Hi there. Sorry to take a break from my usual philosophy friday post (although this gives you a chance to catch up on any blog posts you've missed, like the Introduction to EvPhil, my Universal Definition of Good, my fun photo essay on travel, or last week's post about emotions), but I'm taking a technical break to add some new features to the website and I wanted to tell you about them. Specifically, two new things:

In my last post, I made the point that the life of the mind arises from the physical structures of the body. Rejecting dualism, I believe an evolutionary philosophy clearly points to a Body x Mind model for our behavior where both elements are intertwined and influence each other. To know thyself, you must be aware of what is going on with your mind and your body. Specifically, I say that:

The body and the mind are inseparable. Minds arise from bodies, and bodies can be affected by the mind. This psychosomatic link introduces other concepts - emotion, needs and desires, and personality - that need to be mastered for life to thrive. As an organism with a mind-body connection, a sound mind builds a sound body and vice versa.

The first of these mind-body connections that I would like to examine are our emotions. These are complex feelings that have been explored by poets and philosophers for millennia, but what exactly are they talking about? First, let's turn to the science of biology for a definition of emotion:

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience where an individual's state of mind interacts with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences. Emotions can be seen as mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (for example, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures.

From this, we understand that emotions are, in a sense, mere chemical changes in the brain that act to encourage our behavior. From fight or flight, to mania or depression, to steady effort or distracted pausing, to certain striding or confused questioning; our emotions fuel our actions. But what causes these chemical changes? Do they arise from the ether? Or a raging subconscious world we have no access to? Well actually, our best current understanding of emotion comes from the field of cognitive psychology. Specifically:

An influential theory of emotion is that of Lazarus: emotion is a disturbance that occurs in the following order: 1) cognitive appraisal - the individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues the emotion; 2) physiological changes - the cognitive reaction starts biological changes such as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response; 3) action - the individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react. Lazarus stressed that the quality and intensity of emotions are controlled through cognitive processes.

Think about this for a moment. Say you have a painful fear of spiders. If one were to silently crawl behind you, you would feel absolutely no fear. Even if the spider was dangerously close to you. Your body does not get scared of an unseen spider until you actually see it - until you "assess the event cognitively." Then the pounding heartbeat and sweaty palms that accompany the fearful fight or flight response kick in. Now let's suppose that you see a ball of dust that you mistake for a spider. Your fear kicks in at the first cognitive thought, "that is a spider!" But as your brain recognizes the fact that it is not really a spider, but only a harmless speck of dust, then your new updated cognitive appraisal of the situation changes your emotional response. You lose the fight or flight kick of adrenaline and get back to whatever it was that you were doing.

Now, what kind of cognitive assessments can you make? Using our logical system of finding a MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) framework to analyze your assessments, we can come up with something new and unique to understand our emotions. Specifically, I say:

No definitive emotion classification system exists, though numerous taxonomies have been proposed. I propose the following system. Given that emotions are responses to cognitive appraisals, they can be classified according to what we are appraising. In total, we can think about the past, present, or future, and we can judge events to be good or bad, or we can be unsure about them. We can also appraise our options for what to do about negative feelings (positive emotions need no immediate correction). Finally, our emotional responses can range from mild to extreme. A list of emotions might therefore be understood through the following table.

Run through this table in your mind. I took a list of 70 of the most commonly listed emotions and tried to categorize them here. Do they make sense to you? Do you feel some but with different cognitive appraisals than the ones I've ascribed? This is a new and untested idea, but one that I think can be very important to the eventual task of learning to cope with our emotions through the use of philosophy. Next time, I will get into some of the implications that a table like this has on developing a worldview and making decisions within that world.

Contrary to what my mac's photobooth shows, my mind doesn't flex like this when I'm hard at work on philosophy.

Before the election sidetracked this blog with 1, 2, 3, 4 political philosophy posts, I was in the middle of explaining how exactly you can know thyself through evolutionary philosophy. I looked at the past by asking, "Where Did I Come From?" I kicked off an examination of the present by asking, "Where Am I?" And I continued the tour of thyself by beginning the "What Am I?" questioning with a brief look at our bodies. Next up in our tour: the mind.

By splitting the tour of thyself into a body and a mind, I do not mean to imply any kind of Cartesian dualism: the belief espoused by Descartes that the material body and immaterial mind were separate from one another and that "animal spirits interacted with the body through the pineal gland in the center of the brain." Taking the evolutionary history of life into account and finding only natural (no supernatural) causes for actions along the way, I clearly side with the physicalists in the question of the mind-body problem. The life of the mind arises from the physical structures of the body. This was hard to see in the 1700's when Descartes saw no evidence of the body changing when the mind changed, but today's many brain scanning techniques put that question to rest. (It's a pity our heads don't noticeably swell when we are thinking. We could have thoroughly rejected dualism a long time ago.)

Today, neuroscientists and psychologists are mapping the areas of our brains and learning about their functionalities and abilities to change. Philosophers are arguing over what this means for our definitions of consciousness. Is it emergent? Is it a hard problem? These will surely be answered as the scientific facts roll in. In the meantime, it is just important for us to recognize that:

Internal mental processes of thought, consciousness, perception, memory, language, imagination, logic, reason, judgment, ethics, and aesthetics have evolved that allow life to use a brain to understand the sensory perceptions that come from the body. These mental processes allow life to make decisions on how to act in the best possible manner to perpetuate the species.

The individual mind is developed through education. Strengthen the mind to help it make the best choices. Use it, expand it, do not let it atrophy. Be aware of its biases and susceptibility to illusion. Be open to the use of chemical remedies for severe chemical imbalances in the brain. Be open to the use of cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, psychotherapy, and philosophical counseling to remedy faulty decision-making.

Since I wrote that, an important review of a disturbing new book has come out that makes me leery of being "open to the use of chemical remedies for severe chemical imbalances in the brain." Big Pharma may have sold the American public on chemical treatments for mental illnesses that have no real basis in fact and actually cause terrible and long-lasting side-effects. Abandoning this treatment will make the exploration of psychological and philosophical treatments for mental illness all the more important. This is a topic I will discuss in more detail in my next posts when I explore the interactions between the mind and body.

So we've got a new president now. We spent the last two years as a country under a deadlocked congress with historically low approval ratings while both parties spent billions of election campaign dollars telling us we needed a change. And what did we end up with? Pretty much exactly the same status quo - Democrat president, Republican House, Democrat Senate. When will we get some new ideas?

Perhaps we would get somewhere new if we stopped arguing about big government vs. little government, and instead agreed to focus on efficient government. That's going to take someone running for office though who is less of a politician and more of a wonk who is interested in being a chief executive officer as the head of the executive branch of government. We haven't had anyone run on that kind of a platform before, but hopefully this sample passage from my new novel Draining the Swamp will inspire someone out there to take that idea seriously.

To set this up, the heroine of my novel, Justine Swensen, has come to DC to change things. She was a passionate, young idealist when she got there as a staffer for a newly elected Senator, but over the next 30 years, she rose through the legislative and executive branches of government holding many meaningful positions along the way that taught her all about the inner workings of our government. Eventually, she runs for the presidency (NO SPOILERS!), and has this to say as a small part of her signature campaign speech:

     “With that purpose for government, what then is actually the role of the leader of that entity? What part does the president play, and why, therefore, would I be your best choice for the position come this fall during the election? To answer those questions, I want to use concepts from two quick background stories. The first, is the actual root of the word ‘government.’ This word was derived first from the Ancient Greek shipping word kubernismos, which meant to steer, to pilot, and to guide. This later transformed into the Latin word gubernatio, and took on the additional meaning of management. Gubernatio, from managing and guiding, became government.
     “After this look at the origins of this word, it will make sense to you why my second story comes from one of my favorite business books – The Future of Management by Gary Hamel. In this book, Hamel describes the ideal role of a leader using a metaphor that is particularly apt for our historical definition of government. In this book, he asked the reader to imagine a large organization as if it were a sea liner. If that were the case, what would be the role of the CEO? Some people would say it is that of the captain barking out orders from the top of an unquestioned hierarchy. Others would say the CEO should be a navigator, charting the course for the future. A few would even say he or she should be the boiler room engineer stoking the fires of the engine – not with coal, but with inspirational words of motivation. These are all fine choices that will help the boat move forward, but Hamel argued that the role that would best determine the ship’s fate, the most important one that a CEO, or in this case a president, can take on, is that of the boat’s architect. The architect gets to design how many levels there are, how fast the rudder turns, what visibility the crow’s nest has, what instrument panel is in the control room. The architect in fact plays the largest role in determining the fate of all the other positions on the ship.
     “Bringing the point of these two stories into focus, I say that the president can best steer, pilot, or guide – kubernismos – the management, or gubernatio, of his or her government by playing the role of architect. As your president, I will not be the one executing the mission of the executive branch. But as its head, I can design a better ship to sail us towards the destination or vision that I laid out for the government. As you know, I have devoted my entire career, over thirty years, to working my way through all of the decks of this USS United States. From the overseers on Capitol Hill to the interns working beside them. From the individual agencies executing the most specific missions, to the Executive Offices of the President determining their budgets and personnel. From the outsiders hired to help, to the insiders who wished they’d receive more of it. From sea to shining sea. I know the ins and outs, the incentives and deterrents, the forces at work, and the heroes and villains, that all play a part in this story. And I know how to build you a better organization. I know how to be your President of these United States.


Wouldn't you like to vote for someone who promised that?

In my last two posts, I laid out a new definition of the purpose of government, and then gave my 2012 presidential endorsement to Obama. The election is next week, so I have one final post to make about politics before I go back to my introduction of how you can know thyself through evolutionary philosophy.

One of the main criticisms that Romney and the republicans level at President Obama is that while he may be a likable figure (they can read the opinion polls about that) he was just not competent in his first term and struggled to get anything accomplished. Setting aside the fact that Obama did push major health care legislation through, which no other democrat before him was able to do (not for lack of trying), or the fact that republicans with their obstructionism have preferred to compete rather than cooperate (a cheating strategy that must be punished in terms of game theory), this "Obama is ineffective" line of attack reminds me of a theory from change management that I used to work with and think is important to consider. The theory goes something like this:

In any organization, there are two ways you might look at how you are acting. You can decide if you are are doing the right thing or the wrong thing, and you can determine if you are performing well or performing poorly. If you were to set up these options in a typical 2x2 matrix, you would get something that looks like this:

The thing that every organization is shooting for is the upper right quadrant - that place where the group is doing the right thing, and doing it well. The two positive attributes lead to a positive outcome. However, a surprising result comes from a close look at this matrix when we realize that the worst possible outcome on this chart is to be doing the wrong thing...well. It's not two negative effects that lead to the worst result, but one negative and one positive. This is pretty obvious upon reflection. It's worse to be running towards a cliff than it is to be crawling toward one. So, ranking the outcomes of action in order of lowest to highest, you get a chart that looks like this:

This tells a much more interesting story about the journey of an organization during a change management intervention. Take a firm in box 1. You can imagine a perfectly optimized company following a particular strategy that will lead to its destruction in the long-term. (Dell? Microsoft? Nokia?) As some people in the organization realize their strategy is wrong, they start fighting the processes and challenging the decision making. Things slow down. The brakes are tapped. The firm moves into box 2. Then, as more and more people swing over to the proper strategy, things start to turn around. However, there will still be people who will resist the new direction. There will be people who either don't have the skill to go in the new direction so it frightens them, or there will be others who are personally embarrassed to admit they were wrong so they continue to fight for their original position. These are the characteristics of a firm in box 3. The company is moving in the right direction, but still being dragged down by some members of the group. Finally, as new results kick in, better arguments are made, and intractable malcontents are forced out, a change management turnaround is completed and some firms manage to make it to box 4. They are doing the right thing and they are doing it well.

This change management story is important for two reasons. One, it gives you an idea of the path it takes to actually get from where you are to where you want to be. This is never an easy one-step process, and this 2x2 matrix shows you why. Secondly, this story gives you some comfort when you are in the middle of a turnaround. Just as you often hear in sports, you sometimes have to "get worse before things get better." Things may get uncomfortable in the middle of a turnaround, people may disagree vehemently over the change in direction, but this is a necessary part of getting to the right end.

Does this story remind you of what we are seeing in the Obama presidency? By the end of the Bush presidency, America was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, the economy was collapsing, we were in two wars abroad, we had lowered taxes on the rich, income inequality was rising, nearly 50 million americans were medically uninsured, environmental regulations were being lifted, automobile fuel efficiency was actually getting worse - we were an organization headed in the wrong direction, and in many ways, we were going there as fast as we could. Now, we are turning that around. Did anyone expect that to be painless? Here is one way you could characterize the last several years of government under the leadership of Bush and Obama:

When Obama came into office, he had the benefit of working with a democrat led Congress and Senate. He changed directions fast. He addressed the economy with a stimulus package, he helped start or continue the bailouts of the financial and auto industries, he wound down the war in Iraq, and he used his political capital to push through the one thing on his agenda that he thought was most morally important - health care reform that will ensure more people do not go uninsured or get dumped by their insurance companies. Republicans refused to cooperate on any of this. Any of it. And they highlighted the fact that Obama simply rammed his policies home (even though the republicans were giving him no choice). This fighting was scary for America and those in the middle decided to slow government down by giving Obama a republican Congress to deal with. Now, the four-year term is up, and America has another choice. Do we continue to let Obama lead in the democrat direction, or do we let Romney return us to the republican direction? If you genuinely thought that Bush had it right for America, your choice is clear. If, however, you just think that Obama is presiding over a messy government right now, and you think that is reason enough to vote for Romney, then I hope this story of what it feels like in a turnaround has changed your mind. Stay the course. Let Obama lead us to do the right thing well.