Migrant Mother (credit: Dorothea Lange, via Wikimedia Commons)

Early tribes gradually learned that general terms – if they accurately describe larger classes of things in reality – can be very useful because more general terms help us to design behaviors that will be more effective in our struggle survive. They enable us to respond to hazards and opportunities in reality more quickly and accurately.  Thus, finally, we come to values, the most general of principles; they apply to huge patterns in our memories of sense data. We care about defining a value term like good because, deep down, we want to know what good is in order to get it and then avoid losing it so that we survive in increasing numbers over the long run.

Terms for values name meta-behaviors, programs that are called up and run within our brains. We continually use values terms learned from our mentors and teachers to form judgments about what we are seeing. Values enable us to prioritize and so they give us order. Sanity. They enable us to decide, second by second, about all that we see: important or trivial? Hazard? Opportunity? Requiring action? Now? Soon? Later? Ever? 

Note, however, that most of the time we don’t take any action when an experience is evoking one of our values. Sometimes we recognize a thing or experience is harmless so we cease to think about it. Being constantly aware of the details in our surroundings does not always mean we respond to them in any way that shows on the outside. Thinking, even thinking about our ways of thinking and which of them have been getting good results lately, is internal behavior. Often, what shows on the outside—to the frustration of the behaviorists, who want to study only what is objectively observable—is nothing at all.

Nearly every human past the age of eleven is capable of forming generalizations based on what he has learned from his individual experiences and, to an even greater degree, what he has been taught by the adults of his tribe. Conceptual thinking is as human as having forty-six chromosomes. It comes to a child at the age when, for example, he realizes that the short, wide cup holds more soda than the tall, slim one. Volume is a concept. (I take Piaget as my guide here.⁶)

The programmers of society—parents, teachers, shamans, and others—make use of this faculty in their young subjects, greatly increasing these children’s chances of surviving by programming them with more than simple, one-to-one responses to recognizably repetitive sense data patterns in the tribe’s territory. The young subject is to be programmed with concepts and then, at higher levels of generality, with principles, beliefs, and values. These enable that young subject to respond to, and handle, new situations. Recognize that a new animal or fish or plant could be used for food. Or recognize that the new animal or plant is harmful. “This lizard or spider has a poisonous bite.” “This weed is making my cattle sick.”

Our capacity to think, to use concepts, gives us a big advantage over all other species on this planet. It is also by this capacity to think, combined with our capacity to communicate, that human tribes evolve. An individual sees a new way of getting food or chipping flint or curing diseases, etc., then tells her/his fellows. A few try it. If it works, and it’s not threatening some other moré that is “sacred” for the tribe, the new moré will get taken up and the tribe as a living unit will evolve. Not by genetic variations, but by cultural ones.  

   

                                   

              Reindeer with herdsmen (credit: Detroit Publishing Co., via Wikimedia Commons)

Every tribe has labels (words) for large groups of similar things or events in the tribe’s environment. These category terms are taught to the young because they are useful in the quest for survival. The Sami (Laplanders) have many words for describing a reindeer because they sometimes need to differentiate between them. A single word to describe a blond, pregnant doe is useful if she is in labour, in distress, and in need of immediate aid. And for Cro-Magnon tribes, it probably was useful to have many terms for rock or stone or flint because only certain types of flint could be used to make effective weapons and tools. 

By contrast, most visitors to Lapland speak only of reindeer does, bucks, and fawns, and some visitors may have no words for reindeer at all. And most of us today, compared to our Cro-Magnon ancestors, know very little about types of flint.

The word principle is a term for patterns that are common in even larger groups of things or events. Terms like danger and edible name very general principles that a tribe has spotted in many real-life experiences of many tribe members. Terms for principles are harder to learn than ones like tiger or nuts, but also very useful in real life. The term danger enables one tribe member to tell another to get away from something quickly and stay away. It covers tigers, snakes, bears, crocodiles, unstable cliff faces, avalanche zones, poisonous plants, and so on. It’s an efficient term and one worth learning and keeping. 

The term edible covers nuts, berries, maggots, eggs, frogs, fish, lizards, and many more things an individual may come upon within the tribe’s environment. It enables one tribe member to tell another that the substance they’re looking at is worth gathering because it can be safely eaten, even if sometimes it doesn’t look very appetizing.

   

            

              California spiny lobster (credit: Dr. Kjaergaard [assumed], via Wikimedia Commons) 

This train of thought on the long-term purposes that morés serve for human tribes brings us to an implication deeply embedded in our argument. Close analysis of individual human behaviors reveals that some of them can’t be completely explained by their long-term advantages for the tribe. We can’t reason our way to a moral code for all humans until we understand that humans are capable of noticing and labeling large patterns in their thinking. Frequently occurring patterns. These are the ones that we usually call concepts or beliefs. Using and comparing them in our minds is what we do when we think. 

We humans act much of the time in ways that our cultures have programmed us to act, but we also can figure some situations out for ourselves and try new responses to them. We can learn on our own. Sometimes, we even add useful new ideas and mores to our whole culture. 

Behaviourism’s model of how humans think is left behind at this point since it does not take account of how we form concepts. It pictures stimulus and response as being connected in a one-to-one, mechanical way. It then explains some individual behaviors for which stimulus and response can be clearly described in convenient, objective terms. The behaviorist reports that “The organism sees and recognizes these colours, shapes, and sounds, pushes the bar, and gets the food-pellet reward.” For example, a rat sees a light go on in its cage, presses the bar it has learned to press, and gets a food pellet reward. I go to work at the factory, punch my time card at the clock beside the door, put bolts on widgets for nine hours, punch out, collect my pay, and go home. This picture of learning and behaving, for the behaviorists, demonstrates how all learning and doing works for all living things all the time. Or so the behaviorists say.

   

                                       Bull Moose (credit: Ryan Hagerty, Wikimedia Commons)

But a human can confront situations that are not, by sensory evidence, like anything the human has encountered before, and still the human can react effectively. The English hunter who had never seen a moose, kangaroo, or rhinoceros in muskeg, outback, or veldt still knew where to shoot to kill one. Polynesian sailors navigated well by the stars of a new hemisphere when they first came to Hawaii as did European sailors when they first began to explore the lands and seas south of the equator. In each of those situations, they used a set of concepts—ideas based on patterns found in large numbers of experiences. For example, the animal’s heart lies at the bottom of the ribcage, slightly to the left of center, and a heart shot is fatal for every animal on this planet.

Furthermore, a man may react in one way to a new stimulus in his first encounter with it and quite differently in his next encounter, after he has thought about the stimulus situation for a bit longer. He sees a deeper, more general pattern that he recognizes, and then, based on concepts stored in his memory, he plans and executes a more effective response to it. The lists of concepts and their uses could go on for pages.

                 

   

                                       Modern children working in brick factory in Nepal 

                                             (credit: Krish Dulal via Wikimedia Commons)

                                (Some customs that once served a purpose no longer do so.) 

Children may not enjoy some of the behaviors their elders dictate, nor may they enjoy them later when they are adults. Work is hard. Building shelters is work. Making clothes is work. Gathering food and preserving it for the winter is work. Raising kids is work. Work is tedious. But for survival, individual happiness is not what matters. Patterns of living that maximize the resources of the tribe over many generations are what matter, and these ways of living do not always make sense to the people being programmed to do them. But tribes that do not teach hard work and loyalty to family and tribe die out.

To illustrate further, another example of a custom that seems counterintuitive to Western minds but that works can be offered here. Polyandry allows and encourages one woman to have two or more husbands, legally and with the blessings of the community. It seems counterintuitive to us. But the practice is not only viable in some cultures, it even promotes better survival rates. In some areas of the Himalayas, when a man knows that finding work may require him to be away for an extended period, he can pick a good second husband for his wife. Then he will know that she, his children, his property, and the children and property of the other man will be protected. If she becomes pregnant while he is away, it will be by a man he has approved of.⁵ As long as all three really are faithful to the marriage, the risks of any of them getting an STD remain small. More surviving children is the result. 

Again, readers, sorry I missed a day. I was occupied for almost all of yesterday with grandson's birthday trip/present. I am now back on my regular schedule. Skipped days most likely will not occur again for a long time. 

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              Secretary Sibelius, Joplin MO (2011) (credit: By HHSgov, via Wikimedia Commons)  

It is worth noting that the fifth commandment in its original wording read, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long …” and so on. “Thy” days, not “their” days. At first glance, this seems odd. If I honor my parents, they will likely enjoy a more peaceful and comfortable old age, but that will not guarantee anything about my own final years. By then, my parents, even if they are grateful folk, will most probably be long since dead. At that point, they can’t do much to reciprocate and so to benefit me.

On closer examination though, we see that there is more here. As we treat our elders with respect in their last years, consult their opinions on a wide range of matters, include them in social functions, and so on, we model for our children behaviors that are imprinted on them for a lifetime, and they, in turn, will practice these same behaviors in twenty years or so. Take care of mom and dad. The commandment turns out to be literally true.

Note also that there is a deep, complex relationship between our morés or patterns of behavior and our values programming. The common behavior patterns in a culture, patterns that we call morés, are just ways of acting out in the physical world beliefs that are held deep inside each individual’s mental world, beliefs about what kinds of behavior are consistent with the individual’s code of right and wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, sensible or silly. More on these matters as we go along.

Honouring parents enables the increase of the tribe’s total store of all kinds of knowledge. Avoiding committing adultery checks the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. It also increases the nurturing behaviors of males, as each man’s confidence that he is truly the biological father of the child he is asked to nurture increases. Not stealing and not bearing false witness have benefits for the efficiency of the whole community, in commerce especially.

By this point in our argument, explaining the benefits of more of these moral commands should be unnecessary. A major fact is becoming clear: a moral belief and the behaviors attached to it become well established in a tribe if the behaviors help tribe members to survive in both the short and long hauls. It is also clear that individuals usually do not see the long-term picture of the tribe’s survival. They just do, in their daily lives, what they were raised to believe is right.

   

    Innu grandmother and granddaughter (credit: Ansgar Walk via Wikimedia Commons)

Another example of the morés that guide our cultures can be found in a different area of life, in the laws of Moses. These instruct followers of the Hebrew, Christian, and Muslim faiths to “Honour thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land that the Lord thy God hath given thee.” (Exodus 20:12) The faithful are instructed to care for, treat respectfully, and consult their parents (therefore, by a small logical extension, all citizens of the community should be cared for in their old age).

Honouring our elders means consulting with them on all kinds of matters. Before writing was invented, an old person was a walking encyclopedia to be consulted for useful information on treatment of diseases and injuries, planting, harvesting, and preserving food, making and fixing shelters and tools, hunting, gathering, and much more. Knowledge and wisdom were passed down through the generations by oral means. By honouring elders, the people in a community preserved and thus had access to much larger stores of knowledge than if they had simply abandoned their elderly as soon as they appeared to be a net drain on the tribe’s resources. An elder’s knowledge often solved both small problems and major crises for the entire tribe. Over many generations, societies that respected and valued their elders gradually outfed, outbred, and outfought their competitors.

Imagine an elder in a primitive tribe. She might very well have said: “We have to boil the water. This sickness came once before, when I was seven summers old. Only people who drank soup and tea did not get sick. All who drank the water got sick and died.” Honoring elders is, every so often, a tribe-saving policy to have in place. It is, every so often, the difference between life and death for the whole tribe. 

Note to readers: Sorry I missed a day. I drove up to Edmonton. I thought I would post after I got there, but I was just too tired. But I'm back today. Welcome.                        

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                                                                        (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

But let’s return to this attempt to discover a model of how moral codes work in the real world.

The gradual process by which new morés enter into the cultural code of a society is vital to the survival of the morés themselves. None of the phases in a society’s adopting a new moré necessarily entails any of the others. A behavior recently acquired by one person on a trial basis may make that individual healthier and/or happier, but this does not automatically mean he will reproduce more prolifically or nurture more effectively or teach his morés to his children more efficiently. Other factors can and do intervene.

Many examples can be cited as evidence to support this generalization. Some of the tribes in Indonesia once taught every member of the community to go into the forest to defecate. The individual had to dig a hole in the earth, defecate in it, then cover the excrement with earth before returning to the tribe’s living spaces. Children were taught to hide their excrement so no hostile shaman could find it and use it to cast an evil spell on such a careless child or his/her family.⁴

In the view of most of us in Western societies, the advantages of the practice lie in the way it reduces the risk to the community of diseases such as cholera. Similar practices are taught to people in Western societies (and described in cultural codes as early as those found in the Old Testament of the Bible).

For centuries, many Europeans drank large quantities of malt liquor, wine, and beer, and later, tea and coffee. This custom was based in tradition rather than religion, but its beneficial effect was felt just the same, since local water often contained dangerous bacteria. While the benefits were mixed because they were offset by the negative effects of alcohol and caffeine abuse, the important thing to see is that these people did not need to know anything about bacteria in order to arrive over generations, by trial and deadly error, at a set of behaviours that enabled them to survive in greater numbers over the long term. Of course, in China, the drinking of tea had been looked on as a healthful practice for both the individual and society for much longer.

   

                                                       (credit: DocteurCosmos, via Wikimedia Commons)

                                           

                                              (credit: Sgt. Sinthia Rosario, via Wikimedia Commons 

But if humans act as they do mostly because of social programming, why or how did some behaviour patterns ever become established in the first place in the earliest of human societies? And why did many behaviours obviously possible for humans vanish totally or never get tried at all? Why don’t most people on this planet eat Rowan berries or make their children into slaves? The answer is obvious: the morés that help us to live are kept; the ones that don’t serve the needs of survival aren’t. We keep alive the morés that keep us alive.

                                                   

The second step in the explanation of social morés and cultures is this: behaviour patterns become established in a society and passed on from generation to generation if they enable the people who do them to live their lives as individuals and as whole tribes , to reproduce, and to program the behaviours into their young. If new morés or behaviour patterns are to last, they must achieve these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as those the community knew before its people began to acquire the new behaviour patterns. This is the theory around which is built the field of sociocultural evolution, a field of study that began to develop as a branch of Science only in the twentieth century due to the work of people like sociologist Gerhard Lenski and anthropologists Leslie White and Marshall Sahlins.³

And none of the socio-biologists has come up with a comprehensive theory of socio-cultural evolution, one that is widely accepted as correct in the way that Darwin’s theory of biological evolution is. But at least they are on the right track. Their project is the right project. They are trying to understand morality in terms of reality, and so to make the connection we desperately need. Why do we do the things that we do? What things should we be doing? 

   

                                      Marshall Sahlins (credit: Elkziz, via Wikimedia Commons)

                              

   

                                                                (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

It is important to note the profound way in which human behavior patterns differ from those of nearly all other animals. A turtle need not ever see another turtle, from hatching to dying of old age, in order to be turtle-like. Alone, a turtle would not be able to complete its genetically-driven reproductive behavior each mating season, but it would at least try to find a mate. The rest of the time, it would live in ways that are completely normal for turtles, entirely directed by its body’s genetic code.

Creatures like ants, crabs, and fish that came early in evolutionary history clearly are more fully programmed by their genetic codes than are those of higher orders such as cats, dogs, apes, and humans. But even most large, complex animals learn only small portions of their behavioral repertoires. Kittens, in time, will stalk balls and then mice and birds, even if they are taken from their mothers still blind and helpless. Puppies are genetically programmed to bury bones. Humans, by contrast, if raised by dogs, become humanoid dogs, and demonstrate hardly any human behaviors at all. We humans—unlike turtles, apes, and kittens—learn how to be human-like by “enculturation,” that is, almost entirely from other, older humans.^1,2

Most animal behaviors are instinctive, programmed into animals genetically, especially in lower-order animals. As we rise up the scale of complexity, we arrive at humans, in whom most behaviors are programmed by nurture—by their upbringings, in other words. The body of knowledge that a given human community or tribe consults in order to respond to specific situations, to perform the recommended behaviors, and then to verify that each behavior has been done appropriately, forms what is called the culture of that society or tribe. Put a dead fish in the ground with each corn seed that you plant in the spring and wear your tuxedo and black tie to the opera.

The first step on our journey to answering the large questions about humans and their ways is simply this: patterns of behavior in human communities are mostly the result of programming of individuals in their formative years by the adults around them.

                                    

                                                                              

If we keep asking "Why?" about our "ways of life", the answers seem to spread further and further from one another into a variety of human morés and then cultures; human morés vary widely within any given society and much more so from society to society. But if we persist in analyzing masses of social evidence, patterns begin to emerge. Based on these patterns, we can make some general statements about people and their ways. For the most part, people act in the ways they do because they have been programmed to act in those ways by their parents, their teachers, and the media of their cultures. For example, close observation shows that the vast majority of humans learn to perform the actions that relieve their bodies’ physical needs in the ways considered socially acceptable in their particular culture.

        

         Balut (soft-boiled fetal duck, Vietnam) (credit: Marshall Astor, via Wikimedia Commons)

In this category, we find the morés that govern how we eat. I far prefer to eat dishes I find familiar from my upbringing. And in my culture, I wash my hands before eating to remove disease-causing germs I might otherwise ingest with my food if I ate it with dirty hands. I’ve never seen these tiny animals, but I’ve been trained to be wary of germs. Therefore, I take measures to neutralize the danger I believe they pose to my well-being. I also make an effort to urinate and defecate only in places deemed acceptable in my society, no matter how urgently nature calls.

   

                                                 (credit: yang yang, via Wikimedia Commons)

Another interesting example of a custom that is commonplace in some societies but not others is the one that trains men to shave their beards. In some cultures, men who are clean shaven are seen as being presentable, neat, and attractive. In other cultures, a man without a beard is seen as being weak or alien. In some cultures, men are forcibly shaved as a form of punishment. The fascinating questions come when we ask “Why?” Why is shaving done? Is there some survival advantage in some environments for men who were trained by their fathers to shave off their beards? For example, do men who shave daily appear younger or more attractive to women? Do they then reproduce more successfully and prolifically and thus pass their ways on to more progeny, especially the sons who watch them shave and so will do the same themselves one day?

                                         

Research on such shaving customs is sparse and inconclusive. However, what’s important to see is that asking questions about cultural morés and customs in terms of their possible advantages in the survival game entails thinking scientifically about morés in general. Under this view, none of our actions are trivial or meaningless. They all matter. Under this view, we can compare cultures, and the mundane rapidly becomes the fascinating.

Chapter 9 – The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution

   

                                     geisha dancers (credit: Joi Ito, via Wikimedia Commons)

   

                                         dabbing (credit: Gokudabbing, via Wikimedia Commons) 

In order to build a universal moral code, we must now do two things. First, we must explain how moral codes get established and amended. Second, we must extract from our best modern models of the physical universe the principles that should guide us in building a moral code so that it is consistent with all our other knowledge in modern times. We need to make our best ideas of good connect to our best ideas of real.

Most of us are raised and conditioned to be fiercely loyal to the way of life we grew up with, so we can expect that analyzing the roots of morality will be difficult. Powerful and subtle internal programming steers us toward affirming the morals and morés we grew up with. But difficult does not mean impossible. Most importantly, we have the evidence of history and of life as it is lived by real people today to check our theories against.

And what do we notice about moral code systems if we closely analyze various human ways of life, that is, the cultures of a variety of human societies, present and past? Human beings baffle one another and each even sometimes baffles him or her self. Why do we do the things we do?

The reasoning process that answers this question contains several steps. 

To begin with, we can analyze the everyday actions of the people around us. Why does this man get up when his alarm clock rings? Why does he even have an alarm clock? Why does this woman shampoo her hair, then dry it with a hot-air blowing electrical device? In similar ways, dozens of mundane questions may be posed about everyday life in our society or any society. Of course, these actions and the motivations behind them seem obvious to the people who live in the society where they are practiced. To the people in each society, their actions just show people being normal. But to people in other cultures, the reasons for those foreigners’ ways aren’t just confusing; they’re unknown.

                        dancers in West Africa (credit: Eric Draper, via Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter 8 – What Is Bayesianism Saying?

What is an individual who is sincerely straining after truth to conclude at the end of a careful analysis of the problem of epistemology? The pattern is there; records of centuries of fruitless seeking for a model of knowing are there; the conclusion is clear: rationalism and empiricism are both hopeless projects. Whatever else human minds may successfully cognize and manipulate—in purely symbolic forms such as philosophical arguments or in more tangible forms such as computer programs—the mind will never define itself.

A human mind is much larger and more complex than any of the systems it can devise, including systems of ideas that it assembles to try to explain itself. It makes, and contains, systems of symbols for labelling and organizing its memories and thoughts: the symbol systems cannot contain it.

                                

   

                                     IBM supercomputer Blue Gene/P (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

But the model of the human mind and how it works called Bayesianism is workable enough to allow us to get on with building the further philosophical structures we will need in order to arrive at a modern moral code for all humans. The Bayesian model of knowing contains some difficult parts, but it does not stumble and crash in the way that rationalism and empiricism do. Bayesianism can justify itself as being a good gamble. It will do what we need it to do.  It will serve as a base upon which we may construct a universal moral code. But it does require of us that we agree to gamble on rational gambling as being the best way of getting on with life.

And let’s be crystal clear here. All the alternative ways of seeing human thinking and knowing are variations of either Empiricism or Rationalism. All the world’s religions so far. Marxism. Postmodernism. The whole lot.

And let’s be even clearer. We have to get on with life. Therefore, we have to have some way of organizing all our thinking. A mind that can’t organize and prioritize the details being fed into it moment by moment is going to dissolve into madness. Anyone reading these words and making sense of them has some program in place for simply handling her/his daily life.

It is also true that many people do not want to look at how they do the thinking they need to do to handle their lives. But this book is for the person who does want to understand both herself and the world around her.

The points made in the book so far then say these undeniable things:

1. Our world is in deep trouble. Nuclear weapons. Global warming. Overpopulation. Etc.

2. All the ways we used in the past to handle life are inadequate for dealing with our world now.

3.  We must find a new way of understanding what being human means. We can’t do without one. 

      4. Bayesianism, as a new way of building a base for our understanding, looks like our best gamble.

Therefore, from this point on, I am going to offer arguments and models of how humans fit into the real world which will not pretend to be perfectly logical; there is no perfect worldview. What we must now try to find is the best gamble, the most likely looking, of the options that we have before us. By the end of the book, I will make the case that the worldview I offer is a better one than any of its alternatives, which is all any writer can aim for.

Here we pause for a short rest. 



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                                                                        (credit: Wikipedia) 

Oyama Morning

The restful sleep of boyish innocence

Awakens, stretches, smiles through dreamy eyes,

Looks over sunlit window ledge and spies

His Labrador, Black Queen, fixed, pointing, tense,

Below the dewy grass and picket fence,

Stock still, as now the air her black nose tries,

Then delicate with stealth, she steps ... Surprise!

A pheasant cock splits sunlight rays' suspense

And arcing, flapping, squalling, climbs the skies,

Squawks window-by, a boyish reach away;

Flinch-startle back, now pause, now hear him bray;

Lean out and see the green-red-golden glide

Fade into drifting dust of breaking day,

The flowing tail and wings in angry pride,

Through fresh, rose-saffron Canada, immense.

   

                        Pheasant in flight  (credit: Archibald Thorburn, via Wikimedia Commons) 

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So. We’ve had a rest. Looked back over how far we’ve come. Let’s take up our task again and press on toward the summit of our mountain, namely moral realism. Maybe there, we might even find something unexpected … and unbelievably precious.   

The Bayesian way of thinking about our own thinking requires us to be willing to float all our concepts, even our most deeply held ones. Some are more central, and we stand on them more often and with more confidence. A few we may believe almost, but not quite, absolutely. But in the end, none of our concepts is irreplaceable.

For humans, the mind is our means of surviving. It will adapt to almost anything.

We gamble heavily on the concepts we routinely use to organize our sense data and memories of sense data. I use my concepts to organize the memories already stored in my brain and the new sense data that are flooding into my brain all the time. I keep trying to acquire more concepts – including concepts for organizing other concepts – that will enable me to utilize my memories more efficiently to make faster and better decisions and to act increasingly effectively. In this constant, restless, searching mental life of mine, I never trust anything absolutely. If I did, a simple magic show would mesmerize and paralyze me. Or reduce me to catatonia.

When I see elephants disappear, women get sawn in half, and men defy gravity, and all come through their ordeals in fine shape, some of my most basic and trusted concepts are obviously being violated. But I choose to stand by my concepts in almost every such case, not because I am certain they are perfect but because they have been tested and found effective over so many trials and for so long that I’m willing to keep gambling on them. I don’t know for certain that they are sure bets; they just seem like the most promising options available to me.

                           

                                                    Harry Houdini with his “disappearing” elephant, Jennie 

                                                                           (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Life is constantly making demands on me to move and keep moving. I have to gamble on some things; I go with my best horses, my oldest, most successful and trusted concepts. And sometimes, I change my mind.

This mental flexibility on my part is just life. Bayesianism is telling us what Thomas Kuhn said in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. We are constantly adjusting all our concepts to try to make our ways of dealing with reality more effective.

And when a researcher begins to grasp a new hypothesis and the model or theory it is based on, the resulting experience is like a philosophical or religious “awakening”—profound and even life-altering. Everything changes when we accept a new model or theory—because we change. In order to “get it,” we have to change. We have to eliminate some of the old beliefs from our familiar background set.

And what of the shifting nature of our view of reality and the gambling spirit that is implicit in the Bayesian model? The general tone of all our experiences tells us that this overall view of our world and ourselves, though it may seem scary or perhaps, for more confident individuals, challenging—is just life.

We have now arrived at a point where we can feel confident that Bayesianism gives us a good base on which to build further reasoning. Solid enough to use and so to get on with all the other thinking that has to be done. It can answer its critics—both those who attack it with real-world counterexamples and those who attack it with pure logic.

So here is a good place to pause to summarize our case so far in a new chapter devoted just to that summing up.

Notes

1. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

                                      

                                         (credit: Sigismund von Dobschütz, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s important to point out here that the idea behind H&B, the set of the new hypothesis plus my background concepts, is more complex than the equation can capture. This part of the formula should be read: “If I integrate the hypothesis into my whole background concept set.” The formula can only attempt to capture in symbols something that is almost not capturable. This is so because the point of positing a hypothesis, H, is that it does not fit neatly into my background set of beliefs. It is built around a new way of seeing and comprehending reality, and thus it will only be integrated into my old background set of concepts and beliefs if some of those are removed, by careful, gradual tinkering, and then many other concepts also are adjusted.

Similarly, in the term Pr(H/E&B), the E&B is trying to capture something no math expression can capture. E&B is trying to say: “If I take both the evidence and my set of background beliefs to be 100 percent reliable.” 

But that way of stating the E&B part of the term merely highlights the issue with problematic old evidence. This evidence is problematic because I can’t make it consistent with my set of background concepts and beliefs, no matter how I tinker with them.

All the whole formula really does is try to capture the gist of human thinking and learning. It is a useful approximation, but we can’t become complacent about this formula for the Bayesian model of human thinking and learning any more than we can become complacent about any of our concepts. And that thought is consistent with the spirit of Bayesianism. It tells us not to become too blindly attached to any of our concepts; any one of them may have to be radically updated and revised at any time.

Thus, on closer examination, the criticism of Bayesianism which says the Bayesian model can’t explain why we find a fit between a hypothesis and some problematic old evidence so reassuring—turns out to be not a fatal criticism, but more of a useful tool, one that we may use to deepen and broaden our understanding of the Bayesian model of human thinking. 

We can hold onto the Bayesian model if we accept that all the concepts, thought patterns, and patterns of neuron firings in the brain—hypotheses, evidence, and assumed background concepts—are forming, reforming, aligning, realigning, and floating in and out of one another all the time, even concepts as basic as the ones we have about gravity, matter, space, and time. This whole view of this scary idea called “Bayesianism” arises naturally if we simply apply Bayesianism to itself. In short, we must learn and adjust until we die. 

A human mind experiences much cognitive dissonance when it keeps observing evidence that does not fit any of its mental models. The person attempting to explain observed evidence that is inconsistent with his world view, clinging to his background beliefs and shutting out the new theory his colleagues are discussing, keeps insisting that this evidence can’t be correct. Some systemic error must be leading those other researchers to think they have observed E, but they must be wrong. E is not what they say it is. “That can’t be right,” he says.

In the meantime, his more subversive colleague down the hall is arguing, even if only in her own mind, “I know what I saw. I know how careful I’ve been. E is right; thus, the probability of H, at least in my mind, has just grown. It’s such a relief to see a way out of all the cognitive dissonance I’ve been experiencing for the last few months. I get it now. Wow, this feels good!” Settling a score with a stubborn bit of old evidence that refused to fit into any of a scientist’s models of reality is a bit like finally whipping a bully who picked on her in elementary school—not really logical, but still very satisfying.

Normally, testing a new hypothesis involves performing an experiment that will generate new evidence. If the experiment delivers new evidence that was predicted by the hypothesis, but not by our background concepts, then the hypothesis, as a way of explaining the real world, seems more likely or probable to us. The new evidence confirms the hypothesis.

But I may also decide to try to use a hypothesis and the theory it is based on to explain some problematic old evidence. I will be looking at whether the hypothesis and its predictions did in fact occur in the old evidence situations. If I find that the hypothesis and the theory it is based on do successfully explain that problematic old evidence, what I’m actually confirming is not just the hypothesis and theory but also the consistency between the evidence, the hypothesis, and my background set of concepts.

                                     

   

                                                 Levitation (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

And no, it is not obvious that evidence seen with my own eyes is 100 percent reliable, not even if I’ve seen a particular phenomenon repeated many times. Neither my longest-held, familiar background concepts nor the ordinary sense data I see in everyday experiences are trusted that much. If they were, then I and anyone who trusts gravity, light and human anatomy would be unable to watch a good magic show without having a nervous breakdown. Elephants disappear, men float, and women get sawn in half. By pure logic, if my most basic concepts were believed at the 100 percent level, then either I would have to gouge my eyes out or go mad. 

But I know the magic is all a trick of some kind. And I choose, for just the duration of the show, to suspend my desire to connect all my sense data with my set of background concepts. It is supposed to be a performance of fun and wonder. If I did figure out how the trick was done, I would ruin my grandkids’ fun … and my own.