Believing is seeing

[Adrian II]

Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine which I read occasionally for comic relief, has a book out about the origin of the human belief in gods, conspiracies and aliens and such. He is not the first to pursue this train of thought and there is already a sound evolutionary and cognitive basis for his approach. To my mind it provides the most convincing explanation for our dogged attachment to real or perceived patterns of cause and effect, even if one of these terms is 'unseen'.

An amazing aspect of this is that both science and belief are rooted in the same evolutionary reflex, although of course science proceeds to methodically test any intuitive patterns whereas beliefs make the facts fit the intuition.

A more sobering aspect is that man will always invent new gods and conspiracies. Inevitably these will also be subject to the evolutionary law of selection. Some day someone should write an evolutionary history of religion. In the meantime I would love to hear Pape's insights in particular.

Beliefs come first; reasons second. That's the insightful message of The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are "belief engines" that naturally "look for and find patterns" and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this "belief-dependent reality." The well-worn phrase "seeing is believing" has it backward: Our believing dictates what we're seeing.

Mr. Shermer marshals an impressive array of evidence from game theory, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. A human ancestor hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor anymore. Since early man had only a split second to make such decisions, Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose "default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind."

"As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy, we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods," Mr. Shermer writes. He lists more than a dozen gods, from Amon Ra to Zeus, and wonders how one of them can be true and the rest false. "As skeptics like to say, everyone is an atheist about these gods; some of us just go one god further."

Link

[Fragony]

'A human ancestor hears a rustle in the grass. Is it the wind or a lion? If he assumes it's the wind and the rustling turns out to be a lion, then he's not an ancestor anymore.'

You wouldn't exist as your to-be ancestor got eaten, smart guy

[ICantSpellDawg]

Sounds interesting. I believe in God the "watchmaker". I am always interested in seeing the mechanism of life. A dry understanding of the history of evolutionary faith would be interestingfrom both a secular and religious perspective.

[Papewaio]

Mr. Shermer says, we are descendants of ancestors whose "default position is to assume that all patterns are real; that is, assume that all rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind."

That ancestor would be dead of adrenaline overdose the moment a mild wind went across the Savannah.

More seriously, ideas do quite often come first. A lot of scientist's have the intuition that something should be. The funny thing is that empirical evidence is considered an inferior way to find a predictive model.

The flipside is that the first meme is very hard to shake, to be a good scientist you have to take the thing that you most firmly believe in and in the face of evidence let it go, and some of the best will embrace an idea that's just destroyed something they believed in for decades. It's also why some of the best scientists have turned out to be very religious (ie Jesuits)... the memes you start with a very hard to break out of.

Pattern recognition is crucial in science, but one has to avoid overly vague patterns like horoscopes which can be made to fit the bill on anything.

[Skullheadhq]

I still don't get atheist obsession with religion, they should get an hobby or something. Creating magazines about something you think is nonsense is just plain silly.

[Adrian II]

It's also why some of the best scientists have turned out to be very religious (ie Jesuits)... the memes you start with a very hard to break out of.

Aye

And is the 'pattern-thinking' pattern impossible to break out of? I mean, if religious and conspiratorial thinking is ineradicable, you and I had better adapt to the fact.

Aii

[CBR]

And is the 'pattern-thinking' pattern impossible to break out of?

It could be. What is important IMO is that we are all aware of how a strength of our brain quickly can become a weakness, as we might all be hit by such pattern-thinking in various degree.

[Adrian II]

It could be. What is important IMO is that we are all aware of how a strength of our brain quickly can become a weakness, as we might all be hit by such pattern-thinking in various degree.

Mebbe. Social science abounds with such paradoxes. We can for instance try to render the scapegoat mechanism inoperative by raising kids to be aware of it. There is even an evolutionary basis for such tactics as well, in the sense that we have a genetic make-up that enables us to study our self-same genetic make-up and influence it.

What makes it so hard to 'switch off' such mechanisms is that they have served us so well. Like Papewaio said, even science thrives on it.

AII

[CBR]

Yes, as it is an essential way of how our brain works we will always struggle with the negative side of it.Some of the conspiracy nutters seem so far out that they seem just better "wired" for such thinking. So maybe some will always be a lost cause.Then it will all be about saving the grey majority from being persuaded by the nutters.

[Rhyfelwyr]

Some day someone should write an evolutionary history of religion.

idk, I always thought that the history of all of our religious systems could be better explained by socioeconomic developments.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Some day someone should write an evolutionary history of religion.

Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer.

I thought it was a very interesting book. He goes into what kinds of things we find plausible and what we don't. He's an anthropologist, and talks about that with a lot of cognitive psychology as well.

He says we have a certain (small) number of very powerful inference mechanisms. One for "is it an animal" one for "is it human" one for "is it a tool" and only a couple more. If you've ever come across a big bug in your house and killed it, and realized afterwards that you were able to scan the whole room and judge a dozen objects based on how suitable they are for killing it then you understand the idea of the tool inference mechanism. Religious beliefs tend to be minimally counterintuitive (I think that's his phrase). So there's one tribe in africa that believes a certain kind of tree eavesdrops on the conversations of whoever is listening. When you hear about it, you don't believe it, but the thing that you aren't believing in is the same as the thing they actually believe in, despite the fact that I told you very little about it. You make the assumption (because it's much more plausible to you) that the trees have many of the features of a human like mind. You assume that their hearing has a limited range, that they don't forget everything they've heard after 10 seconds, etc.

It focuses very little on modern monotheistic religions, his point is that those are very unusual compared to the rest of religious thinking. One thing I remember about it was a study he described where they told christian believers a story in which god was described as omnipresent (what they said they believed). In the story he saved a man from a car crash and cheered up some woman who was having a bad day and prayed for help with it at the same time. When they were brought back in a few months later and told to repeat the story, they usually had remembered it with god saving the man first, and then going and helping the woman later.

[Fragony]

let's hope we can recycle 0 and 1's ome day that was LONG

[Fisherking]

Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine which I read occasionally for comic relief, has a book...

You must be hard up for entertainment.

Michael Shermer is no skeptic. Skepticism requires an open mind. From what I have heard and read the only thing he believes is that he is right and everyone else is stupid.

With that in mind I tend not to buy his work, or to pay for it.

But, what ever floats your boat

[Adrian II]

When you hear about it, you don't believe it, but the thing that you aren't believing in is the same as the thing they actually believe in, despite the fact that I told you very little about it. You make the assumption (because it's much more plausible to you) that the trees have many of the features of a human like mind. You assume that their hearing has a limited range, that they don't forget everything they've heard after 10 seconds, etc.

This made me laugh out loud because it's so true.

I found some articles and parts of books by Boyer in Google books and they look very promising. What appeals to me (and to Shermer, who wrote a very favorable review of Boyer) is that Boyer doesn't invoke any extraordinary capacities or circumstances to explain religion. As it says in a quote in the Wiki:

As I have pointed out repeatedly the building of religious concepts requires mental systems and capacities that are there anyway, religious concepts or not. Religious morality uses moral intuitions, religious notions of supernatural agents recruit our intuitions about agency in general, and so on. This is why I said that religious concepts are parasitic upon other mental capacities. Our capacities to play music, paint pictures or even make sense of printed ink-patterns on a page are also parasitic in this sense. This means that we can explain how people play music, paint pictures and learn to read by examining how mental capacities are recruited by these activities. The same goes for religion. Because the concepts require all sorts of specific human capacities (an intuitive psychology, a tendency to attend to some counterintuitive concepts, as well as various social mind adaptations), we can explain religion by describing how these various capacities get recruited, how they contribute to the features of religion that we find in so many different cultures. We do not need to assume that there is a special way of functioning that occurs only when processing religious thoughts.

Which saves a lot of fruitless speculation about a 'religion gene'.

Religious beliefs tend to be minimally counterintuitive (I think that's his phrase).

From various reviews I get the impression that Boyer holds the opposite view, i.e. that religious ideas are expressly counterintuitive. As karen Armstrong wrote in het review:

We have an inbuilt set of ontological expectations and a tendency to dwell on intuitions which violate these, such as mountains that float or companions whom we do not see. From the dawn of modern consciousness, men and women have focused on certain imaginary personalities that transcend the norm, convinced that they can help them in strategic ways. These supernatural agents link with other mental systems, such as our moral intuitions and social categories, for which we can find no conceptual justification.

Ur giving me food for thought Sasaki, thanks.

Now, would it be possible to write a similar 'natural history' of conspiratorial thought?

AII

[Papewaio]

I still don't get atheist obsession with religion, they should get an hobby or something. Creating magazines about something you think is nonsense is just plain silly.

Skeptics are like mechanics. I've seen my mechanically minded cousin's happily tear down a favourite engine and then rebuild it. Skeptics and scientists in general will test all theories, theirs, other scientists. So it's being part of the group when they test other's.

I can live with religion as long as the monks keep rolling out the beer .

When religion is used to illuminate it's a good thing, when it's used to narrow views down to a single document out of context... well you end up with a whole host of unsavoury things.

So until people stop flying planes into buildings, wearing bomb vests, or blowing up rallies because one group has a different colour in the spectrum then the other... well I think it's in anyone's best interest to understand how we created such an meme suite even if we think its nonsense or not.

[Tellos Athenaios]

What makes it so hard to 'switch off' such mechanisms is that they have served us so well. Like Papewaio said, even science thrives on it.

No, what makes it hard is the impossibility of it. If you cannot generalise, if you cannot infer, if you cannot apply patterns then you cannot function as a being. It's really quite simple: if you don't do patterns, you can't walk upright, if you don't do patterns you cannot read or talk, listen or see. None of your senses work without patterns. Your entire brain is one giant pattern matching machine, where the result of the computed action depends on the previously computed ones to the point that the only outcome is a pattern: they are self-reinforcing because the valid ones are repeated.

You don't ever see a face: you see light points, from which you infer some are shadows, from which you infer geometry and curves, from which you infer shape, from which you infer a face-like-shape, from which you infer a face.

It extends beyond the brain, throughout the nervous system, and even down to some of the complex chemical reactions in your cells: DNA repairing is error checking, is pattern matching.

[Adrian II]

No, what makes it hard is the impossibility of it. If you cannot generalise, if you cannot infer, if you cannot apply patterns then you cannot function as a being.

You're right about such basic patterns.

But we can doubt certain patterns. Agency, for one. We can suspend judgment, force ourselves to consider alternatives, we can even experiment in order to test a perceived pattern.

AII

[Tellos Athenaios]

You're right about such basic patterns.

But we can doubt certain patterns.

To a degree. The problem is not that you as an individual can exercise some higher brain functions and enforce a new pattern of behaviour to suppress others. But when these higher order brain functions or created patterns fall apart, the old ones emerge again. You cannot fundamentally change the assumption of agency, you can merely shrug it off until the time your brain is damaged and the higher order intelligence to shrug it off no longer functions -- then you will become your old paranoid self. Similarly, a learned helplessness and reliance on other members of the “group” to perform what would have been basic exercises of trial/error & reasoning during adulthood comes back the further away you go from the age span when the brain is still sufficiently receptive to outside stimuli.

If you are a 70 year old, intelligent adult with a good grasp of English and your 16 year old granddaughter is able to setup your cell phone where you give up this is simply your brain refusing to suppress old patterns and create new ones.

[Adrian II]

You cannot fundamentally change the assumption of agency, you can merely shrug it off until the time your brain is damaged and the higher order intelligence to shrug it off no longer functions -- then you will become your old paranoid self.

I accept that a decrepit person's brain is likely to fall back on primordial patterns of just about everything: thought, behaviour, sensation. And memory lapse goes a along way toward explaining elderly peoples unwillingness to use modern gadgets.

But suspension of the assumption of agency should be within a normal adult's grasp. Take this example of a recent prank in the city of Delft.



Some muppet put up a puppet in a bell tower. Passers-by contacted the police saying there was a 'ghost' in the tower. Of course the callers didn't believe that at all, they just wanted to see some action. A policeman climbed up and confirmed it was a puppet. It was later taken down and confined to a police cell to 'cool off' for the night.

Maybe some people would have believed it was a ghost if the puppet had been battery-driven and had moved quasi-spontaneously and said 'booh' at irregular intervals, but I doubt it.

What do you think was lacking in the puppet so that it immediately disabled peoples' agency pattern?

AII

[Tellos Athenaios]

I accept that a decrepit person's brain is likely to fall back on primordial patterns of just about everything: thought, behaviour, sensation. And memory lapse goes a along way toward explaining elderly peoples unwillingness to use modern gadgets.

No, it does not. If they went to the trouble of buying a cell phone in the first place, they're perfectly willing to use it. The trouble is they can't get their head around how these tools are supposed to “work” (more precisely: how they are supposed to be operated). The English have a very nice word to describe the frustration of the elderly with new phenomena (in particularly tools) for which their previous experience does not provide them with understanding of: “newfangled”.

It's not a lapse of memory: there's no memory of this device at all! Memory lapse is what explains why they thought that their granddaughter was 15 instead of 16, or why they get names wrong.

But suspension of the assumption of agency should be within a normal adult's grasp.

Suspension, or the reality check? The two are different things. When I say, “shrug off” I really do mean (applied to this example) that the brain sees some movement but based on previous patterns decides the moving cloth is just that. It is not a suspension of agency: you still assume that someone went to the trouble of affixing this cloth and that if you ring the police someone might turn up to check it.

[Adrian II]

It's not a lapse of memory: there's no memory of this device at all!

Memory is more than a cupboard full of information. It's a complex system for retaining and retrieving information. What I mean is that in elderly people both retention and retrieval become less efficient, hence their unwillingness on incapacity to engage with new gadgets.

you still assume that someone went to the trouble of affixing this cloth and that if you ring the police someone might turn up to check it.

Five Interwebs to you sir!

I suspected that you would say: oh well, the cloth doesn't look convincing, or something to that effect.

Instead you nailed it: it's agency what reassured them, only agency of a different nature, or should I say level!

I am amazed that people are unable to switch to such higher level when it comes to, for instance, intricate world-wide conspiracies, alien or otherwise.

AII

[Tellos Athenaios]

Memory is more than a cupboard full of information. It's a complex system for retaining and retrieving information. What I mean is that in elderly people both retention and retrieval become less efficient, hence their unwillingness on incapacity to engage with new gadgets.

Agreed so far, but the problem of new gadgets is only temporary: once granddaughter has done the hard work of setting things up, and wrote down some instructions they are perfectly willing to learn them by heart and then use the device. Memory or lack thereof, is not the stumbling block, but rather the fact that they have become so set in their ways that it is less effort to call on granddaughter and let her do it than to read the manual and figure it out themselves.

But then, to read the manual and discover for yourself would require you to suppress learned helplessness.

To get back to the memory point: memory is little more than stored patterns, or vice versa: all patterns of behaviour are little more than the execution of memorised behaviour. This is because the brain is both its “state” and the “machine”, thus when the state of your brain changes that is actually your brain itself changing. IOW: memory is not stored in any cupboard of any kind, and likewise patterns are not genuinely learned in terms of mere data/behaviour to be remembered. Instead, both are one and the same, namely a change to the configuration of your brain which affects both all computations afterwards and all memories prior.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I suspected that you would say: oh well, the cloth doesn't look convincing, or something to that effect.

Is that a pattern of arguing with people on the Internet failing to predict my behaviour?

[Adrian II]

Is that a pattern of arguing with people on the Internet failing to predict my behaviour?

No, it was the fact that my question was preceded by a suggestive passage.

In the split second when they became aware of the figure in the bell tower, passers-by must have had the primary agency-reflex: there's a conscious, sentient being in the tower.

Then when they perceived the flapping of the cloth, the eyes drawn on it, etcetera, they changed to a different suspicion of agency: somebody must have put it up there.

My question: why isn't t this switch operative in other settings, such as people being told of hugely complex conspiracies? Surely they should be able to switch to a different, 'higher' perception of agency instead of falling for the nonsense.

AII

[Tellos Athenaios]

My question: why isn't t this switch operative in other settings, such as people being told of hugely complex conspiracies? Surely they should be able to switch to a different, 'higher' perception of agency instead of falling for the nonsense.

You mean to say, they should realise that the conspiracy theory is a tale told by an agent with aims to make you believe ...?

More seriously though the difference between the assumption of someone affixing a cloth and a conspiracy theory is very small. You cannot rule out either, whereas you can use both to explain the present. This is like belief (of any colour or stripe or supernatural being) in that it is very much a “higher understanding” of the world through which the world can be explained.

It is a pattern, or if you will intuition: the world makes sense, somehow. Similar to how intuition says that rand() + rand() is equally random as rand(). Yet, on closer inspection it turns out that rand() + rand() is random, but not nearly as truly random as rand() is, because rand() + rand() is not uniformly distributed.

[Adrian II]

You mean to say, they should realise that the conspiracy theory is a tale told by an agent with aims to make you believe ...?

Yes.

More seriously though the difference between the assumption of someone affixing a cloth and a conspiracy theory is very small. You cannot rule out either, whereas you can use both to explain the present.

I see what you mean. I suppose there is some sort of Ockhamite razor at work, where most people will readily accept a pattern they know (person installing puppet in public place) and not one they have never observed before (for instance: rabbi cabal successfully plotting for world power).

AII

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I think people have a strong tendency to look for motives behind events. The idea that something just happened randomly is not very intuitively plausible. "Who benefits" is all people really need. NFL makes a rule change? It benefits team X, so team X influenced the commissioner to get the rule changed.

edit: and about the minimally counterintuitive, I think what was meant by that was that something was likely to break the normal rules (maybe in a big way) but usually only one rule...if they involve a plant or animal having human like qualities, they generally gain the whole range of human like qualities.

[Papewaio]

It is a pattern, or if you will intuition: the world makes sense, somehow. Similar to how intuition says that rand() + rand() is equally random as rand(). Yet, on closer inspection it turns out that rand() + rand() is random, but not nearly as truly random as rand() is, because rand() + rand() is not uniformly distributed.

I think it is quite possible that with enough use some patterns will supplant older ones iff they are used often enough and they reward the brain.

The example given for instance, I automatically
went rand() vs rand() + rand ()
specific case would be
1d6 vs 2d6
1/6th for each point vs bell curve.

I suspect having played D&D since age ten (I can remember my first Bell Curve in AD&D DMs guide), programmed Excel to calculate odds for Warhammer (Mathshammer) and my second computer program at age 14 was Craps (2 dice)... that my guy feeling is somewhat different.

What I can't be certain of is that it started out with this understanding or it's been seeped into my mind from a young age.

[Ironside]

I see what you mean. I suppose there is some sort of Ockhamite razor at work, where most people will readily accept a pattern they know (person installing puppet in public place) and not one they have never observed before (for instance: rabbi cabal successfully plotting for world power).

AII

Conspiracy theories are also by default elusive, unlike the "ghost" (but like a ghost). You can't observe this theory until you'll see that it's something else.

Add something that makes this puppet "move" and "disappear" (mirror illusions for example) and the ghost reporting would probably skyrocket.