Brian63

This is a very illuminating and important article that is definitely worth resurrecting (it is a couple years old). I'm curious if anyone has any criticisms of it.

<a href="http://www.csicop.org/si/2000-11/beliefs.html" target="_blank">Why Bad Beliefs Don't Die</a>

Brian

infidelchic

New anatomy of the brain?

Brian63

That is *EXACTLY* what my brain looks like, maybe not yours though.

Actually, that's even a picture of me that they used in the sketch, although I'm not quite that bald and I have a physical body below the neck.

Brian

fando

Thanks! That was pretty informative. I've always suspected there was a biological reason for the immutability of beliefs and this article strengthens the position.

Vogelfrei

Actually, I though the article was quite poor. It attempts to explain away a rather large issue with rather trivial anthropomorphizations, logical contradictions, etc.

Problems:

1) The author writes that sense-data contradicts beliefs at every moment. This is only true when one takes "not being about something" to imply "contradictory" (which is clearly not true, by definition of "contradictory"). When the object of sense-data is not about the object of beliefs, then sense-data has *nothing to say* either way about beliefs. Perhaps the author thought it otherwise because he assumed that the subject has an additional belief about object permanence (well, the lack thereof), but that's a downright unadaptive belief to have, and makes no sense according to the paradigm the author advocates.

2) According to the article, beliefs exist to ensure survival; beliefs, however, are painted as existing to *provide comfort and stability*, which is why the author claims that it's difficult to change a belief that plays a role in a larger belief-system. If the former were exclusively true, coming up with and rejecting beliefs would be very much like science, either in that a single credible contradictory observation destroys a theory(*), or in that multiple contradictory theories are allowed to coexist because they all predict something useful, and there's nothing better to supplant them (i.e. "coherence of belief-system" wouldn't be relevant). If the latter were exclusively true, beliefs would be only coincidentally related to reality. If neither are exclusively true (the more likely case)...well, the article isn't about that, is it?

(*) The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" thing/conservation of belief-system-coherence is not sufficient to explain the stubbornness with which people hold to beliefs; if I claim that gravity operates in reverse in my house, a scientist might not believe me, but if I demonstrated it, the scientist would be interested enough in figuring out what was going on to give my interpretation fair consideration - not the automatic rejection that most people treat adversarial claims with.

3) This isn't a critique directed specifically at the author, but includes him. Using what I call "childish animism" in explanations is pretty common - one says that the brain "wants" or "fears" a thing, or whatever, and so acts accordingly - but unless it's understood by all parties to be a metaphor (i.e. literally false), it's either a) the speaker talking talking down to the listener due to an assumed lack of intellectual capacity on the latter's part ("night comes because the sun goes to sleep", sez the parent to the child), b) stupidity on the part of the speaker ("night comes because the sun goes to sleep", sez the child to the parent), or c) mass ignorance ("night comes because the sun goes to sleep", sez one child to another). The problem with talking about what the brain "wants" is that it either claims that pure physical phenomena are intentional (false by definition), or that there are little homunculi inside objects which directly cause their behavior (empirically untrue, and philosophically problematic/requiring an infinite regress, besides). Things don't happen for reasons or purposes; things are the way they are "just because", and the best we can do is give explanations of how they came to be that way, sans teleology and so forth. To apply that here, it's possible that beliefs are largely static because they happen to *function* to promote survival, but the mechanism itself came into being for no reason and happened to be good for promoting survival only coincidentally. (I may take this point up further in a separate thread re: evolution and evolutionary psychology...we'll see. Note also that my revised explanation of static beliefs is probably hopelessly shortsighted, akin to "humans have intestines because the humans without them died off").

As for the article, well: it's already known that beliefs are hard to change. To answer the question of "why?", the article tells you the equivalent of "there's a process in the brain which makes them hard to change" - but we already knew that! This is equivalent to saying "George can't lift X weight because he's not strong enough" or "Bob's thoughts are nonsensical because he's insane" - restatements of the obvious ("strength" and "insanity" are just new descriptions for "ability to lift weight" and "possession of nonsensical thoughts", respectively), falsely passed off as new information. The brief foray into a useful psychological explanation (i.e. something that describes the phenomenon from a psychological first-person perspective, and makes definite predictions) ends in contradiction, with the explicit claim that beliefs are meant to mesh with reality, but the strong implication that beliefs are meant to be form a coherent whole with other beliefs, only.

So much for pop psychology. I'd suggest a simpler explanation: beliefs are static in proportion to the degree to which a person has a cerebral sort of temperament. Again, it seems to be a pointless, non-informative rephrasing ("cerebral" = "allowing intellectual analysis to inform beliefs", by definition, right?), and it's oversimplified to the extent that it's more a mockery of a position than a position itself, but at the very least, it makes predictions that can be checked for accuracy, and so is vastly superior to the non-explanation in the article.