Reduced analytical thinking and the Great Filter Theory
In his book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan stated: “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” At the dawn of the 21st century, it seems that we are living this dystopia advocated by Carl Sagan. Apparently, the popularization of rational and analytical thought and scientific knowledge, which has occurred in the last three centuries, has not yet succeeded in overcoming the superstitious and mythical-religious thought, rooted in human culture for hundreds of thousands of years. And that will have disastrous consequences for humanity, as we will see in this story.
Since Homo sapiens emerged on Earth, ignorance, misinformation, and misunderstanding have always taken part in the human condition. Ancient peoples cultivated all sorts of religious and spiritual beliefs. Amulets, totems, and spells were used to ward off evil. Animals and people were sacrificed to the gods to receive good luck.
In the Middle Ages, scientific thinking began to develop. However, faced with the prevailing belief systems (superstitions and mythical-religious thinking), generally lost the clash. The Enlightenment was a “watershed”; it was the historical event that elevated science to the condition of legitimate and reliable knowledge, which endures to this day.
Since the 18th century, the scientific method has gradually established itself as the most reliable source of knowledge. Science and its prodigal son, technology, operated a real revolution in human well-being, especially after the Industrial Revolution. The main preoccupations of humanity throughout its existence (famine, disease, war) have been combated to such an extent that today they are far from being the people’s main concern. Life expectancy has increased exponentially. Humanity has never experienced a time of peace, prosperity, and social welfare like the contemporary.
Even so, at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity seems to be involuting. Topics such as flat Earth, creationism and anti-vaccine movements have returned to the agenda. Science denial has returned with full force, influencing, including, business and government policies, such as denial of anthropic global warming, denial of fires and deforestation in tropical forests (confirmed by satellite images), propaganda of medicines for COVID-19 treatment without scientific proof of effectiveness, just to cite a few examples. What would be happening to humanity? Were we entering a new Dark Ages? Would we be leaving the Age of Reason and entering the Ignorance Era?
It happens that, although science has become very popular over the last three centuries and imposed itself on superstition, superstitious thought has never ceased to be present among us. Just see how many people, these days, consult horoscope, fortune-tellers, tarot and coffee grounds, read the tea leaves, avoid the number 13, black cats, break mirrors or walk under stairs, use amulets, clothes, specific colors, and numbers, evoke spells, visit places associated with good luck, among other beliefs. Other examples of superstition are athletes who always wear the same outfit or boot in competitions, or grow “playoff beards”, or wear amulets to preserve a winning streak.
Burrhus Frederic Skinner demonstrated that it is possible to induce behaviors in animals and humans employing reinforcements (positive or negative). He realized that animals also exhibit superstitious behavior patterns. Skinner introduced the concept of operant behavior, which describes a relationship in which a response that generates a consequence (or is only accompanied by it, as in the case of superstitious behavior) has a certain probability of occurring again in a similar context, modified by the effect of the consequence on the interaction. He concluded that, in a sense, all behavior maintained by reinforcement is, by nature, superstitious.
In addition to superstitions, a large number of people are prone to believe in fake news and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are not as intrinsically positive, optimistic, and uplifting as most belief systems, such as religion for example. People prone to believe in them have a personality trait known as schizotypy, which combines several distinct qualities, including eccentricity (unusual ideas and experiences) and a tendency to distrust others and to consider the world as a dangerous place. They are people with more obsessive and paranoid traits, who need to feel itself special, they are more likely to detect significant patterns (which may not exist), and they are more likely to judge absurd statements as profound, which is known as bullshit receptivity. A study published in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition reveals that dogmatic people and those with delusional personalities, reduced analytical thinking, and religious fundamentalists are more prone to believe in fake news and conspiracy theories.
Although religiosity and spirituality, as well as conspiracy theories, come both from belief systems (unlike science, whose source of knowledge is completely different), it is necessary to differentiate these two strands. In conspiracy theories, there is a fundamentally bleak view of human relations. Religious and spiritual issues generally describe the world as orderly and coherent, and life as being good and meaningful. Generally, there is a notion of a benevolent God or universal force. In contrast, conspiracy theories present a world in which malicious actors work in secret to harm people for the conspirators’ benefit. In this case, there is a sense of injustice and cynicism that does not seem to characterize most belief systems.
According to modern psychological theories about the hierarchy of human needs, after food and shelter, the greatest need for a human being is safety. One of the factors that most makes a person feel insecure is the unknown. Fear of the unknown causes the brain to create answers that give it comfort. Not knowing what will happen is uncomfortable for most people.
Superstitions, myths, and conspiracy theories allow people to explain events that otherwise seem random or inexplicable, and to feel that they have control over the results that would otherwise seem outside their domain. Superstition helps relieve anxiety and makes the person believe that the superstitious act improves their success chances in a given situation. People, therefore, believe in superstitions in trying to restore some predictability and control to their world and, with it, to feel better about the future.
In the book How Superstition Won & Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States, John Burnham states that, although there were successful attempts to popularize science throughout the twentieth century, science has evolved from an understandable system to a body of complexity difficult to apprehend. From there, the popularizers of scientific knowledge had to contain the confusion and, instead of trying to explain the mysteries that involve science, bringing them to the level of popular understanding, offering reductionism and nature unity, they chose to embrace romanticism.
Thus, throughout the twentieth century, a new authority was imposed through media and advertising, uniting two traditional science enemies in the popular sphere: superstitious authority and commercial interest. Science is incomprehensible to the masses. For the ordinary citizen, science came to be seen as an authority’s pronouncement, one more belief in the beliefs systems so to speak. One can believe in the argument of authority or not. Like religion, believing or not in science has become a choice. You have the option to believe your priest, pastor, or rabbi in the same way that you have the option to believe or not in the word of a scientist.
At the dawn of the 21st century, we are living in the Post-Truth Era. People simply stopped believing in the authority’s pronouncement and came to believe in what is most convenient for them. People prefer comforting lies to inconvenient truths. Truth is no longer universal and has become a personal choice. The truth is what I want to believe, and nothing different from that. In the cognitive dissonance phenomenon, the individual needs to establish coherence between his cognitions (his knowledge, opinions, and beliefs), which he believes to be the right, and the behavioral or thinking alternatives. To overcome dissonance and seek consonance, two attitudes can be taken: (1) accept what is offered and reflect on what should be changed or (2) reject the alternative thinking or behavior in the name of what one thinks is “the right”. Most people choose the second option. Even if they verify the lie, they do not give up their personal convictions, because it is consistent with their way of thinking, of acting, of being in the world, or brings them some compensation and comfort. These people are prone not only to assimilate the lying news and ideas that circulate on the internet and social networks, consistent with their personal beliefs but also to propagate them, spreading the lies so that they convert other people to the same purpose.
In the 21st century, the resumption of people’s confidence in science will be fundamental to human survival. Nature degradation and global warming are threatening life on Earth. The denialism of global warming is one of the problems that hinder the development of public policies to its combat. According to experts, we are already experiencing the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history. In this extinction event, most likely the human species will also be extinct.
This is where Fermi’s paradox comes in. It concerns the apparent contradiction between the high estimates of the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations' existence and the lack of evidence that they do exist. The universe age and the extraordinarily high number of stars (there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth) suggest that, if Earth is a typical planet, then the universe must be teeming with life, and intelligent life should be quite common. Since Earth is a relatively new planet, extraterrestrial civilizations may have developed much longer than ours. So, why there’s no presence of aliens or their artifacts here on Earth? And why have low-frequency radio signals picked up by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), or other similar initiatives, for over 40 years ever found conclusive evidence of intelligent life out there? This absence of evidence is called The Great Silence.
One explanation for Fermi’s paradox and The Great Silence is the Great Filter Theory. According to this theory, one or more stages of most likely evolutionary paths for an explosion that leads to colonization of a universe part are very unlikely; there would be a “great filter” along the way that would prevent this explosion. The vast majority of things that start along that path never come to the end of it. In fact, so far none of the possible civilizations that may have already emerged among the billions of trillions of stars in the universe have managed to travel all the road along this path. The fact that our universe seems dead suggests that the arising of a lasting and advanced explosive life is a highly unlikely event. And, if there are other radically different ways to expand lasting intelligent life, it only makes things worse, as it would imply that the “great filter” should have an even finer mesh.
Apparently, human civilization is confirming the Great Filter Theory. We are moving in the footsteps of our own extinction. Superstition, myth, ignorance, intentional misinformation, and lack of critical spirit and analytical thinking maybe make up the great filter mesh that will annihilate human civilization. If we use the human species as a model for understanding how civilizations develop in the universe (after all, it’s the only model known), we can conclude that the intelligence advent triggers an events cascade that goes through the development of articulated language and technological artifacts, culture transmission to next generations, plants and animals domestication, writing invention, scientific development, technological explosion, unbridled exploitation of natural resources, environmental pollution and, finally, mass extinction of animal and plant species, including the civilizing species itself. And that, perhaps, has happened a thousand or a million times in the universe. Maybe it’s the norm and not the exception! As the technological explosion occurs very quickly, considering the time elapsed between the civilizing species emergence and the civilization development itself, the rational-analytical thinking and scientific knowledge cannot establish itself in time to overcome the beliefs systems (superstitious, mythical, and religious thoughts), historically ingrained, to the point of avoiding a catastrophe. Perhaps this is a natural law in the cosmos, inevitable and unforgiving.
I hope Carl Sagan and I are wrong!