ON BEING CERTAIN
Robert Burton is a former Associate Chief of the Department of Neurosciences at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital.
In ‘On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not’ he argues that conclusions are not conscious choices. Rather, certainty is a sensation that feels like a thought, but actually arises out of involuntary brain mechanisms that function independently of reason. So while we think we have weighed the evidence and come to a logical deduction, we are not actually in control of the process and certainty is something that happens to us, like thirst. This, he says, lies behind the a-ha moment, when things suddenly fall into place.
This is no mere academic exercise. It explains why trying to change somebody else’s mind by presenting them with information - my evidence is better than your evidence - is so ineffective.
He also touches on the growing anti-elitism in the western world: it’s a result, he says, of intellectuals claiming that logical argument is superior to intuition. Many people are offended by this because their own experience contradict it.
His focus, in this podcast, is about conclusions we have already reached rather than whether, and how, weighing the evidence contributes to this feeling of certainty arising in the first place. But he is an erudite and articulate thinker. Worth a listen.