Reasoning draws a conclusion, but does not make the conclusion certain, unless the mind discovers it by the path of experience.

The brain has conflicting goals: to provide you with information, and to reduce your anxiety about the worrying outcome. If you wanted Clinton to win in 2016, your brain achieved both goals by accepting the 30% figure but telling you it would not happen.

For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data — offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order — creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.

Although our intellect always feels itself urged towards clearness and certainty, still our mind often feels itself attracted by uncertainty. Instead of threading its way with the understanding along the narrow path of philosophical investigations and logical conclusions, in order, almost unconscious of itself, to arrive in spaces where it feels itself a stranger, and where it seems to part from all well-known objects, it prefers to remain with the imagination in the realms of chance and luck. Instead of living yonder on poor necessity, it revels here in the wealth of possibilities; animated thereby, courage then takes wings to itself, and daring and danger make the element into which it launches itself as a fearless swimmer plunges into the stream.

it’s precisely the infinite that casts light upon how the brain thinks, and how clever it is in showing us something that seems real when it’s merely an abstraction, namely that brain introduced or employed to great effect those methods of distortion, that dislocation

Our brains work like computers: They input data and process it in accordance with their wiring and programming. Any opinion you have is made up of these two things: the data and your processing or reasoning

It is very interesting how the human mind works. We have the need to justify everything, to explain and understand everything, in order to feel safe. We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe. This is why we make assumptions.

Yet by forcing the brain to accept propositions of which one set is absurdity, the other truism, a new function of brain is established.

Fundamentally, your brain doesn’t like or want to believe in randomness. It always believes you have some control, even when you don’t.

It may be delusional but we’re happier deluded. And delusion ironically makes us perform better on average.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

[I]n trying to figure out the brain, the obstacle is that we have no finer instrument than the brain itself for the purpose. The greatest hindrance to objective knowledge is our own subjective presence.

In order to determine whether we can know anything with certainty, we first have to doubt everything we know

It is evident the mind knows not things immediately, but only by the intervention of the ideas it has of them.

I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True... but I sure as heck can work to find out what isn’t true! Moreover, I can improve my model of the world, by slowly, carefully finding out what is truer than what I already know.