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“You've got to believe in something... the problem is there's more than psych truth... there's a need for the numinous"
Tom identifies an important puzzle: whatever shall we make of faith?
https://twitter.com/tomxhart/status/1023962211763539968
Tom identifies an important puzzle: whatever shall we make of faith?
https://twitter.com/tomxhart/status/1023962211763539968
First we need to understand that it is impossible to believe nothing. Even for those who call themselves nihilists, their void-belief becomes a kind of credo. Usually nihilists and atheists end up unwittingly synthesizing a religion surrogate out of politics or drugs
If you dig down into your beliefs for some kind of axiomatic firmament, you will find only aether; Cartesian doubt, Gödelian paradox, maybe Buddhist dissolution. This is because we form our beliefs through mimesis of those around us, and not through logic. No exceptions
Where then does belief originate? It germinates, through many iterations of human transmission, noise and observation filtered through psychological proclivity and amplified by iteration. But this is a topic for another time.
In every apologia ever written, in EVERY attempt to derive meaning from meaninglessness, there is a certain sleight of hand, where the author constructs a graph of concepts, inserts a cyclical reference, and tries not to notice what he did.
All philosophical frameworks rely on this mechanism of ABSTRACTION OF TAUTOLOGY, a loop of ideas with a wide circumference, ideally with a curvature so subtle that the logic seems flat.
Religious types possess a fundamental honesty about this process. They call their epistemic circle by the name of Faith. They KNOW it is a circle and they try to cultivate comfort with this awareness.
Secular types, on the other hand, must lie about their epistemic closures. “My worldview is built on rationality and reason.” Oh, indeed.
Epistemic closures are not a bad thing! They are an important technology, and they reveal things about the shape of human cognition, about the shape of all cognition! A man without an epistemic closures in his head lacks all conviction: he is lukewarm.
Tight epistemic closures enable us to wear beliefs as uniforms; they make it possible to divorce the “numinous” from the material. Secular people have to realize God’s kingdom on earth, but the faithful can seek material truth unimpeded
The art of cultivating faith lies in crafting an epistemic loop you can accept. Faith isn’t rational in the computational sense, but it’s highly adaptive. With effort you can meme yourself into any belief, so pick a strong one
I still hold out hope that with this understanding of faith, we can build a highly instrumental new religion, perhaps by reinterpreting an old one. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1017450155891556352
