If You Think You Know, Understand, or "Get It", You Probably Don't

If you think you have a solution to the problem of consciousness, you haven't understood the problem. _Susan Blackmore, Consciousness (An Introduction)

The human mind hates to be wrong. But it hates uncertainty even more. The end result of any particular struggle between the "fear of being wrong" and the "fear of not knowing" cannot be predicted -- but in the long run people tend to "take sides" in the face of uncertainty.

Inside the brain of every human, sits a little person who is watching the ongoing theatre of his life. Well, that's one way of looking at it anyway. It makes sense in a simple-minded way, as long as you understand the theatre analogy. Otherwise you might find a similarly simple-minded analogy to help you "understand."

One problem with "being on the inside looking out", is that you will certainly see yourself out there -- even though you may not realise that is what you are seeing. When faced with gaps or ambiguities, the mind has a way of painting them over or filling them in. The world makes sense to us because we prefer it that way -- not because we actually understand what is happening.

When one says "a picture paints a thousand words," he is not strictly accurate. Pictures express thoughts which words cannot possibly express. Music, movement, and touch can also easily outrun the capacity of verbal language.

But reality is incomprehensible in any form of expression or human comprehension. We really do not understand the present and cannot predict the future in any meaningful way -- and that bugs the crap out of us. So we make things up. We pretend we understand what is happening, and that we know what will happen in the future. It makes us feel better to do that.

We have found ways to deal with uncertainty in certain parts of our lives. We may have faith that a power greater than ourselves is watching out for us, is balancing the bad with the good, making everything turn out right in the end. Or we may think that everything is going to hell, and that nothing and no one can help. Either way, we are compensating for our lack of knowledge and understanding -- attempting to replace uncertainty with certainty.

A Panglossian utopian is utilising the same compensatory mechanisms as a catastrophist doomer, when imagining the future. Whether a religionist or an atheist, the same mental processes are constantly at work conjuring up an acceptable future -- even if it is a future of doom.

Part of the reason that people who believe themselves terminally ill sometimes commit suicide, is to remove the uncertainty of when they are going to die. Similarly, doomers and apocalyptics of the dieoff.orgy persuasion often pursue policies which will bring about the very doom they claim to be warning against.

Peak oil doomers, for example, often lobby against the mining of coal, oil & gas drilling, nuclear energy, oil sands, and other alternative fuels and energies -- seemingly unaware that their political activism is making their peak oil predictions into self-fulfilling prophecies. In such a case, they are taking a strong predictive stand, then taking subsequent actions to help assure the accuracy of their prediction. Sadly, everyone will suffer if they are right, but it is very important to them, so they persist.

Humans are irrational, and they will have their religion -- regardless of their denials of faith.

As for you, dear reader, look to the essential core. Emphasise competence for yourself and those around you. Expect things to go wrong from time to time and be prepared. Expect the unexpected. Embrace uncertainty, and turn it to serendipity. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

And although it is almost certainly futile in the long run, never stop trying to understand. ;-)

Optimism vs Pessimism: Which is More Rational?

Matt Ridley's latest book, "The Rational Optimist," highlights the deep vein of pessimism flowing through the modern human heart. The video above is from a May, 2010, presentation at Cato. More recently, David Boaz takes a brief look at The Rational Optimist, and how its main themes are viewed by various persons.

One of the most striking images from the video above is a graphic image comparing the areas of land required to support a single human under various regimes of food production. Hunter gatherers, for example, required about 1,000 hectares of land to feed each person. The use of slash and burn agriculture reduced that area to roughly 10 hectares of land per person. Agricultural methods of the 1950s reduced the area further to about 4,000 sq metres (0.4 ha) per person. Modern agriculture of the 2000s needs only 1250 sq metres to feed each person. And so it goes.

Ridley also looks closely at the marvelous economies that are possible from both trade, and division of labour. It is clear that over the long run, the plight of most living persons on Earth has gotten "better." More quantity and variety of foods to eat, longer lives, better treatments for disease, etc.

But life does not proceed along a monotonic curve. No doubt life was getting better in many ways in Pompei, just before Vesuvius uncorked itself. Not long before the eruption of Hitler's wehrmacht in Europe, there were many reasons for Europeans to believe that things were getting better, in recovering from economic devastation.

The point being that there are trends of varying duration. If you see that a short term trend appears to be aligned with a long-term trend, you may feel that you understand how things are going. But between the short and the long terms, the medium term trend can be a killer.

The actual texture of most trends is more like a fractal curve -- like the shoreline of Britain, rough and uneven at any scale of observation. Step back far enough and you can "fuzz out" most of the detail, leaving something like a simple trend. Zoom in closely enough at the right point and you may achieve the appearance of a simple trend -- perhaps in alignment with the long-term view, by chance.

We see this phenomenon of selective focus in various extrapolative dooms such as peak oil DOOM! and carbon hysteria DOOM!. Predictions of climate catastrophe depend upon the timescale selected, and selective omission of important details and uncertainties. Predictions of peak oil DOOM! depend upon timescale, ignorance of actual resource (see recent shock of shale oil bonanza) and a strict avoidance of the reality that the debate is not at its essence about oil, but is about useful energy.

Recent trends of debt and demography in Europe and the Anglosphere suggest that an economic retrenchment of very serious proportions is likely to occur within the next 1 or 2 decades. Such economic retrenchments have often been accompanied by wars, historically. I am not certain how to phrase an optimistic viewpoint of that reality.

But long-term trends in technology suggest that even cyclic problems which derive directly from innate human stupidity may be soluble within a century or two. Al Fin cognitive scientists and cognitive sociologists believe that correcting human stupidity itself would be a worthy goal.

It is important to maintain an open mind toward possible catastrophes, golden ages, and utopias. Many would-be utopians are not afraid to crack a large number of eggs to cook their golden omelettes. Likewise, many doomers are quite willing to be the instruments of the doom and dieoff which they so loudly predict.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.