Everyone has their own unique upbringing filled with
distinctive experiences. These pivotal events lay the foundation to how we will
relate to the world and the information we receive from it. I doubt many would
argue with the notion that our personalities and behaviors are shaped by our
experiences. It’s rather easy to overlook our past history’s influence on us
and forget how deceptively powerful they can be. Perhaps it is due to our
brain’s ability to mask its own limitations by bridging the gaps between any
perceived inefficiencies. Or in other words, we can’t see the gaps found at the
end of our cognitive limitations because part of what our brain does is hide
these from our conscience mind so that we experience reality more smoothly.
There are so many things that the brain is doing that we are
not aware of most of the time. For instance, our hearts beat and our body
temperature stayed regulated without any conscience effort. Well, it appears
that our ideas and beliefs might also arise in a similar fashion, starting deep
from within an inaccessible place of our minds that we are not aware of until
it reaches a certain level into our consciousness.
Our emotions are no exception to this notion either.
Usually, we do not think of our feeling of certainty, or our feeling of being
right, as an emotion. However, I have come across more recent discoveries made
through research being done in this area of brain science that has shifted my
view to consider the feeling of “knowing” to be classified more as an emotion.
Even just philosophically, this is a fun conversation to have and ponder upon.
But, when boiled down to the bones, it all comes back to describing a feeling.
A feeling like an emotional state of being, or you know, like an emotion. So,
like with the other examples of how things enter into our consciousness, the
feeling of “rightness” begins with a process in the brain that we do not
consciously initiate. I can even vividly recall experiencing this feeling in certain
instances of my dreams where nothing makes sense but know what I’m supposed
to do or where I’m supposed to be. This might also lend some insight into
feelings of déjà vu. Our brains might just be interpreting a situation as being
familiar and produce the feeling of familiarity without our conscience
awareness, sort of like knowing without knowing. Some people who have damaged
parts of the brain that are needed for functioning properly lose their ability
to experience any sort of feeling of certainty. Think of that for a second. These
people report to recognize that everything about a person, place or thing to be
identical to something they used to know like a person they are married to or
even their own children, but without the feeling of certainty they insist these
things to be imposters. So, sometimes our feelings of being right can obviously
throw us off from time to time.
Now, it might seem obvious that our feelings of something
being true are not arguments or good explanations to support something being
true. Like saying something is right because it feels right. Just think of all
the instances in which people can’t explain what they saw, but still protest
they know what they saw. These are some reasons why we should be cautious of
individuals that operate with no shadow of a doubt, making claims of absolute
knowledge or absolute certainty about anything. In many circumstances, this feeling can act as an obstacle to the process of expanding our understanding and acquiring new knowledge.
The inspiration for this train of thought came from
something I read in Carl Sagan’s, The Demon-Haunted
World. This all comes back to why understanding the inquiry process of
science is so important to EVERYONE in ANY field.
"Science is different from many another human enterprise — not, of course, in its practitioners being influenced by the culture they grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong (which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive experiments that confirm or deny ideas, in the vigor of its substantive debate, and in its willingness to abandon ideas that have been found wanting. If we were not aware of our own limitations, though, if we were not seeking further data, if we were unwilling to perform controlled experiments, if we did not respect the evidence, we would have very little leverage in our quest for the truth." (Sagan 1997)
Reference:
Sagan, Carl. 1997. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Antiscience. (pg 263). Ballantine Books.
