Critical Thinking: Pareidolia and Equivocation

For the first and second parts of this series, please go here and here.

For this installment, I'll be discussing the phenomenon of pareidolia and the equivocation fallacy.

Pareidolia

Pareidolia refers the phenomenon of humans' pattern recognition capabilities registering false positives.

And it is really common.

First, I'll talk about why pattern recognition is a good thing and how that probably came about.

Now, obviously, thousands of years ago life was much harder and much shorter for people. And for our ancestors, being able to recognize patterns quickly quite often meant the difference between life or death. A rustling in the grass might mean a rabbit, and it might mean a snake. Yellow and black stripes might mean a shade tree, and they might mean a tiger.

So it's easy to see why people that were good at recognizing these kinds of patterns and acting quickly on them would have had a tendency to survive more than those of us that weren't as good at deciding that every rustle in the grass means "SNAKE!" and every time black and yellow stripes appeared it meant "TIGER!" Since people that were better at pattern recognition were better at surviving, this meant that they lived longer, bred more, and passed the ability on through their offspring.

Today we can see that this knack for picking out patterns is just as active as ever, even though our day-to-day survival generally isn't dependent on it. Just look at the 'Face of Mars,' or some Rorschach Ink Blots, or the hundreds of people that have found the Virgin Mary in their food, or flying saucers, or optical illusions, or just stare at some clouds for a few minutes.

We're especially good at picking out faces. Especially especially where there aren't any faces.

In reality, there is no real reason to see a face in the above picture. But we humans almost always think 'friendly face' when we see two circles above a curved line.

And that would be a pretty obvious tendency to have, given how long it takes us to develop to maturity. It's a really simple pattern and would be really useful for a toddler to be able to identify if she were lost or distressed.

Now, here's where it gets interesting. We tend to assign intent to these patterns. We have a natural disposition for assuming that other people are somewhat like us: They behave a certain way, think a certain way, emote a certain way, and so on. And we do this on to animals as well.

Now, while it is fair to argue that most mammals do display some level of emotion and intellect, it certainly wouldn't be fair to say that they do so in the same way that humans do. But we think they do. If we didn't we may never have had a Mickey Mouse or a Bugs Bunny. Aesop's fables would have been much duller. On the other hand, our pets would probably be a lot happier with us if we weren't constantly torturing them by forcing them to wear clothes or pose for fucking pictures.

Even inanimate objects and events are assigned human characteristics. Thunder doesn't mean that the gods are angry. A tornado doesn't give a fuck about your house. The rain isn't aware that you just washed your car. A table never jumped out at anybody. But we act like they do.

So all of this leads us to constantly get correlation and causation mixed up and do things like think that a certain dance set to certain music will effect the weather, since it rained shortly after the last two times we danced. Mix this in with a little justification and some confirmation bias and suddenly we have rock solid evidence for the efficacy of rain dances.

And believe me, rain dances are no sillier than some of our other pareidoliac tendencies.

There's a school mysticism/pseudo-science known as synchronicity. Many, many people ascribe to it, even if they've never heard the word.

Synchronicity involves intentionally taking casually unrelated coincidences and assigning special meaning to them. Say, for instance, one morning I read "Youtube sensation converts to Scientology" on a website. Then that afternoon someone I don't know very well on Facebook asks "What do you know about Scientology? I was looking into it on Youtube." And then, low and behold, that evening I'm on Youtube and every other video seems to be mentioning Scientology.

Now, if I was as silly as I was ten years ago I might think this was some kind of sign that I should look into Scientology. Or maybe start a religion based around YouTube or social networking. But in reality, the things aren't related. Well, anymore than anything else.

It's just a coincidence.

But people get crazy dedicated to it, seeing significance in the colors of shirts people wear at the store, linking something someone says at a meeting to something that happened five years ago, finding a random New Age Happy Talk quote or their horoscope and forcing it to line up with their day.

But it's just coincidence.

And it builds all kinds of irrational beliefs and behaviors. Just because the third horse on the ticket won the race two times in a row doesn't mean that you've found the secret to making money on horse-races. Just because the fourth and eighth person on Chatroulette wasn't a naked dude jacking off doesn't mean the fourth person will always not be a lunatic pervert.

They will always be a lunatic pervert. Pissing Jesus, but will they ever.

Equivocation

Also known as the bait-and-switch, the equivocation fallacy is generally an argument or statement that involves intentionally using a term with more than one meaning. This generally looks something like:

• Man is the smartest creature on earth, and
• Man has conquered the earth, so
• Man, being the smart conqueror that he is, should have dominion over woman.

See what I did there? Not a great example, I admit, but I'm not nearly as good at being dishonest as I used to be. In the first two statements I used 'Man' in the meaning 'mankind' or 'homo sapiens'. But in the third statement I switched it out with 'man' in the sense of 'male human,' or 'fella'.

For an example of this fallacy performed on a level that probably qualifies as art, I'd suggest watching "Doctor" William Lane Craig debate the existence of God.

What Craig lacks in scholastic integrity and philosophical elegance he more than makes up for in invincible confidence and verbal hocus pocus.

Half his arguments are just eloquent this.

One of his strongest, or at least most often repeated, arguments is a bastardization of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The Kalam argument, in it's purest form, goes something like

1. Everything that exists has a cause.
2. The universe exists.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Now, I personally have no problem with that argument since I don't really have a lot invested in whether or not the universe could be said to have been caused. The fact is we don't know. We don't even know what we don't know. Once we get to the point of the Big Bang then we don't even know if terms like 'time' or 'cause' or 'existence' have any meaning.

Now here's where the equivocation comes in on Craig's part. He asserts that God is the first cause. This would be God in the Deistic sense: a God that merely set the dials of reality, pressed the start button, and doesn't interfere in his creation.

And while I don't see the logic in assuming that God was the first cause of the universe, since there's no way to check, as arguments for the existence of God go it's one of the less retarded ones.

Craig then equivocates by drawing a wordy-ass line from God: Non-Interfering Force of Nature to God: Jesus Christ of the Bible. And while I am Straw-Manning him to an extent for the purposes of brevity, I'd invite you to check out any of his many debates on YouTube, as he gallops out the same five or six arguments in every one I've seen, then when his opponents can't address every subtle nuance of every argument to his satisfaction, he claims victory.

Or, if they do refute all of his points he merely rewords them slightly or changes the subject, and claims victory. Which is called a Red Herring, which I'll discuss later.

ANYWAY.

The point is, is that even if Craig had managed to prove the existence of a Deistic god, that in no way provides any evidence for the God of the Bible, and certainly not the Christian god, because those are two very different meanings of the word god.

Some more common examples of this include the word UFO, which can mean Unidentified Flying Object, of course, and Alien Spaceship. Saying "People see UFO's all the time, they've got one buried out in the Desert outside of Roswell that they reverse engineered to build modern computers," is equivocating.

Big Government is another one. Does that mean big as in 'powerful, centralized government' or big as in 'a government composed of many different people and view-points'?

And finally, my favorite: Faith. Which can mean anything from fidelity, as in "I will be faithful to my girlfriend," to reasonable expectations, as in "I have faith that my friend will pay me on time," to belief in an irrational, supernatural claim despite any evidence to the contrary, as in "I have faith that Jesus will arrive on December 21, 2012 and take all the good Christians up to Heaven." 

So those are a couple of things to keep an eye out for, both internally and externally.

From here on out I'll probably only be addressing one thing at a time in an effort not to spend five hours a day staring at this screen. But I'll probably look at the Dunning-Kruger Effect next and Red Herrings after that.