The dangers of certainty

So, in reading “Thinking fast and slow”, I’ve come to think of the human brain as having two modes. One of these modes involves some voodoo that we might call ‘free will’ – it doesn’t execute quickly, but it is easily changeable. The other involves hardcoded, compiled neural interconnects – it’s the reflexes that make you hit the brakes when the car in front of you stops – and, I am coming to suspect, the hard-wiring that makes you insist “Of course Jesus hates gays and would support hurting them in any way possible!” and other equally absurd interpretations of the bible – not to mention “COVID is a hoax and I am free to not wear a mask” even as you read of others who took that stance dying.

I talked in a previous article the idea that because multiple signals pass through the same set of subnets our minds may protect even wrong ideas because they are necessary confluences of signal. I’ve also come to think more and more about the actual physical restrictions of changing the physical wiring – neurotransmitters, proteins, all sorts of actual, limited resources come into play when unlearning something. Therefore, there is a biological reason we might defend wrong ideas.

Now, there’s a couple of directions I’d like to go with this. At some future date I will discuss the tendency of certain Christians to think hate is love – I think I’ve talked about that before but the above does point out why there’s probably not a lot of point in trying to bring to their attention that they are just plain wrong – they’re not going to be capable of learning, their firm belief has translated into neural wiring and they *can’t* unlearn – even if Jesus himself came and told them they were wrong, they wouldn’t be able to accept and integrate that.

This same problem exists in political ideology that is carefully grounded in fiction. We’ve talked about how conservative media (especially Fox) has been lying for a long time – but the adherents to it think that the lies are facts, and have formed hard structures encoding them. Again, they can see over and over the data proving that trickle down economics do not work, and continue to push for it. They can see over and over that automation is taking their jobs, and continue to blame the immigrants.

Part of what I’m trying to wrap my head around is there’s no point in being angry with them. Both groups of people mentioned above are contributing to making the world a worse place, but there’s no way they can stop. They can’t even be aware of the fact that they’ve got deep structures that are counter-factual stored.

Now, there’s a lot of things that I talk about as being ‘unknowable’ – things like our purpose here, what happens after we die, what deities there might be (clearly if there is someone in charge they don’t want us to know that as the amount of work they’ve gone to to maintain plausible deniability is absurd). And I try to avoid having certain beliefs about those unknowables, because I’d rather not know than have absolute faith in something that’s wrong, especially if that absolute faith led me to encourage abuse of others because I thought, in my limited view of the universe, that their choices were “sin”.

I have noticed that over and over people create God in their image – limited and full of hate. One of the things that I’ve mentioned to various Christians trying to convince me that I’m going to hell is that I tend to think I’d be better at imagining God than they would because of my life experience – I’ve built worlds (in games), I’ve coded somewhere near a million lines in a wide variety of languages, I’ve used evolutionary algorithms, I’ve read thousands of books and studied many subjects. Now, I’m not claiming I’m God – far from it – but I think I’d be better able to wrap my head around what a deity might think like than most of the people who claim to know the mind of God because of a bunch of words written by people wandering around in a desert 2000 years ago.

Now, if God would like to change my mind about this, I’m certain *e knows how to reach me. I’m open to other ideas – but you are not going to convince me that the Bible is the word of God (except in the very general sense that if God is infinity, all books are the words of God). You will convince me that the words of Jesus contain wisdom – and the primary message is “Be excellent to each other”. Them who would like to hate on those who sleep with different folk are failing to be excellent to each other, therefore I am clear on the fact they have failed to grok the message of Jesus. Often it’s because they are creating God in their own, hate filled, confused, lost image. But you’ll never convince them of that. Why? See above.

2 Responses to “The dangers of certainty”

  1. Firesong Says:

    It’s often very difficult and takes a long time, but it is *possible* to relearn what was hard-wired. People who have strokes or otherwise lose some pathways/sections of their brain have been able to rebuild their connections differently. (Which I know you know.) Now it’s not like learning something normally, and no, simply telling someone they’re wrong won’t do anything — but if they *want* to work on re-routing, then, as many an ex-Christian will tell you, they can.

    This essay is, as ever, thought-provoking and well-said.

  2. bunne Says:

    Two things I am sure of about God. If he does exist, as stated, there’s no sense in hating him.

    If he doesn’t exist, see above.

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