MONDAY, OCT 25, 2021: NOTE TO FILE
Belief in Belief
Game over for the believing mind
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: BELIEF-BASED WAYS OF NON-KNOWING, FROM THE WIRES, COGNITIVE PATHOLOGY
Abstract: The 'belief in belief' meme comes from my reading Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon 2006 look at religious systems. He used it as short for 'belief in belief in God' to reference those nominal atheists (the 'yes, but...' atheists) who think there probably isn't a God, but that having a belief in God is maybe a necessity for most people and likely a good thing, even essential for life as we know it. My usage came to be more inclusive of all beliefs, including not believing in God. For years I attended monthly Center for Inquiry meetings featuring a guest lecturer. Most were humanists and atheists. My wife and I once took in an atheist convention in LA featuring the likes of Dawkins and Krause. But I also once went to a local atheist sub-group to share an essay modeled after Russel's 'Why I am Not a Christian' titled 'Why I am Not an Atheist'. It was based on a talk by Sam Harris at an atheist meeting where he pointed out the absurdity of defining oneself in terms of what you don't believe in. I also wanted to bring up Martin Gardner's fideism. Gardner was impeccably skeptical, a razor sharp intellect (see The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener), yet was also a theist. I'm not, but his argument/reasoning was impeccable (such that I came to realize I too was a fideist). But, of course, none of the atheists would read the copies I handed out and therefore none could correct me when I went to the next meeting. They were true not-believers, and I was not part of the tribal consensus narrative, even though I once had a Christian friend willing to discuss matters late into the night, who thereby got to know me, who noted, in what seemed like a compliment, that I was 'the most Godless person I've ever known'. So far as I know, I'm good without God. I've been to a conference of Jehovah's Witnesses, a Degrowth conference in Mexico City, as well as a Seventh-Day Adventist conference in Tucson AZ. Same belief-based dynamic.
COOS BAY (A-P) — That we modern techno-industrial humans believe in belief, have normalized the believing mind; that we are successful in passing it on with mother's milk, or a plastic bottle, is a near universal. The hegemony of the believing mind may not be normal for our species, however. What I would call into question is belief-based cognition, all belief-based ways of pretend knowing. The concept of ‘believe’ and the set of all that someone believes that can be stated as such, is the tip of an iceberg that includes all that we see or seem, how we imagine/assume/expect/experience/perceive our world and everything in it through social constructs. Believing in our social constructs is optional. Understanding that our consciousness is constructed is to no longer believe in any of it or any concepts of anything. There may be an out there, but anything we say of it is untrue in that the concept of a thing is not out there, and some constructs may be better than others (i.e. adaptive). A model of the climate is not the climate, but some models are better than others.
Our foundational belief is not a belief in God, human supremacy, money, or even democracy, but our belief in belief as a viable dynamic, i.e. as a non-pathological form of cognition. In the 6 to 7 million year history of hominins, the ability to tell stories emerged. Modern humans, over the last 375k years, became Homo s. sapiens var. narrator, the storytelling animal, about 70,000 years ago. But it may be that only in complex societies that select for hierarchy (e.g. priests, chiefs, Popes and Kings) that humans came to believe the stories told were more true or real than what was in front of their face. Perhaps living in small bands of 20 to 50 others, familiarity breeds, if not contempt, a tolerance for one another's stories. If uncle Ug tells a story of a burning bush that told him he should be the leader of the band, that would merely get him a few chuckles and bemused smiles.
The opposite of the believing mind is not the non-believing or anti-believing mind. Believing and not believing (in God or dragons) is on the same side of the coin, just on an edge to edge spectrum. Believing deeply that there is no God is functionally the same as believing fervently in God. I detect no difference. The opposite condition of the believing mind would be an abelieving mind that does not traffic in believing or not believing anything, in asserting or not any claim. All claims, stories, are not the thing spoken of. There are no true stories. Complex stories, e.g. climate models, are not the climate, the thing itself, which isn't a thing but a system likely more complex than we know or can know. Some climate scientists, as James Lovelock has noted, seem to believe their climate models are true. They are a best guess, maybe a good one, but no more. The climate in 50 years may be more benign than feared/modeled, or vastly worse. Predicting that all humans will be extinct by 2028 is hubris on steroids.
'There is one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is "true," that everyone, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, has a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to "get" at a gut-level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment.' —Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer
As Charles Peirce noted: 'If one's conclusions determine what your reasoning shall be, that reasoning is sham'. In a believing mind, belief comes first, then reasoning and selected evidence supports one's conclusion, hence: a cognitive pathology. The cure, what the Buddhists call enlightenment, may be the condition of no longer believing in belief, of having (and being had by) a believing mind, which is antithetical to an abelieving mind. 'Even to have the idea of enlightenment [to be had by a belief or disbelief in enlightenment] is to go astray.' —Jianzhi Sengcan
Can humans normalize abelief? I don't know and you don't either. But considering the last 7,000 years of history, how's that believing mind dynamic, our consensus singing been working for us? What if inquiry and doubt were normalized? What if we formed Circles of Abelief?
https://app.box.com/s/3lcz1tpgb3tqtv67zwxavw7jromrh2qu
I was mostly singing along until this slide. Ten solutions that aren't, e.g. local food production and maybe recovery from our behavioral sink is the condition that will come anyway (if we persist long enough), but non-fossil-fueled agriculture where everyone strictly follows the dictates of permaculturists (with enthusiasm) will not support modern techno-industrial society in any form even if 99% of humans took up arms to rapidly contract the global economy and population of humans, crops, livestock, and pets by rapid birth-off. We are also in civilizational overshoot, i.e. this overcomplex civilization will end and no citizen gets a vote (only feet may get a vote). Or we'll keep on growing the economy and go fourth to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the universe with wonder after Elon Musk retires on Mars and a statue even larger than his hubris is built.
SUBNOTE TO FILE 8/17/2022
Sometimes it takes belief. Would you kill an innocent person/child knowing that you would be executed? Would you, knowing that you would be tortured (beaten/whipped for weeks, having hands cut off before being beheaded in public, or having your extremities repeatedly run over to break every major bone and left to die, in public, of your injuries? If you are a normal true believer living in a society that normalizes a belief in belief, then maybe.
After the protestant reformation the Lutheran did what God (in their view) decrees: murderers must be executed. The remorseless enforcement of execution for murder had an unexpected outcome. The murder rate increased.
It was, as everyone knew, a fact that if one repented prior to death (before one had time to sin again), one would go to heaven for an eternity of good times. Everyone also knew that the penalty (God's) for suicide was going directly to hell to suffer forever. Those who were not living such a good life here on earth for a short time, often wished they were dead, but couldn't even think of killing themselves. If a mother killed her infant, she would be executed, and soon join her baby in heaven because, prior to execution, she would sincerely repent and affirm her unquestioning belief in God Almighty. In the 18th century, in Lutheran countries, murder suicide was becoming rampant and something had to be done. Torture was mandated for the crime of murder suicide prior to execution.
The solution was to abolish the death penalty, a profoundly irreligious idea opposed by the God fearing. On the upslope, housing felons for decades or life is possible. On the downslope, expect suicide to be discounted in secular society and the death penalty, when imprisonment is not viable, to become a righteous duty again to God and Country. When summary execution is again the norm, you are on the downslope, and where it ends nobody knows. We could enact a belief penalty..., but there already is one.
