on beliefs

I’m in a cafe, reading some text on Descartes for an ethics class. My laptop screen is cranked up to full brightness, and I’ve got thunderstorm sounds playing for complete focus. I’m easily flowing through the text, the words becoming images and emotions in my mind.

Then,

the track switches to rain sounds simulated to be falling on a tent instead.

It was really weird.

The transition was offputting and took me out of my groove, as my attention switched from the writings on screen to how this audio was now making me feel.

I consider myself to be an obsessively introspective person. It is not enough for me to acknowledge my own feelings, emotions, and thought processes — I must be able to understand them, know where they come from, and judge their goodness. As one becomes more comfortable with this mode of thinking you naturally start to introspect on your introspections, and then introspect on those, recursively, on and on forever. Almost immediately after acknowledging that the tent rain sounds were distracting me, I began asking myself why I felt distracted. To be clear, I was not thinking of any sort of sound perception or music theory, which would talk about the technical reasoning behind why the sounds were undesirable — instead, I was trying to get at some indirect answer by asking the inverse question: why were the original thunderstorm sounds not distracting?

A couple solutions might’ve immediately popped in your head. One is that, during thunderstorms, work/school is typically paused. While I enjoy school most of the time now (ugh, what a narc), as a kid this was obviously something that I would’ve celebrated about. Your responsibility, whether it was to go to work or school, or some other commitment, would be relieved of you; and so, that day would go on to be more or less relaxing and low stress. And since there would be a thunderstorm happening in the background, you’d associate those sounds with feelings of relaxation and relief.

There is, of course, the technical aspect. While I do not claim to have any proficiency in sound or music theory, I hope it is not absurd to say that rain sounds are similar in shape to white noise, which has (as far as I know) been shown to empirically and deterministically induce feelings of relaxation as well as dull anxieties and stressors. It can perhaps be said that this is inherent in the human psyche, that sounds of this shape can generally be said to be relaxing, independent of any emotional associations formed through experience, such as that mentioned previously.

This resulting duality is the same duality that I reason with when it comes to morality. In my reading I’ve converged to “emotivism” as the most compatible ethical theory to the beliefs that I hold. Essentially, I hold that morality is nothing more than an expression of our emotions, and that there are no “fundamental” moral laws that hold true universally beyond what applies to humans.

We can use the same categories formed earlier when we talked why thunderstorm sounds can be pleasing. Here, we’d have those moral beliefs formed via association, and those inherent within us as from birth, as humans.

Inherent beliefs are easy to think about, and I don’t think there is anything interesting to be said about these. They are embedded within us as heuristics that benefit us insofar as evolution and natural selection are concerned. Feces, spoiled food, and rotting carcasses both smell disgusting and look visually displeasing, because the people that didn’t feel these things died much faster to disease. The part of our brain associated with pain is activated when we are socially rejected, because the brains that didn’t tended to not collaborate, and died much faster. Food is delightful when it is fatty, salty, and sweet, and anything more than that is a rounding error, because natural selection doesn’t really care about all those other complex and rich flavors that are probably inconsequential to whether you live longer or die. As long as you didn’t eat the poisonous berry, you’re good.

Formed beliefs are a much tastier branch to munch on. These are secondary to inherent beliefs, and are a low-resolution, crude approximation of a belief that your brain forms because it’s constantly trying to get you to satisfy your inherent beliefs. Work or school may make you stressed because you might not be good at your job, or you might not understand what is being taught, and if you traverse the sequence of causes and effects you arrive at an inherent belief: social rejection, lack of food, etc. Thunderstorms can then tell a very different story depending on how your inherent beliefs are affected. If you are a student, chances are you’re delighted, or at least indifferent. If you are a worker depending on that day’s salary, then you look at the weather report with despair, and the sounds of rain droplets may not be as relaxing for you anymore.

It is in this line of reasoning that I (and emotivism) claim that there is no point to debating about morals. In this model, everything is downstream of inherent beliefs, and inherent beliefs are out of our control. There is no difference between a person acting on an inherent belief you find to be wrong, and them breathing.

What makes this interesting at all to talk about are two things:

Formed beliefs are mutable. They are affected by your experiences, and you control your experiences.

The line is blurry. What you may think is an inherent belief might be a formed belief.

It’s extremely fun to play around with your beliefs once this comes natural to you. Any feeling, however ordinary or mundane, can be subject to rigorous examination, and the results are sometimes incredibly amusing. I’ve long been aware of my aversion to the particular brand of cleaner that I use in my bathroom, not even because of how it smells — it’s lemon-scented, and it objectively smells good. No, the real reason is rather funny — it’s because bathroom cleaning is a chore!

People have known this for a long time with respect to prejudice. The solution to getting rid of prejudical beliefs is to simply give your brain the opportunity to wire new associations. This is why representation matters. It’s the same idea as the bathroom cleaner!

Think about all the beliefs that have restricted you, such as that you are not a public speaker, or that you are afraid of heights. Your brain is extremely malleable. If you can reason about your beliefs and why they were formed, then you can control your beliefs, and as a result, you can control your mind.