Amos - how many filters can you afford to do away with before the mind recoils in horror? Just wondering

We humans build our maps of reality and using them eke out a rather meager, but comfortable living. When those maps start to prove false, we get upset for a while. If we're lucky and smart and perceptive and lucky again, we quickly adjust our maps and move on. If not, we borrow other people's maps (therapy and religion) or just sit still for a while (drugs).

Mostly, we look at the connectedness of things and try to find other connections. Sometimes we are willing to invent connections where there aren't any, if we need to or if it looks like fun.

I am nowhere near smart enough or intuitive to know which connections are real and which are not. I like paddymac's "statistical concepts relating to causation". It helps in some cases to be able to apply the rationalist's litmus test to our "map making". Keeps us walking that rope between "open-mindedness" and "gullibility" or between "literalism" and "skepticism". It helps to remember that our perception of what's going on (our current map of reality) is not necessarily what is actually going on (reality itself).

The one thing that seems to throw me completely is the question of faith. Belief without proof, regardless of experience, is a completely different kind of map entirely. We tend to want things to follow a set of rules and have limits. Even when those rules and limits are not obvious to us, the thought that they exist is comforting, in some small way. Faith is the willingness to admit that there is something beyond the reach of any rules and limits that we can formulate. It makes my head hurt.

To respond to Fmaj7's original thought: I don't eliminate any possibility, simply because I have no proof in my experience to support it. But I don't avow anything that is beyond logical proof. Some things you just have to let sit there in the various "possible bins" - possible, but not likely/probable, but not proven/improbable, but wouldn't it be cool if.../possible, but beyond the realm of our experience