My belief system is similar to a jigsaw puzzle.
Not every piece is likely to fit together, and I'm not sure anybody's entirely does.
This is going to be a really long article. I'll try to keep things compartmentalized.
This will also be updated frequently. Many of the most hardened beliefs are actually rather fuzzy when pressure tested. The mere act of self-analysis is likely to refine my beliefs as they are reviewed.
Here are the pieces of the puzzle.
Foundation: Science and the Lense of Interpretation it Creates
Imagine all of the beliefs someone would hold if they truly cared during science classes. If they spent a large amount of time consuming scientific media. Amd consequently placed a great deal of value on the truth.
Before you can understand any of my beliefs, you must understand that they sit on a foundation of, and are filtered through, broad scientific principles:
- Anything I believe needs to be falsifiable. If something proves a belief to be wrong or mistaken, the belief must be modified or rejected.
- My beliefs should be based on reproducible evidence. Other people should be able to verify in good faith any evidence I claim.
- Anything I believe should be as logically consistent with itself and as many of my other beliefs as I can make them. If two of my beliefs don't fit together, they should either be modified, rejected, or spurn careful examination of other beliefs.
- My beliefs should also logically extend as far as possible. If I believe in something, I should believe in its logical endpoints as well.
- And finally: should a foundational premise turn out to be wrong, all beliefs dependent on the compromised premise must be revised.
With those principles established, a broad point needs to be made:
I am a human, with human limitations. I can't review, test, or confirm every single piece of data in the world.
For a large majority of my beliefs, I place trust in scientific institutions, peer review, and expert opinions.
This is not a perfect system. I certainly will have overly simplistic understanding of countless specific topics.
With that out of the way, here are some general scientific consensuses (consensi?) I believe in:
- The Standard Model of particle physics.
- Cosmology and its timeline for the universe.
- Biology and its timeline for evolution of life on Earth (Where I live.)
- Geology and its timeline for Earth
And so on. Basically if something is an established field in science, whatever consensus experts in that field agree on is what I'm likely to agree on.
Metaphysics
(Foreword: The majority of this hinges on the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics being valid interpretation of reality. The rest of it hinges on time actually being an illusion. If either of these premises turns out to be falsified, obviously I've got some rethinking to do.)There are two components of my metaphysical model. Realspace, and Informationspace.
Realspace is specifically what we perceive to be physical reality. Atoms, quantum interactions, fundamental forces, and all of the emergent phenomena that we can observe going all the way up to the entire observable universe.
Informationspace is much, MUCH larger, and is composed of every single set of information. This is every idea ever thought of, every conceivable and inconceivable system of rules. All possible states of information systems. The entire universe of Mathematics is a mere grain of sand in the vast desert that is Informationspace. If something can be expressed as information, it exists in Informationspace.
With those specific ideas out of the way, some important interpretations I hold about them:
In Realspace, I believe that the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is valid. This means that I believe that wave functions don't actually collapse, and that ALL states of the universe branch at every single quantum interaction. And that they all exist simultaneously. The Universe is a ridiculously, inconceivably complicated hyper-tree, containing all possible quantum branches all existing simultaneously.
Also in Realspace, I believe that time is an illusion. I believe that the perception that anything changes is due to humans having biological brains that operate on mostly one-way chemical interactions.
An analogy I like to use: If you draw an arrow on a piece of paper, the arrow is not moving. It is merely pointing in a direction. (add picture of arrow here)
The entire timeline of your life already exists, as well as all possible quantum branches. Your entire past, present, and futures already exist. You only perceive time because all of the chemical interactions are arrows that point in a certain direction. Nothing is actually moving or changing.
Just like the arrow on the page.
Back in Informationspace, I believe that all informatino already exists. Nothing ever changes in Informationspace, you can only discover more of it. Examples of this are mathematics. If you can come up with identical axioms, then even physical reality can't change the consequences of those axioms. Different alien species should arrive at the same conclusions.
2+2 = 4 in all universes. Because 2+2 = 4 already exists in Informationspace, and anyone who comes up with math will eventually find it.
Putting it all together, nothing ever changes, everything already exists in both Realspace and Informationspace.