“For some of our most important beliefs, we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous—and it is also essential.” 카지노사이트
Beliefs are a slippery concept. What actually are they? Philosophy has long struggled to define them.2 In this post-truth and ideologically polarized world, we need a better understanding of beliefs. As a psychiatrist, my job frequently involves identifying distorted beliefs, understanding how they formed, and helping people to learn to be more skeptical of their own beliefs.
Let’s consider a helpful evolutionary framework for making more coherent sense of what beliefs really are, and why mistaken beliefs can sometimes be so hard to change. Then we’ll talk about how to gain a more accurate grasp of reality, and how, ultimately, to advance society.
Beliefs as energy-saving shortcuts in modeling and predicting the environment3
Beliefs are our brain’s way of making sense of and navigating our complex world. They are mental representations of the ways our brains expect things in our environment to behave, and how things should be related to each other—the patterns our brain expects the world to conform to. Beliefs are templates for efficient learning and are often essential for survival. 바카라사이트
The brain is an energy-expensive organ, so it had to evolve energy-conserving efficiencies. As a prediction machine, it must take shortcuts for pattern recognition as it processes the vast amounts of information received from the environment by its sense organ outgrowths. Beliefs allow the brain to distill complex information, enabling it to quickly categorize and evaluate information and to jump to conclusions. For example, beliefs are often concerned with understanding the causes of things: If ‘b’ closely followed ‘a’, then ‘a’ might be assumed to have been the cause of ‘b’.
These shortcuts to interpreting and predicting our world often involve connecting dots and filling in gaps, making extrapolations and assumptions based on incomplete information and based on similarity to previously recognized patterns. In jumping to conclusions, our brains have a preference for familiar conclusions over unfamiliar ones. Thus, our brains are prone to error, sometimes seeing patterns where there are none. This may or may not be subsequently identified and corrected by error-detection mechanisms. It’s a trade-off between efficiency and accuracy.
In its need for economy and efficiency of energy consumption, the default tendency of the brain is to fit new information into its existing framework for understanding the world, rather than repeatedly reconstructing that framework from scratch. 온라인카지
Seeing is believing
It seems likely that the processes in the brain involved in abstract belief formation evolved from simpler processes involved in interpreting sensory perception.
Since we experience the external world entirely through our senses, we find it hard to accept that these perceptions are sometimes subjectively distorted and that they are not necessarily reliable experiences of objective reality. People tend to trust their physical senses and to believe their perceptions even when they are hallucinating and no matter how bizarre their perceptual distortions. People will layer explanations on top of their perception of reality to explain away contradictions.
We give our subjective experience too much credence, and so too our beliefs. We will more readily explain away evidence that contradicts our cherished belief by expanding and elaborating that belief with additional layers of distorted explanation, rather than abandoning it or fundamentally restructuring it.
Homeostasis — maintaining stability
Primitive nervous systems evolved in simple organisms in part to serve the function of homeostasis—a dynamic physiological state of equilibrium or stability, a steady state of internal conditions. Homeostasis is structured around a natural resistance to change, following the same principle as a thermostat.
The lower, primitive parts of our human brains maintain homeostasis of breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, temperature, energy balance (via appetite) and a variety of endocrine processes. So too, beliefs preserve a kind of cognitive homeostasis—a stable, familiar approach to processing information about our world.
We should expect that the homeostatic function that defined primitive brains would likely have been preserved as an organizing principle in the evolution of more complex brains. Certainly, complex brains are geared toward reacting, learning and adapting, but just like primitive brain functions, these adaptations are ultimately in the service of maintaining homeostasis in an ever-changing environment.
Radically restructuring our belief system and creating a new worldview engages parts of the brain involved in higher reasoning processes and computation, and is consequently more effortful, time- and energy-consuming. The brain often cannot afford such an investment. This would explain why, when we experience cognitive dissonance, it is easier to resolve this discomfort by doubling down on our existing belief system—ignoring or explaining away the challenging, contradictory information.
A consistent sense of self, and personal investment in one’s beliefs
Another important factor accounting for resistance to changing our beliefs is the way our beliefs are so often intertwined with how we define ourselves as people—our self-concept. Indeed, beliefs are associated with a part of the brain integrally involved in self-representation—the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.4 We want to feel that we are consistent, with our behavior aligning with our beliefs. We constantly try to rationalize our own actions and beliefs, and try to preserve a consistent self-image. It’s embarrassing and quite often costly in a variety of ways to admit that we are fundamentally wrong.
In many cases, people have a lot invested personally in their belief system. They may have staked their reputation on a particular belief. Not infrequently, people structure their whole lives around a belief. And this investment may go far beyond a sense of self, extending to large material and financial investments or a life’s career. A change of belief for such a person would obviously involve a monumental upheaval and may entail intolerable personal losses.