Random Thoughts

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism when hate of people other than your own comes first.” Charles de Gaulle

“We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself.” Chris Mooney, science writer

 “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” Carl Sagan

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.” Abe Lincoln

“The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth.” John Gray, English philosopher (b. 1948)

“When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a bigger circle to include them.” Pauli Murray, transgender activist

US security agencies found that Russia and China listen to Trump as he talks on his unsecured iphone. Trump vilified Clinton in the 2016 campaign for her email server being unsecured and her sloppiness about security.

B&B orig: 11/11/18

Perceiving Reality by Controlled Hallucination

A major research focus tries to understand how people perceive reality. Originally, perception was generally believed to be a process of directly perceiving the world as it is based on signals the senses send to the brain. In that hypothesis, the brain signals or perceives what the reality is by limited processing or finessing of sense inputs. Thus, when a person looked at an apple, the brain was believed to do limited processing of the visual input into a perception that it is an apple, which is food. That is considered a bottom-up process because the brain has a relatively limited effect on direct perceptions of reality and what the senses are sensing directly reflects reality. In this model, external sensory inputs from sense organs are the main drivers of perception and the brain plays a smaller role in perception.

A more recent hypothesis proposes an opposite way of processing sense inputs. In this model, the “prediction machine model”, the brain exerts a greater influence on what is perceived relative to sense inputs from the eyes, ears, skin, etc. Here, the brain processes sense inputs by making predictions about what is being sensed based on prior experience. When for visual input from looking at an apple, the brain considers hypotheses for what the apple is or could be. The visual input acts mainly as a way to transmit prediction errors to the brain. Such input to the brain acts to rectify incorrect brain hypotheses about what is being sensed. This is considered to be a top-down mechanism of perceiving reality because the brain is the primary reality-perceiving organ, not the senses.

Thus, in essence, the newer model is a process of controlled hallucination (brain hypotheses), not direct perception of reality by sense organs. This model holds that the reality we perceive is  not a direct reflection of the objective external world. Instead, we perceive our brain’s predictions of what is causing our senses to respond as they do. Because no two brains are alike,[1] no two perceived realities will probably be exactly alike. Over time with repeated experience, the brain gets better and better at being correct about what is perceived for many things, but not necessarily all things.

Relevance to politics

The implications of the more recent model for politics could be important. In politics, a person’s brain isn’t just perceiving an apple or smelling a rose. It is trying to discern reality from extremely complex inputs. Those inputs usually implicate one or more powerful unconscious influencers of reality, including a person’s morals, ideology, religion, identity, gender, race, tribe or party affiliation and their social situation. Perceptions of an apple involve a relatively high degree of predictive accuracy by the brain. Clinically healthy people do not mistake an apple for a hamster or an orange.

By contrast, a political speech, especially one intended to mislead and trigger automatic, irrational emotional responses, will lead to a broad spectrum of perceptions that range from perceptions of mostly or completely fact, truth or reason to mostly or completely lies, deceit, emotional manipulation or irrational reasoning. In politics, two minds will rarely or never perceive the same reality from the same complex input. Even a simple political input such as a Christian cross behind a speaker evokes responses that range from positive to negative.

The process of the brain getting better at guessing about perceptions of reality is important. For example, social media echo chambers tend to reinforce perceptions of facts, truths and sound reasoning, even if they happen to false, wrong or flawed. Over time, false, wrong or flawed perceptions are reinforced and become harder to correct. That has been confirmed by cognitive and social science research. That research is consistent with prediction machine model of the brain’s role in perceiving reality, and distorting it into something it isn't when the conditions for reality distortion or denial are present.

In politics, those conditions seem to be present all the time. Their effects arguably include great social damage due to false perceptions of reality.[2]

Source: Scientific American, September 2019

Footnotes:
1. As discussed here before, people vary in their range of experiences that constitute real hallucination. The brain structure associated with reality monitoring ranges from normal, to smaller to absent and that correlates with (not necessarily causes) different frequencies of perceived hallucinations. The machine prediction model of perception sees hallucinations as a form of uncontrolled perception, not as something the brain simply makes up from nothing. In hallucinations, sensory inputs, e.g., something a person sees or smells, are considered to be failing to correct the brain's hypothesis of reality when the brain makes a mistake and either perceives something that either isn't there or perceives a distorted version of something that is there.

2. With any luck, working out how the brain perceives reality just might lead to better ways of communicating that could minimize distortions of facts, truths and reason or logic. If that turns out to be possible, it might present a pathway forward that relies less on conflict and violence than would otherwise be the case. Although the human species has been becoming less violent and brutal over the centuries, that aspect of our nature could still lead to major disaster.

A major miss-step in our history, that had helped take us to the brink?

 this is a re-post form another now closed board.

While contemplating our current problems as a country, I sometimes reflect on the Might Have Beens, where we as a nation took the wrong turns which brought us here.

One of the regrets I have for our nation is that McCain did not win the Republican primaries in 2000.
McCain won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide, and nearly upended the coronation of Bush II. Bush's adoption of a negative smear campaign was the only thing that saved him in South Carolina.
https://www.azcentral.com/s...
https://www.thenation.com/a...
I consider this a tragedy for the country. Bush, while a well-meaning man, was a real lightweight both mentally and in his character, and was dominated by his political advisor Karl Rove, and VP Cheney for the first 6 years of his presidency. McCain had character in spades, and rejected the divisiveness that Rove and Cheney urged on Bush II. Overall, I thought McCain would have been a far better president. But there were specific disasters, that are much less of a judgement call than this, which Bush's win over McCain lead to.

One was 9-11. I doubt that a more security focussed Prez could have prevented 9-11, but there is a chance.

Of more certainty, the Bush presidency produced four disasters for this country, which McCain would have avoided:

* Iraq War
* torture and abandonment of due process
* Extreme disconnect between Military/Security agencies, and the populace
* Massive budget deficits

As a military strategist, I am fairly confident that McCain would not have undertaken a 2nd discretionary war (Iraq), when the first and necessary war (Al Qaida) had not yet been won.
McCain led the effort to overturn the torture program of the Bush admin, so he would not have
supported the torture, renditions, incommunicado detentions, etc that Bush adopted from the world's dictatorships.

McCain would not have called upon Americans to go out shopping, when their service members
were at war. Our service people were always stunned when they rotated home, and it was like there was no war. This should have started with 9-11. Rather than a paternalistic "I will do everything possible to never let this happen again" (IE, torture, violate civil rights, etc), McCain would have honored the dead as HEROES, not VICTIMS! A nation at war, fighting for the Enlightenment values of Human Rights, Religious Tolerance, and Democracy would have been far more resistant to the anti-military/security conspiracy theories of the Truthers, and of the anti-muslim religious bigotry.

As the leading deficit hawk in congress, McCain would not have already emptied our bank account before the Great Recession hit.

Bush gets the blame for the Great Recession, unjustifiably. This was actually a Bush strength, and the best thing he did in his presidency. He created the bank rescue fund, and prevented a second Great Depression. McCain may have mismanaged this recession, and turned it into a depression -- but I don't have reason to think that he would have been less competent than Bush, so this is not a reasonable expectation from a McCain win.

So, the four greatest disasters of the Bush presidency would have been avoided, with no obvious downsides, if the right man had carried the day.

Instead, the pursuit of negative politics, and smearing one's opponents, was pretty much enshrined as the way to win elections!

So -- was this one of the major national missteps on the way to our current climate of partisan hostility and non-communication? Or am I totally misjudging what happened in 2000 and its consequences?

Is Moral Authority Inherent in Fact, Truth and Logic?

“But it cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” U.S. Supreme Court, Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 545 (1945)

Constitutionally protected free speech includes facts, truths, and sound reasoning, (collectively, honest free speech), and lies, including lies of omission or truth-hiding, flawed reasoning and unwarranted emotional manipulation (collectively, dark free speech). Unless a legal line is allegedly crossed, e.g., defamation, incitement to violence or false advertising, the courts usually won't even consider lies or flawed reasoning because that isn't what the law is for. Unless someone crosses a legal line or is testifying under oath and lies to the court (perjury), the courts do not see any difference between truth and lies or sound reasoning and flawed reasoning. Outside the courtroom, the scope of free speech in public is vast. Politicians, ideologues, pundits and marketers are all free to do an essentially unlimited amount of lying and flawed reasoning to the public with no legal liability.

When considering the scope of free speech in public, moral authority seems to be equal to all forms of free speech from the legal point of view. What about from a social point point of view?

When asked about politics, most people would say that their perceptions of reality and reasoning is firmly grounded in facts and logic. In general, most would claim to dislike and not employ things like lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity (truth-hiding), and maybe also unwarranted emotional manipulation such as fomenting irrational fear, hate, distrust or bigotry. It is reasonable to believe that over about 85% of adults would claim they prefer facts, truths and sound reasoning over lies, deceit, truth-hiding, flawed reasoning and probably also emotional manipulation.

It is also reasonable to believe that some people believe that at least for politics, the means justify the ends, and thus they are willing to admit that they would lie, deceive, hide truth, apply flawed reasoning and emotionally manipulate to get what they want.

Assuming there is a social preference for honest free speech in politics, does that reflect a belief that there is usually more moral authority or value in honest free speech compared to dark free speech? If it isn't a matter of morality or ethics, then what is basis for the preference?

And, what about people who would not hesitate to use dark free speech in politics to get what they want? They can morally justify lies, deceit and emotional manipulation as a way to achieve good social outcomes, which justifies their behavior. They can even morally justify it as something that benefits themselves, but that benefit then flows to the rest of society. They can also justify dark free speech as something that God would approve of.

Is there more moral authority or value inherent in relying on fact, truth and logic than in relying on lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity and unwarranted emotional manipulation? Or, is it the case that morals and moral behavior are so personal and so subjective that there is no point in even trying to discern any kind of socially meaningful difference between honest free speech and dark free speech?