It can sometimes be useful to think of yourself as consisting of multiple systems. You have an emotional system that constantly processes your sensory input and thoughts, and produces emotions like fear, anger, happiness and contempt based on this input. You also have a reasoning system, which is what you use when you are reasoning, planning, analyzing and consciously predicting. But the operations of these two systems are not independent. In fact, they each have the power to alter the operation...
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Month: July 2011
What’s So Special About Your Own Beliefs?
Suppose that Tom and Sally have a disagreement over a factual question (as opposed to one of values or preferences). She claims that the argument he is making has errors or is unconvincing, but Tom feels the same way about her argument. They debate the question for an hour, but afterwords are still each adamantly convinced that his or her own reasoning is sound while the other person's is flawed. In this instance, is each person really more justified believing in his or her own belief than he or...
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Some Things Are Only In Your Simulation
It is impossible to perceive anything directly. What we experience as a visual image starts out as electromagnetic radiation of various frequencies which reflects off of an object and then hits our eye. The photoreceptor cells in our eye are stimulated, information propagates down the optic nerve, and so forth. We usually interpret this as seeing the object we are looking at. However, a more complete description involves acknowledging that we live in a simulation constructed by our brain. Our ey...
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Still Living with the Emotions of our Ancestors
According to evolutionary theory, emotions evolved because they were helpful for survival. Anxiety alerts us to potential danger and makes us wary. Anger motivates us to fight and shows our allies that we need help. Jealousy motivates us to keep our mates to ourselves to help maximize the number of our offspring that survive to child-bearing age. But the environment we live in today is obviously very different from the environment of our distant ancestors for whom these emotions were optimized. ...
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Do We Really Read Non-fiction to Learn?
When you ask people why they read non-fiction, they are likely to tell you that their primary motivation is to learn. But are people's behaviors really consistent with this being their motivation? Almost all of the information that we read is already forgotten days after having read it, and most of what remains is forgotten after months. Even those facts or ideas that are particularly interesting or useful to us are forgotten the significant majority of the time, or at least, only partially reme...
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Novel Ways of Carving Up Knowledge
Normally we divide up the elements of knowledge into the traditional categories of history, literature, math, physics, chemistry, psychology, fine arts, and so forth. We are so used to these divisions that it may not even occur to us that knowledge can be split in plenty of other ways. But imagine, for instance, a school that offered the following subjects:
Making Observations
Formulating Theories
Making Predictions
Testing Predictions
Developing Happiness
Making Observations coul...
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