Chapter 8.                            Part D

On the other hand, life holds together. All throughout the natural world, living things adapt, even individual human things. And species can change and evolve. This is especially true of humans, who can evolve both genetically and culturally. 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 probable 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? React or not?" Those systems are what people are most reluctant to change. Because of 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 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. Our bombs have become too big. If we are going to survive our own technological brilliance, it will be because we develop a moral code that is universal and that equips us to handle this enormous power that we have acquired so quickly.