POETICKS

What follows as a review for Amazon I just wrote.

I bought a copy of Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain in hopes that it would help me improve my own theory of how people come to believe in nonsense. As a rival of his in the field, I was also curious as to how his theory of that compared with mine. It doesn’t. I would love to be able to spend several thousand words to say why, but this is just an Amazon review, so I will have to be brief and superficial.

The main difference between his theory and mine is that his doesn’t go very deeply into brain structure. We find out from him what parts of the brain are involved with the patterns he hypothesizes we all form in our attempts to make sense of the world, and discusses dopamine, which scientists have long held to be active in Skinnerian reinforcement. It seems to Shermer to contribute much to some persons’ being more likely to find patterns in noise than others’. Which is clearly akin to seeing conspirational patterns where there are none. That, alas, is as far as
he goes.

Compare that to my theory, and you’ll see the problem. My theory involves not just a few different areas of the bain and neuro-transmitters, but what the areas contain, to wit: collection of brain-cells whose activation is experienced as an understanding of some fairly significant aspect of reality, say the biology of housecats, or of the human eye, or of all mammals. I show in detail how one (entirely hypothetical) element oversees the organization of the connections made between each of the brain-cells, and how endocrines (like dopamine) reinforce or weaken these connections–due to other elements’ judgement of their effectiveness (which has to do, basically, with their ability to keep a person’s ratio of pleasure to pain as high as possible).

I also show what happens when the person involved encounters new information, in particular new information that contradicts the person’s understanding. I posit that people have different temperaments that have a great deal to do with how sensitive they are to contradictions–
how susceptible to confirmation bias. I show in detail why, neurophysiologically, one temperament will make a person gullible, another resistant to unhappy facts, and another . . . scientific. That is, I show what I think happens to individ ual cells as a result of a
person’s temperament that determines how believing his mind is.

Shermer doesn’t begin to do anything like this, preferring references to trivial psychological experiments having to do with things like whether people engaged in a game will notice a gorilla who walks nonchalantly through their play area or not. Interesting anecdotes, and not entirely
irrelevant, just not of much help to someone like me. My ideas may make far less sense than his, but my attempt is far more worth making than his.

I also feel that Shermer jumps around too much. He sometimes seems more intent on arguing for some outlook of his–on religion or politics, mainly–than on providing an in-depth portrait of a believing brain.

Among my other problems with him is his assertion that you can’t prove a negative. No doubt I’m missing something, but surely if I prove I’m a human being, I prove I’m not a chimpanzee.

He loses me, too, when he claims that a person’s consciousness is just a bunch of brain-cells firing. Nowhere does he seem to realize that consciousness, the inexplicable Me inside all of us (it seems to me although I have no way of knowing whether or not any consciousness but
mine exists), is something wholly different from matter. How it can simply arise when some creature’s nervous system becomes complex enough somehow to form it seems to me as absurd as the idea that a universe can simply arise when some deity’s nervous system becomes complex enough to form it.

I have a question for Shermer, and those as committed to his idea of consciousnesses as he: if I use a blackjack to knock you unconscious, how can you tell whether I’ve rendered your consciousness effectually dead, or merely rendered it empty by blocking its access to data, as
well as its access to wherever it is that memories are formed? My wonder in this area goes alarmingly further, to the belief that I can’t feel certain a stone lacks consciousness.

Despite all my criticisms, I would certainly not call Shermer’s book worthless. He’s a clear writer, and more clear a thinker than many are on the subject his book is about, which is not an easy one. I’d call The Believing Brain superior (and mostly entertaining) journalism. It’s just not serious science. (But there aren’t that many scientists doing what I’d call serious science.)