of this?) I won't bother with learning chess at this point, not until I have a lot more free time, but it seems to be an apt analogy: those eventual concrete motions of the abstract things, they may not turn up for a while. It's the making decisions about the future, as yet unrealized things, that is difficult, and where belief comes into it.
It is much too easy to believe ideas, and even ideas that are being only hypothetically explored can have such a magnetic pull that seeing the nearby but different ideas really takes an effort.
This entry is, again, unsatisfyingly unfinished. But there I must leave it.
- "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker (2014) P172.↩︎