Are you Really Free?

What you think you know is determined by what you think you are. Whether you believe that you are capable of knowing the world around you, or you believe that the world is mysterious and strange and wholly unpredictable, the belief will determine your behavior. You might believe that your world is mostly inert and soulless, raw material for your manipulation. You might believe that there are spirits and forces and powers lurking just beneath the surface, ultimately controlling the world and making your efforts to manage your affairs irrelevant. It may be that there is really no way to know. The important fact is that you believe, what you believe doesn't matter that much.

If we were mostly concerned with facts, things that have actual and verifiable existence, disagreements would be rare and easily resolved. If we could establish some fundamental understanding about what the world is, there would be no point in our endless disputes, distrust and hostility. If the world is some particular way, possessing some easily discernible characteristics, it should be possible to agree on what they might be. Since we never agree about much of anything, it must be either that the world is essentially unknowable, or that our ability to understand it is severely impaired (A probable cause lurks here).

Historically, we act on what we believe, not on what we know. Belief is the primary fact of life, the thing we fight about, the elemental force of nature. We believe that our understanding is correct and it's that belief that we believe, not the understanding. Every experience is filtered through our beliefs. What we call knowledge is a collection of "things" we believe we know. We believe in our facts and that makes the belief the primary fact. We're trapped in a world made of perception and preference and desire and, therefore, inescapably subjective. Can we really trust anything?

Obviously a lot of people believe we should believe them. When you look through a telescope for the first time, you have to be told what you are seeing and, once told, the image changes. Instead of a little blob of light, you now see a planet or maybe a star. Having been properly prepared you have less difficulty understanding whatever explanations accompany the thing observed. Not only is your seeing enhanced, but how you understand what you see is changed. Is this education or indoctrination? Would the thing you're looking at change along with your perception of it? Once explained can any phenomenon ever be experienced as itself or is it forever different? Do we then see the thing we observe or the explanation of it?

The problem with explanations is that they always depend on other explanations. If any one of the explanations on which the current explanation depends is flawed, whatever knowledge we thought to gain is suspect. As it turns out, every explanation is flawed. The fact that there is never enough information to fully and completely explain much of anything, is evidence that knowledge is always somewhat provisional and tentative. Claims of certainty are mostly arrogance; the belief that one knows enough to speak authoritatively.

In fact any explanation assumes something closely akin to omniscience since one must fully understand everything pertaining the thing being explained. Even so, most of us believe in omniscience or we wouldn't lap up the deluge of explanations poured out on us daily. It may be that it gives us comfort to believe that things are explainable. We cheerfully incorporate the latest explanation of this or that into our suite of unsubstantiated beliefs because we like the feeling of control it gives us. Even if we know we don't know something, we believe that someone does and that's good enough.

What makes all this worthy of discussion is that there's nothing we can do about it. We inherit our beliefs from whatever culture we are born into. We have no choice about any of it. It's as if we are a vessel that other people have filled. The vessel can be any size or shape, it can be beautifully crafted or crude and simple, whole or broken, of great value or humble and plain. Regardless of what is poured into the vessel, the vessel is given meaning and purpose just by being filled. The vessel gives its contents identity and form. There is never anything like choice, everything is defined by everything else. We are the outward manifestation of every expectation ever expected of us; we are what others say we are.

This doesn't diminish our uniqueness of course. Each of us is one-of-a-kind and wholly unique. What is diminished though, is any confidence that our beliefs have any application in the world at large or, if they do, that they are binding on anyone else. We are all victims of circumstance, formed by a long sequence of events that is only meaningful to whomever experienced it. These events determine what you will be willing to believe and, while unique to you, they may not have any value to anyone else. That's why people disagree: it's a battle between different beliefs over which neither side has much control. So, is the problem what we believe or belief itself? Check This.