Thinking About Thinking

   

                                                               pitcher plants 

       (credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast, via Wikimedia Commons)

Human thinking is going on. That much is obvious. Like all living things of the animal type, humans normally don’t just sit and let the rockslide bury them. They jump out of the way. They also pick low-hanging fruit when they can. Something must be going on inside each human bundle of skin and bone to make it move as it does. A stone or a glacier will not get out of the way of a landslide no matter how much warning it gets. A stone is unaffected by a berry no matter how juicy the berry looks. A stone won't even lean toward a sheltered place a foot away to escape the eroding winds that visit its face so roughly. 

Trees are living things of the plant type; they can’t get out of the way of an avalanche. But they can communicate with each other, even warn each other, via airborne organic compounds, when a blight or swarm of insects is coming. And flowers, more things of the plant type, can turn toward the sun. Pitcher plants snap shut on hapless insects that come too close - and eat them. 

All living things can, to some degree, act to increase the odds of their surviving in their present form.

The ability in living things to discern subtler and subtler sense data and react to them in more and more complex ways, so that each living thing enhances its odds of experiencing well-being and reduces its odds of getting hurt or killed, keeps increasing as we rise up the scale of complexity. Complex organisms are quicker at avoiding pain and finding well-being than are simpler life-forms.

Humans are the best of all species at avoiding pain and securing pleasure. We can plan years before an event occurs to mitigate it if it is likely to be painful or enhance it if it is likely to bring us well-being. We can take effective action years before hazards or opportunities occur. It is this acting to enhance our odds of finding joy or avoiding pain before any stimulus is felt that we can safely say was preceded by thinking. Foresight. We are the only life forms that have it.   

A big debate in Philosophy occurs over what is going on inside the brain of a human that makes her/him capable of such complex behavior. Philosophers are fascinated by this thinking. What is it? How does it work?

I wish to discuss today the model of human thinking that I believe best fits the evidence of real human behavior. It matters very much to moral realism.

Human thinking is based, before anything else, on concepts. We see, hear, feel, taste, and smell things around us in our environment all the time. Even in her sleep, the young mom hears her child starting to whine. Sense data are always being transmitted via our nerves into our brains, and we can recognize, and react effectively, to millions of different events happening around us. Mom is about to wake up and go to that child before the child vomits on his pillow.

“Maybe thousands, but not millions of different events,” some readers will cry out at this point. Here we come upon a useful insight. No situation we experience will ever be exactly like any other we experience, so we can legitimately say that humans can react effectively to millions of different stimuli. Small differences in lighting, colors, sounds, aromas, etc. make every situation we experience unique. Why we react effectively so much of that time is that we notice patterns in sensory details, even though no two sets of details, i.e. no two experiences, are ever exactly the same.

   

                                     Spot 7 differences between these two pirate ships

                                        (credit: By Ftiercel, via Wikimedia Commons)

What people mean when they say that every situation we experience should not be called unique is that we constantly sort the sensory details of the situations we are moving through, and thereby sort the situations we are experiencing, into categories. Most situations we encounter are giving off details among which we recognize patterns, patterns we know from memories of past experience. We see patterns in the details we are sensing, and we correctly categorize each situation by recognizing its type, then recalling and implementing behaviors that have worked in the past in events of this type. Thus, most events we pass through can’t be called unique. They are almost always events of a type we have seen before, even though they aren’t exactly like any of our past experiences.

The patterns that mark the especially hazardous or promising situations matter most to us because once we know them, we can more quickly and efficiently recognize and respond to them and thus avoid major pain or seize major opportunities. We learn from our experiences or from mentors’ instruction, or both, to see useful patterns, the ones that tell of hazard or opportunity. But it is important to see here that we learn to spot the patterns that may affect our health and well-being because that is how we survive. It is not a matter of curiosity or of wanting an education. Pain and pleasure are our teachers. Pain is our warner, pleasure, our rewarder. Both give us effective learning incentives. Cultural conditioning complicates matters; for example, pain, in its social form, is disapproval. But in the end, pain and pleasure are always our teachers.  

As an aside, perhaps, we should note that a culture is simply a collection of bits of knowledge about how to find pleasure and avoid pain. It is passed from generation to generation of humans because, most of the time, it works. But all cultures contain bits of knowledge – concepts, customs, and morés – that are generally accepted by the people of that culture even though they are obsolete. They guided people of the culture toward more health and vigor once, but they now hold no benefits for the tribe. Nevertheless, all tribes, out of habit, keep at least some obsolete customs and beliefs. 

Curious. However, deeper discussion of the ways in which tribes and nations evolve culturally is beyond the scope of this post and has been dealt with in this space before. For today, we’ll be satisfied with thinking about thinking and saying what we can that will throw light on the whole subject.

Most adults have learned the concepts that enable them to recognize patterns in the events they are likely to encounter. They then strive to use their concepts, make decisions, and act to find well-being and avoid pain. So goes the day.

For the most part, our concepts and categories work. We don’t get hypnotized by trivial details; we look past trivial stuff, see the larger patterns, and act to live another day. We have effective sense-detail-processing, decision-making programs in our heads. If we did not, we would starve, get eaten by predators, or get run over in the first few hours in which we were on our own.

When I am hungry, as I am now, I think of the categories of things that I call “food” and I plan to move in the next hour or so in ways that will likely allow me to encounter and consume some food. Luckily, in my area of Canada, I can go to a café I like, order a kind of food I like, and eat it. I’m dreaming of bean burritos at this minute. I know the locations of several cafés that make them and I am near certain they will still be open for business an hour from now.

But my larger point is this: like my planned taco expedition, all that we think, decide, and do is based on our mental manipulation of concepts. They must be in there or we could not function. We would be overwhelmed by a continuous stream of sensory details and sit and stare in a catatonic trance. 

But the vast majority of us don’t. We learn and use concepts (hunger, taco, bus, money, etc.) and we go to the right bus stop, wait, get on the one that will take us to the taco stand – not the theater bus tonight – board the bus, ride it to the taco stand we love so well, get off the bus, and find the taco stand - gone. The owner has left a sign which says the city has granted him a change of location. The new location is nearly six kilometers from here, but much better for his business. 

(Business? What is a "business"?)

Which only goes to prove my next main point about thinking. All our concepts are useful in helping us to calculate the odds that events we are encountering now will turn out in ways we have seen similar events turn out in the past. But we don’t ever know that any possible outcome is certain. We only have some concepts and with them we do some reasoning that we believe has very good chances of being correct. But my taco café may be closed because the owner is attending a wedding. Or it may be out of taco shells because the morning shift manager forgot to call the tortilleria and order more shells today. If my favorite café burned down last night, it will not be open today. We learn concepts; they help us decide; but they are not guaranteed to support infallible reasoning.

We learn and store memories of patterns in sense data, patterns that warn us of likely upcoming events which in the past have brought us either high levels of pain or of pleasure. But our best thinking – our best memory manipulations – can only point us toward good odds of coming through the events around us alive and whole. No thinking can guarantee we won’t get hit by disaster or miss a chance to own a gold mine.

“But”, you interject, “surely this probabilistic, odds-making thinking does not govern in sciences like Physics, Chemistry, and Computing Science? The laws of Science, once our scientists discover and prove them, are unchanging.”

No, they’re not.

The glaring example in Physics is seen in the Michelson-Morley experiment. In 1887, Michelson and Morley were trying to measure the drifting effect left by the earth as it traveled through the ether, a substance physicists believed must fill up all space in the universe. They reasoned that light waves, like all waves, obviously needed some medium in which to travel. Waves like those on the sea travel through liquids. The atoms in a body of liquid don’t go forward as a wave passes through them, they just go up and down. Sound waves travel through a medium also, namely air. Thus, light waves must travel through a medium of some sort. 

Or so the physicists thought.   

But Michelson and Morley couldn’t find any evidence of an ether filling space. In fact, the evidence indicated that there is no ether. And if that was so, then what was light? What is light? How does it get around? What is it doing?

Thus, began a long sequence of experiments and theories that led eventually to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Physicists at the time had come to believe that Physics was pretty much a done deal. Newton had found the laws that describe how all bodies move. The rest of the history of Physics, most physicists believed, would be just working out details and implications of Newton’s equations.

What the Michelson-Morley experiment did was it led Physics to a whole new picture of reality and how it works. Newton was nothing like the last word on the subject matter of Physics.

The laws of Motion. Universal Gravitation. Calculus. These models had been unshakable for over 200 years. Now, the experiments were telling physicists that Newton’s equations described only a tiny percentage of the phenomena that the universe contained. Reality was way more complex than Physics had so far imagined. Newton was the beginning of Physics, nothing like the end.

Why does this example tell us so much about human thinking? Because no subject is more rigorous in its reasoning than Physics. Chemistry is tightly reasoned, but still somewhat sloppy compared to Physics. Biology gets worse. It contains so many vague connections between steps. Psychology, even looser. And physicists see Sociology and Anthropology as being like music, painting, and poetry: sometimes pretty to hear or see, but not really Science at all.

What the Michelson-Morley experiment led to was the shocking realization for all serious thinkers in all fields that they might never set down any laws of Science that were unshakable. Ever.

For philosophers, none of this was very shocking. David Hume, who was a philosopher, had shown that none of our “laws”, even in Science, can ever be set down in final, unshakable forms. We can only state laws of Science that appear to describe what the scientists have seen so far. And some laws of Science do this very well. We use them to make predictions about what will happen at time “D” after we have set up apparatus “A” and performed steps “B” and “C”. We can then do experiments, test the laws, using different materials, locations, and so on. If we can predict what we are going to see happen and we see it happen, we can argue confidently that we have found a scientific law. The power of Science is amazing – most of the time.

But we also get surprises, things turning out in ways we did not expect. Like Michelson and Morley. While they may have understood what Hume had said about the impossibility of knowing anything for certain, it was a rude shock for them and all other physicists to discover that in their beloved science, so clear and rigorous, there were still always going to be rude awakenings.

What Hume said is that our best, most carefully-reasoned laws and models are still only describing what we have seen so far. They may not be adequate for describing what may happen in the future. And we can’t know the future. We can’t ever go there. We can only move cautiously and watch.

Then what are the scientists doing?

They are telling us, whenever they give us a scientific law, what they believe is likely to happen in a given set of circumstances. Likely to happen. Not certain.

If even the best, most rigorous of sciences is only telling us tentative thoughts about what likely will happen in very specific circumstances in the future, how much shakier are the reasoning processes of most of us most of the time?

Which leads us to the even deeper problem with thinking. What is the humility of modern Physics telling us about the very roots of human thinking? About human ways of studying phenomena and trying to describe what we are seeing exactly?

What we have to accept is more than that our laws or generalizations are always imperfect. What we have to accept is that the very categories of things that we think we are describing before we even begin to try to put laws about them together – these categories are themselves always inadequate.  

So let’s go deeper and consider Aristotle’s categorical logic, the way of describing thinking that Philosophy students usually begin their studies with.

There are only four kinds of statements that have real content, according to Aristotle. He sees value in creative literature, but it is not Philosophy. It is not the serious matter for serious students to analyze.

The four types of statements are: Universal Affirmative (e.g. All whales are mammals. All politicians are liars.); Universal Negative (e.g. No men are mothers. No rodents are reptiles. No prime numbers are even numbers.); Particular Affirmative. (Some pro boxers are women. Some charmers are psychopaths. Some dogs are purebred Rottweilers.); and Particular Negative (e.g. Some women are not mothers. Some flying machines are not airplanes.)

There are many logical manipulations one can do with Aristotle’s categorical statements. For example, we can work out in Logic that if all things of type “A” are also things of type “Z” and all things of type “B” are also things of type “A”, then all “B’s” must also be “Z’s”. And if some “D’s” are “R’s” and All “R’s” are “O’s”, then some “O’s” are “D’s”. And on and on. There is a lot of fun to be had with pure Logic.  

But what I want to show today is this: these statements are idealizations because the very terms they speak of are idealizations. In reality, there are no tight, sealed categories of birds or of reptiles. In the past, and even now, there were and are creatures on the border between the two categories. At some time in the future, the categories will again not fit real animals in the real world. Reality and all of the entities in it keep slipping across the borders we create and try to impose between categories of real things. In reality, with any statements about the physical world, our categories, our terms, never apply perfectly or even for very long.

As an aside, we can note that there are exception-free statements in pure Math, but Math is a special area of study. Proofs in Math exist only in human minds. They sometimes fit phenomena in the material world, but often they simply don't.

 

                                                                    Leopon

                                (credit: TRJN (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons)

So we can repeat: in the empirical world, there are no exception-free categories of things. This means we can't devise any perfectly unshakable statements about the real world ever, and this is why all our real-world statements are really only statements of probabilities.  

In short, in all our thinking we have ask ourselves, “What are the odds, the probabilities associated with all of my statements?” Those odds, especially in Science, are sometimes very high, but they are never 100% certainties.

It is on this spirit of tentativeness that the tolerance of moral realism rests. We all have to learn that we all are capable of judgements that are in error. It’s not just that my thinking is tilted by my upbringing and the mores and customs that I was raised to accept. The problem runs even deeper. The problem is that all human reasoning is flawed at its core.

Reality is subtler than our best reasoning. All of our most confident statements about reality are still only statements of what we believe are high probabilities. Never of certainties. It is that realization that prompts us to really listen to each other and examine our terms and the evidence we have, over and over, even when the process proves tedious. Scientists submit all that they do to peer-review, and even then, they have sometimes led each other to false theories and models. Luckily, the ongoing peer-reviewing that Science is based on has the power to fix these errors.

Curiosity and venturesomeness, with humility and social interdependence added: these are what loving our neighbors really means. Tell me your view of the issue. I'll tell you mine. We'll discuss our terms, our evidence, and our reasoning. We'll test and we'll let reality be the arbiter.  

We can disagree and yet respect each other’s views, as long they can be explained with reasoning and evidence. And thus we can live together and get along.

In the shadow of the mushroom, nevertheless, have an empathetic, tolerant day.