The first three Adventures In Flatland essays were written in 2014 and appeared on this blog (DOTE).
This essay presupposes that you have read the original, but it would be helpful to read all three. This fourth and final long essay does not review those earlier essays. You've got to read them.
I use the term "flatland" in different ways. As a hypothesis, the flatland model posits a set of unconscious core instincts which drive our most important characteristic behaviors. I also use the term as an adjective (e.g. describing those characteristic behaviors as "flatland nonsense"). Flatland as a metaphor implies a 2-dimensional world, where the missing 3rd dimension is human nature itself (all those unconscious processes). Otherwise, the term simply refers to the human condition itself. These various usages will usually be clear enough in context.
What's Important And What Is Not
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
— Carl Sagan
Let's be clear about what is important and what is not. I want to model what appear to be instinctually-driven human behaviors. Such behaviors are most easily observed in politics, economics, religion and other social behaviors, in the stories humans tell, in the inevitable preference for technological rather than behavioral solutions to human-caused problems, in the long-term human expansion on the Earth and in observations of how humans treat the biosphere. This list is obviously incomplete.
I am not much interested in, for example, behavioral economics theory.
The economist Richard Thaler, a keen observer of human behavior and founder of behavioral economics, was inspired by Kahneman & Tversky’s work (see Thaler, 2015, for a summary). Thaler coined the concept of mental accounting. The overarching notion behind this theory is that people think of value in relative rather than absolute terms. For example, they derive pleasure not just from an object’s value, but also the quality of the deal—its transaction utility (Thaler, 1985). In addition, humans often fail to consider fully opportunity costs (tradeoffs) and are susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy (Thaler, 1999).
A core idea behind mental accounting is that people treat money differently, depending on factors such as the money’s origin and intended use, rather than thinking of it in terms of formal accounting. An important term underlying the theory is fungibility, the fact that all money is the same and has no labels. In mental accounting, people treat assets as less fungible than they really are; they frame assets as belonging to current wealth, current income, or future income. Consider unexpected gains: Small windfalls (e.g. a $50 lottery win) are generally treated as ‘current income’ that is likely to be spent, whereas large windfalls (e.g. a $5,000 bonus at work) are considered ‘wealth’ (Thaler, 1985). Another example from mental accounting is credit card payments, which are treated differently than cash. Mental accounting theory suggests that credit cards decouple the purchase from the payment by separating and delaying the payment. Credit card spending is also attractive because on credit card bills individual items (e.g. a $50 expense) will lose their salience when they are seen as a small part of a larger amount due (e.g. $843) (Thaler, 1999).
The bottom line is: who cares?
These "insights" amount to flatland observations of flatland. How we treat small or large windfalls is one thing, but the larger context in which these trivial behaviors occur is quite another. Humans now dominate the biosphere. This outcome represents the sum total of every economic (niche-building) behavior humans have engaged in over tens of thousands of years.
How we handle small windfalls is not important. How Homo sapiens came to dominate the biosphere and what will follow from human "success" in that regard are the important issues here. On that subject, outside a relative handful of observers, humans are curiously silent. It seems to have escaped the notice of virtually all Earth's human inhabitants that Homo sapiens is in deep trouble.
Reactions to humanity's near total failure to address the dangers of long-run climate change and other profound environmental issues are even worse than I've implied here. Consider environmentalist George Marshall's Understand faulty thinking to tackle climate change — the amorphous nature of climate change creates the ideal conditions for human denial and cognitive bias to come to the fore (emphasis added, New Scientist, August 13, 2015).
Daniel Kahneman is not hopeful. “I am very sorry,” he told me, “but I am deeply pessimistic. I really see no path to success on climate change.”
Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his research on the psychological biases that distort rational decision- making. One of these is “loss aversion”, which means that people are far more sensitive to losses than gains. He regards climate change as a perfect trigger: a distant problem that requires sacrifices now to avoid uncertain losses far in the future. This combination is exceptionally hard for us to accept, he told me...
Discussions about economics, meanwhile, invariably turn into self defeating cost-benefit analyses. Stern offers a choice between spending 1 per cent of annual income now, or risking losing 20 per cent of it in 50 years’ time. This language is almost identical to that Kahneman used two decades earlier in his experiments on loss aversion. Is it surprising that when a choice is framed like this, policy-makers are intuitively drawn towards postponing action and taking a gamble on the future?
Loss aversion is a behavioral economics bias which distorts "rational" economic behaviors — people care more about losing a dollar than gaining a dollar. Once again, we have a flatland explanation of flatland behaviors. The implicit argument states that this trivial economic bias has caused human reluctance to spend a little money now to prevent a catastrophe which will happen in the far flung future. Presumably, if we did make some relatively small investments now, we could easily fix the climate problem.
We are supposed to believe that simple loss aversion explains why humans are not responding to climate change. For reasons I discussed in Confusion In The Twilight Zone (DOTE, September 17, 2013) and the 2nd flatland essay, this alleged explanation flies in the face of reality.
I will return to this point later in this essay. In the updated flatland model, the human failure to adequately address climate change, the belief that doing so would be relatively cheap and easy, and Kahneman's absurd explanation for that continuing failure are all called congruent outputs. Remember that term.
I am interested in observations and explanations of the human condition which Human Nature itself inhibits or precludes. That's what is important. Much of what I have to say is not flattering to Homo sapiens. They do enough of that themselves. Humans believe, and can not help but believe, that the entire universe revolves around them.
It does not. Humility is a good thing.
Human Instincts (The Short List)
For simplicity's sake, let's assume there is only one human instinct with five interrelated aspects. I call that instinct Live & Grow.
Live & Grow
- Economic niche-construction
- Technophilia
- Anthropocentrism
- Adaptation
- Sociality
Live & Grow is simply the imperative of all evolved life as it applies to humans. This imperative drives most (if not all) human behavior, including making babies, making a living and consuming stuff. Live & Grow is so generalized that one might easily dismiss it—"well, of course" you might say.
Yet, dismissing it would be a mistake because life's imperative is so elaborated in humans as opposed to, say, crustaceans (like shrimp) or bovidae (like sheep). Dreams of colonizing Mars are expressions of Live & Grow. It is safe to say that neither shrimp nor sheep do that. Deforestation in the tropics to create palm oil plantations is an expression of Live & Grow. Capitalism itself is an expression of Live & Grow.
Live & Grow at its most basic level expresses Life versus Death, but it would also be a mistake to always construe this as literal death as some theories assume. Similarly, it would also be a mistake to reduce Live & Grow to "selfish genes" or similar theories. Again, this imperative is highly elaborated in humans, so if the goal is to understand human behavior generally, one needs to delve into the details.
In particular, Life = {existence, growth, integrity} versus Death = {non-existence, dissolution, fragmentation} applies to—
- the self
- the family/social groups/tribes the self is tied to (social identity)
- societies/civilizations
- the species itself
And depending on how much detail we want to get into, we can look at the life and death of—
- political/economic institutions
- socioeconomic arrangements
- cultural arrangements (traditions)
There is literal death, of course, but there is also the dissolution or fragmentation of the self or social group and so on. Social death is sometimes just as real and painful for humans as grievous injury to the physical body. A threat to one's self-image is akin to a threat to the self-image of a political or economic institution (e.g., a corporation).
Economic niche-construction is the most direct reflection of Live & Grow. I referred to this as the human "economic frame of reference" in the 2nd Flatland essay. The new term is a slight modification of Erle Ellis' term "socio-cultural niche construction," which he introduces in his study Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (Ecological Monographs, 85(3), 2015, pp. 287–331). This text is from the abstract and first paragraph (references excluded). I have also included Ellis' quote from ecologist A.G. Tansley.
Humans, unlike any other multicellular species in Earth’s history, have emerged as a global force that is transforming the ecology of an entire planet. It is no longer possible to understand, predict, or successfully manage ecological pattern, process, or change without understanding why and how humans reshape these over the long term. Here, a general causal theory is presented to explain why human societies gained the capacity to globally alter the patterns, processes, and dynamics of ecology and how these anthropogenic alterations unfold over time and space as societies themselves change over human generational time. Building on existing theories of ecosystem engineering, niche construction, inclusive inheritance, cultural evolution, ultrasociality, and social change, this theory of anthroecological change holds that sociocultural evolution of subsistence regimes based on ecosystem engineering, social specialization, and non-kin exchange, or ‘‘sociocultural niche construction,’’ is the main cause of both the long-term upscaling of human societies and their unprecedented transformation of the biosphere. Human sociocultural niche construction can explain, where classic ecological theory cannot, the sustained transformative effects of human societies on biogeography, ecological succession, ecosystem processes, and the ecological patterns and processes of landscapes, biomes, and the biosphere...
It would be difficult, not to say impossible, to draw a natural line between the activities of the human tribes which presumably fitted into and formed parts of "biotic communities" and the destructive human activities of the modern world.
— A. G. Tansley, 1935Human societies have been altering ecological and evolutionary processes across the Earth for millennia. As behaviorally modern Homo sapiens spread out of Africa more than 50 000 years ago, their advanced hunter-gatherer societies helped to cause the extinction of more than half of Earth’s mammalian megafauna, yielding trophic cascading effects on ecosystems coupled with the direct effects of landscape burning to enhance hunting and foraging success. More than 10 000 years ago, agricultural societies accelerated these early defaunation and land clearing processes, ultimately replacing them with even more novel ecological transformations, including the culture of domesticated species, widespread soil tillage, sustained societal growth, and ever-increasing scales of material exchange, leading to globally significant transformation of the terrestrial biosphere by at least 3000 years before the present time.
In short, this is Live & Grow implemented over tens of thousands of years. None of this is controversial. You've all seen those scary exponential growth curves, so there is no need to beat a dead horse.
Technophila is literally from Greek the τέχνη - technē, "art, skill, craft" and φίλος - philos, "beloved, dear, friend", and no wonder. Since the time when Australopithicines first used stone tools to scrape meat from bones some 3.4 million years ago, technology has supported Live & Grow among the hominini. Today we have Boeing 747s, cell phones and solar panels. Those are the modern equivalent of stone age hand axes.
Adaptation is covered in the next section. An updated discussion of Sociality will be published as an addendum to this essay. Anthropocentrism is described in the textbox below.
| Anthropocentrism |
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The concept Anthropocentrism is easily grasped. Conversely, it is almost impossible for humans to recognize it in themselves. This text is from The Human Conceit (DOTE, July 19, 2013).
In short, anthropocentrism must be observed and identified at the margins—in discussions of free will and consciousness, in astrobiology as we contemplate the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, in the humiliations of science which point out that humans are not in fact the center of the universe ((e.g., Darwin, Copernicus, modern ecology) and, finally and especially, in how humans treat other species here on Earth, including the ones we've pushed into extinction. The simplest and most accurate story simply says that humans are human-centric just as badgers are badger-centric or mice are mouse-centric. There's nothing mysterious going on here — instinctual anthropocentrism would be predicted in any "objective" view of Homo sapiens as an evolved species. Unfortunately, there are no alien anthropologists who might point this out to us, and all the "gods" humans have created have nothing to say about it. Ecologist Erle Ellis, who was quoted earlier, writes the following at the end of the essay I cited. Ellis believes humans can achieve a "good" anthropocene if only they do this or that. At least, that is the hope (emphasis added).
When Ellis speaks of a sustainable "anthropogenic biosphere," he is of course referring to a biosphere which is both human-managed and human-centered. With regard to ultimate causes, I note without irony that human transformation of the biosphere is best explained by Live & Grow as expressed by economic niche-building, which itself is supported by primitive anthropocentrism. If these behaviors are truly instinctual, nothing can be done about them. Ellis can not of course confront ultimate causes in this sense because he is merely expressing them—he adopts an entirely anthropocentric view of the hoped-for future throughout his 44-page essay, but the term "anthropocentrism" and related forms of this term do not occur in those 44 pages. Is this simply an oversight on Ellis' part? I think not. In short, Ellis lives in flatland, which is ironic because he provides such a superb description of humanity's opportunistic but relentless transformation of the biosphere over tens of thousands of years (ecological niches were ruthlessly exploited when it became possible to do so). If humans were able to grasp their instinctual human-centric position—Ellis writes that "our job now and going forward is to manage non-human species successfully"—you would expect to find that insight in the writings of researchers who are thinking about the causes and consequences of the anthropocene. I recently pointed out another example in Notes On Instinctual Anthropocentrism (DOTE, December 27, 2016). Writer J.B. MacKinnon, who wrote a book about endangered nature called The Once And Future World, could not come up with a non-anthropocentric view of why humans should value the natural world.
What does it look like to recognize and acknowledge anthropocentrism? Examples are vanishingly rare as you might expect, but you can find one in the work of Colorado State philosopher Holmes Rolston. Rolston understands that being more "biologically objective" requires a non-anthropocentric view of the natural world, but such a stance appears to be beyond our reach. I laid out an ideal environmental ethic in Why Should We Protect Nature? (DOTE, July 8, 2015). That ethic was entirely hypothetical because it has a snowball's chance in hell of ever being implemented as I explained in that post. However Rolston has worked out environmental ethics, the situation is decidedly not as the Christian Science Monitor put it in a review of his 1988 book on the subject.
There are hardly "two camps" if there are a handful of intellectuals in one camp and 7.4 billion people in the other. Like niche-building, species-centrism is a direct reflection of Live & Grow in any evolved animal, humans included. It is hard to imagine one without the other. For example, instinctual sociality merely reinforces anthropocentrism because social behaviors are inevitably human-centered. We will see unconscious anthropocentrism over and over again as this essay progresses. |
Existential Threat Filtering
Instincts and filters are the linchpins of the flatland model. As we shall see, these are complementary. Having discussed instincts, it is straightforward to define an existential threat.
Definition in the Flatland model
An existential threat is a threat to instinctual behaviors, i.e., it is a threat to some aspect of Live & Grow. More precisely, the evolved human mind interprets such threats as existential even when they are not.
In the usual meaning, an existential threat is a threat to existence or survival (literal death), but the human mind seems to have evolved in a way which generalizes such threats to include threats to self-image, generalized self-interest, the status quo, social identity, social status and legitimacy, social groups or institutions, and many other types of "bad news" as discussed in the original (1st) Adventures In Flatland essay.
Such threats need not be threats to existence or survival, but instead imply dissolution or fragmentation. The death of the Democratic Party would not mean the literal death of the individuals comprising it. A harsh blow to someone's self-image need not entail the death of the person in question. Much-despised Luddites (alleged technophobes) constitute an existential threat to Live & Grow because they call unrestrained technophila into question. On the other hand, resistance to robots taking jobs is indeed a threat to Live & Grow for those who will lose those jobs. Automation is clearly not a threat to the political, economic and technological elites whose self-interest is served by it.
And so on, ad nauseum.
The definition above is perhaps overly parsimonious—perhaps there are significant classes of exceptions—but it constitutes a very powerful way to explain lots of otherwise mysterious human behaviors. The rule goes like this—
Responses to Existential Threats
Humans respond to existential threats if the threat is on their doorstep and there is an actionable instinctual (Live & Grow) response. Actionable means literally to take action in some way (physically, socially, institutionally, etc.).
Otherwise, humans filter existential threats (the threat is not concrete and immediate, or there is no actionable instinctual response). To filter a threat means to defang or defuse it in some way without taking action. A filtering response is therefore nearly always a psychological response and occurs only when there is something very important (instinctual) at stake.
Right away we see that instincts and filters are the Yin & Yang of human nature, for surely it is true that filtering a threat is also an instinctual reaction to the threat. Nonetheless, I find it useful to consider filtering separately. Instincts are primary by definition, but I see filtering responses as an evolutionary add-on.
To better understand filtering, let's look at an incomplete but useful list of filtering modes (below). In human cognition, each of the psychological behaviors listed below is characteristic of our species, i.e., these behaviors can be observed everywhere all the time in human/group interactions where existential threats are in play, which is often the case with an aggressive species like ours (e.g., as in politics or family conflicts).
Modes of Existential Threat Filtering
- rationalization (motivated reasoning /cognition, explaining away your own unacceptable attributes or behaviors in a self-serving way, aka. bullshit)
- projection (projecting your own unacceptable attributes or behaviors onto someone else or some other social group in the tribal case)
- other adaptation (defense) mechanisms, including denial, dissociation, compartmentalization, intellectualization, sublimation and compensation
- optimism bias (obligatory hope as a filter of future outcomes)
- positive illusions (including the illusion of control over events and invulnerability to risk)
- the illusion of moral superiority (remain blind to your own immoral behaviors or double standards)
- shift the blame (from the self or social group to another person or group)
- postponing (assume that present threats only apply in the far-flung future)
- omission (exclude threatening information)
- the ostrich effect (act as though the threat doesn't exist)
- confirmation bias (ignore conflicting/threatening information)
- the backfire effect (conflicting information reinforces instead of weakening core beliefs)
- change the subject (misdirection, deflection, red herring, avoid threatening information)
- blame the victim (for what you have done to them, includes the belief in a "just world")
- shoot the messenger bearing the bad news
- ad hominem attacks (delegitimize, harass or belittle the source of the threat)
- set up a straw man (misrepresent, misinterpret or distort the views of those posing the threat)
- stigmatize or dehumanize the source of the threat (justifies punishment or worse)
- dismissal (discount the importance of the threat)
- downward comparison ("cheer up, things could be worse")
- existential reassurance (no matter how bad things get, everything will be all right)
Humans are never subjectively aware that they are engaged in these filtering behaviors. A person blaming the victim is not aware that they are doing so. A person dehumanizing another person or social group is not aware that they are doing so. And so on, ad nauseum. These are instinctual and therefore unconscious behaviors.
To understand filtering modes and why they are so prevalent in human social interactions, you need only understand this observation by Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California.
The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body. The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.
Let us provisionally call the body (including the brain/psyche) the self (see below). Three important things follow from Kaplan's crucial observation:
- Where existential threats to the self are in play, as in politics, no one ever changes their mind, or only very rarely does so.
- Although the human condition is everywhere fucked up in myriad ways—dysfunctional and full of human-caused suffering— it is nobody's fault. (If you blame others, they are also blaming you.)
- In so far as filtering modes arise out of the unconscious and are therefore automatic, humans are not aware of what they're doing or why they're doing it when existential threats to the self are in play.
In the list, rationalization leads off because it is the most widely used filtering behavior. Now we understand more fully what motivates the bullshit in question—there is a threat to Live & Grow. For example, humans engaging in self-interested behaviors which are harmful to others almost invariably find a way to rationalize (justify) those behaviors (e.g., they have corn-pone opinions). In other cases, humans rationalize the cruel nature of life itself. A personal favorite of mine (and non-ironically of many others) is crazy Friedrich Nietzsche's what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Tell that to traumatized and disabled Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
Well, we are talking about the myriad forms of human bullshit here
I fear the list above describes only a small (but significant) subset of the animals in the human filtering zoo. As with instinctual Live & Grow behaviors, existential threat filtering is highly elaborated in humans. Consider this recent example from The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert. Scott Pruitt is Donald Trump's climate-denier nominee for head of the EPA.
In his opening statement, Pruitt offered the following on climate change:
“Science tells us that the climate is changing and human activity in some manner impacts that change. The human ability to measure with precision the extent of that impact is subject to continuing debate and dialogue, as well they should be.”
The statement was clearly designed to be obfuscatory, but it was just comprehensible enough to also be clearly wrong.
What's going on here? There is filtering, of course, but it is complex. The flatland model (as described so far) tells us there is a threat to Live & Grow (self-interested business-as-usual, growth) and that is certainly the bottom line here.
But we might call the filtering (the motivated bullshit, or post-hoc rationalization) complex denial (as opposed to simple denial). There are elements of confirmation bias (ignoring conflicting scientific information), dismissal (the science isn't settled), and postponement (we should wait until the science is settled). Filtering usually works this way—it is highly elaborated. And this example gives rise to another animal in the filtering zoo:
- sow confusion (cast doubt or introduce uncertainty where none exists, put up a smoke screen)
Pruitt's nonsense introduces uncertainty where none exists, but this smokescreen will appeal to those already naturally inclined to the kind of filtering described in this example. Unfortunately, existential threat filtering is usually complex. However, complexity should not deter us from describing and modeling this ubiquitous and universal human behavior.
After all, defending instinctual behaviors is what Big Brains do
Do not be unduly influenced by the seemingly political nature of the Scott Pruitt example. Those who have no doubt about the reality of anthropogenic climate change also employ very complex filtering strategies which I described in the 2nd Flatland essay. Realistic human responses to climate change, the sixth extinction and the destruction of marine ecosystems would threaten nearly every aspect of Live & Grow. Ergo, responses proportionate to these huge environmental risks can not occur.
For example, primates are our closest living evolutionary relatives. Do primates matter?
| Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me! |
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In the third week of January, 2017 there were a few media reports on a paper published that week by Science Advances called Impending extinction crisis of the world’s primates: Why primates matter. Here's the abstract.
The anthropocentric argument is obvious in the first sentence—"nonhuman primates, our closest biological relatives, play important roles in the livelihoods, cultures, and religions of many societies." Such reports are not new and have had little effect on destructive human impacts on primate populations (habitat loss, bushmeat hunting, etc.). Acting effectively to abate primate extinctions would threaten the human imperative to Live & Grow in the places where primates live (Asia, Africa, Central and South America). Human decimation of primate populations is also threatening to the all-important self-image of our species. Is Homo sapiens not the very apex of evolution? The apple of God's eye? Of course we are! Threats to our self-image must be filtered, and urgently. On Saturday January 21, I was listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!, which is
So play along! You will only get the full effect by listening to the segment up to about the 1:10 mark, so I will not provide a transcript or tell you what to listen for. Those happy, fun-loving NPR quiz show people had no awareness whatsoever of what they were saying. It simply didn't register. As a filtering mode, this comes closest perhaps to dissociation, which we can define informally as self-pr0tective detachment from some threatening reality, a splitting off of mental attitudes from the threat in question. Did the words "primates" and "extinction" have any real meaning or import for the people on that quiz show? No. Even among the few people who noticed the primates story, for example here,
there is little reason to believe this impending extinction catastrophe had any substantive impact on anyone (excepting primate conservationists) a short time after that Vice news story was published. (It is now 22 days later as I write this.) This kind of short-term temporal filtering—when the threat in question registers at all— is typical and entrenched in the human animal. I alluded to it in Teflon Humans (DOTE, January 6, 2017). Long story short, this filtering mode is easily summed up—
Every morning there is a talk show on NPR (now 1A, formerly the Diane Rehm Show). Everyday a panel of "experts" discusses some fucked up thing. Everyday. The discussion ends, the fucked up thing is still fucked up, and then they do it again tomorrow. No one ever notices that virtually everything (in America) is fucked up. And why? Well, they do it everyday. Afterwards we forget about it, and they forget about it, and we listen in again tomorrow when another panel of "experts" discusses some other fucked-up thing. Wash, rinse and repeat. Nothing sticks. Primate extinctions? What primate extinctions? The problem, of course, is that it's hard to be an eco-warrior, but it's easy to drive like one |
Threat filtering is also the appropriate context for a discussion of instinctual adaptation, an aspect of Live & Grow listed above. Here I mean adaptation of individuals (of the self) to negative life events. I am not referring to evolutionary (genetic) adaptation, which I regard as a relatively trivial determinant of characteristic human behaviors over the last 50,000 years (with the exception of the evolution of racial differences over time, which triggered unfortunate in-group/out-group social responses based on skin color.)
For an alternative view of the importance of adaptation in the last 50,000 years, see The Incredible Shrinking Brain (DOTE) and Has social living shrunk our brains? (New Scientist, May 2014).
The main insight about adaptation comes from Harvard social psychologist Dan Gilbert, who discovered a cognitive strategy he calls impact bias. This quote is from Ted Radio Hour segment How Does Misfortune Affect Long-Term Happiness? (NPR, February 14, 2014).
Research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the impact bias, which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly, for the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.
From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness...
It's not because people don't get over these events, and if by get over, we mean end up having happy productive lives. They do. In fact, the vast majority of people who experience any kind of tragedy or trauma will ultimately return to their baseline or very close to their baseline in what seems like relatively short order. We don't recognize that we are as resilient a species as we turn out to be. What's interesting to me as a psychologist is, why don't we know this about ourselves?
Although Gilbert focuses on impact bias as described above, the far more interesting phenomenon from a flatland modeling point of view is that humans have what Gilbert calls our psychological immune system—"the vast majority of people who experience any kind of tragedy or trauma will ultimately return to their baseline or very close to their baseline in what seems like relatively short order."
Straightforwardly, the eventual return to baseline (or close to it) is temporal existential threat filtering in the Flatland model. The self is undermined—an existential threat—but the self adapts to the threat over time, eventually carrying on as though the negative event had not occurred. Unlike the return to baseline, threat filtering is otherwise a spontaneous and usually immediate (automatic) response to threats to Live & Grow as described above.
Naturally Gilbert puts a positive spin on temporal filtering by noting how "resilient" we humans are, which is presumably a good thing (but see below). If the self could not recover from life's onslaughts, the self would be effectively done for. From this point of view, resiliency makes human life possible, which is a good thing. Adaptation thus promotes Live & Grow directly.
In this context we see instincts and filters as complementary, for example—
- return to baseline (adaptation) filters negative events over time and thereby re-enables Live & Grow
- post-hoc rationalizing filters threats to instinctual behaviors and in so doing maintains Live & Grow
- obligatory hope (optimism bias) filters seemingly hopeless futures and thereby enables Live & Grow
- confirmation bias filters negative (threatening) information but also seeks out self- or socially-affirming information, which promotes coherence of the self or the social groups the self is tied to, thereby promoting Live & Grow
And so on down the filters list. I daresay it could not be otherwise.
Deep-rooted, intractable problems arise when adaptation applies in a larger context. In flatland human adaptability is always taken to be a good thing—it re-enables Live & Grow—but our wonderful "resilience" becomes self-defeating when humans adapt to degraded and deteriorating social or environmental conditions over long periods of time on the human time-scale (years, decades, centuries). This is the proverbial Boiling Frog writ large.
Resilience in the face of a catastrophic disease outbreak or the death of a loved one is one thing, but adaptation to human-caused social or environment degradation is quite another. I recently commented on this in Our Foolish Species (DOTE, December 21, 2016). I was responding to David Grinspoon's delusional take on the human future (indented quote below).
... Making massive changes in landscapes is not unique to us. Beavers do plenty of that, for example, when they build dams, alter streams, cut down forests and create new meadows. Even changing global climate and initiating mass extinction is not a human first. Photosynthetic bacteria did that some 2.5 billion years ago.
What distinguishes humans from other world-changing organisms must be related to our great cleverness and adaptability...
Oh, my! Human "cleverness" is destroying the biosphere and human "adaptability" helps humans not to notice what they're doing. (Adaptability is ultimately a form of filtering.)
Precisely. Longer term temporal filtering in a wider context was discussed under the title Shifting Baselines in the 2nd essay (and here, Daniel Pauly's Ted Talk)
The ocean has degraded within our lifetimes, as shown in the decreasing average size of fish. And yet, as Daniel Pauly shows us onstage at Mission Blue, each time the baseline drops, we call it the new "normal." At what point do we stop readjusting downward?
The return to baseline in a deteriorating world—the human propensity to create a new "normal" as society, global civilization or the Earth's biosphere degrades—strongly implies that there is no point at which humans stop adjusting downward until irreversible and destructive dissolution or fragmentation of human populations and sociocultural arrangements occurs. In the worse case where there is a massive die-off of human populations in a severely degraded biosphere, survivors would continue to try to adjust to barely tolerable living conditions.
Finally, human resiliency has disturbing consequences (as if the foregoing was not bad enough). When humans adapt to urgent self-created threats like climate change, they are not learning anything. For example, as the biosphere gradually deteriorates, adaptation (resiliency) means in effect that humans do not question the wisdom of their own long-run behaviors. If humans were able learn from their macro-level mistakes, that process might potentially lead to self-critical examination.
But the return to baseline obviates the need for meaningful soul-searching. The new "normal" is now normal, end of story. So adaptation has a peculiar and self-defeating property—it reinforces the very flatland behaviors which created the problems which must be adapted to. Adaptation thus creates a "closed world" because "successful" adaptation to degraded conditions seems to demonstrate that human capacities are sufficient to handle any social or environmental problems which might come up.
In this closed world, successful adaptation to terrible conditions—whatever that means—implies that what humans do not know about themselves is also irrelevant or unimportant. Destructive, self-defeating, and otherwise foolish behaviors are therefore meaningless because humans never learn anything from them, or at least not for long. For experience to be "meaningful" in this sense, experience would necessarily prompt significant and enduring changes in human behavior.
I called this Flatland Nihilism in a recent post (DOTE, January 4, 2017). It seems that all the instinctual aspects of Live & Grow, along with the various filtering modes, conspire to keep humans immersed in flatland, which is thus a closed world. Technophilia tells us effective solutions are at hand. Our success at economic niche-building and our anthropocentrism tell us we can do anything. Sociality tells us the sky's the limit if we all work together. Sociality derives from and reinforces anthropocentrism.
Our instincts all lead to the same conclusion—we humans are OK, no reflection required. From an evolutionary perspective, in so far as we are slaves to Live & Grow, inherent delusional blindness seems inevitable. I don't see how it could have turned out any other way.
Updated Flatland Model
Here is the updated Flatland model. This version supersedes all previously published versions.
Figure 1 — The Flatland Model
Flatland is the Unconscious (Live & Grow with associated filters and biases) together with The Internal Self (red bordered rectangle). External Inputs (events, speech, other sensory data) serve as direct inputs to the unconscious, where they are processed to produce Congruent Outputs, which are defined below. The two components of Flatland are linked by the arrow labeled "expressed by", so read it this way: unconscious Live & Grow instincts, filters and biases are expressed by the the internal self. And so on for the other major elements in the model.
I will discuss The Internal Self, Consciousness and Memory in the next section. For now, let's focus on Congruent Outputs and relate them to the previous discussion of instincts and filters. To be clear, to be "congruent with" (also "congruous") means to be "in agreement, harmony, or correspondence with." Necessarily, outputs in the Flatland model are congruent with what the unconscious dictates.
There are two cases to consider.
Definition in the Flatland model
At the broadest level of generality, a congruent output is simply an instinctual behavior (i.e., "instinctual" means what it says).
So when we learn that humans have shaped Amazon basin rainforests to suit their own Live & Grow purposes (economic niche-construction) over the last 8,000 years, we should not be surprised—this is what humans (qua animals) do (Science, March 3, 2017). The only surprise (for modern humans) is that Amazon has not been "natural" (pristine) for many thousands of years (The Atlantic, March 2017).
... the human fingerprint can even be seen across one of the most biodiverse yet unexplored regions in the world, the Amazon rainforest.
For more than 8,000 years, people lived in the Amazon and farmed it to make it more productive. They favored certain trees over others, effectively creating crops that we now call the cocoa bean and the brazil nut, and they eventually domesticated them. And while many of the communities who managed these plants died in the Amerindian genocide 500 years ago, the effects of their work can still be observed in today’s Amazon rainforest.
“People arrived in the Amazon at least 10,000 years ago, and they started to use the species that were there. And more than 8,000 years ago, they selected some individuals with specific phenotypes that are useful for humans,” says Carolina Levis, a scholar at Wageningen University who helped lead the study. “They really cultivated and planted these species in their home gardens, in the forests they were managing,” she said.
In so far as Flatland humans will not acknowledge that they are animals whose behavior is driven by instincts, regardless of how superficially complex those behaviors are, the axiom above will be rejected (filtered in various ways). In fact, very complex but superficial variation in human behavior makes it much easier for humans to maintain the delusion that they are not animals driven by identifiable instincts. And filtering behaviors are among the most complex of all. This gives rise to the next definition.
Congruent outputs in the narrower case are simply what humans do or say or think in response to existential threats to instincts as defined earlier. More precisely—
Definition in the Flatland model
A congruent output in the existential threat case takes one of two forms:
An actionable response to immediate existential threats driven by and consistent with instincts. In short, something happens, i.e., there is an actual response.
A filtering response to existential threats driven by and consistent with instincts. Filtering occurs when one or both of these conditions holds—
1. there are no possible or effective responses to the threat compatible with Live & Grow.
2. the threat is not immediate (i.e., not on your doorstep or perceived to be).
In short, nothing much actually happens or changes, though there is often the appearance of a response.
A few examples will help make sense of this. Although I present only few examples in this essay, I can assure you that the "rules" above are quite general. They apply to and attempt to explain virtually everything I've written on DOTE over the last four years. Future posts will provide further examples.
This handy rule of thumb provides further guidance—
With humans, always look at outcomes (congruent outputs) and consciously filter the noise (congruent outputs are usually complex with lots of messy details which ultimately don't matter).
With simple filtering modes, it is easy to see that nothing much happens (rationalization, simple denial, postponement, dismissal, obligatory hope without substance etc.). Unfortunately, in the real world, filtering is usually complex (noisy) and there are lots of messy details, as you will see in the Fed example (textbox below).
| The Fed Filters The Threat |
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In the spring of 2015, a few studies and press reports accused the Federal Reserve of exacerbating growing income and wealth inequality in the United States.
Some months before that, Fed chair Janet Yellen gave a speech on inequality in the United States, which was covered in the New York Times by William D. Cohan in How Quantitative Easing Contributed to the Nation’s Inequality Problem (October 12, 2015, emphasis added).
Cohan goes on to explain in great detail how quantitative easing made the rich richer in the United States (read the article). The evidence is crystal clear and compelling, which comes as no surprise in so far as the Federal Reserve is an elite institution whose actual mandate, as opposed to its publicly stated mandate, is to protect other elite institutions, principally the largest U.S. banks (aka. the primary dealers who can "borrow from the Fed, essentially [for] free.") Clearly the Fed had to defend itself against these accusations, which were a threat to it's legitimacy as defined by its official mandate. In the Flatland model, there was direct threat to Live & Grow. It is simply not possible for the Fed to take such accusations seriously, own up to its role in preserving and exacerbating inequality, and reconsider the impacts of monetary policy. Doing so would not be compatible with instincts as they apply to this elite institution. Filtering responses were clearly called for. Janet Yellen got the filtering ball rolling by omitting Fed policy in her speech about inequality. Omission is a common filtering mode, although other filters may have applied (e.g., dissociation). However, Yellen was called out for avoiding the subject, so a stronger filtering response became necessary. This response was implemented in the spring of 2015 by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Brookings Institution, another elite institution which Bernanke had joined after leaving the Fed. On June 1, 2015, the Brookings Institution held a 1-day conference the sole purpose of which was to squash the allegation that Fed policy had made the rich richer in the United States. On the same day, Bernanke himself wrote a blog post refuting this threatening accusation. In terms of social instincts, concerning elite institutions like Brookings, the Fed and the New York Times, "it's one big club and you're not in it" — George Carlin, requiescet in pace. But I digress. Binyamin Applebaum of the New York Times reported on Bernanke's blog post and the Brookings conference the next day (June 2, 2015) in an article called Ben Bernanke Says Fed Can't Get Caught Up In Inequality Debate. The tone of the article is strange, no doubt because of the sensitivity of this subject. Apparently, the renegade William D. Cohan of the Times, who was quoted above, had wandered off the reservation, a "mistake" Applebaum seeks to correct. Here is a stripped-down version Fed's defense—
The conference attendees spent the entire day arguing that Fed policy had saved the economy and lowered the jobless rate, so the crucial rationalizations follow the quote above—
Feeling the social pressure of his peers, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh caved.
There were other filtering responses. A researcher at the Philadelphia Fed studied the issue and—surprise, surprise!—made the evasive argument outlined above. In the Flatland model, the predictable defensiveness of the Fed is a typical filtering response. It is a congruent output because the accusation that the Fed had made the rich richer was an existential threat to the integrity of the Fed, which views itself as an institution whose policies serve the public interest. It was also a threat to the self-image of those inside the Fed and the elite social groups aligned with it. Such responses are ubiquitous and predictable. Has any human institution accused of moral or legal wrongdoing ever admitted it's complicity or guilt? It happens, but such admissions are very rare indeed. As with all filtering responses, nothing much actually happened, although there was the appearance of much activity (studies were made, articles were written, conferences were held). Did the Fed re-evaluate and change it's own behavior? Of course not. Today, some 21 months after all this took place, the Fed continues to act as a "reverse Robin Hood." The stock market is in record territory—the rich own almost all the equity wealth—the Fed has made only two token interest rate hikes and the Fed's balance sheet is still well above 4 trillion dollars. The labor market is still weak even as shown by the Fed's own measurement of labor market conditions. Yet, the alleged strength of the labor market was used to justify monetary policy which continues to benefit the wealthy. And few remember today that after the meltdown of 2008 the Fed did everything it could to protect elite banking interests and maintain the status quo in an economy with the highest income and wealth inequality in the developed world. |
For the Fed, in the face of this existential threat, there was no possible actionable response compatible with Live & Grow. Therefore, the Fed filtered the threat, albeit in a very elaborate way.
Now let's discuss ineffective filtering responses. These are human responses to big existential threats to the biosphere and ultimately Homo sapiens itself, including global warming, natural resource depletion, the 6th mass extinction and the destruction of marine ecosystems. Using climate change as an example here, I will reframe the arguments I made in the 2nd Flatland essay to fit the updated model. The substance of my observations in the 2nd essay remain unchanged. Here is the restated premise.
There is no effective solution to the climate problem compatible with Live & Grow.
This rule also applies to ongoing threats to the Earth's biosphere not discussed in this essay (e.g., there is no solution to global soil depletion which is compatible with Live & Grow).
Those in the "climate business" (see below) are filtering in the sense that they deny this premise. In the 2nd essay I called this have your cake and eat it too (cake-eaters). There is the appearance of a very complex response, but this response is inevitably ineffectual. There are congruent outputs in all cases. What is the bottom line? Nothing much happens.
Let's review what can be observed. How are humans responding to the climate threat? It is no exaggeration to say that mitigating and adapting to global warming is now a global industry which generates billions of dollars in revenue. We can call it the climate business. Who is in the climate business? Lots of people, including activists, U.N. bureaucracies, renewable energy companies, electric car makers, government agencies and labs, scientists at these agencies and at universities, lots of non-profit organizations, science journalists, etc.
Conferences are held, as in Paris, scientific studies and reports are written and the media reports on them, plans are made, or changed and made again as the science evolves. Anthropocentric optimism is expressed—we are told that the Paris conference was a great success—which serves to keep the climate business going. Many of the people in this worldwide industry know each other, or know of each other. Sociality is thus expressed. We are told over and over again (by the "cake-eaters") that a strong climate response is indeed compatible with continued population and consumption growth, so Live & Grow at the most basic level is not violated. We are told that effective (but non-existent) new technology will allow us to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, so instinctual technophilia is also served.
On the other hand, there have also been actionable responses to the climate problem. Solar panels are cheaper, there has been a large uptick in installed renewable energy worldwide, albeit from a very low baseline (mostly wind and solar). Ethanol has made a small dent in global oil consumption. There are electric cars now. There is much talk of a carbon tax to create the right economic incentives, but only a few ineffectual "carbon markets" have been implemented. There are a few demonstration carbon capture & storage (CCS) power plants. In the United States, natural gas replaced some coal burning, but that was due to changes in the energy market, not climate activism. The Chinese are expanding their nuclear capacity and attempting to cap their coal consumption. No doubt I've overlooked a few other inconsequential responses, but by and large that's about it.
And what does all this amount to in terms of outcomes? Using the American slang, the human response to climate change doesn't amount to a hill of beans—little of consequence has resulted from this flurry of human activity. There is the appearance of a positive response in all cases, but the CO2 level in the atmosphere continues to rise. Global industrial civilization is still largely run on fossil fuels.
We can make two important observations about humankind's response to human-caused climate change—
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Necessarily, all the actionable responses (congruent outputs) have been driven by and are consistent with Live & Grow. In these cases, something happened (e.g., natural gas replaced some coal burning in the United States, the cost of solar technology has declined dramatically).
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All other activities amount to ineffective responses to the threat in question. Those responses, with rare exceptions, are also driven by and consistent with Live & Grow. Therefore, nothing much happens. Only radically transformative and immediate action to halt and reverse global warming matters. Everything else is bullshit.
Just to be clear, let's review what's being filtered here.
Those in the climate business are not filtering the fact that 1) the Earth is warming; and 2) humans are responsible for it. What is being filtered is the premise stated above—there is no appropriately scaled response to the climate problem compatible with Live & Grow, for acknowledging that grim reality would not itself be compatible with Live & Grow. Doing so would pose not-so-subtle threats to economic niche-construction, anthropocentrism, adaptation, and technophilia.
In short, the maintenance of positive illusions in the face of humankind's ongoing failure to come to grips with the climate problem is a filtering response (a congruent output). Therefore, for the "cake-eaters" who take climate change seriously, it is literally unthinkable to conclude or even seriously consider the idea that humans are not capable of fixing the climate problem and other anthropogenic threats to the biosphere. And why? Because a fundamental expression of Live & Grow says—
- Play the game (even when you're nearly always on the losing side of things)
We might facetiously call this the "Thanks for playing!" rule. In our evolutionary past, those who gave up, the ones who stopped playing the game, did not last long. They did not contribute to our genetic inheritance. They were weeded out. For environmentalists, species conservationists, political progressives of various kinds, human rights activists and many others, playing the game infuses life with "meaning"—hope springs eternal, never give up, never say die. But finding "meaning" in such activities is ultimately a delusional rationalization. Giving up on Homo sapiens would not be compatible with the all-powerful dictates of Live & Grow.
For example, David Grinspoon can not throw in the towel, so he invents delusional fantasies about a masterful human future. Applying the Flatland model, we now understand that such fantasies are instinctually motivated. Here's what I said in the comments section of my post Our Foolish Species.
Everything Grinspoon said in that Aeon article I quoted is motivated (as in "motivated reasoning" aka. bullshit). He is motivated by the need to keep hope alive, which arises from instinctual optimism, he is motivated by instinctual sociality and anthropocentrism, by his own self-interest, he's motivated because he has kids who have to live in our degraded future, etc. But of course he is blind to his own motivations. He's whistling in the dark. He is filtering in the face of human-caused existential threats. That's what humans do.
In other words, David Grinspoon is telling a story driven by Live & Grow. Let's take a look at that.
Stories As Congruent Outputs
It would seem to go without saying that humans are story-telling social animals but it needs to be said because humans—God bless them!—are usually (if not always) completely unaware that they're telling stories. In all the cases we're in interested in, those stories are motivated as described in the 3rd essay. Thus the world is full of post-hoc rationalizations (aka., bullshit) whose sole purpose is to filter threats to instincts as they apply to—
- the self
- the social groups/tribes the self is tied to (social identity)
- societies/civilizations
- the species itself
- political or private institutions (e.g., the Fed, banks, non-profits, health networks)
- traditions
etc., as outlined above. Long story short, stories are congruent outputs in the updated Flatland model.
Although we yearn for a simple and powerful model which explains the precise origin in the mind of complex and bizarre human stories, there isn't one and never will be. Belief systems are highly idiosyncratic and arbitrary even when widely shared. What we can say, in so far as these stories are motivated, is that they need not have anything to do with observable reality. The rule of thumb says—
- The stronger the instinctual motivation, the less likely the story will reflect observable reality. Thus powerful existential threats, or threats unconsciously taken that way, often elicit crazy responses.
So, human stories are often delusional as defined here (textbox below). Nonetheless, those stories are still congruent outputs. The most obvious examples come from the religious and political worlds—Russia elected Donald Trump!—but in so far as power & status relationships pervade every aspect of human life (in the home, the workplace, the tribe, etc.), the rule of thumb above is generally applicable.
| What Does "Crazy" Mean? |
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This text is adapted from my post Delusional Beliefs (DOTE, November 25, 2016). In the Flatland model, "crazy" means delusional in the sense of being out of touch with reality. This quote is from neuroscientist Dean Burnett's book Idiot Brain.
In Flatland, beliefs (stories) are considered delusional only if they depart from normative behavior in some unexpected and bizarre way. Thus the devout evangelist who hears the voice of God would not be considered delusional, whereas the agnostic trainee likely would be. In the Flatland model, delusional is delusional independently of what is normative for the person in question and independently of brain state (whether there is a pathology or not). If you are hearing the voice of God, you are crazy—period. If you don't believe that hearing the voice of God is delusional, you needn't read this essay because there is nothing I can do to help you. |
Let's illustrate this rule of thumb with a recent, telling example. What does Donald Trump's right-hand man Steve Bannon believe? (Quartz, February 3, 2017). Bannon's story is too complicated to lay out in detail here. It includes a fantasy called the 4th Turning, where each "turning" involves some great war (the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II).
In Bannon’s view, we are in the midst of an existential war, and everything is a part of that conflict. Treaties must be torn up, enemies named, culture changed. Global conflagration, should it occur, would only prove the theory correct. For Bannon, the Fourth Turning has arrived. The Grey Champion, a messianic strongman figure, may have already emerged. The apocalypse is now.
“What we are witnessing,” Bannon told The Washington Post last month, “is the birth of a new political order.”
Bannon made a documentary called Generation Zero which blames the decline of America, including the housing bubble and the subsequent financial meltdown in 2008, on the hippie counter-culture of the 1960s! And then there are the three pillars of Bannonism (from Quartz).
Bannon’s political philosophy boils down to three things that a Western country, and America in particular, needs to be successful: Capitalism, nationalism, and “Judeo-Christian values.” These are all deeply related, and essential.
America, says Bannon, is suffering a “crisis of capitalism.” (He uses the word “crisis” a lot—more on that later.) Capitalism used to be all about moderation, an entrepreneurial American spirit, and respect for one’s fellow Christian man. In fact, in remarks delivered to the Vatican in 2014, Bannon says that this “enlightened capitalism” was the “underlying principle” that allowed the US to escape the “barbarism” of the 20th century.
We can see what motivates Bannon in that quote. Capitalism must be restored, even if it takes an apocalypse to do it. Bannon's story and behavior, however confused and twisted, is entirely motivated by Live & Grow.
To restore the health of America’s economy and patch its shredded social fabric, Bannon wants capitalism to be re-anchored by the Judeo-Christian values he believes made the country great throughout its history. This shared morality ensures that businesses invest not just for their own benefit, but also for the good of native workers and future generations.
Can the Flatland model, or any other model of human nature for that matter, explain how this perverse story formed in Steve Bannon's mind? Certainly not. It is enough to know that crazy stories like Bannon's are congruent outputs. The stories the Islamic State (ISIS) tells are congruent outputs. The stories scientologists tell are congruent outputs. And so on. All such stories serve Live & Grow.
Most motivated "reasoning" is not as extreme as Bannon's. Nonetheless, such stories are invariably self-serving and delusional to a significant extent. Even after the election of Donald Trump, America's overthrown elites—its talking and deciding classes—continued to tell themselves that America's economy was strong and growing as a result of their enlightened leadership (for example, here and here). This is of course another example of complex denial. The economic reality for Americans living in the neglected hinterlands is something else altogether, which played a significant role in Trump's victory.
Trump as president would seem to provide compelling evidence that all is not right in America. But America's toppled elites learned nothing. They circled the wagons instead (i.e., filtered the threat to their self-image and legitimacy). Reality counts for nothing when instincts are served. In Flatland, congruence is everything.
The Internal Self, Consciousness And Free Will
Social behavior is reflexive, automatic, and unconscious.
— John Bargh
Let's do a reality check before I get into some fairly technical stuff. What kind of world are you living in?
Are you living in world where humans make "mistakes" in judgement and then try to learn from them? A world where people strive to acknowledge and correct their moral and ethical failures? A world where humans not only seek to improve themselves in this way, but are socially shunned if they do not? A world where how you treat others must (or at least should) meet or exceed your own expectations about how you yourself would like to be treated? A world of restraint where your fellow man and the natural world have intrinsic value? A world where wisdom and self-knowledge are prized above all other kinds of knowing?
Hell, no! — you do not live in this impossibly hospitable world and you never will. The Flatland model tries to explain the real human world, which is in large measure a meaningless world of selfishness, cruelty and excess.
Here is Figure 1 again, repeated for your convenience.
Figure 1 — The Flatland Model
It should be clear from all of the foregoing that the "self", consciousness and free will play a very limited role in the Flatland model. There are either 1) positive unconscious and automatic instinctual responses; or 2) negative filtering responses which defend against threats to instincts (i.e., existential threats). Such a model leaves little or no room for a free-willing "self" and consciousness where basic instincts are in play.
Let's start with The Internal Self. What is this mysterious thing? It is helpful to start with what it is not.
The Internal Self is not some autonomous and hidden conscious "mind" which makes decisions independently of the physical brain as assumed in the mind/body dualism of Rene Descartes and his many successors—there is no soul, there is no ghost in the machine, there is no homunculus in your head which makes decisions and implements free will. The internal self is not a free-willing executive in charge of your decision making.
If that statement is not entirely clear, I will return to it below (and follow the link). The key point is this—there is only the physical brain and that is all there is. Period. End of story. So what is this internal self anyway?
The Internal Self
The internal self lies within "Flatland" and processes inputs from The Unconscious (instincts, filters and biases) and Memory (the narrative self, social identity, belief systems, etc.) as in Figure 1.
Specifically, the internal self coordinates and boils down the outputs of an astonishing array of inputs (instincts, biases and filters as defined above, social identity and its concomitant belief systems, idiosyncratic early experience, cultural knowledge, etc.) to produce congruent outputs.
The Responder of Figure 1 (i.e., "You") resides in the unconscious and is entirely conceptual. The internal self has no physical correlate in the physical brain, so intrepid neuroscientists shouldn't bother to look for one
The default network governing social cognition linked in above, including the dorsal medial subsystem and the medial temporary subsystem, which are two of the many subsystems which provide inputs to the conceptual internal self.
It is helpful to look at Bruce Hood's post What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement? (edge.org, 2014). Hood is the Chair of Developmental Psychology in Society at the University of Bristol and the author of The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity (Oxford, 2012). I've added the emphasis.
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. 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.
The internal self in the Flatland model is a "convenient way of discussing the emergent output of multiple parallel processes" as Hood states. It is not an "implicit endorsement that there is "a decision-maker, an experiencer [or] 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.
... 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.
That is exactly the move I've made in my Flatland essays—I abandoned the free-willing self in order to examine the factors underlying the behaviors I wanted to understand. Thus it seemed possible to me "to begin to make progress in understanding how we [humans] really operate."
It is our naive sense of a unified, free-willing "self" that is an illusion. Conversely, there is no doubt that the conceptual internal "self" exists at any given point in time. That internal self is "informed" (per Figure 1) by the narrative self which resides in memory (textbox below).
| Memory And Filtering |
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If you look closely at the updated flatland model, you will notice two outputs linking the instinctual unconscious to the external world and memory. It is startling to realize that the unconscious is filtering both what we attend to and what gets encoded in memory prior to generating congruent outputs. The first model link refers to confirmation bias, which I discussed in the 3rd essay. Confirmation bias has been in the news lately (Washington Post, July 14, 2016).
There is nothing mysterious about this "alarming" behavior in the flatland model. Threats to instinctual sociality (here, tribal identity) are filtered and social ties are reinforced. The model assumes that social identity and shared beliefs reside in memory. In this respect, what gets encoded in memory is the flip side of confirmation bias because information which confirms social ties gets encoded in memory, whereas conflicting information is filtered. Our narrative self (or identity), which also resides in memory, is inextricably bound to our social identity as Matthew Lieberman and others have demonstrated. This was also discussed at length in the 3rd essay.
The very existence of this narrative self (our life story) raises the question of how that story gets updated over time. In the flatland model, unconscious filtering often compromises what we remember. We believe our memories are accurate, but they may not be, especially if those memories apply to ourselves. The accuracy of memory problem is quite general (e.g., the reliability of witnesses). In short, what makes it into memory with respect to the narrative self follows this rule of thumb—
This rule may not apply to depressed people, although there are theories which posit that even depression serves an evolutionary purpose. Sticking to "healthy" people, let's flesh this out with a few examples. First, and most straightforwardly, there is self-serving bias (Huffington Post, February 22, 2011).
Alan Greenspan's narrative self (in memory) never received any updates which might have put some of the blame for the financial crisis on himself. Don't be fooled by the specificity of this example. Self-serving bias is a well-documented effect. And then there is choice-supportive bias (Medium, November 9, 2016.)
The last example describes ethical amnesia (DOTE, May 24, 2016, based on a PNAS study linked in below).
Several other biases or effects could be brought to bear here (e.g., egocentric bias). These memory filters are all consistent with positive maintenance of the narrative self as described above. I believe the Flatland model organizes these diverse but related phenomena in a useful way. |
No one knows how the conceptual internal self coordinates and boils down great complexity to create integrated (albeit often complex or crazy) congruent outputs. It is enough to observe that it does so. Moreover, the brain does this very quickly in most cases. Responses often bypass conscious awareness altogether when instincts are in play. Filtering reactions to threats are often automatic and spontaneous (occurring on the order of a few hundreds of milliseconds). You can think of it this way: the human brain is there to maintain and defend "You", where "You" and your body are identical for all evolutionary intents and purposes.
In so far as we are interested in instincts and filtering of threats to instincts, this implies that these behaviors are hardwired in the brain even when those behaviors are idiosyncratic (varying from "self" to "self"). For example, early childhood trauma causes filtering responses in people which does not typically occur in others who did not have similar experiences. This is the basis of psychotherapy. Some instinctual responses (forms of adaptation) are intrinsically slow, but verbal or actionable responses to immediate threats to Live & Grow (as might occur in a heated political discussion, for example) happen in the blink of an eye.
Therefore, the oldest evolved parts of the brain (e.g., threat detection in the amygdala or memory formation & retrieval in the hippocampus) are chiefly responsible for instinctual behaviors (both actionable responses and filtering). On the other hand, reptiles and mice don't shift the blame when accused of wrongdoing, nor do they sow confusion about climate change science. So I believe our recently evolved gray matter—the expansion of the cerebral cortex—implements the uniquely human add-on which filters, rationalizes or defends instinctual behaviors in elaborate ways. Of course the cerebral cortex also implements lot of other stuff (e.g. very complex instinctual social behaviors).
I am not going to review the history of the so-called "mind-body" problem, nor am I going to take a close look at the current literature. All that history and literature boils down to two incompatible positions.
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dualism — this view takes one of two forms: 1) there is within us an independent free-willing "self" (or soul or ghost in the machine); or 2) consciousness ("mind") is a fundamental property of human brains and therefore, by extension, all matter has consciousness to one degree or another. Clearly, mice are more conscious than cell phones, and humans have more of this "mind" stuff than anything else, alive or not
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materialism — consciousness is entirely a property of the physical brain
You know which side of this "debate" I support. The first silly dualist position arises out of religion. The second silly dualist position is called panpsychism (and here). You should be aware that there is not a shred of scientific evidence of any kind (from psychological or neuroscience studies, etc.) which supports dualism.
To my knowledge, all the current evidence points the other way toward materialism, but there is always contentious debate about how to interpret that evidence. In so far as materialism does not accord with what we think we actually experience and diminishes the importance of much of our subjective experience, there is a lot of predictable resistance to accepting a strictly physical view. In the flatland model, that resistance amounts to negative filtering of the usual sort (see below).
In the Flatland model consciousness is post-hoc, which means that whatever limited self-awareness we have occurs after unconscious responses have been wholly determined. Consciousness may in fact be epiphenomenal, though I am not committed to that view one way or the other. It may also be—it probably is—an emergent property of the brain. Unfortunately, that explanation doesn't tell us much.
As shown in Figure 1, congruent outputs appear in consciousness after the fact. Consciousness does two things:
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creates "subjective awareness" of unconsciously determined responses (sensory states or thoughts)
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which serves to reinforce unconsciously determined responses—this is the illusion that you know your own mind
You will have noticed in the model that there is a link labeled "self-interpretation" connecting congruent outputs back to the flatland unconscious (Live & Grow). The mind operates recursively (i.e., in a loop which is active when you are awake or dreaming). Just as external events prompt congruent outputs, so do internal events. Without external prompting, our own actions, speech or thoughts may lead to further actions, speech or thoughts.
There is a little voice inside your head which researchers call inner speech. This is not the same as hearing voices which are not your own; it is part of normal human functioning. These are the stories you tell yourself. During introspection, that recursive loop prompts one thought after another. How this is implemented in the brain itself is profoundly mysterious. In the flatland model, consciousness plays no role in this recursion (e.g., during introspection). Consciousness is merely the "place" where unconsciously determined inner sensory states (like pain) or thoughts (our subjective awareness) appear. This is true even in cases where humans have genuine self-awareness, or in cases of self-questioning or self-doubt leading to such awareness. Genuine self-awareness is rare in this world.
Ben Bernanke did not spontaneously sit down without forethought to write a blog post defending the Fed against accusations that the central bank had made wealth & income inequality worse in the United States (textbox above). He first had to dream up the rationalizations he would use. That's an example of the stories we tell ourselves (inner speech). Basically, Ben Bernanke had to interpret his own actions and motivations in formulating and carrying out Fed policy after the financial meltdown in 2008. Following the two points made above, the rule of thumb says—
Humans almost invariably believe their own bullshit. And in rare cases where people are aware that they are bullshitting, as with some politicians for example, they will come to believe it in time.
We also might conclude that actual or inner speech in the relevant cases are instances of confabulation, which is usually defined like this—
a memory disturbance in which a person confuses imagined scenarios with actual memories with no intent to deceive. Most cases of confabulation are the result of dementia, brain damage, aneurism or Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome (thiamine deficiency due to alcoholism).
People who confabulate stories are often very confident in their memories even after being shown contradicting evidence. These stories can vary from slight truth alterations to completely unbelievable or bizarre tales. Even when the stories are completely false, the person appears coherent, consistent and relatively normal.
Unfortunately, this flatland definition covers only a small subset confabulating behaviors. This text is from Everyday Fairy Tales (emphasis added, New Scientist, October 7, 2006).
Confabulation is clearly far more than a result of a deficit in our memory, says William Hirstein, a neurologist and philosopher at Elmhurst College in Chicago and author of a book on the subject entitled Brain Fiction (MIT Press, 2005). Children and many adults confabulate when pressed to talk about something they have no knowledge of...
Sound familiar?
...and people do it during and after hypnosis. This raises doubts about the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. In fact, we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalize decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career?
We might add to that list of questions. Here's one for Ben Bernanke — why did you create another bubble in the stock market which made the rich richer?
At the extreme, some experts argue that we can never be sure about what is actually real and so must confabulate all the time to to try to make sense of the world around us...
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.
Intriguing possibility? And now let's observe flatland in action (congruent outputs).
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.
We are aware of at most 40 pieces of information out of 11 million. And what might we conclude from that?
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 stuff up] all of the time,” says philosopher Lars Hall.
While I am not claiming that humans confabulate all the time, I am indeed claiming that humans routinely confabulate when they rationalize/justify/defend/etc. congruent outputs as defined above (review the various modes of filtering). In fact, William Hirstein, the author of Brain Fiction, could not accept his own depressing conclusions about confabulation in every day life. That's another congruent output.
The flatland model is not meant to apply to anything that may be said to lie properly outside the domain of instinctual behaviors (including filtering). For example, this view does not apply to what consciousness researchers call qualia (feeling pain, seeing colors, etc.). It does not apply to emotional sensory states, although these too are no doubt instinctually-based. I am also agnostic about the behavior of the honest plumber who is fixing your leaking water pipe. I am not agnostic about the fate of the Earth's non-human primates. Here's another reminder about what we're talking about (Vox, January 23, 2017).
Primates are our closest relatives on Earth. If we can understand them better, we can understand ourselves. Here’s how Carl Zimmer at the New York Times explains it:
The first primates evolved roughly 80 million years ago, and then split into the living lineages over millions of years. By comparing our biology to those of other primates, we have learned about the evolution of our brains, our vision and our vulnerability to diseases.
When we lose the primates, we lose a bit of ourselves.
Why should humans save primate species they are driving to extinction? Because if we lose them, we lose a bit of ourselves. In the flatland model, this kind of response is a congruent output born of instinctual anthropocentrism. Humans are not aware and can not be aware of what drives this kind of typical human-centered response. Clearly humans do not know their own minds. Necessarily, the workings of the physical brain are opaque to self-awareness (the contents of consciousness).
My view is thus similar to and has been influenced by the hypothesis of philosopher Peter Carruthers, the author of Opacity Of Mind (Oxford, 2011). Carrthers' ISA theory was described by Keith Frankish in Whatever you think, you don’t necessarily know your own mind (Aeon, May 27, 2016).
... contemporary philosopher Peter Carruthers [argues] that our beliefs about our own thoughts and decisions are the product of self-interpretation and are often mistaken.
Evidence for this comes from experimental work in social psychology. It is well established that people sometimes think they have beliefs that they don’t really have... [see the article]
Building on such evidence, Carruthers makes a powerful case for an interpretive view of self-knowledge, set out in his book The Opacity of Mind (2011). The case starts with the claim that humans (and other primates) have a dedicated mental subsystem for understanding other people’s minds, which swiftly and unconsciously generates beliefs about what others think and feel, based on observations of their behavour. (Evidence for such a ‘mindreading’ system comes from a variety of sources, including the rapidity with which infants develop an understanding of people around them.) Carruthers argues that this same system is responsible for our knowledge of our own minds. Humans did not develop a second, inward-looking mindreading system (an inner sense); rather, they gained self-knowledge by directing the outward-looking system upon themselves. And because the system is outward-looking, it has access only to sensory inputs and must draw its conclusions from them alone. (Since it has direct access to sensory states, our knowledge of what we are experiencing is not interpretative.)
This theory makes sense, especially with respect to the instinctually driven behaviors we're interested in. This theory has some "startling" but unsurprising consequences (emphasis added).
The ISA theory has some startling consequences. One is that (with limited exceptions), we do not have conscious thoughts or make conscious decisions. For, if we did, we would be aware of them directly, not through interpretation. The conscious events we undergo are all sensory states of some kind, and what we take to be conscious thoughts and decisions are really sensory images – in particular, episodes of inner speech. These images might express thoughts, but they need to be interpreted.
Another consequence is that we might be sincerely mistaken about our own beliefs...
Exactly. For example, those studying primates have evidence that these animals play an important role in their native ecosystems. That's science. Good enough. But science journalist Carl Zimmer (quoted above) also believes that primates should be saved because they can be useful to humans. That belief is instinctually forced by unconscious anthropocentrism. That belief is an example of self-interpretation as discussed by Carruthers and me. Zimmer does not know and can not know his own mind.
And Zimmer's rationalization (his "belief") is absurd to boot. Primates are not merely some conceptual extension of ourselves. Non-human primates are sui generis—we share the same evolutionary lineage but they are wholly "other". Primates lived independently of humans for at least 55 million years. Unfortunately, the continued existence of a growing number of primate species isn't compatible with Live & Grow in the human primate.
If consciousness merely reinforces or (mis)interprets congruent outputs, it follows that consciousness is a misleading trickster (DOTE, August 25, 2016). Mitchell Diamond nicely summed up this aspect of consciousness in his book Darwin's Apple, which lays out an instinctually-based theory of religion (p. 76, and see the DOTE review).
The detached science reveals [consciousness] contributes only a small portion to everyday life, but people feel it is far more important. Self-aware consciousness has the ironic consequence of giving people the illusion that it sits atop a throne and sees itself as the executive in charge. People believe they have conscious control of their actions because their consciousness tells them that they do, but consciousness is misinformed and misinforming. Despite our sense of consciousness' importance, consciousness comes with serious downsides. Introspection is more likely to lead to false or erroneous conclusions than true ones. Consciousness is an observer after the fact and rationalizes reality rather than directs it.
People are lucky if they can accurately attribute actual causes to their behavior.
Unfortunately, humans don't get "lucky" very often when they are filtering threats to instincts, or even when they are acting instinctually. It may seem incredible—sadly, it is not —that it is relatively easy to observe flatland filtering behaviors in people who study free will and consciousness. I'll provide some examples for your edification and amusement.
I should also add that John Horgan is right when he observes that not only is study of the mind/body problem going nowhere, but it is also regressing. There seem to be two main reasons for this: 1) no one can locate consciousness in the brain or associate it reliably with specific brain states or wave patterns; and 2) more importantly, many people studying consciousness are consistently deceived by the awesome power of their own consciousness
In a critical review of Carruthers's ISA theory cited above, Timothy Allen and Joshua May summarize their critique as follows, with added emphasis:
Carruthers argues that knowledge of our own propositional attitudes is achieved by the same mechanism used to attain knowledge of other people’s minds. This seems incompatible with “privileged access”—the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, regardless of the mechanism. At one point Carruthers seems to suggest he may be able to maintain privileged access, because we have additional sensory information in our own case. We raise a number of worries for this suggestion, concluding that Carruthers’s new theory cannot clearly preserve the superior reliability of our beliefs about our own attitudes.
You see, then, that the problem with Carruthers' theory is that it is not compatible with the idea that we have more reliable beliefs about our own mental states, whereas it is clearly the case—there is no doubt about it, it's totally obvious, it's only common sense to believe—that we do. This illustrates the "beg the question" filtering mode. And surely Steve Bannon knows what he's thinking more reliably than anything we might come up with.
Our second example comes from David Chalmers, my "favorite" philosopher of mind and the inventor of the "hard problem" of consciousness: if consciousness plays no important role in our everyday lives, why do we have subjective self-awareness at all? Why aren't we simply unconscious zombies without subjective experience?
Well, consciousness either 1) evolved because it increased our evolutionary fitness; or 2) it is simply a byproduct of having these massive neural networks in our heads (epiphenomenalism). End of story. But that's not good enough for Chalmers, who has the usual instinctual agenda.
CHALMERS: So here's the mapping from [brain circuits] to this state of consciousness. But underneath that is always going be the question, why and how does the brain give you consciousness in the first place?
Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. So we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness, scientifically.
That initially seem crazy?
The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks — space and time and mass — and you build up the world from there.
Well, I think that's the situation we're in. If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time — the natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental — a fundamental building block of nature.
The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. This view is sometimes called panpsychism — pan, for all, psych, for mind. Every system is conscious. Not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even microbes. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. You know, it's not that a photon is wracked with angst because it's thinking, oh, I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses. No, not like that. But the thought is, maybe photons might have some element of raw subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.
This may strike you as silly, and it is, but there is a deadly serious sense in which we might consider Chalmers' delusional outlook. As far as we know, what is the only animal which is truly conscious? You guessed it—Homo sapiens! Or, if consciousness is truly universal, which living entity (again, as far as we know) has more consciousness than any other? Right again—Homo sapiens!
And where, consciousness-wise, does that put the very special and in-all-ways wonderful species called Homo sapiens in the grand scheme of things? Right at the top of the nature's pyramid! Right at the happy end of an evolutionary march of progress! Thus Chalmers is asking us—as if we needed any prompting —to contemplate just how wonderful we humans really are. Thus we see that Chalmers has unknowingly—isn't that a great word in this context?—inserted the rosy view humans typically take of themselves.
And finally there is Daniel Dennett, who talks about free will in the video below. What makes this example interesting is that Dennett's views are diametrically opposed to those of Chalmers. Dennett is a determinist who denies the possibility of dualism. I have transcribed the relevant text below. Dennett is not using the word 'determined' in the sense of "wanting to become". He's means that we are driven by biological necessity
What we have to understand is that free will is our capacity to see probable futures, futures which seem like they're gonna happen, in time to take steps so that something else happens instead.
... but what you can change is what you thought the future was going to be into something else. And this is the key to avoiding [which is what evolution taught us to do] ...
The varieties of free will worth wanting, as I've said, are perfectly compatible with determinism.
We're not deluded about our sense of our own capacity. We are determined to be the masters of our fate to a surprisingly and gratifying degree.
My original motivation in creating the flatland model began with the idea that humans are indeed deluded about their own capacities. And that is the reason why humans are not taking the steps required to avoid catastrophic futures. In fact, humans are continuing without pause to engage in the very same behaviors which got them into this sorry predicament to begin with.
In so far as these self-defeating behaviors make no sense from a long-term survival standpoint, it surely must be the case that necessity (instinct) drives these behaviors. The only reasonable conclusion is that these instinctual behaviors were adaptive in our deep evolutionary past but are no longer adaptive in our bootstrapped modern human world.
And yet, here is Dennett, who is a materialist determinist like me, saying that "we're not deluded about our sense of our own capacity. We are determined to be the masters of our fate to a surprisingly and gratifying degree." This delusional view (congruent output) is surely a product of Dennett's instinctual anthropocentrism.
The flatland rule of thumb for free will is easy to state—
Regarding free will, in the instinctually-driven behaviors (including filtering) we are examining , there isn't any.
Harvard psychologist and determinist Daniel Wegner literally wrote the book on free will (MIT Press, 2002). Wegner died in 2013. Here's his simple model of how the mind works.
I believe the flatland model improves this 2002 model by positing one causal path, not two as Wegner specifies (look at Figure 1 again).
I will conclude this section by quoting Yale psychologist John Bargh. This text is from The Will Is Caused, Not "Free".(Psychology Today, June 23, 2009). I will quote this article without additional comment because if you've made it this far, what Bargh is saying will be self-evident. Bargh had participated in a debate with Roy Baumeister about free will.
... But let us assume that there is a free, internal source of control that guides our behavior and is ultimately responsible for ‘real' choices. To attribute human behavior to this mystical source is to place one's bets on an increasingly shrinking sphere. The project of social psychology, after all, has been to identify (a) external-to-the-individual causes of judgment, motivation, and behavior, such as situational influences, and (b) internal-to-the-individual causes, which research has shown increasingly to operate outside of awareness and conscious intention-not "freely chosen" in any sense of the term. Are there some human behaviors that are possible only if free will exists and is a true causal source of action? There may be. But let's not give up on the search for non-mystical causes just yet.
This brings us to an area of agreement revealed in the debate: that a belief in free will is important for human strivings. People cherish their sense of control over the world and their own behavior. In the debate, we noted recent empirical articles by Vohs and by Baumeister showing negative consequences (cheating, aggression) of informing participants that free will does not exist. Our response to these ‘new' articles is that our field revealed the existence of such positive illusions decades ago, and we already know how essential they are to normal functioning. Clearly it is motivating for each of us to believe we are better than average, that bad things happen to other people, not ourselves, and that we have free-agentic control over our own judgments and behavior -- just as it is comforting to believe in a benevolent God and justice for all in an afterlife. But the benefits of believing in free will are irrelevant to the actual existence of free will. A positive illusion, no matter how functional and comforting, is still an illusion...
We should also not forget past social psychological research demonstrating that the belief in personal free will is selective: people routinely make self-serving attributions about the causes of their behavior. We take credit for the positive things we do (free will), but not for our misdeeds and failures ( "I had no choice", "I was abused as a child", "I was angry"). This suggests to us that much of the emotion surrounding the issue of free will is not about freedom per se but about self-esteem maintenance. We take personal pride in our ancestors, our blue eyes or rich brown skin, our height or birthday or name (as in the name-letter effect)-none of which we chose or had any control over. Accordingly, we analyzed hundreds of individuals' spontaneous self-descriptions, and indeed 34% of their first-to-mind completions to the stem "I am _____" were such non-chosen aspects of self. It seems that people do not possess a consistent belief in free will so much as they strongly wish to take credit for the good things they are and do (regardless of whether they caused them), and to distance themselves from the bad things (even if they caused them). Evidently, the belief in free will is not principled, but socially strategic in nature.
It's time to finish up.
You Can't Jump Over Your Own Shadow
Here ends my contribution to the human project on this planet and my contribution to posterity. I would like to thank my reviewers Jim, Brian, Mike and Katherine for their help. They forced me to make some useful clarifications.
I had thought to say a lot of stuff here at the end but the essay is already long enough. So, I'm going to just sit with all this for a while. Future posts will sometimes be appendices and footnotes to the flatland model described in this essay. I will also post additional examples illustrating the model. After all, there are millions to choose from, though some are more interesting to me than others.
Responding to David Grinspoon's optimistic take on humanity's future as described in my post Our Foolish Species, a DOTE reader wrote—
"This [happy future] will not require altruism or idealism or self-sacrifice, only accurate self-perception and enlightened self-interest" [quote from Grinspoon]
That's really quite a statement, isn't it? I mean, it's essentially the neuro-psychological equivalent of saying that the only thing needed is for humans to grow wings and learn to fly through space without oxygen.
No biggie there. Any day now.
Following up, another reader wrote—
Cohen, I believe, has come to the conclusion that really, there's no point in trying to jump over one's own shadow because it simply can't be done. Quit wasting your time. There's nothing to do once you understand you can't make that jump.There's nowhere to go after that point. It's like finally coming to the understanding that you can't flap your arms, jump off a cliff and fly. If you were hell bent on flying off that cliff and came to this realization and there's no other way to fly, well, that's it. You're done. You're not going to fly. Go home and do something else. That's all there is to it. Finis.
Not really the answer anyone wants, but it looks to be true.
"There's no point in trying to jump over one's own shadow because it simply can't be done"—this simple but beautiful metaphor captures the flatland model perfectly. If you flap your arms and jump off that cliff, regardless of what you believe is going to happen, you're not going to fly. So, give it up and go home. Do something else. Finis.
In the flatland model, the "shadow" is Live & Grow and its associated filters and biases. You can't jump over your own instincts. The truly unfortunate thing about human existence is this—
The instinctual "shadow" reinforced by consciousness also tells humans there is nothing to jump over. It tells them they can fly.
If you can't fly, you shouldn't jump off that cliff. Unfortunately, that's exactly what humans seem to be doing, which follows from what I just told you.
"I got an idea —let's make the car a place of silent reflection."
This ends Part IV of Adventures In Flatland.
Dave Cohen
Decline of the Empire
[email protected]
March 13, 2017
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