We Also Use Our Imagination And Take

Science Has Revealed A Universe That Is Vast, Ancient, Violent, Strange, And Beautiful, A Universe Of Almost Infinite Variety And Possibility One In Which Time Can End In A Black Hole, And Conscious Beings Can Evolve From A Soup Of Minerals.

Our Inner Weighing Of Evidence Is Not A Careful Mathematical Calculation Resulting In A Probabilistic Estimate Of Truth, But More Like A Whirlpool Blending Of The Objective And The Personal. The Result Is A Set Of Beliefs - Both Conscious And Unconscious - That Guide Us In Interpreting All The Events Of Our Lives.

We Believe That When We Choose Anything, Judge A Stranger And Even Fall In Love, We Understand The Principal Factors That Influenced Us. Very Often Nothing Could Be Further From The Truth. As A Result, Many Of Our Most Basic Assumptions About Ourselves, And Society, Are False.

When We Are In The Grasp Of Illusion - Or, For That Matter, Whenever We Have A New Idea - Instead Of Searching For Ways To Prove Our Ideas Wrong, We Usually Attempt To Prove Them Correct. Psychologists Call This The Confirmation Bias, And It Presents A Major Impediment Of Our Ability To Break Free From The Misinterpretation Of Randomness.

Listeners Instinctively Detect That When We Lower The Usual Pitch Of Our Voice, We Are Sad, And When We Raise It, We Are Angry Or Fearful.