On Being Certain

Neurologist's Robert Burton’s book, On Being Certain, addresses some questions I have been struggling to understand. How can people adamantly believe they are right even when it is clear they are not? How could such cognitive deficits survive? Could they have evolutionary value? How far can reason take us in a discussion considering various points of view? How can we know what we know?

An initial insight is that the feeling of knowing is a primary mental state like fear or anger. One can cause it by stimulating a particular area deep the oldest part of the brain, the limbic system. It is involuntary. It is pleasurable. When it follows some attempt at reasoning, we believe that reasons are the cause. The conviction that our conclusion is a conscious choice is illusory.

How could such a process arise? How could pleasurable feelings evoked by false beliefs further survival? Often reasoning takes time without immediate rewards and involving wrong turns. The feeling of knowing could have arisen as a reward for thinking, even where the thinking rests on false beliefs. The results of useful thinking are so beneficial that the process helps us survive. Thus, an unwarranted feeling of knowing might have a positive evolutionary role.

It also has the adaptive function of reducing the uncomfortable state produced by cognitive dissonance; when a person’s actions or beliefs are inconsistent with other beliefs. As Leon Festinger noted, the more committed we are to a belief, the harder it is to relinquish it, even in the fact of contradictory evidence. These belief systems become emotional or cognitive habits.

One interesting possibility that arises from this view concerns the know-it-all personality. Could he be addicted to the feeling of knowing, as this is pleasurable on a basic unconscious level? Indeed, for most people, recognizing and criticizing their beliefs is, if not impossible, unpleasant and difficult. As Burton says (p. 101), “the feeling of knowing, the reward for both proven and unproven thoughts, is learning’s best friend, and mental flexibility’s worst enemy.”

This helps us understand disputes between science and religion. A deeply felt sense of purpose and meaning is also a mental state. He considers Richard Dawkins’ arguments against religion. Dawkins can only believe that his powers of introspection and self-assessment allow him to understand why the world and we exist by assuming the myth of the autonomous rational mind. This misunderstands the biology of belief. Much of our cognitive processing goes on at an unconscious level and cannot be directly accessed. “Whether an idea originates in a feeling of faith or appears to be the result of pure reason, it arises out of a personal hidden layer that we can neither see nor control (p. 195).” “If most of us were forced to choose between a sense of purpose and reason, most would side with purpose (p. 221).”