by Chris Cogan
(Copyright 2005)
Feedback,
discussion, comments, questions: Chris Cogan, ccogan@ou.edu
In what follows, I have
tried to present an integrated view of a subject that naturally tends toward
disintegration. To do this, I have included philosophical and empirical views.
I wish now that I had realized more fully what I was doing and so had more clearly
distinguished between philosophical and empirical aspects. At some point I
expect to do just that, but, for now, I will leave it as is. However, this is
not intended as anything like a report on the relevant science. Others have
done that better than I would. My main interest is not in the kinds of unreason
that scientists find in labs. My main interest is in the more psychological
forms of unreason, or irrationality.
Also, because I have gathered together pieces written
over some period of time, and ideas developed over an even longer period of
time, there is some disjointedness between sections because I have not yet
smoothed everything out to give it a uniform style.
There is some redundancy and repetition, not to
mention saying some things two or more times. This is partly because of the
joining together of different pieces written at different times, and partly
because I haven't yet decided which exact way of saying things is best, either
in terms of formulation or in terms of location in the whole. I urge you to
skim lightly over parts that you find to be too much of a repetition of things
I've already said.
In future versions, I expect to reduce the
redundancies but also to include more new material on some of the more
fundamental fallacies, both formal and informal, and their affects, and more
material on the specifics of cognitive science.
I've given above some of the reasons for calling this
a draft. Another is simply that the writing is still fraught with errors and
(to put it mildly) infelicities of wording. I expect to have a more polished
version ready soon.
I hope you find this material both interesting to read
and useful in your daily life.
Reason, according to Ayn Rand, "is the
faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s
senses." While this definition is adequate in a technical sense, it is not
immediately clear to most people what it means to identify and integrate the
material provided by the senses, so I tend to use the characterization of
reason as the application of logic to our experience, including perceptual
data. By this, I do not mean the application of logic in the sense of
explicitly analyzing bits of perceptual data and their relationships to each other
to make such identifications, but rather the overall process of arriving at a
result that is justifiable in such cognitive terms, even if in fact we work our
way toward that result by trial and error and intuition and so on. That is,
reason primarily functions as a standard against which to test what we take to
be cognitive processes. If the result is that we see that a conclusion is
justified by the data, it really does not matter what things what kinds of
mental processes we went through to arrive at this realization. Reason includes
any method that helps us arrive at the closest approximation of knowledge of
truth that our data allows, without regard for any digressions or backtracking
or uses of intuition we may have made. Once we understand that two plus two is
four, it no longer matters what dead-ends and mistakes we made in finding our
way to that understanding. (Of course, for reasons of efficiency, we normally
want to find a reasonably straightforward way to such understanding, but that's
a different issue.)
Rationality, with respect to belief, is the deliberate
attempt to use reason to establish all of one's beliefs, and to exclude from
the category of belief all those ideas that one cannot establish as being at
least likely to be true or veridical by means of reason.
Rationality in a more general sense is the use of
reason do decide what actions to take or not take, and, because the decision as
to what action to take is predicated on whether we believe it to be the best
action to take, at least for the moment, so rationality in this sense is
actually subsumed under rationality as rationality with respect to belief.
By the classification I will use for no, unreason
comes in two types, mere unreason, or what amount to mere mistakes of one sort
or another, and irrationality, or a more "psychological" form of
unreason, motivated unreason. I will mostly limit my remarks to irrationality,
which is more difficult to deal with in both conceptual and practical terms.
That is, it is harder to understand, and harder to correct. In other words, I
won't be talking much about mere slips of the mind, or about ideas that we
honestly plan to think about but which we haven't gotten to yet, or about the
crazy ideas that children innocently get from their parents merely because they
don't know any better and haven't yet developed the conceptual skills and
habits to enable them to properly question what they are taught.
What I want to talk about are those forms of
irrationality that occur not because of slips of the mind in the ordinary
sense, but which occur because of various kinds of desires and fears. I will
talk mainly about those forms of mental processes that are not cognitive but
which are used because they lead to the conclusions one has some special reason
for wanting to be true, regardless of the data.
Sometimes these processes have a resemblance to
reason, but this resemblance is superficial. When this occurs, these processes
are more in the nature of rationalizations, or imitations of reason, imitations
make unreason seem reasonable to the unwary, the ignorant, or the over-eager
mind.
But many of the alternatives to reason do not even
pretend to be reason, and are often used by people who explicitly reject
reason, not merely by people who want to hold unreasonable ideas but in such a
way as to seem, at least superficially, to be reasonable. The faith of the
Fundamentalist is typically of this sort; here there is little attempt to
justify belief in cognitive terms, except to make such claims as, "I know
in my heart that God exists," or, "I have had direct contact with
God," etc.
What both rationalizations and other forms of
irrationality have in common is the desire to evade some fact or facts about
reality, including facts about the limitations on one's knowledge.
Rationalizations, even when they are used to justify an idea that actually
could be true, are still irrational in that they try to justify something that
the person cannot actually justify because of his lack of sufficient data
and/or his lack of sufficient ability to process the data he does have in such
a way as to produce a genuine justification of the idea in question. That is,
even if the conclusion of a rationalization does in fact happen to be true, it
is irrational if his reason for accepting it is in some critical way
psychological rather than cognitive. It is a person's attempt to make an
"end-run" around what he can in fact justify given his actual
relevant information. It's like claiming to have climbed a mountain without
ever having gone near it; even if one could in fact climb it, it is still false
to claim that one has climbed it when one hasn't. Just as being able to do
something is not the same as actually doing it, so the fact that something may be
true is not the same thing as knowing that it is true, or even the same thing
as having a good reason for supposing it to be true.
Irrationality is always, in an overall sense, harmful.
That is, because it requires the acceptance of false beliefs, even if only
false beliefs about how one can justify one's beliefs, it always is in conflict
with the principles of rational cognition and with reality. In practice, an
individual's irrationality is not always as harmful to an individual as we
might guess, because there may be various kinds of cultural support for a
person's irrational ideas, and it may also happen that an irrational idea leads
to action that just happens to be successful in a given situation. For example,
one may have an irrational fear of crossing streets, and there may occur a
situation in which this fear, just by chance, stops one from crossing a street
just before a meteor smashes into the middle of the street where one would have
been if one had in fact chosen to cross the street a moment earlier. That a
meteor might hit almost anywhere on Earth at any time is not a justification
for not crossing a street. The occasional coincidence of irrational ideas
having a beneficial result in specific situations does not mean that irrational
ideas are not generally harmful, just as the occasional failure of a rational
action to effectively protect us from harm does not mean that rational ideas
are generally harmful. All this really tells us is that we don't have enough
raw data or cognitive capacity to know everything about what may happen in
particular cases -- something we already knew anyway.
We often say that ignorance is the source of
irrational ideas, but this is not really true. Some people are quite ignorant
without holding irrational ideas, or at least without thinking irrationally.
There are just many things they don't know, and simply not knowing something is
not the same as believing something false or irrational.
Thus ordinary ignorance, by itself, is no more than a
good start on explaining the irrationality of nearly all of the human race. All
ignorance would explain would be the state where these same people frequently
say, "I don't know," instead making crazy claims about things. People
adopt and tenaciously hold onto irrational ideas not from mere honest
ignorance, but from something more. True, ignorance, up to a point, is needed
for the more common, simpler forms of irrationality, but it is even possible
for people to hold irrational ideas when they are not ignorant, or at least not
ignorant in the way that we normally would grant to be sufficient for
explaining their beliefs or claims
The human brain has a remarkable patter-detection
ability. It can easily detect patterns in the random snow on an unused TV
channel, or in the static from the same channels. It can detect patterns in
random strings of digits, and patterns in the shapes of clouds (and I don't
mean just meteorological patterns such as those used to classify clouds as
cirrus and cumulus and so on). We can detect patterns in the haphazard
occurrences of everyday life, such as when a friend of mine who had become
paranoid claimed that there was some sort of "message" about him in
the honking of a passing car in a busy street on the far side of the apartment
building he was staying in.
More importantly for my
purposes, as the last example suggests, it can “detect” patterns that don’t
exist, patterns that are more the product of its own processing than of the
data. I occasionally look up at the stars and "see" patterns
deliberately, patterns that I know are merely artifacts of our particular
perspective on those stars because the actual stars are almost certainly not
arranged in three dimensions as the corners of the geometric figures as they
appear in the essentially two-dimensional field of human vision. Just as we can
see all sorts of things in an ink-blot, so we can “see” all sorts of things in
all kinds of data, things that aren’t in the data, that are in fact objectively
contradicted by the data.
What is a pattern? Basically, a pattern is any idea,
perceptual experience, or apparent structure that stands out as something
distinct without necessarily being a physical thing, or even something that is
a perceptual thing any more than anything else is. For example, if one has just
purchased a new truck, it is likely that other trucks that are similar to it
will stand out in one’s mind when one sees them, and it may seem that damn near
everyone has a truck similar to one’s own, even though, just a week earlier,
most of these trucks would not even have been noticed.
For our purposes, a pattern is any order or structure
that seems to be non-accidental in some way, that somehow “stands out”
in one’s mind. We may even think that the apparent pattern is mere coincidence,
but part of the mind has still “registered” the pattern, and made it an
official part of the mind’s equipment. We may even realize that it is actually
quite accidental and yet still see the pattern, as in the case of the seeming
geometrical figures marked out by stars in the night sky.
The “words” a person hears in TV static seem to be
non-random in that we would not expect to hear any words at all in such a
noise. The shapes we see in clouds may seem non-random. It may be thought to be
a result of causal order at a physical level, it may be regarded as designed by
some agent (a human, a god, etc.), it may be regarded as some connection that
is not known but which nevertheless is real, etc. Or, a pattern may be nothing
more than something that we recognize because we have seen it or something like
it before, but that is all that’s necessary for it to be a pattern to a person.
Detecting a pattern is establishing some piece of
information as being significant, at least at an automatic response level (even
if we consciously regard the information as insignificant). We may come
accidentally to associate a phrase with a given piece of music, even though
they have no special connection, even to us, except that we happened to hear
the phrase while listening to the music, perhaps. The essence of the pattern is
that we attribute more than such an accidental or random, transitory,
relationship between the two things. Thus, the name of a song may be a phrase,
too, and we would normally associate it with the music of the song in a
different way than we would just any phrase that we happened to hear while the
music was playing.
For example, the shape of a starfish is seen as being
more than an accidental juxtaposition of similar parts that just happened to be
the parts of a star shape. Or, for another example, we may seemingly “hear”
words in the static that comes from a television tuned to an unused channel,
thus connecting something that we already know with bits of sound seemingly
buried in the static.
Evolutionarily, living on the Savannah required (and
still requires of some, I suspect), a goodly amount of pattern-detection.
Pattern detection that is often enough correct can help a person or group of
people do things like find water and food, kill food that may think they are
food, and make use of other resources in a way that other animals cannot.
Not the least of the fruits of this ability is the
ability to understand language, in which sounds are used in a systematic,
highly patterned way, to think about and to communicate much more than can be
communicated by mere gestures (as distinguished from the more highly-patterned
(i.e., not mere) gesturing of sign-language).
Pattern-detecting and pattern-matching is also heavily
involved in learning to speak a language, because one has to be able to tell
when one is using the sounds in the correct patterns. De facto grammar is the
patterns of an actual language, and nearly all human children are able to
detect and then learn to replicate (with variations) all of the basic patterns
of whatever language(s) are consistently used by those around them.
An aptitude for pattern-detection is at the root of
the unusual mental abilities of humans. It enabled our ancestors to survive in
the wilds by detecting perceptual-level patterns, probable causal
correlations at the level of simple physical events and such, patterns that,
because of their direct basis in basic physical observation, were often enough
correct that they promoted the survival and reproduction of the species.
It enabled our ancestors to do such things as
associate certain leaf-shapes with edible roots, to learn that certain kinds of
clouds meant that there was a high likelihood of a storm coming soon, and to
learn not to say “Here Kitty” to the saber-tooth tiger.
This pattern-detection mechanism is very sensitive. It
can detect patterns that are quite abstract compared to the patterns that other
animals generally appear to be able to detect and identify, patterns such as
sequences of events that take many days to complete.
A more or less basic feature of our propensity for
seeing patterns is that, once we have established a pattern firmly, it tends to
prevent the formation of competing patterns. If a child comes to believe the
“pattern” that all cats behave in a certain way, he may be resistant to
noticing or acknowledging it when a cat behaves in a way that’s inconsistent
with the pattern that the person has established.
The pattern in the mind tends to dichotomize what we
see in the world into more-distinctly divided categories than are really
present in the things in the world. The “cat” behavior pattern that a child
establishes can be expanded, but the difference between the new behavior and
the behavior already established for cats may have to be more dramatic than it
would otherwise. This depends, to a large extent, on how the mind uses the
patterns it sees in the world. More on this later.
But, patterns can also serve to make the mind
sensitive to deviations from whatever the mind has come to regard as normal.
Whether a pattern tends to block awareness or not depends on the way in which
the pattern is held in the mind. If it is held as information only, even with
an emotional commitment to it, it may still make a person more likely to see
deviations from it.
This seems to be controlled largely by the cognitive
status of the pattern in the mind. If it is held as a means of enhancing
consciousness, rather than as a means of by-passing consciousness, then its
function when there are deviations will be enhanced, because the deviations are
now deviations relative to a baseline that we might not otherwise have.
But, if the function of the pattern is to avoid
consciousness, to skip over reality to conclusions we have already arrived at,
then the function of the pattern will be to promote mental “blind spots” where
things may happen that deviate from the pattern, but which we don’t notice, or
which we find convenient ways of distorting so they seem to fit the pattern
after all, thus protecting the pattern from correction.
This is especially the case when there are a large
number of different component-patterns that all fit together in the mind (not
necessarily logically) in such a way as to seem to reinforce each other.
Whenever one is challenged, the others in effect come to its defense. Then,
when one of them is challenged, the first one comes to its defense. No one
component in the system need be very strong in its own right, but when it is
grouped with a large enough number of other components that reinforce each
other in the person’s mind (again, not necessarily in any rational sense), the
person is likely to hold the group very strongly, and to use it as a “lens”
through which other data is filtered, or against which other data is compared.
As one may be beginning to see, there are problems
with the human pattern-detection mechanism. The pattern-detection process can be
too sensitive, so that things that are in fact associated only randomly or
accidentally are seen as being somehow essentially connected or as purposeful,
or as following some sort of rule, etc.
Even at the physical level, the level of living on the
Savannah, not all of the patterns we can “see” are valid. We are “primed” by
the pattern-detection mechanism to notice coincidences, but we are not primed
to recognize when a coincidence is just a coincidence. Thus, even at such a
basic level, it is not uncommon for the patterns we “see” to be incorrect, to
be artifacts of coincidence and the mind’s readiness to “see” patterns
everywhere.
Much of mental illness consists of or is exhibited by
poor management of the brain’s pattern-detecting mechanism. John Nash “saw”
enemy ciphers in ordinary newspaper stories, and other mentally ill people
“see” various patterns in the world for which there is no objective basis. This
is why the common distinction between mental illness and screwed-up beliefs is
often not a very good one. Only occasionally can we correctly say, “Boy, his
beliefs are screwed up, but he’s mentally healthy,” because, typically, a
person’s screwed up beliefs will cause or promote more-obvious forms of mental
illness. This is not to say that schizophrenia and other disorders do not have
a physical basis, but that, often, the cognitive functions of the mind in
effect “conspire” with the disorder to form a system of ideas and beliefs that
seem consistent to the person without admitting the existence of the disorder.
I’m not an expert on schizophrenia, but it’s my suspicion that few people who
have it are able to do as Nash did in “A Beautiful Mind,” and rationally
discover that a delusion is a delusion (a nonexistent little girl that he kept
having conversations with never seemed to get any older, as a real little girl
would have, and he retained enough rationality to realize this on his own, and
I knew a woman who’s schizophrenia caused her to hear strangers around her
saying things to her, even when they were clearly not even aware of her
presence, and she had learned to recognize that these voices were not real --
but that didn’t stop them).
Why is there so little of such spontaneous recognition
of the unreality of the schizophrenic illusions? Because people have mostly
learned to “go with the flow” of the face-value of anything they perceive.
At the level of abstractions, pattern-detection is
essential. Noticing, for example, the similarities between multiple instances of
furry things that live in one’s house can enable one to formulate the concept
of “cat.” The pattern we see in this case is the repetition of various
attributes of these furry things in the various times we see them (or pet them,
etc.). At higher levels, noticing the pattern of similarities between two
superficially different ideas or systems of ideas is a very valuable ability.
For example, I recently spontaneously noticed some similarities between certain
ways of using G. Spencer Brown’s Calculus of Indications and the
one-dimensional cellular automata that Stephen Wolfram writes about in A New
Kind of Science. At first, it was merely an intuition, but, upon investigation,
it turned out that the parallel was in fact real (this way of using the Brown’s
calculus is in fact equivalent to a one-dimensional cellular automata). Another
example of the use of this mechanism is in noticing that there are fundamental
and essential similarities between such superficially different ideologies as
Nazism and Communism.
This pattern-detection mechanism also enables us to
notice differences that we might otherwise not notice. For example, if we see a
number of cats and a number of dogs, it is likely that we will see more
similarities among the cats and among the dogs than between the cats and the
dogs. Indeed, when we are first developing our concepts in these cases, we may
expect a dog to behave the way we have seen cats behave, and may be surprised
by the differences in behavior, by the fact that the dog we are observing does
not fit the pattern established by the cats we have seen. But, if we had not
established in our minds the pattern for cats, we might not have realized that
the behavior we see in the case of dogs is different from the behavior of cats.
With respect to abstract ideas, it enables us to
detect the differences between systems of ideas that may be superficially
similar but which are in essence radically different. For example, both some
conservatives and libertarians talk about promoting political freedom, but the
fundamental ideas of freedom that the better libertarians hold is radically
different from the idea of freedom that right-wing conservatives typically hold
(in which freedom tends to be whatever the conservative happens at the moment
to feel magnanimous about allowing other people to do).
In general, as we work our way up to higher levels of
abstraction (mammals, animals, living things, physical entities, etc.), we
still use the pattern-detection mechanism as a “workhorse” of conceptualization
and of conceptual thought. Eventually, we can, for example, notice certain
patterns of behavior of people in relation to others, and from the similarities
of some kinds of such behavior and the differences between kinds of behavior,
we can formulate concepts such as freedom, dependency, “ruling, ” “pecking
order, ” parenthood, obedience, obligation, love, etc.
But, the problems of uncontrolled pattern-detection
become worse at this level than at the level of physical survival, because the
cognitive basis for the patterns we are typically less direct and less clear,
and small errors in lower level abstractions may lead to “seeing” patterns that
are definitely not real, and failure to see patterns that are real. The range
of facts that can and should go into formulating abstract ideas, and the
abnormally large number of different ways to make mistakes will increase the
error rate in higher-level abstractions as compared to the error rate for such
low-level abstractions as “rock” or “dirt.” Where we can get away with a kind
of spontaneous pattern-detection at the level of living on the Savannah, such a
slap-dash, effortless process of pattern-detection at higher levels of
abstraction guarantees serious errors, in both seeing patterns that are not
real and of failing to see patterns that are real.
The brain’s propensity to see patterns is so strong,
so basic to the mind, that we often have a tendency to “see” patterns as if
they had their own independent existence as things in the world. This
propensity has even been turned into a specific type of philosophical position
known as Platonism, though many lesser versions of it have been formulated as
well. The apparent reality of patterns of a certain type is so commonly so
strong in the minds of some that they literally cannot believe that what they
“see” is not in fact real. For example, the Platonistic typology of living
organisms that is a major aspect of creationism (including the so-called
“scientific” creationism). Creationists see the more or less accidental distinctions
among species or broader classes of organisms as being somehow real in
themselves, essential, fundamental types that have an independent existence.
Biologists know that this is not true, that today’s “absolutely fixed” species
or other type is tomorrow’s “transition” between an earlier species and
whatever organisms have evolved from it “tomorrow.”
Mathematics is another area where the
pattern-detection mechanism commonly leads to confusion about the status of
patterns. Though the “Platonism” of a mathematician often has little in common
with true Platonism (because it often means little more than that mathematical
ideas are objective and not arbitrarily made up). But, mathematicians often
understand mathematics better than they understand the metaphysical status of
their ideas. Mathematicians often do not see the actual objective basis for the
basic ideas of mathematics that they use, and so something like the set of all
natural numbers (for example) may seem to be a thing unto itself, even though
it is really a set of “objectified” quantities with relationships amongst them.
The set of all natural numbers is objective, but not a thing that exists on its
own, but our ability to “objectify” such things as relationships and quantities
is so deep that it will often automatically convert abstractions into things in
their own right. The mistake is in not understanding that the mind does this in
order to be able to think about relationships and abstractions as objects
because the brain is naturally better able to think about distinct things than
it is about aspects of reality that do not have such concrete forms. By making
“objects” out of numbers, if we do it correctly, we are able to think about
them more easily.
This brings us to metaphors and how we use them, and
the roll they have in the development of our ideas. Metaphors are a major form
of the use of patterns. By using a metaphor, we can apply the facts that are
the case with respect to one thing to another, as when we use the number line
as a metaphor for the relationships among numbers (how they are ordered, how
numbers are between other numbers, etc.).
Confirming the Reality of the Patterns We Think We
Detect
Not only do we have a remarkable ability to detect
patterns that are not reality-based, but we have a remarkable ability to find
“confirming evidence” for virtually any pattern we “detect, ” whether real or
not. This is because, once we have “detected” a pattern, we are further
“primed” to notice anything that tends to support it. We become super-sensitive
to any data that might support the reality of the pattern we think we have
detected.
For example, if we think we are having a “lucky
streak” while playing roulette, we will notice any occurrences favorable to
that view and discount or dismiss anything that tends to refute it.
This pattern is naturally so pronounced that only a
small percentage of people are ever able to recognize that there is anything
wrong with it, and that confirmatory “evidence” is not a generally sound way of
validating the reality of the patterns we think we detect in the world.
In fact, until the Twentieth Century, even many
scientists and philosophers of science thought that the method of validating
scientific theories was a process of confirmation, of finding facts that fit whatever
theory was being considered.
While we may not agree with Karl Popper on everything,
even with respect to philosophy of science, his emphasis on the possibility of
falsification of empirical theories, and on testability have been of
inestimable value in shifting the way scientists and even ordinary people think
of both science and the scientific method. The old “verificationist” theory of
meaning, for instance, was recognized as not even being applicable to itself,
but, more generally, it was seen as fundamentally wrongheaded. We learned (at
least in terms of abstract ideas) that seeing “verifications” of a pattern does
not validate the pattern (or in terms of scientific theories: seeing
“verifications” of a theory does not significantly support the truth of the
theory).
We “recognize” patterns by a largely intuitive
process. We may even be consciously looking for a pattern, but, when we finally
recognize it, it is very likely to be seemingly “spontaneous.” It may even (and
commonly does) occur when we have, for the moment, set the problem we are
working on aside, and are doing something mundane, like getting on bus or
taking a shower.
Intuition is an essentially subconscious process of
integrating data in such a way that we detect some sort of pattern that we
would not otherwise have detected. The pattern may be “seen” in the form of a
mathematical equation, it may be in the form of seeing a general causal
relationship, or it may be in the form of noticing that the “unfit” offspring
of an organism do not survive and reproduce as often the “fit” offspring do.
And, of course, we may detect patterns at this level that are not real, that
have no actual basis in reality, or that have a partial basis in reality that
we combine with fictional patterns, so we end up “seeing” all manner of general
metaphysical patterns that are not real (or that are at least not objectively
supported by the evidence).
The following are examples of intuitional
pattern-detection without sufficient regulation by other mental processes.
The idea of synchronicity is an explicit formulation
of the idea that there are causal patterns in reality that are not mediated by
any normal physical means, such as some significant connection between a flock
of geese migrating and some situation in one’s personal life. In effect, this
is “institutionalizing” the tendency to over-detect patterns into an explicitly
accepted habit of the mind. Instead of encouraging a person to be skeptical
about the patterns he seems to detect until they can be validated, this theory
encourages the person to take all such seeming patterns at face value. Because
people often act on such seeming patterns, this is not merely a harmless
intellectual error that we can ignore. One variant of this is known as
paranoia.
The Freudian theory of the special and general
significance of dreams, and the theory of raging childhood sexuality are both
examples of this same pattern-detection mechanism run amuck, uncontrolled.
The patterns of astrology. People look diligently for
patterns in the stars and our lives, and, if they are not careful -- and few
people are -- they will “see” all sorts of special correlations between the
relative positions of the planets in the sky and events in human life.
Ordinary theism is probably one of the most common
forms of such mistaken pattern-detection. Literally thousands of distinct --
and conflicting! -- patterns have each been definitely and absolutely
determined to be real by millions of different people.
This brings us to evidence. Objective evidence has a
cognitive relationship between it and whatever it is evidence for, a
relationship that does not depend on the mind but on causal or logical
connections between it and the conclusion. Thus, there is a causal relationship
between the Sun and the Earth such that as the middle part of the day is
reached, the temperature (on average) will be higher than it will be twelve
hours later, in the middle of the night. We not only discover this as a
statistical pattern, but we are able to determine why this statistical pattern
exists. The facts that go into determining why this pattern exists are also
evidence that the pattern is real.
But there is another kind of “evidence.” Loosely, this
is the concept of evidence as it is often used in law: Evidence is whatever
someone claims is probative in the above sense. It need not actually be
probative in the sense of having an objective and rationally discernible
connection with the pattern or belief that it is being used to support. That,
in the minds of many, would be asking vastly too much.
For example, no one, in thousands of years, has been
able to find a good reason for thinking that visions are evidence of whatever
gods or demons they are supposedly visions of, any more than we have evidence
that having a dream of talking with God really means that we did talk
with God. Nevertheless, I know of people who insist, despite this, that such
visions (and, presumably, the dreams as well) are evidence for the existence of
whatever they are visions of.
And, not only are they evidence in the sense of being
claimed to be objectively supportive of such things, but they are accepted by
some as if there were some such established cognitive connection as there is
between the Sun’s being up and the increase in temperature of the day.
This illustrates (and confirms!) the reality of the
pattern of mistakenly taking patterns “seen” by intuitive means and simply
accepting them as objective reflections of the nature of reality (rather than
as reflections on the nature of the way people’s minds work).
Of course, confirmation is not enough, but then there
is the fact that the pattern of taking patterns “seen” by intuition and setting
them up as absolute truths of reality is something that is easily tested,
though not in quite the same way as a typical scientific theory would be. What
we can do is predict that, on closer examination, it will be found that a large
number of patterns that people think they see as objective patterns of reality
are in fact not supported by the facts. Astrology is one example of such a
case. Every rigorous test of astrological claims has failed to provide any
support for astrological theories.
And, the history of science and of empirical theories
about the world in general is virtually bursting at the seems with theories
that were based on intuition and that were nevertheless later proven to be
false (that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is at the center of the universe,
that breaking mirrors causes bad luck, that water dowsing works, that, if one
teaches a hundred monkeys to wash their yams, all the other monkeys will
suddenly and marvelously be found to have “learned” to do this without ever
having seen any of the first hundred monkeys doing it, that Friday the 13th is
an inherently unlucky day, that life arises spontaneously in dung, and that the
bumps on one’s skull give us a special insight into a person’s personality. Oh,
and that taping magnets to a wound will make it heal faster than taping a
non-magnet made of the same material to the same wound.
The patterns of theism are such that they make all
sorts of events into special “evidence” for whatever form of theism one happens
to believe in. For example, a homeless man who manages to get a job, get his
life together, and find a home may be seen by one theist as evidence of the
Christian God, while another sees it as evidence of a Jewish God, and yet
another sees it as evidence of the existence of the definitely non-Christian
God Allah. Still another may see it as evidence of the existence of
Quetzalcoatl.
These are all examples of theories that were supported
solely or largely by intuition, but which turned out not to be true, or at
least not to have any objective basis. They are results of the
pattern-detection mechanism running on autopilot, or to serve the particular
wishes of the person doing the pattern-detecting.
We usually don’t notice the pattern-detection process
as such. Instead, we think of it as “intuition, ” or “just knowing.” This is
because the core of the process is subconscious, not subject to direct
conscious control. We just “see” things, and that may seem to be all there is
to it. We see the results, not the mechanism. Our experience at the level of
physical reality tends to give us an excessive confidence in the reliability of
the pattern-detecting mechanism.
What we don’t notice is that when we have once
established a pattern as reflecting reality, we will tend to ignore, deny,
discount, or distort evidence against the reality of the pattern we think we
have seen so clearly. The theist typically “sees” the patterns of his religious
beliefs so clearly that anything that might be supportive of them is regarded
as definitely supportive of his beliefs, while the same kind of facts that tend
to contradict his beliefs will be ignored, discounted or distorted so as not to
appear to contradict the theory.
For example, the same person who sees a homeless
person getting a job and a home as a piece of evidence in favor of his belief
in whatever God or gods he happens already to believe in may nevertheless
ignore, discount, or distort the evidential significance of people who have
jobs and homes who lose their jobs and become homeless. These are essentially
the same kind of fact of reality, but they are rarely seen as evidence that
one’s particular God or gods are not real.
Thus, instead of correcting the cognitive processes he
uses, the person will compound errors with further error. The first errors are
made in initially adopting the patterns embodied in one’s religious beliefs,
but then they are compounded by the extremely biased way in which facts are
treated in relation to such beliefs.
Part of the explanation lies in the physical-level
reliability I spoke of earlier. This can easily tend to give a person a false
sense of the general reliability of the method of intuitive pattern detection
as a means of determining the truth “directly,” without the bother of learning
and systematically applying rational thinking skills. This is why it’s possible
for a person to believe himself to be rational while believing masses of
nonsense. Since, in his mind, his intuition is essentially completely reliable,
it becomes “rational” to him to continue to rely on it, and not to bother with
examining it or its results very closely – assuming that he has the skills that
would enable him to examine it or its results closely were he to choose to do
so.
Another part of the explanation is that, with very few
exceptions, people do not in fact learn the skills that would enable them to
properly examine the results of intuition. Critical thinking skills have never
been a part of the ordinary person’s education, beyond, perhaps, some ability
to pick nits of grammar or factual accuracy. These and other skills like them
are low-level skills and have little effect on whether one’s main beliefs are
objectively based. Indeed, often people with a lot of “factual” knowledge are
very poor at critical examination of their own beliefs, apparently on the
premise that the skills they already have and spend so much time using are the
necessary and sufficient critical thinking skills to have. A recent study has
tested (and, sadly, confirmed) the suspicion in the minds of some that, in
fact, significant knowledge of science (for example) does not provide any
“protection” against believing in nonsense like astrology or that plastic
pyramids have “magical” power to sharpen razor blades and keep fruit fresh
(more effect than, say a similar-sized plastic box would have as a means of
keeping fruit fresh).
Another part of the explanation is that, when people
do learn critical thinking skills, they tend to use them almost exclusively for
examining ideas they disagree with, rather than for critically examining their
own beliefs. Is this an illusory pattern that I see and that is not objectively
supported by the facts? No. It, too, can easily be tested, simply by asking
people to provide critical analyses of the ideas they agree with as well as the
ideas they disagree with, and to provide validations of their own beliefs as
well as invalidations of the ideas they disagree with.
This tendency is inherent in the pattern-detection
mechanism’s “feeling” of being a means of directly accessing truth. Why would
one attempt to critically examine the truth? Do we question whether 2+2=4? Do
we, if we are not mathematicians or philosophers, bother to examine this issue
the same way we might examine a neighbor’s religious beliefs that we find objectionable?
No. But, in general, we should examine many of our
ideas thus closely and critically, because, obviously, since these ideas
conflict with each other, they can’t all be true. They can’t even all be parts of
the truth (though they may occasionally contain some element of truth, or be
truth-like in some ways) because of the contradictions among them.
“But, the patterns I see are real. My
intuition-established beliefs are true. They don’t conflict with each other. So
why should I bother with critical, detailed examination of them?”
Because, if that is how they are established, some
very important ones are almost certainly seriously false, that’s why.
People don’t like to think that they, personally, are
subject to the same fallibility that other people are subject to. And, because
of the way they select and manipulate evidence, they are almost guaranteed to
have little but confirmatory experiences, depending on their ability to
discount or distort evidence against their views.
But, the reality is that the pattern-detection
mechanism is guaranteed to produce significant false results if it is used in
this way. By “guaranteed,” I mean with a certainty so close to absolute as to
be effectively indistinguishable from absolute certainty for all practical
purposes. The probability of such serious error goes up in proportion to the
number of beliefs established in this way, and may actually increase over time,
because of improper or missing understanding even of ideas that are in fact
true. The lack of proper understanding means that even a true belief (in such a
context) can actually increase the probability of adopting a false belief.
For example, one may recognize that rockets can travel
through the Earth’s atmosphere, but because of a misunderstanding of how this
happens, belief that they could not travel outside of the Earth’s atmosphere
“because the engine would have no atmosphere to push against.” Thus, the true
belief (that rockets can travel through the air) combined with a
misunderstanding of how they do it, yields an outright false belief, a belief
that one could have avoided had one come to understand how rockets actually
work.
Similarly, one may believe that it is wrong to steal,
and this would, in general, be true. However, if one understands it as being
wrong only because God supposedly says so in a document written more than two
thousand years ago by people who exhibited no special expertise in either
morality or theology, then, if one loses one’s belief in all such Gods, one may
mistakenly conclude that it is in fact morally okay to steal (or, at least,
that there is no legitimate moral basis for refraining from stealing).
Rational thought is largely the correct application of
patterns from a special set of patterns that have been shown to be valid forms
of reasoning. The various rules of inference are patterns which enable us to
arrive at true conclusions if our premises are true. In general, we add to
these rules various other rules of reasoning regarding probabilities,
correlations, causal relationships, and so on.
Illogic, or fallacious reasoning, occurs when a person
either does not apply any pattern of logical thought, even incorrectly, or when
it is applied incorrectly, or when some look-alike rule of inference is applied
instead of a valid one.
Most of the fallacious thinking that people do is some
form of false-alternative or argument from ignorance, followed closely by
equivocation, undistributed middles, but circular reasoning, stolen concept,
affirming the antecedent, and the rest.
These typically consist of the misapplication of
normal rules or patterns of reasoning.
The false alternative is a variant on elimination of alternatives.
If there are, say three alternatives initially to be considered, with no others
possible, then, if we are able rationally to eliminate any two, the remaining
possibility must be correct. The fallacy occurs when one alternative is
rationally eliminated and the conclusion is reached that another specific
conclusion is correct, but in fact there are at least one other alternative
that must be eliminated in order for the conclusion to be established as
correct.
The argument from ignorance fallacy is similar (and
they are often both the same fallacy in practice). However, here the argument
effectively argues from the ignorance of some fact (such as a naturalistic
explanation for a “miracle”) to the one conclusion that the person committing
the fallacy seeks to prove (such as that Quetzalcoatl, or Allah, or even God
exists). Here again, if the existence of alternatives were in fact rationally
excluded, the conclusion would be justified. But, the whole point of the
argument is to argue as if a lack of information were itself adequate grounds
for eliminating the alternatives we are ignorant about.
The fallacy of equivocation is the incorrect use of a
valid pattern of reasoning. A typical form of reasoning is that “All A is B”
and “All B is C” implies that “All A is C,” but if the meaning of B changes
sufficiently between the first and second premise, the argument is invalid.
This is an obvious case where a valid form (or pattern) of reasoning is
misapplied, producing an argument that looks valid as long as no one notices
that shift in meaning of the middle term.
These and other patterns of “reasoning” are pandemic
in philosophy, religion, politics, and debate over social issues. They look
just enough like valid forms and uses of valid forms that many people both make
and accept arguments involving these fallacies, because, in their minds, the
arguments fit the “patterns” of reasoning that they have come to accept as
sound.
Of course, it’s easier to accept an illogical argument
if one already agrees with or strongly inclines to agree with the conclusion,
because believing in the conclusion, or being strongly inclined to believe it
increases the willingness to accept that the reasoning is correct and reduces
the incentive to find fault with it.
Much of the pattern-matching people do in thinking is
analogizing. Done rigorously, reasoning by analogy is a sound form of
reasoning. But it is often, of not usually misapplied because people do not
take precautions in such reasoning.
For example, the arguments by design of the
conventional type argue by analogy from the fact that a watch is designed by
man to the conclusion that Nature is designed by God. But little or no care is
taken to ensure that the basis of the analogy is valid, or that it is even the
proper analogy to apply.
Most people who use this argument do not analyze it at
all; it is simply taken as obvious facts that the universe is designed and that
the designer is God.
The analogy breaks down even if we assume that the
universe is designed, because, while we would know that man designed a watch if
we came across one lying in the grass, because we have found (to a reasonably
high degree of certainty) that no other species on Earth designs watches. But,
how can we know that God is the only possibility as a designer for universes.
Indeed, how can we know that God is a possibility at all as a designer of
universes?
We can’t, but the quick, casual, all-to-easy habitual
use of whatever analogies seem handy leads people into this intellectual
cul-de-sac.
But, worse still is that we can’t even show that the
universe is designed. We can tell that a watch is designed because we are
familiar with the differences between things that man designs and the things
that man finds in Nature. We can see the characteristic marks of craft or
manufacture, we can observe that not even the component parts occur in Nature
(materials, yes, but screws and springs of the sort used in the making of
watches? –No). We can observe that the parts are both formed and fit together
with a precision that is rare in Nature (for example, things that grow to be
round are rarely as precisely round as the face of even a cheap pocket watch).
Finally, we already know that watches and similar things are made by man, so
the analogy cannot even begin to get going, because we do not reason from the
nature of watches to the conclusion that man designs them, as if man was an
alien species and we just happened upon one of their watches. We start by
knowing that watches are designed by man.
The design argument does not depend on actual signs of
design, but on merely one typical aspect of designed things, an aspect that is
common to things in Nature as well: Order and structure. The obvious problem is
that we cannot eliminate the likelihood of alternative sources for the order
and structure we find in nature. Paley (the most famous promulgator of the
design argument) did not have an understanding of natural evolution, but even
in his day it was understood that the principle of causation means that
ultimately there cannot be such a thing as a truly disorderly and unstructured
universe. As long as things are what they are (as long as, whatever a thing is,
that’s what it is), they will behave according to what they are.
But Paley and those like him rarely consider alternative
ways in which order and structure can arise; all they can see is the pattern:
Watch is to man as Nature is to God, and while the pattern is compatible with
the existence of God, they don’t notice that it has no probative force at all.
The non-sequitur is a catch-all category of illogic
which includes those errors in reasoning in which there is no rule of logic
that is being mis-applied or when the rule of reasoning that is being applied
is not a corrupted form of a valid rule of reasoning. In the more severe of
these kinds of “argument,” about the only similarity to the normal valid
patterns of reasoning is the implicit claim that there is a normal valid
connection between the premises and the conclusion.
But, even in the case of non-sequiturs, there are
common general patterns. When the man says, “She was in the middle of the
street and could not decide which way to go, so a ran into her,” we can find
bits and pieces of argument-forms in it. We can fill in enough parts in our
mind to make an ordinary pattern of reasoning out of it. For example, we could
suppose that, since the woman didn’t know which way to go, the driver of the
car did not know which way to go to avoid hitting her, and he didn’t think soon
enough of simply stopping.
In some cases, it might seem at first that this
re-formulation would be possible, but when it is actually attempted, we find
that there are no argument-forms that actually fit, that there simply is no
logical structure.
This can happen for a number of reasons.
One is that the person may simply associate two or
more things together, and thus link them together in thought. Sometimes the
association is “cognitive,” in that one thing has occurred in some sort of
association with another thing in such a way as to link them in the person’s
mind.
But, often, the association is emotional. The view
that God is the designer of the universe is a “grand” and emotionally
compelling idea to many, so the non sequitur may be nothing more than an
attempt to put something that might be rational in the “slot” in the pattern
where a justification for the idea is needed.
Another is that the person might have some rational
argument-form in mind, implicitly, but does not (or cannot) do an analysis
sufficient to determine that that form, that pattern simply does not in fact
apply.
The problems arise mainly because of the fact that the
mechanism is “designed” by evolution to serve physical-level living, to enable
us to notice patterns in our physical environment that we can take advantage of
to further our lives and thus (typically) our chances of reproducing more
pattern-detectors like ourselves.
But, this alone is not sufficient to explain the
generality and depth and seriousness of the errors people make in using the
mechanism. Another major aspect of the situation is that conceptual-level
cognition, above the barest beginnings, is a process that requires effort; it
is volitional. That is, we must choose to function conceptually and we must
make an effort at it if we are to be mostly reliable in doing it. But, one of
the reasons people continue their naďve use of the pattern-detection mechanism
is that it is so nearly effortless. We may “see” patterns without even paying
particular attention to the context in which the pattern seems to be found.
Thirdly, people do not learn a good set of critical
thinking skills, and, most importantly, when they do learn them, they typically
do not apply them to their own beliefs.
And yet, by the nature of the mind and the
pattern-detection mechanism, the practice of critically examining the ideas one
already believes and new ideas that one finds attractive is essential. It is
not something that one can safely skip, like a movie that one does not find
appealing.
I’m not going to go here into the specific skills and
habitual patterns of using them that one should adopt. Instead, I will try to
make the need for doing so as clear as I can. If the reasons given above
(sometimes implicitly) are not sufficient to convince one, here are the reasons
restated explicitly and in a list form:
The automatic pattern-detection mechanism is provably
unreliable outside of the low-level physical functioning for which at least the
core of it was initially evolved. Even at the level of physical living, it is
not unusual for people to “detect” patterns of causation that are not real, and
it is nearly assured that one’s major abstract beliefs will be wrong if they
are based on such an intuitive foundation.
The consequences of mistaken intuition-based beliefs
or patterns can be and often are horrendous. Hitler persuaded millions of
people that Jews were evil, by reinforcing a pattern that was already present
in German culture. Because the pattern was already present, all it took was
providing some “evidence” of it to convert it from a merely harmful
superstition to a hugely harmful superstition. The “pattern” of Jews causing
evil was thus established more firmly than it had been for a long time. Of
course, Hitler provided or supported other patterns for people to “see” as
factual, even though there was no factual support for them. One such was the
idea of “the Aryan race,” and the pattern of obedience to the state, and so on.
In our own history here in the U.S., millions of lives have been lost to the
ease with which people can see and come to rigidly hold onto apparent patterns
that are not in fact objectively supported by the evidence. Racism, sexism, the
Civil War (it was hardly civil, of course), and the Great Depression are all
examples of the consequences of unregulated pattern-detection and application.
In our personal lives, much of the suffering we
experience – or inflict – comes from our over-willingness to accept the
patterns we think we see as if they were established fact, and to act
accordingly. People often marry the wrong person for this kind of reason, and
some people even get divorced from the right person because they have made an
undetected and uncorrected mistake in adopting as a reflection of reality a
pattern that is really only in their minds. People also often take the wrong
job, or even the entire wrong career, because of “patterns” that they have
adopted uncritically, such as the pattern that “nice” people grow up to become
what their parents want them to become, etc.
The main one is remembering that the brain is
“hardwired” to make a number of categories of mistakes because it is trying to
apply brain functions to concepts and conceptual ideas that is only “designed”
as a means of making heuristically valuable but not necessarily optimal guesses
about what one’s physical environment in the wilds. If one don’t remember this,
or an equivalent set of ideas, one will continue to make serious mistakes in
forming and adopting beliefs and by holding onto these mistaken beliefs against
the evidence. One may not adopt some idiocy like Nazism, or even astrology, but
one will make serious mistakes, and one will fail to notice or correct them,
and they will cost one much in one's life. I guarantee it.
Watch for “Multiplicity Impairment,” which is the
disability that the pattern-seeing mind will tend to fall into of “locking”
onto the first “good” pattern for particular context and thereby often missing
the truth or at least better alternatives. For example, a person who breaks a
mirror and who then experiences some other unfortunate event may become
convinced that breaking mirrors does indeed cause bad luck (beyond those
associated with broken glass, etc.). After this idea becomes firmly lodged in
his mind, he may never notice that, over all, this idea is not in fact
supported by the facts of his or anyone’s life. This is a minor example. More
serious are the people who “see” patterns of the actions of God in such things
as the beauty of Nature, without noticing that there is a literal infinity of
possible alternatives to God as the cause of whatever particular set of facts
that he sees as “proving” the existence of God. For just one category of
alternatives: an alien species that builds universes like ours for fun and
profit. The point here is not that the God-pattern is wrong but that being
locked into it or any other pattern in a situation in which information is so
limited that a wide range of alternatives is possible is wrong. It is a guarantee,
in the long run, of making serious mistakes that are easily avoided.
Be aware that one is filtering and manipulating
information to fit the patterns one have already adopted. If one decides that
God is the cause of the “design” one sees in nature, then one will see any
further even moderately striking instance of order in Nature as evidence for
the existence of God, thus further blocking one from considering
alternatives. If one thins the bumps naturally occurring on people’s
skulls systematically reflect personality and character traits, then one will
see the bumps on people’s heads as confirming one's belief, and one will tend
not to see any evidence against this theory. If one doesn't learn that one does
in fact filter this way, and make major compensations for it, he will continue
to make serious mistakes and fail to notice or correct them.
Learn the rules of reason, and learn them well.
Never assume that one know them well enough: One
doesn’t; one's pattern-seeing mechanism is preventing one from ever seeing just
how often one screws up. Learn to recognize circularity in one's thinking even
if
Our ability to deliberately pay attention to some things
while largely excluding attention to other things is one of our most valuable
abilities. It enables us to perform tasks that we could not otherwise perform
at all, and it enables us largely to avoid paying attention to things that we
have determined we have no need to pay attention to.
And yet, one of the most common types of arguments for
irrationality is the citing of the good consequences that have come from some
irrational action, or the bad ones that have come from some rational action.
What is left out is that, on average, the consequences of irrationality will be
worse than those of rationality, and that, on average, the consequences of
rationality will be better than those of irrationality -- regardless of the
standard used in judging whether consequences are good or bad.
That is, after all, usually why we say that some
action is irrational: We have good reason to think that it tends to have bad
consequences, or that we have good reason to think that some other action would
have better consequences.
Before going on, I'd like to make a last comment on
the nature of reason itself. This is that it, while there are a large number of
mental processes that are rational, the primary aspect of reason is really a
standard against which we measure the overall results of our attempts at
cognition. That is, as long as the belief we finally accept is one that we can
rationally see to be justified by the data we have, it does not matter as far
as this standard is concerned, what all the intermediate processes were that
led us to the point where we grasp the relationship between the data and the
idea we are accepting. It may have been a rigorously analytical process such as
what we imagine Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Spock, or Commander Data (all fictional
characters, by the way!) to use, or it may be a process of creative insight,
intuition, or whatever. As long as we eventually see the logical relationships
among the various facts that do justify the conclusion, we can claim
rationality. Of course, we may not claim efficiency, and there may be
irrationality even in the steps along the way, but that's not relevant to the
basic issue of whether a particular belief is in fact rationally justified.
This is important to remember because many people implicitly accept the radically
false idea that the use of anything other than strictly analytical processes is
irrational. This is simply false, and this idea is in fact used mainly as a
means for irrational people to try to discredit reason (and I note here that,
if this argument were sound, it would be the use reason to discredit reason,
which would mean that the argument would discredit itself, and thus be shown to
be unsound by virtue of its success -- this is just one of the many paradoxes
arising out of attempts at justifying the rejection of rational cognitive
processes).
In a sense, unreason does not need a special
explanation, despite the tendency of some of us, myself included, to think of
reason and rationality as the norms against which unreason is abnormal. In
cognitive and moral terms, this is a correct way of viewing things, but it is
not correct in a broader, biological/evolutionary context. This is because
reason, in the sense in which I'm using the term here, is something we learn.
What we have by birth is the genetics that will normally lead to the
development of the ability to learn rational cognitive processes or standards.
But, while unreason in general needs no explanation,
and while reason actually needs -- and has -- an explanation, irrationality, as
a subset of unreason, still needs an explanation, because, while it is easy to
see why people would be rational, in that this is really our only general means
of achieving our goals, including our survival and our happiness, we want (or
should want) to understand why it is that people in general do not in fact
consistently attempt to be rational. It's like food: We can understand why
people want to eat; it's those people who do not want to eat that puzzle us, or
cause us to seek out medical help for them.
Still, my view is that irrationality is really an
outgrowth of the innocent kind of unreason that we are all born with, the
unreason of ignorance and lack of the skills of rational cognition, the
unreason of incautiously accepting what adults tell us, because we do not have
enough knowledge to understand the folly of doing this. Our wonderful, godlike
parents would not lie to us, would they? After all, our parents and other
adults are so powerful and all-knowing, they can't possibly be mistaken about
the things they tell us, even if we have no idea, really, what they are talking
about -- or at least so we tend innocently to think at this stage of our lives.
And, given a clash between what we have come to think
is rational and our desires, it is not exactly unnatural that we might tend to
side with our desires, since we don't yet have the principles of reason so
deeply learned that this seems really unreasonable.
--And because the ideas we do this with at this age
tend to be more or less abstract ideas, we don't have enough clearly-perceived
feedback from the outside world to let us know that this is not really a good
idea. Out on the Savannah, or in a jungle, irrationality would normally be
about things of immediate consequence. If we say, "Nice kitty" to the
ravenously hungry saber-tooth tiger, we will often get very strong and very
clear feedback almost immediately that teaches us (or our fellow human beings)
that this is not a really good thing to do. The immediacy and clarity of such
feedback tends to limit irrationality in these areas of our lives. We learn not
to step in front of speeding trucks, and to avoid trying to befriend large
hungry predators when we are unprotected.
But abstract ideas, especially those of philosophy,
tend to be sufficiently abstract that we often see no connection between our
acting on an irrational idea and whatever negative consequences we may suffer.
Our perceptual level of cognition enables us to more or less reliably detect
simple causal relationships and to take advantage of them, but it does not
prepare us adequately for the much more subtle relationship between false
or irrational ideas and their consequences, so people feel much safer in
accepting philosophical ideas that they have no justification for than they do in
accepting ideas about befriending ravenously hungry saber-tooth tigers.
Oppressive laws, for example, always have bad consequences, but, for many such
laws, most people do not have either the development of their conceptual
thinking skills nor the specific understanding of causation in such a context
that they can see the negative consequences in a way that is blatant enough to
cause them to back off from their advocacy of such laws, even if their
standards of what constitutes good or bad consequences would otherwise lead
them to do so.
And, some irrational ideas have just enough beneficial
consequences in the total mix of their consequences that people can say,
"Look, see how good the results were? That proves we were right all along
to believe it." But, more on this later.
Ignorance of the truth leaves openings for falsehoods,
but does not create them.
Ignorance of the truth about something does not
produce false or irrational beliefs, but it does contribute by leaving an
opening for them. Ignorance has been likened to the horse manure that mushrooms
grow in, but a more accurate variant of the simile would be that ignorance is
like the darkness that mushrooms grow in. The horse manure is more accurately
related to other factors. It is perfectly possible for a person to be ignorant
of what the truth is about something without holding false beliefs about it.
For example, I don't know whether string theory is true or not, so I'm ignorant
about this issue. But I also don't believe either that it is true or that it is
false, so I don't hold a false belief about it; I simply don't have a belief
about it one way or the other.
When many people think of reason, or of a rational
person, they think of someone like Mr. Spock or Commander Data of "Star
Trek," a person who does not have or who suppresses emotions, who has no
passions.
But, in fact, this view of reason has virtually never
been held by anyone who favored reason. It is almost exclusively used by
irrationalists of one sort or another to try to justify rejecting reason.
Most people don't grasp why reason is important. Most
of us have been raised on
Desire as motivation for self-suggestion
Taking Lack of Evidence as Evidence of a Lack
It is not at all uncommon for people to assume that a
lack of evidence of a view different from their own is evidence that those
alternative views are false. When one thinks about it briefly, this makes no
sense. But, when one think about it a little more, it actually makes a kind of
sense, because it makes sense to suppose that, if some alternative view were
true, there would be evidence for it. However, this principle has a quite
limited domain of applicability. For example, I can say that, given the lack of
evidence of an ordinary full-sized elephant in my shirt-pocket, I can conclude
that there is no such elephant in my shirt-pocket. The problem comes when this
idea is generalized to things where it does not follow that the lack of
evidence of something must mean that that something is not real. For example,
lack of evidence that the Earth is round does not imply that it is flat,
because given a large enough radius, we should not expect to be able to just
see that the Earth is round. Thus, even people thousands of years ago could not
rationally conclude that the Earth is flat. They could only assume that it was
flat, given the lack of evidence to the contrary. The mistake comes in
elevating this assumption to the level of a positive belief, a claim of
knowledge, knowledge that interferes with accuracy of thinking and the
development of better ideas about the shape of the Earth.
The fallacy of regarding a lack of evidence against
something as evidence for something else is not always merely a quaint and
harmless mistake. It is often used in an implicit way as evidence for the
existence of God, for example, as if the lack of specific evidence that God
does not exist could somehow constitute evidence that he does exist. Note that,
in this case, the elephant-in-the-shirt-pocket type of reasoning does not hold.
If there is no evidence of an elephant in my shirt-pocket, we conclude that
there is no evidence there because we correctly suppose that, if there were an
elephant there, there would also be very unmistakable evidence of its presence.
But, in the case of God, the lack of evidence of His non-existence has no such
implications, because, even if God does not exist, there is no reason to
suppose there would necessarily be any specific positive empirical evidence for
His non-existence. Of course, for some specific views of God's nature, we can
produce contrary evidence. For example, the fact of biological evolution is
evidence that the specific Gods claimed by creationists does not exist. This
does not refute any other theories about the existence of any God who has no
beef with evolution, however, so this type of argument is by no means a general
refutation of the idea that God exists.
[Note:
Topics to becovered more fully in the future:
Why people make this mistake
Pitfalls of Attention Control
Attention as selective consciousness
The importance of the ability to avoid paying
attention to things
The importance of the ability to choose what to pay
attention to
The main pitfall: Avoiding paying attention to
unpleasant facts
Pitfalls of Pattern-Detection
Systems Mutually-Supporting Beliefs
Circularity in systems of beliefs
Lack of hierarchical structure to one's beliefs
Out-of-Context Idea Evaluation
Consideration of ideas and facts in isolation
The Inherent Evidence Selectivity of Our Position
We see only what our position allows us to see
We disregard alternatives that would require evidence
that our position
Lack of the Habitual Use of Critical Thinking Skills
end of note]
Our schools do not teach critical thinking. That is
not their purpose. If it were to be instituted, it would result in the collapse
of the school system as we know it.
The failure to teach critical thinking means that very
few children learn critical thinking, and what they do learn they learn mainly
for the purpose of refuting ideas they disagree with, not for the purpose of
examining their own beliefs.
The result is that nearly all of us grow up either
with virtually no useful critical thinking skills or without even the desire to
use critical thinking skills on their own beliefs.
Stunted Growth: The Semi-Conceptual Mind
Most people's basic intellectual development stops at
about the age of fourteen, give or take a couple of years. True, children will
often continue to develop their intellectual capacities in secondary ways, but
rarely in a fundamental way. That is, whatever development occurs after that
time is normally a matter of adding new knowledge of facts or of developing new
specialized skills, such as those used in mathematics or writing. Often, of
course, even these skills are not developed much after this time, but my point
here is that the basic way of using one's mind in conceptual issues is rarely
improved upon after this age.
If one had fully completed the development of one's
basic conceptual thinking skills at this time, this would not be a problem.
But, in fact, virtually no one has reached the level of fully-conceptual
thinking at this age, except, perhaps in some specialty that a person happens
to be interested in.
That is, in nearly all cases, children develop to a
semi-conceptual level and remain at the semi-conceptual level for the rest of
their lives.
The semi-conceptual level of thinking is characterized
by the general use of ill-defined concepts and by their use in illogical ways.
It is a half-baked level of intellectual development.
Children stop developing at this level because there
is little motivation to go beyond it, and because they don't even realize that
there is much further development possible, and because the human race in
general still functions at this level, so it is the de facto norm for
intellectual development. Neither their elders nor their peers will provide
encouragement for the development of either the ability or the motivation to
function at a fully conceptual level.
Functioning at a fully conceptual level does not mean
doing nothing but analytical thought, it doesn't mean becoming like Commander
Data or Mr. Spock of Star Trek. But it does mean that, when one engages in
conceptual thought, one does so in a fully conceptual way, or at least with a
fully conceptual result in mind, the goal of developing a fully conceptual,
fully explicit, and rationally coherent understanding of the topic. Consider
the following passages:
[Insert example of sloppy, foggy conceptual thinking]
In this example, notice the vagueness and ambiguities
of the terms being used and how the context does not provide enough information
for us (or the person speaking) to enable him to be clear about what he really
means and about the relationships among the ideas involved. For this reason
(and perhaps others), he is not aware that the conclusion does not follow from
the stated premises and that the required additional premises would be unlikely
to be true.
[Insert example of conceptually clear thinking]
Notice in this example that qualifiers and context are
used to disambiguate naturally ambiguous terms, and that the terms involved are
clearly enough formulated so we can make at least a good estimate of the
soundness of the thinking involved.
The problem with the first style of conceptual
thinking is that it is virtually impossible to think that way without making
mistakes every few steps. Even if one happens to make a sound inference at one
step, it is likely that within a step or two further, an error will be made,
and the end result will be a false or unsubstantiated belief.
One of the problems with this level of development is
that, while most people at this level are not consciously aware of the errors,
people at this level of development tend to come to believe that even the
attempt at rational thought is not worth the effort. They are like children who
try to do arithmetic but who make so many mistakes that the result is usually
wrong. After a while, they dread even making the attempt, because they
correctly expect to fail, and so they fall back on "intuition,"
faith, "gut-feel," and so on, leaving their beliefs up to the
more-or-less accidental pseudo-integration of their undirected subconscious
thinking processes.
Failure to Make One's Beliefs Explicit
Because a belief that one are not conscious of is a
belief that one do not have conscious control over, failure to make one's
beliefs fully conscious leaves them open to undetected errors, errors that
guarantee falsehood or lack of sound basis for one's beliefs.
The thing about making one's ideas explicit is that
one can then deliberately think about them. One can ask questions about them.
One can wonder whether they are true or false. One can talk with other people
about them. One can treat them the way one might treat an idea about a
scientific theory. If we did not make the law of gravitation explicit, as
Newton did, we could not formulate it in mathematical terms, we could not apply
it to the orbits of planets and satellites, and so on.
Similarly, if we do not make our own beliefs about
things explicit, we can't challenge them, we can't analyze them, we can't test
them, we can't do research on them, we can't rationally integrate them with the
rest of our knowledge.
Of course, even after making our beliefs explicit,
there is still plenty of room for errors, but we can't even reach the stage
where we can make these additional errors if we don't make our beliefs explicit.
For example, when people do make their beliefs
explicit, they often do so very badly, with a resulting explicit formulation
that may not really make any sense. But, if we don't make our beliefs explicit
at all, we can't even reach this level of development of our understanding. At
least, if we have incorrectly formulated an idea in explicit terms, we can test
that idea in various ways, we can do research on it, we can talk with other
people about it, and we can keep it in our mind as something to think about and
to question. For example, if we don't formulate some version of our belief in,
say, fairness, we can't take the next step of questioning it and of seeking out
better formulations of it as we go through our lives. We end up just
automatically saying that something is fair or unfair, with no more than a kind
of accidental background for our judgments on such issues.
Making our beliefs as explicitly formulated as we can,
and continuing to be on the lookout for improvements in their formulation, is
something we should do as a matter of course in our lives, not something that
we save for special occasions. When a special occasion arises, it is often an
occasion that does not allow us the time and the psychological calmness to
properly develop our understanding.
How do we do this?
Ah, there's the rub, even for those of us who decide
to do this. I have in fact developed a method that seems to work reasonably
well, and that appears to be such that, aside from motivational issues, would
be applicable by nearly everyone with considerable success, but I will have to
deal with that in a later edition of his essay, or another essay altogether.
It's a little unusual compared to what I've seen in books in improving one's
thinking, but it works.
One might think, mightn't one, since we all know that
man is fallible, that few people except the clearly mentally ill would hold any
belief in their own infallibility. But this is not so. This seems to be one of
the many areas where people accept some generality about human nature, but
where nearly everyone believes themselves to be a special case, or at least
highly unusual. A similar phenomenon occurs with respect to driving skill.
Obviously, on average, people's driving skills are, well, average. But, most
drivers believe that their own personal driving skills are well above average.
The reason for our tendency to believe in our own
infallibility of our own minds in some domains is that we formulate our beliefs
in such areas in such a way that whatever might tell us of the flaws in our
beliefs is either discounted or not noticed or even inverted in our minds as
support for our belief.
What enables us to keep such beliefs is the general
lack of noticed corrective feedback. This allows us to keep the beliefs even in
the face of massive contrary evidence by simply not bothering with any contrary
evidence, and by focusing heavily on anything that seems to support our belief.
For example, we can make almost any "nice" fact support our belief in
a particular God, even though, obviously, that exact same "nice" fact
could be just as real without any God, or with a very different God. Thus,
Fundamentalists always take certain kinds of facts as evidence of the existence
of one of the various Supreme Beings of the Old Testament, while Muslims take
exactly the same facts as evidence of the existence of some variant of the God
of the Koran.
Obviously, something that can be evidence of anything
is evidence of nothing, but who, in the throes of warm feelings about his or
her personal God, will notice this. Thus, the belief in one's infallibility
about religious of philosophical issues is maintained. That is, despite the
lack of distinctive evidence for one's beliefs, one may take such
"nice" facts not only as evidence of the truth of a particular
belief, but as evidence of one's own infallibility about such issues.
Of course, people don't usually explicitly think they
are infallible about such things. Even to make the issue explicit would be too
risky. What they do instead is hold this belief in an implicit way, so they can
avoid challenging it, or even avoid having others challenge it.
Because of the belief in one's infallibility, one will
tend to be uninterested in testing one's beliefs, in considering contrary
evidence, and uninterested in examining the cognitive processes that led to
them.
Because of this tendency, one will not notice when
one's beliefs are falsified, and so will tend to take each unfalsified belief
as evidence of the reliability of one's cognitive processes, when, in fact, one
has simply adopted a policy that protects one's errors against detection. Over
time, this will tend to reinforce the implicit belief on one's infallibility,
thus leading one to be even less conscientious about how one establishes one's
beliefs. After all, if one's experience has "proven" one to be
infallible, it means that one need not be so cautious, and that it is safe to
accept ideas as true on less and less basis, such as any feeling of
plausibility they may have as one thinks of them.
Thus, a person's past failure to challenge one's
infallibility becomes converted into further apparent evidence of infallibility.
The universality of this belief in personal
infallibility is encouraged by the implicit and automatic belief in the
cognitive correctness of one's thinking processes. Even when people realize the
need to do some thinking to validate their beliefs, they naturally assume that
the thinking processes they use are correct and not in need of significant
improvement. This is like the average person's belief that his or her own
driving skills are above average, often even after getting involved in
accidents of their own causing, and like that belief, the belief in the
automatic correctness of one's own thinking habits is rarely justified.
Again, we can explain this in an economic sort of way.
Unnoticed errors in thinking tend to be discounted because they are unnoticed.
It is difficult for us to take into account errors that we haven't detected.
Because we haven't detected them, we tend to assume that we haven't made them,
so we then assume that our thinking processes are correct. And, we can end up
using the erroneous results of these erroneous processes as further evidence of
their correctness. For example, a person who believes in God may believe that
his thinking processes must be pretty good, because, after all, they led him to
believe in God, didn't they? Since, in their minds, the belief in God is
obviously correct, the fact that their thinking processes naturally led them to
this belief is evidence of the correctness of their thinking processes. Note
again the vicious cycle that is occurring in cases like this.
This belief in one's near fallibility is such a major
mistake that one might think it would be almost exclusively a mistake of people
of low IQ and little schooling, but this is not true. Very bright people have
often gotten used to being right during their formative years, and this tends
to establish the basic belief in their infallibility, which, once established,
reinforces itself by causing them to ignore evidence against that one's beliefs
are flawed, or to assume, without much further thought, that any apparent
errors are trivial and of no consequence, that they are not even worth pursuing
to determine what they are. Thus, one can talk oneself into holding beliefs
that are provably false, merely by supposing that the apparent falsity is
either a mere superficial flaw that could easily be corrected or that the
arguments against one's beliefs are themselves flawed and that it is just not
worth one's time and effort to study them thoroughly enough to determine the
actual nature of their flaws. After all, one's own beliefs have been arrived at
by an infallible process, so surely they can't be wrong.
The single most general basis for irrational beliefs
is the implicit belief that one's mind can somehow determine the truth either
by making reality conform to belief, or by mystical/magical automatic knowledge
of reality, knowledge that does not depend on the ordinary processes of sensory
perception and rational thought. This belief is thousands of years old, and
though it has a very poor record historically, it is still the most popular
fundamental error regarding cognition and knowledge and veracity of belief.
I will define a meme as a mental "entity"
that can be transmitted from person to person, typically by imitation. This
"entity" need be nothing any more truly distinct than a tendency to
laugh in a certain way, though it can be a full-fledged conceptual idea. This
ability to adopt mental contents this way is a consequence of our tremendous
pattern-detection ability. Over time, we can learn all manner of things by a
process of imitation and trial and error, thereby making our own imitation a
better and better replication of the idea as exemplified by other people or as
communicated in books, art, TV, etc.
At all times, our ability to imitate other people has
been a major survival value, because, in our evolutionary history, the people
who were around us to imitate were mostly the people who were successful at
surviving. The ones who were not successful were not around any more, and so we
couldn't imitate them. This meant that our ability to imitate did not have to
come with a corresponding ability do discriminate between what was good to
imitate and what was not. Our genes did not need to bother with this, because
the natural filtering effect of natural selection would ensure that, on
average, the people who were available for imitation would be the ones that it
was best to imitate. All the worst people to imitate didn't hang around long
enough to provide sustained models to imitate.
Memes evolve by replication and variation. The
"fitter" variants of a meme are the ones that survive and get
themselves replicated in other minds. You might think that the remarks about
the evolutionary usefulness of imitation would ensure that the memes we adopt from
other people would nearly all be quite good ones. And, in the early stages,
this was undoubtedly true, for the reasons given.
But the success of this very mechanism meant, at some
point within the seventy-five thousand years or so, we became so successful
evolutionarily that, as a species, we could survive even after adopting memes
with really serious flaws. As long as they don't get us killed, there are no
special inherent and solid limitations on what the ideas we can adopt and that
can spread through a culture.
And, while we don't have a rational genetic means of
discriminating between true and false memes or ideas, we do have a
psychological means of discriminating between kinds of memes, but not
necessarily in a way that strongly parallels whether they are in fact true or
false.
We have developed a mechanism for making decisions
that itself has a genetic basis, but which has severe limitations. This is the
pleasure/pain mechanism. By pleasure and pain, I mean any "positive"
or "negative" feeling, not just physical ones. For example, for my
purposes here, I would count the pleasures of mathematics (for those who find
mathematics emotionally satisfying), or the pleasures of thinking of someone we
deeply love.
This mechanism provides us with a means of making
decisions that served us very well in the conditions under which our long dead
evolutionary ancestors lived. By combining this mechanism with a little bit of
rudimentary learning, we could learn not to hang around the saber-tooth tiger,
and to dig up the tuberous roots of some plants to eat while leaving the roots
of other plants alone.
But this mechanism has no "brain" of its
own. It is driven either by simple physical facts (such as the pain of the
cactus spine) or by simple psychological associations. We have to learn which
tubers are good to eat, and link this knowledge to our decision-making process
and to our motivation.
However, as human culture developed and became more
and more successful, the mechanism still continued to function the same way. It
has no choice, after all.
So what happened and what still happens is that we
developed various complex associations between ideas and our pleasure/pain
mechanism, only some of which were rationally sound. Various gods and demons
could momentarily soothe us or frighten us in fantasy, and thus become linked
to pleasure and/or pain in our minds. Again, the "economic" principle
of keeping ways of thinking that we don't detect any problems with applies,
because of the apparent uselessness of changing them.
But, the simple way of responding to things that
worked so well in dealing with physical nature in a direct way does not work so
well in dealing with abstract ideas, or with things that we can't concretely
and systematically perceive and examine. If your pleasure/pain mechanism tells
you not to eat the tuber because you know it causes you pain, you are probably
doing the right thing by eating something else.
However, if your pleasure/pain mechanism and your already-present
and mostly implicit beliefs tell you to accept an abstract philosophical idea,
there is a pretty good chance that it doesn't know what the hell it's talking
about. The range of possible and very likely errors increases dramatically, by
something like a geometric progression, the further we get away from direct
perceptual data. When we get to ideas about the nature of existence or whether
gods exist, the cognitive methods and the natural safeguards that were in
effect at the perceptual level are simply not present or are easily inactivated
or bypassed by an attraction for a particular idea.
And, because of the fact that there is no longer the
strong and typically immediate feedback from reality about abstract ideas as
there is about which tubers are okay to eat, the mind tends to be lulled into a
sense of complacency, and, in fact, into a sense of infallibility about such
issues.
In dealing with physical nature, if we feel that the
saber-tooth tiger is a threat, we are probably right, or at least we are right
pragmatically often enough to make this a generally good way to behave in such
situations. But the natural pragmatism that serves us so well in such cases
fails to serve us well in the case of abstract ideas. But, with nothing special
to make this clear to us, with the immediate feedback from reality being
missing or subtle, and with longer-range feedback being often so indirect that
we don't even notice that there is a connection between the use of the idea and
the consequences, we have no reason that we are clearly aware of for not going
on as we always did, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
The result is that, by the time we reach what should
be the level of development that would enable us to discriminate between good
and bad memes on a cognitive basis, our minds tend to be already
"locked-in" to a set of mental habits that we no longer can see any
reason to change.
By this point, the mind has already
"settled" into a system of beliefs and habits that are balanced in
such a way that we at least do not detect any major problems with them. These
problems are nearly always present, but we have adopted only those thinking
skills and habits and beliefs that are compatible with not noticing the
problems, and that, in action, tend to supplement, complement, and mutually
support each other.
I'll give just one example here: The Fundamentalist
who believes that his thinking habits must be correct
because they support his belief in God, and who thinks that his belief in God
must be correct, either because it is supported by the kinds of thinking he
does, or by the fact that he "just knows" that God exists, etc. The
habits of mind and the beliefs that the person has fit together in a neat way
that does not raise serious doubts. Once this level of pseudo-integration is
achieved, it is highly unlikely that the person will change either his thinking
habits or his philosophical beliefs any time soon, because he has adjusted
everything in such a fine-tuned way that it will take quite a bit to knock it
out of its zone of stability.
It's like a ball dropped into a bowl. Once it has come
to rest at the bottom of the bowl, it will take quite a lot of energy to push
it back up the side of the bowl and into the outer world. Similarly, once a
person's mind as found such a point of minimal conflict, it will take a very
strong influence to push it back out into the open world where it will have to
re-consider both its beliefs and its thinking habits.
True, once in a while the metaphorical bowl will be
tipped over, or will dissolve away, or some of the outside world will get in
and disrupt the homeostatic heaven that has been achieved, but not terribly
often. Children of Fundamentalists who go off to universities to study biology
so they can refute evolution sometimes have this happen to them, but the
Fundamentalist who stays home and lives with other Fundamentalists is likely
instead to have his beliefs and his ways and habits of thinking reinforced, not
weakened.
This is because the "bowl" he has settled
into is itself at the bottom of a larger "bowl" (to continue the same
metaphor), so anything that the person comes in contact with in his social
environment is likely to support his sense of having found and finally settled
on the real truth.
The human brain is largely a "meme machine,"
to use Susan Blackmore's term. The basis for language is apparently our ability
to adopt behavior by imitation. Whether we have a special language capacity in
our brains or not, it is clearly the case that we don't need more than the
ability to imitate to establish the basic and simplest form of language. And,
since it is clear also that we humans have a quite remarkable propensity to
imitate each other, we will tend to accept by imitation ideas that are false as
well as ideas that are true, because the imitative mechanism does not itself
provide any standard for what to imitate, other than that it not be too
immediately painful to us. Susan Blackmore (and probably others) has pointed
out that this ability is a major survival value in many ways, because it means
that we can simply adopt by imitation the behavior of our most successful peers
and we will probably be acting in a pro-survival way without all the bother of
having to figure out on our own which behaviors are going to be successful and
which are not. If Grak behaves one way and gets killed by the saber-tooth
tiger, we don't even have to worry about imitating him, because he's no longer
around to imitate, whereas Nuknuk, who has been very successful in avoiding
being eaten and in getting things to eat, is around to imitate. Thus, we will,
especially in this kind of environment, usually have only successful behavior
to imitate, which makes imitation not only the sincerest form of flattery, but
also the most successful way to decide how to live, especially in that it does
not require a lot of intellectual processing as compared to working out
everything on our own with the primitive conceptual skills they teach at
Savannah-Person Elementary School.
Since imitation is, in such environments, such a
fantastic survival tool, we have, naturally, tended to evolve to be very good
imitators. That is, whatever genes we have that tend to make us good imitators
are the ones that tended to live long enough and successfully enough to
reproduce and produce more good imitators. Those who, for whatever reason,
didn't have this ability, tended not to reproduce because they weren't around
to do so.
This doesn't mean that imitation has no drawbacks. It
does. But, at a sufficiently early stage of the evolution of our ancestors, the
benefits of imitation far outweighed the costs of imitating.
However, as I said, our ability to imitate has no
special standards about what to imitate, and so, if we happen to live in a society
that has been so successful in survival terms that even completely wrong ideas
can find "hosts," then these ideas can begin to engage in their own
private evolutionary competitions, wherein the ideas that are the best at
"hooking" us psychologically tend to be the ones that get imitated
the most. After all, if Grak starts talking about the speed of light as a
constant and writing down equations, Nuknuk will probably find them
uninteresting and far too difficult to imitate. But, if Grak starts talking about
beings who are like us but who are usually invisible and much more powerful
than we are, we can fairly easily understand and adopt and imitate that idea,
and we can fairly easily pass it on to our children. If Grak adds that some of
these beings can affect how well we do in life, and that they can often be
persuaded to do what we want by repeating easily-remembered pleas for help, and
if, at least occasionally, one of these pleas seems to have been answered, then
not only is the idea easy to imitate, but it is attractive, as well, and it
will tend to do better than an idea that is similar but which lacks this
attractive feature.
But, note that, in all of this, the ideas themselves
have no special interest in our well-being. Insofar as we can metaphorically
talk about such ideas having any interests at all, their interests are merely
in spreading to new hosts. Obviously, if they get one host killed immediately,
they will tend not to establish a large niche in the ecology of ideas in a
society. However, if an idea is hopelessly irrational but just mild enough that
its hosts can generally survive long enough to get the idea copied to other
hosts, it may do quite well, at least for a while.
And, if an idea is not itself attractive enough to get
much replication from mind to mind, it may become attractive by gathering
together with other ideas to form a mutually-reinforcing system of ideas, a
system where each idea supports at least some of the others, even if not a
single one of them has a solid basis in reality. As long as the host's mind
does not see the circularity or does not care about it, such a system can offer
stupendous rewards for adoption and/or stupendous punishments for failure to
adopt them. Thus, systems of ideas like those of various forms of mainstream
religions, social and political theories such as those of Nazism or Communism
can establish themselves in millions or even hundreds of millions of minds
before the consequences become so general and so generally well-known that
their popularity dwindles.
But, even more remarkable than this is the fact that
our minds, as we see them, are actually largely constructed of memes, of
learned behavior patterns that our brains pick up in our formative years.
People often discuss the possibilities of artificial intelligence, but little
do they realize that, in a sense, most of our intelligence is artificial, in
the sense that we learn it. True, there is a genetic basis for it, and I don't
want to claim that our intelligence is artificial in the same sense an
artificially intelligent computer would be, but I do want to make the point
that facts that we normally take to be natural developments of our minds have
more of a basis in the memes our brains have adopted from our environments.
Memes may be parasitical or symbiotic, but, either
way, they don't care about one's welfare. They don't care about anything, but,
metaphorically, they care only about themselves and their own survival and
reproduction.
Thus, one favorite "ploy" of memes is to
convince the host that they are true (whether they are or not) and, if they are
false, to convince the host that they don't need to be examined or questioned
closely and systematically.
Once this is done, they tend to be fairly stable and
thus in a good position to spread to other minds.
By default, we will think only about those things that
we are naturally motivated to think about, and not about other things. This is
essentially a result of an "economic" type of estimate in our minds
as to the value of deliberate thought, except in cases where we have such a
natural inclination to think about something that we think about it without
special effort, without having to "work" at it. Unfortunately, this
"natural" thinking is not sufficient. In limiting our thinking to
such topics, we almost always fail to think about things that we really do need
to think about.
Therefore, we need to adopt a conscious policy of
thinking about the things we'd rather not think about, and about things we
"know" we don't need to think about. We need to adopt a policy of
assuming that our thinking about things so far has not been adequate, that we
have made significant mistakes, mistakes that are just waiting for us to think
clearly enough to notice and correct.
Beliefs change over time even when their verbal
formulation stays the same, and often these changes are not good ones.
Therefore, we need to frequently re-examine our concepts and ideas and
re-establish their truth and their limits of applicability.
We need to adopt a conscious policy of continually
refining our concepts and ideas and of revisiting our beliefs.
We need to continually seek deeper understandings of
things, rather than just continuing to develop our beliefs along the lines
already established.
Most people, when they attempt rational thought at
all, focus almost entirely on further development of ideas they already have.
But what we often need most is not so much further development
of the implications of ideas that we already have. What we need most is usually
to find the epistemologically essential ideas that we are not even now
conscious of, but which implicitly underlie the ideas we already have. It is
characteristic of human intellectual development that we do not start with the
conceptualization of genuine cognitive primaries or axioms, but rather, we
start, in medias res, in the middle of things, and develop from there. The
result of this is that, at the foundational level, we are like the
pre-Euclidean geometers of ancient Greece, who had developed a large number of
ideas about geometry, and many arguments supporting what we now call theorems,
but who also had no clearly-defined set of foundational ideas. The genius of
Euclid was that he was able to analyze this mass and make a very good first
pass at providing a solid foundation for the whole collection of ideas about
geometrical questions.
What's missing in the belief systems of nearly
everyone is even a crude approximation of this kind of structuring of ideas.
This failure to properly deal with the issue of foundations, and the general
failure to think in terms of, and in terms of finding, fundamentals, often
leads to bizarre results. Recently, for example, I debated someone on the
Internet who claimed that the Bible, the entire Bible was a self-evident axiom,
and that because it was an axiom, there could be nothing prior to it upon which
it could be based, but because it was an axiom, there could also be not even the
possibility of sound arguments against it. Of course, this is absurd, because
it takes as fundamental a vast collection of propositions, many of which are
ordinary factual statements which are perfectly capable, in principle, of being
empirically falsified or verified. Was there a literal Garden of Eden? Unless
we suppose that its existence has been totally obliterated, it would be
potentially possible to find physical facts that either support it or refute
it. But, if we take the Bible as a self-evidently true axiom, we will be
disinclined even to formulate questions like this.
Thinking in terms of fundamentals would have enabled
this person to grasp that the Bible couldn't be self-evident in any objective
sense because he would have understood that propositions about the specifics of
physical reality are never axiomatic, but always depend directly or indirectly
on observation.
The irony of the example just given is that the person
is claiming a fundamental, an axiom, a self-evident primary that does not
depend on anything else, an ultimate starting point, but what he is claiming is
such that it is not even logically possible for it to be axiomatic, let alone
axiomatic in fact, in the real world. This is a fact that the person could
easily have determined for himself, had he actually been interested in seeking
out fundamentals. This irony is in fact the "fundamental" irony of
religious fundamentalism, which, by its name, claims to deal in fundamentals,
but which, in fact, starts from claims that have no good claim to
fundamentality at all, and which all require either proof or other cognitive
validation.
But, one doesn't have to be a religious Fundamentalist
to make the same kind of mistake. Many political liberals, for example, treat a
large selection of liberal moral, social, economic, and political ideas as
axioms, as self-evident truths that are definitely not to be questioned, as one
will find out soon enough if one question any of these ideas in their presence.
In order avoid being burned at a UU stake, I will refrain from mentioning any
of the examples of such liberal misplaced axiomaticity, but they do exist, just
as those of right-wingers exist. For that matter, I have, I'm sad to report,
even seen examples of such misplaced axiomaticity among some of my fellow
libertarians. It seems to be nearly universal in the human race, like some of
the other factors of irrationality I've discussed.
The fallacy involved is one that I call the fallacy of
misplaced axiomaticity, which is the fallacy of attributing an axiomatic,
self-evident status to some idea that is not in fact axiomatic. The failure of
most people to look any deeper than they do into the underpinnings of their
ideas largely rests on this fallacy; they take as self-evident axioms a large
array of ideas that are in fact not self-evident. Many of them are usually not
even true, let alone genuinely axiomatic. This is also related to the premise
of virtual infallibility, in that people typically think that there is simply
no need to rationally determine the actual basis for their ideas because, given
their essential infallibility, there's simply no need to question such ideas;
they are "obviously" true, so why bother with all that intellectual
heavy lifting?
What I think is the key is not so much ignorance, but
that, despite the truth of Aristotle's claim that Man (the species, not the
gender) is a rational animal, the use of reason either methodologically or as a
normative standard of the quality of results is in a very important sense
unnatural to human beings. We virtually all grow up adopting some degree of
rationality, but it's no more natural to us than is the ability to perform
long-division or to play the piano. We have the capacity to learn rationality,
but we have no inherent desire to be rational, to hold beliefs that are
cognitively justified, and to act according to the dictates of what our best
judgment tells us is the best thing to do.
Just as dogs can be trained to do tricks, but doing
tricks is not a thing that dogs will naturally take up doing, so rational
thought, rational evaluation of argument, rational evaluation of data, is not
something that the human mind will simply naturally do at the level that we need
to do it for our well-being.
Some people will take it up, and they will develop the
skills of rational thinking, and they will then use these skills, but even they
don't start out with those skills, and even for them, there is a long and
complicated process of learning these skills. They may enjoy it, but it is
still something that is acquired above and beyond what their genes would supply
them. If one took these same people at an early age and somehow diverted them
from the learning of these skills by keeping them entirely enclosed within such
a plain environment that there was nothing much to learn from it (imagine
children reared in a single plain black room by machines that merely fed them
and did not interact with them, perhaps), they would not just develop
sophisticated rational thinking skills the way they would develop secondary
sexual characteristics at puberty, or the way they get their second set of
teeth. More than genes are involved, much more.
One of the reasons that the children of brilliant
people often do as well as they intellectually do is not that they are as
naturally intelligent in genetic terms as their parents (they usually are not,
because of the tendency of regression to the norm), but rather, they have an
unusually intellectually stimulating environment to grow up in, and higher
standards that they often become inclined to meet, than does, say, a child of a
hillbilly in the back woods might, even if that hillbilly child has the same
genetic endowments as the child of the brilliant person. Of course, sometimes
the child of a brilliant person rebels against the whole idea of the use of the
mind, and becomes, for most purposes, an idiot; I'm not trying to claim any
absolute universal laws here, only suggesting that the environment a person
grows up in can make a significant difference in the development of the
rational faculty because this development is not merely a matter of the
unfolding of genetics during biological development. [See note 4]
The unnaturalness of reason does not mean that it has
no biological value, but merely that our evolutionary history has only provided
the mechanism, not the knowledge of how to use it. Indeed, it would be almost
impossible for such knowledge to be genetically based, because the point of
reason is to enable us to learn about the world by cognitive means, so we don't
have to depend on our genes to have discovered everything we need to know about
the world. How could our genes, millions of years ago, have discovered quantum
mechanics or general relativity or business accounting or the nature of some
predator that our ancestors had not even come in contact with yet?
Learning, both of ordinary facts and of rational
thinking skills, provides us with a means of dealing with things our genes
never encountered. This, of course, is a great survival value, so once we
started developing the genes that would enable us to do this, it is not
difficult to understand, at least in a general way, why it caught on. Thus, by
a genetically economical way, we became able to adapt to our environment and to
adapt our environment to ourselves in ways that far outstripped would could be
incorporated directly into our genes as far as the specifics of coping with the
world.
Thus, we became the pre-eminent species to survive by
doing things that our genes provide only a kind of foundation, and not the
skills themselves. Other animals do this to a relatively small degree, as we
can tell by observing our own dogs and cats, but humans not only do this to a
much greater degree, but we have to do it to a much greater degree, because,
once we have the basic mechanism, it prevents us from successfully living as
other animals do.
This is because, while cognitively correct uses of the
rational faculty requires a lot of learning, the incorrect uses of it require
only a very minimal learning, a degree of learning that occurs in early
childhood. At this level, instead of being able to function as other primates
do, without the heavy use of a conceptual faculty, the human conceptual faculty
will function, but not correctly. In effect, a crude form of the rational
faculty has been developed, and it operates in a subconscious or implicit sort
of way, to automatically connect things together, but not to automatically do
so in a cognitively useful way.
This automatically operating mechanism is the
pattern-detection mechanism described earlier. Without training in
discriminating between patterns that have a really good chance of reflecting
what's actually going on in reality, patterns are "detected" in a
willy-nilly way, according not to cognitive principles but according to the
patterns that have already accumulated in the person's mind, and according to
psychological pressures, according to what the person wants to be true, or
according to what authority-figures have told him.
It doesn't take much of a pattern-detection mechanism
to have a dream of talking with God and then to believe that one was talking
with God. This is pretty natural, since we "naturally” tend to believe
anything that feels true and that we don't have recognized reasons to doubt.
We do this on what we might think of as
"economic" grounds. If we believe something and it has no detected
costs but does have detected benefits (such as making us feel better when we
think of it), we will tend to accept such beliefs because we see no reason not
to. Development of the rational faculty to the point where we can see the costs
of accepting such beliefs requires further learning, which we mostly do not
naturally see any reason to bother with.
Again, this argues for the criticality of teaching
rationality in our schools, so children can be brought to a level where they
will then be motivated to continue developing their rational thinking skills
and their habitual use of them because they understand that doing so is
important to their own well-being. Without this recognition, children will not
see the point of it, and without the early development of the basics, they will
not develop this recognition. What's so tragic about our school systems is that
we don't provide this basic learning even though it is possible to develop this
key recognition with a very limited amount of learning. We don't do it because
we (mostly) have not developed this recognition for the same reason it doesn't
normally develop in our children. Even when we can see the value of it in an
abstract sense, we haven't learned it deeply enough to make it something we
really act on, or something we deeply want to impart to our children or have
the school system take on.
In fact, when we do develop this recognition, it is
usually not even consciously that we do so. We may find ourselves wanting to
learn and understand things, we may conscientiously try to grasp the essentials
of the problems we face and to respond by cognitively validated means, but we
may not realize that this something crucial that needs to be identified
explicitly and propagated to others as much as we can, at least by example and
suggestion. This is the other side of the merely abstract conscious
recognition; this is a subconscious recognition which, because it is
subconscious, is not something we can explicitly think about and deliberately
develop and seek to impart to others.
Evolution is pragmatic, and we are by nature pragmatic
in a certain biological sense. And, when we want to refute certain kinds of
nonsense, such as the popular idiocy among certain intellectuals that science
is no different from conventional mainstream religions in that, they claim, it
is merely a subjective social construct, with no more real claim to objectivity
than such religions, we can do so by pointing out that if that were true, they
wouldn't be able to get their lousy papers and books published because there
would be no technology of printing, manufacturing, distribution, no Internet
for them to use in trying to cook up ever more and more irrational claims to
make, since all of our technology beyond understanding the leverage of a shovel
in prying dirt out of the ground, depends on the very science they regard as
merely subjective. Thus, while we cannot prove that science theories in general
are true in the strict sense that, say, a fundamental law of logic is, it is
clear that there is some sense in which science does in fact represent the
truth, if only by a process of elimination of falsehoods.
Thus, while it is not strictly true that those ideas
that work are necessarily true, and it is certainly not definitive of truth, it
is definitive of a certain kind of veridicality, of truth-likeness, of
approximation to the truth. Kuhn, as I understand him, was wrong about
scientific revolutions. They never just overturn what we already think.
Instead, scientific revolutions, such as those of Newtonian physics and later
of Einsteinian and quantum physics, overturn certain abstract ideas we have
about the science of particular fields. But, while Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe,
Galileo, Newton and others overturned the Ptolemaic theory of the motion of the
planets, they did not reject the basic data behind it nor the fact that
Ptolemaic theory still represents a good first approximation of a method of
calculating the visual position of the planets in the sky.
Newtonian physics is still used in practice in a vast
range of applications because, despite the theory of relativity, Newton's
physics is still such a remarkably good approximation that it makes no sense to
try to apply the relativistic equations under conditions where we know that
relativistic effects are very slight. We use relativity in building linear
particle accelerators because the relative velocities of the particles are so
high, but we use Newtonian equations for calculating space flights. Thus, at a
deep conceptual level, we have a different view of space and time from that of
Newton, but we still keep his theory as a very good approximation for nearly
all ordinary physical calculations. In effect, each revolution has kept the
work of prior scientists as an approximation for some subset of the range of
facts that the new theory deals with.
Thus, as we can see from mere historical facts, even
if not by an examination of the theories involved, Kuhn and the postmodernist
types are simply wrong about what happens. On top of that, they are wrong about
the interpretation of what happens, so they have committed two kinds of errors.
[See note 3]
These are not in any special order, and not
necessarily associated with any specific point in the main text.
1. Rand, in her book on her theory of knowledge,
points out that, at the perceptual level, the given is not sensory data at all,
but rather perceptual data, or perceptual objects, perceptual things.
Perceptual things are not necessarily objects in other senses, but they often
are. What makes something a perceptual object is that we mentally see or
experience it as distinct in some way from whatever is around it, spatially
and/or temporally or in terms of perceptual qualities. This is similar to the
Gestalt psychology idea that we perceive the world in terms of objects in a
context (or background, if I remember the Gestalt terminology correctly). Thus,
things that we see on TV are perceptual objects even though, in fact, they are
mere patterns of colored light emitted by the TV screen, and a splotch of color
on a wall may be a perceptual object even though it is not an object like an orange
or a table. Given that we perceive the world as objects, we can then discern
similarities and dissimilarities among them and thus begin the process of
grouping some things as similar to each other but different from other things,
thus beginning the formation low-level concepts.
2. Reason has somewhat the same relationship to
unreason as the correct ways of calculating the sum of two numbers have to the
incorrect ways, in that reason is rather narrow and reasonably well-defined,
but unreason can be any alternative to the conceptual cognitive ways of
determining what is or is not the case. Thus, for example, while reason limits
us to a certain set of ways of doing things, precisely because we want at least
a good approximation of the truth, unreason has no such limitations on it, and
so we have to define it in essentially negative terms, as suggested by the term
"unreason" itself. That is, unreason is any mental process that is
taken as cognitive but which is not in fact cognitive, at least in some important
respect. For example, the common blind faith in one or other of the various
Gods of the Bible has no core of cognition, but is instead based on mostly
non-cognitive processes, with cognition playing only a secondary role.
3. While I'm on the topic of science, I'd like to
offer a of theory of scientific truth, which goes like this:
Scientific theories can be true in the sense that
there is a vast range of factual claims that they implicitly make, and we can
establish that a large portion of these are in fact true claims. Thus, even if
we have to admit (and I do so admit) that the theory of relativity is not
necessarily strictly true in every respect, it still effectively incorporates
and integrates a vast range of true propositions, of propositions that we can
validate by empirical test and that Newtonian or other such alternative
theories do not support or which they actually contradict. Thus, we can say
that there is, in a good and well-tested scientific theory, a larger set of
true propositions than is effectively contained by theories that do not pass
the same tests. By "larger set," I do not, of course mean larger in a
strict mathematical sense, because any theory that incorporates even one true
proposition implicitly incorporates an infinitude of true propositions. What I
mean by a "larger set" is a larger set of true propositions at
whatever level of granularity or detail we choose to use for comparison. Thus,
for example, Newtonian physics is incompatible with the recession of the orbit
of Mercury and the bending of light as it passes the Sun on the way to Earth,
but general relativity implies both of these phenomenon, and thus (at least in
these two respects, relativity incorporates or integrates a larger set of true
propositions than Newtonian physics does).
Thus, even if we don't know that the theory of
relativity is strictly true in the conventional sense, we know that it is
strictly true with respect to a wide range of factual claims that we can make
on the basis of its premises.
I should also point out that knowledge is contextual,
but that being contextual does not make it subjective, even though the theory
may have to be replaced at some later date. With respect to the context of our
present empirical knowledge, general relativity is true and Newtonian physics
is only an approximation, but, at some future time, we will probably find that,
given an expanded context, general relativity is an approximation in somewhat
the same sense that we now regard Newtonian physics as an approximation.
This is a slightly specialized sense of truth, but it
is not especially radical, and it does enable us to keep truth from collapsing
into pure pragmatism (though, in technical terms, not all forms of pragmatism
are pragmatic by the meaning we normally associate with the term
"pragmatism").
Thus, while we cannot claim that a theory is true on
merely pragmatic grounds, we can claim that a theory that works and works
stupendously well and precisely must have something true about it, something
objectively true, or it would not be able to work as well as it does. Newtonian
physics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics all have a brilliant core of
truth in this sense, even if, in the final analysis, it turns out that they all
disagree with reality in some respects and we have to come up with better
theories.
I have dealt with this
issue of the relationship of scientific theories to reality at some length
because it is not only science made by certain intellectuals, in order,
apparently to make a name for themselves by outdoing others in the absurdity
and irrationality of their claims. Reason itself, ever since its explicit
identification in the depths of human history, has been attacked by some people
with prejudices to sell that would not go over well with a rational audience.
In modern times, these attacks on reason have been renewed by many
Existentialists, by postmodernists, by fundamentalists, by radical feminists,
and by people who want to appear sophisticated by adopting "modern,"
anti-mainstream views, regardless of their cognitive status.
4. Note: This is one of the reasons education (and not
mere schooling) is important. While full education obviously requires more than
merely the development of both the skills and the habits of rationality, the
development of the rational faculty beyond the level that it would achieve by
purely genetically-driven biological development is a core aspect of education
-- which, unfortunately, is almost perfectly and uniformly ignored or even
hindered by ordinary schooling, in all nations and all cultures on Earth today.
Our school systems teach some specific skills, such as spelling or arithmetic
explicitly, but leave all of the core development of reason to chance and to
whatever children learn by implication and sometimes by example.
Bibliography
I don't have formal
references, but here's a small bibliography. It's arranged alphabetically by
title, not by author.
by Daniel Dennett
Little, Brown and Company
Boston
by Stephen P. Stich
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
I have only read part of
this so far, and I'm not at all sure I will agree with his final conclusions,
but it seems to be pretty good in describing certain common cognitive failures.
by Michael Shermer
W.H. Freeman and Company
New York
Though I think Shermer's
explanations are not always complete, I found both this book and the one listed
below to be well worth reading.
by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
John Wiley & Sons
This book is now ten years
old, and I know that cognitive science has not stood still in the interval, but
this is still a pretty good book. There doesn't seem to be a new edition.
by Susan Blackmore
Oxford University Press
Oxford, England
by Micheal Shermer
W.H. Freeman and Company
New York
I haven't read these, but
I've read about some of their work, and it seems very likely that the papers
would be quite good
Feedback, discussion, comments, questions: Chris Cogan,
ccogan@ou.edu