Essay 9: Belief

Essay 9: Belief

At long last, we finally tackle the namesake of this series, belief, or to go a step further, belief structures. It may seem like we went through a lot of pretext to get to this point, but we are still less than halfway through the first of three books. That being said, the point of this paragraph is not to make you dread the long journey ahead; it is to connect the topic of this essay to the purpose of this book, but in this case, it is almost self-explanatory. If we are trying to create a phenomenological framework to encompass what all humans share experientially, what could possibly be more universal than belief? We all believe in a lot, we have to. If we could not assert the truth (or at least the “good enough until something proves otherwise”-ness) of something we are intellectually aware of, how could we do anything? Let alone read this essay. Belief (not bolded) is defined by Merriam-Webster as “something that is accepted, considered to be true, or held as an opinion,” and I ask you, how could we live without believing something? This essay delves into the nature of belief itself, and I will do so by first placing belief within the context of existing key terms so we share an understanding of what I am referring to, then I will illustrate how beliefs relate to one another within a belief structure, and finally I will point out how belief structures lead to the inevitable consequence of some ideas being harder to let go of than others.

A belief is an attribute held to be true because it forms the conclusion of an argument that we accept to be valid. This is obviously not a legible definition on its own, so let’s take this one step at a time. If you remember from earlier, arguments make up the backbone of reasoning (especially deductive reasoning). In an argument, you have a series of premises and an asserted conclusion. The argument is effectively valid if the conclusion it asserts remains the only possible conclusion for the given set of premises after undergoing intense scrutiny. The validity of an argument can only be disproved by a contradiction, where we see an instance in reality of a state-of-things that exemplifies the same premises as the argument alongside a demonstrably different conclusion. A valid argument is thus phenomenologically (not literally, as that would be a metaphysical claim) an argument where the believer has yet to find sufficient evidence of its contradiction in the world. I will disregard how non-falsifiable arguments play into this for the time being because they do but require more context than this essay will provide. Then why specifically did I further clarify in the definition of belief that the conclusions in question must be an attribute to be believed? Does this imply that there are conclusions we cannot believe?

No, this distinction merely serves to highlight that all possible conclusions are attributes. Attributes are effectively a descriptor of a trait a thing has. Take the classic argument, “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal…” as an example. The conclusion that Socrates is mortal is in reference to an attribute Socrates has. Socrates being mortal is the thing (Socrates), and the attribute the thing has (being mortal). If Socrates is running, the fact that he is running is an attribute of his. If Socrates exists, then his existence is an attribute of his. This raises one of the most dangerous ideas in philosophy, one which you have to thoroughly digest before any good can come of it: we cannot interact with things, only their attributes. We cannot believe in things in a vacuum; we can believe in their existence, but in which case we believe in its existence (an attribute), not the thing in a vacuum. An attributeless thing cannot be a part of an argument and, as such, cannot be believed unless we attach attributes to it as a matter of definition. Things lie at a level more fundamental than belief; they are what has the attributes that make it possible to be a logical building block, but they themselves need attributes to be interacted with. Thus, we do not interact with the thing; we interact with its attributes. We do not interact with a person in the absence of their firmness, their intelligence, the texture of their skin, or their existence because without attributes, there is nothing to interact with. By interaction, I mean action; this includes physical actions like holding or speaking to the thing, but this also includes the very act of thinking about the thing. We cannot think about a thing with no attributes, and thus, we cannot believe in it either. So to reiterate, every argument has premises and a conclusion. Each premise details an attribute, and we can create a set of premises where the attributes of each, if all are true, can lead to only one possible conclusion. That conclusion is also an attribute, and the attribute that makes up the conclusion of an argument we take to be valid is a belief. This definition (despite how it sounds) does not exclude the idea that we can believe in the premises of an argument, as they are often conclusions of lower order arguments; an idea that can be structured.

The belief structure, the namesake of this series, is how the relationship between higher and lower order conclusions (thus beliefs) are interrelated. The existence of a belief structure is built on the premise that the conclusion of one argument can serve as the premise of another. Let’s refer back to the argument “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal.” We can use the conclusion “Socrates is mortal” as a premise in another argument. Say, “Socrates is mortal, mortals only stop metabolizing when they are dead, Socrates stopped metabolizing, therefore Socrates is dead.” Let’s name the argument that says, “All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal,” Argument D, and name the argument that says, “Socrates is mortal, mortals only stop metabolizing when they are dead, Socrates stopped metabolizing, therefore Socrates is dead,” Argument E. Argument D’s conclusion is a premise of Argument E, thus Argument E is a higher-order argument than Argument D and Argument D is a lower-order argument than Argument E. This applies in the other direction, too. Take the argument, “Socrates speaks Greek, Socrates has a beard, Socrates has a penis, only a man can speak Greek, have a beard, and have a penis, therefore Socrates is a man.” If we call this argument Argument C, then we can see that the conclusion of Argument C, “Socrates is a man,” is a premise in Argument D. Of course, we can go down lower-order arguments to Argument B, Argument A, Argument Ω, Argument Ψ, etc and we can move up higher-order arguments to Argument F, Argument G, Argument H, etc. In each case, the letter used in the name of the highest order argument whose conclusion is used in the premise of a new argument is the letter that is increased by one in naming the new argument. For example, let’s say in the case of Argument D, the premise that was not derived from Argument C, “All men are mortal,” is the conclusion of an argument that comes from a different line of reasoning but is only an “A Level” argument. Let’s name that argument Argument A1. Thus, the highest order argument whose conclusion is present as a premise in Argument D is Argument C, and that is the reason why this argument is called Argument D.

I will now ask you to disregard the earlier example because the names and layers of all mentioned arguments are arbitrarily chosen. If we could go down a rabbit hole of infinitely lower-order arguments to Argument Ω, Argument Ψ, Argument Χ, Argument Φ, ad infinitum, then any assertion of one argument being higher-order or lower-order than another is a pointless distinction (unless we are comparing two arguments in the same line of reasoning) and thus the concept of a belief structure falls apart, but thankfully, that is most certainly not the case. That is because there is a floor of conclusions that are as fundamental (a term I will use interchangeably with low-order) as conclusions get. They are the uncaused cause that prevents the infinite regress down infinitely lower-order arguments. Some call them axioms, some call them self-evident truths, some call them leaps of faith, but I will use the term base assumption when referring to them. I would say the work that best describes what a base assumption is is the Old Testament in the story of Exodus. When Moses asked God who he is, God said simply, “I am that I am.”  A base assumption is exactly that, a conclusion whose sole premise is “I am that I am.” It is a conclusion whose sole source of validity is its lack of contradiction with reality. Examples of them include value judgements, such as the definition of words like good, truth, reality, god, and thing. Others include the preconditions for logical thinking that make up the three laws of logic. In all such cases, the only way they can be proven false is the realization of enough evidence to change the definition; there are no premises to challenge, and the only way to disprove them is by using these base assumptions as the premise in an argument and seeing if the conclusion holds. Base assumptions are ordinarily developed through inductive reasoning, because as they lack substantial premises, they can only come to be by describing how the world is. This can also be applied in a scientific capacity, as units of measurement and the underlying assumptions that make the scientific method viable are all base assumptions, too. We can thus theoretically call the sum of all base assumptions that one believes 0th order conclusions (or 0th order beliefs) and use the framework detailed in the previous paragraph to move into 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc, order beliefs. By doing this, we should be able to theoretically map out everything any one person believes if they are ideologically consistent.

Now, that caveat is significant but not in the way or to the extent that seems intuitive. I suspect that people are a lot more ideologically consistent internally than they externally project, and this differential can be accounted for in two reasons, the second of which raises a whole other can of worms. The first reason is that no one in this world knows themselves well enough to know what they actually think about everything at all times, nor does anyone have the capacity to consider everything in forming their arguments all the time. The first point of this reason is quite simple: the gap between what we think we believe and what we actually believe is massive. Just like how the road between the mind and the heart is long, the road between our beliefs and what we think we believe is not only long, it’s also covered in fog. There are only two ways to communicate with this deeper sense of our true beliefs: interest and pain. What we intellectually feel our beliefs are are worth shit, and our real beliefs are a hell of a lot more consistent. The second point of this reason is literally that we forget things, but it also ties into the next reason. The second reason is that we tie our beliefs to our needs, and thus our emotions, all the time. This, however, will be the core of the next essay.

The final point I would like to discuss here is an implication of the inherent logic of belief structures, that some beliefs are the premises in a lot more arguments than others. Let’s reference back to the earlier example. The belief “All men are mortal” is likely a premise in many arguments that form our belief structure. Let’s use “men” in the gender neutral sense to refer to humans for now (I am aware that this is not what the argument was likely initially intended to be, but bear with me). So if all humans are mortal, that means we are mortal, so any plans we make for the far-off future need to account for the fact that we will die eventually and could die before we ever live them out. Also, we generally avoid eating what is considered poisonous because we understand it can kill us, a conclusion we can derive because of a more fundamental understanding of our own mortality. Many of us support a system of government that enforces the rule of law in part because we know that if the frequency of killings goes up, that increases the likelihood we die before having lived as long as we could have otherwise, an understanding built on a premise of our own mortality. Additionally, you are not the only human, so when you see someone else running in fear from a bear, you can make sense of their behavior through an argument where one premise is that the individual who is running is also mortal. The premise “all men (humans) are mortal” is a premise that sneaks its way into a fairly substantial portion of all of the decisions we make in life, and that is because it is a premise in so many arguments or the arguments the conclusions of those arguments support. Compare this to the belief that birds feed their babies through the regurgitation of food they already partially digested. I would like to hope this is a well-known fact found within many of my readers’ belief structures, but how often are we utilizing this information as a premise in higher order arguments? I mean, it definitely happens; I hear people say that something resembles “baby-birding” every now and then, but its frequency of use can hardly be compared to “all men are mortal”. As a general rule, the more fundamental beliefs (lower-order beliefs) tend to be used as the premise in more arguments than higher-order beliefs, but some higher-order beliefs become such an important realization to us that they become massively utilized in our day-to-day, and thus the premise in more arguments. This is arguably the whole point of wisdom; to move beyond the often detrimental premises we build through a surface-level and lower-order understanding of the world into a new way of life built on a more sophisticated set of premises, thus radically altering our belief structure and implying use in reasoning that exceeds many more lower-order beliefs. The point to remember is quite simple: beliefs can serve as the premise in any number of arguments, some more than others, and there is a negative correlation between how high-order the belief is and how often it is used in the premise in other arguments (note I said correlation, not a direct relationship, there are many exceptions). 

This may seem like a fairly unemotional and heartless analysis but this is the namesake of this series for a reason. Part of that reason is because it is my belief structure that is being expressed through the writing, but in other part because it plays a central role to the very nature of why we feel what we do when we do. The initial exploration of this will be done in the next essay.

That is all, see you all sometime by March 20 for Essay 10: Reflexivity!