Long Links #3

On my subreddit I put up links to individual videos, websites, or blog posts, etc. Any of these things can be "consumed" (paid attention to) in one sitting (generally speaking). Those are "short links". But "long links" take (or take me) more than one sitting and to me seem to not belong in the same context as short links.

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Recently (in the last 6 months) I watched the following movies (among others):

My Name is Sarah (a woman finds community and romantic love in an Alcoholics Anonymous group even though she doesn't drink)

The Book Shop (a woman opens a book store in small-town coastal England, has to deal with enemies)

Detroit Unleaded (Two Arab-Americans in the Detroit area -- a young man, who works in a gas station convenience store, and a young woman, who comes from a rich family -- meet and fall in love)

Nowadays, I watch movies to pass the time, not to explore the world of human experience or rewire my brain (more what I was going for when I was in my 20s). I think these movies are not great movies in the way that Citizen Kane, Last Year at Marienbad, Stalker, or Testament are great. But if I wanted to rewatch those great movies, I could, and I could probably find more like them. Nothing really prevents me. But I actually prefer to watch these unassuming movies.

Actually, I think that there is more going on under the surface in these movies that I don't catch because I don't process audiovisual information quickly enough. Films do a lot of hinting because they don't have time to flesh out everything they're trying to portray, and subtle things like that go over my head, although I can see the hints happening and say to myself "they're trying to say something". The films, being unassuming, don't strike my brain hard to make it notice. Perhaps I would understand their ideas better if I rewatched them. I'm not sure I would want to rewatch them, but I could imagine myself doing so if I owned them on DVD and had a hard time getting new media. (Like kids back in the day watching the same VHSes.)

I think it's exactly the fact that these movies don't strike my brain that hard, or engage in too-strong of visceral engagement, that makes me open to them and like watching them enough to finish them.

I do think that despite that I find them "just to be a way to pass the time", on one level I think even then they do important cultural work by expressing an aesthetic. People can find each other through aesthetics and are encouraged to continue in their personal vibes/aesthetics/sarkars by the bits of time they can spend watching films congenial to them.

These movies are small, quiet, and unassuming. (Not necessarily that the characters or their experiences are, but more that the films themselves don't assert themselves the way that "hard-hitting", "exciting", "sexy", "weighty", "important" movies do.) Although it would not be small, quiet, and unassuming of them, what if those three vibes became greater, or dared to try harder and do bigger things, without losing their roots? I think people carried along by those vibes might be good at doing things that other people are not.

(I think that that last paragraph connects to my own writing a lot. To take one example, I think my book Letters to People who Care would fit in to that same set of vibes.)

(Maybe someone who knows more about movies could list some unassuming movies that do something great.)

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I watched two video essays by biz barclay.. One of them on the binding of Isaac, God is Not Dead, and Midnight Mass, the other on the phenomenon of Snapewives.

The Snapewives one presents the question "what is religion?" and shows a particular new religion. I think its value for me was in showing my own relationship with God in an alien light. The Snapewives' relationships with Snape (their god) sound similar but different from my relationship with God, at least insofar as they hear from Snape and have some degree of devotion to him. The "varieties of religious experience" are profuse and it can seem as though we should give up the search for the real God, since it looks like there's a separate version for each group of people, made in the image of what would serve them. Can I really believe that I am in touch with a person, who is God, rather than am under some kind of force that produces religious experiences of whatever form suit my mind?

I can recommend the other video more highly, especially if, like me, you are someone who is modernist-leaning (i.e. not postmodernist), in favor of being active, in favor of listening to God's voice (an evangelical in some sense of the word?), because it presents the binding of Isaac, a story which in itself shows those pursuits to be dangerous. (The Bible sets dangerous precedents. Also (a la Kierkegaard?) the Bible at least in this story frustrates logical ethical thought processing (even though overall it supports it). "Formulalessness", perhaps.)

Modernism/activist religion is dangerous. Postmodernism is also dangerous (the inability to be excellent, the inability to do what needs to be done, to coordinate cultural activity, the danger of settling for socially-convenient shared values rather than asking about the possibility of causing harm not currently part of consensus reality, such as harming God, or harming humans in ways the social consensus doesn't recognize.) Is there a counterpoint to the binding of Isaac that shows the dangers of postmodernism or other anti-activity philosophies/cultural drifts? Perhaps the rest of the Old Testament, as a whole, is about that. A counterpart to this video could be one about the call of Abraham (in Genesis 12 and renewed later in Genesis), and the need for society to have crazy (literally mentally ill like we might diagnose Abraham), outsider antagonists to the social order to drive moral progress forward.

Both videos are 3 hours long. I think the video essay format, especially the longer the essays get, lends itself to imparting energy to the viewer and giving them time to think about things. As mentioned above, I don't process audiovisual things the best, so I would latch on to some ideas as they were repeated throughout the video, and then think about them for myself. Maybe part of the comparative advantage of video essays is in this energetic transfer and stewing tendency.

(If you combine the two videos, you get the question "how can you know that God (a specific God) is talking such that you should trust and/or obey the voice you hear?")

Should We Believe Voices, as Though They are From God?

It's not uncommon for people to hear voices in their head. Are these the voices of the unconscious self or evolved neural patterns (materialist atheist explanation)? Are these the voices of demons, angels, and/or God? Are these the voices of other spirits (perhaps Severus Snape?)?

Given all those options, it might seem like, who can know where these voices come from?

(I could add in any other kind of communicative signal, like the things that people say that don't make sense in context of the conversation but which speak to your life, or the animals that behave strangely around you and whose natures communicate symbolically about realities inside you.)

Are these from a trustworthy source, or an untrustworthy source? Could we come to the conclusion that a voice is from God (either spoken directly by him or by a faithful messenger)?

Then, if they are from a trustworthy source, can we trust the voice enough to obey it?

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If we can figure out the nature of the world, we can rule out some possibilities. If we can somehow know that materialism is correct, it commits us to the "unconscious self / evolved neural patterns" view. If we can somehow know that God doesn't exist, it rules out the possibility that he is speaking.

Also, if we rule out the possibility of non-personal beings being agents (I think this is a logical conclusion of the belief that everything is consciousness) and if we can know when it is that we do things (I think this makes sense -- if I do something I didn't intend, it wasn't I who did it), then all things are caused by conscious personal beings: humans, animals, angels, demons, other spirits, or God, and it wasn't somehow secretly I who produced the voice in my head that I didn't manufacture and didn't feel like me.

I believe in (trust, find trustworthy to believe in) the world of the previous paragraph and not the one before that. So I rule out the possibility of it being somehow "me" or some "unconscious self", and this leaves open the possibility of it being an angel or God (or a demon or some other spirit).

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What is "intuition"? Intuition is something that enables us to know when people are scamming us. It enables us to sense what people are thinking and feeling. A trained intuition can be used for many different tasks, depending on how it was trained. But intuition is just a feeling that something is so, something is to be done, etc. Sometimes we can figure out rationalizations for our intuitions, and sometimes we can't. Much of knowledge is intuitive at its foundation (for instance, the way reason works). We have to rely on intuition. But intuition is opaque as to its sources and inner workings. It's a black box. A spirit could easily work through it.

Where do ideas come from? Many creative and intellectual people report ideas coming to them -- something else was working through them when the idea came. So probably ideas can come from spirits (unless we can prove materialism or some equivalent) and according to the philosophy I believe, certainly do.

The world is full of people who trust intuition or the ideas that come from intuition. But evil spirits could be poisoning our collective thinking through those two sources. Yet, good spirits could be guiding and enlightening us. Once an evil spirit uses these channels to deceive us, perhaps we will need the good spirits to use the same channels to help balance things out.

We have some way of sorting out intuition and/or ideas, into "trustworthy, less trustworthy, somewhat untrustworthy, evil" or similar categories.

So a voice in your head that says something: does it say something trustworthy or not? Often, you can sort something like this out, since often you can sort out which intuitions or ideas are trustworthy or untrustworthy.

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Now, can we know that a particular voice is from God? Any voice that is trustworthy might be from God. A doubter can say "you don't know if it's from God" and if they mean "but it really might be, you have a point", then they are on the side of reason. (Unless they can prove that God doesn't exist, a difficult task.) But if a doubter wants to close off the possibility that it could be from God, then they are not on the side of reason. They close off that possibility as a knee-jerk reaction, or perhaps because they want to control your thinking.

If God exists, and loves us, why wouldn't he want to talk to us? But then, why doesn't he speak in a very clear way to us? If you're really skeptical, you can always doubt that it's God talking to you. Sure, it's a superpowerful being, like an alien or angel. Sure, it knows a lot. But is it really God? Couldn't it be some kind of scam? Maybe a very good angel who passes himself off as God, but secretly has a dark side? You may never get to certainty even with a God you talk to face to face.

I do think it's possible to prove that God exists (in the sense that the task is one worth attempting), and the particular God that I see a way to prove is one who is bound by his own holiness to allow the world to be worse than he would ordinarily intend. This could mean that he is prevented from talking to us as clearly as he would otherwise want to. It's also possible sometimes that his distance is better for us. We can't "feed" on him the way we do on people, whose words and gestures are solid to us, flesh and blood. So we can have a (perhaps our only) non-vampiric relationship, with him.

Given these constraints, I think we could still expect God to want to communicate to us sometimes, in a more specific way than just "do what is right, which you know to do from logic, experience, and whatever bodies of trustworthy wisdom you might have available" (like the Bible). If he wants to, he probably does sometimes, and when he does, he would do so in a way that at least we would trust what he said, even if we couldn't know 100% that it was him.

In the Bible, Abraham trusts in two notable ways. His overall life story is one of coming to trust God when God says "go to a foreign country" (a demanding thing for Abraham to do) "and I will make you a great nation to bless all the families of the earth". Abraham is being asked to do something that is personally demanding and which is grandiose in its ambitions to make the world a better place. This faith of Abraham is constructive, positive (if crazy) and I feel basically okay with recommending it to people in general. If what the voice calls you to is something like the Abrahamic promise, (assuming that you understand things well enough to know or reasonably guess that what you're doing will "bless all the families of the earth"), even if it was from some other source than God, you would be attempting to do God's work, and if God does say things like this to someone sometimes, that person should be prepared to listen, otherwise great good will not result.

Abraham's other faith is a sort of paradoxical / recursive occasion where God commands him to kill his son Isaac (through whom the promise of his great nation is to come). I call this paradoxical and recursive because it's how in order to pursue something trustworthy, you need to let go of it, not affirm it. The process of blessing the world is outward facing, laminar, positive; but it must purify itself and it's counter-intuitive when it does so.

I don't know all the effects on Abraham of being tested to the point of being willing to give up his son and risk stopping the very promise that he invested his life in. But one might have been for him to value God more than the promise, and God's provision of well-being more than physical life. Isaac's life could be guaranteed by the fact that he had a functioning body, what atheists could count on. Or it could be guaranteed by God -- somehow -- what atheists would not count on. (Incidentally, on a meta-textual level, the Bible is a text that can be trusted in, wants you to trust in it, but includes a difficult passage (or a few more), difficult even by its own account (the Bible is against child sacrifice). Follow the Bible, but don't grip to it too hard, if you want to obey God.) (Maybe all this is a message for those given to "wretched evangelicalism".)

Now, if taken as a myth, this story is easily digested. If you are going down the path of the promise, God will identify some part of the promise in your life, through which it will come, and push you to the point where you have to decide whether to sacrifice it. It won't be your literal child or anything on that level of disturbingness. If you are willing to sacrifice it, he will give it back to you just like he gave Isaac back to Abraham. The Bible can be read as a collection of existing life patterns (stories, perhaps continually playing out somewhere in the imaginal world) that instantiate themselves in our lives sometimes, used by God to shape us and communicate with us.

But we do not always take it as myth, but rather imagine, what if it really was God, really commanding us to sacrifice our literal children? In that case, I can't recommend obeying such a voice. I think you should assume that it is not from God, because whatever justification could be come up with for God doing that with Abraham (Hebrews 11:17-19 says that Abraham expected God to resurrect Isaac, (my thought:) so confidently that it wouldn't count as murder or God tempting him to murder), nowadays it would go down so poorly, make religion look so bad, that it's not worth it and God wouldn't command it.

When you hear a voice, consider the possibility it's coming from Satan. Some voices are worth obeying even if they prove someday to have been from Satan, especially if we implement what the voices call for in an anti-Satanic way. Other voices are not.

These are some easy answers as to which things to think are from the voice of God, for practical purposes of obedience or investing in promises. (Leaving your home country to bless the world -- generally worth it. Sacrificing your child -- don't do it.) In between, I guess we are left with needing to train our individual intuitive and rational grasping of the nature of God, so that when we hear voices, we can tell which ones are from God. However, there will probably always be times when we are uncertain. (Maybe technically we are always uncertain. But we can be more certain than uncertain, sometimes, while other times we are more uncertain than certain.)

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If what a voice says is trustworthy and could be from God, why not obey it like it is and see where it takes you? You wouldn't want to not obey God if he was trying to get you to do something. It's possible that you're wrong that it's trustworthy, or from God, but sometimes, you should trust your judgment and obey.

Consensus Reality and Psychological Warfare

This is an essay.

Atheists, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other people in a society (for instance, Western society) disagree about many things. But some things, they all (or seemingly all) agree on. There is a span of life between birth and "physical death" (the last breath in the bodies we currently have) which all of them acknowledge. In that span, there is the need for food, shelter, clothing, transportation and so on. Food, shelter, clothing, and transportation exist and we have to deal with them -- even enlightened people have to get on the bus if they want to ride it. In Western society, there are schools to go to and for most, jobs to work. There are bureaucracies to deal with. This is all real. This (and similar things) make up consensus reality.

(I thought about putting "science" in that list, but there are "science-deniers" who would not deny the existence of the above. Science is widely favored, but it's not quite literally consensus reality. Maybe we could say that it is near-consensus reality?)

The rest of reality is controversial. Is there such a thing as material substance (or something effectively like that) as atheists often believe? Idealists dispute that. Each of the Gods (or sets of Gods) of the theistic religions is different. Christianity insists on Jesus (God and human in one) as the only way to God, the Father, while Islam insists that you can't associate anyone with God -- perhaps this is a controversy. Hinduism says everything is one thing, while Buddhism sort of says it's all nothing -- perhaps another controversy. Many of us seem to like morality and think it should have binding force on us -- so it would be weird if we thought it didn't exist -- but Nietzscheans officially don't like morality, and moral anti-realists think that it doesn't exist. Academic philosophy has people arguing on different sides of different questions.

It is convenient for us to center our thinking on consensus reality. We can argue about all of those controversial things all day and not persuade each other (that's what it means for them to be controversial). So we think that the solid, real, good truth is consensus reality.

How likely is it that consensus reality exhausts all of what's real and what matters? At first glance, it sounds like that's not very likely. Why should it be the case that all of the things we agree on are real, and none of the things we don't agree on are real? It's probably a good sign if we all agree on something, but I wouldn't trust that completely. Maybe we could all agree on some moral value that was actually invalid, just because that's what made society run smoothly.

Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism all posit the existence of spirits other than humans. Spirits might be able to affect the minds of people. (Have you ever seen a spirit come over someone, or experienced that yourself?) Spirits might not be all on the same side. Humans disagree and form blocs that want to defeat each other. It doesn't seem unlikely that spirits would do the same.

How would spirits fight? Partly by psychological warfare, trying to convince us of different random things. If they can win us over, we will do their bidding. Or our trust might be the prize in itself. The profusion of non-consensus reality beliefs is something that would make sense if there are different blocs of spirits trying to control our minds with the beliefs that they favor. The difficulty of us being certain about "spiritual" (ethical, metaphysical, religious, etc.) things being in part the result of the damage done by warring beings on the noetic equipment of our minds.

Sometimes I have told non-Christians that I believe in God because of meaning. I can remember two different people who heard that having a knee-jerk "that doesn't work" kind of reaction. They did not say "huh, that's interesting" -- a more philosophical response. They did not seem open to hearing my argument. The people (those two and four others) I can remember talking to about my theories of or interest in proving the existence of God did not react in a philosophical way, nor did they seem eager to explore to see if I was right. One of them even implied that proving the existence of God was impossible (but he would say things he didn't really believe in order to put ideas in my head, I later realized.)

This, in itself, is interesting. Why were they so reactive against the idea of the proof of the existence of God, or a particular way to prove it? Why weren't they interested in learning more? Why isn't this like any other topic where one might think about what is?

I can say that the effect of their reactions to me has got me really questioning my own beliefs sometimes. Sometimes I believe and move forward, other times I don't. After a few of these strange reactions, it breaks down my (sometimes fragile) natural sense of what's true. I can use my intellectual discipline to believe what I do, but my brain is always traumatized by the strange reactions -- I don't want to say they are literally "gaslighting" since I don't want to (always) impute manipulative intent, but what's going on is very much like gaslighting. That trauma makes me "not really believe", doubt my intellectual vision.

Why do the other people traumatize me? They have been through the same thing as me, perhaps, traumatized by other people. So they refuse to listen to me, not trusting me. They believe what they do in a fragile way, and now that they don't know what to believe, they rigidly shut out competitors to what they already believe.

It could also be that we want to believe things -- that beliefs about religion, God, and the lack of religious truth or the non-existence of God, are precious things. They are so foundational that we build our lives around them, and to change your foundations threatens self-destruction. We keep ourselves alive through our inner beliefs.

It may be as frightening to be offered a way to believe in something that you dearly wish to be true, as to be offered a disproof of it.

I probably made the mistake of talking to people who were as old or older than me. Older people lose the ability to really think and question, and instead operate as machines, stable and strong, which just do whatever they were programmed to do while growing up. People can resist this tendency, and it's not universal, but I can feel it in me now. To really question whether God exists requires research -- too much for most mature adults. Immature people have a chance at coming to know what is true. You have to have that immature spirit of adventure in you in order to keep your mind oriented toward knowing what is, rather than becoming aggressively or sadly dogmatic.

Perhaps I misunderstand maturity, and many mature people misunderstand it. It is virtuous to become more mature, not inevitable. It may (seemingly) be inevitable for the young to struggle against the many voices that try to control their minds, and their own inner instability, to try to reach a kind of promised land of being functional in society, stable and secure in mind, patient and emotionally self-regulating. But if this is the "inevitable maturity", the virtuous process of maturity requires that people who (more or less) attain "inevitable maturity" push on to the next stage, which requires them to recover the adventure needed to be in touch with reality.

Where do spirits come in? Spirits can engineer and disseminate new ideas. Time after time, intellectuals, artists, inventors, and so on receive brilliant ideas in "flashes of inspiration". They don't know where they come from. Well, if they don't know where it comes from, it's probably not from them. Where else can it come from? If we insist on materialism, it must come from the "unconscious self". But I don't see why we should insist on materialism -- at best it's one of multiple live options for how the world could work. In any of the others (I'm thinking of dualism and idealism), where spirits are possible, the most natural explanation is that spirits implant these brilliant ideas in these creative people.

I see spirits at play in some of the strange reactions I have to things. I feel like I'm, for better or worse, sick with the same mental sickness as "everyone else" (Western non-Christians). I hear God's voice and see his purpose in my life. But then, sometimes, I read someone saying "humans are really good at seeing patterns in things, humans make meaning". And then that's all I can see in my purported "hearing God's voice".

Why does this seem instantaneously and devastatingly true? Rationally speaking, it's no more weighty than pointing out that sometimes people (seemingly) falsify their own memories. The faculty of memory is not perfect. But I don't think "Oh no! None of my memories are valid!" So the faculty of "finding patterns" is imperfect. But sometimes it shows us things that really are there. Why am I so quick to distrust one faculty and not another? (Actually, now that I write that out, I don't see why I should distrust my instincts of pattern finding, bearing in mind that they are imperfect.)

People say "humans make meaning" in a certain way that implies something. And I fall for it. Why do I fall for it? Is it because I "know", deep down, that it's true? Or is it that I'm under the power of the same spirit as them? Why do they fall for it? I think neither they nor I are being rational. If we were we would see that pattern finding ("meaning making") is something that is basically reliable but with exceptions. Maybe pattern finding when we want something to be true or when the stakes are personal is less reliable? But it could be valid. If you really want someone to be romantically interested in you, it's possible to accurately perceive that they are. But when the implying and the subtext are ruling, I can't even consider that. So there's something fishy going on.

If people are being irrational, or in other words if they are making decisions based on subtext, psychological powers that live in the darkness of intuition, then that world of intuition is a black box. Spirits could take natural intuitions and feed them to produce "reasoning" that the spirits like. Or they could implant entirely new ones.

Does this sound paranoid or crazy? Why does belief in spirits or spirit conspiracies sound paranoid or crazy? Is it weird to think spirits might exist? Not under dualism or idealism. If they do exist, is it weird to think they would behave in concerted ways -- conspiracies? No, because that's how humans sometimes act. It's possible for thoughts of concerted intelligent action to mislead us or make us behave or feel badly. But reality exists regardless of whether we manage to safely believe the truths that correspond to it. Can we approach spiritual warfare in a philosophical way, rather than with heuristics that reject possibilities a priori due to a stigma (nor with spirits possessing us in the very contemplation of those spirits' conspiracies)?

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Whether through natural psychological mechanisms (traumatization and trying to maintain a coherent worldview) or direct spiritual manipulation, the psychological environment for coming to believe the truth about ultimate reality is not ideal. So we have to pay extra attention to what goes on, have more focus, keep our heads together, and have more courage, so that we can come to know the ultimate truth.

Conscience; Fiducial Conscience

I read L. John Van Til's Liberty of Conscience: The History of a Puritan Idea. I can't say I followed it very closely, but it did introduce me to thinking about conscience.

My idea of conscience is that it is an intuition which in some way is the voice of truth or God, but isn't necessarily infallible. It could be the voice of God because a person has trained themselves to think the way that God does, so they naturally react the way he would. Or, it could be the voice of God because when they see something, God directly causes them to feel that way about it. It could be the voice of truth, because by thinking through and experiencing the way things are, we come to react to things intuitively according to how they really are. Or, it could be the voice of truth because some truths are conveyed intuitively, directly. (Or it could be that God or some other being tells us these truths directly.)

What is interesting about conscience is this ambiguity as to what produces it. Normally when we talk about conscience, we are talking about moral conscience (sometimes also intellectual conscience). Your moral conscience tells you that something is wrong. Should you do it anyway? There's some chance that your conscience is malformed. But it could be well-formed and thus in touch with reality. And it could be the voice of God telling you not to do something. It is never totally safe to ignore your conscience, although it may be fallible.

Another variant of conscience, beside intellectual and moral, which I am making up here, perhaps is new, is "fiducial conscience". We have a sense that certain things are trustworthy or not. It's an intuition, and thus it can't be fully justified in words. It is not necessarily irrational, as I define "rational", but it is not fully legible. It is produced by the same kinds of things as moral conscience. Should you trust your fiducial conscience? Probably, although it may sometimes be wrong.

Some matters may only be resolved by appeals to fiducial conscience. You sense that something is wrong but can't put its wrongness into words -- some people who trust your intuition based on prior experience should trust your intuition, and probably you should just on the basis of it being your own fiducial conscience. But this doesn't scale up as aptly as verbal, textual reasoning and evidence. It is less suitable for governing a nation or even a congregation of a church, although it is reasonably well-suited for governing an individual or group of close friends and family. (And, perhaps many of the individual votes that are cast in nations or churches depend on people's experiences and leadings from God that inform the "black box" of their conscience.)

The concept of conscience allows us to both trust and not overtrust intuition, and potentially have some idea that we can train it.

What the concept of conscience introduces is that everyone is a witness to the truth, in a way that they are uniquely qualified to be. They can experience intuitions that no one else does or can look into and debunk. However, these intuitions and witnesses are only binding on those who trust them, and by default the only person who (probably) should find them binding is the witness themselves. It is not the case that these intuitions are necessarily reflective of the truth, but they may be and it's hard or perhaps impossible in some cases to completely rule them out.

There is an absolute truth, and we can partially know it, and to some extent each of us is in a unique position to know the truth. I guess this could be a midpoint between "everyone has their own truth and perspective" and "there is one absolute, objective truth".

Sarkar; Sarkar and Truth

In Hinduism, sarkar is (something like) how your pattern of behavior, vibe, feeling, "energy", and spirit are all one thing. If you make a physical movement, it affects the rest of your sarkar. Your feelings will affect your movements. Your feelings are movements, in a way. You are like a motor with interconnected parts moving in a rhythm. You have an inner rhythm which is interconnected with and between your consciousness and your body. (Again, this is approximately what Hinduism says. I may have bent it somewhat to my own purposes.)

It's hard to believe things that you can't work into your sarkar. It could be that we don't live according to our real beliefs, what we really see to be true according to our best seeing. That best seeing may be buried under a pile of how everyone around us patterns us, physically, with shared vibes, and so on. The human body, the brain, the physical mechanisms of the mind, can seemingly only be patterned in certain ways. Intellectual knowledge, the "seeing-that-a-belief-is-justified" (perhaps the ought-belief), might be unbelievable, "un-hold-able", untrustable, if it is not in line with the body in some way.

However, if we want to believe, in a more bodily way, something we see to be true (perhaps is-believe it), then we may have to retrain our sarkars so that they fit what we really believe to be true. We may have to do this against the headwind of how other people pattern us.

Another perspective (than saying what is intellectually true should pattern our sarkars) would be to say that the sarkar is what is right. The right sarkar is what is right, and intellectual beliefs must be chosen as to whether they fit the right sarkar.

How would you know which approach to take? Sarkar-truth or intellect-truth? Either one could be true, one might think. I can't be sure that this is the only meta-truth approach, but the one I tend to favor (the one I currently think best), is that of the epistemology of love / altruism, where we consider all the possibilities, and when there is uncertainty, try to trust and act according to the course of action or trusting which avoids the greatest harm. So if intellect-truth says that there is a threat, it should be taken seriously, and if sarkar-truth says (or "feels") that there is a threat, it should be taken seriously as well. Whatever threat matters most should be prioritized, but the threat that is of secondary importance should be taken into consideration as well.

Re: Empiricism is Silly as an Epistemic Basis, by APXHARD

18 March 2022: fixed a broken link.

Here is another in my series of comments I decided not to leave on people's blogs, and instead wrote here as blog posts (see also Hero's Journey vs. Absurdism vs. Ancient Judaism). The post I would have replied to in this case is APXHARD's Empiricism is Silly as an Epistemic Basis (archived here).

I didn't post this one because it was too long (I thought) and also a little bit off-topic. But mainly too long.

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I like empiricism when it implies things like "everything that exists is consciousness because that's all we experience" and is broadened to include noetic perception (things we perceive by believing that they exist or are true, like memories or concepts) as well as sensory perception, since that's part of what we actually experience. The consequence of holding to this kind of empiricism (in my understanding of it) is an openness to something like Platonism (I can "noetically see" democracy or algebra for instance, just as I can "sensorily see" my laptop as I type this). From this point of view, empiricism is a good epistemological stance because experience is all there is to know.

But the version of empiricism you are talking about involves something like verification. Public, based in sense perception and not shared noetic perception.

At some level, experimentation and perception merge. If I want to "test" that the word "that" is written in this comment box as I type, I just look and it's there. I'm not sure that there's a more rigorous way to test that, and if there is, the basic component parts of that test have to be taken as "bedrock" at some point, have to just be perceived to be true. In that sense, we empirically prove 2 + 2 = 4, just by seeing it to be true, just like we empirically prove any of the tenets of logic, or anything that really follows from deductive reasoning. We test that 2 + 2 equals 4 to us, and very consistently it does.

(Perception can be valid even if uncorroborated.)

I think that there may be such a thing as materialism bias, which gets us to prefer to see the physical world "out there" and ignore the things we see which are not "out there", but rather "in our heads". But really it's all perception, and there's a kind of continuity and unity to what can be known.

Having said that, some perceptions are more trustworthy than others, and materialism bias protects us from taking seriously some untrustworthy perceptions. I think our culture (parts of it) decided a long time ago to not listen to certain possibilities. Maybe if you don't believe in ghosts, they don't haunt you (whether that really means there are no ghosts or not, you don't know and perhaps don't care).

If you don't trust at all, you die. A definition I like for trust is "receptivity to enhancement". If you're not receptive at all, you don't breathe or see the world as a place to find food. Without constraints like death (or experiences as bad as death), we would be free to be as free in believing as we want, and as strict as we want. But there's a kind of deep reality that says "To have life, you need to not believe everything, and also, you have to trust something to have life."

I like looking at things through the lens of "everything is uncertain, so what do we do practically? How do we choose to see the world, given that uncertainty gives us degrees of freedom?" We choose "practical epistemologies" to help us make decisions. The one I like best is one of love / altruism, which says "believe in the world to the extent that, just in case it does exist, you do help the people / sentient beings it represents to you."

If it matters whether you regard something as trustworthy or not (in order to avoid harm or seek enhancement), enhancement (and harm) matter. Harm and enhancement occurring to others matter no more or less than such happening to you. So harm-minimization (or the maximization of some essential enhancement) then shapes how I see reality, how seriously I take skepticism, and how freely I believe things. There's some real risk to being too skeptical or closing off some aspect of reality, as well as a risk of being too credulous or letting ideas (or worse, other beings) take over my mind.

The endpoint for me, of these kinds of thoughts, is not materialist or physicalist. I believe in God both because there is a certain amount of evidence (following from, for instance, the idea that everything is consciousness), and because the consequences of not believing could include harm for God or for other beings whose well-being is affected by the fact (or, speaking uncertainly, the live possibility) that God exists. I "practically believe" (through practical epistemology) that God exists, closing the gap between the evidence and whatever level of certainty is needed to live. This could be labeled "faith", but it's one that has the tonality of responsibility. It follows from being responsible for the world, rather than from letting go of responsibility for the world, or wanting to feel good in a practical, egoistic way.

I think empiricism is the only possible epistemic basis, but not the definition of "empiricism" you were talking about. (Everything we know about comes through our perceptions, and even our theories or deductions about reality we only know through noetic perception -- they are instruments for noetically perceiving the realities they talk about.) I think holding truth to a standard matters, but not divorced from how effective we are in helping.

Listening to Satan Can Have Good Results

28 July 2023: minor edit and added update to the end.

I used to have a friend, whom I will call "A" (she was a philosophy major). At some point, she fell in love with a friend of hers, whom I will call "B", who had been pursuing her romantically. They became a happy couple.

I learned at some point from her that there was a young man who went to the same church as her and B, whom I will name "X". X was not a good person according to A. I don't remember all the details, but he could well have been immature, or had a bad personality, or was in some deep sense ill-intentioned, or something else. In any case, A did not trust him. And it became apparent that he had a crush on her.

At some point, X said that God had told him that he was going to marry A. (A and B eventually got married -- I don't remember if they would have been engaged at this point or not.) The pastor of A, B, and X heard about this and had a talk with them. He told X that God does not tell people that they are going to marry people if the person being sought or desired is in a relationship already (boyfriend and girlfriend? engaged? I can't remember / would depend on whether A and B were engaged at that point or not).

This story has stuck with me for years -- it came from a past era of my life, and it's been quite a while since I was friends with A, as well -- and I still think about what might have been going on.

Did X hear a voice from God? Or from some other spiritual source? Was the pastor's judgment Biblically-based? Or was he saying something pragmatic? Or was he led by the Spirit to say what he said? Or by a spiritual force of pragmatism?

I don't know, and I suspect that the people in the situation also didn't really know.

So what should X have done? Let's assume that he was sincere and wanted to please God. If God tells you you're going to marry someone who is in a relationship, but it could be Satan telling you that, you could say "I just shouldn't listen to that voice, try to forget I heard it". But what if God is trying to tell you something important? It's risky to not listen to God when he's trying to get you to do something, as much as it is to listen to Satan when he's trying to get you do something. So X might not ought to have just forgotten he heard the voice.

So now what? As a sincere, theistic young man, X might say "well, how can I be most pleasing to God in pursuing this message that I think might be from him, given the possibility that it is from Satan?" He might think of all the ways that Satan could use this message. Perhaps Satan would want X to harrass A and discourage her. Maybe Satan would be setting up a two-step scam, where because of him harrassing her, she had to (or would be tempted to) put up defenses, act out of fear, judge X, etc. Or maybe if he looked further ahead he could see the potential of Satan using his action to affect other people in the church community or the community as a whole. A two-step scam could be meant to get the pastor to form pragmatic judgments ("let's just not have creeps hitting on young women in my congregation") rather than really being open to the range of things God could be asking, weird though they may be -- to put practicality before obedience to God. And this emphasis on the pastor being the "professional manager of human situations" could affect his overall approach to leadership, making him less deeply theistic and thus less able to anti-tempt.

A smart, safe thing X could have done would have been to not mention that he expected to marry A, to stop showing outward romantic interest in her, and simply try to love her and love God, not with any sense of grasping but with the hope that is a "non-technique" (as Godfrey puts it in A Philosophy of Human Hope), hoping that someday she would understand that B wasn't the one for her after all, if that was in fact the case. Or even to persevere in loving her without grasping onto that potential outcome (of her realizing that he was more suitable for her). He could try to change to become more suitable for her.

If X learned the ever-educational way of the desert, and perseverance, hope, and trust in God, and sought to become a generally trustworthy person (and thus more trustworthy to God), through the message of "you will marry A", and didn't harrass or otherwise bother A, then no matter where the message came from, the outcome would be fairly unambiguously good from God's perspective (assuming that there are no other significant factors than the ones listed). It might not have been the best possible outcome (maybe X could, or couldn't, have known that God didn't really give that message, and either way it would have been better for him to not listen to it), but unless deciding to forget the message would have furthered some bigger plan of God's (that is, if we just evaluate this situation in itself), it would no longer be a win for Satan, but rather more so a win for God.

So, if that message came from Satan masquerading as God, if X had been serious about pursuing God, and had known how, he would have actually turned Satan's weird advice into something good.

--

28 July 2023:

Having reflected more on evil, my perspective has changed. I think the tone of the above does not take spiritual danger sufficiently seriously. I understand the pastor's behavior more now.

Otherwise, I think the post still makes sense to me. If you're going to listen to voices that could possibly be from Satan (voices in your head, from culture at large, from people you know, etc.) then you should implement what they say in as God-honoring a way you can.

Theism Bias and Atheism Bias

It's possible to have a cognitive bias in favor of theism, as well as one in favor of atheism, or opposed to theism.

One experience that I had that makes me think that atheism bias may be a thing is what happens sometimes when I think about credences for the existence of God. I have found, often enough, that I can't believe in God unless I arrive at some internal credence of 1 that he exists. I think when we believe things to be true, it is often to us as though there is no possibility of them being false. To be made aware of uncertainty somehow completely destroys a belief.

A credence of 0.9 isn't good enough for me. I can't seem to process the probability of God existing, which ought to go a long way even if certainty isn't possible. Humans might not ought to be expected to be good at thinking involving probability, but I think there's even an inconsistency in me there, where the 90% threat of something means something to me, but threats that are 90% likely given the 90% likelihood that God exists do not bother me as much as they should, while I do respond (with fairly assiduous avoidance) to most 90% chances of threats that I think matter. I do think that unwittingly being deceived by Satan matters (a likely risk given the 90% chance the worldview obtains which includes the God I believe in). But I seem to often not naturally care about it for some reason, and I suspect that there is some kind of atheism bias at play. Rationally, I should care (at least by my lights), but sometimes find that I don't.

(Another explanation, which may avoid bringing in the concept of atheism bias: this may be a case where my belief in Satan has been more often in the past an ought-belief rather than an is-belief. On the other hand, maybe atheism bias often just is the difficulty of is-believing things related to God.)

That's an atheism bias that cuts through my usual theism bias. Atheism biases can find a more welcome home in other people (maybe the welcome home for them can itself be a bias).

Theism bias and atheism bias both (at least partially) discredit theistic and atheistic beliefs formed under their influences. It's possible that atheistic beliefs that break through a theism bias, or theistic beliefs that break through an atheism bias, are to be given more credit, for having arisen under hostile circumstances. However, I think that if you want to believe something badly enough, it generates its own bias both toward and away from belief. In other words, the fact that theism bias discredits beliefs formed under its influence creates an automatic atheism bias, which then discredits atheistic beliefs as well. (This puts a person in a kind of impossible position, at least while it lasts.) If atheists want to be atheists badly enough, the same dynamic should hold for them.

God as Younger than Us

A lot of what makes a person older or more mature is their broken-downness and lack of energy. So God, though he is many millennia older than we are, may in a sense have a younger outlook than many of us, because he still has his energy, and he is more functional than we are.

We think that the truth is that which is believable by mature people, but it may really be the case that immature people, in many ways, are closer to the truth, see things with eyes as young as God's.

Young view of reality: looking at reality literally instead of through the lens of practicality. A thing is what it is in itself, not seen in the way that is most advantageous to us to see it for our own personal well-being over the long term. We are not practical beings who use sight, but we are seeing beings, when we are young. Also, each moment or person or idea (etc.) fresh, instead of discounted by their diminished place, among other moments or people taken generally, general rules, "the way things work".

Really Believing, Really Healing

To believe that something is true is not just to believe that one should believe that it is true, to prove it true. Belief is not just recognition of the justification of a belief, even if somehow justification is to show that something is true. To believe is to trust what you believe you ought to believe. So attempts to justify beliefs can keep things in the frame of justification, rather than ever proceeding from that into the frame of belief, of trust, and thus defeat the purpose that one would think they serve (to guide people to believe what is true).

--

Another angle: If you're seeking healing by repeatedly doing something, that's different from just being healed. The mindset of trying to heal yourself may be preventing you from being healed. Healing is not when you apply effort to yourself to bring about an effect of healing, it is when you are actually healed.

Epistemology of Obeying God

One might be afraid of death or emotional pain or of not thinking in a socially-acceptable way, or have other fears related to values like love or altruism, or have some other practical epistemology posted here before, but you might also be afraid of failing to obey God, of not acting when there was some task he wanted (or even needed) you to perform, and that could found your practical epistemology.

Epistemology of Avoiding Scams (vs. Avoiding Bias)

One practical epistemology is avoiding being scammed.

A scammer is an intelligent being who wants to take something away from you. People may worry about their biases fooling them, and guard against bias. But biases and scammers are different, in that biases are relatively simple, can't be expected to be devious.

We could say that epistemology (one angle to it) is knowing how to guard against the things that get us to believe falsehoods. An epistemology of avoiding bias will not pick up on the same threats as an epistemology of avoiding being scammed.

A bias epistemologist might be concerned that scam epistemology could be paranoid, vulnerable to "paranoia bias". The scam epistemologist should be concerned about the threat of scam epistemology itself, because a scammer can use all kinds of different ideas as part of a scam, including scam epistemology -- and bias epistemology.

Openmindedness vs. Closedmindedness as Truth-seeking Strategies

If there is a truth that is "out there", which you want to come to believe, and there is some possibility of believing, trusting in, the wrong thing, you might want a strategy for maximizing the chances of believing or coming to believe that truth. Part of that strategy could be policy on an overall mental climate with which to pursue the truth. One feature of that climate could be openmindedness vs. closedmindedness.

If you are maximally closed-minded, you can only believe the truth (if you happen to have found it) and cannot come to know the truth if you have not yet found it. So in the likely event that you may not yet have the truth, or at best you only have a possibly inadequate or incomplete part of it, you want to be open-minded.

But how open-minded? You can be so open-minded that all truths are the same to you, or none are true to the extent that you trust them at any depth. (To trust a truth enough means that it might cause you to effectively exclude other truths by not trusting them, since we only have so much time and energy to devote to truths.) If so, you will fail to really rely on, trust, what is really true.

Maximally open-minded people can't come to believe in, trust, the truth. So if you are truth-oriented, you will want to be somewhat open-minded, but not maximally so, so that you are more likely to believe the truth in the end.

Book Review and Postview: Warranted Christian Belief by Alvin Plantinga

I will start this review of Warranted Christian Belief, by Alvin Plantinga, by answering my questions from the preview:

I got my copy of Warranted Christian Belief in the mail yesterday. I have read this book, back when I was college, probably in 2008 or 2009. So I have a vague memory of what it says, beyond its basic premise.

Here are some questions I'm interested in answering:

It could be claimed that Reformed epistemology equally justifies Islamic belief, so how can we tell between Christianity and Islam? This is potentially a very important question, because both of them teach hell. If one of them is right and we don't believe it, we may end up not being saved. Does Plantinga have anything to say that closes off the possibility of other religions being just as justified as Christianity via their own properly basic beliefs?

This isn't exactly how Plantinga put it. He was trying to see if the beliefs of others offer a defeater for properly basic Christian belief. I'm not sure I understand him perfectly, but I think his argument boils down to: "I can ought to believe what I perceive myself even though everyone else contradicts me." This is something that similarly convinced Muslims could say.

Do warranted Christian beliefs have anything to do with the fact of the matter whether God exists? If not, then why would we want them? If they do, then don't they furnish some sort of evidence that the Christian God exists? And then, Muslim perceptions of God also should furnish some sort of evidence.

Plantinga gives the example of a man who is mistakenly accused of a crime (p. 450). All the evidence points to his guilt. But the accused knows that he was taking a hike far from the crime scene at the time of the crime. Should he believe his own memory rather than the accusations? Well, it seems like he should. But maybe the reason why is because he has a superior reason to know his own whereabouts than those who accuse him. So then, do Christians have a superior reason to know the "whereabouts" of God than Muslims do? There might be a way to make that case, but it wouldn't be solely on the basis of properly basic belief. I think it would have to come from some kind of reason.

Trying to build off of Plantinga, what's going on when a Muslim and a Christian each talk about God? They each perceive Something. They both say that that Something is God. Maybe each of them perceives a different being who only claims to be God. One view (the occult scene's view, or something like one of their views:) --There are spiritual nations, nations of spiritual beings. The Christian nation, which has no superior claim to legitimacy, wars against the nation that includes the occult (and their fellow travelers). Christian prayers and Christian religious experiences are all part of the spiritual economy that fuels the war. Basically, there is a polytheism, and the Christian god is just one of many.-- From this, it's not so strange for the Muslim god and the Christian god to each appear before their followers. Perhaps also not strange for them to each claim to be "the" God. So which one of them, if any, is telling the truth? Plantinga helps to validate that gods can talk to humans, that when it seems like they do, some god is responsible. But I would say that God is not God because he is powerful and can communicate with individuals in a powerful way, but because he is legitimate. Given all of the warring spiritual armies, which one of them is really good? That's the question we should have, when confronted with the influence of spiritual beings. So then we would ask, is the Christian God plausibly the one telling the truth? Is the Christian God really morally better than the Muslim god?

A second possibility is that the Muslim and the Christian are both perceiving the same God. From a Christian perspective, the Muslim is really praying to and worshiping the Father, Son, and Spirit when he turns himself toward the God who speaks through the sensus divinitatis. He mistakenly thinks that that God is as described in the Quran, rather than the Bible. (The Quran, perhaps, was a product of a spiritual nation at war with the real God.) But he is actually worshiping the same God as the Christian.

In either case, why should the Christian think he is more likely to be the one worshiping the correct God, or having the correct understanding of God, any more than the Muslim? Maybe some kind of reason can be given, but I think it has to go beyond Plantinga's theory.

Another objection: If I have what reasonably enough seems to me to be a properly basic belief in God, and then it goes away (and maybe then comes back, and then goes away, and so on), what should I think about whether God really does exist? Should I trust the beliefs in God when they come? Does Plantinga address this at all?

I don't think that Plantinga addresses this at all (although I might have missed it). Maybe he could say something like "Well, when you see God, you perceive God. Suppose you see a city off in the distance. As you journey toward it, the fog obscures it. Now you're not sure you saw a city. Then the fog lifts and you see it again. The memory of seeing the city clearly should dominate the fact that the city disappears in the fog. Probably there's such a thing as object permanence, and the city was there the whole time, just covered with fog. Probably there is something like object permanence with God, and you were just in the fog when you didn't believe." If he were to say that, I would find that reasonably satisfying. God seems like the kind of being who would exist all the time. So if I saw God off in the distance, once, I should assume that he still exists. It might be difficult for me to have faith in my memory (in the phases when I don't believe), but not because that faith would be unjustified if I could have it.

A question: did Abraham have warranted [not exactly "Christian", but maybe we could say "Yahwist"] belief? We have the benefit of billions of fellow Christians to validate our belief. But he was alone at first. If there was someone like him in our day, we would likely think him to be a crazy person who trusted the "voices in his head". How did Abraham know that he was listening to God? Did he not even really know? The Bible presents him as an exemplar of faith. Should we believe like Abraham? I'm wondering if Plantinga addresses this to any extent. (A side question: what is the Bible's epistemology?)

I somewhat expected to see something in Warranted Christian Belief about this, based on a memory that Plantinga talked about it. Again, it's possible I missed it, but I don't think it was in this book. I may have gotten it from Faith and Rationality (by him and some other people), which I also read back in college.

This cuts to a possible criticism of WCB, that once you allow that God can speak his own existence to people directly, he can also command them to do anything. The Holy Spirit could move a person to do anything, and how could anyone object to them? It's like the man who was taking a hike but who seemed to everyone else to be committing a crime. Well, if their evidence overwhelmed his in court, he would have to go to jail or prison. But he would know that he was innocent. Likewise, someone led by God could consider themselves justified in what they did, no matter what the consequences were, as long as it seemed to them like it was God who was talking to them.

What I thought I remembered Plantinga having said before is that there's some kind of "popularity filter" for beliefs that seem to be from God. Christianity is certainly popular enough that its "great truths" are safely attested to. But still, would Abraham's be popular enough?

One could raise the point that if I think I have something from the Spirit, then what if everyone else thinks they have something contradictory from the Spirit? I can't just be sure that I'm right and they're wrong. But then why not ask if maybe the Muslims are right and the Christians are wrong? We're all trying to figure out what God is saying to us. Maybe a kind of libertarianism is called for. The Muslims and the fanatical Christians can pursue their non-mainstream-Christian beliefs, as though they have been spoken to by the Spirit to that effect, and unless they sufficiently harm or hinder each other or mainstream Christians, they let each other be themselves. This seems like a reasonable social or political solution.

On the other hand, maybe it's possible to filter out Muslim beliefs or certain Christian beliefs. We might be able to say, for instance, that some leadings just couldn't come from God, could not be things that the Spirit would say, based on what we know about God. That filter would probably come from some form of reason, other than the reason given by Plantinga. Maybe we would accept the Bible or Quran as authorities, for some reason, and apply what they suggest using reason. Or we might turn to some kind of natural theology.

Here is a question / set of questions that, to be fair, may not need to be answered by Plantinga, for being outside his area of expertise, and that I don't really expect the text to directly address. But maybe after I'm done reading the book, I will have a better idea of what I think the answer is, and I can report it when I do the postview for this book. The question is, to what extent does adopting a Reformed epistemology-based approach to belief incline a person to no longer index themselves to reason, and therefore not feel driven to any of reason's other conclusions, the whole skein of perceptions, intellectual relations, and cause-and-effect in which people live?

Is this an approach to truth that inclines us to weep like Jesus (who was weeping when technically he didn't have to, because of his superior divine knowledge), or more toward a kind of inactivity, or even self-satisfaction? For the portion of the church that has learned that faith is superior to reason in producing belief in God, is there a danger that that attitude produces ineffective, unproductive Christians? Perhaps also Christians who can no longer relate to the people who don't have that faith that's superior to reason. Do we trust reason less when our assurance of salvation no longer comes through it, and thus fail to follow the law of reason which normally forces us to interact with the world?

Can we become intellectually lazy about the nature of God? If belief is something that we can directly access and which suffices for us, do we assume too easily that we understand God, and do not correct our understanding through natural theology or even Scripture study (which are both based in reason)?

I don't think Plantinga would say that reason doesn't matter at all, since he went to the trouble to write a 500 page book that is based in reason, to try to justify taking faith as properly basic. But I think there's something semi-fideist if not fideist about the idea that "it's rational to just have faith through the belief that you have", more so than something like "it's rational to have faith because of [MSLN or something like it, a chain of reasons, reasons like "there's a high likelihood that all that exists is consciousness"]".

Plantinga did not address any of that, as expected. In theory, a Christian should care about secular reality because it has something to do with the temporal, and even eternal, well-being of people. This would follow from truly warranted Christian belief. An evangelical Christian ("little-e" evangelical) would care as much about secular reality, in principle, as a rationalist Christian. A Reformed, "semi-Reformed", or fideistic Christian would, if they were evangelical. But if they weren't evangelical, they wouldn't. Or they might care, but only coincidentally.

A person (that's all we are, personal beings) is responsible to another spiritual reality, or to none at all. This responsibility is awakening, and produces reality in a person. If we are responsible to God, or to reason, or to the lost, then we care about something, and that includes secular reality. Some people care, and some people don't. Some people respond to responsibility and accept it, while others turn away from responsibility. Some people care but don't want to care, and deep down, they don't. Does it matter what we believe intellectually? I think that Reformed epistemology, by itself, does not incline me to care, not as much as more rationalist takes on belief. So I find it suspicious, dubious, even if its reasoning is valid. Perhaps it causes some people to care who wouldn't have, otherwise. Is fideism an excuse to take things easy? Is that what trust in God really means? I think a fideist who recognizes this danger can run from the temptation, while still being a fideist. A Christian fideist, if truly a Christian, still recognizes reason, for Christian reasons.

--

How can we form or hold beliefs that have some connection to reality outside ourselves? I think this is the real question of epistemology, not "what is justification?" or "what is warrant?". Those questions ought really to be about trying to answer the question "how can we form or hold beliefs that have some connection to reality outside ourselves?"

After reading Plantinga (though not necessarily because of what he said), it seems like "good epistemology is a case of 'you know it when you see it'". You know when you have a good criterion for how to believe when you see it, feel it, understand it. There are certain things that everyone feels to be valid, and some other things that you can hold even when other people don't think they're valid (like if you have a better angle on something). But there are some things that you can't hold if other people don't think they're valid. You just can't. We are all subject to a big "is", which is "what good believing feels like it ought to be". But we take this "is" to be an "ought".

The epistemology I like best (I think) is one of love, or of altruism. So then we should be concerned about the threats to things, and reach out to know things. This leads us into evangelism and altruism, and to reason. I think something like this is probably what God would want us to believe, if he existed.

Also I think about the ought-nature of "ought" (what ought ought to be, and thus is). What we are allowed to know, whatever restriction that says we can't know, is a law imposed on us as personal beings, as is all of reality. So what can make reality valid enough to have a claim on us? I think only one which is made by or is an extension of a legitimacy which is personal and which bears the burdens of its laws to the full extent possible, and this implies God who is Father and Son (in legitimist terms. I think this is something that many people would not accept, but which I think they could if they practiced more simantist-style thinking, which I think is in keeping with what we actually observe, as personal beings.

The world can best be improved if we believe that the ideal is the foundation of reality, even of non-ideal reality. "Ought" enables us to believe as we ought to, not pinned down by "is". (In fact, there could be a characteristically "ought"-style believing, and I think probably we ought to believe that way.) I see "is" thinking in Plantinga, which I suppose is to be expected, since that's the default for knowers. But I want to say that "ought" is the more fundamental reality than "is" -- and somehow we smuggle "ought" in to help us avoid the worst skepticism, even in the middle of our soberly "is"-oriented epistemology.

I've looked more at epistemology over the last two months or so, and that's my tentative conclusion about it: reality is "ought", so believe what is in accordance with "ought". That is how you will be in tune with reality.

Is-believing vs. Ought-believing

Epistemic status: provisional. I haven't fully tested this idea.

I read through some old notes from 2016 and 2017, and I'm struck by how much I lived in the world of "is" back then. There was a lot about how we don't really know anything, we just trust; how there isn't any ought, things just are; and there was quite a lot of me talking about whatever psychological state I was in, under the assumption that truth can be found by looking to the "is" of psychology and diaristic lived experience, rather than the "ought" of philosophy or religion.

I find myself now more on the side of "ought". This blog, while still somewhat "formulaless", still aspires, at least overall, to talk about truth the way truth ought to be, according to topics, building up a knowledge-base.

I am aware that according to "is", there is no such thing as knowledge. There's always a way, imaginable or not, that we could be wrong. There is even a way, imaginable or not, that what is likely to be true is false, despite the unlikeliness of the alternative view. There is infinite possibility and only the bare given, and any concepts we apply to the given, we have no proof of having anything to do with its real nature. We generally ignore all that and believe things as though there is knowledge, and we all more or less approve of each other doing that. So we don't question all the way down.

But is reality something that fundamentally is, or is it something that fundamentally ought to be? It seems like some "ought" creeps into most people's thinking, to avoid the profundities of "is"'s nihilistic agnosticism. That things are as they should be allows us to interpret them, to take them as meaningful, to be able to process them with our minds in an intelligible way. And while I could argue that this is merely a "practical epistemology", that is, we bring in "ought" for practical purposes, I think we are often not aware of that potential motive, and didn't decide to think that way for that purpose. What I have called "descriptive epistemology" concerns itself with things that, with effort, a person could still disbelieve, out of a diehard commitment to "is". But we know them nonetheless. The foundations of knowledge have to include some "ought", and maybe this is just the way knowledge is, and unbridled "is" is not the fundamental principle of reality.

(After writing this and coming back to it, I see that a reader might still not grasp what I mean when I say "is" and "ought". Maybe it is helpful to think of "is" as "that which just is" and "ought" as "what ought to be". In our materialism bias world, we think that "ought" is "patterns that humans impose on reality, or wish to find in reality". But in a "less-traditional modern society" (not as materialism-biased), we could say "ought itself has its own being and its own deserving (the ought equivalent of is's "being"), which ultimately derives from a non-human source".)

If "ought" is part of reality, then can we "ought-believe"? Or are we stuck in "is-believing"? "Is-believing" is when you are in your natural state, using the flesh of your brain, going with your gut, using the rational faculties that are given by evolution or (fallen?) created biology. "Ought-believing" is when you see that something is justified but the difficulty in considering it to be knowledge ("justified true belief") comes in the "believing" part. If something makes sense but feels unnatural to believe, we find ourselves sketched out, edging away from the belief, simply forgetting the issue and going on with natural believing. But ought-believing is a disciplined believing. Is-believing is the way of being pulled this way and that by moods and spirits, which sprout in our natures, while ought-believing is the way of freedom from all that.

What is "faith"? Faith may be is-believing, where the "is" is provided by God. Or faith may be ought-believing, where we grip onto a piece of wood to save ourselves, rather than hoping in the ocean liner of "is".

Aside from faith, I can think of three examples where I find I can believe according to ought-believing, but less so or not at all according to is-believing: 1. The notion that there is no such thing as knowledge because we can never know anything -- there is always a possibility of us being wrong for reasons we can't imagine. I can't is-believe this. In this case, ought-believing is needed to fully apply "is". 2. Most of Berkeley (at least, his basic immaterialist project), I find is-believable, but his insistence that an idea is inert and its being is to be perceived, and a mind is just that which perceives and acts on ideas, and anything else is inconceivable (or, the way I could put it a little differently, nothing beside consciousness can contact us metaphysically) I find possibly ought-believable, but less so is-believable. (A similar formulation that I definitely find ought-believable, and strangely only equally is-believable, though it is a weaker claim, is "All we know exist are minds and ideas. Everything else is doubtful.") 3. To some extent, I can find the following statement is-believable, but to some extent, only ought-believable: "That which is must ought to be, and ought to be absolutely; absolute ought comes from incontrovertible legitimacy; only a person (or set of persons) who was disposed to experience the full burdens of reality could ought to have founded all of what absolutely is and ought to be; such a person (or set of persons) exists and is legitimacy". I feel most comfortable affirming this statement, of the three, according to justification and according to a basic sense of trustworthiness. But if I remain in "is"-believing, I can't believe it fully.

Is ought-believing trustworthy? We could ask "Is is-believing trustworthy?" Is ought-believing affirmed by is-believing? Is is-believing affirmed by ought-believing? Ought-believing (or the mindset and truthset that go with ought-believing) would find is-believing incomplete or insufficient. Is-believing would not affirm ought-believing, but should we care what is-believing thinks? I can see that ought could be a substantial realm of reality. So why should I limit myself to "is"? (It is as though to fully explore "the way things ought to be", I must leave the areas where "is" and "ought" overlap, and ought-believing is the way to do this.)

Someone who can see (and isn't colorblind) can know from experience that flowers are colorful, and needn't be worried when a blind person objects that according to touch, there is no such thing as color. Certainly many of us have been disappointed before, and of course we all have the biological slavery to survival, and I can see how that could inhibit belief, but why not believe not according to the "is" of your own pain and fear, and instead according to the "ought" of "seeing whatever is out there just to see it"? Certainly "is" is understandable, but if we are seeking truth, then "ought" is better-justified. Ought-believing goes along with ought-thinking, which is a more disciplined (and thus in some ways saner) way to think.

I think ought-believing can turn into is-believing. I've experienced this. If you try on a thought enough, you start to see the world that way. So if you try on thoughts that you ought to, with ought-believing, you may eventually be able to believe according to is-believing.

I would contrast ought-believing with the "beauty" of Destruction and Beauty in that (speaking as the author, privileged to know what I meant when I wrote it), the "beauty" in it is something which, like much beauty, is very "is", is a powerful pull on natural tastes. Otherwise, you could find a degree of analogy between "beauty-believing" and "ought-believing".

Human Nature Bias

Rationality is founded on what we find believable. Likewise, fideism is founded on what we find believable. What do we find believable? Where does that come from?

One answer is biology. Our brains are the way they are, so that is why we find certain things believable, and other things not believable. I don't think human nature is inherently biological, but it does seem that by altering the brain, we can alter even that non-biological reality (there's a tight correlation between brain and consciousness).

To the extent that the brain can be altered by people, we could alter what is believable. (If there's some aspect of human nature that does not respond to brain manipulation and that does respond to some other manipulation, then that too can be altered.) This would be a form of "overcoming bias", overcoming "human nature bias". But if we could overcome bias to an arbitrary degree, what should be believable? For whatever answer to that last question, how do we know that?

Maybe we could say that we should find believable that which promotes survival. If we didn't survive, we wouldn't exist. So, why should human existence be a criterion for what's believable? We have a strong survival bias. But why not overcome that bias? We also have a strong anti-pain bias. I can see that we probably would always choose to have that one. But should we? Do beliefs that follow anti-pain bias actually connect us with reality and thus tell us which beliefs should be believable? It might fit us for reproduction and to fit into our environments (or to bend in favor of whatever is using pain to control us), but why do we think that connects us to reality? Where does our concept of reality (i.e., the definition of the word) even come from?

But somehow we know that things matter and thus that there is such a thing as the truth / that which ought to be found believable. This is something we know as persons, even starting out from the Cartesian starting point. It's how we start out from that position.

It's somewhat like how we know that there is such a thing as morality, even if we tend to struggle to ground morality rationally. Maybe there is a set of valid believabilities, just like there could be a set of valid moral duties. In both cases, we would have to ground their validity in something that was not rooted in human nature. It would have to be rooted in "should" of some kind. What kind of ought can transcend human nature, and lay claim to being ultimate? Can we know anything about this ought, which would help us to know what we ought to find believable? Does this ought give us a reason to trust our existing believabilities, and to what extent?

If this ought is conscious, and a person, who values us, who is the seat of trustworthiness, who to a great extent understands simantic words the way we do, then we can know and trust this ought-person to speak reality to us in a basically trustworthy way, and there is a reason for our believabilities to be valid, and even for our alterations of our believabilities to be potentially valid, as long as they are compatible with belief in that ought.

But maybe there is some other explanation. Could ought be something impersonal? How much can we know about an impersonal ought, one which does not reduce to human nature? Can we know enough to validate any of our natural believabilities, and guide us as we gain the ability to change human nature?

Bias; Materialism Bias

This post contains both a working definition of bias and an example of a bias.

Bias is when what is not-strictly-rational is programmed into how we think or intuit.

Materialism is the belief that matter is real and its own substance just because it feels real, or the further belief that all that exists is matter. So materialism bias is when this belief goes beyond what is strictly rational. To some extent (to a large extent), we see things the way the others in our culture do, so a bias can be a societal thing, not just an individual thing. Materialism has been the underlying belief of atheists and practical atheists for the last few centuries.

It's possible that when we perceive matter to be real ordinaristically, that should count in favor of matter really being real. But I find it easy to think that the perception of matter being real may really be a perception. This informs how I look at material objects, ordinaristically. I see them as simultaneously material objects and perceptions -- as perceptual objects, perhaps. Whatever lingering sense I have that matter has to be its own thing to the exclusion of an immaterialist view is, in my view, a materialism bias.

I don't know exactly how to tell the difference between "this intuition is valid noetic perception" and "this is a bias". But I think it's possible for there to be biases, and for there to be such a thing as materialism bias. Perhaps simply by asking the question, people can sometimes introspect and see that they have been biased, instead of that they have perceived something noetically.

The arguments for immaterialism (the attractiveness of monism and the inescapability of the reality of consciousness) may provide enough reason to think materialism false, and that lingering intuitions to the contrary are probably bias.

Anger, Anxiety, Complacency, Passion in Intellectual Believing

Epistemic status: provisional, practical implications somewhat tested.

Alec Ryrie, in Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, traces two kinds of ways unbelief emerged in early modern Europe, two emotional regimes that produced it: anger and anxiety.

To simplify what he says: Angry unbelievers are angry at Christians and take it out on God by denying him. Anxious unbelievers are those who wish they could believe, but are afraid that they can't, and as their anxiety keeps them from trusting God, find that they can't.

I would add two more kinds of emotional regimes that can found unbelief: complacency, and passion. (There may be even more, but these are the two to add for this post.) Complacency might have been missed by Ryrie because he was studying how unbelief could arise in an overwhelmingly theistic society -- how theistic society could break its own theism. But complacency can motivate unbelief when unbelief is taken as an easy, available option. Passion, on the other hand, is neither complacency nor anxiety nor anger. One might disbelieve because it was apparently the right thing to do. A person could have a genuine passion for the truth and come out an atheist.

I'm not sure how to define passion, exactly. (What follows may need to be revised later.) Maybe it's like having a passionate hobby, or a passionate life pursuit. The truth can be something you pursue for its own sake, with more than just your thoughts. You can pursue truth in a fiducial way, in how you trust. You trust that path, but not in a way where you are primarily concerned with your own survival, comfort, or gain. Buber says that good is done with the whole soul. Maybe that is the best way to put it. Passionate truth-seekers pursue truth with their whole souls. Passion is trust, pursuit, and other-orientation.

At the same time, believers can believe out of anger, anxiety, complacency, and/or passion.

This post is concerned with epistemic or intellectual emotional regimes (epistemic or intellectual anger, anxiety, etc.). Anger, anxiety, complacency, and passion play out in other areas of life as well.

Which of these emotional regimes is most truth-conducive? One can easily see how anger and anxiety might not be. If you've ever been around someone when they are very angry or very anxious, you probably did not find their angry or anxious beliefs to necessarily have a faithful connection to reality. Complacency as well is something which disconnects people from reality. When you stop looking, or take an easy answer, then you're probably not in line with truth.

While passionate people can be wrong about things, their regime is that which is most plausibly aimed at, and capable of reaching, the truth. You aren't as much obligated to believe any thought or intellectual path in you that arises from anger, anxiety, or complacency -- perhaps each of the characteristically angry, anxious, or complacent mental movements are self-defeating. If you believe that there is no God, or that there is, for passionate reasons, then perhaps you are right. But the same belief, held for anxious or angry or complacent reasons, is not to be trusted, until you have left the state of anxiety, anger, or complacency.

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If you want to be passionate in truth-seeking, you may find yourself wandering into anxiety. You want to know what really is? You have found your answer? Are you sure? That last question can trigger or express anxiety. Somehow passion can have high standards for the truth, without being anxious.

Perhaps we could look for cases in which beliefs mostly only seem to be held by anxious people, by contrast with passionate people, and those which are more characteristic of anxious people are not to be trusted as readily. And again, if you see a belief forming or recurring in you when you are anxious, especially one which is connected in some plausible way with your anxiety, then don't put too much weight on it, see if it makes as much sense when you are passionate again.

Can you passionately, as opposed to anxiously, think that you are in some danger of hardening? I think that if you are passionate, you are not hardened yet, and are not the closest to being hardened. Complacency and anger are much more dangerous. A hardness of heart and mind do not correlate with passion.

You may still be in some danger of hardening in the future, but as a passionate person, you would view such risks with awakeness (or something like it) rather than anxiety.

(Anxiety is less dangerous, with respect to hardening, than complacency and anger, but more dangerous than passion. You aren't convinced you're right, as you would be in complacency or anger, but if you are anxious, you find it difficult to trust God, and to the extent that you choose to be stuck in anxiety, you may be avoiding trust in God -- that disposition of avoiding being a risk factor for hardening.)

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Incidentally, one could ask, which form of love is best, that which is founded in anger, anxiety, complacency, or passion?

If you want to be like Jesus, should you spend more time in anger, anxiety, complacency, or passion?

Epistemology of Common Sanity

One practical epistemology is the epistemology of sanity. To act as though you believe, or to encourage yourself to believe, so that you do what is likely to bring you success on the scale of your own personal life, both in terms of mental and physical health, as well as socially and materially.

It is "insane" (by this definition) to try to do something that is unlikely to work but which has high expected value, because you are likely to fail, no matter how good the outcome would be if you succeeded, even if it is in some sense rational to pursue it (the likelihood of outcome times value of outcome exceeds that of your other options).

Also, you should do things that appear reasonable to other people, because it is unpleasant to try to do things that do not. So sanity is partially defined by your culture, whether your culture is benefited by the "wisdom of crowds" or held back by historical collective traumas, or has established traditions which are good, or bad, in their effects, or whatever else goes into culture.

"Sanity" in the sense given in this post could also be called "common sanity", what would be sane if there was a one-size-fits-all definition of what was sane to believe. There are no special people according to this. Does it make sense to think that you're exceptional? The odds are always against it, by definition. What is sane is to take care of yourself, and caring people, or helping professionals, will see the value of this "common sanity" but filter out the value of the great reward which a "high expected value" person might seek.

Therapeutic Truth

Sometimes we believe things because of the process of therapy. If a therapist says "try thinking of your inner life as a bunch of people who take on different roles, see if that helps your problem" (what Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy is based on), and it does help, you probably won't be absolutely certain that you have a bunch of people who make you up as a community, but your credence in that will rise, and you may trust as though that belief were absolutely true.

Similarly (though this isn't exactly therapy), if a therapist like Freud says "your religious belief is created by a subconscious mechanism of wish fulfillment" and, when you hear of that, you think "it can't be true, can it? Can it? ... It must...", as though after thinking about it, you see that it is true, and then you lose your belief in God, obviously not founded on faculties aimed at truth-seeking, then that loss of belief can be taken to show that your religious belief was founded in wish fulfillment. (Was it really? Was it only founded in wish fulfillment? You did want it to be true as you would any good thing. Well, since you lost your belief, the therapy worked, so the ideas involved in the therapy must have been true, or "therapeutically true", as much as the notion that there are many people in you because IFS works.)

To be fair (to therapists), beliefs produced through the therapeutic process can be helpful (the goal of therapy), or even true, if the therapist is responsible to the truth.

We tend to believe whoever heals us, whoever changes us, or has decisive psychological power over us (often, whoever abuses us), whether or not they really know what they're talking about.