The Knowledge Problem (Part 1)
"Believing is not knowing"
What you cannot know, you must believe (in)
or
You must have faith in what you can not know
To wit:
From Amoebae to AI:
The laws of nature and mathematics are set; to be recognized, not made up.
These recognized laws (not man-made rules!) must then be axiomized (set into words), expanded and formalized to be communicated horizontally (among others) and vertically (through history).
For this, the formalization must be kept stable (even when new data or methods will forever change the outcome).
The laws of nature and mathematics may remain the same; but changes in the surroundings recant your prerequisitions, setting up the fallacy of assumptions trap.
The knowledge problem
The so-called "knowledge problem" arises from the fact that you cannot automatically predict the future from the past, as this can be done only if one assumes that the past is a model for the future; that what was correct to assume in the past will be correct to assume in the future.
And this cannot be proven, only assumed, therefore believed in.
As an example, go back (if you can) some 15 or 20 years and ask yourself if you could have, at that time, predicted the future as it is now (and keep in mind that in certain sciences, such as meteorology, predicting non-change is not considered a prediction; only the correct prediction of a change is counted as one):
How many changes that have taken place in the last 15 or 20 years did you foresee, based on your then-knowledge of the past, and how many future changes can you predict now to take place in the next 15, 20 years, based on your by now expanded knowledge of the past (and if you’re not, why are you not betting on these changes taking place on the stock market)?
Since you cannot know, you must believe or have faith that the presumptions under which you perceive the situation today will remain unchanged in the so predicted future.
However, you cannot prove that the future will be like the past - you need faith to assume that: faith and hope in the sufficient consistency, constancy and continuity of your surroundings to keep your assumptions valid (and not render them invalid).
Indeed, you are forced to believe this.
Otherwise, you could not live, as a conscious being, for all the freaky things that might - just MIGHT - happen to you at any single second of your life - from suffering a stroke to stumbling over an untied shoelace to having ghosts, demons, and outer space aliens appear to probe you.
For, as we have seen, over the centuries, millions can be made to change every aspect of their lives due to injections of hope and fear into their minds - which are no more that altered assumptions due to a (new) belief.
People are in such need of an anchor in their mind that are ready to believe another human (or anything impersonating or posing as a human) blindly and without a doubt, up to the point that they (consciously or unconsciously) will accept even multiple 180° turns, and assertions of the opposite of the narrative up to this moment (‘well, I guess things have changed now, so I'll trust that person with that…’) - even though, being human, they KNOW humans will lie to further their gains, and have probably experienced it themselves, which probably was what brought them to their current object of absolute trust in the first place.
You can not know that the universe is going to be stable in the future just because it has been stable up to now; these things are beyond any creature living within its confinements. It must be believed.
Does this mandate a belief in God? No… but a non- existent God cannot lie to you, and an existent one won't (or else he would be Satan, the impostor and impersonator); so he's a pretty good bet, either way (if you seek the truth).
That being so, something in our evolution brought this forth, and, observing the results, the belief in God and the distinction between good and bad as between God and Satan could be the more benign concept in the light of our self-preservation. Especially since we cannot preserve ourselves.
On the other side, dying or petrified end cultures caught in a cul de sac always have turned to sacrificing the ones that could not fight or run away, offering them to a deity of choice to achieve the unachievable. Ut aliquid fiat!
And what was once the vision of an apocalyptic End of the World for the Sins of Humanity in the old religious world, today has become the fear of such an occurrence in the scientific one, notably conjuring up the very same ancient visions of Fire and Brimstone (or burning sulfur) embedded in the human mind; perhaps both a reminder of us living on a ball of molten rock, which can indeed be prompted to break surface and burn all, and corresponding to traditional visions of hell.
On the other hand, this necessary faith in the consistency of your surroundings is what causes black swans to appear and all sorts of societal upheavals to occur, where, after the event, everyone will honestly be thinking "We never would have deemed that even possible, because 'never before' did it happened in this way."
And then (with some precautions in place) believing it will never happen again - such as, say, a Third World War, assumes that:
these precautions will work in the future because they COULD have worked in the past, had they only been implemented then and that
people will even remember the past - even though that turns to interpretable history in one short generation of, say, 50-70 equally short years, which is a long way away from 'NEVER again' and that
society will not ever change in any such ways as to counteract these assumptions - say, with a new technology - and, or, maybe even with new false assumptions, expectations and hopes.
And furthermore, there is no way of telling if you yourself are mad, or sane (and thus capable of discerning reality as far as is possible) now, or will be then, collectively or individually; for, how often has it been stated, after some horrific deed, that he (or she, or we, or indeed “our peoples”) must have gone mad?