Pattern Recognition

I see a red pen sitting on my desk between my keyboard and my computer. How?

The answer cannot be as simple as “my eyes send me the information.” What is incoming from my retina is not a world with pens and keyboards but a pattern of colors, the contents of my visual field. Figuring out that the reason part of that pattern is red and part brown is that I am seeing a red object of particular shape and size sitting on a brown surface requires my brain to analyze that pattern and deduce from it what I am seeing. As A.I. researchers discovered when they tried to program computers to make such deductions, it is not easy. We are able to do it only because evolution has provided our brains with very sophisticated pattern recognition software, probably incorporating a good deal of information about the nature of the world around us, hence the likely meaning of what we see.

An analogous process occurs when we use the information available to us to form a picture of the world, not merely what is where in the visual field but what the universe is like and why. We are trying to construct a pattern, a picture of reality, which makes a reasonably good fit to the available facts. The fit is unlikely to be perfect both because we may not get the pattern quite right and because some of the “facts” we are fitting may not be. Just as in seeing, we are using pattern recognition software created by evolution and incorporating beliefs about the nature of reality, true or false, beliefs that are hardwired into us because they produced reproductive success for our ancestors.

Pattern recognition need not give an unambiguous result. The same black and white picture can be seen either as a vase or as two faces. A paranoid may have a picture of the world that fits all of the data available to him, with apparent inconsistencies explained by the plots of his enemies.

There are at least three interesting possibilities:

1. All religions are wrong; there are no gods.

2. One of the existing religions is correct or very close to correct in the form in which most believers hold it, a form inconsistent with all other existing religions. There is a tradition of Mohamed saying that, at the day of judgment, his followers would be divided into 73 sects of which only one would be saved; I see no logical reason why that could not be the case. If it is, the odds of getting the right version of the right religion are low.

3. There is a true religious belief and some, perhaps many, perhaps all, religions imperfectly reflect it. This makes sense if the reality in question is sufficiently hard for humans to understand that a correct account of it would be incomprehensible to them. I view this as the most interesting and plausible of the pictures of the world in which religions are not simply all wrong.

Some might object that if my third alternative is correct then almost all religious believers are wrong; if they are all wrong, what reason do we have to believe there is anything to religion at all?

Apply the same standard to our understanding of physical reality. We can intuit a description of light as a wave, we can intuit a description of light as a particle, to our intuition they seem inconsistent but each is a partial description of a single consistent reality.

In that case we know enough to write the equations for an explanation consistent with all of the evidence. But from the standpoint of someone living before the discovery of quantum mechanics or someone living now who, whether or not he knows quantum mechanics, does not intuit it, the situation is very much what I have described for religion. There is a reality out there of which we have two inconsistent pictures, both in part true, neither complete.

The same holds in other areas. Writing as an economist I frequently treat economics as if it were the full description of human behavior but it isn’t.^[1] Human beings routinely deal with complicated realities through models that have enough truth to be useful and are simple enough to be usable. There is no reason why, if there is a “religious reality” out there, if, for instance, there is something reasonably describable as a god (or gods), it should not fit the same pattern.

Humans use their pattern recognition software to make sense of the world around them; different people get different results. Since we do not have enough data to uniquely determine the pattern, the best guess someone accepts often depends in large part on what he is told by the people around him. That is true with regard to our beliefs about the nature of the physical world as well; none of us has enough first hand data to recreate most of what we believe about it. We believe in Australia and the North Pole even if we have never been to either, are dependent on second hand data and the results of other people’s analysis for much of out picture of the world. It is not surprising that, for those people who believe that there is a religious reality out there, what version they accept depends in large part on the beliefs of the people around them.

What about alternative 1 vs alternative 3? Once one sees the alternatives as “some version of the atheist world view is true” vs “some version of the theist world view is true,” the arguments for atheism become less compelling; most are attacks on onlyparticular versions of the theist world view. One is left with the question of which picture one finds more convincing. I observe that different people, even different intelligent and apparently rational people, reach different conclusions.

My own conclusion is that there are no gods but it is not so obviously true that all reasonable people ought to accept it.

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^[1] I have one article which tries to use evolutionary psychology to explain patterns of behavior inconsistent with economics