For a very long time -- since high school at the very least -- I've thought of the human brain as a rather sophisticated pattern recognition engine. Wherever possible, we seek to establish direct causal relationships among events. When that's not possible, we infer more subtle relationships at work. This enables us to make connections that are not at first obvious but which nonetheless help us to survive.

Example of the obvious: Me throw sharp stick at charging lion. Charging lion fall down, bleed out eyeballs, stop bothering me. Me survive to throw another sharp stick another day.

More sophisticated: Sun come up over here. Sun go down over there. Sun must be circling around Earth to come up again over here tomorrow. Me get cave facing over there so that me sleep in tomorrow morning.

Of course, the more subtle models where we make connections with limited information may prove to be incorrect down the road, but they are sufficient for the time being and thereby enable us to get along. Once they no longer work, we adopt even more sophisticated models. For example, we figure out that in order to explain the way stars and planets move across the sky over time, the sun couldn't possibly be going around the Earth, but perhaps the Earth goes around the sun. Etc.

During my high school days, this was my theory for explaining away the concept of intuition/precognition and the practice of religious belief. I figured that the experience of intuition (a preferable word, for me, to 'precognition' or 'premonition' or 'clairvoyance', which imply new age cosmic woo-woo) was simply a sophisticated pattern recognition model that generated correct answers on the basis of incomplete information. When somebody gets a strong hunch that a certain event is going to happen, and then it doesn't happen, they shrug it off as a bad guess. When that strong hunch pays off, they call it premonition. Someone who is able to consistently experience good hunches on the basis of limited information could be considered 'intuitive' or 'psychic', depending upon your preferences, but it all came down (as far as I was concerned) to having some good pattern recognition going on somewhere in your brain.

Likewise, when we have incomplete information about how or why things happen the way they do, our brain finds comfort in (or actually develops and enhances belief in) the subtle and sophisticated models of that we call religion: a belief system that explains the otherwise inexplicable connections among objects and events. Before we can explain rainbows scientifically, we ascribe them to an invisible Being that paints the sky with colors to remind us of a promise (as in the story of Noah in the Judeo-Christian religions). Later, when we figure out that raindrops can form prisms that separate out the colors of sunlight, we no longer need religion to explain rainbows. (And, importantly, some of us choose to keep the religious explanation, while others write off the religious explanation as fanciful stories.)

The story of Noah is more charming than the story of raindrops acting as prisms that separate out the colors of sunlight. But understanding how light works enables us to create CD players and computers, which in turn allow me to write goofy essays and beam them to you on something called a 'web site'. The story of Noah does not allow us to manipulate the physical world thusly. The story of Noah *does* allow us to convey social memes and to disseminate ethical ideologies. But the pattern explained by the story of Noah is simply not sophisticated enough to build televisions, and so we move on.

This, as I said above, was my interpretation of the world at the age of 16 or thereabouts. I was struggling to explain events that had occurred in my life, without sacrificing my emerging sense of *reason*. If you've read the essay that immediately precedes this one (Pattern Recognition, Part I) -- the one I wrote five years ago or so -- you've no doubt noticed that I'm still fascinated by the concept of brain-as-pattern-recognition-engine.

So while I was visiting a friend's house recently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a book called something like Why People Believe Weird Things. In it, the author (editor of Skeptic Magazine, or something along those lines) asserts his own similar views about the brain-as-pattern-recognition-engine concept, and uses it to explain why people believe in astrology (a subject for another essay of mine, I expect), UFOs, the Green Party, and other flights of fancy. (Okay, just kidding about that last one. Nobody believes in the Green Party.)

The author includes a chapter on near death experiences and comes to the conclusion that, well, there is no conclusion. The scientific evidence is simply not there, one way or the other, to sufficiently (for the author, at least) explain why so many people seem to experience so many common events as part of the dying process. The author manages to successfully debunk both the common scientific explanations as well as the common woo-woo new age ga-ga explanations, leaving the question of life after death and the status of the immortal soul open. Of course, since it isn't explained one way or the other by science, this remains in the realm of religion for most people. We are then left with the agnostics' dilemma (which the author acknowledges): if we don't have a basis for believing in the certainty of life after death, and by extension the immortal soul, then how to we find comfort in living what may well be, by extension, a meaningless life?

He offered an answer that I found interesting... until I gave it some serious consideration. His answer may be paraphrased like this:

History is a long, long continuum of events that impact other events. We know this as a fact. We also know that one small event at one point in the continuum can have very powerful repercussions farther down the line. We know this, too. There are innumerable examples of people who died in seeming obscurity but who later became famous because something they did ended up having a huge impact on society down the line. Since we do not know at what point of the continuum our lives are played out, it is entirely possible that there is still a great deal of history yet to be written, and we may very well end up making that small difference now that could have a huge impact in the future. Ergo, we should take comfort in the fact that even if we don't know it now, what we do with our lives may prove to be extremely important / influential in the years that follow us.

So went the author's reasoning, and I found it to be a comforting thought at first. But then I gave it more consideration, and realized that it suffers a bit of a fatal flaw:

The author says that the person who does not know whether to believe in a life after death can find meaning in the idea that we may, for all we know, end up leading an influential life anyway.

"Wait a minute," my brain says. "In other words, that means if we can't find comfort because we don't know our place in the cosmos, then we should find comfort in the fact that we don't know our place in history."

Now THAT doesn't make any sense at all. What the author presents as the agnostics' solution is really just restating the agnostics' problem: "Sure, you don't know if you matter; but at least you don't know if you matter."

So I see a pattern in the problem of the pattern-recognition-engine. Recognizing patterns can be a source of comfort because, in general, it is recognizing patterns (correctly, usually) that helps us to survive. But when we reach the limit of our ability to recognize the patterns, we are left with... what? Filling in the blanks with "To be determined?" Or filling in the blanks with a leap of faith that the religion you've picked (or that has picked you) will have the best answers? Neither option is intellectually satisfying. (And, perhaps, we have more options available than just these two....)

That said, the question of which to choose comes down to this: which option helps you to move forward? Which option helps you to answer the questions that need to be answered in order for you to make progress? When a person has hit the limits of his or her ability to solve the puzzle at hand, is it better to keep banging away at it until you've revealed enough information to guess at the pattern, or is it better to simply leap, and have faith that the net will appear?