How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 28: Morality and What to Do Next?

This is Chapter 28 of my advice to a hypothetical baby. I'm using this website to act out my time-travel fantasy of going back give myself pointers on how to avoid some of Life’s potholes. If I only knew what I now know . . . All of these chapters (soon to be 100) can be found here.

Why do people do the things they do? How can we make sense of all of this talk about what is "moral," and what is "right" and "wrong." These are an extremely difficult topics. As we already discussed, however, we need to beware systematizers who scold you to based on their mono-rules of morality. That was the main take-away from the previous chapter.

In this chapter, I’ll briefly discuss three approaches to morality that don’t rely on such simplistic rules. The first of these thinkers is Aristotle, who still has so very much to offer to us almost 2,500 years after he lived. His view of what it means to be virtuous is a holistic set of skills that requires lifelong practice. What a change of pace from the mono-rules of other philosophers. I’ll quote from Nancy Sherman’s book, Fabric of Character pp. 2 - 6:

As a whole, the Aristotelian virtues comprise just and decent ways of living as a social being. Included will be the generosity of benefactor, the bravery of citizen, the goodwill and attentiveness of friends, the temperance of a non-lascivious life. But human perfection, on this view, ranges further, to excellences whose objects are less clearly the weal and woe of others, such as a healthy sense of humor and a wit that bites without malice or anger. In the common vernacular nowadays, the excellences of character cover a gamut that is more than merely moral. Good character--literally, what pertains to ethics—is thus more robust than a notion of goodwill or benevolence, common to many moral theories. The full constellation will also include the excellence of a divine-like contemplative activity, and the best sort of happiness will find a place for the pursuit of pure leisure, whose aim and purpose has little to do with social improvement or welfare. Human perfection thus pushes outwards at both limits to include both the more earthly and the more divine.

But even when we restrict ourselves to the so-called ‘moral’ virtues (e.g. temperance, generosity, and courage), their ultimate basis is considerably broader than that of many alternative conceptions of moral virtue. Emotions as well as reason ground the moral response, and these emotions include the wide sentiments of altruism as much as particular attachments to specific others. . .  Pursuing the ends of virtue does not begin with making choices, but with recognizing the circumstances relevant to specific ends. In this sense, character is expressed in what one sees as much as what one does. Knowing how to discern the particulars, Aristotle stresses, is a mark of virtue.

It is not possible to be fully good without having practical wisdom , nor practically wise without having excellence of character  . . . Virtuous agents conceive of their well-being as including the well-being of others. It is not simply that they benefit each other, though to do so is both morally appropriate and especially fine. It is that, in addition, they design together a common good. This expands outwards to the polis and to its civic friendships and contracts inwards to the more intimate friendships of one or two. In both cases, the ends of the life become shared, and similarly the resources for promoting it. Horizons are expanded by the point of view of others, arid in the case of intimate relationships, motives are probed, assessed, and redefined.

Aristotle is talking to those of us who live in the real world, recognizing the complexity of the real world and helping us to navigate as best we can. Again, what a change from the mono-rules!  This real-world applicability and appreciation of nuance is something Aristotle has in common with the Stoics, which we discussed in Chapter 21. 

Here’s another approach, this one from modern times. For a long time, I've been almost obsessed that what we think of as moral is, in a real sense, beautiful and what we think of as immoral is ugly. Based on our reactions to situations that are "moral" and "immoral," there is no possible way that these things are not connected. Such an approach also recognizes that morality is not dictated by any static set of commandments or imperatives. Rather, both morality and art are, at least to some extent, in the eye of the beholder.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 28: Morality and What to Do Next?

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 24: You are a Big Intuitive Elephant Attached to a Tiny Squawky PR Department

Hello again, Hypothetical Baby! I'm back to offer you yet another chapter with a simple lesson. As you grow up, people will question you about some of the decisions you make on “moral.” Issues. By the way, “Moral” is an ambiguous word. We tend to pull it out most often when we are talking about sex, death and distribution of food and the other things you need to stay alive. That reminds me. Someday we will have some good discussions about sex that will consist mostly of letting you watch selected David Attenborough Nature Videos featuring animal sex. You'll find that most human talk about sex is confusing and unhelpful except to let you know that most other people are as awkward discussing it as you will be. I'll give you a one sentence preview. Bank on this: human animal sex is a lot like the sex of other mammals, even though it does not much resemble the exotic sex of snails.

Before we go further on moral decision making, here's a short reminder that I’m trying to teach you things that I did not know while I was growing up. I learned these lessons the hard way. You can find links to all of these (soon to be 100) lessons here.

Now, back to your moral decision-making. After people challenge why you made a particular “moral” decision, you will try to give reasons and words will actually come out of your mouth, but much of the time (to quote "My Cousin Vinny," it will be a bunch of bullshit.

Jonathan Haidt has shown that, for the most part, we don’t make moral decisions using our ability to reason methodically. Moral decision-making is not like math; there is no metric for making moral decisions. Nor does our ability to decide moral issues make use of emotions (which are intricately tied up with our sense of reason, as we discussed in Chapter 11). Most of our moral decision-making is intuitive. Based on sophisticated and entertaining experiments, Haidt has shown that our moral judgements are instantaneous and based on intuitions (akin to what Daniel Kahneman describes as thinking fast). After you’ve made your quick and dirty moral decision, you will employ your slow difficult thinking to concoct excuses that you will publicly present as “reasons” for your decisions.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 24: You are a Big Intuitive Elephant Attached to a Tiny Squawky PR Department

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 11: The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

Chapter 11 – The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

I have returned with another lesson for, you, my hypothetical newborn baby. This is my eleventh lesson and like many of these lessons you will be able to find in this series of what will be 100 lessons, you might find this lesson counter-intuitive. That is why I am going to discuss this topic of emotions in some detail. Let me say, though, that you have been incredibly patient with my long intense lessons and I appreciate your stamina. Then again, after all, you are only a hypothetical baby standing in for my fantasy might time-travel back to warn my younger self some of these things. On second thought, maybe I should leave my younger self alone to figure things out on his own because half the fun is in figuring it all out, right?

There is a long and false history of emotions that continues to this day. It goes like this. There is Reason over here and Emotions over there and they are completely different things even though they are both experienced, sometimes simultaneously, by each human animal. This false dichotomy goes at least as far back as the dualist Rene Descartes, who famously declared that the human mind is separate from the animalistic human body, yet they are somehow yoked together at the specific location of the human pineal gland. Descartes has been highly influential. Although he did not believe that the mind was a divine soul (and religions attacked him for this), many religions have embraced dualism, the entities denominated as the body versus the “soul.”

How is it that so many people are so convinced that the mind is not merely a physical function of the physical body? Historically, they taken educated guesses based upon the scant information that is available. Most of the thinkers weighing in on this topic did not have the benefit of critically important information. Further, most of people convinced of dualism rely on introspection, though cognitive scientists now know that introspection is not a reliable or valid way to determine what is going on "under the hood."

But let’s get back to the false dichotomy of Reason versus Emotion. This dualist approach is confidently and ubiquitously asserted by earnest looking people. This false story seems plausible because emotions do sometimes cause us to lose control. Emotions sometimes do scramble our thoughts. We sometimes need to tamp down emotions, so we can get our head clear. And sometimes, it is only after we set the emotions aside can we seemingly use Reason alone to think clearly. In my work as an attorney I have heard many people claim that it is critically important for judges to be unemotional so that they can make rational legal decisions.

Cognitive scientists almost unanimously disagree. Over the past few decades, old models of cognition that failed to consider the ubiquity of emotions have crumbled. Modern writers and scientists challenging the old models include Daniel Kahneman whose long litany of cognitive fallacies and heuristics have reshaped how we see ourselves. Kahneman’s “prospect theory," for example, has severely crimped economists’ “objective standard” of homo economicus. It turns out that we are much less logical than we’d like to believe. Even our understanding of how words carry meaning is undergoing a sea change. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, best known for their work on conceptual metaphor, have made a strong case that meaning is thoroughly embodied—we understand meaning with our entire emotion-permeated bodies, not with dispassionate brains. The past few decades have not been kind to the long-held idea that a word can have a singular “objective” word meaning that is universal and independent of the emotion-permeated bodies that use that word.

Consider also the many insights of Daniel Goleman, found in his 1995 best seller, Emotional Intelligence. His five components of “emotional intelligence” (self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy and motivation) are key to one’s ability to succeed as an attorney.

Moral Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has painted each of us as cohabited by two personas. This moral intuitionist approach posits that our first (and most dominant) persona is a big elephant ("automatic processes, including emotion, intuition"). The second persona is a much less influential lawyer-like elephant rider, who is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant decides, including dishing out reasons to convince others. Haidt’s approach, bolstered by many experiments, is that "Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second." In sum, “The Emotional tail wags the rational dog.” Haidt approvingly quotes philosopher David Hume who, in 1739 wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Neuroscientist Antonio R. Damasio disagreed, as set forth in Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994). Damasio has delivered substantial evidence demonstrating that emotions must, of necessity, permeate everything we say and do. In Descartes’ Error, Damasio turns Descartes’ model of human beings upside down (p. 128):

The apparatus of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical, does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, traditionally presumed to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.

Failure to see this extensive integration of thought and emotion, Damasio writes, is “Descartes' error.”

What are emotions? Damasio distinguishes emotions from feelings. 

In everyday language we often use the terms interchangeably. This shows how closely connected emotions are with feelings. But for neuroscience, emotions are more or less the complex reactions the body has to certain stimuli. When we are afraid of something, our hearts begin to race, our mouths become dry, our skin turns pale and our muscles contract. This emotional reaction occurs automatically and unconsciously. Feelings occur after we become aware in our brain of such physical changes; only then do we experience the feeling of fear.”

In Descartes’ Error, Damasio introduced the cases of Phineas Gage (long dead) and “Elliot” (a living patient), who both suffered brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal area of their brains.

Gage’s brain damage occurred when a metal tamping rod was accidentally shot through his brain during a blasting operation (he recovered and lived many years). Elliot’s damage occurred as a result of a brain tumor. They were both left with high level intellectual functioning but little ability to experience emotion.

[Gage] seemed to be like a child, with no stable sense of what was important and what was not. He was fitful, intemperate, obscene. It was as if he didn’t care about one thing more than another. He seemed bizarrely detached from the reality of his conduct. So he could not make good choices, and he could not sustain good relationships .

Elliot had been a good role model, husband and father before his tumor. After the tumor, he was:

weirdly cool, detached, and ironic, indifferent even to intrusive discussion of personal matters- as if such remarks were not really about him. He had not previously been this way; he had been an affectionate husband and father. He retained lots of cognitive functions: he could perform calculations, had a fine memory for dates and names, and the ability to discuss abstract topics and world affairs.” After surgery, “he was even less able to care about things or to rank priorities. He could stick obsessively to a task and perform it well; but on a whim he might shift attention and do something completely different. Intelligence testing showed him to be a superior intellect. His emotions were askew, though. He could no longer set priorities or make decisions. He had no sense of the relative importance of any situation.

Elliot could think but he couldn’t judge value. “[T]the cold-bloodedness of Elliot’s reasoning prevented him from assigning different values to different options, and made his decision-making landscape hopelessly flat.”

Gage and Elliot each became somewhat like “Mr. Spock.” Many people would think of this as a potentially good thing, because always-under-control Mr. Spock is one of their favorite TV characters. They also believe that emotions inevitably lead to “irrational” behavior. The conventional wisdom is that people lacking emotions would be more clear-headed and therefore capable. What happened, though, is that both Gage and Elliot suffered severe impairments of judgment. Though they both appeared intelligent after their injuries, they were completely incapable of making sensible personal and business decisions in the absence of emotions.

Damasio also studied other patients and found that people with flat affect were incapable of making decisions. He found that pure rationality is helpless to make decisions. Rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us. He found that emotions are a necessary condition to allow rational decisions to be made, even purely “logical” decisions. “Rationality” describes the way brain-damaged people make decisions. Even “our most refined thoughts . . . use the body as a yardstick.” He was convinced that the traditional views on the nature of rationality were therefore incorrect:

I had been advised early in life that sounds decisions came from a cool head … I had grown up accustomed to thinking that the mechanisms of reason existed in a separate province of the mind, where emotion should not be allowed to intrude, and when I thought of the brain behind that mind, I envisioned separate neural systems for reason and emotion … But now I had before my eyes the coolest, least emotional, intelligent human being one might imagine, and yet his practical reason was so impaired that it produced, in the wanderings of daily life, a succession of mistakes, a perpetual violation of what would be considered socially appropriate and personally advantageous.

Damasio was convinced that reason was “not be as pure as most of us think it is or wish it were, that emotion and feelings may not be intruders in the bastion of reason at all: they may be enmeshed in its networks, for worse and for better.” He found that a reduction in emotion correlates with irrational behavior. This “counterintuitive connection between absent emotion and warped behavior may tell us something about the biological machinery of reason.” The bottom line: pure reason is not sufficient for meaningful decision-making.

It is not only the separation between the mind and brain that is mythical: the separation between mind and body is just as fictional. The mind is embodied in the full sense of the term, not just embrained. The study of the mind is the study of the entire body: the neural processes that are experienced as the mind concern the representation of the body in the brain. Our minds critically depend on our human bodily existences.

Damasio asserts that “Somatic markers” comprise the emotional learning that we have acquired throughout our lives and that we then use for our daily decisions. These markers record emotional reactions to situations. Somatic markers work as emotionally-weighted indicators, steering us away from or toward choices, based on past experience. It’s not that we can necessarily recall the specific past experiences that formed our system of markers, but we feel them and they allow us evaluate some options over others. These emotion-laden markers help us to rank our options.

The brain does not merely record advance in the world but “also records how the body explores the world and reacts to it.” Even though these neurological processes may occur in various portions of the brain, people "experience and act on them in a unified coherent manner: the records that bind together all these fragmented activities "are embodied in ensembles of neurons” Damasio refers to as “convergence zones,” where

The axons of feedforward projecting neurons from one part of the brain converge and join with reciprocally divergent feedback projections from other regions. When a reactivation within the convergence zones stimulates the feedback projections, many anatomically separate and widely distributed neuron ensembles fire simultaneously and reconstruct previous patterns of mental activity.

“Brain and Language,” Scientific American, 89-91 (September 1992).

Far from being a limitation or distraction, then, emotion is an integral part of cognition. Emotion constructs and maintains the somatic markers that allow us to evaluate the desirability of our actions.

In Damasio’s view, our entire experienced world is thus filled with emotional peaks and valleys that constitute our map of what matters to us. There are no purely objective rational thoughts. Every thing on this inner map is infused with an emotional valence that pulls us toward it or pushes us away. Without this all-encompassing emotional map, no amount of analytical intelligence, not even a great intelligence, has the capacity to care about the world enough to employ logic or reasoning abilities. He makes the strong claim that not only does the intellect interweave complexly with our emotions. That is why pure rationality is helpless to make decisions and rational thought, devoid of emotion, paralyzes us.

Since I’m an attorney let’s imagine that Star Trek’s Mr. Spock went to law school, he would make a terrible lawyer because he would be at a loss to care about anything. He would further lack the capacity to know what anyone else cares about or even to care about what anyone else cares about. Even Spock’s great knowledge base and his sense of logic would leave him at a complete standstill. He would not know what to do next without an biologically-based emotion-sculpted landscape to push and pull him in various directions based on (oftentimes subconscious) survival needs.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 11: The False Dichotomy of Reason versus Emotions

About Mass Formation Hypnosis

Dr. Robert Malone recently discussed "Mass Formation Hypnosis" on Joe Rogan's show:

I decided to do a deeper dive into this topic.  Clinical Psychologist Dr. Mattias Desmet discusses Mass Formation Hypnosis with Max Blumenthal in this video:

As Desmet describes at 14 min (and summarizes at 19:45), there are four conditions for MFP:

1. Lack of social bonds

2. Lack of meaning making

3. High levels of free floating anxiety. They don't know why they are anxious and it is very distressing/painful for humans to experience because of the lack of control, resulting in risk of developing panic attack. They actively look for something to which they can attach the free-floating anxiety, something they can control.

4. High levels of free floating frustration and aggression

What happens when these conditions exist? Desmet explains: A narrative is disseminated that A) indicates an object for the anxiety and B) offers a strategy/solution for this object of anxiety. As a result of this narrative, all of the free-floating anxiety attaches to the object of anxiety offered by the narrative, resulting in a over-willingness to participate in the strategy.

In present times, the object of the anxiety is the virus and the strategy is the lockdown, social distancing and other corona measures. MFH allows people to feel that they can control their anxiety by participating in the strategy. When large groups of people participate in the strategy, it leads to a new social bond, new connectedness, a new solidarity, and this leads to a new sense-making in life. In other words, life becomes meaningful through the heroic struggle with the object of anxiety (the virus). COVID led to a new solidarity because everyone participated in a heroic collective battle with the virus. As social beings, we switched from isolation to the new strong social bond (or solidarity) with large masses of other people. This is why people enthusiastically buy into the corona narrative even if it is utterly absurd. For those not caught up in MFH, they are amazed that others so often utter such absurdities.

Those caught up in the narrative don't do so because the narrative (the set of extreme COVID measures) is correct. Rather, they do so because they seek the new powerful social bonds. Many of the measures are not relevant or true, but they function as rituals in which people participate in order to connect to the masses of others caught up in the narrative. The more absurd and unscientific the COVID measures and the more that sacrifice is demanded, the better the measures function as rituals. This fits the general function of rituals: a behavior that you participate in not because it is functional to protect you from the virus, but to show to the tribe/collective that the collective is more important than the individual. You would be in error to think that as COVID measures become more absurd, more people will wake up to the insanity, but that is an illusion. The more absurd the measures become, the more blinded certain people will become.

Mass Formation is a type of hypnosis. In hypnosis, the attention of an individual is hyper-focused on a very small part of reality, making the rest of reality disappear into darkness. People caught up don't realize that in obsessing over the COVID measures, they are losing much else, meaning that they lose interest in cost/benefit analyses. Even substantial losses are a small price to pay in order for one to feel that one is part of the heroic struggle against COVID. This has led to an aggressive stance toward heterodox outsiders, people who question the narrative, such as Dr. Robert Malone. The masses always need a common enemy, which includes the virus as well as the people who don't fall completely in line.

At Min 30, Blumenthal applies the theory to many political movements in sadomasochistic fashion. These phenomenon are always destructive and self-destructive. Desmet adds: The exclusive focus on one part of reality to the neglect of the rest of reality inevitably leads to self-destruction. George Orwell noticed that the masses, the crowd, exists because it has to channel/satisfy its frustration/aggression and it needs to attach its anxiety to a certain object--and once an object of anxiety is destroyed, the crowd seeks a new object of anxiety, which also must be destroyed. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism. She noticed the in its effort to keep reattaching its aggression to new objects of anxiety, the masses become a monster and the system destroys itself.

Desmet fears that we are seeing the emergence of a new totalitarian state, exactly as Hannah Arendt predicted, not led by gang leaders but by dull bureaucrats and technocrats, pursuant to her concept of the banality of evil. We can see this by the extreme COVID response in Australia. These measure are palpably absurd to those not caught up in the narrative. Arendt warned: once you accept the starting point, there is no stopping. You feel compelled to accept all the rest.

This theory of Mass Formation Hypnosis would appear to have ubiquitous applications--wherever anxiety is widespread. This theory has screamingly obvious application to the formation of many religions, for example.

Relevant to the above: Joe Rogan's guest, Dr. Robert Malone was recently deplatformed by Twitter, a stunning development, given Malone's credentials:

Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment.

Continue ReadingAbout Mass Formation Hypnosis

Jonathan Haidt: “We Were Fooled in the 1990s into Thinking that Democracy was Easy.”

What happened to progress in the US? It seemed like we had a plan and a good track record for progress back in the 1990s. A lot of things happened, of course. That is the topic of this discussion involving Jonathan Haidt and John Wood Jr and April Lawson. Here's how Haidt set the table for the longer discussion:

We can go back to some of the ideas in The Righteous Mind, because that's the summary of my own work as a social psychologist who studies morality. What I've always tried to do in my work is look at evolution. What is human nature. How did it evolve. [What is the] interplay of human nature with culture? And of course, everything can change over the course of just a few decades, too. We're very dynamic species.

What I'd like to put on the put on the table here first: let's really lower our expectations for humanity. Okay. Now, this sounds depressing. But let's be serious here. What kind of creatures, are we? We are primates who evolved to live in small groups that dominate territory, in competition with other groups were really, really good at coming together to fight those other groups. Part of our preparation for doing that, I believe, is the psychology of religion, sacredness, tribal rituals. We have all this really complicated stuff we do that binds us to each other. This is a human universal. Every group has rituals. I'm a big fan of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.

And so from that kind of perspective we ought to still be pre-civilization times with very high rates of murder. And somehow we escaped that. Somehow we've had this incredible ascent. This unbelievably rapid ascent, in which we've gotten wealthier, smarter, healthier. We've made extraordinary progress on women's rights, animal rights, gay rights, the concern about the environment. So let's start by appreciating our lowly origins as really violent tribal creatures, and the way that we've rocketed up from

Okay, now, in the last 10 or so, years, 10 to 20 years, we've had a little bit of a come-down. I really want to put this not just in an evolutionary perspective, but in a recent historical perspective, because this, I think, is the key to understanding what is happening to us now. It is that we were fooled in the 1990s into thinking that democracy was easy. The founding fathers were under no such illusion. They knew that democracy is prone to faction. That's what Madison wrote about, especially in Federalist 10. They knew that democracy is generally self-destructed, so they gave us all kinds of safeguards, They tried to create a system that would not be so prone, a system in which these tribal, irrational emotional creatures might actually live together. And it worked. It worked pretty well. And it worked badly at times.

But by the 1990s, we had the the mistaken view, that if we just wait for Iran, and Russia and North Korea to develop market economies, they'll get prosperous, their people will demand rights. And this was true for China too. That people will demand rights. Liberal democracies will break out everywhere. Liberal democracies are the endpoint, the end of history.

And so that's the way those of us who live through--I'm older than you guys--but the late 20th century was an incredibly dangerous and an exciting time in which there was a victor and it was liberal democracy. Okay, but like in a lot of movies where it seems like there's an early denouement and everything's great? Well, we still have a lot of stuff to go and in the 21st century, things have really come down from there. So that's the backstory.

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt: “We Were Fooled in the 1990s into Thinking that Democracy was Easy.”