This led to another peculiarity in Blankenhorn’s testimony: Perhaps because he did not speak in detail about his own original research, his testimony lacked the authority of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Instead, his language was strangely self-referential. For example, when he described the process that brought him from opposing domestic partnerships to favoring them, he did not recount a scientific study. Instead, he described a personal “journey” and “exploration” that required him think about social discrimination. “That was the big thing I had to grapple with in my own mind – to be able to look myself in the mirror,” Blankenhorn said. He ultimately concluded that “it means a lot to me personally … that I have been able to understand this” but did not clarify what new information led him to reverse his professional opinion.
Perhaps most importantly, we as doctors and patients must be open to evidence. Pills and surgery are potent symbols of healing power, but our faith in these symbols has often blinded us to truths. Somewhere along the line, theory trumped reality. Administering a medicine or performing a surgery became more important than its effect.
Wolpert sees human credulity all around him -- not just religious faith but all sorts of modern superstitions. His book targets astrology, psychics, homeopathy and acupuncture. Wolpert has participated in public debates with maverick scientist Rupert Sheldrake about telepathy and other paranormal experiences. He dismisses Sheldrake's theory -- that "morphic fields" can transmit thoughts through space and time -- as nonsense.
Some criminals do not see themselves as basically good people getting away with something bad. Some people do not believe God is on their side when they commit their crimes. We have this story from reporter Marilyn Snell about a bankrobber who now lives in Oakland, California.
The story of Reverend Carlton Pearson, a renowned evangelical pastor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who cast aside the idea of Hell, and with it everything he'd worked for over his entire life.
When Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychiatry, and religious studies, ponders the nature of reality, it makes fascinating, mind-bending reading. What is reality, he asks, but a combination of the subjective vividness of an experience (strengthened by the continuity and duration of that experience) and the consensus of others that it is so? Expanding on a thread picked up before in Why God Won't Go Away (2001), he and Waldman examine the Liar's Paradox, assert the likes of "Truth cannot be entirely known, for no matter how much evidence you collect, your knowledge will always be incomplete," and maintain that individual reality is exclusively guided by a combination of sensory perceptions (which are prey to any number of distorting influences) and beliefs.
In On Being Certain, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we "know" something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this "feeling of knowing" seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen. [via
mymindonbooks]
When thinking changes your mind, that's philosophy. When God changes your mind, that's faith. When facts change your mind, that's science.
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY?
Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?"
For NPR listeners, "This I Believe" will be familiar broadcast program in which people from a diverse cross section of life read a short essay expressing fundamental beliefs, personal creeds, or quirky individual mission statements.
Harris and two co-authors ran 360 statements by 14 adult subjects whose brain activities were then scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) devices. It suggests that within the brain pan, at least, the distinction between objective and subjective is not so clear-cut. Although more complex assertions may get analyzed in so-called "higher" areas of the brain, all seem to get their final stamp of "belief" or disbelief in "primitive" locales traditionally associated with emotions or taste and odor. Even "2 + 2 = 4," on some level, is a question of taste. Thus, the statement "that just doesn't smell right to me" may be more literal than we thought.
Contemporary analytic philosophers of mind generally use the term "belief" to refer to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true. To believe something, in this sense, needn't involve actively reflecting on it: Of the vast number of things ordinary adults believe, only a few can be at the fore of the mind at any single time.
