Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Does this mean ...

... your brain also creates trees and birds and stars? Born believers: How your brain creates God.

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us, he says.
What about the possibility that we think this way because our brain is designed to orient us toward reality? It enables us to perceive trees and birds and stars because there is something "out there" corresponding to trees and birds and stars. Why assume that the brain is on the money when it presents us with the "natural" world, then assume otherwise when it presents us with a "supernatural" one?

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