I’d define belief as a mode of I-thou “seeing” or mutuality recognition.
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This is why seeing/being seen and “recognition” are such a big deal for humans. It’s shared entry into parts of the extended cinematic beliefverse. You see each other by recognizing that you’re each seeing the same thing. You’re now bound by universes you can only enter together.
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Sidebar, this is my elaborate explanation for Trump’s weird inability to “see” martyrs and war veterans. I don’t think it’s a moral failing. It’s a mental disability. You don’t have to be patriotic or altruistic to grok why people might risk their lives in wars for fellow humans.
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Whether you’re doing it for your buddy in the foxhole or for a larger egregore of patriotic feeling, you’re risking life for beliefs. Which are things shared with others. Completely not mysterious for a normal human. Trump is like a blind man who can’t parse talk of sight.
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This is also why it seems like a Trump has no beliefs. That’s because he doesn’t. He’s never entered the beliefverse. Only pushed buttons without understanding what they mean, because meaning rests on mutuality and belief.
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But you can’t say he exists in pure doubt like some idealized spherical philosopher in a vacuum, because to know doubt you have to have experienced, and recovered from, belief. As best as I can reconstruct what it is like to be in his head, it must be a sensory-aesthetic soup.
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Knowledge is far less satisfying than belief.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1302123436798435329?s=21 …
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The mathematician in the joke still isn’t living with knowledge alone. He shares the belief-concepts “sheep” and “field” with the other two. It can unravel way more than that.
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