Self-Awareness: Bolted on Real-World Modeling

A recent study seems to suggest that we often make decisions before we are conscience of making up our minds. It makes sense to me, when you think that self-awareness evolved late in the game. Perhaps self-awareness is primarily useful for building accurate models of the world - perhaps it is useful in building cohesive social networks - but it does not seem to be central to decision making.

This reinforces the idea of “gut reactions” and “sleeping on it.” We have very efficient decision-making skills that predate self-awareness. Self awareness adds a mental model of the world we live in and the importance of social relationships and cultural factors. Our decision-making ability may ignore all of that - which is why a gut reaction can be refreshing, ruthless, inappropriate… in short, it is a decision without regards for social status or “big-picture” ramifications. Literally, cutting through the Gordian knot, because it is an immediate solution not open to anyone who censors their instincts by their social and political awareness.

So self-awareness adds a social and ethical dimension to our decision-making. Who knows, perhaps our social and ethical ideas, our “big picture” models of how the world works can also inform our “gut reactions” - but then again, maybe they can’t. This would go a long way in helping us understand why we have such a hard time aligning our actions with our ideals - our gut is constantly short-circuiting our ethics, and offering clear decisions that may not align with how the world really works, or the larger realities (about which our intuition knows nothing).

If this is true, it might help us understand why wise men are also hermits - because they can align their intuition with their lifestyle, without running afoul of the complications of civilization.

 

The Real World?

It is important that we understand that there is a real world, and that we live in it. The mantra of “real for me” and “true for me” is a distortion that makes a real difference in how we live, the choices we make, and the kind of community we seek.

One of the implications of the the success of the scientific world view is the vindication of the existence of the real world. I can run a test for iron in your blood, confident that your body works essentially like mine, and that the test for iron will work the same on your blood as it does for mine, no matter where you live or what you believe about bodies, science or blood.

But to say we all live in the same, real world is not the same thing as saying that we all experience or think about the world in the same way. We perceive the world through a subset of all possible perceptions, all possible senses. For example, we have no ability to see into the infrared, so we don’t visually observe the heat of an object. What we sense about the world is a subset of what is “out there” to be observed. So one person can see a rock and not know it is hot,while another person can see and feel it, and so knows that it is hot. Because we don’t all observe all of the world’s properties, our starting points can and do differ.

Next we process and filter what we sense. For example, we have 3 color receptors (some birds have 4), so we “sort” light waves into 3 bins - a somewhat arbitrary choice that limits what we report to our brains. We have blind spots, chemical fatigue, we have special receptors to process lines, etc. What we pass on to the brain has been filtered and enhanced before it ever leaves the eye.

Then we process and filter our perceptions in various places in our brain - for example, converting a chemical signal from the eye into the experience of color, looking for faces, identifying patterns, processing motion - we do quite a bit of pre-processing before our awareness of the outside world gets to our consciousness. For example, out brain suppresses background noise, especially when we concentrate, so we may not “hear” someone talking to us, though there is nothing wrong with our hearing - it has literally been blocked by our brain. Sometimes, our perceptions get passed onto different parts of the brain on “priority override” and we find ourselves on our feet and running before we are consciously aware of some perceived threat.

Finally we make decisions about the meaning and significance of what we see - ignoring some data, rationalizing others, assuming other things not in evidence. Some of this is under our control, lots of this is not - and our responses can be predicted by our genetic makeup, physiological state, upbringing, education, faith and culture.

What we pay attention to, how we assign significance, what responses we can conceive of in responding to what we perceive - these are all in large part not going to change from experience to experience. It may be that you can “expand your consciousness” to encompass possible ways of thinking about and responding to the world around us - but this is a difficult, unpredictable and time-consuming process. Even conversion experiences and “ah-ah” moments are the culmination of complex cascades of thought and experience.

In the past, challenging someone to a fight over a slight of honor would have been commonplace. Today, it is less accepted, at least in some circles. Once, changing your path to not cross that of a black cat’s would have been deemed prudent. Today, I hope, not so much. Once, you would have taken on your father’s job, or been married, or taken a religious vocation. Now, there are lots more options. Once, the world was full of dangerous capricious spirits - in the trees, in the water, behind the wind, in the creatures we encountered - a magical, potent nature to be approached with awe and fear, and propitiated. It is not quite so numinous these days, at least for most people. Are we exercising our free will when we walk, unafraid, across a stream that our ancestors knew housed a capricious water sprite, or do we just see the world differently?

A more recent example are the reactions to the 2000 Florida presidential vote. Researchers found that they could predict an individual’s attitude to the crisis by looking at a person’s education and background, even though the judges, lawyers, business people and so on interviewed thought they were judging the evidence. It is a sobering reminder that what we feel so strongly to be a rational decision may be more about who we are and how we were educated and raised, than about the facts themselves.

What we think of as free will is much more determined by the culture in which we live (and that does include concepts like materialism, and faith, and the nature of “reality”) than by any absolute intellectual categories. Even so, materialism does not posit that because we are “just” biological machines, we are limited to mechanical responses to inexorable forces. Rather, it suggests that the world we see around us is governed by knowable principles. Even if things are too chaotic to predict, the possible consequences can be modeled, and predictions can be made and assigned various probabilities.

This is why you or I can go to a store and buy jeans that reflect our individual style, even though they were made months ago in the tens of thousands by strangers on the other side of the world! But still, within certain guidelines, we do choose this brand and not that, this style and not that one. And we can, within limits, decide to look at the evidence and begin to change how we view and react to the world.

So angels do not push the planets in their orbits - you need to look to physics to understand the motion of celestial objects. People not not fear loud music because their mother was scared by a cannon shot while they were in the womb. We look to the physiology we inherited, and our own experiences. The witch in the next village is not making your cow sick because she put a curse on you. We turn to veterinary medicine and epidemiology, and forgo burning the witch.

The choices we make are bounded by how we sense, how we filter, the things we have inherited from our culture that tell us how to make sense of our world. And within the degrees of freedom provided by our physical and psychological faculties, and within the range of things that we can imagine, given the times we live in, we make choices. Not completely free, but not completely bound, either.

 

Neighbor Is a Verb

Imagine for a moment if you could not be considered someone’s neighbor until you had somehow tangibly impacted their life for good. That the word neighbor meant someone who was in your circle, willing to be be counted when it counted. Not necessarily a friend or confidant, but someone who, if needed, would be there for you.

I was thinking about the story of the Good Samaritan in the Bible. Jesus had been asked who should be considered a neighbor, and instead of answering with a geographical response, or one based on ethnicity, shared values, religion or any other socio-economic category, he responded by making neighbor a verb. Neighbor, Jesus said, was the act of helping out when someone really needed it.

Jesus did this by telling a story of a religious outcast who took care of a man, badly beaten, who was ignored by the man’s co-religionists. He then defined neighbor as someone who behaved like that.

Think about how that might transform your neighborhood - and the way you look at (and after) your neighbors. We need to know that someone is on our side. We need to be known, held accountable, to be trusted, to be befriended, and sometimes, we really, really need help. Those people who help us - they have neighbored us.

 

Corporations are Community-Lite

Ever think about why corporations are so effective?  They allow people to specialize, apply their resources, talents and energy to a specific goal.  In lots of ways they are like a community, but rather than have as their end the survival of the group, their aim is the growth of the corporation, and profit to the shareholders.

No wonder individuals and ad hoc groups are so ineffective in fighting them.  Same with organized crime, trafficking drugs and people.  The concern of a few are up against the capital and group efforts of folks who have a clear aim and purpose (not to mention the financing that comes from their eager clients).

Most communities, churches, even special interest groups are often less effective because they lack the resources, dedicated skill sets and single-minded motivation of the enterprise they are contending with.  A community might have a goal, but lack resources, or have resources, but rely on volunteer or non-specialist staff, or be diversified across a whole range or worth objectives.

On the other hand, a healthy community, joined with other communities and organizations can provide a resilient response to crime, to materialism, to exploitation.

 

Cooperation - The Foundation For Morals & Ethics

Good Christians used to gather with their families in London to watch the torturer kill prisoners in the most painful ways possible. They saw nothing wrong with this (it was a picnic). What we would reject as wrong and gruesome was commonplace to them. Yet some people say that everyone “naturally” agrees on what is right and wrong. Maybe you could say this from a narrow cultural perspective, but in these Internet days, it is simply not credible to pretend that there aren’t very different ideas of right and wrong. Still, some say that morals are based on faith- and if everyone had the same faith, we would share the same morals. But this is wrong as well. The picnic I just alluded to was, after all, a Christian London.

So we might agree that torture is wrong, but only if the ones we torture are not purported terrorists. Sure, slavery is wrong, but only if they are not making our cheap consumer goods in some sweatshop overseas. And kindness and compassion is important, but only if the candidates for our compassion are not the uninsured poor.

I don’t mean, “don’t you see our attitude towards these things are wrong,” I mean, this is reality. We kidnap people and ship them off to be tortured, benefit from slave labor (Google “firestone rubber plantation”) and ignore the plight of the poor everyday, and do most of us feel like it is wrong? No - in fact, if these daily abuses come to mind at all, we generate elaborate justifications to make the case that it is not wrong. Yes, we might get worked up by a particular story - but these abuses (and much worse) happen daily, and in our minds, at least, we know this - yet we do little or nothing to stop them. Yet, if it was our family, friend or church member in any of these situations, we would stop at nothing to try to rescue them. But this is not really a complaint - it is my point - when we include the abused person in our “circle of compassion” we see that their abuse is clearly wrong. This means that we can only justify our treatment of them by ignoring them, or casting them in the role of evildoer.

So no, we do not have an innate sense of what is right or wrong, it is an inbred desire (literally coded in our genes) that gives us the ability to treat our community, our family, our tribe fairly - the way we would like to be treated - and this is the foundation of morality.

We miss this distinction because we spend most of our time with our tribe, and we forget the suffering at our gates. We demonize the abused, or trivialize their suffering until we recognize that they are family - and then we may be moved to take action.

So the basis for morality is in our evolved ability to cooperate in groups (because a cooperative group out-competes individuals, or uncooperative groups), and the hope for greater justice and universal human rights lies in our ability to extend the concept of neighbor to include everyone (even those we fear and despise).

 

An Inherited Foundation for Community and Moral Behavior

The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule is a book that discusses new research detailing the neurochemical links to why we treat each other well.  This is part of a growing body of knowledge that supports the idea that there is an inherited foundation for community and moral behavior - one that can be identified and nurtured (see the earlier post on developing compassion).

The combination of innate ability for moral action, plus a demonstrated ability to learn to chose those behaviors, and become better at them, points to a possible foundation for a non-religious or non-sectarian culture that is still moral and pro-community.

 

Becoming More Compassionate

Here is an article that holds open the possibility of using science to address benefits traditionally provided by religion. In this case, becoming more compassionate.

“Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate—or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one’s family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy.”

and

“The researchers have already begun a long-term study to see if and how the brain can be trained as well as to compare how different forms of meditation, such as simple concentration versus focusing on compassion, affect the brain differently. In the meantime, compassionate meditation is as simple as visualizing someone you care about, holding that feeling of loving kindness in your mind, and then extending it to others—even people you don’t like.”

The suggestion is that many practices normally associated with religion are effective in and of themselves - as mental exercises that produce compassion and genuine care for others.

 

No Man an Island?

Elliott Spitzer discovered why he should have behaved - not because of fear of punishment or obedience to a command, or even because of his love of God - but because he has lost the trust and respect of the people he loved - family, friends, admirers. He also lost his chance a being president - no doubt his long game. He is experiencing that this is not a good feeling, and that he can’t just do what he wants with impunity - no one is that powerful, that isolated (well, there are sociopaths, but…). One of his problems was that he (evidently) lacked people who held him accountable, people he could be open and honest with about his sexual struggles. He tried to solve his problem on his own, and it did not work.
All this is true without invoking religion or the right or wrong of his actions. Often religion acts as a conservator of values, a cultural memory of how we should live, and why. Faith sees these values as God’s gift to us, embedded in our genes, and expressed (genetically, as cultural institutions and customs, as memes…) in the ways we relate to each other.

Of course, in some times and cultures, visiting a high-priced sex worker would not be a big deal. But you need to look at it in terms of community, of relationships, of the inter-personal context. If everything we do impacts our web of relationships, our community, then there is no such thing as a “victemless act” - all acts impact our community. So the question becomes, “how do I live with my community,” not “what should I be able to get away with?”

 

Golden Rule in Our Genes?

One of the “culture war” slogans is that God provides the only basis for morality. In the US at least, God is used to justify some pretty selfish choices. Because the focus of most conservative Christianity is on individual salvation / personal responsibility, there hasn’t been very much mainstream work done on community (not none, its just not … mainstream).

Freedom has to be constrained by accountability, rights with responsibilities, capitalism with respect for the commons (air, land, water ..) and the poor, the minorities, the disenfranchised. This is what it means to live in a community. Isolated individuals are not very good at dealing with freeloaders and others who will abuse the system for their own advantage, but communities can easily do just that. However, it requires mature, robust, inclusive communities - not rigid and judgmental ones.

Religions do provide abundant material from which to construct a caring global community - the issue is a matter of focus. The selfish, individualistic focus of many churches, for example, are a reflection of the culture we live in. The solution is to transform our culture by changing what we value.

How is such a thing done? It starts with a dissatisfaction with how things are now. Concern for the trajectory of our culture. Perhaps even fear for a future weighted down by ecological collapse and torn apart by fundamentalist religious strife. This last part is important, because it suggests that the solution is not a return to “old time religion.”

The difficulties we face are tied up with the failure of world religion to adapt to the remarkable advances of our understanding about the natural world. Had scientific discoveries confirmed the sacred texts of one or more religions, religion would have a much more dominant role in the West. As it is, multiple religions compete with various naturalistic and “new age” worldviews to define how best to live.

Through it all, an unprecedented rise of personal wealth has all-but-obliterated the need for sacrifice, discipline and hard work for hundreds of millions of people. This has created a large leisure class, and an even larger class of people who can live fairly comfortable lives (especially by global and historical standards) without exhibiting any particular drive, discipline or even skill.

Though there is no unifying voice pointing to a solution (cultures, religions, institutions offer a multitude of options, but they are often contradictory, and there is no obvious way to select from among them), these scientific observations ay offer a way forward. While retaining your cultural / religious / socioeconomic framework, begin to form, value and maintain healthy community. Create affinity and affiliation with as broad a conception of community as possible. Most cultures affirm the idea of treating others in the way you would like to be treated. Perhaps this is all we really need - genuine community, where we strengthen and encourage one another, and band together against the freeloader, the oppressor, the abuser.

 

What We Get Right

One of the interesting things about reading history and philosophy is how much folks got right. Even though we have a pretty different understanding of how the world works, we can understand, and even agree with, a lot abpout what the ancients believed about life. This is because science is not the only way to know things.

I may not mean what you think I mean, however. Bright and observant people through the ages have picked up quite a bit about how things really work. This idea is worked out in a recent book,
Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Leher. In the book, Leher points out how a number of artists presage modern scientific discoveries about things - like why things taste good and how memory works.

Acupuncture is another idea that seems a bit odd (that sticking needles in your skin would alleviate pain). Here however, science and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) part company. Double blind studies have demonstrated that acupuncture works well to stop pain. But, it turns out, so does sham acupuncture (placing needles shallowly, and avoiding all meridian points). One conclusion you could reach from this is that acupuncture works, but not for the reasons TCM practitioners claim.

So folks through history have discovered a lot that is worth emulating- but the explanations behind why these discoveries work may or may not be valid. I wonder if the same could be said for morals and ethics. Could it be that behaviors that have resulted in greater evolutionary fitness (community, altruism, happiness, faith, meditation and prayer for example) are genuine “higher” values, without requiring them to be validated by giving them metaphysical roots?

If cause and effect is largely ascribed to the invisible and supernatural, then effects will inevitably be given invisible and supernatural causes. As science begins to identify more natural explanations for the cause, does this inevitably invalidated the effect? For example, just because altruism has an evolutionary explanation, does that make altruism less important, or feel any less good?

I think that the answer matters, because avoiding sectarian strife and religious fundamentalism will require that we develop reasons for community, virtue and altruism that go beyond local religion. One of the strongest arguments for religious resurgence today is that the reasons to behave are all too often grounded in strictly religious appeals. Lose religion, lose the motivation to behave. Cultures are clearly weakened when values like respect, community, love and altruism are absent. That such values can exist outside of religion are clearly demonstrated in the relatively high levels of satisfaction and low level of crime in, for example, the Scandinavian countries.

So, in order to live as happy and healthy individuals, we need to embrace community, accountability, forgiveness, meditation, self-denial, discipline… in short, embrace the wisdom of the past, even if we don’t accept all the explanations for what these practices signify, and why they work.