How we deal with toxic thoughts

I have long been confounded that otherwise intelligent people can claim, straight-faced, that the earth is only 6,000 years old or that a virgin got pregnant.  Such people are utterly sincere, of course.  Many of them excel at highly technical jobs and they generally embrace the results of science (they choose doctors who use high-tech medicine and they dare to fly on airplanes) and they are capable of great skepticism (they scoff at the dogma of everyone else’s religion and if one of their own unmarried daughters gets pregnant, they don’t believe her story that she didn’t have sex). 

I’ve spent much of my life trying to understand this unevenness of skepticism. Though fundamentalists are generally intelligent, inquisitive, and skeptical, they are science-adverse only with regard to a limited range of topics. While in their “Believer” mode, they seem to be totally transformed people. What is grabbing their brains and making them say such things, I’ve often wondered.

The deepest, most treasured, assumptions of many religious Believers are somehow cordoned off.  Once hooked on religion, they seem incapable of truly considering whether God exists.  They seem psychologically and intellectually incapable of considering that the writings and history of the Bible seem flawed, self-contradictory and all-too-human. 

Before you start thinking that I’m picking on religious fundamentalists . . . well, I am.  But I’m also picking on anyone else who’s ever shuddered and become glassy-eyed at simple questions aimed at their most basic assumptions.  I’m talking about all of us, …

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The Brain is not a Computer.

How often do you hear someone say that the brain is a computer?  This statement is not literally true. The brain is certainly not like a desktop computer. Brains don’t look like computers; there’s no CPU in the head.  Neurons aren’t all wired together to an executive control center.  Human brains have a massively parallel architecture. Cognitive scientists who have carefully thought through this issue arrive at this same conclusion:  the brain does not really resemble a computer, certainly not any sort of computer in general use today.

The brain as computer is a seductive metaphor. According to Edwin Hutchins, “The last 30 years of cognitive science can be seen as attempts to remake the person in the image of the computer.” See Cognition in the Wild (1996).

Metaphors are models, however, and models are imperfect versions of the reality they portray.  Metaphors accentuate certain parts of reality while downplaying other parts. 

Unfortunately, many people “reify” the brain-as-computer metaphor: they accept this metaphor as literal truth, leading to various misunderstandings about human cognition.

Here’s another big difference between brains and computers: human cognition is fault-tolerant and robust.  In other words, our minds continue to function even when the information is incomplete (e.g., while we’re driving in the rain) or when our purposes or options are unclear (e.g., navigating a cocktail party).  Computers, on the other hand, are always one line of code away from freezing up. 

In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire:  On the Matter of the Mind (1992) Gerald M. …

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How We Really Think About Religion and Politics: The Power of Metaphors

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

The above is an excerpt from “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” a poem on which John Godfrey re-told an ancient Indian fable that serves as an allegory. The lesson is this: the lens through which we view reality accentuates some features while downplaying others.  It must be this way, because we are creatures of limited attentional capacities. 

Metaphors are the lenses through which we view our world.  In abstract fields like religion and politics, the use of metaphors isn’t just fanciful (although it can be fanciful); the use of metaphors is absolutely necessary to understand abstract concepts.  Further, research has shown that the use of conceptual metaphors is systematic, not ad hoc. 

Just as physics students understand the flow of electricity by reference to the flow of water, the rest of us use metaphors to understand our own abstract concepts (e.g., in the fields of religion and politics).  More important, without metaphors, we would have no meaningful understanding of most abstract concepts.  Therefore, whenever we discuss any abstract concept, we are compelled to relentlessly engage in the use of metaphors–there is no other way to talk or write about such things. 

Not convinced? What does this matter? Read on and consider the examples.  This was literally and truly a life-changing idea for me.

In Metaphors We …

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Pump up your tires to save Alaska

"HOW ALASKA CAN HELP MEET AMERICA'S ENERGY NEEDS" is an article to which Republican Senator Jim Talent of Missouri refers his constituents.  That article argues that we need to start drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) of Alaska, because it holds 10 billion barrels of economically…

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The Two Paths: No Self versus extended Self

Sometimes we can get to the same place taking opposite paths.

One path is the Buddhist belief that “self” is a delusion.

The objects with which people identify themselves—fortune, social position, family, body, and even mind—are not their true selves. There is nothing permanent, and, if only the permanent deserved to be called the self, or atman, then nothing is self. 

Buddhists set forth the theory of the five aggregates or constituents (khandhas) of human existence: (1) corporeality or physical forms (rupa), (2) feelings or sensations (vedana), (3) ideations (sañña), (4) mental formations or dispositions (sankhara), and (5) consciousness (viññana). Human existence is only a composite of the five aggregates, none of which is the self or soul. A person is in a process of continuous change, with no fixed underlying entity.

Compare this central tenet of Buddhism with a broader definition of “mind.”  In a book called Being There:  Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (1997), philosopher Andy Clark makes the case that there is no basis for conceiving of the mind as bounded by skin and skull.  Clark cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty:

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism . . . it forms with it a system.

Admittedly, we do many of our basic activities—e.g., walking, reaching and looking—as individuals.   But what about activities involving advanced cognition, such as “voting, consumer choice, planning a vacation or running a country? 

To accomplish these higher order activities, we

create and maintain

…
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