Posted on by Kyle Roques

Better Thinking

Reasoning aside, we know that people often acquire their beliefs about the world for reasons that are more emotional and social than strictly cognitive. Wishful thinking, self-serving bias, in-group loyalty, and frank self-deception can lead to monsters departures from the norms of rationality. Most beliefs are evaluated against a background of other beliefs and often in the context of an ideology that a person shares with others. Consequently, people are rarely aa open to revising their views as reason would seem to dictate.

There are some things that we are just naturally bad at. And a mistake people tend to make across a wide range of reasoning tasks are not mere errors; they are systematic errors that are strongly associated both within and across tasks. As one might expect, many of these errors decrease as cognitive ability increases. We also know that training, using both examples and former rules, mitigate many of these problems and can improve a person’s thinking.

On this front, the internet has simultaneously enabled two opposing influences on belief: on the one hand, it has reduced intellectual isolation by making it more difficult for people to remain ignorant of the diversity of opinion on any given subject. But it has also allowed bad ideas to flourish – as anyone with a computer and too much time on his hands can broadcast his point of view and, often enough, find an audience. So while knowledge is increasingly open source, ignorance is, too.

Sam Harris
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Out-Group Hostility – In-Group Altruism

A very interesting theory to contemplate. I feel this helps make sense of our current state of tribalism and morality.

Territorial violence might have been necessary for development of altruism. The economist Samuel Bowles has argued that lethal, “out-group” hostility and “in-group” altruism are two sides of the same coin. His computer models suggest that altruism cannot emerge without some level of conflict between groups. If true, this is one of the many places where we must transcend evolutionary pressures through reason – because, barring an attack from outer space, we now lack of proper “out-group” to inspire us to further altruism.

Sam Harris

Explains why it seems that we are constantly looking for a “they”, “them”, or “other” to transgress upon, contradictory to the altruism we show “our” own group.

Posted on by Kyle Roques

The Moral Landscape

My new book by Sam Harris

There are facts to be understood about how thoughts and intentions arise in the human brain; there are facts to be learned about how these mental states translate into behavior; there are further facts to be known about how these behaviors influence the world and the experience of other conscious beings. We will see that facts of this sort exhaust what we can reasonably mean by terms like “good” and “evil.” They will also increasingly fall within the purview of science and run far deeper than a person’s religious affiliation. Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, we will see that there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality. Indeed, I will argue that morality should be considered an undeveloped branch of science.

Sam Harris
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Thought

Thinking is indispensable to us. It is essential for belief formation, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other capacities that make us human. Thinking is the basis of every social relationship and cultural institution we have. It is also the foundation of science. But our habitual identification with thought – that is, our failure to recognize thoughts as thoughts, as appearances in consciousness – is a primary source of human suffering. It also gives rise to the illusion that a separate self is living inside one’s head.

We spend our lives lost in thought. The question is, what should we make of this fact? In the West, the the answer has been “Not much.” In the East, especially in contemplative traditions like those of Buddhism, being distracted by thought is understood to be the very wellspring of human suffering.

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It’s a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis. Thought itself is not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one’s thoughts – that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance of consciousness – is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness. It doesn’t matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are.

Sam Harris
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Mindfullness

Practicing and cultivating the skill of “mindfulness”, for me, has been one of the single most important, transcending, and life altering changes I’ve ever made. As Sam states – as well as any other practitioner of mindfulness will tell you – it is an absolutely necessary skill to develop for one to be able to navigate through life with less effort and more happiness.

It’l is always now. This might sound trite, but it is a truth. … The reality of your life is always now. And to realize this, we will see, is liberating. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand if you want to be happy in this world.

But we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth – overlooking it, fleeing it, repudiating it. And the horror is that we succeeded. We manage to avoid being happy while struggling to become happy, fulfilling one desire after the next, banishing our fears, grasping at pleasure, recoiling from pain – and thinking interminably, about how best to keep the whole works up and running. As a consequence, we spend our lives being far less content that we might otherwise be. We often fail to appreciate what we have until we lost it. We crave experiences, objects, relationships, only to grow bored with them. And yet the craving puts it. I speak from experience, of course.

…the literature on its psychological benefits is now substantial. There’s nothing spooky about mindfulness. It is simply a state of clear, non-judgmental, and undistracted attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to reduce pain, anxiety, and depression; improve cognitive function; and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self-awareness.

Sam Harris
Posted on by Kyle Roques

Waking Up (A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion)

In this book Sam goes into deatil on how one can have spirituality without religion. Understanding this fact, I feel, is crucial for the advancement of human kind. It’s absolutely imperative for the expansion of conciousness to seperate spirituality from religion. Most often people use religion to put a personal spiritual experience into context, though, most don’t know that religion and it’s dogmatism isn’t necessary for one to put it into context, and in certain cases is more harmful to the individual to do so. Fertile ground for a spirtual consciousness does not lie in restrictive dogmatic superstitions.

20% of Americans describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally, separating spirituality from religion is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It is to assert two important truths simultaneously: Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular cultural generally admit. One purpose of this book is to give both these convictions intellectual and empirical support

Sam Harris