3)  BELIEF SYSTEMS

A belief system is a set of ideas which a person holds to be true.

Let’s take a simple case: “I believe that the fruit on the other side of the river is better.” This involves 2 concrete items, the river and the fruit, and a judgement, more delicious. Even animals can and do have this belief system.

Abstract items. “I believe that if I am bad, God will punish me.” Bad is a relative term, so it depends on how I define that. And God may be real to me, but I have never seen or talked to him/her. And what form might the punishment take?

The brain of all animals is designed to make sense out of sensory inputs. Experience teaches and in the case of the river and the fruit, it is pretty simple and fairly quick to learn and can lead to crossing the river.

But when the cause of an event is unknown, it doesn’t stop the brain from coming up with an explanation. And how I connect the dots depends on a lot of different factors. But it doesn’t matter, because once I am satisfied with my theory, it becomes one of my belief systems.

There are simple belief systems like “God is Love” and complex like my metaphysics. It depends on how much thought I want to put into it, and how much I want it to come up with varied solutions to a complex series of events. Personally, I like complex.

And this is where we humans are differentiated from other animals. It’s not tool-making, language, empathy—those have all been found in animals. What makes us unique is that we can come up with abstract belief systems and communicate them to others. We seem to be the only animal that can do that.

The brain of all animals can generally handle knowledge of only about 50 to 100 other individuals. That’s why groupings of monkeys and American Indians accumulate into tribes with those numbers. We come to know some as friends, some as untrustworthy, some as giving, etc. We can handle those numbers and we can trust some of those individuals.

Trust is important in order to get anything done, otherwise you are so concerned with security that it makes any kind of leisure or progress difficult. From a concrete standpoint, an animal learns which individuals in its own group can be trusted. But animals from another group, well you just don’t know, and therefore they cannot be trusted.

Another piece of information about the brain has recently been discovered, and that is that once we form a belief system, we tend to agree with evidence which support our belief and disbelieve the evidence which doesn’t.

So how did we as humans develop technology while other animals have not? It is because it takes a rare combination of abilities to create something new in a subject, and that combination is usually not found in any numbers within a group. To work together to share ideas and leap-frog each other with advances requires trust.

How did we do it? Abstract belief systems. If we can find someone from another group that shares our abstract belief, or can be taught it, we tend to trust them, and then we can cooperate with them. So all of a sudden, the number of people we can trust shoots up, and voila’, cities, states, and technology.

By the way, did I mention that the belief system has to be true? Not at all, just shared—whether true or false, positive or negative, crazy or sane, or healthy or unhealthy.

An obvious candidate for a belief system is the god or gods worshipped.

Another one is money: if I give you a piece of paper which you cannot eat, that piece of paper can be given to someone else to purchase food. Most people in the world hold that belief system, which makes commerce possible and travelling easier.

By the way, they have found some members of some intelligent non-human species which are capable of understanding and using money. I think it was a crow which learned to collect coins from one machine to take to another machine to get food. Needless to say, the crow had trouble passing that knowledge to others. But you never know. We should be grateful though—what if crows learned to steal wallets and purses?