Don’t let your Belief System keep you from the truth

I’m having coffee with a friend when he mentions the book “Thinking, Fast And Slow,” by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky’s work on decision making. Amos, alas, missed out by way of being dead.

Since our memories are notoriously inaccurate, bad, incomplete, and even … well, largely fictive, I won’t vouch for this portrayal of our conversation, but it goes something like this:

My friend opens by telling me, “I just finished a book called ‘Thinking Fast and Slow.’ ”

He always forgets the comma in the title, but never mind that, as my response is not what he expects. I rudely break in, “Hey, great, I was wondering when you’d get around to it. I’ve been wanting to reread it and I loaned it to you months and months ago.”

“No you didn’t. I just picked it up at Hastings.”

And that’s enough of that, as you know as well as me how this sort of thing goes, and I’m (just barely) smart enough to drop it and say, “Well, I’d like to read it again, so can I borrow it?”

So I’m having coffee with a friend – I know, I know – and he hands me this paperback and I say, “Great, thanks, the one I loaned you was a hardcover but I don’t care which I have.”

I don’t sometimes refer to myself as Idiot Boy for nothing, you know. Repeat above conversation with added heat. “Don, I KNOW you didn’t loan me that book because I keep track of them (and I wish you’d put your name in books you give me) and periodically take them in for store credit, and I’d remember it if you had loaned me that book, especially in hardcover.”

Ah, there’s the rub, as I just ran hard aground on the reef I call RBS, or Rigid Belief System. Or, so, so conveniently, Real BS. As I put it in my unfortunately-yet-to-be-published metaphysics trilogy, “Belief systems – or BS (naturally) – are of two types: provisional and rigid. If provisional, they accommodate reality, i.e., change in accordance with change. If rigid, reality is seen as fixed (at least in regard to that BS), and it is but a short leap to certainty, that this reality is all that there is.”

Skipping ahead a few pages, “If belief is an acceptance of something that one regards as true, then if something is true, one should believe it.

“But to accept something as true is not to say that what is accepted is true. Likewise, even if something is true, it need not be accepted. This reveals the basic nature of belief and belief systems, namely, that they may or may not be valid. Think of the difference between valid and invalid belief systems the next time you run out of the toilet paper that you know you have.”

And think of all your own Big T “truths,” God being the biggie, of course. Then think of my friend’s email to me with the heading, “Memory Loss.”

So comedic. So human. So tragic?