“But Dad, what do you believe?”. I’ve been discussing spirituality with my son, and we’ve just been through some ‘modern traditions’: Theosophy (inspiration of Mondrian), Wicca, Asatru and Crowley.
“I try to stick to my own experience. All I can really say is this: there’s definitely something funny going on …”
Not a satisfactory answer. We need to believe something. We can’t make decisions otherwise. A defining boundary between childhood and adulthood is that children believe their parents (mostly), while adults believe something else that enables decision-making.
I spent a year of my doctorate exploring belief. I started by reading about predicate calculus (“Logic”). The gist is this: One might have a rule that goes “Whenever X is true and Y is true, one may say that X is true … or that Y is true”. Is this true? Intuitively, yes, but prove it! That’s what predicate calculus does, but only if we make assumptions, like something can’t be true and false at the same time, etc. Very detailed.
There’s this joke: “A Physicist, a mathematician and a logician are travelling to a conference from London to Edinburgh. The train crosses the Scottish border, and they see a black sheep. The physicist says: “Look, all sheep in Scotland are black”. The mathematician replies: “Fool, only some of the sheep in Scotland are black”. The logician retorts: “Idiots – all you can say is that at least one sheep in Scotland is black on at least one side”. As I said, Logicians are different.
But you can’t reason with logic until you make “real” assumptions. You can’t say “all birds can fly”, and “Tweety is a bird”, and deduce “Tweety can fly”, without assuming that there are birds, something called flight, and something called Tweety. And “all birds can fly” is another assumption.
Everything we ‘know’ is just assumptions … beliefs.
Also, our knowledge contains many contradictions. Frege proved that if your knowledge contains one contradiction, then you can prove anything.
I managed to prove that it’s so hard to resolve contradictions, it would take us many lifetimes to clean up our ‘knowledge’ to the point where we could reason with it. But we can still reason … how come?
I wrote a computer program that could be ‘fed’ contradictory knowledge, reason with it, provide apparently sound proofs of completely contradictory things, quite happily … like us.
This is why I am so sceptical of the ‘academic rigour’ that artists are expected to apply to their work. There are a million ways of justifying any piece of art, given a brief and context … and our contradictory knowledge. It’s just pissing with proof, logical masturbation.
I do it – nobody takes you seriously if you don’t … but come on, folks, inject some reality here, stop pretending that this cognitive charade has any creative, or academic, value whatsoever: let’s get on with making stuff, doing stuff, and making the world a better place … which is what I really believe we should be doing!
