The greatest motivator of humans has been doubt. It isn’t in certainty because if you are certain,
you lose your reason to search. Why search for God, when god is handed to you on the silver platter
of Christianity. You needn’t search for the truth if you are certain you have the truth. If you are certain of
a particular fact, why is any search even necessary? You have the truth. For example, people who
believe in Jesus Christ and believe in his divinity already have the truth. There is no need for a search
for the truth if you already believe. You have the truth, why search? But if you have doubts, questions,
reservations, then you have a nagging hesitation to commit to a truth. For example, I doubted in god
and so I searched and searched and searched. I searched for 30 years and found…nothing.
I need not search anymore. I could devote my whole life to searching for god, but why? I think 30 years
is enough time to reach a conclusion. I have doubts about other matters and so my search will continue
on those matters. I have found as I have grown older, I doubt more. The truths that seems so clear
and right, no longer seem to be so clear and right. My days as a young man seem to be days of
clarity and certainty. So today, I search for…what? Today I see like I have never seen before, that
our answers are not single answers, such as the solution for immigration is building a fence. There is no
such thing as single answers nor are they single questions. Everything is connected and interconnected.
there is no one question and no one answer. Every question is connected to every other question and every
other answer and every answer is connected to every answer and to every question. You cannot separate
them out into neat, clean separate little piles. The question of god is connected to every other question
and to every other answer. The question of freedom is connected to the question of god and to every
question and every answer. You cannot escape this web of connection and interconnection of everything
to everything else. Look long enough and hard enough and you will see the universe is connected
to all the questions and to all the answers. That is why this little matter of philosophy seems to be so
hard because it is about the connections between everything. The meaning of life is connected to the
question of god which is connected to freedom which is connected to forms and the universals and to
technology which is connected to… and on we go listing everything. So we throw our hands into the
air and declare the matter closed to discussion because we can’t find our way into this weave of
connections. But I doubt, what if I am wrong and so I keep on searching for other possibilities.
So the dance continues between me and my doubt. I think I reach a place where I can rest
and allow a home to grow where certainty resides, a home such as god is, but doubt, doubt
forces me along and there is no home, no rest for honest searchers. Rest only comes to those
who settle for a certainty.
All stems out from the cognitive capabilities. First of all, it manifests curiousity, which further leads to other processes of acquiring knowledge, including doubt and faith too.
The only “motivator” for ALL humans is the Perception of Hope and Threat, PHT. Doubt is merely a small suspicion that there might be an unseen threat. All that is suspected as “going unseen”, proposes the perception of possible threat. Thus the hidden “dark world” of secrets and conspiracies are a threat to all life from which many turn away out of the subtle fear that they might actually exist.
As long as the act of seeing does not exhaust preception, and include other ways of ‘seeing’, as feeling, intuiting, dreaming, hope and threat may work in conjuction to create managable or unmanagable doubt. If the doubt becomes unmanageable, it means that threat has taken up more psychic space then hope, the economy of it has become unbalanced. Then constant checking becomes the modus operandi of trying to attain balance. The process is reductive, and can lead to the insight being driven out by constant and repetitive doubt, even under the most certain likelihood of the opposite.
When I say the greatest motivator, that is not to discount any other motivator,
fear, desire, hope, danger (among others) are also great motivators.
I use doubt because it is the genesis of philosophy and science and history.
Rome fell because the gods demand it. You have doubts about this version of history
and you study the matter and if you are Gibbons, you write a history of Rome. And someone
comes along doubting Gibbons version, so they study the matter and then write their own book,
and others also having doubts write their own books. Each books focuses on what the writer
believes to be the TRUTH and each book focuses on some aspect of the fall of Rome.
One believes it to be too high taxes and another believes environment/climate and another
believes barbarians invading cause the fall of Rome and another believes that lead poisoning
from clay pots and dishes cause the fall of Rome and what is the answer? All of these hypotheses
are right and partly to blame for the fall of Rome but that is the problem. The answer such as it
is not just one reason to blame for the fall, but many, diverse, often contradictory reasons
are needed to explain the fall of Rome. There has never been a true history book written because
to explain even a small event, many thousands of pages are needed to explain the true multitude of
reasons why an event happens. Everything is connected to everything else. The fall of Rome is connected
to the price of rice in China and to the amount of rain in England and to the level of lead in
dishes and to millions of other reasons. Some reasons stand larger than others in explaining
the fall of Rome and given all those possible reasons, we wonder (doubt) as to the real reason
Rome fell and we will never know as to why Rome fell because so many different possibilities
could have caused the fall of Rome. There is no one simple reason (cause) for anything
and no simple reason (cause) for any question or answer. And you doubt me… as you should.
Doubt will cause you to search for or suggest other reasons, for the fall of Rome and everything being
connected and we see doubt hard at work.
The hope in being sufficiently aware of truth is what inspires the essence of philosophy. Doubt only comes into the game as a tease produced by the perception of contradiction in prior accepted truth. Doubt has to be formed in the presence of existing concern for truth, else it does nothing at all, inspires no action at all.
The concern for maintaining a “true-perception” is what has always inspired philosophy. Doubt is merely a tool to bedevil a prior philosophy (whether it was accurate or not).