Why Do We Reach Wrong Conclusions?
The question I want to hold onto in this fifth episode is simple: why do we reach wrong conclusions? On hearing it, we may first think about why somebody else is wrong. What I want, however, is for us to question our own judgments first. My conclusion may be wrong, and so may the conclusion of someone I trust. If this video leads you to ask even once, “Why did I judge it that way?” then this discussion has served its purpose.
In the previous two episodes I said, “Question every last thing,” and “Do not even believe the Buddha.” The short verses of the Kālāma Sutta tell us not to accept something merely because it is written in a book, passed down for a long time, or spoken by a teacher or apparent authority. Doubt is not a weapon for attacking others. It is the starting point for directing critical awareness toward every person, every book, and every statement, including my own.
Not a Believer in the Buddha, but a Disciple Trying to Become a Buddha
Even if Gautama Siddhartha was a teacher of great authority and wisdom, simply believing his words is not the aim of Buddhism. A Buddhist disciple is not a believer in a transcendent being. A disciple follows the way the teacher showed in order to become wise, awakened, and a Buddha. We must break our own frame, escape delusion, and become liberated. Put differently, that is what being a disciple means.
Some people reacted with resistance as soon as they saw the title “Do Not Even Believe the Buddha.” I have no intention of softening that title for more views. What makes you certain that a sentence is the Buddha’s word? Can its appearance in a scripture make it the actual voice of the Buddha who once lived? If you mistake a wrong direction for his teaching and dig into it for ten, twenty, or thirty years, that much of your life may be wasted. When someone declares, “Only this is the Buddha’s word, so believe it,” that person is asserting his own selection and authority rather than teaching Buddhism.
I am no exception. My many videos and the words I speak cannot be certified as the Buddha’s truth. They are claims, conjectures, and inferences produced by what I have selected and thought through. Viewers must not simply believe me either. Many people select a few scriptural passages and declare, “Only these are authentic.” If they never learned how to read critically, that act of selection itself may be absurdly mistaken.
Reciting That You Have Abandoned Images Does Not Free You from Them
People recite phrases such as “If one sees that all appearances are non-appearances, one sees the Tathāgata,” and “Being far removed from inverted dream-thought, one finally reaches nirvana,” then say that they are free of appearances. Yet if every time they open their mouths their speech and conduct reveal attachment to the image of self and countless other images, they have only memorized words. In actual life they remain bound by those images. Remembering a scriptural sentence and putting it into practice are entirely different things.
That is why I want to examine the structure that generates wrong conclusions. Ordering people to “abandon appearances” is not enough. We need to understand how humans see, remember, and infer, and why our thoughts tilt in one direction. This is where Francis Bacon’s four idols meet the study of Buddhism.
Novum Organum and Words Whose Meanings Change with Time
In Novum Organum, Francis Bacon examined why humans misunderstand nature and reach absurd conclusions. Its Latin title means “new instrument.” We should be cautious about immediately translating the book’s scientia as modern “science.” If we assume that readers in 1620 had exactly the same concept that comes to a modern mind at the word science, we misunderstand the title and text and pass that misunderstanding on.
The meaning of a word never stays perfectly fixed. Over time it changes, expands, and contracts. For Bacon, knowing means understanding how nature and the world work and what causes lead to what effects. Only then can that knowledge become a power we can use. “Knowledge is power” must be read in that context. The problem is that we observe a phenomenon, misidentify its cause, and then believe the mistaken conclusion to be knowledge.
The Four Idols of the Mind
To explain such error, Bacon speaks of idola mentis, the idols of the mind. Today the word “idol” may first evoke a pop star, but the same word has also meant an object of worship or a false representation. That history itself demonstrates how language changes. In the human mind are mistaken ideas and representations believed to be facts, and they keep us from understanding nature as it is.
Bacon classified them as the idols of the tribe, cave, marketplace, and theater. People of my generation may have heard those four labels pass by in a high-school ethics class. Merely memorizing four names, however, does nothing. I want to examine deeply what they mean and how they operate in my own judgments. My own claim is that the flow of ideas that reached Bacon was also conditionally influenced by the Buddha’s awakening and words long before him. In that sense, understanding the four idols is very close to understanding Buddhism. Here I address the idols of the tribe and the cave, leaving the marketplace and theater for later.
The Idols of the Tribe and the Cave
The idol of the tribe means that the human species itself has tendencies that lead it to wrong conclusions. The first answer to “Why do we reach wrong conclusions?” can sound almost deflating: human beings naturally judge in ways that make error likely.
The idol of the cave means that every individual has a private cave and tinted glasses. Looking at the same thing, one person calls it yellow, another red, and another purple. None transparently sees one identical world; each sees a world that has passed through a private lens. The Guhaṭṭhaka Sutta of the Sutta Nipāta says that a person bound in a cave, covered by many things, and hardened becomes lost in delusion. My frequent images of the frog in a well and the Korean expression jeongjeojiwa make the same point. Confined by the limit called “I,” we cannot fully understand another person’s position.
Even One Hijab Appears as Different Worlds
Most people watching this video communicate in Korean in the Republic of Korea in 2024. Because our language, culture, and time overlap, we can share some common ground. Yet even within that common ground, our judgments diverge. How much greater is the difference between someone who has lived wearing a hijab in Iran and someone looking at her from Korea?
Looking at the same hijab, one person asks, “Why must women alone cover their bodies? Is that not discrimination?” Another may answer, “It is our tradition and the natural order. How could people expose their bodies like that?” The same phenomenon appears as oppression to one side and ordinary order to the other. Neither gaze is colorless. The society and culture in which one has lived become lenses that tint the judgment.
The Cave of the Body and Temperament We Are Born With
The first condition that creates an individual’s tinted glasses is the body and temperament one is born with. My younger brother, five years apart from me, and I were born to the same parents in the same household in Busan, yet our personalities and temperaments differ. One person is calm and another hasty. One has a strong memory and another thinks deeply. We therefore act differently and reach different conclusions about the same event.
The senses are no different. We suppose that we see the rainbow colors similarly, but we never see them in exactly the same way. My brother has color-vision weakness and struggles to distinguish certain colors between yellow and green. My eyesight also differs from that of a child with vision above 2.0. I see a blurred image while that child sees something closer to 4K. Though standing in the same place, we receive different amounts of information at different resolutions. We only imagine that we see the same thing; within our bodily caves, we see different worlds.
The Second Pair of Tinted Glasses, Put on by Experience
The second condition is personal experience. The region and period of one’s life, the words heard from parents and neighbors, books read, films watched, and friends met all create another lens. If adults in Busan repeatedly say that people from a certain region are all a certain way, they put tinted glasses on a child who has never even met anyone from there. People in another region can do the same regarding people from Busan.
Differences are clearer between countries, but even people raised in the same place and time do not share identical experiences. They read different books and media, meet different friends, and undergo different events. They therefore reach different conclusions in the same situation. One might object that a “different conclusion” is not necessarily a “wrong conclusion.” That is true. Up to this point I have described individual difference. Error arises when that difference meets the human species’ general tendency to tilt in a particular direction.
Cognitive Bias Is Like a Sloping Floor
Cognition is the entire process of receiving information through the eyes, ears, and other senses, then remembering, judging, and coming to know. To say there is bias in it is like saying that the floor is sloped rather than level. A ball placed on a level floor stays put, but on a slope it rolls to one side. Human thought is likewise not neutral and directionless; it tends to flow along particular directions. That is cognitive bias.
A representative example is confirmation bias. Someone who supports the Democratic Party or Lee Jae-myung may readily accept favorable news as evidence and find unfavorable news difficult to believe. The other side does the same. Once I have concluded that someone is good, evidence fitting that conclusion becomes more visible, while contrary evidence is not admitted. The point here is not which party is right. It is that humans tend to select evidence that supports what they already believe.
Someone who believes “All swans are white” may accumulate white swans as evidence, dismiss a slightly darker one as dirty, and when a black swan appears insist that it is another bird. Once people find a pattern, they try to force the rest of reality into it. The idol of the tribe names this shared human tendency.
Too Much Information and Too Little Memory
Modern diagrams of cognitive bias show an almost uncountable number of errors. One important condition behind them is too much information. We continuously receive visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile information, but we cannot process and store all of it in real time. Memory capacity is limited, so only selected features and patterns remain.
What percentage of everything you have seen since opening your eyes this morning can you remember? I have looked at this room throughout a long recording, yet I cannot accurately remember even one percent of the objects in it. What received no attention does not remain. Even if every moment could be stored like a photograph, storage would still be finite, so new information would push out the old. To escape that burden, the brain remembers features rather than the totality.
Is It a Fact That He Is My Son, or an Inference That He Looks Like My Son?
When I see my son in the morning and call, “Jeong-min,” how do I know that he is my son? I do not compare him against a flawless memory of every part of his face. I remember a pattern consisting of selected features—his eyes, facial form, expression, and voice—and infer that a person matching enough of them looks like my son. His hairstyle can change, he can grow, and he can gain weight; if similar features remain, I recognize the same person.
You may ask, “Are you trying to make a sane person mentally ill? Is it not simply a fact that my son is my son?” Yet the operation of the judgment I make at that moment does not seize the fact directly. It infers from patterns. I return after a month-long trip, he looks like my son, and in conversation he recognizes me as his father, so I infer that he is probably my son. The inference is usually correct and therefore useful, but its form does not guarantee one hundred percent truth.
The Turtle and Pot Lid, and a Stranger’s Back
The Korean proverb “A heart startled by a turtle is startled by a pot lid” shows the same structure. If someone once bitten by a turtle sees a round pot lid in the kitchen and jumps, it is because part of its pattern resembles a turtle’s shell. For an instant the person concludes that it is a turtle, but the conclusion is an illusion.
Faces also change continuously. After haircuts, aging, wrinkles, and white hair, we still identify a friend from twenty or thirty years ago by finding parts of an old pattern. Without this capacity, we could not recognize the same person after the slightest change. Yet this useful capacity is also why we call “Jeong-min!” to a stranger whose back resembles our son’s and then apologize. Humans are not machines that verify facts. We are conjecture machines and inference machines.
Artificial Intelligence Also Gives Probabilities, Not Answers
Artificial intelligence may distinguish subtle patterns in a scan that a human overlooks and judge that there is an eighty- or ninety-percent probability of early dementia. Does that make the conclusion an answer? No. The machine has distinguished patterns more precisely than a human, but its judgment remains probabilistic inference. Some people become angry when AI gives a wrong answer, but human beings themselves do not directly produce infallible answers.
When reading a handwritten 2 or 3, humans infer from the surrounding context and shape. Asking AI to read handwritten digits is the same kind of task. AI imitates the intelligence of living beings and humans, and it has begun to reproduce the ability to infer from patterns. A machine can be tuned for precision and count finer features than a human, but a more precise inference is not an absolute answer. We need to understand humans to understand AI, and AI in turn reveals that human knowing is also based on conjecture.
Heuristics Are Fallible but Useful Methods of Discovery
We can give this act of inference a more impressive name: a heuristic, a method of discovery. Like the story in which Archimedes sees water overflowing from a bath and cries, “Eureka, I found it,” a heuristic is a way to discover a solution. Yet it is not a formula guaranteed to produce the correct answer. It uses limited information to judge quickly, reaches an approximation likely to be near the answer, and uses it when it is serviceable.
If dark clouds have repeatedly brought rain, we may carry an umbrella when they gather again. Rain is not guaranteed, but the inference is useful. If a rabbit in the forest waits to identify whether a rustling sound behind it comes from a tiger, a person, or a cockroach before moving, it may already be too late. Pricking up its ears and running can be wrong yet valuable for survival. Human knowing is like this. Rather than perfectly possessing facts themselves, we quickly construct conclusions from limited information.
Why It Is Hard to Escape Majority Opinion and Visual Illusions
Our judgments also lean toward other people. As the Korean proverb says, “One follows a friend even to Gangnam”; when many people say something is right, I am likely to feel that it is right. It is difficult to stand alone and say no while everyone moves in one direction. The narrow gate in Christianity and the Buddhist injunction to go “like wind not caught in a net, alone like the horn of a rhinoceros” can be read as requests not to be swept away by other people’s conclusions.
Two lines with differently directed arrowheads at their ends appear to have different lengths even when they are equal. Here cognitive bias shows its frightening force. To boast, “I will try hard and see the lines as equal,” is to misunderstand one’s limit. Instead of trying to transcend it, we must first acknowledge it. Human beings are equipped with tendencies to see differently from what is there, and we can scarcely resist those biases.
When the Tilt of the Species Meets the Individual Cave
When the cognitive biases of human beings in general meet the tinted glasses made by an individual’s body and experience, I conclude in favor of what I want to know, believe, or like. I do not see things as they are and hit upon the answer. I infer, and the inference tilts toward one side. This is why we reach wrong conclusions.
A human is a living being, an animal, a mammal, a primate, and a human. We see the world with limits at each of these levels. Human eyes cannot see infrared and ultraviolet, while some animals and insects sense different ranges of light. We are confined first within the senses of our human species and again within our personal bodies and experiences. We therefore cannot be certain that our conclusions contain truth and fact exactly as they are.
Choosing Flexibility Instead of Certainty
If we refuse to recognize these limits, we confidently insist, “I am right,” “This is how tradition has always done it,” and “Everyone else says so.” If I can be wrong and others can be wrong, how can we certify that a particular sentence is the Buddha’s word, the answer, and the truth? We cannot be certain.
This does not mean that we must use no judgment at all. We can use one that proves useful and testable in reality. We must only preserve the flexibility to admit that it may fail under new conditions and that we may have been mistaken. Without that flexibility, people beat or kill those who reject their beliefs, insist that wrong acts are right, or torture themselves in pursuit of a mistaken goal. The idols of the tribe and cave are not merely terms on an exam. They are actual structures that produce violence, suffering, and wasted lives.
Buddhism Is a Life That Asks “Why?” of Every Judgment
Among the many currents of thought in ancient society, a person called the Buddha appeared. An awakened one is not an omniscient being but someone who recognizes, “I was trapped in an absurd illusion. I knew wrongly,” and tries to see directly. Buddhism teaches that way of living. Bound in our caves, covered and hardened by countless things, we fail to question what we learned, experienced, and inherited, and so become deluded. We become angry at absurd things, pursue absurd goals, waste our lives, and insist that violence is right.
The heart of this discussion is that humans have a tendency to reach wrong conclusions because of cognitive bias. When others call something right, it feels right to us. We see evidence that supports what we already believe and overlook evidence against it. A theory that fits what we like feels more appealing. Therefore we must not simply believe and follow either our own conclusions or those of others.
Before the information I accept today, the judgment I make now, the image that arises in my mind, and the emotions that say “beautiful, filthy, delicious, good, happy, depressed, angry,” let us ask: Why? Why? Really, why?
Only by continuing that question can I see what shell encloses me and what cave binds me. Liberation is repeatedly escaping those illusions. I hope we can live by questioning and correcting our judgments, becoming liberated anew each day. May you attain Buddhahood.
This article was edited by AI solely from the supplied video captions and description. No external sources were used.