Chapter 8.                                  (continued) 

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 strip centipede, I can’t say which mental 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.

Bayesianism can coherently express what minds do, if first we accept that such things as minds exist. Bayesianism can’t pin down in an infallible definition what a mind is. In the rough Bayesian view, the mind is a program capable of data processing, manipulation, and storage, running on a constantly active, probability-calculating platform system, deciding second by second which applications to use and which files to open, always aimed at prime objectives of self and species perpetuation. It manifests itself in the material world, specifically in the chemistry of my brain, whenever I physically see, hear, feel, smell, or taste a bunch of sense data and then spot a pattern in them. Sometimes, in events around me, I even see a new pattern and experience what is usually called a causal connection. This brain chemistry change is experienced subjectively as an “Aha! moment.” It is a trait of life, and most especially, of human life. No computer program, so far, has been able to imitate it.

However, Bayesianism does not pretend to say in any more precise detail what a mind is.

The human mind is ultimately its own greatest mystery. Or rather, as nearly as minds can make out, the mind is one of the most successful manifestations of that greater mystery, life itself. It is an entity whose precursors are built into the human genome. Once the basic neurological structure is built, once the baby is born, the brain is stocked with cultural programming authored by the ancestors of that human’s society. The being that results is driven by its very nature to seek a healthy direction, from the molecular level on up to cells, organs, the individual, her family, her society, and her species, to learn and grow. Why? We don’t know. Life’s love of itself is an unanalyzable given.

   

   

A miracle, by definition, is an event that seems incorrigibly to defy all rational and empirical explanation. For us today, old-style miracles likely are over. But the most amazing phenomenon that a modern human mind will ever encounter, but never truly know, is itself. You are your own greatest wonder.

   

In furthering our goal of constructing a moral code that is founded on our best understanding of reality, these last three chapters have served only one purpose. They have left us with a model of the mind—and what it does as it thinks and “knows”—called Bayesianism.