Believing Silly Shit

Ethical Philosophy, Psychology or BSology Topic for Examination on 2012 July 22 Believing Silly Shit

(Note that the man on the right has lost an arm.)

Why we believe it and how we justify it.

Mark Twain famously observed that “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Of course, what is silly nonsense to you may be a god-given eternal truth to me.

So let’s skip what silly shit is…and go to how we come to belief it. From several recent books on how our brains work1, I got the following ideas.

We like to feel good! Feeling safe makes us feel less anxious, therefore more “good.” Whatever ideas help, we embrace and are rewarded with dopamine. Afterwards, other subconscious mechanisms justify them.

A major human urge is to feel that the world is predictable, controllable or at least controlled by somebody who knows we’re here. Even if his/her aim is to do us harm, it is more reassuring to believe that he exists than to believe life is just random chance. Even if there is somebody out to get us, at least we can make a deal with him/her. If it’s a random world 2, what can we do? We need order and someone in charge.

Many subconscious brain functions seem to help us with this process. A few are:

1 1. Patternicity 2. Agency 3. A sense of ones self and of someone else 4. Confirmation Bias 5. Feeling Certain 6. Re-writing history and honestly believe it 7. Self Justification Bias

Patternicity – We are able to see patterns in the world that help us predict and control the future. Sometimes they are justified, sometimes not.

Percival Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars, today we see faces. Is that a man’s face or a woman walking by a tree?

Either way, they reassure us. We can feel that we know what is going on.

Agency – “The tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intent.”

Interestingly, most SETI researchers had fundamentalist religious childhoods.

Scientists tell us however, that it is a bottom-up, not a top-down universe. That means that stuff happens because of prior events. Newton’s apple fell to earth not because god wanted it there or because it wanted to be there, but because of gravity. Gravity doesn’t care about the apple, it just sucks. (Or maybe the bending of space/time caused by a nearby mass 3, whatever that means.)

2 A Sense of Oneself or of Someone Else – A part of the brain’s left temporal lobe communicates with a corresponding part in the right hemisphere. When they are synchronized we have a feeling of being ourselves. When they are out of sync (caused by stress or trauma), we get the feeling that there is someone else here and/or we are being watched. (TBB p 91)

Doctored photos were a great consolation in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. Of course someone really is watching you. It’s called the National Security Agency. Authorized by Congress, the Total Awareness Program under Bush II spies on everyone all the time. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

A feeling that someone else is here is common. Lindbergh had it on his famous flight and reported that “voices spoke with authority and clearness” but “I can’t remember a single word of it. (TBB P. 101) This brain function is common, even expected among mountain climbers and Iditarod racers.

It also fits in nicely with the Agency function to give us the impression that someone is out there, in charge, and cares about us.

The world and our lives are in God’s hands or Ra’s rays.

All religions claim that their gods are in charge and usually created the cosmos. For example, Ra, Yahweh and Brahma.

Scientology, Mormon-ology and String Theory claim the same thing. Except String Theorists claim that their creator (The Big Bang) doesn’t care and is going to rip us to tiny shreds, or strings. Who are you going to believe?

Who would you rather believe?

Confirmation Bias - We tend to cherry pick evidence to confirm our already existing beliefs. (TBB p. 259)

Which reminds me of my favorite saying…

There is only one god and we all worship him. He has a name, his name is… What’s Familiar

4 To Me.

Motherhood, apple pie, baseball, the flag, bathroom facilities, all are familiar and therefore good.

Unfamiliar things cause anxiety and are therefore bad and must be destroyed.

Therefore we look for evidence to confirm our existing beliefs in the familiar and overlook evidence that conflicts with it. Cool!

Feeling Certainty – (OBC p. ) The feeling of being certain is just that, a feeling.

5 Only a feeling, it has nothing whatsoever to do with reality. When the pope and the whole world believed the world was flat, their sincere belief did not make it flat. They were certain and they were wrong.

When parts of the brain malfunction, we can feel super certainty or no certainty at all or anything in between. What’s more, certainty (or doubt) can land on any idea. For example, Cotard’s Syndrome is a condition in which a person comes to believe that he is dead. Obvious evidence to the contrary (“you have a heart beat and you’re talking”) is discounted in favor of his new certainty. In a case described in The Believing Brain, a young graduate student who had a head injury, suddenly found that “being dead felt more real than any contradictory evidence that she was alive.”

(The researcher concluded that there is no point in arguing with a woman.)

Feeling certain is much more comfortable than feeling uncertain.

But it doesn’t say anything about the world.

6 Nobody wants to think that HIS beliefs are nutty. That’s for a small group of nuts.

Read the pic to the left. HITLER WAS ELECTED. We don’t want to admit that whole societies are screwy. Hitler’s ideas didn’t seem nutty to millions of Germans, until Stalingrad.

In our own time, the Vietnam War was to protect capitalism and democracy from world wide collapse due to “domino theory.” Our current War On Terror is like a war on spitting. Anybody can do it at anytime. How do you have a war on something that anyone can do at any time? When do you know you have won?

I can’t believe what our masters think people will fall for this nonsense. But oddly, many people do.

When a guy in a uniform or expensive suit tells us something, most people believe it. Among many biases, one is the In–Group Bias. When a high status guy in our group tell us silly shit about another group, we believe it. Ya gotta think groups, our group good, their group bad.

From Dr. Strangelove (upper right), Group Capt. Ripper explains his delusions about the out-group to Mandrake.

Re-writing History – Many experiments on eye witness accounts report that they are not good evidence. The modern analogy of human memory being like computer technology is a poor one. Our memories just pick up the highlights of an event and then change them over time. We mix and match and even add to our memories. Information can be added after the event from outside suggestions or from the subconscious.

7 One example mentioned in The Believing Brain is of a college experiment that asked eye witnesses to write down (and sign) statements describing what they saw during a staged event. Later, one subject declared, “that may be my signature, but that is not what happened.” False memory syndrome played out in the recovered memory of Satanic ritual child abuse trials. Dozens of people we sent to jail. It can be dangerous.

The effect of modern technology on political candidates is an interesting phenomenon. A candidate can claim one thing and be viewed claiming just the opposite at another moment. Video recordings can clearly show him to be lying.

What is scary about those who criticize Romney for being a flip- flopper is that they feel his beliefs are

not silly enough.

But to his followers, the fact that he is lying doesn’t matter.

Which brings us to another function. Cognitive Dissonance allows us to believe two mutually exclusive ideas at the same time. It creates “blind spots” in a person’s thinking. He simply does not notice a contradiction.

On the other hand, “consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” Emerson’s actually wrote "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin…". He didn’t mean “blind spots.” Of course you can always compare different principles or just misapply one.

Self Justification Bias – We cherry pick evidence to justify our past decisions and actions. (TBB p. 265) We use many biases for that.

One of my favorite is very old, the Attribution Bias. In it, we attribute noble motives to ourselves and less-than-noble motives to our critics. Since their motives are so base, anything they say must be wrong. It used to be called ad hominem attacks.

8 Of course once in a while, someone will change his mind and acknowledge his error. But if you look closely, it’s usually something like “mistakes were made.”

Robert McNamara really was deeply involved and did apologize. Richard Clarke apologized for an administration, but he wasn’t in charge of it. Scott McClellan apologized for being so naïve. But for an individual to apology for his big mistake? Unheard of!

No matter how many they kill and how red-handedly they are caught, how utterly wrong they are proven; it’s always justify, justify, justify. They just write a book claiming silly shit that contradicts all the evidence. They probably actually believe it.

Bottom line?

We believe what we want to believe and find good evidence to justify it. We are good intentioned, honest and enlightened folk. And, we are right!

Stated another way, you can believe any damned thing you want, have confidence in it, justify it to yourself with all honesty. That’s nice. But…

if it ain’t so, it just ain’t so!

Do you have any moral responsibility to check the evidence before you get on board?

W. K. Clifford says yes. William James says no.

9 I agree with them both because they were not talking about the same thing. Even though they thought and believed that they were 4. Ironic isn’t it.

Does it really matter what you believe? Well, yes it does.

It can get you killed.

Of course, the reason why have the psychologists have gone to all the trouble to describe these biases is because they believe more in scientific evidence than in human certainty.

So…first you decide what you value, then you describe how other people come to be wrong. What has that really accomplished? Newton didn’t invent gravity. He just gave it a name and explained how it works with big objects.

But, that is better than what they had before.

So, the question is…

WHAT SHOULD WE DO WITH OURSELVES?

1. Take the “pragmatic” approach and believe whatever makes you happy?

2. Scour our souls and thick books for expert advice?

3. Be agnostic about everything except what we’ve researched ourselves? (Which means being wobbly while conmen wax confidently about the flat earth.)

4. Take a position based on uncertain evidence and promote it in a world of silly shit.

10 5. Find the best truth we can but remain silent, watching the fools run off the cliff? Richard Mohley 2012 July 16, 2012

Footnotes

1 The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer, Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me by Travis and Aronson and On Being Certain by Barton.

2 Of course there are no random events, everything has a prior cause. However, the factors that create this moment’s reality are so diverse and unpredictable that, as far as we are concerned, much of it is random.

3 I am reading a book on cosmology, relativity and String Theory. It is absolutely the silliest nonsense imaginable or unimaginable. Yet, I believe it. Why? I guess because they guys who wrote it are presumably experts and it’s now familiar to me.

4 Ok, that was a rhetorical flourish. Clifford had never heard of William James. James wrote his rebuttal (The Will To Believe) to Clifford’s famous essay The Ethics Of Belief. Clifford was talking about real life decisions that affect other people. (The ship owner doesn’t inspect his ship in order to save money. He wants to believe the ship is sound. The ship sinks, the passengers drown, the owner picks up the insurance check.)

James was talking about your Aunt Minnie believing in Jesus or you believing you can do something you haven’t done before. I think they are very different.

People at that time were expecting the new science to prove their religious faith. It wasn’t happening. James was giving them a justification for believing ideas that science could not support. These were beliefs that made them happy and more functional people. He called it Pragmatism. He wrote and spoke for decades, encouraging positive beliefs but he never spoke clearly. I think it was because he was an atheist in a world that ostracized atheists. But he never said exactly what he meant.