Beliefs can be partial.
If there's one crucial thing rationality taught me, is this. Beliefs can be measured, in the sense that a belief can be assigned a subjective probability.
By operational subjective probability beliefs, it is possible, given an honest subject, to determine his odds to bets on an event, given the current amount of information available to him, that he may feel comfortable taking either side of. That would be his fair assessment of the bet's payoff, and in that sense, it is representative of his subjective assessment of probability of the event. 3:1 odds signals a 25% probability; 9:1 odds signals a 10% probability, and so on.
A belief is effectively an estimate about events, and as such, can be assigned subjective probability, representative of the amount of confidence of the holder. And if such confidence amounts to 0% or 100%, that would mean it would be unmovable, no matter the amount of evidence to the contrary. You can't dislodge a 0% no matter how hard you multiply it.
Beliefs have to be partial in order to be falsifiable.
If a belief was unfalsifiable in such a way, that would be what it's like to be truly insane. Imagine that you had a belief so deeply rooted that nothing, absolutely nothing could displace it, not even waking up in a different reality, living there for years, or an eternity for that matter, where everyone, everything points in the opposite direction, or having direct proof of the contrary for any number of times. Imagine if one could have an overwhelming, unmistakable, lasting impression of God, and then ending up not believing it anyway. It would be like not believing in the postman. Sounds insane, right? That's because it is. That's what 100% or 0% means, and no human belief truly reaches that place. All beliefs contain the possibility of being falsified, if with varying difficulty.
With each new piece of evidence, those beliefs can get refined (and that's basically what Bayesian updating does), but believing a thing is both true and false at the same time is just human nature. We do not, and cannot have, perfect beliefs.
We live in a shifting world of shadows and echoes; and our inner model of the world reflects this, no matter how much we like to pretend otherwise.
As the Buddhists preach, a very core component of reality is anicca, its inherent impermanence and transience. Not one single thing lasts forever.
Terms and conditions subject to change.
This too shall pass.
But, since we cannot have certainty, the next best thing is acknowledging the uncertainty and making the best of it that we can.
Now more than ever before, is a time where there an individual has potential access to world-shattering amounts of information, and from that information, knowledge may be abstracted. And from that knowledge, wisdom may be distilled.
It can feel exceedingly daunting to sift through such impossible amounts, but guiding you through this, can be your own inner sense of truth. The one you can instinctively compare every notion that comes your way with, in order to assense its validity.
And even then, for all we gather from it, our models and beliefs are doomed to be partial, incomplete representations of what exists outside them, by the very nature of existence. Every abstraction is leaky. The map shall never be the territory.
Not to mention things shifting around us all the darn time. We've always been at war with Eastasia, have we not?
The certainty in our models can never be fully achieved, much like we could never fully capture a river. No likeness of it will be the actual thing, and besides the actual river is something impermanent and changing, so no still image or representation will be able of fully capturing that.
But we can come close. And we can iterate on that closeness. And when the river shifts its course we can always chase it. Poetry may not fully capture the ineffable, but it can represent it. Abstractions may not completely eliminate complexity, but they can streamline it. Systems may not account for the unfathomable, but we can expand them.
All models are wrong, but some are useful. — George E. P. Box
But whatever happens, do not delude yourself that you've reached the end point. Everything is a work in progress, neverending.
Newtonian physics are surely the ultimate model of bodies interaction, now that we've finally discovered them and they work, right? So how about that indivisible atom? Or what bout dem dinosaurs?
But isn't that part of the beauty of it? Surely it would be boring if people eventually ran out of things to discover, and everything was just laid out.
Keep your truth-seeking about you.
When it comes time to know yourself, will you offer up all your opinions and theory, like a child their favourite blanket or toy?