Belief Explained

[Farsight]

BELIEF EXPLAINED

 

When I analysed my basic concepts, I found things that weren’t real, that don’t exist, that we never actually see. But we assume they’re real, we take them for granted, and we believe in them. Because we have holes in our understanding, holes that we’ve all grown up with. We’ve lived with them for so long that we don’t know they’re there any more. We cover them up with ignorance of our ignorance, with our blindness of our blind spot, and we shield ourselves with a peer pressure that persuades there are no alternatives to consider. We do it because we are social animals, we follow the herd, we are prey to groupthink. That’s the way we are. So much so, that we even place our faith in negative carpets.

 

 

What’s a negative carpet? I hear you say. Well, let’s say that the wife is so impressed with the new lounge carpet, that she now wants a new carpet for the guest bedroom. The room is square, and we need sixteen square metres. What’s the square root of sixteen? There are two solutions, four and minus four. So, wise guy that I am, I opt for the latter solution, and get down on my hands and knees to cut a big fat square out of our brand new living room carpet. I roll it up, put it over my shoulder, and take it to the carpet shop, walking backwards for dramatic effect. I hand it over to the proprietor and pay him a minus ten pound note, which I stick in my pocket, then go home to crack open a bottle of wine and greet my guests. We are standing in the living room examining my negative carpet and discussing its negative mass when the wife walks in. She stands there open-mouthed as I begin to explain the merely technical details of relocation to the guest bedroom. Then all hell breaks loose. Get the picture?

 

The thing about all this, is that a solution is sometimes absurd, but it's not always plain. People just don't spot it. So we talk about it quite seriously without examining whether it’s a real solution. We end up taking it for granted and using it to search for further solutions. Then when we struggle, we forget to track back to the beginning and look at the thing we took for granted. We don’t realise we’re riding a negative carpet, and that’s why physics is getting nowhere. What it all boils down to, is that a negative carpet doesn’t exist. It isn’t real. It’s just a figment of our imagination. A belief.

 

 

I need to talk about belief. Your belief. It’s important. If I don’t talk to you about your belief, you won’t believe what I tell you. Then you won’t share the vision. You won’t see the light. Believe me, this is important.

 

It was Richard Feynman who said “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”. This is more true than you realise. It’s true because when you’ve fooled yourself, you don’t know it. You convince yourself that you haven’t fooled yourself, and you develop a conviction, a faith, a belief about it. You will be quite irrational in defence of this belief. You will not test your belief in an empirical scientific fashion. Instead you will become incredulous, and perhaps even insulting. If you don’t behave this way, that’s fine, you’re not a believer. You merely have an opinion, or better still, an open mind. What’s that I hear you say? You do have an open mind? I’m sure you like to think so. But let me goad you by saying this: No you don’t. You’re fooling yourself. At which point I can see you bristling already. See how it works?

 

The truth is this: you’re not quite as open minded or as rational as you think. This is hard to accept, but that’s the way it is. It’s like that because if you believe something, you don’t need to think about it. Because you already know the answer. Hence you are less receptive than you should be, and can be too quick to dismiss.

 

Stop a minute and think about it. Why do you think we have suicide bombers? What on earth possesses them to think that there’s seventy two virgins waiting for them in paradise? What possesses them is something called The Pschyology of Belief. And they don’t think, that’s just it.

 

This thing is far more powerful and far more prevalent than you realise. There’s a whole spectrum of belief out there. Think about Young Earth Creationists. You can talk to these people until you’re blue in the face, but they are totally immune to logic because they believe that they are right. You can say anything and everything, but they duck and dive and dismiss every last scrap of evidence you throw at them. Everything you say goes whoosh, in one ear and out the other. They just aren’t listening. They just aren’t thinking. The weird thing is that they don’t know they’re immune to logic. These guys aren’t lying to you. They just don’t have a rational open mind. But they don’t know it. They think they’re being perfectly sensible, and you’re just some crazy fool who just doesn’t know.

 

 

It doesn’t stop at religion. There’s ideology, Kafkaesque bureacracy, and insane conspiracy theory. There’s things like heroin addiction where people usually end up killing themselves. Moving down the scale there’s conditions such as obesity and anorexia. Then there’s gentler symptoms like fashion, where folk let themselves be brainwashed into thinking purple is the new black, or walking around with an unethical cotton bag over their shoulder. It affects everybody to some degree, even people who consider themselves to be very rational and extremely open minded. Everybody’s got some kind of belief about something. When you find it and hit it, whoosh, everything you say goes in one ear and out the other. They just don’t listen. They just don’t think. They think they think, but they don’t. It’s like the shutters are down and there’s nobody home.

 

Would you like to put yourself to the test? This will show you what I mean. This will demonstrate to you how you yourself are not immune to The Psychology of Belief. Nobody is, not even me. Look at the picture below:

 

 

Now, squares A and B are the same colour. They’re the same shade of grey. Oh no they’re not, I hear you say. Oh yes they are I insist. Oh no they’re not you answer back. We could do this all day, but I’m right and you’re wrong. They really are the same colour. Squares A and B are the same shade of grey. The apparent difference in colour is an illusion. I’ll prove it. It’s very simple. Just tilt the page so you’re looking at it from a narrow angle. Alternatively fold the paper to get the two squares next to one another. Another method is look through a small hole to remove the context that fooled you into fooling yourself. You can look at it online if you wish, google on “checkerboard illusion” or go to echalk optical illusions directly.

 

Check it out for yourself. Satisfy yourself. Be empirical, test yourself, find a way to stop fooling yourself. Then you realise that A and B really are the same colour.

 

 

Don’t be surpised. I told you The Psychology of Belief is powerful. More powerful than you ever dreamed. What’s surprising is just how common it is, even amongst scientists. Conviction is a hard nut to crack. It’s the way we are, the way we think. Why do you think it took Einstein seventeen years to get a Nobel Prize for the wrong thing? Why do you think there’s that saying: catch ‘em young? It’s because there are people out there who are fully aware that if you instill children with a belief when they’re very young, they’ll carry on believing it come heaven or high water. These children remain so utterly convinced, that they grow up to become adults who will fight and die for it. But we’re not going to fight and die for something like The Capacity To Do Work are we? Because we are rational, we have an open mind, and we listen and we think.

 

Yes, The Capacity To Do Work. Can you explain energy to your grandmother? You might believe you can, but the chances are you’re fooling yourself, and your explanation is no explanation at all. Your grandmother will peer at you over her bifocals, suck on her false teeth, say Thank you Dear, then she’ll get on with her knitting or whatever. She’s too polite to say it, because butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But what she really meant is: Capacity To Do Work my arse.

 

 

Come on now, The Capacity To Do Work is no explanation at all. You swallowed that when you were young and gullible, and you haven’t looked at it since. Energy is a simple basic concept that you really ought to understand, but you don’t. And you don’t know that you don’t. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. And what you also don’t know, is that the Capacity To Do Work is merely a label that covers up a hole in your understanding. A hole that you’ve grown up with, that’s been there so long it’s like a blind spot, you don’t even know it’s there. I’ll show you the holes in your understanding, I’ll peel back the labels and fill the holes with concepts that are crystal clear. Then you can stop fooling yourself. But not entirely. Remember this, it’s important: the basic concepts I will give you are better than the concepts you hold now. But don’t ever think they’re perfect. Don’t fool yourself that you’ve stopped fooling yourself. Keep that open mind open.

 

Are you ready? It’s time to begin, and it all starts with time. Einstein said Time is Suspect, and he was right. Once you understand time, everything else is easy.

[YT2095]

doesn`t this create it`s own little Paradox though?

 

I mean, since you`re telling us not to believe Anything were told, Why should we believe what you`re telling us?

 

"This statement is a Lie"

[Reaper]

"This statement is a Lie"

 

 

But then if the statement really is a lie, then the statement is true. I love this paradox.

 

 

 

 

@Farsight: The only thing I'm going to say is "Inference to the Best Possible Solution". Belief in anything does not rely on the senses.

[swansont]

Come on now, The Capacity To Do Work is no explanation at all.

 

Capacity to do work was never meant to be an explanation.

 

Science isn't about belief. It it's core, it isn't about explaining the nature of things — that's metaphysics. Science attempts to describe how nature behaves, and "capacity to do work" works. You don't like it? I don't care. Until you understand that what you are doing doesn't have scientific merit, it will be speculative hand-waving and nothing more. I can tell if science works because I can do a calculation to see what the theory predicts, and compare it to what happened in my experiment. How do we test XXX explained?" How do we, in principle, falsify it? If it can't be falsified, then it's belief, not science.

[Reaper]

Maybe this is in response to our refusal to accept his so-called theories?

 

Wait, actually I just goolged it and he posted this on a couple of other boards.

[swansont]

Maybe this is in response to our refusal to accept his so-called theories?

 

Wait, actually I just goolged it and he posted this on a couple of other boards.

 

And he gets the same kind of reception elsewhere, from what I have read.

[Klaynos]

And he gets the same kind of reception elsewhere, from what I have read.

 

And yet he keeps on going, you really need to respe...pity that...

[someguy]

it's no secret that without seeming official it would be near impossible in many cases to convince someone of something that everyone around them, including official seeming documents, disagrees with. in some cases seeming official is in fact all you need, the actual validity of the content doesn't matter.

 

maybe nobody believes you simply because you are not official looking enough. maybe you are right about all of your theories. if you are right about your theories then you should be working at proving them, rather then telling people they should just start to believe you. why are you wasting your time with posts like this one? you should be posting more about time if you think that is the most important thing to start with. you believe that everybody just dogmatically believes? if you do then i would have thought you would know that certainly with such a post as this you could never change my our minds. if you believed what you wrote you must have also believed the whole thing was in vain. the fact you make posts like these rather than exploring the actual subject really makes me a little suspect of the validity of any theory or ideas you put out prior to even reading them. if you are so sure you are right and so sure we are wrong then showing us should be easy. you must know exactly how to show us you are right since you have shown yourself, convincingly enough to be certain. maybe you have made mistakes and you showed yourself wrong, and it looks to me like you have. maybe you are easily convinced to be certain. if you want me to give your theories credibility I need to be certain. honestly I don't care about what you know, i don't care about what your theories are. I only care about how you know. that's what makes science science.

[swansont]

Farsight recognizes and admits that much of what he has presented do not fit the criteria of being a theory. What he has is speculation and metaphysics. (and despite his tendency to have a negative reaction to those terms, that's what they are) Because of that, there isn't much scientific merit to them. One can go to a magic show and see a trick and ask for an explanation. "It's magic" is an explanation. But it's not science; it doesn't really tell you much, and you can't test it to see if it's valid.

 

Phlogiston was an explanation for combustion/oxidation. People taught it, and it was a big hit. Explained a lot. People loved it. Until scientists were able to quantify things — then the explanation was found to contradict what was seen in nature. Phlogiston was supposed to leave things after combustion, purifying it, and that seems OK when you start with a compound. But as we now know, a pure element will add mass when it oxidizes. Once chemistry had advance to the point where things could be tested analytically, it was found to be false. That's what's lacking here, and why most posters aren't willing to invest the time. You can't falsify something that makes no predictions.

[Reaper]

At least he "references" his own work, by referencing himself:rolleyes:

[dichotomy]

BELIEF EXPLAINED

Are you ready? It’s time to begin, and it all starts with time. Einstein said Time is Suspect, and he was right. Once you understand time, everything else is easy.

 

Well, time is no more than an illusion. A useful human abstract concept like many others. So?

 

I agree with you that people live with many delusions, some even useful, but isn't this just part of man's evolving consciousness? We had to start somewhere, and we develop from that point. We can only truely enlighten ourselves and shatter mindsets with continued research, experiments and growing evidence. And yes, we will probably always be blind to an infinite number of things. That's the nature of things.

 

cheers.

[stormwarrior]

your little test with the chess board is bogus

 

Look at both pictures at the same time

 

they are different pictures.

 

I mean seriously trying to use an illusion to mess with peoples belief is absurd at best.

 

Of course the pictures are different when you squint your eyes. Logically speaking your perspective has changed. Personally I am immune to alot of visual tricks because my eyes dont work the same as yours.

 

I actually can focus on one of the other eye and cause myself to see two different perspectives at the same time.

[iNow]

your little test with the chess board is bogus

 

Look at both pictures at the same time

 

they are different pictures.

 

I mean seriously trying to use an illusion to mess with peoples belief is absurd at best.

 

Of course the pictures are different when you squint your eyes. Logically speaking your perspective has changed. Personally I am immune to alot of visual tricks because my eyes dont work the same as yours.

 

I actually can focus on one of the other eye and cause myself to see two different perspectives at the same time.

 

I'm not sure it's the best argument for the belief explained presentation, however, I can assure you that the boxes on the chess board are the same color.

 

Easy proof... take screenshot, paste into MS paint, sample colors from both squares, check the RGB numbers.

 

 

What do you see? A vase or two faces looking at one another?