They all insist that “seeing is believing” — in other words, hundreds upon hundreds of medical research findings that haven’t been personally witnessed don’t measure up to one piece of firsthand observation. A good quantitative thinker would demand that numbers be used to make the case, but for some reason, the author’s parents proved the value of the research on Tamiflu using the Groucho Marx method instead: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?” — Derek Niedermann and David Boyum, What the Numbers Say, Chapter 1, Shanghai Century Publishing, 2006

When people judge whether some unknown event is true or false, they always use experience as their point of reference. We make subjective judgments based on certain properties of things, and from there judge truth or falsehood. This way of thinking — from object to mind, from outside to inside, “the mind itself has no origin, it arises only through circumstance” — is the one true method by which materialists view the world. But there are also those who believe the entire world is nothing more than a product projected outward by human subjectivity.

When the author was young, he received treatment with a certain medicine and quickly recovered. But later research showed that this medicine actually had little effect on that illness. Still, the author and his parents refused to believe the research findings, dismissing them as “nonsense.” This really is a very real problem — much like how atheists don’t believe in ghosts or spirits, don’t believe in aliens… So how could the author, who never witnessed the experimental results himself, possibly believe them?

Think about it: quite a lot of our ideas are produced through experience, and we tend to file away anything that exceeds the bounds of experience into the category of the impossible, the fictional. There’s that old saying: “hearing is empty, seeing is believing.” Yet in high school politics class, the teacher would give an example — “something is false simply because you’ve never seen it” is a wrong statement, because it falls into the trap of idealism. We’ve never seen a real blue whale — does that mean blue whales don’t exist?

Going one layer deeper, that line attributed to Marx isn’t actually quite right, because sometimes we don’t trust our eyes either — what we trust instead is whatever it is we already “believe.” The “belief” produced through extensive practical experience can end up contradicting what our own eyes show us. Seen this way, the relationship between experience and belief is so ambiguous!

If I told you there are unknown microorganisms deep in the sea, would you believe me?

If I told you this world has been visited by aliens, would you believe me?

If I told you there are places on Earth where the laws of physics are violated, would you believe me?

These questions aren’t simple true-or-false items you can mark with an absolute check or cross — they interrogate your experience, and ask you, point blank: do you believe them?