A café on a busy street, with stylish passers-by. White coffee mugs, a curl of tobacco smoke, dappled sunlight, pigeons. Everything is frozen... then suddenly begins to move, to speak.

Nathalie: ...but I'm not sure the word "belief" helps in this situation.

Blakkat: I think of "belief" as just kind of like a subjective description of what it feels like to be part of a larger neural-net system, right? Our ideas, our assumptions, our damn perceptions themselves are conditioned to help reproduce this larger system, or "assemblage" I think folks are calling it. Or at least, that's what you see if you look at from the perspective of the overarching patterns. If you're part of one such pattern, then you're a believer in one way. If you're part of another, then you're a different kind of believer.

Nathalie: Yes, I think that's a compelling image, and certainly there's some sort of give and take between the beings that we participate in with one set of concepts and worldings, and the human experience of that participation. But belief tends to imply some sort of a priori commitment, that might change but only through a mystical experience. What about the day to day hard work of scientists, in which everything that we think we know is open to be changed by the encounter with novelties in the world, through the experimentalist's lab (in the canonical image of science), or perhaps more profoundly, through the fieldwork of the naturalist, the ethnographer, the physician?

Nelt: Well, but that's a somewhat simplistic image of science, Nathalie. We all know about the intransigence of certain paradigms, the way crucial anomalies sink without a trace.

Nathalie: (waving dismissively) Of course, of course, it's a human activity, but what's truly remarkable and worth celebrating in science is precisely that despite such impediments, truly new ways of seeing and interacting with the world do emerge, through the very practice of the field. And thus, "belief" seems like the wrong word: I'm explicitly not attaching myself irrevocably with one of those neural nets you mention, Blakkat; I'm working to be open to change.

Regina: I'm not so sure we need to quibble over the word. Surely it has problematic connotations. What I would like you to consider, though, Nathalie, is that it's possible to actually be a participant in such a larger being, the net Blakkat keeps talking about, without consciously realizing it. Indeed, one might have a conscious image of the world that actually facilitates one's reproduction of a pattern that is completely dissonant with it.

Nelt: You mean like how scientists know in detail very well how their disciplines work, the social struggles and the pruning of legitimate from unpublishable considerations, and yet they "believe" that science works like some pristine cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and falsification?

Blakkat: Yeah, but I think that's partly an artifact of this refusal to believe in belief. In other words, I think we're all believers in the objective sense: we're all mobilized and conditioned by larger human and more-than-human systems, networks, superorganisms, whatever you want to call it. But only by accepting such belief can we gain agency: exploring it, practicing stepping into it and out of it and all around it, noticing how it affects us, how it evolves, and how we can hold multiple "beliefs", in the sense of participating in multiple overlapping patterns, at the same time.

Nathalie: (musing) I'm wondering about the difference between intellectually holding to the idea that there really are different beings in the world, that it's ontologically diverse, versus participating in those beings in the way you describe this "belief". I'm thinking here of how I am a graduate student studying neopagan rituals, and suddenly finding the "participant observation" business very odd, as if letting go of my "distance" would somehow be a slippery slope to "going native". But that would be essential to understanding their beliefs, right?

a pause