I had a discussion recently with a Christian friend of belief. Personally of course, pondering the process of believing is more curious than the content of any belief. So you won’t find me debating the existence of God, for instance; my question would be rather: How and Why does one believe in a God, or gods? Even more basic questions lurk deeper about the belief-in-words process our mind uses to formulate its belief in God (or any thing else) in the first place.
It is striking how faithfully we believe the reality of the words we use to think our beliefs. We trust word meaning ‘religiously’, unquestioningly, blindly. Words and names are like pillars of preconception from which we build and maintain the temples of our beliefs. (Even writing these observations now requires an underlying belief in the meanings of the words I’m using to express these observations. I must at least temporarily believe in word meaning in order to think about thinking.)
Debating the merits or qualities of a particular belief is like debating the merits or qualities of any product. Unless you test the merits and qualities of the materials used to build the product, you can never really resolve things. Take, for example, bridges and the concrete used to make them. You must inspect the integrity of concrete itself to truly know the integrity of the bridge. Otherwise it remains simply an aesthetic issue: What about the bridge feels ‘good’? Do you ‘like’ the bridge? Is the bridge ‘beautiful’? Do you ‘believe’ in the bridge? Like concrete for bridges, words are the material we use to build the beliefs we think, so let’s poke around there and see what turns up.
Origins of word meaning
Word meaning is the foundation upon which we learn, preserve, and pass on our culture’s world view (religious or otherwise), yet we seldom inspect the integrity of this foundation. Why do we so readily accept word meaning on faith? Perhaps because we’ve been ‘learning’ (conditioned) from birth. We never get another way[1] to experience awareness. Word meaning becomes a self reinforcing ‘virtual reality’. Believing in the words with which we think leads to believing what we think, and visa verse.
It is fairly clear that emotion plays a huge role in word meaning. A baby, before it learns the ‘correct word’ to express emotion, expresses emotion in babbling and crying. As a baby learns word meaning, it uses words to begin expressing its feelings. As we mature into adults word meaning becomes second nature; it is a closed loop where feelings lead to words which re-enforce feelings. The blind faith we have in word meaning lies in its connection to our primal sensory and emotional experience – feeling.
Consider the basic emotions common to all animals, especially those with more developed nervous systems. Word meaning emerges from such primary emotion. The illustration below depicts this.
At the core, the thread that ties all living things together is the sense of attraction and repulsion. The push pull dynamics of this play out at all scales, from amoeba to the people. Both non-thinking animals and humans are generally drawn to what gives pleasure, and repelled by what is painful. Need for something pulls us toward; fear of something pushes us away. That is the mechanism that makes survival possible for all living things; in nature, feeling need and pleasure indicate a survival advantage; feeling fear and pain indicate danger.
Speaking of feeling
Many animals express attraction and repulsion with vocalizations. Humans are the only animals we know (so far) that have honed such vocalizations into extensive cognitive vocabularies (names and words). For example, if something stimulates a sense of pleasure, I’ll be attracted to it. Up to this point, the duck and I are no different. When I think or say, “I love that, it is good, it’s beautiful, it’s right, I want more of that,…”, etc., I’ve converted the raw sensations of attraction into words symbolic of that experience. The same applies to repulsion; feelings of repulsion and fear become linked to words: “I hate that, it’s bad, it’s ugly, it’s wrong, I want to avoid that…” etc.
Naturally, life seldom feels like a simple choice between what we are attracted towards and repelled by. Often we are torn between the two, or different parts of the two. For example, “I love the sun, I hate to get sunburned; I love meat, I hate the way they treat animals; I love cake, I hate being overweight;…” etc. And so we spend most of our waking moments in a kind of tug-or-war between varying degrees of cognitive stress. Imagination pulls and pushes us. We long for a future; regret a past; long for a past; fear a future; want to have our cake and eat it too. The power of thought comes with unintended consequences. As it has been said, ” To know yet to think that one does not know is best; Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.” ‘Thinking that one knows’ leads to the difficulty caused by inferring too much reality in what are merely figments of our imagination. Stress then ensues around imagined needs and fears.
Well, I’ve beaten around this bush-of-words long enough. So far, I’ve found correlations the only way to actually get to the bottom of word meaning, otherwise it is just going around beating the bush in circles. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. It just helps knowing that’s the way it is.
[1] LSD and similar chemicals can shake the foundation of word meaning slightly, but this always comes with more adverse and unintended consequences than it’s worth.
