Sunday, September 26, 2004

Knowledge, Belief and Faith

Nicolas,

This is difficult, but let's try to narrow down our definitions again. These are my working definitions. I'm not averse to altering them in reasonable ways.

Belief is a model or collection of models that are trusted by an individual as a consequence of reason and prior experience. Here, trust is not a binary value (yes or no). Trust is a continuous value between zero and one. I believe 97% that I will to walk to lunch later this morning. This is belief because I do not have verification.

Knowledge is trust in the verification of a belief. Verification is rarely complete, but it is statistically possible. I will know whether I walked to lunch or not this afternoon with 99.999% confidence (maybe I was hallucinating). I may believe that the universe is supersymmetric (symmetry between matter and energy), but it is not knowledge until I have empirically verified my belief.

Faith is different. Faith is a model or collection of models that are trusted by an individual a priori, independent of any prior experience, reason or process of verification. Again, trust here is a value between zero and one.

Let's subdivide faith into that which is the result of reason (reasoned faith), and that which is not (blind faith). Faith, in the traditional sense, does not require reason.

Does reasoned faith include heuristics?

If you include heuristics in faith, then the principle of verifiability is a form of faith. The principle is a priori. Note that, by including heuristics, we have expanded faith beyond its traditional sphere.

If you drop your keys at night, do you have reasoned faith that you dropped them under the street light? Or do you only search under the street light because that's the only place you'll be able to find them? Is this faith at all? I would say this is not faith. It is a choice based on knowledge and belief, so not all heuristics should be considered faith.

Is faith in God heuristic? Perhaps, if a man sees eternal life as the ultimate goal, then subscription to a particular religion is the only way to have even a small chance at eternal life (again, discounting transhumanism). There are few people people of faith who would claim this line of reasoning. Besides, this line of reasoning is flawed because there are plenty of alternative religions to choose from. People do not have religious faith because of reason. They don't need reason to have blind faith.

Your definitions of knowledge, belief and faith may be different. That's okay, but we need to get the definitions in sync.

Nicolas, you have mentioned faith several times. Is it reasoned faith or blind faith? If it is reasoned, what are the reasons?

doctor(logic)

1 Comments:

At September 27, 2004 at 2:20 AM, Blogger fi11222 said...

Regarding belief and knowledge, I think the only important question is whether one considers knowledge as a subset of belief or as separte set.

If, as you do, we suppose there is some sort of 'trust measure' (I would prefer ‘justification measure’) that varies between 0 and 1 and we decide to call a belief 'knowledge' once this measure reaches a certain threshold, then we are in agreement; provided we also agree that it is still a belief. We may decide to call a yound sheep a ‘lamb’, but it is still a sheep.

Now, what about faith ? Appart from established religions, this word also designates, in everyday use, a feeling which is a close kin of ‘trust’ but with a connotation which seems to apply more to projects and endeavours. When you created your own company, you had faith in it. When Einstein published his first paper on relativity, he had faith in his insight.

When we look at it that way, we realize that faith is what BINDS us to our beliefs. It is the psychological precondition of their existence. If you have no faith in a belief, you just drop it or, in any case, you do not make much effort to justify it. A belief cannot exist if there is not someone who has faith in it. In that sense, faith always starts a-priori. It is what makes ANY belief survive past the initial phase before we have had time to gather justifications for it.

You had faith in your company BEFORE you were able to show any P & L. So why should’nt we allow whole communities to have faith in belief systems BEFORE there are strong justifications in their favor ?

Faith and reason ? I do not believe that faith can be the result of reason. Our psychology just does not work that way. The origin of beliefs is mysterious. I think they appear at random, through our conscience, in a darwinian creative process. Faith is there before reason. If a belief does not meet faith first, it does not even get a chance to meet reason. But it does meet it afterwards. And it should. Blind faith, in the sense of protecting our beliefs from any probing by reason, is indeed bad.

But there is a reason why blind faith exists and that reason is that too much reason is bad for faith. If we submit all our beliefs to a ‘no holds barred’ cross-examination by our reason, we kill them. And we cannot live without beliefs. As we have seen, ALL our endeavours are sustained by faith in some kind of belief. Life without belief is deep depression : you just do not get out of bed anymore. This is the internal (psychological) counterpart to what we have said earlier on trust and verification.

Faith is ALWAYS heuristic because it is always linked to some sort of project. If the project fails, so does the faith. Religious people do not often admit that openly because they want to protect their faith against the kind of all-out attack by ‘reason’ I mentioned above. But some do. Pascal’s wager is an example. Another reason they do not is that they do not fully realize it. Though it is rarely explicit, an established system of belief is always linked to a civilzation project of some kind. If the civilization fails, so does the faith. Conversely, if the civilization thrives, so does the faith. Just because of that, faith cannot be other than heuristic at a macro level.

One of the reasons I think the various forms of scientism are bad is that they all encourage us to have blind faith in knowledge. We imagined a ‘justification indicator’ varying between 0 and 1. When you start to imagine that it can reach the value 1 exactly, you are in trouble. This is the reason why I feel we should be cautions when using the word ‘knowledge’. To those that say that knowledge is ‘justified TRUE belief’, I say that no such thing exist. By contrast, plain justified belief is perfectly ok.

Having ‘faith in reason’ is even worse because it is absurd. Faith and reason ar two antagonistic forces within our psyche. The best we can do is to let them fight over our beliefs, without letting any of them ever fully win. This may be what some describe as ‘having a philosophical attitude to life’.

 

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