And Slaters Go Plop

No one believes that they are dogmatic. We’re all far too reasonable for that carry on. But we can all point to a number of other people who we would term as dogmatic and, with a little imagination, we should be able to understand that they probably don’t think they are dogmatic. This leaves us with a dilemma; how do we know that we are not being dogmatic ourselves? If we can see others acting dogmatically who are unaware of it then, chances are, we could be too.

By ‘dogmatic’ I am describing an absolutist kind of belief that, if I could summarise in my own words, boils down to the fact that you would really rather hold to what you believe than accept an alternative even if the alternative is true. Dogma is the belief you refuse to interrogate.

Dogmatism can get in the way of new truths. The reason for this is that if you are unwilling to honestly put a belief to the test then you will never find out if that belief happens to be false. A valid argument can be made that perhaps there are some beliefs that we’d be better off clinging to rather than risking finding out a truth that would cause you great unhappiness. Would you like to find out that your partner cheated on you all those years ago? What if we discover that we are really just a brain in a jar somewhere living a simulation? What if God really is imaginary? What if God really is real? Whether we dare to search for the truth of a particular matter is a personal decision. But if we refuse to honestly put our beliefs to the test then we ought to show a little more humility when telling others what we ‘know‘ to be true.

So, assuming we do want truth, how do we avoid dogmatism? The best way I can think of is to actually value truth over any existing belief. This can be excruciating, especially when a belief is foundational to any meaning you get out of life. I found it very difficult many years ago to say to myself in all honesty that I would hold truth higher than my belief in the existence of God. If you’ve never believed in God you’ll probably struggle to understand the significance of this but, to a believer, God is truth and so it can seem a kind of fundamental blasphemy to say that you would even challenge the idea. If you do believe in God, fear not, many respectable people have done what I did and kept their belief afterwards and I greatly respect them for it.

Other than valuing truth over existing beliefs I’ve come across another technique that can help to break the emotional attachment we often develop with our dearly-held beliefs. That is to regularly switch perspectives or, “state the opposite”. An example of this is to first say what you believe i.e. “Labour has the best health policies” and then say the opposite i.e. “National has the best health policies” or, “Act has the best health policies” and try to mean it. You can do this with just about any belief in which you are tempted to take sides and it really can help to make you more objective because it can lessen the effects of the ‘in-group/out-group’ factor.

Does anyone have any other good tips or tricks for finding truth that can be used by anyone regardless of their starting assumptions?

Prior to 2005 I was reading mostly the kind of books that make the Whitcoulls Top 100 list along with the occasional classic by the likes of Dostoevsky, Hardy and others. And, of course, Iain [M] Banks whenever a new book came out.

In early 2005 a friend recommended Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. It was this simple book that, to my great surprise, allowed me to clearly see the fact that my view of reality didn’t match what we can observe of the universe around us. Subconsciously I’d been aware of this fact but had managed to ignore it for 14 years or so. I decided that I would be better off with truth rather than a comforting fantasy and decided to investigate further. I watched a lot of documentaries, visited a lot of websites (and blogs) and talked with a lot of interesting people. I also read a lot of books – here are the ones that have influenced me the most over the last three years:

The Bible – Various Authors
The Mind of God – Paul Davies
A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
E=mc2 – David Bodanis
Deep Simplicity – John Gribbin
Pale Blue Dot – Carl Sagan
The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
Climbing Mount Improbable – Richard Dawkins
The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
The Demon-Haunted World – Carl Sagan
The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
Letter to a Christian Nation – Sam Harris
The Richness of Life – Stephen J Gould
The Creation – E O Wilson
The End of Faith – Sam Harris
Various Writings – Thomas Paine
Breaking the Spell – Daniel Dennett
Why People Believe Weird Things – Michael Shermer
God is not Great – Christopher Hitchens
Infidel – Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Freakonomics – Levitt & Dubner
The Blank Slate – Steven Pinker
Consciousness, An Introduction – Susan Blackmore

And I have the following books waiting to be read:

Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
How The Mind Works – Steven Pinker
The Ancestor’s Tale – Richard Dawkins
Freedom Evolves – Daniel Dennett

I’m not sure where I’ll go to from here but I feel I’ve done the topics of religion, superstition and pseudoscience to death. Evolution, cosmology and the workings of the mind still fascinate me so I’ll probably carry on down that path for a while.

Last year a study was performed by Sam Harris, Sameer A. Sheth and Mark S. Cohen where they used fMRI to observe the physical responses of the brain when a person was provided with statements that were taken to be true, false or otherwise. They found that different areas of the brain showed activity depending on how the subject perceived the statement.

Here is the abstract of the original study:

Objective: The difference between believing and disbelieving a proposition is one of the most potent regulators of human behavior and emotion. When one accepts a statement as true, it becomes the basis for further thought and action; rejected as false, it remains a string of words. The purpose of this study was to differentiate belief, disbelief, and uncertainty at the level of the brain.
Methods: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the brains of 14 adults while they judged written statements to be “true” (belief), “false” (disbelief), or “undecidable” (uncertainty). To characterize belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in a content-independent manner, we included statements from a wide range of categories: autobiographical, mathematical, geographical, religious, ethical, semantic, and factual.
Results: The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.
Interpretation: Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as “true” or its rejection as “false” appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.

Oliver Sacks, in a review of the study said,

Harris et al. note that reactions of assent are significantly prompter than those of dissent or uncertainty. This they take to support “Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true,” an almost reflexive, if provisional, assent, to be followed by a more deliberate weighing and assessment. Human beings, in other words, are wired to “accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” This seems to us to ring true.
The most provocative suggestion made by Harris et al. relates to their finding that all reactions of assent or acceptance (or belief, if one prefers) are neurophysiologically identical, whether propositional judgments are made in the highly charged realm of ethical or religious issues or the seemingly neutral realm of arithmetical statements. If such results can be duplicated, Harris et al. will have made a fascinating discovery.

The results of this original study have led to questions of whether religious faith ‘looks’ different than belief at the level of the brain and Harris is preparing for another study that will also use fMRI to observe the physical aspects of belief and faith.

In an attempt to find questions that will best suit the upcomming study Harris has set up four surveys and is looking for people who have opinions either way regarding Christianity to participate. If you are a Christian or an atheist/agnostic and you want to help them identify the most appropriate stimuli for the study you can complete one or more of the following surveys:

• Belief Survey A
• Belief Survey B
• Belief Survey C
• Belief Survey D

Each one has around 100 questions. I did C and it didn’t take too long.