Belief
Jean has a post about belief at Talking Philosophy*. I find myself unconvinced, and I’m curious as to what other people think.
The idea is that ‘faith’ in the sense of belief without evidence is okay, and it’s belief in belief that is pernicious.
A person who was willing to believe nothing “on faith” would have a rather scanty store of beliefs. He or she would be missing some beliefs I take to be very important. For example—the belief that every human being matters. Exactly why does everyone matter? No doubt you could say a few intelligent things about it, but you’d soon find yourself not quite sure what the basis for the belief is.
I argued that moral commitments are different from beliefs about the world (and that I take belief that God exists to be a belief about the world); others argued that things are not so simple. I brought up Francis Collins.
I suppose I do think Francis Collins is blameworthy in some sense for interpreting his experience of the waterfall as a reason to believe in Jesus. I suppose my thinking is that surely he wouldn’t accept a non sequitur like that in genetics, so it seems blameworthy to accept it elsewhere, and especially blameworthy to try to use it as a public argument in a book.
Jean agreed with that, but considered it not relevant.
This is really about cognitive virtue and vice–how to manage your own set of beliefs, what to let in without full reasons, what not to let in. “Waterfall, therefore Jesus.” That certainly seems like bad mental self-management. Smart religious people surely have something a bit more intelligent going on in their heads. (In my experience there are tons of those…including some very smart, wise and authentic rabbis I know…)
But if so, what? Isn’t that the point? Not about their heads in general, of course, but on the subject of belief that God exists – the point is that some people just have a gut feeling that God exists and that that’s okay. But is there much of a difference between a gut feeling and ‘Waterfall, therefore Jesus’? Well there is of course the fact that Collins put that in a book, and I think the claim is about personal beliefs rather than proselytizing ones. But all the same…the problem with just assuming that smart religious people have something more than ‘waterfall’ is that that perpetuates the default respect for religion, and that perpetuates religion’s ability to keep on convincing people because it’s been going on so long and so everywhere that surely there must be something to it. It’s the Ponzi scheme aspect. We’re skeptical about new religions and cults, but the ones that have been around for centuries, that’s different, because, well because they’ve been around for centuries. But they’ve only been around for centuries because they’ve been getting away with it; so we keep letting them get away with it because they’ve been getting away with it. At some point that begins to seem like a not very good reason.
It’s not (of course) that I think people who just have a gut feeling that there is a God should be punished, but it is that I’m (obstinately perhaps) unwilling to agree that that’s cognitively okay or on all fours with other beliefs we have without being able to give good arguments for them.
*I wish I could contribute to Talking Philosophy, but I can’t; I’m not invited. The door is barred against me. The powers don’t want me polluting its crystalline purity with my – whatever: stupidity, probably.
Smart people are perfectly capable of constructing bad justifications for belief – they are just more capable of constructing clever, sophisticated, and persuasive bad justifications for belief. And I use the word ‘justifications’ advisedly since I think they are almost invariable post hoc – as OB suggests, what comes first is the gut feeling.
I don’t think faith and ‘belief in belief’ really do come seperately that often. Religion just doesn’t work that way. The number one way that people get religion is that they are born into it, and it is particularly hard to shake off those beliefs that we are brought up with, and that come tied up to a whole set of emotional stuff: love, acceptance,identity etc…
Religions that are good at incalculating their beliefs into young children are the ones that thrive, those that take a more laid-back attitude to keeping children within the faith don’t.
Similarly, I don’t think that there are any religions that are just about personal beliefs and not proselytizing ones. I mean, if you honestly believed that you knew how to get to heaven(or even that you had the secret to a more abundant life here on earth) it would be preaty wierd not to want others to share in these beliefs.
Maybe I’m missing something, but isn’t a discussion such as this reverting to a point before empiricism was invented? You don’t have to ‘believe’ anything will happen when you flip a lightswitch – you are guided by a reasonable expectation of what will happen based on previous experience, with a willingness to investigate alternate hypotheses should one present itself [or should, indeed, the light NOT come on]. Anything else is hooey, an attempt to mask empirical experience with the trapping of ‘faith’ to make ‘faithists’ feel better. If scientists [or electricians] ‘believed’ each other they way one is supposed to have ‘faith’, there’d be no new experiments, and a lot of really dangerously-wired houses…
I think we should be more fair to Jean: she’s not talking about “beliefs” that are empirically testable (light switch), but those that are *not*, yet we still hold them: “every person matters” is a great example.
Here’s the difference, though, in my opinion: believing that every person matters is a normative belief, not a descriptive one. I believe that every person *should matter* equally, and that we should act accordingly. (My normative “belief” is based on a sort of mixture of consistency and the golden rule. You can call it Kantian deontology if you like.) This is NOT what religious believe about god: their beliefs are supposed to be describing the world, not telling us how the world should be.
Absolutely, be fair to Jean! This isn’t meant as a dig at Jean, it’s to continue a discussion that interested me. (I can’t keep it going at Talking Philosophy, obviously, but I can here, which is why I brought it over here.)
But the discussion is also about beliefs that are empirically testable – one example was gut feelings about medical or nutritional advice. The point there is that we’re not experts (everybody is not expert in nearly everything) and the evidence fits different conclusions, so we don’t know firsthand how to decide on contested subjects (Pritikin? Atkins?), so we go with beliefs, or intuitions, or our gut.
I would agree to that but I would add that ideally we also keep in mind that that’s what we’re doing, and remain alert for further evidence. I would in fact call what we do, ideally, an educated guess rather than going with our gut, because that’s both more rational and more tentative and corrigible.
I said the whole thing about normative v descriptive over there, but for reasons which I don’t quite understand it was not persuasive. I still think normative views are completely different from belief that God exists.
Most string theorists have faith that ultimately string theory will deliver the goods. Despite the fact that in the past two decades there has not been a single shred of empirical evidence to support it. So theoretical physicists know all about faith. [see e.g. Lee Smolin’s book: The trouble with physics]
In science most results are based on trust (faith?) that the experiments were done correctly and can be repeated if necessary. This trust is justified thanks to stringent peer review.
Scientists don’t just trust the results, they trust the process that delivers the results.
Religion in contrast has not process that is trustworthy and justifies faith/confidence/trust.
I said that over there too!
I also pointed out that trust or faith in peer review and other checks (replication, falsification) is all the more rational because it doesn’t require scientists to be pure or virtuous: ambition and self-interest are motivations for trying to show that other people got it wrong.
I meant the part about peer review, not the part about string theory. I know things are weird in theoretical physics. (String theorists use the word ‘faith’ in relation to string theory? Really? Can you cite any examples?)
“Despite the fact that in the past two decades there has not been a single shred of empirical evidence to support it. So theoretical physicists know all about faith.”
I take your point, but why call it faith?
String theory is fundamentally mathematical and mathematics has always been driven by non-empirical considerations. I suspect most theoretical physicists took the attitude “string theory is interesting: let’s work on it” but physicists being scientist want empirical results too and if they’re not forthcoming they tend to lose interest, which is what’s currently happening with string theory (to greatly simply the philosophy/sociology of science). I once had a physics professor who spent much of his professional life trying to identify an apparent anomaly in Newtonian gravitation. In the end it didn’t pan out. I’m sure he was disappointed but I doubt he felt he was a victim of misplaced faith. In the end facts are important, but the important things aren’t the facts. Most religious people (the naive religous people who aren’t supposed to exist) don’t understand that point which is why it has to be constantly pointed out.
Snap.
Religious belief is to rational debate what diplomatic immunity is to the laws of a given land.
You want evidence? Facts? Rational argument? I’m sorry, you don’t seem to understand. I don’t sink down to that level of materiality, you see, I have a permit…
I don’t want to repeat everything in that huge discussion at TP (short for “The Pure,” according to OB)…but do want to say that moral beliefs and religious beliefs can be importantly different, but still similar in a way that’s relevant to my point. They both operate in the realm of reasons. That’s the similarity.
Whether one is about something descriptive and one is about something prescriptive seems immaterial. We want to get those prescriptions right. We should be against honor killings, not for, to pick one example. When the topic is gay marriage, there are arguments we should pay attention to.
In the moral case, I actually feel a little more worried about trusting gut feelings. Belief in God is often completely harmless. But if you don’t believe in gay marriage, that has an impact on other people. If you do believe in honor killings, again, a huge impact.
Still, gut feelings have some claim on us–they tell us, in a way, what our whole brain thinks. They’re also reflections of what a whole society thinks–instead of just the lone individual. I wouldn’t abandon them too fast.
Still, and especially in the moral case, there ought to be openness to argument and evidence and new ways of feeling. Gut feelings can change. This is really what’s happened on the gay marriage issue.
I think if we got rid of “belief in belief” gut feelings really would evolve…partly because of argumentation, partly not. The ponzi scheme might be defeated without everyone having to turn themselves into a super-rationalist.
Ophelia, You are insistent. If you recall my example of the stock and currency markets, I’m not big on gut feeling. Someone once accused me of being a terrorist of truth. Imagine a world where everyone, not just you, insists on examining every gut feeling to see if it is true or not. Jean’s position makes for a more comfortable world, I think. Is a comfortable world what I want? It’s not what you are seeking. Maybe the difference between the two positions is deeper, that is, is based on more radically different ways of living the world, than I had thought.
Amos, I’m insistent? Because I want to go on discussing the subject but over here where I won’t be annoying anyone over there? That’s insistent? I didn’t order (or even ask) anyone to join me, you know! Jeez. And no, I don’t recall your example of the stock and currency markets, because I was too bored by it to read it.
“Imagine a world where everyone, not just you, insists on examining every gut feeling to see if it is true or not.”
Can I imagine a world where everyone just does examine every gut feeling to see if it is true or not, rather than insisting on it? If I imagine a world like that, it sounds pretty good – assuming of course that by ‘gut feeling’ you mean gut feelings about truths about the world, not simply emotions in general.
‘I think if we got rid of “belief in belief” gut feelings really would evolve.’
That would certainly be a start. (Can we also get rid of belief in gut feelings? Can we tolerate them but decline actually to believe in them? I’m already willing to tolerate them in individuals [aren’t I kind] but I don’t believe in them.)
Hmm. I think I agree with much of what Jean K. is saying, but I am not at all satisfied with the WAY she is saying it, which I think confuses and conflates some things that ought to be clear and distinct. Primarily, I think “gut feelings” shouldn’t be at issue at all. Faith doesn’t operate at the level of gut feeling, it operates on the products of gut feeling – just like reason does. Except reason operates to improve or refine the beliefs generated by gut feeling, whereas faith operates to preserve such beliefs from any refinement or change.
I am nothing if not a dedicated rationalist/critical thinking type, but I’m happy enough to be guided by instinct and intuition in many matters – which is really just a way of saying that I’m often content to let my brain generate conclusions without a lot of interference from my conscious mind. After all, the cutting edge of neuroscience seems to keep moving toward the conclusion (very roughly characterized) that “consciousness” is simply the process by which the forebrain imposes a semi-coherent narrative organizing structure on the untidy impulses, desires and beliefs generated by the rest of our brain.
Thing is, the process of imposing structure (i.e. the forebrain’s activities) is where things like analysis, reasoning, and evaluating evidence happen. Faith is also a product of this structure-imposing process, something that follows after the “gut feeling” processes that generate beliefs (and impulses, desires, etc.). It’s important to distinguish between the generation of beliefs and the preservation or alteration of beliefs – and sometimes Jean’s way of talking about it preserves that distinction, and sometimes it loses or confuses it.
Faith is not primarily about beliefs, it’s about believing. That is, faith is a process of acquiring and fixing beliefs – not simply having the gut feeling that there is a God, but the decision to rely upon one’s gut-feeling beliefs to such a degree that one excludes the feedback of reasons and evidence entirely (at least on some matters).
Jean says that religious beliefs and moral beliefs “both operate in the realm of reasons,” but ordinary beliefs about the world also operate in the realm of reasons. The realm of reasons is, she seem to be saying (and I agree), where feedback is imposed on those “gut feeling” beliefs to determine whether or not they are true or worthwhile or consistent. But faith happens at that same level: It’s not a matter of gut feeling, but of responding to gut feelings by imposing some narrative structure.
That means that the contrast between faith and reason should also be characterized at this level of feedback on the beliefs generated by gut feelings: Reasoning, moral reasoning or otherwise, attempts to impose a coherent narrative on our gut-generated beliefs that is both internally and externally consistent. Faith throws coherency and consistency out the window, and instead walls off some subset of beliefs from all feedback. Faith is the narrative that imposes no feedback, always reinforcing and never fundamentally questioning or altering the initial output of the “guts” of the brain.
Like OB says, the gut feeling that God exists is not really the point: That gut feeling is not in and of itself a matter of faith. What one does with that gut feeling is what’s at issue: One can evaluate the belief motivated by that gut feeling by the same standards as one evaluates any other belief, by attempting to give the belief a clear definition and evaluating the belief’s consistency with both one’s other beliefs and with one’s experiences of the world. Or one can deliberately decide to wall off that belief from any such evaluation, to apply different standards (or no standards) of coherence and consistency to this belief than one applies to others.
However beliefs get generated by the guts of the brain, we can either subject those beliefs to critical evaluation, or protect those beliefs from critical evaluation – that is, make the choice of reason or faith. I think reason is an objectively better choice – for all sorts of reasons ;-)
And, I suppose, we can also perform such critical evaluation with varying degrees of success. I find I’m much more willing to let people off the hook for not being good critical thinkers more than I am for rejecting critical thinking entirely… although it can be awfully hard to tell the difference between the two.
OB: I don’t use the word “insistence” as an insult. Remember that you had characterized yourself as tedious, and I said that I found you insistent, not tedious. I was trying to be friendly. In this blog, you characterized yourself as stupid. I don’t find you to be stupid. I do find you to be angry with yourself and with others. Perhaps your anger is justified. I’m sorry that you found my examples from the stock and currency markets boring, but they are examples that came to mind about how gut feelings can lead us astray when we make important decisions. As I said before when I talked about markets, our gut feelings tend to be characterized by wishful thinking, denial, projection, etc. I’m a slow thinker, and I can see points in favor of your position and points in favor of that of Jean. As I remarked previously, your point of view and that of Jean lead to radically different ways of being in the world, if you’ll allow me some existentialist terminology. My way of being is probably closer to yours than to that of Jean, but I wish I could be more like Jean.
I wrote what I wrote (above) before going out for the evening and figured by the time I got back I would have been completely eviscerated. I’m pleasantly surprised that things aren’t really quite that bad.
I welcome the attempt (in G’s post) to talk about these things more precisely and within a cognitive science framework. All of these issues really do have to do with how the mind actually works.
I will say that G does seem to start shifting from the issue of faith (belief without arguments) to the issue of “belief in belief” towards the end (“protecting” beliefs, “walling off”)–which I said all along seems pernicious.
amos, In person I’m evil and irreverent. Really. But I appreciate the compliment.
Great stuff G. I would point out that it is not just faith that makes people wall of beliefs they do prety much the same with political beliefs as well.
The act of walling off beliefs seems to be hard-wired. Cialdini’s stuff on ‘committment and consistency’ describes how people ‘grow’ new supports for beliefs when an original one is taken away – and become more strongly committed.
Was it not so that in the left-right brain separation experiments, the subject would pull complete rationalisation systems out of the air to justify things that were the result of left-right hands operating in separate sides of reference?
I think you are probably right chris.
People also seem to inherit certain beliefs, for instance most people tend to inherit the religion and political beliefs of their parents,although if the relationship with the parents is troubled the oposite belief is often adopted,e.g someone with a conservative christian father may become a liberal atheist as a reaction.
Since I haven’t got the time (or currently anything like the brainpower to engage properly with this – what’s that “sleep” business all about, anyway?), can I just mangle an old saying, and offer:
“All roads lead to Hume”
:-)
But then I’m Scottish, and most firmly ‘reality-based’, so inevitably biased.
And Einstein liked to talk about ‘god’. Don’t take it too seriously. Physicists, especially theoretical physicists, have a wierd sense of humour. It’s part of the culture.
Now that I’ve had some sleep and I’ve reread G’s post, I see that he really decided to equate faith with “walling off” preserving beliefs from critical evaluation, etc. etc. In other words, he ignored the whole point–which is to separate two things going on in the minds of religious people–belief without argument and “belief in belief”. If you go and talk to some religious people, I think you will actually find one without the other.
This analogy may help! I mentioned gay marriage above. When that issue first came up, my attitude was initially to be against. It was sort of strange, because I had gay friends, etc., but it just seemed intuitively obvious that marriage is for a man and a woman. I did think about all the arguments, I did not “wall off the belief”. I actually even wanted to support gay marriage (what with my friends). But the intuition persisted.
This is what it’s like to be religious for some people. They are perfectly open to all arguments and reflection. They just do believe. Talk to some religious people…you’ll find out this is true!
This is a rather important point if you’re goal is persuasion. Back to gay marriage–the turning point for me was when I saw a great movie called “Chicks in White Satin.” Very, very touching movie about two women getting married. It connected with me on a gut level–wow, you really can have two wedding dresses in one wedding. They obviously felt toward each other like any married couple.
I am now solidly pro-gay marriage–even, I would say, passionately. Sure, I can state all the arguments, but the truth is my support is on a gut level.
If you want to convert religious folk (personally, I don’t), you need to stop complaining about how closed minded they all are and clobbering them with arguments. You need to find a “Chicks in White Satin” that works at the intuitive level.
Don’t trust women. There is a built-in competition between women? Edna O’ Brien
Amos,
‘I don’t use the word “insistence” as an insult. Remember that you had characterized yourself as tedious, and I said that I found you insistent, not tedious. I was trying to be friendly.’
Oh, sorry; I misunderstood you. You didn’t actually say you found me insistent, not tedious, you just said ‘You are insistent’ – different thing! Sorry I was snappish – especially when you were trying to be friendly.
OB: Just for the record, in the Philosophers Mag Blog, I stated explicitly that I found you “insistent, but not tedious”. I assumed that you had read my comment there, and so my comment here was simply a continuation of the previous comment. Everyone is or should be insistent when something matters to him or her. Take care, Amos
Amos, oh I see, so you did. I missed that; sorry again!
Well I am insistent, of course; insistent and persistent. And I suppose usually aware of the risk of being thereby tedious. I’m much more willing to risk being tedious here than on other people’s sites (and that should apply especially to TPM’s blog).
Outeast,
I don’t think my gay marriage example has anything to do with walling off. You listen to arguments, and they transform your attitude or they don’t. You can want them to, and find them ever powerful, but find yourself still with the old attitude. Conviction is not entirely under your control (which is one of the reason it’s so absurd to make a virtue out of religious belief.)
Another example: some people read arguments for God’s existence that they take to be excellent, plus they very much want to believe, yet they find themselves not believing. (To their immense frustration…)
I think the intuitive or gut or instinctive (many elements of this)part of thinking shouldn’t be suppressed, because it’s part of the way the mind gets us to the truth. Fallible, of course, but it has value.
Jean, I don’t think anyone is claiming that gut feelings should be suppressed – only that they should be reasoned about. That’s what I’m claiming, anyway.
We need to strike a balance between trusting gut feelings, intuitions,instincts, etc. and examining them. The more times I say this, the more it strikes me as just common sense.
Ah, a balance. I don’t think I had quite grasped that that was what you meant.
But why do we need to strike a balance? Are you saying that it’s a common mistake to examine gut feelings too much, and that lots of people should do less of it? If so, I gotta say, I don’t see it. Maybe it’s just selection bias, but I see lots of unexamined gut feelings and not all that much excess examination of gut feelings. I don’t see why it’s not right just to say that we should do both – that except in emergencies and other situations when we don’t have time to examine and we really have to act, we should examine our gut feelings and intuitions in case they’re simply wrong. Why isn’t that just common sense?
I like reflection. I’m for it. What does it really mean, though? Think again, look again, listen, be open to multiple possibilities. You can be reflective and take your intuitions seriously.
Common sense tells me that I’m wasting my time wondering whether I can trust common sense. But isn’t common sense just what society tells us that normal people should believe? It may be right at times and it may be wrong. Common sense is usually inculcated by those with the power to do so: schools, the media, authority figures including parents and advertising. Common sense is rarely the product of rational reflection.
Sure, you can be reflective and take your intuitions seriously; I think that’s what I was saying; but I was responding to the claim that we need to strike a balance between trusting intuitions and examining them – so that’s two differences: trusting is different from taking seriously, and a balance between trusting and examining is different from doing both. If the claim is that we should both take our intuitions seriously and examine or reflect on them, then I agree with it. (Mostly. I think I probably have some intuitions that are just silly and not in need of taking seriously – but that’s a detail rather than a principle.)
amos, Common sense can seem fearsome, but so can the lone, fanatical individual. Sometimes he/she needs the correcting influence of other people. Sometimes it’s the other way around. (Why can’t anything be simple?)
Ophelia, “Balance” was a bad choice of words (gulp). It’s not like we should get ourselves into a state halfway between trusting and examining…or trust half the time and examine half the time. Ugh.
Actually I really have to be pro-reflection, considering I wrote that article about how the Brahmin needs to do some reflecting. But still, we all have our intuitions, and even if we come back to them, they don’t necessarily change, and when they do it can be because of an argument or many other factors. I a word, being a sane person is very tricky.
I think we’re back to that point of a delicate consensus. So quick, someone take a picture!
By the way, just because of this discussion I bought the book “Philosophers without Gods” today. A collection of essays by all sorts of atheists, with all sorts of attitudes toward religion. I’m lookin’ forward to it.
It’s always a pleasure to talk to both of you.
Jean, ah there you go – we can join hands and repudiate ‘balance’! Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing about the Brahmin – you know, ‘yes but what about the Brahmin? What about Haidt going off the deep end?’ I was also thinking I should have added ‘not that I mean to say I think my reflections are necessarily any good.’ Being a sane person is very tricky indeed.
Jean: Are the only two alternatives, common sense and being a lone fanatical individual? Are all solitary thinkers fanatics? I hate to use cliché examples, but here go some. Socrates certainly went against what we might call Athenian common sense. Was Socrates a fanatic? Was Spinoza a fanatic? Couldn’t we examine common sense collectively, using what you call the corrective influence of others? If all of us had more common sense, we wouldn’t be engaged in this strange discussion. Common sense tells me that time is money, for example. Common sense tells me that normal people don’t spend (note the verb “spend”) their time arguing about the kind of things we’ve been arguing about. For OB: it’s not tricky to be sane. It’s tricky to be normal. Being sane and being normal (in the statistical sense of the word) are not at all the same thing. Being sane just means (unless one was born with the genes for schizophrenia)asking questions and not lying to oneself.
I have been wondering about this walling of beliefs,for instance I am against capital punishment I think that I am rational in this,but I am also sure that no argument however compelling would change my mind on this,is this a walled of belief?
Richard, I think that’s a commitment rather than a belief. Commitments often are walled off. Sometimes that’s just as well (commitments not to cause pain to sentient beings, for instance); other times it’s not.
It’s depressing and alarming how easy it is to undermine people’s commitment not to cause pain, and how easy it is to habituate them to doing just that. Cf. Milgram, Zimbardo, Browning, etc etc.
Lots of talk about gut instinct, without ever really addressing what it is.
Everybody knows about neural networks, right? They’re arrangements of nodes with inputs and outputs based on our understanding of how the neurons in the brain actually work (more or less). You train them by feeding in various known inputs until the outputs match your test target. Then you set them loose on real inputs. The various input nodes fire signals to other nodes which fire to even more nodes which feedback into themselves etc until eventually things settle down and the “answer” comes out. This can be very quick, as no rules are followed, or calculations made. Essentially the network just “reacts”. (This is obviously grossly oversimplified.)
Now consider how you learn a physical skill, like juggling. While your slow, reasoning, fairly linear consciousness is controlling each step you are clumsy and uncoordinated. But the practice serves as inputs to your subconscious neural network, which gradually gets trained into a state which lets it take over the skill by just “reacting” to the inputs, without thinking through the steps.
(I’m getting to the point, honest.)
How about a non-physical skill, like programming say? Same thing goes on. You teach your subconscious by “practising” writing programmes. Eventually, the training builds up and your subconscious can provide you with insight even without you consciously being aware of how you came to it. One approach to a problem might not “feel” right, where another one will. When you stop and think, you may be able to work out what the pros and cons of each approach are, but importantly, that’s not what your subconscious did: it just reacted.
Is this making sense? Your “gut feeling” is the neural network in your subconscious reacting to inputs and providing an answer. A well-trained system will be very reliable, but it can still be wrong, which is why it’s good to be able to separately reason consciously through the issues to see if you come to the same conclusion, thereby reconciling “gut thinking” with “conscious reasoning”.
So: trust your gut to the extent warranted by your confidence in its past performance, but try and verify rationally where possible. Use your gut to inform your thinking, but avoid relying on it exclusively.
(There’s more to be said, but if I make this comment any longer I’d be surprised if anyone had the energy to read any of it at all…)
Yeah. It’s like driving. Most of driving is automatic once you know how to do it – but you still need to pay attention, because there are surprises. (JS tried to tell me recently that even the surprises are automatic and that there have been studies that show drivers deal with them better if they’re not paying attention – which I flatly refuse to believe, and JS doesn’t drive, so he wouldn’t know.)
Hmm. I wonder how I’d have fared in my Advanced Driving test if I’d tried that approach. “Oh, it’s okay Mr Examiner Sir, I’m actually a better driver by *not* paying attention.”
(Not *entirely* convinced by Mr S…)
And yes, it is indeed like driving (I nearly used that as my example). The problem is that most people aren’t aware that what is true for such physical skills is also true for the *non* physical ones.
But what if I had walled of the reverse position O.B would I not be an idealouge with a closed mind? or does the pain to another being taboo make my walling better than the reverse?
But I am ok with the war so it cant be I have a problem with pain?
Owen,
I think that’s a really good explanation, especially since it explains very nicely how none of these are “really” gut feelings – they are, instead, “shortcuts” for something we have learned through a rational, conscious process. (By rational I mean that we have reasons for them, not that they’re necessarily good reasons.)
Jean wrote that she has a gut feeling that vegetables are better for her diet than junk food (or something like that) – but it seems obvious to me that this is just a consequence of all the things she’s learned about healthy food throughout her lifetime. I think the same goes for her doubts concerning gay marriage – it’s a product of what she’s been told about it. In other words, “gut feelings” are really all based on our reasons – we just don’t always have conscious access to them. Which is exactly why we should be careful to examine them whenever they surface, because either those reasons or our reasoning can be faulty.
In other words, “gut feelings” are really all based on our reasons – we just don’t always have conscious access to them Not so, in the sense being discussed of “reasons” equating to internalised learning. Some of our “gut feelings” are also based, at least partly, on genetic propensity – parental love, reciprocity, incest avoidance, to name a random few.
This fact, however, doesn’t detract from the claim, with which I agree, that we should rationally examine our gut feelings when there is time to do so; in fact if anything it strengthens it.
(I would be interested to know more about the driving experiment. It seem more plausible to me that it was showing that an instinctive reaction is better than a consciously rational one – you can see it probably would be, because it would be quicker, probably much quicker in relation to the relevant timeframes. However, that’s a different thing from the way the driver noticed the thing that needed reacting to in the first place).
Yeah, I’d be interested to know more about the driving experiments or studies or whatever they were, too. Like most of our arguments this one was conducted while walking at top speed to somewhere in the echoing wilderness of the SUNY Buffalo campus, so it wasn’t possible to look it up. It was triggered by my mention of the experience familiar to drivers of suddenly realizing that our minds have been thoroughly elsewhere for the past X minutes and wondering what the hell would have happened if someone had suddenly changed lanes right in front of us, and then reminding ourselves not to let our minds wander while driving, dammit. JS’s claim was that the studies show that wandering minds aren’t a problem. I don’t believe it. But maybe he confused instinctive reaction with noticing – because he doesn’t drive, so he wouldn’t know. (It was an irritating argument, because he doesn’t drive, so he wouldn’t know, but he wouldn’t take my word for it that you have to be paying attention in order to notice the unexpected.) (This only about a week after that trip to the Finger Lakes, when I drove us all back at top speed on a crowded freeway because we were going to be late for the welcoming dinner; his life was in my hands for two hours and he didn’t even know it. Tsk.)
“Mind-wandering experiences are defined by their lack of relation to the task in hand and are more likely to occur during driving, reading and other activities where vigilance may be low.” See mind wandering. I individually commit to memory on umpteen occasions finding myself driving via car through Wicklow and Wexford [a distance of some thirty miles or so.] and whilst doing so not being cognisant of having travelled through some of the smaller villages. I always found myself being enormously flummoxed. It always left me with an uncanny reaction suffice it to post.. However, not as ghastly as that of finding oneself on innumerable occasions effectively somnolent and snoozing for what may have seemed, I hope, like a split second, on the motorway. It exactly ties in with OB’s “I drove us all back at top speed on a crowded freeway because we were going to be late for the welcoming dinner; his life was in my hands for two hours and he didn’t even know it.”
If there were passengers in the car I was drivingN they would have doubtless been none the wiser for my sudden sleep. Too frightening to even contemplate.
While I am on the subject. 1) Do Americans drive on the same side as drivers in Ireland? 2) Do American drivers mainly drive automatic cars as opposed to manual ones?
About 34% of the world population drive on the left, and 66% on the right. Ireland/Britain come under the former category as do seventy three other countries, too innumerable to here mention.