To say the human response to anthropogenic climate change has been "irrational" would put the case mildly. Climate change (among other self-created ecological disasters) poses an existential risk to humankind, and such threats, unless they are on our doorstep (here & now), are subject to cognitive filtering, as discussed in the original Flatland essay. In the second essay, I discussed the unconscious biases which inform the human response to climate change. In the third essay, I talked about the primacy of human sociality and the social roots of confirmation bias (i.e., the prevalence of bullshit, harmonizing, etc).
All the above is certainly illuminating, but my explanation of things remains incomplete. Lately I have thought about the dismaying fact that human responses to climate change, outside the scientific community, which strives to be aloof, are entirely political in nature. And politics (inter-group conflict) is a predictable product of the human animal.
I was reminded of this unhappy fact by the preliminary climate talks going on in Bonn this month. The current negotiating round is exactly like all the previous ones (The Guardian, June 6, 2015).
The world’s least-developed countries have accused richer nations of failing to provide financial backing for a strong new global climate treaty.
With little negotiating time left ahead of the UN climate summit in Paris later this year, diplomats from nearly 200 countries meeting in Bonn have reportedly made little progress, raising the possibility of a last-minute diplomatic fiasco, as happened in Copenhagen in 2009.
The mistrust between countries that built up in Copenhagen now threatens the Paris talks, said Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who is chairman of the 48-strong least-developed countries group. “The [UN] process is flawed by a complete lack of trust and confidence between rich and poor countries,” he said. “We need time. Because of this lack of trust we have no other way of proceeding. We have to go ahead with baby steps. We are not making much progress, but we are going in the right direction. There are so many issues. It’s a process of attrition.
“Every year there is a watering down of the commitments. It feels every year that we are losing out. Twenty countries contribute 80% of emissions, the rest 20%. Yet we in Africa are being asked to cut emissions. OK, we say, but help us. Give us finance, technology.”Concern is growing that rich countries, which have together pledged to mobilise $100bn a year to help countries adapt to climate change, are so far unwilling to discuss how the money will be raised, said Martin Khor, director of the South Centre, a leading intergovernmental thinktank of developing countries. “The developing countries are disappointed that there seems to be little hope that the $100bn will materialise. They have no idea what will be available, so they cannot plan ahead. If countries really wanted a [strong] deal, they would be talking about finance by now,” said Khor.
Amjad Abdulla of the Maldives, chief negotiator for the 39-member Alliance of Small Island States – countries highly vulnerable to sea-level rises and extreme weather events – said: “We have an enormous task. We need to speed up the work. The ambition for a good deal has not gone. Our target is still to negotiate to hold temperatures to a 1.5C rise. But achieving it is going to be difficult and may require dramatic efforts by humanity.”
Jan Kowalzig, climate change policy officer with Oxfam, said: “The French government [which will chair the Paris meeting] is becoming extremely nervous. It has to show success. Everyone recognises the talks are going too slowly, but the US completely refuses to put anything on the table about finance. The developed countries are not ready to talk about it. Informally, they recognise they need to make concessions, but the big danger is that the $100bn becomes a clever accountancy plan. The developing countries would see through that. A few powerful countries would be happy with a weak deal. The US, China, Japan and India are not very interested in a strong deal because they would be bound by it.”
With only around 10 days’ worth of negotiations remaining after the Bonn talks close next week, no discussion has started on three vital issues: whether rich countries should compensate poor ones for the loss and damage done by extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change; how deep the overall emission cuts should be; and how countries should fairly share the burden of cuts.
So far, 36 countries, including the world’s biggest emitters, China and the US, have pledged to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, but, given the scale of current commitments, the world is on a path to a 3-4C temperature rise. However, more than 150 smaller countries have yet to submit their carbon pledges.
Kofi Annan, UN secretary general from 1997 to 2006, urged all countries to “seize the climate moment”. He added: “Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. The effects are being felt all over the planet, but not equally. In Africa, millions already feel the consequences of global warming. Yet millions more have never reaped the benefits that citizens in countries with high-carbon economies have long taken for granted.
“Climate justice demands that the world seizes the climate moment. The window of opportunity for avoiding a climate catastrophe is open, but it is closing – and closing fast,” Annan said at the launch of the latest Africa Progress Panel report.
Leading environment and development NGOs urged David Cameron to act on his climate pledges and use the G7 conference in Berlin to support a global goal to reduce overall carbon emissions to zero.
“The Paris climate conference is the biggest opportunity in a generation to create momentum for a safer and more prosperous world. He can use it to build trust in developing countries by supporting a roadmap to $100bn of climate finance and support goals for a global goal to reduce overall carbon emissions to zero by 2050,” said the heads of Christian Aid, WWF, the RSPB and others.
What a mess! And it is always precisely the same mess every time humans sit down to negotiate climate solutions.
For me, the question becomes it is possible to identify the deep roots of politics in the human mind? Put another way, is it necessarily the case that humans must always frame climate mitigation as a political problem? After all, from a strictly "rational" point of view, it is clear that humankind's best strategy would be to eschew politics and work together to do whatever is necessary to defeat the climate problem, all other things being equal (which they are not, see the second essay).
I believe the answer to this crucial question is a tentative yes, and I think there is good reason to believe that the work of Matthew Lieberman and his neurosciences colleagues, which I quoted in the third essay, already describes what we might call "political bias" in the brain.
Before I can broach that subject, I want you to read the abstract and introduction to The Default Mode of Human Brain Function Primes the Intentional Stance, an academic paper by Robert P. Spunt, Meghan L. Meyer and Matthew D. Lieberman. This paper and others underlie the points Lieberman makes in his seminal book Social.
Some key terms are: default-mode network, mentalizing, the intentional stance, theory of mind
Abstract
Humans readily adopt an intentional stance to other people, comprehending their behavior as guided by unobservable mental states such as belief, desire, and intention. We used fMRI in healthy adults to test the hypothesis that this stance is primed by the default mode of human brain function present when the mind is at rest. We report three findings that support this hypothesis. First, brain regions activated by actively adopting an intentional rather than nonintentional stance to a social stimulus were anatomically similar to those demonstrating default responses to fixation baseline in the same task.
Second, moment-to-moment variation in default activity during fixation in the dorsomedial PFC was related to the ease with which participants applied an intentional— but not nonintentional—stance to a social stimulus presented moments later. Finally, individuals who showed stronger dorsomedial PFC activity at baseline in a separate task were generally more efficient when adopting the intentional stance and reported having greater social skills. These results identify a biological basis for the human tendency to adopt the intentional stance. More broadly, they suggest that the brain’s default mode of function may have evolved, in part, as a response to life in a social world.
Introduction
(references omitted, consult the original paper)Humans have a seemingly irresistible tendency to conceive the actions of others as intentional and guided by beliefs and desires. This intentional stance toward other humans is already apparent in the first year of life and eventually becomes so automatized that it is effortlessly adopted to understand the behavior of not just other humans but also pets and iPhones [i.e., anthropomorphizing].
The importance of the intentional stance is highlighted by the enormous difficulties faced by those who are not predisposed to it, such as individuals with an autism spectrum disorder. Although the tendency to engage the intentional stance is regarded as essential to human sociality, the neurobiological basis of this preparedness remains a mystery. Numerous functional neuroimaging studies in humans have demonstrated that a psychological process at the core of the intentional stance—mental state inference— is reliably associated with a set of cortical regions commonly referred to as the theory-of-mind or mentalizing network.
For instance, our own work has shown that regions of this network, namely dorsomedial PFC (dmPFC), precuneus, TPJ, and anterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), show a supramodal association with the use of mental state concepts to produce and evaluate explanations of others’ actions and emotional behavior. Although these studies outline the functional neuroanatomy of experimentally induced mental state inference, it remains unknown why the human mind seems naturally primed to adopt the intentional stance in the first place.
The explanation considered here is motivated by two empirical facts about the human brain. The first is that most of the brain’s energy budget is consumed not by activity evoked by specific cognitive tasks (e.g., mental arithmetic) but by spontaneous ongoing activity that is most notable when the brain is at rest. This spontaneous activity is most prominent in a distributed cortical network commonly referred to as the default-mode network (DMN).
Given that the brain consumes a disproportionate amount of the energy available to the body, it is likely that the persistent activity of the DMN during periods of rest serves important adaptive functions. Here, we consider a function of the DMN that is suggested by a second fact about the human brain: The anatomical boundaries of the DMN largely correspond with the neuroanatomy associated with adopting the intentional stance. Importantly, this anatomical coincidence does not permit the conclusion that spontaneous DMN at rest is functionally relevant for adopting the intentional stance in response to social stimuli. This is because regional brain activity observed under different conditions (e.g., resting vs. inferring a mental state) may reflect different underlying processes.
Hence, this anatomical coincidence raises an important yet unanswered question: Does spontaneous activity in the DMN during periods of mental rest prime the intentional stance, preparing us to conceive others as minds and not merely bodies? A handful of neuroimaging studies already illustrate that intraindividual variability in the neural response to a nonsocial stimuli can be partially explained by spontaneous brain activity occurring in the resting periods before stimulus onset. Building on this logic, we designed a novel fMRI task to test the hypothesis that default activity in the DMN functions to prepare the mind to adopt the intentional stance to social stimuli.
This hypothesis also has strong theoretical ties to large body of research on priming and accessibility in social and cognitive psychology, which reliably observes that the efficiency of evaluating a target stimulus (e.g., the word “DOCTOR”) is increased by recent exposure to a conceptually related priming stimulus (e.g., the word “NURSE”).
Hence, our hypothesis can be elaborated as follows: If spontaneous activity in the DMN between stimulus events involves mental operations that are similar to those involved when adopting the intentional stance, then spontaneous DMN activity before encountering a social stimulus may make it easier to adopt an intentional (rather than nonintentional) stance to that stimulus. If this is true, then sustained activity in the DMN during periods of rest might serve as an endogenous prime that makes an intentional stance the default strategy for making sense of the social world.
Discussion
Taken together, the findings reported here suggest that the default mode of human brain function, perhaps centralized to the dmPFC, primes the intentional stance to social stimuli. Just as the word “face” primes people to initially see the Ruben’s illusion as faces rather than a vase, spontaneous DMN activity before a social interaction may prime the mind to treat others as minds rather than simply bodies extended in space.
Drawing on a psychological theory and method on priming, we reasoned that, if spontaneous DMN activity features mental operations that are utilized when adopting the intentional stance, DMN activity should make it easier to adopt the intentional stance in the event that another person is encountered. We found evidence that variability in spontaneous dmPFC activity both within and across participants has a priming-like effect that is selective for mind-focused judgments of other people. We offer this as strong evidence that DMN activity in between moments of cognitive activity is the biological basis for the powerful human tendency to adopt the intentional stance...
Emphasis added below.
The data we present here suggest that the DMN and its activity in between moments of directed thought may be evolution’s solution to the problem of other minds. Evolution seems to have made a “bet” that the best thing to do with any spare moment is to get ready to see the world in terms of other minds. This bet has allowed human beings to get together in groups and achieve far more than ever would have been possible separately...
Think of the "default-node network" (DMN) which "primes" the intentional stance as those locations in the brain which support social intelligence (i.e., the real social network) as opposed to rational intelligence. It is clear enough that human politics is a typical expression of the brain's default social network.
In short, politics is a characteristic outcome of evolved social intelligence. I will talk about this next time.
There is an easy way to identify the DMN at play because you have very likely observed and experienced it. For me, it goes like this: you are sitting in a bar watching a person with a cell phone talking to someone else (that person is engaged). The other person goes to the bathroom, and the person with the cell phone, who is now at "rest" in Lieberman's terms, immediately and automatically picks up their cell phone to look for texts, tweets, etc. (social interactions). That's the DMN in action. I call this behavior "defaulting" and I see it all the time. And you would too, if you make the effort to look for it.
Think about how this might apply to the human response to the climate problem. Evolution's bet did indeed allow "human beings to get together in groups and achieve" lots of things, but it also allowed human beings in different social groups to get together and achieve nothing at all.
From a Flatland perspective, also think about the fact that, to my knowledge, there is no research at all which directly relates typical human politics (intra-group conflict) to innate social proclivities in the human mind. That strikes me as a very large gap in our knowledge of ourselves. One might think that the subject is taboo
My approach is that you've got to start somewhere because otherwise you go nowhere at all.
Interesting. So, is your thinking that this natural, unconscious priming of our brains to assign intent to the actions of others both positively and negatively affects our ability to communicate socially? That is, on one hand this mechanism allows us to recognize and, sometimes, accurately ascribe intent to other human beings, which allows us to recognize "like minds" and establish the in-groups necessary for concerted social efforts. On the other hand, however, the mechanism is also responsible for us naturally falling into these social in-groups, which must implicitly result in out-groups. The constant and permanent existence of both of these groups, combined with the reinforcing nature of this unconscious mechanism, then must lead to the evolution of some process that allows for communication and negotiation between our various in-groups and out-groups. This process is what we call politics.
Is that a rough idea of what you are getting at? Or am I horribly off the tracks?
Posted by: Brian | 06/08/2015 at 04:34 PM