Shermer’s patterns and agents

Renowned sceptic Michael Shermer’s TED talk covers his main ideas.

"patternicity" - the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise.

When we do this process, we make two types of errors.

A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not.

A Type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is.

Now I said back in our little thought experiment, you're a hominid walking on the plains of Africa. Is it just the wind or a dangerous predator? (Making a rustle in the grass).What's the difference between those? Well, the wind is inanimate; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent.

“agenticity” - is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency, often invisible beings from the top down. This is an idea from Dan Dennett, who talked about taking the intentional stance.

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception?language=en
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_shermer_the_pattern_behind_self_deception/transcript?language=en 


Shermer also briefly outlines his theory in the Scientific American.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/

His straightforward answer to the question “Why do people believe?” is stated in his 2011 book “The Believing Brain – from spiritual faiths to political convictions – how we construct beliefs and reinforce them as truths”.

“We form our beliefs for a variety of subjective, personal, emotional and psychological reasons in the context of environments created by family, friends, colleagues, culture and society at large;

After forming our beliefs we then defend, justify, and rationalise them with a host of intellectual reasons, cogent arguments, and rational explanations.

Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.

I call this process belief-dependent realism, where our perceptions about reality are dependant on the beliefs we hold about it. Reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold at any given time.”

See also - Sceptic Magazine - http://www.skeptic.com/about_us/meet_michael_shermer/