Atomic Belief
Ben Rutter: In the early months of the century, Sam Harris found himself apprenticed in the study of the brain. Combing over colored scans of minds at work, Harris, who is a graduate student, sought to correlate cognition and behavior. On September 12, 2001, his own behavior changed, and he began to write a book. Adjustments in his circuitry had corresponded in those days to the view that something in the world was going quickly, badly wrong. What was this? Elected leaders spoke of moral evil. For his colleagues at the MRI lab, the trouble hung in a mesh of inequalities. For Harris, however, the answer was more simple. The world had fallen ill not from want of goodness, or of goods, but from a diet poor in basic information… Continue Reading →