Reality Tunnels: On Faith
If you understand and accept the Reality Tunnel model then congratulations, you get to skip over the apparent problem (“What’s, like, actually real?”) into the real problem: “What ought I treat as though it were actually real?”
It turns out that we’ve got a wide variety of cultural institutions that have spent thousands of years coming up with compelling arguments in this space: many religions have had to grapple with the question of “But why should I believe something that gives me no evidence of its truth?”
And the answer that they arrive at is Faith.
If you’re a religious person, I’d like to ask you to take a moment and think about what exactly faith is and how it works. I don’t mean the high-level functional answer — “well, it lets me believe without evidence” — but rather the underlying mechanical answer.
If you’re not a religious person, that’s okay too. You still practice faith, but you haven’t necessarily thought about it in those terms. As we’ll see below, faith is not something unique to the religious domain — and the sooner we come to understand that, the sooner we get to liberate one of the most powerful human cognitive faculties from the problematic domain where it seems to live and into our own toolboxes, ready to be applied to any number of secular problems.
Pick some proposition that has the following two properties: (1) you have no evidence whatsoever to support it, and (2) you want it to be true.
For instance, I believe that our reality is a computation. I think that deep down, once you zoom past quantum mechanics, you’ll find a very simple cellular automaton whose basic rules give rise to the complexity of the universe in all its splendor.
I have no evidence to support this claim beyond a vague feeling. I like the elegance of it. Nevertheless, it’s very easy for me to act as though it were true. I can accept and believe this claim, and I’m here to tell you that it’s faith that lets me do that. It feels “true” to me in a way that “the world exists on the back of a giant turtle” does not.
Now pick another proposition, but this time instead of something that you want to believe make it something that you don’t want to believe. Similarly you should have no evidence to support it, no easy way to confirm that the proposition is true or false.
For instance, let’s pick the belief that your best friend is planning to betray and rob you. Years of friendship have all been a long con — or maybe they loved you once, but now you’ve got something they want and their kindness is all a ruse. As soon as they can secure whatever it is they’ll leave you in the lurch.
Is it easy to act as though this proposition is true? Can you slide this claim into your active reality tunnel and maintain it? It feels…wrong. Right? Trying to have faith in something that you don’t want to be true has a specific kind of feeling, a sort of cognitive dissonance, that we don’t get when we’re trying to have faith in something that we want to believe.
Hmm. Weird, right?
If you’re a religious person, is your faith more like the first example, or more like the second example? I’d be willing to bet, pretty strongly, that it’s like the first example. Your faith allows you to believe something that you want to believe, because you want to believe in a just God running a just universe, right?
(I mean, we can get into Abraham and Isaac and God testing peoples’ faith — but all he’s really testing, in every story, is whether or not the person being tested will make the choice to continue to serve him. He’s offering a choice, and we are meant to understand that rejecting god is always the wrong choice, even if he’s asking for infanticide, right?)
But ultimately if you didn’t want to believe it you wouldn’t bother with faith at all. We never seem to use faith to explain what we don’t believe, do we?
So. How does faith work? Faith, like all magic, works because the faithful want it to. That’s it. Faith is nothing more than the choice to accept a given reality tunnel.
Robert Anton Wilson observed that we have different terms for this phenomenon:
When I was first taught “hypnosis,” it was called “guided meditation,” and was supposed to be a sort of synthesis of psychoanalysis and Buddhism, bringing one rapidly to the bedrock of consciousness. Then I was taught it all over again, but it was called “astral projection” and was supposed to be literal journeys of some literal “ego” outside the body. — Robert Anton Wilson
The single most important underlying characteristic of this practice, whether we call it faith or guided meditation or hypnosis or marketing or cable news, is that the audience is willing. No guided meditation will pierce your refusal to meditate; no hypnosis will overcome your skepticism. Nothing they say on MSNBC will change your mind if you only trust Fox News.
So I think we’ve got a bit of a problem in terms of how we talk about faith. We’ve let the religious folks define it because we’ve allowed ourselves to believe that it only exists in the religious domain. But if this examination is correct, then there’s nothing mystical about faith at all. Faith is just a choice.
And we’re really good at thinking about choices, right?
At the beginning of this essay I suggested to you that the central question is “What ought I treat as though it were actually real?” That “ought” wasn’t an accident — faith, it turns out, is a choice; and every choice is a moral choice.
The real meat, the Big Idea I want you to take with you from this essay, is just this: that if you get to choose what reality you live in then it’s incumbent upon you to make that choice within whatever moral framework you accept. It’s not a passive, accidental happenstance unless you choose to let it be one.
And now, you can never accidentally make that choice again.
Reality is yours: use it wisely, use it kindly, and use it well.
