What Happens in a Philosopher's Brain? | Philosophy Tube

philosophy involves a lot of thinking and brains are pretty important for thinking so if we want to be good philosophers we need to learn a little bit about how brains work in his famous book Thinking Fast and Slow Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes two systems in the brain system 1 and system 2 system 1 is fast and intuitive things like 2+2 is 4 Romeo and Juliet system 2 is slower more deliberate things like what's 12 times 17 what are the major themes of moby-dick who should you vote for in the next election the two systems do not map on to actual brain structures it's not like system one is the left hemisphere in system two with the right hemisphere ok that's not true these are metaphorical characters in a story that explains how the brain works trouble is system 2 is incredibly lazy and whenever system 1 can jump in with a quick and easy answer it will often it will take a difficult question and substitute it for an easier one without us realizing so for instance should I eat this chocolate becomes would I like this chocolate who should I vote for becomes which politician do I like the sound of should I buy this product becomes do I like this product the easiest way to demonstrate system one's activity is with a simple question consider this daniel is quiet tidy meek neat and organized is daniel more likely to be a librarian or a farmer most people when asked that say that he's probably a librarian but there are far more farmers in the world than librarians so even if daniel is all of those things he's still much more likely to be a farmer what's happened is that your brain has taken the original question which requires you to retrieve statistics about farming and do some mental shuffling and substituted it for an easier question does Daniel resemble a stereotype of a librarian but in this case not only is your answer based on a stereotype it's also wrong you can put your brain systems through their paces with a cognitive reflex test or CRT the CRT is composed of three questions which are designed to have an intuitive answer come to mind straight away which is wrong things like a bat and a ball together cost one pound 10 the bat costs one pound more than the ball how much does the ball cost if you'd like to know more about the CRT or take it yourself you can find some links in the doobly-doo so why do we have two systems if system one can lead us so easily into error and not just small errors like getting the cost of the bat and ball wrong either substituting questions can affect who you vote for your political beliefs negotiations making war or peace when it goes wrong it can go seriously wrong well the reason we have two systems is this glucose actually this is sucrose but sugar is the answer your brain runs on glucose when system two is working your heart rate increases your pupils dilate your muscles will tense and your brain consumes more glucose but human brains evolve in an environment where glucose was scarce so they evolved to use as a little of it as they could whenever they could when human brains were evolving they didn't need to be perfect they just needed to be close enough for rock and roll and efficient and fast nowadays things have changed glucose is no longer scarce and we have much more complicated decisions to make than just there's a tiger run but we're stuck with these outdated brains the fact that our brains can be so rubbish sometimes produces some interesting phenomena like the anchoring effect if you ask people to produce a numerical estimate in answer to some question like say guess how many pennies are in the jar their answer will be greatly affected by any random number you can put in their heads Kamin describes an experiment where people were asked how old was Gandhi when he died the group that were first asked was can be over 114 when he died gave on average much higher estimates than the control group interestingly the anchoring effect still happens even when the number has nothing to do with anything Kaman performed an experiment where he spun a wheel of numbers which he had rigged to show either the number 10 or the number 65 he then asked participants to answer a question about percentage of African nations in the UN the group that was shown the number 65 gave on average much higher answers than the other groups even though the number 65 on a random spinning wheel had nothing to do with the percentage of African nations in the UN their brain still uses it system one hangs on to any random number and goes here use this obviously this has massive implications for everything from bankers bonuses to tuition fees to prison sentencing when judges were asked to recommend sentences for fictional crime cases they gave much higher sentences on average when they first rolled dice that had been loaded to show a high number and if you set a cap on bankers bonuses at say 2 million pounds the amount that gets given out in bonuses every year will increase because whenever the board meets and thinks what should we give Steve for his bonus this year the number 2 million is in their heads anchoring them and causing them to give higher answers than they otherwise might another interesting result of our lazy brains is bias bias is just systemic inability to appreciate facts and everybody is biased because everyone's brain is limited just different people are biased in different ways there are different kinds of bias - for instance outcome bias is the inability to appreciate the role that luck played in previous outcomes you get negative outcome biases like suing your surgeon because a low risk surgery went wrong and you want to blame them rather than accept that it was just bad luck and you get positive outcome bias like everybody thinking Captain Kirk is a great captain when actually he makes terrible command decisions and he's just lucky system one likes personal explanations it likes to be able to say this happened because this person did it and it doesn't deal well with the truth of statistics which is that some stuff just happens incidentally if you're looking for answers the ball costs 5 pence Gandhi was 78 when he died and the only way to stop the bankers bonuses rising is to set the cap at or below the current average bonus so what does this have to do with philosophy well two things first of all it kind of casts a shadow over free will if the decisions that you think you make can actually be very easily influenced by just any old random thing brain happens to notice it also might cause us to think very carefully about democracy and how we design our political and media systems if people can be so easily misled with disastrous consequences it might also be a good argument for diversity in decision-making bodies - if you have lots of different people from different backgrounds with different experiences then hopefully they will have different biases and be able to cover each other's blind spots but secondly it also shows us I think what philosophy is for often in philosophy we ask questions that do have intuitive answers but we try to ignore those intuitive answers and press them and not take anything for granted studying philosophy is like a Rakhi training montage for your system - you're trying always to use that method of thinking and smack down system 1 whenever it comes up with the easy answer that doesn't mean that philosophers are immune to the effects of a lazy system - I know I'm not but you can train your brain to be better earlier on I asked what's 12 times 17 and probably some of you have done enough maths that instantly go 204 I asked what's the major theme of moby-dick and probably some of you have read it closely enough to instantly go revenge thinking takes practice and there are few better ways to practice thinking than by studying philosophy subscribe for more videos about philosophy from me and you can help keep the show alive at patreon.com slash philosophy tube Lydia and Nate thorne earned a reward for sponsoring the show they got to ask me a question that I would answer here in front of everybody and they chose to ask me we've heard it said that belief is not a choice if you were compelled by a rational argument do you really have to believe or can you choose not to ok so this is by no means a settled error in philosophy but I am of the opinion that you cannot choose to believe or not believe something like go ahead and try it right now try and believe that your face is made of plastic although the world is flat you just can't do it that said I do think that people can set themselves up to believe so belief for me is a little bit like falling asleep you can't choose to do it right now but you can get into bed and snuggle down and choose to put yourself in a state where you will be receptive to sleep and similarly you could choose to try and stay awake but eventually your and I have to sleep similarly I think people could choose to avoid evidence or arguments that would challenge their beliefs either deliberately and might stick their fingers in their ears or they could maybe even do that without realising if those beliefs are core to who they think they are I've heard it said that if a belief is very closely tied to how you identify then it becomes very difficult to listen to or appreciate arguments or evidence against it that's something cane Minh talks about in his book actually is the science of persuading people and what are the best ways to distribute information so that you persuade people and who you're really gonna be persuading when you engage in certain kinds of arguments and myth-busting so yeah very very interesting question

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 87,528

Rating: 4.9548388 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, brain, thinking, neuroscience, psychology, learning, Daniel Kahnemann, cognitive reflection test, Philosophy Tube, Oliver Lennard

Id: QZ50yy65e3U

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2016