Belief Systems

Nov 30, 2021

4 minutes

Your subjective reality is created when you assign meaning to an external objective reality using your belief systems. When you change these belief systems, you are changing your subjective reality. MindOS is basically a collection of such belief systems that you can “install”(or as regular people call it, believe). The end goal is to change your subjective reality using these belief systems.

I’ve spend the last month studying about belief systems - and I have not been very successful. We don’t have a standard definition for the phrase “belief system”. So people use different terms to express what they mean. I have seen these phrases to describe roughly the same thing as what I mean by “belief system”…

Personal Philosophy
Stories - Yuval Noah Harari prefers this
Social Constructs
Religion
And many more.

Before we continue, since this an article about Belief Systems, and I’ll have to use the phrase “belief system” a lot, I have made a handy short form - BS. It’s also a helpful reminder of what any Belief System has a potential to be. 😉

Definition

I don’t have a good definition I can offer you all. I’m hoping that something will emerge over the next 4-5 articles when I study it in more depth. But for now, we can use this working definition…

Belief Systems are our mental models of how the world is and how it works. We have created these belief systems to better interface with the world. These beliefs can be(but not limited to)…

Definitions. Eg. The car I bought with my money is “My Car”.
An idea of how things work. Eg. If I push on the accelerator, the car will move faster.
Values. Eg. “My way of driving the car is the best way to drive.”
Predictions about the future. Eg. If everyone drove like me, we would be living in an utopia.

Objective vs Subjective Reality

BS can be about both objective reality or about subjective reality. To know which reality a BS belongs to, just ask yourself - Will reality change if everyone in the world changes their belief about it? If reality can change with it, it’s subjective. If reality won’t change, its objective. Take the example of Gravity vs Currency value. Gravity is not going to change even if everyone in the world believes that gravity is not real. But currency values are going to change drastically with people’s belief in it.

Subjective BS are created and reinforced by culture, society, experience and training. It works because enough people believe it.

My main goal with MindOS is to come up with a list of such BS - and find healthier alternatives to them. If enough people believe in the healthier alternative, the world should change in a way that is predicted by the BS.

Let’s take an example. Most of us work for a living. This is because we believe that only people who work should be paid. This has caused a lot of issues - many people who cannot work are trapped in poverty. Many are forced to do work that they hate doing. We can change this belief. Maybe something like people should be paid a basic income no matter what they do(or don’t do). If enough people change their belief, Universal Basic Income(UBI) will become a standard. It will solve a lot of problems that we currently have.

Emergent Beliefs

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. We have a matrix of BS - not just one. These BS interact with each other to create new emergent beliefs as well(which might be unique to each person). In the above example, someone might believe that people who don’t work are lazy. This will make it more difficult for them to change their belief to UBI - because that would mean we are “rewarding laziness”. Here multiple beliefs interacted with each other - and created a more complex belief.

Also, I don’t want to change other people’s beliefs. I just want to create a list of alternative beliefs - with their end goals(what is going to happen if enough people believe it). Let people choose what belief/future they want. MindOS will be a collection of such “ideal” BS.

To come up with a list of alternative ideal beliefs, we have to think how the world ideally should be. Then we can find what people should believe if that idea of the world should be the reality. Next we can codify those beliefs in a “install”-able format, and the people who want that world to come true can install them.

To enable people to change their beliefs, I might have to create a few more tools as well…