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Published: 2011-05-18 18:10:26 +0000 UTC; Views: 4762; Favourites: 225; Downloads: 59
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[link]Believe nothing (but understand as much as you can)
I was inspired by this video
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Jack Namaste : [link]
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Comments: 77
somehow i agree...i think, understand look more wise than believe since believe can blinded...unless just use one side understand to proof believe is true...i think that different case
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I don't see anything wrong in believing (you are free to believe in whatever you want), as long as it doesn't reach the level of extremism.Β
Of course, there is nothing wrong with understanding, either. It is essential that we understand what's going on around us so that we can live our lives without problems (yet there will always be a problem since mankind lacks perfection)
Belief can lead to understanding, too, and isn't necessarily a religious belief. It can be any sort of belief.
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'Follow your strings through the fog, for you cast them there, they are yours, but do not make others follow them, for they did not cast your strings, and are so rendered blind.'
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Yep. True that.
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I wish all of my friends could understand this...
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What about questioning yourself? What to believe in when you do that. And sometimes that has to be done, cause the people who never question themselves, tend to make bad decisionsΒ
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Of course. I'm not a "god",if I was,I'd off myself,& I don't believe in suicide,unless you're already terminal. That is why I love learning. Knowledge,is a great way to continually push yourself forward,instead of remaining stagnant.
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So, should I "believe" this is good advice?
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No, but you can consider it.
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Words to live by. THat said, belief in and of itself is not bad, so long as it does no conflict or degrade understanding.
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Great work my friend. 
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Skepticism. Making the weaker argument the stronger by means of "our understanding will always change."
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Oh this I like very much. Faith is way overrated.
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This Is Very True. I Also Like The Style You Did It In!
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A strange supposition.
Understanding both precedes and is prior to belief?
Should I think that the method by which we use to understand something most completely is understood before we even leave on that path?
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Yes! Thank you for saying this. Too bad most people who read this post won't see your comment... it is absurd to think understanding can be reached without belief. Believing that you don't believe anything - you just "understand" - is just another way of trying to convince yourself that your beliefs are superior. Oh well!
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I think the message of this quote is meant to be simpler than that.
"Believe Nothing" = Be skeptical, avoid being bias.. Obviously we all constantly need some sort of belief in order for function/guidance, keep going with it if it's working for you BUT keep in mind that the current assumption MAY be inaccurate.
Β "Understand as much as you can" = Try to understand as much as you can.
I'm guessing thinking about this quote in a "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" is not a relevant question. The quote is more than likely meant to open people's eyes. We are being deceived by many, what we believe, what we are told, might not be true at all, that we should seek more knowledge for truth.
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ha ha, yup. At least they believe that they know they're right.
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I mean "precedes" and "is better (higher)" than belief
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your fine artwork was featured here:
[link]
and here:
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would be very nice of you, if you could fave the news for more attention...
have a nice weekend
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Agreed. Keep an open mind and understand how others thing and behave , and be informed on the goings-on of what's happening around you. But sport a healthy skepticism so as to remain objective.
Your meaning may deviate somewhat from mine, but I think they both fit into the same train of thought.
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I think its a fallacy we can reach understanding without belief. Every scientist is in the business of deciding which associations are accidental, and which essential. With induction, conjecturing, in deciding what questions to ask and what constitutes a valid answer, we're incorporating experience/data/empirical evidence... but the way in which we do so necessarily depends on prior assumptions.
For example, existing language "entrenches" us in particular ways of categorizing the world... I may say all emeralds are green, and use that to guess that any emerald I see in the future will be green... but what if my language didn't have the word green, but only the word "grue", which meant green before a certain time point and blue after that time point... since the emerald has always been "grue" in the past, I will guess that it will continue to be "grue" in the future... but this means I'm making very different predictions, because I'm starting from different concepts.. this stuff is discussed more articulately in Nelson Goodman's "Fact, Fiction, and Forecast" -- a book I highly recommend!
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Yes, I agree with you that every understanding has a bit of belief behind it. However, when it comes to getting rid of that belief because new fact come up, one can distinguish religious and scientific belief.
I am not sure I agree that your example with green and blue is a right one. Surely, if we merged two colours into one in our naming conventions, something would have to change it our perception. Language is a limited means of transferring information, but it is based on our biology and our needs for how we understand this world and how we pass that understanding further. If we did indeed merge two colours together, it would mean it wouldn't make sense for us to call them separately anymore. In which case naming a green thing to be green-blue would be correct for purposes of science. That said, I do believe that true understanding transcends words and therefore language. And we have to count with that when trying to say something about the present or the future. However, as long as our current language is enough to predict future well enough for our needs, i don't think it matters how the words we say structure the world.
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"Surely, if we merged two colours into one in our naming conventions, something would have to change it our perception. Language is a limited means of transferring information, but it is based on our biology and our needs for how we understand this world and how we pass that understanding further. If we did indeed merge two colours together, it would mean it wouldn't make sense for us to call them separately anymore. In which case naming a green thing to be green-blue would be correct for purposes of science."
Precisely! Cognition in general is a process, is inherently temporal - it's state in any moment depends inextricably upon its state in previous moments. This is why I doubt that understanding can ever transcend language - language brings us to an understanding, but what understanding we're brought to depends - at least partially - upon what language we acquire - and how our language changes depends upon our understanding on the world - and what we observe - there is an interdependence between these three processes, and I'm guessing they can never be completely disentangled.
It is as it is in bayesian statistics - the more data you have, the better your posterior probability, but no matter how much data you have, your posterior is always sensitive to what the original prior probability distribution looked like.
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Ok, i see what you mean. I thought you were originally implying that understanding is BASED on our language capabilities. I agree with you then - both understanding and information transfer depend on each other.
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WOW ! that just summed up what I've been trying to figure out for a while now! well, took my belief and put it into a sentence for me - y'know what I mean! thanks
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So if I understand correctly, you believe that we should believe nothing, but understand as much as we can?
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close
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I watched it. Cute, though not a very strong philosophical argument.
The point I was trying to make is that you cannot avoid beliefs.
Since knowledge can never be verified, all purposeful action must implicitly implies a belief that said action will have a desired effect.
To deny the belief in something is to believe its negation. To 'believe nothing' is self refuting from the onset because in order to comply to this dictum you necessarily cannot believe in the dictum itself, thus undermining the validity of the dictum in the first place.
Such a statement is paradoxical and falls under the sub category of self-referential paradoxes.
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Also, even if all knowledge could be verified with 100% certainty, you'd have to spend your life verifying it personally, and you probably wouldn't confirm 0,001% before dying.
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If this was the case, then even for posterity's sake it will be an honorable occupation worthy of life long dedication. At least that's my humble opinion.
Not all men get the chance to reap the fruits of their labor, that in itself doesn't make the end result of their work any less sweet.
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Personally, I think it'd be a foolish occupation, a waste of energy and resources that many have already spent before (unless this person found peace through such work, that'd be an honorable cause). It would be better to accept the already found knowledge and use it to solve current mysteries. Sooner or later, either a genius will come that will see the errors in the widely accepted facts, or our new findings and experiments will give us a clearer answer and allow us to reject fallacies.
My values are a bit different. After I die all my knowledge will go to waste anyway and then I won't care about what happens afterwards (as no-one will). But a belief in helpfulness to a greater cause is a good thing to go by.
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People simply like to kid themselves that if they don't follow a religion, or have loose morals, that they're somehow higher beings than their fellow humans. They're performing their duty for the almighty "mind" and "reason", and it is a true duty that every other human being should strive for, even at the cost of their happiness. But in the end, it's an ideal that's no more unaffected by human subjectivity than any other idea. And after all, if we believed nothing, we wouldn't have morals, aspirations, theories. Or belief that people should "understand but not believe".
In the end, we can never be certain of anything, neither of the information fed to us, nor the way our brains process it. Even if we were somehow to understand everything (impossible feat imo), all of us will be looong dead by then, so it really doesn't matter. Science has been rewritten so many times that it's odd how obsessively some people hold onto it. Not to mention that the results aren't always unbiased and the media through which you get those results likes to skew it somewhat.
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