Post
by Stein » Mon Feb 16, 2015 12:54 am
You think this is all so funny. How about this?
"Beliefs as Principles of Action
The human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. In fact, the very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of propositional truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts. By recourse to intuitions of truth and falsity, logical necessity and contradiction, human beings are able to knit together private visions of the world that largely cohere. What neural events underlie this process? What must a brain do in order to believe that a given statement is true or false?. We currently have no idea. Language processing must play a large role, of course, but the challenge will be to discover how the brain brings the products of perception, memory, and reasoning to bear on individual propositions and magically transforms them into the very substance of our living. It was probably the capacity for movement, enjoyed by certain primitive organisms, that drove the evolution of our sensory and cognitive faculties. This follows from the fact that if no creature could do anything with the information it acquired from the world, nature could not have selected for improvements in the physical structures that gather, store, and process such information. Even a sense as primitive as vision, therefore, seems predicated on the existence of a motor system. If you cannot catch food, avoid becoming food yourself, or wander off a cliff, there does not seem to be much reason to see the world in the first place—and certainly refinements in vision, of the sort found everywhere in the animal kingdom, would never have come about at all.
For this reason, it seems uncontroversial to say that all higher-order cognitive states (of which beliefs are an example) are in some way an outgrowth of our capacity for action. In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action: whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding (and misunderstanding) of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior.
THE power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:
Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.
What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailers are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.
The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas."
How funny is that?
Stein
