Michael Shermer on belief

Shermer has a new book out titled The Believing Brain. Here's some info from it:

We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture, and society at large; after forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalize them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations. Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.

Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process he calls agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency.

We can’t help believing. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation. Dr. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths and to insure that we are always right.

Interlaced with his theory of belief, Dr. Shermer provides countless real-world examples of belief from all realms of life, and in the end he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.

Hey! Thanks for the heads up on this one. Sounds like my kind of reading. You may also be interested in following up with "Minds and Gods" by Todd Tremlin and "The Feeling of What Happens" and "Self Comes to Mind" both by Antonio Damasio. In addition, one of my all-time favorites is "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer.

Take a look at these books, you won't be disappointed. And thanks again - BIG TIME!

You share these great book titles and now that I have a Kindle, it is very hard to restrain myself from buying books and overshooting my budget. I don't even have time to read all the books I want to. It's making me nuts! :-)

(Thanks for the great titles.)

Thanks for the review. I enjoy Shermer's books, I'll be looking for it.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2011 05:14PM by steve benson.

O.K. Let's step away from our materialist mentality for a minute and analyze Shermer's statements. I will assume you have represented his ideas accurately.

Shermer states:
>
> We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective,
> personal, emotional, and psychological reasons in
> the context of environments created by family,
> friends, colleagues, culture, and society at
> large; after forming our beliefs we then defend,
> justify, and rationalize them with a host of
> intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and
> rational explanations. Beliefs come first,
> explanations for beliefs follow.

Our beliefs are no doubt formed and shaped from a variety of influences. However, one of those influences is our rational cognitive faculties as established by evolution. In addition to the physical brain, We have minds and we reason. We are capable of evaluating data, considering environmental, political, and social influences, and forming rational beliefs, even in the face of powerful environmental influences.

Thus, belief formation is NOT simply a rote process of which we are powerless. Moreover, we defend our beliefs by use of the same mental faculties. Sure, sometimes we get it wrong, but to suggest that beliefs are always formed prior to application of cognitive reasoning is simply false. It is also false to suggest that we cannot form beliefs, or change our beliefs, when faced with the cogent arguments and explanations of others. We are not totally controled by our environements, and/or our brains. WE ALL KNOW THIS FIRST HAND! IF THIS WERE NOT TRUE, WE WOULD ALL STILL BE MORMONS!
>
> Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind
> our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From
> sensory data flowing in through the senses the
> brain naturally begins to look for and find
> patterns, and then infuses those patterns with
> meaning. The first process Dr. Shermer calls
> patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful
> patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data.
> The second process he calls agenticity: the
> tendency to infuse patterns with meaning,
> intention, and agency.

The brain is NOT a belief engine, it is a biological machine. It does not "look for and find patterns with meaning" as if it had sensual faculties over and above its neurological (physical) properties. As a biological machine the brain operates through mechanical, cause and effect principles. Mechanical machines do not "find meaning" or create meaning. They merely function. The brain is totally indifferent to pattern "recognition," as well as everything else. It takes a conscious subject to assign meaning to the input, and operations of the brain.
>
> We can’t help believing. Our brains evolved to
> connect the dots of our world into meaningful
> patterns that explain why things happen. These
> meaningful patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs
> are formed the brain begins to look for and find
> confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs,
> which adds an emotional boost of further
> confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates
> the process of reinforcing them, and round and
> round the process goes in a positive feedback loop
> of belief confirmation. Dr. Shermer outlines the
> numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to
> reinforce our beliefs as truths and to insure that
> we are always right.

See above. Now, think, think about the statement, "Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful
patterns that explain why things happen." Who is Shermer talking about when he says "Our brains," or "our world?" Who or what is the reference for the pronoun "our." Clearly, it cannot be a bunch of us brains. The brain does not "connect the dots" for our brains. It connects the dots for "us!" Thus, he must be talking about persons, i.e. individual minds, somehow removed from the brain itself. This is precisely the point. Our brains likely support and provide a physical basis for our beliefs in some way, but "we" are the subjects that use and to some extent control our brains. Thus, we must of necessity be more than what is revealed by the mechanistic brain.
>
> Interlaced with his theory of belief, Dr. Shermer
> provides countless real-world examples of belief
> from all realms of life, and in the end he
> demonstrates why science is the best tool ever
> devised to determine whether or not a belief
> matches reality.

Science may indeed be "the best tool" to establish and evaluate beliefs. But, again, who is using this tool? Who is evaluating our beliefs? Our brains? Without consciousness and mentality, with only a physical, mechanistic brain, the whole notion of "belief" would not make sense, since brains do not have beliefs, any more that a car motor has beliefs. Moreover, we would not be able to evaluate our beliefs. And the fact that we can apply science to form and change our beliefs, demonstrates that the mechanistic features of the brain are not enough to provide a full explanation of our cognitive processes, and our personhood.

For further discussion of this topic, read M.R. Bennett, "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience," and Popper and Eccles, "The Self and Its Brain."

Combined with the temporal lobe-based imaginative abilities of the human species (whereby we are able to concoct all kinds of superstitious religious beliefs to account for supposed tribal "specialness" as well for natural phenomena not yet scientifically understood or appreciated), the so-called "God part" of the brain kicks in and--tah dah!--what you get is an in-the-brain belief brew that opts for embracing notions of the supernatural. It is an evolved impulse that is passed from one generation to the next, because those within the tribe who utilize their neurologically- and biochemically-based religious impulses to survive, thrive and organize are the most likely to pass their genes to the next generation.
_____


Here's the science of the matter, 101-style, as it has been developed over years of research:

There is a growing and stimulating branch of intra-cranial "God"-part brain research going on (it has, in fact, been burgeoning over the years). It's know as "neurotheology" and has been particularly researched at UCLA-Berkeley:

"The term 'neurotheology' refers to the attempt to integrate neuroscience and theology. Depending on whether its subject matter is defined in terms of religiosity or human personhood, neurotheology may be divided in two main lines of research.

"The first line of research was dominant during the 1970s and 1980s when Eugene d’Aquili, Charles Laughlin, and others attempted to relate neuropsychology to religious phenomena, for example, by looking for the neuropsychological determinants of ritual behavior. Researchers also studied the psychological characteristics linked to dominance of the left or right hemisphere of the brain in relation to various patterns of belief and images of the divine. John Ashbrook suggested the term 'neurotheology' for this type of inquiry.

"Since the 1980s, the search for specifiable brain structures and brain functioning in to religious or mystical experiences has come to the foreground. Along this line, Michael Persinger as well as Vilayanur Ramachandran have claimed a direct relation between religious experience and temporal lobe activity. Persinger inter- prets this relationship atheistically, but others point out that it validates neither an atheistic nor a theistic conclusion.

"D’Aquili and Andrew Newberg have gone considerably beyond the temporal lobe hypothesis by developing a model for religious experiences that involves the entire brain. This model is based in part on non-invasive neuroimaging of the working brain during ritual behavior and meditation. It is especially this kind of work that is commonly labeled'neurotheology.'Its aim is to explore the question of how religion and God are perceived and experienced by the human brain and mind. This research has revealed that during meditation and worship, the level of activity in those parts of the brain that distinguish between the self and the outside world is diminished. D’Aquili and Newberg regard their research not only as neuroscience but also as a contribution to theology because they feel that it will bring all the elements of religion under one rational explanatory scheme, namely that of neuroscience.

"The second line of research concerns a portrayal of human personhood, which is both neuro-scientifically and theologically accurate. The neuroscientific discourse on the human person, increasingly vocal since 'the decade of the brain' (1990–2000), seems to be at variance with theological discourse on that subject. In the latter, mind and soul, free will, consciousness, responsibility, and the human being’s contact with God are thought to be fundamental characteristics of the human person. In neuroscience, all of these are either seriously doubted or reduced to their under- lying material relationships."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2547257/define-Neurotheology
_____



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2011 07:04PM by steve benson.

This looks familiar, Steve. Thank you for removing the personal attacks. I appreciate it.

I have a very serious and honest question. Why is it you always respond with a list of quotes, instead of your own opinions based upon your own critical thinking. Do you just assume that everything you read, and every scientific discourse, must be true, and by simply quoting it you establish your point? In this particular post, I do not see how your response relates to my response. This post is about the formation of beliefs, not about the "God gene."

I am going to answer your post, and see if you have a substantive response:

I am very familiar with essentially all of the research programs cited, apparently from Wikipedia's reference to "neurotheology." But I have read the actual literature in support of this research, as well as their critics. By way of background, all of this research is an attempt to determine correlations between belief in God, or religious experience, with either genes or brain states. The suggestion is that if it can be shown, for example, that belief is related to a particular gene, or set of genes, or that spiritual experiences correlate with specific brain states, the metaphysical religious interpretations of these beliefs and experiences are somehow undermined. If spiritual experiences are nothing more than brain states, states that can be reproduced via drugs, or diseases, such as LSD and epilepsy, then they cannot, so the argument goes, relate to a metaphysical cause, i.e. God. Thus, if NDE experiences correlate with brain states and functions, they are not after-life experiences after all. If out-of-body experiences correlate with brain states, they are only illusions, and not real OBE experiences.

In considering this line of research, we can first question the assumption that if a given religious experience correlates with a brain state, it cannot have metaphysical implications. This is a legitimate criticism, because logically one might well have a “spiritual” experience actually from a metaphysical source that nonetheless causes a corresponding brain state. The issue is causation, not correlation. Thus, even if that same or similar brain state (or phenomenal experience) is also caused by LSD or epilepsy, this does not establish anything as to the ultimate source of the experience, unless one assumes that mental events must always have a physical cause, which assumption begs the question. Thus, the anti-religious motivations of such researchers, such as Michael Persinger in particular, are flawed from the outset. Persinger, by the way, has also been roundly criticized from methodological deficiencies, and the notorious failure of his research results to be replicable. Frankly, he is no longer taken seriously.
Arnold Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili are more honest in their approach. But here again they focus on correlations between religious experience, on the one hand, and mysticism and brain function, on the other, but without drawing anti-religion conclusions. The Newberg research is most interesting, however, for its enlightenment as to causation. Newberg recruited Buddhist monks and wired their brains to EKG monitors during the meditation process. When they entered a self-induced trance state, he noted the correlated brain states. Although Newberg did not mention this in his book, “Who God Won’t Go Away,” a serious oversight in my view, it is quite apparent that the monks by their mental meditation activity were able to cause changes in their brain states. In short, this research, if valid, shows that the mind has causal efficacy over the brain. If this research is valid, it suggests that the standard materialist assumption of the causal closure of the physical is false, and that some form of Cartesian dualism is true. This is a serious blow to the materialist thesis, which has long denied what to the rest of us is obvious, i.e. that the mind is a causative agent in its own right. (For example, if you “decide” to raise your hand, it seems that you made a mental decision, causing a physical result. The materialist view would say that no, the raising of your hand had a physical cause, i.e. brain function, and that the correlated mental phenomena was either an illusion, or simply an unimportant corollary to the actual physical cause.) Moreover, it suggests that mind has an ontological status separate and apart from the brain, calling into question identity and eliminativist theories that attempt to resolve the mind-body problem.

The research programs you summarized require that researchers establish that belief in God, or religious experience, is associated with a particular gene, or brain state, such that an individual having such an belief or experience, also has the associated brain state or gene, and the person having the associated gene or brain state, has the associated phenomenal experience. This has never been established in a way that for me is anything but trivial. Certainly, there is no scientific evidence to support the claim that belief in God, or having spiritual experiences, are direct byproducts of Darwinian evolution, as manifested in evolved genotypes or brain states. Moreover, as indicated above, even if an interesting correlation is established, the causation issue must also be addressed and determined because conclusions can be drawn related to proper understanding and interpretation of religious belief and experience.

Now, what are your thoughts?

Reed

Remember when you compared RfM to Provo? But, hey, that was awhile back, so (heh, heh) let's let your bygones be bygones, shall we? After all, you were so good-natured about (NOT!) :)

And, yes, my post is familiar, just like are your arguments here, which you have also previously made.

Anyway, please pick up a copy of Matthew Alper's "The God-Part of the Brain." It'll be a good, decent tutorial for you. It doesn't appear that you have read it.

The places in the brain where we experience "religion" are physiologically identifiable and the science explains the sensations generated in those locales. Familiar with the research on how low-frequency sound waves (such as organ music) stir up emotional feelings of spirituality, ghostly presences and other-worldly tingles?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2309505.stm

Don't fret. It IS all in your head. :)



Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2011 07:31PM by steve benson.

Steve:

Thank you for your response. I actually have Alper's book, and have read it. Although admittedly it has been awhile.

You state:

"The places in the brain where we experience "religion" are physiologically identifiable and the science explains the sensations generated in those locales. Familiar with the research on how low-frequency sound waves (such as organ music) stir up emotional feelings of spirituality, ghostly presences and other-worldly tingles?"

Look, there is no question that every mental state, whether it be a belief, pain, or whatever, has an associated brain state. That fact is not in dispute. Moreover, there are no doubt correlations between the brain states associated with religious experience and brain states associated with other kinds of experience, e.g. drugs or epilepsy. However, such correlations are not enough to establish either (a) that spiritual experiences are associated with a particular "God gene" or unique brain state such as to establish the "God part of the brain," or (b) to undermine any metaphysical interpretation that might be claimed to be associated with such an experience. To establish a "God Gene" or God Part of the Brain" you need either a unique gene or brain state that is associated only with religious experience. Otherwise, the claim of mere correlation is trivial.

The fact that the mind can cause brain states (as apparently shown by Newburg), suggests that at least in some contexts, the mental experience can cause the brain state, and not visa versa. This leaves the possibility that the spiritual experience was causally prior to the brain state. This is what is missing in books like Alpers. They assume that causation works only one way--brain to mind. This is scientifically debateable.

Having said the above, you must know by now that I often play devil's advocate (no pun intended). I try to get people to think critically, honestly, and fairly about these issues, before jumping on skeptical bandwagons. However, I myself, am very skeptical of any claim that a religious experience has metaphysical implications. But this simply cannot be established as a general scientific postulate, and certainly not by appeals to "God genes" or the like.

Best,
Reed

That's what your brain does, Reed, but in that you are not alone. Welcome to the wonderful, imaginary world of the homo sapien temporal lobes. It's been going on in there for, well, quite some time now.

You can thank your chemical soup for that amazing inventive ability, fired up as it is by electrical impulses.

Want a "near-death experience"? Get spun around in a G-machine like test pilots do and you'll see a tunnel of light and maybe meet family members from the spirit world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvxFXkv7L24
_____


Nah, the religion ride is more fun. :)



Edited 7 time(s). Last edit at 05/25/2011 09:51PM by steve benson.

"They assume that causation works only one way--brain to mind. This is scientifically debateable."

Citations, please.

The beliefs I grew up with did not come from my own thoughtful consideration. They were told to me, and I was required to either accept them or face social stigma with lots of crying faces telling me I was going to hell.

What I wonder is why many people accept the beliefs they are assigned without question. People like that don't even think about the consequences of unbelief, because they never do. That to me is the "believing brain" that I would like to understand.

We all know people who were born in a religion, left, and return thinking it must be true because if it weren't I wouldn't have returned.

It's like Marie Osmond's re-marriage to her first husband. He could have gotten away, but he's back. Now they think it's a sign from god.

Assigned a belief or assigned a spouse. Some people find it easier than to use their brain to think of another way around. People have been this way sense they crawled out of caves. Except for a few excapees!

I downloaded it yesterday to my kindle. It's really good so far!!

Unfortunately I was on my way to an appointment and couldn't listen to the whole interview, but definitely I am going to put the book on my Kindle. Wow--so great to listen to a rational discussion about the topic.