Chapter 8.                            (continued) 

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 human-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. We 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 description, I believe, is the most accurate one that I can currently formulate to record in words how I see myself. (See also Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop for a computer scientist’s interesting take on consciousness. A candid, enjoyable read.¹)