A person who can hold unbelievable ideas that become true is also a person who can hold unbelievable ideas that never become true. Put another way: Smart people can convince themselves of almost anything.
That’s a big theme from the 2011 book The Believing Brain: From Spiritual Faiths to Political Convictions – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, written by science writer Michael Shermer.
Like other books from Shermer, this references lots of brain research that is enlightening and fun to absorb. Generally this book’s theme s that belief comes first and reason comes second. Or as he puts it himself: “People believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe non-weird things.”
He explains this by arguing our predilection toward “patternicity” (we crave patterns) and “agenticity” (we crave meanings into patterns). As he wrote: “This research supports what I call Spinoza‘s conjecture: belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.”
Below find my notes for future reference.
My notes:
- “Beliefs come first; explanations for beliefs follow”
- Patternicity: we crave patterns and
- Agenticity: we crave meanings into patterns
- Author: belief-dependent realism is based on Hawking’s model dependent realism
- Voltaire wrote “every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the times.”
- CS Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’ and other perspective on religiosity
- David Rosenhan’s 1973 paper “On being sane in insane places” was based on his time undercover in mental institution. The doctors all found reasons to describe the undercover pseudo patients as really unhealthy, only the real patients notice a difference. Of the 118 patients whose remarks were recorded 35 of them indicated they really knew what was going on. As one exclaimed “you’re not crazy. You’re a journalist, or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.” (More here)
- As Rosenhan concluded “the hospital itself imposes a special environment which the meaning of behavior can be easily misunderstood.”
- Francis Collins writes his famous book “The Language of God” that though as a scientist he agrees with explaining the world by natural law, there are two exceptions, as Immanuel Kant wrote it “ the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
- No relationship between intelligence and belief at high professional levels because smart people can rationalize anything
- The left hemisphere interpreter is a set of neural networks in our brain that could be understood as the brain’s storytelling apparatus, which reconstruct events into a logical sequence and leaves them together in a meaningful story
- The Euthyphro Dilemma by Plato, in which Socrates asks: do the gods love good action because it is good, or is good action good because it is loved by the gods?
- Criticism of the founder of a philosophy does not by itself constitute a negation of any part of the philosophy
- Type I (false positive) error in cognition typically means no or less harm, as opposed to Type II (false negative) in which you assume the rustle in the bushes is just wind rather than a predator
- Hamilton’s rule is a central theorem of inclusive fitness (kin selection) theory and predicts that social behavior evolves under specific combinations, and it challenges the “selfish gene” logic
- Harvard ‘s Kevin R. Foster and Hanna Kokko 2011 paper suggested that we naturally selected for defaulting to type 1 pattern recognition: “The evolution of superstitious and superstition like behavior”
- In author’s 2004 book Science of Good and Evil, he showed pre-social cooperation and altruistic behavior makes sense for not just blood relatives but those with positive social ties
- “People believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe non-weird things”
- BF Skinner’s Project Pigeon that showed the impact of random feeding patterns
- Niko Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz : “filial imprinting,” in which baby geese will accept any animal as their mother at a key point. Humans have evolved a reverse imprinting in terms of incest
- Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt showed that many human facial greetings are innate (except when culturally suppressed in Japan)
- Mimicry
- Sweet and rich foods are coded to be rare and nutritious in our brains so we have no shut off mechanism
- One-trial learning or aversion effect of not liking food once (perhaps a bad experience the first time) and never wanting it again
- Deirdre Barrett’s 2010 book “Supernormal Stimuli” shows how modernity has hijacked our brain (sweet food and women proportions)
- Baseball players: rituals for defense when they are more likely to succeed; if they have rituals often when they are more likely to fail so need to confront uncertainty (78)
- People who confront uncertainty are more than likely find patterns: a 1977 study with parachute jumpers, a 1994 study of the first year MBA and a 1942 study for a hungry all show this 78
- Repetition avoidance
- Illusory correlation
- Affirming your values creates calm
- Famous 1976 research from Ellen Lange and Judith Rodin in a New England nursing home: those who watered house plants lived longer, and were healthier
- Research: would you receive heart transplant or wear the sweater of a murderer? (Essentialism: will the evil rub off?)
- The Waste Land by TS Eliott: People reference the “third man” which was inspired by Shackleton’s Antarctica exploration in which he sensed a fourth man part of their party. This is called “third man factor” or “sensed presence factor” during times of stress
- Embodied cognition, the extended mind of, as Andy Clark, calls it “supersizing the brain”
- Marvin Minsky: “The mind is what the brain does.” Or as author writes: “There’s no such thing as mind or say outside of brain activity. The mind is just a word we use to describe neural activity in the brain”
- Thinking, processing, learning and understanding are fuzzy words to describe a process
- British biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975) poked fun at French philosopher Henri Bergson’s 1907 concept of “élan vital”, by remarking that it is no better an explanation of life than is explaining the operation of a railway engine by its élan locomotif (“locomotive driving force”)
- Neurons communicate information in one of three ways: firing frequency, firing and firing number (this is like binary )
- Neural binding is how we have complex thoughts
- Christof Koch and Gabriel Kreiman’s 2004 paper showed that a single neuron fired for Bill Clinton and Jennifer Anniston
- Dopamine is “critical in association learning and the reward system in the brain that Skinner discovered through his process of operant conditioning, whereby any behavior that is reinforced tends to be repeated” 117
- “Dopamine produces the sensation of pleasure that accompanies mastering a task or accomplishing a goal”
- Cocaine and bad ideas can flood this pleasure center (which Olds and Milner found in 1954 with ‘rewards center’)
- Debate about whether dopamine acts to stimulate pleasure (liking) or motivate behavior (wanting). Either it feels good or it feels bad if it isn’t repeated.
- Brugger and Mohr shows more dopamine means more belief in magic. In part dopamine increases our signal to noise ratio (we find patterns where they may not be there)
- Too much and you make a lot of type 1 (false positive error); too little and you make type 2 (false negative). This is the difference between creativity (discriminate patternicity) and madness (indiscriminate patternicity)
- “It may be that 99% of scientists are skeptical of what [controversial biochemist] Kary Mullis believes but 99% of scientists never win the Nobel prize.“ (Mullis both discovered highly original research and believed highly controversial and unproven conspiracies)
- Alfred Russel’s “ Wallaces Patterniticity” filter was porous enough to let through both revolutionary and ridiculous ideas at the same time“ (127)
- Anterior cingulate cortex is likely error detection network
- Monistic believe mind and body are the same; dualists believe mind and body are separate, dating at least as far back as Rene Descartes saying body and soul, which means same thing
- Yale psychologist Paul Bloom wrote in his 2005 book ” Descartes Baby”Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human” that both kids and adults use phrases to differentiate “body” and “my “brain.” Bloom has shown children appear to instinctively begin with this separation. We are naturally dualists.
- There is no theater of the mind, with an agent watching
- Mirror neurons result in Theory of Mind but likely evolved for in-group behavior like empathy, anticipation and imitation
- Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Dutch Jewish philosopher of Portuguese descent, claimed and modern neuroscientists (including Sam Harris) seem to confirm that “The mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of it being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection.” (134) Harris’s research shows it took longer for people to register something as false than register it as true
- The ventromedial prefrontal cortex tied to belief and skepticism
- “This research supports what I call Spinoza‘s conjecture: belief comes quickly and naturally, skepticism is slow and unnatural and most people have a low tolerance for ambiguity.”
- Greek word for soul is psyche, Latin is anima
- Duncan MacDougall and his infamous 1907 “21 grams experiment,” which refers to him believing he had found the average weight of a person’s soul.
- Raymond Moody: 1975 near death experience led to research that ultimately resulted in the 2015 book Life after Life
- Andrew Newberg’s 2001 book Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief
- Not referenced in this book but the author Michael Shermer has advised the development of a “baloney detection kit”
- In his 1871 followup Descent of Man, Darwin agreed about the evolutionary strength of in-group forming by god and the author expanded on it saying ears ago those predisposed to spirituality may have out-survived other tribes
- Twin studies of religiosity say about 40% is genetic, or when “assortive mating” is factored in (idea that religious people mate with religious) it is 55% genetic; 39% to “nonshared environment,” 5% unassigned and just 3% assigned family environment (like parents) . The genetic disposition is about cognitive process for belief and personality traits (like authority and traditonalism)
- The gene that codes for production of dopamine is DRD4 (dopamine receptor d4) and is located on the shirt arm of the 11th chromosome
- Dean Hamer‘s 2004 book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes was of course over simplified but genes do encode likelihood for belief
- In 10k years, we created 10k religioons and 1k gods: why is yours right?
- Dionysus sounds like Jesus, Osiris redirects like Jesus and Apollonius was a Jesus contemporary. American Indian Wovoka
- “You just can’t keep a good story down. Why? Because the propensity to tell such stories is hardwired into our brains”
- Agnosticism is an intellectual position but atheism is a behavior (do you act like there is a god or no?)
- Author argues for his own “Shermer’s Last Law: a sufficiently advanced extra terrestrial life would be indistinguishable to god.”
- Author really wants to clarify that Einstein believed in “Spinoza’s god”, or a force we can’t understand but doesn’t involve itself in our judgment. Einstein wrote we are like children in a great library of many languages — we see an order but we can hardly determine it.
- Einstein’s quote sometimes attributed as: “We are in the position of a little child, entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of the human mind, even the greatest and most cultured, toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged, obeying certain laws, but we understand the laws only dimly. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that sways the constellations.”
- “Science picks up where theology leaves off“ they’re miracles until science explains them (184)
- Disastrous “recovered memory movement” of the 1990s was example of faulty memory being misused by therapy
- “The vividness of a traumatic memory cannot be taken as evidence of its authenticity,” as documented in 2005 book Abducted by Susan Clancy
- She politely disagreed with Carl Sagan who argued belief in pseudoscience was proportional to misunderstanding of science
- Demons from old English night-mares or angels or aliens are all different cultural words for the same hallucinations, author argues
- To Fermi’s paradox, he thinks EITs are probably out there but it’s just a lot rarer
- Richard Dawkins and Shermer have debated how unlikely it is that aliens would have evolved into bipedal primates, given how rare we are. Carl Sagan said we are “carbon chauvinists”. Matt Collin’s drawing of whether dinosaurs would have evolved bipedalism
- We can’t communicate with dolphins, why assume we could with aliens?
- Protagora’s bias: “ Man is the measure of all things“ so we are biased by our standards
- Neanderthals didn’t develop much advanced tools or culture in 250k years in Europe (199)
- Why did hundreds of tool-using primates die out and we the only to evolve complex society?
- George Basalla’s 2005 book Civilized Life in the Universe: Aristotle split the universe into the superior celestial realm and the inferior terrestrial one, which informed Christianity and others
- Frank Drake of the famous Drake equation wrote in his 1992 book: is anyone out there?
- SETI people are often previous religious people
- The Archduke Ferdinand assassination was messy, like what real conspiracies are
- Daniel Klein showed academics really are overwhelmingly liberal
- In th 2004 book Partisan Hearts and Minds, Donald Green argues we pick a political party first and then follow all those policies
- Jonathan Haidt’s famous brother-sister incest story. He argues we have five foundations of our right and wrong system: (1) harm/care, (2) fairness/reciprocity, (3) ingroup/loyalty, (4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity
- His research suggests that liberals are higher on one and two, but lower than conservatives on 3/4/5
- Yourmorals.org has a quiz to discover your own
- “Altruistic punishment in humans” 2002 paper by Ernst Fehr & Simon Gächter aimed to explain why non-related human-strangers ever cooperate. This study showed we need a system of both encourages generosity and punishes free riding
- Religion and government are our two inventions for creating order for complex societies beyond kin- group tools
- Thomas Sowell argues constrained vs unconstrained in Conflict of Visions: “The one vision is tragic and sees humans as inherently and irrevocably flawed while the other is utopian believing that human nature is perfectible.”
- In his 2002 book Blank Slate, Steven Pinker argues this as the Tragic Vision vs Utopian Vision
- John Stuart Mill: beat the tyranny of the magistrate but beware the tyranny of the majority (that’s what the U.S. Bill of Rights is to do)
- In his 2008 book The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, author Leonard Mlodinow shows probability is misunderstood. (For example, this is where news orgs have to balance data and storytelling; For example, in 2004, CNN called it a “one in 149,012” chance that fund manager Bill Miller outperformed the S&P for a decade; called his 15 year streak a 372529 to 1 odds but someone had to do it.
- Author calls this “folk numeracy” or our “natural tendency to misperceive probabilities, to think anecdotally instead of statistically and to focus on and remember short term trends and small number runs”
- A heuristic is a rule of thumb and both lead to cognitive biases
- Confirmation bias: the 1983 by John Dudley and Paget Gross study “A Hypothesis-Confirming Bias in Labeling Effects“
- Author’s study of attribution bias of 10k Americans: most believed in God because “the good design of the universe “but when asked why other people believed in God the most common answers were “comforting “or “fear of death (265)
- Upton Sinclair said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- Author lists a whole lot of bias (endowment effect, in which we over-price objects we on, is one of my favorites)
- Availability heuristic: Emory University study showed heart disease is reported as much as homicide; drug use covered as much as poor diet
- The in-attentional blindness bias is the tendency to miss something obvious in general while attending to something specific and special. This is the famous gorilla experiment
- In the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy wrote of Terra Australis Incognita
- It was only in 1992 that Pope John Paul II exonerated Galileo; in the remarks, he makes a reference to the saying attributed to Baronius: “Spiritui Sancto mentem fuisse nos docere quomodo ad coelum eatur non quomodo coelum gradiatur,” which can be translated as “it was the Holy Spirit‘s intent to teach us how one goes to heaven not how the heavens go”
- Book of authority (deduction: general to specific) to the book of nature (induction: specific to general) phase transition (Dioscorides)
- Fine tuning problem as described in Martin Rees’s 2001 book “Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe”
- Anthropic principle vs Copernican Principle reminds me of art vs science (art tells us we are important, and science tells us we are not)
- In 2006, John Barrow and John Webb write of inconstant constants like speed of light
- Carl Sagan’s “carbon chauvinism:” we assume life must look like ours
- Many different arguments for different multiverse: The author likes “the natural selection multi-verse “proposed by American cosmologist Lee Smolin
- Null hypotheses in science is we assume it isn’t true until proven (journalism takes a similar task) this term is used differently in statistics so be careful
- (This reminds me of a different across industries in content: audio creators edit out space in their videos, but audio journalists wouldn’t)
- Diamond’s 1997 Guns Germs Steel: grains and animals and East-west Eurasia rather than north -south
- Ad astra per aspera is a Latin phrase meaning “through hardships to the stars.”
