You can believe what you want to believe...or can you?

[Dymanic]

Do you believe in Santa? Do you have a choice?
Could you believe in Santa if you wanted to?
Do you believe in the Taj Mahal? Have you ever seen it with your own eyes? Could you make a decision not to believe that the Taj Mahal exists, and then cease to believe in it?

In so many discussions about so many things, so much emphasis is placed on belief. The significance of this is that what you believe determines what you are; if you believe this you're a this, and if you believe that you're a that, and pinpointing your precise location on the atheist-believer continuum is treated as a matter of utmost importance.

The tacit assumption in all of this seems to be that belief is subject to conscious control.

If I look at it closely, I realize that when I listen to someone who believes in astrology, or crop circles, or Jeezus, or Atlantis, my reaction is not merely that they are mistaken, but that they have somehow committed a moral offence. I...I can't help it. To reach such absurd conclusions (something inside me says) they must have deliberately turned their back on the only thing in the world I consider sacred--the truth. I don't want merely to bring them into the light of (what I consider) the truth--I want to slap them. Not actually doing that--and not letting on that I want to--is as close as I can get to 'respecting' their beliefs. I can't say I'm proud of this, but in all sincerity, that's the way it is. I get little consolation from observing that I am not the only one who has this problem.

Why do I even care what they believe anyway? I ask myself this because...I do care. I can't help it. Not just the people in my life, either; total strangers even. I don't want to care what they believe, but I do. It's like there's this crusader who lives inside my brain, and he needs to know what they believe so he can decide whether or not they get to keep their heads.

He's a suspicious guy, too, that crusader. He not only wants to know who the believers are--he wants to know who the true believers are. He suspects that many of those who claim to believe...don't, not really. They may want to believe, they may claim to believe, they may pretend to believe (even to themselves), but way down deep in their very heart of hearts (or brain of brains or whatever) they feel like imposters...and they are. They do what they have to do to be accepted, but the self-brainwashing never really reaches all the little nooks and crannies where their core beliefs live.

I don't seem to be able to reason with that crusader guy, either. I can say, "Look, maybe they're doing the best they can. Maybe they have reached their conclusions after carefully considering the best information available to them, using all the reasoning power they've got. There is even some chance that they are right, but even if they are wrong, it's not their fault--give them a break". His response: "Off with their heads".

"He that believeth on him is not condemned; but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God".

Could this sort of thinking be the result of some hardwired process in the brain?

I saw it on 'People's Court' once. A case involving a cat leaving paw prints on a neighbor's car. Wopner used a latin phrase which he translated as: "Hold no man responsible for that which no man can control".

So. Can you really choose what to believe?

Next question: Can you choose what you want to believe?

[Dancing David]

Belief and knowledge are seperate, I do not know that the Taj Mahal exists because I have not journeyed to it. I belief it exists because there are some criteria which my belief meets, such as pictures of it, lots of different people caiming that it exists. And it does not seem to be a matter of faith.

On the other ones: I belive that some people can choose to alter thier beliefs if they choose to do so, now you have to be careful which beliefs you alter, some are more dangerous than others.

There are probably many different kind of beliefs, those based upon experience, those based upon personal choice and the moo cow herd mentality.

Then there are those who share believes that are not held by other(and I don't mean religion): delusions! Delusional people really belive that they are Zaphod Beeblebrox, or that they are friend with the president. Something wrong in the brain leads them to some strange beliefs that others do not share. but they are valid for them.

Funk On

[A_Feeble_Mind]

Dymanic,that is amazing. Are you my alter ego? ;)

I have this exact viewpoint as well. Lately, since I have lost my belief in God, I realize that I did not choose to become atheist and I could not choose to believe again, just as I could never go back to believing in Santa.

Good post.

[Dymanic]

Belief and knowledge are seperate
Is this something you know, or is it just what you believe?

I guess I'm not really seeing that much difference, at least from the perspective of the person doing the believing/knowing.

I'd say that all of the things I know are also things I believe (this is forced--which is my main point) but maybe not all of the things I believe are also things I know--only the ones that are true.

Originally posted by A_Feeble_Mind

Dymanic, that is amazing. Are you my alter ego?
I don't believe so.

[Underemployed]

An excellent post! You've been watching The Matrix again, haven't you? Remember, there is no spoon.

'Belief' is a spectrum covering all levels of faith in a certain idea/object. Reading Stimpy's various posts on the matter of certainty, it is clear that although there can never be absolute proof of something (eg that the sun will rise tomorrow) we can have a high enough level of certainty that we have no need to consider it an article of faith.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are beliefs which can have no such levels of certainty - Alien abductions, the Loch Ness monster, communication with the dead.

In between, we have things which most people accept and believe in, even though there is no way one can be certain of it in the same was as the sun rising tomorrow - democracy is the best system, your spouse loves you.

Perhaps we should instigate some sort of 'Belief Index'! put forward your belief and it can be judged (ahh but by whom) on a ratio of proof/faith. At one end would be every mathematical proof at 99.9% Proof/0.01% Faith - at the other end and in between....take your pick.

I suspect all of the people your crusader takes issue with are strong believers in things with a very low proof to faith ratio. Now, to actually get to your question...(sorry)

I...ahem...believe...that beliefs are a product of the environment and society.

If you are brought up to believe in a certain idea, there is a strong chance that you will believe it your whole life unless you are presented with strong evidence to the contrary. In a multicultural, pluralistic society, there is every chance that competing beliefs cancel each other out and only those with strong proof remain. We can see this happen in Western countries as church attendance figures go down year on year. (http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_rate.htm) Beliefs you were raised with can be 'un-believed' - sometimes easily, sometimes not.

In a caveman-type society, there would be no churches or poor photography to convince people about gods and ghosts. But there would be a huge number of things that you just can't fathom out, and it seems we are hard-wired to assign some sort of meaning to everything we experience, so phenomena we understand today would have been assigned to some other cause. Could you change the beliefs of a Cro-Magnon man by showing him today's world? It would be a lifetime's work. Yet he no more chose to believe what he did (if indeed he believed anything) than did a devout scientologist.

But on a less practical note, you are also asking a philosophical problem about knowledge, as DD pointed out. What is the difference between knowing the sun will rise tomorrow, and believing it will? The belief/knowledge arises from a lifetime of experience. It is not something you could choose to 'un-believe' without actually seeing the sun fail to rise (no smart comments about living near the poles).

It is only those things which have a high faith/proof ratio that you can really choose to believe or not to believe. I might decide I believe in fairies because I like the idea of ladies in see-through dresses buzzing around my garden. Here we can start to make a distinction between belief and knowledge, because I will never actually see any scantily-clad ladies in my garden (until my next barbecue). Thus I can believe in, but not know, fairies.

I suspect you are having a problem with knowledge being separate as, even with the most comprehensive proof imagineable, you cannot 'know' something without there being a tiny vestige of belief in there somewhere. All we can do is accept this and live with it, just as we live with the constant threat of being hit by a meteorite or abducted by a serial killer.

[Dymanic]

If you are brought up to believe in a certain idea, there is a strong chance that you will believe it your whole life unless you are presented with strong evidence to the contrary.
I think you are absolutely right. I think the tendancy is to continue to believe what you already believe, and that this tendancy is strong enough that it can often easily win out even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

In order to function in a world filled with unknown dangers and sudden surprises, we need a stable frame of reference; a system of categories and assumptions that we can use to interpret information and make decisions. Points are more often awarded for reasonable guesses and close approximations than they are for absolute certainties and exacting precision. Even a factually imperfect system then, is often good enough. The brain's first choice is to try to make new data fit the preexisting categories and assumptions; abandoning an established system which had previously proven reliable would naturally be a disfavored solution.

A person with a seriously delusional world view might nonetheless be at least marginally functional as long as that view had correlates for critical elements in the real world (indeed, it is possible that the view of the world by even the sanest among us is nothing better than this).

So, you might avoid drinking from a particular water hole because you believe it to be inhabited by angry spirits...or you might avoid drinking from it because you know that it contains high levels of bacteria. Sometimes it doesn't matter what a thing looks like as long as it works.

[Yahzi]

Could you believe in Santa if you wanted to? Not just by willing it. But if I really wanted to, I could probably beat myself into it after years of self-abuse, drinking, drugs, and the complete rejection of everything.

Of course you can't make yourself crazy in an afternoon of logical debate. But if you really, really try for many years, you probably can.

[Dancing David]

Originally posted by Dymanic

A person with a seriously delusional world view might nonetheless be at least marginally functional as long as that view had correlates for critical elements in the real world (indeed, it is possible that the view of the world by even the sanest among us is nothing better than this).



The DSM excludes from delusions specifically those beliefs that are culturaly appropriate. Geat post Yhazi.

Fonk On

[Dymanic]

Originally posted by Me, in another thread

I have always thought that if I woke up one morning and Jesus was sitting on the foot of my bed, and he told me all about how he wanted me to follow him and become a Christian...that I would do it without hesitation. I just won't do it on the strength of someone else's experience.
I'd like to clarify this.

It isn't exactly that I won't do it on the strength of someone else's experience, it's that I can't. Well ok, now it's both--but at one time I was willing to try, and it was based largely on the adamant claims others were making that their experiences were genuine. I was completely sincere in my efforts to get my head to that place of 'really believing'.

I think self abuse is an apt description of some of the techniques I tried (on the advice of others). Drinking and drugs are not usually part of the recommended regimen, although sleep deprivation is often part of the process, and I read a book once that claimed that the Hari Krishna sect gets good results with copious quantities of sugar.