Belief

It is always amazing to me how antagonist humans are to "thinking."

Let me give you an example. Go on a forum anywhere online and try to say something deeper and more complex. Watch as the thread turns from the issue (whatever it is) to why you over-think things. That will become the topic. Humans are so opposed to thinking that they will prioritize every discussion to be about how much they hate philosophy. Now, granted, they aren't aware of this and won't say it like that. But ultimately that is what it is.

I know this because for the first three weeks of every semester I had to overcome the distaste kids have for thinking. They get it from their parents and from culture. But it is nearly every kid in class.

In addition to the human distaste for thinking you can add the more academic perspective that philosophy is out-dated. It has evolved into science. The notion is that every discipline morphs into science as humans learn enough about it to have real things to say. Take astrophysics. Early on, the hairless monkey morons thought stars were the spirits of people that had gone to heaven. They looked upon the night sky and all they saw was God. As enlightenment thinkers began to realize different things about the sky, a discipline emerged to study what became knowledge. Stars were other suns. Bodies that moved across the sky slowly night after night were often planets, just like ours. Humans collected enough information to make it into a discipline.

Think of it this way: If humans only had guesswork religious bullshit, the study would never work. Imagine classrooms of hairless idiots studying the skybound spirits of dead ancestors and how far that school of thought would progress. Oh wait, that's astrology today and half the humans, mostly the longer-haired version, pretend to believe it.

My point is that another criticism of philosophy is that it is dead.

I would like to suggest that humans know nothing. If process knowledge is the arbiter of knowing (as opposed to collecting rote knowledge) then humans have nothing. The good news is that if humans know nothing, philosophy is wide open. Philosophy is, if nothing else, the study of knowing. Love of wisdom, blah, blah, blah. Just call it what it is. The good news is that philosophy hasn't started yet because humans are clueless hairless monkeys imbued with over-confidence, but amidst a completely undeveloped discipline of thinking.

I would like to suggest that philosophy is not dead. It just has no place among the obsession with rote knowledge. If we turn and we see that process knowledge is what leads us forward, what leads to progress and invention, and what saves us from self-destruction, then philosophy is all we have.

With that said, I'd like to suggest something in regards to the idea that philosophy is over-thinking. I would like to suggest that, in fact, we know nothing. And the first thing we know nothing about is the word "belief." What does it mean to believe something? It's sad really that we have no clue, if we have no clue, but that is what I'm suggesting. Do we "believe" that stars are other suns, not that dissimilar from our own that warm up and maintain other solar systems?

I would like to say that we have memorized that fact, but that we don't believe it. It is pretty far away and so the act of "believing" might be a little more difficult. So let's keep it simple. What do we believe about "belief?"

We all assume that what we know we believe. For the most part. If I am right that we don't really believe anything, then that over-confidence is really the thing that fuels our self-destruction and stagnation. But what is belief? Gathering facts? Maybe. But what does that mean after we gather facts that we actually "believe" something?

I think what's happening is that we assume we believe the things that make sense to us via rote knowledge. Much of this comes through experience. We believe, for example, that we have free will because we make choices everyday. The suggestion, by David Hume or Albert Einstein, to the contrary seems to have little effect on us because, in our little minds, it is over-thinking. Yes, they both ended up sounding like they "believed" in determinism. The opposite of free will.

So the next post will jump into what it means to believe positively. What it means to believe the right way. What it might really look like to have a conception of belief. Because that is where you start.