Free The End of Faith by Sam Harris

contradiction? It is not even a dream within a dream.13 And yet, given the demands of language and behavior, it remains true that we must strive
     for coherence wherever it is in
    doubt, because failure here is synonymous with a failure either of
    linguistic sense or of behavioral possibility14
    Beliefs as Representations of the World
    For even the most basic knowledge of the world to be possible, reg- ularities in a nervous
     system must consistently mirror regularities in the environment. If a different assemblage
     of neurons in my brain fired whenever I saw a person's face, I would have no way to form a
     memory of him. His face could look like a face one moment and a toaster the next, and I
     would have no reason to be surprised by the inconsistency, for there would be nothing for
     a given pattern of neu- ral activation to be consistent with. As Stephen Pinker points out, it is only the orderly mirroring between a system that
     processes infor- mation (a brain or a computer) and the laws of logic or probability that
     explains “how rationality can emerge from mindless physical process” in the first place.15 Words are arranged in a systematic and rule-based way (syntax), and beliefs are likewise
     (in that they must logically cohere), because both body and world are so arranged. Con-
     sider the statement There is an apple and an orange in jack's lunch box. The syntactical (and hence logical) significance of the word “and” guarantees that anyone
     who believes this statement will also believe the following propositions: There is an apple in jack's lunch box and There is an orange in jack's lunch box. This is not due to some magical property that syntax holds over the world; rather, it is a
     simple consequence of the fact that we use words like “and” to mirror the orderly behavior
     of objects. Someone who will endorse the conjunction of two statements, while denying them
     individually, either does not understand the use of the word “and” or does not understand
     things like apples, oranges, and lunch boxes.16 It just so happens that we live in a universe in which, if you put an apple and an orange
     in Jack's lunch box, you will be able to pull out an apple, an orange, or both. There is a
     point at which the meanings of words,
    their syntactical relations, and rationality itself can no longer be
    divorced from the orderly behavior of objects in the world.17
    W H A T E V E Rbeliefsare,noneofusharborsaninfinitenumberof them.18 While philosophers may doubt whether beliefs are the sort of thing that can be counted, it
     is clear that we have a finite amount of storage in our brains,19 a finite number of discrete memories, and a finite vocabulary that waxes and wanes
     somewhere well shy of 100,000 words. There is a distinction to be made, therefore, between
     beliefs that are causally active20i.e., those that we already have in our headsand those that can be constructed on demand.
     If believ- ing is anything like perceiving, it is obvious that our intuitions about how
     many of our beliefs are present within us at any given moment might be unreliable. Studies
     of “change blindness,” for instance, have revealed that we do not perceive nearly as much
     of the world as we think we do, since a large percentage of the visual scene can be
     suddenly altered without our noticing.21 An analogy with computer gaming also seems apropos: current generations of com- puter
     games do not compute parts of their virtual world until a player makes a move that demands
     their existence.22 Perhaps many of our cognitive commitments are just like this.23
    Whether most of what we believe is always present within our minds or whether it must be
     continually reconstructed, it seems that many beliefs must be freshly vetted before they
     can guide our behavior. This is demonstrated whenever we come to doubt a proposition that
     we previously believed. Just consider what it is like to forget the