Neon

Got it. Neon out.

Lians: “God is the highest level [belief] system God is predicated on belief Therefore belief is the highest level belief system Your mistake was to assume that I left out the word ‘belief’, and so you felt the necessity to insert it. This is something your debating experience should have taught you not to do. The ‘systems’ of my focus were those which studies in psychology show are justified in order to avoid feelings of cognitive dissonance. (See the Wiki on System Justification Theory) These include, but are certainly not limited to religious systems. Cultural, political, monetary, scientific, and even philosophical systems are a few examples of those to which their adherents devote much cognitive attention. The greater the investment of attention spent, the stronger the connection will be. Perhaps without realizing it, an emotional component will naturally appear in order to support this connection. This emotional component is belief. In order to justify a belief in this valued system (whatever it might be) and avoid cognitive dissonance, the adherent to this system will unconsciously and automatically run a subjective routine in order to restore cognitive consonance. This routine is called system justification, and this is the ‘system’ to which I was referring. If one follows the hierarchy of these systems from the lowest level systems to the highest—family, community, city, state, and nation, as an example, the highest level system that people feel the need to justify is God. Perhaps the expression “God and country” will help put this in perspective for you. My argument therefore is: God is the highest level system When belief in a God dies, the God dies Therefore God is only significant in the presence of belief And therefore, belief is fundamental (see the difference between the designation ‘fundamental’ and ‘significant’) Although I am reading something from your last response, Lians, that suggests that you have decided to leave the conversation, I may continue to cover your previous concerns if only for my own edification. Thank you for your participation, and for the link you provided. I'll watch them now.

Welcome, Lians! From the top then: What’s my working definition of belief? (I hope you don’t mind if I cut-and-paste from my book. It is not only the logic of my argument that I wish to have critiqued, but also its readability. I will try, when I can, to cut paragraphs that advance the flow but not the argument, but I will do so sparingly. This is a book after all and not a PhD submission, and is written with many suggestive phrases) The final chapter (10) is entitled: What Is Belief, which cuts to the chase of your question. This chapter provides a seat in the final class of Belief System Therapy. If you are familiar with Cotard’s Syndrome and similar examples of feelings of certainty, you will already understand the answer to your question regarding my definition. Please keep in mind that the purpose of this book is not to prove and then connect facts so that they might become something new to believe. Such would be anathema to its very purpose, which is to provide a hearty table of food-for-thought to the average consumer of today’s many menus of toxic belief. I state very clearly in the introduction that I’m full of shit, and that my readers should not believe anything that I am about to write. Other replies to your post will follow this weekend as quickly as I can address them. Thank you for your reasoned response, Lians. I really appreciate it. Knowing that the purpose of the final session of BS Therapy was to dissect and define belief, I arrived early and reviewed all of the posters in the hallway and classroom display cases—everything that began with “Belief is…” and wrote them in my opening notes for today. Belief is the death of intelligence. Belief is the presumption of knowledge. Belief is a deception you play upon yourself. Belief is when someone else does the thinking. Belief is both the fear and the proof of ignorance. Belief is a deadly virus that causes cancer of the mind. Belief is proof that any answer is better than no answer. Belief is our emotional connection to a persistent thought. Belief is an assumption that causes an investigation to falsely appear complete. Belief is a satisfaction with assumptions that only the brainwashed can appreciate. Belief is a quick fix, feel good pill, which when taken regularly dulls the pain of ignorance and fear. Belief is the night-light in a child’s darkened bedroom; it allays the terror of lurking monsters that don’t exist. Belief is the battlefield upon which warriors of truth are slaughtered, and ignorance proclaims victory, while facts look on from the ridgeline above… unconcerned, unaffected, and free. What is a “warrior of truth”? I wonder, and why would it be slaughtered? Isn’t such a person concerned only with the facts? “Welcome and congratulations! It has been a long and arduous journey for most of you these last 23 weeks. As you have learned, belief therapy is not for the faint of heart. “In these nearly six months, all of you have come a long way toward understanding the effects of the toxicity of belief, and I am happy to announce to you tonight that the staff has already printed certificates of graduation for each and every member of this class. Before I begin to cover this final session of your therapy, I want to thank you for your energetic participation and express to you, on behalf of the entire staff here at the center, our appreciation of this class. We’ve had more fun, and are enjoying a greater feeling of satisfaction with you than with any class prior to yours. “As the leaflet you brought home from last week’s session indicated, tonight’s topic is: What is belief? Alternately during this session, I will also be using the phrase ‘feeling of certainty’. This alternate phrasing will be used to harmonize with one of the books on your list entitled On Being Certain – Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, by Dr. Robert A. Burton. “As indicated in your class notes for tonight, the revolutionary premise at the heart of this book is, and I quote: Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice, nor even a thought process. Certainty, and similar states of knowing what we know arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason. “Please take a moment to absorb a portion of that brief quote, and all that it implies. ‘Certainty… is not a conscious choice, nor even a thought process’. If, at the end of this session, you agree that Dr. Burton has proven his premise, then you must logically call into question, not only every belief—every feeling of certainty—regardless of the depth and seeming veracity of its complex history or the longevity of its existence, but also every significant conclusion that has ever resulted from this unconscious involuntary emotional process. If this feeling of certainty actually has little or nothing to do with the ‘thought process’, then all of the conclusions that have ever resulted from it must be reexamined and verified. An emotion such as that which arises ‘out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason’ simply cannot be relied upon to consistently produce independently verifiable results. [Later on in the session] “How can such a person be so completely fooled by his own thoughts? Because, according to Dr. Burton, they are not thoughts at all. From where then does this claim of veracity come? What if it is purely emotional? What if it’s nothing but a highly charged, heavily invested, feeling of certainty, which is neither a conscious choice, nor a thought process? “What is the result when someone with strong beliefs makes such a claim to veracity who wields tremendous power and influence over others? The result is the brainwashing of multitudes of impressionable and weak-minded individuals, whether intended or not. How might someone respond who has been so thoroughly brainwashed? As a Middle Eastern terrorist was once quoted as saying, ‘I have not been brainwashed, I have been educated to a higher standard.’ His certainty could not be assailed by any logical argument because it was not derived logically. Although he was certain that he was right, he was in point of fact, quite wrong. While this universal feeling of certainty masquerades as truth, it is actually nothing but an emotional charade—one that often brings with it deadly consequences. [Later on in the session] “Now let me repeat my question… What is this feeling of certainty—our belief that we know the truth—if it is really nothing more than the result of an involuntary brain mechanism?”

On faith: Despite your thoughtful consideration of the difference in our definitions, I remain convinced that faith (and also perhaps, trust) are installed alongside belief as motivators to insure that a sanctioned belief is sustained (and in fact, becomes self sustaining like the reaction of a nuclear fuel rod exposed to the air). But of course, this is a minor semantic difference in our view. On religion: While, in my opinion, the propaganda of religion stands as the most successful way ever devised to control the masses (and while my book clearly makes this point), my reply to you also referred to political and commercial propaganda. On belief: Whether they are cultural, religious, political, economic, environmental, or otherwise, belief systems tend to impede the essential evolution of original thought, and thereby, all necessary human progress. In order for humans to survive, thinking must trump belief. We must abandon belief and engage in dynamic thinking on a grand scale. Belief is an emotion, whereas thinking is a cognitive process. The emotional response of belief originates in a part of the primitive brain known as the amygdala, can be created by electrical stimulation, and is shown to have a genetic predisposition (at one end of the arc are people predisposed to a feeling of certainty – the know-it-all. And at the other end of the arc are people predisposed to a feeling of uncertainty – the doubting Thomas). The result of this pathological tendency toward certainty is that roughly half of the population believes one thing, and the other half believes in the rough opposite. The prize for the winner of the resulting struggle is the justification and survival of his or her system of belief, due to the subconscious psycho-emotional tendency known to psychologists as System Justification. The survival of the dominant belief system is primary; the survival of humanity is only secondary to this self-righteous, self-absorbed, self aggrandizing, egomaniacal tug-of-ideological-war. Is it only me, or does it not also seem to you that progress on many consequential fronts appears to have come to a screeching halt with entrenched and intransigent forces blocking key political and other decisions? Climate change, energy policy, human rights, political freedom, and economic stability... the list of solvable problems goes on and on. What actually stands in the way of a solution? It is the entrenched beliefs of those with the emotional force, but not the cognitive power, to create one. All of our genocidal wars, religious inquisitions, and colonial excursions into countries inhabited by natives; all occurrences of ethnic and religious cleansing; all of humanity’s inhumanities have been, and are currently being caused by belief. Ignorant, intransigent, myopic, or often totally blind—belief has killed millions, is currently killing hundreds of thousands, and will kill us all if we cannot break free from our addiction to it! Why, when under extreme duress, do we routinely act before thinking? And why, when under calmer circumstances, do we routinely think before acting? Why does our addiction to Belief often control our behavior to the extent that the very process of thinking is often obstructed, or even abandoned? It is because the signaling bandwidth from the amygdala to the sympathetic nervous system has much greater capacity than that of the prefrontal frontal cortex. Though the fight-or-flight response was an extraordinary evolutionary feature largely responsible for the survival of the proto-human, this reactionary function is quickly becoming obsolete (and dangerous). Also, in order to avoid the feeling of cognitive dissonance, humans respond emotionally to challenges regarding their beliefs by running a system justification routine. (See Wiki: System Justification Theory) These include “God is great”, “My country right or wrong”, “Greed is good”, “What people don’t know won’t hurt them’, “It’s only a white lie”, and many, many others. In cases such as these, cognitive consonance is only restored when a strongly held belief is justified; often despite the facts involved. Thinking is a cognitive (non-emotional) activity, which originates in the post-primitive prefrontal cortex. We must learn to control our emotions, especially the emotion of belief, and begin to THINK as if our lives depended on it; because it very clearly does! “Five percent of the people think; ten percent of the people think they think; and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think” –Thomas Edison One day, this quote by Thomas Edison may turn out to be more of a prophecy than a simple observation.

For rock siles barcellos: While it would seem that belief in a theory is necessary to sustain one’s inquiry, it could also be shown, as you suggest, Mr. Barcellos, that belief often prevents an inquiry from continuing to its appropriate conclusion. In this intriguing lyric by David Crosby, he suggests a process that doesn’t require the emotion of belief: Today I learned / there are no secrets / only time for them to unfold / and the patience to watch / the scroll of truth / slowly be unrolled. Galileo believed that the Earth revolved around the sun, despite the self-evident belief that the Earth was the center of the known cosmos. So persistent was the geocentric belief of the time that we still refer to the sunrise and the sunset. Galileo also believed that the tides were caused by the sloshing back and forth of water in the seas as the Earth's surface sped up and slowed down because of the Earth's rotation on its axis while it coursed around the Sun. His account of the cause of the tides to support his theory of a heliocentric system was a failure. He was tried and found guilty of heresy by the inquisition, and sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Meanwhile, a contemporary of Galileo by the name of Johannes Kepler held that the tides were caused by the moon’s gravity; a theory that Galileo dismissed as a useless fiction. In addition, Galileo refused to accept Kepler's theory of the elliptical orbits of the planets, considering the divine circle to be the perfect and the only god-ordained shape for planetary orbits to follow—another belief he would eventually regret having entertained. Today we know that the Earth indeed revolves around the Sun, that the Moon does indeed control the tides, and that the naturally occurring orbits of objects in space are indeed elliptical. So I guess you could say that, in this narrowly presented case I’ve just given, Galileo got one out of three right. My question therefore is: Why did Galileo so stubbornly insist that all of his beliefs were true? Could it be said that he was addicted to his beliefs? Centuries later, none other than Albert Einstein expressed the opinion that Galileo developed his fascinating argument regarding the tides, and accepted them uncritically, due to pressure from the church to provide physical proof of the motion of the Earth around the Sun. In a hurry to provide such physical proof, Galileo presented Cardinal Orsini with a theory regarding the tides that didn’t hold water… Pun intended. Galileo’s example shows how one strongly held belief, which might be true, is often supported by a structure of other strongly held beliefs that are in fact not true. Facts do not require the support of such enhancements, and neither do theories. Time alone will tell which theories evolve into facts. In my opinion, if it weren’t for the persistence of belief in approximate answers, which keep new discoveries in abeyance, then the solutions these discoveries could provide would advance more quickly, and arrive at a time when we need them the most. The enemy of knowledge isn’t ignorance. It is belief. (to paraphrase a quote by Steven Hawking) “Don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anyone else. If you don’t believe, what is not true will dissolve in front of your eyes. Only what is true will remain, because what is true doesn’t need anyone to believe it” –don Miguel Ruiz For James Mahler: 1) According to my research humanity has suffered from the effects of belief ever since it was learned that creating a strongly entrenched belief could serve to control and manipulate the masses. I estimate that this began in earnest in Biblical times and has since been perfected by the Church, exploited by advertising, and enhanced by the Elite. Belief-creating techniques in the form of neurolinguistic programming have today become a fine art. Belief is an addiction, the drug is propaganda, and the pusher is whatever authority is in power. To paraphrase a quote from the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca, ‘Propaganda is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful’ Shouldn’t we therefore make an effort to reevaluate how susceptible our beliefs are to this propaganda? Shouldn’t we make an effort to discover what belief itself is? “The goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief” –Jacques Ellul 2) The faith of which you speak, Mr. Mahler, is not just one of the emotional consequences of belief, it is the emotion created as a fortification for belief by those in authority to insure that a strongly held belief becomes inviolable. Another way of putting it is that faith maintains the belief in a model of reality long after the facts can no longer support it. How long faith can be called upon to maintain an obsolete belief in a model of reality that is no longer supported by the facts depends upon the strength of the belief and the tenacity of the emotional commitment to it. Faith is the anchor that holds our beliefs locked in an eddy and prevents our questions from continuing to flow downstream as they naturally should. Today the increasing flow of new facts is getting ever stronger. Today our cherished archive of facts needs to be purged ever more frequently in order to make way for new, more accurate facts. In ancient times our archive of facts, and by extension our beliefs and the faith needed to support them could stand the test of time spanning millennia. Today this archive will often not even stand the test of time spanning a century. The time that had once been available for us to build this factual archive into a model of reality, and then to see it from the inside as an ideal; and to believe in it with all our heart; to have the unbreakable faith that our truth is true-for-all-time and inviolable; this interval of time necessary to support the permanence of belief is no longer available to us and we can no longer afford to have even the slightest bit of faith in it. Today, the effects of faith in our beliefs are being challenged as never before. According to a recent Harris poll, religious belief has been steadily declining. In my opinion, the same could be said of our nationalistic belief, and perhaps of belief in general. The Vietnam War was an embarrassment and a disgrace because the American people lost faith in their belief that the cost in blood and treasure was necessary for our national defense. This watershed event will be viewed by future generations as the time when we finally began to rebel against our programmers. We are at a pivotal moment in history—beliefs have polarized our world and are preventing the solutions we immediately need to adopt in order to survive. Where there is gridlock, there is going to be a reckoning. Will we overcome our addiction to strong belief, jettison our prejudices, and embrace the chaos? Or will we continue to preach our intractable beliefs to others, convinced that we (insert your belief system here) are the only ones with the wisdom to command our destiny? “The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world” -Max Born “The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions” –Paul Watzlawick

This is essentially a conversation starter between you and I with the selfish goal of having members of this forum critique my thesis regarding the possibility that humanity is suffering a pandemic addiction to BELIEF, with all of the symptoms and effects generally categorized and recognized as such. And, that this addiction is so toxic that it has the potential to cause a mass extinction event in the near future. Since my book is written for the general public, but this forum is visited by those with powerful intellects, I would like to begin with a make-or-break section at the end; in the final chapter. The setting for the following few paragraphs: This is the final group session of the (make-believe) Central Jersey Chapter of the Belief System Therapy Center--a 23 week course of Belief Therapy. The first speaker is the instructor named Leon, with participants in the class making comments... “Here’s another question for you, Anders… More to the point of this discussion on System Justification Theory: What is the possibility that belief itself is a system that people feel compelled to justify? What if we refuse to consider other alternatives to those that belief provides because of our need to feel safe within a particular belief system? What if belief is so seamlessly integrated into our prevailing mindset, that, in the face of any contradictory evidence, we will automatically, and unconsciously, run the system justification sub-routine on the subject of the necessity of belief itself in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance connected to the possibility that our personal beliefs are invalid? Justifying the necessity of belief itself serves as a basis for justifying all high-level systems. Everybody believes in belief, right? ”Would someone like to tell us what the highest level system is; the one many of us spend so much energy to justify?” Roger takes this one on, and replies, “God”. “And what justifies this most significant system; what empowers it? What gives it life? What is the one thing without which this supreme system would not exist? Anyone?” Richard is ready for this one, and answers, “Belief!” “Since I have already shown that when belief in a god dies, the god dies", Leon continues, "which is fundamental—which cannot exist without the other?” “I decide to get into this discussion and reply, “God cannot exist without belief, and so belief is fundamental. God is only significant when belief is present.” “If our logic is correct, then belief is more fundamental than God! But that seems to contradict what was previously said about God being the highest level system, doesn’t it? “If belief is the pan-ultimate system, then IT should be given the reverence reserved only for God. Belief must be justified at all cost because without it even God doesn’t exist! IT should be most feared and respected; IT should take its rightful place on the throne as both the savior and the destroyer of humanity, wouldn’t you say, Anders?” Anders appears shaken, and there’s a hush over the class that I haven’t experienced till now that seems to be a mix of awe and confusion—as if the room has just been deluged with a series of thoughts like the heavy downpour from a thunderstorm. In order to bail the room of this unexpected gully wash, Leon returns to his notes and continues, “I’m sure that at this point in our therapy we will all admit that doubt and uncertainty are highly stressful and are powerful motivations to run the sub-routines that immediately and automatically relieve such stresses. But there are other more courageous methods to relieve stress. These have to do with engaging our thought processes—thinking things through, while coming to tentative solutions and approximate answers." <Forum, thank you in advance for your interest, your conversation, and your critique>