THOUGHT EXPERIMENT CONCLUSION! Apologies for the delay on this. It was fascinating watching the conversation in the two threads I posted. I first asked “Are you right about everything you believe?” and then to the people who said no (who were the majority of the responses!) “what are the things you believe even though they’re not true?” Despite so many people recognizing that no, not everything they believe is true, no one really was able to share an example of a belief they’re wrong about. There was a lot of fascinating discussion about the nature of belief, the nature of truth, how one decides to believe something, etc… but no one was able to give an example despite recognizing that they likely exist. This is not an unusual result. The thought experiment is one that author Will Storr (The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science) encouraged people to try, and when he tried it, he couldn’t think of anything either—nor could I when I tried it. And that’s okay! The most important part of this is to be aware of how it felt to try to identify your incorrect beliefs and, as many discussed, just how they came to believe the things they do believe. I found a description of the experiment and was inspired to share it by this article, titled “Why People Believe Things You Don’t Believe”, by David McRaney, who writes the blog and book “You Are Not So Smart”: boingboing.net/2014/09/30/why-people-believe-things-you.html We live in a time where the edges of knowledge are constantly being pushed and expanded, and there are a lot of people who believe things that other folks think are patently ridiculous: climate change deniers, young earth creationists, Holocaust deniers, anti-feminists—all groups that believe things that many other people can’t understand. To a lesser extent, we have a hard time understanding how people can possibly disagree with our political, religious, or other beliefs no matter how many people do. Our words to these people are angry, dismissive, and insulting, and we create tribes based on our adherence to these beliefs. Examples (not necessarily things I believe): How could anyone ever think that an unrestricted free market isn’t the best way to solve unemployment? What kind of moron could believe that anyone shouldn’t be allowed to marry the person they love? Of course GMO foods are harmful to humans. It’s so OBVIOUS that Jesus is Lord—why can’t everyone else see that?! Our most important beliefs are felt at such a deep level that we really have a hard time understanding why someone would believe anything else, and this article does a great job explaining part of why it’s so hard—we’re unaware of how and why our OWN beliefs are formed, and of how we relate to our own beliefs. We think that we see evidence and proof and make rational choices based on that evidence, but really the evidence we see is filtered by so many elements that we ALL are making choices based on incomplete or inaccurate data. To quote the article: “All you can ever know about your own body, or the world outside of it, is what your brain tells you, and your brain doesn’t tell you the truth. It just makes an approximation, it makes a model of the world. This is where belief begins. If you drill all the way down. If you dig until you reach the rock, your original faith, your central belief, is in your model of reality, the one generated by your brain. That is your terminal dogma: your faith in your internal representations of the world around you. It isn’t limited to ownership of your limbs or the belief that your hand is on your head when you place it there. Who is right, you ask, when your messengers arrive, the people telling you vaccines are harmful or those telling you that they are harmless? Who is right, the climate scientists or the politicians who distrust them? Locked in the skull, its only interaction with the world based on models and maps, your brain can only make best guesses that are good enough.” When you recognize that your own beliefs are based on “good enough”; when you acknowledge that the things you believe most deeply are perhaps not based on as firm facts as you may have thought; when you know that everyone is in the same state, and that everyone else is also trying their best to make sense of that filtered data—hopefully that can help you be more patient and open-minded in your discussion with the people you disagree with most, and work together to find a way to the actual truth. I don’t know if the thought experiment was helpful in getting anyone else to understand that, but it was amazing to me to see so many different takes on belief, on thought, and on truth, so from that perspective I’m counting it as a success. Thanks for participating everybody—and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article. :)
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:57:56 +0000
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