The most paralyzing confusion in my mind about how to best realize my prime directive occurs when I am trying to decide between the preservation of myself and that of others outside myself. Even deeper than our minds is the basic programming of sex and reproduction. We’re built to love our kids, and since we want them to survive so much, we learn to be motivated about the survival of our tribe. Gradually, as we mature, we learn to expand this circle of moral consideration to our nation. 

Our most interesting literature dramatizes situations that portray heroes trying to sort through choices between their own survival and that of their friends, families, or nations. We find them challenging and fascinating. In such literature, we are seeking models to guide us through possible future situations in which we may have to choose between saving ourselves and saving our children, our nation, or our species. I, like all my fellow humans, want to live. But I want my kids and my country and its way of life to survive too. Bayesian decision processes get confused in such dilemmas. We feel this confusion as what we call “anxiety”.  We wonder: What outranks what?

                                                               

                              John Barrymore (in costume) as Hamlet (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Shakespeare’s Hamlet still holds the stage for exactly this reason. Hamlet can’t see any point in this life of treachery in which the bad succeed by being bad. But in the end, he realizes he is willing to die for the restoring of order in his beloved country, Denmark. The rest he will leave for God to sort out.

There are, of course, no neat, simple answers to such questions, no unfailingly reliable guides. Reality is uncertain, subtle, complex, and frightening. No sets of programs we can devise will ever enable us to live in reality without running into anxious challenges and rude surprises. Still, the bottom line is that reality is where we must live. Therefore, in our universe, it is sad but true that a moderate but constant anxiety is the natural human condition. Anxiety is the downside for us of surviving in the probabilistic real world. The upside is freedom. If we are brave enough, we learn to relish life as challenge.

As far as this book is concerned, the important point to be made about Bayesianism is that the Bayesian model of the human mind is the one on which this book is founded. For each of the further points I argue in this book, I will try to show that they currently appear to have the best odds of working in the future, not that any one of them is irrefutably logical. To aim for logically irrefutable conclusions is to violate the spirit of Bayesianism—and to waste one’s time. In this life, any search for perfect confidence in any belief is either deluded or doomed to cycle after cycle of circularity, frustration, and failure.

Therefore, we must aim to adopt beliefs that, when they are used to construct arguments, make our conclusions look increasingly probable the more we check those conclusions against wider observations of physical evidence. Higher levels of probability are what we want, probabilities that appear to keep climbing the more of the real world we explore and successfully cognize.