Agnosticism, Belief, and Echo Chambers

 The world seems vivid around us like Cinemax, but it is only clear in an area about the size of a postage stamp at arm's length. Our 20/20, full-color vision comes from a pit that comprises less than one percent of the retina but uses over 50% of the visual cortex. Everything else is, to varying degrees, a grayish blur. Stare at a word on the far left side of this screen and, holding that tight focus, try to read a word a few inches to its right. You can't. The impulse will be to "look," to shift your focus right, but, if you do, the word to the left will blur. 

          We experience a photograph-like world around us because our eyes are constantly moving, stitching together postage-stamp snapshots to form panoramas (plus our quickness to focus on whatever interests us). Our visual world is a montage, a construct of remembered fragments constructing a narrow space that ends with the walls of a room, a street, a row of trees, and the like. The past provides context. The world we live in, insofar as we can experience it from the bottom up, is a trace of memories.

Given this and similar limitations in all the senses, how can we form true beliefs? As Kant theorized and psychological experiments conform, we come into the world programed to make sense of it (newborns can recognize faces and objects in space), but specific experience-based beliefs are created by noticing patterns of events. Beliefs formed this way (by "induction") are famously unreliable. We overgeneralize from a few strong examples, often a single overwhelming one--like my old dog Schubert's lifelong terror of being in a box after surviving a tornado in his doghouse. And even when we  scientifically generalize from a large sample of events, sampling error is unavoidable. 

          Thousands of white swans condition us to believe that the next swan we see will be white. This is a useful bird-watching guide, but black swans exist. Our primary knowledge of swans is generalized from a probabilistically sampling of all possible waterfowl, and we can't be expected to travel the swan-world expanding our sample, so we're stuck with statistically unreliable conclusions about swans--and similarly with every other conclusion we form by induction.

We like to imagine that we base our beliefs on experience, but we wouldn't survive long if this were our heuristic. Almost everything we believe that we know is something we've been told and haven't personally tested, a protective cocoon of education that begins with our first words and goes back millions of years into our prehuman lineage. Any hominid that ate forbidden purple berries to ascertain inductively that they were deadly or paused to collect inductive evidence that lions were carnivores was culled from our lineage. 

         Human newborns, even in the most rudimentary societies, spend at least a decade being educated, learning beliefs that their elders believe from being told, in turn, by their elders. Systems of beliefs, of course, evolve with the environment and are ideally modified by experts able to search for black swans. I was twenty-seven before I finished a Ph.D., and I'm still learning by reading the writings of my elders--not living writers older than I am (there are very few of those), but established cultural documents.

It's all about authority. I have no direct sensory evidence that the earth is round and orbits the sun in space. Honestly, it looks flat, and the sun seems to cross a blue sky. Astronomical facts, along with nearly everything I know about science, are confirmed only by faith in scientific and educational institutions, embellished by a few classroom demonstrations. I base this faith on the the success of science-based technology such as the iPad I'm typing this into with a wireless keyboard, the text transmitted via wi-fi to the Cloud. This would have been  a wild fantasy back in 1955 when I spent an inflation-adjusted $30 on a single CK722 transistor swapped between projects. At the time, I had a lab in the garage and wanted to become an engineer (my brother and two of my sons did). 

         By college, my interests had shifted toward literature and philosophy, but, whatever the field, formal education demonstrates the power of collective, evidence-based problem solving, the reliability of information arrived at by evaluating sources and insisting on documentation. Anything I wrote in a research paper that was merely my opinion (a factual conclusion without a chain of supporting evidence) was sure be marked off. 

Scientific revolutions happen, Galileos have been silenced, but, most of the time, peer-reviewed journals and double-sourced, fact-checked professional journalists are best when facts matter. In July 2020, social media is abuzz with claims of  untested Covid-19 therapies. Such chatter is harmless at the level of gossip, but, as a trained researcher acquainted with the Placebo Effect and the unreliability of small samples, I won't believe any therapy works without successful randomized, large-scale, double-blind trials. I don't use the word believe here in the faith sense--not as cognate of belove--but in the context of epistemology, the field of philosophy that tries to understand what basis there is for justifying true beliefs.

In terms of strict contemporary epistemology, hardly any religious statement can be justifiably believed, not as a proposition about shared external phenomena--not as a fact of science or its fuzzy borderland in common sense. Hearty skepticism, a firm prove it, explodes piety. But still, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, over fifty percent of Americans believe in the God of the Bible, and eighty percent affirm some kind of  spiritual power. How do we arrive at beliefs of this kind? 

          In his video lecture series, "Theories of Knowledge: How to Think about What You Know," Joseph H. Shieber systematically demolishes internalism as an epistemological criterion, establishing that--whatever our aspirations and pretenses--we cannot reliably deduce or induce true belief by reflecting on first-hand experience. Shieber also dismisses--a little hastily perhaps--coherence as a criterion for truth, but he has a good point. If two "facts" seem contradictory, which one is wrong? And is the contradiction merely an artifact of language? “A foolish consistency," as Emerson said, "is the hobgoblin of little minds." Having demolished would-be epistemological foundations of the greats from Rene Descartes to Bertrand Russell, Shieber proposes a solution for a cyber century: we believe what our echo chambers tell us. As irresponsible as this sounds, it is ultimately the best that we can do. We just have to be careful.

Shieber explains (with experimental support) some basic difficulties: we often fail at evaluating the reliability of testimony. We often forget where we learned things, but we still accept the information as reliable. Eliminate everything we know from unvetted or unrecalled sources, and there's not much left. We usually believe what we hear unless we have reason not to--unless it clashes with prior beliefs or come from a sketchy source--but this can't justify calling the information knowledge, "justifiable true belief." Obviously, we hear untrue things. 

          Shieber has given up on the kind of absolute truth that Descartes hoped to deduce and asks more modestly how we achieve beliefs that we can have reasonable confidence in. Not Truth, but well-vetted probability. Our personal powers of observation are so limited that he sees our best source of reliable belief in the social networks of information processing that surround us. Call this epistemological crowd-funding. 

         Psychological experiments have shown that, confronted with a strong consensus of others (rigged by the experimenter), people affirm observationally false beliefs. But this is a false situation, rigged to deceive. In real life, faced with a choice between believing I am wrong or everybody else is, I am on safer ground assuming that I am. Faced with a medical decision, it's very rare that a patient has the leisure and background to independently evaluate all the experimental and clinical data related to it, much less run his own double-blind lab trials, so he's left trusting the physician in his social network, an expert informed in turn by her own professional network with tiers of expertise: friends of friends, advisors of advisors.

Shieber invokes Dunbar's number, 150, the brain-defined limit for a person's group of casual friends (inside circles of some 500 acquaintances and 1500 recognized faces) and expands this with research showing the importance of weak ties, strangers who are friends of friends and their friends. Because we outsource information processing to our friends, who outsource to theirs and so forth, we center of a fuzzy network of influencers, and yet (rationally unless the system system seems to be broken) we still reasonably accept the consensus of our Dunbar circle of 150. If you disagree with everybody you know, you may be a Galileo, but you're probably delusional.

            Shieber's theory, in his words, "doesn't require that we consciously screen out unreliable sources from reliable ones, but . . . the screening process is completely offloaded from the individual to the social network or networks in which he or she is embedded" (p. 164). The obvious danger is of toxic social contagions spreading though networks--madness of crowds--so  Shieber's theory allows for paying attention to "the man behind the curtain." 

         We are certainly able to sense incoherence between a given network and other experience, and, even if we aren't able to gaze into raw experience and improvise a truth-structure out of whole cloth, we can and do often participate in more than one competing network and may shift allegiance from one to another. A term for this kind of shift is conversion, which can be like the tipping of a fulcrum.

Shieber goes on to discuss the role of professional fact-checking and other ways to avoid factual error, but I find his theory of social networks interesting with respect to religious belief, which is broadly non-factual, insulated from publicly falsifiable truth (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2019/10/kalashnikov-truth.html). To some degree religion is internal and personal. We certainly are drawn to particular religious networks that fit our personalities and experiences (some popular networks give me the creeps), but the externality of influence is not to be minimized, as our personalities are shaped by our experience with social and family networks. So most religious people, even if they have changed nominal denominations, are still situated in externally defined networks of faith. 

Friedrich Schleiermacher saw the network of the church as a presence of Christ: "The influence of his community takes the place of his personal influence, because the picture of him that is still available to us in the scriptures owes its origin and perpetuation to the community. . . . the community's influence in producing the same faith is simply the influence of the personal perfection of Jesus himself" (Gerrish, p. 35). Christ lives in the social network.

         This influence may come from an expansive network, perhaps the Catholic magisterium or a theological library, but I've met protestants whose ultimate religious authority was "the preacher," a man whose sole training might be Bible study and hearing other preachers. Once we are in a network, the well-documented tendency to believe the most popular ideas in a networks tends to keep us orthodox.

References

Gerrish, B. A. A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology. Wipf and Stock, 2001.

Shieber, Joseph H. Theories of Knowledge: How to Think about What You Know: Course Guidebook. The Great Courses, 2019.