The End of Faith (30 page)

[abstract]. 3. Not yet being sure whether this is a hoax of some sort (perhaps Mr. McMahon
is now working for Candid Camera) you take another moment to study the man at your door. You form the “belief,” based on his
tone of voice, the look in his eye, and many other factors, that

NOTE TO PAGE 50 245

he is trustworthy and therefore means what he says. Your ability to form such judgments
reliablyin particular, your ability to detect untrustworthinessrequires that you have at
least one functioning amygdala (R. Adolphs et al., “The Human Amygdala in Social Judg-
ment,” Nature 393 [June 4, 1998]: 470-74), a small, almond-shaped nucleus in your medial temporal lobe.

4. Mr. McMahon then informs you that you are the lucky winner of a “big jackpot.” Your
memory for words (requiring different process- ing from your memory for faces) leads you
to “believe” that you have won some money, rather than a “pot” of some sort. Making sense
of this phrase will require the work of your superior and middle tempo- ral gyri,
predominantly in your left hemisphere. See A. Ahmad et al., “Auditory Comprehension of
Language in Young Children: Neural Networks Identified with fMRI,” Neurology 60 (2003): 1598-605, and M. H. Davis and I. S. Johnsrude, “Hierarchical Processing in
Spoken Language Comprehension,” Journal of Neuroscience 23 (2003): 3423-

31. 5. Ed then produces a piece of paper, which he invites you to read. He does this by
pointing. Your “belief” that he wants you to read requires what has come to be called
“theory of mind” processing on your part (D. Premack and G. Woodruff, “Does the Chimpanzee
Have a Theory of Mind,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1 (1978): 515-26)if a tree limb had swayed in the direction of a piece of paper, you would
not have understood it as “pointing” at all. The anatomy underlying the- ory of mind
processing is not entirely clear at present, but it seems that the anterior cingulate
cortex as well as regions of the frontal and temporal lobes enable to you to attribute
mental states (including beliefs) to others. See K. Vogeley et al., “Mind Reading: Neural
Mech- anisms of Theory of Mind and Self-perspective,” Neurolmage 14 (2001): 170-81; C. D. Frith and U. Frith, “Interacting MindsA Bio- logical Basis,” Science's Compass 286 (1999): 1692-95; and P. C. Fletcher et al., “Other Mind in the Brain: A Functional
Imaging Study of 'Theory of Mind' in Story Comprehension,” Cognition 57 (1995): 109-28. 6. Scanning the paper with your eyes, you see the following symbols
appended after your name: $10,000,000. Some processing relative to Arabic numerals
(probably in your left parietal lobeG. Denes and M. Signorini, “Door But Not Four and 4 a
Category Specific Trans- coding Deficit in a Pure Acalculic Patient,” Cortex 37, no. 2 [2001]:

While many diverse streams of neural activity have conspired to make you believe that you
have won a terrific sum of money, it is this ideaexplicitly represented in languagethat underwrites the sweeping changes that will take
place in your nervous system, and in your life. Per- haps you will startle the benevolent
Mr. McMahon by shrieking; you may even burst into tears; it is only a matter of hours
before you begin shopping with an unusual degree of abandon. Your belief that you have
just won ten million dollars will be the author of all these actions, both voluntary and
involuntary. In particular, it will dictate the following behavior: to the question “Have
you just won ten million dollars?” you willif moved by the spirit of candorreply yes.

3 Belief, in this sense, is what philosophers generally call a “propositional attitude.” We
have many such attitudes, in fact, and they are usually indi- cated by a clause containing
the word “that”; we can believe that, fear that, intend that, appreciate that, hope that, etc.

4 The formation of certain primitive beliefs may be indistinguishable from the preparation
of a motor plan. See J. I. Gold and M. N. Shadlen, “Rep- resentation of a Perceptual
Decision in Developing Oculomotor Com- mands,” Nature 404 (March 23, 2000): 390-94, and “Banburismus and the Brain: Decoding the Relationship
between Sensory Stimuli, Deci- sions, and Reward,” Neuron 36, no. 2 (2002): 299-308, for a discussion of visual judgments and oculomotor response.

5 We do not have to bring the membership of Al Qaeda “to justice” merely because of what
happened on Sept. 11, 2001. The thousands of men, women, and children who disappeared in
the rubble of the World Trade Center are beyond our helpand successful acts of
retribution, however satisfying they may be to some people, will not change this fact. Our
subsequent actions in Afghanistan and elsewhere are justified because of what will happen
to more innocent people if members of Al Qaeda are allowed to go on living by the light of
their peculiar beliefs. The horror of Sept. 11 should motivate us, not because it provides
us with a grievance that we now must avenge, but because it proves beyond any possibility
of doubt that certain twenty-first-century Muslims actually believe the most dangerous and
implausible tenets of their faith.

6 A consideration of the structure of our language reveals that this is not a

NOTES TO PAGES 54-57 247

special case, since all words and their usages lead us in circles of mutual

explanation. 7 The philosopher Donald Davidson has made this insight do some very

heavy lifting in his work on “radical interpretation.” One interesting consequence of the
relationship between belief and meaning is that any attempt to understand a language user
requires that we assume him to be basically rational (this is Davidson's “principle of
charity”).

8 At least at the “classical” scale at which we live. That the quantum world does not behave
in this way accounts for why no one can claim to “understand” it in realistic terms.

9 D. Kahneman and A. Tversky, “On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,” Psychological Review 103 (1996): 582-91; G. Gigerenzer, “On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to
Kahneman and Tversky,” ibid., 592-96; K. J. Holyoak and P. C. Cheng, “Pragmatic Reasoning
with a Point of View,” Thinking and Reasoning 1 (1995): 289-313; J. R. Ander- son, “The New Theoretical Framework,” in The Adaptive Character of Thought (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1990); K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, “Cul- ture, Dialectics, and
Reasoning about Contradiction,” American Psychol- ogist 54 (1999): 741-54; K. E. Stanovich
and R. F. West, “Individual Differences in Rational Thought,” journal of Experimental Psychology: General 127 (1998): 161.

10 A. R. Mele, “Real Self-Deception,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (1997): 91-102, “Understanding and Explaining Real Self-Deception,” ibid., 127-36, and Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001); H. Fingarette, Self-Deception (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000); J. P. Dupuy, ed., Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rational- ity (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998); D. Davidson, “Who Is Fooled?” ibid.; G. Quattrone and
A. Tversky, “Self-Deception and the Voter's Illu- sion,” in The Multiple Self, ed. J. Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), 35-57.

11 This assumes that many of the beliefs have common terms, as the beliefs of human beings
invariably do.

12 This example is taken from W. Poundstone, Labyrinths of Reason: Para- dox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Press, 1988), 183-88.

13 Recently, physical theories have been advanced that predict quantum computation across an
infinite number of parallel universes (D. Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality [New York: Penguin, 1997]) or the possibility that all matter will one day be organized as
an “omniscient” supercomputer

(F. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality [New York: Doubleday, 1995]) availing itself of a dilation of space-time resulting from
the gravitational collapse of the universe. I have excluded these and other theoretical
hierophanies from the present discussion.

Another way of getting at these logical and semantic constraints is to say that our
beliefs must be systematic. Systematicity is a property that beliefs inherit from language, logic, and the world at
large. Just as most words derive their sense from the existence of other words, every
belief requires many others to situate it in a person's overall representation of the
world. How the loom of cognition first begins weaving is still a mys- tery, but there
seems little doubt that we come hardwired with a variety of proto-linguistic,
proto-doxastic (from the Greek doxa, “belief”) capac- ities that enable us to begin interpreting the tumult of the senses as
reg- ularities in the environment and in ourselves. We do not learn a language by
memorizing a list of unrelated phrases, and we do not form a view of the world by adopting
a string of unconnected beliefs. For a discussion of the systematicity of language, see J.
A. Fodor and Z. W. Pylyshyn, “Sys- tematicity of Cognitive Representation,” excerpt from
“Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture,” in Connections and Symbols, ed. S. Pinker and J. Mehler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). A belief must be knitted
together with other beliefs for it to be a belief about anything at all. (I have left aside, for the moment, whether there exist beliefs that do
not rely upon any others to derive their meaning. Whether or not such atomic beliefs
exist, it is clear that most of our beliefs are not of this sort.)

The systematicity of logic seems guaranteed by the following fact: if a given proposition
is “true,” any proposition (or chain of reasoning) that contradicts it must be “false.”
Such a requirement seems to mirror the disposition of objects in the world, and therefore
places logical constraints upon our behavior. If a statement like “The cookies are in the
cupboard” is believed, it will become a principle of actionwhich is to say that when I
desire cookies, I will seek them in the cupboard. In the face of such a belief, a
contradictory claim like “The cupboard is bare” will be seen as hostile to my forming a
behavioral plan. Confident cookie-seeking behavior requires that my beliefs have a certain
logical relationship.

S. Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking, 2002), p. 33. There is a point of contact between my remarks here and
the “mental models” account of reasoning developed by P. N. Johnson-Laird and R. M. J.
Byrne, Deduction (Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1991), chaps. 5-6. I would note, however, that our mental models of objects in the world

NOTES TO PAGE 59 249

behave as they do because objects do likewise. See L. Rips, “Deduction and Cognition,” in An Invitation to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 297-343, for doubts about
whether a concept like AND could be learned at all.

17 Of course, we can think of examples where certain of our words run afoul of ordinary
logic. 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.

18 Another property of belief follows directly from the nature of language: just as there is
no limit to the number of sentences a person can poten- tially speak (language is often
said to be “productive” in this sense), there is no limit to the number of beliefs he can
potentially form about the world. Because I now believe that there is no owl in my closet, I also believe that there are not two owls there, or three . . . ad infinitum.

19 Most neuroscientists believe that we have somewhere on the order of 1011-1012 neurons, each of which makes an average of 104 connections with its neighbors. We therefore have something like 1015 or 1016 indi- vidual synapses. It's a big number, but it's still finite.

20 Following N. Block, “The Mind as the Software of the Brain,” in An Invi- tation to Cognitive Science: Thinking, ed. E. E. Smith and D. N. Osherson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 377-425.

21 D. J. Simons et al., “Evidence for Preserved Representations in Change Blindness,”
Consciousness and Cognition 11, no. 1 (2002): 78-97; M. Niemeier et al., “A Bayesian Approach to Change Blindness,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 956 (2002): 474-75 [abstract].

22 R. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Penguin, 1999). 23 Consider a mathematical belief like 2 + 2 = 4. Not only do most of us believe this
proposition; this belief seems to be antecedently true of us in every present moment. We do not appear to construct it as the occasion
warrants, rather it is by virtue of such rudimentary beliefs that we con- struct others.
But what about a belief like 865762 + 2 = 865764? Most of us will have never considered
this sum before, and we will believe it only by virtue of constructing it according to the
laws of arithmetic. And yet, doing so, we can cash it outjust as we do the proposition 2 +
2 = 4. Is there any difference between these two mathematical beliefs? In phe-
nomenological terms there surely is. You will notice, for instance, that you cannot easily
speak (or think) the longer sum, while two plus two equals four comes to mind almost reflexively. As far as our basic epis- temic commitments are
concerned, however, these beliefs are equally

“true.” In fact, all of us stake our lives on the validity of far more com- plicated (and
therefore less transparent) mathematical propositions every time we board an airplane or
cross a bridge. At bottom, most of us believe that an operation like addition is truth preserving, in that it can be repeated over and over, and with arbitrarily large values, and still
yield a true result. But the question remains, how can we know that our belief that 2 + 2
= 4 isn't constructed anew each time we use it? How, in other words, do we know that we
believe it antecedently! If we are tempted to say that this belief is always newly constructed, we must ask,
constructed with what! The rules of addition? It seems doubtful that a person could know that he was successfully
practicing addition unless he already believed that 2 + 2 = 4. It seems just as certain,
however, that you did not wake up this morning believing that eight hundred and sixty-five thou- sand, seven hundred and sixty-two, plus two, equals
eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four. To really exist inside your brain, this belief must be constructed, in the present moment,
on the basis of your prior belief that two plus two equals four. Clearly, many beliefs are like this. We may not, in fact, believe most of what we believe
about the world until we say we do.