Colourless green ideas sleep furiously

……. Supernatural beliefs work so well because they seem plausible. And they seem plausible because they fit with what we want to believe and already think is possible. They also make sense of all the weird and uncanny events that pepper our lives. Ideas and beliefs may be transmitted, but only those that resonate with what we think is possible take hold and make sense. This is a really important point that is often overlooked. We either accept ideas or reject them, but seldom do we consider why. Ideas have to fit with what we already know. Otherwise, they do not make sense.

To prove this, let me give you a new idea I want you to believe in. It’s not a supernatural one, but it makes the point about how ideas work. If I told you that “colourless green ideas sleep furiously,” would you believe me? Think about it for a moment and try to take the idea on board. At first it sounds okay, but eventually you see that the idea is meaningless. The statement is actually a famous sentence among scientists who study language and thinking. In 1957 the linguist Noam Chomsky www.chomsky.info constructed this perfectly grammatical but completely meaningless phrase to demonstrate that sentence structure alone is not enough to convey ideas. The content of the sentence follows all the rules of language, but as a sentence it does not compute in our minds. It is meaningless because of what we already know about color, ideas, sleep, and anger. Something cannot be both green and colourless. Ideas do not sleep. Sleep is not normally furious. These are concepts that already exist in our minds, and because the contradict each other, they dictate that Chomsky’s statement makes no sense. So any new ideas has to fit into existing frame-work of knowledge This is why some ideas can be so difficult to grasp. Science, for example, is full of ideas that seem bizarre simply because we are not used to them. It’s not that people are being stupid when it comes to science. Rather, many scientific ideas are just too difficult for many of us to get our heads around. On the other hand, folk beliefs about the supernatural seem quite possible. That’s why it is easier to imagine a ghost than a light wave made up of photons. We have seen neither, but ghosts seem plausible, whereas the structure of light is not something we can easily consider. ~ Page 8