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Draft of My Paper “On the Origin of Knowledge”

2/27/2025

12 Comments

 
Hi all! It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here but that’s because I’ve been hard at work on a major project. Over the last few years, I’ve been preparing my epistemology thoughts for a peer-reviewed publication. That process has gone through several starts and stops but I’m finally ready to share a rough draft. My proposals are quite ambitious (to say the least) so I’m starting by asking for feedback here before I proceed with the final submission. I have a journal lined up already (This View of Life), but if you have other suggestions for where this would be appropriate, I would very much appreciate it.
 
I literally have about 200 pages of quotes and citations ready for the final paper, but I won’t use most of that. In order to elicit feedback as painlessly as possible, I’ve compressed the arguments into a presentation deck accompanied by about 1300 words below. That’s obviously not in the form of an academic paper yet, but I trust this will be clear enough for you to be able to comment on any weak points or clarifications that you think need to be addressed for the final paper. Thank you in advance for any thoughts you can share! Here goes:
 
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On the Origin of Knowledge*

​In 1900, the young artist Gustav Klimt presented the first of his three “Faculty Paintings”, which he had been commissioned to produce for the Great Hall of the University of Vienna. It was a time of growing confidence in the Austrian-Hungarian empire, the sciences, and the power of reason. However, 
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​“Rather than the anticipated glorifying works, Klimt created mysterious symbolic paintings that, instead of celebrating the triumph of human knowledge, exposed it as powerless. In ‘Philosophy’, a group of naked people drift through a nebulous starry sky, despairing at the reality of their untethered existence.” (Gustav Klimt, p.61)

​This monumental painting, over 4x3 meters in size, was never installed and was later destroyed in a fire in May 1945. All we have left is a black and white photo of the original. But it is still powerful, and in fact captures the present situation of philosophy perfectly.
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Why are we like this? The history of unsolved problems in epistemology makes it clear.

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At the heart of this, is philosophy’s definition of “truth”, which has proven impossible to attain.

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​There are two ways that evolutionary thinking can help with this. First, is thinking in terms of gradualism rather than essentialism.

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Second, is building from the bottom up, rather than using imaginary sky hooks to descend from the top down.

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This gives us a starting point for knowledge as something like a pinpoint of light floating in the complete darkness of a universe that life was ignorant of.

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Living beings slowly learned to navigate their environment using a process we now call cybernetics.

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And so…

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Over time, life develops two “species of thought” in this epistemological world. One is for the realm we can learn about. The other is for the realm where we are totally ignorant.
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And so…

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The field of evolutionary epistemology has identified mechanisms for how knowledge continued to evolve.

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Note that the latest step in this evolution came with the invention of the scientific method. There are many ways this method can be depicted. Here is one example:

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​Reviewing the literature turns up at least 11 more ways that the scientific method has been depicted.

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All of these are actually just extensions and refinements of the original cybernetics loop. Therefore, we could label all knowledge production (including the scientific method) as coming from an epistemological method.

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​Note that the 12 scientific methods identified earlier do map to this very easily. This is important because it helps us understand knowledge as existing along a continuum. So-called “scientific knowledge” or “philosophical knowledge” is related to simpler forms of knowledge.

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With all this talk of methods and loops, it is important to see that we are not merely running in circles! Here is an AI-generated cartoon to help drive that point home.

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​As described in an earlier paper, we raise and lower the credence of our ideas as we discover more and more information about them.

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Our new knowledge is connected to previously generated knowledge. It grows or shrinks with each new turn of the epistemological loop. This turns our 2-dimensional circles into 3-dimensional spirals.

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There is a long history of different truth-seeking disciplines recognizing this and creating hierarchies for their evidence and knowledge.

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Analyzing this history, we see the same pattern emerging over and over. The famous “Photo 51” helped Watson, Crick, and Wilkins win Nobel prizes for their roles in discovering the structure of DNA. That photo showed two crossbeams that determine the size and shape of the double helix. In a similar (though purely metaphorical) fashion, this paper posits that there are two crossbeams that push knowledge spirals outwards.

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​With each iteration of the epistemological loop, it is the quantity and diversity of observations that make for wider and sturdier spirals in our knowledge production.

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This is because “intersubjective views from everywhere” are the closest we can ever get to the “objective view from nowhere” that would be required for full and certain philosophical truth.

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So….

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​We start with an undifferentiated word cloud. (Do not actually read this.)

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Then perform a “functional analysis” on this heap to help make sense of the emerging phenomena of knowledge as it evolves through different hierarchical stages.

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Try to do all of this comprehensively. Tinbergen created his Four Questions for studies of biology, which are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive because they sit at the four quadrants of a 2x2 matrix where “ultimate vs. proximate” distinctions are located on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales are on the other axis. Similarly, four questions can be created for studies of knowledge. These lie in the four quadrants made by “objective items vs subjective knowers” on one axis and “current vs. historical” timescales on the other. Answering all of these questions about a piece of knowledge will give you a comprehensive understanding of it.

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After performing such a functional analysis on the word cloud for knowledge collected above, the following hierarchy for knowledge is proposed. Knowledge grows from fragile to robust as the epistemological loops that produce it increase in quantity and diversity. Each piece of knowledge has facts, knowers, processes, and credence associated with it. These progress across five columns based on the knowers — subsystems of an individual, an individual, small niche groups, larger established groups, and globally diverse groups. Each column can only progress so far. The knowledge produced by these groups could also be placed in a hierarchy of quality from A to F. But note there is an overlap between columns as the best knowledge production in small groups transitions to new knowledge production in larger groups.

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Placing all of the terms from the word cloud above into this hierarchy gives us the details we need to more fully understand it and use it for further analysis. (Click here if you want to read the details of this table.)

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There are many points of discussion to be considered from all of this.

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First, some important disclaimers…

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This hierarchy doesn’t apply directly to all forms of culture. However, It can be applied to “knowledge about” the utility of those other items.

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There is an important paradox about power embedded in this view of epistemology.

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This view may also help us understand experts and expertise better.
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We can imagine disseminating this using simplified scorecards for knowledge.

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It may also shed light on another paradox about the perceived quality of knowledge due to its stability or instability.

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It could help with the issues of “fake news”.

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In fact, this evolutionary view can help dissolve all of the knowledge problems of philosophy.

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This brings us back to Klimt’s picture of philosophy. In recent years, researchers have used historical facts and AI analysis to colorize the painting as it may have been originally. The result does not change the meaning of the painting, where its subjects are still floating untethered, surrounded by a universe of ignorance. But it does make things in there more beautiful now. Hopefully, the view presented in this paper on the evolution of knowledge can do the same for us.

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*Now that you have read this post, you can see why I think it is ambitious. The full title of Darwin’s revolutionary book about biology was, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. As a playful ode to this, I’ve been considering the following title for my paper:
 
“On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Rational Selection or the Survival of Justified Beliefs in the Struggle Towards Truth — How the Universal Acid of Evolutionary Thinking Can Dissolve the Great Epistemological Problems of Knowledge, Scepticism, Relativism, Demarcation, and Disinformation.”
 
That is way more than one mouthful, though, so let me know if you have a better title in mind.

12 Comments

Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 2 of 2)

8/23/2024

1 Comment

 
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(Photo by Ven Tenzin Jamphel on the Dalai Lama Facebook page)

​Okay, I’m back for part 2 of the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion. As I covered in my last post, part 1 of this fascinating book offered a vision for “secular ethics for a whole world”, which I was inspired to read because this goal matches ProSocial World's purpose statement as well as my own views on evolutionary ethics and why evolutionary philosophy matters. Each of these sources speaks similarly about how empirical data gives us overwhelming evidence to appreciate our deep interdependence and therefore we need to be compassionate towards all beings as we try to survive and flourish together in this world. Let’s do that!
 
Now, in part 2 of the book, the Dalai Lama tells us how he personally strengthens his mind to work towards these goals in the face of all the obstacles that are sure to come. This mostly amounts to descriptions and tips for various methods of meditation, which is not something I know a ton about. But the evidence shows it is so beneficial, and these tips are coming from perhaps the world’s premiere expert, so I wanted to share them as succinctly as I could, with the hope that it will inspire you (and me!) to take up more of this mental training. As before, the quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.
 
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama
 
Part II — Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind
 
Introduction to Part II: Starting with Oneself
  • (p. 101) How are we to become more compassionate, kinder, more forgiving, and more discerning in our behaviour?
  • (p. 102) Educating the heart takes both time and sustained effort, though I have no doubt that with sincere motivation we can all learn kindheartedness, and we can all benefit from it.
 
We have so many options out there to improve our minds and bodies. Yet all of these are “slaves to our passions”. So, why don’t we spend more time working on our emotions?? This is deeply brilliant. I know Buddhists have practiced this for centuries, but I’m not sure it has been “sold” this way, or always focused towards the secular ethics that the Dalai Lama is now advocating for. Before we get to the actual training, some Buddhist context is helpful.
 
Chapter 8 — Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life
  • (p. 103) even the most sophisticated ethical understanding, if it is not applied in daily life, is somewhat pointless.
  • (p. 103) regarding the question of how to put ethics into practice in everyday life, it may be helpful to consider the process as having three aspects or levels
  • (p. 103) As outlined in some classical Buddhist texts, these are as follows: an ethic of restraint — deliberately refraining from doing actual or potential harm to others; an ethic of virtue — actively cultivating and enhancing our positive behaviour and inner values; and an ethic of altruism — dedicating our lives, genuinely and selflessly, to the welfare of others.
  • (p. 106) I personally find a list of six principles from a text by the second-century Indian thinker Nagarjuna to be helpful.
  • (p. 106) Avoid excessive use of intoxicants. Uphold the principle of right livelihood. Ensure that one’s body, speech, and mind are nonviolent. Treat others with respect. Honour those worthy of esteem, such as parents, teachers, and those who are kind. Be kind to others.
  • (p. 107) we require a basic toolkit to help us in our daily effort to live ethically. In Buddhist tradition this toolkit is described in terms of three interrelated factors known as heedfulness, mindfulness, and introspective awareness
  • (p. 107) heedfulness, refers to adopting an overall stance of caution.
  • (p. 109) mindfulness is the ability to gather oneself mentally and thereby recall one’s core values and motivation.
  • (p. 109) Awareness…means paying attention to our own behaviour. It means honestly observing our behaviour as it is going on, and thereby bringing it under control.
 
I don’t see anything wrong with any of that. This is more evidence fitting with my belief that “Buddha Will Survive”, as I wrote during my series of essays on the survival of the fittest philosophers. Buddha came in at number 7 out of 60 on that list. The Dalai Lama might take Buddhism even higher now.
 
Next up, are two chapters about our emotions.
 
Chapter 9 — Dealing with Destructive Emotions
  • (p. 113) the greatest impediments to our individual well-being and our ability to live a spiritually fulfilling life are our own persistent propensities toward destructive or afflictive emotions.
  • (p. 115) in contemporary psychology the main distinction is often drawn between emotional states which, on the one hand, are pleasurable or joyful and are described as positive, and those which, on the other hand, are unpleasant or painful and are described as negative. In classical Buddhist psychology, however, the distinction is rather different. Instead, the primary distinction is not between those states which are pleasurable and those that are painful, but between those that are beneficial and those that are harmful.
  • (p. 117) In the context of secular ethics, this distinction between those mental states which undermine well-being — our own and that of others — and those which promote survival and well-being can be very useful, since it is directly relevant to our pursuit of happiness and an ethically sound way of life.
  • (p. 124) Our inner development with regard to regulating our destructive emotions calls for a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we must seek to reduce the impact of the destructive potentials that are inherent within us; on the other, we must seek to enhance the positive qualities that also naturally exist within us. This two-pronged approach to mental training is what I consider to be the heart of genuine spiritual practice.
 
Chapter 10 — Cultivating Key Inner Values
  • (p. 137) a few of the other key human values: patience or forbearance, contentment, self-discipline, and generosity.
  • (p. 138) There are three aspects of patience, or forbearance, to consider: forbearance toward those who harm us, acceptance of suffering, and acceptance of reality.
 
I really appreciate the difference between contemporary psychology and classical Buddhist psychology. And the focus on enhancing well-being (“our own and that of others”) is brilliant to see. I would just add that the distinction between “beneficial” and “harmful” is often a difficult one because of the uncertainty over short-term and long-term consequences as well as the benefit accruing to yourself or others (which ultimately may or may not benefit you). So, it’s very hard to simply place an emotion into any one category. The ultimate judgment of each one will be very dependent on context — sometimes beneficial, sometimes harmful. Rather than looking forward into the mists of this murky future, I found it easier, and very useful, to look to the past for my own taxonomy by asking “what’s causing these emotions?” These are quibbles about how to categorize emotions, though. There doesn’t seem to be any conflict between the goals of my system and the Dalai Lama’s.
 
Finally, in the last chapter, we arrive at the Dalai Lama’s advice for how to work on all of this.
 
Chapter 11 — Meditation as Mental Cultivation
  • (p. 155) I would like to say a few words about cultivating mental discipline. For myself, such cultivation is an indispensable part of daily life. On the one hand, it helps reinforce my determination always to act compassionately for the well-being of others. On the other, it helps me keep in check those afflictive thoughts and emotions by which we are all assailed from time to time, and to maintain a calm mind.
  • (p. 155) the Sanskrit term bhavana … [and the] Tibetan equivalent gom [are] often translated into English as meditation, [but they] refer to a whole range of mental practices and not just, as many suppose, to simple methods of relaxation. The original terms imply a process of cultivating familiarity with something, whether it is a habit, a way of seeing, or a way of being.
  • (p. 156) [There are] “three levels of understanding,” as found in the classical Buddhist theory of mental transformation. These levels are understanding derived through hearing (or learning), understanding derived through reflection, and understanding derived through contemplative experience.
  • (p. 156) this progression — from first hearing or learning, to deepening one’s understanding through critical reflection, to conviction — is quite usual.
 
This is great! It really expanded my naïve understanding of “meditation”.
 
  • (p. 158) I engage in two main types of mental cultivation practice — discursive or analytic meditation and absorptive meditation. The first is a kind of analytic process by means of which the meditator engages in a series of reflections, while the second involves concentrating on a specific object or objective and placing one’s mind upon it as if dwelling deeply on a conclusion. I find that combining the two techniques is most beneficial.
  • (p. 159) The first of these two approaches corresponds to the development of mental states that are more cognitively oriented, such as understanding, while the second develops more affect-oriented mental states, such as compassion. We might refer to these two processes as “educating our mind” and “educating our heart.”
 
Fascinating. And I would say from personal experience that writing philosophy might qualify as an “education of the mind” exercise then. Before we get to the details of how else to do this, the Dalai Lama offers a few practical tips, which makes him seem just as human as the rest of us.
 
  • (p. 159) Mental cultivation takes time and effort and involves hard work and sustained dedication.
  • (p. 160) As to the specifics of practice, early morning is generally the best time of day. … you need to have had a good night’s sleep beforehand.
  • (p. 161) the mind will tend to be sluggish if you have eaten a lot beforehand.
  • (p. 161) in the early stages even ten to fifteen minutes per session is quite adequate.
  • (p. 161) It is also helpful to plan to practice for a few minutes several times during the day in addition to the main session.
  • (p. 162) sit where we will not be disturbed by noise.
  • (p. 162) any position that is comfortable will do
 
Love it. Next up, the Dalai Lama gives us details of his different practices. He didn’t lay it out like a simple formula, but I see it starting by taking us progressively through these six steps: 1) Getting Settled; 2) Affirming the Practice; 3) Strengthening Your Focus; 4) Understanding What Focus Is; 5) Really Focusing on Emotions; and 6) Returning to Your Day.
 
So, let’s see these steps in action.
 
1) Getting Settled
 
  • (p. 163) take one inhalation and one exhalation while silently counting from one to five or seven, and then repeat the process a few times. The advantage of this silent counting is that, in giving our mind a task to perform, it makes it less likely to be swept away by extraneous thoughts.
  • (p. 163) it can be helpful to quietly say a few words over and over. A formula such as “I let go of my afflictive emotions”
  • (p. 163) you may find that a whole session is taken up with exercises to calm or still the mind.
 
2) Affirming the Practice
 
  • (p. 164) When you have succeeded in establishing a more settled state, perhaps a few minutes into your session, you can then begin the actual work of mental cultivation.
  • (p. 165) One very useful exercise at the beginning of a session is to consider the benefits of practice. An immediate benefit is that practice gives us a brief respite from the often obsessive worrying, calculating, and fantasizing with which our minds are habitually occupied. This by itself is a great boon.
  • (p. 165) One who never engages in this kind of work has very little chance of dealing effectively with the destructive thoughts and emotions which, when they take hold of us, destroy all hope of peace of mind.
  • (p. 165) we should find that the benefits far outweigh any arguments in favour of not practicing. We then rest the mind on this conclusion for a short time before moving on to the next stage of the session.
 
3) Strengthening Your Focus
 
  • (p. 165) A more formal meditation practice is the cultivation of sustained attention through single-pointed concentration.
  • (p.166) Having relaxed and settled your mind, try to maintain your focus on the object. Visualize it about four feet in front of you and at the level of your eyebrows. Imagine the object to be approximately two inches in height and radiating light, so that the image is bright and clear. Also try to conceive of it as being heavy. This heaviness has the effect of preventing excitement, while the object’s brightness prevents the onset of laxity.
 
4) Understanding What Focus Is
 
  • (p. 167) after many, many weeks or months of persistent practice — you now try to inspect the mind itself as it holds the object in view.
  • (p. 167) you can start to familiarize yourself with the sort of focus that in ordinary life you may only experience when attempting to solve a particularly challenging mental problem.
 
5) Really Focusing on Emotions
 
  • (p. 167) when you have learned to really focus the mind, then, … you can use the whole force of your mind to focus on qualities such as compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness.
 
6) Returning to Your Day
 
  • (p. 168) Finally, when we wish to end our session, we can do some deep breathing exercises once again so that we finish in a relaxed state of mind.
 
After a lifetime of working on this, the Dalai Lama next offers several pieces of advice.
 
  • (p. 168) Two qualities are essential in this kind of meditation: mental clarity and stability. Mental clarity assists you in maintaining your focus. Stability assists you in ensuring clarity by monitoring whether or not your attention remains vibrant.
  • (p. 168) It is through constant application of these two faculties that you can gradually learn to train your focus so that you become capable of sustaining your attention for a prolonged period of time.
  • (p. 168) set a forceful intention not to allow your mind to be swept away by thoughts of what might happen in the future or recollections of things that have happened in the past.
  • (p. 170) every now and then you will come to experience short intervals of what feels like an absence or a vacuum, when your mind has no particular content. Your first successes in this will only be fleeting. But with persistence over a long period, what begins as a glimpse can gradually be extended, and you can start to understand that the mind is like a mirror, or clear water, in which images appear and disappear without affecting the medium in which they appear.
  • (p. 170) Like a detached onlooker watching a spectacle, you will learn how to see your thoughts for what they are, namely constructs of your mind. So many of our problems arise because, in our naive untrained state, we confuse our thoughts with actual reality. We seize on the content of our thoughts as real and build our entire perception and response to reality on it.
 
As your practice gets more advanced, the Dalai Lama offers 4 more options for what you might work on. I see these as options for step 5 above, so I’ll label them that way. They are: 5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness; 5b) Equanimity; 5c) More Equanimity; and 5d) Positive Imitation.
 
Again, let’s see these in action.
 
5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness
 
  • (p. 170) Another very beneficial class of practices involves cultivating positive mental qualities, such as compassion and loving-kindness.
  • (p. 170) begin with a preliminary breathing exercise to relax and settle the mind.
  • (p. 171) when you are struggling with your attitude or feelings toward a person with whom you have difficulty. First, bring that person into your mind, conjuring up a vivid image so that you almost feel his or her presence. Next, start to contemplate the fact that he or she also has hopes and dreams, feels joy when things go well and feels sadness when they do not.
  • (p. 171) try to feel connected with the person and cultivate the wish that he or she achieve happiness.
  • (p. 171) saying something like “May you be free of suffering and its causes. May you attain happiness and peace.” Then rest your mind in this state of compassion.
  • (p. 171) this way of cultivating compassion primarily involves a discursive process, but every now and then it is also good to rest the mind in a state of absorption, somewhat in the fashion of bringing home a concluding point in the course of an argument.
 
5b) Equanimity
 
  • (p. 171) equanimity is a state of mind where one relates to others in a way that is free of prejudice rooted in the afflictions of excessive attraction or aversion.
  • (p. 172) begin by relaxing and settling the mind through a breathing exercise and then proceed as follows. Call up an image of a small group of people you like, such as some of your close friends and relatives. Establish this image in as much detail and with as much verisimilitude as you can. Then add an image next to it of a group of people toward whom you feel indifferent, such as people you see at work or out shopping but do not know well. Again, try to make this image as real and detailed as possible. Finally, call up a third image, this one of a group of people you dislike, or with whom you are in conflict, or whose views you strongly disagree with, and again establish it as clearly and in as much detail as you can. Having created images of these three groups of people in your mind, you then allow your normal reactions toward them to arise. Notice your thoughts and feelings toward each group in turn. You will find that your natural tendency is to feel attachment toward the first, indifference toward the second, and hostility toward the third. Recognizing this, you next turn to examining your own mind and considering how each of these three responses affects you. You will find that your feelings toward members of the first group are pleasurable, inspiring a certain confidence and strength coupled with a desire to alleviate or prevent their suffering. Toward the second group, you will notice that your feelings do not excite you or inspire any particular thoughts of concern at all. Toward the third group, however, the feelings you have will excite your mind in negative directions. The next step is to engage in contemplation, using your critical faculty. The people we consider our enemies today may not remain so, and this is also true of our friends. Furthermore, sometimes our feelings toward friends, such as attachment, can lead to problems for us, while sometimes our interactions with enemies can benefit us, perhaps by making us stronger and more alert. Contemplating such complexities can lead you to reflect on the futility of relating to others in an extreme manner
  • (p. 174) Over time, the aim is to be able to relate to others, not as friends or foes according to your divisive classification of them, but as fellow human beings whose fundamental equality with yourself you recognize.
 
5c) More Equanimity
 
  • (p. 174) for the second form of equanimity practice, … The key points are two simple truths: that just as I myself have an instinctive and legitimate desire to be happy and to avoid suffering, so do all other people; and that just as I have the right to fulfil these innate aspirations, so do they.
  • (p. 174) over the course of weeks, months, and even years, we will gradually find that we are able to generate true inner equanimity based on a profound recognition of humanity’s shared, innate aspiration to happiness and dislike of suffering.
 
5d) Positive Imitation
 
  • (p. 174) Another exercise which can be very helpful in cultivating beneficial states of mind is a discursive practice taking as its object the good example of a person we greatly admire.
  • (p. 175) the idea is to train ourselves to act, in our daily lives, as the person we admire would act
  • (p. 176) Having chosen which afflictive emotion or attitude you will address first, you begin as described earlier, relaxing the mind with a breathing exercise. Then you are ready to start the actual practice.
  • (p. 176) First, reflect on the destructive effects of the mental state you have selected.
  • (p. 176) This contemplation of the destructive nature of these mental states needs to be sufficiently deep that over time your basic stance toward such states becomes one of caution and vigilance.
  • (p. 177) Once you are convinced of the destructive nature of these afflictions, you then move on to the next stage of meditation. This involves developing a greater awareness of the mental states themselves, particularly of their onset.
  • (p. 177) The third stage of this mental cultivation practice for dealing with afflictive mental states is to apply the relevant antidotes to them: for example, forbearance to counter anger, loving-kindness to counter hatred, contemplation of an object’s imperfections to counter greed or craving for that object.
  • (p. 177) In all three stages of this practice it is important, as suggested earlier, to combine discursive, analytic processes with resting your mind in single-pointed absorption on the concluding points. This combination allows the effects of your practice to seep deeply into your mind so that it begins to have a real impact in your everyday life.
 
After giving all of these options for a deeper meditation practice, the Dalai Lama offers some more advice about dealing with things you may also encounter there.
 
  • (p. 178) there are two principal obstacles to good practice. One is distraction, while the other is laxity or what we can call “mental sinking.”
  • (p. 178) Sometimes it will be enough to recollect our purpose in undertaking this mental cultivation. At other times, we may have to leave off whatever we are trying to practice and move on to some other exercise. Or we may do a short breathing exercise, or repeat a few words suitable to the occasion. This may be as simple as saying, “I let go of my distraction,” slowly and deliberately a few times. But sometimes we may need to break off the session and walk around the room for a few minutes.
  • (p. 178) laxity or mental sinking, is what happens when the mind becomes too relaxed. We succeed in withdrawing from our habitual preoccupations and manage to free the mind from distractions, but then, because our energy is low or we are not alert enough, the mind sinks and we become, as it were, “spaced out.”
  • (p. 179) A short, brisk walk may be an effective remedy, or a few moments spent visualizing a bright light. For those with religious inclinations, briefly considering the surpassing qualities of some figure in their religious tradition may help. Another remedy is to imagine our consciousness springing up into space.
 
To finish up, the Dalai Lama offered some brief reflections on the value of all of this.
 
  • (p. 180) what we are talking about here is not suppressing negative thoughts and emotions. Instead, we must learn to recognize them for what they are and replace them with more positive states of mind. And we do this not only to achieve self-mastery but also because attaining this kind of control over our minds puts us in a much better position to compassionately benefit others.
  • (p. 182) What we want is a moderate, steady light which enables us to see the objects around us clearly. Thus when we develop some degree of control over our minds we are more able to take events, whether they are positive or negative, in our stride.
  • (p. 182) What good practice really requires is a constant stream of effort: a sustained, persistent approach based on long-term commitment. For this reason, practicing properly, even for a short period of time, is the best way.
 
Afterword
  • (p. 185) when each of us learns to appreciate the critical importance of ethics and makes inner values like compassion and patience an integral part of our basic outlook on life, the effects will be far-reaching.
 
So, to recap, meditation is great! Of all the books, podcasts, apps, and seminars about meditation that I have been exposed to, this one was by far the most helpful and far-reaching. It is much more than just the emptying of the mind or the building of focus that I have mostly learned about before. Yet it is simple! In its explanation, anyway. I’m sure the experience and effort will be more difficult. But I plan to work on these steps over the years ahead. 10 to 15 minutes at a time.
 
1) Getting Settled
2) Affirming the Practice
3) Strengthening Your Focus
4) Understanding What Focus Is
5) Really Focusing on Emotions
     5a) Compassion and Loving-Kindness
     5b) Equanimity
     5c) More Equanimity
     5d) Positive Imitation
6) Returning to Your Day
 
I hope you found this as interesting as I did and are inspired to work on this too. My post here shared a lot of quotes to get you going, but you should really buy the book to capture the full depth of the Dalai Lama’s thoughts and emotions here. I’ll just finish with this quote from the man who caddied for the 13th incarnation of the Dalai Lama.


​"Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know." And he says, "Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.”

Nice indeed. Maybe we can all hope for that with some effort. 😁
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Overview of Beyond Religion by the Dalai Lama (Part 1 of 2)

8/16/2024

1 Comment

 
Picture
(Photo by Ven Tenzin Jamphel on the Dalai Lama Facebook page)

​Beyond Religion. Sounds like my kind of book! But even though it offers “A New Vision of Secular Ethics” (the title for Part 1 of the book), it was written by a man who goes by “his holiness.” The subtitle states it was written “for a whole world”, but the Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, an offshoot of one of the world’s major religions, practiced by a relatively small number of people in a mountainous enclave that has been in exile since the People’s Republic of China annexed it in 1951. Like a koan, this book appears to be a manifestation of “the identity of opposites.” In fact, I wish it had received the opposite title. Something like Before Religion or Up to Religion would have been more accurate in my opinion. But I’ll explain why at the end of this review.
 
I actually came across this book via my work with David Sloan Wilson and ProSocial World. On every page of ProSocial’s website, its “Purpose Statement” says it wants to “Consciously evolve a world that works for all.” I always liked this because it is deeply aligned with my view of Evolutionary Ethics and Why Evolutionary Philosophy Matters. But it turns out this is also highly aligned with the Dalai Lama’s message. And that is no accident! Beyond Religion was published in 2012. According to ProSocial’s 2022 Annual Report, their history “began in 2011 as an initiative of the Evolution Institute and spun off to become its own nonprofit organization in 2020.” And during that incubation time, on October 30th 2019, ProSocial co-founder David Sloan Wilson took part in a conversation with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India about this “whole world ethic.”
 
Part of this alignment comes from evolutionary thinkers arriving at the same conclusion from different locations. And part of this is me being deeply influenced by David Sloan Wilson’s work. But with the Dalai Lama too? That was unexpected so I wanted to dive into this book to see how strong the links really are. And what I found was so good I just had to share it here.
 
Beyond Religion is a short book — the Kindle version has only 189 pages. But it is split into two parts that are so distinct, yet equally important, that I thought my review should reflect this too. Part 2 is about the Dalai Lama’s meditation practice, which by itself is worth the price of the book (and much more!). So, I’ll write about that next. But Part 1 is all about secular ethics, so I’ll cover that first. As usual for these reviews of mine, I’ll share some important passages from the book and just comment on them as we go along. The quoted passages below all come from the 2012 UK Kindle version.
 
Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by His Holiness Dalai Lama
 
  • Table of Contents: Cover; About the Book; About the Author; Title Page; Introduction; Part I A New Vision of Secular Ethics; 1. Rethinking Secularism; 2. Our Common Humanity; 3. The Quest for Happiness; 4. Compassion, the Foundation of Well-Being; 5. Compassion and the Question of Justice; 6. The Role of Discernment; 7. Ethics in Our Shared World; Part II Educating the Heart Through Training the Mind; Introduction: Starting with Oneself; 8. Ethical Mindfulness in Everyday Life; 9. Dealing with Destructive Emotions; 10. Cultivating Key Inner Values; 11. Meditation as Mental Cultivation; Afterword
 
About the Book
  • (p. 2) [It] may seem extraordinary to hear one of the world’s best-known spiritual leaders argue that we need to move beyond the dictates of faith, but in this ground-breaking book that is exactly what the Dalai Lama suggests.
  • (p. 2) the Dalai Lama contends that we will not change the world just by praying: we need to turn to ethics if we are to succeed in sustaining and improving human life on this planet.
  • (p. 2) the Dalai Lama is clear that faith without reason can be harmful, leading to fundamentalism.
  • (p. 2) His Holiness reveals that another way is possible: to meet the future, we must marry compassion with reason and create a system of secular ethics that can unite us, whatever our beliefs.
 
Amen and hallelujah! But I wonder how many people who have turned to Buddhism are receptive to this message. And I wonder how many secular thinkers know the Dalai Lama is saying this. This is an incredibly brave book, but I fear it could fall on deaf ears all around the world.
 
Introduction
  • (p. 2) what is it that we lack? The fundamental problem, I believe, is that at every level we are giving too much attention to the external, material aspects of life while neglecting moral ethics and inner values. By inner values I mean the qualities that we all appreciate in others, and toward which we all have a natural instinct, bequeathed by our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive only in an environment of concern, affection, and warmheartedness — or in a single word, compassion. The essence of compassion is a desire to alleviate the suffering of others and to promote their well-being. This is the spiritual principle from which all other positive inner values emerge.
 
This message about the virtue of compassion is central to the book and will be discussed later. Here, though, I would like to highlight the ultimate consequence that the Dalai Lama mentions in passing — “our biological nature as animals that survive and thrive.” Perhaps it is in the nature of a Buddhist to not focus on striving towards something, but science can give us all the guidance we need about this goal, if only we would all agree to it. And knowing this goal is essential to best “alleviate suffering and promote well-being” since avoiding all harm is impossible.
 
  • (p. 2) we will never solve our problems simply by instituting new laws and regulations. Ultimately, the source of our problems lies at the level of the individual. If people lack moral values and integrity, no system of laws and regulations will be adequate. So long as people give priority to material values, then injustice, corruption, inequity, intolerance, and greed — all the outward manifestations of neglect of inner values — will persist.
 
This is exactly why atheism alone won’t work. And why the Humanist movement’s shyness about developing an ideology or prescriptive worldview is a missed opportunity.
 
  • (p. 2) Science, for all the benefits it has brought to our external world, has not yet provided scientific grounding for the development of the foundations of personal integrity.
 
This is no longer the case. Just to take a few obvious examples, the shift in evolutionary studies from competition to cooperation as a driving force for the survival of life, and the focus on thriving in the fields of positive psychology and ecology could all provide necessary details about how personal integrity can lead life towards the ultimate goal mentioned above. We just need to spell this all out.
 
  • (p. 2) any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.
 
Agreed! And I still think our universally-shared evolutionary history is the best source for this approach to ethics.
 
  • (p. 2) I am of the firm opinion that we have within our grasp a way, and a means, to ground inner values without contradicting any religion and yet, crucially, without depending on religion.
 
So, this may be correct for the Buddhist’s emphasis on inner values. Highlighting compassion would not contradict any religion that I know of. But stating an end goal — is it surviving and thriving here on Earth or an afterlife of heavenly paradise? — does cause conflict. And I don’t believe you can fully express the inner values without having an end goal in mind.
 
  • (p. 2) I should make it clear that my intention is not to dictate moral values. Doing that would be of no benefit. To try to impose moral principles from outside, to impose them, as it were, by command, can never be effective. Instead, I call for each of us to come to our own understanding of the importance of inner values. For it is these inner values which are the source of both an ethically harmonious world and the individual peace of mind, confidence, and happiness we all seek.
 
Imposing moral rules doesn’t work. But clearly stating the moral guides and the reasons for them could work to gather cooperators together who agree with them. I’ve never seen how Buddhism’s great emphasis on inner values could be enough. To me, they are necessary (and we will develop them in Part 2), but not sufficient.
 
Part I — A New Vision of Secular Ethics
Chapter 1 — Rethinking Secularism
  • (p. 5) I am pleased by recent developments in scientific methodology in these areas, in which the traditional scientific principle of objective third-person verifiability is now being expanded to include the domain of subjective experience.
 
Yep. The cognitive revolution of the 1950’s is a great example of this happening during the Dalai Lama’s lifetime.
 
  • (p. 5) have also had a longstanding interest in what scientific basis might be found for understanding the effects of contemplative practice and the deliberate cultivation of qualities such as compassion, loving-kindness, attention, and a calm mind. I have always felt that if science could show such practices to be both possible and beneficial, then perhaps they could even be promoted through mainstream education.
 
Bringing mindfulness to schools is happening as we speak.
 
  • (p. 5) there is now a reasonably substantial body of evidence in evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and other fields suggesting that, even from the most rigorous scientific perspective, unselfishness and concern for others are not only in our own interests but also, in a sense, innate to our biological nature.
 
Yes, but selfishness is also “innate to our biological nature.” The trick is to argue when and why to use each one. And that takes a goal to guide us.
 
  • (p. 6) for some people, in particular for some Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters, my use of the word “secular” raises difficulties. To some, the very word suggests a firm rejection of, or even hostility toward, religion. It may seem to them that, in using this word, I am advocating the exclusion of religion from ethical systems, or even from all areas of public life. This is not at all what I have in mind.
  • (p. 6) In Indian usage, “secular,” far from implying antagonism toward religion or toward people of faith, actually implies a profound respect for and tolerance toward all religions. It also implies an inclusive and impartial attitude which includes nonbelievers.
 
It would be great if everyone could adopt this inclusive and impartial attitude, but it just doesn’t seem attainable given the epistemological positions of many religions. More on this later.
 
  • (p. 9) dating from the reign of Emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE. One inscription contains the exhortation to “honour another’s religion, for doing so strengthens both one’s own and that of the other.”
  • (p. 11) Two of the most important ideas I share wherever I travel — the principles of nonviolence and interreligious harmony — are both drawn from ancient Indian heritage.
 
Once again, this is great, until disagreements about truths and goals occur. Nonviolence and harmony do not provide guides for answers to intractable disagreements.
 
  • (p. 12) I should acknowledge that there are some who, though sympathetic to my explanation of secularism in Indian terms, still question the viability of detaching ethics from religion in this way. The mistrust of attempts to separate the two is so strong among some followers of theistic traditions that I have been cautioned, on some occasions, not to use the word “secular” when speaking about ethics in public.
  • (p. 13) For those whose religious belief is so closely tied to ethical practice, it is hard to conceive of one without the other. For those who believe that truth requires God, God alone can make ethics binding.
  • (p. 13) I do not agree that ethics requires grounding in religious concepts or faith. Instead, I firmly believe that ethics can also emerge simply as a natural and rational response to our very humanity and our common human condition.
 
Wow. These passages could have been written by any of the “four horsemen of the non-apocalypse.”
 
  • (p. 14) The systems of belief with which the world’s religions ground and support inner values can, generally speaking, be grouped into two categories.
  • (p. 14) On the one hand are the theistic religions, which include Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In these traditions, ethics is ultimately grounded in some understanding of God — as a creator and as the absolute ground of all that is.
  • (p. 14) since God is infinite love or infinite compassion, loving others is part of loving and serving God.
  • (p. 14) there is the belief that after death we will face divine judgment, and this provides a further strong incentive for behaving with restraint and due caution
  • (p. 15) On the other hand, in the non-theistic religions, such as Buddhism, Jainism, and a branch of the ancient Indian Samkhya school, there is no belief in a divine creator. Instead, there is the core principle of causality, while the universe is regarded as beginningless.
  • (p. 15) [These] religions instead ground ethics in the idea of karma. The Sanskrit word karma simply means “action.” So when we talk about our karma, we are referring to all our intentional acts of body, speech, and mind, and when we talk about the fruits of our karma, we are talking about the consequences of these acts.
  • (p. 15) When combined with the idea of rebirth and successive lives, this understanding becomes a powerful basis for ethics and the cultivation of inner values.
  • (p. 15) All religions, therefore, to some extent, ground the cultivation of inner values and ethical awareness in some kind of metaphysical (that is, not empirically demonstrable) understanding of the world and of life after death.
 
Yes. And these metaphysical stances are blockades to universal agreement wherever they become hardened.
 
  • (p. 16) I do not think that religion is indispensable to the spiritual life.
  • (p. 16) Today, in a scientific age in which religion strikes many as meaningless, what basis for such values is left to us? How can we find a way of motivating ourselves ethically without recourse to traditional beliefs?
  • (p. 16) although humans can manage without religion, they cannot manage without inner values.
  • (p. 16) As I see it, spirituality has two dimensions. The first dimension, that of basic spiritual well-being — by which I mean inner mental and emotional strength and balance — does not depend on religion but comes from our innate human nature as beings with a natural disposition toward compassion, kindness, and caring for others. The second dimension is what may be considered religion-based spirituality, which is acquired from our upbringing and culture and is tied to particular beliefs and practices.
  • (p. 17) The difference between the two is something like the difference between water and tea. Ethics and inner values without religious content are like water, something we need every day for health and survival. Ethics and inner values based in a religious context are more like tea. The tea we drink is mostly composed of water, but it also contains some other ingredients — tea leaves, spices, perhaps some sugar or, at least in Tibet, salt — and this makes it more nutritious and sustaining and something we want every day. But however the tea is prepared, the primary ingredient is always water. While we can live without tea, we can’t live without water.
 
What an interesting metaphor! We non-religious types need to develop our tea.
 
  • (p. 18) there are some who believe, at one end of the spectrum, that we are by nature fundamentally violent, aggressive, and competitive; while others, at the other end, take the view that we are predominantly disposed toward gentleness and love.
  • (p. 18) if we view human nature as dominated by destructive tendencies, our ethics will most likely be grounded in something outside ourselves.
  • (p. 18) If, however, we view human nature as predominantly oriented toward kindness and the desire for a peaceful life, then we can consider ethics an entirely natural and rational means for pursuing our innate potential.
 
Yes. And we now know that humans are both of these. And for good reason. The signature adaptation of the human species may be cooperation. But the science around prosociality shows that cooperation requires special conditions, including regulation towards shared goals using graduated responses to both helpful AND harmful behaviors. In other words, we need to be kind. And sometimes we need to be cruel to be kind. And it takes wisdom to know the difference between these situations.
 
  • (p. 19) I believe that an inclusive approach to secular ethics, one with the potential to be universally accepted, requires recognition of only two basic principles.
  • (p. 19) The first principle is the recognition of our shared humanity and our shared aspiration to happiness and the avoidance of suffering; the second is the understanding of interdependence as a key feature of human reality, including our biological reality as social animals. From these two principles we can learn to appreciate the inextricable connection between our own well-being and that of others, and we can develop a genuine concern for others’ welfare. Together, I believe, they constitute an adequate basis for establishing ethical awareness and the cultivation of inner values.
 
That is an argument that is perfect in sync with evolutionary philosophy. And this continues in the next few chapters.
 
Chapter 2 — Our Common Humanity
  • (p. 21) in any attempt to develop a genuinely universal approach to ethics, [we have] to have a clear understanding of what unites us all, namely our common humanity.
  • (p. 26) Since we are social animals — that is, since our survival and flourishing depend on being part of a group or community — our capacity for empathy has profound implications for our pursuit of happiness and well-being.
 
This is almost word-for-word what Humanists UK says when they teach ethics.
 
Chapter 3 — The Quest for Happiness
  • (p. 31) A human being survives only with hope, and hope by definition implies the thought of something better. As I see it, our very survival depends on some idea of future happiness.
  • (p. 31) Happiness is a rather general term, so there is potential for misunderstanding. For example, it should be made clear that in this book’s secular context, we are not talking about religious conceptions of ultimate happiness, but rather the simple joy or happiness we all understand in an ordinary or everyday sense.
  • (p. 31) what are the sources of human happiness? Three factors immediately suggest themselves which, I think most people will agree, contribute significantly to human well-being, namely wealth or prosperity; health; and friendship or companionship.
  • (p. 40) there are also other crucial factors which greatly contribute to our level of genuine happiness and joy. Recent scientific research suggests that chief among these are a sense of purpose which transcends narrow self-interest and a feeling of being connected with others or of belonging to a community. The root of both of these, I believe, is compassion or warmheartedness
 
The positive psychology literature is overflowing with scientific books about this topic. (See here, here, here, or here.) I’ve read many of these and listened to podcasts with the authors of many, many more. Unfortunately, this short chapter by the Dalai Lama is completely lacking in actual references to this field, but it does help to see his simple, straightforward thinking as well as the link to compassion, which is the subject of the next two chapters.
 
Chapter 4 — Compassion, the Foundation of Well-Being
  • (p. 41) Without another’s loving care, none of us would have lived more than a few days. As a result of this intense need for others in our early development, a disposition toward affection is a part of our biology. This is a characteristic we share with many other mammals, and also birds
  • (p. 48) What is important is that when pursuing our own self-interest we should be “wise selfish” and not “foolish selfish.” Being foolish selfish means pursuing our own interests in a narrow, shortsighted way. Being wise selfish means taking a broader view and recognizing that our own long-term individual interest lies in the welfare of everyone.
  • (p. 50) While compassion at the biological level can be unconditional, like the mother’s love for her baby, it is also biased and limited in scope. Nevertheless, it is of the utmost importance, because it is the seed from which unbiased compassion can grow. We can take our innate capacity for warmheartedness and, using our intelligence and conviction, expand it.
  • (p. 52) universal compassion is not rooted in any self-regarding element, but rather in the simple awareness that all others are human beings who, just like oneself, aspire to happiness and shun suffering.
  • (p. 53) My old friend Professor Paul Ekman, a pioneer in the science of emotion, once told me that even Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, believed that “the love for all living creatures is the most noble attribute of man.”
  • (p. 55) since universal compassion involves gradually expanding one’s circle of concern until it finally embraces the whole of humanity, it needs constant cultivation.
  • (p. 56) religion is not necessary for cultivating compassion. In fact, secular techniques for compassion training are already in use, and their effectiveness has even been scientifically demonstrated.
 
It’s striking to me how much this mimics Peter Singer’s book The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress, which I tried to take to its logical ethical conclusion by considering the evolutionary story of all of the life that has ever been or ever will be. I’m really looking forward to spending some more time in Part 2 of Beyond Religion to learn about ways to cultivate this compassion. But first, are there limits to this compassion?
 
Chapter 5 — Compassion and the Question of Justice
  • (p. 57) For many, it seems, there is a conflict between the principle of compassion, which implies forgiveness, and the exercise of justice, which requires punishment for wrongdoing. As they see it, the principle of justice or fairness, rather than that of compassion, must underpin any humanistic approach to ethics.
  • (p. 58) compassion by no means implies surrender in the face of wrongdoing or injustice.
  • (p. 61) From a secular point of view, without such beliefs in punishment and reward in the afterlife, we must ask ourselves what punishment is really about. Is it about retribution and revenge — about making wrongdoers suffer as an end in itself? Or is it more about preventing further wrongdoing? To my mind, the purpose of punishment is not to exact suffering as an end in itself. Rather, the suffering inflicted by punishment should have a higher purpose, namely to discourage the wrongdoer from repeating the offense and to deter others from committing similar acts. Punishment is, therefore, not about retribution but about deterrence.
 
This is roughly the same conclusion reached by Dan Dennett and Greg Caruso in their book debating free will, determinism, and “just desert”. We’re aligned once again! But what about the final subject of Part 1 of Beyond Religion — ethics — which is covered in the next two chapters?
 
Chapter 6 — The Role of Discernment
  • (p. 73) While intention is the first and most important factor in guaranteeing that our behaviour is ethical, we also need discernment to ensure that the choices we make are realistic and that our good intentions do not go to waste.
  • (p. 74) For those occasions when we do not have time to work things out in detail, it is useful to have internalized general rules to guide our actions.
  • (p. 80) we will never know all the causes that have given rise to any situation. Nor can we foresee all the consequences of our actions. There is always bound to be some element of uncertainty. It is important to acknowledge this, but it should not worry us. Still less should it make us despair of the value of rational assessment. Instead it should temper our actions with proper humility and caution.
  • (p. 80) This uncertainty is another reason why ethics must be grounded at the level of motivation, as I have said, rather than purely on consideration of consequences.
 
In my paper on “Rebuilding the Harm Principle”, I say something similar about how to integrate consequentialism and virtue ethics. (I also add in the third of the three major camps of moral ethics, deontology.) Bravo!
 
Chapter 7 — Ethics in Our Shared World
  • (p. 84) people are making a convenient distinction between ethics on the personal level and ethics on the wider social level. To me, such attitudes are fundamentally flawed, as they overlook the interdependence of our world.
  • (p. 88) Disarmament is compassion in practice. What is required, therefore, is both inner disarmament, at the level of our individual hatred, prejudice, and intolerance, and outer disarmament, at the level of nations and states.
  • (p. 91) On the issue of economic inequality, I consider myself at least half Marxist. When it comes to creating wealth and thereby improving people’s material conditions, capitalism is without doubt very effective, but capitalism is clearly inadequate as any kind of social ideal, since it is only motivated by profit, without any ethical principle guiding it.
  • (p. 92) I told [a very wealthy couple], having made your money as capitalists, you should spend it as socialists!
 
This chapter actually consists of several short sections about technology, war, the environment, economics, science, education, and perseverance, but these four quotes are enough to show we’re basically aligned again. All of the points being made are simply a natural extension of the principle of flourishing in an interdependent world. The fact that this secular ethics is coming from the Dalai Lama rather than a typical atheist is completely remarkable. It’s a perfect example of what Cass Sunstein called a “surprising validator”. And it gives me great hope.
 
This marks the end of a fairly long overview of just the first half of this book, but I do hope it sparks an interest to read the whole thing and to share it widely with people who might be receptive to this message. As I said at the start, I only wish the title of this book had been flipped. Here’s why. In David Sloan Wilson’s autobiography, he wrote this about the Dalai Lama:
​
A quote of his is framed on my wall: “To defy the authority of empirical evidence is to disqualify oneself as someone worthy of critical debate in a dialogue.”

​This is an enormously important statement about epistemology that wasn’t covered in Beyond Religion. I entirely agree with the authority of empiricism and with the empiricists’ arguments that all of our knowledge comes from this source. But we are also crucially inspired by our beliefs, hopes, imagination, hypotheses, or faith about what might be in the realm of the unknown. If life had only ever acted on what was empirically known, it would never have progressed at all. I will have more to say about this in an upcoming paper about the evolution of knowledge, but the important thing to say here is that perhaps this message about secular ethics would be easier to accept if it was advertised as being confined to the empirical world, as being confined to the evidence that we can all agree upon.

​Beyond that realm, some of us may be inspired by various visions of earthly utopias. Some of us may be inspired by various visions of heavenly paradise. Trials and errors will show us which of these prove to be more accurate and/or effective. But, to put a spin on the Dalai Lama’s book title, these are “beyond secularism”. That doesn’t make them better or more important. Just literally out of reach. This isn’t the same thing as S.J. Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria since religions have typically tried to make claims about the empirical world. But if religions were prepared to retreat from any disproven ideas, then empirical secularism could become what we all agree to. Beyond that, you can believe what you want to believe, as long as it doesn’t “defy the authority of empirical evidence.” I’m sure that suggestion would still face pockets of fierce resistance, but maybe it would be a more comforting way to approach this attempt to create an ethics for the whole world. What do you think?


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Review of Truth & Generosity by Weiner & Forsee

8/1/2024

5 Comments

 
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I’m currently working on a big paper on the evolution of knowledge and during my research for that I came across an obscure but interesting little book that I wanted to share. It’s called Truth & Generosity: How Truth Makes Language Possible by Neal Weiner and Tina Lee Forsee. (T&G by W&F from here on out.) According to the Amazon description:
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It doesn't matter whether you're conservative or liberal, religious or skeptical, the very fact you are able to understand the words you're reading right now—that we are all able to communicate with each other using language—means we must share a vast body of beliefs. While language may shape the way we think about the world to some small extent, it makes much more sense to say truth shapes language to a very large extent. That’s the central argument of this book:

Truth is the condition that makes language possible.
​
​Tina was my way to finding this book. She’s the fascinating writer behind several projects that would definitely be of interest to anyone reading my site. In T&G, she is described as having “published her debut novel, A Footnote to Plato, in 2023 (Wipf and Stock). She is an Associate Acquisitions Editor at After Dinner Conversation, a magazine dedicated to philosophical short stories. tinaforsee.com.” Her website has links to a couple of Substack newsletters she runs, including her personal one Philosophy and Fiction (subjects I love!) where she recently posted about every chapter of T&G. After I finish my review here, I am definitely going to go engage in the conversations there about this book.
 
(Also, you should know that her book A Footnote to Plato is an excellent addition to the canon of campus novels. It’s like a mashup of Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Definitely check it out if that subject is of interest to you.)
 
While Tina’s solo works are great, T&G is a co-production that has an interesting origin story. This is best explained by quoting from the foreward that Tina wrote.
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My husband wrote the first draft of this manuscript nearly twenty years ago while he was still teaching at Marlboro College. He retired shortly after, and I suppose at that time he was perfectly happy to stuff the manuscript in a drawer and get back to it someday. … I’ve always felt the book needed to be published, but I also knew how much work that would require. Back then, I didn’t even know where to begin. Time passed. Neal is now 81 years old. The last thing he wants to do is spend his retirement years going through the academic publishing process, so I offered to publish it for him.
 
I understand if you’re skeptical of such ventures, but I hope you’ll make an exception in this case. After all, Neal has paid his dues. He went to prestigious universities and taught philosophy at Marlboro College for nearly forty years. He has published academic works, but he has also seen commercial success and has even appeared on Good Morning America. There’s his ‘social proof’. Make of it what you will.
 

So, yeah, that’s why I called this an “obscure” book. But it’s only 113 pages, and since Neal and Tina’s styles are both very clear and jargon free it is an especially quick read that is easily worth your time. Before we dive in, I thought I should quickly share some of my own positions on the relevant subjects so you know where I am coming from.
 
On my website’s page for epistemology, I wrote, “In summary, Plato laid down the most influential definition of knowledge as ‘justified, true, belief.’ But this has proven to be untenable and I propose that it ought to be replaced with an understanding that knowledge can only ever be justified beliefs that are currently surviving our best tests.” Also on that page, I have links to my three most important essays on this subject so far — Knowledge Cannot be Justified True Belief; Evolving Our Trust in Science; and The Bayesian Balance — as well links to four other epistemology books that I have reviewed in this website — Kindly Inquisitors; Knowledge and Its Limits; How to Talk to a Science Denier; and Mental Immunity (Part 1 and Part 2).
 
Finally, I think an important concept for this discussion is the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Truth, which has these important descriptions for the term as it is often used in philosophy:
​

​There are two commonly accepted constraints on truth and falsehood: 1) Every proposition is true or false. [Law of the Excluded Middle.]; and 2) No proposition is both true and false. [Law of Non-contradiction.] These constraints require that every proposition has exactly one truth-value. Although the point is controversial, most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.
​

Okay, with that (very) brief background on knowledge and truth out of the way, let’s dig into T&G. Rather than write a full review, I’ll just share some of the passages I highlighted and react to them along the way. All page numbers are from the 2023 Kindle edition.
 
Truth & Generosity: How Truth Makes Language Possible by Weiner & Forsee
  • Table of Contents
    PART I: The Principle of Generosity
    CHAPTER 1: The Principle of Generosity
    CHAPTER 2: Violations of the Principle of Generosity
    CHAPTER 3: The Poetry of Ordinary Language
    CHAPTER 4: What Language is Not
    CHAPTER 5: Etymology and Truth
    CHAPTER 6: Social Influences on Semantic Change
    PART II: Generosity and Shared Belief
    CHAPTER 7: Politics and Relativism
    CHAPTER 8: Trust and Doubt
    CHAPTER 9: The Origin of Language
    CHAPTER 10: Radical Interpretation
    CHAPTER 11: How We Recognize Language as Language
    PART III: Generosity and Truth
    CHAPTER 12: The Body of Truth
    CHAPTER 13: The Heart of Truth
    CHAPTER 14: Generosity Beyond the Sentence
    CHAPTER 15: The Interpretive Ideal
    CHAPTER 16: Interpreting the World Through Generosity
 
This table of contents excited me! We begin with PART I: The Principle of Generosity.
 
  • (p.2) The very fact that we can communicate with each other and translate other languages into our own means there must be a vast body of belief we all share—a body of belief which, taken on the whole, must be true. To put it in a snappier way: Truth is the condition that makes language possible.
 
As I shared above, this is the central argument of the book. W&F introduce this right from the start, which I appreciate, but I could have used a bit more background. Although the word “truth” is in the title of the book, and it is used 101 times in 113 pages (according to my Kindle search), I didn’t find a clear philosophical definition of the way they are using the term. In the IEP entry for Truth that I mentioned above, there are sections for the correspondence theory, the semantic theory, the coherence theory, pragmatic theories, and deflationary theories of truth, each of which have several subsections. This is a highly discussed term in philosophy! And without a lot of agreement. So, it would have helped me to know where W&F stand. But let’s adopt this book’s other main term — generosity — and see if their language will eventually demonstrate what they mean over the course of the book.
 
  • (p.2) This is not to say every single opinion must be true; after all, surely some of the beliefs we hold contradict each other. And I certainly don’t mean we should blindly embrace the status quo either. What I mean is, ordinary opinion, on the whole, has things basically right, and a sensitive and careful distillation of what is presented there is the best approach to seeking truth.
 
This is a telling caveat to the declaration in the first quote (“a body of belief which, taken on the whole, must be true”). According to the three constraints on truth that I listed above — excluded middle, non-contradiction, and universality — the way philosophers use “truth” is very much as a black and white term. But by using and emphasizing words such as “on the whole” and “basically”, W&F seem to allow for a fuzzier, blurrier, folk usage of the word truth. “Must be true” has transformed into “basically right”. That’s not exactly what epistemologists have been fighting over, but it can still help the “approach to seeking truth.”
 
  • (p.2) Some of what I have to say will be drawn from Donald Davidson’s work, which stretches back to the early sixties and has won great respect in academic philosophy.
  • (p.25) [Davidson] argues that the truth of a sentence comes first and the meanings of its words are adjusted to make this truth possible.
 
Ok, what does that mean?
 
  • (p. 26) Suppose an auto mechanic from the rural south currently living in New England tells me that to deal with my car problem, I’ll need an auto holler. … I realize he is using the word-sound holler as I would use the word-sound hauler, and from that point on everything proceeds smoothly. … The initial confusion does not get straightened out by anyone’s explaining to me the conventions of the Southern dialect. Instead, I presupposed the truth of the mechanic’s speech—in other words, I assumed the mechanic was quite aware that yelling at my car would not solve a thing …The point is, the truth of the sentence came first, the word and its meaning came second. I can be sure then that for me, the word did not get its meaning by convention, but by generous interpretation of its usage in accordance with my beliefs about the world.
 
This is an extremely helpful example, demonstrating both truth and generosity in action. In other words, W&F are saying that in order to communicate at all we must begin by being generous and assume the good intentions of the mechanic to speak the truth. That’s great, but it doesn’t address the traditional problems of knowledge where skeptical arguments (e.g. evil demons, Gettier cases, or the Matrix) imply that these good intentions may not be enough. How can we ever know we are really talking about the same thing?
 
  • (p.27) meaning is plastic and takes its shape by conforming to the contours of a presumed shared reality.
 
This, to me, is a key move of the book that isn’t highlighted enough. In my own work, I’ve called this “presumed shared reality” our first assumption or our first hypothesis. Donald Campbell, who coined the term evolutionary epistemology, called this “hypothetical realism”. Once that stance is taken, all communication and knowledge-seeking can proceed as basically a test of this presumption. But how can we ever know if our meanings actually do conform to these contours?
 
  • (p.33) novel usage puts the word under a kind of truth stress so that it must change meaning to relieve that stress. If for whatever reason the untrue way of speaking becomes widespread and the process is allowed to reach its logical completion, then whatever is strictly speaking not true or not believable about the novel usage is eliminated by a shift in meaning. At this point, an ironic sort of miracle occurs: the meaning of the word adjusts on a grand scale to make the untruth true
 
This is a lovely demonstration of how knowledge and language evolve. But it does not show how we could ever hope to attain the very strict status of “truth” as laid out in the philosophical definitions above. Claiming we can become “on the whole” “basically right” is an important counter to nihilistic relativism, but that is not strictly “true”. I would happily just admit that as part of my own larger project of evolutionary epistemology. But for W&F, I think is too easy for skeptics to poke holes in their language.
 
  • (p.43) the principle of generosity underlies all communication whatsoever and thereby guarantees the unified, public character of anything worth calling a world.
 
After my review of Naomi Oreskes’ book Why Trust Science?, I’ve been using her term “consensus” to describe this “unified, public character” but I love how this principle of generosity describes an important aspect of the cooperation we rely upon to reach this consensus. Perhaps the other side of that would be a “principle of stinginess” to describe the competition that uses disagreements to whittle away at any differences in our consensus. But this ends the discussion of Part I: The Principle of Generosity, so the topic shifts now. On to PART II: Generosity and Shared Belief.
 
  • (p.44) It took a long time, roughly from 1776 to 1976, for political equality (equality of political rights) to turn into first social equality (equality of income or opportunity) and then epistemic equality (relativism), but it happened.
  • (p.45) There was and still is real oppression, both political and epistemological, but the blind worship of equality comes at the cost of the distinction between knowledge and opinion.
  • (p.45) Relativism speaks to the demand for an egalitarian society. The question is how to retain its democratic virtues without its nihilistic vice.
  • (p.52) Relativism makes the unity of being a mere appearance while preserving the diversity of opinion. What I propose is the reverse: to make diversity of opinion the appearance and preserve the unity of being.
 
This is a fascinating analysis of the spread of individualism from politics to economics to epistemology. I’ll leave the political-economic discussion for another day, but in epistemological relativism the control of knowledge, which has slid down from powerful groups and elites to the common individual, still has one more step to take. As I shared in my overview of Kindly Inquisitors by Jonathan Rauch (a title that sounds like it also advocates for generosity), the liberal system of inquisition has two foundational principles — no one gets final say, and no one has personal authority. In other words, the power to decide what is accepted as knowledge drops not to any one individual, but it actually resides in zero people! Not with kings, queens, or aristocracies. Not with popes, ayatollahs, or religious councils. Not with professors, philosophers, scientists, or academic councils. Not with western white men, eastern gurus, or indigenous wisdom councils. And certainly not with billionaire tech bros. The best production of knowledge is now governed by an inanimate process — the scientific method, broadly construed — whose practices we can all continue to shape as well. I call it “the epistemological power paradox” that as the power of individuals to determine knowledge dropped to zero with the discovery of this method, the power of that knowledge actually grew to its highest point. That, to me, is how we retain knowledge’s democratic virtues without its nihilistic vice. That is how a diversity of opinions can actually be shaped into consensus about the (presumed) unity of being.
 
The next sections of the book take us through a bit of theorizing about the origins of language. At first, this feels like a sidetrack from the main theme of the book, but the link does quickly become apparent.
 
  • (p.54) Throughout the 19th century, debates on the origin of speech had become so contentious that, as contemporary writers are usually quick to point out, in 1866 and 1911, the Linguistic Society of Paris banned all papers on the subject.
  • (p.56) In our thought experiment we eliminate the possibility of misusing established meaning because there is no established meaning. In ur-sentences, there is absolutely nothing available to give meaning to words except the very objects described. In other words, our thought experiment takes us to the very bedrock of truth.
 
I would not put it that way and don’t really understand how W&F could make such a claim. These ur-sentences are still based on our perceptions and perceptions are fallible. To put it as Kant would say, there is still a difference between the phenomena and the noumena.
 
  • (p.56) The vast majority of those who have given the matter serious thought have favored the idea that the first utterance must have been a sentence rather than a word.
  • (p.57) the most persuasive reason is obvious and not technical at all: Words only function in sentences. They are good for declaring, commanding, promising, begging, asking, wishing, warning, and so on, but they can perform these roles only in sentences
  • (p.57) Sentences, at least as they are usually defined, are complete thoughts. The implication is that anything less than a sentence—a word, phrase, or syllable—is a fragment of a thought.
  • (p.58) In an inquiry into natural language’s origin and evolution, however, to suppose words could arise independent of sentences is rather like supposing bodily organs could arise apart from the body to which they belong.
 
But organs (sorta) did arise prior to bodies! Not the fully finished organs that we see today, but the discrete functional elements of protists (e.g. photosynthetic energy production, flagellate movement, parasitic consumption, stalked reproductive spores) evolved separately before combining in a Major Evolutionary Transition to create multicellular life. I think W&F’s argument here could be turned on its head. How could bodies have evolved without the organs being out there to comprise them? Evolution of complexity requires simple steps along the way that each give an evolutionary advantage. Turning back to the evolution of language, perhaps the definitions of “words” and “sentences” need to be thought of more flexibly so we can imagine their simplest protist versions way back at the beginning of their journey towards today’s linguistic complexity.
 
  • (p.61) It is surely not the case that language began with the naming of things followed by a synthesis of names into sentences, sentences which may or may not have been true. For reasons we have already discussed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how language could have come about by such a process. It is even more difficult to imagine truth limping behind the first sentences; the first utterance could not have been false.
  • (p.61) Without established usage, there is simply no way to bespeak things other than they really are. In other words, in order for the first utterance to count as language, it had to be infallible.
 
Did you catch Dennett’s alarm bell for a weak argument there? (The use of “surely.”) I don’t see how “the first utterance” might not have been mistaken or illusory and therefore false. Again, I could really use W&F’s definition of true here because maybe they mean something different. Which theory of truth are they using? Does it need to be universally true? Because that would be far too high a bar to clear. Other animals have been observed shouting false warning calls so they can obtain the foods left behind by their fellow creatures after they run for cover. So that lying is an example of at least some false communication happening before human language even began.
 
  • (p.62) We are supposing this to be the birth of public language, so one way or another the semantics had to become shared by the entire community. This means that public language depends on the whole community taking these ur-sentences as true.
  • (p.62) Suppose FLABEH meant, Run! A mammoth is coming! Someone might have mistakenly screamed it after hearing a loud crashing noise on a very dark night. But that would be a case in which the bespoken object was absent, which absence is precisely what makes the falsehood possible. This sort of error could not have been normal. If it had been, the result would have been either semantic change or the destruction of referential usefulness for the incipient language.
 
So, not each and every utterance is true. But the generally accepted usages that arise must hone toward truth after many, many iterations. This is exactly the same process that is used today. But it does not start from some bedrock of truth. It starts with a guess and proceeds in a Bayesian fashion from there towards consensus.
 
  • (p.64) Only one conclusion is possible: We have not left the epistemic Eden; we are as infallible as our forbears. Within a certain limited range, we, too, cannot be wrong.
  • (p.64) But we can be wrong!—you may be thinking. If this conclusion seems shocking, let us not forget that the infallibility I am talking about applies only to the description of objects directly experienced, while they are experienced, and this should not be confused with other types of assertion.
 
Ah hah. So perhaps W&F are accepting the line of argument, leading from Descartes, about “self-knowledge” being especially secure. But this is easily refuted. Our “direct experience” is just not infallible.
 
That closes Part II about the origins of language giving us reasons to believe we speak truth. I found this section very unpersuasive, but let’s proceed to the conclusion of the book with PART III: Generosity and Truth.
 
  • (p.78) the shared beliefs we are talking about are not merely widespread agreement—they form an absolutely necessary agreement that is the condition for the possibility of recognizing language and intelligence as such. Such beliefs are not merely uncontested or not contradicted; they are not, as a mass, contradictable. Thus the indispensable body of belief may be undefined, but it is on the whole and for all practical purposes, infallible. Which is to say, to contradict them in their entirety and in their very possibility is to contradict oneself. And so for us, the undefined body of belief must be taken, on the whole, as true.
  • (p.80) What I wish to borrow from Quine is the general idea of a gradient of confidence and stability based on the degree of upset caused by the abandonment of a given belief. Quine's system measures beliefs by their logical connectedness to other beliefs, but ours measures them by how dispensable they are for interpretation.
  • (p.81) Thus it seems plausible to imagine a slowly evolving mass with some of its propositions stable enough as individuals to be candidates for eternity, others locked into groups that are either rigid or elastic, and still others that live alone, so to speak, and as individuals are relatively changeable. … To put it another way, you can sometimes change your mind about certain propositions, but you can’t change your mind about all contingent propositions, or even a great many of them, all at once.
 
I loved seeing this reference to “a slowly evolving mass.” That is the right process, and we do end up with a huge, interconnected network of stable propositions. We just don’t need to start with “truth” to arrive there. And the history of skeptical arguments show we shouldn’t ever expect to arrive at a finishing line either.
 
  • (p.82) when a belief cannot be dispensed with, what can we call it but true?
 
Looking at the thesaurus for synonyms of “correct” we can could call it right, accurate, veracious, unerring, faithful, faultless, flawless, or error-free. We could call it widely accepted, a proven fact, or a justified belief currently surviving our best rational tests. But according to the strict philosophical definition of truth set out above (passing the tests for excluded middle, non-contradiction, and universality), these indispensable beliefs are not known to be “true”. That powerful term should not be bandied about too casually. It cheapens the philosophical ideal. And calling something true sets us up to fail to see new information. I would much prefer to treat truth with the reverence it deserves. When I’m speaking and writing carefully, I try to only use the term “true” for the abstract philosophical concept of perfect knowledge that we can seemingly never actually achieve. True is a future goal. Not a currently reached destination or designation. That, to me, helps enormously for keeping our knowledge evolving in the right direction.
 
  • (p.82) Theories such as coherence and correspondence are like species of truth, but none can be a satisfactory definition of truth (or of being or goodness, for that matter). Reductionisms such as materialism, idealism, and hedonism make the same mistake. Definition must stop somewhere, and, logically, it must surrender at both the top and bottom of the conceptual mountain.
 
I honestly am not sure what this means, but it might explain why W&F don’t take the time to declare their preferred definition of truth. Maybe I would agree that definitions cannot capture everything, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to keep working on them. Definitions are like all knowledge in that way. I don’t think of them as having a solid bottom and top but rather as an ever-expanding light exploring the darkness of our ignorance that was once total and complete when life first arose.
 
  • (p.86) Meaning depends on context, and context is a series of ever-more-encompassing wholes. The word-sentence relationship is but one part of the series. Below it are the mere sounds—prefixes and suffixes, for example—which have the word they belong to as their context (consider: ing means different things in bring and chopping). Above this stretches a long sequence of ever-larger wholes in which the same sentence can have more or less plausible alternative meanings. First the paragraph, then the chapter, the section, the book, the author’s other works, the author’s life during that period, the totality of the author’s works, the totality of the author’s life, the library in which the works are stored, the culture of which the library is but a single institution, and the sweep of world history in which that culture is but a small part, not to mention the universe itself.
 
This is a great evolutionary view of knowledge along a continuous spectrum! I hope to publish more on this soon.
 
  • (p.88) The conclusion we can draw from this is that the assumed sense of an entire work adjudicates between alternative or competing meanings of its components,
  • (p.93) The truest interpretation is, all else being equal, the one that best fits the parts into a coherent whole. To the extent that we cannot make them fit, we cannot understand the work.
 
This has echoes of the famous Wilfred Sellars quote, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” It is also reflected in my definition of knowledge as justified beliefs currently surviving our best rational tests.
 
  • (p.99) As a regulative principle, the principle of generosity amounts to a presupposition of what it means to make sense running alongside the principle of sufficient reason: things must be assumed to make sense. To put it another way, we cannot make an earnest attempt to interpret anything while at the same time assuming it makes no sense.
  • (p.106) Thus we arrive at the sheer, bare form of understanding from which all concrete belief depends. Perhaps it can only be called a kind of faith in the comprehensibility of the world.
 
Or, to avoid using religious terms, and instead preferring to draw on the scientific method as the best way yet discovered to gain knowledge, we could call this “comprehensibility of the world” our first hypothesis. And after all of the evidence that has rolled in to support this idea, it is no longer a leap of faith to believe in it.
 
Despite some qualms about the middle section of the book, and with its general usage of the word truth, I thoroughly enjoyed Truth and Generosity. Tina Lee Forsee should be commended for rescuing it from Neal Weiner’s archives and sharing it widely. I look froward to using some of its arguments in my own efforts to help us understand truth and knowledge better. And I’m sure I’ll need a plea for generosity when I do.

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Deep Philosophical Confusions Among Artists and Critics

7/14/2024

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Soon after I wrote my last post on “why I’m done with the publishing industry for my fiction”, I came across a perfect example of the mass confusion that resides in the world of the arts. I just had to share it and analyze it. It’s the essay, “Analyst or Moralist?” by James Jackson, which was published in Quillette in mid-May.
 
Firstly, so we can know where this is coming from, James Jackson’s bio for the article says he is “a writer and academic interested in culture, the arts, and politics. He is currently completing a monograph on the French poet, playwright, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau.”
 
Digging a little deeper, Cocteau “was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements.” Where surrealism “is an art and cultural movement …in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas.” Avant-garde “identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.” And Dadaists “believed that the 'reason' and 'logic' of bourgeois capitalist society had led people into war. They expressed their rejection of that ideology in artistic expression that appeared to reject logic and embrace chaos and irrationality.”
 
We are not off to a good start.
 
As for the outlet, Quillette was “created in 2015 to focus on scientific topics, but has come to focus on coverage of political and cultural issues concerning freedom of speech and identity politics. It has been described as libertarian-leaning, ‘the right wing's highly influential answer to Slate’, as well as an ‘anti-PC soapbox’.”
 
This isn’t a news source that I am willing to pay money to subscribe to, but I do monitor it to see another perspective on things, and I have occasionally found some good articles or ideas there.
 
Okay, now that we understand the messenger, what about the message? The one-sentence lede does a good job of summarizing the focus of the essay:
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​The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.
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I could perhaps agree with this declaration if the emphasis were placed on the increasingly *poor* political nature of cultural criticism. But the article — which is itself a stridently political piece of cultural criticism — somehow manages to transgress its own prescriptions while mixing in lots of moral and aesthetic nonsense with a few interesting points. The author is clearly intelligent and speaking about the state of the artistic world with an informed intimacy that tells us something important about what is going on with artists, critics, and publishers / producers. And this gives us good evidence of the philosophically-tangled mess of beliefs that is driving all three of these vital populations. The entire article, therefore, deserves a close reading so that we may understand and solve many of the problems we observe in contemporary arts. As such, I’ll reproduce much of the article below, with my comments inserted along the way as a running critique. Off we go!
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“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when evaluating a work of art. A novel may contain unpleasant characters, but it does not follow that the novelist himself is immoral for creating those characters in the first place. The function of a flawed or immoral protagonist may be to remind us of our own corruptible natures, to introduce complexity to a story’s people and dilemmas, or simply to illuminate humanity in all its variety and peculiarity. A novel filled with moral goodness and clarity will not be not true to life.
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Right off the bat, this is wrong and confused. Wilde had his reasons for saying what he said (which I’ll get to below), but you can all pick your own examples to illustrate that books can obviously be moral or immoral. But Jackson immediately contradicts this opening pronouncement anyway, by telling us the functions that immoral characters and storylines can serve. When they “remind us about our corruptible nature”, that is a moral lesson!
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​“All art,” Wilde also remarked, “is quite useless.” This pithy aphorism reminds us that art is intended for aesthetic pleasure not practical utility—it is an end in itself and not an instrument of moral instruction or politics. The very worst art, Wilde believed, is that which kowtows to rigid orthodoxies and sacrifices the autonomy of the artist in order to deliver a helpful message of some kind.
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Ugh. Aesthetic pleasure is not so easily divorced from reality. It is either short-sighted, relativistic, or nihilistic to claim pleasure is an end in itself. And whichever way you go, this claim is a profoundly moral argument! So, to insist on art for art’s sake, and to revel in these kinds of amoral works, is actually the same type of moralizing messaging that Jackson denigrates. It’s just that his “useless” art conveys an unhelpful and destructive message. The fact that its hollowness is hidden behind a sweet-tasting veneer only makes it all the more pernicious. Kowtowing to rigid orthodoxies may be a more obvious wrong, but that is not the only alternative.
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​In Wilde’s time, moralistic objections to art usually emerged from the conservative and religious Right.
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Yes. And Wilde’s trials and imprisonment show exactly why he *had* to say what he said about art being useless and amoral. He was trying not to be prosecuted for his! But Wilde did not really believe this. His works provided strong counterpoints to the dominant and dangerous culture of the day that was persecuting him. And Wilde literally wrote, "Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine." That is a description of a useful and moral art!
 
(By the way, I believe Wilde’s argument is wrong because it goes too far towards individualism. Multilevel selection now shows us the need for *aligned* individuals and groups. Individual invisible hands will not a good market make.)
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In our own age, artists must contend with demands from the progressive Left that art bend the arc of history towards social justice. Activist critics insist upon purity of language and proportional representation of minority demographics in ways that undermine freedom of thought and expression. But the micromanagement of language and the misconception of life as a competition for recognition are not conducive to the creative process. How can the imagination flourish freely in such a climate?
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Okay, so that is wrong. But two wrongs don’t make it right to say that artists and critics should therefore strive for *amorality* rather than a Left or Right morality. As I already said, amorality is a moral choice. It would be far better to do art that is beautiful *and* good. It is up to the artist and critic to make their cases for aesthetics and ethics together. Despite the siloed nature of these subjects in academia, they cannot actually be divorced from one another in reality. The levels of beauty and goodness in the world are always affected by our objects and actions.
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Unfortunately, the people who seek to remake art in this way hold positions of power in precisely those institutions where creative freedom and the elevation of the individual voice ought to be abundant. The works of those who espouse an unambiguously progressive worldview are celebrated while an appreciation of our cultural inheritance is increasingly scarce or even scorned. This destructive ideology is radical, simplistic, and incoherent—a perversion of French Rationalism and German Idealism that attempts to impose a false teleology upon our shared culture. It overlooks the particular and the concrete in search of the abstract, which moves culture away from organic expression towards something closer to agitprop, unrooted in experience and the spontaneity of imagination. This development, well-meaning though it may be, misunderstands the true nature of artistic creation.
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My experience is that the people in positions of power do hold these varieties of philosophies — either insisting on Dadaist amorality or individual tales of intersectional woes. (See Footnote 3 from my last post for evidence of this in the NYT 100 notable books of 2023.) I have yet to find people in artistic power who are open to the kind of evolutionary ethics I argue for, or the kind of art that I find to be both beautiful and good.
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“Goethe’s garden,” George Steiner once noted, “is a few thousand yards from Buchenwald” and “Sartre regarded occupied Paris as perfect for literary and philosophic production.” To which he added, “When we invoke the ideals and practices of the humanities, there is no assurance that they humanize.” Kant, Euripides, and Chaucer do not necessarily make their readers better people, …
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Is this to be celebrated? Or mourned? Can we not do better? What if the best artists were also wise philosophers? The separation of these aesthetic and ethical endeavors does not help anyone. Including the artists themselves…
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​…nor does involvement in artistic production make a person more virtuous. Caravaggio murdered a man in a brawl and G.K. Chesterton was an antisemite. Their behavior does not diminish the beauty and profundity of the work they produced. To appreciate their creative talents does not require an endorsement of their personal politics or conduct. Caravaggio’s startling use of light and Chesterton’s sharp and lucid prose draw us into their work regardless of the creators’ moral shortcomings. 
 
Harold Bloom (who was Jewish) spoke of the ambivalence he felt reading Chesterton: 
 
Chesterton goes on puzzling me, because I find his critical sensibility far more congenial to me than that of T.S. Eliot and yet his anti-Semitism is at least as ugly as Eliot’s.
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Why settle for such cognitive ambivalence and puzzlement? Given these judgments, the behavior of an artist obviously does diminish the (so-called) beauty and profundity of their work.
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While Bloom had personal reservations about the man, he understood his obligations as a critic. Works of culture may move us in complex ways but they should not be asked to transform moral character. It would be quixotic for an artist to believe that he can convert the reader to a particular point of view on a whim. A novel by Dickens or Tolstoy may persuade us of the plight of their characters but they do so without resorting to didacticism. That is not to say that didactic culture is without value or somehow inherently inferior, but those works without any merit beyond the social or political message they wish to convey don’t really qualify as culture at all.
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So, which is it? Should the works not transform us or should they persuade us? Should they not resort to didacticism or should they provide valuable didactic culture? Jackson’s contradictory messages here are exactly the result of his confused philosophy.
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The critic underwrites the imaginative power that an artist brings to bear on what it means to be human. Rather than resorting to grandiose theories and pseudoscientific methods, the critic’s job is to elucidate the work of the artist with care and sympathy. The task of the humanities, after all, is to transmit the achievements of humanity across generations. The critic should be a disinterested analyst, willing and able to suspend his own feelings, convictions, and beliefs when assessing art and culture.
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Once again, grandiose theories and pseudoscientific methods are not the only possible tools for a critic or artist. Philosophy is part of the humanities too and no critic or artist should be disinterested in the best that that field has to offer. (Nor should they be disinterested in the sciences for that matter either!) It would take a hideous schizophrenia to carve out one’s “feelings, convictions, and beliefs” from one’s assessments of art and culture. I don’t actually think it’s even possible. And Jackson is clearly mixing his own beliefs and assessments here. He is just doing it poorly, illustrating how his beliefs in one area have crippled his ability to gain and express good beliefs in another. It would be far better to integrate all of what it means to be human into our humanities.
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But today, critics are preoccupied with “problematizing” the back-catalogues of artists and scrutinizing a work’s social or political message. These priorities have in turn affected the kind of work that gets produced. Charlie Higson’s series of Young Bond novels seem to have been designed to repudiate the moral complexities of Ian Fleming’s brutal womanizing protagonist. One of the books contains this passage, clumsily inserted to reassure the reader of the author’s left-liberal bona fides:
 
Birkett was an ex-Tory MP, famous for promoting covid/vaccines/mask-wearing/5G conspiracy theories, which had spilled over into the usual anti-immigrant, anti-EU, anti-BBC, anti-MSM, anti-cultural Marxist, Climate Change Denial pronouncements.
 
The politics is heavy-handed, the syntax is convoluted, and the combination is only likely to be appreciated by someone who wants to have their own left-liberal sympathies flattered. The condescending and paternalistic language resembles an editorial written for the purposes of political education rather than a thoughtful exploration of the human condition.
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That is on the way to being fair criticism of both the ethics of today’s critics as well as the aesthetics of Higson’s novels. Why deny that each are important? Lean in and discuss them both!
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In Amazon Prime’s film Red, White, and Royal Blue, the message often suffocates the drama. The story deals with a homosexual romance between a spare to the British throne named Henry and Alex, the Hispanic son of the president of the United States. The two men love one another but their relationship is undermined by the stuffy conservatism of backward institutions. In addition to being gay, Henry and Alex both feel victimized in other ways. Henry feels like an outsider who can never play a full role in the institution into which he was born. Alex’s Hispanic surname and ethnicity, meanwhile, lead him to believe that he is unfairly treated by American society, the advantages of his social position notwithstanding. Alex complains that Henry will never understand his grievances because Henry is rich, white, and male. The scene is unedifying, subordinating the emotional drama to a contest of intersectional oneupmanship between two indisputably privileged people. This kind of sermonizing occurs throughout the film, including one character’s lofty description of the senior staff at Buckingham Palace as “wrinkled white men.”
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How is this “unedifying”? These beliefs and conversations are clearly happening in the world today. Why can’t our fictional characters have them? Jackson’s usage of the words “victimized”, “intersectional”, and “privileged” are clearly dog-whistles to the Quillette readers who need their “anti-PC soapbox”. And so, Jackson is therefore engaging in exactly the kind of ethical judgment that he purports to be against. But why dodge this at all?? Just make the strong case (if you have one) that Red, White, and Royal Blue’s intended message is a poor one.
 
(By the way, I watched this movie after reading this and found it simply to be an awfully written and acted rom-com. The potentially sweet story of hidden gay and bi love was outlandishly unbelievable, bouncing back and forth between the White House AND Buckingham Palace. All the character development and meet-cute moments were rushed through in some kind of site location bingo montage. It felt like the product of an AI collage rather than a real and sensitive imagination. I found the politics, however, to be so minor (hardly “suffocating”) that it makes me think Jackson must just have allergic reactions to cameos by Rachel Maddow.)
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Emerald Fennel’s film Saltburn, on the other hand, offers a more irreverent and complex indictment of class privilege that seems to have been inspired by a combination of Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem. It is not exactly apolitical, but nor does it lecture us with the instructive sanctimony that Red, White, and Royal Blue employs. The film’s message—that the rich are spoiled, vapid, arrogant, and vain—is subordinate to the amorality of the psychodrama and the demands of its twisty narrative. Fennel does not have to spell out the fact that the characters are morally inept—she just lets us watch how they behave.
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Again, confusion reigns in Jackson’s arguments not matching his actions. He praises Saltburn’s supposedly ethical underlying message, while claiming its morally inept characters make the message more aesthetically pleasing by somehow hiding the didacticism. But this is not “irreverent and complex.” It is attention-seeking and deeply confused. I hated Saltburn because the indictment of class privilege was completely undermined by the glorification of the settings and the shocking depravity of the scenes that were chosen. My judgments were pretty much borne out by the fact that “'Ignorant' rich people use Saltburn TikTok trend to show off their huge houses.”
 
Much of the rest of Jackson’s article is a random mash-up of perspectives that ultimately amounts to intellectual name-dropping (e.g. Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School, F.R. Leavis, Marxism, Wordsworth, Cultural Studies, Terry Eagleton, Martin Scorsese, and Pierre Bourdieu) without any sort of coherent argument to tie them all together. He continually judges the judgments of other while failing to admit his own judgments are just unargued for judgments of a different flavor. You can skim the article to judge for yourself, but then it ends with this:
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“Persons of genius,” John Stuart Mill argued, “are always likely to be a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.” Even for authors who produce work under tyranny and oppression, the best and most enduring art will be true to our shared condition and not consumed by the noise and folly of the moment. The sympathetic critic should recognize that while an artist lives and works within a particular social and political structure, this is not the same as destiny. It is his solemn task to understand and describe the relationship between the artist, the art, and the experience of being human.
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​Yes. But since ethics and aesthetics (and politics!) all affect that human experience, they must all be considered together. To argue otherwise is to advocate for the willful blindness of a blinkered suppression. Therefore, for Jackson’s headline question of “analyst of moralist?”, the answer should really be both.
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Why I’m Done with the Publishing Industry for My Fiction

6/3/2024

6 Comments

 
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It's time to focus on my craft.
Almost seven years ago, I started submitting my novel The Vitanauts to different literary agents and publishers. I’ve come painfully close to getting it published a few times, but it never actually happened for me. And after the latest near miss that took up a huge amount of time and energy, I’ve come to the realization that I need to stop waiting around for permission from others to get my ideas out there.
 
(For fellow writers who take solace or lessons from these trials, see Footnote 1 for a rundown of my efforts.)
 
Look, don’t get me wrong. The publishing industry exists for a reason. The people who work in it are well trained. They love books. They have great intentions. They know what has worked in the past and they know what the latest trends are that are working right now. When I quit my job to become a full-time writer, I dreamed of working with this industry and finding a team within it that could support me and help me become “a success”. But I have an MBA degree. I can read the prize-winners and the bestsellers to identify trends and analyze the market. And I can see that publishing houses are facing huge financial challenges that limit their choices and abilities to take risks. The problem, however, is that I *want* to be a risk.
 
Way back in 2012 when I started this website, I blogged my way through my book Evolutionary Philosophy and I wrote two main posts about aesthetics: “What is Beautiful is What is Good” and “The Purpose of (My) Art.” In these posts, I offered both a new definition of beauty and a new plan for how to create it. Talk about challenging the status quo! These ideas combined some of my peer-reviewed evolutionary ethics with a desire to produce what I now call “positive fiction”, which, like positive psychology, focuses on what can go right, rather than dwelling on what has gone wrong. I wrote statements about this such as:
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Beauty is just a word we use to name a quality that we like, that moves us, that pleases us. If we've already defined good as "that which promotes the long-term survival of life," how can we really like something that is bad, that is against that?
 
The longstanding and pervasive view that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" seems to suggest that aesthetics is something different, that aesthetics is a subjective field filled with personal judgments from sensitive souls set inside an influencing landscape of cultural relativism. But the purpose of art is to inspire life. Making bad things known can inspire good living by telling us what to avoid. Showing good things provides aspirations by showing us what to do or strive for.
 
Tolstoy was wrong [when he said in Anna Karenina that “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”] Every unhappy family is simply shortsighted in some way. Happy families have an infinite number of interesting and difficult ways to proceed with long and rich lives.
 
Art causes emotional responses so it often draws emotional people to it, but great art is created by rational processes, filled with knowledge, fueled by emotion, and executed with skill. Bad art is blind emotion that purports falsehoods for truth.

​I thought these ideals would resonate with *someone* in the publishing industry. But see Footnote 2 for a recent example of the blind emotion that clearly dominates there. I just don’t know why writing can’t be more like sculpture, painting, or photography. Artists in those fields create something beautiful to contemplate. Novels rarely, if ever, do. These days, they simply give us heartbreakingly depicted tales of woe. They follow Tolstoy’s example and give us more and more intricate details of more and more intersectional struggles. See Footnote 3 where I’ve conservatively calculated that 86% of the works of fiction in the 2023 New York Times 100 Notable Books fit this description. Is this really the best that books can be?
 
Problems in life happen naturally with entropy. We don’t need more examples to know that this is how the universe grinds on. Life is the struggle to *overcome* these problems. And I believe we could use more inspiring examples to keep us going. Rather than exploring yet another variety of distress with great precision, I want to leave that reality behind and produce art that shows possibilities of strength, resilience, adaptation, and other evolutionary virtues. I believe that imagining this kind of beauty should be a major calling for artists. But after almost 7 years of painfully dealing with publishers, I have realized that this is not aligned with their goals. In order to stay alive, they must make money in the current environment. They must be assured of making a profit by replicating what has already been done. They must take the safe route of simply depicting the reality of our sadness rather than risking rejection by imagining something new and better.
 
Although I haven’t seen anyone diagnose the aesthetics of the industry in precisely this way, I have been noticing other artists struggling with this as well.
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“I make myself feel better by saying you can’t both want to do things that nobody has ever seen before and then then be frustrated that nobody understands why it’s going to work or why you believe in it. This plagues me in my whole career.” —Director Patty Jenkins in Episode 5, Season 10 of Revisionist Historywith Malcolm Gladwell
 
“I’ve accumulated a vast reservoir of such rejections. Everyone I know is self-publishing. All that means is a somewhat smaller audience, but so what. Borges sold 34 copies of his first book and wanted to write thank you notes to each reader. Did Van Gogh sell any paintings? For me the pleasure is in the doing.” — Words of consolation and encouragement from an author friend.
 
“I had an actual epiphany…on a panel discussing science fiction in the age of President Trump. All these little bits of things that I've been taking in for the last several years all kind of hit me like a tidal wave. It was that we were great at dystopic fiction but we weren't telling the readers, who were now willing to fight, what to fight for! They had finished the battle. But now what?” — Author P.J. Manney in “Envisioning the Future Through Story”

And, of course, the evolutionary lens that I bring to this situation creates its own issues with the publishing populace as well. Alice Andrews — an author, psychotherapist, and former professor of psychology at SUNY New Paltz — has written about this with great perspicacity.
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​“[T]he traditional fictiphiles are purists who seem to believe that once we become aware of a lesson or of information in the story—once the author starts “telling us” instead of “showing us”—it’s all over. The pleasure is gone, its power is gone, and subsequently, the story’s merit and value are gone. The romantic fictiphiles believe the only good fiction is fiction shrouded in a kind of Dionysian mystery. … Hermione, in D. H. Lawrence’s, Women in Love characterizes the view quite well: ‘When we have knowledge, don’t we lose everything but knowledge?’ she asked pathetically.” — Alice Andrews in “A Mind for Evolutionary Fiction”
 
“Distant, enigmatic, and maybe even a little commitment-phobic, traditional fiction evokes desire and passion by ‘exploiting’ our evolved psychological mechanisms and preferences. … [But] I think there’s even more pleasure to be had than with the traditional pleasure of seductive fiction. And that pleasure, I think, can be found in the arrows of what I call ‘meta-seductive fiction’—traditional fiction’s sexy contender. Meta-seductive fiction seduces (if it’s successful) by countering the seductive ‘hiding’ strategy, with its openness—with hiding from hiding. Meta-seductive fiction flirts with truth and intimacy by telling the reader what it’s doing and by expressing ideas openly, unafraid of logic’s potential to prevent feeling. It isn’t afraid of wanting to affect (and having a relationship with) the reader.” — Alice Andrews in “A Mind for Evolutionary Fiction”
 
“Much has changed since Entelechy was first published, but it's been over 20 years and there still isn't a forum for the kind of fiction we want to read, publish (and write!). … What still seems to be true after two decades is that literary publications are politically uncomfortable with an evolutionary worldview and are aesthetically repelled by the integration of the sciences into fiction.” — Alice Andrews, considering the relaunch of her journal Entelechy

These 6 quotes from Alice and the other artists have helped me see the issues I’m facing with great clarity. But they are also part of a more general problem with innovation. The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman illustrated this perfectly in these quotes from his recent essay “Talent is Underrated”:

​“Research has shown that creative people do tend to have a greater inclination toward nonconformity, unconventionality, independence, openness to experience, ego strength, and risk taking.”
 
“Creators rarely receive helpful feedback. When creators put something novel out into the world, the reactions are typically either acclaim or rejection.”
 
“Critics often disagree amongst each other, making it difficult for the creator to know which feedback is really helpful and which stems from other factors, such as obtuseness, jealousy, or bitterness.”
 
“As Kuhn noted, the standards for artistic and scientific products are constantly changing. What may be considered a ‘revolutionary’ best-selling book at one moment in time, may be considered utter drivel by future generations.”
 
“Creative people are not just good at solving problems. They are also good at finding problems.”

So, yes, I think there is a problem here! The world needs a new direction. And artists could play a leading role in articulating the right kinds of change. But the commercialized and highly competitive publishing world has become stuck simply rewarding tales of the troubles we’re in. It’s too risky for them to try anything else. In evolutionary terms, the publishing world has competed for high ground on a spot that turned out to merely be a local maximum. Someone must come down from there to go and find greater heights elsewhere. And this is precisely what the trials and errors of innovators are for. Even if I end up not having the talent to overcome these issues, I now realize it’s my job to try.
 
This is why I am done with the publishing industry for my works of fiction. I have plans for several major works going forward and I’m no longer going to wait around for a money-making team to steer me. If you are interested in supporting this, keep following me for options on how to provide a bit of patronage. But from now on, my writing is going to be based on love for the future, rather than concern about what has made money in the past. I hope this meta-seductive fiction excites you as much as it does me.
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Footnote 1
Here are the bullet points of just some of my efforts over the past 6+ years seeking publication.
  • I started sending query letters for my second novel in October 2017. I scoured books and online lists about the thousands of options out there and picked out several dozen that seemed like possible fits. I submit letters to these places in batches so I can tweak subsequent letters based on feedback and results.
  • In mid-2018 I found a local publisher who was interested in publishing philosophical works. They expressed great interest in my work. We met several times. I published some non-fiction essays with them. They said they were keen to publish my novel. But then in May 2019, after working with them for almost a year, they decided to change their publishing strategy and not publish any more books after struggling with their first efforts.
  • It took me a while to recover from this and get back on the horse of submissions. But then, the pandemic hit. No one knew what was going to happen and suddenly my book about the prospect of ending aging and living indefinitely seemed extremely out of touch with all of the death and despair that was happening in the world. I threw myself into my philosophical work, completing a book-length treatment on consciousness on October 2021.
  • In November of 2021, my wife and I lived in Oslo, Norway for her work. Then in January and February of 2022 we lived in Vienna, Austria for another project. These were busy times, during which I redesigned my entire website to get ready for another publishing push.
  • As it happened, I was contacted by David Sloan Wilson in February 2022 to ask if I would work with him on the launch of his non-profit venture ProSocial. He asked if I would help him create an evolutionary philosophy group, the likes of which would never happen at a single university. This was a wonderful chance to test and spread my ideas so I threw myself into that for the next 2+ years.
  • Meanwhile, in June 2022, a friend with an MFA, JD, and PhD in Criminology who teaches a class on speculative fictions heard about The Vitanauts and asked if he could read it. After I sent him a copy, he told me it was one of the best things he’s read. He told me:
    • “In no uncertain terms, I loved your book.  You have a real gift for taking the most exciting philosophical questions and presenting them in a clear, thought-provoking way, while still writing a "futuristic" or "sci fi" novel (neither seems like the right description) that is a page turner. Bravo! I'm also extremely impressed with the sheer amount of research that must have gone into this.”
  • In January 2023, this friend recommended my book to a small publishing house he had connections with. He wrote:
    • “Ed Gibney is a writer/philosopher and author of The Vitanauts—one of the best books that I have read in the last few years. I'll let Ed describe the book to you, as well as his other work more generally, but in my opinion The Vitanauts ranks up there with works by J.G. Ballard, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Kim Stanley Robinson.”
  • After a month, this publisher wrote me back and suggested I go ahead and send them my full manuscript through the normal submissions process. Three months later, I got word that they weren’t interested and they didn’t give any feedback as to why.
  • Later that month, through my work with ProSocial, I met an acquisitions editor at another small publisher. She encouraged me to send her a query letter and manuscript. I did. After reading everything, she told me she was excited to pitch it to the president of the organization. In September, she told me the President of the company loved the concept and approach and would submit it to their Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) with the promise of a forthcoming developmental edit. I began looking for editors to work with.
  • Then, in February 2024, after hearing nothing for five months, I was told the EAB voted 3-2 against going forward with the novel. The feedback they sent bore no resemblance to the feedback I have gotten from other readers throughout this saga, which indicates this was probably never a good fit anyway.
  • After this latest setback, I’ve been struggling with how to move forward. Writing this mini-manifesto has been my way of sifting through the evidence for ideas about what I should do.
 
 
Footnote 2
In a story about Alice Munro story after her death, a writer wrote this in the New York Times:  “But the art of hearing the voice of a fictional person or sensing a fictional world or working for years on some unfathomable creation is, in fact, the opposite of saying something with the opinionated and knowledgeable part of one’s mind. It is rather the humble craft of putting your opinions and ego aside and letting something be said through you.” Ugh! This is a clear and painful example of the kind of anti-rationalism that casually saturates the publishing world.
 
 
Footnote 3
Here are illustrative summaries from 50 works of fiction in the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2023. I have bolded the only stories that might NOT be works about struggles in small segments of society.
 
  1. an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers, and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries
  2. about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children
  3. a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons
  4. a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene
  5. a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper
  6. explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away
  7. for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead
  8. prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom 
  9. generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles
  10. uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point
  11. tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades
  12. a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help
  13. the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children
  14. a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family
  15. the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary
  16. successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters
  17. a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism
  18. it explores the mundane and the horrific
  19. to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history
  20. a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family
  21. the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again
  22. a missing-persons case that unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions
  23. one family’s reckoning after the patriarch dies in a fire, as his widow, a Nigerian immigrant, considers returning to her home country and the entire family re-examines the circumstances of their lives
  24. new translation of the “Iliad”
  25. sisters raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things
  26. a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man
  27. traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.
  28. a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps
  29. a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state
  30. the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins
  31. a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal
  32. a young Black couple, mourning the loss of their newborn daughter and disillusioned with the world, start a utopian society — but tensions both internal and external soon threaten their dreams
  33. the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries
  34. An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet
  35. a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment
  36. mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death
  37. an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family
  38. an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel
  39. Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons
  40. acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia
  41. the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother
  42. the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community
  43. three sisters and their mother reflect on love and regret
  44. a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists
  45. the long life of Pampa Kampana, who creates an empire from magic seeds in 14th-century India. Her world is one of peace, where men and women are equal and all faiths welcome
  46. queer midcentury romance that lingers on small, everyday acts
  47. an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash
  48. Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers
  49. a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul
  50. a white woman who achieves tremendous literary success by stealing a manuscript from a recently deceased Asian friend and passing it off as her own
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Purpose: Design a Community and Change Your Life

4/4/2024

4 Comments

 
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What an intriguing book title! Who isn’t looking for more purpose in their life, and longing to be part of a strong community? The needs for these are pretty much human universals and it’s hard to imagine having too much of them, so I expect this title will speak to you at least a little. It sure did to me. So, I thought I’d share a bit about it. First, though, a little context.
 
For a little over two years, I’ve been heavily involved with an online community run by the non-profit organization ProSocial World. That’s where I led the creation and day-to-day running of the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle and I was also asked to be on the Stewardship Circle (a kind of advisory board) for the ProSocial Commons in general, which hosts lots of events and oversees the platform that is used by many other prosocial groups. These have all been run while focusing on two intellectual principles—Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prizewinning research on the core design principles of groups that oversee common resources, and the scientifically validated Acceptance and Commitment Therapy used to foster psychological flexibility in individuals and groups. It’s been a fascinating and highly educational experience!
 
But….this has all been led by evolutionary biologists and psychologists who don’t have a strong track record or focus on building businesses. As such, the growing pains we’ve experienced would probably not surprise any entrepreneur. Recently, I started looking around for other examples of community building organizations to see what we could learn from them and the pop-up ad in the picture above splashed onto my screen. It’s from Gina Bianchini, who is the CEO and founder of Mighty Networks, which is currently “trusted by 900,000+ creators, entrepreneurs, and brands.” Bianchini grew up in Cupertino, California, graduated with honors from Stanford University, started her career in the High Technology Group at Goldman Sachs, and received her MBA from Stanford Business School. The front page of the Mighty website asks, “What makes Mighty different? Our obsession with member engagement.” This sounded exactly like the kind of business experience that ProSocial World needs, so I ordered my free copy of Purpose: Design a Community & Change Your Life and I raced through it when it arrived, dog-earing many of the pages and taking lots of notes.
 
Since Bianchini is giving her book away for free, I feel safe in sharing so many good details from it. But really, if you have any interest in joining or creating a community group, and these details pique your interest in the slightest, get yourself a copy and spend a bit more time with these ideas. (I think of this blog post as the “snack”. Go get the book for the full “meal”.)
 
First, what’s in it? Here is the table of contents. This is all covered in bite-size chunks totaling just under 180 pages. You can easily read it in a day or two.

Preface
Part I: Find Your Purpose
1. How I Found My Purpose, and You Can Too
2. Purpose in Modern Life
3. Purpose in Practice
4. Your Future Story
5. Your Future Story is Your New North Star
Part II: Turn Your Purpose into Action
6. From Hero to Host
7. Your First Host Skill: The Power of a Great Question
Interlude: Where We Go From Here—Onward to Digital
Part III: Take Your Purpose Digital
8. The Power of Digital is Creating Culture at Scale
9. What to Expect When You Create a Digital Community
10. Who Needs Your Community the Most Right Now?
11. From Purpose to Big Purpose
12. Launch Your Community to Your Ideal Members with Community DesignTM
13. Your First Digital Members Come from Your Core Community
14. Take Your Members on Quests
15. Conclusion
 
Because of the timing of her upbringing in Silicon Valley, Bianchini’s interests led her to cross paths with a lot of the major players in the development of the internet. I found her comments about “social media” particularly enlightening.
 
  • (p.24) Facebook was defining what social networks would become. First, they quietly and subtly shifted from calling it a social network to referring to it as social media. While to the outside world this wasn’t a major shift, I saw it as ominous.
  • (p.24) The true value of Facebook and any social network is the connections made between people. The power of social networks, then, is they become more useful to everyone with each new person who joins and contributes.
  • (p.24) Facebook would keep the network hidden and replace it with social media operated mainly in a single “newsfeed” and controlled by a complex algorithm.
  • (p.24) In Facebook groups, an administrator could no longer message the members of their groups, control which posts their members would see in their feed, or prevent the marketing of other groups to their members.
  • (p.24) Where groups or interest pages once enjoyed in their own space, now individual group posts were stripped of all context and shown next to every other post surfaced by the algorithm. In the name of removing friction, Facebook was setting up a single (and fragile) “monoculture”. … The system was much more easily manipulated by outrage and extreme emotion.
 
Bianchini was keeping close tabs on all this as the co-founder of Ning.
 
  • (p.26) I pictured a different future, one where creators owned their own communities and could design the cultures, experiences, and relationships they sparked between their own members.
  • (p.26) There was content to inspire and influence, but unlike social media that stopped at content, a creator or brand could do something more powerful with cultural software. They could use native courses to educate and apply, enabling people to go deeper around new ideas and begin to apply new frameworks to their lives. Commerce was there not just to ensure creators, entrepreneurs, or brands could charge for access but to help members focus and prioritize. It turns out, people pay attention to what they pay for. Therefore, the fastest way to build a loyal, tightly knit set of early adopters or brand loyalists was by making the community paid, charging for events, or offering paid course communities. Perhaps counterintuitively, the easiest way to move people off social media was to charge for access to people, conversations, writings, and experiences outside of it.
 
Now that the world has experienced all the decay and harm from Facebook’s model of social media, doesn’t this “cultural software” sound like a breath of fresh air? It can’t grow as big or come to dominate the world, but that’s kinda the point. And it’s the right way to build robust diversity. Fragile monocultures all go extinct much more easily.
 
But how do we build all of these online communities? After working on thousands of them, Bianchini has developed some best practices.
 
  • (p.27) People who hosted successful networks approached their communities with an openness and their own curiosity. They embraced a “growth mindset”. They also took specific steps to make their communities happen in pursuit of a shared purpose. … I called it Community DesignTM.
  • (p.27) Our promise with Community DesignTM? Create a community so valuable you can charge for it, and so well-designed it essentially runs itself.
  • (p.28) A course didn’t need to be sterile videos and guides alone. Rather, I could treat it as a living, breathing, and forgiving community of fellow travelers, equally interested in how to unlock the power and potential of bringing people together with intention.
  • (p.28) The most successful communities online and in the real world started with a clear purpose. They not only had a clear intention, but the way they stated that intention followed a specific formula that worked time and time again to draw the right people to a new idea, join a community, or sign up for a course or membership, and then contribute in ways that would get them results and transformation in a specific area of their life.
 
But what specific community should you start or join? Bianchini has a plan to help you find out.
 
  • (p.40) If you want anything to have a tangible, real impact in your life you need to make it a practice. Daily.
  • (p.40) Purpose is a throughline in your life. … We call this your Current Story and there are five questions to structure it. 1) What stands out for you about your upbringing and background? 2) What have been the top three most pivotal experiences in your life? 3) What are your top three proudest achievements? 4) What are three times you’ve taken a stand? 5) When you think of the people you’ve been drawn to help, who are they?
  • (p.41) To most effectively crystalize your purpose, the most potent and powerful place to find a clear intention for your time, talents, energy, and focus is in the future.
  • (p.43) Create a ritual around [spending] thirty minutes. … Spend them imagining the future and asking yourself the same six questions every day. The ritual and repetition are key to unlocking something new and forcing yourself into a different headspace.
  • (pp.43-47) These seven steps make up your Purpose 30. … Step 1: Take your phone, computer, iPad, and TV. Turn them off and slowly walk away. … Step 2: Make your favorite beverage. … Step 3: Have blank paper and a pen ready. … Step 4: Start by clearing out everything that’s on your mind. … Just write down everything you woke up thinking about. Drop all of it on its own blank piece of paper. … Step 5: Set the clearinghouse aside and establish context for your Purpose 30. … Start in the future and picture yourself looking backward. … It’s ten years from now, and you’ve uncovered a secret formula that lets you create the future you want. Your future state is positive, exciting, and unexpected. More than helping you alone, it’s a future where your impact is felt by others. You have a community, are surrounded by exciting challenges and unexpected opportunities, and you have the confidence to put your talents, time, energy, and focus towards anything you want to accomplish. … Step 6: Reflect on your Purpose 30 questions. … Now tackle these questions: 1) What are three things you’re able to do in the future that you’re not able to do today? 2) What are three things you’ve accomplished? 3) What are three things you have taken a stand for? 4) What has changed in your world for the better in the most unexpected and surprising way? 5) Who are the people you have brought together? 6) What are three things they are able to do in the future that they aren’t able to do today? … Step 7: Celebrate when your Purpose 30 is up. … After thirty days you willhave cultivated a picture that allows you—no one else—to define a positive intention and direction for your time, talents, energy, and focus. And you’ll have the blueprint for your next step. Your future story.
 
Great! But why are we building a community exactly?
 
  • (p.69) If you take one concept away from this book, let it be this: The quickest and simplest way to translate your purpose into action is through community. Community not in the faux sense of an audience or fans who may talk to you but aren’t talking to each other. A true community is where connections are made, relationships are built, quests are undertaken, challenges are overcome, opportunities are seized, and people are transformed.
 
Okay. But “leading a community” sounds scary. Can I really do that?
 
  • (p.72) A host is the most powerful role any of us can take on as we turn our purpose into action. A host can take many forms—gatherer, facilitator, guide, teacher, coach, mentor, or a warm, welcoming friend—but a host does something the rest of us increasingly don’t. They bring people together with intention. The intention to discover, explore, comfort, belong, teach, learn, solve problems, take on challenges, collaborate, celebrate, grieve, and so much more.
  • (p.90) The single greatest way to start attracting people to your purpose isn’t to make a video espousing your views or expect someone to do exactly what you say to do. … It is easier and more effective to learn the art and science of asking great questions. They are going to do more to share your purpose with people than anything you can read, consume, or produce yourself.
  • (p.90) I’m talking about questions that evoke meaningful responses and spark a connection between people. I call them community questions, and once you get the hang of them, they make nearly every interaction you have twice as much fun.
  • (p.92) What makes a great question? Chances are it contains one or more of these four ingredients. 1) It taps into universal, human phenomena and common experiences a majority of people can relate to. 2) It is structured in such a way that it’s almost impossible to give a boring answer. 3) It ignites a domino effect of entertaining answers. Answers spur more answers. 4) It gives people an opportunity to share a part of themselves that they want to be seen.
  • (p.93) Now that you have the ingredients, you need the recipe. … I finally landed on the idea of a question generator with two distinct elements—an unlocking phrase and a topic. An unlocking phrase is what your question starts with—it’s the frame and helps you focus in on one aspect of a broad topic. There are thousands of options, but here are my Top 10.
    • What is your favorite…
    • If you could…
    • What do you value most in a…
    • Name one thing…
    • How do you know when…
    • When was the last time…
    • Where would you…
    • What’s an unusual…
    • As a child…
    • What’s the first…
  • (p.93) Then you combine your topic—your purpose—with the unlocking phrase. One unlocking phrase could generate endless amounts of questions, based on different topics and variations.
 
Being a “host” and asking questions doesn’t sound so bad. But who do I ask?
 
  • (p.109) People who are new to hosting carefully plan their new community guided by perfection. In contrast, those who are ultimately successful accept the beauty of communities as decidedly imperfect and ultimately forgiving. They quickly get to the core questions they need to answer to start inviting folks in. Who is going to want or need my community the most right now? What results or experiences do they want to get? What kinds of activities will they do together? What new things will my members get or be able to do as part of my community? How am I going to make it exciting and awesome? The folks who thrive in this phase are those who realize quickly, “This is so much easier than people think.”
  • (p.114) Your ideal member is the person who needs your community right now. They are the people who you want to attract first to help you bring your Future Story to Life.
  • (p.115) The number one mistake I see with communities is not getting clear or specific enough at this stage with their Ideal Member. … Your Ideal Member, instead, needs to be brought to life with a story.
  • (p.119) Write your Ideal Member’s story. First, start with the questions below… What transition is your Ideal Member navigating right now? Are they experiencing a loss or figuring out how to add something new to their lives? Are they starting something or ending something? What’s on their vision board for the life they’re living five years from now? What’s holding them back? Is it practical? Is it mental? A bit of both? What are they Googling late at night? What’s the biggest question they have right now? What are they losing sleep over? What does a typical day in their life look like? What emotions do they cycle though each day? Where have they looked for support already? Their spouse? Books? A therapist? A coach? Social media? A spiritual advisor?
 
Got it. But what are we going to talk about exactly?
 
  • (p.126) Your Big Purpose is the motivation for your community—not just yours, but your members’ motivation. Why they’ll join, why they’ll contribute, and why they’ll walk arm in arm with you toward your Future Story.
  • (p.127) Community builders tend to fall into two camps: 1) They try to create an elegant, almost “tag-line” like Big Purpose…something they can fit on a bumper sticker. Or 2) They write an essay combining their Future Story, their Ideal Member Story, and even their diary entries into a novel-like experience. Like most things, there is a middle path. It’s where the most successful Big Purposes end up.
  • (pp.127-9) I’ve developed a simple, three-part formula that gives you enough room to be expansive and add the details. … Step 1: Identify the Transition. … The transitions in our lives are when we need community the most. It’s when we may find ourselves more isolated, because the people we need to go to are a part of our old life, and we don’t yet have any connections in our new life. … Step 2: Define the Results. … Be specific. … Be ambitious. … Step 3: Build a Bridge. … Describe how your Ideal Member will move from A to B, from their moment of transition to the results and transformation.
  • (pp.129-130) Put it all together. “I / We bring together ____(your Ideal Members with a transition)____ to ____(the bridge, or the activities your members will do together)____, so that we can ____{achieve the results we want)____.
 
That’s a very clear and inspiring start. Then what?
 
  • (pp.140-1) Your Community Design PlanTM is…a structure that guides your Ideal Members to your community—that gets them to answer the call—and takes them to a new future, a year from now, where they’ve achieved results and transformation they couldn’t imagine today. It has five elements. … 1) Your Big Purpose. 2) A Year in the Life. 3) Monthly Themes. 4) A Weekly Calendar. 5) Daily Polls and Questions. They start wider, with the overall motivation for your community, and then break it down by time period.
  • (p.149) Your first digital members come from your core community.
  • (p.152) Your superpower right now is that you know these people.
  • (pp.158-60) Create a magical first experience. … The Enemy of Magic is the Expected. … Purpose + Connection + Surprise = Magic.
  • (p.161) Instead of focusing on the mechanics and what not to do, focus on how someone can contribute, what they’re going to get out of it, and who’s there in it with them. It’s focused on joy and assumes the best of everyone who’s walking through the door. A community built on that foundation is going to be more focused and powerful than anything you’ve encountered before.
  • (p.164) Your people and your people’s people are gathering around your Big Purpose. Energy is building. Ideal Members are joining, and you’re delighting them with a magical first experience. … How do you take all this emerging promise and potential and turn it into deeper impact, results, and transformations? … Quests!
  • (p.164) Quests are the activities in your community designed to connect your members to each other and the results they want to achieve. Human beings are built for Quests, which help us belong to something bigger than ourselves, make connections to people on our same path, and master something interesting or important together.
  • (pp.165) Quests can loosely be categorized into four types: courses, challenges, experiences, and collabs.
 
How fun. But not everything is done in a community. And not all of us can host a community, right?
 
  • (p.172) If I haven’t made you a true community believer yet, that’s all right. You still have the potential to turn your purpose into a practice and develop more energy and resilience with any action you choose to take with just the Purpose 30 and your Future Story.
 
Amazing. This book really landed with me at a time I needed it most. I’ll write more on my own purpose and future story soon, but I wanted to share this first as a gift to all the ProSocial communities I’ve been involved with over the last 2+ years and to anyone else who’s still looking for more communities to join. Please get Bianchini’s book for more!
4 Comments

The Bayesian Balance

12/13/2023

1 Comment

 
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​Hi all! I'm pleased to announce a new publication that has just been released. In the latest issue of Skeptic magazine, I have a piece co-authored with Zafir Ivanov. Zafir participates in the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with me and during our last generation of activity talking about mental immunity, he proposed that we work on something together. The result, after a few months of hard work, is the article below. The final version is behind a paywall for subscribers to Skeptic, but this draft copy is close enough. Enjoy! And let me know in the comments below if this new thinking tool seems helpful to you.

The Bayesian Balance

How a Tool for Bayesian Thinking Can Guide Us Between Relativism and the Truth Trap
BY ED GIBNEY AND ZAFIR IVANOV


​On October 17, 2005 the talk show host and comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the word “truthiness” in the premier episode of his show The Colbert Report:[1] “We’re not talking about truth, we're talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist."[2] Since then the word has become entrenched in our everyday vocabulary but we’ve largely lost Colbert’s satirical critique of “living in a post-truth world.” Truthiness has become our truth. Kellyanne Conway opened the door to “alternative facts”[3] while Oprah Winfrey exhorted you to “speak your truth.”[4] And the co-founder of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, has begun to regularly talk to his podcast guests about objective external truths and subjective internal truths, inside of which are historical truths, political truths, religious truths, literary truths, mythical truths, scientific truths, empirical truths, narrative truths, and cultural truths.[5] It is an often-heard complaint to say that we live in a post-truth world, but what we really have is far too many claims for it. Instead, we propose that the vital search for truth is actually best continued when we drop our assertions that we have something like an absolute Truth with a capital T.
 
Why is that? Consider a friend one of us has who is a young-Earth creationist. He believes the Bible is inerrant. He is convinced that every word it contains, including the six-day creation story of the Universe, is Truth (spelled with a capital T because it is unquestionably, eternally true). From this position, he has rejected evidence brought to him from multiple disciplines that all converge on a much older Earth and universe. He has rejected evidence from fields such as biology, paleontology, astronomy, glaciology, and archaeology, all of which should reduce his confidence in the claim that the formation of the Earth and every living thing on it, together with the creation of the sun, moon, and stars, all took place in literally six Earth days. Even when it was pointed out to him that the first chapter of Genesis mentions liquid water, light, and every kind of vegetation before there was a sun or any kind of star whatsoever, he claimed not to see a problem. His reply to such doubts is to simply say, “with God, all things are possible.”[6]
 
Lacking any uncertainty about the claim that “the Bible is Truth,” this creationist has only been able to conclude two things when faced with tough questions: (1) we are interpreting the Bible incorrectly, or (2) the evidence that appears to undermine a six-day creation is being interpreted incorrectly. These are inappropriately skeptical responses, but they are the only options left to someone who has decided beforehand that their belief is Truth. And, importantly, we have to admit that this observation could be turned back on us too. As soon as we become absolutely certain about a belief—as soon as we start calling something a capital “T” Truth—then we too become resistant to any evidence that could be interpreted as challenging it. Afterall, we are not absolutely certain that the account in Genesis is false. Instead, we simply consider it very, very unlikely, given all of the evidence at hand. We must keep in mind that we sample a tiny sliver of reality, with limited senses that only have access to a few of possibly many dimensions, in but one of quite likely multiple universes. Given this situation, intellectual humility is required. 
 
To help us examine all of this more precisely, some history and definitions from philosophy are useful at this point, particularly from the field of epistemology, which studies what knowledge is or can be. A common starting point there is with Plato’s definition of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB).[7] According to this JTB formulation, all three of those components are necessary for our notions or ideas to rise to the level of being accepted as genuine knowledge as opposed to just being dismissible as mere opinion. And in an effort to make this distinction clear, definitions for all three of these components have been developed over the ensuing millennia as well. For epistemologists, beliefs are “what we take to be the case or regard as true.”[8] For a belief to be true, it doesn’t just need to seem correct now, “most philosophers add the further constraint that a proposition never changes its truth-value in space or time.”[9] And we can’t just stumble on these truths; our beliefs require some reason or evidence to justify them.[10]
 
Readers of Skeptic will likely be familiar with skeptical arguments from Agrippa (the problem of infinite regress[11]), David Hume (the problem of induction[12]), Rene Descartes (the problem of the evil demon[13]), and others that have chipped away at the possibility of ever attaining absolute knowledge. In 1963, however, Edmund Gettier fully upended the JTB theory of knowledge by showing, in what has come to be called “Gettier problems,”[14] that even if we were to manage to actually have a justified true belief, we may have just gotten there by a stroke of good luck. And the last 60 years of epistemology has shown that we can seemingly never be certain that we are in receipt of such good fortune.
 
This philosophical work has been an effort to identify an essential and unchanging feature of the universe—a perfectly justified truth that we can absolutely believe in and know. This Holy Grail of philosophy surely would be nice to know, but it actually makes sense that we don’t have this. Ever since Darwin demonstrated that all of life could be traced back to the simplest of origins, it has slowly become obvious that all knowledge is an evolving and changing thing as well. We don’t know what the future will reveal and even our most unquestioned assumptions could be upended if, say, we’ve actually been living in a simulation all this time, or Descartes’ evil demon really has been viciously deluding us. This is why Daniel Dennett titled one of his recent papers, “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism.”[15]
 
So, what is to be done after this demise of our cherished notions of truth, belief, and knowledge? Hold onto them and claim them anyway, as does that creationist? No, that path leads to error and intractable conflict. Instead, we can keep our minds open and adjust and adapt to evidence as it comes in. This style of thinking has become formalized in recent years into what is termed Bayesian reasoning. Central to Bayesian reasoning is a conditional probability formula that helps us revise our beliefs to be better aligned with available evidence. The formula from which the term derives is known as Bayes’ theorem and it is used to figure out how likely something is, taking into account both what we already know and new evidence. As a demonstration, consider a disease diagnosis, derived from a paper titled, “How to train novices in Bayesian reasoning”[16]:
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​10% of adults who participate in a study have a particular medical condition. 60% of participants with this condition will test positive for the condition. 20% of participants without the condition will also test positive. Calculate the probability of having the medical condition given a positive test result.
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Most people, including medical students, get the answer to this type of question wrong. From the facts above, some would say the accuracy of the test is 60%. However, this evidence must be understood in the broader context of false positives and the relative rarity of the disease. To see this, simply put some actual numbers on the face of these percentages. For example, since the rate of the disease is only 10%, that would mean 10 in 100 people have the condition, and the test would correctly identify 6 of these people. But since 90 of the 100 people don’t have the condition, yet 20% of them would also receive a positive test result, that would mean 18 people would be incorrectly flagged. Therefore, 24 total people would get positive test results, but only 6 of those would actually have the disease. And that means the answer to the question is only 25%. (And, by the way, a negative result would only give you about 95% likelihood that you were in the clear. Four of the 76 negatives would actually have the disease.) 
 
Now, most usages of Bayesian reasoning won’t come with such detailed and precise statistics. We will very rarely be able to calculate the probability that a fact is correct by using known weights of positive evidence, negative evidence, false positives, and false negatives. However, now that we are aware of these factors, we can try to weigh them roughly in our minds, starting with the two core norms of Bayesian epistemology: thinking about beliefs in terms of probability andupdating one’s beliefs as conditions change.[17] We propose it may be easier to think in this Bayesian way using a modified version of a concept put forward by the philosopher Andy Norman, called Reason’s Fulcrum.[18]
 
Like Bayes, Norman asserts that our beliefs ought to change in response to reason and evidence, or as David Hume said, “a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”[19] These changes could be seen as the movement of the fulcrum lying under a simple lever. Picture a beam or a plank (the lever) with a balancing point (the fulcrum) somewhere in the middle, such as a playground seesaw or teeter totter. As in Figure 1, you can balance a large adult with a small child just by positioning the fulcrum closer to the adult. And if you actually know the weight of these people, then the location of that fulcrum can be calculated ahead of time because the ratio of the beam length on either side of the fulcrum is the inverse of the ratio of mass between the adult and child (e.g., a 3 times heavier person is balanced by a distance having a ratio of 1:3 units of distance). 
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If we now move to the realm of reason, we can imagine substituting the ratio of mass between an adult and child by the ratio of how likely the evidence is to be observed between a claim and its counterclaim. Note how the term in italics captures not just the absolute quantity of evidence but the relative quality of that evidence as well. Once this is considered, then the balancing point at the fulcrum gives us our level of credence in each of our two competing claims. 
 
To see how this works for the example given above about a test for a medical condition, we start by looking at the balance point in the general population (Figure 2). Not having the disease is represented with 90 people on the left side of the lever, and having the disease is represented by 10 people on the right side. This is a ratio of 9 to 1, so to get our lever to balance we must move the fulcrum so that the length of beam on either side of the balancing point has the inverse ratio of 1 to 9. This, then, is the physical depiction of showing just a 10% likelihood in the general population of having the medical condition. There are 10 units of distance between the two populations and the fulcrum is on the far left, 1 unit away from all the negatives.
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Next, we want to see the balance point after a positive result has been received (Figure 3). On the left hand side, we were told the test has a 20% false positive rate, so 18 of the 90 people stay on our giant seesaw even though they don’t actually have the condition. On the right hand side, we were told 60% of the 10 people who have the condition would test positive, so this leaves 6 people. Therefore, the new ratio after the test is 18 to 6, or 3 to 1. This means the fulcrum must be shifted to the inverse ratio of 1 to 3 in order to restore balance. There are now 4 total units of distance between the left and right, and the fulcrum is 1 unit from the left. So, after receiving a positive test result, the probability of having the condition (being in the group on the right) is 1 in 4 or 25% (the portion of beam on the left). This confirms the answer we derived earlier using abstract mathematical formulas, but many may find the concepts easier to grasp from the graphic representation.
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​To recap, the position of the fulcrum under the beam is the balancing point of the likelihood of observing the available evidence for two competing claims. This position is called our credence. As we become aware of new evidence, our credence must move to restore a balanced position. In the example above, the average person in the population would have been right to hold a credence of 10% that they had a particular condition. And after getting a positive test, this new evidence would shift their credence, but only to a likelihood of 25%. That’s worse for the person, but actually still pretty unlikely. Of course, more relevant evidence in the future may shift the fulcrum further in one direction or another. That is the way Bayesian reasoning attempts to wisely proportion one’s credence to the evidence.
 
What about our young-Earth creationist friend? When using Bayes’ theorem, the absolute certainty he holds starts with a credence of 0% or 100% and always results in an end credence of 0% or 100%, regardless of what any possible evidence might show. To guard against this, the statistician Dennis Lindley proposed something called “Cromwell’s Rule”, based Oliver Cromwell’s famous 1650 quip: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.”[20] This rule simply states that you should never assign a probability of 0% or 100% to any proposition. Once we frame our friend’s certainty in the Truth of biblical inerrancy as setting his fulcrum to the extreme end of the beam, we get a clear model for why he is so resistant to counterevidence. Absolute certainty breaks Reason’s Fulcrum. It removes any chance for leverage to change a mind. When beliefs reach the status of “certain truth” they simply build ramps on which any future evidence effortlessly slides off.
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​So far, this is the standard way of treating evidence in Bayesian epistemology to arrive at a credence. The lever and fulcrum depictions simply provide some concrete ways of seeing this, which may be helpful to some people. However, we also propose that this physical model might help with a common criticism of Bayesian epistemology. In the relevant academic literature on this, Bayesians are said to “hardly mention” sources of knowledge, the justification for one’s credence is “seldom discussed”, and “Bayesians have hardly opened their ‘black box’, E, of evidence.”[21] We propose to address this by first noting it should be obvious from the explanations above that not all evidence deserves to be placed directly onto the lever. In the medical diagnosis example, we were told exactly how many false negatives and false positives we could expect, but this is rarely known. Yet, if ten drunken campers over the course of a few decades each swear they saw something that looked like Bigfoot in the woods, we would treat that body of evidence differently than we would if it were nine drunken campers plus the pictures from one BBC high-definition camera trap set by a team of professional documentarians. How should we depict this difference between the quality of evidence versus the quantity of evidence?
 
We don’t have firm rules or anything like “Bayesian coefficients” for how to precisely treat all types of evidence yet, but we can take some guidance from the history of the development of the scientific method. Evidential claims can start with something very small, such as one observation under suspect conditions given by an unreliable observer. In some cases, perhaps that’s the best we’ve got for informing our credences. Such evidence might feel fragile, but who knows? The content could turn out to be robust. How do we strengthen it? Slowly, step-by-step, we progress to observations with better tools and conditions by more reliable observers. Eventually, we’re off and running with the growing list of reasons why we trust science: replication, verification, inductive hypotheses, deductive predictions, falsifiability, experimentation, theory development, peer review, social paradigms, incorporating a diversity of opinions, and broad consensus.[22]
 
We can also bracket these various knowledge-generating activities into three separate categories for theories. The simplest type of theory we have explains previous evidence. This is called retrodiction. All good theories can explain the past, but we have to beware that this is also what “just-so stories” do, as in Rudyard Kipling’s entertaining theory for how Indian rhinoceroses got their skin—cake crumbs made them so itchy they rubbed their skin until it became raw, stretched, and all folded up.[23]
 
Even better than simply explaining what we already know, good theories should make predictions. Newton’s theories predicted that a comet would appear around Christmastime in 1758. When this unusual sight appeared in the sky on Christmas day, the comet (named for Newton’s close friend Edmund Halley) was taken as very strong evidence for Newtonian physics. Theories such as this can become stronger the more they explain and predict further evidence. 
 
Finally, beyond predictive theories, there are ones that can bring forth what William Whewell called consilience.[24] Whewell coined the term scientist and he described consilience as what occurs when a theory that is designed to account for one type of phenomena turns out to also account for another completely different type of phenomena. The clearest example of this is Darwin’s theory of evolution. It accounts for biodiversity, fossil evidence, geographical population distribution, and a huge range of other mysteries that previous theories could not make sense of. And this consilience is no accident since Darwin was a student of Whewell’s and he was nervous about sharing his theory until he had made it as robust as possible.
 
Combining all of these ideas, we propose a new way (Figure 5) of sifting through the mountains of evidence the world is constantly bombarding us with. We think it is useful to consider the three different categories of theories, each dealing with different strengths of evidence, as a set of sieves by which we can first filter the data to be weighed in our minds. In this view, some types of evidence might be rather low quality, acting like a medical test with false positives near 50%. Such poor evidence goes equally on each side of the beam and never really moves the fulcrum. However, some evidence is much more likely to be reliable and can be counted on one side of the beam at a much higher rate than the other (although never with 100% certainty). And evidence that does not fit with any theory whatsoever really just ought to make us feel more skeptical about what we think we know until and unless we figure out a way to incorporate it into a new theory.


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​We submit that this mental model of a Bayesian Balance allows us to adjust our credences more easily and intuitively. Also, it never tips the lever all the way over into unreasonable certainty. To use it, you don’t have to delve into the history of philosophy, epistemology, skepticism, knowledge, justified true beliefs, Bayesian inferences, or difficult calculations using probability notation and unknown coefficients. You simply need to keep weighing the evidence and paying attention to which kinds of evidence are more or less likely to count. Remember that observations can sometimes be misleading, so a good question to guide you is, “Could my evidence be observed, even if I’m wrong?” Doing so fosters a properly skeptical mindset. It frees us from the truth trap, yet enables us to move forward, wisely proportioning our credences as best as the evidence allows us.
 
References
[1] Sternbergh, A. (2006, October 16). Stephen Colbert Has America by the Ballots. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/news/politics/22322/
[2] The Paley Center for Media. (2009, November 7). Colbert Report Writers—Truthiness and Pun Journals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvnHf3MQtAk
[3] Blake, A. (2017, January 22). Kellyanne Conway says Donald Trump’s team has ‘alternative facts.’ Which pretty much says it all. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/22/kellyanne-conway-says-donald-trumps-team-has-alternate-facts-which-pretty-much-says-it-all/
[4] Friedersdorf, C. (2018, January 8). The Difference Between Speaking ‘Your Truth’ and ‘The Truth.’ The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-power-and-perils-of-speaking-your-truth/549968/
[5] See especially: Shermer, M. (n.d.). Jordan Peterson & Michael Shermer on Science, Myth, Truth, and the Architecture of Archetypes (174). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/jordan-peterson-beyond-order-12-more-rules-for-life/. For more examples see: Shermer, M. (n.d.). Simon Winchester—How We Transfer Knowledge Through Time (355). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/simon-winchester-transmission-of-knowledge-from-ancient-widsom-to-modern-magic/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). The Sacred Depths of Nature—Ursula Goodenough on How to Find Sacred Scientific Spirituality (336). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/natures-sacred-depths-ursula-goodenough-on-finding-sacred-scientific-spirituality/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Gale Sinatra & Barbara Hofer—Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It (212). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/science-denial-why-it-happens-and-what-to-do-about-it-gale-sinatra-barbara-hofer/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Richard Dawkins on evangelizing for evolution, science, skepticism, philosophy, reason, and rationality, based on his new book Books Do Furnish a Life: Reading and Writing Science (205). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/books-do-furnish-a-life-reading-and-writing-science-richard-dawkins/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Jonathan Rauch—The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (190). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/jonathan-rauch-constitution-of-knowledge-a-defense-of-truth/. Shermer, M. (n.d.). Robert Pennock—An Instinct for Truth: Curiosity and the Moral Character of Science (98). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.skeptic.com/michael-shermer-show/robert-pennock-an-instinct-for-truth-curiosity-moral-character-of-science/. Shermer, M. (2020, June 26). What is Truth, Anyway? [YouTube]. https://www.skeptic.com/skepticism-101/what-is-truth-anyway-lecture/.
[6] Holy Bible, New International Version, Matthew 19:26. (n.d.). Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2019%3A26&version=NIV
[7] Ichikawa, J. J., & Steup, M. (2018). The Analysis of Knowledge. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/knowledge-analysis/
[8] Schwitzgebel, E. (2021). Belief. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/belief/
[9] Dowden, B., & Swartz, N. (n.d.). Truth. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://iep.utm.edu/truth/
[10] Hasan, A., & Fumerton, R. (2022). Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/justep-foundational/
[11] Laertius, D. (1925). Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Vol. Book IX (R. D. Hicks, Ed.). http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0258%3Abook%3D9
[12] Hume, D. (1902). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (L. A. Selby-Bigge, Ed.; Second). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9662/pg9662.txt
[13] Gillespie, M. A. (1996). Chapter One: Descartes and the Deceiver God. In Nihilism Before Nietzsche. University of Chicago Press.
[14] Hetherington, S. (n.d.). Gettier Problems. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved July 23, 2023, from https://iep.utm.edu/gettier/
[15] Dennett, D. C. (2016). Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism. In D. L. Smith (Ed.), How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism (pp. 9–22). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107295490.002
[16] Büchter, T., Eichler, A., Steib, N., Binder, K., Böcherer-Linder, K., Krauss, S., & Vogel, M. (2022). How to Train Novices in Bayesian Reasoning. Mathematics, 10(9), 1558. https://doi.org/10.3390/math10091558
[17] Lin, H. (2022). Bayesian Epistemology. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
[18] Norman, A. (2021). Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind-Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. Harper Wave. https://www.harperacademic.com/book/9780063003002/mental-immunity
[19] Hume, D. (1902). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (L. A. Selby-Bigge, Ed.; Second). https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9662/pg9662.txt
[20] Jackman, S. (2009). The Foundations of Bayesian Inference. In Bayesian Analysis for the Social Sciences. John Wiley & Sons.
[21] Hajek, A., & Lin, H. (2017). A Tale of Two Epistemologies? Res Philosophica, 94(2), 207–232. http://dx.doi.org/10.11612/resphil.1540
[22] Oreskes, N. (2019). Why Trust Science? Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179001/why-trust-science
[23] Kipling, R. (1902). Just So Stories (D. Reed & D. Widger, Eds.). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2781/2781-h/2781-h.htm
[24] Whewell, W. (1847). The philosophy of the inductive sciences, founded upon their history. London J.W. Parker. http://archive.org/details/philosophyinduc00goog

Zafir Ivanov
Zafir has had a lifelong interest in how we form beliefs and why many people resist counterevidence. This interest resulted in becoming familiar with research literature, experimenting with difficult conversations and amateur ethnography.
 
Ed Gibney
Ed writes fiction and philosophy while trying to bring an evolutionary perspective to both of those pursuits. His work can be found at evphil.com.

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EPC Generation 3 — Mental Immunity

11/2/2023

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The Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I’ve started with David Sloan Wilson’s ProSocial World is just about to start our fourth “generation” of activity (which is sort of like a semester), so I wanted to finish recapping what we’ve done so far. As I said in the last two posts, we first took a whirlwind tour of the different branches of philosophy in generation 1 to see how the theory of evolution affects them all. Then, in generation 2, we took a look at another holistic worldview (Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy) to see how it differs from the worldview we are building with evolutionary philosophy. For generation 3, we dove deeper into one branch of philosophy to further develop our thinking there. We looked at the philosopher Andy Norman’s new theory of mental immunity, which attempts to improve epistemology (the norms around what should count as good knowledge production) by arguing for a new way of looking at ideas and our mental processes that deal with them.

Back in January of 2022, I reviewed Andy’s book that introduced this idea — Mental Immunity: Infectious Ideas, Mind Parasites, and the Search for a Better Way to Think. I found it so interesting that I devoted two long blog posts to covering it. (See here and here.) I wasn’t alone in this interest either. Andy had many, many discussions about his book during the publicity tours he did for it, and he also organized a symposium in the online magazine This View of Life (now a part of ProSocial World) to gather thoughts about his book from a variety of philosophers and scientists. Andy and I agreed to invite all of these essay writers to discuss their thoughts with our Evolutionary Philosophy Circle, and that constituted our third generation of activity. After 14 weeks of deep readings and discussions, I put together a list of links and summaries for all of the essays we considered, which you can see below.

Please note that if you are interested in watching the recorded discussions that we had about these essays, you can find links for those by joining our Circle. Our fourth generation of activity will follow this format of organized essays and discussions around a general topic (this time featuring evolutionary ethics) so now’s a great time to join in for that! Anyway, on to the summaries for generation three:
 
Week 1
  • Speaker — Andy Norman
  • Article — The Science of Mental Immunity Has Arrived
  • Summary — Minds have immune systems. Mounting evidence and novel arguments suggest this claim is quite literally true. Evolved systems have to defend themselves against internal and external threats. The body’s immune system is an evolved solution to this problem. Evolutionary theory predicts that comparable systems will be found at many different levels of selection. Look for such systems and you can find them at work protecting cells, organs, and bodies, nations, cultures, ideologies, religions, and minds. These entities have “immune systems” too. The mind’s immune system—its capacity to ward off problematic information—is implemented somehow in the brain. We can all benefit from “cognitive immunotherapies”: evidence-based interventions designed to boost and modulate mental immune response.
 
Week 2
  • Speaker — David Sloan Wilson
  • Article — Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms
  • Summary — The concept of ‘organism’ must be expanded to include groups as organisms. When we do this, the concepts of both ‘mental’ and ‘immunity’ can be seen in a new light. Two key concepts for the purposes of this essay are multilevel selection (MLS) and major evolutionary transitions (MET). Today, every entity that biologists call an organism is regarded as a MET. From a multilevel perspective, the word “mental” cannot be restricted to individual cognition. Human moral systems make great sense from this perspective. Deviant behaviors are defined as cheating—a form of cancer—and punished. Foreign beliefs are tagged and removed, like infectious diseases. This does not distinguish fact from fiction. Instead, all beliefs and practices with fitness value (the survival and reproduction of the group) are distinguished from all beliefs and practices that pose a threat to fitness. Regardless of the past and present, there is an urgent need for a moral system that defines “us” as the whole earth, including the biosphere in addition to humans.
 
Week 3
  • Speaker — David Samson
  • Article — A Tribalism Vaccine
  • Summary — In my book Our Tribal Future, I offer an operational definition of a tribe, which is: a meta-group – an intersubjective belief network – that uses symbols as tokens of identity signaling membership in a coalition. The ‘Tribe Drive’ leverages our species' capacity to create and transmit memes in a way that allows individuals, with no prior interaction, to see strangers as trustworthy. Religion, language, music, ritual, consumer behavior, clothing, and food can all emit such signals. Humanity had a new way to bootstrap cooperation, but the feature contained a bug. All humans today have inherited identity protective cognition — the tendency to unconsciously dismiss evidence that does not reflect the beliefs that predominate in our own groups. Tribalism is the belief that different identity-based coalitions possess distinct characteristics, abilities, or qualities, especially so as to distinguish them as inferior or superior to one another. To vaccinate the world from the tribalism virus, we need herd immunity of people who hold metabelief as their sacred value pegged to a single “community of inquiry” tribal identity. This is what I call a Metatribe. The syringe delivery system for the tribalism vaccine needs to leverage humanity's penchant for social norm creation and regulation to facilitate its spread. Historically, tribal creeds have served this purpose. What then, is an effective Metatribal creed for the long-awaited tribalism vaccine?

    I am a member of Team Human.
    Our creed is that beliefs can change in light of evidence.
    We are a community of inquiry where beliefs are deemed reasonable if they can withstand reasonable challenges to their veracity.
    We are the Metatribe.

Week 4
  • Speaker — Ian Robertson
  • Article — Mental Immunity, The Group Mind, and Existential Fear
  • Summary — As a highly social species, humans have an evolved tendency to favor the ‘in-group.’ This trait significantly impacts our immunity, or lack of it, to false or harmful information. The emerging science of cognitive immunology must take full account of this fact. 'Minimal groups' have no purpose, past, or future. Real groups have a purpose – family protection, soccer team victory, religious dominance, or national prestige — they have long histories, rationales that usually involve trying to get a competitive advantage over other groups, and they have a strong sense of continuity into the future. Even in ‘minimal groups’ people allocate rewards to their ingroup and impose sanctions on the outgroup, even when the overall costs and benefits of their group-favoring choices are to everyone’s detriment! There appears to be a primitive drive in the human mind to define oneself in a group instantly and then automatically favor that group at the expense of an outgroup. Feeling bad about oneself makes people more tribal. It’s as if in compensation, the collective ego of the ingroup offers some protection. The fear of our extinction seems especially potent. One theory to explain this goes by the rather forbidding name of Terror Management Theory. The core idea of terror management theory is that we work hard to gain self-esteem and support for our worldview so as to ward off existential anxiety and that work pays off. It can be hard for millions of people to feel part of a group, but one surefire way of making that happen is to remind them of their mortality through fear and threat.
 
Week 5
  • Speaker — Barry Mauer
  • Article — Bad Ideas Recruit the Mind’s Immune System to Protect Themselves
  • Summary — Some bad ideas get past a mind’s defenses and then hijack the mind’s immune system. This process is similar to what happens with metastatic cancer, which spreads from one location in the body to a distant one. Metastatic cancer “flips” elements of the body’s immune system, recruiting them to defend tumors and attack the body. When bad ideas hijack the mind’s immune system, these bad ideas become resistant to correction and the mind becomes susceptible to more bad ideas. Bad ideas spread in the mind and can eventually take it over. A pathological belief is one that “is likely to be false, to produce unnecessary harm, and to be held with conviction and tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is likely false and will produce unnecessary harm.” A group with a hijacked mental immune system is a cult; in a cult, the group’s mental immune system is altered to protect the group’s bad ideas at the expense of the group’s wellbeing, the wellbeing of its members, and of those around it. Institutions such as schools and journalism play outsized roles in enhancing or corrupting the mental immune systems of individual people and of groups.
 
Week 6
  • Speaker — Steije Hofhuis
  • Article — Witch-Hunting: A Lethal Cultural “Virus”?
  • Summary — Historians are traditionally dismissive of comparisons between the evolution of living nature and history. History is thought to be far too complex and capricious to be captured in general principles. But what if we take the aforementioned comparisons seriously? Viruses are known to be extremely well adapted to reproduce within their environment. They make people cough and sneeze, for example, which enables them to infect others through the air. It appears like an intelligent design, but in fact, it was only a blind Darwinian process that did the manufacturing: variants that were accidentally adapted were cumulatively preserved in repeated rounds of selection. Biologists call this “design without a designer.” “The implementation of witchcraft persecutions spread contagiously, but any politically coordinated effort with that direct intent was conspicuously lacking.” It was a cultural design without a designer. The question of what function ideas such as the witches’ sabbath, flying witches, or child witches had for the people involved, or for their communities, does not necessarily bring us any further. For them, it was often harmful. But when we look at it from the reproductive angle of the witch-hunting phenomenon itself, all of it makes perfect functional sense. These cultural variants were ingeniously adapted to make this cultural “virus” spread.
 
Week 7
  • Speaker — Ed Gibney
  • Article — Evolving My View on Mental Immunity
  • Summary — The actions of the so-called mental immune system may just be part of a larger, more generalizable function of the brain. When our minds swarm with doubts, it may be easier to think of this as problem-solving for our predictive worldview, rather than the actions of some kind of neuronal version of white blood cells. That way, the swarming of reinforcements that I personally experienced can also be explained by the same mechanism. This seems more parsimonious. Inoculation theorists have shown that exposure to weakened information threats will tend to “inoculate” a mind against more formidable versions of those same threats. But perhaps this isn’t inoculating a mind against bad ideas so much as scaffolding a worldview in another rigid direction. If I’m right, then mind inoculation will only work if it is received from a trusted source. Even if the weakened idea is a “bad” one, whenever we perceive the inoculation as coming from “them” then the inoculation should not work as intended. In fact, don’t we see this all the time with the sharing, belief, and disbelief of ideas among friends, foes, and relatives? Andy’s definition of mental immunology is, “The mind’s wherewithal for warding off bad ideas.” That’s just a very broad description of a wide-ranging function. We could easily adopt this and still say that the brain can perform this function using general mechanisms, even if there isn’t a specifically evolved mental immune system, like there is for bodily immune systems. If so, how can we highlight this metaphor’s similarities without brushing over the differences and leading people astray? Perhaps making a clear list of the differences between bodily immunity and cognitive immunity may actually help with getting past some resistance to this project.
 
Week 8
  • Speaker — Steve Gilbert
  • Article — Changing A Belief Means Changing How You Feel: The Role of Emotions in Cognitive Immunology
  • Summary — Psychotherapists have long known, and science has now confirmed, that there is no thought without feeling. All thought is affect-laden and important personal beliefs very much so. Changing your mind does indeed mean changing how you feel, especially so for beliefs, which are more emotion-sensitive than knowledge. Thus, changing a salient belief, toxic or otherwise, is often too heavy a lift for reason alone. Feelings “may be experienced as internal evidence for beliefs which rivals the power of external evidence from the environment” and may be given more weight than reason and evidence. Feelings also guide attention. Donovan Schaefer discusses this in the context of cogency theory: “To say an argument is cogent doesn’t mean, exactly, that it’s true. It means it appeals, or it’s compelling.” So, what might this look like in practice? Client-centered therapy centers on active (i.e., reflective) listening, empathy, and clarification of content and affect. Cognitive therapy focuses on how thoughts and beliefs cause feelings and how modifying thoughts can change feeling-states. My subsequent career as a psychotherapist taught me that both approaches are more powerful when combined than either alone. This review of the role of emotion in belief suggests that debunking may be more effective if intervention begins with a relaxation exercise, followed by an empathic conversation centered on the person’s feelings about their beliefs, next an elicitation of commitment to the values of open-mindedness and evidentiary belief, and lastly a presentation of disconfirming evidence and reasoned argument.  All too often, the cart is put before the horse.
 
Week 9
  • Speaker — Melanie Trecek-King
  • Article — Teach Skills, Not Facts
  • Summary — Why are nearly all undergraduate students, regardless of major, required to take science? The obvious answer seemed to be to foster science literacy and critical thinking … but what does that mean? Science is so much more than a bunch of facts to memorize. It’s a process. It’s a way of learning about the world, of trying to get closer to the truth by subjecting explanations to testing and critically scrutinizing the evidence. It’s not just what we know; it’s how we know. Basically, science is good thinking. To equip students with the skills necessary to evaluate claims, I provide them with a toolkit, appropriately summarized by the acronym FLOATERS. This stands for Falsifiability, Logic, Objectivity, Alternative explanations, Tentative conclusions, Evidence, and Replicability. Another of the most important lessons for students is about the limits of perception and memory. We often fail to recognize that our perceptions are subjective and highly biased and that our memories are flawed and unreliable. After students have a better appreciation of how flawed their thinking can be and the importance of skepticism, we turn to information literacy. It’s important that students recognize the limits of their knowledge and learn how to be good consumers of information more broadly. Science literacy is about more than memorizing facts. Instead of teaching students what to think, a good science education teaches them how to think.
 
Week 10 — RESCHEDULED DUE TO ILLNESS
 
Week 11
  • Speaker — Zafir Ivanov
  • Article — Reframing Mental Immunity
  • Summary — I think with a slight reframing of this idea we will have a more accurate diagnosis of susceptibility to infodemics, which can lead to better treatment outcomes. The immune system is a layered system of defence. The innate immune system includes physical barriers such as the skin and mucous membranes lining the digestive and respiratory tracts as well as an immediate nonspecific smothering response by defensive cells. Beyond the innate defences comes the adaptive or acquired immune system where antibodies are custom made to the invader. Mark Sheller proposed the behavioural immune system, in which aspects of our behaviour aids in the prevention of infection to the point where it makes sense to think of these behaviours as a first line of defence of the immune system. Karen Shanker and her colleagues realized that behaviours associated with avoiding and combating infection affects not just the individual but also the group. They suggested broadening the behavioural immune system to the inclusive behavioural immune system. I think this is what our response to threatening ideas is built on. I propose that we stop referring to the mind having an immune system of its own and instead reframe this as the mind's contribution to our overall immune system. With this slight reframing we can avoid talk of metaphor and focus on more accurately understanding our various responses to harmful information. I also have many concerns about inoculation theory and think this needs to be reframed as well. My main concern is that inoculation theory requires no modification to be weaponized. Instead, generalizable tools that work with almost all ideas are not custom-made vaccines to specific viral ideas, they are much more like broad-spectrum antivirals. I think our efforts are best focused on developing new and refining existing tools with reduced weaponizability as a design criterion. Tools that are simple with obvious benefits that are likely to gain wide acceptance. Tools such as the New Socratic Method, Reason’s Fulcrum, Scout Mindset, the Pro-Truth Pledge, and Intuitive Bayesian Reasoning all have an antiviral effect.
 
 
Week 12
  • Speaker — Luke Johnson
  • Article — Paradigms in the Cognitive Sciences
  • Summary — In his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn developed a philosophy of science that has since influenced many an intellectual through the idiomatization of the phrase “paradigm shift.” In Chapter 2 of Structure, Kuhn introduces the criteria for something to serve as a paradigm: it must be “sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity… [and] sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve.” Counterinstances to existing paradigms are viewed as anomalies until sufficient evidence and “extraordinary research” lead to paradigm shifts as a result of new theories that account for these “anomalies.” Essentially invented by Andy Norman, PhD, a philosopher of science, Cognitive Immunology is most extensively articulated in his book, Mental Immunity. But is Cognitive Immunology a distinct field of science, and if so, how? Or is it a pre-paradigm school of thought? What crisis is cognitive immunology addressing and what paradigm or paradigms it is challenging? Science communicators, public health officials, and educators have struggled to address the crisis of misinformation with the application of existing science. Cognitive Immunology seems to be addressing the failure of other cognitive sciences to provide solutions to the ideological polarization, extremism, and culture war of our time. Only time will tell if cognitive immunology spurs a scientific revolution, to what degree it influences human progress, and how it fits into the history of science.
 
Week 13
  • Speaker — Maarten Boudry
  • Article — Are Some False Beliefs Good For You?
  • Summary — We all entertain some false beliefs about the world and about ourselves. Being totally deluded about reality is probably a bad idea, but who could object against some “little follies”, a few judicious falsehoods to sugar-coat the harshness of reality? To phrase the discussion in cognitive immunology terms, we have to look for misbeliefs that are mutualists – a relationship in which the host benefits from the “intruder” – rather than parasites, which only harm their host. Once you’ve done the hard work and weighed the costs and benefits of different follies, it’s time to embrace the most salubrious ones. But of course, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just flip a switch in your brain and decide to believe something. In order to find out which misbeliefs are beneficial and which are harmful, you have to investigate the attendant benefits and downsides. But once you’ve done that, you are no longer in a position to embrace your favorite misbelief, which means that you’re also unable to reap its advantages. Is there any way out of this paradox? For my part, I’m not so sure. Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief? Reality, as the writer Philip K. Dick argued, is that which, after you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. At the end of the day, would you not prefer to know the truth, warts and all?
 
Week 14
  • Speaker — Andy Norman
  • Article — Do Minds Have Immune Systems?
  • Summary — Do minds have immune systems? In this paper, we remove several obstacles to deciding this question in a rigorously scientific way. First, we show why the scientific community needs to take up the question. Then, we give the hypothesis a name: the Mental Immune Systems Thesis (or MIST) is the claim that minds do in fact have immune systems. It’s tempting to dismiss this claim as “mere metaphor” – and many do – but that stance turns out to be indefensible. It is at best a well-intentioned stopgap: one that postpones a pivotal reckoning. So how to settle the question? Above all, we need clarity about the meaning of “immune system.” To that end, we examine candidate definitions, nominate one, and show why it makes sense to embrace that definition. We then consider an evolutionary argument for MIST: mental immune systems, so defined, didn’t just evolve, they had to evolve – to protect minded creatures from informational threats. We then detail some of MIST’s testable implications and summarize the extant empirical evidence. Finally, we discuss the prospects of cognitive immunology, a research program that (1) posits mental immune systems and (2) proceeds to examine and explain how they work. MIST, we conclude, is a hypothesis that deserves serious scientific development.
 
Other Essays in the Mental Immunity Series on This View of Life
  • The Analogy of/and Inoculation Theory to Mental Immunity by Josh Compton and Sander van der Linden
  • The Many Faces of Cognitive Immunology by Stephan Lewandowsky
  • Building Mental Immunity by Nele Strynckx
 
Post-Generation Comments and Questions
  • Questions for the MIST by Ed Gibney
  • Do minds have immune systems? The title question from Andy’s latest paper cannot be answered without more clarification of the MIST. In particular, a definition of the general abstract label “immune systems” needs to be settled upon, a definition of the particular abstract label of a “mental immune system” needs to be agreed upon, and definitions of the component parts of this system such as “mental inoculation”, “mental parasite”, and “mental vaccines” all need to be developed and confirmed. Until the clarification of each of these terms occurs, the answer remains “no” for each and every one of them because new scientific theories remain guilty until proven innocent. Once this philosophical work of defining terms is complete, there are still two options going forward. The first may be to say yes, all of these philosophical definitions are logically consistent and by definition it is obvious or demonstrable that they all exist. This would create a philosophical argument for looking at the world in a particular way using a particular set of words. The second and more difficult option is to define all of these terms in such a way that they create falsifiable and empirically verifiable predictions. This would create a scientific argument that only remains to be tested in order to either be accepted into consensus, refined, or rejected.
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EPC Generation 2 — Evaluating Ken Wilber's Worldview

10/17/2023

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Is there a reason why academic philosophers don't take Ken Wilber seriously?
In my last post, I described the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle I've been running at ProSocial World and I shared a summary of the first generation of activity we undertook. For those first steps, we conducted a brief survey showing how a deep consideration of evolution affects every branch of philosophy. And since I have argued elsewhere that one way to define a worldview is as the sum of one's beliefs across all the branches of philosophy, it follows from this that adopting an evolutionary philosophy will deeply affect one’s worldview.

Our group is still in the midst of considering different aspects of evolutionary philosophy, so our worldview could still be described as unsettled, but for our second generation we decided to look at another fully formed worldview to see how we might analyze, critique, and learn from it. In particular, we decided to look at Ken Wilber’s Integral Philosophy since several members and leaders within ProSocial World have been involved with that movement and often endorse Wilber’s ideas. I had never heard of Wilber before joining ProSocial and my early explorations into his work did not appeal to me (to say the least). But it is often just as helpful for the formation of groups to say “that is NOT us” as it is to say “THIS is us” so we decided to give Wilber a try.

We had 10 weekly meetings to consider him in the Fall of 2022, but Wilber’s Wikipedia entry lists 30 paperback books where he is the sole author, which altogether have a total of nearly 10,000 pages. So, there was far too much primary source material for our task. As such, and based on recommendations from members of the Integral community, we focused our efforts on a 71-page summary of Ken Wilber that was written by Paul Helfrich called “Ken Wilber’s AQAL Metatheory: An Overview.” At the end of our explorations, we produced 46 pages of research, which are attached below. The research consists of a 9-page report of our findings, a 10-page appendix citing direct quotes to support our findings, and a 27-page appendix quoting other relevant material that we felt was helpful for completing our understanding of Wilber.

I have copied the abstract of our main report below. Please download the full report to read it in its entirety.

​What do you think? Have you heard of Ken Wilber before? What do you think of him, either before or after having read our report?

Wilber Report by the EPC.docx
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​ABSTRACT

The purpose of this report is to examine the very well documented worldview of Ken Wilber, which has been developing over the last several decades in the many volumes that he has written about his Integral Philosophy. We started our analysis using a framework for worldviews that looks at a person’s positions in the six main branches of philosophy. These positions can also be tied together by a unifying narrative that can be either explicit or implicit. Once we documented all of these elements of Wilber’s worldview, we attempted to analyze it using the three criteria that David Sloan Wilson listed in his essay titled “Evaluating Narratives of Conscious Evolution.” 1. Is the narrative psychologically and emotionally motivating? 2. What does the narrative cause people to do? 3. How well does the narrative comport with current scientific knowledge? In the end, there were serious and substantial points of agreement with Wilber’s worldview that have made our overall efforts worthwhile. However, we believe there are several points in Wilber’s worldview that make our shared goals difficult to reach together. The vision of ProSocial World (PW) is: “To unleash the power of science and inquiry to help us notice what’s within us and between us, to create a more harmonious world for everyone around us.” Some vocal critics in the Integral movement have asked Ken Wilber to update his views based on the latest in evolutionary science. We can only add to that request since Integral Spirituality’s stated goals of understanding life and creating a world that works for all are laudable indeed and deserve as accurate and motivating a worldview as possible.
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