Ukraine: Forbidden Discussions

I'm despondent that the mainstream news outlets are so intensely jingoistic, so focused on the logistics of war, so unwilling to look into the mirror. This is not surprising given the vast numbers of retired military and spy state talking heads who now work for the left leaning MSM. It's also unsurprising given that this is how war propaganda always works, illustrated brilliantly by "War Made Easy."

Here are a three snippets of conversation that I with the news media would take much more seriously:

First, this is from Freddie DeBoer's Substack:

[R]ight now, [the United States is] investing hideous amounts of treasure to maintain an order that we can’t afford and that no one really believes we can maintain. Perhaps the Ukrainians will beat back the Russians and they’ll be welcomed into NATO and we can all cheer that the good guys won. But hegemony does not last forever, and sooner or later you’re going to have to ask more adult, more useful questions than, “who’s the goodie, and who’s the baddie?” Otherwise the superpower eventually goes down the hard way.

I find myself considering this quote from a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

When the U.S. drove five waves of NATO expansion eastward all the way to Russia’s doorstep and deployed advanced offensive strategic weapons in breach of its assurances to Russia, did it ever think about the consequences of pushing a big country to the wall?

It doesn’t take sympathy for Putin to see that this is a very good question.

Second, Tulsi Gabbard tweeted this:

Third, Matt Taibbi reminds us that history matters:

I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that’s being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there.

Once, Putin’s KGB past, far from being seen as a negative, was viewed with relief by the American diplomatic community, which had been exhausted by the organizational incompetence of our vodka-soaked first partner, Boris Yeltsin. Putin by contrast was “a man we can do business with,” a “liberal, humane, and decent European” of “alert, controlled poise” and “well-briefed acuity,” who was open to anything, even Russia joining NATO. “I don’t see why not,” Putin said. “I would not rule out such a possibility.”

Fourth, this excerpt is from Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of our tribal dysfunction that mushroom when that exciting topic of war hits the tabletop:

In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those warning of the possible dangers of U.S. involvement were assured that such concerns were baseless. The prevailing line insisted that nobody in Washington is even considering let alone advocating that the U.S. become militarily involved in a conflict with Russia. That the concern was based not on the belief that the U.S. would actively seek such a war, but rather on the oft-unintended consequences of being swamped with war propaganda and the high levels of tribalism, jingoism and emotionalism that accompany it, was ignored. It did not matter how many wars one could point to in history that began unintentionally, with unchecked, dangerous tensions spiraling out of control. Anyone warning of this obviously dangerous possibility was met with the “straw man” cliché: you are arguing against a position that literally nobody in D.C. is defending.

. . .

There is a reason I devoted the first fifteen minutes of my live video broadcast on Thursday about Ukraine not to the history that led us here and the substance of the conflict (I discussed that in the second half), but instead to the climate that arises whenever a new war erupts, instantly creating propaganda-driven, dissent-free consensus. There is no propaganda as potent or powerful as war propaganda. It seems that one must have lived through it at least once, as an engaged adult, to understand how it functions, how it manipulates and distorts, and how one can resist being consumed by it.

I will end with a photo:

Continue ReadingUkraine: Forbidden Discussions

How to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

Hello again, hypothetical newborn baby!  I'm here to teach you some of the many Life Lessons I was forced to learn the hard way.  Here are all fourteen lessons in one easy link. 

Let's start off by noting that at this point in your life your parents, your crib, your blanket . . . and me, of course are your entire universe. That's all you've got in front of you, yet you are feeling like there is nothing else that could be worthwhile and there is nothing at all outside of your bedroom door.

Let me tell you about my situation. My toe is hurting.  Nothing major, but it's red and throbbing. When I think about my hurting toe, that thought gets quite big in my consciousness. It almost seems like my throbbing toe is the only thing in the universe.

Here's another example: When I'm thinking about a lawsuit while walking to court through the downtown area, I'm barely aware of anything other than what I'm going to tell the judge when I arrive. I'm not noticing any other people or any cars or that new restaurant going up even though those thing are right in front of me as I walk. Isn’t it weird how our ability to attend to things is so incredibly limited?

Using a technique called conversation shadowing, psychologists Broadbent and Treisman demonstrated that one’s ability to absorb multiple simultaneous conversations is severely limited. Attention is bottlenecked at the site of working memory  during perception. In 1956, George Miller pointed, “[T]he span of absolute judgment and the span of immediate memory impose severe limitations on the amount of information that we are able to receive, process and remember.” George A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information." Given that humans have such tiny attentional windows, it is surprising the extent to which we take it for granted that we share the same world. The real world is laughingly beyond our capacity to fathom without rampant simplification. Just because we can say the phrase "the world" doesn't mean we can comprehend more than a trillionth of it at any particular moment.

This is one of the downsides to having a human body. We are incredibly limited in what we can attend to at each moment. That's Part One of a two-part whammy that affects us human animals every hour of every day. This attentional limitation in attention interacts with an equally important phenomenon that I have long thought of as the “illusion of fullness." I'm referring to this: it seems like whatever we are currently seeing or pondering, it's somehow enough for us to feel well-informed when the stream of information we are getting is almost nothing at all.

Morgan House wrote the following in “Ideas that Changed my Life”:

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works. People believe what they’ve seen happen exponentially more than what they read about has happened to other people, if they read about other people at all. We’re all biased to our own personal history. Everyone. If you’ve lived through hyperinflation, or a 50% bear market, or were born to rich parents, or have been discriminated against, you both understand something that people who haven’t experienced those things never will, but you’ll also likely overestimate the prevalence of those things happening again, or happening to other people.
It's like we see the world through fish-eye lenses. The things that are in front of us look very big, indeed. Yet the things that are not directly in front of us are barely visible or not visible at all. Our perceptual machinery make us (and I’m writing this in a non-judgmental way) extremely self-centered. We are condemned to make severely overconfident and skewed generalizations and to engage in a lifelong adventure of sense-making based on not-nearly-enough awareness about the billion ring circus into which we have been plopped. Each of us is only one out of 8 billion people. You are almost nothing at all in the scheme of things and you are experiencing only the tiniest speck of what is going on, yet it feels like you are sitting in the front row VIP seat to the most important event in the universe.

It takes conscious effort to know what is happening outside of ourselves. This makes it easy to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own story, justifying our routine of putting half of our conscious horsepower to work doing PR, in-person or on Facebook, tooting to everyone who will listen that we are saving the planet by switching to LED bulbs or whatever.

Skip this paragraph if want to continue being the hero of your own story. Human cognitive machinery massively distorts our sense of morality. With very little effort, we can cause any troublesome moral issue to vanish simply by not paying attention to it. In many cases we develop (sometimes consciously at first) deeply ingrained habits of not paying attention to certain aspects of the world, making our immorality conveniently unconscious. Here's a common habit among people who are financially comfortable: Not-thinking that on here on our planet, a child starves to death every 5 seconds. If you have habituated yourself to not-think about this horrible and undeniable fact, it is quite easy to blow a large sums of money in clear conscience on things like haircuts for your poodle, vacations in far-flung places and steady streams of meals at high-priced restaurants. If this troublesome thought ever bubbles up into consciousness, we scrub away all traces of inchoate guilt by reminding ourselves that everyone else we know is behaves much like us and then we run off to purchase some new porch furniture for our vacation home, thus pushing thoughts of child starvation off the tiny stage of attention. If by some chance we experience the prickly thought we are hypocritical, immoral and selfish because we purposely don't think about starving children, we can take care of that troublesome thought too by thinking about something else. We can fix most of our most disturbing thoughts merely by thinking about something else.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingHow to Be a Human Animal, Chapter 14: You Have Almost No Understanding of What is Going On.

How to be a Human Animal, Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

One of the main reasons I am engaging in this 100-Day Creative Project is to find a new voice as a writer of essays.Since 2006, I have written more than 7,000 articles here at Dangerous Intersection. Since becoming an attorney in 2006, I have drafted thousands of court filings, including hundreds of lengthy appellate briefs. Doing so much of this work doesn’t mean that I’m good at it, but I do think I’ve learned a lot of things along the way and I do seem to be competent at that writing style.

But I want to learn how to be a better writer by exploring new styles. Most of my writing to this point has been technical and precision advocacy of a point of view. I am using this Project to explore a new style of writing. Still persuasive, but also more fluid, more free, more creative and with a dash of humor here and there. The only way I'll know to get better at a new style is to have a lot of reps. Over and over for 100 days would be a good start. I’ve addressed (in my former writings) many of the ideas I am discussing in my lessons for “the newborn baby,” but I’m now working to present them in newer ways that might be more effective for a different audience. I hope t break down some old writing habits so that I can draw from heretofore rather quiescent parts of my brain. I hope those parts have been merely sleeping and that they haven’t completely died off.

I was inspired to create new styles of articles as my 100 Day Project after enjoying about a dozen essays by Freddie DeBoer, who describes himself as a “Marxist of an old-school variety.” https://dangerousintersection.org/2022/02/15/the-type-of-real-life-government-freddie-deboer-can-believe-in/ With his writing, Freddie successfully does a lot of the things that I want to do better. This Project will thus be a 100-step experiment and it’s clearly off to an uneven start, although I am clearly writing in a more unvarnished and less edited style (as you can see from the typos). I am forcing myself to write a lot and to do it more spontaneously. I am keeping in mind Mario Andretti's admonition: "If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough." I'm not striving for any length of these essays, but I am noticing that by the time I've emptied out my quiver, I've spilled out more than 1,000 words, which is a fairly grueling pace for me in the context of the other demands (including self-demands) I face in my life.

I am consciously trying to modify many deeply ingrained and ossified writing habits. I hope that by the end of this project I will have noticeably moved the needle regarding my style. It would be fun to see a difference by the hundredth essay, but more importantly, that the difference is for the better, which is not a given when one screws with some that has worked reasonably well. For more insight into a few of the things I'm aiming to accomplish, here's an excerpt from my new writing guru Freddie DeBoer’s recent article: “If you Absolutely Must: a brief guide to writing and selling short-form argumentative nonfiction from a somewhat reluctant professional writer.”

Your politics are your affair. But fear all political fads, resist all political peer pressure, and be ruthless in asking yourself whether you actually hold a position or if you are just afraid of the consequences of appearing to not hold it. Then express yourself. Whatever you do, be weird. As a consumer of writing, please, for me, be weird. Whatever this profession needs, it does not need more hall monitors or commissars and it does not need more writers who seem to have nothing to offer beyond looking down their glasses at the world in shrill derision. That territory is covered. That corner has been taken. The whole point of writing, the only reason to have an alphabet, is to say what no one else is saying. To be singular. What is the value of replicating words that have already appeared in the same order? You can’t choose to be good and you can’t choose to be successful. But you can choose to be your own.

Be brave and tell the truth. Absolutely everyone and everything in the life you are choosing will try to force you to conform. They will hate you if you break ranks, but they’ll hate you if you say something inoffensive but easily misrepresented too. All they want is to root out heretics; it’s the only thing that makes them feel alive. So you may as well not live in fear. If you let them in there will be little of you left when they’re done, so don’t let them in. If you can hold on to some piece of yourself that does not care what they say, you can have the one pure thing left in an industry now made up only of snitches and nuns, that last virtue for a writer, the courage to be human.

. . .

But do write a lot. Writing is like playing an instrument: it’s all about reps. I know that this is as banal as advice gets. But I think we live in an age of distraction where there are so many other things fighting for your time; I think it’s easy to tell yourself that composing social media posts improves your longform writing when it does not; and I think there remains some unfortunate impression, perhaps left over from the Beats, that great writers produce writing the way a bird produces song.

Continue ReadingHow to be a Human Animal, Chapter 13: My New Quest as an Author

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

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