How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 23: What Are You Supposed to Do with Your Life on Planet Earth?

Even though you are a hypothetical baby, you will need to start figuring out what you are going to do with your presumably long hypothetical life. That is today's topic.

Louis CK has a bit where he says that older people like me have it easy, because we have most of our life behind us—maybe I’ll only need to buy one more coat in my last 25 years or so. A youngster like you, however has a ton of decisions to make over a period of decades, so how will you make use of this life you have been given? I'm trying to teach you things that I did not know while I was growing up, but I’m out of my league here. This will totally be your life, not mine at all. I’m only here to offer some navigation tools, not a purpose, not a “meaning of life” for you. By the way, all of these lessons (soon to be 100) can be found here.

But, again, we need to focus on your personal challenge: what you should do with your life. Perhaps this will remain a nonstop question until you reach old age and look backwards. Yes. I'm sure of it. It would be too damned hard to answer this question when you are young, even when you are a young adult, because you will have no basis for making even a wild guess. You’ve barely started out and the rate of change of culture and technology has reached dizzying speeds lately. And it's really not fair to ask this question to someone who has never before lived a life. But people will ask you over and over and you'll probably say something. What will you say? Cat Stevens asked the question in a song that I love:

Oh very young

What will you leave us this time?

You're only dancing on this Earth for a short while

Oh very young,

What will you leave us this time?

The Cat's song made it sound like Life will be happy travels, but it might not be happy at all. You’ll find out, of course, but only by taking one step after another. And another and another, and then you’ll look back. And you’ll look in your mirror. And you’ll squint as you look forward. And you’ll look back again and again and it might or might not make any sense. You might love your life or you might hate it. You might even commit suicide. I wish you the best, of course, but this is not a rehearsal. You are now using live ammunition. As Shakespeare wrote in MacBeth, this is a tale told over and over. It's only fair that I tell you that life can be wonderful or dangerous (or some combination) and it has sad endings for many of us:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

If you are lucky enough to get old and if you then look back at your life, you still might not understand why you did the things you did. Writer Harlan Ellison arrived at no such insights:

[My] fourth marriage just sort of happened: It seemed like a good idea at the time. In fact—and this is the core of all my wisdom about love—whenever we try to explain why we have done any particular thing, whether it’s buying T-bills or why we would live in a house in the mountains or why we took the trip to Lake Ronkonkoma, or whatever it was, the only rationale that ever rings with honesty is: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” We’re really no smarter than cactus or wolverines or plankton; and the things we do, we always like to justify them, find logical reasons for them; and then you go to court later and the judge says, “Well, didn’t you know that it was doomed from the start?” I’m waiting for someone to say to the judge, “Because, schmuck, I’m no smarter than you."

From A Curmudgeon’s Garden of Love, Compiled and edited by Jon Winokur, p. 50 (1991).

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 23: What Are You Supposed to Do with Your Life on Planet Earth?

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 20: Good and Bad and Certainty

Chapter 20 - Good and Bad and Certainty

I have returned to challenge your tiny baby brain and not a moment too soon because you are already twenty chapters old! Yes, I admit, you actually a hypothetical baby and I am using this platform to confess that I did not know these things while I was growing up. I learned all of these lessons the hard way. You can find links to all of these (soon to be 100) lessons in one convenient place: Here.

Today's Warning: Please be careful when you hear human animals talking about things that are “good” and “bad.” Most often, when human animals say something is “good,” they are telling you that something  made/makes them happy regardless of whether A) it makes other people unhappy or B) whether it will ultimately make you incredibly sad. We are such a myopic species (Remember WYSIATI).

Except for low-lying fruit on the Maslovian Pyramid, things like having food and shelter and avoiding unwanted physical pain and death, people constantly disagree about what is good and bad. The subjects of these disagreements are everywhere. They include such things as good and bad food, cities, politicians, cars, jobs, art, children, pets, technology, habits, websites, books, moral choices, friends and romantic partners.

Here's another important lesson about “good” and “bad” things, my little pal. You will grow up in a complex adaptive system (your environment) and you yourself are a complex adaptive system. This double-complexity means that crazy-seeming things will often happen to you out of the blue. And to everyone else you know too. Yet we are incredibly arrogant in our ignorance.  Despite all of our ignorance, we continue to put human brains on extremely high and privileged pedestals. In the end, though, "A physicist is an atom’s way of knowing about atoms."

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 20: Good and Bad and Certainty

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 19: The Astounding Sameness of Human Animals

Chapter 19: The Astounding Sameness of Human Animals

Hello again, hypothetical baby who I am striving valiantly to help by imparting thick gobs of hard-earned wisdom. This is Chapter 19 of a series of writings that some people doubtless feel is way too long already. Yet this is ONLY Chapter 19 and I will keep imparting until I get to Chapter 100.  You can find all of the finished chapters listed here.

Baby, you and I have spent a lot of hypothetical time together, that’s for sure. And I’ve come to like and respect you, even though you have yet to say a single word. Sure, it’s not an ideal conversation, but you, in your unlimited hypothetical patience are allowing me to process and share some of the ideas I had to learn the hard way. Today I’m going to break some important news to you: You are not special in the grand scheme of things.

I know. I know. You would silently protest at this point if you had any understanding of what I was saying to you. I will now address your hypothetical objections. Yes, I know that you are special in the sense that you wouldn’t have been here at all unless the sperm that helped create you was the fastest swimmer out 200 million sperm. Sure, let’s have a round of applause for that sperm! And yes, that is interesting that you wouldn’t have been born if any one of your 1,000 great great great great great great great great great grandparents hadn’t had sex at exactly the right day and hour. I’m not going to hit you with a low blow, explaining that if you hadn’t been born, someone else would probably have been born instead of you. It seems so crass to say that, but look, there are almost 8 billion people on this planet and those things that you think make you "extraordinary" are also true of everyone else.  Further, we ain’t hurtin’ for people. You want people, we’ve got lots and lots of people here on this planet.

So yes, you are lucky that you actually made it onto this planet, but that doesn’t make you any more special than the other 8 Billion. If Martian Anthropologists watched us from afar, I absolutely guarantee that they would never ever write in their green-colored journals that you, or anyone else, was special. To them, we would look like a bunch of ants running around. Getting born, growing, procreating and dying by the millions. Take a look at the World-o-Meter.  Today so far, there have been 375,000 births but only 157,657 deaths. So far this year, 23 Million people have been born and 9,986,531 have died.

Those Martians would look at each other and exclaim only this: “Will you look at all of those human animals!” before taking a big scoop of us in the middle of the night (only a few hundred thousand, so the rest of us don’t notice) and taking them back to Mars to use on scientific experiments.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 19: The Astounding Sameness of Human Animals

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

I’m back again with more advice for a hypothetical newborn baby. This is my tenth lesson on how to thrive in the complex world.

You will be surrounded by people who insist that there are clearly defined “right” and “wrong” things. This dichotomy doesn't work very well, of course, because many things are not clearly right or wrong and sometimes they seem both right and wrong or neither right or wrong, depending on who is calling the balls and strikes. Many people will tell you that they have “figured things out” with a formula or a set of holy commandments and they will offer to help you understand what you should or should not do in your life. Your default setting should be to not trust any of these people.

Let’s start with the claim that human animals can use their “reason” to figure our right and wrong. The problem is that the brain was not designed to pursue the truth. Rather, it was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. The evidence is everywhere; reason often fails to deliver rational results—behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for exposing many of the heuristics, fallacies and biases—you can delve right in (after you learn to read) by picking up a copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Not only is Reason often not helpful. It is often detrimental to rationality. People “systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions.” Reason tends to “seek justification and not truth.” Human reasoning is severely distorted by the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning and reason-based choice. Here is an excerpt from an article by Mercier and Sperber, “Why Humans Reason”:

Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes

So beware of the claim that reasoning will figure out what is right or wrong.

Also beware of that you can figure out morality by referring to simple principles like the Golden Rule. First of all, no, the Golden Rule wasn’t invented by Jesus (as many people will tell you). It has been around since at least 2000 BC. Please notice that there is something weird about The Golden Rule. Must we really make reference to what we would want in order to understand that we should be nice to others? Why shouldn’t the Golden Rule be shorter, something like “Be Nice” or “Don’t be a dick”?

Watch out for people who tell you that people need the promise of heaven and threat of hell in order to live a worthy life. That is a particularly insane way of looking at humanity. If you are kept in in line only by the threat of hell, you are one fucked-up person. How about just be good to others for the sake of being a good person?

Watch out for people who tell you that rules will guide you with regard to morality. Rules cannot do any such thing. If one can determine morality based on reason or rules, the people who believe in rules should please tell me: How shall I calculate the amount of money it would be appropriate to give to the next homeless person I encounter? What do the Ten Commandments say about whether to give the homeless person any money at all?

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle ferociously attacked the idea that rules can form the basis for any moral system. As Aristotle explained in detail, there are simply too many exceptions to even the most basic moral rules; we often kill, steal and covet in ways that are socially applauded. In order to actually apply any rule, we need to invoke (often subconsciously) a set of meta-rules for deciding when and how to apply that rule, and a meta-meta system of rules for knowing how to apply those meta rules, etc. Written sets of rules are intrinsically incomplete; they are always subject to further elaboration and explanation. The application of rules thus amounts to a fuzzy eternal regress, the end result of which is that we are actually self-legislating, though we project the rule onto our conduct as our infallible authority.

There is a modern tangible analogue to illustrate Aristotle’s concerns about the application of rules. It’s the American legal system, which relies upon thousands of common law cases to enable the interpretation of even simple-seeming Constitutional concepts (e.g., “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech . . .”). The thousands of common law cases end up being the big tail wagging the little First Amendment dog, so much so that no one can legitimately claim to understand the First Amendment without having studied hundreds of pages of case law. In both moral dilemmas and the legal system, it’s often not a matter of simply “invoking” or “applying” a rule; rather, it’s about making sense of the rule in a particular situation after spending substantial energy to understand the rule, and then working hard to achieve an equitable result in the context of the written law.

Thoughtful people know that rules don’t guide moral behavior. Much more often, they are the post-hoc justification. Law Professor Steven Winter has studied rules at length, concluding that " there's a lot more space than we'd think in 'following the rules."'

[T]he real world of human action is too varied and complex to be captured by any set of categorical structures. It is not so much that every rule has a few comers that do not quite fit, as it is that life's diversity and complexity cannot be contained within square comers. Indeed, as long as we treat categories as rigid little boxes, any set of boxes we devise will be either too few to do like justice or too many to be workable.

Winter quotes Stanley Fish, who wrote: "Every rule is a rule of thumb."

Philosopher Andy Clark also points out the significant limitations of moral rules:

The attempt to condense [legal] expertise . . . into a set of rules and principles that can be economically expressed by a few sentences of public language may thus be wildly optimistic, akin to trying to reduce a dog's olfactory skills to a small body of prose.

Clark reconceptualizes rules as "guides and signposts" that enable collaborative exploration "rather than as failed attempts to capture the rich structure of our individual . . . knowledge." Researching prior cases provides a menu of suggestions for discussing and collaborating (through briefing and oral arguments) to attempt to resolve difficult legal issues.

We’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic. We haven’t even discussed Kant’s hopelessly flawed categorical imperative or the equally flawed theory of utilitarianism. That said, I hope I have disabused you of any temptation to explain morality in terms of “reason” or “rules.”

Beware, too, that those people who most often claim to know how to calculate morality are living lives all-too-similar to the rest of us in terms of selfishness versus altruism.

We aren’t done talking about We’ll talk more about morality later, especially Jonathan Haidt’s engaging discussions regarding social intuitionism and the multiple moral foundations.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 10: Moral Behavior cannot be Determined by Using Reason or Rules

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body

Hello again, newborn baby. I’m here again to give you advice on many important topics. This is our seventh visit, the seventh chapter to this 100-chapter story.

Today we are going to talk about your amazing human animal body. First of all, you don’t have a body. Rather, you are a body. “You” is shorthand for trillions of cells that somehow work together. When “you” decide you are hungry, that is actually trillions of microscopic cells coordinating their separate energies into a few macroscopic actions: crying for milk, sucking and then swallowing the milk. How did that miracle of coordination happen? Honest people don’t claim to know.

All of this is pre-verbal for newborns like you—done without the use of words. This seemingly makes you brilliant but actually this puts you into the same predicament as chimpanzees, pigs, mice and earthworms. Your amazing body almost entirely takes care of itself without needing any words at all. And when you finally develop language, you’ll have only the illusion that those words are pulling the strings, whereas your words are only an epiphenomenon. Whenever you “decide” to say “hello,” something else made you “decide.” Your words don’t cause your words, because that would be an eternal regress. We will save the rest of this dangerous topic for another day, however.

People think they know their bodies, but they know almost nothing. We don’t even know how it is that “we” control our breathing or how the body does this automatically when “we” ignore it. We don’t even know how we think thoughts or imagine the ocean. We don't know how we keep from falling over as we run down the sidewalk on our two peg legs. We don’t even know how it is that we are able to start peeing. Or how we digested yesterday’s meal.

Some people will protest and claim that we do know a lot of things. I agree. We know a LOT of things and it is wonderfully useful to know those things. This knowledge allows us to invent smartphones, medicines and rockets. But we never get totally to the bottom of anything. We think we are explaining, but we are only describing. As I was once told by philosopher Andy Clark, “An explanation is a description that makes us feel good.” We have only thin explanations in a deep world. As Nietzsche said,

Just beyond experience!– Even great spirits have only their five fingers breadth of experience – just beyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity begins.

Maybe we don't fully and deeply understand anything but certainly we can make things, right? Not really. We can only rearrange things. As Carl Sagan said, ““If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Making things worse, when we do rearrange things, they always eventually fall apart, as Heraclitus noticed thousands of years ago.

We appear to be dynamic patterns rather than bodies. The stuff of the universe moves in and out of us, yet somehow the pattern and form our bodies more or less remains. We are thus like flames, though far more complex. We turn bananas into poop to assist our largely subconscious effort to pass our genes to the next generation. How's that for complexity, especially when we figured out how to transport our bananas to our city from 1,000 miles away by using a flying aluminum tube?

We like to say that we understand basic things like how our body works, but that is mostly to keep our sanity. We say lots of things to reassure ourselves, yet we don't even know how our words convey meaning from person to person. We blithely accept words as substitutes for deep understanding because we must. We are experts at concealing our ignorance of our own bodies. Nietzsche had a lot to say about this self-ignorance:

Does nature not conceal most things from him-even concerning his own body, in order to confine and lock him within a proud deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key. And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous-as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger.

Now, back your body. It is more complex than you will ever be able to imagine, multiplied by fifty trillion. Your liver is an immense chemical factory packed into one side of your abdomen and it works extremely well even though we don’t have any deep knowledge of how it works. We notice correlations and we attribute causation, but the magic is in the complex fluid movements and as we drill down from biology to physics to quantum physics, the ultimate “things” we would like identify as the objects of our explanations smear into wave patterns.

OK. Maybe that is too esoteric. Let's simplify. Have you ever considered your ankles? Mundane ordinary ankles. They are a collection of bones so small you can almost wrap your hand around them, yet they hold up your body all day long and they can last for 100 years. Even one ankle can hold up your entire body weight, even if you hop. How is that possible. If they get injured they usually fix themselves. How is that possible?

How is it possible that the body is so good at patterns of actions such as peristalsis, vomiting, sneezing and orgasms, where the body orchestrates a complex cascade of mini-actions? And we haven’t yet mentioned the brain, three pounds of such “mind-blowing” complexity that it allows us to fire up our memory and imagine walking through our house! We can generate mental representations in such exquisite detail that we can find our keys while lying in bed with our eyes closed! “I left my keys on the back porch!” And it doesn't help us to blithely say that our brain is like a computer. Our brain does not work like a modern computer. It doesn't have architecture anything like a computer. Further, everything thought we think is infused with emotional valence.

Instead of working like a store-bought computer our brain seem to run on connectionist architecture that excels at pattern matching. We’re “good at frisbee, but bad at math.” That’s another observation by Andy Clark. We have thinking meat in our brains. How does meat think? How is that possible? If all of this unnerves you, perhaps you would rather conclude that thinking goes on somewhere other than in a body, perhaps in a disembodied soul. That is a dramatic fail.As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio concluded: "There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body."

We have immune systems that are factories of natural selection (and much more) within our own bodies. They identify and neutralize complex threats without requiring us to think about those threats. How powerful are immune systems? When someone dies, their body starts to “rot” within a few hours. But the bugs and microorganisms that devour bodies at death are always trying to devour our living bodies too, but bodies, relying on their immune systems, usually beats the invaders decisively. That’s how powerful your immune system is. Without a functioning immune system, a newborn baby like you would never make it to two days of age.

On a microscopic level, there is probably a lot more going on in our bodies than we even want to know. Yesterday, for example, you were oblivious that your body defeated pre-cancerous cell that would have replicated and killed you in a year. Again, it’s probably a really good thing that “you” aren’t needed to keep your body running well. If you were in charge of your body, all of the harrowing microscopic things going on underneath your skin would scare the shit out of you and you wouldn’t have a clue about what to do about any of this.

As you grow up, look at your hands often and marvel at them. Think about how amazing they are, giving you the power to grasp and sense and fight and caress. The hand: a multi-function tool if there ever was one. Your hands are all the evidence you need that your body is extraordinary.

And now please note that we’ve only discussed a few of your amazing body parts. There are hundreds more, including your tiny ear bones which, millions of years, ago served as jaw bones in our reptile ancestors.

Take care of your body. It’s more amazing than anything a science-fiction writer could imagine. Be good to it. Thank the stars that you inherited something so incredibly complex and functionl that defies deep explanation.

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 7: Your Amazing Body