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Deep Philosophical Confusions Among Artists and Critics

7/14/2024

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:

The increasingly political nature of cultural criticism does a disservice to the arts, to artists, and to criticism itself.

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!

“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.

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!

“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.

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.

In Wilde’s time, moralistic objections to art usually emerged from the conservative and religious Right.

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.)

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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, …

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…

…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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.”

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.)

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.

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:

“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.

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

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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:

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.

“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.

“[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.

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.

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
about a Black sheriff in a rural Southern town, searching for a serial killer who tortures Black children
a once wealthy Irish family struggles with both the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash and their own inner demons
a polarizing female performance artist who made her way from the South to New York City’s downtown art scene
a collective of activist gardeners crosses paths with a billionaire doomsday prepper
explores what it means to be erased and how to persist after being wiped away
for the first time in fiction, Knoll pooh-poohs Bundy's much ballyhooed intelligence, celebrating the promise and perspicacity of his victims instead
prison inmates duel on TV for a chance at freedom
generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles
uses a crime story to illuminate a singular neighborhood at a tipping point
tracking a cadre of scientists and activists from the gathering storm of the Obama years to the super-typhoons of future decades
a young Russian soldier on a trans-Siberian train decides to desert and turns to a civilian passenger, a Frenchwoman, for help
the kind of folkloric fantasy that remembers the old, blood-ribboned source material about sacrifices and stolen children
a British Palestinian actor returns to her hometown in Israel to recover from a breakup and spend time with her family
the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary
successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters
a svelte, intrepid foray into American racism
it explores the mundane and the horrific
to explore the town’s Black, Jewish and immigrant history
a fresh spin on the classic tale of four sisters and the man who joins their family
the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again
a missing-persons case that unfolds into a tale of Dickensian proportions
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
new translation of the “Iliad”
sisters raised to protect a collection of magic books that allow their keepers to do incredible things
a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man
traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.
a chef who’s hired to cook for an “elite research community” in the Italian Alps
a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state
the titular character, abandoned by her mother as a child, endures a life of calamities before resolving to learn about her origins
a Senegalese writer brought low by a plagiarism scandal
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
the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries
An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet
a new mother falling apart within the four walls of her apartment
mediums who can summon “the Darkness” for a secret society of wealthy occultists seeking to preserve consciousness after death
an upper-crust Brooklyn Heights family
an incisive examination of the lingering traumas of racism and a gripping, ghost-filled horror novel
Trained to kill by his mother and able to see demons
acerbic, comedic and lyrical odyssey into Korean history and American paranoia
the complex relationship between a young woman and her former stepmother
the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community
three sisters and their mother reflect on love and regret
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
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
queer midcentury romance that lingers on small, everyday acts
an 11-year-old Jain girl in London who has just lost her mother turns her attention to the game of squash
Set in Brooklyn, and featuring animal rescue workers, florists, volunteers, ghosts and UPS workers
a bored young woman in thrall to a boy band buys a one-way ticket to Seoul
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

7 Comments

Purpose: Design a Community and Change Your Life

4/4/2024

4 Comments

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

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]:

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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Generation 1 in the Evolutionary Philosophy Circle

10/6/2023

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Generation 1 — How Evolution Impacts Different Branches of Philosophy

I’ve mentioned in quite a few different posts now that I’ve been working to create an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle (EPC) on a platform that has been built by ProSocial World. PW is an NGO that was co-founded by the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson who is famous for championing the idea of group selection, so in keeping with that, this PW platform gives tools to groups to help them cooperate better and make meaningful change in the world. One of the common ways these groups act is via 12-week “sprint sessions” that are modeled after Robert Shaffer’s 100-day Rapid Results programs. This also aligns with the length of a semester at a university, but we speak of them in evolutionary terms so we call them “generations” in order to emphasize that they are something that can be varied, selected, and retained as they hopefully improve over the lifetime of the group.

For our generation 1, we spent several weeks going over ProSocial methods (which I discussed previously in theory, and in practice) and we also had an amazing talk from David Edmonds (author of a recent book about the Vienna Circle) about why Vienna and why discussion circles work so well. After that, we had 7 events over 6 weeks, which gave us a brief survey of how evolution impacts different branches of philosophy. We recorded videos of these events and hosted online chats about them on our members-only platform. And while anyone who joins ProSocial can see these recordings in full and engage in the online conversation with our members (currently about 50 people), I also wanted to share a summary of these talks here. That will help old members to remember what we’ve done, new members to catch up, and prospective members to decide whether or not to join. We’ve completed three such generations on very different topics (and are about to start a fourth), so I’ll share similar summaries for other generations in future posts.

The seven talks we hosted were:

“Evolutionary Metaphysics — How This View of Life Can Deeply Alter Other Branches of Philosophy” by Ed Gibney
“Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
“Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
“Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
“Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
“Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst

These were a really wonderful way to kick things off. They built a lot of momentum for the group and I’m excited to share their main ideas with you now. Enjoy!

1. “Evolutionary Metaphysics” by Ed Gibney
This talk was the first in a series organized by the EPC about how evolution can affect all branches of philosophy. For metaphysics, Ed began by arguing that after examining the most famous philosophical thought experiments in history, he felt that, “The hypothesis of a physical universe survives.” This position of physicalism/naturalism was recently supported by the stoic philosopher and evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci in his essay “Metaphysics dissolved. Because who needs it?” In that essay, Massimo claims that the job of philosophers should be to synthesize all of the natural knowledge we have, rather than spend time speculating about what else might be out there.

Within this school of thought, Ed shared a favorite paper of his from Dan Dennett which shows how evolution ought to shape this synthesis of what exists. The paper was drawn from the book How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations For Naturalism, which was published in 2017. Dan's paper—“Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism”—was the first entry in this edited collection. Ed shared 9 key passages from this paper, including these 3 quotes:

“Ever since Socrates…the idea of clear sharp boundaries has been one of the founding principles of philosophy [but] Darwin showed us that the sets of living things were not eternal, hard-edged, in-or-out classes.”
“In particular, the demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”
“There are other philosophical puzzles that can benefit, I suspect, from exploring the no-longer-forbidden territory opened up by Darwin's critique of essentialism. … We can perhaps begin to reconstruct the most elevated philosophical concepts from more modest ingredients.”

These quotes clearly show how the naturalist view within metaphysics ought to be mindful of the gradual emergence of phenomena in nature. But this, of course, has not been the case in the long history of philosophy. And so, there is much work now to be done in many areas.

Ed then gave several examples from his own work that show how “this view of life” has impacted the philosophy he writes. These included essays about the meaning of life, what good is (ethics), what harm is (politics), how consciousness and free will evolved, and how knowledge (epistemology) is evolving as well.These examples all show how important the evolutionary view of the world is and how it can continue to help us make significant changes to the way philosophy is done.

2. “Art, Evolution, & Action” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by noting how the arts include what we traditionally think of in this sphere—music, dance, painting, sculpture, storytelling—but they should also include rituals and religion as a collection of inspiring activities organized around the sacred. What’s important to consider here is Durkheim’s definition of religion: “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things…which unite in one single moral community, called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

Arts like these have long been considered puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Why are they fitness enhancing? Do these traits exist because of mismatch, spandrels, drift, or as by-products? Or as a sexual display? David has weighed in on this debate by writing about art (including religion) as a group-level cultural adaptation.

To David, multilevel cultural evolution provides a new theoretical foundation for group-level functionalism. The study of the arts as group-level cultural adaptations is more general than just the study of religion, though.Other good examples include works from: Ellen Dissanayake, Kathryn Coe, William McNeill, Steven Brown, Jonathan Gottschall, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll. Far from “cheesecake of the mind”, the arts are “vital organs” in the “anatomy and physiology” of cultures that act as “superorganisms”. David finished his brief talk by sharing some good examples of how people are acting on this: the Science to Narrative Chain, StoryAction, New Stories, Story Commons, and InsightShare.

3. “Evolution and Art” by Nathalie Gontier
Natalie’s talk took a look at how art has helped advance human thinking in general and about evolution in particular. She did this be examining how art has helped to depict aspects of the evolution of life and how then these depictions have evolved over time. These depictions are part of the cosmologies of an evolutionary philosophy, where Natalie defined cosmologies as the parts of worldviews concerning the nature of matter, space, and time, and what has happened over the course of natural history.

Nathalie shared four major western cosmologies. The first one was from the Ancient Greeks, which has roots all the way back to the neolithic and the origin of agricultural societies. Typical diagrams from this worldview include wheels of time and chains of being. An example of that is the zodiac. A second cosmology is that of the Romans and the Judeo-Christians. These relied on scales of nature, presenting concepts of chronologies and different categories of pedigrees. But later, with the rise of classical physics, natural history, and the origin of scientific thinking, we see the third cosmology where linear diagrams are changed into more precise timelines and phylogenetic trees. Finally, today, in the fourth cosmology, these views are being changed into networks.

Nathalie presented more details on all of these, looking into the different kinds of artwork that have been introduced and from the three elements that define a cosmology: matter, space, and time. Wheels of time, for example, adhere to a circular notion of time The Romans and the Judeo-Christians introduced a linear notion of time. Classical physics saw the introduction of evolutionary trees which introduce a multi-linear notion of time. And modern physics in evolutionary biology today questions the very existence of time or whether it is multi-dimensional.

In conclusion, Nathalie said that art enables us to depict worldviews, and there is a back and forth where art influences science and science influences art. And therefore, it's very important to choose the right images to convey the right messages, especially when you look into scientific illustrations of evolution.

4. “Mind Germs: Cultural Replicators and the Future of Epistemology” by Andy Norman
Andy began by noting how the roots of philosophy started 2500 years ago with the intentional search for wisdom. Since then, there have been notable successes but we've largely failed to create a human population that is significantly wiser. And the discipline of philosophy has mostly lost sight of its original objective. However, a new form of epistemology that draws from the biological sciences might help. A colloquial way of talking about epistemology is “how do we sort bad ideas from good ideas”. This simple description shows the relevance of this project to what's going on in the world today since there are a lot of people who are learning fake facts online and who are really having trouble distinguishing between sense and nonsense.

Andy described some current cultural assumptions that are causing this “epistemological crisis”. For example, our view that we “have” ideas, as if they were separable from us and we alone have agency over choosing which ones we believe. This discounts the view of ideas as something like bugs or germs that (without intention) can replicate and multiply all on their own. We also tend to regard ourselves as “entitled to our opinions”. This stresses our cognitive rights to the exclusion of our cognitive responsibilities. And since a right is something that you're not supposed to interfere with, and critical thinking does in fact interfere with belief, there's a very short path to seeing critical thinking as trampling on one’s rights. This kind of culture excuses closed-mindedness and ideological rigidity, making us even more vulnerable to infectious nonsense.

Andy then laid out what an alternative might look like, which he called his mental immunity framework. On this view, minds are actually infection-prone colonies of ideas. Mind infections are common. Cognitive contagion is real. But the good news is that our minds actually have immune systems that work to ward off mistaken information. It’s an observable fact that some minds ward off bad ideas better than others, so we need to scientifically understand why some minds are relatively immune to such things and other minds are more susceptible.

Some research about this has emerged from the last 70 years of studying “inoculation theory”. Just as white blood cells swarm an injury, something similar happens when information that people feel is threatening comes along. Their minds generate antibodies and the antibodies of the mind are doubts. When doubts swarm to the scene of a new piece of information that you find distressing, dangerous, challenging, or upsetting, that's your mind's immune system in action. And Andy envisions a world where we develop cognitive immunotherapies to protect vulnerable minds and make humanity substantially wiser and more prone to engage in things that promote our collective flourishing.

5. “Morality, Religion, and Spirituality from an Evolutionary Perspective” by David Sloan Wilson
David began by sharing a memorable quote from the British philosopher Simon Blackburn. David had asked him to define morality as you would in an introductory philosophy course and Simon said, “I think at its simplest, it's a system whereby we put pressure on ourselves and others to conform to certain kinds of behaviors.” So, David noted, there are two sides to morality—one more coercive (pressure on others) and the second more gentle and humane (pressure on ourselves). And this is exactly what you would expect from an evolutionary perspective. Moral systems are somehow designed for the good of the group (defined as within the moral circle). There's a compulsory component and there's a voluntary component.

From a multi-level perspective, this social control has the effect of suppressing within-group selection where cheaters and free-riders can prosper. Instead, between-group selection becomes the dominant evolutionary force. That's the definition of a major transition and it explains just about everything that's distinctively human (for example how violence is 100 times more likely in chimp societies compared to human ones). And these two dimensions of morality must go together—the compulsory dimension makes it safe to express the voluntary dimension. Without the compulsory dimension, the voluntary dimension would be too easily exploited. That accounts for the two faces of morality.

Turning to religion, David noted two major definitions. One is from Durkheim, which is all about moral communities. He called religion, “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, which unite into one single moral community, called a church, all those who adhere to them.” The second definition, of course, is a central belief in supernatural agents. But these definitions are orthogonal to each other. It's possible to imagine evolutionary pluses or minuses for each of them. David then went through several examples of examining religions through this evolutionary lens, all of which showed how religions have adapted to function in their particular ecologies. And in the same way that different cells of our body have the same genes but are differentially expressed, David has produced research that shows how different congregations within the same broad religion can exhibit very different behaviors by means of differential activation of different passages in the Bible.

David finished his sketch of morality by noting the “universal elements of spirituality” that were named by a Catholic and Hindu contemplative named Wayne Teasdale. These are key to a subgroup of ProSocial World called ProSocial Spirituality and they may show how a vital part of spirituality comes from both recognizing the individual as part of something larger than itself and also a willingness to subordinate one's self-interest to a higher good. This straightforwardly makes sense as the psychology of an individual within a group organism and it may just be how we are programmed to think in situations where we are functioning in the context of a highly cooperative group.

6. An “Examined Lives” Conversation about Evolution and Philosophy
"Examined Lives" sessions are conversational and meant to produce "mosaics" of individual viewpoints, so that when viewed collectively they yield a greater understanding. These sessions usually start off with a brief five-minute introduction on a topic followed by a few thought-provoking open-ended questions just to kind of get the ball rolling. Then a few follow-up questions can be inserted from time to time just to help refocus, redirect, or re-energize the discussion.

The topic for this session was broadly about the science of evolution, but the conversation mostly revolved around the ideas of what "biophilosophy" or "evolutionary philosophy" are as opposed to the "philosophy of biology" or the "philosophy of evolution". The latter (Philosophy of X) brings philosophical tools to a field to help clarify thinking there. The general consensus in this meeting, however, was that this group brings learning from the science of evolution to classic philosophical questions. This fits the format of X Philosophy, which in this case is Evolutionary Philosophy.

Many other points were raised about the implications of this. By tying ourselves to the science of evolution, we seem to tie ourselves to a metaphysics of naturalism which considers evidence received by the senses. Just like evolutionary psychology, this can be thought of as a lens or approach. Noting “Darwin’s strange inversion of reasoning”—where absolute ignorance replaces absolute wisdom as the starting point for the universe—has all sorts of philosophical implications. Being aware of the proximate vs. ultimate distinction from evolution can help clear up confusion in other fields. The universal mechanisms in evolution of variation, selection, and retention can be fruitfully applied to many problems. This is different than mere “change” which is sometimes implied by casual usage of the word evolution. Tinbergen’s four questions (function, mechanism, phylogeny, and ontogeny), which is a standard tool in evolution to understand the entirety of a biological phenomenon, also provides a comprehensive framework for many issues in philosophy. The field of evolution is the properly large umbrella under which other sciences and philosophical subdisciplines can fit. In fact, the concept of evolution can even be applied beyond the realm of biology, which only considers living organisms. The gradualist view of life that comes from considering evolution is something very different than the essentialist view of life that came from the Vienna Circle studying physics. It helps cross the fuzzy boundary between life and non-life. Understanding the “major evolutionary transitions” that life has gone through sheds a lot of light on why the world is the way it is, where it might go next, and how it might do so.

7. “Evolution and the Social Sciences: Understanding Organizations and Institutions as Major Transitions” by JW Stoelhorst
JW sketched the contours of an understanding of organizations and institutions as “major evolutionary transitions.” And at the same time he tried to give an idea of how this might improve social science theory. He noted that one famous question in economics is simply “Why do firms exist?” In fact, Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this topic. But it was largely in contrast to markets. Markets are efficient, so why then would firms exist? Oliver Williamson won another Nobel Prize in economics for this topic, also framing the question of why firms exist as an alternative to the market. So, this runs very deep in the field.

However, where might we go if we ask this question from an evolutionary explanation? We can start with Tinbergen's four questions. There are both proximate and ultimate explanations. And within the ultimate explanations there's a functional explanation and a phylogenetic explanation. So, “Why do firms exist?” This calls for us to develop a functional explanation complemented by a phylogenetic historical evolutionary explanation. (Perhaps a Nobel Prize is waiting for this.)

Another question to consider is how could or should we think of firms? Firms are in some sense higher-level collective entities so if you start with individuals that are competing, then something like a firm is an organized unit of individuals. In this sense, it is a collective entity, a higher level of organization. That quickly brings one to the so-called major evolutionary transitions (MET) and for JW there is a very close resemblance between these METs as discussed by Smith and Szathmary and our understanding of firms. This, then, also brings in the topics of multi-level selection as well as social dilemmas and collective action problems. So, the evolutionary lens brings a rich set of questions to consider.

JW went into further detail about each of these questions and concepts. And for social scientists this involves a new quote-unquote language. The participants in this session may be familiar with this language, but for JW, there is much work to be done in his field to spread this kind of thinking. And this brings in even broader topics such as moral psychology (studying how individuals react in collective action problems), and politics (how governance is accomplished both within firms and also across firms within societies).

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Back to Work

9/20/2023

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Hi all — it's been a while since I've been able to regularly post to this blog, but it's time to get back into the swing of things. I've missed it!

Back in March of 2022, I announced that I was going to be starting an Evolutionary Philosophy Circle with David Sloan Wilson's non-profit group called Prosocial World. Then, in August of 2022, I mentioned that I was moving to Vienna with my wife who had received a job with the United Nations. Those have both gone very well and I'm settling into a good groove now but these things sure have kept me super busy. Especially since we've had over 20 visitors to Vienna since we moved here who were excited to see this amazing city. Und, mein Deutsch ist jetzt nicht sehr gut, aber ein bisschen besser jeden Tag!

What I didn't mention before is that I have also been redoing my entire house in England, essentially taking everything out of it in order to reconstruct it as a modern, environmentally friendly home that should be a great place for writing and relaxing some day. I've got a long way to go on the house (it basically still looks like the pictures above on the inside), but I realize now that this is a good metaphor for doing philosophy. Clearing out the old to make room for a new, logically-constructed layout using the best information we've got now. All in the hopes of creating an even better place for thinking. I've been fortunate to do this both figuratively and now literally.

I have several things to post about what I've been doing with the online philosophy group. I have a couple of new writing projects to share. And it's looking more and more like I'll have a major publishing announcement to make soon. But for now, I just wanted to get back in the swing of things and get these website muscles working again. Thanks for reading along and I look forward to reconnecting with you all soon. Please take the opportunity to tell me what you've been up to in the comments below. I'd love to hear!

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Evolving My View on Mental Immunity

1/13/2023

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Hi all, and Happy New Year! It's been several months since I've managed to post anything on my website, but that's not because I've given up on this. Hardly! It's just because I've been far too busy with life and other outlets for my writing. In fact, 2023 is looking like a promising year for me. I mentioned in my last post about the Vienna Circle that my wife and I were planning to move to Vienna and that has gone off without a hitch. (It sure took a lot of work though!) After 10 weeks here, we're fairly settled in and I hope to get back to regular writing activities soon. I've also been doing a lot with my Evolutionary Philosophy Circle that's being run in David Sloan Wilson's Prosocial World, and I'll have a lot more to say about that very soon. But in the meantime, I've just published an article about "mental immunity" and I wanted to share it here along with some background.

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

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

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

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Vienna, Circles, and 5 Reasons Why Groups Thrive

8/3/2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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