Funny how I just replied to bookish’s concerns about belief, then less than 12 hours later, I read the below. I thought my teamates might find it interesting given all the introspection going on about beliefs to write these essays.
The human being acts at almost all times not according to direct perception of the world around him or her, but according to his or her beliefs, at that moment, about the world. These beliefs provide the context for each person’s action, for our perception, and for our ideas about how the world is. The beliefs that we have about the world form layer after layer of preconception, prejudice, or bias. This bias is not a bad thing or a good thing, it just is so. It is the nature of the human and perhaps all perceiving organisms.
The universe, as we, the ordinary men or women of the street, know it to be, is a contextual belief system. It is taught to us gradually by explicit instruction of our parents and teachers, by what we read and by everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch around us. And what we believe the world around us to be profoundly affects the way we perceive and experience that world. Thus the two, our beliefs and our perceptions form a tightly interlocking system of mutual feedback and support so that we could just as easily say “I will see it when I believe it” as “I will believe it when I see it.” We perceive only what we already believe to exist and we perceive it in the way that we believe it to exist.
- Jeremy Hayward, Shifting Worlds Changing Minds, p10
