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Roberto Zepeda djsaike6481 — wonderful book.

Natalia Otiniano nataliazol — Here's the tl;dr review: If you're looking for the ways that we tend to trick ourselves and how to deal with that reality, see Predictably Irrational or The Power of Habit. Shermer's book is definitely not the book for that. Now the full review: I was really excited about this book. I was hoping that it would update and extend Consciousness Explained with contemporary neuroscience about belief. That was, after all, exactly how the book billed itself through the marketing coverage and through the first couple of chapters. And, to be fair to the book, there is a fair bit about that going on. I know more about the neuroscience of belief than I did when I started. The science content — which is almost entirely found within the first half of the book — is why this book got two stars instead of one. It's a great book to get some general ideas and get the names of other interesting things to go research. The basic idea that Shermer is pushing is that we choose our opinions first and justify them later, which seems obvious to me. What this amounts to for Shermer is that we decide our opinions based on non-scientific evidence and then have an expectation that science should justify them, and we've got in-built biases that help construct a fitting reality. Once that clarification is in place (Shermer does not supply it), Shermer does a really nice job proving it out in Part II. The book is also very accesible without being childish. Shermer has a great writing style and his voice manages to remain friendly even when tackling highly controversial topics in a fairly confrontational way. But that's about all the positive stuff I can say about this book. Beyond that, the book is basically a tour de force of philosophical and anti-religious errors. It's the most adroit, masterful presentation of all the problems with the so-called "skeptic" culture that I am yet to see. Ripping this book a new one could easily be the final project for an undergraduate class on post-modernism or post-colonialism. Let me highlight some of the glaring failings which are still pissing me off, in roughly the order that they really bug me. First and foremost, the God Helmet, which Shermer treats at length. Seriously, people, let this one go. The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul demolished the God Helmet, revealing it as the pseudoscience that it is. Persinger is a de facto huckster selling a magic device to skeptics, and they're eating it up. Shermer falls into the trap, too, and proceeds to announce that the God Helmet "may be the first step toward demystifying a number of centuries-old puzzles." The problem is the God Helmet has never successfully been repeated. Even using Persinger's own equipment, teams other than Persinger could not get the kind of results he found. In short, the more controlled the experiment, the less the effect of the God Helmet. This is precisely Shermer's critique of the experiments around psychic phenomenon. It's a totally warranted and valid critique of psychic experiments. But it's also a totally warranted and valid critique of the God Helmet. Shermer fails to apply his own skeptic standards to a device which he is inclined to believe, instead presenting us solely with his anecdotal experience and a heaping gob of praise. If Shermer is going to call himself a skeptic, then he needs to actually be skeptical of everything evenly, including and especially those things he wants to be true. The only good thing about the God Helmet example is the irony: he fell into this trap because he wanted it to be true while writing a book about how people fall into traps by wanting to believe. So it shows Shermer is as human and fallible and self-delusional as he's casting everyone else to be, too. Second, Shermer's handling of philosophically loaded jargon and concepts is desperately in need of work. In the first chapter, he disparages philosophy in favor of science (as though they are mutually exclusive), and then proceeds to not just stumble across philosophical hornets' nests, but to actually seek out those hornets' nests and stick sensitive, squishy body parts right into the hole until he's sure he's been stung. It's insane. The most obvious example is his monism. He says that he is a monist—that all that exists is the physical activity of the brain. Fine. Unfortunately, the only defensible monist position vis a vis subjectivity is to deny it outright: for a monist, the only philosophically safe position is to say that subjectivity simply does not exist. You are not a subjective person. You have no subjective experience. Descartes was just wrong. This is Daniel Dennett's take, and Shemer cites Dennett in footnotes, but apparently Shermer missed Dennett's actual point. Instead, Shermer gives a delightful performance as a pseudo-dualist, using terms like "conscious" vs. "subconscious" (which Dennett clearly explains is an erroneous distinction for a monist), "became aware", and even "qualia". He even talks about a sense of free will! But the "qualia" example is the most glaring demonstration—Shermer asserts that qualia are purely chemical reactions (pg 116), which is a pretty astounding assertion, since neither science nor philosophy has come up with any way of accounting how one gets subjective experience (qualia) out of a chemical soup. Despite that radical assertion, Shermer gives no justification...which isn't surprising, since there is none to give. What is surprising is that Shemer makes the claim in the first place: apparently monism and promissory materialism doesn't deserve skeptical treatment by Shermer. Third, Shermer fails to even handle his own terms well. He defines two terms: agenticity and patternicity, which seem to have promise as descriptors, but then he proceeds to use them inconsistently with his own definitions. Agenticity is apparently the projection of an agent onto experience: this is sometimes warranted (e.g. other people), sometimes not (e.g. wind in grass). But then Shermer treats expecting the recently deceased person to be present in their home as a kind of agenticity. That's not agenticity: it's not the projection of an agent. That's just a disappointed expectation or altered habituation. Other examples are easy to find as you work the book: just keep his technical definition of those terms at hand, and compare that to the way he uses them. Because of this sloppiness, Shermer ends up coming across as not even really knowing what he's even talking about with his own ideas — either that, or speaking out of both sides of his mouth. Fourth, the book takes a massive turn for the worse about half way through. All the science falls out of it, and it basically falls in quality to a level below most science news blogs. It's just ranting opinion stuff without justification or warrant. The conclusion pulls things together a bit, but by that point, the damage has really been done. Fifth, the book panders to evolutionary psychology like it's science, but it's not. There's no Popperian falsifiability to evolutionary psychology — that is, there is no experiment which could prove theories in evolutionary psychology wrong. Instead, people tell narratives and try to argue that the narratives make sense. But that's not science: that's philosophy. And all you need to remind yourself that evolutionary psychology is lame is to remember that the aquatic ape hypothesis is still a viable evolutionary psychology hypothesis. Worse, Shermer demonstrates his failure to grok evolutionary psychology when he calls it a "full fledged science" (pg. 42): it's not a science at all, but insofar as it is used in science, it is as a framework, not a discipline (that's according to Tooby and Cosmides themselves in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2007, 30:1, pg. 42-43). But Shermer, following others like Dawkins and Dennett, want to laud evolutionary psychology because of some misguided idea that it disproves something about religion or faith. Sixth, Shermer is so locked up in the modern worldview that he's busy fighting ghosts of arguments that perished two centuries ago. This is reflected in the very way he frames his core thesis: that we form beliefs first and go looking for evidence later. This is nonsense, as he well knows — the use of the ACC (the brain region, not the NCAA division) means that the brain is processing evidence. What Shermer means is that the we form beliefs without consulting science, and then we accept scientific evidence later. This, of course, is obvious: the brain doesn't have a capability for objective/intersubjective thought, even granting the existence of mirror neurons. There is no repeatable experiment performing homunculus in the brain that spends its downtime reading journals published by other repeatable experiment performing homunculus within other people's brains. Scientific evidence — like all intersubjective evidence and most rational argumentation — reaches the brain through hijacking the primal systems. So when we are forced to construct a belief, our only option is to do so through non-scientific systems. Once we construct a belief, though, that belief is a part of our reality, and so any additional evidence is forced to conform with the reality, or we're left with cognitive dissonance. (And the brain doesn't like cognitive dissonance.) Once a neural network is built, reconstructing/modifying it is difficult, and so the brain prefers to kludge in new facts and cling to existing beliefs rather than destroy existing beliefs in favor of the new facts. It's just how we're wired. But for Shermer and his modernism, "evidence" just means "scientific evidence", and so he misses this entire cognitive process because he wants to cling to the long since debunked Enlightenment idea of human cognition somehow grokking science directly. This modernism blindness also completely wrecks his treatment of dualism. That treatment is pathetically out of date: Shermer has clearly never read John R. Searle when he tries to argue that dualism is somehow hurt by evidence that the brain impacts the mind (the mind which, remember, Shermer should be denying even exists!). Finally, Shermer basically participates in all the standard Eurocentric, semi-racist, modern ideas which post-modern and post-colonial critiques have ripped to shreds. It's infuriating to see him—a thought leader in this "skeptic" community—failing to acknowledge the legitimate and valid critiques of the project which he is engaged on. And a lot of it is purely superficial stuff which could be modified without losing any kind of core motivation to the project. The most blatant single example of his modernism is when he says that current practices of hunter-gatherer societies are models for our paleolithic ancestors — as though those cultures have been doing nothing for the past 10,000 years but sitting on their thumbs and waiting to be discovered by Europeans. In another place, Shermer presents the Neadrathals possessing Europe for centuries yet not developing culture as evidence of their weak-mindedness — as though Europe itself contains some kind of magic that's not found in Africa, the Middle East, or South Asia. Also, there's a problem with the extensive argument that Shermer builds based on the assumed universal role of a god as judge of the good and the bad: that problem being that such an idea is pretty much unique (or at least central) to the monotheistic religions. It's so wrong that it isn't even Euro-centric, but even more limited than that: even the Greeks didn't have a concept that Zeus was going to get you if you secretly betrayed your society—unless, of course, someone in that society had an in with Zeus and tattled on you, or Zeus happened to be paying attention to you personally at the moment! So that entire way of thinking is just plain empirically erroneous. The idea that science can be the be-all, end-all of knowledge is an idea that has been roundly destroyed by pretty much everyone working post-Nietzsche, and it's especially unforgivable in a post-MacIntyre world. But, of course, Shermer doesn't notice any of these issues, because modernism doesn't deserve the same kind of skepticism that everything else does. This book was a horrid failure, and it should be an embarrassment for an author who claims to be a critical thinker. The fourth through sixth chapters have some interesting stuff, but everything else is straight up dangerous, because it's compellingly written but profoundly and painfully wrong even by its own skeptical standards. The worst part is that Shermer is a thought leader and writes in an extremely accessible and convincing style, even as he spews bad philosophy and calls it science. Because he's so charming, though, people buy it and pass it on — as evidenced by the 5-star reviews here on GoodReads.

Andrzej Kwedo kwedo — Wow...can't put it down. Similar to the Giver or City of Ember. Very fun read.