Friday, June 15, 2012

Lawyer vs Scientist


The default state of our brain is that of a lawyer, constantly feeding data into our belief system. Picking and choosing data to fit our mental image of something.
Whereas, the trained/evolved state of mind would be that of a scientist, where data comes in as is and it helps in either accepting or rejecting our mental hypothesis.
So, ultimately, our inner struggle is to balance these two opposing and contradicting mental states. Some examples from personal experience. When my wife was pregnant, we used take walks in the mall and we will notice a lot of other pregnant women as well. Now that we have our son, when we take a walk now, we notice lot of couples with stroller and baby around the same age as ours. I was contemplating buying a jeep and these days I notice at least 4-5 jeeps on the road. They were all there, hidden in the random chaos of our daily life but what we notice and what leaves an impression in our mind is to a large extent our choice. There is no cosmic intervention but a sampling of events from an infinite number of random collections.

For example, when someone fighting cancer recovers through a series of chemo therapies and other diagnosis carried out by doctors, nurses and scientists what does he do? He thinks it's a blessing from God and donates to local church, temple, mosque,....strange! Should not he be donating to the development of science so that the same set of miracles can be passed on to others. I feel that we don't want to praise and truly be happy for another fellow human being from the bottom of our heart. That's why we always need a divine intervention to justify our actions.

[Inspired by: The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer]

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