Consciousness is magic
January 15th, 2010
Before discussing it, I offer you the chance to watch From Science to God by Peter Russell. (and apologies to Sarah Silverman for alluding to her film Jesus is Magic in the post title)
Peter Russell is an author and filmmaker who seems ever eager to bridge what many see as a gap between science and religion, however, it seems like he’s trying to make a bad relationship work. Not that one can be both scientific and religious, but that the two things must somehow be shackeled in ways that don’t really work for the purposes of shaping a new worldview.
This post actually started off as a response to a friend who had shared the video with me (that’ll learn ya). The basic notion here, that science can now be dismissed as a means of answering certain questions on the basis that the questions are really quite old and science hasn’t fully solved them yet, is what I’d classify as a sort of a new mutation of Neo-Luddism. I have a different piece of writing on Modern Luddites in general that seems to be taking quite a bit of time, but for now, and in this post I’d like to focus just a bit on the spiritual strain. Spiritualists take a lot of things for granted about science that often seems more like an analysis of what they are seeing in the mirror rather than an objective assessment, and this film is a perfect example.
What he’s referring to when he says “consciousness” often seems be more of an aspect of theory of mind. Also, he claims science says animals lack consciousness. This assertion is blatantly false. Science actually indicates various levels of consciousness in many species. Different animals, most noticeably chimpanzees, but perhaps others, also appear to have some levels of theory of mind as well.
There’s a certain ego behind the idea that consciousness is all that unique, ours and at the center of things. He’s preaching that because we don’t know what gives rise to consciousness, then it must be a spiritual quality and he sort of over relies on social constructionist theory (which I do find quite a powerful one for describing a lot of human behaviour) in a way that would imply we are working diligently to deny a spiritual basis. I don’t think that’s quite the case of you look at the percentage of global religious belief. He also asserts that our primal need for happiness and and our consumerist tendencies is the result of denying our spiritual self, or the “real” nature of our consciousness, but this wouldn’t pass the test of occam’s razor, as evolutionary psychology offers a much more direct explanation of over consumption.
In the latter third he looks at meditation. The act of being in the present. This does bring about certain physiological changes, but there’s no proven correlation of a spiritual change. As you sit still, focus on smooth, slow breathing, your heart beat slows down, neurons rest. This could be what we call “at peace,” and is a phenomenal experience that is not diminished by being totally a chemical process.
Lloyd Morgan's Double Induction Method from his 1894 textbook
We do have some great laboratory settings to investigate consciousness, and the exist in hospitals in almost every town around the world. Ray Kurzweil recently discussed them in h+ Magazine. Anesthesiologists make people unconscious all the time. In studies of what happens to people when they go under, consciousness seems to correlate with gamma coherence; a certain synchrony between neurons that create gamma waves. Evidence shows that gamma coherence goes away with anesthesia and people enter the experience known as unconsciousness. Is that the whole story? Far from it. But it’s an example of how the systems that give rise to consciousness can be explored and understood. At various points in human history it was thought that diseases were the work of devils and impure living. It was a great way to wash your hands of the sick and say they had it coming, but not much good for solving problems.
“Anesthesia is an interesting laboratory for consciousness because it extinguishes consciousness. However, there‘s a lot of other things that anesthesia also does away with. Most of the activity of the neocortex stops with anesthesia, but there‘s a little bit going on still in the neocortex. It brings up an interesting issue. How do we even know that we‘re not conscious under anesthesia? We don‘t remember anything, but memory is not the same thing as consciousness. Consciousness seems to be an emergent property of what goes on in the neocortex, which is where we do our thinking. And you could build a neocortex.” — Ray Kurzweil
Finally, Russell states that science describes the world but doesn’t give us meaning, it gives us technology, but not guidance in how to use it. He sums up by saying we should combine the knowledge of science with the wisdom of religion. I couldn’t imagine a better way to stunt both of them. The goal of discovering the root of conscious, he seems to assert here, is not identifiable and thus a matter of faith so let’s stop worrying about it and just accept we’re all spiritual beings. But that’s the opposite of what science does.
To me, science gives us a lot of meaning: a dedication to exploration, study and wonder about the nature of all that’s around us being one. It also does give us ideas about how to live: Science says don’t eat all that crap fast food, you might want to cut down on smoking and boozing it up night after night might not be a good idea. If you want to see the people who are sapping these sorts of ideas out of our culture you’d have to find the corporate lobbyists.
I think this and other sort of spiritual arguments like it make the false assertion that science claims to “know” the truth. That’s actually what religion does. Science puts forth what is the most likely explanation and then peers debate the studies, attempt to repeat them and either refute them or build upon them if they can be repeated with the same results.
He says that underneath it all, religions are all basically the same. To me, this would really only be true from an atheistic point of view. At some point we do also need to take into account that religions do differ, sometimes in fundamental ways (hence: fundamentalists). It’s great the the interfaith groups are getting together. It’s certainly better than the classical way of working things out, but the reason they’re doing it is to overcome the obstacles.
There are certain things people are fond of considering to be miraculous, and consciousness, literally who we are, is one of them. We don’t know yet what ultimately infuses us with it, but the arguments for a physiological explanation have a lot more going from them. I don’t think it makes the reality any less incredible.
In our modern genome-mapped age there seems to be a knee-jerk backlash to scientific process and discovery. A woman on the BBC Sunday show The Big Question are openly hostile to the notion that angels might not have cured their breast cancer. People build theme parks to convince themselves of a 6,000 year old planet that matches Biblical timeline. Willing naysayers parrot the arguments of anti-climate-change lobbyists. There is a movement that lack any foundations for their statements — but does have celebrity endorsements — and against immunizing your children. Any technological advancement, so they say, looks like magic to the primitive. But people throughout history have often attributed even normal occurrences to magic, such as sickness or just a run of bad luck. Our need to arrive at reason may be too quick for the scientific method, but let’s hope our impatience doesn’t stop it in its tracks.
January 16th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
There is a lot here. Both in terms of the video and your response to it. I’ve never heard of this guy, but I’m not sure you are representing him accurately. There 22 minutes of video here to highlight or emphasize so maybe we are latching on to different parts. You are definitely right to call him when he makes factual mistakes like he did with what he said science has to say about animals. I just don’t understand the neo-Luddite label you want to apply. I don’t understand where he seems to get lumped in, at the very end, with the same kinds of people who have “knee-jerk backlash to scientific process and discovery” such as the biblical creationist.
When I think of Luddite it brings three different ideas into my mind. One is a more formal definition of a person who distrusts and dislikes technology. Second is the historical Luddites who went about destroying the machines of the industrial revolution that were taking their jobs. Third is a more emotional affective quality of a backwards person who would like to live like a cave man or some pre industrial person. I know you added the “neo” but this doesn’t remove some of the negative affect of the world any more than neo-fascist removes the taint of the word fascism. These are emotionally loaded words.
It just doesn’t seem to frame what he is getting at correctly. Its like he’s an advocate for the elimination of scientific inquiry and technology. I see this more as a philosophical viewpoint. He’s making some ontological claims about the origin of consciousness and he’s making claims that their is a quality of experience that cannot be touched by science (mainly subjective experience). This type of debate has been going on for some time in various forms. Its basically ontology which has been a major theme of the great philosophers since ancient Greece and probably before if we had the records. One can even look at the history of the field of psychology to see how various schools of thought arose based on what could be measured and what could not. Take the whole behaviorist movement as a type of radical empiricism which only recognized behavior because behavior could be observed and the subjective experience inside a person was not relevant.
I think Russell is wrong to assume science cannot study some of the things he’s talking about to the extent he’s saying science cannot. Just like the behaviorist. We have technology today that allows us to peek inside people’s heads as well as gather other measures such as skin conductance, temperature, heart rate variability, etc. There is a lot of research on meditation going on.
I’ve got other points I wanted to make, but this is already toolong. I want to leave with a post to a You Tube video of Sam Harris speaking at an atheist conference. If you don’t know Harris he is often mentioned in the same breath as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet and Christopher Hitchers. He’s a big figure in what is called the New Atheist movement. He has taken an interest in the scientific study of meditation and consciousness. Dennett actually questions him at the end of his talk and characterizes meditation much the same way you did in your post here. Its interesting to hear the various responses by the audience.
His speech starts at 4 minutes and goes on to another video (which a link will appear for). He’s talking about problems with the word atheist at that point and how it presents a PR problem for people like him early on. You can skip the up to about the 23 minute mark where he really gets into the topic of consciousness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok2oJgsGR6c
January 17th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Good comments. I’m working on a post on what I sort of think is the New Neo Luddite (or just the New Luddite, there already was a Neo Luddite movement. Can say “neo neo”?). the three categories you mention are part of it, and I sort of think this falls into the third, if from a new age spiritual movement and not from a traditional monotheistic tradition. There’s something in Russell’s outlook here that rejects exploration in terms of excepting the status quo (it’s forever unexplainable). I think that for the time being, based on what we know, there are huge gaps in our knowledge about what makes consciousness , but reject the idea or attached hubris that no one will ever figure it out simply because we haven’t in our time.
To me there is a strain of the Luddite tendency here that tells us to accept an outmoded mystical way of thinking when it comes to employing methods to describe the world around us, including the inner experience. He focuses on consciousness, which is a better argument than Intelligent Design’s use of the complexity of the human eyeball, but the two arguments still share an essential commonality: That it’s just too complicated to be the result of biology or nonrandom selection.
The argument’s relation to the Luddite tendency for rejectionnism is that it sees this knowledge or exploration of it as somehow being a danger, the way the original luddite tradesmen saw automation as a danger. In some way it is: it requires a change in a way of life. But when ways of life don’t change with the world there are far worse alternatives.
I’ll have to come up with a better way of combining it into the rest of what I see as New Luddite’s though.
January 17th, 2010 at 11:58 pm
Thanks for the civil and thoughtful response. Never know what to expect when trying to have a conversation on the internet.
It sounds like you are going to make a new post on this whole Luddite concept soon. I’m still at a loss, after reading what you last wrote, of making this ’shoe’ fit though. I’ve got a theory I want to test about how it does fit by running it past you. I’ve sort of convinced myself that it makes a lot of sense and I’m hoping you give it a fair hearing because I can’t read minds.
One of the challenges we face in talking about this matter is similar to the effect described by trying to get reliable eyewitness testimony as to what happened in an accident. We both watched the same 22 minute video, but we seem to be drawing different conclusions from it. Complicating matters is that there isn’t a transcript we can easily quote. I suspect you are relying on memories of the video like myself and memories are, as the researchers tell us, not very reliable. Of course we have the pre-memory problem of perceptual filters and cognitive biases like confirmation bias that may cause us to zero in on different sentences or points made.
I’m going to throw a personal theory out there. We all approach the world with a certain viewpoint or worldview from which our thinking is limited. I threw the Sam Harris video out there and it is a good reference for getting at where I come from. Now you mentioned Ray Kurzweil and threw out a quote and some studies he mentioned. From this there are three worldviews at work in regards to consciousness study and what consciousness is – mine\Harris (more agnostic – need research), yours\Kurzweil (consciousness arises from matter\computation) Russell\new agers (consciousness arises from the unknown\spookiness).
It seems to me that you hold a philosophical position that the ultimate substance of reality is matter. In the materialist worldview, and Daniel Dennett writes great books on this subject matter, consciousness is something that arises as an ephiphenoma of the brain. It is a belief system that sees consciousness as computation – computation by neurons – massive parallel processing.
I’m further inclined to think this is your view because of the quote you pulled from Kurzweil that ends with “and you could build a neocortex” in a context suggesting the replication of consciousness on machines is possible. Of course Kurzweil hopes to attain immortality through this process or at least eliminate the problem of aging which leads to natural death. One can still always die in an earthquake or something.
Assuming I’m right about you and you are basically Kurzweil-like in your philosophical outlook then there is a new way to look at your Luddite comment. You see research into consciousness as something that will aid in the creation of conscious machines like Kurzweil talks about. We will be able to merge our consciousness with machines. We will be able to have cool and useful experiences of life using this technology. Wouldn’t it be cool to have our own personal Matrixes that we could load our minds into. Not just for the sake of immortality, but to deliver whatever experiences we wanted. And I’m agreeing that this is all cool and desirable stuff. At least to me. And isn’t it sort of like the ultimate technology. Russell’s worldview, however, makes consciousness a much more elusive and spooky concept. In this view, consciousness is not something that arises from computation. And if that is true these wonderful machines seem less possible. Russell stands in the way of advancement in this area because of some ancient and primitive belief\value systems just like a Luddites did with the labor saving machines of the industrial revolution.
January 18th, 2010 at 10:07 am
I’m sort of hoping comments here keep the civil tone as the reason for setting the blog up was to share some ideas while i’m studying the subject and see how far afield I might be getting on occasion as well as maybe posing some ideas that may challenge the status quo. And thanks for the Harris video, by and by. I haven’t read his work. I have read three of Dawkins’ books. I’ve moved off of HItchens because he seems to have simply become a contrarian rather than an observer or commentator. Harris brings up some really good issues in that video, though. Primarily, that there are real, legitimate reasons that propel people toward a backlash.
You’re correct in assessing some of where I’m coming from. I like reading Kurzweil and had actually just read the interview a little bit ago, and the video in this post reminded me of some of what he was saying. My coursework just recently covered some aspects of consciousness as well. But while I like Kurzweil, and give him some credit for his past predictions, he’s also an aging man and an optimist. It’s in his best interest to see this stuff happen in his lifetime. I’m somewhat in tune with Kurzweil in that I see an ongoing merger and a new development in human evolution that could basically be seen as a new development in evolution as a whole: We’re bending it around technology. Now, we can have a good discussion about the postives and negatives of that, but as this takes place we are also faced with what appears to be a spike in denialism and rejectionism. There are aspects about our society that to many are empty and self-absorbed. It’s not too surprising that people in search of purpose would investigate possibilities elsewhere.
Part of the modern rejection may also stem from a perception that science is claiming to have the answer to everything. I find this somewhat unfounded. Certainly there are individuals who claim it is, but in the main, most of the ones I’ve had interactions with realize there will likely remain more that we don’t know than will know, but see that as the propeller for human development.
Read the interview with Kurzweil linked to in the post. I think you’ll find his view not too different from Russell’s. As he says, he’s been working on it for 50 years and hasn’t figured it out yet. While anesthesia offers a good laboratory, he points out that the processes that seem related to consciousness couldn’t actually give rise to it alone. His idea on reverse engineering it isn’t just to create machines, but I think more about creating the best way of using a machine analogy to explain consciousness.
What’s good to bare in mind with his arguments is that what he calls “the signularity” is a black hole in future prediction. The point where we can’t see what the results will be. There are rational reasons to have some fear of such a turning point. But the turning point is coming regardless, and not really just in technology. Climate, religion, economics to name three are becoming more observably tenuous, less reliable.
The modern Luddites are different from the classical ancestor in most ways. Primarily, they actually use the trappings of what they are trying to denounce. Technology Luddites have websites and anti-evolutionaries use the jargon to move intelligent design forward. But the classical Luddites did have a point: The world was changing and they didn’t see (or couldn’t imagine) their place in it, and I think here I’m sort of backing into where the modern equivalent is. The world is changing again faster than many people can/will/want to adapt, and the change (in terms of the lifespan of the entire species) is taking place pretty close to the last major shift.
Where it applies here, and perhaps the reach is a bit too much for a single post, is that while some people blanch at the traditional smorgasbord of philosophical/religious offerings to find a safe haven in, but new forms of rejectionist ideas are emerging all the time, many without the Judeo-Christian aftertaste but essentially the same comforts. The riddle of existence is solved, and the answer is that it’s unsolvable. Ruling out science we reaffirm magic, because the gap is uncertainty.
January 18th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Your comment about Hitchens in relation to Dawkins reminded me of a brief exchange in a Beyond Belief seminar in 2006 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2xGIwQfik ). Its a question of how does one present a message in a way that is most effective. I find Harris a more effective (calm) communicator who doesn’t seem like he is driven by his emotions. I’ve seen the fundamentalist types keying in on Dawkins passion as an argument they use to talk about the atheist threat. I think this is a source for a lot of comments I see where someone says “atheism is just another religion. Your observation of Hitchens being a contrarian is going in the right direction. I think I can build on that a bit. Harris, Dennet, and Dawkins all seem to have a reverence to science and intellectual curiosity. Dawkins was writing about evolution decades ago as was Dennet. Harris is younger, but he’s got a neuroscience degree or is working towards one. These men are scientists who see religion as something anti-science. Hitchens is a 9/11 atheist. He’s horrified about the evil done in the name of religion. The others touch on this theme a lot, but I don’t think it is their entire foundation. Hitchens also has a strong theme of God as brutal dictator and authoritarian. So I see a strong anti-authoritarian motivation in Hitchens arguments. One time I remember him saying wouldn’t it be horrible if god was real and there was this brutal, immoral dictator watching over everything you did 24 hours a day. He really keys in to that Old Testament God who orders genocide and has people stoned to death for picking up sticks on the Sabbath and such. So “God is not Great” is the title of his book because God is immoral and the people who support and follow a brutal genocidal God must be immoral themselves. They even fly planes of innocent people into buildings full of innocent people. That’s where he’s primarily coming from I believe.
I agree with a lot of what you are saying in the last post. I know what meaning you are attaching to the Luddite label. I believe I know the spirit in which you are defining it. You are all for advancement that breaks down old world views that claim to have all the answers. You find that world views that actively discourage seeking answers and new solutions (technology) to problems is bad. Just like the Luddite’s of history were bad for destroying machinery that ultimately ended up improving the condition of human life in the long run – though some modern day religious Luddites like the Amish would disagree with that conclusion. Is this pretty much on target?
I see your definition fitting well within a worldview where we are generalizing to entire groups. Russell is classified as new age. So is astrology and healing crystals. So are eastern religions. Russell, astrology, healing crystals, and eastern religions may all be classified as new age but it does not follow that since Russell is a new ager that he think the new age astrologer has something useful to offer. Russell may think astrology is all bunk. Now let’s move into Eastern religions. Its “new age” in many circles. Now let’s take a certain head figure out of an Eastern religion – the Dalai Lama. So logically, the Dalai Lama is a Buddhist, Buddhism is an eastern religion, eastern religion are “new age” therefore the Dalai Lama is a Luddite. Yet the Dalai Lama is personal fan of science and is one of the largest advocates of empirical research into consciousness and the mind and meditation that there is.
Russell is a useful strawman here. I say strawman because he’s what we have been working off of but I’m not entirely sure, if you approached the man, that he would say “I don’t think we should do this research the Dalai Lama supports – its pointless because science can’t study these areas”. If he actually says that then he is anti-progress, anti-intellectual, anti-understanding, anti-research. If he doesn’t he’s been mischaracterized. But assuming he’s not, he can serve as useful person to symbolize those with anti-research tendencies to completely distinguish him from another new-ager – the Dalai Lama, who would could hold very similar viewpoints of the ontological origins of consciousness\matter as Russell, who is all for research into the mind. The findings of such research serve both the Dalai Lama and someone with an ontological philosophy quite different from his like Kurzweil. Now if the Dalai Lama gets some research that contradicts his claims and causes Kurzweil to cheer and he says well no more use in science then we have the Luddite problem you are describing.
But overall, it appears, that you are painting with a very broad brush. I’m not sure if you are getting at nuance within “new age”? And that may be an angle I’m more familiar with that I bring to that 22 minute video that isn’t as apparent to you since you may not be familiar about the divisions within in. Its much like the Christian religion. We can call a person a Christian, but what does it really mean? Are they Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Baptist, Lutheran, etc, etc? Its useful to lump than all together to make a quick point about “Christians”. Do all Christians support intelligent design and creationism.? In fact the Catholic Church officially recognizes evolution and sees the Genesis story as a metaphor and not literally. The head of the human Genome project in the US, Francis Collins believes in evolution but calls himself an evangelical too. This is a man who helps in science not hinders. Ken Miller is a biologist Catholic who testifies in court slamming the intelligent design movement.
So my concern with most language, like the Luddite term you are using, is its not entirely accurate. Which is one of the reasons these posts get really long. Because simple words don’t do justice to complexity. The word is not really telling us the whole picture of what is going on with some factions within broader defined movements. And its easy to wield words to describe groups in way that do an intellectual disservice to overall understanding. Just think about the emotional taint loaded with the word “liberal” in America. To many conservatives liberalism is synonymous with communism and a dictator like Joseph Stalin and big, intrusive government overall. Yet most American liberals I know are far from communist and hate government intrusion. But to listen to conservatives in America who buy the propaganda of their pundits as truth there really is no difference and to even suggest there was nuance would get you labeled a liberal propagandist trying to hide the authoritarian, controlling, big government agenda of liberals. In fact this is one of the major conspiracy theories that global warmer deniers latch on to. That its some secret one world plot of liberals ton control your life.
The effect you seem to be describing to me are people who are anti-intellectual. People who have no intellectual-curiosity and are closed minded because being any more open may stray them from the belief systems they hold so dear. They attack professors and scientists and intellectuals and colleges and universities as snobbish elites who lack common sense. Their idea of common sense being that since the world and people are so complex then it must have been created by an active intelligence like us, but vastly more powerful. Or common sense fueled by slogans repeated like mantras by talk show hosts they listen to day in and day out for years talking about global warming conspiracies as perfect evidence of liberals being authoritarian lovers wanting to control your life. I’m not sure this phenomena needs a new word when other words do quite well?
January 18th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Good points, and I may need to revisit the idea some. I think the anti-intellectual as you define it is still a fellow traveler with the luddite in some ways, but an anti-intellectual can also be an avid adopter of some advances. A lot of them use new tech to spread their world vision. A luddite can also be an intellectual. The commonality for me is a clinging to the status quo no matter the consequences or evidence against such a stance. Still, it might be good to part them out at some point in a broader discussion.
In terms of liberal and conservative politics in America, the tendency is used to scare people in much the way you indicate: Liberals are trying to control your life (to what end, they never say) and rob you of your freedoms. there are a lot of arguments that feed off the fear of a change of the status quo: climate, immigration, etc.
I guess, in terms of psychology, there’s an underlying common trait in a lot of what I guess could be described as absurd rejectionism, or possibly a phrase less condescending. Willfully turning your back on an avalanche of evidence and willing yourself to believe it’s somehow not real. I think anti-inellectualism doesn’t quite fit the bill entirely, but is a subset of it, like the luddite.
The different views of science by different clergy is another good example, and again, it could be parted out as those who see the holy texts as something to be engaged and studied and debated about, and there are those who want it to simply be a set of rules to go by, full stop. Both can be people of faith. The latter would be anti-inellectual, but they also have to adopt more and more rejectionism to hold on to it, and eventually this can lead to luddite tendencies. In the US we see it in the Amish lifestyle. In other religions, we see it in those who refuse medical treatment for themselves and their children on the basis of holy grounds.
Anyway, much food for thought. Thanks!
January 19th, 2010 at 5:50 am
So Luddite and anti-intellectual aren’t great fits since you could, in theory, have a person who is a modern day medical doctor who still believes in the literal creation story.
You are using this word “rejectionism”. Seems fitting for what you are getting at. Or how about anti-empirical or anti-empiricist? This could be defined as someone uninterested in evidence and\or denies it.
January 19th, 2010 at 5:52 pm
That might be the best, and under which the different category types. Rejection Reflex Theory? There does seem to be a reflexive nature to it. Next up is figuring out the unifying psychological drivers behind it I think there are some explanations to be found in evolutionary psychology, but also in social constructionist theory as well.
January 19th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
UPDATE: According to philosopher and psychologist, Dan Dennett, consciousness IS a magic trick: “The first problem in understanding our own minds is giving up many of the things we think we know. Dan Dennett is a philosopher of consciousness whose talk for TED, which uses visual illusions as illustrations, shows how consciousness is a kind of magic trick cooked up by our brains.”
January 20th, 2010 at 5:48 am
“That might be the best, and under which the different category types.”
Not sure I understand this sentence?
“Rejection Reflex Theory? There does seem to be a reflexive nature to it. ”
We get into the problem of “not always” again. We’ve had a couple of players that you have wanted to build this idea around: Russell\new agers, global warming deniers, and young earth creationist.
Lets take the global warming deniers. Not it is my belief, not really based on evidence as much as logical reasoning and understanding of the business world, that the head of the resistance to global warming are the oil and coal industries. They stand to lose a lot of money and power if society adopts policies that limit carbon emissions. This is not really reflexive on their part. Its a calculated business strategy to put money into PR to persuade the public otherwise.
“Next up is figuring out the unifying psychological drivers behind it I think there are some explanations to be found in evolutionary psychology, but also in social constructionist theory as well.”
There are explanations in evolutionary psychology for how religion arises. See Robert Wright. But we aren’t always just talking about traditional religion. We’ve got global warming and people like Russell.
One of the fundamental forces at work, to me, seems to be cognitive dissonance. The tolerance for ambiguity within each individual’s psyche will be spread randomly throughout the population. A person with a low tolerance will tend to exhibit a closed-minded dogmatism about their beliefs and will quickly challenge, sometimes with the most absurd arguments, anyone who dares unsettle them. A person with a high tolerance can actually hold conflicting ideas in their head long enough to really make a judgement on which one has more evidence to back it up. Someone with exceptional tolerance may not need to make a judgement at all if none of the evidence is convincing enough. This is easier in some areas than others. A person can state a belief that there is life on other planets and another person can say no. The former can argue about the size of the universe, the latter may say we are unique, maybe for religious reasons. Yet there is a middle ground here – “we just don’t know”. The more dogmatic or fundamentalist person is likely to perceive “we don’t know” as a rejection of their worldview because it introduces ambiguity. It suggest the other belief they don’t agree with may be true and this dissonance is enough for them to reject the agnostic position as an unsettling threat too. Degrees of tolerance for ambiguity lead to persons that appear to be doubters\skeptics vs. those who look more certain\dogmatic\fundamentalist.
January 20th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
That’s because it was a horribly written sentence. I missed a word as well. I meant to say that luddites and anti-intellectuals would be types of rejectionists. First would be to set up the orverall subject and then to look at the types.
The “not always” issue needs to be resolved by being more specific about who we are talking about and we can look at the climate change denialists about this again. If I were to use it as an example, I wouldn’t likely focus on the oil or coal industry types who are lobbying heavily against it. There reasons for doing so are compromised by economics. There’s a tangeable fiscal loss potential for admitting they contribute to climate change. An oil drilling CEO may actually beleive his company does harm the envireonment and endanger people to some extent but still publicly deny it because of the fincancial rewards he personally receives for doing so. There are other people, though, with no clear economic incentive to deny the science behind it, and these (to me) are more interesting. Working against climate change might change their lives moderately (new training for jobs or using different methods for energy consumption) but they’re basically in the same boat as the rest of us. Still, they go out and whether they understand climate models or not, argue against htem and try to point out gaps in the evidence to hang their arguments on. They start blogs and troll internet forums.
Similarly in religion and fundementalists, I don’t know that I’d focus on the clergy, but the flock. It’s the receivers of information who are more interesting in how they process it and why the reject an overwhelmingly provable thing in favor of smoke and mirrors.
You have some interesting thoughts here on cognitive dissonance. I think ambiguity can be really upsetting for some people, and answers that promise both certainty and the status quo have a distinct advantage. There are people who will — no matter what you show them — deny a thing to keep ambiguity at bay, and the argument “it’s a matter of faith” is one of the strongest arguments some of these people have. It’s a debate stopper because what do you come back with after that. They’ve just claimed that they’ll go on beleiving it because they believe it.
I also think social construction may limit people from being able to undergo radical shifts in opinion. If you set yourself up as a conservative, for example, you decide for yourself what that means and associate with others who have decided similarly and all your social interactions build on that. Perhaps part of that is that humans inherited the earth and are the masters of it. Thus, someone saying we’re doing ourselves in would have a tough sell. Similar with the belief in other beings in the world. You can show that, mathmatically, life somewhere else in the universe is nearly guaranteed. But the gap between here and there is still enough to deny it. Someone who has built their social being on that idea and has invested in it would have to redifine themselves to themselves and others. This relates also somewhat to evolutionary psychology, because what’s the loss of respect and possible associated resources that comes with making a 180 degree turn on something you’ve fundementally endorsed? A person may not be consciously thinking this, but sense an underlying danger in heading too far along an opposing argument no matter what evidence it has going for it.
January 20th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
So you are focusing on the “flock”. This makes me think of the Authoritarian follower personality. Check Bob Altemeyer’s page http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ , jump to the Chapter 3 PDF.
The whole chapter is 31 pages, but here is a good summary quote:
“But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and–to top it all off–a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.”
He goes through some research actually performed to test these things. Hate throwing out something that large. Sometimes I get in conversations and here something that reminds me of a concept hashed out in a 400 page book and there generally is no easy way to summarize it. I keep thinking I’m going to reply to the Dennett video you posted, but its hard to even get started there is so much there.
The biggest problem with this Altemeyer, who is a psychology professor, is that he ties it to much into American political parties. And thus its easily tossed aside as a partisan piece. If he had left this out, and kept it as straight piece on personality studies than I think it would be more valuable. I’m always curious to see how things would fare under the close scrutiny of other psychologist like you get in the peer review journal process. Sort of like I’m doing for you with your initial neo-Luddite label. It allows you to redefine until the concept of what you are getting at is more accurately communicated. In a similar vain, I do feel the word “authoritarian” packs a certain emotional punch to it that can close people off from reading his research. When we have people running around calling other people authoritarians, we aren’t probably going to have much intellectual dialogue about the research.
As far as your take on the social constructionist aspect I have to say I couldn’t agree more. I have a friend who, until a few years ago, lived in a very small town in red state America. His social life suffered for several reasons. At one point he had taken a class with someone and ended up enjoying this person and found out she was a “Christian”. So he began to hang out with her and her friends and ended up going to church with them. I would describe him, before this point, as a non-religious person. He just didn’t give much thought to religion and wasn’t hostile to it in any way like some atheist would be. It was interesting to watch some of the changes in his belief systems. For example, homosexuality wasn’t a neutral thing to him anymore it was a bad thing. He expressed that he was worried that he was going to be separated from his parents because they wouldn’t be going to the same destination in the afterlife. He insisted I meet these friends and that they were really open minded. He sent me some emails from them to show how intellectual they were in talking about religious matters. One of the emails basically started off with one of them criticizing some Hare Krishna or something and than bashing Eastern metaphysics in general. It was as I expected. Then there was an interesting tidbit in there if this stuff isn’t true (Christianity) then I’ve wasted my life. That’s another angle to this whole thing beyond social acceptance, that a person has made so much of an investment in something historically that there is an incentive to want to believe its still true. I did not get involved in these email discussions, but it was quite clear to me my friend, in his social isolation in this small town, was willing to adapt his beliefs however he needed to in order to fit in. Eventually life took him out of that town and he’s back to being a non-religious type person. Not an atheist, but just someone for who church and reading the Bible and such is not really where he is at. To me, I saw his brief journey into a more Christian fundamentalist mindset, as a way for him to feel part of some community. These are powerful forces.
January 22nd, 2010 at 3:49 pm
I will have to take a look at Altemeyer’s work. I bookmarked it on the blog some time ago for that purpose, but the required course reading is taking up a lot of my free time these days. Comments and feedback are precisely why I decided to blog while doing studies. It’s a good chance to broaden the conversation out and get some other perspectives. I think in the case of words and meanings, at some point we either have to make up new words or combinations of words to describe some things or be careful about explaining our use of words that may not be an exact fit. When he talks about authoritarian regimes, somewhere in his paper he needs to define what he means by that, even though there is a dictionary definition, he has to qualify it with some parameters so that the reader knows who he is incorporating.
January 22nd, 2010 at 7:49 pm
Thanks for the link. Some of the comments on boingboing about Altemeyers work seem to support my hypothesis that it was a bad idea for him to use the type of wording and language that he uses and to identify himself as a liberal. Altemeyer, of all people, should know about the power of in and out group thinking and that if you put yourself in the enemy camp your ideas aren’t even worth considering. He basically poisoned his own well
I haven’t read his whole work for a few years now. You mention the word regime and how he defines it. This is sort of where he gets in trouble with the use of the acronym RWA (right-wing authoritarian) everywhere. So, if I remember correctly, in the beginning of the book he talks about why he uses RWA. So he states that the Soviet Union was founded on left-wing economic principles. But once these left-wingers got into power their supporters (the authoritarian followers) became RWAs because they were now supporting the status quo or the power structure as it existed. And over time the support of this regime was support for the traditional regime. Then left wingers, in this type of definition, are those who are interested in changing the status quo.
So he defines his use of language early on, but its still a mistake. It sort of the process we went through with your use of the word Luddite. I claimed it was an emotionally loaded word and that it probably didn’t speak best to what you were trying to describe. You basically had to tack new meanings on it in order to fit, but this didn’t remove the prior baggage that the word carries and how that baggage didn’t seem to fit to well with certain technological savvy creationist and such.
There was a commenter on the boingboing thread who mentioned that motorcycle helmet laws would be authoritarian. I thought this was interesting. I didn’t disagree with the point. The argument that someone is being forced to wear a helmet by the government makes sense. And people who support such laws could possibly be called authoritarian too. There is no end to this type of argument. So the question to me, and you are asking it to in terms of how you define ”regimes”, is what people think of when they think of an authoritarian regime. Well the first thing my memory pops into my mind is Nazi Germany. Now let’s take the motorcycle thing and apply it to Nazi Germany. Was Nazi Germany bad because they had motorcycle helmet laws? I don’t even know if Nazi Germany had them or not, but the question and answer seem almost absurd in context of what Nazi Germany did. We have this problem in America now where certain political demagogues define Obama’s health care plan as “national socialist” and that’s what Nazi means in English and Germany had a national health care plan. Pure demagoguery. So then you have people of a certain political persuasion equating Obama with Hitler and the Nazis and that we are on this road and this is how this stuff gets started. And of course this fits in with the language of big government liberals who are going to take control of your life. Here’s the thing though. Most people don’t recognize Nazi Germany as evil (the emotional baggage evoked by the words Nazi, fascism, Hitler, and even authoritarianism) because of their health care system (and I don’t even know if this was something Hitler actually put in place). They recognize it as evil from images of concentration camp graves full of the dead bodies of bone thin Jews who were starved and used as slave labor. They recognize it as evil for enslaving an entire group of people based on ethic and religious identity. They recognize it as evil for the violent and brutal wars it initiated in the name of self defense and historical claims to land for to build a greater Germany. They saw it as evil for having a secret police that jailed and executed political opponents.
So how did Hitler come to absolute power in a democracy to carry out things like mass genocide and war? From what I can tell, Hitler’s main rhetorical strategy was appeals to German patriotism\nationalism, German ethnic\racial pride, and demonization of certain groups of people – mostly the Jewish people. So he established a strong in and out group tendency and used the Jews as a scapegoat for Germany’s problems (including what Hitler and other nationalist felt was a premature surrender in WWI and a very bad economy). I believe he was also able to exploit class tensions (hence the socialist label) of Germany’s working poor and project the cause of their financial ruin on rich Jewish bankers and such. So this is the type of themes he is using in to create political power and support for himself. And I have read that after these political gatherings Hitler’s brownshirts would go around and trash Jewish businesses and get into fights with Jewish people and communist. Its a political movement that fed off hate and fear and one should not be surprised that it ended in war and death camps.
So in this type of authoritarian regime and politics (as opposed to motorcycle helmet laws or universal health care) I see an rhetorical style, by authoritarian leader\politicians, to one of the most base instincts in the human animals – fear and anger and hate. Could you not begin tying this into neuroscience? This is the politics of the amygdala as opposed to a politics that appeals to say the prefrontal cortex. I think of the anti-intellectualism that tends to go along with these movements. Book burnings and hostilities to academics and universities and scientist. What is more beneficial to the amygdala’s control of the mental environment than shunning intellectualism that slows one down in drawing quick and reactive solutions? Its a politics that would succeed mostly by exploiting differences between people, forming in\out groups as easily as possible. Paradoxically we are forming our own new grouping here, but we are a bit more cautious and analytical about it as opposed to the instant reactions someone has against someone of a different skin color or religion.
Could one use fMRI to determine authoritarian and political tendencies? The more reactive\reactionary brain being subject to amygdala hijacks more often than the non-reactive. A lot of things fit into this model. First off the success in emotional appeals to the political base as opposed to intellectual appeals. Second the general hostility to intellectualism, which potentially, via neuroplasticity causes the prefrontal cortext to become more developed and thus exert more control and restraint on amygdala hijacks. Third a tendency to prefer more violent solutions to problems (i.e. preemptive wars), Fourth a morality that does not extend to all human groups but human groups that have a closer impact on one’s immediate survival. I’m thinking of how some of these mechanisms might have evolved. So evolution favored those human beings who could develop love and kinship with their own tribe since those forming groups had a higher chance of survival than those doing it on their own. However, this love and kinship (which could be defined as morality) that worked within the group stopped with the group and saw other tribes of humans as competition for resources. Competition for resources led to conflicts and wars (at a small scale). So those who learned to distrust the “other” while maintaining strong love within their own group had a better chance of surviving since the “other” was likely to kill them.
It seems like a very good parsimonious explanation to me too. I know that regions within the brain sort of compete for control over the whole organism. Compete to get their contents into consciousness. I understood this, from a cognitive psychology class many years ago to occur even at a much smaller level, that different neurons within the visual cortex would metaphorically yell as loud as possible to say this visual input is a line – I’m picking it up – that is what is – while another neuron that was set to handle a different shape wouldn’t “yell” as loud. Maybe the amygdala, as a much larger collection of neurons with a specialized survival function, is yelling over the more controlled and rational prefrontal cortext. And it does so more in some people and that people would begin to take on more sophisticated cognitive and behavioral traits from this dominance of one over the other? And its not that the amygdala is bad. We want it to hijack us when a tiger shows up so we run away and don’t sit there and ponder our situation. Its just bad for other domains.
That’s probably a pretty unsophisticated explanation and probably wrong in some ways. As a current psychology student your knowledge should be fresher on these matters from my decades old memory. It does seems like it leads down a useful path to some of your earlier concerns about reactivity and rejection of evidence and my comments regarding anti-intellectualism and anti-empiricism.
January 24th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
I think the reason that Nazi Germany garners so much of the psychological microscope space is that psychology was really coming into its own during its rise and also because it was such a stunning example of the extreme negative outcome that can emerge from some traits we still identify as positive: pride, heritage, religion (there’s some great writing out there on how Hitler did actually rely on human religious programming), etc.
Per this conversation I was thinking about another different paper I came across a while ago, that was blogged about here. Now I’m not so interested in the ramblings of Paul Craig Roberts, who will hang his argument on just about any coat peg he thinks will support it, but the paper, “There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification.” looks interesting. It’s another on my reading list to absorb and see if there’s anything to relate to the topic, but does seems to fit with Altemeyer’s discussion.
In my quick perusal of it, the most interesting thing to jump out was the section on “Strategies for Resisting Information.” The interesting thing about this study is that people adhering to a propagandistic line do seem able to hold entirely contrary viewpoints and justify them through mental strategies. “The first surprise in our findings is that several interview respondents denied believing Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda, even though they had indicated such a belief on the survey.” 10.2 percent knew “that no evidence had currently been found linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 but must have been involved in 9/11 because his general antipathy toward the United States propels his support for terrorism in general.” 1/3rd of the respondents switched topics to other reasons that the war in Iraq was justified when pressed on the 9/11 connection they had made in the survey.
More interesting was the strategy of “Selective Exposure” in which respondents in this category were either unwilling to put their knowledge of the state of evidence up to the interviewer’s scrutiny, or were generally puzzled about events, though I sort of like this one because Kurt Vonnegut describes a similar process really well in Mother Night when discussing how people willingly file down the teeth of gears on their own logic. 10.2 percent dismissed out of hand any evidence showing Saddam wasn’t involved in 9/11 but were unwilling or unable to offer a reason why the evidence wasn’t any good. One respondent was quoted in a way that reminds me of everyone from Holocaust denialists to intelligent design advocates: “Well, I bet they say that the Commission didn’t have any proof of it but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that. ”
The above mentioned study is a qualitative look at the issue. But using the neuroscience angle would, I think be able to tie some brain regions to response in ways that have been done before. There’s a set of standardized images used to measure emotional responses, and they’ve been used for people wired up to measure which areas of the brain are activated. I would imagine a similar study could be done here, but I don’t know how much the wiring of one of these people’s brains in and of itself would actually throw off the study.
The amygdala is known to process and keep the memory of emotional reaction. You might see something there. In the amygdala, cells called intercalated (ITC) neurons fight off fear and anxiety. During the questions in the above study, it would have been interesting to see at what level (if any) the ITC neurons were firing at when the defense mechanisms were employed. If anything, it would indicate a fear response which could be tied to a heritable, biological tendency. You could then measure for people with a higher tendency of this and see how impervious they were all to evidence-based arguments. It could be in the ITC neurons that the only direct connections between modern luddites, anti-intellectuals and anti-empiricists might be made, but that’s a pretty far-out hypothesis without knowing more about how this all works.
An aspect in evolutionary psychology that interests me quite a bit is the idea of lag time; the notion that we have 10,000 year-old tendencies firing off in a vastly different world from the one that molded them. At some point in prehistory an over-active amygdala with hair-trigger ITC neurons popping off at the slightest challenge might have come in mighty handy. These days it could be potentially dangerous.
I’m not savvy enough to know what exactly detects a specific neuron firing. I think fMRI would just highlight the part of the brain undergoing a drastic change in blood flow. Though blood flow would be related, I’m not sure if it would necessarily single out a specific neuron. Hopefully one day I’ll be at the controls of some such machine and can find out!