Believe not what is true, but what is helpful

In an earlier post, I wrote about Mark Manson and some things that he’d written that I’d liked.

One of them was: “Believe not what is true, but what is helpful.”

Wait? What?

Shouldn’t you always and only believe what’s true?

Maybe not.

What’s helpful?

There’s a ton of stuff packed inside that question.

Helpful to whom?

Helpful over what timeframe?

Helpful in what context?

What if two things are both helpful? What then?

What if we think something is helpful, but it turns out that it’s not?

Never mind that complexity. Let’s assume we have a good idea of what’s helpful.

What’s true

The only thing I can know is true is that I experience consciousness. Same goes for you. Anything else could be an illusion.

But certain things are more-or-less likely to be true, or more or less likely to be reasonable approximations of what is true. Should our belief be based on the degree to which something is closer to being true?

The way the universe works, what’s true is often also helpful. And what’s outright false is generally unhelpful. But that’s not always true.

Most of what’s true is irrelevant. Consider two galaxies. It might be true that one is older, or more massive than the other. But for our purposes, the answer is irrelevant. Believe what you want. Or believe nothing. It doesn’t matter.

Some of what might be true is currently unknowable. There will eventually be a correct (or roughly correct) answer to the question: “What will the be the temperature on this day, next year, at this location?” But we really cannot know what it will be. We might make some reasonable guesses, but the true answer, at this point is unknown and unknowable. And what I believe may not change anything.

But now consider the question, “Will I finish this blog post?” The answer is also unknowable. There will eventually be a true answer. Either I will finish it, and it is true, or I die, and it is not true. Does it matter what I believe? In this case, it does.

If I believe I will not finish it, then there’s little sense in continuing to write it.

If I believe that I will finish it, then Predictive Processing says that it’s not only a good idea to keep working on it, but my belief in its future state will cause me to finish it.

Would it matter if I believed I would finish it in the next ten minutes? Or in the next hour?

It seems to me that believing that I will finish in the next ten minutes is not helpful. It put me under impossible pressure. Or it’s something I ignore. In any case, it’s not helpful. So I believe I’m best off not believing that.

But it seems that believing that I will finish in the next hour might be helpful. It’s not necessarily true, but it does seem helpful. So I’ll choose to believe that.

Belief in God

Pick a God, any God. Do I want to believe that that God exists?

If I pick a God that demonstrably cannot exist—say one that’s in this room right now and visible to me—then I see nothing useful in such a belief. To the contrary, I now must explain to myself why I can’t see a God that I have defined as one that I can see.

But if I pick a God that can exist—say a benevolent and invisible God that will help me get this post done in the next hour—believing in its existence might be helpful. Writing is often a lonely and uncertain business. It makes me feel better to think that I’ve got some help. It might not be true, but it’s certainly helpful.

So I’ll believe in that God. And I’ll believe it helped me get this post done.

Sure enough! It’s done.

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