Ch. 9: Three Crazy Things That Live in Your Head ("Good Thinking" - by Guy P. Harrison)
Please use this thread to discuss the above chapter.
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Ch. 9: Three Crazy Things That Live in Your Head ("Good Thinking" - by Guy P. Harrison)
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Re: Ch. 9: Three Crazy Things That Live in Your Head ("Good Thinking" - by Guy P. Harrison)
This chapter I have been kind of savoring, So far the book has been excellent in brain description, a big help for someone like myself who hasn't really studied anatomy as much as I should, be that as it may, The differing bias's we all should see in our selves, as well as others or as we encounter or experience through external media, are something that has to be strengthened throughout our lives, It seems to me that the weeding out of bias's is absent in many people from many places. Motivated reasoning can be both self concerning and self centering, the former being healthy, the latter destructive.
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Re: Ch. 9: Three Crazy Things That Live in Your Head ("Good Thinking" - by Guy P. Harrison)
We can't close out this book discussion without a polite, mature, conscious, humble, and fair consideration of this statement.It is crucial that readers understand how natural this process of selective observation, assessment, and retention of evidence is. One has to make the conscious effort to seek out, listen, and consider evidence that goes against the grain and feels wrong. It can be hard work and often is uncomfortable, but it must be done. Good thinking demands it. If you are a Christian, go to the trouble of actually listening when a Muslim tries to sell you on the Koran and Muhammad. It can be worth the time spent. If nothing else, you are likely to learn something new about a belief system you may not have known much about but is important to more than a billion of your fellow human beings. You may also learn things about your own belief system and your thought process about it as well. If you are an atheist, don't pretend that you have this and all other possible universes figured out from top to bottom. If they come calling, listen to the Mormon, the Scientologist, the Hindu, the Buddhist, and so on. Time is a finite resource, of course, so one wouldn't want to squander too much time on too many claims that may lead nowhere. But we all can find moments here and there to give alternative views a hearing. It's polite, it's mature, and it's good thinking. No matter how sure you are that you are right and the are wrong, listen. Keep in mind that we never know if confirmation bias has made a fool of us on a particular subject. It operates beneath our conscious awareness. So all we can do is stay humble and try our best to be fair to the contrary arguments and evidence we encounter.
p. 181
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Re: Ch. 9: Three Crazy Things That Live in Your Head ("Good Thinking" - by Guy P. Harrison)
At this point, too, we have a better understanding of how vital the emotions are even in our reasoning process. We may not think anything without attaching some emotional valence to it. And in many situations, our emotional, intuitive response precedes our conscious reasoning, which contains the justification we want to present to the world. David Hume was a famous proponent of the primacy of emotion; recently Jonathan Haidt and several others have made the post-hoc nature of our reasoning a central tenet of social psychology. I don't think we need to make an axiom of this tenet, to the point that we swing to the opposite side of the old image of reason ruling the emotions like a charioteer his horses. But it's good to be on the lookout for our own slipperiness when we might be about to claim the high ground of reason.