The Illusion of Intelligence

If you scan the news each day, one can’t help but get the feeling that we are being inundated with idiotic ideas from all sides. From the lunatics in ISIS who are supremely convinced that they are doing God’s work, to the ignorant politicians who think that we can just build walls everywhere to keep the bad people out, to the moronic economists who seem to believe that all of our deficit spending and quantitative easing is actually making our economy better.

Additionally, if you visit any of the thousands of chat rooms on the internet, you will undoubtedly come across a seemingly endless supply of dentists, plumbers, web designers, etc., who are more than happy to share their ignorant views on religion, economics, politics, etc. In some ways, it seems as though our world may actually be getting dumber by the minute.

The truth, however, is that life has always been this way. One simply needs to spend a little time studying history to find that our ancestors were just as confident in their own idiotic beliefs as the people of today are. After all, many of our ancestors whole-heartedly believed that the earth was flat, that slavery was perfectly acceptable, that powered flight was impossible, that you could heal a person by draining blood from them, and the list goes on and on.

In fact, if we could build a working time machine and travel throughout history asking people “On a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you with mankind’s overall understanding of the world?”, what we would inevitably find is that the average answer would be the same no matter what time period we visited. In short, we would find that all of our ancestors were just as confident in their beliefs as people are today.

After all, our ancestors didn’t write “Well, gee, I dunno. Maybe the earth is flat??? But we’re so dumb that there’s really no way to be sure.” Instead, they were so confident in their concept of a flat earth that they would routinely punish anyone who suggested otherwise.

So why is this the case? Why do people who seemingly have almost no understanding of how the world actually works develop such a strong sense of certainty that they actually do?

In order to understand why this is the case, we need to examine some of the lessons we have learned from science about the nature of “reality”. Throughout human history, mankind has generally accepted the idea that there is a reality outside of us and that we look out onto this reality and record images of it into our brain. To the contrary, relatively recent advancements in science have shown us that this is not the case at all. Science has in fact shown us that what we call reality is actually a crude model constructed by our mind.

This may sound a little far-fetched, but it is really quite simple to recognize. After all, when you look out onto the world you should be aware that you don’t see “everything” that is out there. You don’t see the millions of bacterial cells crawling all over your body; you don’t see the dead skin cells falling off your body; you don’t see the waves of electromagnetic radiation traveling through your body; you don’t even see the air as it enters and leaves your body.

We could then take what we have learned from science to go even further. When you look out onto the world, you certainly do not see that the world is constructed of tiny electrons, protons, quarks, etc.… Or that most of the “stuff” we are made of is just empty space. You certainly cannot see that if we removed the empty space from our bodies, the entire human race would fit into an area the size of a sugar cube.

The simple fact of the matter is that we do not see the world as it really is. Instead, what we call “reality” is actually a highly simplified model constructed by our mind. The crucial point to recognize from this is that because our ideas and what we call “reality” are one and the same, no matter how ignorant, short-sighted or self-serving an individual’s ideas really are, from the individual’s perspective their ideas will always appear to do an effective job at describing reality (because their ideas are merely describing themselves). Thus the individual is easily fooled into believing that their ideas are “true”; that their ideas are describing the world as it really is.

This is the simple reason why our ancestors were overly confident in their naive view of the world and why there are so many people today who are overly confident in their own ignorant beliefs. This is why religious lunatics are supremely convinced they know God’s thoughts. This is also why there are so many people in this country who are absolutely certain that they know what is wrong with our economy. This is also why scientists are constantly being deluded into thinking that they are always on the verge on some profound breakthrough (i.e. that they have located the God particle).

By failing to understand this, mankind is constantly being fooled into believing that we can “solve” problems like ISIS without addressing the actual source of the problem. In short, the only way to solve the ISIS problem is to also solve our science problem and our “dentist who thinks he is an economist” problem or our “plumber who thinks he understands racism” problem or our “saving is good for the economy” problem.

These problems will not be solved by policy, or by psychology, or by “getting involved” or by disseminating the “proper information”. Instead, we will only overcome these problems by recognizing and understanding the illusion of intelligence created by our thought process.

#HumanBeingsAreIdiots