Here is another source for my next Flatland essay, should I ever get around to writing it. I want my readers to see the primary/secondary sources I'm using before they read that essay. Below I've reprinted a good review of William Hirstein's 2006 book Brain Fiction. Hirstein's work was featured in the New Scientist article I published here.
Spin Central
"Know thyself," urged the inscription over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi, setting a goal for Western philosophy and many of the sciences it would ultimately spawn. Although nobody claims that self-knowledge is easy, certain basic facts about oneself seem direct and immediate: For example, I know whether I am now seeing properly, whether I am moving my arm, which of my thoughts are memories and which fantasies, and whether I am recognizing a familiar face. We are so intimate with these basic perceptual and cognitive capacities that it is difficult to imagine being wrong about such matters. Nonetheless, following brain injury even these simple insights can miscarry.
Below I've embedded a video of the philosopher John Searle talking about the problem of free will. Please watch it, and as you do so, think about what Searle is saying in light of the of the following questions:
The scientific evidence is overwhelming that humans are altering the Earth's biosphere in a very a destructive way (global warming, marine ecosystems, deforestation, the Sixth Extinction, etc.). And yet humans (at the species/population levels) are doing nothing to slow the destruction of their own habitat. In fact, humans are behaving (or always striving to behave) in exactly the same ways which brought about the very serious problems they "refuse" to deal with.
How can we explain such persistent and consistently self-destructive behavior? Is such behavior compatible with the commonsense view discussed by Searle that humans have free will? In light of the trends briefly described above, what happens to the ordinary view that humans can and do make unconstrained ("freely made") choices?
Following up on my Michael Gazzaniga post, here is the conclusion of Everyday Fairytales (New Scientist, October 7, 2006). I am posting some of the sources I'm using for a planned (but not written!) Flatland essay on our subjective sense of self, free will, storytelling, and sources of human delusion in the brain.
Just an illusion
There is certainly plenty of evidence that much of what we do is the result of unconscious brain processing, and that our consciousness seems to be interpreting what has happened, rather than driving it. For example, experiments in 1985 by Benjamin Libet of the University of California in San Francisco suggested that a signal to move a finger appears in the brain several hundred milliseconds before someone consciously decides to move that finger. The idea that we have conscious free will may be an illusion, at least some of the time.
Even when we think we are making rational choices and decisions, this may be illusory too. The intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalize them, says neuroscientist Morten Kringelbach. That may well be a good thing, he adds. If we were aware of how we made every choice we would never get anything done — we cannot hold that much information in our consciousness. Wilson backs up this idea with some numbers: he says our senses may take in more than 11 million pieces of information each second, whereas even the most liberal estimates suggest that we are conscious of just 40 of these.
Nevertheless it is an unsettling thought that perhaps all our conscious mind ever does is dream up stories in an attempt to make sense of our world.
“The possibility is left open that in the most extreme case all of the people may confabulate [i.e., make shit up] all of the time,” says philosopher Lars Hall.
I have almost completely lost the urge to write on this blog. I guess I'm writing this easy post to keep busy, as Arthur Schopenhauer recommended. So those of you waiting for updates to the Flatland series may be waiting for some while. We'll see. My motivation has disappeared, which may betoken my acceptance (at last!) of this crock of shit called the Human Condition.
There is a new series on PBS called EARTH: A New Wild. The "new wild" is new because there is no wild. There is no wild because "people are everywhere" (video below).
The series was written by and features the naturalist and conservationist Dr. M. Sanjayan. Ample evidence exists which demonstrates that thousands and thousands of other species are fucked, and Sanjayan is familiar with that evidence, but that is not the story Dr. M wants to tell
To his credit, Sanjayan tries to bring humans into the picture. Unfortunately, that's where things start to unravel, because over and over again Dr. M makes the point that Other Species Have Value To Humans, and thus his underlying questions are always the same:
Can't we peacefully co-exist with these other species? Surely we can, right? Isn't it in our best interest to do so?
You know, the very species we're driving to extinction. Sanjayan avoids this unpleasant fact, preferring instead to focus on Stories of Hope.
Today I ran across a number of articles discussing the death of blogging (hat tip, Naked Capitalism). All this hand-wringing was prompted by Andrew Sullivan giving up his blog. Now I know who Andrew Sullivan is!
Is blogging dead? I'll get right to the point—sure it is! Deceased! A dead parrot!
There is lots of analysis, including the obvious point that blogs no longer matter because of the existence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. (e.g., see Kevin Drum here, and Ben Thompson here).
Blogging is always seen as an individual endeavor, but that is never true. Like all things human, blogging is primarily a social activity. All the bloggers (or now former bloggers) named above, and all others (in non-trivial cases) sought to represent and cater to some pre-existing social group ("community") in whatever subject area (technology, politics, the environment, etc.) they were discussing. Some were very successful at doing so, and got lots of web traffic. In the old days, that is.
Nowadays, that web traffic is disappearing. Traffic = The Social Network You're Catering To. A blog without traffic is like the tree that falls in the forest. Does anybody hear it? If not, that blog is dead, whether the author wants to admit it or not. No traffic, no buzz.
Now, people have other places to go, places which better serve their needs
Actual "social networks" (like Facebook) and what we might call on-line Big Box Stores (like The Huffington Post or Ezra Klein's vox.com) get more and more traffic, while blogs featuring standalone "think pieces" are dying on the vine (see Kevin Drum's post). Do you want politics? Do you want to go green? How about killer apps? You can get it all and more at the Big Box Stores. Or, you can visit popular specialized websites like Grist, Politico or Wired.
Such consolidation is a natural process, and that process is nearly complete. Blogs were the Wild, Wild West, but now Big Money has tamed (civilized?) the neighborhood.
And of course Big Traffic = Big Advertising = $$$. But let's move on.
Let's face it: the vast majority of people were never really interested in those in-depth analyses by Kevin Drum or Yves Smith. The vast majority of human beings are effectively morons! They are as unconscious as the day is long! And they are not seeking enlightenment. Now people can get a superficial taste of everything at Facebook or The Huffington Post.
Google doesn't even support blog searches anymore. They used to. If you're lucky, Google will decide that you're a "news" source. Otherwise, you're ranked somewhere in normal searches. And the less traffic you have, and depending on the number and quality of in-bound links, the lower your rank will be.
The blogger, if he is not already well-known for other reasons ( e.g., Robert Reich) is going the way of the dinosaur. Extinction is inevitable. The hey-day of blogging is long gone.
In Part III of Adventures In Flatland, I wrote the following—
We can think of bullshit, or, in contemporary usage, spin, as the other side of the filtering coin discussed in Part I. Filtering and bullshit are the yin and yang of the human flight from reality—humans unconsciously filter what they can't acknowledge, and then generate all sorts of bullshit to cover up, justify or rationalize what is unconsciously unacceptable to them. Human cognition is thus consistently out of kilter with reality nearly all of the time. In important matters, reality basically counts for nothing.
This seems like a good time to provide another detailed example of what I was getting at above.
Today's example concerns the U.S. economy and housing market. I will deconstruct the standard interpretation of how the U.S. is doing.
The story I'm going to tell would be hilarious if it weren't so fucking tragic.
