Silverknife - 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.