Making Sense with Sam Harris - #38 — The End of Faith Sessions 2

Episode Date: June 15, 2016

Sam Harris reads and discusses the second chapter of "The End of Faith."  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our sessions, chapter two. Chapter two, the nature of belief. It is often argued that religious beliefs are somehow distinct from other claims to knowledge about the world. There is no doubt that we treat them differently, particularly in the degree to which we demand, in ordinary discourse, that people justify their beliefs. But this does not indicate that religious beliefs are special in any important sense.

What do we mean when we say that a person believes a given proposition about the world? As with all questions about familiar mental events, we must be careful that the familiarity of our terms does not lead us astray. The fact that we have one word for belief does not guarantee that believing is itself a unitary phenomenon. An analogy can be drawn to the case of memory. While people commonly refer to their failures of, quote, memory, decades of experiment have shown that human memory comes in many forms. Not only are our long-term and short-term memories the products of distinct and dissimilar neural circuits, they have themselves been divided into multiple subsystems.

To speak simply of memory, therefore, is now rather like speaking of experience. Clearly, we must be more precise about what our mental terms mean before we attempt to understand them at the level of the brain. Even dogs and cats, insofar as they form associations between people, places, and events, can be said to believe many things about the world. But this is not the sort of believing we are after. When we talk about the beliefs to which people consciously subscribe, the house is infested with termites, tofu is not a dessert, Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, we are talking about beliefs that are communicated and acquired linguistically. Believing a given proposition is a matter of believing that it faithfully represents some state of the world. And this fact yields some immediate insights into the standards by

which our beliefs should function. In particular, it reveals why we cannot help but value evidence and demand that propositions about the world logically cohere. These constraints apply equally to matters of religion. Freedom of belief, in anything but the legal sense, is a myth. We will see that we are no more free to believe whatever we want about God than we are free to adopt unjustified beliefs about science or history, or free to mean whatever we want when using words like poison or north or zero. Anyone who would lay claim to such entitlements should not be surprised when the rest of us stop listening to him. Beliefs as Principles of Action The human brain is a prolific generator of beliefs about the world. In fact, the very humanness of any brain consists largely in its capacity to evaluate new statements of

propositional truth in light of innumerable others that it already accepts. By recourse to intuitions of truth and falsity, logical necessity and contradiction, human beings are able to knit together private visions of the world that largely cohere. What neural events underlie this process? What must a brain do in order to believe that a given statement is true or false? We currently have no idea. Language processing must play a role, of course, but the challenge will be to discover how

the brain brings the products of perception, memory, and reasoning to bear on individual propositions and magically transforms them into the very substance of our living. It was probably the capacity for movement enjoyed by certain primitive organisms that drove the evolution of our sensory and cognitive faculties. This follows from the fact that if no creature could do anything with the information it acquired from the world, nature could not have selected for improvements in the physical structures that gather, store, and process such information. Even a sense as primitive as vision, therefore,

seems predicated on the existence of a motor system. If you cannot catch food, avoid becoming food yourself, or wander off a cliff, there doesn't seem to be much reason to see the world in the first place. And certainly refinements in vision of the sort found everywhere in the animal kingdom would never have come about at all. For this reason, it seems uncontroversial to say that all higher order cognitive states, of which beliefs are an example, are in some way an outgrowth of our capacity for action. In adaptive terms, belief has been extraordinarily useful. It is, after all, by believing various propositions about the world that we predict events and consider the likely

consequences of our actions. Beliefs are principles of action. Whatever they may be at the level of the brain, they are processes by which our understanding and misunderstanding of the world is represented and made available to guide our behavior. The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition. Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail. What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that

such a proposition would loosen the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you don't have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailers are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges. The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. Now, as an aside, that is, I think without question, the most controversial sentence I have ever written, needlessly so if you actually make any effort to understand it in context. But this won't surprise you, and as many of you know, has been lifted out of its context

and used to paint me as a total maniac who wants to kill people for thought crimes. So let me start this paragraph again. Back to the text. The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherence beyond reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in

killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt at even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas. Let me just highlight a few things that appeared in that paragraph, which many people don't notice. I am talking about the link between belief and action. I'm talking about beliefs as principles of behavior. It should go without saying that I'm talking about beliefs that are behaviorally effective, therefore. I'm talking about the proximate cause of things like suicidal terrorism. I'm talking about beliefs that are behaviorally effective, therefore. I'm talking about the proximate cause of things

like suicidal terrorism. I'm talking about beliefs that place people, quote, beyond every peaceful means of persuasion while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. So I was never talking about killing people merely for what they think. And here I'll go to my website where I responded to some of the controversy that that sentence provoked. Because again, I think this is important. And here's part of what I say there. When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Ayman al-Zawahiri, the current leader of al-Qaeda? The answer cannot be because he killed so many people in the past. To my knowledge, the man hasn't killed anyone personally. However, he is likely to get a lot of innocent people killed for what he and his followers believe

about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc. A willingness to take preventative action against a dangerous enemy is compatible with being against the death penalty, which I am. Whenever we can capture and imprison jihadists, we should. But in many cases, this is either impossible or too risky. So let's linger on this point for a second. If you imagine dropping a bomb on al-Zawahiri or al-Baghdadi. What would justify that? Again, I don't know that these guys have personally killed anyone or will ever kill anyone, but they are part of a machinery that is grinding up innocent lives. And this machinery is built on belief, belief that is effective, belief that is the proximate cause of action. If you know someone is disposed to act on his beliefs, his beliefs become continuous with the action that you would

be justified in preventing in a case of self-defense, for instance. You don't have to wait to be killed in order to defend yourself. And when you ask why it would be ethical to kill someone who's in a leadership and propagandistic role in an organization like ISIS or al-Qaeda, where they themselves don't kill anyone necessarily, they simply tell people to do it. It has a lot to do with the contents of their minds. All Ayman al-Zawahiri and al-Baghdadi do, as far as I know, is talk. And if we could kill them, we should absolutely do it. And the interesting ethical question is why. it. And the interesting ethical question is why. And I'm getting at some part of that question in this statement about belief as a proximate cause of action. If you're going to conjure some person who believes crazy things that have no behavioral implication, they're never going to

harm anyone or cause anyone else to harm anyone on the basis of their beliefs. Well, then it doesn't matter what they believe. That is precisely the case where beliefs don't matter. And I would never have thought, much less suggested, that those people should be killed for believing in Jesus, say, or believing that Muhammad is the final prophet of the God of Abraham. But what's interesting about belief and consequential is that in most cases, insofar as something is really believed, it shows up behaviorally. It shows up in the kinds of public policies people want to fight for. That's the whole point of this book. And the boundary between a war of ideas and a real war is not always easy to find. As I say a lot, we have a choice between

conversation and violence. We live in perpetual choice between conversation and violence. And that's why it's so important to be able to reason about everything, talk about everything, put everything on the table to be pressure tested against new facts and new arguments. And if you're not willing to do that, you live in perpetual invitation to violence or threaten others with it. Dogmatism is a refusal to reason with other people. And when that refusal becomes highly consequential, when lives depend on it, people are going to go hands on your body. If there is no talking to you, what are other people

going to do with you? If you are standing in the way of, what, life-saving medical research, getting out of a burning building. Surely you remember the case of the Saudi girls' school where all those poor girls burned alive because the religious police wouldn't let them out of a burning building because they were not appropriately veiled. religious police wouldn't let them out of a burning building because they were not appropriately veiled? You had the fathers of some of those girls standing at the gates, being cowed by the religious police. What should those fathers have done? The possibility of violence, necessary violence in that case, starts the moment the conversation ends.

The moment there is nothing left to say, the moment you're in the presence of someone who will not listen to reason, and your daughter is burning up in a fire. The beliefs that we should care about are the beliefs that suddenly spring into life in this way as shocking impediments to basic human decency and a wide open path to well-being. So that has been a source of really extraordinary controversy, but for obvious reasons, it is, egg-sized from its context, a fairly shocking sentence. It's a good sentence. It makes for an interesting paragraph, and if you are at all an honest reader, you will understand what the paragraph says. But like many provocative sentences, it has been a gift to malicious and dishonest critics. Back to the text. The necessity for logical coherence. The first thing to notice about beliefs is that they must suffer

the company of their neighbors. Beliefs are both logically and semantically related. Each constrains and is in turn constrained by many others. A belief like, the Boeing 747 is the world's best airplane, logically entails many other beliefs that are both more basic, e.g. airplanes exist, and more derivative, e.g. 747s are better than 757s. The belief that some men are husbands demands that the proposition some women are wives also be endorsed, because the very terms husband and wife mutually define one another. I'm pleased to know that that example seems anachronistic now, given that you can have two husbands in a marriage, but hopefully you still understand the point I was making. Back to the text. In fact, logical and semantic constraints

appear to be two sides of the same coin, because our need to understand what words mean in each new context requires that our beliefs be free from contradiction, at least locally. If I am to mean the same thing by the word mother from one instance to the next, I cannot both believe my mother was born in Rome and believe my mother was born in Nevada. Even if my mother were born on an airplane flying at supersonic speeds, these propositions cannot both be true. There are tricks to be played here. Perhaps there's a town called Rome somewhere in the state of Nevada.

Or perhaps mother means biological mother in one sentence and adoptive mother in another. But to know what a belief is about, I must know what my words mean. To know what my words mean, my beliefs must be generally consistent. There's just no escaping the fact that there's a tight relationship between the words we use, the type of thoughts we can think, and what we can believe to be true about the world. And behavioral constraints are just as pressing. When going to a friend's home for dinner, I cannot both believe that he lives north of Main Street and south of Main Street, and then act on the basis of what I believe. A lives north of Main Street and south of Main Street, and then act on

the basis of what I believe. A normal degree of psychological and bodily integration precludes my being motivated to head in two opposing directions at once. Personal identity itself requires such consistency. Unless a person's beliefs are highly coherent, he will have as many identities as there are mutually incompatible sets of beliefs careening around his brain. If you doubt this, just try to imagine the subjectivity of a man who believes that he spent the entire day in bed with the flu, but also played a round of golf, that his name is Jim, and that his name is Tom, that he has a young son, and that he is childless. Multiply these incompatible beliefs indefinitely, and any sense that their owner is a single subject entirely disappears. There's a degree of logical inconsistency that is incompatible with our notion of personhood. So it seems that

the value we put on logical consistency is neither misplaced nor mysterious. In order for my speech to be intelligible to others and indeed to myself. My beliefs about the world must largely cohere. In order for my behavior to be informed by what I believe, I must believe things that admit of behavior that is at minimum possible. Certain logical relations, after all, seem etched into the very structure of our world. The telephone rings. Either it is my brother on the line or it isn't. I may believe one proposition or the other, or I may believe that I do not know. But under no circumstances is it acceptable for me to believe both. Departures from normativity, in particular

with respect to the rules of inference that lead us to construct new beliefs on the basis of old ones, have been the subject of much research and much debate. Whatever construal of these matters one adopts, no one believes that human beings are perfect engines of coherence. Our inevitable failures of rationality can take many forms, ranging from mere logical inconsistencies to radical discontinuities in subjectivity itself. Most of the literature on self-deception, for instance, suggests that a person can tacitly believe one proposition while successfully convincing himself of its antithesis. For example, my wife is having an affair, my wife is faithful.

Though considerable controversy still surrounds the question of how or whether such cognitive contortions actually occur. Other failures of psychological integration, ranging from split-brain patients to cases of, quote, multiple personality, are at least partially explicable in terms of areas of belief processing in the brain that have become structurally and or functionally partitioned from one another. And here's a section that relates an experience that I still find just incredible. The section is called The American Embassy. A case in point. While traveling in France, my fiancé and I experienced a bizarre partitioning of our beliefs about the American

Embassy in Paris. Belief system one. As the events of September 11th still cast a shadow over the world, we had decided to avoid obvious terrorist targets while traveling. First on our list of such places was the American embassy in Paris. Paris is home to the largest Muslim population in the Western world, and this embassy had already been the target of a foiled suicide plot. The American embassy would have been the last place we would have willingly visited while in France. Belief system two. Prior to our arrival in Paris, we had difficulty finding a hotel room. Every hotel we checked was full, except for one on the right bank, which had abundant vacancies. The woman at reservations even offered us a complimentary upgrade to a suite.

She also gave us a choice of view. We could face the inner courtyard or outward, overlooking the American embassy. Which view would you choose, I asked. Oh, the view of the embassy, she replied. It's much more peaceful. I envisioned a large embassy garden. Great, I said. We'll take it.

The next day we arrived at the hotel and found we had been given a room with a courtyard view. Both my fiancé and I were disappointed. We had, after all, been promised a view of the American embassy. We called a friend living in Paris to inform her of our whereabouts. Our friend, who is wise in the ways of the world, had this to say. That hotel is directly next to the American Embassy. That's why they're offering you an upgrade. Have you guys lost your minds?

Do you know what day it is? It's the 4th of July. The appearance of this degree of inconsistency in our lives was astounding. We had spent the better part of the day simultaneously trying to avoid and gain proximity to the very same point in space. Realizing this, we could scarcely have been more surprised had we both grown antlers. But what seems psychologically so mysterious may be quite trivial in neurological terms. It appears that the phrase American embassy, spoken in two different contexts, merely activated distinct networks of association within our brains. Consequently, the phrase had

acquired two distinct meanings. In the first case, it signified a prime terrorist target. In the second, it promised a desirable view from a hotel window. The significance of the phrase in the world, however, is single and indivisible, since only one building answers to this name in Paris. The communication between these networks of neurons appeared to be negligible. Our brains were effectively partitioned. The flimsiness of this partition was revealed by just how easily it came down. All it took for me to unify my fiancée's outlook on this subject was to turn to her, she who was still silently coveting a view of the American embassy, and say with obvious alarm,

This hotel is ten feet from the American embassy. The partition came down, and she was as flabbergasted as I was. And yet the psychologically irreconcilable facts are these. On the day in question, never was there a time when we would have willingly placed ourselves near the American embassy, and never was there a time when we were not eager to move to a room with a view of it. I don't know if there's any more to say to extract meaning from that episode, but I just got to say in my memory, it was such a flabbergasting moment. I mean, both of these meanings of American embassy and our attitude toward them had been spelled out with crystal clarity to both of us.

I mean, we had articulated that we were not going to go near the American embassy, especially on the 4th of July. I mean, there actually had been talk in the news about what a prime target it was. And we were simultaneously making our best effort to get a room with a view of it. This is one thing I do remember, and I didn't write about it. There was something about this experience of waking up from this dream of incoherence and suddenly recognizing that both of us had been led to this spot by just an astounding level of logical blindness and shared, right, the fact that neither of us recognized that the American embassy is the American embassy led us both to become suddenly fairly superstitious. I certainly don't believe and didn't believe that there's any plan working that would have led us to our doom. but the fact that we had decided not to go there and yet wound up there was fairly creepy.

It just actually seemed impossible that we were in that situation, and yet we were. All I can say is it had the character of a Twilight Zone episode, where we suddenly felt that the world and our own minds may not be what they seemed. In any case, we promptly checked out of the hotel to the absolute bewilderment of the staff, and a powerful wind of superstition blew us across the city to some other hotel that we managed to find. Back to the text. While behavioral and linguistic necessity demands that we seek coherence among our beliefs wherever we can, we know that total coherence, even in a maximally integrated brain, would be impossible to achieve. This becomes apparent the moment we imagine a person's beliefs recorded as a list of assertions, like,

I am walking in the park, parks generally have animals, lions are animals, and so on, each being a belief unto itself as well as a possible basis upon which to form further inferences, both good ones, I may soon see an animal, and bad ones, I may soon see a lion. And hence new beliefs about the world. If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical contradictions. But here we encounter a minor computational difficulty. The number of necessary comparisons grows exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list.

How many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were as large as the known universe, built of components no larger than protons, with switching speeds as fast as the speed of light, all laboring in parallel from the moment of the Big Bang up to the present, it would still be fighting to add belief number 300 to its list. What does this say about the possibility of our ever guaranteeing that our worldview is perfectly free from contradiction? It is not even a dream within a dream. And yet, given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive

for coherence wherever it is in doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure of either linguistic sense or behavioral possibility. Beliefs as representations of the world. For even the most basic knowledge of the world to be possible, regularities in a nervous system must consistently mirror regularities in the environment. If a different assemblage of neurons in my brain fired whenever I saw a person's face, I would have no way to form a memory of him. His face could look like a face one moment and a toaster the next, and I would have no reason to be surprised by the inconsistency,

for there would be nothing for a given pattern of neural activity to be consistent with. As Steven Pinker points out, it is only the orderly mirroring between a system that processes information, a brain or a computer, and the laws of logic or probability that explains, quote, how rationality can emerge from mindless physical process in the first place. End quote. Words are arranged in a systematic, rule-based way, syntax, and beliefs are likewise, in that they must logically cohere, because both body and world are so arranged.

Consider the statement, there is an apple and an orange in Jack's lunchbox. The syntactical and hence logical significance of the word and guarantees that anyone who believes this statement will also believe the following propositions. There is an apple in Jack's lunchbox, and there is an orange in Jack's lunchbox. This is not due to some magical property that syntax holds over the world. Rather, it is a simple consequence of the fact that we use words like and to mirror the orderly behavior of objects. Someone who will endorse the conjunction of two statements while denying them individually either does not understand the use of the word and

or does not understand things like apples, oranges, and lunch boxes. It just so happens that we live in a universe in which if you put an apple and an orange in Jack's lunchbox, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both. There's a point at which the meanings of words, their syntactical relations, and rationality itself can no longer be divorced from the orderly behavior of objects in the world. As I say in an end note here, there are exceptions here. Certain words and concepts run afoul of ordinary logic. And I say, for instance, one cannot put the shadow of an apple and the shadow of an orange in Jack's lunchbox, close the lid, and then expect to retrieve one or the other at the end of the day. That's just based on an understanding of what shadows are. They are not objects of the same sort. And I should also

say that quantum mechanics obviously runs afoul of our intuitions here, and that is what is so hard and counterintuitive about it, and why it resists a mapping onto our realistic and logical expectations of the world. Back to the text. Whatever beliefs are, none of us harbors an infinite number of them. While philosophers may doubt whether beliefs are the sort of thing that can be counted, it is clear that we have a finite amount of storage in our brains, a finite number of discrete memories, and a finite vocabulary that waxes and wanes somewhere well shy of 100,000 words. There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between beliefs that are causally active,

i.e. those that we already have in our heads, and those that can be constructed on demand. If believing is anything like perceiving, it is obvious that our intuitions about how many of our beliefs are present within us at any given moment might be unreliable. Studies of change blindness, for instance, have revealed that we do not perceive nearly as much of the world as we think we do, since a large percentage of the visual scene can be suddenly altered without our noticing. Off text. Now, if you haven't seen change blindness demonstrations, they're pretty phenomenal. So the demonstration runs this way. You'll show someone a

slide, let's say a picture of a family picnicking in the park, and change it to another slide that is identical to the first, but for the fact that you have changed something like 20% of its visual properties, like removed a tree, or removed a person, or, you know, put a buffalo in the scene. And it can take people an astonishingly long time to notice the difference between the two images. You know, once you see what has changed, you just, you can't believe that it took you any time at all to notice it. Back to the text. An analogy with computer gaming also seems apropos. Current generations of computer games do not compute parts of their virtual world until a player makes a move that demands their existence. Perhaps many of our cognitive commitments are just like this. So I'm saying that we may not have the stable model of

reality that we think we have. We may continue to compute things all the time and on the fly. And we do this perceptually, clearly. We're not seeing everything all the time that we think we're seeing with our eyes open, pointed in the right direction, as change blindness demonstrates. And we may not believe things all the time the way we seem to, but construct beliefs on the fly much more often than we think we do. And there is a kind of confabulatory way we do generate our opinions about the world. You can notice this in various experiments, and you can notice this about yourself. You just start saying things, even on new topics. Think of what it's like to be asked a question that you have never been asked before. For instance,

if I were to ask you, do you think human beings will ever outgrow violence entirely? Right now, maybe you've thought about this before, maybe you haven't. I doubt anyone has asked you to answer that question. I don't think I've ever been asked that question. You know, I ask you the question, now give me an answer. If you try this, I think it will be the rare person among you who will simply pause for a moment, reflect, and say, I don't know. Of course, it is a perfectly reasonable position. In fact, I think maybe the only reasonable position to take on that question, right? I certainly don't know. But most people ask that question, could answer it one of two ways, I think with real confidence. And they would begin

to just form an answer. They would start talking and it would go something like this. Well, no, no, no. We're never going to outgrow violence because it's just so deeply rooted in us. We are apes. And unless we outgrow our humanity, unless we change ourselves fundamentally so that we're no longer human. The potential for violence will always be there. That sounds pretty good. Okay, that's what I believe. Or we'll have to outgrow violence at some point because the power of our technology is only increasing. The ability for one person to destroy the lives of many others,

even millions of others, is only increasing. And it's hard to see how that will ever change. So at a certain point, we will have to figure out how to cancel our violent impulses. And we will do this. It will be at some point the most important thing for us to do. The human capacity for violence will become literally insufferable at a certain point. Okay, that sounds pretty good too. So you could just start talking, and if your internal bullshit detector doesn't go off,

that can suffice to be your belief. Right now, did you harbor that belief, either one of them, before talking? Probably not. But the fact that they survive coincidence with all the things you do believe, the fact that you didn't say anything in either of those answers that contradicts something you know to be true, well then that kind of confabulation will survive and pass as a belief that you have harbored about the world, and perhaps now harbor going forward because you said as much. Okay, back to the text. Whether most of what we believe is

always present within our minds, or whether it must be continually reconstructed, it seems that many beliefs must be freshly vetted before they can guide our behavior. This is demonstrated whenever we come to doubt a proposition that we previously believed. Just consider what it is like to forget the multiplication table. 12 times 7 equals... All of us have had moments when 84 just didn't sound quite right. At such times, we may be forced to perform some additional calculations before we can again be said to believe that 12 times 7 equals 84. Or consider what it is like to fall into doubt over a familiar person's name. Is his name really Jeff? Is that what I call him?

It is clear that even very well-worn beliefs can occasionally fail to achieve credibility in the present. Such failures of truth testing have important implications, to which we now turn. A matter of true and false. Imagine that you are having dinner in a restaurant with several old friends. You leave the table briefly to use the restroom, and upon your return you hear one of your friends whisper, just be quiet, he can't know any of this. What are you to make of this statement? Everything turns on whether you believe that you are the he in question. If you are a woman, and therefore excluded by this choice of pronoun, you would probably feel nothing but curiosity. Upon retaking your seat, you might even whisper, who are you guys talking about? If you are a man, on the other

hand, things have just gotten interesting. What secret could your friends be keeping from you? If your birthday is a few weeks away, you might assume that a surprise party has been planned in your honor. If not, more Shakespearean possibilities await your consideration. Given your prior cognitive commitments and the contextual cues in which the utterance was spoken, some credence-granting circuit inside your brain will begin to test a variety of possibilities. You will study your friends' faces.

Are their expressions compatible with the more nefarious interpretations of this statement that are now occurring to you? Has one of your friends just confessed to sleeping with your wife? When could this have happened? There has always been a certain chemistry between them. Suffice it to say that whichever interpretation of these events becomes a matter of belief for you will have important personal and social consequences. At present, we have no understanding of what it means, at the level of the brain, to say that a person believes or disbelieves a given proposition. And yet it is upon this difference that all subsequent cognitive and

behavioral commitments turn. And going off text now, I would say that this has changed a little bit since I wrote that, in part because of the neuroimaging work I did to finish my PhD in neuroscience, as well as some subsequent work I did with my friend Jonas Kaplan, which hopefully will soon be published. We know more about which regions of the brain are active when people believe and disbelieve various propositions. And I summarize the first of those studies in my book, The Moral Landscape. But there are regions of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex often associated with reward and self-reference, self-representation, that are more active when we judge something to be true. And in these studies, judging something to be false was

associated with activity in the insula, which is often involved in more visceral rejection states like feelings of disgust. So I still consider that work quite preliminary, but the believing brain is not entirely a black box anymore. And another graduate student in the lab at UCLA where I did that work, Pamela Douglas, came along a few years later and used a machine learning analysis on my data to see if she could detect whether or not people believed or disbelieved various propositions at the single statement level. So just training on half the experiment, she went into the other half of the data blind with a machine learning tool to see if she could discriminate whether people believed or disbelieved propositions.

And she found that she could do that with 90% accuracy. found that she could do that with 90% accuracy. So even in this very crude paradigm that was not at all designed to be able to detect individual instances of belief or disbelief, rather it was designed to compare all of the belief and disbelief trials in a statistically simpler way, she was able to detect belief and disbelief with 90% accuracy. So it was an interesting tweak on that experiment and certainly portends a future where we will have mind reading and lie detection technology that is reliable. I think there's no question about that. And whether you find that terrifying and Orwellian or a great relief certainly depends on your own beliefs about how that technology is likely to be used. Back to the text.

To believe a proposition we must endure. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Thank you. Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.