Belief is an emotion after all, a characteristic we do not associate with it, at least in writing or expression. Its discussed sometimes as a fact, a proposal, an invitation but rarely as an emotion. At what point belief started to exist in human history is one of the great questions never asked. In fact still today when asked we will struggle to identify when it began to exist it in our personal lives. Sadness, Happiness, Love, Envy are emotions too, we understand them better because we have learnt to engage with them, in a methodical fashion, we have understood or agreed their causes and effects mostly. However, its the engagement that leads to valuable insights in our personal and social lives. An academic approach has so far yielded the broad science of psychology, behavioural sciences, economics etc.
However, the belief is not understood to be such an exact science, thus it remains largely un-contacted, exclusive and illusive. Although we have based so many large tectonic structures of our society on these beliefs necessarily we don’t understand them. The significance of such an undertaking can be as paramount as scientific method, emotional sciences seems like the closest term. The next great paradigm shift in mankind evolution may come from our emotions, its maybe an exact science or maybe not, but its worthy of exploration. Since we can break down our emotions into number of components for academic purposes, personal purposes, economic purposes, identify multiple correlations, make strategies, design global & local products, same is truer of belief because of its even more universal nature.
Belief is an emotion to which we are exposed directly because of social and emotional ecosystems we live within. One crude understanding of belief is that it’s natural and correct by the virtue of religion, through certain schools of thought and sometimes simply exist when compared against the sheer scale of mathematical probability of life, circumstance and survival. In another interactive approach towards belief, we can assume it to be an artificial/constructed emotion. An emotion that humans have constructed, developed or adapted to progress/survive. Maybe it was the belief that came to become a part of our intelligence that decided the differential course of our evolution from apes. By some chance or probability, we learnt it, or came by it and there goes the boom, what we today call the mankind. If there has been a big bang of emotional intelligence, consciousness then belief certainly has all the hallmarks and embodies quite comprehensively what we know about them.
Just as much the big bang has driven our Physics and understanding of universe, the Science of Belief offers the promise of understanding the intelligence and consciousness. It does not require some out of the world tools but simple Logic, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Social science, Political science, Scientific Method, one very specific physical measure which is Time and a composite tool called effort. A question, a hypothesis, an experiment, a way to record data, may be some new mathematics or some modern computing approach like quantum, nothing we don’t have yet or wont have. The age of quantum is here hopefully we have interesting problems to solve by then.
Neomodern 