Unhealthy Conditions

The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia; if you want to print it out so it’s legible and useful, print the original over four letter-sized landscape pages and paste them together (my printout is taped, tellingly perhaps, over my rarely-used TV). The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the online version includes links by TillmanR to the wikipedia articles explaining each bias.

Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about what I call Pollard’s Laws. In very abbreviated form, they are:

Law of Human Behaviour: Humans have evolved to do what’s personally urgent (the unavoidable imperatives of the moment), then to do what’s easy, and then to do what’s fun. Not to do what’s important.

Law of Complexity: Complex systems evolve to self-sustain and resist reform, until they finally collapse. Reforming them is usually impossible, so workarounds and adaptation are best strategies.

Law of Human Beliefs: We believe what we want to believe, not what is actually true. We tend to seek sources that reinforce those beliefs and ignore those that undermine or unsettle them.

These three laws reflect our conditioning — the instinctive biological drivers we are born with, and the repeated assurances, demands and suggestions of the people we encounter throughout our lives who ‘culturally’ condition us. This conditioning, I have argued, subject to the circumstances of the moment, determines everything we do and everything we believe. There is no room for ‘free will’, and no little homunculus inside us ‘deciding’ what to do on some kind of rational or moral basis.

So we prioritize the urgent, the easy and the fun over things that are important because that is how our biology and our culture has conditioned us. Our bodies instinctively attempt to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Doing ‘urgent’ tasks reduces the anxiety of things hanging over our head (pain) and gives us pleasure (checking things off the top of the ‘to do’ list). Likewise doing easy and fun things give us pleasure and a sense of accomplishment. The dopamine hit (pleasure) or the cortisol hit (pain) compels us to follow our conditioning. The ‘merely’ important stuff can always be done later, until it can’t, and then it becomes urgent and gets done. We can rationalize our actions after the fact all we want, but ‘we’ had no say in them.

Likewise, we may attempt to try to change complex systems that aren’t going the way we want (like our climate system, our political system, our economic system, or the systems that constrain us in the workplace), but we will generally find them too difficult or impossible to change, so instead we will look for workarounds or means of self-adaptation.

So we’ll buy air conditioning to deal with global warming, and portable generators for when the power keeps going out. And at work we’ll find ways to ‘beat the system’ so we can provide what the customer needs, even though it requires us to ‘work around’ sclerotic business practices, manuals, edicts, incompetent management, and rules. Our conditioning teaches us to do these subversive things and we get a little rush of pleasure from ‘beating the system’. Or, failing that, we learn to just turn ourselves off in the morning when we start work, and turn ourselves back on at the end of the work day.

And similarly we are both biologically and culturally conditioned to want things to be simple and pat, because we have only so much capacity to handle seemingly intractable and unfathomable problems and cognitive dissonance. So we want to believe in happy endings, simple answers, the inevitability of progress, self-control, karma, responsibility, destiny, miracles, popular myths, a proper order of things, the power of love, and infinite human capacity and agency. Most of us want to believe in a higher power that can and will step in when we falter. And we want to believe what those in our circles of trust believe (even if it’s crazy, gaslighting or propaganda). Believing these things helps us ‘make sense’ of a world that never really seems to make sense.

The fact that such beliefs often fly in the face of facts, evidence and reality does not matter. We are conditioned as a social species to get along with, agree with, and reassure our tribe-mates, and doing so frequently means going along with what the rest of the tribe agrees. You hear something said adamantly long enough and often enough, by people you have come to trust, you tend to believe it must be true.

The cognitive bias codex, reproduced above, can be used as another tool to explore how our conditioning can lead to some seemingly bizarre and inexplicable behaviours and beliefs. A few examples from the codex:

• “We notice things already primed in memory or repeated often” — we pay attention to and tend to believe information that is familiar, consistent, or well-accepted by our trusted circles, and to dismiss (or even fail to notice at all) critical information that doesn’t ‘fit’ with our existing belief systems and worldview.
• “We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs” — We often tend to jump to conclusions based on erroneous, incomplete or distorted preconceptions, presuppositions, and misinformation (propaganda).
• “We assume we know what others are thinking” — We often base our assessments, rationales, and justifications for people’s behaviour on our personal experience (how we believe we would act in the same circumstance) and on incomplete or erroneous historical, cultural or other contexts.
• “We favour simple-looking options with apparently-complete information over complex, ambiguous options” — We often focus attention and effort on what we think we already know and what we think is easily done, and elide over riskier, less certain, more involved alternatives.
• “We edit and reinforce some memories after the fact” — We tend to reinvent and reimagine what has happened in the past to make it fit better with our worldviews and understanding of subsequent events.

All of these tendencies, and many more, also arise from our conditioning. These biases make our life and ‘decisions’ easier and faster, with less room or need for anxious second-guessing. They prioritize the simple and easy in what and how we think and believe, and what we assert and suggest to others. They promote quick, righteous ‘feel-good’ reactions over more thoughtful, ponderous responses. And, most importantly, they help us ‘fit in’ more easily with our trusted circles, and ease our minds about the validity of doing so.

But why would we have evolved these biases in the first place, if they effectively lead to less-than-rational, poorly-thought-out behaviours?

It might help to think of human brains as model-makers. Our brains, for better or worse, are obsessed with processing unimaginable quantities of signals from our senses and bodies, and fitting interpretations of what they ‘mean’ and what they ‘represent’ into the model of the world that they (our brains) have constructed, to make sense of it all. When stuff doesn’t fit, our brains will either dismiss it as false (“that can’t be right”), or alter it so that it does fit — clipping off the rough edges, or reinterpreting it.

This is what human brains do. They are map-makers. They ‘represent’ the world in a model or map as best they can, and constantly revise it. But they are loath to erase parts of the model entirely, since that would render it incomplete, incoherent, and even fragile and discordant. So we stubbornly resist changing our belief systems and worldviews, and the facts be damned.

There’s a famous story about one of the mountain groups I see outside my window as I write this. It is called t’Lagunna (“the horned one”) in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ (“hal-ka-may-lum”), the language of the indigenous Stó:lō peoples. The European settlers renamed it the Golden Aeries, presumably for the eagles that made their homes there. But apparently due to a mishearing or misreading, it was transcribed into the early geographic atlases as “Golden Ears“, although there are more than two mountains in the group, and they in no way resemble ears of any kind. But the incorrect name stuck, and has since been used for all kinds of tourist attractions in the area. Now, of course, there’s an attempt to deny it was a mistake and attempt to “see” ears in the two most prominent (but not tallest) mountains in the group. That’s the length our brains will go to to make sense of what cannot possibly make sense.

But at least map-makers are honest in that the maps they make are mere representations of the territory they are mapping. Things can get dicey quickly when two people with utterly incompatible ‘maps’ (worldviews) both insist that theirs is correct, and that if the other disagrees, it will mean war. Maps are, by necessity, over-simplifications. They are representations of the territory, but they look nothing like the territory they presume to portray. They are useful precisely because they oversimplify and omit most of the detail. If you wanted to really appreciate a place, you wouldn’t do so by looking at a map!

The problem with our brains is that they grew more than a little over-ambitious in what they purport to represent in their models of reality. As a result, tragically, our brains began to mistake the model they had created for the reality it represents. (I have explained how this might have arisen in my Entanglement Hypothesis posts.) This has created a ‘veil’ between the infinitely complex, unknowable real world and our simplified, modelled, human understanding of and connection with that real world. It’s a veil we can’t remove.

So now we have a problem. Our conditioning has led our bodies to do and say certain things, which is straight-forward enough. But now our brains, mistaking the model they constructed for actual reality, furiously and desperately work to ‘make sense’ of our conditioned behaviour, to make the map — the very imperfect, simplified model — reflect and justify what was actually done. Sadly, the model is missing most of the information needed to explain our conditioned behaviour (which is overwhelmingly unconscious and unfathomably complex). So it has to attribute everything that doesn’t make sense through its simple model, to the ‘self’, and hence blame its self and other selves for everything that happens. Someone has to be to blame, and be responsible for this outrage, this atrocity!

And the result of this veil, this confusion of the model with reality, this misunderstanding of what actually drives human behaviour, is a mass of chronic emotional outrage, anger, fear, hatred, anxiety, shame, and guilt, and, with it, mental illness on a massive, global scale.

Cognitive bias, in fact, is a feature, not a bug, of the human brain. It’s a short-cut, a simplification, a compromise, an agreement, a filling-in-the-blanks. It enables us to be conditioned to do what evolutionarily has worked for the tribe, and for our bodies. It enables us to ‘kinda make sense’ of what cannot and does not make sense. Were it not for these elisions over things that don’t really make sense, and the shrugging off of all the things we don’t know, our brains would likely be overwhelmed, paralyzed, and defeated.

And still, we would continue to do and say exactly what our bodies have been conditioned to do and say, given the circumstances, anyway. As exhausting and energy-consuming as all our brains’ model-making and sense-making is, it makes not one iota of difference to our behaviour. Our brains don’t actually have to make sense of what our bodies do and say. Their only ‘conscious’ function is to rationalize what our bodies have done after the fact. Why? Because our brains evolved to the point where (a) they had the capacity to create models of reality and try to reconcile those models with what was actually apparently happening, and (b) they had the unused brain cycles and energy to do so.

When nature evolved this strange capacity (uniquely, I believe) in humans, it probably assumed that it might make our species somehow more ‘fit’ to function in the increasingly complex, overcrowded, and environmentally diverse environments humans had moved into. But instead it has just made us more anxious, more fearful, more easily flustered, more needlessly blame-y and hateful and revengeful and, in a way, even more clueless than we were before this ‘model of consciousness and separate self’ emerged. And it has disconnected us from the rest of life on earth, without which nothing we do can make sense.

Even nature makes mistakes, I suppose. The correction, sadly, is going to be pretty harsh — the accelerating collapse of human civilization and desolation of much of the capacity of the planet to sustain life.

Perhaps next time a species evolves with a lot of excess unused brain capacity, nature will think better of the idea of endowing it with the hubris and pretension of self-control, thus making our sad species ‘too smart for our own good’. The cells, tissues and organs of the human body were doing pretty well for a million years without the need for “conscious self” management.

Those workers on the front lines of our bodies, that control our breathing, our circulation, our digestion, our immune response, and our instincts — They know what needs to be done. They don’t need any ‘one’ to tell them. But we confused humans, with the best of intentions, have created a disconnected, prosthetic, fragile world, and messed up our natural systems, especially our food systems that weaken and starve our digestive system of essential nutrients, our high-stress, low-exercise lifestyles that inhibit and enfeeble our circulatory system, and our use of dangerous toxins and overuse of antibiotics that damage and debilitate our immune systems.

So now, not only are we confused by brains trying vainly and obsessively to make sense of what they cannot possibly understand or make sense of, we have also damaged our bodies to the point they can’t survive without constant and massively-expensive interventions. Unhealthy brains, unhealthy bodies. Perhaps EO Wilson got it right when he said “Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth”.

As for the endgame, Ronald Wright probably summed it up best in A Short History of Progress when he said:

If we fail — if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us — nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea.

I am content in my belief that it couldn’t possibly have ended any other way. We are products of our conditioning, and nothing more. We have all done our best, the only thing we could possibly have done. Now, we can only watch and wait as our conditioning plays out.

Look closely. You see the ears, now? There and there? It all makes sense, now, right?