Chapter 14.                                       (continued) 

For a page or so, let’s pursue this line of thought. We know that the matter in the universe itself at levels of resolution far smaller than the simplest life forms is pulled into its shapes—in fact, into its existence—by balanced sets of opposing forces. The earth in its orbit is being pulled toward the sun by gravity and flung away from the sun by centrifugal force. In this dynamic state, our planet orbits through a band of space fit for the thing we call life. The nuclear strong force and weak force alternately work to dissipate matter into nothingness or crush it out of existence. In balance, they pull the nuclei of the atoms around us into their shapes. Electrons are held in their orbits by balances of forces, like planets and stars. As we find ways of balancing courage with wisdom and freedom with love, humans mirror the universe itself.

We need internal tensions in our communities. Pluralism is an indicator of a dynamic, vigorous society. Societies that aim to be monolithic and homogenous lack resourcefulness and vigor. A democracy may seem to its critics to be enervated by the energy its people waste in endless arguing. But over time, in a universe in which we can’t know what hazards may be coming in the next day, year, or century, diversity and debate are what make us strong. Indulging in self-deluding, wistful thoughts of ending uncertainty and its attached anxieties leads us away from real love for our neighbors and from pluralism. Therefore, love is not merely nice and pleasant: it’s vital. It has brought us this far, and it is all that may save us.

   

A basic Buddhist truth is that life is hard. Another is that only love can drive out hate. Jesus’s number one command to us all: love one another as I have loved you. These codes have not survived because a bunch of old men said they should; they have survived because they enable their human carriers to survive. In short, our oldest, most general values have survived because they work.

   

                                   Socrates talking with an Athenian woman (painting by Monsiau)

Courage is the human answer to entropy, the adversity of reality. Wisdom tempers courage. Freedom is the human response to (quantum) uncertainty. Love guides freedom. Diligence, responsibility, humility, and many other values are hybrids of the four prime ones. They show their real value only on a huge scale as the daily actions of millions of people over thousands of years, in societies of increasingly greater internal dynamism, keep evolving and getting good results. But values are not merely vacuous concepts or trivial preferences, like preferences for specific flavors of ice cream or brands of perfume. They are large-scale human responses to what is real.

The largest purpose of philosophers is to give ordinary folk—by precept and example— such clarity of understanding that people feel renewed and inspired to keep getting up and trying again to get it right.

Notes

1. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Part XXXIV, “Self-Surpassing” (1883; Project Gutenberg). http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm#link2H_4_0004.

2. Kenelm Henry Digby, The Broad Stone of Honour; or, The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry, Vol. 2 (London: B. Quaritch, 1976). https://archive.org/details/broadstoneofhono02digbiala.

3. Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, Chapter 11 (1843; The Literature Network). http://www.online-literature.com/thomas-carlyle/past-and-present/34/.

4. Melissa Lane, “Ancient Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-political/#SocPla.

Chapter 14.                                             (continued) 

Some social changes contribute to the building of new values and morés and others contribute to the dismantling of old ones. Some do both at once. The important point for the purposes of my argument is that this inclination toward unceasing positing and testing—an inclination that evidence in all human societies suggests is programmed into us genetically and that constantly places some people at odds with their society’s morés—is an unalterable part of our nature. And luckily so. It makes our cultures evolve. It gives us our statesmen, scientists, artists, and eccentrics, and they enable us to respond to this ever-changing physical reality – and thus to evolve, economically and socially, in a timely way.

Externally, reality’s uncertainty and adversity are always weathering, eroding, and jolting the body of any society, compelling it to deal with change. When a society no longer deals effectively with these jolts and pressures (e.g. overpopulation, pollution, drought, war, famine, plague, and economic and technological advances) by one process or another, it is sooner or later superseded by a society that does.

   

                       Bee sipping nectar while pollinating a flower, demonstrating mutualism in nature

Another interesting feature of how values drive society’s behavior patterns and morés is the paradoxical design that value clusters, at first look, appear to exhibit. Values are designed in matched pairs. As one value drives humans toward a particular set of behavior patterns, it is tempered with a complementary one which attenuates, gives focus to, and reduces the excesses of the undiluted use of the first value. Our guide here is nature. Nature creates endless clusters of relationships by balancing cooperating and competing forces.

If our young people were filled only with aggression—or daring or courage, as they might see it—they would die off continually, in large numbers, hurling themselves at cars, cliffs, ocean waves, outer space, and one another. But they are also encouraged to acquire judgment—wisdom, as their elders see it—that will direct them to practice courage in ways likely to benefit rather than harm them and their society. Be aggressive, assertive, and ambitious, but aim to use your drive to become an entrepreneur, a scientist, a doctor, an athlete, an artist, or a musician, rather than a criminal or a highway casualty. Strive to participate in your society in a way that encourages compromise rather than cruelty. And most importantly, remember what would exist today if, historically, there had been no human values at all.

Some societies and some individuals within those societies don’t balance courage with intelligence very well, and excesses result. But over time, the overall movement for our species, despite the difficulties or pain incurred, is toward a social ecosystem of ever greater vigor, wisdom, tolerance, and diversity. There were once a few hundred of us; there are now over seven billion. On this earth, on Mars, and beyond our solar system, nothing living sits still; we either evolve or we die.

Freedom, as a value programmed into children, also is useful to society. It drives all, the young especially, to develop talents and live motivated lives. But, if it weren’t tempered and complemented with love, freedom as a social value would beget cliques and subcultures, then prejudice, then strife, then anarchy.

Brotherly love, as a widely accepted basic value, solves this dilemma for society. In Western society, for example, love seemed so crucial to Jesus that he told his disciples to aim to live by love above all other virtues. He proclaimed that it was the one thing he’d taught them that they must not forget. Implicitly, he was saying that all other values—even courage and wisdom and their benefits—accrue from love.

“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another as I have loved you. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13: 34-35)

Thus, humans sustain and spread their societies by practicing lifestyles that may seem paradoxical to anyone who looks for all phenomena to be reduced to simple parts. Our behaviors and the values that drive them mirror the balance principle of their prototype—that is, the ecosystem of the earth. A culture is a self-monitoring and self-regulating system that is designed to respond to reality within strategically set limits or parameters—set by the values that it teaches to its citizens. Our morés can seem to be built on logical contradictions, but they are anything but. Rather, opposing forces, by constant interaction, create dynamic equilibria. 

   

This is basic systems theory. We couldn’t survive long in this uncertain reality, as individuals or societies, if our lives were otherwise. And the balances are tricky to find and maintain, but who really expected easy? Freedom is a precious, beautiful thing. If the price of it, over the long haul,  is an honest, loving attitude and standard of conduct, there is a deep sense of justice and symmetry to that picture. A good life for an individual or her/his society is hard - but not impossible. Freedom asks only all that we have to give.   

Chapter 14.                                 (continued) 

For the citizens living in a given society, the ways in which values and behaviors arise can seem difficult to analyze. The values a society lived by when it was first growing strong can become lost for generations before the system starts to unravel. This is why trying to find constants in history can be so frustrating. When a tribe updates its code of values or becomes lazy in adhering to its old values, the consequences can take generations to show up and can be obscured under mounds of irrelevant trivia.

But then again, from our limited perspectives we should not be surprised at the apparent gradualness of history’s processes. A thousand years is fifty human generations. In evolutionary terms, a span of fifty generations is trivial. In normal, genetic evolution, a thousand generations often have to pass before a new anatomical or physiological feature can prove itself valuable in the survival game.

The evidence of history indicates that a new value, with the cultural-behavioral morés that are implied by it and attached to it, can prove itself much more rapidly than a new anatomical or physiological variation can. For example, science produced cannons and, for states, they changed everything. This evidence supports the view that the cultural-behavioral mode of evolution is superior to the genetic mode in a very basic sense. 

Cultural evolution responds to and even causes environmental changes in a timelier way and thus outruns genetic evolution. Cultural change seems slow in our limited view, but it is actually very quick compared to biological change. And most cultural experiments don’t take a thousand years. Only the very profound ones do.

Some societies have worked out sets of values and behaviors that have led them to deal with their environments so effectively that for generations, even centuries, their citizens may come to believe they have found the answers to life’s riddles (as was the case in Rome and in Victorian England and is the case presently in some nations of the West). 

   

                                            Poor scavenging at Payatas dump site, Phillipines 

These citizens may create niches that are well insulated from harsh contact with the uncertainty and adversity of the material world. People of wealth and indolence can become so totally insulated that they come to take their lifestyle for granted; they think of values like courage, wisdom, freedom, and love as being old-fashioned notions for peasants, notions that don’t fit in with the self-centred morés of the sophisticated. In reality, of course, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, we must deal with reality. It will keep right on being hard and unpredictable, demanding courage, wisdom, love, and freedom of each of us.

   

                                                 Propaganda poster for the Cuban Revolution.

Ultimately, all societies must exist in material reality. If some citizens are not experiencing adversity and thus feeling no need to practice courage, wisdom, love, and freedom, this only means other citizens are handling more than their share and buffering or further insulating the lives of the spoiled and deluded few. In the past three centuries, complacency of a nation’s elites has brought more and more revolutions and the overthrow of an old, corrupt order. (e.g. France, Russia, China, Cuba, and many other countries). Marx was right in this at least: as civilization grinds forward, literacy spreads, ideas spread, and ordinary people in growing numbers become aware of their collective power. Arrogant, exploitative aristocrats, bureaucrats, theocrats, and plutocrats are less and less likely to be tolerated, in societies all over this world, with each year that passes.

But we also must not lose sight of the larger view: even political revolutions are merely group behaviors that are contained within the larger cultural evolution model. They differ from social evolution in degree of chaos, but not in effect. Political revolutions nearly always are accompanied by widespread violence and so are more painful for the people living through them, than are the more gradual social, economic, and industrial revolutions, but in the end, political revolutions are just parts of the general trend toward greater and greater resilience and versatility in the human race. Society’s main mission is to find more dynamic balances among its values clusters and so to grow constantly more courageous, intelligent, free, and loving.

Chapter 14.                                           (continued) 

As with courage and wisdom, a balanced pair of values also shapes the behavior of citizens in successful societies’ attempts to handle the second trait of reality, quantum uncertainty. For a society to maximize its chances of handling the uncertainty of existence—the way unexpected events keep coming at us—that society must contain as wide a variety of potential responses to the demands of the physical world as the people in it, individually and jointly, can learn to perform. In a scary world, if you’re smart, you try to be ready for anything. Programming each individual to strive to be versatile (the Renaissance man/woman concept) helps, but the really important value a wise society should instill in each upcoming generation is freedom, a desire to become one’s best self, and then a generosity of spirit that encourages others to do the same.

To be equipped to meet the widest range of futures possible, a society must contain the widest range of humans possible, with skills and talents literally of every sort imaginable. If an unforeseeable crisis threatens a freedom-loving society’s continued existence, it has a higher likelihood of containing a small group of people, or even just one individual, who will be able to react effectively to the situation and also direct others to react effectively than it would if it were a more homogeneous society.

In addition, in more ordinary times, when a society seems to be merely maintaining a steady state, the people in a vigorous and diverse society are pursuing a wide range of activities, doing research on a wide range of theories, and developing a wide range of ideas, skills, services, and products, any of which may reap benefits for all citizens in the future. Which activities will turn out to be more than just hobbies in a decade or two can’t be known in a truly uncertain universe. Some of these hobby activities will fit into the society’s economy and, in a decade or so, become simply parts of the division of labour. Others, in a truly free society, will prove to be silly wastes of time. Still others, in rare instances, will prove to be brilliant innovations that benefit all of society.

Therefore, a wise society cultivates its dreamers. Once in a while, an eccentric invents something that is amazingly useful to all. In addition, the freedom that allows these folk to carry on being eccentric is vital to everyone. The presence of eccentrics in a society is proof that the value called freedom is part of that society’s moral code. Uniformity in a population is an enemy of survival in the very long run. Pluralism, on the other hand, over the long run, works.

   

                                       Pluralism: staff of President Bill Clinton's One America Initiative 

To balance or focus this value called freedom, in the same way as wisdom balances and focuses courage, society must teach love. Brotherhood. Agape. As wisdom plus freedom yields work, so freedom plus love equals democracy.

A society with a wide range of behaviors or lifestyles practiced among its citizens must teach these same citizens to respect one another’s sensibilities and rights. If it doesn’t, the society will be constantly torn by violence between its various factions. No matter which wins, some of the society’s versatility will be lost, which amounts to a net loss for all. Thus, some form of love for one’s fellow citizens is taught by the vast majority of long-enduring, successful societies and has been so taught for centuries.

          

                                                       Thomas Hobbes, English political philosopher

In a democracy, the majority of citizens must cooperate to build into their society a process that will enable them to live, work, do business, and settle disputes without violence. For enlightened modern nations in the twenty-first century, this process is the rule of law. The law is not perfect, but we do not live in a perfect world. However, people in the majority sense that whatever the flaws in our legal system, it is infinitely preferable to anarchy. As Hobbes famously put the matter, life for humans with no system of social order in place is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Chapter 14.                               (continued) 

It is familiar and cliché to push young people to aspire to courage. But clichés get to be clichés because they express something true. Amid the hazardous background of the physical universe, life strives to create stable, growing pockets of order. In the case of humans, it does so by programming into young people an entire constellation of values around the prime value called “courage”. From it, behaviors that meet and overcome adversity flow, and societies that believe in courage survive better because of that belief.

 

And now we come to a subtler insight. The value society instills into its young to make them seek out, meet, and conquer adversity must be balanced with a second value that will cause the energy put into seeking challenges to be focused so the individual can deal with those challenges efficiently. There is nothing to be gained by teaching young people blind aggression; it will only run amok in its own society and sometimes other societies. Eager, but directionless, young people end up hurting themselves in car crashes, daredevil stunts, and street fights, while accomplishing little or nothing in useful, material terms.

The courage-tempering value is usually called wisdom, but intelligence and judgment are also terms for this same value. Wisdom has the effect of directing humans to achieve objectives by behaviour patterns that employ their energy efficiently. It is seen clearly in the medieval code of chivalry and the samurai warriors’ code of bushido, both of which contain instruction on how a man may be simultaneously brave and civilized, i.e. “noble”.

                                

                                                                    Merlin and Arthur   (Frazetty) 

        

             The Education of Achilles by the Centaur Chiron    (from a fresco in Herculaneum) 

Not surprisingly, there are echoes of this balancing of courage and wisdom deeply embedded in mythology. The Greek heroes Jason, Achilles, Perseus, Theseus, and Aeneas all needed Chiron, the wise, kind, moderate teacher. Among the early Britons, Arthur needed Merlin. In modern myth, Luke Skywalker needed Yoda, Dorothy, Glinda, and Katniss, Haymitch. Courage tempered with wisdom.

   

                               Characters Dorothy and Glinda, from the film The Wizard of Oz

                         

                                                          Thomas Carlyle  (sketch by Samuel Laurence)

The most familiar moral value that is a hybrid of courage and wisdom is the one known as work. Diligence and conscientiousness are two of its other names, as most of us are wearily aware. But the dreary, tedious, clichéd feel of this values cluster should not discourage us. Clichés, like this one about the nobleness of work, become clichés because they express something that is universally true. “I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” (Thomas Jefferson) “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” (Thomas Edison) 

Courage is good. Intelligence is good. We learn that if we want to achieve great things we have to work very hard. Added together, and spread over lifetimes, wisdom and courage produce the synthesis called work. Thomas Carlyle distilled the idea well:

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature’s appointments and regulations, which are truth.³

Chapter 14.                                      (continued) 

Over thousands of years and billions of people, values enable the survival of a human society only if they complement the forces underlying physical reality, or, to be more precise, successful values must cause humans to behave in ways that complement and accommodate adversity and uncertainty, especially for whole societies over the long term. Successful values, riding in their human carriers, can thus go on.

Our values in modern democracies have been fairly effective at guiding us to survive and spread, though admittedly not always in humane ways. Over millennia, the demands of survival in a hazardous reality have caused us to work out a set of values, morés, and behaviours that (mostly) guide us to handle both adversity and uncertainty. If we and our forebears had not learned and implemented our lessons at least moderately well, we would not be here. Having children is hereditary: if your parents didn’t have any, you won’t have any.

 

   

                                                   American children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance

 

                                   

                                                                           Chinese children saluting their flag

   

                                                                        Children's Day in Iran (2008) 

But we don’t yet comprehend the biggest of these truths in a conscious and self-aware way. Most people of every nationality still see their values as being exempt from analysis because via early childhood imprinting we have been programmed to be deeply, unswervingly loyal to those values. This style of programming has made the vast majority of people in most societies, both historical and modern, into unwitting pawns of their society’s way of life. A major purpose of this book is to help thoughtful readers become consciously aware of values and turn them into concepts that are available for analysis and discussion.

First, then, what are the values that enable humans to respond to the main consequence of entropy, the unceasing, uphill struggle of life, the quality of life we know as adversity?

A whole array of values should be taught to young people to enable them to deal with adversity. In order to deal well with adversity, a society needs large numbers of people willing, even eager, to face constant struggle, exertion, exhaustion, and pain. In fact, a society proves most effective and durable if its citizens take up the offensive against the relentless decay of the universe. 

Children taught to embrace challenge become adults who seek to bring new territories (perhaps even planets) under their tribe’s control, to devise new ways of growing and storing food and building shelters, to use technology to accomplish more work with less human exertion, and, in general, to perform the tasks of survival more efficiently.

When we generalize about what these entropy-driven behaviour clusters have in common, we derive two giant values that are found in all cultures; these are courage and wisdom.

In different cultures all over the world, courage is instilled in the young, which is what we would expect if it really does work. Bergson spoke of élan, Nietzsche of the will to power.¹ Japanese samurai women and men lived by bushido, their code of total discipline, and European nations lived by a similar code, chivalry, right into modern times. But beyond the difficulties of translation from culture to culture and era to era, we see in all these values a common motif: they all direct their disciples to train themselves to persevere through challenges and obstacles of all kinds, even to seek challenge out. Achilles chose a brief, hard life of honour over a longer, easier one of obscurity. For centuries, the ancient Greeks considered him to be a model of a man, as do some people in nations that have absorbed ancient Greek culture to this day. Many other cultures have similar heroes.

 

   

                                             Achilles dragging body of Hector behind his chariot

 

                              

                                                             alleged photo of Apache leader Crazy Horse

                            

                                                  statue of Shaka, Zulu leader 

                            

                                                                          Huo Yuanjia, Chinese martial artist 

Confucius said that the superior man thinks always of virtue, while the common man thinks always of comfort. Nineteenth-century English writer K.H. Digby put it this way: “Chivalry is only a name for that general spirit or state of mind which disposes men to heroic actions, and keeps them conversant with all that is beautiful and sublime in the intellectual and moral world.”²

The exhortation to meet and even seek adversity echoes through all societies. Young people everywhere are especially encouraged to face hazards in defense of their nations. We can sum up the gist of all of these values by saying that they are built around the principle that in English is called courage.

Chapter 14 – The Morally Crucial Features of Modern Physics

At last. We are ready to tackle the moral challenge. The question now is: What are the characteristics of the real universe, according to our best scientific understanding of it, that determine how we should design our new moral code? The answer is: The two most morally crucial characteristics of the modern scientific worldview are quantum uncertainty and entropy. Each of these needs a bit more elaboration in order for us to see, first, how it affects human lives materially and, second, what its significance is morally.

   

The first morally relevant feature of reality is quantum uncertainty. It requires that humans, individually and in society, survive by learning to calculate probabilities of future events. These probabilities range from the likelihood that it may rain this afternoon, to the likelihood that I’ll get a stomach ache if I eat these fried onions, to the likelihood that a leopard is hiding in that field of grass ahead, to the likelihood that a war will come if we forbid the tribe that regularly crosses our rope bridge from using it anymore, to the likelihood that Germany will attack Russia given Hitler’s words in Mein Kampf asserting Germany’s need for living space to the east. We shape our actions and live our lives by odds-making.

The second morally relevant feature of reality is stated by the second law of thermodynamics, and it is more familiar to us and far easier to explain than quantum uncertainty. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy, with matter viewed as just a concentrated form of energy, can’t be created or destroyed. It can only be changed in form, as in from chemical energy in gas, to heat energy in a motor, to mechanical energy in the motions of the pistons, the crankshaft and so on. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that, while the amount of energy in the universe remains constant, that energy always flows downward, from areas of greater concentration to areas of lesser concentration. If matter and energy become more concentrated or organized in one area of space, that means only that an even greater amount energy has flowed in from areas nearby. Everything is burning out, including us. Metals corrode, wood and fabric rot, and people and animals die. Even the stars and our sun are burning out.  In ordinary experience, this law means that life is always hard.

An area of matter-energy concentration (e.g., the biosphere of our planet or the mass of my body) must always be maintained at the expense of even greater rates of energy dissipation in nearby spaces. I get energy by eating plants or animals which also ultimately depend on eating plants. Plants get their energy from the sun as it burns. When fossil fuels are burned, they are also simply releasing stored solar energy, as are hydroelectric dams and firewood. The sun is our source; it burns and dissipates energy much more intensely than the creatures in the biosphere of the earth build up and store second-hand solar energy.

   

                                        galaxy calculated to be thirteen billion light years away from earth

Stars are burning out. The universe is heading toward a final state in which more than 10⁷⁹ instances of some kinds of elementary particles will be spread uniformly across it at a temperature of absolute zero. We really don’t understand numbers that big, but that doesn’t matter. The heat death of the universe, as far as our science can tell, is inevitable. (It isn’t due for at least another five billion years.) But the effect of the second law of thermodynamics is seen every day in the way things keep falling apart; rust and decay are built into the fabric of daily life.

To humans, who are complex, energy-concentrated, subtly organized, living entities, this means that like all living things we exist against the natural flow of the physical universe. The level of disorganization or “burnt-outness” of any object or area of space (including the universe) is called its entropy, and the overall entropy of the universe is always increasing.

Thus, our present world view, along with what it is telling us of entropy and quantum mechanics, is much more generally telling us, in terms relevant to human experience, that the universe is governed by what humans recognize as two main principles: adversity and uncertainty. Our deep feeling that adversity is inherent in life is our way of characterizing entropy. Our deep feeling that hazard is inherent in life is our way of characterizing quantum uncertainty.

Chapter 13.                            (continued) 

                         

                                                                              Charles S. Peirce.

Quantum theory breaks the backbone of classical determinism. At the tiniest level that we have been able to study, events are not connected by single paths of direct cause and effect. They are connected by forces that do not obey exact laws of cause and effect, but instead can be described only by laws of probability. The consequence for humans is that life is full of uncertainty, or to be exact, probabilities. In science, the usual term for this kind of system “stochastic”. Most of the time we know to a high degree of probability what is going to happen next, and also, with a fair degree of reliability, how we may be able to influence what is going to happen next, but we never know for certain what is going to happen. This view was anticipated by American philosopher and scientist Charles Peirce in the 1890's and has been further developed by many thinkers right into the twenty-first century.^4,5

We can and do act in bold, informed, calculated, and skillful ways, and our actions alter the probabilities of the various events that may happen in the next few seconds or decades, but it is also true that we can’t ever act so intelligently or skilfully that we can be 100 percent sure of any outcome, good or bad. The elements of surprise and risk are built into reality.

   

If the true picture of reality and our place in it is that stochastic, one begins to wonder how we manage to get anything done. What mental models guide us to effective action in such a scary environment? The answer lies in viewing the human mind itself in a way that is consistent with quantum theory, namely in the Bayesian way.

Simply put, none of us would truly engage in everyday life if we did not see ourselves as being free. In my dealings in everyday life, of course I believe in free will. I get out of the way of oncoming landslides or buses, I go to work to earn my pay, and I hold people responsible for their actions. I expect other rational adults to do the same. I applaud decent actions and reprimand mean, unethical ones. I calculate odds of both the material rightness and the moral rightness of nearly everything I do. The Bayesian view of the mind, combined with the quantum picture of reality, affirms and draws into sharp focus my everyday picture of myself. Free. Responsible. Scared.

The Bayesian model of the human mind is an appropriate one to integrate with the quantum model of the universe because it portrays the human mind in a way that is consistent with quantum uncertainty. A sense-data-processing, probability-calculating, action-planning operating program—refined by trial and error through centuries of biological and cultural evolution—is going to be more likely to enable the organism that uses it to survive than is any other survival program we could propose.

The mind software that runs on the brain hardware is presently defying all computer simulations and other models we have devised to try to imitate or explain it. In other words, the details of the programs that run on the brain’s protoplasmic hardware are even more of a mystery than the enormously complex neuron hardware itself. The mind, which is only an evolved variation of the larger phenomenon of life itself, spots patterns in sense data. In fact, some of the models of reality that the mind uses to guide its choices and actions have been worked out by whole societies over generations.

Finding patterns in the flows of matter and energy around us and calculating ways to exploit them is what our minds do. So far, we have not been able to pin down exactly how they do this. But in spite of our difficulties with comprehending what happens when we are comprehending, the Bayesian model of the mind is still useful and workable. With it, we can do some serious reasoning.

So far, we have shown how the Bayesian model of the human mind is integrated with the socio-cultural model of human evolution and the quantum model of the physical universe. We are thinking creatures, learning—sometimes over generations—by Bayesian means, individual and collective, to improve how we deal with this probabilistic universe. Bayesianism. Cultural evolution. Quantum uncertainty. With this tripartite model to support us, we are ready to draw some further powerful conclusions.

Notes

1. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperOne, 1952), p. 19 of URL link. https://www.dacc.edu/assets/pdfs/PCM/merechristianitylewis.pdf.

2. Vassilios Karakostas, “Nonseparability, Potentiality and the Context-Dependence of Quantum Objects,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Vol. 38 (2007), pp. 279–297. http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0811/0811.3696.pdf.

3. Robert Bishop, “Chaos,” Edward N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2009 edition, first published July 2008). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2009/entries/chaos/.

4. “Indeterminism,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed April 25, 2015. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminism#Robert_Kane.

5. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined,” originally appearing in The Monist, Vol. 2, (1891–1893), pp. 321–337. http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/bycsp/necessity/necessity.html.