I previously posted the results of my personal investigation into the fake medical clinics that call themselves "Pregnancy Resource Centers." My earlier investigation revealed that Pregnancy Resource Centers are unwilling to plainly admit their real agenda: to keep people ignorant about birth control, to deny women access to effective birth…
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, …
In a recent post (http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=166), I discussed God's attractive nuisance in His garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge. Let's take that discussion one step farther. Not only did God plant his deadly tree smack in the middle of His garden (bad garden design), not only did He fail to…
We define terror narrowly, and one of the components seems to be that it is aimed at A People, rather than individuals. Given the overwhelming cost of dealing with it, perhaps such definitional parameters are necessary. Certain things ought to be "merely" police problems, while "terrorism" is a larger, necessarily…
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. …