Certificates of certitude

I feel like I need to try over on yesterday's post. Based on a couple of comments I received, I'm not sure I conveyed what I was thinking appropriately. That's quite topical, since the inherent unknowability of an an author's thoughts was an example I touched on. It's also abundantly clear to me that the closer we get to trying to communicate the nature of subjective experience and the internal workings of the mind, the further we get from consensual reality. Everyone's mental model of themselves is quite different, I expect. I suppose that's why science concentrates on outer jointly perceived phenomena. The inner phenomena are just as real, but are not subject to the usual tools of science.

So, returning to yesterday's post, let me proceed by analogy. Imagine that statements about the world that have been entertained by the mind are pieces of paper, perhaps with the statement printed on them. Some pieces might say "The sky is blue," "That person is a friend," "I once went to that restaurant," etc. Now I posit that there is a mental faculty that staples a certificate of belief to certain pieces of paper representing statements that the mind has determined are true. This certificate may come in different strengths ranging from absolute certainty to scant possibility. This is what I think goes wrong in schizophrenics, or one of the things that goes wrong. The certificate of strong belief gets wrongly stapled to various thoughts. In some ways, this may sound like a simple problem to deal with. Just stop believing the thoughts with that certificate. My analogy makes that sound rather easy, but I think that the certificate of strong belief is a hair's breadth apart from the strong belief itself, almost identical. If you have a strong belief that something is true, almost by definition you can't disbelieve it, and how do you distinguish the correctly labeled thoughts from the incorrectly labeled ones? What if your whole mental model of the universe has become so distorted from the repeated malfunctioning of this certificate system, that there is no objective way for you to sort out which thoughts are true from which are false?

Yesterday, I referred to "flashes of insight" that sometimes occur for me as a similar phenomenon. My mind attaches a certificate of strong belief to something which I probably couldn't explain or justify in words. I think that sometimes I am right, but it is clear that I am not using a secondary system of judgment to analyze whether the belief is true. I am just trusting the certificate that manifests as absolute certainty in my mind. For me these episodes are rare enough that I could always take the strength of the belief as a warning sign that I should look at it more closely, but what if dozens of strong beliefs were flooding my consciousness daily? Then it wouldn't seem unusual.

Another example of an incorrect certificate occurs with memory. When I was younger, I absolutely trusted my memory. Those memories came with the certificate of belief, so I didn't mistrust them. As the years have passed and I have seen what a fluid thing memory is, I now realize that memories cannot be fully trusted. There's plenty of science to back up how memories change over time, similar incidents get consolidated, roles get revised, etc. It's also almost universal that every time I jointly recall an event with another person there will be significant differences in what we each remember. These memories only have a certificate of moderate certainty for me though, and they are always distant memories. The certificate attached to them is not nearly as strong as the certificate attached to, say, the belief that I am now typing on a computer. It would be well nigh impossible for me to disbelieve that.

So in summary, perhaps a workable model for how belief works is that there is a mental system that attaches certificates of belief to thoughts representing the level of one's belief. I haven't really gone into how that system makes its decisions, which is surely highly complex, but it is just as surely preconscious. Indeed, the fact that it is preconscious makes it difficult to autodiagnose that it is malfunctioning.