How Do You Know?

I talk a lot about beliefs here. I do this because changing your beliefs is the easiest way to change your experience of the world.

What is a belief? According to the dictionary, a belief is a thought which we accept as true. To say this is to say nothing about the actual truth or falseness of the belief. It says everything about the person having the belief. Forming beliefs is one of the most basic functions of thought.

In English, when we say we believe something, we tend to give it less weight than something which we say we know. “I believe rocks are hard.” “I know rocks are hard.” See the difference? In actuality, there is no difference. Something we know, a fact, is a belief that we think has evidence to back it up.

The Sources of Knowledge

We have three basic sources of knowledge - personal experience, reasoning, and other people.

Personal Experience

We look at the sky and see clouds. We become lucid in a dream. We experience a state of blissfulness during meditation. We bang our shin on the coffee table. We hear a child laugh. These are all examples of knowledge gained through personal experience. Experience is our closest approach to the truth, but just because you experience something doesn’t mean it is true. You may be misinterpreting your perception, or looking at it from a particular stance. For example, nothing looks more solid than the physical world, but it consists of far more space than actual matter, which in itself can be looked at as pure energy - light. Our senses, however, are designed to focus on the matter, smearing it to hide the empty spaces between, so it appears solid. When we sit in a chair, space meets space and we are held up by the smearing between. Whether your experience is biased or not, you have to pay attention to it. Distrust your own experience and you have no safe place in life.

Reasoning

All knowledge derived from reasoning begins from either direct experience or things we have been told by others.For example, you wake up in the morning and say you have been asleep. You have no real experience of sleep, but infer it from the fact that time has appeared to pass, you are lying in a different position than you last remember, and you feel different than you did when you went to sleep.

Dreams are another example. If you awaken and think, I was having a dream, you infer it wasn’t real because other people you remember being in the dream don’t remember it or they are people you are not familiar with in your physical life, and the activities of the dream are discontinuous from your physical life.

Our reasoning may lead to correct conclusions, or incorrect conclusions. I get an upset stomach after eating a dozen green apples. I may infer that green apples are poisonous, while in reality I just ate too many of them. The dream above is another example. Just because it is not part of physical life, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It just means it isn’t part of the physical world.

Knowledge Received From Others

Many of the beliefs we gain as children and while going to school are of this sort. We may be taught that God died on a cross for us, or that the only reality that matters is the physical world. We may be told we are dumb, or we are cute. We may be taught that the correct way to respond to perceived danger is to run away, or to lash out. We are taught to add two and two to arrive at four, and that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.

The knowledge we receive from others may be correct or incorrect. In some families people are taught the Holocaust of WWII didn’t happen, when it is a matter of historical record that it did. In other cases we may be taught to look for immediate pleasures because we may die tomorrow. Usually, of course, tomorrow comes, we’re still here, and we’re having to deal with the consequences of our actions.

The True and the Real

Correct and incorrect as I used them above are actually poor choices of terms, but they’re what people are used to. We want to know if something is true or false, real or unreal. Truth and reality are tricky to reach, though. The closest we come is personal experience, and what we experience is filtered through our senses and our beliefs. All that we know is based on models built from personal experience, reasoning, and what other people have told us. If these models have any ultimate truth or reality, we have no way to know it. They are models. The only real standards we have of what is true and what is false are social and operational.

Social Truth

If ten people out of ten say I have gray hair, I would assume I have gray hair, even though I have no way of knowing whether each of those ten people actually saw the same color. If an eleventh person said I have red hair, someone is telling me an untruth. We usually assume it is the eleventh person, but it may actually be the other ten.

Social truth can be untrue. For thousands of years, people thought the sun, planets, and stars revolved around the earth. The evidence of the senses says they do. But they don’t.

You can disagree with social truth, and do so on the basis of your own experience and reasoning, but you do so at your own peril. You may be hailed as a genius, but are more likely to receive some form of sanction. You may be called dumb or irrational. You may be legally punished, as when you have been found guilty of a hate crime and are punished on the basis of your motivation, rather than your act. Saying the emporer has no clothes is always dangerous, but ignoring your own beliefs is even more dangerous.

Operational Truth

The second way to define truth is to see how useful it is - how well it explains the world you experience, how well it predicts what will happen in this world, and how well it allows you to manipulate the world to pursue your goals. The more useful a model is, the more likely it is to be true. Most of us, unfortunately, believe that just because a model is useful, it is the truth.

The geocentric model of the solar system lasted so long because it worked. It wasn’t until it began to be less and less useful in predictions that it was replaced by a heliocentric model of the solar system. Even then, the social truth of the geocentric model took a long time to overcome.

Back to Beliefs

So we judge whether beliefs are true or untrue based on their social acceptance and their utility. We have different degrees of faith in our beliefs.Those which most shape our experience of what is and what may be are those that we know are true. It is possible to hold two conflicting beliefs, but the one in which we have the most faith, the one you know, is the one that will shape our experience. You may believe it is possible to levitate, but you know that if you jump up in the air, you’ll come back down. Guess which one happens. You may believe the woman you want also wants you, but if you know she’ll reject you, the chances are you’ll never find out because you will either avoid trying to start a relationship out of fear of rejection, or you’ll act in such a way as to cause her to reject you.

Many people find defining truth in terms of social bias and utility frightening or unrealistic, but it isn’t. It doesn’t negate the existence of a world outside of your mind. It shows that your world a partnership between your mind and what is outside. Your beliefs are affected by the world, and your beliefs affect the world. You can change what you believe. In doing so you will change your world.

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