I am always slightly annoyed when a book is not about what is is supposed to be about. A few chapters of this book - those towards the end - are on why the feeling of certainty is just that: a feeling. This leads the author to some interesting discussions about how the 'feeling of certianty (a feeling though it is) is something that tends not to be subject to reason, but owes more to emotion. The author also goes into some really interesting thoughts about evolutionary reasons why the feeling of certainty as a tool to help us survive in an uncertain world (where we have to act, so we might as well act with conviction).
Unfortunately, this only happens well into the second half of the book (maybe 2/3rds of the way through). The first many chapters are stage setters. There are chapters about distinguishing what is meant by "mental states," "feeling" and "sensation," chapters describing how we know that emotions like fear, deja vu, and religious experience are chemical in nature, and how the "mind" is an emergent property tying together several components of the brain into a unity.
The author also spends quite a bit of time talking about what neuroscientists term the "hidden layer." That is, when we make decisions, the brain "surveys" a whole host of things - past experiences, attitudes one has acquired, things one has learned, etc. - to come to a conclusion, but this is all "hidden" form our consciousness. Thus, the author concludes that while we may feel like our deliberations are conscious, often the bulk of our deliberation is unconscious.
All of this, the author tells us, supports the thesis (that he eventually gets to) suggesting that certainty is a feeling,, and not always one subject to rationality as we generally assume. Since we have seen that attitudes like fear, deja vu, and sense of purpose are feelings like any other, and we have seen that feelings like these are often not subject to rationality (try convincing a clinically depressed person that the feeling of purposelessness is only a chemical "illusion"), and we know that much of our thought is unconcious, we can also infer that the feeling of certianty is subject to all of these. (Try convincing a young-earth creationist that the earth is more than 6,000 years old and that their certainty is not due to the strength of the idea.)
Really, I don't have any huge qualms with this. We've all seen people be so certain of something that is (to us) obviously wrong, and know all to well that people's attachment to ideas often has not a thing to do with rationality. (And we all, if we are honest, realize that we have been the 'dummy' in this scenario as well.)
My biggest problem, from a literary standpoit, is that the author takes a very long time to get to his point, beginning many chapters with something like: "I want to talk about the feeling of certainty. But first, let's..." Once that happens too many times, I begin to lose patience, particularly when some chapters (like that reviewing the difference between "feelings" and "sensations") simply go on longer than they should.
My philosophical beefs with the book is: the author, who suggests may times that we cannot step beyond our feelings of certainty if they are strong enough, would be well served to have included a chapter on examples where people DO change their minds about things they were once deeply certain about. The fact that this happens - albeit happens only with difficulty and pain - gives empirical lie to this thesis.
Really, this is a quite interesting book with an interesting case that simply takes the author too many pages to make. I resisted the urge to skip ahead numerous times (and did skip half a chapter that seemed to veer frequently off topic). I wish the author would have discussed the issue of 'certainty' more than the tertiarilly related matter of brain states like fear and deja vu.
In the end, I would reccomend this book to people as a follow-up read to books like "Mistakes Were Made," which give a much more direct discussion of our brain's tendency to fall into illusions of certainty. This book does that, but simply tries to do so much more that it may better have been written as a collection of loosely related essays.
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