What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
Maura Pennington's very interesting post on the devaluation of the written word led me to a website I'd never heard of, and which I now have to studiously avoid because it's a time-suck of such epic proportions -- kind of like Facebook for people who talk about big ideas instead of about cat antics. It's called Edge. The central premise is simple: a Big Question is put out there and Big Thinkers weigh in with their answers. The questions range from "What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?" to "What have you changed your mind about?" and "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
The questions are all fascinating, but one in particular really grabbed me: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The first reply that occurred to me was "the idea that what I see as green is the same as what you see as green". Edge compiled 120 very interesting answers, including this one from psychologist Alison Gopnik:
I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. I believe this because there is strong evidence for a functional trade-off with development. Young children are much better than adults at learning new things and flexibly changing what they think about the world. On the other hand, they are much worse at using their knowledge to act in a swift, efficient and automatic way. They can learn three languages at once but they can't tie their shoelaces...
I think that, for babies, every day is first love in Paris. Every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide and seek is Einstein in 1905.
What about you? What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it?
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Feb '11
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
Judith Levy, Ed.
What about you? What do you believe is true even though you can't prove it? · · 10 minutes ago
Loads and loads of things - mostly genealogical. In fact, I shall be speaking on exactly that subject Sunday 17 March in Kiryat Tiv'on.
Mar '11
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I imagine they're talking about big ideas, but there's a whole class of ideas believed without any proof by even the most sceptical of thinkers, even though they are not often acknowledged as such.
They are called axioms. They are the fundamental facts which we believe to be true, accept as true, place at the foundations of entire structures of knowledge, yet which are incapable of proof.
Jan '11
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
That was the Big Question from several years back. Here's my answer anyhow: that the United States would have been better off under the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.
May '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I believe, but can't prove that if everyone thought like I do, the world would be a better place and we could all get along.
Seriously though, the Alison Gopnik quote is lovely and I find it likely. As a religious sort of person, I would add to that the idea that children are more attuned to the spiritual because they have just come from the presence of God and haven't yet become deadened, blunted and scarred by the influence of the world on their souls (which is also why they cry a lot).
Sep '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
In Romans 3:4, the Apostle Paul wrote:
Let God be found true and every man a liar.
I believe both propositions but can only prove the latter.
Dec '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
That the function ζ(s) has all its nontrivial zeros on the line s = ½ + it.
Sep '10
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I believe the recent widespread use of LSD and hallucinogens have brought unprecedented cognitive abilities and spiritual knowledge to humans directly and through cultural transmission, and that in the future the phenomenon will be acknowledged as a singularly transformational element.
I believe the Universe is filled with life and some of them have been here. I believe there was some technology existed in the ancient world that involved the use of stone and megaliths and that the prevailing theories of our current civilization being the most advanced to date on earth are wrong.
Oct '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I just started reading this year's question "What should we be worried about?" This quote from an contributor puts it nicely:
"One is the world of the objective content of ideas, in particular of science as a body of knowledge, of actual and possible scientific theories, their truth or falsity, their refutability, tests passed or failed, valid and invalid arguments, objections met or unanswered, crucial evidence deployed, progress achieved. Darwinian science has high status in this world of objective knowledge as perhaps "the single best idea anyone has ever had". And, probably uniquely in the history of science, it is unlikely to be superseded; biology will be forever Darwinian—for natural selection, it seems, is the only mechanism that can achieve design without a designer. And the Darwinian understanding of human nature is a straightforward implication of that core insight. The first serious attempt at a science of ourselves … and, what's more, it's most likely right."
Everybody's fear comes straight out of this point, impersonal forces can destroy us or moral/immoral choices from flawed human beings will bring catastrophe down on us.
Aug '11
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
Show off.
Oct '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
From above...
The smartest among us are the most stupid, believing in faith that human insight plus random chance is all we have to keep us alive and existing as a species.
The writer's quote: "-- for natural selection, it seems, is the only mechanism that can achieve design without a designer..." shows how limited so many of the posters/contributors vision really is.
She doesn't want a Designer but she fears the future without one, especially since the great unwashed are not worshiping at the altar of human intelligence like she and her compatriots are.
Sadly her essay, which begins with a treatise on Newton's statue at the British Library, is the best obituary for the failure of the Enlightenment, which held such promise for humanity. It devolved to the Hobbes 'law of the jungle' when it forgot the simple insight of the Deists, there is a God out there, and we can discover how the watchmaker made the universe.
Throw away belief in a higher moral being then yourself, and the mess of our society is what you get in return.
Edited on February 20, 2013 at 1:43pmSep '10
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
People have no objective ability to hold a conception of "time". This is why as we age, we feel time moving faster. When we are 10, one year is one tenth of our life (or really more considering we don't begin to conceive of time until around age six) When we are fifty years old, one year is 1/50th of our conscious life and therefore considered smaller and hence "faster".
Aug '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
To your point about color. I had a pair of sweatpants in college that I thought were green and my roommate swore were grey.
Aug '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I believe that my dog and tell more about what is going on around him using his nose, than I can using my eyes aided with a microscope and binoculars.
Oct '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
That my mother and father would never abandon/disown me no matter what I did.
Mar '11
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
Franco: I believe the recent widespread use of LSD and hallucinogens have brought unprecedented cognitive abilities and spiritual knowledge to humans directly and through cultural transmission, and that in the future the phenomenon will be acknowledged as a singularly transformational element.
I believe the Universe is filled with life and some of them have been here. I believe there was some technology existed in the ancient world that involved the use of stone and megaliths and that the prevailing theories of our current civilization being the most advanced to date on earth are wrong. · 31 minutes ago
Oh man, Franco. You went ahead and dropped the brown acid anyway, didn't you?
Jul '12
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I guess number one for me would be the existence of God and the believe that Christ died for us. We've got evidence, but no proof. Luckily, neither does the other side.
May '10
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I believe quantum mechanics is an amazingly useful and predictive theory, but it's wrong.
I believe eating fat doesn't make one fat any more than eating brains makes one smart.
I believe Barack Obama has contempt for 99% of Americans.
May '10
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
I believe if cats were big enough they would eat their owners.
Sep '10
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
Percival
Franco: I believe the recent widespread use of LSD and hallucinogens have brought unprecedented cognitive abilities and spiritual knowledge to humans directly and through cultural transmission, and that in the future the phenomenon will be acknowledged as a singularly transformational element.
I believe the Universe is filled with life and some of them have been here. I believe there was some technology existed in the ancient world that involved the use of stone and megaliths and that the prevailing theories of our current civilization being the most advanced to date on earth are wrong. · 31 minutes ago
Oh man, Franco. You went ahead and dropped the brown acid anyway, didn't you?
What acid did you drop?
I hope this thread has more promise than this. so far there are a couple of interesting ideas, a couple of jokes and a couple of declarations that have been out there for centuries and nothing new. (Not necessarily wrong, but not new) So this brown acid comment as best as I can tell is mockery and display of ignorance. "Fire is a bad thing because it burned my sister", said the caveman.
Edited on February 20, 2013 at 2:31pmOct '10
Re: What Do You Believe Is True Even Though You Can't Prove It?
Almost everything. Even things I knew how to prove - the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees - I can't any more. I can't prove my parents are my parents. Others may be able to perform the appropriate DNA tests, but I can't prove they did them correctly, or that such tests actually prove what that say they do. I believe all sorts of things about the human body and nature and physics and chemistry - but I can't prove them.