Decline of the Empire

Abandoning The "Self"

I continue to work on the 4th Flatland essay, which focuses on the self, consciousness and free will. I ran across this short essay from cognitive psychologist Bruce Hood at edge.org. Hood believes we should abandon our naive concept of a "self" operating freely (without constraint) in the world. So do I, but of course that is impossible, so it will never happen.

The Self

It seems almost redundant to call for the retirement of the free willing self as the idea is neither scientific nor is this the first time that the concept has been dismissed for lacking empirical support. The self did not have to be discovered as it is the default assumption that most of us experience, so it was not really revealed by methods of scientific inquiry. Challenging the notion of a self is also not new. Freud's unconscious ego has been dismissed for lacking empirical support since the cognitive revolution of the 1950s.

Yet, the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die. It crops up again and again in recent theories of decision-making as an entity with free will that can be depleted. It re-appears as an interpreter in cognitive neuroscience as capable on integrating parallel streams of information arising from separable neural substrates.

The "interpreter" is probably a reference to Michael Gazzaniga's work. The "conceptual zombie" is a reference to the dualist views of David Chalmers.

Even if these appearances of the self are understood to be convenient ways of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes, students of the mind continue to implicitly endorse that there is a decision-maker, an experiencer, a point of origin.

We know that the self is constructed because it can be so easily deconstructed through damage, disease and drugs. It must be an emergent property of a parallel system processing input, output and internal representations. It is an illusion because it feels so real, but that experience is not what it seems. The same is true for free will. Although we can experience the mental anguish of making a decision, our free will cannot be some kind of King Solomon in our mind weighing up the pros and cons as this would present the problem of logical infinite regress (who is inside their head and so on?). The choices and decisions we make are based on situations that impose on us. We do not have the free will to choose the experiences that have shaped our decisions.

Should we really care about the self? After all, trying to live without the self is challenging and not how we think. By experiencing, evoking and talking about the self, we are conveniently addressing a phenomenology that we can all relate to. Defaulting to the self in explanations of human behavior enables us to draw an abrupt stop in the chain of causality when trying to understand thoughts and actions. How notable that we do this all so easily when talking about humans but as soon as we apply the same approach to animals, one gets accused of anthropomorphism!

By abandoning the free willing self, we are forced to re-examine the factors that are really behind our thoughts and behavior and the way they interact, balance, over-ride and cancel out. Only then we will begin to make progress in understanding how we really operate.

Regarding anthropomorphism, I am not sure what point Hood was making.

I will tackle anthropomorphism in the 4th essay. If you want to understand anthropomorphism, watch a Disney movie with talking animals, or this clip from Wall-E.

 

Anthropocentrism Day

From a purely objective point of view—there is no such thing—the dolorous fact that human beings are very fucked-up is nothing to get angry about. After all, it's not their fault. Homo sapiens is merely one outcome at the bottom of an enormous evolutionary tree. That outcome is Kurt Vonnegut's "crock of shit." It looks like that leaf node (technical term) will be pruned sometime in the next few centuries, thus the hominin branch will become a dead end.

It seems to me that on "Earth Day" one should not even try to be objective. Why would one try to cultivate compassion (using the Buddhist term) for all living things when one species is at war with all the others? And these fucking humans don't can't even give a shit. These humans think they're the cat's meow, the greatest thing since sliced bread! And who is there to tell them different, I mean, apart from me?

I did a Google news search for Earth Day, and there it was—human self-centeredness everywhere you look.

The Last Thing You'll Ever Watch

Some good laughs in this one. God knows we need a sense of humor on this planet. Enjoy.

 

Much Ado About Methane

When I asked a reader to give me scientific paper supporting doomer fears of a rapid meltdown (on the human time scale) of methane hydrates in the Arctic, he gave me a reference to Michael Bender's Paleoclimate, part of the series Princeton Primers in Climate. That's a fucking textbook.

The most up-to-date overview on the subject, Paleoclimate provides an ideal introduction to undergraduates, nonspecialist scientists, and general readers with a scientific background.

I was reading books like that 20 years ago, and since then I've kept up with the subject (e.g. here).

Regarding these methane hydrate doomers, you now know what the phrase "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" means. Michael Bender of course did not know that he was writing a book which readers without a scientific background could use to distort the science and promote their own agendas.

What the science says should count for something as we create our expectations about the future, but humans being what they are, it doesn't. Humans will believe anything which fits what they want to believe, and if it doesn't fit, they will distort it to make it fit (confirmation bias, etc.). Or they will ignore it, etc.  

In the Flatland essays, I discussed the fact that humans can't assess risk. I did not talk about doomers because they make up such a tiny subset of humanity taken altogether. But doomers, who are basically flipped optimists, can't assess risk either. Unlike characteristic optimists, characteristic doomers accentuate or magnify risk instead of downplaying or dismissing it. In all cases, they do so in a self-supporting social context (singing with or preaching to the choir, just like optimists do).

Doomers are not "special" in any sense outside the fact that they are flipped optimists. Pessimists have the same arsenal of biases, filters, instincts, etc. that optimists do. Doomer social instincts are also very strong because they see themselves as a very small, beleaguered group whose concerns are ignored by the world at-large. And of course that is true.

Thus we see that doomers live in Flatland. As such, they simply do not have the cognitive competence to understand what Flatland is. This blog is about human nature. It does not concern itself with forecasting precise dates for human-caused future catastrophes. That's a flatland game. Humans have been doing that for thousands of years. To predict the future generally, Flatland says it is sufficient to know that humans will always do what humans characteristically do. And those predictions must have some basis in our best science. Otherwise, such predictions are based on typical (if magnified) human fears.

I thought some of you might have some interest in a scientific assessment of the possibility of an Arctic clathrate meltdown. Here it is, reprinted from Real Climate (January 4, 2012). It's by David Archer of The University of Chicago, which is also where I went to school.

Also, I've made some assumptions here—I'm assuming that doomers seeing this know how to read and are capable of understanding what they read.

I know, I know—these are big assumptions, and they are almost certainly unwarranted.

This Guy Is Working On It, But Can't Quite Get There

I am finally writing the fourth Flatland essay, so posting will be sparse. For your amusement, I present the thoughts of Lewis Gilbert, who is Managing Director and Chief Operations Officer of the Institute on the Environment at University of Minnesota.

His article appears at The Conversation, and is called To manage Earth in the Anthropocene, we need to focus on systems change. I've added a few notes. Enjoy.

Daniel Dennett On Free Will

I have been procrastinating lately. I don't want to write that 4th Flatland essay because once I've written it, as far as I'm concerned, there will be little left to say about the human condition and the fate of our species. All that will be left to do is watch what happens in future, or, as Iain Banks said in one of his great Culture books, watch humans fuck-up.

And this is so because the 4th essay is about the nature of our consciousness, or our sense of self, and its relationship to the (for all intents and purposes) fully determined physical and unconscious brain. As such, the next essay expands and clarifies the definition of Flatland given in the original essay, thereby cementing the various hypotheses following from it. After that, future human actions will determine whether I am right or I am wrong.

I do not take seriously the possibility that I am wrong about how the human animal functions, but seemliness demands that I state things this way