David Brook’s Magical Thinking

Via IOZ, I see that David Brooks has penned a column singing praises of the rise of “spiritualism” in neuroscience. I have long been of the opinion that the next big battle between the scientific worldview and received religious tradition would take place on this front, and Brooks seems to agree with me. He’s on the opposing side though, and we see him extrude the standard mystical gibberish of those of his persuasion. Like this for instance:

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

That’s classic magical thinking. We hear from Brooks that the brain seems less like “a cold machine” and that it doesn’t “work like a computer” (an odd implication, since just about every consumer level PC requires cooling systems to prevent it from overheating). Instead, we hear about some vague, quasi-mystical series of events that somehow renders unto the brain properties that distinguish it from mundane machines. Top-down thinking comes so naturally to us that peripheral and ambient effects among distributed interacting agents look magical, but there is no compelling reason to actually assent to such a belief. It is what Daniel Dennett calls an “intuition pump”, one which confers an intuitive misunderstanding. Distributed and parallel processing are certainly not alien to computer scientists, especially those who work in graphics. There is nothing inherently mysterious about how triangles, polyhedra, lighting, etc. arise from stream processors on a GPU, and there is no reason to assume, even in the absence of a unified scientific explanation of such, that a similar process among neural networks is magical.