Chapter 9.                   Part C               

     But if humans mostly act as they do because of programming from their parents, then why or how did some behavior patterns ever get established in the first place in the earliest of human societies? And why did many behaviors obviously possible for humans vanish totally or never get tried at all? Why don’t people in some societies on this planet eat Rowan berries or make their children into slaves? The answer is obvious: the morés that help us to live are kept; the ones that don’t serve the needs of survival aren't. We keep alive the morés that keep us alive.     

      

                                                                    

The second step in the explanation of social mores and cultures then is this: behavior patterns get established in a society, and passed on from generation to generation, if they enable the people of that society, first, to live, individually and as a community, second, to reproduce, and third, to program the behaviors into their young. If a new moré or behavior pattern is to last, it must foster the achieving of all of these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as the levels of efficiency that the community had before its people began to acquire this new behavior pattern. This is the theory around which the field of sociocultural evolution is built, a field of study which only began to develop as a branch of science in the twentieth century due to the work of people like Marshall Sahlins and Talcott Parsons. (3.)   

  Note that each of these steps in the adoption of a moré into the cultural code of the society in question is vital to the survival of the moré itself and that none of the parts or phases of this moré’s becoming established is necessarily entailed by any of the others. A behavior recently acquired by one person on a trial basis may make that individual healthier and/or happier, but this fact does not automatically mean that he will reproduce more prolifically, nor that he will nurture more effectively or teach his morés to his kids more efficiently. Other factors can, and do, intervene.

            Many examples can be cited as evidence to support this generalization. Some of the tribes in Indonesia once taught every member of the community to go into the forest to defecate. The individual had to dig a hole in the earth, defecate in it, then cover the excrement with earth before returning to the tribe’s living spaces. Each child was taught that he or she must hide his or her excrement in order that no hostile shaman might find it and use it to cast an evil spell on such a careless child. (4.)

            In the terms of Western societies, the advantages of the practice are seen to lie in the reduced risk to the community of diseases such as cholera. Similar practices are taught to people in our societies (and described in cultural codes as early as that found in the Old Testament of the Bible).

               

Chapter 9.                  Part B 

         If we keep asking why we automatically fall into the behaviors that we do, the answers seem to spread further and further apart into arrays of various human morés and then cultures; human morés vary widely within any given society and much more so from society to society. But if we persist in analyzing masses of the evidence, patterns begin to emerge. Based on these patterns, we can make some general statements about people and their ways. For the most part, people act in the ways that they do because they have been programmed to act in those ways by their parents, their teachers, and the communications media of their cultures. 

               

           People don’t simply relieve even pressing, short-term physical needs. Close observation shows that the vast majority of humans learn to perform the actions that relieve their bodies' needs in the ways that are considered socially acceptable in their culture.

                            Balut - soft boiled fetal duck (commonly eaten in Vietnam)

I eat, but I far prefer to eat dishes with which my upbringing has made me familiar. In my culture, I wash my hands before eating to cleanse them of disease-causing germs which I might otherwise ingest with my food if I ate it with grubby hands. I’ve never seen these little animals, but I have been trained by the mentors of my society to be wary of germs; consequently, I take measures to neutralize the danger that I believe they pose to my well being. I also make an effort to urinate and defecate only in places deemed acceptable in my society, no matter how urgently “nature calls”.

                                 staphylococcus bacteria (common on human hands) 

       

            A fact that it is important to stress here is the profound way in which human behavior patterns differ from those of nearly all other animals. A turtle need not ever see another turtle, from his hatching to his dying of old age, in order to be “turtlish”. Alone, a turtle would not be able to complete all of the reproductive behaviors that his body’s genetic programming would be prompting him towards each mating season, but in a lonely way, he would at least try to find a mate. The rest of the time, he would live in ways that are completely normal for turtles, entirely directed by his body’s genetic code.

               

            Animals such as ants, crabs, and fish, who came early in evolutionary history, clearly are more fully programmed by their genetic codes than are “higher” ones, like cats, dogs, apes, and us. But even most “higher” animals learn only small portions of their behavioral repertoires. They are far more creatures of their genes. Kittens, in time, will stalk balls and then mice and birds, even if they are taken from their mothers still blind and helpless. Puppies are genetically programmed to, one day, bury bones. This is genetic programming of behavior. Humans, by contrast, if raised by dogs, become humanoid dogs, and demonstrate hardly any “human” behaviors at all. We humans – unlike turtles, apes, and kittens – learn how to be "humanish" by "enculturation", i.e. almost entirely from other, older humans. (1.) (2.)    

               

            Most animal behaviors are instinctive, programmed into animals genetically, especially in the “lower” animals. As we rise up the scale of complexity, we arrive by degrees at humans, in whom most behaviors are programmed by nurture, by their upbringings in other words. A set of behaviors, along with the body of knowledge that a given community of humans consults in order to judge when to apply specific behaviors to specific real life situations, how to perform the behaviors, and then how to verify that each behavior has been done appropriately, form what is called the “culture” of that human community. Put a dead fish in the ground with each corn seed that you plant and wear your tuxedo and black tie to the opera.

               

            Thus, the first large step on our journey toward the answer to our question about humans and their ways is simply this: humans behave in the ways that they do because their patterns of behavior are programmed into them by the adults around them in their formative, impressionable early years

Chapter  9                 The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution              Part A

               

            In order to build a universal moral code, we must now do two things: first, explain how moral codes get established and amended; second, extract from our best modern models of the physical universe the principles that we should use to guide us in building a moral code so that it is consistent with, not disconnected from, all of our other knowledge in modern times. We need to make our ideas of Good connect to our most coherent and effective ideas of Real.

               

            All of us are raised and conditioned to be fiercely loyal to the way of life that we grew up with so we can expect that analyzing the roots of morality will be difficult. Powerful and subtle internal programming will steer us toward affirming the morals and morés that we grew up with. But difficult does not mean impossible. Most importantly, we have the evidence of history and of life as it is lived by real people in real societies today to check our theories against. 

               

            And what do we notice about moral code systems if we closely analyze various human ways of life, i.e. the cultures of a variety of human societies, present and past? Human beings baffle each other, and sometimes, individuals even baffle themselves. Why do we do the things that we do?  

                     

               

           

                 

            The reasoning process which answers this question contains several steps. To begin with, we can analyze the everyday actions of the people around us. Why does this man get up when his alarm clock rings? Why does he even have an alarm clock? Why does this woman shampoo her hair and then dry it with a hot-air blowing electrical device? In similar ways, dozens of mundane questions may be posed about the everyday life of our society or any society. These “ways”, of course, seem obvious to the people who live in the society in which the ways are practiced. To the people in a given society, their ways seem simply to involve people being people. But to people in other cultures, the ways are often not merely unobvious; they’re unknown.

               

            Another interesting ordinary example of a custom that is commonplace in some societies but not others is the custom which trains men to shave their beards. In some cultures, men who are clean shaven are seen as being neat, presentable, and attractive. In other cultures, a man without a beard is seen as being weak or alien. In some cultures, men are forcibly shaved as a form of punishment. The fascinating questions come when we begin to ask “Why?” Why shaving? Is there some survival advantage in some environments for men who were trained by their fathers to shave their beards? For example, do men who shave daily appear younger/more attractive to women? Do they reproduce more successfully and prolifically and thus pass their ways on to more progeny?

               

       

            Research on such shaving questions is sparse and inconclusive. However, what is important to see in our present context is that our beginning to ask questions about cultural morés and customs in terms of their possible advantages in the survival game entails our beginning to think scientifically about morés in general. Under this view, none of our “ways” are trivial or meaningless. They all matter. Under this view, the mundane rapidly becomes the fascinating.     

               

Chapter 8.                                      Part G

The most paralyzing confusions in my mind about how this prime directive may be best achieved occur when I am trying to decide between the preservation of myself and that of some others outside myself. Our most interesting literature dramatizes such situations because we find them intimidating, challenging, and fascinating. What we are looking for in such literature is models which could be used to guide us through possible future situations in which we may have to choose between saving ourselves and saving our kids, our nation, or our species. 

 

                               

"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 that, at a minimum, he is willing to die for the restoration of order in his and his father’s 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 that we can devise will ever enable us to live in reality without running into anxious challenges and rude surprises. Still, in the final analysis, 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 the stochastic nature of the real world; the upside is freedom. If we are brave enough, we learn to relish the uncertainty of life as challenge. 

The important point to be made about Bayesianism, as far as this book is concerned, however, is that the Bayesian model of the human mind is the one on which the rest of this book will be founded. For all of the further points and models that I will argue for in this book, I will try to show that they appear, currently, to have the best odds of working in the future, i.e. of getting useful results for those who employ them. I won't try to prove not that my arguments, and the evidence supporting them, yield a case that is logically inescapable. To aim for logically inescapable conclusions is to violate the spirit of Bayesianism, and to waste one’s time. In this life, a search for perfect confidence in any belief is either deluded or doomed to cycle after cycle of circularity, frustration, and failure. What we need is usefulness, i.e. life-supporting results.   

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

Over two hundred years ago, David Hume spotted a major problem with the whole method of reasoning by induction, which is the reasoning method that empiricism and Science depend on. (2.) If we draw generalizations from our masses of experience of the real world, no matter how careful we are in how we observe reality, nor how careful we are in formulating our generalizations, nor how thorough we are in doing research to further test, refine, and bolster these generalizations, we are still not able to say with certainty that any of them is “true”. To do so would be to posit that the events of the future will be like the events of the past. We can posit that axiom only tentatively. We haven’t been to the future.

Bayesianism slips out of the problem of induction. It simply says that we are gambling all of the time, and we are checking the generalizations that inform our gambling – even our most general ones, the ones that we need in order to see reality and form generalizations at all – against real world data constantly. By choosing to live in this state of permanent tentativeness, we are even gambling on alert, rational gambling as being our best gamble. 

But we aren’t putting all of our eggs in the single basket of any one model of any part of reality. Rationalists end in doing that, as they “reason” their way from sets of concepts that they “just know” to premises that they won’t question to policy decisions that they won’t analyze, no matter how ineffective or destructive the consequences of those policies may more and more appear to be.

With Bayesianism, we also aren’t stopping in our progress toward a kinder, wiser world in a sort of stymied funk, which is what we would do if we kept staring at Empiricism's flaw, the problem of induction, and refused to get on with life until that problem was solved. It isn’t going to be solved. Bayesianism gives us a viable way out.

Thus, we can get on with it …the task of formulating a moral code based on our best current models of the real world. In the coming chapters, the Bayesian view of the human mind, combined with two of the most basic ideas in Physics and a model of cultural evolution, will enable us to build a modern moral system. And then, finally, we may be able to make a case for theism, a belief in the existence of God.

Notes 

1.http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?  

  doc=plat.+phaedrus+265e

2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/

Chapter 8.                    Part F 

Bayesianism can talk in a coherent way about what minds do, if first we accept that such things as minds exist. In the Bayesian view, the mind is a system of programs capable of data processing, storage, and manipulation, 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, namely 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, what is usually called a "causal connection". This brain chemistry pattern change is experienced subjectively as an "Aha!" moment. It is a trait of life, and most especially, human life. No computer program, so far, can imitate it. 

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

The mind ultimately is its own greatest mystery. The word "mind" is a rough term that names a property of certain complex living systems. It can be reliably identified and dealt with ...usually ...as long as we are dealing with other "sane" humans. But how a person can lose his mind without losing any of his brain, we don't understand very well yet. And whether dolphins or apes or aliens may have something that fits our term "mind", we are a long way from deciding. 

As nearly as our minds presently can make out, the mind is one of the most successful manifestations of that greater mystery, life itself. In other words, 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 structure is stocked with culture-programming by the older members of that human's society. The being that results is then 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 (or his) 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 which seems incorrigibly to defy all scientific, empirical explanation. For us today, old style miracles likely are over. I'm not waiting for the parting of the Red, or any other, Sea. But the most amazing phenomenon that a modern human mind will ever encounter, but never "know", is itself. You are your own greatest wonder.

 

                         

For 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". A mind is an odds-weighing program that has as its prime directive the preservation of all material conditions necessary for transmitting the program itself forward through time. I think in order to better design and implement my actions in ways that will raise the odds that I, my kids, my tribe, and my species will keep on being able to think.

Chapter 8.                      Part E 

          The human mind is therefore left, in the first place, with a cheerful pragmatism. Like the cartoon centipede, I cannot say which 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 which enable us to categorize and manipulate sense-data memories and categories of memories (concepts), then devise action plans that, when they are put into practice, get us good results. Our thinking systems enable us to plan and execute survival-oriented behaviors at least two levels more prescient than those seen in any other species, even though these systems of memory manipulation are all arbitrary and tentative.

 

They are arbitrary in the sense that they do not, as Plato would say, "cut nature at the joints".(1.) They do not divide 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 new behavior patterns by constant mental and cultural re-programming are very much not arbitrary in a deeper sense. We cannot function without some kinds of concepts by which to organize our sense-data and respond to them. If a vital program is to be retired, it can only be retired when a replacement is ready to be put in. Hazards and predators are everywhere. We 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, my 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, then I have to accept that, in it, I can never get smug. I have to have a coherent set of concepts to base my thinking on so that I can perceive and act in this reality that requires me to act. But I can't ever get 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 learn and revise at any time. An honest, modern thinker has to gamble on gambling as being the best gamble. I may be very tough, smart, versatile, and educated, but I will still have to grow and change in this world until the end of my days. I know and accept that. It is a way of conceiving of myself and my existence that makes life look frightening and unnerving ...and challenging and exciting. 

Chapter 8.                            Part D

On the other hand, life holds together. All throughout the natural world, living things adapt, even individual human things. And species can change and evolve. This is especially true of humans, who can evolve both genetically and culturally. Children raised in the Hitler Youth or raised to be Stalin's "socialist beings", incapable of thinking of themselves 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 that their fathers did to their mothers. With medications and counseling, even some pedophiles can learn to re-direct their needs into socially acceptable channels. We can learn and adapt; we can re-program. Not perfectly, but functionally, which in the end is what matters to the individual, the community, and our species’ survival. The kids will do better because they will have to.

Mind/consciousness is a program that calculates the probable usefulness of other programs for enhancing and perpetuating the conditions that will produce more mind.

I am constantly calculating, usually as a mostly 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 right now. Once in a while, I calculate the odds that a different way of thinking, one that I am only considering using, will get me, my children, and my nation good results, i.e. happiness and health, over the long haul. The majority of the time, I check my sensory impressions against my expectations and re-affirm 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 vigor, then I become inclined to move aside some of my old mental gear and move the new ideas in. This is true of nearly all, but not quite all, of 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 re-programming. Once in a while, if I am very stubborn in refusing to learn life’s latest lessons, I or my family, or even my tribe, will get discarded from the human community of the planet by evolution itself as some new, more efficient and current society replaces us.

That picture, "I" believe, is the correct picture of "me".

Bayesianism says about 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 and then handle reality well because we are using it, that is to say, the more we handle reality, individually and as communities, better than other humans using other, less flexible, less resourceful, less effective, less nimble models. 

  

This description, however, has an important caveat attached. I am forced to admit, if I am honest, 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 deep, central gear includes the moral beliefs most widely connected to all of the other systems in my mind.

   

I am very reluctant to change my central operating systems, which in plainer language are programs that I engage as I am deciding, second by second, item by item, possible action by possible action, "Good or not? React or not?" Those systems are what 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.

The harshest mechanism by which the values pool of the human race evolves - by wars between nations, rather than by rational persuasion of individuals - is a mechanism that serves a purpose as well, or at least it served a purpose in the past. It cut out of the culture pool what no longer worked. Today, it is mental baggage that 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. If we are going to survive our own technological brilliance, it will be because we develop a moral code that is universal and that equips us to handle this enormous power that we have acquired so quickly.