Bullshit in My Own Mind

There was one pivotal event in my road to eupraxsophy.

In case you have ignored the blogs I've written that were entitled eupraxsophy, eupraxsophy is the practice of being an activist for the scientific worldview who uses the scientific worldview's foundational philosophies in that activism.

Eupraxsophy is the use of science and philosophy in the marketplace to improve the world.

One day I was with my mentor, the social psychologist Jeff Larsen, and we were discussing a psychology experiment. He asked me what I thought would happen.

I told him.

He asked me how I knew that.

I told him, "thats just how people are."

He responded with a stern talk on the power of experimental data and how much of experimental psychology has rendered our intuitions false.

It was then, that for the first time, I learned to distrust my own mind.

The mind does a pretty good job of getting us through the day. Don't get me wrong, but the mind makes some common predictable mistakes.

For one, the mind is a pattern recognition machine. Which by default often makes it a deception machine.

We humans are hard-wired for a perceptual phenomena known as paradolia, which causes us to see faces in visual patterns. This is why so many of our Catholic brothers and sisters see Jesus and the Virgin Mary in normal objects.

Of course, the rest of us see all sorts of things as well. I can't look at a wooden piece of furniture without seeing faces in the wood rings, or in clouds, or in anything that has enough texture. I just don't call the media when this happens.

Our brains also come equipped with their very own sense of physics: which just happens to be totally wrong. This is the idea of impetus.

Impetus was the classical theory of physics, and it was dethroned by Sir Isaac Newton.

Almost all of us, as determined by research, are born with a notion of impetus. Again impetus is totally wrong.

In a survey conducted which asks when a baseball is thrown and is in mid-air what forces are acting on the ball.

Almost everyone, including me -->before I learned the real answer<-- said that the force of the pitchers throw was acting on the ball.

Some people also said gravity.

The correct answer is only gravity.

This is extremely counterintuitive to most of us. If it is intuitive to you, congradulations mutant scum!

The idea that correlation implies causation is another predictable betreyal that our mind can be expected to provide.

I am currently working on a blog about the product Airborne which claims to "boost the immune system."

Airborne is almost nothing but vitamin A, and it does not claim to heal but prevent disease.

Yet I have a close friend whose husband had a fantastic recovery from a severe cold when he took airborne.

Nevermind that our immune systems have been shown to be fantastic by over a century of research, in fact it is inevitable that all of us who are not suffering from full blown AIDS or another autoimmune disease can fully expect a statistically predictable set of rapid recoveries in our lives.

In fact, scientific research has confirmed that humans will statistically usually recover from disease without any treatment.

Yet because Airborne was at the scene of the crime it gets the credit.

This is logical fallacy.

It is also one we seem to predisposed to.

Just because something happened right before something else, does not mean that there is any cause between the two.

These examples are only a few among many of the lies our brains have evolved to tell us.

We have also evolved some other important tools. We have a neocortex, we have language, we have frontal lobes, all tools that we can use to protect ourselves from the lies that seem to come preprogrammed by evolution in our brains.

The problem is so few of us engage in this critical thinking in which our own thoughts are suspect.

We regularly convince ourselves of things that are simply not true.

I do this.

We all do this.

But I'm always looking at my thoughts, prejudices and ideas to catch myself doing this, and when I do, I fix it.

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