Epistemic status: provisional.
Trusting is when you connect to a reality outside yourself on a deep level -- staking your being or some element of your being on it. It is a real connection between you and and what is not-you.
What reality do you connect to? You connect to the thing that you directly trust, but also other things. A definition for "trust" is "receptivity to enhancement". You affirm that there is such a thing as enhancement, and the possibility of not being enhanced. So you connect to meaning and ought. You also connect to trustworthiness itself.
When you trust, there is a letting-go. You enter a new reality when you believe something rather than continuing to try to apply the strictest doubt to it. If you believe (thus, trust) something that could possibly be wrong, there is some chance that you fail to believe what would save you. To exist is to accept that you might be wrong, or rather to live in the reality in which you are not wrong and will not die, which is trust. If you succeeded in not trusting anything, you would be dead.
This reality of not being wrong and not dying is a kind of taste of heaven which we can visit in this life, but not forever. (Often enough, we are betrayed.) Having gone to that place, we know it exists. We may not know the full nature of the place, of trustworthiness. We don't know that everything will turn out right for us, just because trustworthiness exists. But somehow that place exists.
Compare trustworthiness to the fantasy world in a book (Arrakis, Middle-Earth, etc.). Why not believe that Arrakis exists as a real place? You can go there in your imagination. I would say that the difference between Arrakis and trustworthiness is that you can enter trustworthiness with your whole being, but not Arrakis.
Or perhaps you can enter Arrakis with your whole being, and can go to live there. I don't expect to be able to. But trustworthiness is a basic thing. It's not culturally-dependent like Arrakis, and it is woven through one's entire life. Trustworthiness is clothed with the five senses, and the noetic sense as well, and if Arrakis is trusted, it's included as a subcomponent of trustworthiness, in the imagination. So trustworthiness can encompass all of reality, in a way that it seems Arrakis cannot. Arrakis is not a necessary component of personal existing, whereas trustworthiness / trusting is.
What about other psychological states that come over us? Perhaps anger or sadness can take us out of trustworthiness. Does a place of ultimate and unending anger exist? That sounds like hell to me. Maybe it does. Does hell have to exist as a place forever as it seems to promise? Hell is not bound to tell the truth about itself the way trustworthiness is. We always trust, but anger can overtake us. Similarly joy may exist as a place, but it seems like it's just one of the expressions or modes of trustworthiness. So there are fundamentally two places, perhaps, trustworthiness and hell, the anti-trustworthy place.
We are jarred out of trustworthiness, but only for a time, before we someday return to it. And there is a partial access to trustworthiness which is even in our lives as we return, at all times.
Can we trust that of which we have no conscious access, neither with the senses nor noetically? I don't think so. So can we have direct personal connection, whether to trust and remain in trustworthiness or be betrayed, with that of which we have no conscious access? I don't think so, either. So then how can we have personal connection with what cannot affect either us or our experiences? If a mind can mediate between us and some unconscious reality, then that mind would have to trust it, so as to be affected by it, and it would have to be a mind or experience. So that leaves experiences. Can experiences exist outside of minds, or have causal power of themselves? This is doubtful. So trust gives us reason to doubt the efficacy of unconscious beings, which are neither minds nor experiences. Even the bullet that kills completely unexpectedly probably must be mediated by a mind, and thus would be an experience.
But what about when we trust things in an unconscious way? Are there such trustings? It's possible to enter a state of trusting, consciously, and then remain in it, unconsciously. The past self consciously trusted, but the present self remains in the state of receptivity to enhancement toward the trusted reality. In the case that we trust that the infinite possible evils will not affect us, those which we haven't imagined, then those evils may not exist in any sense, having not been imagined, and what we really trust is trustworthiness itself, which says "you will live forever". Similarly, if we trust the unimagined goods that may come, we are trusting trustworthiness itself. We have a noetic sense of trustworthiness, at all times.
The axioms of the act of trusting are 1) consciousness exists, 2) you exist, 3) what is not-you exists, 4) you can directly contact what is not-you in a deeply personal way, through trust, 5) trustworthiness exists, 6) enhancement exists, 6a) meaning exists, 6b) legitimacy exists 7) trust is most likely (or is certainly?) only of minds, experiences or beings reducible to minds or experiences.
What can we derive from these axioms? Overall, it looks like God exists. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 7 support the metaphysical organism argument. Those points and 6a support simantism, those points and 6b support legitimism.
5 seems like something that points to the existence of heaven. If trustworthiness promises that there is such a place as trustworthiness, but there is no such place, it itself is not trustworthy. That's a little like the qualia of redness itself not being red. Or the qualia of goodness not being itself good, something which Sharon Rawlette argues against. I wanted to argue against her, but had to admit it was hard to conceive of the qualia of goodness as not being good (although more than that could be good). Perhaps the qualia of goodness just are the qualia of trustworthiness, and are valuable as a promise, if not the complete reality, of what ought to be.
If there is a place where a person can be not-wrong and live forever, it seems like the kind of place that God could arrange, by bringing us into tune with reality, and by keeping us alive. For having suffered so much to raise us, God is the kind of being who is truly motivated to keep us alive forever, something which we can't necessarily even say of ourselves.
--
Trustworthiness is not just a property of where we are, but of who we are. We might suppose that, though humans are made to some extent of how they are arranged, they are also made of their material. So there must exist some source of personality that is truly trustworthy.
People in a trustworthy place need to be trustworthy, themselves. When we trust, we are trustworthy, in that trustworthy place, although we break out of it due to the untrustworthiness of ourselves, or of the things in our lives, which break us out of the place, into betrayal. When you are fully absorbed in returning a serve while playing tennis, it is like you are in heaven and are free from sin (and in a sense, you really are there and are that), but when your anger returns on the way home after being cut off on the freeway, both life and you have (if not sooner) proven your untrustworthiness.
The source of the material of trustworthy personality is a truly trustworthy person. For all that we arrange ourselves to be trustworthy, we must receive the spirit of this person in order to be trustworthy ourselves and thus part of unbreaking trustworthiness.
No comments:
Post a Comment