Truth, Beliefs, and Intuitions
In the last blog post, we talked about intuitions we have, but ended on a sour note. Our intuitions are often disproven. In fact, we would be hard pressed to find any intuitions that we have that are not. We use flat-earth-like intuitions to navigate; we do not use chemistry when cooking. Our memory is often unreliable, we apply teleological reasoning to deterministic processes, and we cannot comprehend how long ago dinosaurs, mammoths, or the first life existed. We don’t intuitively understand how tiny atoms are, how large the Earth and the universe are, or what temperature and energy are. Not to mention the numerous beliefs people held throughout history: vital force, feature inheritance, microbe source, phlogiston, heliocentrism, and many, many others.
Often, adhering to inaccurate intuitions is okay and has no negative effect on our lives. But our lives have gotten subjectively better because we learnt to separate intuitions and beliefs. And so it is that concept of beliefs that I want to discuss in this post. But what are beliefs? We could, of course, just slap the “belief” label on some intuitions and call it a day, but beliefs have some features that will be important later, so it is important to give a more precise definition. Here it is: “belief is a relationship between labels used in predictions.” Notice how it is not a relationship between labels that should be used, or one that can be used, or often used but the one that is actually used.
This definition includes multiple features often attributed to beliefs. Some might say that beliefs are what we act on. This definition supports that, since we use predictions when acting. Some might say that beliefs are probabilistic and that we are more certain about certain beliefs compared to others. We could believe with almost complete certainty that the sun exists, with slightly less certainty that it will rain in a week, even if the forecast says so, and we can believe with even less certainty about what outcome the next election will have. This probabilistic feature is reflected in our definition.
But what about the beliefs we have that we do not actively make predictions with? Think, something primitive, like “the sky is blue”. But you believing that the sky is blue implies that when you go outside, you expect to experience “blueness” in the “sky” region. But these predictions need not even be of the realistic scenarios. A belief that “the Big Bang happened” could include predictions about the kinds of evidence you could find online if you were to look. But something like “If I travelled back in time to the time when the Big Bang supposedly happened, I would experience it,” no matter how incoherent the concepts of time travel or experiencing without space, time, or light are.
This shows us the difference between our intuitions and beliefs. We could have an intuition that the Earth is flat when navigating a city, while having a belief that the Earth is a globe. But then there is the concept of truth. We could cheekily define truth as the highest certainty beliefs, since everything that we consider true is in fact that, even if we believe in the tooth fairy or flat Earth. Do not let the subjectivity of that definition scare you. The whole input-theoretic framework is subjective, so it should be no surprise that something like truth is subjective as well. Finally, we could mention that metaphysical truth, the search for which has resulted in Input Theory, is inaccessible to us. We often talk about metaphysical truth as something that is true outside of our experience. But it is quite difficult to even conceptualise what that might mean, since there might not be anything outside of our experience, and since the existence of input and its features is the only thing that we can know with relative metaphysical certainty.
