The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [4]
That said, the evidence I present in this book demonstrates how dependent our beliefs are on a multitude of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological factors that make our understanding of reality such an “enchanted glass” and so “full of superstition and imposture,” in Francis Bacon’s epigrammatic description. We begin with anecdotal evidence from three personal belief stories. The first story is about a man whom you will have never heard of but who had a profound and life-changing experience in the wee hours of the morning many decades ago that drove him to search for ultimate meaning in the cosmos. The second story is about a man whom you will most definitely have heard of, as he is one of the greatest scientists of our age, and he too had a life-changing early-morning experience that confirmed his decision to make a religious leap of faith. The third story is my own passage from believer to skeptic, and what I have learned along the way that drove me into a professional career of the scientific study of belief systems.
From narrative evidence we shall turn to the architecture of belief systems, how they are formed, nourished, reinforced, changed, and extinguished, first conceptually through the two theoretical constructs of patternicity and agenticity, and then delve deeper into how these cognitive processes evolved and what purpose they served in the lives of our ancestors as well as in our lives today. We shall then bore deeper into the brain, right down to the neurophysiology of belief system construction at the single neuron level, and then reconstruct from the bottom up how brains form beliefs. Then we shall examine how belief systems operate with regard to belief in religion, the afterlife, God, extraterrestrials, conspiracies, politics, economics, and ideologies, and then consider how a host of cognitive processes convince us that our beliefs are truths. In the final chapters we will consider how we know any of our beliefs are believable, which patterns are true and which false, which agents are real and which are not, and how science works as the ultimate pattern detection device that allows us a few degrees of freedom within belief-dependent realism, and some measurable progress away from its psychological trappings.
PART I
JOURNEYS OF BELIEF
Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the times.
—VOLTAIRE
1
Mr. D’Arpino’s Dilemma
The voice was as distinct as the message it delivered was unmistakable. Emilio “Chick” D’Arpino bolted upright from his bed, startled that the words he heard so clearly were not spoken by anyone in the room. It was 4 a.m. on February 11, 1966, and Mr. D’Arpino was alone in his bedroom, seemingly unperturbed by what he was hearing. It wasn’t a masculine voice, yet neither was it feminine. And even though he had no reference guide built by experience from which to compare, Mr. D’Arpino somehow knew that the source was not of this world.
* * *
I met Chick D’Arpino on my forty-seventh birthday, September 8, 2001, just three days before the calamitous event that would henceforth cleave history into pre- and post-9/11. Chick wanted to know if I would be willing to write an essay to answer this question: Is it possible to know if there is a source out there that knows we are here?
“Uh? You mean God?” I queried.
“Not necessarily,” Chick replied.
“ET?”
“Maybe,” Chick continued, “but I don’t want to specify the nature of the source, just that it is out there and not here.”
Who would ask such a question, I wondered, and more important, why? Chick explained that he was a retired bricklayer interested in pursuing answers to deep questions through essay contests and one-day conferences he was sponsoring at San Jose State University and at Stanford University, near his home in Silicon Valley. I had never heard of a retired bricklayer sponsoring conferences before, so this got my attention, as I have long admired autodidacts.
Over the years, as Chick and I became close friends, I grew more and