A New Fallacy? The Infallible Person

I'm not sure if this fallacy has been talked about before in the depth that I'm about to talk about it or even if it is correctly identified as a new fallacy. What is clear is that it is an error in reasoning that hinders many peoples thinking without them even realizing they are making a mistake. That error is thinking that the mind works perfectly and is a perfect translator of external events to sensory information to rational understanding to memory retention and recall. Which could be encompassed in the argument from authority fallacy where any person is the authority of what they did/didn't do, but I don't think that, that description encompasses the totality of  different kinds of errors being made.

Any person considers themselves the authority on what they did or did not do. I was at the casino last night and played poker, lay down my flush draw when I should have but got criticized about it, and all sorts of other things. These are the types of things people hold unquestionably true.


The mind does a wonderful job taking different waves at different frequencies and turning them into something intelligible, but it does error and on top of that it makes systematic mistakes; to err is human, and people don't understand how truly human they are. This is because the brain and body do such a seamless job, most of the time, that unless these mistakes are being consciously looked for they are unnoticed or shrugged off. Forgotten almost immediately, escaping notice, leaving no reason to doubt a personal infallibility about what is going/went on in the world.

However, mistakes are made, remotes end up in the freezer next to the popsicle's and ice cream end's up in the fridge under the cheese slices. These are the common errors that the mind makes when it is busy and concentrating on something else, the programming was there so the mistake shouldn't have been made, but it was made anyway, due to any number of reasons.

Pareidolia took this Canadian bill off the market (See the Devils head?)

There are another class of errors that aren't mistakes, per say, they are errors that are purposely made or that are there for a reason. Pareidolia, the common misconception of memory, cognitive dissonance, implanted memories, and  intuitive measurement, intuitive probability (Monty Hall Problem). Yet, despite these and the more common problems like miss identification people normally don't doubt any of the knowledge they have.

This all accumulates into a host of unknown phenomena being understood as 'real'.  Ghost stories have started by objects moving and no one being able to account for who moved them, extraterrestrial visits have been caused by implanted memories and a host of other things,  lucky streaks happen because of the poor understanding of probability, and many other supernatural occurrences can be accounted for just with the fallacy of the person thinking that they are infallibly seeing the world, instead of seeing reality through a evolutionary crafted human lens.  

This failure is mainly due to the mind working so well that its non-perfect functioning is a novel amusement (the inward nose) and (balls rolling uphill). No one really thinks about how often their brain gets something wrong and the people who do think about it might fit into the category of people who look at the brain as the work of a divine hand that could craft a brain that sees the true picture of reality, instead of a product with limitations and made not for the purpose of understanding reality, but for being a successful gene package.

Pariedolia works, it has often been noted, because the 8 times you mistake a tiger being in a bush, your only out a couple seconds of your time, but the one time you don't see the tiger in the bush you may be out your life. Errors can be just mistakes or they can built into the mind itself for enhanced survival. Mistakes exist in categories that aren't the exception, but instead the rule.

So when a lady tells me she knows that a house is haunted because one day a hairbrush went missing and turned up in the kitchen cupboard, I don't doubt that hairbrush went missing, but I question the persons memory about things they have done. There needn't be ghosts when there are so many specters of the human mind. Seeing isn't believing.

Which pretty much covers the basics of this fallacy, the fallacy that the mind functions perfectly. People think that their brain works perfectly and their version of reality is what infallibly happened, instead of the brain producing a, usually, well working picture of reality through a human lens.

Thanks for reading,
-themoralskeptic

Seeing Isn't Believing

This is a bit of a dedication to the previous color scheme I was using and the after images some of those previous readers experienced after reading some of my longer posts. In this post I will show some optical illusions, which are always fun to see, talk about what the human brain actually gets from the eyes, and then talk about some of the ramifications.

Those people who were unlucky enough to see my blog in its past format can stare at the picture on the right for 30 or so seconds and then look away to a white or soft colored background. This is because your retina will adapt to the unchanging stimulus and actually stop responding to it. So people who were reading my white text on the black background were inadvertently 'looking at the x', and then seeing waves of text as after images. It then takes a little while for it to start adjusting again. I got this information and picture from the sampling of Illusions page, which I found linked from Scientific American.

The winner of the the best illusion from this year actually has relevance to my home country of Canada. The winner showed how from one perspective it looks like balls are rolling up hill. This is something found in Moncton, New Brunswick in a place that is referred to as Magnetic Hill. It is called Magnetic Hill, because that was how some people explained how the cars could be 'pulled' uphill. There is even a wikipedia page on it and About has an article that shows nearly a dozen places in the US that are like it.

It is actually surprising that the brain isn't tricked by optical illusions more often  Ray Kurzweil does a great job in The Singularity is Near (pages 185 -188) pointing out some information that I will summarize here, but if you don't have the book you can find nearly the same information here. It really points out that the process of vision is a collection of stimulus, then the cortex makes guess about what it is seeing and tries to match it up with something. There is an illusion that the eyes are sending high resolution pictures, but what is really being sent is 10-12 output channels, each carrying minimal information. One group looks for the changes in contrast, another looks for uniformity in color, while another constraints solely on the background of what is of central attention. Kurzweil goes as far to say that, "[After getting those 10-12 pictures from the brain] We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels. There is a picture in the book that gives a general idea of what the eye see's but for the life of me I couldn't find it on the internet.

Anyway given the lack of actual information and how the brain makes up for it, and the beliefs of people I am actually surprised more ghosts and flying saucers aren't seen. Pareidolia, can be seen in how people can see what they are looking for in random visual information, and is a source of money for those who can make a Jesus like object appear on anything.  

I recently experienced some pareidolia myself. When I am fishing I am constantly looking for fish in the water, and I looked beside the boat and saw what I thought to be a huge fish. I was startled then realized that the fish wasn't moving and that it was instead a rock, but I was tricked for a few seconds.

There is no shame in being tricked, and when people are looking for a specific thing they will find it eventually. There will be stimulus that the mind will link to that thing. People are great a picking out patterns in clouds, the real skill comes in after the image is seen and distinguishing the meaning of these patterns.

Thanks for reading,
The Moral Skeptic