The human species faces a number of threats that could damage civilization or, in the worst case, lead to extinction. A major nuclear war would at least significantly damage civilization. At least hundreds of millions of people would die. Polluting human activity could initiate a chain reaction that leads to a toxic environment and possibly human extinction. Various climate change episodes that caused mass land animal extinctions are known, e.g., anoxic events and the Permian-Triassic extinction event or Great Dying of about 252 million years ago. Given incomplete human knowledge, it is possible that human activity could trigger such an event without human awareness until it is too late to save the species.
If humans do wind up damaging or destroying modern civilization or even annihilating the human species, the ultimate cause would necessarily come from some sort of human behavior that is at least theoretically avoidable. The question is, what is mankind's greatest survival threat?
This discussion excludes threats that humans simply cannot affect or prevent, e.g., a mass extinction caused by eruption of a supervolcano.
Volcanic eruption - a micro-pipsqueak compared to a supervolcano blast
The human cognition threat: From a cognitive and social science point of view, the greatest threat lies in the nature of human cognition and the irrational politics it engenders. That directly reflects human biology. In turn, that directly reflects the intellectual firepower that evolution endowed the human species with. Whatever mental capacity humans have as individuals and when acting in groups or societies, it was undeniably sufficient to get humans to where we are today.
The unanswered question is whether what evolution resulted in is sufficient to survive our technology and ability to kill ourselves off.
Under the circumstances, humanity's greatest threat lies in the psychology of being human. The very nature of human sentience and the individual and group behavior that flow therefrom are the seeds of human self-annihilation. If, when and why the seeds might sprout are open questions. Nonetheless, the seeds are real and viable.
Within the last century, research from cognitive, social and other relevant branches of science proved that all humans are driven mostly by our unconscious minds, which are intuitive-emotional-moral. In terms of politics and religion, output from our unconscious minds are not mostly fact- and logic-based. Powerful unconscious biases heavily affect what little we wind up becoming consciously aware of. As a consequence, we are not primarily driven by objective fact or logic. Instead, (i) false perceptions of reality or facts, and (ii) conscious thinking (reason or common sense) that is heavily influenced by powerful unconscious biases drives thought, belief and behavior.
Although we are sentient and conscious, unconscious (intuitive-emotional-moral) mental bandwidth or thinking is 100 million to 100 billion times more powerful than conscious thought. For better or worse, the human mental constitution dominated by unconscious intuitive knowledge and thought was sufficient for modern humans to survive and dominate.
None of that is a criticism of humans or their intellectual makeup. Those are objective facts based on modern science.
That biology applies to politics and it always has. In other words, politics is mostly irrational and based on false information, conscious thinking (common sense) that is heavily biased by unconscious personal beliefs and morals and evolutionary biases that all humans share.
Misinformation is easy to acquire and very hard to reject, especially when it rejecting it undermines personal ideology, belief or morals. Often or usually, there is insufficient information or situations are too complex or opaque for true objectivity. The unconscious human mind nonetheless has to act in the face of that. In their 2016 book Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce responsive Governments, social scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels summarized the human condition in politics like this:
“. . . . the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. . . . cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. . . . . the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”
All modern societies operate under some form of government and political system. What nations, societies, groups and individuals do and don't do is governed by human biology. That is mostly governed by our heavily biased, unconscious perceptions of reality (facts) and thinking. That irrationality, disconnection from reality and associated group behavior, including a lack of empathy toward outsiders, is where the greatest threat to the human species resides.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/08ac2aa91bc4949a3f76eb5e07aebd51f89bb8bae7fc73a1b5295c3e48a32e56.jpg
Questions: Is humanity's greatest threat the imperfect cognitive and social biology that underpins politics? If it is, can our weak, usually deceived and misinformed conscious minds do anything to change the status quo? Or, as some cognitive and social scientists at least imply, are humans destined to never rise much above their innate cognitive and social biology, leaving the fate of the human species up to irrational biology?
Saturday, March 16, 2019
Book Review: The User Illusion
In The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down To Size (Penguin Books, 1991, English translation 1998), Danish science writer Tor Norretranders dissects the powerful illusion that humans believe that what they see and think is accurate or real. The User Illusion (TUI) relentlessly describes human consciousness and the biological basis for the false realities that we believe are real. TUI is about the constraints on knowledge. The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the curse of always increasing disorder (entropy), information theory and mathematics all make it clear that all sentient beings in the universe operate under severe information constraints. That includes the limits on the human mind. To believe otherwise is a mistake, or more accurately, an illusion.
TUI’s chapter 6, The Bandwidth of Consciousness, gets right to the heart of matters. Going there is an enlightening but humbling experience. When awake, the information flow from human sensory nerves to the brain is about 11.2 million bits per second, with the eyes bringing in about 10 million bits per second, the skin about 1 million bits per second, with the ears and nose each bringing in about 100,000 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot, right? No, it isn’t. The real world operates at unknowable trillions of gigabits/second, so what we see or perceive isn’t much. It’s puny, actually. Fortunately, humans needed only enough capacity to survive, not to know the future 10 or 100 years in advance or to see a color we can’t see through human eyes with just three different color sensing cell types (red, green, blue). For human survival, three colors was good enough. Evidence of evolutionary success is a planet population of about 7.4 billion humans that’s rapidly heading toward 8 billion.
Given that context, that 11.2 million bits/second may sound feeble but things are much weirder than just that. The 11.2 million bits/second are flowing into our unconscious minds. We are not conscious of all of that. So, what is the bandwidth of consciousness? How much of the 11.2 million bits/second we sense do we become aware of? The answer is about 1-50 bits/second. That’s the estimated rate at which human consciousness processes the information it is aware of. Silently reading this discussion consumes about 45 bits/second, reading aloud consumes about 30 bits/second, multiplying and adding two numbers consumes about 12 bits/second, counting objects consumes about 3 bits/second and distinguishing between different degrees of taste sweetness consumes about 1 bit/second.
What’s going on here??: It’s fair to ask what's really going on and why does our brain operate this way. The answer to the last question is that (i) it’s all that was needed to survive, and (ii) the laws of nature and the nature of humans, which are severely limited in data processing capacity. The human brain is large relative to body size but nonetheless only it processes information at a maximum rate of about 11.2 million bits/second, most of which we never become consciously aware of. That's human bandwidth because that’s what evolution resulted in. What’s going on is our unconscious mind taking in information at about 11.2 million bits/second, discarding or withholding from consciousness what’s not important or needed, which is about 50 bits/second or less, and then presenting the little trickle of important information to consciousness. That’s how much conscious bandwidth (consciousness) that humans needed to survive, e.g., to finagle sex, spot and run away from a hungry saber tooth cat before being eaten, find or hunt food, or do whatever was needed to survive. In modern times, our mental bandwidth is sufficient to do modern jobs, build civilization and advance human knowledge. Where things get very strange is in the presentation of the little trickle to consciousness. Discussing that step is a different discussion, but a glimpse of it as applied to politics is in the Democracy for Realists book review. This discussion focuses on the human brain operating system and the inputs and outputs it deals with and creates.
If one accepts the veracity of the science and Norretrander’s narrative, it is fair to say that the world that humans think they see is more illusion than real. Other chapters of TUI and the science behind the observations reinforce this reality of human cognition and its limits. For example, chapter 9, The Half-Second Delay, describes how our unconscious minds make decisions about 0.5 second before we become aware of what it is we have unconsciously decided. Although there's room for some disagreement about it, we consciously believe that we made a decision about 0.5 second before we became aware of it. Current data suggests that decisions can be made unconsciously about 7 to 10 seconds before we're aware of the decision. We trick ourselves. In other words, we operate under an illusion that our conscious mind makes decisions when that's the exception. The rule is that our unconscious minds are calling the shots most of the time. When it comes to perceiving reality, the low-bandwidth signal the brain uses to create a picture is a simulation that we routinely mistake for reality. As Norretranders sees it, consciousness is a fraud. That’s the user illusion.
TUI’s chapter 6, The Bandwidth of Consciousness, gets right to the heart of matters. Going there is an enlightening but humbling experience. When awake, the information flow from human sensory nerves to the brain is about 11.2 million bits per second, with the eyes bringing in about 10 million bits per second, the skin about 1 million bits per second, with the ears and nose each bringing in about 100,000 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot, right? No, it isn’t. The real world operates at unknowable trillions of gigabits/second, so what we see or perceive isn’t much. It’s puny, actually. Fortunately, humans needed only enough capacity to survive, not to know the future 10 or 100 years in advance or to see a color we can’t see through human eyes with just three different color sensing cell types (red, green, blue). For human survival, three colors was good enough. Evidence of evolutionary success is a planet population of about 7.4 billion humans that’s rapidly heading toward 8 billion.
Given that context, that 11.2 million bits/second may sound feeble but things are much weirder than just that. The 11.2 million bits/second are flowing into our unconscious minds. We are not conscious of all of that. So, what is the bandwidth of consciousness? How much of the 11.2 million bits/second we sense do we become aware of? The answer is about 1-50 bits/second. That’s the estimated rate at which human consciousness processes the information it is aware of. Silently reading this discussion consumes about 45 bits/second, reading aloud consumes about 30 bits/second, multiplying and adding two numbers consumes about 12 bits/second, counting objects consumes about 3 bits/second and distinguishing between different degrees of taste sweetness consumes about 1 bit/second.
What’s going on here??: It’s fair to ask what's really going on and why does our brain operate this way. The answer to the last question is that (i) it’s all that was needed to survive, and (ii) the laws of nature and the nature of humans, which are severely limited in data processing capacity. The human brain is large relative to body size but nonetheless only it processes information at a maximum rate of about 11.2 million bits/second, most of which we never become consciously aware of. That's human bandwidth because that’s what evolution resulted in. What’s going on is our unconscious mind taking in information at about 11.2 million bits/second, discarding or withholding from consciousness what’s not important or needed, which is about 50 bits/second or less, and then presenting the little trickle of important information to consciousness. That’s how much conscious bandwidth (consciousness) that humans needed to survive, e.g., to finagle sex, spot and run away from a hungry saber tooth cat before being eaten, find or hunt food, or do whatever was needed to survive. In modern times, our mental bandwidth is sufficient to do modern jobs, build civilization and advance human knowledge. Where things get very strange is in the presentation of the little trickle to consciousness. Discussing that step is a different discussion, but a glimpse of it as applied to politics is in the Democracy for Realists book review. This discussion focuses on the human brain operating system and the inputs and outputs it deals with and creates.
If one accepts the veracity of the science and Norretrander’s narrative, it is fair to say that the world that humans think they see is more illusion than real. Other chapters of TUI and the science behind the observations reinforce this reality of human cognition and its limits. For example, chapter 9, The Half-Second Delay, describes how our unconscious minds make decisions about 0.5 second before we become aware of what it is we have unconsciously decided. Although there's room for some disagreement about it, we consciously believe that we made a decision about 0.5 second before we became aware of it. Current data suggests that decisions can be made unconsciously about 7 to 10 seconds before we're aware of the decision. We trick ourselves. In other words, we operate under an illusion that our conscious mind makes decisions when that's the exception. The rule is that our unconscious minds are calling the shots most of the time. When it comes to perceiving reality, the low-bandwidth signal the brain uses to create a picture is a simulation that we routinely mistake for reality. As Norretranders sees it, consciousness is a fraud. That’s the user illusion.
Monday, August 6, 2018
Cognitive Science: Reason as a Secular Moral
Monday, August 6, 2018
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images
A 2016 peer-reviewed paper by psychologist Tomas Ståhl and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Exeter suggests that some people see reason and evidence as a secular moral issue. Those people tend to consider the rationality of another's beliefs as evidence of their morality or lack thereof.
According to the paper’s abstract: “In the present article we demonstrate stable individual differences in the extent to which a reliance on logic and evidence in the formation and evaluation of beliefs is perceived as a moral virtue, and a reliance on less rational processes is perceived as a vice. We refer to this individual difference variable as moralized rationality. . . . Results show that the Moralized Rationality Scale (MRS) is internally consistent, and captures something distinct from the personal importance people attach to being rational (Studies 1–3). Furthermore, the MRS has high test-retest reliability (Study 4), is conceptually distinct from frequently used measures of individual differences in moral values, and it is negatively related to common beliefs that are not supported by scientific evidence (Study 5).” Ståhl T, Zaal MP, Skitka LJ (2016) Moralized Rationality: Relying on Logic and Evidence in the Formation and Evaluation of Belief Can Be Seen as a Moral Issue. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166332.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0166332.
According to Ståhl’s paper, “People who moralize rationality should not only respond more strongly to irrational (vs. rational) acts, but also towards the actors themselves. . . . . a central finding in the moral psychology literature is that differences in moral values and attitudes lead to intolerance. For example, the more morally convicted people are on a particular issue (i.e., the more their stance is grounded in their fundamental beliefs about what is right or wrong), the more they prefer to distance themselves socially from those who are attitudinally dissimilar.”
ScienceDaily commented on the paper: moral rationalists see less rational individuals as “less moral; prefer to distance themselves from them; and under some circumstances, even prefer them to be punished for their irrational behavior . . . . By contrast, individuals who moralized rationality judged others who were perceived as rational as more moral and worthy of praise. . . . While morality is commonly linked to religiosity and a belief in God, the current research identifies a secular moral value and how it may affect individuals' interpersonal relations and societal engagement.” ScienceDaily also noted that “in the wake of a presidential election that often kept fact-checkers busy, Ståhl (the paper’s lead researcher) says the findings would suggest a possible avenue to more productive political discourse that would encourage a culture in which it is viewed as a virtue to evaluate beliefs based on logical reasoning and the available evidence. . . . . ‘In such a climate, politicians would get credit for engaging in a rational intellectually honest argument . . . . They would also think twice before making unfounded claims, because it would be perceived as immoral.’”
Since most people believe they are mostly or always quite rational, it seems reasonable to argue that rationality is a moral issue. The finding of personal value for evidence-based rational thinking about political issues suggests it be a possible basis for a political principle or moral value in political ideology.
A 2016 peer-reviewed paper by psychologist Tomas Ståhl and colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Exeter suggests that some people see reason and evidence as a secular moral issue. Those people tend to consider the rationality of another's beliefs as evidence of their morality or lack thereof.
According to the paper’s abstract: “In the present article we demonstrate stable individual differences in the extent to which a reliance on logic and evidence in the formation and evaluation of beliefs is perceived as a moral virtue, and a reliance on less rational processes is perceived as a vice. We refer to this individual difference variable as moralized rationality. . . . Results show that the Moralized Rationality Scale (MRS) is internally consistent, and captures something distinct from the personal importance people attach to being rational (Studies 1–3). Furthermore, the MRS has high test-retest reliability (Study 4), is conceptually distinct from frequently used measures of individual differences in moral values, and it is negatively related to common beliefs that are not supported by scientific evidence (Study 5).” Ståhl T, Zaal MP, Skitka LJ (2016) Moralized Rationality: Relying on Logic and Evidence in the Formation and Evaluation of Belief Can Be Seen as a Moral Issue. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166332.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0166332.
According to Ståhl’s paper, “People who moralize rationality should not only respond more strongly to irrational (vs. rational) acts, but also towards the actors themselves. . . . . a central finding in the moral psychology literature is that differences in moral values and attitudes lead to intolerance. For example, the more morally convicted people are on a particular issue (i.e., the more their stance is grounded in their fundamental beliefs about what is right or wrong), the more they prefer to distance themselves socially from those who are attitudinally dissimilar.”
ScienceDaily commented on the paper: moral rationalists see less rational individuals as “less moral; prefer to distance themselves from them; and under some circumstances, even prefer them to be punished for their irrational behavior . . . . By contrast, individuals who moralized rationality judged others who were perceived as rational as more moral and worthy of praise. . . . While morality is commonly linked to religiosity and a belief in God, the current research identifies a secular moral value and how it may affect individuals' interpersonal relations and societal engagement.” ScienceDaily also noted that “in the wake of a presidential election that often kept fact-checkers busy, Ståhl (the paper’s lead researcher) says the findings would suggest a possible avenue to more productive political discourse that would encourage a culture in which it is viewed as a virtue to evaluate beliefs based on logical reasoning and the available evidence. . . . . ‘In such a climate, politicians would get credit for engaging in a rational intellectually honest argument . . . . They would also think twice before making unfounded claims, because it would be perceived as immoral.’”
Since most people believe they are mostly or always quite rational, it seems reasonable to argue that rationality is a moral issue. The finding of personal value for evidence-based rational thinking about political issues suggests it be a possible basis for a political principle or moral value in political ideology.
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
Unchangable political beliefs
Neuroscientists at the University of Southern California have published a
paper, Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political
beliefs in the face of counterevidence (Scientific
Reports, 6, No. 39589, December 2016;
http://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589 ), describing brain responses
to evidence that contradicts personal political beliefs. Areas of the
brain that are activated by contrary evidence include the amygdala and
insular cortex. Those areas are associated with emotion,
decision-making, threat perception and feelings of anxiety.
When self-described political liberals were presented with evidence that contradicted eight strongly held political beliefs, the amygdala and insular cortex were more activated than when they were presented with evidence that contradicted eight strongly held, but non-political beliefs. When asked to rate their beliefs after seeing the contrary evidence, people’s beliefs about the non-political topics decreased in strength, but they didn’t significantly change the degree of their faith in their political beliefs. The contrary evidence was five statements of fact that contradicted each of the political and non-political beliefs.
According to the paper: “People often discount evidence that contradicts their firmly held beliefs. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that govern this behavior. We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence, presenting 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world. . . . We also found that participants who changed their minds more showed less BOLD* signal [detectable brain activity] in the insula and the amygdala when evaluating counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.”
* BOLD: blood oxygen level dependent
The amygdala are the green areas in the brain scan
The amygdala and insular cortex are brain areas associated with thinking about personal identity and abstract or deep thinking that disengages from present reality.
The paper puts the research into context: “Few things are as fundamental to human progress as our ability to arrive at a shared understanding of the world. The advancement of science depends on this, as does the accumulation of cultural knowledge in general. Every collaboration, whether in the solitude of a marriage or in a formal alliance between nations, requires that the beliefs of those involved remain open to mutual influence through conversation. Data on any topic—from climate science to epidemiology—must first be successfully communicated and <em>believed</em> before it can inform personal behavior or public policy. Viewed in this light, the inability to change another person’s mind through evidence and argument, or to have one’s own mind changed in turn, stands out as a problem of great societal importance. Both human knowledge and human cooperation depend upon such feats of cognitive and emotional flexibility.”
Other observations from the paper: “It is well known that people often resist changing their beliefs when directly challenged, especially when these beliefs are central to their identity. In some cases, exposure to counterevidence may even increase a person’s confidence that his or her cherished beliefs are true. . . . One model of belief maintenance holds that when confronted with counterevidence, people experience negative emotions borne of conflict between the perceived importance of their existing beliefs and the uncertainty created by the new information.”
The human mind very much dislikes uncertainty. It is extremely adept at quickly and unconsciously removing uncertainty via rationalization and just making stuff up until uncertainty goes away.
The paper raises some obvious questions. Is an inability to change another person’s mind through evidence and argument, or to have one’s own mind changed, a significant social problem? Is it more ethical or moral to retain one’s core beliefs, even when faced with evidence that those beliefs are factually wrong? In other words, is it better to stand on ideological or moral principle, or, is cognitive and emotional flexibility (pragmatism) a more ethical or moral mind set?
ScienceDaily also discusses this paper: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161223115757.htm
When self-described political liberals were presented with evidence that contradicted eight strongly held political beliefs, the amygdala and insular cortex were more activated than when they were presented with evidence that contradicted eight strongly held, but non-political beliefs. When asked to rate their beliefs after seeing the contrary evidence, people’s beliefs about the non-political topics decreased in strength, but they didn’t significantly change the degree of their faith in their political beliefs. The contrary evidence was five statements of fact that contradicted each of the political and non-political beliefs.
According to the paper: “People often discount evidence that contradicts their firmly held beliefs. However, little is known about the neural mechanisms that govern this behavior. We used neuroimaging to investigate the neural systems involved in maintaining belief in the face of counterevidence, presenting 40 liberals with arguments that contradicted their strongly held political and non-political views. Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world. . . . We also found that participants who changed their minds more showed less BOLD* signal [detectable brain activity] in the insula and the amygdala when evaluating counterevidence. These results highlight the role of emotion in belief-change resistance and offer insight into the neural systems involved in belief maintenance, motivated reasoning, and related phenomena.”
* BOLD: blood oxygen level dependent
The amygdala are the green areas in the brain scan
The amygdala and insular cortex are brain areas associated with thinking about personal identity and abstract or deep thinking that disengages from present reality.
The paper puts the research into context: “Few things are as fundamental to human progress as our ability to arrive at a shared understanding of the world. The advancement of science depends on this, as does the accumulation of cultural knowledge in general. Every collaboration, whether in the solitude of a marriage or in a formal alliance between nations, requires that the beliefs of those involved remain open to mutual influence through conversation. Data on any topic—from climate science to epidemiology—must first be successfully communicated and <em>believed</em> before it can inform personal behavior or public policy. Viewed in this light, the inability to change another person’s mind through evidence and argument, or to have one’s own mind changed in turn, stands out as a problem of great societal importance. Both human knowledge and human cooperation depend upon such feats of cognitive and emotional flexibility.”
Other observations from the paper: “It is well known that people often resist changing their beliefs when directly challenged, especially when these beliefs are central to their identity. In some cases, exposure to counterevidence may even increase a person’s confidence that his or her cherished beliefs are true. . . . One model of belief maintenance holds that when confronted with counterevidence, people experience negative emotions borne of conflict between the perceived importance of their existing beliefs and the uncertainty created by the new information.”
The human mind very much dislikes uncertainty. It is extremely adept at quickly and unconsciously removing uncertainty via rationalization and just making stuff up until uncertainty goes away.
The paper raises some obvious questions. Is an inability to change another person’s mind through evidence and argument, or to have one’s own mind changed, a significant social problem? Is it more ethical or moral to retain one’s core beliefs, even when faced with evidence that those beliefs are factually wrong? In other words, is it better to stand on ideological or moral principle, or, is cognitive and emotional flexibility (pragmatism) a more ethical or moral mind set?
ScienceDaily also discusses this paper: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161223115757.htm
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)