Mizblog

This idea keeps coming back into my head. It happened again when I read this article on atheist/theist thought processes, especially the bit about how it relates to Cypher from The Matrix.

In the movie, of course Cypher never gets plugged back into the matrix the way he wants. But either way, he no longer has memories of living his renegade life on an outlaw vessel, eating disgusting mush and being miserable all the time. There are actually drugs being used as anesthetics which cause amnesia for the procedure! So if you don’t remember it, did you experience it? You can only infer that it happened. I bet psychologists could implant false memories in you about what had happened. You wouldn’t remember, but you’d come to think of it like something you used to remember. You would believe that things happened, even though they didn’t really happen.

Or did they? Maybe if you believe something with all your heart and with all your soul, then it has to be true! This seems to be the feeling of the deeply religious people I’ve talked to, when they talk about their belief in God. They just know their beliefs are true, because they can feel it as a warm feeling in their hearts.

Then again, some of us believe in something called objective truth. We’re called “scientists” and we explore the world in order to find out what these truths are. Some of us try to find out objective truths about the way our minds work. We’re called “cognitive scientists” and we study cognition, perception, learning, memory, language; basically: intelligence.

Not only do we study it, but we also make computer models to try to make our theories of mental functioning concrete. Then we test those theories, and if we believe that they’re true then we make up elaborate scenarios in order to show them to be true, rather than shining the light of truth on them and jettisoning them if they don’t cast a shadow. But that’s where other cognitive scientists come in: they see our theories as competition to the theories which they fervently believe are true, and will point out the many shortcomings of those competing theories. The way we get around this negative attention is to make our computer programs as unavailable or incomprehensible or unusable as possible, so that other researchers aren’t able to level such criticisms against us without our being able to reply “well, you must not have done it right!”

So much for Objective Truth, huh? When I think about it this way, I can no longer proudly claim that I am a Brain Scientist. I now have to admit that I am a Brain Hacker. I have a hack that seems to work very well in inducing learning, and I’m trying to promote and augment that hack. I’d like to be a scientist one day, though…