Evolutionary Philosophy

Evolving My View on Mental Immunity

1/13/2023

Hi all, and Happy New Year! It's been several months since I've managed to post anything on my website, but that's only because I've been far too busy with life and other outlets for my writing. I mentioned in my last post about the Vienna Circle that my wife and I were planning to move to Vienna and that has gone off without a hitch. After 10 weeks here, we're fairly settled and I can hopefully get back to regular writing activities again soon. I've been doing a lot with my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that's being run in David Sloan Wilson's Prosocial World, and I'll have a lot more to say about that very soon. But in the meantime, I've just published an article about "mental immunity" and I wanted to share it here along with some background.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a two-part review of Andy Norman's new book Mental Immunity. (See here for part one and part two.) Andy and I have been acquaintances for years and we had lots of other conversations about this review before and after I wrote it, and then he and I joined forces to help run the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson. In addition to that, Andy has been doing TONS of speaking, organizing, and promoting for his work on mental immunity (see his website for just a hint), which has included coordinating a series of essays about the topic being published in the online magazine This View of Life (TVOL for short). I'm not sure exactly how many essays are going to be part of this symposium (they're still gathering them), but so far six have been published and mine is the latest one.

These rest of the essays will be published about once a week over the next few months, so be sure to sign up to the TVOL newsletter if you want to catch them all. If there's something you'd particularly like to say about this issue, send me an email and we can discuss getting you published in this series as well. I'm also working on getting a discussion group going about this series, so be sure to follow along for more on that. In the meantime, here are the links to all the essays. They are all standalone pieces so no need to read all of them in any kind of order, but Andy's introduction is useful and then be sure to let me know what you think of mine in the comments below. Enjoy!

The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived by Andy Norman
Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms by David Sloan Wilson
The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity by Josh Compton and Sander van der Linden
Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves by Barry Mauer
Changing a Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology by Steven P. Gilbert
Evolving My View on Mental Immunity by Ed Gibney

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Vienna, Circles, and 5 Reasons Why Groups Thrive

8/3/2022

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Over the last few blog posts, I introduced a new Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that I have been co-founding, which was built using the theory of the Prosocial method. I wrote about how that project was going in practice, and then shared the first talk I gave to that group, which showed how evolutionary metaphysics can deeply alter all other branches of philosophy. The organisation of this new group was deeply influenced by the fact that just before I was recruited to work on it I happened to have read David Edmond's fantastic book The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle. Why was I reading that book? I'll tell you more about that at the end of this post.

Since the Vienna Circle made for such an inspiring example of what a philosophy group could do, I thought I'd invite David Edmonds to speak to our new group about them. Not only did he accept, but he also ditched the usual talk that he gives about philosophy for this book, and instead, he shared with us a new theory he had for why Vienna was so unusually successful. The Vienna Circle may be rather famous among philosophers, but it was actually just one element of an extraordinary profusion of cultural and intellectual projects that occurred in Vienna during the first few decades of the 20th Century. Edmonds likened this to Edinburgh in the 18th century, Florence in the 14th & 15th centuries, and Athens in 400 BC.

After first acknowledging that the Vienna Circle members themselves would only consider a theory meaningful if it could be tested, David shared his hypothesis for what made Vienna special, which included five key ingredients.

Money — Perhaps the most prominent member of the Vienna Circle was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who happened to also be one of the richest men in Austria. He didn't exactly fund the Vienna Circle, but he and his family were emblematic of the kind of wealth that had circulated around Vienna for centuries, giving patronage to so many cultural and intellectual pursuits. This long history of empire gave Vienna a lot of assets to work with.
Politics — The Vienna Circle met regularly between 1924 and 1936 and it's no accident that this was during the interwar years between the fall of the Hapsburg Empire and the rise of National Socialism. Massive inflation wiped out much of Austria's wealth. The loss of the Great War had been a great humiliation. And these are the kinds of circumstances that bring out extremes. Nobody could be politically apathetic at a time like this.
Ethnicities — Over half of the Vienna Circle were Jews who, as a people, were only a few generations removed from ghettos. This had unleashed a tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm in people who were desperate to assimilate into a vibrant society. But it wasn't only Jews. As the center of a centuries-old empire, Vienna was a true melting pot filled with Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Slovenes, Serbs, and native Austrians, all of whom brought a wide variety of ideas together.
Circles — None of these assets, fervour, or diversity would create something new, however, if there wasn't an intermingling of communities. Ideas remain stuck in place if they only persist in monocultural ghettos (along any variable of culture you can imagine). So, where did this intermingling occur in Vienna? This is worth an extended quotation from David Edmonds' lecture:

"You might expect that a key institution in the spread of ideas in Vienna would be the University of Vienna — the pre-eminent university in Austria, and before that, the pre-eminent university in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But in fact, the University of Vienna was a bastion of conservativism and operated using rigid racial quotas. Professors were unapproachable and did not encourage interaction with students. So, no, the transmissibility of ideas took place elsewhere and there were two main routes. The first one is illustrated [in the picture at the top of this post]: circles! The Vienna Circle actually met around a long table; it really should have been called the Vienna rectangle. But a “circle” was a more or less formal group of people who met to discuss a particular topic. The Vienna Circle was only one of many such circles. And these circles flourished in Vienna precisely because the official lectures in the university did not lend themselves to free discussion. So, crucially, many people were members of more than one circle. Carnap, for example, went to a circle run by the philosopher Gomperz, which covered economics, politics, and psychoanalysis, as well as philosophy. That was held on a Saturday. He went to another one on a Wednesday night, a circle that was run by the psychologists Karl and Charlotte Bühler. And many members of the Vienna Circle also went to Karl Menges mathematical circle. Circles had very different ways of operating. Some were more formal than others. Some were right-wing, others were left-wing. Some were more welcoming than others. Some did not include women. As for the Vienna Circle, this was effectively run by the German-born Moritz Schlick and Schlick chose whom to invite. And if he took a dislike to you, you would be excluded, as Karl Popper was to find out to his cost."
Coffee — In addition to the formal and informal circles, the second mode of transmission for ideas was via the famous coffee houses of Vienna. Here you could play chess, read newspapers, eat pastries and strudel, or drink a cup of coffee all day long. The coffee houses acted as a sort of democratic club with an extremely cheap price of admittance. And there were heaps of them! There were possibly more than 1,000 in Vienna during the 1920’s and 30’s. This is not a sprawling city, either, so people were continually bumping into others they knew as they floated from cafe to cafe where different groups usually met. Many coffee houses even had the practice of reserving a “stammtisch” or "regular's table" for these welcoming discussions. And unlike in a university or other formal setting, the coffee shops offered a more relaxed environment where tentative views could be floated and wild theories could be exchanged.

These elements make a lot of sense to me. They remind me of the stories I often read about San Francisco and the unique success of Silicon Valley when I lived there in the 1990s. Could this theory be tested, however, as the Vienna Circle might insist? Well, David Edmonds cited the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines who have been studying the success of cities, and they have broadly reached the same conclusion: what is required for ideas and economies to flourish is interaction, interactivity. That’s clearly something that Vienna had in abundance, and something others would do well to copy.

For those of us that want to bring about a more Prosocial World, the question then becomes whether we can recreate this online. With an ability to draw people from all over the world, we can clearly meet the first three criteria in David Edmonds' hypothesis. There are a wealth of ideas out there from a diverse group of people who are all highly motivated to change the failing politics we see everywhere. The difficulty, then, is getting a profusion of circles going where people can intermingle in a relaxed and productive manner. How do you best encourage that?

I've mentioned before that the philosophy circle I'm leading is just one of many such groups establishing themselves on the Prosocial Commons. We've all just taken a slight break at the end of our first 12-week generation of activity (kind of like a semester break in between courses at a university), and a few of us have joined a "steering committee" to review what we have learned and help take the next steps ahead. David Edmonds' presentation — which you can watch in full below — will surely give us something to think about.

This is an enormously exciting opportunity to me, and one that's about to be informed by much more in-depth research on Vienna. I mentioned at the top of this post that I would say why I had been reading David Edmonds' book in the first place, and that is because my wife and I were considering a move to Vienna. Well, I'm very happy to report now that my wife was recently offered a job there with the United Nations, which she has accepted. So, we'll be heading to Vienna in early November. If any of you want to come for a visit, I'll do my best to get a stammtisch set up where we can have a great long chat about all of this. Prost!

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Evolutionary Metaphysics: How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy

7/3/2022

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This is the talk I gave to the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle on May 24, 2022. The EPC was a new group at this time, modeling itself after the accomplishments of the famous Vienna Circle. But rather than being inspired by revolutions in physics, as the Vienna Circle was in the 1920s, the EPC is inspired by the latest developments in the science of evolution. This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy.

Hi all. I’m going to be talking about evolutionary metaphysics today. A few days ago, I sent out an article from Dan Dennett that will be the center of this talk. But before I get to that, I have a little prologue to give about the topic of metaphysics in general. And then afterwards, I'll dive more into some applications we can derive from Dan Dennett's paper, based on some of the work that I've been doing in philosophy over the last several years.

So, when the Vienna Circle first started meeting, David Edmonds said in his book about them that they spent months going line-by-line through this book by Ludwig Wittgenstein known as the Tractatus. One of our group members shared a really interesting New Yorker piece about Wittgenstein last week that really drove home how kind of mysterious and up and down this book was. Wittgenstein himself disowned many of the ideas in it by the end of his life, and he wrote another book that was published after his death that refuted much of the Tractatus. But the most famous line in the Tractatus is the very last one in the book, which is this: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”

This sentence probably best represents the attempts that the Vienna Circle made for metaphysics, knowledge, and epistemology in general. And what they meant by this sort of either obvious or cryptic sentence is that they were aiming to create a perfect language and a perfect knowledge that was based in reality just as much as the physics of their time was. (Or so they thought.) And if you couldn't speak about something that perfectly, well then don’t talk about it at all. It must be passed over in silence. Of course, they ended up failing in that pursuit. And philosophers often talk about all kinds of things that don't meet this criteria of perfect knowledge. You can see several of them here.

This leads me to one of my favorite anecdotes from David Edmonds’ book, which was that this member of the group — Otto Neurath — was really insistent on keeping to this rigorous idea of never discussing things we couldn't see, touch, or taste, or what have you. And any time the group wandered into that territory, he would bang his fist on the table and shout “Metaphysics! Metaphysics!” He would apparently do this so often that they sometimes joked he would be better off shouting when they were not talking about metaphysics. Now, he was kind of a big, loud, and sometimes obnoxious guy who, David Edmonds wrote, wouldn't get invited to others’ houses or out for dinner. So, I'm not planning to do any banging on tables like that. But I have thought about maybe making a sign or something and just kind of holding it up in front of the camera if we ever go down that path. I don't actually think that's going to happen too much in our meetings, but it’s something to think about.

But, of course, you can't just shout down philosophical arguments about metaphysics. You have to argue against them. And there have been loads of attacks on this sort of physicalist metaphysics over the centuries. A couple of years ago, I worked through this book from Julian Baggini which listed 100 philosophical thought experiments. It's called The Pig That Wants to be Eaten, and 19 out of the 100 entries were about metaphysics. These presented lots of different attacks on physicalism or attempts to prove the existence of gods, souls, minds, zombies, what have you — anything kind of immaterial that would show that the universe isn't just a natural, physical place. But going through all of these thought experiments from an evolutionary perspective, I found that none of them were persuasive.

So that led me to the current position that I show on my website, which is: “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This is just a kind of “one-sentence summary” of my position on metaphysics. And the wording using “hypothesis” and “survives” has something to do with my thoughts about epistemology. But we can get into those at some other point.

I'm far from alone in this position, however. The stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci had a really interesting post about this recently trying to sum up his own thoughts about metaphysics. His post was called “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” He wrote that piece mostly recounting and affirming what he had read in this book from James Ladyman and Don Ross called Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. I haven't read that book yet but basically what they're claiming, according to Massimo, is that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there. And since Massimo is not one to pull punches, he wrote this phrase that I've quoted here about how David Chalmers and all of his speculations are, quote, “not even wrong.” In other words, they don't even exist in a plane where we could ever test them. So, that article and book are additional arguments for this naturalized metaphysics, which I think of as an important part of evolutionary philosophy.

When I talked about this to a local group a couple of years ago, I presented it this way — that you could just drop the meta from metaphysics. I thought that was maybe just a simple way to get past some of the jargon for the laypeople in the audience that I was speaking to. But, of course, physicalism (or naturalism as it's also known) is still actually a metaphysical position. It’s not as if metaphysics is gone. We don't want to try to to say that. And I also don't mean to say that physics is all that matters either. We’re influenced by much more than just physics. There’s chemistry, and biology, and (germane to this group) evolution.

And that brings me to the paper from Dan Dennett that I shared, which was drawn from this book: How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper — “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism” — was the first entry in this edited collection from a variety of philosophers, and I thought it was just perfect for setting up evolutionary philosophy. I didn't ask ahead of time how many people have read this, but it doesn't matter if you haven't since I'm going to share nine quotes from it now that help summarize the paper and drive home some of the key parts in it.

First, right at the very beginning of the article, Dan makes the point that ever since Socrates, the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy. But Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.

Still, Dan notes that philosophers have tried to impose their classical logic on the world as if Darwin never existed.

Now, Dan would acknowledge that this may be a methodological rather than a metaphysical prejudice. He's not claiming that philosophers don't believe in evolution. It's just that they tend to think, “We can go back to business as usual, tolerating Darwinian population thinking among those with a taste for such practices but denying its application to our chosen topics.”

But then Dan pushes back on that and says these undeniable borderline cases that exist in nature are not just a nuisance. They typically disable the arguments altogether.

In another passage, he ropes in the biologist Richard Dawkins to back him up on this. He says Dawkins notes there are good reasons for having tidy, discreet names in our taxonomies but we mustn't mistake our convenient agreements for discoveries. There just aren't real, objective joints in nature, as opposed to what Plato said all those years ago.

And that led to a passage in the middle of the essay that was, for me, a real clarion call for what evolutionary philosophy is and can fight against. This sentence said, “In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.” So, there's a list of the types of things we can look at as gradualist theories of complex phenomena. And I'll have more to say about some of those topics later.

Next, it’s not just the fact that there are gradualist theories, but this anti-essentialist view gives us the place where we have to start thinking about these things too. In Darwin’s “bubble-up theory of creation,” you have to start at the bottom. Dan has this fantastic quote from a critic of Darwin in the 1800s who said, “Mr. Darwin…by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom.” And as Dan makes clear, this is actually a perfect description of what is going on with evolution in nature. It does start with absolute ignorance, and we should be thinking about philosophy in the same way, starting there, rather than with a priori, perfect concepts from some imaginary higher plane in the universe.

In addition to those two points about gradualism and starting from the bottom, Dan also gives us a kind of operator for how to think non-essentially with this passage on the word ‘sorta’. He asks, why indulge in this sorta talk? Well, the sorta operator is, in cognitive science, the parallel of Darwin's gradualism in evolutionary processes. What he's getting at here is that any time we say something “is” or “was” or “will be”, it becomes much easier to become prone to thinking about things in terms of strong definitions, which are naturally hard edged, in or out things. On the other hand, if you say you know something is sorta intelligent, or sorta conscious, or an idea is sorta knowledge, then you already start to put in a little bit of fuzziness around the edges to help keep that in mind when you're starting to make arguments about these things. Now, obviously, we're not going to talk about sorta all the time, but it's a very helpful label to use occasionally as necessary.

Finally, on the last page of the article, there was this passage that was another real clarion call to me for evolutionary philosophy and what we're doing here. Dan said in the very last paragraph, “There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.” I think this is really key for us. When I first read this, I was like “Yes!”, this is what I've been trying to do all this time. But now it was clearer to me how we could explore this no-longer-forbidden territory and reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts into something better.

With that, I want to turn now to how I have worked on applying some of these ideas in the past. Hopefully this will help drive these points home and make this all a little more real and tangible.

I thought I'd start with something simple like the meaning of life. There's a BBC radio program called the Moral Maze where they usually have a panel of people discussing moral issues of the times. Generally, it's infuriating and I'm constantly shouting at the radio when I hear them discuss these things. But back at Christmastime, just this last year, they had a special panel to discuss the meaning of life. Amongst the panel members was the Archbishop of Canterbury (who, if you don’t know, is like the Pope for the Church of England), and they had the president of Humanists UK, Alice Roberts. They also had a writer who was a nihilist, and I believe a Muslim scholar as well.

As they all went through this topic, they had the typical kinds of dogmatic, nihilistic, or relativistic presentations of what they thought the meaning of life was. Alice, in particular, speaking for Humanists UK, presented the view that everyone has their own meaning for life and we’re not against any of them. That can sound fine and non-threatening to outsiders, so I get why she speaks this way, but it spurred me to write something for our local humanist group in our monthly newsletter. I started with the idea from Dan Dennett's paper about Darwin's strange inversion of reasoning, and I said, “In exactly the same way, there is no singular, top-down ‘Meaning of Life’ that comes booming down to us from on high.” As much as we joke about 42 being the answer, something specific like that is just not going to be the solution. Instead, meanings are built up through trials and errors. But only some of these meanings lead towards more survival and flourishing for life on this planet.

So, that's one simple way of looking at a concept in a gradualist manner and coming to a different kind of answer for how you might approach it rather than what is typically presented. And that last sentence in my approach is a reference to the evolutionary ethics that I've worked on, which is the next topic I'll talk about.

So, there's a picture of my very first academic paper, which was about ethics and where I tried to use an evolutionary lens to bridge David Hume’s famous is-ought divide. We can talk about that when we talk about ethics some other time, so I won't go into any details on that, but the conclusion of the paper was that life ought to act to remain alive, that our morals ought to be driving us towards survival. If not, well then the group that's acting on those morals won't survive, and then neither will the morals. That's just a cold hard fact of evolution.

I got a lot of pushback on this article, as you would expect, but one of the common threads that is relevant for today was that a lot of people looked at this bottom line and said morals can't just be about remaining alive. That's too simple. It's got to be about much more than that. It's about well-being, and eudaimonia, and other highfalutin things. And to me, this was a classic example of having an essentialist concept of the word surviving.

This cartoon sort of captures that perfectly. It shows thinking of surviving as considering only the most basic things — eat, survive, reproduce; eat, survive, reproduce. And all of the the lower, non-human animals only ever think this way until suddenly humans stand up and say, “Oh what's it all about?” There must be so much more above that. Well, that’s a clear example of having an essentialist concept of what surviving is all about. You're thinking it's not changing at all throughout the entire history of evolution. And that, of course, isn't true. Non-human animals also have an emerging, gradualist view of all of their needs and what gives them well-being in their own conception. Not that they have words for this or think about it that way, but it's much more than just the most basic things. And that really takes off with humans and culture and what we've developed over the last few hundred-thousand years or so.

So, if that was an essentialist concept of surviving, what I really wanted to illustrate was some kind of gradualist concept of surviving. I wanted to be able to display the slowly growing list of needs that we all have. And so I wrote this paper called “Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs.” It was originally published on patheos.com with the help of two professors of evolutionary psychology, but patheos has since taken down all of the work on their atheist channel so I've had to recreate it on my own website if you want to read the paper in full.

I started with the classic gradual presentation of well-being, which is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That starts at the bottom with physiological needs, and then goes up through the different levels of safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem, before arriving at self-actualization at the top. And just as I said before about morals, if these levels at the top aren’t also driving towards survival, then they're probably not the right needs to be fulfilling. And eventually, they will be deselected.

Now, Maslow never actually presented his hierarchy as a pyramid. And if you read his work, or if you've ever had these moments of self-actualization where you feel alive with meaning and purpose, this is what it actually feels like. The top kind of takes over and the physiological needs at the bottom sort of fall away.

But upside-down pyramids aren’t very stable, so I worked on finding a new, better image. I eventually settled on the typical tree that evolutionary thinkers like to use, where the bottom is a strong trunk that's bringing up nutrients from the bottom. The next level of ‘safety and security’ provides a kind of canopy under which people could be protected. In the two ‘love and belonging’ and ‘self-esteem’ levels in the middle of the tree are the tangled and interwoven branches. And the ‘self-actualization’ at the top pulls us towards something bigger than ourselves, in a way that is similar to the way that the top of a tree is being pulled towards sunlight, gaining energy and strength from the things that are above it.

So, that is a nice way of looking at the gradualist view of survival. But it’s still only one slice of what we want to concern ourselves with. It's only considering the needs of individuals. And only human individuals at that too.

What we really want to concern ourselves with is not just human individuals, but with all of life. And in E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience, he gave us these seven concentric circles that he put together to try to unite all of the fields of biology using the concepts of space and time to grow outwards as you go through the different sub-disciplines. What he ended up doing was presenting a picture of all of biology, which is also essentially a picture of all of life — all of the life that has ever been or ever will be. And so, if we want to concern ourselves with the well-being of life, we should try to work on some kind of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for all of these circles.

So, that's what I worked on for the rest of my article. The first thing I had to do was generalize Maslow's levels to make them less about human things and more universal so that they can apply to any form of life.

And, to make a long story short, I sketched out a set of Maslow's hierarchies for all of the different levels of biology. What emerges from this view, is a picture of just how fragile survival would look if you only really focus on the basic needs of individuals, which is kind of the case we are in now with many governments, for example, just looking at GDP and a couple of health indicators and not much else.

Whereas you can imagine a world, instead, where there's robust survival, where we’re trying to fill in and meet the needs of all of life as much as possible. We're starting to see inklings of this with things like the UN Sustainability Goals, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics, or the Planetary Boundaries, but those are all kind of just pieces and parts of what I consider to be this comprehensive map of how we could look at the welfare all of life.

So, back to the question at hand from my evolutionary ethics that ended with “Life ought to act to remain alive.” If you take a simplistic, essentialist view of ‘survival’ and ‘acting to remain alive’, as I laid out in that cartoon, then this is a problem. But hopefully, once you have this greater concept of how survival, and meaning, and well-being can grow and grow and continue to expand across all of life, then I think you can have a much bigger notion of what it is for life to act to remain alive. And then my ethics conclusion maybe becomes more acceptable.

Next, once I had something done for evolutionary ethics, I turned to evolutionary politics for my next paper. I wrote this one with my wife, Tanya Wyatt, who is a criminologist. In that discipline, she spends a lot of time reading, writing, and thinking about justice, and how justice systems in liberal democracies are based largely on the work of the utilitarians and John Stuart Mill’s harm principle. This idea of the harm principle originally sounded great. It says you can do whatever you want in society as long as you don't harm others. But without a really good definition of harm, you're not actually helping all that much. Pretty much everyone can claim to be harmed by most actions in one way or another. Even donating to charity might be considered money taken away from someone else in need. And this is how the harm principle has eroded over the next hundred years or so, as more and more people tried to build democracies around this far too simple of an idea. In the late 1990s, a legal scholar named Bernard Harcourt published a seminal paper about this called “The Collapse of the Harm Principle” that noted how, without a good definition of harm, you have no way of trading off one harm for another, or understanding which harm is more important than another one. And so, in the end, you just end up going back to might makes right. Whoever is in power at the time gets to decide which harms matter more than others.

So, my wife and I wrote this paper to try and address this problem. The paper is called “Rebuilding the Harm Principle: Using an Evolutionary Perspective to Provide a New Foundation for Justice.” We took the definition of good that I had written in my previous paper, where good was about making the survival of life more and more robust, and we argued that harm is just going to be the opposite of that. Harm is that which makes the survival of life more fragile. Again, this is a topic for another day to get into all the details here. But once again this is another kind of gradualist view — in this case for harm — that helps us understand the problems that are involved in politics much better than some kind of essentialist definition of harm could ever hope to to provide.

So far, I've only been talking about gradualism in one dimension for these theoretical concepts of good, harm, survival, and the meaning of life. But there's another tool in the evolutionary toolkit that I find really useful for metaphysics. And this helps make gradualism multi-dimensional. That tool is Tinbergen’s four questions. Tinbergen was an ethologist who put these together to help really understand the biological world in depth. His claim is that to understand anything in biology you have to understand these four different parts of the thing being considered. This is a classic two-by-two matrix where one axis maps the difference between ultimate and proximate causes, and the other axis looks at things in a current time frame versus an historic time frame.

So, you end up with these four questions around ‘mechanisms’ (what are the underlying bits and bobs that are chugging away inside of the organism to cause something to happen); what is the evolutionary ‘function’ (what is the long-term purpose that will lead some things to happen); or you can look at the personal development of an entity (that's the ‘ontogeny’) so you know its singular life history; or you can look at the ‘phylogeny’, the evolutionary history that led up to that individual item. Again, to really understand anything in the biological world, you need to look at all four of these pieces. For any of you who have read or listened to David Sloan Wilson at length, this concept comes up pretty quickly. But there are very few philosophers that I've heard who ever talk about Tinbergen, even though philosophers talk about biological phenomena all the time!

As an example of how this can help, I tried to use Tinbergen’s four questions to look at consciousness and free will — two concepts that have long bedeviled philosophers and which are patently biological phenomena. I did this during lockdown over the last year and a half as I was looking for something to do since I couldn't travel anymore. I thought this wouldn’t take me too long, but it ended up being a huge project. This was really fruitful for me, though, as I didn't find anybody else doing anything like this, and there was just so much research to be done. I ended up putting together about 260 pages worth of material, which I collected into this little pdf booklet. This whole project is still in its early stages as only a handful of good readers on my blog have reviewed it, but I'd eventually like to push this out some more and try to get pieces of it published in academic, peer-reviewed journals to see if it continues to hold up.

But regardless of whether my own theories turn out to be useful, this subject is still a good example of using Tinbergen for philosophy questions. So, that's what I wanted to to share here. One of the chapters that I wrote looked at the history of definitions of consciousness and you can see the Dennett operator in the title. The sorta was obviously a nod to Dan, but it's also there because this was not actually a brief history at all. It ended up being 5600 words, which is about ten pages of just definitions. It had 28 different entries from philosophers, 25 entries from scientists, and six entries from different dictionary definitions.

Almost all of these definitions were incompatible or disagreed with one another in some way. As the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes, this level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people, or else it encompasses a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common. Now, considering what we've been talking about today, it's clear that most of these definitions of consciousness have been looking for an essentialist, in-or-out box that just isn't going to be there. Consciousness is clearly another one of these complex phenomena in the biological world that is much better handled with a gradualist perspective on it (especially one that Tinbergen can give us).

So, to make a very long story short, I tried to work through all of that. I went through the steps of a Tinbergen analysis and came up with a hierarchy of consciousness as it emerges from the origins of life and gradually builds up to the highest levels that are currently attainable in nature. I developed this hierarchy using each of the four questions and that proved to be one of the beauties of using Tinbergen. This four-pronged process ends up providing independent lines of research that you can check against one another. So, if you have a theory of how consciousness emerges according to the mechanisms or the functions, but that doesn't map with how it emerges in the life of a single human or over the evolutionary history of life, then you have to tinker and play around with your theory.

And that's what I was able to do until all of these hierarchies aligned and ended up describing the emergence of all of the different properties that are generally considered within the various definitions of consciousness. Taken altogether, I believe they end up merging and presenting a multifaceted view of a gradualist approach to this extremely complex phenomenon.

The same thing applies for free will as well, since the two concepts are very tightly related. Many others have said you really can't deal with one without dealing with the other. And so I ended up putting together a chart for the emergence of free will through the same gradualist hierarchy.

I don't have much time left so let me just say very quickly that while I was doing all this research, I got the opportunity to publish a book review of Dan Dennett's book with Greg Caruso on free will called Just Deserts: Debating Free Will. That’s ‘deserts’ as in determining whether we deserve to be blamed or punished. This isn’t a book about strawberry shortcake or other types of lovely desserts. Dan and Gregg went back and forth a lot in this book with over 100 exchanges between them. Gregg is one of these classic essentialists. He draws beautiful boxes around all of his very precise definitions and he comes to the conclusion that there is no free will, there is no moral responsibility, you have to get rid of all prisons, and we have to use a public quarantine health model for our justice system. Dan looks at this and says, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's way too much to throw out for this kind of essentialist approach. That's not the way we should be thinking about free will. Dan has his gradualist approach that he defines as achieving a ‘free will worth wanting’. To him, we don't have perfect free will. But we do have something here. Some sorta free will.

Now, Dan holds his own very well against Gregg in my view. But he has never once referenced Tinbergen as far as I know. So, I used my review as an opportunity to introduce that concept into the discussion, which ended with that rhetorical question you can see at the end of this paragraph — is free will more like a geometry proof or a frog? To me, it's pretty obvious that it's more of a complex biological phenomenon like a frog, and it should therefore be treated as such like we've done with other Tinbergen analyses.

I have one last slide here, and this is a work in progress so don't look at this too closely. I'm currently working on a paper on evolutionary epistemology where I’m writing about the evolution of knowledge. This is another classic philosophical problem of essentialism where Plato tried to define it two thousand years ago as “justified, true, beliefs”. Philosophers have been trying for thousands of years to find ideas and beliefs that are able to fit that bill and meet all those essential qualities, but they have ultimately failed to do so and we're still stuck dealing with this problem.

My contention in this paper will be that once again we need to start with Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning and start at the bottom where we have absolute ignorance. Then, I’ll trace the evolutionary history of knowledge mechanisms as we have learned to learn, and developed new ways to learn, until we gradually built more and more robust knowledge. Even after all this evolution, we never quite reach the level of certain truths and falsehoods. We know this from some classic skeptical arguments, which show that we can't ever claim to know truth (so far) because we just can't know the future. Since we can't know what the future will bring, maybe the ideas we have today will some day be overturned. But that's okay! This sort of gradual, evolutionary understanding would give us a much clearer way to talk about knowledge and how strong it is or how fragile it is and why. And I think that conversation could do a lot to overturn all the nonsense we see about fake news and truthiness and the like. At least, that's my hope.

So, that’s the end of my talk. I tried to present why I think evolutionary metaphysics is really inspiring to me, and why it can be really useful for this group in particular. It opens up so many different places that we can take this evolutionary worldview that we've been given, and we can really try to make significant changes to the way philosophy works because of this. I’ll be happy to take your questions now.

What do you think? One of the philosophers in this meeting said immediately after I was done that this could be a clear manifesto for what could be done in evolutionary philosophy. Let me know if you agree or disagree in the comments below.

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Prosocial (In Practice)

6/11/2022

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In my last post, I shared some summary highlights of the process that has been developed by Paul Atkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Steven Hayes for Prosocial World. This process has a lot of scientific rigour (and a Nobel Prize!) behind it, and it has been proven to help groups be more successful. But how does it feel to use it?

As I announced back in March, I was invited to create a new group of philosophers to go through this process, and be part of what David Sloan Wilson has called "a bold new experiment in cultural evolution." Well, we're over halfway through that experiment now, which means we've completed our first run through the Prosocial process and I thought I should report on how it is going.

Eleven different groups have formed on the Prosocial Commons platform and are currently making their way through all this. Recently, I was asked to present to everyone what our philosophy group has done, in order to provide a kind of "case study" for what has gone well or poorly, and what can be shared, discarded, or improved upon. My presentation was given during one of the weekly "Cafe" meetings that provide an opportunity to share general information and ask questions that any group can learn from. The 27-minute recording of my talk can be seen below, and it was described as follows:

The Prosocial process leads groups to understand: 1) the Core Design Principles for successful groups; 2) the ACT matrix for psychological flexibility; and 3) goal setting for focused action. In the first generation of activities on the Prosocial Commons platform, groups were given 4 weeks to get through this process using just a handful of tools. In this video, the case study of how this went for the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle is presented by co-leader of that group Ed Gibney. This presentation was given during a general Prosocial Cafe meeting on Friday May 20, 2022.

As you can see on that splash screen for the video, I mapped the Prosocial process into 8 steps going from project design through to the end of goal setting for the group. (Once the goals are set, you're off on your own group's journey.) Each of those 8 Prosocial steps required lots of management on my part and the use of several new online tools — some provided, many more created from scratch. Overall, it has been quite a lot more effort than I expected to lead a group through these 8 steps. And I don't think it was feasible to expect just anyone to be able to do all this. But I managed! And I'm not alone.

After sharing the details of all that management work, I also gave a few thoughts on how I tried to drive engagement throughout the whole process. I had to do that engagement work because it turns out that this experiment is probably a lot like a gym membership. It sounds great. Maybe your best self *wants* to do it. But it's still really hard to change habits and begin doing something new that's a bit difficult. Although people all self-selected to volunteer to go through this, and they all had to donate some money to join in, and they were asked up front to promise 2 hours of work per week on these projects, a majority of participants across the site have not lived up to that.

But that's okay! Enough people have joined in. And the people that have made it through have been almost universally spectacular to meet and work with. The Prosocial process has unearthed deeply held values and fears that it turns out we all share. And that has provided an opportunity to form strong, purposeful bonds even though we've only just met, and we are only meeting impersonally via Zoom and online chats. The tools and instructions have, quite frankly, been both lacking and overwhelming at times. We've all lost valuable members at each new hurdle. But in general there is a real feeling of excitement and enthusiasm at doing something new, which excuses many of the bumps in the road because we all know the intention is to continuously improve things using the tried and true evolutionary method of variation, selection, and retention. In a few generations, successful steps will be surviving and thriving.

Having been through this just one time now, I can already see how much easier we can make this for future groups. And the power these groups can have is only limited by their imagination. Think about the good intentions of every group you have ever worked with, and how most of them have failed because of one typical problem with group dynamics or another. Now imagine a way to get rid of all those self-destruct buttons that kept you from realising your goals. It doesn't mean the work to change the world will be easy. But it does mean it will be much clearer to manage.

Having the Prosocial process in hand, and developing all the tools to use it, feels like the start of something really big. It was specifically designed to start small, and radiate out, group-by-collaborative-group, until it spreads success throughout populations across the globe. That was the theory. And I can see it now in practice.

If you have a group (or even just an idea for a group!) that you'd like to experience this process with, don't hesitate to ask me how you can do so. It's open to anyone, and it will only get easier.

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Prosocial (In Theory)

6/3/2022

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In my last post, I made the announcement that I was going to be starting an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with Andy Norman and David Sloan Wilson. I shared lots of links to learn about the non-profit organization Prosocial World, which would be hosting this project (along with many others) on its new online platform called the Prosocial Commons.

Projects on the Commons are intended to last 12 weeks to mimic the 100 Day Challenge model that was developed by the Rapid Results Institute. And since we started on April 25th, that means we're about half way through our first "generation" of work. (Note that the 12-week sessions are called generations in order to mimic evolution, and to give people the chance to vary, select, and retain what works after a sizeable but manageable chunk of effort.) So far, our group has gone exceedingly well and I'm really looking forward to sharing much more about that in future blog posts.

Before I get to all that, however, I wanted to share something more about the theories behind all of this work because they are really significant and incredibly useful. Many of the links I shared in my last post had quick summaries of this, but for the full treatment, you really need to read the book-length manual called Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups.

In preparation for leading a group through this process, I hoovered up everything I could about Prosocial. To start, here are a few quotes from a great book review of Prosocial that was written by Kathleen Walsh. She is one of the 650 group facilitators who have been trained on this method, and she has been wonderful to work with!

“Prosocial” is, at the broadest level, an umbrella term that describes an emerging global movement to elevate the functioning of groups at all levels and scale so that individual members can achieve their mutual goals in cooperative, efficient processes and groups can more effectively collaborate within networks, or nested hierarchies.
The conceptual framework developed by Atkins, Wilson and Hayes builds upon the research conclusions of Elinor Ostrom, the only woman awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, which refute the conventional assumptions derived from Garrett Hardin’s “the tragedy of the commons” formulation.
Ostrom’s work identified the qualities of effective, cooperative groups that self-organize at the local level to protect collective resources and achieve outcomes they value. Atkins et al have enlarged Ostrom’s findings to define the essential qualities of effective, self- organized groups at multiple levels and scales. Based on her work, the Core Design Principles they have developed are:

Shared identity and purpose
Equitable distribution of contributions and benefits
Fair and inclusive decision-making
Monitoring agreed-upon behaviors
Graduated responding to helpful and unhelpful behaviors
Fast and fair conflict resolution
Authority to self-govern
Collaborative relations with other groups

Wilson immediately recognized how Ostrom’s design principle approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory as an aspect of evolutionary transitions, which posits that members of groups can become so cooperative that the group itself becomes a higher-level organism in its own right.
The application of the scientific verification of the evolutionary advantage of more cooperative groups to economic and social system design has exciting implications for envisioning and achieving a positive future for humanity.
Prosocial builds upon a “power with”, not “power over” relationship model by integrating the importance of enhancing individual “psychological flexibility” skills honed by the use of vital “noticing” tools derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which they term “ACT Matrices”.
Use of the Prosocial ACT matrices offers deeper understanding of members’ experiences of themselves, their group relationships and common goals. ... This awareness leads, in turn, to the recognition of specific action steps that can strengthen their group’s overall functioning and the quality of their relationships with one another.
The potential of the Prosocial ARC to inform the quickening of insight and skill demanded by the current survival challenges humanity faces is linked to the degree to which it actually practiced. ... These are exciting ideas, indeed.

That covers the basics pretty well, other than I would add that Acceptance and Commitment Therapy has been very rigorously studied with several hundred radomized control trials now showing that it is an effective psychological intervention method. For just a little bit more, Kathleen's entire 3-page review makes for a quick summary of the book for people in a hurry to learn about it. If you are only interested in these theories for theoretical interests, you can definitely stop reading this post now. (Seriously, just stop.)

If you have applied (or are about to apply) these theories, however, either formally with Prosocial or informally on your own, here are several key passages from the book that bring many more details about the process into focus. I recommend reading these regularly for reminders on how to improve group behaviour.

p.21 Evolutionary theory offers a novel perspective on virtually all efforts to accomplish positive change at all scales, from that of the individual to that of the planet. One key insight with this theory is that there is something special about small groups, which were the only human social environment for most of our evolutionary history, and, like the cells of a multicellular organism, they need to remain the building blocks of modern large-scale societies.
p.28 By applying the first seven core design principles at ever higher levels of organisation, small groups could be the bedrock of much larger polycentric (that is, many centred) systems of governance. Polycentric governance respects the localised needs, knowledge, and autonomy of small groups, as well as the need for modern societies to organise at a regional, national, or even global scale. It takes into consideration that life consists of many spheres of activity, that each sphere has an optimum scale, and that good governance requires identifying the optimal scale for each sphere and appropriate coordination among the spheres.
p.53 If we want to build a science of intentional change, it makes sense to use the power of associative, social, and contingency learning to affect behaviour. We cannot stop there, however, because these tools do not yet fully give us the means to foster key elements of prosocial relations to others, such as trust, awareness of shared purpose, and more prosocially oriented values. For that purpose, we need also to delve into the world of narratives and rules, cognitive heuristics and problem solving, and sense of self and perspective taking.

p.59 Our purposes grow largely from our capacity to tell stories about the future (and the past). When we say “purpose”, we generally mean either values or goals. Values are our chosen qualities of being and doing. They express how we want to be as people, and the desired qualities we would like our actions to reflect. Think of them as the adverbs of our lives. When we act in service of values, we are acting lovingly, compassionately, kindly, consciously, and so on. Values are different than goals. Concrete goals can be achieved; you can make a million dollars, or get a degree, but once a goal is achieved it will likely lose its power as a source of further motivation. That is not true of values, and this difference is a major reason why values are so important. Values are only displayed or instantiated, not obtained or possessed, so while we may use them, they are never used up.
p.64 The six flexibility processes that make up psychological flexibility: values, emotional flexibility, cognitive flexibility, committed action, flexible attention, and perspective taking. Together these comprise an integrated skill set. Both individuals and groups can be psychologically flexible. It is a skill set that supports prosocial behaviour change and the deployment of the core design principles. However, it also has implications for building some key elements that social psychologists have found underpinning prosocial behaviour: trust, a focus on longer-term rather than immediate outcomes, and social value orientation.
p.74 The matrix is a process for thinking about two key dimensions of experience: “toward/away”, which reflects the way all animals move toward aspects of experience they want more of and away from experiences they want less of, and “outside/inside”, which represents what is actually happening in the physical world—what people can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell—versus the internal experience of our mind, including our thoughts, emotions, imagery, memories, and the like.
p.74 Generally speaking, the more frequently our behaviour is guided by moving toward what we want, rather than away from what we don’t want, the happier and more fulfilled we’ll be. Moving toward what we care about creates energy and vitality, as well as expands the flexibility and range of our behaviours. … B.F. Skinner defined freedom as being under the control of appetitive stimuli as opposed to aversive stimuli—living in a toward mode rather than an away one.
pp78-83 Completing the matrix. … Start with what we might call the “values” quadrant. [Inside—Toward. “What matters most to you about your group?”] … Move to the quadrant about the inner stuff you would rather not have. [Inside—Away. “What difficult internal experiences show up and get in the way of moving toward what is most important to you?”] … Moving to the Outside—Away quadrant, answer this question: “What can people see you do to avoid or control those difficult experiences?” This quadrant is all about what you do overtly to try and minimise the occurrence or impact of the difficult experiences you just mapped in the Inside—Away quadrant. … For the final quadrant [Outside—Toward], consider this: “What might you do to move toward who or what is most important to you (even in the presence of difficult experiences)?” What are some small or large steps that you might actually take to increase the frequency or presence of what you most care about in your life?
p.95 We designed the Prosocial process to be modular. It contains six interlocking modules, which groups can use separately or in combination: 1. Measurements for assessment and diagnosis. 2. The individual matrix. 3. The core design principles. 4. The collective matrix. 5. Goal setting. 6. Measurements for evaluating change.
p.100 One group we worked with had a leader who did not appreciate the value of what he saw as “soft skills”, and so he refused to do the individual matrix with his group. Although using the collective matrix alone worked up to a point, the Prosocial process never quite took hold. In the end, the group limped along relatively ineffectively because organisational inflexibility flowed from the failure to work on psychological flexibility.
p.101 Even though the individual matrix is an excellent icebreaker in its own right, sometimes groups need to first engage in other trust-building exercises, such as shared projects and social events, before they can even begin to work with the individual matrix.
pp.104-7 In general, like trust, cohesion is slow to build and easy to fracture. But there are definitely things you can do. Here are a few ideas that might be helpful for your context. Use the individual matrix before the rest of the Prosocial process. … Utilise the power of small groups. … Clarify membership. … Make space for the personal. … Improve communication skills. … Share reflections. … Use “onboarding” processes. … Create similarity in the context of diversity. … Create a strong sense of shared purpose.
pp.107-9 There are many practical benefits for groups to have a shared sense of purpose. … Shared purpose creates a sense of group identity and belonging. … Shared purpose guides individual actions, empowering individuals at all levels of the group. … Shared purpose creates motivation. … Shared purpose facilitates cooperation with other groups. … Shared purpose creates personal benefits. … Shared purpose makes collective interests more salient and highly valued.
p.109-10 The collective matrix is a superb tool for clarifying and deepening a sense of shared purpose in most groups. Not only can it help establish values and goals, but the process of discussing the fears and concerns that surface and might get in the way can often help with the process of integrating individual and collective interests while building a sense of trust and safety in the group. Instead of beginning the process with “What matters most to me about the group?” you can begin with questions like “What is our shared purpose? Who or what matters to us?” You can then follow up with questions similar to those we outlined with the individual matrix exercise, but framed as a collective.
pp.120-1 Consider this example: Three employees of a medical goods company, Alison, John, and Margaret, are arguing about who should be given the perk of an overseas sales-training program. Alison argues that she made the largest number of sales this year and deserves to be rewarded. John argues that Alison previously received a similar trip and that it’s his turn. Margaret argues that she really needs the training as the lack of it has been holding her back from making as many sales as Alison. … Alison’s approach, an equity approach, takes merit and contribution into account when deciding on the distribution of resources. By contrast, John’s approach, the equality approach, provides equal benefits irrespective of contribution. Margaret’s approach, allocation according to need, is a third normative principle that strives to achieve equal final outcomes for all, so that those who are more disadvantaged to begin with receive more irrespective of contribution. When group goals focus on high performance, groups tend to value a norm of equity. But when they are focused on social harmony and care, they tend to value norms of equality or need. Each approach has costs and benefits. Equity motivates highly skilled individuals to contribute as much as possible to the group, but if handled poorly it can create competition and comparison between individuals, thereby reducing overall group cohesion. Equality emphasises the equal worth of all but can create situations in which people free-ride on the efforts of others. Need emphasises a principle of care for all but can create feelings of resentment when those who contribute little are sometimes carried by those who contribute a great deal.
pp.142-3 Models of decision making you may find helpful. … We organised the following options along a spectrum, from least to most inclusive. … Autocratic decision making. … Consultative leadership. … Facilitative leadership. … The advice process. … Consent-based decision making. [Similar to the advice process, it differs in that authority to decide is distributed across the group. The group votes on proposals with these typical response options: agree, abstain, disagree, block.] … Consensus decision making.
p.145 Once you’ve conducted a collective matrix focused on core design principle 1, shared identity and purpose, encourage each group member to develop a personal mission, outlining the value they wish to provide to better serve the group’s collective goals. Members can share and discuss these personal missions to increase coordination, self-determination, and accountability.
p.148 Ultimately, with the Prosocial process we’ve built all our ideas around the guiding principle of including people in decisions that affect them. From that core idea you can tack on two other principles that are often helpful: 1. Enable those who have the urgency to take the initiative to make proposals to actually make them. 2. Move authority to whomever has the best information, provided they are willing to take the authority.
p.151-2 When we use “monitoring”, we really just mean transparency of behaviour—all members being able to see or notice what others are doing in the group. … In our own Prosocial development team, which must interact largely online, we noticed that simply instituting a shared to-do list using online tools such as Notion, Trello, and Slack made our behaviour much more transparent.
p.153 There are many benefits of monitoring. … Increased prosociality. … Decreased cheating. … Increased motivation and shared identity. … Improved coordination.
p.162 Ostrom’s fifth design principle was “graduated sanctions” for violations of rules and agreements. While we recognise that reducing uncooperative behaviours is essential for groups, it is at least as important in most contexts to also pay attention to increasing the frequency of helpful behaviours. Few groups will survive for very long without social support when people act cooperatively.
p.163 People are more cooperative when opportunities to punish uncooperative behaviour are present than when they're absent, and the threat of sanctions for "bad apples" decreases antisocial behaviour. If you're in a group, it's good to know that "bad" behaviour will not be tolerated and may even lead to expulsion from the group; otherwise, group members will lose faith in the capacity of the group to avoid being undermined by self-interest.
p.163-5 Initial sanctions for rule violations were often very light. Gossip is an example. … Sanctions that start small are far less likely to elicit strong emotional responses, counterattacks, or withdrawal from the group. By giving violators an easy way out, the sanctions also are likely to seem fairer and less indiscriminate. … Poorly designed systems of sanctioning can have serious long-term side effects, such as the following: counterproductive behaviours, diminished well-being and engagement, diminished trust, inefficiency, negative effects on the one administering sanctions.
p.174 Participants were asked to play the role of a team leader giving feedback to a team member (Frank) who had interrupted them twice and joked three times during a meeting. Paul played the role of Frank, and the people in his classes role-played giving him feedback. … The classic management advice for this sort of situation is to simply describe the situation as factually as possible, describe how it affected you, and then ask for the other’s perspective. … But almost nobody spontaneously approached the situation in this open, learning-oriented way. Almost everybody assumed they were in the right and Frank was in the wrong.
p.177 Conflict is maintained in our heads, in the judgments of right and wrong, good and bad, and justified and unjustified, and stepping into the perspective of another, seeing things from their point of view and drawing a circle that takes them in, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. If a group is to find a way through conflicts, it needs to ensure it has effective capability at three levels: 1. Interpersonal skills such as listening well and speaking assertively, not aggressively. 2. Personal skills such as emotion regulation and perspective taking. 3. Group-level agreements and processes for managing conflict efficiently and effectively. … When you are working with a group to explore its values and overarching goals in relation to conflict, it can be helpful to make a distinction between task conflict, which is often helpful for groups, and relationship conflict, which is almost always unhelpful in groups.
p.190 Core design principle 7, the authority to self-govern, is about the group, not the individuals within the group. Specifically, it’s about the group’s capacity to manage its own affairs without excessive interference from outside. “Authority” can mean the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. But it can also mean the capacity and power to author one’s own experience. We mean it in this latter way. … The concept of subsidiarity arose within the Catholic Church as “the principle” that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level.” The political concept of federalism follows the same principle, according a degree of authority to smaller units nested within larger units.
p.191 The core design principles are so sensitive to context that nearly every group will need to continuously monitor how its implementation is working, and change it as problems are encountered.
p.201 How can core design principle 8 be implemented in a practical sense? We will outline three answers to this question. First, when a single group grows in size, it must differentiate its members as groups of groups in order to function well. … Second, if your group or multigroup organisation has become prosocial enough to function as a corporate unit, then you can work with like-minded groups to form prosocial consortia that thrive in competition with less-organised groups. … Third, groups often fail to implement the core design principles and polycentric governance because of competing narratives.
p.209 You’ll need a process for compiling and prioritising the goals of the group over the short and medium term. You will need an action plan. … Goals are important for groups because they help them coordinate action in a shared direction, and because they motivate people to initiate and sustain effort, even when the going gets tough.
p.210 Learning goals can help increase the psychological flexibility of groups. Learning goals help the group members hold goals more lightly, recognising the need to try things out (variation) and retain only that which is helpful (selection and retention). Learning goals help group members be more willing to make mistakes and less likely to seek to blame others if things go wrong.
p.224 Contacting our hopes for a better world necessarily means contacting our pain over what has happened, what is happening, and what might happen in the future. It is easy to let our hearts harden over and let ourselves become cynical, as though to hope, wish, or act to create a more cooperative and harmonious world is the height of foolish naivety. Faced with all that pain, it is so easy to stop imagining the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
p.224 Martin Luther King Jr. expressed this idea this way: “And all I’m saying is simply this: that all life is interrelated. We are tied in a single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And what affects one directly affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich, even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the Mayo Clinic. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way the world is made."

How beautiful! In theory.

Next time, I'll report on how this is actually going....

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Joining a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

3/26/2022

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Big news folks!

Over the last couple of months, I've been working with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson and philosopher Andy Norman to create a sort of "Vienna Circle" for evolutionary philosophers. The time has finally come to take these ideas to the big leagues.

This is going to be part of an amazing community called Prosocial World, which you'll have to join to take part. So, in this post, I'll share some information about Prosocial in general, and then you can read the specific call to action for my project.

I'll continue to write on this website, of course. But for far more interaction with a growing group of other evolutionary thinkers, please do consider joining us. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me. We plan to start our first activities in April, so do act now!

Summary

Prosocial World is an independent non-profit organization whose aim is to promote positive change around the world. Based on the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom and grounded in contextual behavioral science, evolutionary science, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Prosocial uses a practical, step-by-step approach to help energize and strengthen groups.

These methods can help any group become more cooperative and adaptable at achieving its valued goals and entering into prosocial relations with other groups. Since its formation two years ago, they have trained over 650 group facilitators from more than 30 nations and are creating “field sites” for stewarding cultural evolution around the world.

In February 2022, Prosocial World launched an online platform called Prosocial Commons where groups of all sizes can come together to communicate with one another as they use the prosocial methods to reach their goals. To join the Prosocial Commons, please begin by making a financial donation using the link at the bottom of this page. This can be anything within your means and exemptions can be made for anyone who truly can't pay anything.

The Movie

Award-winning filmmaker Alan Honick has produced this great 7-minute video summary.

The Book

A book about these ideas was published in 2019 by Paul W.B. Atkins PhD, David Sloan Wilson PhD, and Steven C. Hayes PhD.

Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups

"A groundbreaking, comprehensive program for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes—from businesses and social justice groups to global organizations."

David's Long Introduction

Written on Charles Darwin's 212th birthday, this essay by David Sloan Wilson gives a history of the formation of Prosocial World and the other organizations that directly preceded it. This essay also traces the intellectual history of PW all the way back to Darwin himself.

Paul's Short Introduction

Prosocial co-author, and organizational psychologist Paul Atkins wrote "A Short Introduction to the Ideas and Process Behind Prosocial" which gives you just what the title says in a 12-minute read.

Steven's 7-minute Introduction

Prosocial co-author, psychologist, and the developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Steven Hayes features in a 7-minute video about the prosocial process called Linking individual behavior change to social transformation.

Introducing the Prosocial Commons

Introducing the Prosocial Commons contains an announcement from David Sloan Wilson about the creation in February 2022 of a new online platform for bringing Prosocial members together. There is also a link here for the 2-hour webinar that was held to launch this platform. The highpoint of the webinar is a series of short introductions by people who are part of the PW community, giving a vivid impression of the diversity and sense of meaning about what they are building together.

In just a couple of weeks, six projects were already proposed for this platform:

Global Online EvoS with campus chapters
Feeding our Future
Creating a volunteer workforce
Art, Evolution, and Action
Toward a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers
Local community chapters

This is a good start, but more can still be accommodated. If there is a new project that you would like to propose, join now and do so on the project section. A project need not be large. For example, a group for organizing a monthly book club could consist of just a few people.

A Note About the Platform

The digital platform we'll be using for Prosocial Commons is run by hylo. This is "the Community Platform for People on a Mission. Hylo helps groups and networks build community and a better world, together. Free. Open Source. No Ads. Own Your Data."

As if that wasn't good enough, hylo can also be used to create homes for each group that forms within Prosocial, in addition to the "mother" Prosocial group. Hylo is exceptionally well suited for communication among all these groups.

A Note About Making Contributions

Think about the mindsets that are often used to persuade people to donate to good causes.

Sometimes there is an appeal to self-interest—what’s in it for the donor—such as exclusive access to content, merchandise, a burnished reputation. Let's call this a “Me” mindset.

Sometimes there is an appeal to the common good, such as alleviating the suffering of children, mitigating climate change, or reducing inequities. Let’s call this a “We” mindset.

What mindset should we cultivate for the Prosocial Commons? Perhaps we can authentically cultivate a “We & Me” mindset, in which we work for a common good that includes our own welfare. Helping others need not be sacrificial. We can be part of something larger than ourselves, sharing in all of its benefits.

if we really want to support Prosocial World’s mission to “consciously evolve a world that works for all”, then we want to grow as fast as possible. It seems reasonable to expect everyone to make a financial donation within their means, as a signal of their more general intent to contribute to the group. This literally builds a Prosocial World by being prosocial.

Sounds amazing! I can report that the first few weeks have been great.

And now, here is my project:

Towards a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

The Vienna Circle began meeting in 1924, partially inspired by Einstein’s revolution in the field of physics. The group sought to create a similar revolution in philosophy, determined to ground truth in empirical findings using logical positivism. Their ultimate failure in this quest became an important historical example for the limitations of knowledge, but the Vienna Circle still serves as a shining example of the power of small groups acting with purpose towards a goal. (Other than the tragic murder of one of their founders!)

Now, inspired by recent revolutions in evolutionary biology, the time is right for another group of philosophers to come together and focus on the implications for their field. Early philosophers after Darwin may have once poisoned the well for such endeavours with their abhorrent and tragic beliefs such as eugenics and Social Darwinism, but they were digging in the wrong place based on naïve and poorly understood versions of evolution. With the advent of the modern synthesis, the extended evolutionary synthesis, multilevel selection theory, and a host of other findings about the major transitions in the evolution of cooperation among living organisms, a much more mature evolutionary philosophy can now be developed.

This is already happening in isolated pockets around the world. Just a handful of prominent examples illustrate this clearly:

Dan Dennett has been writing about Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and the metaphysical implications for consciousness and free will for decades.
Michael Ruse has written dozens of books on evolution and philosophy and edited The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Ethics.
The term evolutionary epistemology was first coined in 1974 by the psychologist Donald Campbell and has had notable developments from philosophers including Michael Bradie, Nathalie Gontier, and Andy Norman.
David Livingston Smith edited a superb collection of essays in 2016 titled How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism.
The philosopher Denis Dutton published numerous books and essays on aesthetics and his TED Talk “A Darwinian Theory of Beauty” has been viewed over 2.6 million times.
During the 10 years he’s written Evolutionary Philosophy, Ed Gibney has published peer-reviewed papers on evolutionary ethics and evolutionary politics, which propose ways that evolutionary perspectives can help us bridge David Hume’s is-ought divide and rebuild the collapsed harm principle from John Stuart Mill which underlies theories of justice in liberal societies.
Even the field of classical logic has been built on three laws of thought that only hold for static views of the universe, which, of course, have been completely undermined by Darwin.

From this brief list, we can see that all of the major branches of philosophy have been affected by evolutionary thinking. Dan Dennett’s “universal acid” has reached every one of them. Yet these exciting developments are seldom seen together by specialized philosophers or their students. This is because university departments necessarily contain diverse perspectives and are often still dominated by Continental or Analytic philosophers who sometimes ignore or are downright hostile to evolutionary and other scientific studies.

This project contends that there is now a huge opportunity to bring all of these evolutionary perspectives on philosophy together. Such a collaboration could provide great benefits to the field of philosophy, to the intellectual underpinnings of the activities of Prosocial World, and to the study of the survival and flourishing of life in general.

Prosocial World (PW) is a nonprofit dedicated to “consciously evolving a world that works for all.” It was co-founded in 2020 by David Sloan Wilson as an amicable spinoff from his previous nonprofit, the Evolution Institute. With its online magazine This View of Life, over 15 full and part-time staff, and a new major grant from the John Templeton Foundation, PW is in an excellent position to serve as the online hub of a circle of evolutionary philosophers.

Elsewhere on PW, EvoS programs have demonstrated the benefit of bringing a cross-disciplinary group of scientists together from all backgrounds (both physical and social) in order to view their subjects through the lens of the latest findings of evolution. Movements are also sprouting to bring such evolutionary views to the study of topics in the humanities like art and religion.

What is to be done here? In the development of this circle of evolutionary philosophers, we can follow much of what the Vienna Circle did. Their group included academic and non-academic philosophers, as well as scientists and thinkers from a variety of other disciplines. They included teachers as well as students. They met regularly to discuss important papers and ideas. Some members wrote a manifesto for the group (which others vehemently disagreed with—a sign they weren’t using the prosocial process!). They organized conferences. They started a peer-reviewed journal. And numerous influential books were produced from this intellectual environment.

Now, with advances in technology, we can do all this and more, drawing from a worldwide audience of interested participants. Anyone eager to learn about and apply “this view of life” could join in. Altogether, this would eventually construct an independent and virtual philosophy department within the broader “Evolution University” of Prosocial World. If such a department did form, it would be unique in the world, and likely impossible to replicate in any existing universities.

The information above lays out a long-term vision for this circle of evolutionary philosophers. We can only get there through many iterations of projects and growth. And we must start from square one not knowing who will take part in this circle or how fast it will spread. As such, this particular initial project will embark upon a co-created “learning journey” to begin to explore this vast territory with practical applications in mind. The steps accomplished will very much depend on who is taking them, but a firmer plan for the future will be one of the main goals we seek.

This exploratory process will take place as part of the Prosocial Commons (PC), a new support-and-engagement group that has been formed within PW for implementing new initiatives such as this one. The initiatives will take place as part of a 12-week ‘generation’ of activity that will begin in April. The minimal commitment for becoming involved includes:

Attend a single one-hour online meeting per week.
One hour of preparation for each meeting.
Notification if this commitment cannot be met on any given week.

This is a very modest commitment per capita that can result in a very large public good. Working in appropriately structured groups with meaningful objectives and a minimal commitment by each member is usually a highly rewarding experience.

Joining the Prosocial Commons requires making a financial donation to PW that can be anything within one’s means, with exemptions for those who truly can’t afford to pay anything. This creates a common pool of financial resources for the PC without imposing any financial barriers to entry. Members of the PC are free to join other initiatives or to nominate initiatives of their own. In general, we expect a high degree of synergy between initiatives, which will be in communication with each other during the 12-week cycles of activity.

To join in this exciting new collaboration, begin by taking just these two steps:

1) Go here to make your donation to PW to become a member of the Prosocial Commons.

2) Go here to register for this project and provide some basic information about yourself and your interests.

Thank you for becoming part of this bold experiment in cultural evolution! We look forward to varying it, selecting it, and replicating it with you.

Ed Gibney
Evolutionary Philosopher
www.evphil.com

Andy Norman
Author of Mental Immunity
Executive Director, CIRCE

David Sloan Wilson
President, Prosocial World
SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus

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An Evolutionary Perspective on the Meaning of Life

2/7/2022

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Last week, I wrote a small piece for the North East Humanists' bulletin, which I thought I should share here. There's much more to say about the topic, but I hope you enjoy it.

At the end of 2021, the BBC Radio 4 show The Moral Maze had a special episode titled “Meaning” to discuss the meaning of life. This show usually draws from a handful of regulars for their four panellists, but for this show they brought in Will Self, an author and journalist; Bonnie Greer, a playwright, novelist, and former Chancellor of Kingston University; Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury; and Alice Roberts, the President of Humanists UK.

The written introduction to the show is very thought provoking:

“The end of one year and the beginning of another can be an obvious moment for people to set goals and reset priorities. The pandemic, from which we are yet to emerge, has put much into perspective and has doubtless prompted many to ask the question: where am I going with my life? What’s it all about? While none of us can truly know the meaning of life, most of us are meaning-seeking creatures who have our own ideas about what gives life meaning – God, nature, the arts, human relationships, good food, scientific progress. Is meaning essential to a life well lived or do we put too much pressure on ourselves in trying to create it?”

The entire 43-minute episode is worth listening to, but I wanted to share and reflect on the final words from Alice Roberts. Near the close of the program, she said,

“I think that what’s interesting is the diversity we’ve heard. Both amongst ourselves on the panel, but also from the witnesses. I think that what makes human life meaningful, in a much broader way, is all this diversity. So, we’ve got religious people for whom religion and its tenets are important and may suggest a meaning in life. And then we’ve heard from a nihilist. As a Humanist, I think I can live an ethical and fulfilling life using my own reason and empathy and my own moral sense as a guide. But I don’t think there will ever be just one meaning of life. There are as many meanings as there are different people.”

This is a typical response from Humanists, reflecting the humility we have about our place in this universe. We profess no certainties taken from any sacred texts that provide religious meanings for life. As such, Alice provided a good representation of Humanists UK. But without more context, this can come across as relativistic. Who’s to say that any of those religious meanings of life aren’t proper? Based on many campaigns from Humanists UK, I think it’s safe to say we Humanists think plenty of religious meanings for life don’t fit the bill. But how do we explain this?

One concept that I think is helpful comes from a paper written by the philosopher Dan Dennett. In a 2009 article titled, “Darwin's ‘strange inversion of reasoning’”, Dennett described the way our understanding of the world has been completely turned upside down compared to the way that creationists think about it. Dennett quoted a passage from a contemporary critic of Darwin who just couldn’t believe what was being proposed. That critic wrote:

“We may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole [Darwinian] system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory [of Evolution], and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all of the achievements of creative skill.”

As Dennett makes clear, this intended criticism actually turns out to be a wonderful description of what is going on in the world. There has been no “Absolute Wisdom” from on high designing the world in a beautiful, top-down fashion. Instead, Darwin’s “bubble-up theory of creation” explains very clearly how life has found its way forward through myriad trials and errors conducted in “Absolute Ignorance”. In exactly the same way, there is no singular, top-down “Meaning of Life” that comes booming down to us from on high. Instead, meanings are also built up through trials and errors. Over the millennia of human culture, we have discovered some that survive better than others. And we are still testing others out, which is why Alice was right to say, “There are as many meanings as there are different people.” Only some of these meanings, however, lead towards more survival and flourishing for life on this planet. And that is what we can use our reason to try and figure out.

For much more on this topic, I highly recommend the work of philosopher John Messerly. He wrote a book in 2013 called The Meaning of Life, and he published a synopsis of it on his website called “A Philosopher’s Lifelong Search for Meaning.”

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Overview of Mental Immunity by Andy Norman (Part 2 of 2)

1/14/2022

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Hi again! It’s time for my second post about Andy Norman’s great new epistemology book, Mental Immunity. In my last post, I covered parts one, two, and three of the book, which explained the new science of cognitive immunology. I absolutely loved it. I ended that post by asking if Andy had succeeded in “the search for a better way to think,” as he proclaimed on the cover of the book. I superficially said that he had, but in reality, that raises a much deeper question of what exactly “better” is. Dealing with that, and with some other deep questions, is the task of the fourth and final part of Mental Immunity.

And there is where I had some real questions and potential differences with Andy. To try and resolve them, I followed up on several of the footnotes from the book after I finished reading it. In particular, I found Andy’s 1997 paper “Regress and the Doctrine of Epistemic Original Sin” to be very illuminating. Still, I had more questions, so I had an extensive back and forth with Andy over email. And I’ve thought about that exchange continually for a few months now while I’ve carried on with my other epistemology research. I’ll leave the details of my private exchange private, but I think I’ve hit upon some good ways to resolve any issues we left outstanding. (At least to my mind.)

A good place to start is with Andy’s humble pleas about his daring proposal for a “New Socratic model of reasonable belief.”

(p.319) My philosopher friends will pick at it. That’s okay: it’s more a heuristic than a fully worked-out theory, and I welcome efforts to refine it.
(p.342) By all means, explore the space of possible challenges, and give voice to those I’ve missed. Delve deeper than I have, and bring overlooked challenges to my attention. But don’t make sport of hoisting my petard; be a friend, and lead me away before it blows. Better yet, guide us all to a better alternative.

Those are wonderful words that should really be in the preface of all works of philosophy. (I’ve said something very similar on the Purpose page of my website.) And in that spirit, let me use this post to try to lay out a few of my personal alternatives for Mental Immunity. I’ll leave it to posterity to decide if these are “better” or not. In summary, I have found that there is one main concept that separates Andy and I, and one supporting concept that needs more consideration. Otherwise, we’re practically perfectly aligned.

First, the supporting concept. In order to claim that one infectious idea is good while another mind-parasite is bad, you really need a way to define good and bad. You could just go the amoral, instrumental route and say you’re only concerned with whether an idea is good or bad for its goal. For example, most of us would say it’s a morally bad idea to fly planes into an office tower, yet we may readily admit that it was a good tactic relative to the terrorists’ beliefs. That would be one way to deal with the issue of value judgments—by basically ducking them. However, Andy wants to do more than that. He wants to be able to judge which ideas are really good and which ones are really bad. And that requires an ethical judgment. What does he use for his criteria? In his discussion with Jamie Woodhouse at Sentientism, Andy said the fact-value distinction can be crystalised by one simple sentence — “Well-being matters.” — and this will be the topic of his next book. That’s great to hear about another book because this needs a lot of consideration. Well-being is a highly contested idea with a long history of philosophical attempts to define it, so it seems to me that Andy has merely kicked the can down the road until he can deal with that definition. Fine. In my recent paper about rebuilding the harm principle, I defined well-being as “that which makes the survival of life more robust” (with harm moving in the opposite direction towards fragility, death, and extinction). I believe this is the long-sought objective grounding for ethics, which I’m happy to discuss at another time. For now, let me just insert this into Andy’s work wherever I think he needs it and then I find much closer alignment with it.

Now for the main concept keeping us apart. Truth. In my work, I say we should drop all claims for it, whereas Andy is happy to keep using that word throughout his work. For a discussion about epistemology, that sure sounds like a big deal! As with so much in philosophy, however, this boils down to definitions. In the excellent Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on truth, there are several theories of truth that are considered — the Correspondence Theory, the Semantic Theory, the Deflationary Theory, the Coherence Theory, and the Pragmatic Theory. There’s no need to wade into that discussion right now since these deal with the ontology of truth—what is it?—whereas we’re presently concerned with its epistemology—can we know truth? For me, that answer is a resounding no, because, as the IEP article lays out, "most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.” In other words, the word truth in philosophy means an eternal and unchanging fact. But because we live in an evolving world where we cannot know what revelations the future will bring, that rules out certifying any proposition as true. And as the IEP article says in its section about knowledge, “For generations, discussions of truth have been bedevilled by the question, ‘How could a proposition be true unless we know it to be true?’” According to that a strict requirement, they cannot.

To drive this point home, I discovered a striking fact in Julian Baggini’s recent book How the World Thinks: A Global History of Philosophy. While discussing the recent problems with Russia and its campaigns of misinformation, Baggini noted on p.355 that, “Even the Russian language helps to maintain the elasticity of truth, for which it has two words. Istina is natural truth, the truth of the universe, and is immutable. Pravda, in contrast, describes the human world and is a human construction.” I studied Russian for a few years, and there is some debate about these definitions, but wouldn’t it be helpful here for philosophers to actually make this distinction and nominate a word for the specific meaning of istina in the sense given here? As it stands, philosophers mix these up all the time and it creates real unsolvable problems. For example, there is this passage from elsewhere in Baggini’s book when he is talking about the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce:

(Baggini, pp.84-5) Given that most convergence on truth is in a hypothetical future, in practice this means what we now call truth is somewhat provisional and relative. “We have to live today by what truth we can get today, and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood,” wrote Peirce. The worry is that if we take this seriously, we are left with a dangerous relativism in which anyone can claim as true whatever they happen to find useful. Truth becomes a matter of expediency and it is then impossible to dispute the truth claims of others, no matter how wild.

Such wild relativism is exactly what Andy wants to fight in Mental Immunity, and he comes up with a novel way to defend his own truth claims. But I think a clearer definition of the word truth, and an avoidance of any connotation of istina, would help to finish the fight even better. Unfortunately, the word truth doesn’t even make it into Andy’s otherwise very extensive 17-page index. The deeper concept of truth is just not something he’s considering here.

So, what’s the right approach for defining truth? Do we deflate truth to mean pravda so it’s compatible with reality, or do we insist that it is istina, and then eliminate it from our usage as an illusion that’s incompatible with reality? This is the kind of choice that Dan Dennett has faced with both consciousness and free will. For the former, as it is widely used, Dan says consciousness is an illusion and we can eliminate it. For the latter, he considers the concept of free will to be so important that we need to deflate it into “the free will worth wanting” in order to keep it in use. Dan spelled that out explicitly in his paper “Some Observations on the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will” while he reacted to Daniel Wegner’s book The Illusion of Conscious Will. He wrote:

I saw Wegner as the killjoy scientist who shows that Cupid doesn't shoot arrows and then entitles his book The Illusion of Romantic Love. Wegner does go on to soften the blow by arguing that "conscious will may be an illusion, but responsible, moral action is quite real" (p. 224). Our disagreement was really a matter of expository tactics, not theory. Should one insist that free, conscious will is real without being magic, without being what people traditionally thought it was (my line)? Or should one concede that traditional free will is an illusion—but not to worry: Life still has meaning and people can and should be responsible (Wegner's line)? The answer to this question is still not obvious.

Similarly, should the word truth only be used for the unerring eternal truths of what really, truly, actually exists (my line) or should the word truth be used for what we think is correct right now while remaining open to revising it later (Andy’s line)? Based on Dan Dennett’s two examples, the correct answer may depend upon the situation. Both choices have their advantages and drawbacks. But to me, religious believers are going to hang on to their usage of the word "true" as unerring and eternal. So, we who see that that is not tenable need to be the ones to avoid its usage. We have plenty of other options at our disposal — accurate, correct, verifiable, factual — and this gives us plenty of opportunities to be loud about admitting we simply can never get to the unerring certainty of truth. And that instils the humility necessary to ensure continued inquiry and dialogue, which is so important for building shared consensus.

I didn’t arrive at this explicit conclusion until after my email exchange with Andy, but I think it fits in with the two big fundamental positions that he and I did agree upon: 1) knowledge is provisional; but 2) we still can establish reasonable beliefs. It remains to be seen whether my "truth" is the right one to insist upon.

Now that I’ve laid out my own definitions for truth and goodness, I can now go over the last part of Andy’s book and interpret it in a way that I think is satisfying to us both and builds upon our two foundations of agreement. As before, I'm not going to provide a formal review of this book. I'll just share some selected excerpts that I jotted down and insert a few of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2021 first edition from HarperCollins.

Mental Immunity by Andy Norman

(p.258) When I speak of a “better” understanding of reason’s requirements, I mean one that is clear, explicit, vetted, defensible, well functioning, and shared. What makes these the right qualities to focus on? Well, look at the way reasoning works, and think about ways to improve that functioning. Do this, and it quickly becomes apparent what “better” ought to mean in this context.

Andy starts with this bare instrumental usage of the term better. Unfortunately, terrorists could probably use these criteria to say they are thinking well too. They provide clear, explicit, defensible, shared, and well functioning arguments for how to apply sharia law for the salvation of human souls. We need some more criteria if we want to judge their beliefs as mind-parasites. I think my definitions of good and harm make this very clear they fall in the bad category.

(p.262) When [Socrates] wanted to determine the worthiness of a claim, he’d test it with questions and see how it fared. The implied standard in such an approach is this: judgments that can survive critical questioning might merit acceptance, but those that can’t don’t.

I love to see the use of the word “survive” in these descriptions of epistemology. That's a key term in evolution and it fits right in with my JBS theory of knowledge.

(p.268) While useful for combatting confused and mistaken judgments, the Socratic picture is less than ideal for building common knowledge. Actually, this understates the problem. The Socratic conception turns out to be profoundly corrosive of the very possibility of positive knowledge.

Andy thinks this is a problem, but to me this is okay because positive knowledge is not possible. As I wrote in my review of Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes, “Oreskes jumps into this story…with Auguste Comte—the father of positivism—and what she calls ‘The Dream of Positive Knowledge.’ If anything could be trusted, it would be a scientific finding that had been absolutely positively proven to be true. Unfortunately, as Oreskes makes clear with her retelling of the history of science, such dreams have proven fruitless.” We have to accept this situation with humility and move on with the best we can get…which can still be very good.

(pp.276-81) 300 BC to 1500 CE … During this extended period, three basic epistemologies gained and lost influence: Aristotle’s, that of the Academic skeptics, and that of Christian philosophers. Each made an uneasy accommodation to the Platonic picture of reason. Each developed an influential standard of reasonable belief—one that gave rise to a distinctive set of reason-giving practices. And each of these epistemologies—initially a “solution” to the quandary of basic belief—went on to shape Western civilization in ways both subtle and profound. … Aristotle’s answer was clever but evasive: our apprehension of first principles is “immediate”—that is, direct and unmediated. In other words, we simply behold them and know them to be true. We know this answer to be problematic. … Aristotle was playing a kind of shell game, hiding his lack of a deep solution to the regress problem. … According to leading scholars, Academy philosophers employed a skeptical strategy that “…attempted to show that all claims are groundless.” “For over two hundred years,” writes one of them, “’Why do you believe that?’ became the leading question in philosophical discussion. ‘You can have no reason to believe that’ became the skeptical refrain.” … We’re talking now about a radical skepticism, one that obliterates the distinction between reasonable and unreasonable belief, thereby undermining healthy mental immune function. … Epistemology had painted itself into a corner and made itself all but irrelevant to practical thinkers. … This led early Christian thinkers to try a different tack…we must accept some things on faith. In the same way that God can halt the regress of causes (by being the Creator, or Prime Mover), faith in God can halt the regress of reasons. Just as God provides the true basis for existence, faith provides the true basis for knowledge. This faith-based understanding…helped entrench an orthodoxy that discouraged challenges to church teaching. It excused stubbornly dogmatic thinking and compromised mental immune systems across Europe. … For centuries thereafter, academic skepticism made it hard for the well educated to have the courage of their convictions. [An] option…to try and steer a middle path between skepticism and dogmatism…is to argue that certain beliefs really are properly and objectively basic, or foundational, for us all. … When pressed…foundationalists have tended to wave their hands and employ techniques of distraction. This has diminished rationalism and prevented it from becoming an influential movement.

This is an incredibly helpful summary of the historical problems and developments within epistemology. These are the efforts that Andy is trying to reconcile and surpass. (As am I.) Framing this issue as the need to find the middle path between skepticism and dogmatism is extremely clarifying.

(p.283) If we hope to establish anything “firm and lasting in the sciences,” Descartes wrote, we must first raze the foundations of received opinion, and build all of knowledge afresh upon beliefs that cannot be doubted.

This, of course, is an impossible goal now that we see how life arose in the middle of the evolution of the universe, which leaves us in a position where we cannot actually gain the type of knowledge “that cannot be doubted.” The cosmological revolutions that Darwin wrought need to trickle down to our epistemology as well.

(p.283) Descartes’ architectural metaphor gave modern thinkers a convenient way to cast the central philosophical problem of the age: On what foundation does true knowledge rest? But it also did something more subtle and far-reaching—something that has, until now, escaped notice: it projected a gravitational field onto the space of reasons.

This is a very interesting observation from Andy! He’s right that knowledge is spoken about as having gravity and requiring a foundation. But actually, it is only ever free-floating, using sets of hypotheses that we continue to test and refine. There is just no “bedrock of truth” down there.

(p.286) In sum, the Platonic picture not only survived the Enlightenment, it traversed it in grand style. It was borne along by the foundations metaphor and its attendant assumption of epistemic gravity. It helped generate one of the defining problems of the age, a difficulty that modern philosophers ultimately failed to solve. Only now can we see why: the Platonic picture has long created cognitive immune problems. It leads us down the garden path to an extreme and impractical skepticism, which again and again compels reactionaries to embrace a ferocious dogmatism. In this way, it renders some mental immune systems hyperactive, and others underactive.

This is a good summary of Andy’s diagnosis of the problem with epistemology. The framework he set up earlier—as needing to thread the needle between skepticism and dogmatism—lines up perfectly with a cognitive immune system that is dysfunctional at either end of the spectrum. The middle path is the way forward. I would only add that acknowledging the merits of skepticism doesn’t necessarily lead all the way to extreme and impractical skepticism. I think it keeps one from ever contemplating the temptations of dogmatism. Therefore, my methods of defining knowledge as justified beliefs surviving our best tests also results in a mental immune system that is neither underactive nor hyperactive.

(p.288) Empiricism, it turns out, is more problematic than it appears. For one thing, it’s often appropriate to question perceptual judgments. … More generally, our senses can deceive us. … Perceptual judgments can, but need not, bring reasoning to a close. How are we to know when they do and when they don’t? Second, perceptual beliefs seem an inadequate basis for the full breadth of our knowledge—a corpus that includes not just matters of empirical fact, but also mathematical truths (e.g. the Pythagorean theorem), counterfactuals (“If average global temperatures rise two degrees, sea levels will rise”), causal laws (“Smoking causes cancer”), things about the near future (“I will go to the store tomorrow”), ethical knowledge (“Honesty is the best policy”), basic things about other people’s minds (“Joe is happy”), and so on. Indeed, it is exceedingly difficult to give a convincing account of how causal knowledge, knowledge of the future, knowledge of right and wrong, and knowledge of other minds are grounded in empirical evidence.

I actually found this criticism of empiricism difficult to follow. Where else can knowledge come from but our senses? There isn’t another natural possibility. I personally found it easy to link these examples of the full breadth of our knowledge to perceptual beliefs. Even logical rules and mathematical truths are shown to work over and over again by empirical evidence. If gods intervened regularly with supernatural interruptions to reality, how would we ever develop theories about the laws of nature? Perhaps I’m missing something about the claims of empiricism, but I think it holds together.

(pp.291-2) The ethic of belief that prevails across much of the world today is a variant of empiricism. It centers on the notion of evidence, so philosophers call it “evidentialism.” The core idea is simple: to be genuinely reasonable, a belief or claim must be backed by sufficient evidence. … (This is the same idea W.K. Clifford defended, so the Western tradition’s “Big 4” pictures of reasonable belief are, on my telling: the Socratic, the Platonic, the Humean, and the Cliffordian.) … Where did evidentialism come from? Empiricism, I think, matured into evidentialism. In a way, it’s just empiricism generalized.

This distinction was new to me, so maybe there is indeed some hair-splitting work to be done on definitions here.

(p.294) Evidentialism entails the illegitimacy of beliefs not supported by sufficient evidence. It’s not hard to imagine this standard working well to sort responsible from irresponsible claims about what is. Indeed, it has a long and distinguished track record of doing just that. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about its treatment of claims about what ought to be. In fact, it’s quite hard to see how evidence alone can license any claim about right or wrong, good or bad.

Actually, my paper on the bridge between is and ought would solve this. To me, the right way to derive oughts are by looking at how life must act in order to stay alive. That is the only context in which oughts make sense. There just aren't any oughts for rocks. Oughts only apply to living things. And we have gained all sorts of natural evidence for what promotes more and more robust survival for life (i.e. well-being).

(pp.296-7) Reason can have nothing to say about our most basic ends and values. Our core ends and values, it seems, must be determined by something utterly nonrational: preferences, desire, faith, or the like.

This is a common position among philosophers who steer clear of Hume’s guillotine, but this is an example of where I might try to improve Andy’s arguments. First of all, I don’t know of anything that is utterly nonrational. That sounds like something supernatural to me. Reasons and emotions are not mutually exclusive things. I’m not a dualist about them. Instead, it’s clear that reasons and emotions are related to one another. They feed off one another in a bi-directional manner. There are reasons we feel emotions, and, as Hume said, reasons are the slave of the passions.

(p.299) For some years, the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has been arguing that, in many cases, rational belief simply doesn’t require evidence. Or, for that matter, any supporting argument. … If arguments like this go unanswered, the evidentialist ethos will eventually wither and die. Plantinga’s case, though, is presently gaining influence: it’s anthologized in popular introduction to philosophy textbooks, and is routinely taught to thousands of undergraduates.

WTF?! That sure is a sorry state of affairs for philosophy. And Andy is right to dedicate a book to fighting it.

(p.301) Plantinga then points out (correctly, in my view) that “no one has yet developed and articulated…necessary and sufficient conditions for proper basicality.” His point, stripped of jargon, is simple: no one has yet spelled out what may properly be deployed as an unargued premise. Rationalists seem to owe us such an account, for they propose an argument-centred standard of rational permissibility. To function capably as rational beings, we need to know when it’s okay to treat a claim as admissible, yet not in need of further argument. Rationalists, though, have yet to provide such an account. … Can evidentialism be repaired? Can we resolve the quandary of basic belief, and revive the rationalist project? The answer, it turns out, is yes. But only if we make a clean break from the Platonic picture of reason.

That’s a bold claim! In my main post to date about knowledge, I said that a free-floating hypothesis that has yet to be disproven is the best we can do to start building our knowledge, and that has proven to be awfully good. But let’s see what Andy has in mind.

(p.306) I took the Socratic standard and plugged in the concept of challenges. That yielded what we might call the “New Socratic standard" — The true test of a good idea is its ability to withstand challenges.

This is very good. I’d say it’s the equivalent of Oreskes’ description of science arriving at broad consensus after debates from all manner of people, but, as Andy has done, we can extend this from scientific knowledge to all of knowledge. That aligns very well with my own conception of knowledge as justified beliefs that are surviving.

(pp.309-10) How do we know whether a given challenge arises? … The solution involves distinguishing two kinds of challenge. One kind seeks to invalidate a claim by presenting reasons against the claim at issue…I call them “onus-bearing” challenges. … The other sort of challenge is simpler. Sometimes, a challenger offers no reasons against but instead just asks the claimant to provide reasons for. … These simpler challenges are naked grounds for doubt, so I call them bare.

This is a key move for Andy in his attempt to stop the infinite regression of asking why, which otherwise leads to radical skepticism. It's a nice distinction to make about challenges to beliefs.

(p.311) Entire schools of ancient philosophy managed to convince themselves that iterated bare challenges undermine all claims to knowledge. They became indiscriminate critics and lost the support of more pragmatic thinkers.

This may be an accurate representation of history, but I don’t think iterated bare challenges are the only way that skepticism arises. There are Descartes’ evil demons, sci-fi speculations that we are in the matrix, Baggini’s thought experiment about hypnotists, Arne Naess’s description of efforts to claim truth as “trying to blow a bag up from the inside,” or Fitch’s paradox of knowability which concludes that in order to know any truth you must know all truths (which we cannot). Andy claims in a footnote to have dealt with these objections in an earlier paper, but I could not find it. I believe that skepticism still holds for any claims of unarguable truth. And that's how I stop any moves towards dogmatism.

(p.312) For example, “We should treat each other kindly” is by no stretch of the imagination a “fact present to the senses.” Nor is it a “fact present to memory.” (Most philosophers don’t even consider it a fact.) It’s plainly true, though, and those who assert it are under no obligation to prove the point.

This is representative of the kind of passages in Mental Immunity that I think could be strengthened by the two arguments I made in the beginning of this post about goodness and truth. First of all, it seems to me that we have lots of evidence from our senses that treating each other kindly leads to good outcomes. (Except when we are enabling bad behaviour and then we may need to be cruel to be kind.) So, this is where my supporting definition of good and harm can be put into play. Secondly, saying “it’s plainly true” does not make it so. To me, that sounds like Plantinga’s derided argument above that “rational belief simply doesn’t require evidence.” It’s also a signal to consider one of Dan Dennett’s 12 best tools for critical thinking —the ‘surely’ operator. As Dan says, “Not always, not even most of the time, but often the world ‘surely’ is as good as a blinking light in locating a weak point in the argument.” Surely, that applies in this case to the word "plainly" as well. Instead, I would have found it much better for Andy to simply avoid the use of the word true here, and say “treating each other kindly is a very well supported guide for most behaviour.”

(p.317) There’s wisdom embedded in our pre-theoretical grasp of how reasoning should go, and any theory that hopes to strengthen mental immune systems must take account of it.

Andy doesn’t say what a “pre-theoretical grasp” is, but I can strengthen this by defining it as an innate valuation of survival. In my series on consciousness, I found the most basic level of consciousness to be built using “affect” or the valance of what is good or bad for life to remain alive. If that’s the wisdom Andy meant to tap into, then I can get on board with that.

(p.319) I can now deliver the long-awaited mind vaccine: A belief is reasonable if it can withstand the challenges to it that genuinely arise.

This is intended to come as a big crescendo in the book. Presented here in such a short format, that may sound like question-begging. But when you dig into Andy’s book and learn what he really means for challenges to genuinely arise, this is essentially equivalent to my JBS theory that knowledge can only ever be justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests. Therefore, I’m happy to accept this end point for Andy’s argument. (Even if I quibble with how he got there.)

(p.319) My philosopher friends will pick at it. That’s okay: it’s more a heuristic than a fully worked-out theory, and I welcome efforts to refine it.

I’m repeating this plea from above to put it in better context. When I first read this, it came across to me as a bit of a backtrack after an entire book filled with very bold claims. But yes, we can refine and strengthen this heuristic into a full theory. I would call that a theory of evolutionary epistemology, but that may just be me. No matter what we call it, Andy is on to something really big here.

(pp.320-24) Where the Platonic picture nudges us into the “How do I validate this?” mindset of those prone to confirmation bias, the Socratic nudges us into the “What should we make of this?” mindset of the genuinely curious. … I see this as the model’s primary virtue [number one]. … The shift to a Socratic conception of reasonable belief, then, could mitigate, not just confirmation bias, but our proneness to ideological derangement. Let’s call this virtue 2. Virtue 3: The New Socratic model also implies that it’s not enough to mindlessly repeat the question “Why?” … Virtue 4: Notice next that the model directs us to consider both upstream and downstream implications. … Virtue 5: The model modulates mental immune response. In fact, it’s carefully designed to temper the impulse to question and criticize. … Virtue 6: The New Socratic Model promotes the growth mindset. For it primes us to learn from challenges. … Virtue 7: The model sanctions open-mindedness and scientific humility. For no matter how well you understand an issue—no matter how familiar you become with the challenges that arise in a domain—it’s always possible that a new challenge will arise and upset the applecart. … Virtue 8: The model also tells us what we must do to merit the courage of our convictions: become intimately familiar with the challenges to a claim that arise in a domain, and make sure that you can successfully address them. … Virtue 9: The model points to more effective ways to teach critical thinking. … Virtue 10: The model expands the purview of science. For the machinery of challenge-and-response allows us to treat any claim as a hypothesis.

Yes! I love all these virtues and agree they are present and helpful. I would even go so far as to call all of these changes, challenges, and growth to be evolutionary. : )

(p.337) Still others object that the account deploys unexplained normative language, and thereby fails to fully explicate the concept.

I’m not surprised he’s faced these objections without a better explanation of what “better” actually means. I really think my evolutionary ethics can help here.

(p.337) I insist that all claims are, and forever remain, open to onus-bearing challenges. We should never close our minds to the possibility that telling grounds for doubt might come along and invalidate a belief.

Agreed! And that’s why I drop truth from my criteria for knowledge. But I admit that entirely depends on your definition of truth.

(pp.344-5) This story—the one our descendants might someday tell—might continue: In short order, our understanding coalesced into know-how. We learned to test claims with a certain kind of question: to seed minds with ideas that can withstand such questioning and weed minds of those that can’t. In effect, our forebears modified an ancient inoculant, produced a mind vaccine, and administered it widely. In this way, they curtailed the outbreaks of unreason that once terrorized our ancestors. They learned how to cultivate mental immune health, and transformed humanity’s prospects.

What an inspiring vision! Imagining a future with a healthy mental immune system modulating back and forth between more and less validated claims is much easier to see take hold in a society than any utopian visions for "perfecting man’s rationality." This really may prove to be a major conceptual breakthrough.

(pp.346-50) Here, then, is a kind of “12-Step Program” to cognitive immune health. … Step 1: Play with ideas. … Step 2: Understand that minds are not passive knowledge receptacles. … Step 3: Get past the self-indulgent idea that you’re entitled to your opinions. … Step 4: Distinguish between good and bad faith. … Step 5: Give up the idea that learning is merely a matter of adding to the mind’s knowledge stockpile. … Step 6: New information is like a puzzle piece; you must find where it fits and how it connects. True wisdom requires you to clarify and order your thoughts. … Step 7: Don’t use “Who’s to say?” to cut short unsettling inquiries. … Step 8: Let go of the idea that value judgments can’t be objective. … Step 9: Treat challenges to your beliefs as opportunities rather than threats. … Step 10: Satisfy your need for belonging with a community of inquiry rather than a community of belief. … Step 11: Upgrade your understanding of reasonable belief. … Step 12: Don’t underestimate the value of ideas that have survived scrutiny.

Fabulous. Once again, I’d modify these ever so slightly with my additional points about truth and goodness, but I love to see the final emphasis being placed on ideas that survive scrutiny.

So, there you have it. As a nit-picking philosopher, I had a few issues with minor pieces of Andy’s arguments. It turns out that he, like every other philosopher so far, hasn’t solved all of the deepest problems in our field. But Andy still ends up in a very good place and he gives us incredibly helpful information along the way. As such, I highly recommend reading Mental Immunity on your own to get the full experience of actually improving your own mental hygiene.

And with that, it's time for me to get going on my own paper about evolutionary epistemology. I've got several projects in the pipeline right now so give me some time for that. In the meantime, have a great 2022. May you maintain or gain your full mental health.

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Overview of Mental Immunity by Andy Norman (Part 1 of 2)

1/7/2022

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After my quick overviews of three books about epistemology — Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch, Knowledge and its Limits by Timothy Williamson, and How to Talk to Science Denier by Lee McIntyre — I’ve finally arrived at the most interesting and thought-provoking book on the subject that I’ve read. And that is Mental Immunity by Andy Norman. Over the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to personally get to know Andy a little bit after he reached out to me when I published an article in The Humanist magazine proposing some changes to their definition of humanism. I’ve also attended a few of the monthly discussions he leads for This View of Life called Examined Lives. (Those are great. Go sign up for them now. I’d join in every month if the timing worked better for me in the UK.) So, Andy’s a prominent humanist and involved with evolutionary projects. If I ever decided to go for a PhD in philosophy, Andy would be one of the first people I’d turn to for advice. As such, I was very excited to order and receive a copy of his book about a topic that I’ve been personally working on as well. And yet, I had no idea about the level of ambition in this book. It really does shoot for philosophical immortality! Which I really admire.

With all this in mind, I really need a few posts to cover Mental Immunity. There is already a ton of stuff out there for this book since Andy has done loads of publicity for it. The Media Appearances and Events page on his website lists almost 50 public discussions, including one with the granddaddy podcaster of them all, Joe Rogan! I haven’t listened to all of these discussions (sorry, Andy, I’m not a stalker), but from what I can tell by their summaries, they generally stay confined to roughly the first three-quarters of the book, since that covers what the title focuses on—cognitive immunology—and that is a new and important idea all on its own. Once that has been well and truly introduced, however, the final part of the book tries to solve some fundamental problems of epistemology by modifying a Socratic idea into something Andy calls a mind vaccine, which he proposes could improve the way we all think, and that would improve the lives of trillions of us and our descendants. Those are some big goals!

So, I’ll need another post to discuss that last part of Mental Immunity, but back in October, Andy was kind enough to fill in for a last-minute cancellation and give a talk to my North East Humanists group. That talk, like many of his other ones, stayed mostly confined to the cognitive immunology portion of the book, and I wrote a recap of that for our November bulletin. For this blog post, then, let me just repeat what I wrote there, lightly editing it for this outlet.

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As a fellow Humanist, Andy said we often think that a lack of ‘critical thinking’ is at the root of all the bad ideas out there today. Misinformation and disinformation are spreading like wildfire. An outlandish example is the QAnon conspiracy that the world is secretly being run by a cabal of paedophiles that can only be thwarted by Donald Trump. But bad information has serious consequences too. It has clearly impacted the 700,000 US and 140,000 UK Covid deaths, which could have been much fewer according to the performance of comparable countries.

There are many ideas for why this is happening—ignorance, gullibility, lack of critical thinking skills, polarisation, skilled disinformation, social media filter bubbles, and online search algorithms. What is missing from these explanations, however, is an empirical investigation of why some minds work well and don’t succumb to bad ideas. As Andy wrote in Psychology Today, Why Aren’t We All Conspiracy Theorists? Could we use this evidence to actually strengthen people’s minds? Such study has been called cognitive immunology, which can help us achieve mental immunity.

The formal history of this field began in the 1960’s with the psychologist William McGuire who studied the propaganda efforts of the Eastern Bloc’s military against the West. He noticed that minds act like immune systems. Weakened ideas can pre-inoculate a mind against stronger versions of harmful ideas. McGuire identified these ‘cognitive antibodies’ as part of what he developed into an ‘inoculation theory’. As is often the case with scientists trying to separate facts from values, this early work was quite amoral. McGuire simply studied how to guard against new ideas. But later researchers—e.g. John Cook, Sander van der Linden, Stephan Lewandowsky, and Josh Compton—have laid the groundwork for how to guard against bad ideas. And Andy Norman’s book Mental Immunity draws on his career in philosophy studying epistemology and ethics to expand on this greatly.

The way cognitive immunology describes it, bad ideas are a kind of mind parasite. Just like biological parasites, they require a host, they cause harm to that host, and they spread to other hosts. Minds also act like immune systems by spotting and removing these harmful ideas. And clearly, minds can function better or worse at the two tasks of filtering out bad ideas and letting in good ones. Minds cannot simply focus on one of those tasks; they must find the right balance between too much acceptance and too much rejection.

According to Andy, we can learn to enhance these cognitive immune functions. But the concept of ‘critical thinking’ isn’t enough. As an example, Andy told a joke about Fred the flat-Earther who dies and goes to heaven. (We’re all Humanists and don’t believe in any of this, but Andy said it’s just a joke so we can continue.) After his initial processing, Fred gets to stand in front of God and ask him one question. Fred asks whether the Earth is round or flat, to which God replies that it is indeed round. Fred’s response? “This conspiracy goes even higher than I thought!”

The point of this joke is that Fred the flat-Earther isn’t devoid of critical thinking skills. He’s actually thinking too critically. One of Andy’s friends, Lee McIntyre, has recently published a book titled How to Talk to a Science Denier in which he writes about going undercover to a flat-Earth convention. It turns out that the attendees there think we’re the ones who are gullible. They ask questions that we’ve never thought about. In many ways, they’re more critical than us. So simply saying “be more critical” can be bad advice. It can actually trigger a kind of autoimmune disorder which attacks perfectly good ideas. This is why mental immune health has become a much better concept to Andy than critical thinking skills, which he has taught for 20+ years.

It turns out that tens of millions of people are like Fred, warped by poor mental immune systems. They have been surrounded by bad cultural immune systems leaving them susceptible to bad ideas. How did this happen? One reason is that cultural sayings like “everyone is entitled to their own opinion” or “values are subjective” lead to poor mental immune functioning. These cultural ideas act as ‘disruptors’ to individual cognitive immune systems. And yet, they are extremely prevalent.

One question that often pops up for this subject is whether this is all just a metaphor. For Andy, the answer is a clear no. To him, this is real, and we are at the beginning of a scientific revolution that sees this. Andy has spent his career studying scientific revolutions and knows that they have signs, which we are beginning to see for cognitive immunology. The first microscopes allowed people to see microbes and that led to many scientific revolutions, including the understanding of our bodies’ immune systems, which saved millions and millions of lives. Cognitive immunology can do the same again and improve the lives of billions of people for generations to come.

As part of Andy’s work with his new research centre CIRCE (the Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative), experts are coming together to develop this new science, learn how to map so-called infodemics, and then study how to disrupt them. CIRCE is trying to develop principles for cognitive hygiene that can help us all in the fight against bad ideas. Some early findings include the following:

It’s easier to prevent poor thinking than to fix it. An ounce of ‘pre-bunking’ is worth pounds of cult deprogramming.
Belonging to a ‘community of inquiry’ can help a lot. Typical communities include Humanists, scientists, or philosophers. Join in!
Religions can often lead to closed minds since they encourage identifying with ideas that are set in stone and this triggers over-reactions of ‘identity protection’ whenever those ideas are questioned.
It’s better to hitch your identity to the act of inquiry, rather than to any specific beliefs since those can always change with new information.

Andy finished his talk by asking us a question. As Humanists who are committed to thinking well and improving the well-being of others, what can we do to bring about the cognitive immunology revolution? How can we try to reduce the blight of bad ideas on all future generations?

(Editor’s note—sharing Andy’s talk or book is a good start!)
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There is a lot more worth reading in Mental Immunity, but that pretty much covers Parts I, II, and III. While I was preparing for this post, though, and listening to Andy’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, something else occurred to me. So much of that discussion, just as it was for our North East Humanist discussion, was about how real mind-parasites and mental immunity are or whether these are just helpful analogies. It struck me that a Tinbergen analysis might actually prove helpful here. As a reminder, the pioneering ethologist Nicholaas Tinbergen said, “to achieve a complex understanding of a particular phenomenon, we may ask different questions which are mutually non-transferable. … What that phrase ‘mutually non-transferable’ really means in this case is your classic 2x2 matrix with 2 options for each of 2 different variables. … Setting up this 2x2 matrix yields the following four areas for consideration:

Mechanism (causation). This gives mechanistic explanations for how an organism's structures currently work. (Static + Proximate)
Ontogeny (development). This considers developmental explanations for changes in individuals, from their original DNA to their current form. (Dynamic + Proximate)
Function (adaptation). This looks at a species trait and how it solves a reproductive or survival problem in the current environment. (Static + Ultimate)
Phylogeny (evolution). This examines the entire history of the evolution of sequential changes in a species over many generations. (Dynamic + Ultimate)”

So, for mind parasites and mental immunity, I would say that Andy has three of these aspects covered. He can describe them from a functional perspective; he could trace the ontogeny of ideas within a single person’s life; and he could give the phylogenetic history of the ideas throughout our cultural history. But we simply don’t understand brains, neuroscience, or consciousness enough yet to (literally) flesh out the picture of mechanisms for these memes. This is a common problem for all studies of cultural evolution at the moment, however, and the rest of the picture is so compelling that it’s still worth using these evolutionary lenses to look at mind parasites and mental immunity as real things, rather than mere analogies.

What do you think? Is Andy on to something here? Does Mental Immunity help with the subtitle on its cover — the search for a better way to think? I think it definitely does and I’m looking forward to discussing that some more in my next post.

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Overview of How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

12/31/2021

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Happy New Year! And good riddance to 2021. Between the January 6th attack on the Capitol and the spread of the anti-Covid-vaccine movement, it’s been another bad year for epistemology and truth-seeking. My last post looked at an epistemology book from a famous philosopher that didn’t offer much help about this situation, but now I’ve got two great books that come to the rescue. I’ll save Mental Immunity by Andy Norman for last, but before I get to that, let me go over a book called How to Talk to a Science Denier, which was written by Andy's friend Lee McIntyre. You can hear Lee talk about HTTTASD on Michael Shermer’s podcast, which I highly recommend if you don’t have time to read the book, but I was lucky enough to receive a pre-print copy from Lee’s publicist and I found it very enjoyable.

As before in this mini-series on epistemology, I'm not going to provide a formal review of this book. I'll just share some selected excerpts that I jotted down and insert a few of my own thoughts and interpretations where necessary. All page numbers are from the 2021 proof edition from MIT Press.

How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

(TOC) Introduction; What I Learned at the Flat Earth Convention; What Is Science Denial?; How Do You Change Someone's Mind?; Close Encounters with Climate Change; Canary in the Coal Mine; GMOs: Is There Such a Thing as Liberal Science Denial?; Talking with Trust; Coronavirus and the Road Ahead; Epilogue

This Table of Contents shows you what topics are covered in this book. I don’t know about you, but I got very excited reading this.

(p.xii) In June 2019, a landmark study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that provided the first empirical evidence that you can fight back against science deniers. … two German researchers—Philipp Schmid and Cornelia Betsch—show that the worst thing you can do is not fight back, because then misinformation festers. The study considered two possible strategies. First, there is content rebuttal, which is when an expert presents deniers with the facts of science. Offered the right way, this can be very effective. But there is a lesser-known second strategy called technique rebuttal, which relies on the idea that there are five common reasoning errors made by all science deniers. And here is the shocking thing: both strategies are equally effective, and there is no additive effect, which means that anyone can fight back against science deniers! You don’t have to be a scientist to do it. Once you have studied the mistakes that are common to their arguments--reliance on conspiracy theories, cherry-picking evidence, reliance on fake experts, setting impossible expectations for science, and using illogical reasoning—you have the secret decoder ring that will provide a universal strategy for fighting back against all forms of science denial.

This is the core idea of the book. If you pay any attention at all to claims from science deniers, you'll see these five mistakes pop up over and over. And it seems possible to make progress against poor arguments by simply pointing these issues out to people. You don’t need to be an expert in epidemiology or voting booth technology or earth sciences. But no matter what, you should continue to talk to people.

(p.xiv) In his important essay “How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail,” professional skeptic and historian of science Michael Shermer recommends the following strategy: From my experience, (1) keep emotions out of the exchange, (2) discuss, don’t attack (no ad hominem or ad Hitlerum), (3) listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, (4) show respect, (5) acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and (6) try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews.

And when you do engage with people, these top tips can help keep it civil.

(p.xv) In my most recent book, The Scientific Attitude: Defending Science from Denial, Fraud, and Pseudoscience (MIT Press, 2019), I developed a theory of what is most special about science, and outlined a strategy for using this to defend science from its critics. In my view, the most special thing about science is not its logic or method but its values and practices—which are most relevant to its social context. In short, scientists keep one another honest by constantly checking their colleagues’ work against the evidence and changing their minds as new evidence comes to light.
(p.9) In my earlier book, The Scientific Attitude, I had argued that the primary thing that separates science from nonscience is that scientists embrace an attitude of willingness to change their hypothesis if it does not fit with the evidence.

These are great points that fit right in with my review of Why Trust Science? by Naomi Oreskes. It’s important to remember that epistemology is a normative discipline, meaning it is concerned with the norms of behaviours that we find acceptable and useful for producing knowledge. As McIntyre notes, the values and practices of truth-seeking and fallibilism are core aspects of the scientific method, and I would extend those as necessary for all epistemological efforts.

(p.13) Conspiracy-based reasoning is—or should be—anathema to scientific practice. Why? Because it allows you to accept both confirmation and failure as warrant for your theory. If your theory is borne out by the evidence, then fine. But if it is not, then it must be due to some malicious person who is hiding the truth. And the fact that there is no evidence that this is happening is simply testament to how good the conspirators are, which also confirms your hypothesis.

Bingo. McIntyre does a great job of pinpointing why conspiracy thinking leads to a bad place where beliefs get stuck and become immune to change.

(p.17) “What evidence, if it existed, would it take to convince you that you were wrong?” I liked this question because it was both philosophically respectable and also personal. It was not just about their beliefs but about them. … Instead of challenging them on the basis of their evidence, I would instead talk about the way that they were forming their beliefs on the basis of this evidence.

This is another key point of HTTTASD. This question is an excellent way in to the mind of science deniers. It's also the kind of question that can slowly eat away at others long after your personal interaction with them.

(p.28) We used to laugh at anti-evolutionists too. How many years before Flat Earthers are running for a seat on your local school board, with an agenda to “teach the controversy” in the physics classroom? If you think that can’t happen—that it couldn’t possibly get that bad—consider this: eleven million people in Brazil believe in Flat Earth; that is 7 percent of their population.

Gah! Watch out for bad thinkers subverting democratic institutions.

(p.39) Why do some people (like science deniers) engage in conspiracy theory thinking while others do not? Various psychological theories have been offered, involving factors such as inflated self-confidence, narcissism, or low self-esteem. A more popular consensus seems to be that conspiracy theories are a coping mechanism that some people use to deal with feelings of anxiety and loss of control in the face of large, upsetting events. The human brain does not like random events, because we cannot learn from and therefore cannot plan for them. When we feel helpless (due to lack of understanding, the scale of an event, its personal impact on us, or our social position), we may feel drawn to explanations that identify an enemy we can confront. This is not a rational process, and researchers who have studied conspiracy theories note that those who tend to “go with their gut” are the most likely to indulge in conspiracy-based thinking. This is why ignorance is highly correlated with belief in conspiracy theories. When we are less able to understand something on the basis of our analytical faculties, we may feel more threatened by it. There is also the fact that many are attracted to the idea of “hidden knowledge,” because it serves their ego to think that they are one of the few people to understand something that others don’t know.

This is an aside from the points about epistemology that I am focused on at the moment, but understanding the psychology behind the bad beliefs does help me sympathise a bit more with the people who hold them. And that can give me more patience too.

(p.42) There are myriad ways to be illogical. The main foibles and fallacies identified by the Hoofnagle brothers and others as most basic to science denial reasoning include the following: straw man, red herring, false analogy, false dichotomy, and jumping to a conclusion.

That's another good checklist for noting the errors that people make.

(p.48) When I was at FEIC 2018, I noted a disproportionate number of people who had had some sort of trauma in their lives. Sometimes this was health-related, other times it was interpersonal. Often it was unspecified. But in every instance the Flat Earther referred to it as in some way related to how they “woke up” and realized that they were being lied to. Many of them embraced a sense of victimization, even before they became Flat Earthers. I have found very little in the psychological literature about this, but I remain convinced that there is something to learn from this hypothesis. I came away from the convention with the feeling that many of the Flat Earthers were broken people. Could that be true for other science deniers as well?

Maybe so! One of the big takeaways from Why Trust Science? was that scientific communities are aiming for broad consensus — broad across all kinds of diversity and all manner of investigations — and this requires good faith efforts and trust in one another. It makes a lot of sense, therefore, that once someone loses faith and trust in others as a result of a personal trauma, then they could easily lose their ability to join in with consensus beliefs too. If so, that is doubly damaging.

(p.49) We now stand on the doorstep of a key insight into the question of why science deniers believe what they believe, even in the face of contravening evidence. The answer is found in realizing that the central issue at play in belief formation—even about empirical topics—may not be evidence but identity.

This is another key takeaway from HTTTASD. And it makes complete sense in light of the discussion above about knowledge building towards consensus rather than truth. We only recognise the good faith efforts of people who we trust to be in our in-groups. That identity can be quite flexible and broad enough to include “anyone trying to tell the truth,” or it can be so rigid and narrow as to only include “those who see the world as I do.” Obviously, the former leads to better outcomes, so be careful who you identify with.

(p.54) Once you decide who to believe, perhaps you know what to believe. But this makes us ripe for manipulation and exploitation by others. Perhaps this provides the long-awaited link between those who create the disinformation of science denial and those who merely believe it.

Yes! And if you remember from my overview of Kindly Inquisitors, two foundation stones for the liberal intellectual system are “no one gets final say” and “no one has personal authority.” Once you commit to these, you join a team that is far more protected from disinformation. Fake news fizzles out here very quickly after a few checks and balances by your other teammates. If, however, you join a tribe that forms around revealed truths from authority figures, then you become much more susceptible to disinformation. This has got to be a major reason why conservatives retweeted Russian trolls about 31 times more often than liberals in the 2016 election. (Other possible reasons do exist for this too.)

(p.56) Science denial is an attack not just on the content of certain scientific theories but on the values and methods that scientists use to come up with those theories in the first place. In some sense, science deniers are challenging the scientist’s identity! Science deniers are not just ignorant of the facts but also of the scientific way of thinking. To remedy this, we must do more than present deniers with the evidence; we must get them to rethink how they are reasoning about the evidence. We must invite them to try out a new identity, based on a different set of values.

This is a brilliant point from McIntyre. We need to be much more explicit about the epistemological values and methods we are using. We have to be clear that anyone can join in with them, and this is precisely why they work. Just shouting “trust the science” isn’t going to work when “science” is such an underdefined term for the general public. (And that includes too many scientists doing the loud shouting too.)

(p.68) Schmid and Betsch tested four possible ways of responding to subjects who had been exposed to scientific misinformation: no response, topic rebuttal, technique rebuttal, and both kinds of rebuttal. … The clear result of this study was that providing no response to misinformation was the worst thing you could do; with no rebuttal message, subjects were more likely to be swayed toward false beliefs. In a more encouraging result, researchers found that it was possible to mitigate the effects of scientific misinformation by using either content rebuttal or technique rebuttal, and that both were equally effective. There was, moreover, no additive advantage; when both content and technique rebuttal were used together, the result was the same.

What a fascinating study. Good to know.

(p.119) According to one recent study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, entitled “Red, White, and Blue Enough to be Green,” the persuasive strategy of “moral framing” can make a big difference in making the issue of climate change more palatable to conservatives. By emphasizing the idea that protecting the natural environment was a matter of (1) obeying authority, (2) defending the purity of nature, and (3) demonstrating one’s patriotism, there was a statistically significant shift in conservatives’ willingness to accept a pro-environmental message.

And that is a good data point about this strategy in action.

(p.175) My message in this book is simple: we need to start talking to one another again, especially to those with whom we disagree. But we have to be smart about how we do it.
(p.176) Those who are cognizant of the way science works understand that there is always some uncertainty behind any scientific pronouncement, and in fact the hallmark of science is that it cares about evidence and learns over time, which can lead to radical overthrow of one theory for another. But does the public understand this? Not necessarily. And lying to someone—for instance, by saying that masks are 100 percent effective, or that any vaccine is guaranteed to be safe—is exactly the wrong tactic. When scientists do that, any chink in the armor is ripe for later exploitation, and deniers will use it as an excuse not to believe anything further.
(p.177) I have long held that one of the greatest weapons we have to fight back against science denial is to embrace uncertainty as a strength rather than a weakness of science.

Yes! And this is exactly why I explicitly want to remove the claims for Truth from the JTB theory of knowledge. Embrace our uncertainty. That’s how we remain flexible in our thinking and begin to pay attention to what it really takes to builds up confidence.

(p.180) What if we taught people not just what scientists had found, but the process of conjecture, failure, uncertainty, and testing by which they had found it? Of course scientists make mistakes, but what is special about them is that they embrace an ethos that champions turning to the evidence as a way to learn from them. What if we educated people about the values of science by demonstrating the importance of the scientist’s creed: openness, humility, respect for uncertainty, honesty, transparency, and the courage to expose one’s work to rigorous testing? I believe this kind of science education would do more to defeat science denial than anything else we could do.

Agreed. I really enjoyed the main points that McIntyre drives home in HTTTASD. And there are numerous examples in the book (which I’ve left out of this short blog post) that are absolutely worth the price of admission. I especially enjoyed his stories about attending a Flat Earth convention. Amazing. If you’ve got any science deniers in your life, I highly recommend picking up a copy of McIntyre’s book to help you deal with them. Maybe we’ll all have a better 2022 because of it.

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Evolving My View on Mental Immunity

Vienna, Circles, and 5 Reasons Why Groups Thrive

Evolutionary Metaphysics: How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy

Prosocial (In Practice)

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Joining a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

Towards a Circle of Evolutionary Philosophers

An Evolutionary Perspective on the Meaning of Life

Overview of Mental Immunity by Andy Norman (Part 2 of 2)

Overview of Mental Immunity by Andy Norman (Part 1 of 2)

Overview of How to Talk to a Science Denier by Lee McIntyre

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