On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not

Fascinating!

This book can change the way that one perceives themselves and others. Burton's examples help to facilitate our understanding of how the mind works and often "plays tricks" on us. So, are we certain? At the end of the book, I realized that I need to ask more and better questions. Burton provides the reader with a sense of relief a "lifting of the burden" that being certain is not they end and be all of life. We can exist in ambiguity.

very profound and important

This is a profound book, possibly very important to understanding many different mental processes. The author posits a partly emotional and partly innate sense of certainty, the belief that one knows something to be certain, as a feature of brain function. He argues that immediate certainty is certainly a beneficial adaptation to uncertain environments, but its existence ought to make one cautious about feelings of absolute conviction.
Excerpts:

The message at the heart of this book is that the feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction, and certainty aren't deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us.

Although not restricted to a single area of the brain or a single definitive physiology, the most striking shared characteristic of these delusional misidentification syndromes is that the conflict between logic and a contrary feeling of knowing tends to be resolved in favor of feeling. Rather than rejecting ideas and beliefs that defy common sense and overwhelming contrary evidence, such patients end up using tortured logic to justify the more powerful sense of knowing what they know.

Reason is not a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.1 (Italics mine.) Disembodied thought is not a physiological option. Neither is a purely rational mind free from bodily and mental sensations and perceptions. TO KNOW WHAT our minds are doing, we need some sensory system that monitors the sensation

The same neural and cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and move around also create our conceptual systems and modes of reason. To understand reason, we must understand the details of our visual system, our motor system, and the general mechanisms of neural binding. Reason is not a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world.1

We know the nature and quality of our thoughts via feelings, not reason. Feelings such as certainty, conviction, rightness and wrongness, clarity, and faith arise out of involuntary mental sensory systems that are integral and inseparable components of the thoughts that they qualify


Wittgenstein's famous aphorism: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

We can, on the other hand, think rationally about the choices that other people make. We can do this because we do not know and are not trying to satisfy unconscious needs and childhood fantasies.

Clarity is an involuntary mental sensation, not an objective determination.

Whether an idea originates in a feeling of faith or appears to be the result of pure reason, it arises out of a personal hidden layer that we can neither see nor control.

In The Crack-Up, F Scott Fitzgerald described an easy-to-accept but difficult-to-accomplish solution: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

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Are you REALLY you?

A very readable review of the latest understanding of how we think; how we form opinions, and what makes us comfortable with our beliefs. Our reasoned conclusions, our beliefs and our opinions may be formed in areas of the brain that are not under our conscious control.

I'll Never be Certain Again

Light, enjoyable, and to the point, Burton illustrates that the human brain is a wonderful, but not 100% reliable, biological device. From now forward, I'll re-examine every 'positive' thought 'before' speaking.

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