The Tao Te Ching opens "The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name."
Sometimes you see an author with great ideas trapped in metaphors of the past. They break through a new way of thinking, and then, when these ideas are adopted and commonplace, and a new generation founds new laymen on this "new right way," the author appears to be a relic of the past, standing on crumbling pillars. Their jump from one frame to another is coarse, neglecting the intricacies of a new way of thinking but thinking so much further. Their critics jeer at giants for the folly of forgetting tippy-toe measures. All are "wrong" in the face of a million voices with the benefit of time to denigrate even those who gave us the most. Anyone who has ever lived is "wrong." This is why Socrates says "I know nothing." Nietzsche suggests, this is like dancing on the edge of an abyss. A swirling abyss of possibilities tangles and confuses. To abandon all belief, to consider all possibilities, it is more than could be asked of anyone.
So I have taken on this experiment, to try to know nothing, to believe nothing. She says, "too depressing." This is only in expression, and because of how the expression is tied to other ideas. We generally want to know something. We think it is "good" to be "smart." "Good" to "have" some mental capacity. Obviously Socrates "knew" to eat or how to walk. To know nothing, and to consider it a good thing, in this sense, it means to be open to all possibilities. To be open minded. To consider everything that could happen. To not be tied to lies of the past. To let go of false dreams. False idols. False ideas. To improve. To understand. To never stop learning. To continue. To pass go and collect.
You might "know" that grass is green or that the sky is blue, but a great painter must see beyond these lies. Don't freeze to death because you think a chair is for sitting. Do you "know" what a bike looks like? If you've never tried this, try to draw one. The idea is that there is always a deeper story there. There is more of an explanation. If you think you have understood something entirely, that is the same as dismissing it, as turning it into a tool in your head. It stops working on you and changing you and helping you grow, and it becomes another thing, limited, with no story, forgotten. A closed book. A conversation tabled forever. Static. Unchanging. Dead. To know is the death of to learn, and to never know is to escape death of all things in life. To box a concept in a word and to never consider it again, there is no worse fate for it.
The reason people believe anything then, that people accept this death, is because it's simple. Take a spoon for example. Unless you make them or collect them or have something in your life related to spoons, it's not so important to consider the make of one or the type of metal or the scratches in it or the shape of the scoop or handle. It's a spoon. You eat (potato?) soup with it, and move on. If you unbox a spoon, and you forget what it is, and you examine it with every ounce of your mind, and then you try to do this with everything in your life, you will go crazy. The mind cannot handle all this. There is too much in the world. You must ignore the spoons and the forks and the chairs and opposing political ideologies and perhaps your own political ideologies, and compress the world onto a name that you can file away in your brain just to live. Though, to forget that label can be changed, that what beneath it is more than a name, it's to be blind to it.
From Richard Feynman's father "You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing-that's what counts."
Yes, it's exhausting. Though, the black swan of a brick wall in the road as you go 70mph into it is not stopped by the good feelings of a smile on your face and the sweet taste of iced tea. So why not try to see? "So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see." I don't want to "know" things I know are wrong.
There are many ways to believe nothing. One way is that you aren't confident enough to commit to an interpretation. Another is that you are open to understanding more. The former is weakness, and the latter is strength. To be willing to tie yourself to an interpretation, for the benefit of others to understand you, that is a kindness. To hold onto "truth" out of a sense of pride, it is stupidity and fear and laziness, a weakness of spirit, and it is the brutal exercise of power against the weak. To be afraid to admit mistakes is the real lack of confidence. To fight for what is right, even if that means abandoning a belief or learning, it is to bring about an improvement of the world without making people wait for death to steal away the lie with your breath.
When we don't put a box on ourselves, we arrive at a surprising conclusion. Rather than "I am X," it becomes "I am" or "I am who I am." Don't limit yourself. I am open to all interpretations about myself. If I believe I am smart, then I may not accept that I make a mistake. If I believe I am stupid, then I will not push myself to improve. If I believe that I am happy, I may not remove what is draining my energy. If I believe I am sad, then I will not look at the little things. If I am tense, I will not relax. If I am free, I will not work. If I am an adult, I will not play. If I am a child, I will not be serious. If I am late, then I will lose opportunities. If I am early, I will not rest. If I am rich, I will spend it all. If I am poor, I will give up. If I am a morning person, I will not go out with friends. If I am a night owl, then I will never see the sunrise. If I am an extrovert, I cannot enjoy being alone. If I am an introvert, I cannot enjoy others for long. I try not to put boxes on myself anymore. I am who I am.
When choosing to believe something, believe something positive and useful and which includes your hopes. If you believe you can't or won't, then you must prove yourself wrong to ever change. Believe something that aligns with your goals so that you won't stop yourself. Though always, be open to being wrong. Be open to revising beliefs. When you consider that you can't be wrong because "I am not wrong," you are living in fear. You don't need to limit yourself.
The idea is, this is a sketch of a baseline belief, subject to change, designed to be aligned with for its utility. Ultimately, it is false, because people die, but I'm too young to run from the sky. To deny myself all labels, it would be truly maddening. I choose to believe useful things about myself and to try to keep an open mind.
To change beliefs too frequently, or even to change beliefs at all, to abandon the wisdom of culture or religion, it risks throwing out the "good" with the "bad." Something which has been around a long time, a tradition, to abandon it entirely, after all the stressors it has experienced, there is a level of hubris in it. To "know" something great and old is "wrong" is begging to learn from mistakes to be made.
I was taking notes on beliefs I noticed people had that are false. If you are considering believing fewer things, consider disbelieving in some of these:
Each item here is a useless thing to believe. The parenthetical parameterized statement is always false, but only frequently useless for certain values. You should be able to come up with a specific reason why each of these are false. For instance, one of many reasons the first is false is that you can apply yourself and be successful even if you are messy.
When you first hear someone describe something, you build a taxonomy in your head. Sometimes the map isn't so great. Half of it is for a sea that no one navigates (actually it's a pond), and there are missing villages. Someone says, it's either this or that, but it's the other. If you believe you understand something because you think you have the right framework, you risk zooming in on things that don't matter and accepting things that aren't real. Many frameworks all operate together at the same time. Outside of mathematics (by definition) holding on tightly to categories of things is always wrong. Even this is wrong. It may turn out we can find a formal system to represent the universe. Though, we might not be able to prove it, an outsider would be able to determine some human statements are in fact accurate. That we could ever "know" anything ourselves, I don't know how.
If you hear a framework first and you come to accept it, you might deny a better framework just because your scaffolding is already setup to think about things in a certain way. If you happened to have heard things better the first time, you wouldn't be stuck disagreeing with the better system. This bias, towards an existing way of scaffolding is a reframe of confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is focused on how new facts are incorporated. The term scaffolding bias emphasizes how the structure you use to think about things doesn't change.
I don't believe there is one.