The Importance of Agnosticism and Evidence-Based Reasoning in Scientific Inquiry

Scientists should remain agnostic, quantifying evidence for competing theories to pursue truth.

### Deconstructing Belief: A Scientific Perspective
* 🔬 **Belief** is explored as either a potentially debilitating commitment or a space for productive theoretical exploration.
* 🤔  Identifying with theories hinders truth-seeking; a scientist should remain **agnostic** when multiple explanations exist.
* ⚖️  The speaker emphasizes quantifying agnosticism by measuring the weight of evidence for different theories.  For example, the hypothesis of a sentient creator lacks sufficient evidence.
* 🚫 While the existence of a creator can't be mathematically disproven, the lack of evidence leads to zero confidence in its truth.
* ✨ The human tendency towards symbolic meaning and self-importance is discussed;  "the universe is actually about you" is an example of such a belief.
* 🤔  These perspectives are explainable and don't require rejection; instead, they should be examined objectively.
* 🧘  The speaker advocates for a state of **sobriety** when evaluating theories, free from emotional attachment and epiphanies.
* 🧪  The process should involve examining models, evaluating supporting evidence, making predictions, and considering implications without emotional bias.

I would start out with deconstructing the notion of belief here. What does it mean to believe something? Is it a

commitment that is going to diminish you if you were to give it up, or is this uh, just a space of theories that is

productive to explore? Yeah, so I think the former notion is problematic to me because it means that if you were

confronted with a theory that explains the same phenomena better, and you feel diminished if you adopt the theory, you are

less likely to be truthful. And so, as a scientist, I would reject the identification with the content of my

theories.  This is a very brittle vector; as soon as you add other vectors into the model, like things that you prefer to be true

and that you negotiate the facts against, you're not going to end up at truth as soon as things get more

complicated. So, uh, to me, I think that when we have several possibilities in front of us, we

don't have the freedom to choose one; we have to remain agnostic, and we also have to quantify our agnosticism, which means

we have to measure the weight of the evidence for the different theories. And so, for instance, when you think about the

mythologies that we are sometimes presented with—for instance, the idea of a sentient Creator being that produces

physics—based on the evidence that it's being written in a book and propagated by powerful institutions of people that

are very, very certain, um, right—what is the evidence for that being true? I cannot, on first principles, rule out that it's true, right?

Because I don't know how I could make a mathematical proof that it's impossible. But, uh, so it's it's a space of theories

that I'm not going to cut myself off from. There is a path into this space of theories; there's just no possible

evidence for this hypothesis, which means I have zero confidence in these theories being true. And this is the way I try to relate to

this. But we have this powerful pull towards symbols, you know, uh, who's buried below the obelisk? You know, you know that

it's always you, you are the chosen one. There is this deep meaning that is calling out to you that tells you that

the universe is actually about you; the universe is your consciousness coming into existence, or everything that happens here is a stage, uh, in which we

enact every person as hand puppets from our own, um, godly perspective, right? I think this is, uh, explainable how we

would get to these perspectives, and we can have lots of theories about them. It is not necessarily belief in any of them;

it doesn't mean that we have to reject them. We can just look at them; we can examine them. We should not have emotions

about them. And this emotion, this sense of, uh, right, the sense of epiphany, this sense where your pupils dilate because you are

connected to your source of meaning—this is the opposite of the state of sobriety that we need to strive for when

we look for truths, right? It doesn't mean that we have to reject any of these theories; it just means that we examine

them without any emotion. We just look at them as models, and then we see: where does this model get us? What is the

evidence that supports this model? What are the predictions that we can make from this model? Could this be the case? What

Deconstructing the notion of belief - @THENAKEDDIALOGUE

Joscha Bach Bits

Deconstructing Belief: A Problematic Commitment?

Questioning the definition of belief: Is it a commitment that diminishes upon relinquishment, or a space for theoretical exploration?

The problematic nature of belief as a commitment hindering the adoption of better-explaining theories.

A scientist's rejection of identifying with theories' content for objectivity.

The brittleness of theories when personal preferences interfere with objective truth-seeking.

The necessity of remaining agnostic and quantifying agnosticism when multiple possibilities exist.

Evaluating Evidence: The Case of Sentient Creator

Analyzing the evidence for the existence of a sentient creator based on its propagation and institutional support.

Acknowledging the inability to definitively rule out the possibility, despite lacking evidence.

Maintaining an open mind towards the theory without granting it high confidence due to insufficient evidence.

Addressing the human tendency towards symbolic interpretations and self-centered narratives.

Emotional Detachment and Objective Analysis

Explaining the appeal of self-centered narratives and the need for objective examination.

Advocating for examining theories without emotional attachment or a sense of epiphany.

Contrasting emotional responses with the necessary sobriety for truth-seeking.

Treating theories as models to be evaluated based on evidence, predictions, implications, and potential validity.