"How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer

The most interesting idea that I took away from the book "How We Decide" by Jonah Lehrer is that when patients suffered head injuries that affected their brains, causing them to lose their emotional faculties but retaining their reasoning ones, these patients end up being unable to make any decision, no matter how trivial the subject.

Without emotional faculties, the patients ended up rationalising everything they are doing. They could not make up their minds on what clothes to wear, what food to buy etc, as their brains constantly seek to evaluate all conceivable choices that could be made, no matter how irrelevant many of the choices would have been. Apparently, humans use their emotional faculties to discard choices. After we have discarded all other alternatives leaving our sole choice, our brains will then use these same emotional faculties to "rationalise" the choice we kept, regardless of how good or bad the choice actually was. Without emotions, the human brain cannot discard even the most remotest of choices, so the person becomes embroiled in a state of "analysis-paralysis".

This was very fascinating because I was not aware of the great impact our emotions had on our rationality. Most of us probably think that the less emotional person will make the more rational decision. Apparently, this is not really the case. In fact, people with strong emotions tend to be more rational in their decision making. It is just that these more rational people tend to also have better control of their emotions. When faced with a crisis, they can usually see both sides of a subjective situation, and maintain great discipline to not yield to the first instinctive emotional response.

Sam Harris - Reconciling science and Christianity

In an exchange between Sam Harris and Philip Ball (both are atheists by the way) about whether scientists should patronise religionists, and acknowledge religion as a worldview that is as robustly supported as that of the scientific one, Harris made a very humorous description of Christianity that I just have to repeat here:

For instance, a reconciliation between science and Christianity (the explicit goal of The BioLogos Foundation) would mean squaring physics, chemistry, biology, and a basic understanding of probabilistic reasoning with a raft of patently ridiculous, Iron Age convictions.

In its most generic and well-subscribed form, Christianity amounts to the following claims:

Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven”—where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and sceptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truth-claims ever revealed about the cosmos. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will (probably) be consigned to a fiery hell for all eternity.

http://www.reasonproject.org/archive/item/what_should_science_dosam_harris_v_philip_ball/

Great quote, Sam!