Cognitive Dissonance
“COGNITIVE DISSONANCE”
(noun, psychology)
“Anxiety and existential discomfort that results from simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes, beliefs.”
“An uncomfortable mental state resulting from conflicting cognitions; usually resolved by changing or justifying some of the cognitions.”
Cognitive dissonance is the tense feeling that occurs when we hold two equally valid, conflicting points of view. Humans generally react to cognitive dissonance by discounting one of the viewpoints, sometimes going so far as to angrily argue against it.
Examples of cognitive dissonance might include:
1. The overwhelming evidence from physics and cosmology that the universe had a beginning in the finite past and arose apparently uncaused and out of nothing, when logic tells us that every effect has a cause (that is, there is no uncaused effects) and that “out of nothing, nothing comes”.
2. The fact that we seem to be living on a “just right” planet, in a “just right” part of a “just right” solar system, in a “just right” part of “just right” galaxy, in a mindless, pitiless, totally random, cold, aggressively inhospitable universe — when we ‘know’ that all of this has just occurred randomly, undirected and without any forethought or planning.
3. That life on earth has all the appearances of intricate design when we ‘know’ that it has all arisen randomly and by complete accident, through the processes of random mutation, chance and natural selection.
4. That against all odds, sentient life and consciousness seems to have arisen in the vast, apparently mindless cosmos — at least on this planet so far as we know — by completely random and undirected processes, and yet the mysterious problem of consciousness seems to be the hardest nut to crack — and reproduce artificially — for our society awash in science and technology.
5. That despite the intense love that we feel for our partner, our children, our family, our pets and other special things, we ‘know’ that the sensation of love is “nothing but” pre-determined, electrochemical exchanges in our accidentally complex neurological systems, and that these intense and seemingly transcendent emotions we call ‘love’ are – we are told — ultimately worthless and pointless side effects of our neurological evolution and have absolutely no transcendent meaning or value at all outside our limited sphere.
Have a nice day.
David
on October 2nd, 2011
Lol! This is wonderfully brusque to the pointed edge of obvious! The irony is not lost on those of us who see the dichotomous worldview of the deity-denying… I have a difficult time understanding how one cannot see such clear reasoning, until I am reminded “though they have eyes, they cannot see, though they have ears, they cannot hear…” And I weep for them, they who from eons past have been foretold about; the spiritual Edomites…