On Being Certain (Robert Burton)

Burton is a neurologist who writes here about the neurobiology of the feeling of knowing, a sense of certainty we have that is often independent of any conscious reasoning process. He makes a compelling case that this feeling of knowing is as much a sensory or perceptual experience as our feeling of pain when we stub our toe or feeling of seeing a baseball coming toward us. All these feelings arrive in consciousness after a sometimes lengthy process in the "hidden layers" of the mind (to use a term from the AI work in neural networks). This is great stuff, and I have seen similar conclusions from similar research from lots of directions. Where I disagree with Burton is his apparent conviction that we are chained by our biology to requiring this feeling of knowing from our unconscious thought processes in order to be able to function effectively. (I say "apparent" because I didn't always follow his reasoning, so my characterization of it might be wrong.) If the feeling of knowing never arose, he says, we would realize that all our beliefs and perceptions might be wrong, and would therefore be stuck in an infinite loop of wondering whether there might not be a better decision or idea, and would be frozen by uncertainty. But science itself is the continual drive to improve our ideas and beliefs while recognizing that every single one of them might be wrong, and science is not frozen by this. He seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the notion of skepticism and toleration for ambiguity. He likens the effort to instill in people a more scientific, skeptical view of the world to encouraging "a clown that he'd be more useful as a mortician." He recognizes that the essential scientific viewpoint is one of provisional acceptance of ideas, and offers the "practical suggestion" that science and faith can be reconciled if only "both science and religion should try to adopt and stick with the idea of provisional facts," despite the reality that faith and religion are defined by the unconditional acceptance of truths not revealed in evidence but in conviction. Isn't this basically trying to talk that clown into opening a funeral parlor? It seems that Burton himself has trouble with accepting in a real and meaningful way ideas that don't match with his unconscious feeling of knowing. He quotes Scientific American on the origin of  the universe ("The point-universe was not an object isolated in space; it was the entire universe, and so the only answer can be that the big bang happened everywhere.") and describes it as "unsatisfying" because our visual system is incapable of imagining a point without it being surrounded by something. To me, this statement is not unsatisfying. It is breathtakingly beautiful and mind-blowing! In a similar way he denigrates Stephen Hawking's theories of the universe without boundaries as "an idea that, even if entirely correct, isn't consistent with how our mind's eye works. We want a palpable resolution for the tension created by trying to understand the surrounding background, not an abstraction that we can't see or feel." So even if Hawking is "entirely correct" in his description of the universe, it's not good enough because it doesn't fit nicely with our preconceptions? Because the great stuff here is stuff I already knew and I didn't like the stuff I didn't know, I was not impressed with the book overall.