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Aug. 21, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:30
3055 The Death of Reason: Why People Don't Listen to Reason and Evidence
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Hi, everybody.
This is Evan Mullen, Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, as you may know, I'm a philosopher, which means I'm in the business of delivering reason to people, which sometimes feels like it should require Amazon drones, four security guards, some duct tape, and perhaps even some lubricant.
So, it's quite important for me to understand my clients or your relationship with the product that I'm offering.
So, I put together this chat to warn those of you who participate in the free market of ideas about the deep darkness that lies hidden within the human mind.
Take a mental note of the word lie, and its dual meaning becomes important later on.
Now, before we examine the data about how people respond to reason, it's important to map out the socio-biological and historical context of this discussion.
Stay awake!
It will be important and interesting, I promise you.
Now, all living organisms depend upon their accurate perception of reality in order to survive and reproduce.
If a gazelle fails to identify a predator, it gets eaten.
For a lion, a tiny mistimed lunge may be the difference between a full belly and death through starvation or even broken bones from a zebra's kick.
Now, human beings lack the sharp nails and teeth of lions or the speed of gazelles, yet we possess, of course, the most powerful and dangerous tool within the animal kingdom, our minds.
We would therefore expect the human brain to be highly capable of accurately analyzing and conceptualizing the world around us.
The process of reasoning invariably involves the use of logic, and logic itself is derived from the immutable properties of the physical world.
Empiricism is another component of reason that depends upon the accurate perception of reality through sense data.
Reason is thus incredibly valuable to us, but what if reason itself gets in the way of our survival and reproductive success?
So, imagine.
Let me take you on a journey.
Come with me, my friends.
Imagine living on an isolated island where the only people around you are volcano-worshipping savages who rely on human sacrifice to appease their fiery god.
Now, of course, the reality is this has more to do with they're trapped on this island, and what they're really managing is not the deity, but their anxiety about the periodic eruptions of the volcano.
What would happen to you if you started questioning the rationale behind the practice?
The lack of evidence about their rituals having any effect on the actual eruptions of the volcano, or the very idea of a deity?
Assuming you survive this blasphemous behavior, would any woman in the tribe be willing to have sex with the man who angered the volcano god?
This is just one of the many examples in which the ability to reason is an evolutionary negative for human beings.
Now, what does happen, of course, in society is that you live on this volcano island.
This is sort of political correctness.
You live on this volcano island.
You can't escape it.
And once a volcano erupts while a man is dancing, so then you say, ah, no dancing, no dancing anymore.
Another time a volcano erupts when a guy is singing.
No dancing, no singing.
You just keep piling on these rules until, well, Something changes, a society collapses, or a philosopher comes and props up the growing, fights against the growing irrationality.
So, as neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga points out, quote, What we must always keep in mind is that our brains have been sculpted by evolution to enable us to make better decisions that increase our reproductive success.
Our brain's job description is to get its genes into the next generation.
So, we need our reasoning ability to create everything from spheres to computers, yet in the social realm, logic and empiricism can be extremely dangerous.
This dichotomy is at the origin of a fundamental split within the human mind, a split that philosophers and all who deal with reason really, really, really need to understand.
Ah, surely you might say, well, things have changed since the more savage days of primitive tribalism.
Nowadays, if you live in the West, questioning the beliefs of, say, a religious person is far more likely to invite requests for logical justification than lashes of a whip, a barrage of heavy stones, or death at the stake.
Believers may even set up a public debate if you're famous enough.
Does this mean they value reason?
According to the latest research and the painful experience of many philosophers, that's not very likely.
In the field of psychology, selective exposure theory tells us that people not only seek information that reaffirms their existing beliefs, but that they also avoid information that contradicts those beliefs.
This is called confirmation bias, or the internet.
And mainstream media, to be fair.
So researchers have tested the prevalence of cognitive bias in a variety of contexts, which range from cars to personal care products to politics and religion.
Unsurprisingly, the latter two subjects is where cognitive bias is most powerful.
For example, one study found that 43% of Republicans, or those on the right, consumed at least one liberal media outlet, while only 26% of Democrats consumed any right-wing media at all.
The percentage of Republicans would likely be far lower if conservative media was more widespread sort of outside of talk radio.
So, a key part of the death of reason in society is unfalsifiability.
So, I had this conversation with my daughter the other day, and she asked me what that meant.
And I said, okay, let's say I tell you I have an invisible spider on my head, a really furry, hairy spider, like Donald Trump's hair.
An invisible spider on my head.
How would you know if I was telling the truth?
She said, of course, well, I'd touch it.
And I'd say, aha!
That's the catch.
Not only is it invisible, you can't touch it.
She said, well, would it smell?
Can I smell it?
No!
No!
You can't smell it either.
You can't touch it.
You can't smell it.
You can't feel it.
And we went through the whole thing.
So eventually, I said, you can't do any of that stuff.
And then she basically said, so there's no spider.
Yeah.
Right?
So if I say I have an invisible spider on my head, and then I remove every single standard by which you might be able to detect its presence or its absence, at some point, there's absolutely no difference between having a completely incorporeal, undetectable, invisible spider on my head and having precisely zero spiders on my head.
So unfalsifiability is when you...
You see, moving the goalpost is another way of putting it and...
Simply, there's no standard by which the proposition can be disproven.
A recent study on the near-universal appeal of unfalsifiability noted, Much research on existential and epistemic motivations has shown that people's political or religious worldviews and beliefs often have a motivational basis.
They are held in part to help satisfy individual-level motives.
Much is also known about how people on the individual level defend these worldviews from factual threat.
For example, people engage in biased information processing or source derogation, that's ad hominem, poisoning the well.
Less is known, however, about what characteristics make some worldviews gain primacy over others, to the extent that beliefs held more strongly are more psychologically fulfilling, and to the extent that unfalsifiability can increase zeal, belief systems that included aspects of unfalsifiability may have been ideally suited to serve psychological needs.
Put another way, unfalsifiable belief systems may allow individual differences in belief strength to be expressed more strongly, whether in religious zeal, political opprobrium, or defensive retrenchment in one's position.
That's the end of the quote.
It's not my writing.
It's not the best writing in the world.
It's academia-speak, but I just wanted to mention that redundancy and an avoidance of taking any stand seems to be quite key.
The researchers concluded their paper with a warning.
These results and speculations suggest that unfalsifiability may be a dangerous force in society at large.
Though it might benefit individuals psychologically or groups socially, unfalsifiability might also lead people and societies to continually make truth-defying decisions or being idiots.
To the extent that the success of a society largely depends on its ability to respect good data and change behavior accordingly, a devotion not just to ideas but to testing those ideas is necessary for the welfare and improvement of the society.
I don't know why I went all James D. Kurth again there.
It just happens sometimes.
What the research suggests is that certain beliefs evolve leveraging the values of unverifiability.
Embedded in their very fabric is a hostility to reason.
Opposing information is thus thrown into the black hole of unfalsifiability.
This process of rejection strengthens the reproducibility of the belief.
In other words, if a belief has evolved to withstand reason, any successful defense against logic and empiricism confirms the utility of its design.
So think of a belief system, and some of these belief systems appear to be genetically based.
I've got a presentation on R versus K reproductive strategies and its relationship to left and right wing politics, which is called Gene Wars.
You can find it on this channel.
And they have done twin studies where significant portions, more than half, of...
Political beliefs appear to be genetically bad.
So you've got to think of these political beliefs as genes within you, gene sets within you.
And the political beliefs, gene sets, they're like animals, like you.
They just want to survive and reproduce.
And so any information which threatens their capacity to reproduce is rejected, and any information which strengthens their capacity to survive and flourish and reproduce is accepted.
And so, think of the rejection of counter-evidence as like the immune system of your body.
It's the immune system of politically-based gene sets.
So, in philosophy, there's a famous, dare I say, inevitably French philosopher named René Descartes, and he had these theories.
Theories or approaches.
You've probably heard of, I think, therefore I am, or the Monty Python rephrasing, I drink, therefore I am.
And he said, hey man, I'm sorry, I have to do that for you.
He said, hey man, what if we're not actually really here?
What if we're like a brain in a tank and we got all those inputs and we're being controlled?
Everything we sense and feel, man, we're being controlled by some demon that's out there.
And everything we think we know, and all our memories, and everything, it's all just, we're just a brain in a tank being wired up to something else, right?
So his theory of reality is a dream, and we live inside the brain tank of a malevolent demon that manipulates our senses, and these ideas are still popular, even though they're completely and totally and absolutely unfalsifiable.
You can't verify them, can't falsify them.
Doubting sense data, while seemingly irrational, may provide significant emotional benefits to a broken mind.
So, when people invite you to reason them out of an irrational belief, they are often engaging in the mental equivalent of a Fabian strategy.
A Fabian strategy is a war of attrition without any direct confrontations.
So what happens is somebody says, well, I don't agree with you, but I'm open to being convinced.
And nine times out of ten, you just keep banging your head against the wall until you exhaust yourself and give up, or your head breaks like Humpty Dumpty.
It's a subtle form of passive aggression that works incredibly well.
I mean, you just have to look at Internet debates, I guess we could call them, to see a plethora of examples.
You might even be able to look below.
So this is the great lie that has baffled generations of philosophers.
We want you to reason with us, saith the masses, but we angrily will reject reason.
So Understand why this really happens.
Imagine that you're working at a car dealership and some dude walks in and he says, I want to buy some particular model of car.
But every time you point out the qualities of the car you're trying to sell, he expresses doubt and asks even more questions.
And the man is giving you contradictory information about what he desires.
He says, I want fuel efficiency, but crazy high performance.
I'm a family man.
I've got to have space for lots of kids, but I want a two-seater.
And after an hour of negotiations, he tells you, oh, I actually never really wanted a car in the first place, and leaves the dealership.
How would you feel?
Angry?
Frustrated?
For a philosopher, that's called breathing.
Perhaps you now understand the purpose of this great lie.
So somebody who engages you in a pseudo-rational debate, he's keeping you from reasoning with other people.
He's sucking you into his crazy, neutering, castrating of reason world.
He's preventing you from reasoning with other people.
He's making you frustrated at your own capacity for rationality, which makes you turn against reason in your own heart.
And he says to other people, if it's a public debate, man, rational people are idiots.
They don't even know when rationality isn't going to apply.
Now, a fellow named Max Planck, a Nobel laureate and father of quantum physics, once said, a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up It's like old scientific theories that are not usually disproven, they just fall into disuse.
Now, this idea, known as the Planck Principle, has important...
And a little grim implications.
If scientists, the people most familiar with the methodologies of logic and empiricism, reject reason, what hope is there for everyone else?
Except for that person you're typing with on the internet.
They're totally legit, I'm sure.
And sadly, there's even more bad news coming from the discipline of neuroscience.
In the lead-up to the 2004 US presidential election, a group of neuroscientists decided to examine how the brains of partisans responded to information that portrayed either George Bush or John Kerry in a negative light.
Fervent Democrats and Republicans were presented with 18 sets of contradictory statements, six by Bush, six by Kerry, and six by another politically neutral male figure like Tom Hanks.
When asked to rate how contradictory they perceived those statements to be, Democrats had no trouble identifying Bush's contradictions but ignored or downplayed Kerry's inconsistencies.
The inverse was observed for Republicans.
In other words, they didn't perceive significant contradictions in their party's candidate.
While, interestingly, both groups had no trouble identifying contradictions made by the politically neutral figures.
The lead researcher described the results of the brain scans, quote, When confronted with potentially troubling political information, a network of neurons becomes active that produces distress.
Whether this distress is conscious, unconscious, or some combination of the two, we don't know.
The brain registers the conflict between data and desire and begins to search for ways to turn off the spigot of unpleasant emotion.
We know that the brain largely succeeded in this effort, as partisans mostly denied that they had perceived any conflict between their candidates' words and deeds.
So this is an unconscious propaganda ministry within us we're not even aware of.
You're a Democrat, you're into Kerry, and you get contradictory information.
You don't even feel any discomfort.
You just reject the information.
But at an unconscious level, or at some level, the brain scans show discomfort is being activated, and the brain is reaching to deal with that discomfort by rejecting the information.
You can see this with people, women, who support Hillary Clinton, and then they're told by someone that Hillary Clinton is paying her female employees 70 cents or so on the dollar compared to her male employees, and...
And just...
Not only did the brain manage to shut down distress, says the researcher, through faulty reasoning, but it did so quickly.
The neural circuits charged with regulation of emotional states seemed to recruit beliefs that eliminated the distress and conflict partisans had experienced when they confronted unpleasant realities.
All this seemed to happen with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning.
But the political brain also did something we didn't predict, he says.
Once partisans had found a way to reason to false conclusions, not only did neural circuits involved in negative emotions turn off, but circuits involved in the positive emotions...
Turned on.
The partisan brain didn't seem satisfied in just feeling better.
It worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement.
These reward circuits overlap substantially with those activated when drug addicts get their fix, giving new meaning to the term political junkie.
There's actually significant indications by the by that political power is as addictive as cocaine, which is ironic given the political elite class's general war on drugs.
In the context of political science, one researcher coined the term backfire effect after observing this emotional positive reinforcement in practice.
After a series of studies, he and his colleagues found that, in some cases, correcting misperceptions like Iraq having weapons of mass destruction actually reinforced the wrong belief within people.
You know, it's like in those shows, like the monster movies, like, you know, you shoot some laser at the monster and the monster uses it to get stronger and meaner.
This is what firing reason at people tends to make their irrationality stronger.
The researcher's paper noted, quote, The backfire effects that we found seem to provide further support for the growing literature, showing that citizens engaged in motivated reasoning.
While our experiments focused on assessing the effectiveness of corrections, the results show that direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen ideologically grounded factual beliefs, an empirical finding with important theoretical implications.
Such is a great challenge to the concept of democracy.
Scientists have also discovered physiological differences between liberals and conservatives.
Liberals have been found to have a larger and more active anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, which is an area of the brain that is involved with detecting errors and resolving conflicts.
Scientists have speculated that the enlarged ACC makes liberals more tolerant of ambiguity and change.
Although the conservatives are more into the free market, which has a lot of change in it, Conservatives, on the other hand, have a larger amygdala, which is responsible for the development, storage, and regulation of emotions, and has a lot to do with empathy, which is one reason why conservatives give more to charity.
For example, one of the physiological features of sociopaths is an abnormally small amygdala or emotional processing.
Conservatives have also been found to have very sensitive sympathetic nervous systems, which makes them much more aware and responsive to threats.
Indeed, vigilance is one of the hallmarks of conservatism.
Right-wingers also have a heightened response to disgust.
So these are some basic brain differences.
Now, twin studies have shown that there might be a strong genetic basis for political beliefs.
And again, you can refer to my Gene Wars presentations for more on this.
So these findings are particularly troubling to, say, a philosopher who's in the business of delivering reason to the masses.
While the chain of causation is, of course, very difficult to establish, ideas may alter the brain through neuroplasticity as much as predefined brain structures can influence what we believe, some combination of free will, genes, and environment is responsible for what people believe, and the latter is the factor over which we have the most control.
As two researchers put it, many studies involving quite diverse samples and methods suggest that political and religious views reflect a reasonably strong genetic basis.
But this does not mean that ideological proclivities are unaffected by personal experience or environmental factors.
Twin studies of heritability are suggestive of genetic factors in social and political attitudes, but they do not specify the biological or psychological mechanisms that could give rise to ideological proclivities.
So, yeah, I would like to live in a world where people put aside ideology, put aside confirmation bias, and really attempted to listen to the evidence, to the data, to the basic rationality of philosophical and empirical arguments.
I'd like to live in a world where children aren't turned into the oil that greases the cogs of a social fiction, a world that is fully in touch with reality.
It's a selfish desire, I'm sure.
Children who aren't broken in their families, daycares, or schools will be more receptive to reason.
Because when you are traumatized as a child, if you're lied to as a child a lot, the The epigenetics of your mind and of your body make you kind of allergic to the truth, and this is part of the volatility that arises in people when you bring rational arguments to historical prejudices.
We bond to our lies, like ducklings bond to an orange balloon or a mama duck or whatever.
We bond with our lies.
And this, of course, is a way of having us survive in irrational tribes throughout human evolution and history.
It's a way of helping us gain access to the female eggs and so on.
It's a huge challenge to overcome.
It's not just that people disagree with you.
It's that there are, like, living beasts of gene sets within them that will fight to the death against the reasons that you bring.
That would cause there's power in the human gene pool to diminish.
So if we raise children peacefully and rationally, children become the backbone of a peaceful society.
We'd never have seen this before in human history.
I've tried to sort of put a roadmap to this peaceful future in my work, and you can, of course, help us shake humanity out of this primitive stage by supporting this show through donating money or spreading the message.
Of course, the first step in solving any problem is admitting that you have one, which is bias.
Through the state, of course, and its capacity to redistribute income, we are actually well paid for ideology, and this is another reason why it gets bigger and bigger and more powerful.
But the truth of the matter is everybody's dreamed of a sort of human brotherhood, a way for us to all come together across lines of culture and race and prejudice and bigotry and so on.
That Place is called reality.
We evolved in tribes where our bond was our shared delusions, our fantasies, the lies that we'd been told, the magical thinking, the delusions that we all shared.
Our bond was our error.
And that is what we evolved with.
And we are...
Genetically programmed, and that's how we grow up, is to bond with error and to tell the errors to others and to share in the errors in various buildings and to transmit those errors to our children.
And in some ways, we are mere vehicles by which the errors reproduce.
But if we turn away from the error and we turn towards reality and reason and evidence and the true compassion for The blank slate of children's minds to not continue to imprint and stamp error and delusion and tribalism onto their minds.
I think we have a fantastic opportunity to do that.
The common bond that ties us together is in fact reality.
Tribalism or the way that we evolve fundamentally means error, delusion, aggression and destruction.
And the real tragedy why it's become so important is that our capacity for rationality, for science and the wealth generated by the remnants of the free market Has given us the technical capacity to create awesome weapons, untold debt, and so on.
And we can't stop now.
We have to push through.
We have to push through.
Reason has given us these awesome and terrible weapons, but we have not yet got enough rationality to avoid using them.
Let's keep moving.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Freedom Aid Radio.
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