Question Everything

Why question?

"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates in Plato, Dialogues, Apology

This is the inspiration for Question Everything. Socrates chose death over a proscription against questioning. That impressed me as a younger student. It occurred to me that Socrates was on to something and that others were afraid of it. As I said in my prior post, people seem to value safety over understanding if it comes down to a choice. There is safety in religion, in ideology in general. There are others who share your beliefs and conviction and you belong to that group. Safety in numbers.

That may have worked well for Pleistocene man; to be part of the tribe. And apparently it seems to be hard coded into every human psyche. Raising questions about what the members of your group believes is a certain way to be expelled (or as in Socrates' case, killed). It is a certain way to lose safety.

And as long as the world around your group remains reasonably stable, unchanging except for variations in the seasons, and as long as the beliefs seem to work that is probably a pretty good strategy for survival. The problem arises when the world is changing in unanticipated ways, as it seems to be doing now, and on a global scale. If you keep on doing the same things in the same ways, based on these beliefs, and the world changes such that it makes your ways no longer successful, what do you do? The world doesn't care what you think; it only cares what you do. If you do the right things — in consonance with the way the world really works — you will survive, thrive, and procreate. If you do the wrong things for the circumstances you will likely go to an early grave, or at least live a stressful life.

Can there really be any doubt that our world is radically changed from the Pleistocene? Can there be any doubt that it is now changing even more than anyone anticipated, say at the start of the industrial age? And which is the greater threat to our safety today, changing our beliefs if needs be, or seeing cataclysm descend?

Perhaps you are one of those who still do not believe that things could get cataclysmic on our current path. You may be going through the grieving stages I discussed in my last post. Or you may simply be incapable of examining your beliefs in spite of evidence and you will rationalize till you die. If so, you really need not read any further. This blog is for people who realize that questioning one's beliefs and the general beliefs of one's group is necessary and worth doing.

In future blogs I want to examine many common beliefs in light of the changes occurring in our world. I want to examine the beliefs we have about beliefs themselves. There are a whole raft of words that need to be thought about concerning the issue of beliefs that motivate our decisions. What does it mean to believe in something, an idea, a concept, or an ideology? Where does our confidence in our ideas come from? How can we be sure our ideas conform to reality? For that matter what is truth, really?

As we look at what is happening in our world today we see the breakdown of social progress due to the strongly held beliefs of so many people. By social progress I do not mean material progress, or growth in the GDP (one of my favorite beliefs to question). I mean progress in the sense delineated by Abraham Maslow as growth of the individual toward self-actualization. I think the evidence that such growth can only occur in the context of a self-actualizing social matrix is building. And as we see so much evidence that the contrary is true — that individuals sink to lower needs-fulfillment motivations in a social environment of stress — I have to ask where did we go wrong as sentient beings? Even while some people claim that things are getting better, materially, are more and more people reaching actualization of their more positive capacities? Are we as individuals happier today than people were in the 1800's?

 

Questioning One's Beliefs

One of the aspects of wisdom that Sternberg, et al, (see my last post for an introduction to Sternberg on wisdom research in psychology) have noted is reflective judgment or the ability to question one's own thinking; in particular the questioning of one's beliefs and reassessment of how well those beliefs are serving in guiding decision making.

This is not an easy thing to do. Many psychologists point out that so many of our beliefs are hidden from immediate view. They are held subconsciously but are every bit as powerful in affecting our reasoning processes. Accordingly one must work hard to find those underlying assumptions (beliefs) and expose them to the light of day for examination. This can sometimes be a painful process when working on beliefs that involve our core values.

Nevertheless, if the world does not seem to be going the way we expected it to, then it is time we dug deep to find out if some of those hidden assumptions, our tacit knowledge needed for wise decision making, are actually wrong or at least inadequate. We can do this through a series of question asking exercises aimed at digging out the hidden beliefs. Once we expose those, we can also examine their relationship to our values - not only WHAT we value, but WHY we value what we do.

Warning: This is not for the faint of heart.

An example of this process comes from my experiences teaching a Global Honors class called Global Challenges. Its the third of three junior seminars (Global Interactions and Global Imaginings precede). We look explicitly at several examples of the problems humanity faces such as global warming and peak oil (energy) in light of their origins in human activity and their potential consequences. I will return to these subjects in future postings, you may rest assured. But the emphasis in the class is not on hand-wringing and being woefull. Rather it is on how one can solve complex, and in this case massive, problems by first understanding the real systemic nature of the problem. We spend the majority of the class time working with systems analysis to show that we can come to understand the problem if we are willing to ask hard questions and throw out bad assumptions. Trust me, this is one of the hardest lessons for college students to learn.

Here is a typical scenario that we go through when first confronted by a serious problem we didn't expect. Take the phenomenon of peak oil (for a better explanation of peak oil and its consequences check out the Primer at: http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php). Most of my students had never heard of this and were, to say the least, shocked at the prospect. Many of the students went through the typical stages of grieving starting with denial.

Stage 1 - Denial: "That can't be right!"

Ask yourself: "Why do you say it can't be right? On what basis do you make this claim?"

Generally the first reaction is to say something like: "We've always been finding more oil." The next question to ask yourself might be: "Is that really true?"

The students are stymied by this. Someone invariably recognizes that they simply believed it to be true without really knowing factually. That is when we start looking at the nature of unexamined beliefs. I show them the data on new oil finds and the peak of increases in oil reserves due to new discoveries (about 20 years ago). I show them the graph on increases in proved reserves and point out how it has been decelerating of late. They are forced to reexamine their belief in light of evidence to the contrary. But that also means they have to examine their own process of forming beliefs in the first place. It is uncomfortable to discover that you just accept so many assumptions as true without evidence or examination.

Some students (not many honors students, but some) will cling to their first assertion that peak oil can't be right, in spite of the negation of finding new oil hypothesis. They look for some other rationale to use. One that stands out is: "There has to be lots more oil in the ground, we just haven't found it yet." This is rationalization — looking for a reason that fits the desired state of affairs. What drives someone to seek reasons to fit their desires? Is it that emotions have more influence on our decision-making processes, our intelligence, than we would like to admit? In my prior post I asked why, if we are so smart, do we make dumb decisions? Here I'm asking if it is the case that we form beliefs based on emotional drives, especially in this case the need for safety and comfort throughout our lives, more than on evidence-based reasoning?

I suspect this is the case. But here is an even more important question. Why do so many people have difficulty giving up their beliefs once they are exposed as based on false assumptions? This is what leads to denial. An inability to examine our beliefs, an inability to use evidence, once presented, to question those beliefs, and, finally, an inability to give up or alter those beliefs in light of the evidence.

In the case of peak oil, as in the case of global warming before it, we seem to see a wide swatch of the population following this stages-of-grief kind of scenario. As the evidence mounts that the world isn't working the way they expected it to the trajectory is similar. To wit:

Stage 2 - Anger: "This is a conspiracy by ___fill in your favorite demons_______ to wreak our economy."

Stage 3 - Bargaining: "I can't believe it will get as bad as they are saying. Or maybe this will be a good thing." and "I have confidence that new technology will fix the problem."

Stage 4 - Blaming: "OK, what is preventing new technology from being applied is the evil intentions of businesses and politicians."

Stage 5 - Appeal to higher power (a form of acceptance): "OK, I can see that things are getting bad. We need leaders who can address the problems (and they will use new technology)."

Each stage involves rationalization rather than self-examination. Why? Why can't people just realize that if things are so different from their expectations they need to go back and understand why they had those expectations in the first place?

What seems to be the case here is an attempt to find a way to believe everything will be all right. But my concern is that these efforts will keep people from finding real solutions. People value safety, as we have seen in the irrational responses to 9/11 by leaders and populace alike. They value it so much that they will rationalize in any way possible to keep from asking the right questions. The belief that technology will provide the safety we want is indicative (and insidious) of this. I hope to explore this fallacy in the near future.

Meanwhile, if the world isn't going the way you thought it would when you were younger, try to question your beliefs. It ain't easy but it is necessary.

Are we really so smart?

Are we as smart as we think we are?

As a young boy growing up and even into manhood I have always heard (and believed) that humans are the most intelligent species on the planet. But over the years I have come to question just how intelligent we are.

Man is the tool-maker and the symbolic communicator. Man can solve complex problems. Intelligence has been semi-defined as the capacity to solve problems. How then is it that if man is so intelligent that he can put men on the moon we are facing some of the most horrendous problems imaginable and all of our own making?

It would seem that man's 'intelligence' is more a producer of problems than a solver.

According to Robert Sternberg, a leading psychologist who has done considerable work on the definition and measurement of intelligence, the human mind is fundamentally divided into three functional areas, intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. I have noted in other writings that we might consider Antonio Damasio's inclusion of affect (emotions, moods, and feelings) as a fourth, if more primitive evolutionarily, part of mind (more on that later). These four functional "modules" each contribute to the overall experience of mind (consciousness) and fulfill different functions. Intelligence, indeed, is the cognitive capacity to search through a decision space for patterns. It is also involved in learning and recall. It is the processing capabilities involved in solving problems. But it is limited in its capacity by the memory and speed capacities of the brain.

Creativity is a kind of novelty search process in conceptual space. When we are trying to solve a problem we resort to selecting analogous problems if we can find them and using them as templates But failing that -- when faced with a different problem than we had solved before -- we might try metaphoric thinking, trying to see a similarity in a problem as compared to some entirely different domain. We attempt to map the pieces of the current problem to something we are familiar with and use that familiarity to guide our tackling of the current problem. In other words, our creativity can guide our intelligence in its decision processing role.

Damasio pointed out ("Descarte's Error") that affect serves a similar function in guiding the decision process. Our feelings and emotions act to "prune" our decision tree, as it were, so that only affectively-relevant choices present themselves to our decision process. This is ancient. Reptiles certainly do not have anything like our conscious awareness of decisions. They do not reason out a solution. They act on stimuli that run through the brain structures that form the lower limbic system in mammals and us.

In us, our emotions subtly guide our decisions from below. Most of life is really about getting along with or besting other people in our lives. What could be more emotionally driven than relationships? In fact, an early hint at the answer to why, if we are smart, do we do dumb things (a wonderful book edited by Sternberg!), might be because so much of our so-called intelligent decisions are made under guidance from our limbic system.

Sternberg's other mental function is wisdom. Wisdom is related to intelligence in even more subtle ways than is emotion. Wisdom can be thought of as guidance of decision making from learned, but tacit, knowledge -- from life experience. It is the ultimate in what we regularly call judgment. And it is judgment with a moral bias, doing the greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time horizon. Wisdom is a combination of life experiences and the lessons learned (generally by self-reflection) and a specific cognitive processing capability, what I call 'sapience'. The latter is somewhat like intelligence. It is the power to gain and use those experiences based on storage (memory) capacity and processing capacity (how many neurons are devoted to this function particularly).

From neuroscience we are beginning to realize that capabilities like planning ahead, or considering alternative futures is mediated by the prefrontal cortex of the brain. In some future post I will explore the possibility that sapience might be an evolutionarily new capability in the genus Homo. But for now I wonder: Is it possible that this capability in humans, for wisdom, is actually quite weak, underdeveloped? Is this why we seem to show no capacity for considering the consequences of what we do, individually and collectively? Are we incapable of applying our lessons from the past to our current decision processes because we are more guided by emotions than by wisdom?

If we are so smart why do we keep making the same mistakes over and over again?

Some good references in which you may want to explore these issues as you ask your questions:

Damasio, Antonio R., (1994). Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, G.P. Putnum's Sons, New York.

Damasio, Antonio R., (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Harcourt Brace & Company, New York.

Damasio, Antonio R., (2003). Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, Inc., Orlando, FL.

Goldberg, Elkhonon, (2001). The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind, Oxford University Press, New York.

Goldberg, Elkhonon, (2006). The Wisdom Paradox, Gotham Books, New York.

Hauser, Marc D. (2006). Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, HarperCollins, New York.

Johnson-Laird, Philip, (2006). How We Reason, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (1990). Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Sternberg, Robert J., (1997). Thinking Styles, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Sternberg, Robert J. (ed.) (2002). Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Yale University Press, New Haven.

Sternberg, Robert J. (2003). Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Why is the world the way it is?

I'd like to start with the lead question from my first post.

Why is the world the way it is?

If we are so smart, so knowledgeable, so capable of learning from the mistakes of history, then why do things seem worse today then they were in days gone by? Or perhaps you don't think things are really bad. Then the question might be posed: why haven't things gotten substantially better?

Are they really worse? Are they really not better?

Isn't the definition of worse/better a matter of values? Some people think snowmobiles, powerboats, and flat panel HDTVs with 600 channels means life has gotten better. Others think having more time to spend with families and friends is more important than having a bunch of material stuff. Who is right?

If we want to get a sense of the state of the world today and compare it with the state of the world, say, 100 years ago, we could begin with a series of questions about some fairly important attributes of the world. Things like the state of the environment, the state of living standards of people, the state of the biosphere (e.g. biodiversity), and, as importantly, the trajectory that each of these seems to be on.

State of the World

How do people treat other people, within their group, outside of their group, as compared with 100 years ago?

How do people treat the environment today as compared with 100 years ago?

How do people treat their fellow organism today as compared with 100 years ago?

In each of these, the only reason we are asking these questions is that we have a sense that something is going horribly wrong. And why would things be going wrong if we had in fact learned anything from the past and changed our ways?

Treating People

Today, more people are living in poverty, squalor, hunger, in absolute numbers, and possibly, even proportional to the whole population. We have not learned to share our resources in anything like an equitable manner. Worse still, the rich countries extract the resources of the underdeveloped countries, exploit their labor, and pay them back with increased exports of pollution (think defunct electronics equipment).

Today, we are just as likely to be fighting with each other, committing genocide, terrorizing, as ever throughout history. We've gotten pretty sophisticated about both our methods and excuses, in the West. But how is what we are doing today any different from 100 years ago?

And what of our neighbors? Especially if they are darker or lighter in skin color? Have we really transcended race and ethnicity to really celebrate diversity? In places and at times, maybe. We certainly give lip service to the need to do so. But how often do we see flare ups like the Jena Six (or seven) case? What was the O.J. Simpson trial really about?

Treating the Environment

As I write this the IPCC (the UN International Panel on Climate Change) has issued its most alarming report to date. There is little doubt that mankind's economic activities are having a world-changing impact on the natural world. Global Warming due to the release of carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil carbon may yet prove cataclysmic in ways we can barely conceive. And what are we doing about the threat? While many people throughout the world agree we SHOULD be doing something, very few really are doing what will be needed to meet the reductions in CO2 emissions spelled out by the IPCC. Those in the US are barely aware of the danger. Too many people still think that swapping out their incandescent lights for compact florescent should be adequate.

Nor is this greenhouse gas pollution the whole story. By our sheer numbers we are depleting fisheries, aquifers, soils, and forests. We are pumping unknown tons of man-made chemicals into the environment as we create new molecules for our enjoyment. Jared Diamond, in his excellent pair of books, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" and "Collapse" offers several examples of civilizations that depleted their local resources and suffered consequences as a result. We've done this to ourselves in the past, locally geographically-speaking, but have we learned anything? It seems not. (Or if we have are we capable of doing anything different now? That will be a subject of a future post.)

Treating Organisms

According to Roger Lewin and Richard Leaky we may be in the "Sixth Extinction", a great diminishment of species diversity all over the globe. There have been a number of 'Great Die Offs', such as what occurred at the end of the Cretaceous Period with the mass extinctions of the dinosaurs. That great die off may have been precipitated by the effects of a massive comet or meteor crashing into the earth -- an outside caused event. The current accelerating loss of biodiversity is attribute to human destruction of natural habitat on every continent.

And what about the sexual potency provided by rhinoceros horn? What about those beautiful carvings of elephant tusks? What about the pleasure of eating the last specimen of a species of monkey? Shouldn't humans have the right to destroy whatever they think will do them good?

Shouldn't we be able to log old growth rain forests even if it means destroying the nesting places for a rare bird?

We've done this before in modern times and suffered unintended consequences (the uncontrolled deer population in the Eastern states along with the increase in Lyme disease and now prion-caused wasting disease is just one example). What have we learned? Why do we keep doing these things?

The truth is there are simply too many examples of how humans are wreaking the world. Even while we notice this, we report it to ourselves, we express the sincere sentiment that something needs to be done, what are we really doing?

My sense is that the world is in worse shape than it was 100 years ago. Today we talk of changes in the climate, melting glaciers and polar ice, rising sea level, destruction of once gigantic fisheries, loss of potable water supplies (look at Atlanta and China), continuing wars in unstable regions. And now a new worry emerges. We have, in all likelihood, used most of the easily extractable fossil fuels (at least oil and natural gas). Extracting what's left that can be extracted (and not all can for simple physical reasons) will be increasingly expensive. The extent of our population depends directly on the availability of high quality energy sources. With the peak and decline in oil production we will have lost one of the greatest sources man has ever had. Then what?

Which leads back to the question -- Why?

Questions lead to more questions. We could start trying to answer this one. We could speculate about why humans haven't really learned anything or why they continue to do selfish things. But would that really help anything?  I think we need to ask many more questions, especially about our unexamined assumptions. That is where I want to go next. If we are so clever -- and we assume we are -- why haven't we figured this all out and done something about it? I wonder.

Questions

Why is the world the way it is? How did it get this way? Where are we going?

After a reasonably long life of wondering what this world was all about I have come to realize that nothing is as it seems. This is especially true of what other people tell me is so. People don't necessarily lie. Its just that they don't really know either.

There are some major disconnects between what so many people believe and what I see as evidence that things are not in accordance with those beliefs. And this is to our peril.

This blog will be devoted to asking questions about these beliefs given the kind of evidence that is building up steadily against them. The subjects of these questions will be wide ranging, from economics (e.g. capitalism is the best form of economic organization!) to politics (e.g. democracy is the best form of polity) to education (e.g. people need to learn a discipline in school). I will be asking questions about life, psychology, energy, evolution, religious faith, and ideology, among other subjects.

I just find that wherever I look, no matter the subject, there are discrepancies in the received wisdom versus the evidence of where we are going. Take the issue of economic growth -- an assumed good. Compare that philosophy with the facts of what happens to people, their values and mental wellbeing, in a consumption-driven society. Compare it with the facts of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming resulting from economic activity.  Things don't add up, do they?

Along the way I will share with you what I have found as possible answers to some of these questions. But I will only offer pointers rather than tutorials. It is my firm conviction that everyone should pursue their own process of questioning. This is because in order to ask a meaningful question you have to have some basis in knowing something about the subject. You don't need to be an expert, necessarily. You just need to have a grasp on the main claims of the subject. I'll provide some examples as we go along.

As much as anything you need two important traits: curiosity and discernment. You need to want to know and you need to recognize that there is some difference between what you expected to observe and what you actually observe. These two traits, plus maintaining an open mind, will generally yield the right attitude to develop meaningful questions.

If you want to share your questions and evidence here, I invite you to do so. I'm quite certain that many of you have thought of excellent questions that would never have occurred to me, so you would be helping me.  I only ask that if you provide comments that they take on the nature of additional on-topic questions. Please also provide the evidence that motivates the question. Share with us the observations of reality that differ from what you had come to believe and that form the basis of the question.

It is extremely tempting to offer answers (or more generally opinions) to questions posed. We all have opinions on all sorts of subjects. And we're naturally eager to show everyone how clever we are. But that isn't the point here. I don't really have any answers after doing professional question asking for many years. But I have developed some good ideas of where to look for answers. And these are always based on evidence, scientifically obtained. They are pointers to possibilities, not definitive conclusions. I ask that you refrain from offering opinion only. If you want to share a pointer, make it based on evidence and reason. We'll see how this conversation goes, given the open nature of blog commentary.

The questions start after the Thanksgiving holiday. Meanwhile, wherever you are in this world, may you find something to be thankful for, and  question everything.