Choice and Belief

As I was getting some work done I was listening to a podcast about epistemology. If you do not know what that is, don't worry. It's basically a way to polish, if you will, the convictions and beliefs we may have. To find out if the reasons why we hold them actually carry any weight.

At any rate, one thing did jump at me as I was listening to the conversation, and it's this idea that some expect people to chose to believe in something, as if it's some sort of switch we ought to flip on. I'm sure you've heard this before, and I'm sure it's even been well intentioned, but it does seem to counter logic if we attempt to break it down to it's core elements.

Why do we believe in something? Why do we believe in karma? In God? I mean, no doubt the roads are as varied as grain of sands, but we've all had a collection of events and experiences that have given us the mental framework for holding them. This is to say that the choice is not so much a choice as it is a consequence of externalities and cultural influences.

If I was to tell you for example, to elect to believe that you can breath underwater, you would know without a doubt that making that choice is incompatible with your understanding of reality, and there lies precisely my point. So, why am I thinking about this yo may ask? Well because I'm revising my own language on the matter.

There's been a time or two where I've said that self confidence is a choice, and even though my intentions may had been good, my "help" was no help at all. Where is the experiential knowledge, the tooling, the bricks that would edify such assertion? Do you see where I'm going with this?

Within this line of thinking, and with this new lens, I'm having a good introspective evening alone with my thoughts. What externalities have given us religions? Was opting into them a choice at all? What about political identity and moral convictions? Choice or just a processed collection that paints a result.

MenO