There’s an annoying book review in today’s Wall Street Journal of Michael Shermer’s latest attempt at reductionism, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts to God and Politics. As the review glowingly summarizes the book, people are hard-wired to find patterns in random events, and “there’s a neurological upside to pattern-finding: When we come across information that confirms what we already believe, we get a rewarding jolt of dopamine.” Ergo, “God is simply the human explanation for pattern-making and agency on an epic scale,” along with “aliens” and other “things unseen.”
The reviewer, Ronald Bailey, who is a correspondent for “Reason” magazine, notes that
it is science itself that Mr. Shermer most heartily embraces. “The Believing Brain” ends with an engaging history of astronomy that illustrates how the scientific method developed as the only reliable way for us to discover true patterns and true agents at work. Seeing through a telescope, it seems, is believing of the best kind.
It doesn’t take much “reason” to wonder how “science” or “the scientific method” have escaped the long tendrils of the wish-fulfillment and confirmation bias Shermer and Bailey descry in every other area of human belief. Perhaps Bailey and Shermer enjoy a “rewarding jolt of dopamine” upon observing the “patterns” of naivete among the vast unenlightened masses of human history? Does the observed “pattern” of correlation between dopamine levels and belief confirmation really determine the truth of their theories, or are the theories underdetermined projections upon the “data?” Is belief in the “scientific method” — belief that there is even a simple and definable “scientific method” — just another instance of blind faith in “things unseen?” (Can “the scientific method” be observed in a telescope?)
If Shermer is correct, one could never know. We are then each trapped in prisons of epistemic reflexivity, doomed to repeat an infinite feedback loop of unknowing from which there is no escape.
2 replies on “Patterns, Mind Games, and the Supremacy of Science?”
“Epistemic reflexivity”! Loved that last sentence.
Good observation, but I’m mostly commenting because the last sentence somehow brought to mind You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
That shows my age and my geekdom.