• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 466 0

never look back. Such belief reversals are so rare in religion and politics as to generate headlines if it is someone prominent, such as a cleric who changes religions or renounces his or her faith, or a politician who changes parties or goes independent. It happens, but it is as rare as a black swan. Belief reversals happen more often in science, but not at all as frequently as we might expect from the idealized visage of the exalted “scientific method” where only the facts count. The reason for this is that scientists are people too, no less subject to the whims of emotion and the pull of cognitive biases to shape and reinforce beliefs.

This process of belief-dependent realism is patterned after the philosophy of science called “model-dependent realism” presented by the University of Cambridge cosmologist Stephen Hawking and mathematician and science writer Leonard Mlodinow in their book, The Grand Design, in which they explain that because no one model is adequate to explain reality, we are free to use different models for different aspects of the world. Model-dependent realism “is based on the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it, and to the elements and concepts that constitute it, the quality of reality or absolute truth. But there may be different ways in which one could model the same physical situation, with each employing different fundamental elements and concepts. If two such physical theories or models accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient.”8

I take this one step further to argue that even these different models of physics and cosmology used by scientists to explain, say, light as a particle or light as a wave, are themselves beliefs, and when coupled to higher-order theories about physics, mathematics, and cosmology, form entire worldviews about nature, and therefore belief-dependent realism is a higher-order form of model-dependent realism. On top of this, our brains place a judgment value upon beliefs. There are good evolutionary reasons for why we form beliefs and judge them as good or bad that I will discuss in the chapter on political beliefs, but suffice it to say here that our evolved tribal tendencies lead us to form coalitions with fellow like-minded members of our group and to demonize others who hold differing beliefs. Thus, when we hear about the beliefs of others that differ from our own, we are naturally inclined to dismiss or dismantle their beliefs as nonsense, evil, or both. This propensity makes it even more difficult to change our minds in the teeth of new evidence.

In fact, all models of the world, not just scientific models, are foundational to our beliefs, and belief-dependent realism means that we cannot escape this epistemological trap. We can, however, employ the tools of science, which are designed to test whether or not a particular model or belief about reality matches observations made not just by ourselves but by others as well. Although there is no Archimedean point outside of ourselves from which we can view the Truth about Reality, science is the best tool ever devised for fashioning provisional truths about conditional realities. Thus, belief-dependent realism is not epistemological relativism where all truths are equal and everyone’s reality deserves respect. The universe really did begin with a big bang, the earth really is billions of years old, and evolution really happened, and someone’s belief to the contrary really is wrong. Even though the Ptolemaic earth-centered system can render observations equally well as the Copernican sun-centered system (at least in the time of Copernicus anyway), no one today holds that these models are equal because we know from additional lines of evidence that heliocentrism more closely matches reality than geocentrism, even if we cannot declare this to be an Absolute Truth about Reality.