There is a reality; I am confident of that claim at the 99.99 percent level. But it is too fluid and dynamic for our minds ever to get a 100 percent reliable handle on any aspect of it. Individuals, families, philosophers, businesspeople, and politicians, in varying ways, all 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. Species evolve, including humans. Children raised in the Hitler Youth or raised to be Stalin’s socialist beings, incapable of viewing themselves in any way 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 as their fathers did to their mothers. With medications and counselling, even some pedophiles can learn to redirect their tendencies into socially acceptable channels. Humans can learn and adapt; we can reprogram. Not perfectly, but functionally, which in the end is what matters to the individual, the community, and our species’ survival. The children will do better because they will have to.

A mind is a program whose prime function is to calculate the usefulness of other programs for enhancing and perpetuating conditions that will produce more minds.

I am constantly calculating, usually as an 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 at any given time. Once in a while, I calculate the odds that a different way of thinking, one that I am only considering using, will obtain good results—that is, happiness and health—for me, my children, and my nation over the long haul. The majority of the time, I check my sensory impressions against my expectations and reaffirm 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 vigour, then I tend to move aside some of my old mental gear and move the new ideas in. This is true of almost all 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 reprogramming. Once in a while, if I’m very stubborn in refusing to learn life’s latest lessons, I—or my family or even my tribe—will be 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 I have of myself. (See also Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop for a computer scientist’s interesting take on consciousness. A most enjoyable read.¹)

                                

Bayesianism says of 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, then handle reality well because we are using it. That is to say, the more we handle reality, individually and as communities, the better off we are compared with other humans using less flexible, less effective, less resourceful, less nimble models.

However, this description has an important caveat attached. If I’m honest, I‘m must admit 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 gear includes the moral beliefs most widely connected to all the other systems in my mind.

I am very reluctant to change these central operating systems, which in plainer language are programs I use as I am deciding, second by second, item by item, for each possible reaction, “Good or not? React or not?” Those are the systems 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.

War is the harshest mechanism by which the values pool of the human race evolves—wars among nations, rather than rational persuasion among individuals. This is a mechanism that used to serve a purpose—it cut out of the culture pool what no longer worked. But today, it is mental baggage 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.

The human mind is therefore left, in the first place, with a cheerful pragmatism. Like the cartoon centipede, I can’t say which foot comes first. I simply move. I have to. And the human mode of survival is called “intelligent” because the human brain contains sense-data-processing systems that enable us to categorize and manipulate sense-data memories and categories of memories (concepts), then devise action plans that get us good results when they are put into practice. Our thinking systems enable us to plan and execute survival-oriented behaviours at least two levels more prescient than those seen in any other species, even though these systems are all arbitrary and tentative.

 They are arbitrary in the sense that they do not, as Plato would say, “cut nature at the joints.”² They do not divide the data we get from reality at the places where it actually falls into categories of things. Under a modern scientific view of reality, nature has no joints. There are no universals. There aren’t even any terms that reliably name individual entities. Even I am not the I that I was ten years ago. Not even ten minutes ago.

However, the human styles of evolving new concepts and behaviour patterns by constant mental and cultural reprogramming are very much not arbitrary in a deeper sense. We cannot function without concepts by which to organize our sense data and respond to them. If a vital program is to be retired, that can happen only when a replacement is ready to be put in. 

Hazards and predators are everywhere. We humans are slow and weak. Yet we dominate our planet to a degree unparalleled by any other species in the history of earth. Using our minds filled with concepts, we have devised practical skills, technologies, production teams, communities, and cultures, and we flourish. This is how I conceive of and explain our concepts about concepts.

In the second place, the mind is left with a picture of itself that amounts to a kind of realistic humility. If reality is that slippery and hard to grasp, I have to accept that, in it, I can never become smug about my way of thinking. It may prove inadequate at any time, no matter how carefully I have worked it out, and no matter how vigilant I am. I may have to revise at any time. An honest, modern thinker has to gamble on gambling as being the best gamble. I may be tough, smart, and versatile, but I will still have to grow and change in this world until the end of my days, and so will everyone I know. I accept that. It is a way of conceiving of my existence that makes life look frightening and unnerving—and challenging and exciting.