    5

    World views share the neural network's fuzziness.  They are not

    precise, but they're frequently close enough.  They can be wildly

    inaccurate.  But it isn't accuracy that counts, it's utility.  They may be

    sloppy, but they render solutions to real world problems fast.   As

    neural net builder John Hopfield says, "Biology, by and large, is not

    interested in finding the best things, just things that are pretty good

    that can be found quickly."

    The creators of electronic spiderwebs have called them neural

    nets for a reason.  These problem-solving skeins of wiring are

    deliberately modeled on the networks of nerve cells in the brain.  In

    fact, the brain contains webs of  circuitry so vast that the machines

    being built in scientific laboratories are pathetically minuscule by

    comparison.

    The world view you build from childhood is carried in billions of

    cells whose connecting threads are precisely adjusted to give you your

    picture of the world.  The late Dr. Donald Hebb, "one of the foremost

    theoreticians on the subject of the human brain,"3 called those networks

    "cell assemblies."  He described these as circuits through which stimuli

    flow like waters through the delta of the Mississippi. If that's true, it

    would help explain a bit about the nature of understanding.  Hebb's

    model of interconnected mental circuits helps us comprehend why,

    though we're hit with thousands of random perceptions, very few stick

    to us. Occasionally one jumps out as significant because it seems to fit

    within our pattern of beliefs.  It can be patched in to our existing neural

    net.

    If we believe that life is a battle between Satan and God, some

    small event can seem proof positive that Satan is out to snare us.  If we

    believe, as the Chinese and the Romans did, that the heavens are filled

    with messages about our fate, the sight of a shooting star may send us

    panicking with a sense of imminent calamity.  If our belief system says

    absolutely nothing about a relationship between the stars and life on

    earth, that same blazing meteorite will seem like a passing curiosity of

    no lasting significance.  In the case of the person who believes that the

    heavens portend events on earth, the sight of the shooting star is

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