Chapter 8       What Is Bayesianism Saying?

Part A 

What is a straining individual who is really searching for 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. It appears that whatever else the human mind may successfully cognize and manipulate – in purely symbolic forms such as philosophical theses or in more material-world oriented ones such as computer programs – the mind will never define itself.

A human mind is much richer, 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 contains, and makes, systems of symbols for labeling and organizing its thoughts: the symbol systems cannot, in principle, contain it.

Fujisu "K" world's most powerful computer, 2012

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 that we will need in order to arrive at a modern moral code for all humans. Bayesianism contains some difficult parts, but it does not crack and crash in the way that Rationalism and Empiricism do. Bayesianism will do what we need it to do. It can answer its critics. It will serve as a base upon which we may construct a universal moral code. We will just have to agree to gamble on rational gambling as being the best way of getting on with life.

Under this model, even human consciousness is built on arbitrary and temporary foundations. For example, my concepts of "red", "round", "sweet", "crisp", and "tangy" are descriptor-organizers that help me to recognize and react to things in the real, material world, some of them being apples. Such descriptors are not built into some other dimension of perfect forms as is posited by Rationalism. They aren’t even built into the physical universe in some permanent way as is posited by Empiricism. Even our ways of stating what we think are the laws of the physical universe are constantly being updated.

Once apples did not exist. Nor did the organic chemicals that make sweetness. Even "round" is a constructed concept that exists only in the human mind, only for now, and only because it helps humans whose minds contain it to sort data, make decisions, and get things done. The cave man who could count could think: “Were there five wild apple trees in this valley or six? I know I saw six.” Knowing the difference meant he fed his kids, and they survived to teach the concepts used in counting to their kids.

At bottom, the shifting nature of reality defies all categories, even "here", "now", and "stuff". (Matter, Einstein showed, is really only a form of energy.) A mind (consciousness/sanity) is built up on concepts, a few of them acquired from our genetics (babies fear heights and snakes, but grasp language), some from the conditioning that is programmed into us by our cultures, and some that each of us has built up by spotting patterns in banks of memories gathered in his or her personal experience.

The "I" that is most deeply what I mean by "I" is a program that runs on brain tissue and that is constantly reviewing sense data, trying to decide whether they signify hazard or opportunity or are just more familiar, non-threatening, non-promising, background drivel. A mind looks for patterns in data.

But sanity is a construct and like any construct it can be “deconstructed”, an idea that deserves a bit of digression. If a sanity really is deconstructed, as happens when a person's perceptions are distorted by drugs or sensory deprivation or mental illness so that her/his programming becomes so incoherent that some of interactions with reality get beyond that person's ability to sort, and respond to, real world events, then s/he has a "nervous breakdown". Real deconstruction of a human’s mindset, i.e. the set of programs that a person uses to organize her/his perceptions of reality, can happen, but it is not much like the Deconstructionists’ way of analyzing a work of literature.

Deconstructionism as a philosophy is a kind of playing at mental illness. It is correct in asserting that every sane human cognition is part of a "text" and as such can be deconstructed into its constituent parts, most of which are culturally imprinted and so can be shown to be culturally biased. But complete deconstruction of any "text" - or "context", to put it more accurately - would require the deconstructer to deconstruct the constituents and then the constituents of the constituents. S/he would have to continue until s/he had deconstructed her/his own mind as part of the total context being analyzed. In short, to go mad. Deconstructionists are too cautious to actually use their method to its logical limit. Mental illness, they well know, is not clever, sophisticated, illuminating, or fun.

But let us set regrets about Deconstructionism aside and return to our main line of thought. 

The thrust of Bayesianism is this: all of my sensory experiences and memories of experiences would seem to be jumbled, meaningless gibberish without concepts by which I can organize them. The crucial problem is that these concepts are not built into a supra-real dimension of ideas (Rationalism) nor into material reality itself (Empiricism). Our minds' thinking systems are based almost wholly on concepts that exist only in our minds and only for the time being, be it seconds or centuries.

All basic concepts are illusions in the sense that they metamorph inevitably into and out of one another. Even trees aren't trees; some are giant bamboo, some are bushes grown big, some are former trees in various stages of decay, some are potential trees (e.g. acorns). 

            Dingo (wild dog of Australia) 

Dingoes that kill human children are vicious brutes; dingoes being killed by human children are pathetic victims. Nature is beautiful or horrible depending on what angle it is perceived from. Light is a particle, not a wave; light is a wave, not a particle. Criminals aren't always criminals; if they make war on another ethnic group and lose, they are terrorists, the worst of criminals; if they win, they are freedom fighters, the best of heroes.

Justices mete out injustice. Teachers stupefy.  Physicians sicken. Not always, of course. Not even mostly. But too often for us ever to get smug about our terms. Life is complex and constantly changing. The distinctions that we draw to try to justify our versions of reality get subtler and subtler, but they are never subtle enough. Real life keeps cropping up with situations that leave us and our thinking systems stranded in bafflement and ambivalence. Therefore, we learn to evolve and even improvise.

There is a reality; I am confident of that – at the 99.99 percent level. But it is too fluid and dynamic for our minds to ever get a 100% reliable handle on it. Individuals, families, gurus, philosophers, businessmen, and politicians, in varying ways, appear to get handles on reality for a while, but they all prove inadequate over the long haul. Things, especially humanly-made systems of ideas, fall apart.

On the other hand, life holds together. All throughout the natural world, living things adapt, even individual human living things. Children raised in the Hitler Youth or raised to be Stalin's "socialist beings", incapable of thinking of themselves except as parts of a collective, can grow out of their early brainwashing. 

Men raised to see women as victims to be used and abused can learn not to do the same things to their wives that their fathers did to their mothers. With medications and counseling, even some pedophiles can learn to re-direct their needs into socially acceptable channels. We can learn and adapt; we can re-program. Not perfectly, but functionally, which in the end is what matters to the individual, the community, and our species’ survival. The kids will do better because they will have to.

Mind/consciousness is a program that calculates the usefulness of other programs for enhancing and perpetuating the conditions that will produce more mind.

I am constantly calculating, usually as a mostly unconscious activity, the odds that each of my familiar ways of organizing my thoughts, processing sense data, and formulating action plans is still working and is still adequate for interpreting, and reacting to, the physical situation that I am in right now. Once in a while, I calculate the odds that a different way of thinking, one that I am only considering using, will get me, my children, and my nation good results, i.e. happiness and health, over the long haul. The majority of the time, I check my sensory impressions against my expectations and re-affirm the beliefs and models of reality that have got me this far.

If I conclude that a new way of thinking about reality is an accurate one and that it will enable me to foresee pain and avoid that pain, or to find more pleasure, health and vigor, then I become inclined to move aside some of my old mental gear and move the new ideas in. This is true of nearly all, but not quite all, of the programs that my mind now contains. I become anxious and reluctant when some event or argument challenges my deepest and most general programs: my values. Those I will replace only in dire circumstances or after years of re-programming. Once in a while, if I am very stubborn in refusing to learn life’s latest lessons, I or my family, or even my tribe, will get discarded from the human community of the planet by evolution itself as some new, more efficient and current society replaces us.

 

That picture, "I" believe, is the correct picture of "me".

Bayesianism says about itself that as a model of how humans think it is probably the best model. The odds that we should accept it as the best model of the human mind keep increasing the more that we use it and then handle reality well because we are using it, that is to say, the more we handle reality, individually and as communities, better than other humans using other, less flexible, less resourceful, less effective, less nimble models. 

  

This description, however, has an important caveat attached. I am forced to admit, if I am honest, that sometimes I am not capable of making my odds-weighing judgments astutely, especially when the judgments are about some of the mental gear that is most central in me. This deep, central gear includes the moral beliefs most widely connected to all of the other systems in my mind.

   

I am very reluctant to change my central operating systems, which in plainer language are programs that I engage as I am deciding, second by second, item by item, possible action by possible action, "Good or not?" Those systems are what most people are very reluctant to change. Because of familial and cultural programming, deep emotions are associated with our values. Rather than change their moral values, many people prefer to die fighting to preserve those values, and in fact they sometimes do.

The harshest mechanism by which the values pool of the human race evolves - by wars between nations, rather than by rational persuasion of individuals - is a mechanism that serves a purpose as well, or at least it served a purpose in the past. It cut out of the culture pool what no longer worked. Today it is a kind of mental baggage that we can no longer afford to carry. What it used to accomplish for our species we must learn to accomplish in other ways, if we are to survive.