Tips on general thinking, thinkers, philosophies, and so on.
Human behavior is largely influenced by our genetic makeup, accounting for more than half of it. Evolutionary Psychology has been teaching us about this for years, but it’s taking time for society to fully grasp these concepts. Understanding this is helping many people accept others and themselves better, be more social, and live in peace with human imperfections.
Sometimes, individuals may seem stubborn because their brains are wired in specific ways, akin to a computer program that can only produce one result. Recognizing this makes it unreasonable to expect people to easily change their thoughts or actions.
We are riddled with a built-in list of cognitive biases, and the grandaddy of them all is probably cognitive dissonance: the psychological discomfort we experience when holding two or more conflicting beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time. This tendency to reduce the cognitive discomfort often makes us change or justify our beliefs and/or actions by compartmentalizing them to avoid directly addressing the contradictions that others point out. See also Table 1. Biases and the Fundamental Beliefs on Which They Might Be Based.
However, it’s not all gloomy. Despite our inherent limitations, there’s still room for improvement. Progress may be slow, but with patience, we can make strides forward.
Humanity’s two biggest core problems are: (1) the Biological Problem, the limited cranial capacity due to the haphazard inheritance from evolution; and (2) the Social Problem, its faulty social structures stemming from the Biological Problem. The late biologist Edward O. Wilson hinted of this in his 2009 book Consilience when he said, “the real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” With technological ingenuity being a possitive result of human biology.
Remarkably, history shows progress in solving the Social problem, and we have also gained a great deal of understanding around the Biological Problem. Advanced nations in the world have achieved what any reasonable person would call fairly stable societies, compared to the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” ones we otherwise seem to default to follow in the absence of societal structures, at least as per Thomas Hobbes. And scientific understanding of how our brains work, its limitations, is undoubtedly getting us closer to fully appreciating who we really are. Hopefully, this progress will continue and someday help in overcoming these problems.
The fact that the Entropy Problem is one of our greatest challenges remains largely unnoticed by most people, yet it is undeniably our most significant issue. The unintentional concealment of this problem may stem from its formal definition and explanation, which is indeed a bit too technical: the second law of thermodynamics. This is why I prefer Steven Pinkers’s more intuitive mnemonic “things fall apart”. The natural state of the universe and the world we live is that all things, our bodies, our societies, our planet, all eventually wither and therefore need constant attention and upkeep, if we care about them. As all our parents remind us, life is a constant struggle in survival and flourishing.
All other problems confronting humanity sit on top of these 3 core problems.
Is the pace of progress limited to the slow, gradual change we have been seeing? Can solutions be accelerated? These are essential questions for humanity.
Libertarianism on its own has many reasonable merits, but there is a particular modern strain, exemplified by the likes of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and others that can be harmful. While their arguments seem very logical and rational, upon closer examination they appear incompatible with fostering a just and cohesive society.
This extreme form of rationality overrides common sense and leads to anti-social tendencies when these social media personalities prioritize strict adherence to ideological principles over empathetic understanding or cooperative behavior in society. One example of that was Rogan’s push-back to COVID vaccines, insisting that his personal prerogative was more important.
The problem with this kind of libertarianism is that it doesn’t consider that not everyone can understand, or have the capacity to follow their ideals. A decent political philosophy should recognize that people have limitations. Not everyone has the knowledge and resource wherewithal to manage their own body like a rich Joe Rogan, and to promote the body-sovereignty ideal to an audience of millions is incredibly irresponsible when it comes to viruses that affect millions of other humans.
The answer to any question has a general pattern:
Roger Penrose is a brilliant thinker that offers some very interesting takes on consciousness and artificial intelligence. There is a great Lex Fridman YouTube interview of Penrose discussing where he stands on the computability of consciousness, so these quick notes originated from that interview and also from reading his book mentioned below.
In general, on Physics, Penrose mentions that Paul Dirac tacitly said that Quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. That we need still a theory that explains the collapse of the wave function. That Physics is essentially stuck. Quantum mechanics has to be modified, in an even-handed way (not just quantum gravity) to include both itself and gravity.
Regarding consciousness, he mentions that there are 3 key aspects of it: intelligence, awareness and understanding. One of the most approachable areas to understanding, he says, is that we do understand how consciousness can be “turned off”, as with anesthesiology. It is from there where his primary insights on the subject seem to come from.
In his 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind he postulated that consciousness originates at the quantum level inside neurons, and although he admits his ideas are speculative it still sounds a bit too exotic. He also argued that human consciousness is non-algorithmic, and thus is not capable of being modeled by a computer. Nowadays we seem to be getting closer to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), so most would say that that objection now appears to be incorrect.
Stephen Wolfram, amongst others, mentions that we used to compartamentalized computational problems. For instance, we used to think that sorting a list of words, or computing square roots, or determining if a particular phrase is palindromic were three different things. However, since Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing we now know that they are computationally the same problems, universal computation.
One interesting implication from this revelation is that technically we can compute anything, once we have the newest and greatest models and the most powerlful enough machinery. Wolfram uses the term computational irreducibility to say this is perhaps mistaken. Maybe there is no easy theory for any behavior that seems complex. You cannot predict the outcome beforehand, and the program must still be run, for us to get an answer. However, isn’t all this a predicate of complexity theory, and also related implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, especially regarding the halting problem, ideas which are almost 100 years old?
By the way, caring about computation is essential because it leads us to paradigm shifts. One of the most famous example was Copernicus’s notion that we’re not at the center of the universe. Before and after Copernicus, computing planetary positions with Ptolemy’s epicycles was and is adequate for most situations, albeit not as accurate. So, we care about paradigm shifts because they usually bring forth more accuracy to our understanding.
It seems silly when people brag about how much they know. Knowledge bling makes humans look like street chimp entertainers. On the other hand, when knowledable folks get together and casually shoot the breeze about human knowlege, that can be pretty cool. And that’s what https://www.edge.org is all about. It is the smartest, most insightful salon in the world. Worth visiting from time to time. Although lately, it’s now 2023, it’s been a bit quiet.
Some notes on Free will.
After philosopher Sam Harris wrote his 2012 book on free will, with a forcefull stance that it is an illusion, there was a follow-up exchange online with Daniel Dennett who is an eminence on the subject, but which left me with these questions and observations.
First of all, I was bit dissappointed with the way Dan Dennett treated Sam Harris during the exchange. As much as anyone may disagree with Sam, one thing is for certain, he epitomizes the proper way to engage in rational discourse. In other unrelated topics, Noam Chomsky also appears to have acted the same way towards Sam, and so has Ben Affleck and others. Again, as justified as their objections may be on whatever subject, only Sam seems to have followed rational and decent conversational decorum. Their lack of discourse decorum is a terrible diservice to human progress, and it is important to note that. It is bad enough that humanity is drowning in misinformation, to have intelligent, respectable, and insightful individual acting so petty(?). That uncomfortable free will exchange between Sam and Dan was also the main inspiration for writing the Discourse tip.
Coming back to the free will disagreement itself, their differences seem to have revolved around Sam’s noting the challenges to Benjaming Libet’s work on volitional acts and readiness potential and their implications.
However, Dan (along with others) is a prominent critics of these interpretations, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will, and he rebuttled that:
Sam also does not seem to see degrees of free will, like Dan does. Also, his take on consciousness, which is a key element with the whole discussion, is not as well-grounded as Dan’s is. Finally, stating that “no one can control anything” simply seems too absolute and limited of a conclusion.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most important intellectuals in human history. I first read about Chomsky in a 1992 Rolling Stone magazine article that I happened to stumbled upon. Reading him transformed my worldview. Until then, I had never encountered a more honest and scientifically grounded perspective on reality.
Chomsky has two important sides. He’s a cognitive scientist and he’s also a political thinker. When it comes to thinking and morality Chomsky is a personal hero, and I think I agree with him on almost everything he says.
Politically speaking I think he has made the world a better place by being such an important dissident in the fight against oppressed people all over the world. However, I think strategically and tactically, a lot of people view his opinions as being a bit too difficult to put into practice, and I tend to agree.
Drawing inspiration from my inner Popper, I find it more compelling to highlight the areas where I diverge from his views.
He seems to believe that the Language Acquisition Device (LAD), which he famously discovered, was not gradually designed by evolution through natural selection. He appears to think that the language faculty was exceptionally designed, and evolution just seems inadequate in explaining its genesis. Many think this is misguided and incorrect because it appears to regard this human trait as some sort of supreme and exceptional, almost magical phenomenon.
He thinks that artificial intelligence cannot duplicate human language understanding using statistical modeling. However, his objections appear to be true only if we want the models to behave in perfection. But why should anyone have this expectation? He seems to suggest that the human language capacity is so exceptionally unique that it will never be artificially duplicated.
He thinks that there are some humans that are more wicked than others. True, but to hold their brains specifically more accountable because (understandably) it is a greater evil just doesn’t seem fully rational. Morally, we can still defend accepting that some (the more wicked ones) are made out of the same basic neural circuits.
He doesn’t seem to think that challenging incorrect religious thinking is a worth-while affair. I think he’s a bit off on this. Irrationalities, of which religion is just one form, corrupts our thinking. That’s almost comparable to him saying that fighting injustice is not worth-while because some people aren’t going to change their minds anyway, which he surely doesn’t believe.
Speaking of tactics, during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, he seemed too keen to point out that Bernie Sanders was not as progressive as many would have wish for. This attitude seems to impede advancement of progressive politics in the US. Afterwards, it looked like he backed off a bit from these types of criticism, and instead pointed out how revolutionary and effective Bernie’s campaign had been. In general, his occasional negative demeanor can be quite vexing and runs counter to the causes he champions.
Regarding philosophy of mind, it is still unclear to me what Chomsky means by, “if there were no limits to human intelligence, it would lack internal structure and would therefore have no scope.” In Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding he touches on this subject, as well as in this short interview clip with Lex Fridman.
He explains that there are mutually exclusive bounds of possibilities in the way a biological system like the human brain develops, which makes sense, though not sure how that relates to this.
Steven Pinker first gained my attention when I encountered his book The Language Instinct during the mid-1990s. Chomsky’s name caught my eye as I perused the back cover, having already delved into some of his linguistics works. Like others, I found Pinker’s writing style to be very approachable and enjoyable.
Pinker has a knack for making scientific concepts engaging and memorable, and personally it has helped me solidify my understanding of linguistics and other cognitive fields. Similar to Chomsky, Pinker equips readers with tools to defend their beliefs using reason.
Despite being published in the late 1990s, Pinker’s How the Mind Works remains a standout comprehensive volume on how evolution has shaped human cognition. Described by The New York Review of Books as “a model of scientific writing: erudite, witty, and clear,” Pinker’s work continues to receive acclaim.
I could dedicate an entire book to reviewing Pinker’s extensive body of work. He serves as my primary reference in the field of psychology.
In 2011 he wrote The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he meticulously documents and shows how much progress humanity has made as a species. Admitting that there’s obviously a lot more to be done, the point is that progress is being made gradually, and that the trends could be reversed if we let things slip. But the truly incredible thing about this book is how many folks still (it’s 2023) refuse to accept the obvious evidence.
Bill Gates aptly lauded Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress declaring it his “new favorite book of all time.”
While I admire Pinker’s insights, there are some aspects of his views that I find a bit challenging to reconcile. His recognition of the positive impact of capitalism and market economies, for instance, definitely shifted my earlier perspective on the subject, although I don’t fully share his loftier regard for it.
Additionally, I’ve observed a tendency in Pinker’s writing, notably in “Enlightenment Now,” to overlook certain underlying motives in human behavior. For example, his discussion of weapons of mass destruction as a rationale for the Iraq War fails to acknowledge potential profit-driven agendas behind such conflicts. Similarly, his analysis of Y2K paranoia attributes it solely to human biases, which seems to disregard the role of profit motives in stoking fear.
In Rationality he lays down the incontrovertible reasons why rationality is really important to humanity, and how it is the essential driver of moral and social progress.
“One of the surprising discoveries of modern psychology is how easy it is to be ignorant of your own ignorance.”
Daniel Dennett passed on yesterday, April 20th, 2024, which, in the universe’s irony, was also the same day that Charles Darwin also passed on in 1882. Dennet was a brilliant philosopher, and I loved his “intuition pumps” to help you think more clearly about certain issues. I also like that as a philosopher he respected science and engineering.
Dennett, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea explains that natural selection unified the world of mechanism/material/physical and the world of meaning/purpose/goals which, until Darwin, seemed to be unbridgeable. He believed that Darwin’s idea was perhaps the greatest idea ever, and at this point in history I think he’s right.
In his last recorded video (need link) someone asked him about linguistics, and he recommended that folks read Daniel Dor’s book The Instruction of Imagination.
With regards to recent debates about concerns regarding artificial intelligence he also mentioned that AI (LLMs) conjuring convincing human simulacra can indeed put at risk essential social infrastructure such as contracts, obligations and consequences. This could lead to our decision-making to be manipulated or subverted. Highlinghting that the emergence of “extremely manipulative” autonomous agents is extremely more ominous than potential rogue AGI. The warning is that this will happen without any intention at all, a natural selection of software. But that hopefully the scientific method with a flavour of humanist freethinking will save us?
The sense that our “self” is a unified, coherent entity is merely a marvellous, evolved illusion. Humanity’s emergence from unthinking matter is marvellous, but not miraculous. Nothing “mere” about calculation or algorithmic processes: it was only ever a question of scale and complexity. Dennett expanded on Gilbert Ryle’s ghost in the machine criticism to further show that there is no need for a homunculus at the center of conciousness. Conciousness needs to be explained in terms of neurons and the processes they create. That gradualism solves the mind-body problem.
Deep emotional attachment is what life is all about, and nurturing, protecting, and ensuring it flourishes is what brings us happiness. Happiness is the closest thing we have to a summum bonum, the highest good from which all other goods flow. The secret of happiness: Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.
