Belief, scepticism and the brain
Senses, beliefs and skepticism, all these are formed by the neural networks of brain cells
Beliefs come first, reasons follow. A common question from skeptics and science-based thinkers ask, "How could anyone believe that?" Sometimes people do believe false and even weird things. In fact, the brain is a belief engine. It finds meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. Once beliefs are formed, we seek out confirmatory arguments and evidence to justify them ignoring the contrary evidence. Indeed, we do not like to admit that we are wrong. If we look closer into the brain's role, we find that our brain's primary purpose is to keep us alive. Survival always comes first among the tasks of brain. If we get injured to the point where our bodies only have enough energy to support consciousness or a heartbeat but not both, the brain choose to put us into coma rather than keeping us conscious at that crucial moment. It prefers us to be alive rather than being conscious when one can be offered at a time. One of the primary tools of brain to ensuring survival is our senses. However, senses alone are inadequate as effective detectors of danger to ensure our survival because of the limitation in both range and scope. Here come beliefs. "Belief" is another survival tool of brain designed to augment and enhance the danger-identification function of our senses. They serve as our brain's "long-range danger detectors". For example, think that you sit in your living room and can't see your car you parked in your drive way some time ago. Now, you can't see it and may get a feeling that it is not in place. But it's your belief that tells you that your car is still there where you left it. Thus, belief can offer you something beyond the sensory data. Again, think of a caveman. He has a much greater ability to stay alive if he is able to maintain a belief that dangers exist in the jungle even when his sensory data indicate no immediate threat. Similarly, a police officer will be in a safe position, if he or she can continue to believe that someone stopped for a traffic violation could be an armed psychopath with an impulse to kill even though they present a seemingly innocuous appearance. However, beliefs once formed, are maintained by us through a number of powerful cognitive biases such as anchoring bias which is relying on single piece of information while making decisions, authority bias which values the opinion of authority, belief bias which judges an argument depending on the believability of its conclusion and finally confirmation bias which finds the confirming evidence for already existing belief. Thus, our brain considers senses and beliefs to be separate but equally important purveyors of survival information. The researchers said their findings support the idea that the brain has evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improves the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history. However, skepticism is very important in some situations. For example, it is a sine qua non of science because this offers the only escape we have from the belief-dependent realism trap created by our believing brains generating falsity in the scientific experiments. In general, being skeptic on an issue is not that straightforward every time. Indeed, trying to change any belief, no matter how small or silly it may seem, can produce ripple effects through the entire system and ultimately threaten the brain's experience of survival. This is why people are often driven to defend even seemingly small or tangential beliefs. In order to effectively change beliefs, skeptics must attend to their survival value, not just their data-accuracy value, because brain has been designed to do so, to keep us alive, a concept strongly correlates with the creation of life and with the continuing evolutionary processes.
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