After being distracted by Texas affairs, politics, Riven, and reading Brian Greene and others, let’s get back to this book and try to finish summarizing it and capturing key points. This and one more post.
Earlier posts about this book: post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4.
Part IV: Know Thyself
How does human nature influence our public and private lives? Most of what people know is “based on gut feelings, folk theories, and archaic versions of biology.”
–Ch12, In Touch with Reality
This chapter concerns whether or not reality is socially constructed, or whether we accurately perceive reality. Neither is totally correct. Naive realism is refuted by visual illusions (examples). Again: the brain evolved to prioritize survival and reproduction of the species. Relativists, on the other hand, are concerned with how we categorize things, suggesting that everything is a social construct, even the facts of science and history. But categorization, like stereotypes, can be dangerous: not necessarily false in every respect, but with many ways they can go wrong. Beware identity politics. Some condemn even language as constraining thought. [[ To the extent these are equivalent might lead to some sf speculation. ]] But cognitive scientists and linguists reject such ideas for several reasons. Both images and words are inherently ambiguous; these confusions are reflected in contemporary art.
–Ch13, Out of Our Depths
We’re aware that we have intuitive understanding of many things — and lack such understanding of much else about the entire universe. Human nature entails forms of intuitive physics, biology, engineering, psychology; a spatial sense and a number sense and a sense of probability; intuitive economics and logic; and language. In contrast are faculties for understanding the world wrought by science and technology, which we do not grasp intuitively. Traditional education assumed a blank slate, into which one poured knowledge in. Now we understand that children have to unlearn intuitive physics and biology before they can tackle the real subjects. The conflicts between intuitive and real science is seen in controversies over abortion, animal rights, when life begins, cells and souls, clones (they’re just identical twins born at different times), and so on. Genetically modified foods; what’s ‘natural’; specious fears derived from intuitive biology. Synthetic magic, voodoo. Relative dangers, of flying vs driving; because statistics are “beyond the ken of our number sense” 231.8. Other examples of barter and exchange. The cure for shortcomings of human intuition is education, and the priorities should be economics, evolutionary biology, and probability and statistics (235.9) — over the classics, or trigonometry. (The famous examples of Malthus and Ehrlich and how their concerns about overpopulation haven’t materialized demonstrates these issues; they were wrong, so far; but it can’t go on forever.) Finally, since the mind is a biological organ, there might be truths that are literally inconceivable, putting a limit on our grasp of science. Just as some theories of physics seem to be true, but seen incomprehensible. QM.
–Ch 14, The Many Roots of Our Suffering
The tragedy of the human condition is that we’re smart enough to know that we’re going to die, while our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, and people inevitably betray us. People have evolved mechanisms to cooperate, through types of altruism, as modulated by social and moralistic emotions. No two people share identical interests; therefore conflict is possible. How this has played out — here Pinker recounts sections of HOW THE MIND WORKS, concerning kin selection and nepotism, parents vs children, differential parental investments in children — discredit the Blank Slate, and casts new light on the doctrine of ‘family values’ on the right. All species balance investing in offspring and otherwise staying healthy. Beyond the family is the tragedy of reciprocal altruism — neither the Noble Savage doctrine that people are communal, nor the alternative of Randian individualism — but the evolution of reciprocity, where sacrifices on behalf of non-relatives entail anxiety, guilt, shame, and so on. Examples of various ‘games’ of game theory. (Pinker touches on group selection, briefly, saying the term’s meaning has shifted.) Society has huge apparatuses to keep exchanges fair; we’re all capable of being saints or sinners. There’s even an advantage in self-deception, the better to trick others. We protest too much, we project our motivations onto others, we rationalize. People overestimate their own skills, and engage in cognitive dissonance.
These various roots of our suffering play to Aristotle’s definition of the tragic: not a catastrophe, but an illumination of how we relate to the hostile universe. Thus dramatic stories are endless. 266m. Examples, especially of family members. Antigone has a singular place in Western literature. 266b. Our genetic conflicts are to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all. Including the joy of sex, and falling in love. “Without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.”
[[ This is quite insightful, thinking again of how science fiction is about “how we relate to the hostile universe.” And “our genetic conflicts are to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all.” Think about that… That’s quite profound. ]]
–Ch15, The Sanctimonious Animal
Keying off the fear of moral nihilism, the problem is that we have too much morality, where people feel the moral rules are universal. But our moral sense is a gadget, laden with quirks and moral illusions. Examples of various victimless crimes (citing Haidt). The roots are in autonomy vs. community-based morality. Some defend gut reactions, but that leads to all sorts of irrelevant moral standards unsupported by reason. We’ve seen some moral emotions turn on and off like a switch: vegetarianism, smoking. Others become amoralized (at least for most people), like divorce, homosexuality, atheism, and so on (longer list 275b). Some activists for a nanny state try to moralize new things, like violence on TV. Concepts of the sacred and the taboo remain alive and well, e.g. how some ideas ought not even to be considered. Again, absurdities can result. Finally, many philosophers have argued that morality cannot be grounded in reason alone.
[[ On this last debatable point, as with so many things: it depends on context. Sam Harris, e.g., has provided a rationale for morality, but it depends on circumstances, the idea that human learns through experience and education, and what was moral or not in one era, might be regarded differently in another. ]]
