What Actually Are Beliefs? This Is A Simplified Explanation

Beliefs are tricky. The philosophers, they scrambled to interpret them. The psychologists, they tussled to describe them. The scientists, they tried to spell them out. Beliefs are good. When they’re good. Beliefs are bad. When they’re bad. But what actually is a belief? Which are good? Which are bad? Why? We throw the term around in conversation with insulting disrespect. We need a better understanding. Ready?

Beliefs, Defined

“A subjective attitude that something is true.” Broken down, beliefs are mental states, stances, takes, or opinions about things. Typically, they span propositions, concepts, and states of affair. Philosophers use them to refer to “attitudes about the world that can be true or false.” To believe is to take something to be true. Psychologists see them a bit differently. They err on the scientific side. According to the logical psychos, beliefs are “forms of mental representation” and “one of the building blocks of conscious thought.”

Hereafter, we’ll go with the psychology-oriented definition. They serve to save energy. Mental models which allow for shortcuts in navigating the environment. The brain hates work. Repetitive and taxing work, especially. Stuff you have to learn, calculations, planning, complex analyses. So it opts to not do the work whenever possible. Saving glucose-hungry neurons, the lazy thing in your skull is happy. One of the ways it does that is by forming mental representations. Beliefs.

Decisions, Dumb and Smart

They are your brain’s preferred way to make sense of and navigate complex environments. The representations are the ways your brain expects things to go and how those things relate to one another. Regard them pre-made molds. When you’re met with a proposition, concept, or state of affairs, the brain gets to work. It scans the proposition, concept, or the situation. It parses it in, trying to fit it to a mold (”representation”) encountered in the past. If it finds a match, it moves onto the next step.

Because the brain is a heavy consumer, it evolved into an equally prominent saver. Shortcuts, they come here. The supercomputer ate up everything it’s information agents threw at it. The eyes with their retinas, the tongue with it’s tastebuds, the ears with their eardrums, the nose with it’s olfactory circuitry, and the body with it’s senses. Recognizing a pattern allowed it to distill that complexity, categorize data, evaluate it, and jump to conclusions. These can be bad or good. It depends.

This Caused That

Beliefs are links between events. Causes and effects. If somebody did A or A happened, and B promptly followed, A must have caused B. They can be simple or convoluted. If A says B is true, and A cannot be disproven, B must be true—the “cannot be disproven” argument is laughable and often used in religious debates (sorry!). By virtue of these shortcuts, the brain interprets our world for us. It connects dots and fills in gaps. It makes extrapolations and assumptions based on the information available and past experiences. Would be fine, if not for one detail. The brain has preferences.

Preferences and partiality mix with rationale and impartiality like water and oil. Hasty assessments based in proclivity. See where I’m going? Error. Failure. The brain can fill gaps that don’t need filling and see patterns that don’t exist. Things like fallacies, biases, and, yes, maladaptive beliefs form. It’s a trade off. You get fast and efficient, you pay slow and effective. Efficient is okay, quantity-oriented, not nearly as accurate. Effective is excellent, quality-centered, not nearly as fault-prone. Neither is better. Sometimes you need pace, sometimes you need space.

You Live An Illusion

Since we experience the world through our senses, we find it difficult to grasp how these perceptions can be distorted. You and I might protest. But it’s true. Your reality is your reality. Your experiences are your experiences. Things aren’t necessarily as you see and feel them. The brain automatically layers expectations on perceptions and warps reality. This is because the most energy-efficient way to handle new information is to fit it into an existing mold. So that glucose-devouring mush of electrical fat beneath your skull does just that. It doesn’t reconstruct each frame from scratch. It takes your current situation and fills in gaps.

In other words, what you see is fake. A carefully crafted illusion. And you trust it, every bit of it. This is why schizophrenia is a problem. The imagination is a strong and creative force, and we believe it. It’s why movies and novellas work. We know the slasher or demon can’t jump at us with their chainsaw or sorcery or gnawing teeth. Yet we get an adrenaline rush, because they fit a mental representation of something threatening. What you see is not what you see. What you see is what you believe.

Don’t Change!—Sincerely, Your Brain

What you believe isn’t always what you want to believe. But change isn’t always easy. Rarely is. That’s why we pay experts to lend us a hand. You call them therapists or whatever. Anyways, segment your brain into two parts. Primitive and simple, modern and complex. The primitive maintains physiological homeostasis—a state of equilibrium, resistant to change. Breathing. Heart rate. Blood pressure. Temperature. Appetite. The physical realm. Keeps the body in check.

Whereas the modern concentrates on psychological homeostasis. Keeps the mind in check. Does that via, you guessed it, beliefs. Modern brains like learning and adapting, but they love retaining. Saving energy, remember? Thus, just like the primitive serves to avoid change, so accordingly does the modern region. Translated to human: change is hard. Restructuring your belief system is effortful and time-consuming. Not for you. For the thing up there. It engages in higher reasoning processes and calculations and… It prefers the opposite. This is why we avoid change even when we’re wrong—it’s easier to argue and explain or just ignore the contradiction.

Who You Are

Another reason that change is difficult is because beliefs are intertwined with who we think we are as people. Our identity. Our self-concept. They are part of how we represent ourselves. It feels great to act consistently with what you believe. And we chase that alignment. Constantly. We rationalize, justify, argue. We go to embarrassing lengths to preserve a self-image. We invest lots into our belief apparatus. It’s not rare to find people who structure their entire life around one belief. Think: the environment, a religion, the earth being a goddamn disk floating across space… Someone’s entire career, personal, and familial life might be belief-centered. No wonder we pick to stay the same.

Do you believe what you believe? No-brainer. Of course. You do, right? Maybe. Maybe not. It’d be more accurate to say you believe a cumulative hodgepodge of things previous humans believed and passed on for thousands of years. A lot of what you believe is formed by parents and other authority figures. Then, as you grow, the culture and environment seeps into your psychology to help you make sense of the world.

Choose Your Belief Former

Sometimes a persuasive authority or compelling concept causes us to override our frameworks. A social movement or attractive ideologue can fundamentally change the way we interpret things. Manipulation. Such cases are especially bad when they affect the younger audience. Childrens’ and teenagers’ identities are still forming, and therefore plastic. When they are enforced and exploited to uptake certain beliefs, these can have cascading effects for them later in life. Examples include attitudes about religion, money, fame, race, age, and demographics.

This is where science comes in. Science is the art of proving things wrong. Akin to the opposite of beliefs. Beliefs are intuitive. Science is not. Science is strict, rational, and disciplined, whereas beliefs are vague and irrational. The scientific method saved us from ourselves. Humanity’s progress is in large part due to discovering just how wrong we were about so many things. The more scientific and scrupulous you are in your thinking, the less errable you are as an individual. Try it. A dash of critical thinking won’t hurt. Science is evidence without belief. Belief is evidence without science.

What We Learned

In the end, beliefs are complicated decision vehicles which allow our brain to save energy and maintain a psychological homeostasis. Maintenance is easy. Reform is difficult. Change is hard. You now know what beliefs actually are. Why not attempt to challenge them? Prove yourself wrong. More often. “Reality is that which,” says Philip K. Dick, “when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”