Friend or Foe?

[Angrboda]

The brain is like a one-way door, it keeps the things that comfort us in, and the things that might distress us out. This is cognitive bias. It's readily apparent from the outside, but not from within. When reasoning about the mind, it is helpful to keep in mind that a brain which cleaves to the truth is not necessarily more desirable than one that doesn't. There is a common trade-off in the brain's heuristics of speed versus accuracy. The more accurate the brain's heuristic, the slower it is going to be. For readily apparent reasons, evolution is going to tend to bias for speed, at the expense of accuracy. (I've recently been introduced to some new work by a favorite psychologist, Daniel Kahneman and his book Thinking Fast and Slow. I haven't read the book yet, but apparently it details how the brain in its handling of stimuli in the environment has two basic strategies. One slow strategy, which considers the problem in its depth and nuance, mulling it over thoughtfully, and a fast system, which strips features from the problem if doing so yields a "fit" with an easier answer, and so on. Needless to say, because of its efficiency, the fast system is likely to handle the bulk of cognitive tasks. This also relates to religion, in which some of the concepts are "hard wired" into the brain, and are thus not truly available for introspection.) However, this means that a lot of error is built into our cognitive strategies, and that things may often persist for reasons completely apart from their truth or instrumental utility. (e.g. if there is a good fit between the brain's error and its biases, it quite likely will be more robustly persistent than another solution.)

Anyway, I haven't even hinted at the evolutionary psychological and sociological factors involved. In short, human brains are not geared towards the discovery of truth; other human needs are far more influential.

(You might start discovery with "perseverance of belief", the bias blindspot, and cognitive dissonance [of which, Tavris and Aronson's "Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)" is excellent].)