Maps

There is a map in the mind, a sense of how the world beyond our immediate experiences works. This is a map initially organized around very broad assumptions & continually revised by the experiences of life, though for some more thoroughly-developed maps the openness to revision may be slight. Where we can interpret our experiences as consistent with our map, we accept those interpretations more easily; where they disagree, we suffer cognitive dissonance or delusions of good and evil, with the good being those experiences our maps say we should be having, the evil a road that really shouldn't be there if we are where we think we are.

There is another guide available, an alternative to intuition as described above, and it is logic; this is the principle that a sufficiently detailed understanding of the road we've travelled so far will empower us to predict it's future course; not so much a maps as a principle of map-making(hypothesizing). In this predictive function it is immensely more reliable than uninformed intuition, just as local city maps are more useful for navigating cities than are world maps for navigating the same. City maps are useless outside of cities, however, and logic likewise fails us when we don't have access to data with which to make new maps. So we make up stories, fall back on the maps of our childhood; we dust off our intuition as it was developed before we got it hooked on logic, and wonder that we don't still have the passion for exploration & map-making we had as children.

I think that the human capacity for forming & revising models of reality, for usefully criticising our own belief systems & those of others, is gradually atrophied by conflating what is logical with what we believe, or worse, dismissing our logically-inconsistent beliefs as simply untrue. Because everyone's beliefs seem illogical when you aren't the person who had the experiences they're based on; when you don't have the data available to distinguish an ordered grid from a scattering of random intersections, judging truth by how apparently logical it is leads to framing most ideas as those of fools & liars. In a world where no one considers themselves either, this practice may breed conflicts.

God(probably not the first)

Our belief in God is the measure of how much our humanity influences our view of reality, of how much sense we think the world must naturally make. God, Maker of Sense.

He will exist, under one name or another, for as long as people seek control over their lives, as long as people care how experiments turn out and whether their loved ones live or die. He's the role-model we look to when we try to imagine a world different from the chaos we're given, when we look for a humane reason for events to have fallen as they did. Our first belief in anything about persons in general is an archetype; our beliefs in the capacities of people, including ourselves, stem from our beliefs about the character of God, our ideal person. Inasmuch as we try to live up to this character, we are reflections of it.

This is the close association of religion with social community, where both personal character and the character of others is judged by assuming a shared aspiration to the same ideal. This is the fear of outsiders, whose character cannot be so reliably judged, and in whose company our own identity is threatened. These are the one or several personalities our cultures all seem to deify, hold up as role-models to admire or vilify or choose among for guidance.

It's too simple to dismiss these imagined heroes just because they exist only to help us know ourselves. All the blessings and damnation of our world rain down alike from our ability to pull sense out of the chaos, and without doubt this will be the skill on which the final judgement of humanity turns. Our fate will be decided by the assumptions with which we make it: Whether we think the world a humane place, and seek to control it by being humane, or imagine it rational and seek to control it with better assumptions, our guiding light is the image in our heads of a person succeeding at our task, of how they would do it; it's only while we can't see a way to our version of success that God exists, because that's when he's still needed. As a reference point.

Light is a good metaphor here: It reveals more, the closer you get to it; the world is better understood as you better understand how a person could ever understand it, as you more closely sympathize your notions of Self and Creator. But it blinds one as a focus of attention; worshipping someone on the basis that they made You is nothing but finely-tuned ego-worship, as indeed is a life occupied with self-congratulation & self-forgiveness. We all need a better self to live up to, whether or not we ever find one, but a life spent on self-judgement is one spent cultivating biases in our assumptions about the world; it will never make sense as long as we believe it should to us as we are now, nor for as long as we think we understand God.

Stories

More and more, I find that the world people live in is not so much a reality to which we react, but rather a fantasy without a place for the findings of systematic research. The most relevant influences on our decisions aren't physical events, but rather the opinions of our peers & our likelihood of being excluded from our social groups. This is why holding a belief against the antagonizing influence of others is held to be such an achievement(once the belief becomes accepted truth, anyway): anyone can be alone and experience something only they know about, and thereby find belief, but an effort is needed to keep that belief in the face of criticism from others. It is this sort of perceptual integrity that is celebrated in the word "faith": the judgement of reality according to a non-social standard.

What we understand to be true is largely decided by those in power because taking such liberties with truth has always been the province of authority; we recognize authority by its confidence in describing reality to us, and truth as the utterance of those in authority. This is central to the success of theistic religions in spreading their models of reality across the planet: they were couched in the words of gods and deified prophets. To this day, it would seem absurd to find physical laws and mathematical formulae shared as freely as quotes of the famous. And yet these are the summaries we use to understand our world.

These are fundamentally different criteria for determining what is true, and each has it's virtues: where one has greater predictive power, the other is more satisfying. To say that one or the other standard should be satisfied exclusively, or even primarily, is to disregard their functions in favour of our own preferences & values. Humans like stories, and throughout our cultural history have described and remembered the world through parables & folk tales; if this method seems functionally obsolete when technology lets us study the nuts & bolts directly, it is nevertheless the one to which we are physically and culturally optimized. All the data & predictive power in the world is useless to someone stuck looking for a main character to identify with.

This perspective mutes, I believe, the arrogance implicit in the popular approach to treating science denial with greater science education; it isn't just ignorance that makes people dislike the methods of science. Students will keep asking to be shown the relevance of their education to their lives, keep asking what they'll ever use esoteric facts of chemistry for, because this is a valid criticism of being drilled with data absent any overarching themes or principles. Given the importance of such a network of associations to learning in general, it is unsurprising that the systematic presentation of knowledge to children only rarely produces adults who retain a substantial portion of their early education.