by James Wallace Harris, 8/4/25
Yesterday I tried to remember what I thought about as a young kid. I recall a few incidents when I was three, but I don’t start having many memories until I was around twelve or thirteen. The earliest age I can recall being philosophical is from that same period. Before twelve, I can’t remember thinking about things. I probably did. Very young kids are notorious for asking why.
But then I thought of something. It was around age eleven or twelve that I started reading books. The first books I chose were nonfiction about airplanes, space travel, dinosaurs, submarines, cars, and other things that boys like in the fourth and fifth grades. Fourth grade was 1960-1961. I turned ten in late 1961. In the fifth grade (1961-1962), I discovered fiction. Especially, the Oz books by L. Frank Baum and the Tom Swift, Jr. series. In the sixth grade (1962-1963), I got hooked on biographies and a few science fiction books.
It seems obvious that reading inspires thinking.
It was around the sixth grade, or the beginning of the seventh grade, that I can remember thinking about the world. During the seventh grade, and into the eighth, I became an atheist. I remember agonizing over that issue. What I heard in church and from my mother didn’t match what I was experiencing. Nor did it match what I was learning in school or what I was reading. I didn’t read any books on religion or against religion. All the ideas I consumed, especially from books, made me think.
Here’s the kicker. I read a lot of crappy books with crappy ideas, and they infected me. Ideas about flying saucers, reincarnation, ESP, and remembering past lives, like in Bridie Murphy. Most of this came from my uncles, my father’s two brothers.
After rejecting religion, I eventually rejected the occult, spiritualism, and psychic abilities. I rejected them because I read more science books and science fiction. I was skeptical of what was in the science fiction books, but I wanted to believe many of SF’s stupid speculations about the future. The genre promised a more exciting reality that competed with religion.
I didn’t become truly skeptical until many years later. Maybe when I encountered the magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer.
The point I’m trying to make, with this long introduction, is to explain how I was overwhelmingly influenced by what I read. Even after a lifetime of skepticism, I’m easily swayed by concepts I got through books and magazines.
Of course, I’m also susceptible to ideas from my peers, television, and the Internet. Whenever I hear about a neat concept, one that sounds like it helps explain reality, I want to embrace it. I’m easily persuaded by intellectuals and studies that claim to be scientific.
Decades ago, I decided that science was the only cognitive tool humans had developed to explain reality in any consistent fashion. Science is statistical. It doesn’t offer conclusive answers. To truly understand science requires a great deal of science and mathematics. I don’t have those skills. I depend on popular science, and that isn’t the same thing. Accepting an idea based on popular science is similar to being religious and taking a theological concept on faith.
The only way to be scientifically minded without being a scientist is to look for the most consensus among scientific authorities. And this is true for understanding everything that doesn’t fit under the scientific microscope, such as politics, law, ethics, and creating a sustainable society.
Since 2016, I’ve decided that humans are all delusional, including myself. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways to be deluded. I decided I couldn’t trust the Internet or television. That I would only trust quality periodicals that had solid editorial policies. Unfortunately, such magazines and newspapers are going out of business.
People no longer want to pay for information. Television and the Internet have conditioned Americans to consume free information. And if you can’t see how that is destroying us, then that’s another delusion you are suffering from.
Humans eagerly embrace untrue concepts that support their desires. We even have labels for that delusion: confirmation bias, wishful thinking, motivated reasoning, and cognitive dissonance reduction.
I’m reminded of what the Jeff Goldblum character said in the movie, The Big Chill. “I don’t know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations. They’re more important than sex.”
I want to separate myself from my rationalizations. The only way I can think to do that is by reading significant research. What I think depends on what I read. That means being extra careful with selecting my reading.
It also means I need to support the periodicals doing the best job of explaining reality.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
Another brilliant piece James!
My earliest thoughts too are age 3, I don’t think I recall much from around 4-5, but then I have sporadic memory from then on. I read my first “proper” book (Four Greek Heroes) around age 8. Basically I hated school and didn’t do too well. I left school at age 19 (one year late because we went out to New Zealand for a couple of years) and joined UKAEA Harwell. At this point in time I took up reading in the evenings. I got through dozens of Science Fiction books and popular science books. I was also taking an HNC in Applied Physics at the same time. What seems obvious to you, but wasn’t to me, that reading inspires thinking, is spot on. I found the HNC to be inspiring and interesting, I also found it quite easy which was surprising given my dismal school efforts. I got an HNC in Applied Physics with Distinctions in all subjects, which then got me into University, and which finally led me into an Academic career.
There’s a very interesting afterthought to all this. I knew at the time that my brain was “on fire” from all this reading, and I felt there was nothing I couldn’t learn. I recall picking up maths books from the Harwell library and amazing myself in being able to understand them. But the really odd thing of note from my now 71 year old perspective, is that many of the books that I thought were mind-blowingly excellent at age 19 now seem rather uninspiring, which is a great shame. One of my greatest disappointments was Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Connection” which I can clearly recall at age 19 I felt was written by a God. When I bought the new edition in 2000 I felt it couldn’t possibly be the same book. No inspiration, no wonderment, no awe at all. I have just pulled the book off the shelf and I’ll now read it again and see if anything has changed in the last 25 years. I’ll let you know.
All the best,
Greg Parker
When I was writing this essay I thought of Cosmos by Carl Sagan, the book and TV series. At the time I thought it introduced me to many new concepts. However, the only one I can recall for sure is the Cosmic Calendar.
Maybe when we read old books again, the sense of wonder if gone because we’ve already experienced the concept that blew our mind the first time.
But there’s another issue – dopamine. I have no facts to support this, but I wonder if we have less dopamine as we get older to reward ourselves. Maybe when we learn something new and exciting, it’s exciting because we were rewarded with a bit of dopamine.
Once again I think you have hit the nail on the head – but I don’t think it is less dopamine as you get older, but rather less dopamine released (maybe even close to zero) on subsequent readings. The reason I don’t think it is less dopamine as you get older is that I have had similar “hits” from books in my later years. Not that I know anything about this subject of course, but I am told by a friend that it is the same with pornography (and possibly also drugs). A big hit the first time which rapidly declines on subsequent exposures.
Well since that last post I have re-read “The Cosmic Connection” and the result was far from what I expected. I found the book overall to be excellent, and every chapter gripping, and of precisely the right length for bed time reading. I was not disappointed at all, but I still didn’t get that sense of awe (dopamine rush?) that I got at age 19. I’m guessing that when I read the book again in 2000 age 45 (and was totally unimpressed) I was in a job that I didn’t like too much, I had a difficult teenage son, and life in general was trying. Interesting that external factors (at the time) could have had such an impact on my enjoyment (or otherwise) of a book.
I think I am going to re-run this experiment, this time with Arthur Koestler’s “The Roots of Coincidence” which also blew my 19 year old brain. I purchased all of Koestler’s books after this one (with the exception of his only novel) and I am about 1/5th of the way through his Biography (author Michael Scammell) which at 689 pages is going to be one of those books I pick up and put down over years.
as a sidekick of mine told me sometime in the earlies, ‘you’ve got to be careful what you let into yr head. ‘ ranks right up there with ‘ never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after tomorrow, but never be afraid to take the bull by the horns,’ or ‘ look before you leap, but remember that he who hesitates is lost.’ time-less wisdom, but i’ve a feeling my time might be growing short.