Victus Spiritus

Faith to me is far from unquestioning belief. It's highly correlated
to hope an both cause the most impressive miracle of all, animation.

What motivates you?

You have faith in your own reasoning, you trust it. Faith is night
always blind, faith can and should be earned.

Define what faith means to you and let's iterate

Faith is belief without reason, either deductive, or inductive. If you can deduce something, then it is true, given the hypothesis. But how about the hypothesis? Well, those induces from hypotheses, which ultimately come from the sensory information we gather. How do we know we can use reason to discover the truth? This is taken as axiomatic, but, consider what existence would be if you fully rejected this axiom: you would very quickly die (rejecting your senses, and all your knowledge based on inductive and deductive reasoning would make you ignore all of the world's hazards). This of course is based on knowledge gained via reason. Ultimately, you may say that the reasonable man still holds the hypothesis that reason is the proper means of gaining knowledge, which I can accept.

You might call it faith in this epistemology, or you might call it adhering to our own nature. The important thing is that it works: it is self-consistent, it works to better our lives, and master nature. Great things can be accomplished, and understood.

Contrast this with the faithful man: beliefs are unfounded, can't be contradicted by reality (because perception of reality is rejected as a means of gaining knowledge), the knowledge leads to nothing, is randomly obtained, with wildly varying results for different men (notice how religious texts never seem to agree that a god from the other side of the world is the true god), and gives man no control over nature. It's interesting that people prop faith up as superior to reason, given that most of its accomplishments are horrific, and at best a waste of time. Sure, some people pretend that miracles occur, but they never have any real evidence. Making shit up doesn't really help anybody, including ourselves (though some might argue that making up religions and suckering people into giving you money is a selfish deed, I would say that a person who lives off of others by conning them in such a way lives a miserable existence).

Hope and feelings don't change reality. They can motivate you to a course of action, but unless that course is navigated by reason, you will surely get lost and end up somewhere other than your desired destination.

haha, great comments. don't sweat the typos.

Seriously you should blog again. Your comments are fully blog posts in of themselves.

I agree with pretty much your entire line of reasoning except for one question on this last comment of yours, “Hope and feelings don't change reality. They can motivate you to a course of action, but unless that course is navigated by reason, you will surely get lost and end up somewhere other than your desired destination.”

Where does your desired destination come from? Where is it's source? Is it reason? Why do you distinguish between hope and action? Without motivation there cannot be life. Why do people feel a need to create, or to imagine. Where's the logic in that? Why do we dream? Some of these questions are difficult to drill down to bare rational essentials.

Compare our* state of understanding of the universe now compared to a hundred years ago, 500 years ago, and a few thousand years ago. Given our love of technology (we'll fuel it's research for some time), how far will our ability to manipulate ourselves and our environment go? We may discover truths about the universe that touch upon the foundations of reason, and the blurring nature of matter, energy and information. It'll take some wild leaps of science to get there.

note, *= the scientific accepting community which may be a small minority

The primitives are fun, hunger, need for a warm home,etc. Then belonging, human connectivity and socializing. But our hunger for something new, our curiosity appears to be unquenchable. The source for that “hunger” can be labeled rationally as an evolutionary advantage. We could hypothesize that incurious folks would die out over time, and there may even be some evidence to support that floating around. Maybe too curious people die out over time too.

While we are biological machines, by your admission you believe in free will. Yet we can't prove it, we just feel that we have choices. That our consciousness grants us the ability to be more than the sum of chemical signals and binary neural transmissions.

How do you feel about complex adaptive systems as a representative model? I got stuck trying to work out the information content of human DNA in an old post because of the growing nature of sequence information over generations.

“The wheel was designed assuming the surface it rolls over is mostly flat”

Not the wheel's on Y.T.'s skateboard in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (favorite novel of Union Square Ventures). The skateboard wheels would sense the ground surface and their spokes would adjust their length accordingly to provide a smooth ride over broken ground.

If not, I can mail you a paperback of it. Let me know.

Yeah, he wrote that too. I liked The Diamond Age, but the best book of his that I read was Cryptonomicon. Highly recommend that one.

Okay I should've added that the I liked your post as well as you two guys duelling on an abstract plane. Neo & Morpheus, kind of

Thanks JP, Seth's a big inspiration to where I'm at now. He was generous enough to wish me luck on my first ebook last year, 3 steps to satisfaction which is a collection of early posts. I plan to do another, when time allows, with professional assistance (Ars Vox on my blog).

The words we use confuse us. My use of faith doesn't match your dictionary. It's better that I try to elaborate precisely what I mean, as in trust, gut instincts, experience with certain outcomes, etc. Those are all different than faith, but in my brain overlapped which painted a confusing picture for you.

Absolutely agree here Mark! When you get past the youtube-style comments and see the really high quality that can come out in the after-article discussion a completely new understanding of how important readers are to a website becomes visible. ^_^

I rely on commenting threads for most of my information these days.

I'm on the same wavelength here Mark. I believe that faith is the logical outcome of our race's development into social animals. The base fact is that in order to function as a society, we MUST have faith in our fellow man to be truthful, dependable, etc… Indeed, our rise as the dominant species on this planet could not have been possible without assumption and reliance on things that rarely change.

In the contemporary world, we have an excess of energy. This excess of energy allows us to spend time and effort examining things that in the past were assumed to be true, because proving the validity of such things required much effort and energy expenditure. As we were able to provide more food and time for ourselves, our ability to question our faith and assumptions has gradually allowed us to develop our science and technology.

Thus, Mark, your post is 100% spot on in that questioning assumptions and faiths we assume to be true (because someone successful says so, or otherwise) is the path towards the future.

I think it is very liberating to look at things with a critical eye.

What about sectioning off a portion of the victusspiritus site for guest bloggers and/or community articles?

I hadn't considered the freedom we have in reviewing assumptions, but this keen insight explains why I enjoy doing it so often