Truth is Timeless

[labelwench]

There is some speculation, based on examination of the brain, an organ whose function is still quite shrouded in mystery to us, that we have evolved genetically to 'believe' in something, possibly as a coping mechanism in times of stress. Genetically inheritable, though not inherited by all, this could be another example of diverse evolution, which in several species shows several branches evolving simultaneously, and not just successively.

If the 'belief factor' is truly an inherent genetic trait, this would clearly explain why the two camps ever have been at odds, and likely to remain so.

As for the brain itself, it has also been put forward as a theory quite recently, that perhaps no two brains are 'wired' in quite the same way, which would also explain the challenges we encounter in communication, though we may use the same language, verbal and visual aids.

Interesting that the facial language of emotion appears to cross all boundaries with the greatest consistency.

Just my 2 cents worth......

[austintorn@aol.com]

ERRORS

A type I error,
Or a false positive,
As believing something is real
When it is not.

A type II error,
Or a false negative,
Is not believing something is real
When it is.

Believers in UFOs, alien abductions,
ESP, and psychic phenomena
Have committed a Type 1 Error in thinking:
They are believing a falsehood.

... It’s not that these folks
Are ignorant or uninformed;
They are intelligent but misinformed.
Their thinking has gone wrong.

In the search for truth
It could be that we ignore
Evidence of the truth,
By ‘neglect’,
In order not to be ‘duped’,
Or because it is not what we wish.

So, we believe a falsehood.
This is a type-1 error.

To compound this,
Sometimes we go on to believe
The opposite, regardless,
A type-2 error—and get duped anyway.

The terms Type I error (false positive)
And type II error (false negative)
Are used to describe possible errors
Made in a statistical decision process.

Type I: reject the null-hypothesis
When the null-hypothesis is true, and
Type II: fail to reject the null-hypothesis
When the null-hypothesis is false

We must be able to reduce the chance
Of rejecting a true hypothesis
To as low a value as desired;
And the test must be so devised
That it will reject the hypothesis tested
When it is likely to be false”

A type I error, or a false positive,
Is believing something is real when it is not.

— Gravity can be suspended.

— One can communicate with other dimensions.

— Was not in sleep paralysis for OBE/NDE.

What is more likely, a miracle or not?

— Condensed from Michael Shermer,
Why People Believe Weird Things, Introduction

[austintorn@aol.com]

In many cases, these errors in thinking do not get us into trouble. In spite of committing errors of thinking, we sometimes do get it right. Shermer calls these occurrences hits.

Type 1 Hits occur when we do not believe a falsehood. For example, most people who read the astrology column in a newspaper do not run their lives by what they read.

Type 2 Hits occur when we believe a truth. For example, people may believe intuitively that they are unwell, even if one or two doctors have found nothing wrong. Not believing expert opinion, these people continue to seek answers. A hit occurs when they finally receive confirmation that their intuition was right.

It might seem that making these types of errors is not a good thing, so we may question why this way of thinking evolved. According the Shermer, "the process of forming beliefs is genetically hardwired", because "The Belief Engine is a useful mechanism for survival, not just for learning about dangerous and potentially lethal environments (where Type 1 and 2 Hits help us survive), but in reducing anxiety about the environments." We reduce anxiety about uncertain and stressful situations by making Type 1 and Type 2 Errors of thinking, leading us to believe something that is not true. Shermer calls this type of thinking magical thinking. "We think magically because we have to think causally. We make Type 1 and Type 2 Errors [when we get it wrong] because we need to make Type 1 and Type 2 Hits [when we get it right].

[austintorn@aol.com]

We have magical thinking and superstitions because we need critical thinking and pattern-seeking. The two cannot be separated. Magical thinking is … a necessary by-product of the evolved mechanism of causal thinking." Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, author of Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds, defines magical thinking as a way of pretending: even when we know something is not true, we still believe that it is true. For example, when the AIDS virus came to the attention of people at the Red Cross, it is likely that many people involved fell prey to magical thinking, pretending that tainted blood would not become a problem.

There are two ways in which knowing about magical thinking is important to us in this time of increasing change and uncertainty. First, recall the story of the humans, the mice, the maze, and the cheese in the last InfoMine (see Vol. 7, No. 4). In this story, when the cheese was moved, humans wanted to believe that it would reappear. Thus, they waited for the cheese to reappear, even though there was a good chance that it would not. These humans were exhibiting magical thinking. Their error was in rejecting a truth (Type 2 Error: the cheese is gone, but I don't want to believe it), and in pretending that this was only a minor problem (Type 1 Error: the cheese will reappear). In organizations, many people wish for the return of the good old days. They believe that the uncertainty that is overwhelming them is an anomaly that will correct itself soon. In fact, if we carefully observe how people act in organizations, we may notice something quite strange. In most cases, change and uncertainty have been occurring for at least 5 to 10 years, and yet, many people still believe that this situation will go away.

Second, in his book How We Believe, Shermer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist who lived among the Trobriand Islanders, off the coast of New Guinea, from 1914 to 1918. Malinowski made an intriguing observation: "We find magic wherever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear, have a wide and extensive range. We do not find magic wherever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under control of rational methods and technological processes." In other words, as uncertainty increases, so does our tendency for magical thinking. More to the point, most of us are experiencing a great deal of change and uncertainty in both our working and personal lives. The natural conclusion is that we deal with this increasing change and uncertainty by relying more heavily on magical thinking, in order to reduce our anxiety.

Not only do many of us believe that this time of uncertainty will pass, but also we use magical thinking to help us to deal with the anxiety that these times produce. James Lucas wrote a book, Fatal Illusions: Shredding a Dozen Unrealities that Can Keep Your Organization from Success, to explain and address this phenomena. Lucas lists 12 fatal illusions, all of which derive from magical thinking. Here are four of those illusions, any or all of which may be evident in organizations today:

• If we have a mission statement, everyone will know where we are going.
• Everyone knows and understands what is important in this organization.
• I think we can get away with that.
• We can run this thing without sharing that information.

These four illusions demonstrate common errors in thinking. Unfortunately, if we continue to believe these illusions, we prevent ourselves, and our organizations, from achieving full potential.

"illusions gain and maintain their power, not because we're ignorant of reality, but because we sense or know the reality and choose to avoid it. We might tell ourselves that we don't know anything different or have all the facts, while what we're really doing is entering more deeply into a process of illusion building. We don't like parts of reality, so we use the mammoth capacity of our minds to put [reality] in a dungeon."
-James R. Lucas, Fatal Illusions: Shredding a Dozen Unrealities that Can Keep Your Organization from Success ,(1997)

[austintorn@aol.com]

And the wrap-up:

Patternicity
December 2008

Michael Shermer

Noun. The tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise

Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.

Traditionally, scientists have treated patternicity as an error in cognition.

A type I error, or a false positive, is believing something is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern). A type II error, or a false negative, is not believing something is real when it is (not recognizing a real pattern — call it “apatternicity”). In my 2000 book How We Believe, I argue that our brains are belief engines: evolved patternrecognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. Sometimes A really is connected to B; sometimes it is not. When it is, we have learned something valuable about the environment from which we can make predictions that aid in survival and reproduction. We are the descendants of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning and it is fundamental to all animal behavior, from the humble worm C. elegans to H. sapiens.

Unfortunately, we did not evolve a Baloney Detection Network in the brain to distinguish between true and false patterns. We have no error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-recognition engine. (Thus, the need for science with its self-correcting mechanisms of replication and peer review.) But such erroneous cognition is not likely to remove us from the gene pool and would therefore not have been selected against by evolution.

In a September 2008 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, “The Evolution of Superstitious and Superstition-like Behaviour,” Harvard University biologist Kevin R. Foster and University of Helsinki biologist Hanna Kokko test my theory through evolutionary modeling and demonstrate that whenever the cost of believing a false pattern is real is less than the cost of not believing a real pattern, natural selection will favor patternicity. They begin with the formula pb > c, where a belief may be held when the cost (c) of doing so is less than the probability (p) of the benefit (b). For example, believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is only the wind doesn’t cost much, but believing that a dangerous predator is the wind may cost an animal its life.

The problem is that we are very poor at estimating such probabilities, so the cost of believing that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind is relatively low compared with the opposite. Thus, there would have been a beneficial selection for believing that most patterns are real. Through a series of complex formulas that include additional stimuli (wind in the trees) and prior events (past experience with predators and wind) the authors conclude that “the inability of individuals — human or otherwise — to assign causal probabilities to all sets of events that occur around them will often force them to lump causal associations with non-causal ones. From here, the evolutionary rationale for superstition is clear: natural selection will favour strategies that make many incorrect causal associations in order to establish those that are essential for survival and reproduction.”

In support of a genetic selection model, Foster and Kokko note that “predators only avoid nonpoisonous snakes that mimic a poisonous species in areas where the poisonous species is common,” and that even such simple organisms as “Escherichia coli cells will swim towards physiologically inert methylated aspartate presumably owing to an adaptation to favour true aspartate.”

Such patternicities, then, mean that people believe weird things because of our evolved need to believe nonweird things.

[MJA]

And the dogma of science is its measure.

=
MJA

[Meem]

It's good to know that UFOs/aliens are an absolute verifiable falsehood. And as for communications with other dimensions, don't tell any string theorists that a "real-tv" scientist already knows what they dream to be possible, is not.

Truth, is stranger than fiction.

[Lloyd Gillespie]

Many seem to forget c is absolute measure's foundation...

[austintorn@aol.com]

For the SuperHeavyWeight Championship of the Universe:

God vs. Science

Exciting, strong, decisive:



(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEIfNTwFP40)

(The other 3 parts are out there, nearby, if you want to watch more)

[cosvis]

Hi Lloyd,
The spiritual, personal or religious reality is just one part of the total reality that can be studied and thus can be called a science. The personal reality has definite principles like the virtues of faith, hope, trust, kindness, forgiveness and love; using proper reasoniing or logic, it investigates the reality of revelations, natural and supernatural. It is different from the physical reality and has different methods of investigations. The difference is similar to the difference between "Law" and the "Fine Arts", both of these fields also belong to reality and can be studied as sciences. I think one should also respect people of faith. If you do not respect them you end up not respecting most of humanity and this can lead to great miseries like Marcism that lead to communism and the gulags; or Nazism that lead to the concentration camps. These occurred because people disrespected people of faith. Whether you like it or not, spiritual reality exists. I think it would be better if the physical scientists should restrict their investigations to the physical reality and use its proper method and principles of investigations. To mix up the different sciences would only bring unnecessary difficulties.
Yours cosvis.