Belief and Certainty

“Belief is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case, with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.”

Or so says Wikipedia.org.

DEFINITIONS, DEFINITONS, DEFINITIONS

As definitions go, it is a deft one:

If a belief is a state of mind, it is therefore entirely subjective, and any consideration of objective reality or absolute truth are coolly avoided. Truth and Reality are replaced with the oblique “factual certainty”.

Deft it may be, but it gives no sense of how and why humans have evolved to create such a “state of mind”. Nor does it even hint at why, in some cases and circumstances, people will lay down their lives for a belief. Or why they get so emotional when their beliefs are challenged.

Worse still, however, is that Wikipedia.org’s definition gives no sense that beliefs do not exist in isolation, in the mind of an individual. To have any broader meaning, a belief must be contained within a system of beliefs as part of a culture (otherwise it is called delusion by everyone else). Much as no culture exists without a community that lives by its rules.

Belief is therefore a social construct. This takes us beyond Wikipedia's definition. 

What validates your beliefs is that other people believe them too. Belief is, in other words, as much a state of belonging as a state of mind. Believing makes you part of a community of believers, whilst disbelieving will identify you in the community’s eyes as the mad and bad ‘other’, a valid target to be overwhelmed, repressed or even destroyed.

What is common to most definitions of belief, including Wikipedia.org’s, is that empirical evidence is surplus to requirement. Beliefs are just stories that we tell ourselves, myths and narratives that become the building blocks, the basic assumptions of our thoughts and identity. Taken literally, this means that if you change your beliefs, you would not survive the experience: you might not die, but you would definitely become a different person. This explains, to some degree, why literal minded people get so aggressive when their beliefs are challenged. It might also explain the death of saints, as well as some aspects of their lives.

Of course, the validity of all these definitions (including Wikipedia's) depends on people being willing to see their beliefs as a psychological device, a mere function, be that a state of mind or a state of loyalty and belonging to a community. But this is precisely the opposite of how most people view their beliefs. Instead, they “believe” their beliefs to be incontestable, absolute Truths.

Put another way, “true” believers believe they are Right. This contains the rather unliberal implication that unbelievers must therefore be Absolutely Wrong. In the absence of arbitration by empirical evidence, this definition of the believer becomes the definition of a bigot. What is more, the “true” believer believes in a stunted, excluding reality, one in which there is only one possible Truth, instead of a richer version where truth is not so much absolute as dependent on the believer and the available evidence that each one chooses to ignore.

So, scratching a bit deeper than Wikipedia.org’s definition of belief, we find the concepts of Truth and Reality goose-stepping back into focus. It also reveals that beliefs are social constructs, enforced by the community via bonds of loyalty and belonging that accredit the believer with a membership card that be verified or rejected, based on an individual’s overt behaviour. 

Beliefs, from this viewpoint, are therefore the social glue, pointless in isolation, that bind people into communities.

The benefit this provides is a simple, yet invaluable, commodity: trust. 

Shared beliefs create in humans a state of social trust (ask any conman), and mutual aspirations, that are vital for the overall community’s survival in the face of a harsh, uncompromising and unpredictable Reality. In turn, belief gives an emotional, if false, substance to safety in numbers. Ask any economist and they will say that a lack of trust in a society is expensive and inefficient to everyone except advocates. This explains why treason is such a heinous crime: it violates trust and reduces the chance of success of the community. So, more than just a binding agent, this sharing of beliefs is nothing short of a foundation stone of society.

So what about taboos, those mummified beliefs of our ancestors, such as the avoidance of incest or eating rats?

Taboos encapsulate tried and tested wisdom in a narrative format (rather than a scientific one) that is hard to dispute: they spare a community the Russian Roulette of an ongoing process of trial and error.

Taboos are a “compilation” of acquired knowledge into the socially enforced bans of certain practices. In other words, they conveniently reduce the amount of thinking that an individual must perform to survive. Apply the taboo, and you can delegate the act of thinking onto the institutions of the community, the only cost to the individual being the social requirement to comply with and police enforcement of the taboo. The downside to taboos is that they cannot be questioned and so, if circumstances change, they can prove to be an inflexible burden. I’m not advocating that brothers should marry their sisters – the realities of genetics are unyielding - but if properly cooked, there is nothing wrong with eating rats and it may well become one way of feeding a growing population, as rats breed and grow faster than rabbits. They also love eating rubbish, one of the big problems of our age. Indeed, it was alleged a few decades ago that a lot of Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires fed rats instead of chicken to their unsuspecting patrons, who quite happily gobbled them down with no discernible ill effect.

The taboo is, by this description, ultimately a blunt instrument of social organization, that doubles as a primitive form of health care. By violating a taboo, you put your own health at risk as well as the health of others. You cease to belong to your group because you are a disgusting person who eats rats, for example. By breaking the ban, you become an “other”, just as if you did not share the defining beliefs of your community. In that role, at least, taboos are indistinguishable from beliefs.

It would be nice if we could generalize what we have learnt about taboos to other categories of belief. Specifically, that they contain compiled wisdom, involve a delegation of the act of thinking, and are social norms that accredit your belonging in the social life of the group. 

It is easy to discard the first, i.e., that all beliefs contain compiled wisdom: clearly, not every belief is wise. For example, God does not always provide, so if you don't get off your arse you will go down the throat of whatever is threatening to consume you. However, the other two notions, that beliefs allow individuals to delegate the act of thinking onto the institutions of the community and that they provide a form of social accreditation to those communities do seem, to me at least, reasonable propositions.

A belief in climate change, for example, delegates thinking onto scientists and experts, and results in useful social behaviour such as recycling your rubbish (or breeding rats?). A disbelief in climate change, on the other hand, delegates thought on the likes of Donald Trump, encourages people to thunder around town in a gas guzzling Humvee, and ends up as a vote for changing the rules of social organisation, such as liberal values, thereby reintroducing the perils of trial and error.

So much for all that. But what is behind beliefs, what gives them their potency, their energy, their relevance in our mental life.

To a true believer, a truth that is not absolute cannot be a truth at all, which is what makes them such bigots. However, if you are an even minded sort of person, and accept that there are no absolute Truths, then our world becomes tainted with uncertainty. 

This is quite terrifying to most people, so what to do?

We all crave Certainty. We want to be told that we are loved, we want to be told that we are right. We don’t need these things validated by facts, we just want them validated by fellow believers. We want to be part of the herd, the pack. The tribe.

But above all else, we want to be Certain.

Sadly, certainty is precisely what NO ONE can deliver because, like True Happiness and Enduring Love, there exists no such objective state of grace (other than as a highly subjective state of mind, the very definition of belief that we have found so bland and disappointing).

What exists, at best, in the face of all this overwhelming uncertainty, is a fragile form of stability. 

Belief systems only survive if they afford some stability to the believers. Safety in numbers, for example. Only when there is stability can you safely delegate thought on someone else. In other words, society will only function properly when there is this elusive stability. When that happens, we get Nirvana on Earth, allowing everyone to get on with procreation, attending truck rallies, paying the mortgage and all the other things that give meaning to life.

A SPECULATIVE SUMMARY

So now, at long last, we come to some sort of summary, albeit with the caveat that where definitions end speculation begins.

Leaving aside taboos, we have shown that there is a large class of beliefs that are little more than a denial of the fact that we live in an uncertain world. A world that one day will roll on without us, quite unperturbed by our discontinued existence.

Let's call this particular class "Denial Beliefs". The question that goes begging a speculation is this:

What proportion of our beliefs are just denial beliefs?

The answer seems to be "one large chunk", and all too many of them are central to our very identity and opinion of ourselves. For example, life after death, socialism, capitalism, the importance of football, the belief in the goodness of the human spirit, to mention but a few that are, in my opinion, just a reaction to an intense horror of insignificance.

So, is this intense horror of Insignificance, the primary emotional energy behind our most cherished beliefs? It would certainly, pun intended, appear so. To me at least.

Put another way:

If we are so insignificant, then what is the bloody point of the self reflecting yet ever credulous apes that we are? Is this, really, the driving force in a majority of our beliefs, that in turn are the core of our identities and our cultures? If so, we have more in common than many of us would like to think.

To give Kant a twist:

I am insignificant, therefore I believe that I am not.

Starwoman

Vera Rubin died on the night of Christmas Day, 2016. Her lights went out at the ripe old age of 88 and she never won a Nobel Prize.

Hardly surprising, you might think, given that not many people win the Nobel Prize. So she was a woman? Well, a lot of men died in 2016 and they didn’t get a Nobel Prize either. Leonard Cohen, for example.

However, Vera Rubin was no ordinary person.  A dedicated wife and mother, she found the time and the energy to become one of the greatest astronomers of her time and probably any other time. In terms of the importance of what she observed, she is up there with Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and, closer to our age, Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who confirmed that the Universe is expanding. Hubble, better known for the space-based telescope named after him, didn’t win a Nobel Prize either, as he died before the Nobel Committee conceded that Astronomy was actually a branch of Physics and so he hadn’t qualified for the prize.l. 

Mrs Rubin didn't win the Nobel, but she did win just about every other accolade going in physics and astronomy, including the 1995 Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal, the first woman to do so since Caroline Lucretia Herschel in 1828. So, what did she do that was so deserving? Back in the 1970s, Vera Rubin had to look for a subject where she wouldn’t be elbowed out of the limelight by her predominantly male colleagues. At the time, the astronomy herd was obsessed with black holes, so Vera decided to steer clear of the subject. She settled on an intelligent choice, the biggest known objects of all, galaxies, and used modern technology to take a closer look at some of their features. Specifically, she studied galaxy rotation curves, or rather the distribution of rotation speeds of the stars in their outer reaches. Pretty soon she came up with her cosmos-rattling result: the stars and the gas in the outer reaches of any galaxies she observed were rotating much faster than expected on the basis of the observable mass of these galaxies, and so should have been flying off into the surrounding void. But they weren’t, so either Einstein and Newton were wrong about a universal law of gravitation, or else what you see is NOT all there is. I.e., dark matter doesn’t just exist, everywhere, but a lot of it exists.

Dark Matter (I prefer the term in German, dunkle materie, which strikes me as more colourful) is an idea that dates back to the likes of Lord Kelvin and Henri Poincaré at the beginning of the 20^th Century. Evidence of dark matter had already been observed in 1932 by the astronomer Jan Oort within the Milky Way, i.e., our very own home galaxy. What Vera Rubin did was confirm this result in galaxies beyond our own, as distant and far away as you cared to look. As a result, she showed that Dark Matter cannot be explained away by some statistical glitch in the movement of stars in our galaxy. It is a momentous achievement, but it was not enough to win her the Nobel.

Why not? You might ask. I certainly do and it is pretty hard to come up with a plausible answer.

The Nobel Committee is a conservative institution, but it is not above the odd publicity stunt. The reputation of the prizes they dish out on a yearly basis are waning, so they need to stir things up. In this respect, Vera Rubin offered them a golden opportunity in our allegedly inclusive times. Her life story is not just one of scientific achievement, it is also one of a triumph against the sexism and the prejudice of her time.

She was the first woman to work at Caltech’s Palomar observatory, back in the days when there wasn’t a separate ladies’ toilet. When she attempted to enrol in Princeton’s graduate course, she was told women weren’t accepted. George Gamow, a renowned cosmologist, became her doctoral adviser, but she was not allowed to attend one of his lectures because “wives were not allowed”. When Gamow spoke to her, they had to talk in the lobby because women weren’t allowed in the offices upstairs. The anecdotes of discrimination against her go on and on. Later in her life, Vera Rubin championed women’s place in science and helped many young women to establish their careers in a man’s world. However, not even gender issues and publicity stunts were enough for the Nobel committee either.

So again, why did she not win the Nobel Prize? What, for example, are the criteria for the selection of nominees?

Nobel Prizes in Physics are only awarded if a discovery has “passed the test of time”. Which in the case of the Swedish Academy of Sciences amounts to around twenty years. Live fast and die young, by all means, but don’t expect to win the Nobel, and many big names in Physics who died young did not.

Vera Rubin presented her results on galaxy rotation curves in 1980, ie, 36 years before her death, so well within the Nobel Goldilocks zone. You therefore have to look elsewhere to explain her absence from the Nobel hall of fame.

Dark matter refers to a hypothetical type of matter that is non-luminous, ie, that does not absorb or emit light, radio waves, x-rays or infra red radiation. Observing this “luminous” radiation is what astronomers, most of them male, do for a living. So to be told by a woman that most of what is out there can’t be “seen” in this way knocked them down a peg or two. Rubin’s observations were not exactly welcome ones. Interesting,  but not welcome. Astronomers are human and, if you believe the winner of the 2002 Nobel for Economics, behavioural psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we humans, astronomers included, have a distinct bias towards believing that What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI). Not so, said Vera Rubin’s observations.

Hmmm.

Nominations for a Nobel Prize in Physics are currently sourced by the Nobel Committee by sending out confidential forms to be filled in by previous Nobel laureates. The list of nominations are kept secret for 50 years, so it will be a long time before it will be known who, if anyone, ever nominated Vera Rubin. As a result, one is left with the evil of idle speculation. It goes, roughly, like this:

Since the Nobel Prize for Physics was first awarded in 1901, only two women have won it, Marie Curie (who also won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry) in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.  Both are now dead. By comparison, over 350 men have won the prize (up to 3 people can win it every year). In other words, the annointed group that nominates physicists and astronomers for the Nobel Prize in Physics is a bit like a lot of golf clubs: men only.

Is that the answer to my question? Who knows? The fact remains that Vera Rubin did not win the Nobel Prize for Physics.

But prizes aren’t everything, are they? In a life as rich and productive as Vera Rubin’s, they ultimately mean very little. The call from Stockholm never came, but in the astronomical scheme of things, so what? It’s what you do that matters. And who you are. In both regards, Vera Rubin blew our minds.

Well, some of us anyway, albeit at the outer reaches of the anorak scale.

At the other end of the scale, people have spent the last months bemoaning the passing in 2016 of the author of the following lyrics:

There's a starman waiting in the sky
He'd like to come and meet us
But he thinks he'd blow our minds

Me? I wish I had met the starwoman.