In Search of Secrets

My kids have been on a bit of a ghost kick lately. They even have an imaginary friend named “Ladybug Ghost” who at least one of them seems to believe is an actual person.

I’ve been trying to teach my kids everything I wish I’d been taught about rationality when I was their age, with mixed success. Some ideas they’ve mastered right away, even going so far as to pass the techniques on to their teachers! Other techniques have been more difficult. I’ve started to get a feel for a pattern: many of the techniques of current rationality are about unlearning bad habits instilled in us by anti-epistemology, religion, and science worship–in other words, learned biases. Other techniques are focused on biases that are innate–flaws in our default way of thinking that are more or less inborn.

“Magic” seems to be innate.

I’ve tried to teach my children that there is no such thing as magic–not because things that seem “magical” must necessarily be false (see: reversed stupidity is not intelligence), but because there is no one particular thing the word “magic” points to. The word’s purpose is supposedly explanation–“so-and-so happened because of magic”–but it’s an empty explanation: a blueprint with nothing written on it but IOU.

The general case turns out to be an incredibly broad category of closely related cognitive failure modes. Human beings evolved curiosity, so we crave explanations–but an explanation’s ability to satisfy our curiosity is completely decoupled from its predictive power as a theory. Our instincts recognize something as an “explanation,” not when it can be used to generate accurate, concrete predictions of future stimuli, but when it feels narratively satisfying. Did it resolve the plot? If so, it counts as an explanation.

One of the giveaways of this type of mistake is that if you ask different people to be specific about the concept, or if you look at different stories and legends about it, none of them are entirely consistent. Take religion as an example: most people on the planet are religious, but different religions are almost nothing alike (excepting, of course, those with common ancestry). Some people pray to gods, some people pray to their ancestors, some people pray to the natural world–and some religions (such as Zen Buddhism) don’t have any analogue to prayer or deities!

Ghosts are another excellent example. What are ghosts? Where do they come from? What motivates them? Are they kind or malicious? Dangerous or safe? Can they interact with the physical world, or do they only affect people’s minds? Different stories give completely different answers.

The power of science comes, not from its rejection of superstition or supernaturalism per se, but from its replicability. It is built on the foundational truth that reality is no more or less than whatever doesn’t change depending on who you are or what you believe. There is nothing inherently unscientific about gods or ghosts or magic or anything else people have believed throughout history. It’s simply that, having actually investigated these things, science has concluded that they are not part of this “reality” business. The only detail they reliably share in common–which is to say, the only part of them that does come from reality–is the human imagination.

Of course, this is not the only mistake my kids are making when they blame their missing sock on a mischievous ghost. Magical thinking leads people to mistakenly accept explanations that don’t really explain anything, but there’s an even graver mistake in considering magical explanations in the first place–it’s called “privileging the hypothesis,” and I’ll talk about it more next week.