My New Project – Cognitive Science Book on False Dichotomies

I haven’t mentioned this to many people until now, but I’m in the early stages of writing a book. I will be focusing on about two dozen false dichotomies that ill-define us. Much of my research involves cognitive linguistics and embodied cognition, but I will touch on many other areas too. Even though I’m just getting started, the process has been both exhilarating and exhausting. Two months ago, when I hit the go button on this project, I didn’t appreciate that this would turn out to be perhaps the most challenging project of my life—these ideas are spilling out of my computer and permeating many other parts of my life, including my practice of law, my art and conversations I’ve been imposing on close friends and random strangers. Throughout my life, I’ve often been told that I’m “different” in that I often crave conversation that challenges me. I've been told that I'm severely allergic to chit chat. I plead guilty to that, and it feels like this allergy is getting worse. It's difficult for me to stop thinking about this project these days.


My outline is currently 100 pages and it will probably get a lot longer before I start trying to distill and wrestle it into a couple dozen digestible chapters. I’m been actively outlining my book for two months. Reviewing the literature has often been like drinking out of a fire hydrant, even though I’ve been given a big assist from the past. I’m repeatedly feeling grateful that the younger version me decided to A) audit dozens of credit hours of graduate level cognitive science classes at Washington University and B) write about many of these topics for twelve years at this website. I wouldn’t have had the audacity to undertake this project without both of these investments. I conclude this even though I can now see that many of my prior writings were naïve and wrong-headed.

I’m lucky to be in a position to dedicate substantial chunks of uninterrupted time to this. It sometimes even feels like a calling, which sounds so terribly self-important. To temper this self-confidence, a voice in my head often whispers that this endeavor is only for my own satisfaction and that I don’t have anything of substantial value to add to ongoing vigorous worldwide conversations by numerous brilliant writers who have made careers doing deep dives into the human condition. That might be correct. We’ll see, but I’m still going to give this a try.

Why does this project speak to me? Once you wrap your head around the past several decades of research of cognitive scientists, once you are no longer merely passively enjoying these concepts, something transformative happens. Once you start breathing these concepts, feeling them in your bones and muscles, almost everything changes, and it can sometimes be scary. I remember a conversation 20 years ago with a close friend. We were discussing a paper I wrote on the role of attention on moral decision-making. I will never forget that look she gave me.

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The countless things to which you owe your existence

I sometimes ponder how many things had to happen in order for me to exist. There are countless things that happen on this planet every day, of course, but some of these things absolutely positively had to happen in order for me (and you) to exist. In this post, I will discuss a few of these contingencies that had to happen in order for you to be reading this post. This is a tale permeated with sex and violence.



The correct egg needed to meet the correct sperm or else we wouldn't have been born. Given that there are more than 40 million sperm in each ejaculation, it was almost mathematically impossible for the "correct" sperm to get to my mother's egg on the "correct" day. But for that sperm and egg to have met, my parents needed to meet. And they needed to court each other in such a way that they, to at least some minimal degree, liked each other on the "correct" evening.

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The brain’s precursors to volitional action

I don't have much to add to this Wikipedia excerpt, but I saw a reference to Benjamin Libet's experiments in an article by John Horgan.  To oversimplify only a bit, Horgan argues that "free will" somehow "emerges" at a level higher than "the level of body and brain understood solely as a physical system."  This sounds like hocus pocus to me.  Here's the Wikipedia excerpt on Libet's experiments:

Implications of Libet's experiments Libet's experiments suggest to some[8] that unconscious processes in the brain are the true initiator of volitional acts, and free will therefore plays no part in their initiation. If unconscious brain processes have already taken steps to initiate an action before consciousness is aware of any desire to perform it, the causal role of consciousness in volition is all but eliminated, according to this interpretation. For instance, Susan Blackmore's interpretation is "that conscious experience takes some time to build up and is much too slow to be responsible for making things happen."[9] Libet finds that conscious volition is exercised in the form of 'the power of veto' (sometimes called "free won't"[10][11]); the idea that conscious acquiescence is required to allow the unconscious buildup of the readiness potential to be actualized as a movement. While consciousness plays no part in the instigation of volitional acts, Libet suggested that it may still have a part to play in suppressing or withholding certain acts instigated by the unconscious. Libet noted that everyone has experienced the withholding from performing an unconscious urge. Since the subjective experience of the conscious will to act preceded the action by only 200 milliseconds, this leaves consciousness only 100-150 milliseconds to veto an action (this is because the final 20 milliseconds prior to an act are occupied by the activation of the spinal motor neurones by the primary motor cortex, and the margin of error indicated by tests utilizing the oscillator must also be considered). Libet's experiments have received support from other research related to the Neuroscience of free will.
I question whether even Libet's "power of veto" is "volitional" or "free." I suspect (though I cannot prove) that it's physics all the way down and that everything felt to be "volitional" or "free," even the "power of veto" (I admit that I too experience this apparent power) is physics, not some spooky homunculus bearing our name and facial features, who is pulling our levers.

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The complexity of the human immune system

The immune system is an unsung hero most days of our lives. We would all quickly die without its efficient functioning. But how complex is it. Take a look at this animation which is an extremely simplified version of this incredibly complex system. Then thank your immune system for doing a good job today. For another animation focusing only on the production of antibodies, see the following:

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About Google Scientist James Damore

I know I'm late to the game on this Google incident, but this is such a good illustration about how we, as a society, are unable to talk and think about serious issues except through our ideological filters. Further, some questions that can be explored through science apparently should no longer be even raised. First, a comment from a Gizmodo article by Melanie Ehrenkranz, who characterizes former Google Engineer James Damore as follows: "The man thinks women are inferior to men as engineers." That is typical of a lot of how Damore has been treated on the Internet. Now consider the basic facts about what Damore wrote at Google:

Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences. According to research he cited, those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait). Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.
Damore has given detailed interviews about what happened at Google and why he wrote his comments. That includes this interview with Joe Rogan:

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