Philosophy and Spirituality

I've been thinking again about this issue of putting people (and ourselves) in categories, and using those categories as a way of not thinking any more. Because it seems to me that this is a massive potential problem in how we deal with the world, ourselves and other people.

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Psychological research indicates that our minds work on a principle called the "cognitive miser". That means that we naturally try to find the way of thinking about things that requires the least effort. We tend naturally towards shortcuts, heuristics, rules-of-thumb.

One of the biggest jobs for the human mind is building models of the objects we encounter - from furniture to people, people being pretty much the most complex and therefore the hardest (in terms of discrete objects). In a sense, we deal with the world by simulating it in our heads. This is why the idea of experiencing a "real" object is kind of problematic philosophically and psychologically - as soon as we first catch sight of, for example, a chair, we build a model of it in our head based on the evidence from our senses.

When we interact with a chair (ie we sit on it, pick it up, paint it purple), we are really interacting with our mental model of the chair, making adjustments according to the input from our senses (we might have a mental model which shows that the chair is very light, but when we pick it up we find that it is made of a different material than we thought, and is heavier - but until we get that information, the chair is a light object to us).

Simulating people is far more complex, but our minds do an amazing job of it if they have enough information. If you have just met someone, you might have no understanding of them at all and be surprised (in a low-key way) by almost anything they do. But once you've known someone and spent a lot of time with them for several years, you can almost predict how they'll react to any situation. With a really close friend you might be able to finish their sentences. What has happened is that your mental model has become complex enough to be very much like your friend's brain - the simulation in your head will actually act and think very much like them. That's pretty incredible.

The problem comes at the other end of the scale, when you have relatively little information about a person or thing. Your mind is always looking for the easy way, the economical way of thinking about something. So it's going to use the simplest way to understand that thing and begin building its model. It does this by building big overlapping groups, often called called "schemas" by psychologists. They're sort of a loose template for one of those models or simulations. The schema called "furniture" would include characteristics like "not alive", "smaller than an elephant", "solid" and so on. The overlapping schema "things you can sit on" might include things like "has a flattish surface lower than one's head", "solid" and "not on fire".

Of course, we have schemas for people too, and we start building our model of a person by (subconsciously) figuring out which of those overlapping groups the person fits into and putting the schemas together. Those schemas might be "Male", "Adult", etc. And of course they also include schemas like "Black", "Straight", "Hippy", "Manager", and so on.

On the surface of things, this paints a pretty sad picture. We seem to be pre-programmed to tend toward racial prejudice, assumptions and categorising people into little boxes. Even the most enlightened, thoughtful and open-minded of us can't escape the subconscious functioning of our own mind! But like pretty much any theory of predestination, it's flawed.

This isn't some kind of immuteable fate, it's a tendency. It's just like genetic predestination - we are genetically driven to reproduce as fast as possible, act selfishly towards everyone else if there's nothing in it for us (or at least for our genes), etc. etc. But that doesn't mean we have to do it! We're not unconscious animals ruled entirely by these genetic or subconscious tendencies, we have a conscious mind which works over the top of all of these models, and can make choices based on much more complex and worthwhile factors.

It's like the genetic differences between men and women - it's unpopular to recognize it, but men and women are significantly divided by genetics to be better at certain activities. Men are built for action, heavy labour and violence, and women are built for nurture, nesting and practicality, right down to inherited mental structures which haven't changed in thousands of years. That doesn't mean that we have to accept those roles, or that they are somehow the "right thing" to do with our lives! It just means that moving in a direction contrary to those tendencies is a bit harder than it would otherwise be. And isn't human achievement and greatness characterised by fighting against our weaknesses and pushing upstream?

To me, achieving true balance in one's life (which to me equates to greatness) requires that we fight all these tendencies - I test myself equally against stereotypically/genetically "female" abilities and goals as against "male" ones in order to decide if I'm satisfied with my life. To do otherwise would be literally sub-human - denying the higher consciousness and ability to choose which makes us human.

A lot of people (particularly those who would describe themselves as "liberal" - and isn't that just another box to put yourself in, with it's own schema?) are afraid to recognize the existence of these tendencies, because they see it as opening the way to prejudice. I think that unless we're aware of these tendencies, we can't effectively choose because we can't understand what's making us want to choose a certain way.

On the other side are those who are "less conscious", and just accept the tendencies as predestination. It's why I taste bile when I hear comments like "Oh, that's just something guys do", "A woman's touch", "Just like a student", all that rubbish. Most despicable of all, obviously, are those who commit terrible acts based on those assumptions and categories, like beating up Muslims because "they're all in Al Qaeda aren't they?". But we all do it from time to time, those schemas don't go away just because we can see them.

I hate being categorised, or put in a box. I've spent my life trying to break down the walls between all my boxes - I'm a technology geek (I'm always at risk of going broke buying useless little gadgets) but I love low-tech solutions. I cook, I love working with and learning about people. I feel proud when I can cry over something worth crying for, and proud when I can be strong and unemotional in a difficult situation.

I'm afraid of heights so I try and climb on things, I'm terrified of needles so I got a tattoo. I've spent just over half my life learning about and practicing the spiritual path of the ancient shamans, practices which may predate language, but I organise my notes and ritual plans using a personal wiki on a Linux PC. I spent two summers helping build a Quality Management system, and I put every bit of my passion and ability into making that work, to the point of working 11 hour days of my own free choice, but I hate corporate culture and established management structures of all kinds.

And when people ask what I do, and I tell them, they invariably say "Oh, so you're a bit of a hippy are you?". Or "a computer whizzkid". Or in extreme cases "a nutter". Because I'm a shaman and therefore an "alternative therapist", it's assumed that I'll believe in chrystals, homeopathy, acupuncture and probably bloody phrenology in a completely unquestioning way.

Sometimes I get angry at the people who try to put me in boxes. But mostly I just feel sorry for them, because I know they're trapping themselves in much smaller and more painful boxes than they're forcing on me. The builder who can't learn to use the web to find work because he's "not a technical sort of person", the web designer who can't deal with her rocketing stress levels through meditation because "it's for hippies, isn't it?", the client of a homeopath who thinks scientific studies are irrelevent to his choice of treatment because they "don't understand alternative medicine". Those are things worth crying about.

We may sometimes wish we had the power to reach out and break down all the categories, tear out all the divisions and let everyone find out who they actually want to be. But none of us can do that. All we can do is set an example by always being open to new experiences, trying not to act on bad categories or put people in boxes, and doing little things to shake up somebody's experience and make them question their role and assumptions, or just nudge others toward thinking about these issues for a few minutes.

Labels: assumptions, Consciousness, Health, Human brain, Mind, Philosophy, prejudice, Psychology, schemas, Subconscious

I turned part of this article into the short piece "Secular Morality and the Examined Life", which was posted on George James' Secular Thought For the Day website last week.

These thoughts were sparked by a discussion with a (Christian) friend. Now, the issue of ethics and morality is a huge one, it's the topic of whole degree courses. But I think there are interesting ideas to play with on a much simpler level and in our own lives, without it becoming an academic process.

The way I see it, first you can divide people into two groups - those who hold to some form of religious belief system which provides their morals essentially ready-made, and those who consider themselves unattached to those systems and are building their own morality as they go along, based on their observations and thoughts.

I'm not going to get into a religious debate here (I've had some kind of presence on the net since before the WWW came into being, and I did eventually learn that religion isn't an area to make statements on in a public forum!) , so apart from the odd comparison for contrast I'll just look at the second group, in which I include myself. It seems to me that if you are in this group, it's important that you are thoughtful and aware of what you consider right and wrong, and more imporantly why. If you're declaring yourself independent of religious laws, then all right and wrong must be up for grabs - you can't just say "that's wrong" without knowing why, because you're open to the question "who says so?"

Of course in life it's not really two groups but a spectrum - there are plenty of religious people who examine their morality and hold it up for testing. The really interesting thing is that so many people who consider themselves atheists/humanists go through life accepting what they are told and taught about right and wrong, without every questioning it. They accept "it's just wrong" as though it actually was some kind of unbreakable religious law. A while back I had a discussion with a very serious intelligent atheist woman about this very issue, but when the discussion got onto public nudity (don't ask), her response was "Oh, that's just wrong. We just know it is, it's natural". So "nature", whatever that is, substitutes for religion.

Similarly I was talking to my classmates in Art History about cannibalism (as you do), and two of them said they couldn't accept eating human flesh as ever being right. Yet all of them, when asked, claimed to be atheists and felt that accepting anybody else's rules for life was a bad idea, you had to prove things for yourself. The interesting thing about the cannibalism taboo is that there is a biological basis for it - cannibal societies are prone to cumulative poisons like heavy metals, and diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, which are transferred by prions (protein fragments which accumulate in a circular diet). But neither of the class members who made that statement knew about about any practical reason not to eat human flesh - it was just "icky".

A strong strand of psychological learning theory, mainly based on the work of Piaget, studies children's understanding of games, and through them understanding of social interaction. It's been shown that part of the development of this understanding is a progression from a belief that rules are absolute and can never be changed, to an understanding that rules are agreements between people which are open to debate and mutual modification according to the circumstances. We might learn something from that.

To me, a large part of my morality is about responsibility - taking responsibility for your own actions and their consequences. That doesn't mean you can always predict what will come from your choices, but you should always be prepared for their effects. It's like good camping - you clean up after yourself. It's a philosophy which has come to me from others via reading and discussing, but which I have spent many years thinking about and testing for myself.

It makes sense to me because independently of any absolute ethics of right or wrong, if you act thoughtlessly, or carelessly harm other people, creatures or plants, the results will ultimately come back to you. That doesn't mean not eating other living things, but dealing with them in a thoughtful way - the Native Americans hunted buffalo for years without harming the herds, because they only took what they needed. They maintained the balance. The settlers wiped them out in no time at all, because they destroyed thoughtlessly.

Equally if you hurt other humans, make their lives less happy, the results will come back to you. You've put a bit more ugliness in the world, and the world of humans is a huge mass of interacting dependencies. That cashier you were rude to for being too slow goes away angry and upset, and takes it out on her co-workers. One of them leaves his shift angry, and gets drunk brooding about it that night, then crashes his car into someone's garden wall and drives off. The owners of the wall have their opinion of human nature badly dented, and start dumping their rubbish over your wall because...why bother when people are so unpleasant? And of course, the reverse is also true - put a bit more love and positivity out there, and it'll come washing back to you sooner or later on the tide. Frankly I like this structure because I instinctively feel that we should be nice to people, but I can't argue that in absolute moral terms without using dreaded terms like "just because it's right", which of course would undermine my earlier point.

Ultimately though, my morality is still up for question. I know it's not bulletproof, but like the rest of our worldviews it's a best case with the information we have to hand. It's a network of connected ideas, a loose map, which fits the world as well as possible for the time being. When new information comes along the map must be adjusted. Right now I'm playing with the "living free" maps, to see if they can be incorporated and where they would fit, what it does to the rest of the map.

I've only found three statements so far which seem to have lasting value to me or resemble morality, I don't know if they'll be of any help to you. Like everything else they're still up for question, they've just lasted a long time - as long as I've thought about them. "Never make a choice out of fear", and "never make a choice out of guilt" are the twin bases of my Seeking philosophy. And to those I would add the ancient Native American phrase "for all my relations", which is traditionally said when entering a sweatlodge to purify oneself. It's a big statement, because "relations" means plants and animals too, and even minerals to some. It encompasses the world, and it means simply that in what I'm doing now, I'm aware of the repercussions for the universe. I take responsibility for the ripples of my own life. It's worth thinking about, I think.

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Labels: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, Ethics, Human nature, Morality, Philosophy, Religion, Religion and Spirituality

Countless pages have been written about the effect of Internet communication on human beings. Presented with a medium in which they can express themselves anonymously, people can develop extraordinary powers of self-expression and sociability. The most common comparison is to the far older technology of the ham radio station, which to a previous generation (or three) was the outlet by which many a shy, retiring individual became a confident, communicative speaker.

Without the social feedback loops associated with being identified and judged (as it may appear to the socially nervous and shy), a long-held desire to speak out and entertain can flower unrestricted. Of course it's not all good - many many people given this kind of unlimited freedom of expression without limiting factors become, in sociological terms, irredeemable fucktards.

To me both the good and the bad raise interesting possibilities for the development of the human mind when immersed in different situations. We know that as humans we are supremely flexible - thrown into an extraordinary range of environments we can adapt with startling ease. It seems to be all about growing - the mind is a construction of memories and habits and patterns, layer upon layer, which is built just to grow and grow. It sucks down information (fastest of all in childhood) and expands as far as it can within the local constraints.

Around this frantically expanding core we have a series of shells - first the restrictions of the body (the needs for food, water etc., the desire to avoid pain), then the needs of the deeper psyche (security, a safe future), then the needs of our self (love, fulfillment) and so on. Those of you who know Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs may already know where I'm going (and how badly I'm butchering Maslow because I can't be bothered to go back and recreate his whole

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structure).

Maslow said that until we have satisfied the requirements of one level, we can't proceed to the next - until we have enough to eat and drink right now, we can't start planning for the future. Until we have a secure future we can't start thinking about lifelong fulfillment. But to me these needs also present a series of barriers which force the mind and personality to grow only up to a certain point and into a certain shape - the desire to express oneself is one of the strongest demonstrations of this effect.

Once we learn that speaking out and saying what we feel isn't going to endanger our body needs (we're probably not going to go hungry because we said something someone didn't like - at least the majority of people likely to be able to read this article aren't, those of us in the impossibly fortunate and overindulged North/West), we expand a bit further but are brought up by the next shell - maybe the need for security (are we endangering our future security by getting a reputation as a loudmouth or troublemaker?) or the need for love (are we risking being unloveable by being too outspoken?) or even the final tier in Maslow's pyramid - self-actualization (fulfillment) - are we closing doors in our life by speaking out?

To some extent the anonymity of the Net allows us to break through at least some of those shells. This is true however much we use that anonymity - posting under a psuedonym gives us almost total invisibility, while others (like myself) give away pretty much everything about themselves. But even I'm safe in a sense, I don't have to stand face-to-face with the people to whom I'm speaking!

If we can't be (easily) traced, we are shielded from consequences to our safety and security. If we don't have to show our face, we are less easy to mock or put down...we are safe from the social repercussions of expressing our views. A lot of the time this has a positive effect - much of our fear is either a useless stub from (often prehistoric) times when we needed it, or it is a pointless or even destructive consequence of traumas we suffered during childhood.

A lot of writers present the Net as a whole new world which we can inhabit, transcending our bodies and normal reality. I think this is a bit overenthusiastic. The Net is an amazing thing because it is a completely new and incredibly open method of self-expression. At root, it's just another medium (like the telephone or writing) by which we can exchange information. To me, trying to make it into something more, something mystical, actually devalues the amazing thing about the Net, which is what it brings out in people.

If it was some magical environment which transformed us into different people, we could say "oh, that's just the Net doing its thing". But when all the Net provides is an opening in our hereditary barriers, we can see that the transformation comes from within ourselves - the shy, nervous person who suddenly develops the ability to express him/herself freely to the world is still the same person, but has lost some of their restrictions. Ditto the inarticulate person who suddenly discovers a joy in speaking out. That ability was there all along, it just needed letting out.

We can't predict the effects of these new freedoms on our species as a whole. The most extreme predictions - those that predict the evolution of the human race onto a new level of existence - seem a bit optimistic. But we have already seen how this new informational freedom is chipping away at established opressive governments, like the Chinese Soviet regime where the government are having to make more and more concessions because they can no longer keep information from their people reliably. That is wonderful, but maybe first we should be looking at (and glorying in) the effect our new communication freedom has on ourselves - our personal evolution as we experience this new way of talking to each other, and saying what we feel. We've spent our lives being told what we cannot express or communicate. Maybe it's time to throw out all those can'ts and start thinking about what we really want to say.

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Labels: Human, Maslow, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Psychology

In case you haven't heard, things are getting a little heated between atheist and religious groups in the UK. You've probably heard about the initial atheist bus advert campaign, launched by Richard Dawkins in October:



(if we're being picky, it's technically an agnostic bus advert, since it says "probably", but anyway...)

Having asked for donations from the public, the campaign has now exceeded its original fundraising target by £146,000, with organisers taken aback by the tsunami of support, mostly via the Internet.

Religious groups have now hit back with a series of bus adverts of their own. This is my favourite:




A little personal, huh?

On the if-you-can't-beat-em-join-em front we have:


Cheery. And no doubt there'll be more to come. The question of whether all this is actually helping advance the human race still hangs in the air, but it's certainly raised a new level of debate, which I've got to say is a good thing.

Alongside it, but of less widespread interest, is the question of BBC Radio 4's Thought For the Day. For years the Today Program, the BBC's flagship radio news and current affairs offering (which runs from 6 to 9am weekdays), has featured a slot in which religious speakers give a short faith-based perspective on some current issue - it runs just under three minutes in its current format.

For some time atheist groups have been protesting the exclusivity of the slot, which encourages members of all faiths but is decisively closed to non religious speakers. Gavin Orland is spearheading the main campain at the moment.

In 2007, Peter Hearty launched Platitude of the Day, where he posts satirical interpretations of the day's TFTD. They're cutting, often very funny and sometimes extremely insightful. It's from the POTD website that I discovered George James' Pledgebank pledge "I Will Set Up a Secular Thought for the Day Website".

George pledged that he would set up a website publishing 300-word secular Thoughts, showing that non-believers could provide equally valuable and insightful views on the day's events, if at least 29 other people pledged to worked with him. I joined the pledge, and we just reached the 30 person mark! So sometime in the next week I'm going to try and put together a secular Thought to be posted on the website. It's an interesting challenge.

The most reasonable concern of believers about allowing atheists into the slot is that it could end up consisting of anti-religious ranting, which would be as unpalatable as religious fundamentalists denouncing heathens (also forbidden on the show). Hopefully we have a chance to show that non-believers can provide thoughtful, rational and intelligent commentary of the same form, without resorting to antagonism (or cheesy bus adverts).

Labels: BBC Radio 4, Religion, Religion and Spirituality, Richard Dawkins, Thought For the Day, United Kingdom