PROLOGUE: Once we have our sight fixed, we don’t easily turn away. Believing is akin to staring. Maybe more intense, definitely more enduring. The eyes tire, but the emotional centers of the brain endure like long distance runners whose vision is fixed well ahead of each step. Seeing down the road of a race keeps one from veering and enables a runner to avoid or jump over obstacles and potholes. With eyes fixed on the predetermined finish, the runner is a moving version of a stare. With eyes fixed, those that hold political beliefs rarely run off course.
THE WHAT IS: Twenty-five centuries ago Parmenides wrote a philosophical work in verse that has survived only in fragmentary form. In the fragments, the Goddess of the Night addresses Parmenides: “As yet a single tale of a way/ remains, that it is; and along this path markers are there/ very many, that What Is is ungenerated and deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect” (fr. 8.1–4). Doesn’t seem to make much sense, but then we are listening to a goddess who walks in darkness.
Actually, maybe the Goddess of Night makes some sense in light (couldn’t resist the word) of research on “belief-change resistance” by Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, and Sam Harris.* As you know from experience, people don’t change their minds easily. Once they acquire a belief, they tend to hold onto it as “deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect,” to use the words of the goddess.
The researchers point out that “cognitive and emotional flexibility” are cornerstones of cooperation. As they discovered in their study, however, after hearing rational counterevidence that disproves political beliefs, people have a tendency to resist change and can actually increase their inflexibility. In the short version: When one’s beliefs are under attack—even rational attack—emotional centers, particularly the amygdalae, activate. It’s the fight or flight response in a walnut shell (yes, amygdalae are described as “walnut-size and shape”).
So, using fMRI to look at the brains of 40 “liberal-minded” individuals (the “mindedness” of the group appears to be irrelevant—could just as easily have been “conservative-minded”), Kaplan and company posed questions, gave statements, and presented counterevidence to beliefs and watched what happened in those brains. As they write, “Generally, political statements showed the smallest degree of belief change…” and “As predicted, participants were especially resistant to arguments against their political beliefs.”
Here’s where the Goddess of Night comes in. If you remember, Parmenides, one of the earliest philosophers, was concerned with the unchanging vs. the changing. His work even seems to foreshadow The Matrix. What is real? Some unchanging What Is? Or the stuff of everyday experience open to interpretation through the senses? Is the daily stuff an illusion?
We don’t treat it that way, especially in regard to the daily “political stuff.” The amygdalae hold onto beliefs, rarely giving them up or even altering them slightly. It’s as though what we believe is the unshakeable, the ungenerated, whole and uniform Being. Yet, we came by these beliefs in a world of change.
CONTRADICTION: We will run through our lives with our eyes on a finish line that is one of our own making. We want everyone to run the same race and to stare at the same goal in the same way. It doesn’t matter whether or not someone sees another goal, proves that is it is a better goal than the one we chase. When it comes to political belief, the emotional centers reject reason.
The irony is that we “run” through life, but we hold What Is to be permanent and unchanging; To be still. Can we have it both ways? Is What Is whole and unified? Is it a conglomeration of fleeting entities? Apparently, after more than two thousand years of philosophy and now neuroscience, we still don’t have answers to simple questions. You can say, “The arrow is in flight. The runner is in step,” but as the Calculus shows us, at any moment both are “frozen” in an infinitesimally small spot, analogous to frames in a movie. (The screen shot shows no motion; yet, it is a necessary component of our sense of motion) So, too, we can say our political beliefs are frozen and the race is an illusion—after all, we don’t admit a second path to a finish line. As we run our life’s races, we do so under contradictory beliefs: 1) that we are moving through a world of constant change and 2) that we are bound to the unchangeable that is a “true” reality. And then, to add to our confusion about What Is—whether permanent or transitory—our emotional centers rarely yield to change in our political thinking while at the same time those same centers are befuddled or frustrated by a similar resistance to change in other brains.
If all this seems contradictory, could you send your complaints to the Goddess of the Night or to Parmenides? They seemed to have started this argument.
*Kaplan, J. T. et al. Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Sci. Rep. 6, 39589; doi: 10.1038/srep39589 (2016).
THE WHAT IS: Twenty-five centuries ago Parmenides wrote a philosophical work in verse that has survived only in fragmentary form. In the fragments, the Goddess of the Night addresses Parmenides: “As yet a single tale of a way/ remains, that it is; and along this path markers are there/ very many, that What Is is ungenerated and deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect” (fr. 8.1–4). Doesn’t seem to make much sense, but then we are listening to a goddess who walks in darkness.
Actually, maybe the Goddess of Night makes some sense in light (couldn’t resist the word) of research on “belief-change resistance” by Jonas T. Kaplan, Sarah I. Gimbel, and Sam Harris.* As you know from experience, people don’t change their minds easily. Once they acquire a belief, they tend to hold onto it as “deathless,/ whole and uniform, and still and perfect,” to use the words of the goddess.
The researchers point out that “cognitive and emotional flexibility” are cornerstones of cooperation. As they discovered in their study, however, after hearing rational counterevidence that disproves political beliefs, people have a tendency to resist change and can actually increase their inflexibility. In the short version: When one’s beliefs are under attack—even rational attack—emotional centers, particularly the amygdalae, activate. It’s the fight or flight response in a walnut shell (yes, amygdalae are described as “walnut-size and shape”).
So, using fMRI to look at the brains of 40 “liberal-minded” individuals (the “mindedness” of the group appears to be irrelevant—could just as easily have been “conservative-minded”), Kaplan and company posed questions, gave statements, and presented counterevidence to beliefs and watched what happened in those brains. As they write, “Generally, political statements showed the smallest degree of belief change…” and “As predicted, participants were especially resistant to arguments against their political beliefs.”
Here’s where the Goddess of Night comes in. If you remember, Parmenides, one of the earliest philosophers, was concerned with the unchanging vs. the changing. His work even seems to foreshadow The Matrix. What is real? Some unchanging What Is? Or the stuff of everyday experience open to interpretation through the senses? Is the daily stuff an illusion?
We don’t treat it that way, especially in regard to the daily “political stuff.” The amygdalae hold onto beliefs, rarely giving them up or even altering them slightly. It’s as though what we believe is the unshakeable, the ungenerated, whole and uniform Being. Yet, we came by these beliefs in a world of change.
CONTRADICTION: We will run through our lives with our eyes on a finish line that is one of our own making. We want everyone to run the same race and to stare at the same goal in the same way. It doesn’t matter whether or not someone sees another goal, proves that is it is a better goal than the one we chase. When it comes to political belief, the emotional centers reject reason.
The irony is that we “run” through life, but we hold What Is to be permanent and unchanging; To be still. Can we have it both ways? Is What Is whole and unified? Is it a conglomeration of fleeting entities? Apparently, after more than two thousand years of philosophy and now neuroscience, we still don’t have answers to simple questions. You can say, “The arrow is in flight. The runner is in step,” but as the Calculus shows us, at any moment both are “frozen” in an infinitesimally small spot, analogous to frames in a movie. (The screen shot shows no motion; yet, it is a necessary component of our sense of motion) So, too, we can say our political beliefs are frozen and the race is an illusion—after all, we don’t admit a second path to a finish line. As we run our life’s races, we do so under contradictory beliefs: 1) that we are moving through a world of constant change and 2) that we are bound to the unchangeable that is a “true” reality. And then, to add to our confusion about What Is—whether permanent or transitory—our emotional centers rarely yield to change in our political thinking while at the same time those same centers are befuddled or frustrated by a similar resistance to change in other brains.
If all this seems contradictory, could you send your complaints to the Goddess of the Night or to Parmenides? They seemed to have started this argument.
*Kaplan, J. T. et al. Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence. Sci. Rep. 6, 39589; doi: 10.1038/srep39589 (2016).
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