Belief is persistent. Over the past few years I’ve worked to consciously recognize and challenge my beliefs about the world. As a result, I’ve experienced, what I assume to be, almost constant cognitive dissonance that pushed me down a path of severe depression. I had to let go of everything foundational (foundational to me, not necessarily reality or fact) and live in a world I scarcely recognized. Even with the successes I’ve faced in redesigning my mind, I still find myself “wanting to believe”. For instance, I found myself watching a lecture by Richard Dawkins about some theory I cannot remember and I noticed that my mind “wanted” to accept his theory as fact. Even though I knew it was nothing more than conjecture, I felt compelled to believe in it, as if the world definitively ran that way. This is a dangerous game and a red flag worth recognizing because building your world off uncertain information does little to help you in the end. However, it brought up a few questions I’ve been pondering: “is it natural for the mind to believe in everything it absorbs, as fact? And if so, then why do we have cognitive dissonance in the first place? Or is this desire to believe nothing more than indoctrination of bad rationality early in our childhoods?” Any answers I find will be published in future series.
In regards to the abandonment of beliefs, you need to approach life like no one has ever taught you anything. You could illustrate it as an alien visiting Earth to document and observe our species. I often feel this way, as if I’m here more to learn than participate, asking sometimes basic questions in different ways to reveal insight I had never considered before. But this is a difficult path because there are no guides or teachers you can turn too. I had this realization early on when I grew frustrated and confused at why I was felt so lost. I was doing something rare and undocumented, something most people can’t fathom or even recognize. I should also clarify that the abandonment of beliefs does NOT need to happen all at once. I approached it systematically, attacking one belief after the other as I encountered them. Don’t overwhelm yourself, just start with what you already are questioning and branch out. Also be aware of the complexity of your mind. Competing or connected beliefs, you haven’t targeted yet, may interfere with how you interpret other things. It’s not a clean process where each belief is isolated and easy to root out. You will destroy a belief and yet find it rooted partially in another aspect of your mind. You will find fundamentally incorrect rationality embedded in many places even though you’ve eliminated them in others. Imagine the process of destroying beliefs like untangling a rubber band ball, sometimes the bands come off easily, but often they are buried under others that require you to remove them first to completely get at it.
The life you are leading, and the person you define yourself as, is both relevant and irrelevant when considering belief. Irrelevant in the sense that you cannot change past events so you are forced to accept the current variables of the system and deal with it. There is no alternative here. But relevant in that any minor change along the way could have drastically altered your perception of reality. It is this recognition that should both humble and scare you. By altering a single variable, regardless of size, you could become an entirely different person with different thoughts and beliefs. The point being that your choice to believe in something hinges on 1. something you may have no control over (look up modern developments on free will) and 2. something that is fragile and impermanent. Your beliefs don’t define you, they define one potential you. Realizing that weakness allows you to let go and rediscover the world.
Related to the last point, actively challenging your emotions is helpful in rooting out subconscious beliefs. For instance, you may not consider yourself fearful of the world, yet you are constantly engaging your mind. Distractions like work, exercise, eating, and socializing all pull your attention away from the present moment. It is when we stop these stimuli that we begin to sense subtle cracks in our foundation. I personally felt more confident, and in control, than ever before a few months ago only to realize, more recently, that underneath it all is this lingering and deep seeded fear. I would not be able to detect or challenge this by believing rigidly that I have made progress, conquered myself, gained confidence, etc. Belief [almost] always stands in your way.
Another important recognition to make is that everything you process is programming your mind is some way. Whether that be “sitting on the couch and watching TV” or “stressing out over new projects at work”, you are restructuring your mind to think that’s how the world operates. You are actually gaining skill and building neurons for those activities. That’s why it’s so important to target bad behavior quickly and eliminate it before it becomes too ingrained. Once those neurons are weakened (if you attack it) you can more easily override them with productive behavior. Belief is in essence “prolonged exposure to a stimuli” and does not necessarily have anything to do with truth. Additionally, this means we can justify any behavior, simply by programming our minds to think a certain way. Sit on the couch long enough and that will begin to alter how you view the world. You’ll set upper and lower bounds on how much TV watching is appropriate, where half a week is fine for you, while another thinks “no TV” is the only appropriate level. You’ll begin to believe the messages on TV and think that cable news is accurate. Your reality will change to fit with your environment. This also means that justification is useless in determining right and wrong or good and bad.
Finally, and this is just for fun, but what if our beliefs in how we perceive the universe is wrong entirely? Artificial Intelligence (AI) programmers have struggled for decades with how to create A.I., and have stated that it may be impossible or, at best, very long before we have anything considered true A.I. But I often wonder if we’re considering problems like this entirely wrong at a more fundamental level. Perhaps the design for A.I. needs to be approached from outside-the-box, a realm that seems discouraged by many within science fields. In fact, I have often heard that minds like Einstein and Feynman were not just brilliant but creative. We often degrade creative elements in science because they seem inherently unscientific, but yet also seem to yield truly innovative and alien results. And this avoidance is compounded by educational institutions and companies that train individuals how to think within their framework, as opposed to exposing people to new subjects and letting them come to their own conclusions. I believe this may account for a vast decrease in creative innovation right now.