Archive for May 7th, 2012
Our conflicted selves
At Edge.org, Neuroscientist David Eagleman points out some of the many ways human animals are conflicted. According to Eagleman, “The elegance of the brain lies in its inelegance.” This conflictedness is one of the main ways that the brain is not like a desktop computer, which is programmed to follow the code given to it, without internal conflict. Computers don’t struggle over whether to eat cake:
The deep and beautiful trick of the brain is more interesting: it possesses multiple, overlapping ways of dealing with the world. It is a machine built of conflicting parts. It is a representative democracy that functions by competition among parties who all believe they know the right way to solve the problem. As a result, we can get mad at ourselves, argue with ourselves, curse at ourselves and contract with ourselves. We can feel conflicted. These sorts of neural battles lie behind marital infidelity, relapses into addiction, cheating on diets, breaking of New Year’s resolutions—all situations in which some parts of a person want one thing and other parts another.
Eagleman then takes a look under the hood. Memory, for instance, comes in two flavors. Most everyday memories are consolidated by the hippocampus. Emotion-laden memory, though, is stored “along an independent, secondary memory track” that have a unique quality to them; the amygdala is in charge of those. These two types of memory are so different that Eagleman declares that “unity of memory is an illusion.”
There are also two versions of decision-making.
[S]ome are fast, automatic and below the surface of conscious awareness; others are slow, cognitive, and conscious. And there’s no reason to assume there are only two systems; there may well be a spectrum.
This division of decision-making into two basic types comports with Daniel Kahneman’s bifurcation in his most recent book, Thinking: Fast and Slow.
What other conflicts are there in the brain? Eagleman notes that even “basic sensory functions” like the detection of motion are determined in the brain by “neural democracy,” thanks to the existence of several distinct neural mechanisms. The two hemispheres of the brain, left and right, compete. We know this from the famous split brain experiments.
There are other internal conflicts I could add. We are all subject to massive conflicts of interest. Who wins when we are conflicted? Me or society? Present me or future me? My appetite or my intellect? The part of me that wants to take chances or the me that prefers to stay the course? Somehow, despite all of our inner conflicts many of us get along well enough . . .
Note: Eagleman’s short article was his response to the 2012 Annual Question of Edge.org: WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?
Permanant war and meaningless chatter
What’s on the table for this election season? Glenn Greenwald explains:
But like almost all of the most consequential and destructive policies — endless war, the Drug War, the sprawling and barbaric American prison state — the domestic Surveillance State expands with equal fervor under both Democratic and Republicans administrations, and opposing it thus affords no partisan gain and it is therefore entirely off the table of debate. In lieu of any dispute over these types of actually consequential government policies, we instead endure a series of trivial weekly scandals that numb the brain, distract attention, and produce acrimony as virulent and divisive as it is petty.
Greenwald pointed out that some mainstream writers are starting to take note of America’s endless state of war and surveillance. For instance, the following excerpt is the writing of Fareed Zakaria:
Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.
Businesses souring on arbitration
The website Arbitration Nation has reported on the cognitive dissonance experienced by businesses when it comes to arbitration of commercial disputes. Based on a new survey, only 60% of companies arbitrated commercial disputes in 2011, compared to 85% in 1997. Why aren’t businesses clamoring to arbitrate their disputes with other businesses?
The most common reasons given by survey respondents (general counsel and senior corporate lawyers) for not using arbitration included: the difficulty of appeal, the perception that arbitrators tend to compromise, the concern that arbitrators may not follow the law, a lack of confidence in neutrals, and high costs of arbitration. The study, conducted through Cornell’s Survey Research Institute, was co-sponsored by Pepperdine’s Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution, Cornell University, and the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution (CPR). (Its results are not currently available on-line.)
Arbitration Nation noted that while businesses are increasingly avoiding arbitration, the United States Supreme Court is making it more making it increasingly difficult to avoid the application of harsh arbitration contracts. Of course, most of the new court holdings enforcing pre-dispute mandatory arbitration clauses victimize non-businesses, such as consumers, employees and victims of civil rights abuses. Arbitration Nation links to a new article by Thomas Stipanowich that proposes a rating and ranking system for arbitration processes. We already have ample evidence exempt these group from mandatory arbitration. It is palpably clear that big businesses are using mandatory arbitration to take advantage of consumers, employees and victims of civil rights abuses, using their disparate bargaining power. They are using “arbitration” as a method of gaining immunity for their illegal actions. They are doing this, even as they vote with their feet that they don’t like arbitration for themselves.
Instead of gathering more data, we completely carve out consumers, employees and civil rights plaintiffs from being required to arbitrate. Sure, give them the option of arbitrating a case, but only after a dispute has arisen; never force them into mandatory, binding, pre-dispute arbitration. What I have just described is the approach of the Arbitration Fairness Act.
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