Boredom

                      Portrait of a Young Girl (artist: Petrus Christus) (via Wikimedia Commons) 

This Bayesian model of how we think is so radical that at first it eludes us. To each individual, the idea that she is continually adjusting her entire mindset, and that no parts of it, not even her deepest ideas of who she is or what reality is, can ever be fully trusted is disturbing to say the least. Doubting our most basic ideas is flirting on the edge of mental illness. Even considering the possibility is upsetting. But this radical Bayesian view is certainly the one I arrive at when I look back honestly over the changes I have undergone in my own life. The Bayesian model of how a “self” is formed, and how it evolves as the organism ages, fits the set of memories that I call my “self” exactly.

Thomas Kuhn was the most famous of the philosophers who have examined the processes by which people adopt a new theory, model, or way of knowing. His works focused only on how scientists adopt a new scientific model, but his conclusions can be applied to all human thinking. His most famous book proposes that all our ways of knowing, even our most cherished ones, are tentative and arbitrary.² Under his model of how human knowledge grows, humans advance from an obsolete idea or model to a newer, more comprehensive one by paradigm shifts— by leaps and starts rather than in a steady march of gradually growing enlightenment. We get, and then start to think under, a new model for organizing our thoughts not by a gradual process of persuasion and growing understanding, but by a kind of conversion experience very like a religious conversion.

Caution and vigilance seem to be the only rational attitudes to take under such a view of the universe and the human place in it. To many people, the idea that all the mind’s systems, all its systems for organizing systems, and perhaps even its overriding operating system, i.e. its sanity—are tentative and are subject to constant revision seems even more than disturbing; it seems absurd. Really boring, actually. 

But then again, cognitive dissonance theory would lead us to predict that we would easily dismiss such a scary picture of ourselves. We do not like to see ourselves as incapable of forming any unshakable concepts or beliefs. However, evidence and experience suggest we are indeed almost completely lacking in fixed concepts or beliefs, and we do nearly always evolve personally and collectively in those scary ways. (Why I say nearly always and almost completely will become clear shortly.)