Again, Belief

I want to suggest that belief is a relationship we have with things. Like an empiricist I want to suggest that all belief is related to things in the sense that things have to operate in order for belief to be possible. In other words, to believe in free will (though it isn't strictly a thing) there have to be objects in my thinking about it. There is a person experiencing free will by doing "things." This is how we conceptualize free will. It is related to things. Whatever they are.

I think after our assumption that philosophy is over-thinking and that philosophy is dead, there is an "elite" group of people who continue on and their assumption really amounts to the idea that belief is a decision. Even philosophers who continue on past nihilism and scorn, ultimately believe that belief is a decision.

Thomas Reid was not one of those people. He believed it happened automatically.

I would like to suggest that belief is a relationship. A process.

When we engage in process knowledge we are sharing, not just socially, but "externally." We are participating with things. When we participate in a "process" way with things, we can draw conclusions from the experience that is very different from how humans normally do things. We can learn things, like, say, about free will. When we look at how humans believe, for example, we see that they continue to make bad assumptions and follow this with bad evidence, and ultimately end at the wrong thing. It is like the primitive human that attempts to build a science around the idea that stars are the lights from transcended souls.

I am suggesting that when we see a rock on the ground, if we pay attention, our belief is the relationship we have with that rock. It is not just the amount of attention we pay, though that is important; it is a relationship in the sense that part of us is in the rock. When we form a process relationship with a thing, in the sense that I am separate and the rock is separate, parts go back and forth. To process the "reality" of the rock I have to partly become the rock. I share something. This is what "belief" really is. It is not a decision and it is not a guess and perhaps not even really, per se, a thought. It is a relationship, a process.

This is true about every "thing." But in this exchange with things our potentially philosophical minds form concepts that are more complex than one thing. We come up with ideas, like free will. The relationship that ultimately formed the basis of my belief that the rock exists and I exist was "free" and I start to see that it was an authentic choice. The relationship was clearly a natural, organic, autonomous process. This is the beginning of both philosophy (about belief) and about externality and objectivity and thinking in general.

What is this important? Why is it just not over-thinking? Because if you see this as a new way of understanding belief, and entire civilization can be built on it. In the same way that a corrupt, petty civilization was built on seeing souls in stars and then, after that, a deadly, self-destructive, atomistic civilization was built on the exclusivity and satisfaction of rote knowledge. It is possible if you start from the beginning with the right question to build a civlization. And I guess that's what I'm suggesting.