The mind

Believing in Belief

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What is truth?  How do we know that we know?  Is it all a collection of beliefs?  Even science may say one thing today and another tomorrow, so an individual who follows yesterday’s precepts might now seem ridiculous – as if today’s explanations are closer to the truth.   Then does that make the truth, even factual truths, belong indefinitely to tomorrow’s understandings?

Then how do we truly know that we know?  Should we stick to our senses, or is there more to know?  We live and learn, and form opinions based upon experiences that lead to differences of opinion, even among experts.  Facts can be inconclusive, but they can’t make our decisions for us in any event.  Experiences are far from simple and those we take to be conclusive are usually filtered through tacit decisions about what counts, the primary filter being belief.  Our confidence in the facts is really a confidence placed in our tacit beliefs about the facts, certainty playing second fiddle to these beliefs.  Hence belief enables us to make decisions when we don’t know any better, the belief supplying the feeling of knowing better.

Knowing anything strikes a balance between the knowing and the knowing otherwise. The balance point is determined by belief.  Beliefs fabricate our certainties based upon images of reality.  Beliefs are the active mental screen on which those images are projected, together with the elaborated images of our senses.   Sometimes we recognise our beliefs, seeing belief as a form of thinking for tidying-up our thinking.  But if belief is a power we exert over our own minds, it is also a power exerted over us by the collective mind of our culture.   Often we can’t tell the difference or don’t bother to try.

We see as we believe, believing we see as we see.  Believing in belief flourishes amidst the urgency to know.   In a paradoxical world, belief is the possibility inviting us to entertain impossibilities that just might be true.  Not knowing is the only restraint we can exercise, but the exigencies of decision making may not allow us the scope for this luxury.  And the various forms of disbelief, non-believing and unbelieving all function as forms of belief serving as alternative social co-ordinates bearing an aura of superior neutrality.  Meanwhile the question about what is truth converts into an issue over what may stand as proof – as if proof is the unequivocal imparter of knowledge that remains independent of what we believe.

If it is ‘true’ to say that belief is the last refuge of the individual, then knowing that we believe is the last refuge of our integrity as individuals.  Then what of truth?  Perhaps belief affords a more pragmatic approach to truth – in accepting that truth is greater than our knowledge, and that the truths we make do with reveal more about our tacit systems of belief than we can ever discover by looking to the facts as absolutes, as decisive matters of fact.  But the same applies to the truth about our beliefs, for we cannot find an absolute in their content simply by believing in our beliefs.

Thus it may be true to say that knowledge is power, especially within our various spheres of influence and cultures of belief, including the religious, the political, the economic and the ‘factual’, but who can say that knowledge is truth?  Alternatively it might be more prudent to consider a more basic truth about knowledge:  knowing that we believe is the safest form of knowledge, believing that we know the most dangerous.

© Mike Laidler 2015

Diets of persuasion

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Rhetoric is a concoction of processed persuasions and artificial additives – a dubious philosophical sandwich – stuffed with beguiling logical-isms sitting between a premise (assumption) and conclusion, then served up to the gullible who are meant to swallow it whole.

But the worst of it is that, at its best, the reasoning ingested with the ‘conclusion’ is meant to be digested as if it gives nourishment to the premise.

Mike Laidler

The problem of happiness

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The problem of happiness is that we have made it into a problem. Children are born with happiness in their being, which they systematically unlearn in learning to be happy.

There is no thing in the world that encapsulates happiness, apart from the things in the world said to make us happy. Thus ‘being happy’ is a construct that is conditional upon finding out how to be happy, which usually depends upon finding the things that make us happy – as if happiness is a thing to be found in the world.

Ironically, the quest to be happy can undermine our well-being on the premise there is something to be found that we do not have, as if it might flood into our lives to fill a vacuum – as if happiness is the experience of that it.

Unfortunately there is much sadness to behold in this quest for happiness – for those who need happiness to be defined for them will never find it on those terms.

Mike Laidler.

The Meaning Well

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There is no meaning to existence to be found without the meaning in existence. And we know there is meaning in existence, even in our deficient quest for it, even when our quest for it is rendered deficient by our expectations of what we want to find.

Yet our commitment to the quest is enough to change the reality, and gird our failures along the way, for how else would we judge our own failure without a sense of what we are looking for – which is our hidden strength.

Only sometimes we hide that strength from ourselves – sometimes by giving in to failure, sometimes by reducing it to serve our ill-judged wants, which never satisfy. Thereby we forget how much more is to be gained when we stop looking for it as something to get, and see it instead as something to give, thereafter to be refreshed from the fathomless depths of its creative abundance.

Mike Laidler

Mindscapes

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The mind is unbounded. Thought travels further than the voyaging spacecraft. Our ideas see beyond the most powerful telescopes. The imagination takes us to places the body cannot follow. Perception illuminates the half-born light. Experience transforms the oblivious firmament. Knowledge transforms the unknown. Wisdom transcends the not-knowing.

No library is big enough to contain human wisdom, and it has always been so. But then we imagined limits to the imagination in the wake of technological advances once unforeseen; and we imagined that the mind of technology could overtake us, as if thought belongs to the thingness of the universe.

So the mind did to itself what nothing else could do – it bound itself in thoughts of its own limitations. Thus we stole our attention away from the wisdom of our ancestors who looked to powers extending beyond themselves – powers seen to transform the thingness of existence within a larger universe that expands into thought, then beyond within realisations we catch as figments of the imagination – a universe that is incomplete in all that is of the time being – a universe with a future that is more than all that it is in the present, that always was more than all that is, because of the enduring potential to be.

Mike Laidler