But if humans act as they do mostly because of parental programming, why or how did some behavior patterns ever become 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 most people on this planet eat Rowan berries or turn 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 morés and cultures is this: behavior patterns become established in a society and passed on from generation to generation if they enable people to live individually and as a community, to reproduce, and to program the behaviors into their young. If new morés or behavior patterns are to last, they must achieve these results at levels of efficiency at least as high as those the community knew before its people began to acquire the new behavior patterns. This is the theory around which is built the field of sociocultural evolution, a field of study that began to develop as a branch of Science only in the twentieth century due to the work of people like sociologist Gerhard Lenski and anthropologists Leslie White and Marshall Sahlins.³

And none of the socio-biologists has come up with a viable theory of socio-cultural evolution, one that is widely accepted as correct in the way that Darwin’s theory of biological evolution is. But at least they are on the right track. Their project is the right project. They are trying to understand morality in terms of reality, and so to make the connection we desperately need. 

If we keep asking "Why?" about our "ways of life", the answers seem to spread further and further from one another into a variety of 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 social 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 they do because they have been programmed to act in those ways by their parents, their teachers, and the media of their cultures. For example, close observation shows that the vast majority of humans learn to perform the actions that relieve their bodies’ physical needs in the ways considered socially acceptable in their particular culture.

       

              Balut (soft-boiled fetal duck, popular in Vietnam)  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In this category, we find the morés that govern how we eat. I far prefer to eat dishes I find familiar from my upbringing. And in my culture, I wash my hands before eating to remove disease-causing germs I might otherwise ingest with my food if I ate it with dirty hands. I’ve never seen these tiny animals, but I’ve been trained to be wary of germs. Therefore, I take measures to neutralize the danger 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 (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

It is important to note 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 hatching to dying of old age, in order to be turtle-like. Alone, a turtle would not be able to complete its genetically-driven reproductive behavior each mating season, but it would at least try to find a mate. The rest of the time, it would live in ways that are completely normal for turtles, entirely directed by its body’s genetic code.

Creatures such as ants, crabs, and fish that came early in evolutionary history clearly are more fully programmed by their genetic codes than are those of higher orders such as cats, dogs, apes, and humans. But even most large, complex animals learn only small portions of their behavioral repertoires. 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 bury bones. 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 human-like by “enculturation,” that is, almost entirely from other, older humans.^1,2

Most animal behaviors are instinctive, programmed into animals genetically, especially in the lower-order 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. The body of knowledge that a given human community or tribe consults in order to respond to specific situations, to perform the recommended behaviors, and then to verify that each behavior has been done appropriately, forms what is called the culture of that society or tribe. Put a dead fish in the ground with each corn seed that you plant and wear your tuxedo and black tie to the opera.

The first step on our journey to answering the large questions about humans and their ways is simply this: patterns of behavior in human communities are mostly the result of programming of individuals in their formative years by the adults around them.

   

                                   

                                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons)                  

Chapter 9 – The Mechanism of Cultural Evolution

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

Most of us are raised and conditioned to be fiercely loyal to the way of life we grew up with, so we can expect that analyzing the roots of morality will be difficult. Powerful and subtle internal programming steers 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, that is, the cultures of a variety of human societies, present and past? Human beings baffle one another and each even sometimes baffles him or her self. Why do we do the things we do?

                                        

The reasoning process that 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. Of course, these actions and the motivations behind them seem obvious to the people who live in the society in which they are practiced. To the people in a given society, their actions seem simply to involve people being people. But to people in other cultures, the reasons for them are often not merely obscure, they’re unknown.

   

                                                     

                                                                      (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Another interesting example of a custom that is commonplace in some societies but not others is the one that 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 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 or more attractive to women? Do they reproduce more successfully and prolifically and thus pass their ways on to more progeny, especially the sons who watch them shave?

                                         

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

Over two hundred years ago, David Hume spotted a major problem with the whole method of reasoning by induction. Deductive reasoning begins from some general rule that we trust totally. We then apply the rule to a problem in front of us. Inductive reasoning begins by looking at a whole lot of examples of a problem and trying to find a common pattern among them. Then we formulate a rule about how these kinds of situations turn out, a rule based on the pattern we think we have spotted. Then we test the rule in new situations, over and over, until we really sharpen and deepen our understanding of it. Inductive reasoning is the reasoning method that empiricism and science depend on.³

However, Hume said that if we draw generalizations from our masses of experience of the real world, no matter how careful we are in how we observe reality, formulate our generalizations, or conduct research to further test, refine, and bolster these generalizations, we still can’t 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’t make that larger claim because we haven’t been to the future.

Bayesianism slips out of the problem of induction. It simply says we are always gambling, checking the generalizations that inform our gambling—even our most basic ones, the ones 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 gambling on alert, rational gambling as being our best gamble.

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

With Bayesianism, we also don’t get stuck like the empiricists, stopping in a stymied funk in our progress toward a kinder, wiser world, which is what happens if we keep staring at the problem of induction and refuse to get on with life until that problem is 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. Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2007).

2. Plato, The Phaedrus, Perseus Digital Library. Accessed April 17, 2015. 

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+phaedrus+265e.

3. John Vickers, “The Problem of Induction,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, March 14, 2014. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/.

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.

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.

                                 

                                                                             (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                              

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. 

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.