What Are Beliefs? (3.5 pages)

 

Beliefs and their primitive equivalents are components of a thinking apparatus’s models/perceptions of All reality—internal and external combined. Beliefs are the units of “knowledge” created to direct decision-making in evolutionary environments. This includes what are perceived as facts. Beliefs exist in many forms: conscious, unconscious, and transitory, representing emotions and gut reactions—among others.

 

In the extralogical reasoning model, All reality is secondarily its parts and primarily the self-organizing system that’s unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of the parts it emerges from. A person is their psychology, and if you model beliefs this way, you can model a psychology as their belief network or All reality. This is a Complex network, subject to the laws of Complex systems theory (Knowledge of Complexity not required for this post; see article on Complexity if you want to learn more).

 

Most would agree that intelligence is an important component of the human psychology and that people can, at least on some level, seek truth and be intellectually invested in their beliefs. I’m no exception. But evidently, beliefs and the like evolved because they were critical to humanity and their ancestors’ survival in evolutionary environments. Beliefs and models of reality are subject to criteria other than correctness. Among them is coherence—consistency and harmony in thoughts and perceptions. Resolve is also important, but this is merely emotional coherence. Confusion, inhibition, distractions, and disjointed thoughts and images must be minimized. So long as a specimen’s models/perceptions of reality at least roughly approximate the facts, their models’ self-consistency is usually more important than their consistency with actual reality.

 

I call coherence in thinking and beliefs Resonance. Beliefs will always be more of a cognitive, social, and emotional phenomenon than an intellectual one. Beliefs are simulations of truth. And as I’ll show, people have all this ass-backwards for the very reason beliefs are a simulated and predominately cognitive phenomenon.       

 

 

In extralogical reasoning, Resonance is the primary imperative of the cognitive system, which organizes thinking and perceptions. Since it’s been shown to do so artificially and fallaciously, extralogical reasoning’s model of the cognitive system is called artificial Resonance. Resonance is achieved through belief reinforcement and twisting related variables into causational-like relationships to create a perceived reality based on a “harmonious narrative.” This sometimes includes discarding information that threatens the narrative. Artificial Resonance not only reinforces beliefs with other beliefs; it reinforces emotions, language, goals, plans, and decisions with beliefs--which, in turn, get reinforced. This makes belief reinforcement a nonlinear positive feedback loop. Like the breaking of inertia in a person’s thinking, the general process begins slowly, increases at an ever-increasing rate, and ends quickly. Moreover, Resonance amplifies consistent patterns, beliefs, observations, etc. and discards the moderately inconsistent, allowing specimen to go into a type of “autopilot” and tune out only for the sufficiently anomalous.    

 

98 percent of the time, artificial Resonance is both descriptive and normative, how the cognitive system does and should operate. After all, “automative,” “autopilot-like” thinking remains invaluable and, ultimately, the default state. However, when engaged in deliberate reflection, it’s potentially dangerous and only descriptive. If belief reinforcement is a nonlinear feedback loop, so isn’t wrongness generally: Wrong beliefs, emotions, language, goals, plans, decisions, etc. encourage more wrongness.

 

Resonance also makes correct beliefs seem more necessary and ascertainable. It causes people to jump to conclusions, oversimplify causality, and confirm already-established beliefs. A fallacy occurs when someone establishes a relationship between two variables and makes illogical simplifying assumptions about that relationship. This is exactly what Resonance is designed to do—making it the root of fallacious reasoning.

 

Analyses that suspend judgment lead to better understandings than hasty ones even if the overall conclusions are the same. Knowing means knowing the answers; understanding means knowing how the facts that support them fit together. If you suspend judgment, you can gather more supporting facts, and you’ll have a better chance knowing how they fit together because analysis that suspend judgment are purer and less circular than hasty ones. Thus, extralogical reasoning’s philosophy of judgment centers on Unwrongness: prioritizing avoiding wrongness over correctness and suspending decisions and judgment whenever practical, including when pursuing correctness.

 

Unwrongness is especially important for mental health management. Emotional states are when people most want to form judgments and make decisions—and the worst time to do so. Heightened emotions make thinking unreliable, and beliefs imprint most on the subconscious during these states. This corrupts thinking and promotes impulsive decision-making. A general habit of Unwrongness prepares victims for emotional states.

 

 

You should now see (I hope) that beliefs and fallacious reasoning are most influenced by the cognitive system. It’s not that the emotional and intellectual systems aren’t important, nor that finite intelligence and emotions don’t contribute to epistemic mistakes: It’s more that they reinforce and drive Resonance. Resonance is as essential as government and taxes are to a society of 330 million people--but no less infallible.   

 

Resonance ensures that animals experience their simulations of reality as actual reality. Beliefs are a simulation of components of true reality, or truth. Cognitive and emotional coherence requires certitude and is threatened by recognition of its simulated nature. Beliefs and truth are, thus, predominately cognitive phenomena designed to appear predominately intellectual.