In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud recognized the many benefits of civilization, including beauty, cleanliness, order and the regulation of social relationships. For Freud, however, nothing better characterized civilization than "its esteem and encouragement of man's higher mental activities-his intellectual, scientific and artistic achievements-and the leading role that assigns…
For centuries, established religions have asserted that science should be viewed through the lens of religion. Over the past few years, scientifically-oriented writers have turned that view on its head. They have asserted that it is more appropriate to view religious practices through the lens of science.
The recent flurry of books includes the following:
Though I own each of these books, I have completely read only half of them; I’m partly through the others. They are a priority on my reading list given the high stakes of failing to understand religious practices (religious tensions and wars everywhere one cares to look).
For anyone just getting started in this area, I recommend Dennett’s 2006 work, Breaking the Spell. This book is classic Dennett: eloquent, heartfelt and clear. He works extra hard so that he is not only preaching to the choir. He spends the first one-hundred pages working to convince Believers to give him a chance. It’s quite an extraordinary opening gambit.
Most of the above books concern …
Let's do a thought experiment. Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang some bananas by a string from the ceiling and place a ladder underneath it. Before long, one of the monkeys will go to the ladder and try to climb towards the bananas. As soon as…
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, …
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. …