What If It's Not About Belief? Part III: Translation

OK, I guess that was kind of a weird thing to do. I've just had these notes sitting around forever for the third and final installment of WIINAB, and the thought of working them up into an actual semi-coherent post has been intimidating me since I wrote them almost a year ago. Then I was reading over them the other morning and realized that they stand pretty well on their own, so I thought, "Screw it, I'll just scan them and post them as is. It'll be funny to see the doodles and crossings-out and whatnot."

But I realize they're not really legible and don't really expect anyone to try to read them. So here's what they say, typed out for universal accessibility. I'm still not going to bother filling in all the logical cracks, because I think that makes them less of an academic case, and more of one person's thoughts on the subject, open for discussion. Wittgenstein wrote in disjointed thought-blocks, so why shouldn't I?

Oh yeah, and let me apologize in advance for any repetition there may be here of ground I already covered in WIINAB I and II. I started writing Part I from these notes, but ended up mostly just introducing their content, and then I wrote Part II in the form of an allegory because I didn't have the notes with me. Still, though, there may be some redundancies, and I beg your indulgence in those cases.

So. As you may or may not remember, WIINAB Part I ended with my wondering why scientists are so driven to reduce inexpressible but rich personal experience to something they can argue rationally about, or else dismiss it as meaningless. That's where I'd like to pick up again here, right after a couple of introductory quotes:

[T]he intentional stance, used correctly, provides a description system that permits extremely reliable prediction of not only intelligent human behavior, but also the "intelligent behavior" of the process that designed organisms [i.e. natural selection].
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

- Reason is just one human quality, to be balanced with others, including uncertain ones like imagination and intuition — John Ralston Saul, On Equilibrium

- I can see why this idea worries the rationalists — doesn't giving up rationality, even temporarily, allow in all sorts of irrational arguments, like we've seen with organized religion so many times?

- Seems to lead to moral relativism if belief becomes just a temporary thing that can be picked up or dropped as needed. Are there hard-core beliefs which can't be shaken? Maybe. Wittgenstein definitely admits that there is a spectrum of more and less axiomatic beliefs. Quine refers to a "web of belief." (Or is that Wittgenstein again?) I would say that it's probably healthy to think of ALL beliefs as changeable, but especially at least in the religious stance, where the point is to see your life as part of something much greater and more incomprehensible. If the type of compassionate, non-judgmental, wise understanding this allows for is to be called moral relativism, so be it.

- But think about it — if someone is telling you what to believe when you've supposedly gone beyond rationality, and making arguments for their case, you haven't gone beyond rationality at all, because beliefs and arguments, even when they're irrational, still belong to the world of the rational mind which we're trying to transcend.

- If we think of a religious way of viewing things as a stance, rather than a belief system, apparent contradictions with reason disappear. Beliefs belong to the world of rationality, but religious ideas like grace and enlightenment are pre-rational — they are ways of experiencing the world before rationality comes in and divides it into neat concepts for linguistic purposes.

- [Outspoken atheist and rational thinker extraordinaire] Dennett himself uses the idea of a "stance" in explaining how we understand the complex behaviour of something as complicated as a human being. Rather than thinking of the person as a physical object obeying an insanely complicated but still deterministic set of physical laws, we move our way of viewing her up to a much more abstract, but much more useful level, where she is regarded as a rational agent with beliefs and desires, trying to fulfill the desires according to the beliefs in a rational way. Thus we understand when a person who has just walked into the restaurant we're sitting in walks up to an empty table and sits down, and we correctly predict that she will next order some food from the waiter, rather than, say, jumping onto the table and doing a jig. And we don't have to know anything about the complex physical, chemical, or even biological forces at work in this situation to understand the phenomenon from this abstract level. Note, though, that the intentional stance doesn't deny that there ARE such forces behind everything — they're just not relevant from this point of view. Thus, the idea that a human is a complex but completely deterministic physical object is not contradictory to the idea that she is a conscious human being with free will. These are just two different ways of looking at her, each with its own system of rules appropriate to its level of abstraction.

- So why can't we also have a way of looking at things called the "religious stance"? It's the stance we take when we see the universe itself as one giant intelligence, composed of all things and their relationships to each other, similarly to how our own intelligence is composed of our brains' neurons and their relationships.

- If the universe can create intelligence, why can't it be intelligent?

- The universe can even be seen as loving.

- Stance doesn't entail belief. Dennett himself gets called on this sometimes — "Yes but do you believe that intention ACTUALLY exists?" He says it exists as much as a centre of gravity exists.

- Other stances: fictional, moral, aesthetic. (Discussion about this last one useful.)

- Looking at a painting, it just grabs you and shakes you before you've even formed any thought about it. That's the aesthetic stance. It gets you interested and then you start thinking and forming thoughts about it to understand how it does that. But the grabbing and shaking itself is pre-rational, and without it there's no point in continuing on with the rest of the process, unless you're a critic or teacher whose job it is to figure out the artist's intention and explain why the work DOESN'T fulfill its role.

- This is the feeling/stance Keats is talking about in his "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." It sounds dangerous because we know that beauty is not always truth, and yet we can understand the state he's describing where, yes, beauty actually IS truth. Why can't we hold both these possibilities in our minds as compatible ideas because they involve two different states of consciousness?

- It's more like "belief within n," where n is some system of internally consistent stories.

- Wittgenstein would call n a "language game."

- So asking whether God ACTUALLY exists, or even which of the many versions of God actually exists, is like saying, "In Crazy Eights, a jack means miss a turn, but in Cribbage it means one point. Which does it REALLY mean?"

- The religious stance may be different from others in that you can't just will yourself into it. I.e. whereas a belief is judged on its truth, a stance is judged on its usefulness. Is something extra to be gained by (temporarily) adopting this "as if" point of view? Well, not really if you just tell yourself these things about the universe. It needs something stronger to be effective, which is maybe why it gets put in terms of belief. But it is possible to get a real feeling or sense of these things — to really SEE the universe this way, though not through any usual belief-validation means, nor through any act of the will. When it comes, it's more direct and less controllable than that, as if it has been thrust upon us. That's why it's called things like "enlightenment" or "revelation." And if we're lucky enough to have this happen to us, life becomes easier, more pleasant. We understand others better, because we understand ourselves better, and are therefore more compassionate. Morality becomes less of a problem because the right thing to do comes to us more easily, with less rumination and internal debate required. We become "unstuck" — there is a sensation of being truly free, fearless, more fully human.

- But how are we supposed to take this stance, if it can't be done through rational or willful means? This is where myths and rituals come in. They're meant to be pointers, leading us in the right direction. There are steps that can be taken that will generally bring you closer to experiencing the world from the religious stance; they just have nothing to do with believing or trying to make yourself believe certain things! It's when they get turned into belief systems that both the believers and the non-believers get into trouble. In fact, they're more about letting go of preconceived notions like belief and allowing the world to let itself be known in all its mystery through your senses, without having the filters of language and rationality and hope and fear and all the rest of the mind stuff make it into something more understandable. This is the experience that the militant atheists miss out on, and which they therefore undervalue in assessing religious belief. They are intellectuals, so they cling to their own hard-won belief systems as their very identity. I hope some day they'll open the door to the larger picture that others know exists.