[Ron]
Interesting how you made the point about faith. I particularly liked:
"We decide what is
right or wrong based on our intuitions, our emotional attachment to one set
of concepts or another or our personal estimation of the probability that
one view is not accurate than another. This then becomes a kind of belief in
the face of a lack of reason or evidence for that belief. I like to call
this a skip of faith. It bridges that gap of uncertainty by finding the
shallowest and narrowest point at which to ford the river of doubt."
I also think that what defines the term is by what means one is willing to
and be comfortable with, making that skip in certainty.
[Krimel]
You are right, comfort is a big issue. How much uncertainty can we tolerate.
You can get by on purely emotional responses if all you care about is "good"
or "bad". Any story will do. The tale of a giant dung beetle rolling the sun
across the heavens is no more or less reassuring than Copernicus and Newton.
But if you are curious about the details of how things hang together, you
will gravitate toward the greater precision of a mathematical analysis of
celestial mechanics. If all you care about is painting pictures and
expressing emotion the dung beetle works just fine.
Ron:
Perhaps viewing it as an increase in predictabilty to create a relative base in
certainty might come closer to the meaning that is commonly held in the
term "belief', I think what is argued is how that certainty is arrived at. I
think
people tend to define the term as it relates to faith in our culture as certain
kinds of socially derrived assumptions verses a personal approach to the
inquirey of experience.
How we make the arguement from the particular expereince to the universal
understanding is every bit as important as the expereince being described.
because it is likewise as important to reduce that universal back to the related
expereince in ones own life.
The most successful methods are those which correlate with expereince more
accurately.
Ayn Rand made some observations about the most common assumptions being to place
faith in the words of an authority figure over individual thought. That as a
result of a complex
culture the tendancy is stronger because of the requirements it demands to
function.
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