VINLO
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You presented me with a documentary which is about as scientific as an episode of "Survivor."
You posited I was not observing people. I suggested you view a documentary in which people behave counter to your position. You rejected it because it's not "natural" enough. In either case, that wasn't my scientific argument and you know it.
There is no scientific evidence of how human beings need to be certain.
Well that's objectively wrong and I can show you.
I rarely do this, but I'm going to give you a list of things to read because this is pretty much common knowledge in the fields of neurology and psychology, and there really is no point in me describing all the science to you when other people have done it better already.
A few of these are not scholarly sources (like Psychology Today) but I submit them because they do a good job summarizing the actual scholarly data. If you really are skeptical of their claims, you can follow their citations and read the work of the scientists and their studies.
(You could have found all of this with just a single Google search, by the way.)
A Hunger for Certainty | Psychology Today
The Certainty Bias: A Potentially Dangerous Mental Flaw - Scientific American
Changes in Brain Regions May Explain Why Some Prefer Certainty and Order - Neuroscience News
Brain cell mechanism for decision making also underlies judgment about certainty | UW News
https://www.amazon.com/Sure-Unconscious-Origins-Certainty-Brain-ebook/dp/B008AK8W1Q
If you want to read a few actual study abstracts, here:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5798459/
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/310/5754/1680.abstract
https://elifesciences.org/articles/27483
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what I found in about 10 minutes. Dig a little deeper and you're going to find the same conclusion over and over going back decades across multiple disciplines: humans crave certainty.
When you've actually developed a coherent argument for why their scientific evidence is invalid, I'd love to hear it. You should probably write a paper on it to, because if you're right and there's "no scientific evidence of how human beings need to be certain" then you might actually win a Nobel Prize.
It may or not be a built in mechanism for every day behavior but it does not mean it is needed to survive as a conscious big picture approach to life.
Brains aren't that compartmentalized. The human craving for certainty bleeds into everything, not just our meals and our sexual partners.
When we know where our next meal is coming from and have some social satisfaction and have some things that interest and entertain us we make it day to day. But one crisis is enough to spark doubt. This doubt may throw us off, but it doesn't necessarily create a fatal crisis.
I've never argued anything about a 'fatal crisis'. I don't even know what you mean by that or why it's relevant to our discussion.
We seem to adapt pretty well naturally, just like other animals do.
Yep, and the way we do that is through our certainty mechanisms.
If people arrive at certainty unconsciously there is nothing they can do to change it consciously.
Congratulations, this is the stupidest thing you've said so far. Unconscious biases can become conscious and analyzed. That's literally the entire discipline of critical thinking.
We are more like what we view as lower animals than we think. Most of life is unconscious.
This is correct. But unlike a donkey, we have a bright spotlight in our prefrontal cortex that is capable of illuminating the darker parts of our unconscious mind. Not all of it, and certainly not all of it at once (we'd go mad otherwise), but unconscious thoughts and beliefs can enter conscious awareness.