I once came out of a year-long funk in an instant by changing a single belief. Until that point I hadn’t thought much about beliefs. It was just a word I casually used like most people do. But it turns out that we can have better or worse beliefs and the consequences for our lives are drastic.
After my sudden recovery, I went around excitedly telling people, “We have beliefs! Do you understand what that means?!” But generally, people didn’t. “Sure, so what” most people told me.
I couldn’t understand. If we were full of beliefs and they were shaping our experience of reality so powerfully, then why weren’t we consumed with inspecting our beliefs and improving them?
But far from it. “I don’t have any beliefs”, several replied.
The more people I talked to, the more I realized that society was very confused about the topic and used words like — belief, knowledge, truth — rather interchangeably, though they differ in important ways.
Then I discovered epistemology. It turns out that I wasn’t the first to notice the power of belief or the importance of these ideas; they had once been considered essential. In some ancient universities it was a fundamental study, a prerequisite before you could study anything else. After all, what business did you have studying astronomy or law if you hadn’t yet learned to discern falsehood from truth?
I was ecstatic and threw myself at studying epistemology. Some of it I found extremely useful, while other aspects had become convoluted and contentious over the academic eons.
So now, I will share with you the most basic, yet powerful, epistemological framework I can, which a decade later has withstood the test of (my) time. Some of it I have borrowed and some of it I have invented, in order to create a succinct and coherent framework with which to help you navigate reality.
A Backpacker’s Guide to Epistemology - Part I
Belief — Your beliefs are whatever you think to be true. And ideally, your beliefs are true. In practice, we end up forming beliefs about all kinds of things ranging from true to completely false and everything in-between. But truer beliefs are better than less-true beliefs, and in an ideal world people would be very interested in forming the truest beliefs possible and ridding themselves of the false ones.
Truth — The word “truth” has almost become a dirty word on account of how badly it’s been misused and abused. But regardless, truth exist. Where? And what is it? Truth is whatever Reality is. Whatever reality is and does, is truth. But what if reality is a multiverse? Or what if reality is affected by our perceptions? Doesn’t matter; those dynamics and all phenomenon are still just part of Reality.
Knowledge — Knowledge is what you get when you succeed in forming a true belief. Believe in something false? That’s not knowledge. Something true but no one around to believe it? That’s not knowledge either. Knowledge requires a knower, and in order to know you must believe, and not just believe anything but believe something true.
Truth Proximity — But perfect knowledge is rare, if not impossible. Language itself is an intermediary reduction of reality, and the limited capacity of our brains leads to limited perceptions of reality, meaning our knowledge will always be some distance from truth. But not to despair, because it turns out that being closer to the truth is still better than being farther from the truth. I call this “truth proximity”.
Freedom & Power — Ok but what does knowledge get you? What’s the grand prize for all this arduous work to find truth and believe in it? As an ancient philosopher once said, “You will know truth and it will set you free.” So the answer is: freedom. Note the precise language of the quote: truth alone doesn’t set you free, knowing it does. And what is freedom? Freedom is the ability to interface with reality. Ever heard that knowledge is power? Same thing. Knowledge gives you the power to interface more freely (intelligently, effectively, and so on…) with reality.
Propositions — So what do we call all these ideas that come flying at you from every direction all the time tempting you to believe in them? We call them propositions. Like beliefs, propositions lie along a spectrum ranging from false to true, or anywhere in-between. They are the raw materials that beliefs are about. They are the thing you accept, which becomes the nucleus of belief, or reject and leave on the table.
Net Truth — Ever meet someone who was very knowledgable and wise in one regard but terribly clueless or misguided in another? Because we are full of an extremely large number of beliefs, I find it useful to think of us as vessels carrying them all. If we were to add up all your beliefs, accounting for where they are on the spectrum of false to true, you’d end up with a theoretical value I call the net truth. So while specific knowledge gives you specific freedom and power, net truth is the sum total truth that you are able to access, or the sum total knowledge that you as a believer carry. As creatures capable of approaching truth by pursuing knowledge, our goal should be to increase our personal freedom and power by increasing the net truth we have access to. That pursuit, not academic credentials, is what it really means to be a philosopher.
Evidence — So what causes beliefs to form? Evidence. Evidence does not mean that something is true, evidence is just anything that has a belief-causing effect on the mind. A thing is evidence if we interpret that thing to point to some truth (even if it doesn’t). The mind collects evidence pretty much non-stop, consciously and especially unconsciously. A footprint in the mud is evidence that someone has been there. A violent outburst from someone easily serves as evidence that causes us to form beliefs about their character. An announcement on the news is often interpreted by the mind as evidence that something is true, on account of the authority of the journalist or quoted expert.
Evidence comes in countless forms, but the important thing is to understand that evidence itself is not true. The footprints in the mud could be from a tricky boot-stamping robot. The emotional outburst heard through the wall from the apartment next-door could be an actor rehearsing their lines. The assertions being made in the news might be important and true, or slightly misleading, or total propaganda. In fact, one person may interpret some event (like a politician coming to power) as evidence of one thing, and another person may interpret that same event as evidence of the opposite.
The point of a sound, personal epistemology is to make us less susceptible to misleading evidence while helping ensure that valuable evidence pointing to actual truth does not pass us by.
In sum, our perceptual field is full of propositions coming and going, ranging from completely false to mostly or totally true. Whether and which we believe in depends on how we interpret evidence for or against them, which happens consciously and unconsciously, leaving our neuroplastic brains with a massive undulating sea of changing beliefs, installed at different depths of conviction inside of us.
The truer the beliefs we carry, the more knowledge we have, the more freedom and power we enjoy, the more we can effectively interface with reality. The more untrue the beliefs we carry and the more numerous they are, the less freedom we enjoy, and the more reality will confound us, escape us, or even destroy us.
For this reason, among many, being human is a tough gig — and also a profoundly beautiful privilege. As finite and not-omniscient beings we can’t fully control the winds of reality, but we can build an epistemically sound ship, learn to sail it, and chart a course toward truth that leaves knowledge in our wake.
It is my belief (warning: incoming proposition) that as we do, and to the extent society does, is the extent to which we will enjoy an age of beauty, peace, and power.
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Thanks for reading! Consider sending this to a fellow seeker of truth or inquisitive person you know and stay tuned for Part II where we expand into some of the implications of what’s outlined here.
I like this.