RE: Binary religious thinking
October 19, 2015 at 6:31 am
(This post was last modified: October 19, 2015 at 6:40 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
It makes me wonder if it's actually some kind of mental deficiency. I don't mean this in a patronising or condescending way, that's just a perk. Ahem. But some people lack certain faculties that the rest take for granted. I knew someone once who could not mentally visualise for example. Some people are dyslexic, others suffer from dyscalculia (dyslexia of numbers). Sociopaths lack empathy. You have people with Aspergers who have trouble seeing things from other people's point of view and can have trouble focusing on more than one thing at once. So it doesn't seem far fetched to me that some people are only able to think in discrete rather than continuous ways.
In terms of the brain being a physical system this makes sense. The brain self organises and is therefore constantly trying to settle into a stable state. So for example we decide on a single action rather than dither between satisfying competing needs. There are many optical illusions where you can see something in two different ways, but generally only one way at once.
The framing problem is a common problem in Artificial Intelligence. At what point do you stop looking at alternative solutions and make a decision? And people with brain damage that affects how they process emotions can often be unable to make arbitrary preferences for one choice over another. We need to be able to do this in order to behave rationally.
So I'm thinking that religious people have a tendency to form particularly strong preferences and have trouble flipping into different states of thinking.
In terms of the brain being a physical system this makes sense. The brain self organises and is therefore constantly trying to settle into a stable state. So for example we decide on a single action rather than dither between satisfying competing needs. There are many optical illusions where you can see something in two different ways, but generally only one way at once.
The framing problem is a common problem in Artificial Intelligence. At what point do you stop looking at alternative solutions and make a decision? And people with brain damage that affects how they process emotions can often be unable to make arbitrary preferences for one choice over another. We need to be able to do this in order to behave rationally.
So I'm thinking that religious people have a tendency to form particularly strong preferences and have trouble flipping into different states of thinking.
