Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest.
The soul, uneasy, and confin'd from home,
Rest and expatiates in a life to come. (查看原文)
This hope is what drives all of us -skeptics and believers alike- to be compelled by unsolved mysteries, to seek spiritual meaning in a physical universe, desire immortality, and wish that our hopes for eternity may be fulfilled. (查看原文)
Life is contingent and filled with uncertainties, the most frightening of which is the manner, time, and place of our own demise.
Under the pressure of reality, we become credulous. We seek reassuring certainties from fortune-tellers and palm-readers, astrologers and psychics. Our critical faculties break down under the onslaught of promises and hopes offered to assuage life's great anxieties. (查看原文)
three tiers why people believe weird things:(1) because hope springs eternal;(2) because thinking can go wrong in general ways;(3) because thinking can go wrong in particular ways. (查看原文)
Humans evolved the ability to seek and find connections between things and events in the environment (snakes with rattles should be avoided), and those who made the best connections left behind the most offspring. We are their descendants. The problem is that causal thinking is not infallible. We make connections whether they are there or not. These misidentifications come in two varieties: false negatives get you killed (snakes with rattles are okay); false positives merely waste time and energy (a rain dance will end a drought). We are left with a legacy of false positives — hypnopompic hallucinations become ghosts or aliens; knocking noises in an empty house indicate spirits and poltergeists; shadows and lights in a tree become Virgin Mary; random mountain shadows on Mars are seen as a ... (查看原文)
Balance can be found by answering a few basic questions: What is the quality of the evidence for the claim? What are the background and credentials of the person making the claim? Does the thing work as claimed? (查看原文)
"One of the characteristics that sets man apart from all the other animals (and animal he indubitably is) is a need for knowledge for its own sake." (查看原文)
On the most basic level ,we must think to remain alive. To think is the most essential human characteristic. Over three centuries ago, the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes, after one of the most thorough and skeptical purges in intellectual history, concluded that he knew one thing for certain:"Cogito ergo sum—I think therefore I am." But to be human is to think. Toreverse Descartes,"Sum ergo cogito—I am therefore I think" (查看原文)
