Just Because Something “Resonates” Doesn’t Make it True

How to be a more disciplined thinker

“Sometimes I just don’t get people.”

It was just after Christmas. My wife was on Facebook, reading the posts in a group she joined to get ideas for planning a family vacation to Disney World. Many of the members had provided helpful tips for avoiding long lines or booking the best restaurants, but there were always a lot of people using the group to do what social media is best known for: ranting about something stupid.

“What’s the outrage du jour?” I asked.

“All these people are complaining about six-hour lines and huge crowds and it’s like, what did you expect at this time of year?”

“Isn’t this like the busiest week?” I asked.

“Yes! Which anyone could tell you if they took five minutes to look at any of the sites that do crowd calendars. But no, people are saying ‘I thought this would be the best time to go because people will be celebrating the holidays at home with their families.’”

Ah, I said to myself. I see. This again. Where by “this” I of course meant that most ubiquitous of modern day logical fallacies: that if an idea resonates with you, it must be true.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this concept of resonance is irrelevant to the nature of truth. I am saying that, once you understand the actual relationship between resonance and truth, you’ll see why the former is, at best, only a potential indicator of the latter, and never proof by itself.

So let’s talk about this idea of resonance, of what it means to say that something “resonates with me.” But to do that, we need to start with the concept of an inference.

Good vibes only

Most of us, when we think of an inference, probably think of something like logical deduction:

All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The last line — the conclusion — is our inference. It follows logically from the premises stated above it.

But to understand resonance, we need a much broader definition of an inference. For the purposes of this discussion, an inference is going to mean the outcome of a process where some perception of our sense organs combines with something that we already know, and results in us either acquiring a new belief, or deleting or modifying an old one.

The kinds of perceptions I’m talking about can be anything like basic sights, sounds, smells, and so on, to things we might hear other people say, or words we read.

And when I talk about things we already know, I don’t just mean explicit knowledge that you could put into a sentence or a paragraph. I also mean things you know unconsciously, either because they’re instincts or because you’ve picked them up over the course of your life.

And finally, when I talk about adding, deleting, or modifying beliefs, I’m also not just talking about beliefs that we might readily put into words. I’m also talking about all those unconscious beliefs — some of which we aren’t even aware of, even though they affect our preferences and choices.

Armed with this broader definition of an inference, we can make a first pass at explaining what resonance means. Essentially, it’s the feeling that accompanies an inference. The stronger the resonance, the more impactful the inference for that particular mind.

Now, I know from many years of arguing with people on the Internet that there is no rhetorical high ground more sought-after than being able to claim that you’re “being rational,” while your opponent is simply “guided by emotion.”

But the truth is that logical reasoning needs emotion, just like a combustion engine needs something to combust, to drive the pistons that turn the crankshaft and by extension the axles and wheels. (I’ve written a couple of articles about this topic, and for anyone with more than a passing interest I would also recommend Relevance: Communication and Cognition, by Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson.)

Building a computer with meat

You’ve probably heard that humans and chimpanzees share 99 percent of our DNA. You may not have heard that our genomes are 75 percent similar to those of chickens, and even 60 percent similar to banana trees. It sounds strange, until you realize that there are just a lot of metabolic processes that every living thing has to do.

Mother Nature never starts from scratch. She always builds on what She’s got to work with. And long before there were animals that could talk, write syllogisms, or do mathematics, there were basic organisms with central nervous systems that had to solve fundamental problems relating to survival and reproduction.

When we think about the meaning of “rational,” we’re usually asking how fully and how efficiently an agent achieves their goals. And not just that, but we usually expect any one goal to make sense in the context of other goals that, taken together, ultimately serve some definable overarching objectives.

For most animals, the overarching objectives are survival and reproduction, so the different goals we observe usually relate to things like finding food or chasing off sexual rivals.

Even in the case of humans, most of our goals tend ultimately to serve our biological fitness. One interesting wrinkle is the amount we invest in communal ideologies, but these too could be means for successfully competing, at the level of the society, for the resources that make survival and reproduction more likely.

The point is, even if human beings had basically conquered scarcity, disease, predation, and other dangers that drove the evolution of our ancestors, we would still be equipped with the basic neurochemical architecture that governs how inferences are drawn by animals with brains made of meat.

And resonance is part of that architecture. Think of it like this: sex feels good because organisms that didn’t enjoy it didn’t do it, and didn’t leave behind any descendants. By the same token, finding things out about our world, satisfying our curiosity and solving problems, also feel good, because animals that weren’t intrinsically motivated to learn about the world and each other left fewer descendants as well.

That’s why we see more playful behavior in larger-brained animals. The propensity to play is directly related to feelings like curiosity and the amount of emotional “reward” we get from figuring things out.

A demon-haunted world

To recap, resonance is the feeling of drawing an inference. And we feel resonance because, all in all, it motivates more accurate and helpful inferences than inaccurate and harmful ones. But remember, an inference is the combination of what we know (whether we’re right or not) with our interpretation of what we’re currently perceiving (whether that’s right or not, too).

If you’ve taken a course in basic logic, you know that a conclusion is only true if its premises are true. So that means there’ll be many times when something resonates with us, even if it isn’t true, either because the “knowledge” we’re bringing to the table is wrong, our interpretation of what we’re perceiving is faulty, or both.

And notice something else: the more the inferences we draw relate to abstract ideas that have no immediate bearing on our safety or well-being, the less we can count on resonance as an indication of truth.

Mother Nature selected for brains that combined inference with emotional reward when almost everything we thought about had to do with our immediate physical, ecological, and social environment. The inference/resonance mechanism evolved to facilitate correct answers to questions like:

• Is that a cliff up ahead?
• Is that a lion that wants to eat me?
• Is she interested in hooking up?

But once we started asking questions about the nature of the soul, or what the basic building blocks of matter are, the less we could rely on resonance as guide to accuracy.

Except we didn’t realize that. We went right on thinking that resonance was every bit as relevant to those questions as to any other. The result was the construction of what Carl Sagan called “The Demon-Haunted World,” a world populated by things like disembodied agents, chimeras, and other beings and forces that feel like they’re real (or could be real) but for which there can never be any definitive proof or disproof.

The demon-haunted world feels real because it seems to explain what we experience. Of course, an explanation is a kind of inference, and as such it adds to, subtracts from, or modifies our explicit and/or implicit knowledge about the world. That’s why it’s accompanied by resonance.

But in the case of adaptively irrelevant questions resonance is, at best, only an indication that we might be on the right track. At worst, it’s leading us down a blind alley.

Conclusion

So what do we do with this idea of resonance? Between the right track and the blind alley, how do we tell which is which without the one thing — resonance — that’s made our inferences feel so reliable for billions of years?

Remember that resonance isn’t proof of truth, but rather your body’s way of rewarding you for finding things out. And just as there are ways that you can experience short-term pleasure at the expense of long-term health (junk food, unsafe sex, excessive drinking or drug use, etc.), there are also ways that you can experience short-term cognitive rewards at the expense of long-term mental health (joining a cult or going down a social media rabbit hole).

And just as you can invest some short-term energy (even if unpleasant) for the sake of long-term physical health (exercise, eating healthy, etc.), you can also invest in a long-term strategy for building a well-adjusted cognition, one that’s capable of more smoothly integrating and reconciling the broadest possible set of data about your world.

That’ll take discipline. When something resonates with you, that’s your cue to begin asking questions, not stop. Scientists are every bit as susceptible to resonance as the rest of us — from Archimedes’ “Eureka” to Brian Greene’s “Elegant Universe” — but unlike most of us, the first thing they do when that feeling hits is to ask themselves, “how could I prove this wrong?”

That may sound unromantic, like I’m draining all the joy out of discovery. On the contrary, the more you cultivate this philosophical discipline, the deeper and more joyful the experience of resonance will become.

Remember: the intensity of resonance is directly related to the impact of the inference. If you’ve taken care to understand your own beliefs, and reconcile them to each other and to as much of the world as possible, then each new inference will have a very high hurdle to overcome.

Someone who chases the cheap rush of a horoscope or a conspiracy theory will be to you like a person admiring a picture of Everest, compared to someone cresting its summit.