The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer

Subitled: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths

I’ve always wanted to read one of Dr. Shermer’s books since he was recommended to me by an atheist friend a couple of years ago. However, I just could not find the right book at my local bookstores. I had to satisfy myself with watching him on YouTube giving one of many talks at events such as TED etc.

When Michael Shermer; publisher and chief editor of Skeptic magazine, published The Believing Brain, he billed it as his magnum opus, “synthesizing” 30 years of research; I just had to get it.

I thought it would be the ideal purchase for my newly acquired kindle, but for some strange reason only the Audiobook version was available for sale to South Africans. While it is always nice to have the text version available for future reference, I decided to go ahead and purchase the Audible Audiobook. It turned out to be a good decision as I could just sit back and listen to it for a little while every day while just relaxing after coming home from work, and still get in some reading of some of my other books on kindle.

Anyway, enough of this idle banter; back to the Believing Brain…

In the book, Shermer explains that we form our beliefs for subjective, emotional and psychological reasons while being influenced by environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society. We then go on to defend, rationalize and justify the beliefs we have formed by employing a number of cognitive biases such as authority and confirmation biases. This process of forming a belief first and then trying to explain it is called belief-dependent realism by Shermer.

Incidently, Shermer based the process of belief-dependent realism on model-dependent realism, as proposed by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their book The Grand Design.

In the first part of the book, Shermer describes how Francis Collins, famous scientist and current director of the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the USA came to form his religious beliefs, considering that scientists are largely nonreligious or atheist. Shermer also shares with us how he himself became a skeptic.

In the second part of the book he explains concepts such as patternicity, that is how the brain looks for patterns in everything it “absorbs,” and agenticity which is the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by powerful invisible agents who involve themselves intentionally in it.

In parts three and four, Shermer explains how and why we form beliefs about Things Unseen such as gods and aliens, and Things Seen, respectively.

All very fascinating stuff indeed! This book is guaranteed to make you think about how you think and perhaps even reconsider some of those weird beliefs you might be holding close to your “heart.”

The truth is not out there…

People of South Africa,

Your President wants you to believe the following:

The executive, as elected officials, have the sole discretion to decide policies for government.
This means that once government has decided on appropriate policies, the judiciary cannot, when striking down legislation or parts thereof on the basis of illegality, raise that as an opportunity to change the policies.

Do not believe him or his rotten political party. They are pressing ahead to enforce a despicable piece of legislation known as the Protection of Information Bill (POIB) which coupled with the Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT), will make wholesale theft from you the people legal, and a crime for you to complain about it. And they don’t want the judiciary to interfere by throwing the constitution at them.

That’s what it boils down to in its most basic form.

Do not allow them to continue to steal from you with impunity as they are doing right now.

Fight them with everything you have. It’s your right…

Non-belief and political commentary now consolidated…

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been toying with this idea for weeks – to merge ScumWatch, my blog on political commentary, with Lenny Says.

It is now done…

I got this mad idea late last year to create a separate blog to express my disgust with politics and politicians. After a while it began to seem like I had this whole other personality which was divorced from the person who writes about non-belief and other things more regular.

I’ve finally realised that my disgust for politicians is just a mirror image of my disgust for clerics, and uncritical thinking.

It therefore makes sense to keep all my irreverent thoughts on the same blog. I trust you’ll agree.

I get goosebumps…

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 from a distance, at the request of cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Subsequently, Sagan was inspired to write a book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future In Space and utter some of the most profound words in sciencedom [from Wikipedia below].

I hope you’ll enjoy this video with an amazing animation sequence, that keeps the voice and memory of Carl Sagan alive; it gives me goosebumps just listening.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.