Beliefs, Knowledge, Truth, Reality (part 1)

Note: I’m writing this as a result of a series of exchanges that happened at the wrong place and time. I hope I’ve learned my lesson not to carry the conversational state with me and reset it when switching context, otherwise I might look like a fool again. 

Beliefs

To believe something is to accept that something as true.

As usual there so much more than meets the eye, but lets move. We will come back here later, I believe.

Knowledge

One example, I found used in various places, that of a particular bridge and the person crossing it is a good starting place. 

“a person believes that a particular bridge is safe enough to support him, and attempts to cross it; unfortunately, the bridge collapses under his weight. It could be said that he believed that the bridge was safe, but that this belief was mistaken. It would not be accurate to say that he knew that the bridge was safe, because plainly it was not. By contrast, if the bridge actually supported his weight, then he might say he “thought” that the bridge was safe, and now after proving it to himself, he knows. However, he could say he knew, by intuition. If one’s belief is held in full acceptance, and the proposition is indeed true, then he knows.”

Now imagine we change the story so once the person reaches the end of the bridge, then armed with his newly acquired belief now turned into knowledge he decides to go back and the bridge collapses. If the bridge collapsed on the first trip his belief was mistaken, if it did on the second trip was his knowledge mistaken? I don’t like playing games, even more in the case where I see it going nowhere so what’s wrong with these suppositions? Is this something new? It hardly ever is. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus used to say “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. Japanese zen masters live by a similar concept:  Ichi-go, ichi-e.

So is the “knowledge” acquired about past events still knowledge or does it turn into belief when we use it later? Regardless of how you answer the previous question, what is the value of acquired knowledge in the future, other than historical, descriptive of the past? Lets wait and see.

From Aristotle’s stress on the nature of substance, to  Bhaskaracharya, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton later move to mass and distance and Einstein spacetime curvature, and now the incomprehensible multidimensional, multi-field, ever-guessing, multi-grants science, our scientific knowledge of the effects of gravitation changed through time. Was that knowledge we could act on ?  Or is it at any time anything but a belief based on our momentary understanding plus lets say knowledge about past events ? Departing from theory, lets imagine for a moment a person doing cargo cult science. He observes a number of experiments, makes the “wrong” deductions and is able to make a number of successful predictions. Until his luck runs out. And then he makes improvements based on another set of “wrong deductions” that with time might bring better results. But to a “real” scientist, his model makes no sense, it’s bogus it works by chance. As a personal note – I work in Software Development and these occurrences are rather common and not always distinguishably successful from the Melanesian Cargo Cult( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult). But the question is there in the corner of my mind: numbers and other abstract construction aside, can we be right with regards to the non-abstract world and its rules? Or do we just consider them a temporary set of rules that fit our observations so far?

So, is there knowledge? What do we know? Before answering this question definitively lets take another detour.

Plato, taught by Socrates about reality (“The only thing I know is that I don’t know anything”) saw in the cave the truth’s shadows and sensed our limits of understanding in totality the essence, the nature of reality. In parallel, the religions made the distinction between knowing(cogito ergo sum) and believing(credo ergo sum), the last one closely guided (transmitted by example rather than words) for example by the early centuries Christian monks (as described in the Filocalia, printed in Venice by the monks Nicodemo and Macario, from the Athos Mountain) as a mode of salvation from the chaos of reality. A few century later the Zen similarly offers a personal, guided solution of throwing the acquired self altered by the reality of shadows that it is said to harm us and going back to our bare self, the ideal state we are born in (few had the courage of ditching this one, Silenus coming to mind here), the only state we are ready to receive the truth. 

Skipping centuries, somewhat unfair to them and their inhabitants, the last one has been the place of many happenings. 

For some reason we as humanity are getting more confident, more self assured. This is not a critique, more of a nuanced observation, because as we grow confident in our various belief systems and they keep standing the test of time, sometimes not by themselves but rather at the meta, categorical level (e.g. Science is correct, based on knowledge even if that changes, sometimes quite often, invalidating our previous knowledge) the more dogmatic we tend to become. And having the open mind is key to understanding these distinctions.

Truth

I believe this is the time, as good as any to introduce the concept of truth. What is truth? For the moment I’ll just throw in my belief that truth is the product of our mind resulted by applying logic based on either beliefs or knowledge we held to the reality of our minds. We’ll see a bit later if this works or needs to be changed.

Reality

This leaves us with the reality. What is real? For a long time people had trouble defining what is real. We started tens, hundreds of thousands of years ago faced with the things we perceived through our senses, and that we needed to act upon, many times very fast and the thoughts that went through the primitive mind might not be that far removed from those of a baby, or of a young child having to deal with their new, ever changing world. Nightmares, playing pretend, learning to cope with fear and various feelings and many other are mechanisms we cary in our genes, allowing us to learn. Our ability to keep learning, to adjust to changes in our realities is a real valuable tool for us.

Bases on those mechanisms, for a long time we kept adding somewhat random observations in various forms, from religious to traditional customs. At some point we decided to have a different, more methodical approach. We thought that by sampling and analyzing our senses we could gain insights into the reality. Only to switch later, more recently to the quite opposite view that the senses are unreliable.

In the last century, we started to look more into the social construct of the reality and we have noticed that it’s more than one reality we have to deal with(Berger and Luckmann) and one challenge we all have is due to our inability to harmonize constantly the rules of all the realities we participate into (the past, childhood, adolescence which we keep cary within us, the daily reality, of being a son or daughter, a husband or wife, parents perhaps, professionals, those of our social circles, the spiritual, and the list could go on for a while).

But cutting through many other undusted ideas, what is reality? Is it just a set of things we observe, and act to, and part of which have to conform when communicated to others to the rules of our shared reality? But if reality is governed in a great part by a set of rules set by the environment we interact within, what is knowledge, belief, truth in that reality?

We could go further to look into our acceptance of rules set by these environments, if by all means we are the ultimate masters of our reality. About that, next time..

PS: I feel obligated to note here the seminal paper by Nick Bostrom “Are you living in a computer simulation?” and also R. Kurzweil’s work pointing to the coming techno-Nirvana and many others loved by the science fiction crowd or otherwise I might be flooded with comments 🙂