Rational Philosophy

The psychology and philosophy of familiarity.

My new baby was born last Friday. My four year old son was born on a Friday, too. And so was I. My mother noted the coincidence. I like coincidences even though rationally I don’t believe they signify anything.

Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in the NY Times about an odd phenomenon — that people identify with people and things that remind them of themselves. Research has shown that, for instance, people with the name Virginia tend to be more likely to move to Virginia (36% more likely than those not named Virginia). “It’s what we call implicit egotism,” says Dr. Pelham, a writer and researcher for the Gallup Organization. “We’ve shown time and time again that people are attracted to people, places and things that resemble their names, without a doubt.” The same effect revealed itself in those who contributed to Bush versus Gore — more Bs for Bush, more Gs for Gore. (Maybe the Democrats should investigate whether more registered independents in the US have surnames that start with an O or with a C…)

This associative effect seems curious but ultimately uninteresting until we dig a little deeper. I wasn’t convinced by Pelham’s easy conclusion that we can chalk this up to implicit egotism. Evolution, it seems to me, wires us to make associations. Making associations helps us connect parallel or related ideas and concepts. If we weren’t wired to make associations, we’d have a much tougher time grappling with abstraction and comparison.

As a case in point, researchers have created a drug that seems to be able to block the lethal effects of radiation by mimicking the action of cancer cells. Andrei Gudkov, of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, led development of the drug (code-named CBLB502). Once Gudkov and his team realized that radiation kills because of an effect called apoptosis — by which reparable cells die off because they have been damaged — they made the association with the actions of cancer. Cancers block apoptosis so that they can replicate. Gukov’s team developed a drug that mimics the malignant trick of cancer cells to block apoptosis for those exposed to radiation, thereby protecting them from cell death.

As with many of the traits that evolution bestows, the mental process of association has pluses and minuses. We have the wonderful, valuable power of association that permits us to draw analogies, extrapolate new ideas, and investigate and solve problems. But we associate even when the association is purely coincidental and signifies nothing. (An extreme example may be obsessive compulsive disorder by which people associate sets of activities or combinations of signifiers with good or bad outcomes.) Looking for one’s Googleganger is a mild side effect, as is the self-satisfaction with the idea that one and one’s sons were all born on the same day of the week.

On nuanced news, suspect psychology and scientific black holes.

With much fanfare Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. today announced a set of changes to government organizations that regulate and oversee financial markets. Touted by the administration as a sweeping reform that will avoid future mishaps like the sub-prime mortgage mess, it is, upon closer inspection, nothing of the sort. In fact, Paulson’s plan is a market-friendly distraction from the real issues; it has been in the works for a while as part of the Bush administration’s market-friendly momentum toward less regulation. [Since I first drafted this blog entry the NY Times has altered its article to emphasize resistance to Paulson's plan.]

The presentation of Paulson’s plan, however, deliberately aims to make people think that the administration is responding to the current financial crisis by firming up regulation. One has to look twice and read through several sources to uncover the story behind the story. If one just reads the headlines and first paragraph or goes to a less rigorous source, one could be left with the mistaken impression that Paulson is taking swift and effective action.

Reporting on the interface between the worlds of literature and dating, Rachel Donadio manages to make me cringe with embarrassment. Not only have I not read and barely heard of Pushkin, but I’ve raved about Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Both dating faux pas for some of those Donadio interviewed. “When a guy tells me [Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” says Judy Heiblum, a literary agent. It seems that many people believe quite strongly that we can tell a lot about a person and our compatibility with them from what they read. Fortunately I had the emotional stamina to read on and find that Donadio also talked to those who think that such literary snobbishness is either overblown or wrong-headed. Writer Ariel Levy’s partner doesn’t read and Levy likes it that way.

And a judge in Hawaii is being asked to put a stop the work on the new large hadron particle collider in Switzerland’s CERN research facility by two men who claim that the experiments being contemplated could result in the destruction of the world. In countering the idea that high energy collisions between protons could lead to a disaster, one scientist who has studied the theoretical work around the artificial generation of black holes, says: “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate. But it would really, really have to be weird.” Comforting, perhaps, to some, but not so comforting, I’m sure, to others.

These three diverse stories all raise the matter of uncertainty in life and ideas. We read the news but how can we rely on what we read with any degree of certainty? People tell us how they make judgments, but how do we know that we can rely on their judgment? And important decisions get made about things that may affect our lives, but how do we know what to think of those decisions?

This difficulty seems to be amplified rather than assuaged by the amount of information available to us. Multiple perspectives on government, dating, and scientific research can lead to a situation in which nothing seems certain. If people with more direct access to information or more informed opinions than ours take diametric positions, how can we know what to believe?

In approaching the uncertain rationally, we should begin by exploring the reason for the uncertainty:

1. Insufficient information: Paulson’s plan seems appropriate if we only have a little information about it. But the more we know about the specifics of the plan and the specifics of the crisis it purports to respond to, the more we can feel certain of our judgment of it.

2. Conflicting experience: If we listen to the daters who care about what someone reads, we may think that we should pay close attention to what we read or to the literature of potential partners. If we listen to those who don’t care, we may form the opposite opinion. The answer to conflicting experience is to dig beneath the response to the reactions. What do the opinions tell us? How does that analysis relate to us?

3. The real unknown: Even well-informed scientists can’t say for sure that running the hadron colider won’t have unexpected and disastrous consequences. They all speak of the extreme unlikelihood of anything untoward happening. What we face in this kind of situation is a risk analysis. If the risk is infinitesimally small we have, relatively speaking, nothing to worry about. The more renowned scientists examine and discount the risk, the more comfortable we should feel. (But let’s not think too hard about whether we could live without these experiments!!)

We don’t necessarily come any closer to eliminating the uncertainty, but we can rest easier knowing that we know why we don’t know.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On letting go.

Hillary Clinton seems to have been finding it difficult to pick her campaign strategy, vacillating between a softer, less strident tone and what has come across as a somewhat nasty tactic of questioning the qualifications and sincerity of Barack Obama. People differ on whether she should have been more ruthless from the start, or less ruthless all the way through; but all seem to agree that picking one would have been better than flipping back and forth.

After conducting extensive research through carefully constructed experiments, Dr. Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at MIT, has concluded, not surprisingly, that people like to keep their options open. But, more surprisingly, Dr. Ariely thinks that we like to keep them open not necessarily because we feel we need them, but because we don’t like to let go of them. Dr. Ariely found that his test subjects worked hard to keep their virtual doors from disappearing, even when they knew there was no cost to making them reappear.

No matter how carefully arrived at, the results of research can be misinterpreted. The test subjects can’t tell us why, on a fundamental level, they wanted to keep the doors from disappearing, so this becomes a matter of inference. But an incredibly valuable aspect of Dr. Ariely’s research seems to be that it gives us a tool we can use when making choices.

Once we are aware that we will be tempted to keep our options open, even when logic tells us that this is detrimental, we will be more likely to trust our logic and let go of unproductive options.

No one would accuse Hillary Clinton of being stupid. I am sure she understands objectively that it would be better, or would have been better, to pick one style of campaign and stick to it. But she was tempted to hold on to all her cards. Whereas, if she’d had the benefit of the insights from Dr. Ariely’s experiments, she may have been able to make the tough call and pick one strategy or the other. (Interestingly, this inability to let a door close seems to be the Achilles Heel of much political decision making. I wonder whether it played a role in Clinton’s initial support for and later distancing from the Iraq war?)

Another example from today’s news: The NY Times reports that after a review of treatments for prostate cancer, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality could not determine which of those treatments to recommend. The article and those interviewed describe this circumstance as “scary,” “troubling,” and “disappointing.” But, as the article points out, in the absence of a prefered treatment, practitioners tend to select the treatment that they most ascribe to or feel most comfortable with. The Agency doesn’t say that any of the treatments being employed don’t have merit. And, in the absence of better data, it seems appropriate that doctors employ techniques they’re happy with. One can’t argue that it would be better to have better treatment data, but in the absence of better data, selecting the most appealing option and letting go of the others, seems a rational choice.

As a more mundane case in point I am put in mind of grocery shopping. A trip to the supermarket for a few items can take me several times as long as a visit to the bodega around the corner, just because in the supermarket I feel obliged to weigh my options. Modern life presents us with so many choices that letting go becomes a more and more valuable technique in time management.

I would present more examples, but I have to stop somewhere…

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

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Perhaps it is ironic to write about the philosophy of love on the eve of Valentine’s day. Why? Because love knows no time nor calendar, as Shakespeare probably once wrote and swiftly deleted. The predictability and premeditation of the modern Valentine’s day ritual conjures up something other than love — we buy flowers and make special efforts either because we don’t want to disappoint our loved one, or because we know we’ll be in the dog house if we don’t. The only other reason would be to deceive by kindly gestures. In other words, to increase our chances of winning affection.

Wikipedia suggests that Valentine’s day might have its roots in an ancient festival (predating the Valentine martyrs); a festival that Plutarch described as “noble youths running up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter striking those they meet with shaggy thongs.” This sounds like a lot more fun than a limp red rose and a bag of Hershey’s kisses.

But I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon, so don’t listen to me.

Then again, no lesser curmudgeon than Arthur Schopenhauer regarded love as

“more important than all other aims in man’s life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it.“

“What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation”

He is, of course, exactly right about the evolutionary role of romantic love. Romantic love has evolved as a powerful mechanism that attracts people sexually and psychologically so that they will perhaps reproduce.

I’m not sure I’d agree that it is more important than all other aims in a man’s life. Successfully reproducing and protecting and raising one’s offspring are undoubtedly at least as important as falling in love. But the point is well taken, it’s far from a frivolous pursuit. But we treat love frivolously, often, and seem to regard it generally as a mystery that shouldn’t be too deeply analyzed or questioned.

The psychological theory of love, and much of the therapy we pay for, rests on the notion that we’re attracted to certain people so that we can replay problematic relationships from our childhood; these fatal romantic attachments allow us to try to address those unresolved issues. But we could also surmise that we would find a way to replay our deep-seated childhood issues in any relationship.

If we accept that love has evolved through natural selection as a way of ensuring propagation of the human race, can we evaluate love rationally? Or are the ways of love too subtle and obscure to submit to rational analysis?

The answer seems to be that love cannot be reasoned into being, nor reasoned away. But with reason we can understand its place and respect its role.

Romeo, loving Juliet, could have reasoned that nature was giving him a strong hint about the genetic favorability of his coupling with this Capulet, but could have also understood that there were unfavorable aspects to the union. Armed with an understanding of love’s rational role in life, he might have concluded that a trip with the boys to the Amalfi coast would be just the ticket to resettle his hormones and avoid a tragedy.

And, conversely, avoiding love because it doesn’t seem appropriate or convenient can be a mistake in the other direction. If we ignore nature’s hint, we aren’t living up to our nature as human beings.

Understanding love doesn’t diminish its hold on us, but it may help us put love’s clutches into context.

A Princeton Professor of Philosophy writes this week about a trend toward philosophical experimentation and away from a field of pure thought. He gives an example of the kind of experiment being performed. The philosopher devises two questions and puts them to a group of people, then tallies the results:

Question #1:

A company chairman has to decide whether to adopt a new program that would increase profits and help the environment too. “I don’t care at all about helping the environment,” the chairman says. “I just want to make as much profit as I can. Let’s start the new program.” Did the chairman intend to help the environment?

Question #2:

The chairman must decide on a new program, but the program would harm the environment. The chairman, who still couldn’t care less about the environment, authorizes the program in order to get those profits. As expected, the bottom line goes up, the environment goes down. Did the chairman harm the environment intentionally?

(In one survey, 23 percent of people said that the chairman in the first situation had intentionally helped the environment, 82 percent thought that the chairman in the second situation had intentionally harmed the environment.)

Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, the author of the piece, supports the perspective that such studies can shed light on philosophical study, but points to the complex and subjective matter of interpreting the results, and the ultimate need for traditional armchair thinking to surface any new philosophical insight.

But, to me at least, this seems to be a matter of one of those divisions in a field where philosophy should fall back to give way to a new field of scientific study. This is not experimental philosophy, it is experimental psychology mixed up with the study of language.

This kind of study doesn’t ask people to analyze the situations objectively, which would give us some meager insight into common objective analysis, it merely asks them to give a subjective response. When Socrates posed questions to his fellow Greeks, he didn’t use their answers to tally up some new philosophical insights, he used them to show how most people didn’t have a clue how to objectively interpret the world around them. Philosophy is neither a matter of statistics nor subjective perspective.

And finally a long overdue and eminently cogent report on the illusory impact of race on intelligence. Richard Nisbett in the NY Times draws together a broad and well-informed knowledge of the various studies on racial differences, both those flawed and those not flawed, to show that the likes of James Watson, and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray (authors of The Bell Curve) are full of crap. That was the conclusion I would have drawn in the absence of such information, but it’s good to see it in print.

I’m puzzled though by why such a keen rebuttal took so long to appear. When Watson made his remarks earlier this year, the general consensus seemed to be that he was either bigoted or off his rocker or both. But people rebuked him with opinion rather than information, which seemed at the time and has seemed since almost a cover up for a concealed bigotry — as if people were thinking to themselves, it’s terrible that he said that, but what if he’s right?

Which makes me think that freedom of speech is a wonderful thing, because it allows people like Watson to say inflammatory things and for people like Richard Nisbett to set matters straight. It’s the advice we give our children in school — if you have something to say, speak up, because you can bet that there are several other kids thinking the same thing but saying nothing.

Barrack Obama has been criticized for being too honest in talking about his past drug use. Unlike Bill Clinton and George Bush, Obama spoke openly about drinking and using drugs as a young person. His critics feel that too much information can be harmful to young people. Others feel that in speaking openly he did the right thing. But how can we know?

An Oprah.com article today discusses the benefits of developing an optimistic rather than pessimistic perspective on our lives. Good advice perhaps if for those who tend to be neurotic and hard on themselves. Not such good advice for those who blame everyone except themselves for their problems.

The formal field of psychology has exploded in the past half century, but as an informal area of investigation and observation it has been practised for thousands of years. For as long as we’ve been able to frame ideas and concepts, we’ve been able to wonder why we behave as we do. Psychology is insight into human motivation. Why do we do what we do. Why do we think what we think. Unfortunately, psychology too often puts an appealing layer of frosting on reality, gooey and sweet and distracting, but not very nutritious.

Without understanding the underlying principles that shape our motivations, we can’t hope to map out a solid and reliable foundation for our psychological insights. The psychological studies that get press and attention tend to focus on narrow and specific aspects of human behavior. But what is the big picture? If we want to understand motivation from first priciples, where do we begin?

We must begin, I believe, with the principles of existence. After all, psychology comes about from the application of abstract principles to human behavior. And human behavior comes about from the principles that shape evolution. And evolution comes about through the operation of the universal principle of persistence (see the meaning of life) in living things over time.

Once we accept that all human behavior derives in some way shape or form from the instinct or impulse to further the persistence of life, we have a skeletal framework upon which we can begin to build a self-consistent science of psychology.

For example, if we want to figure out whether Obama is right or wrong for being honest about his drug use, we need to understand the pros and cons of honesty as it relates to the strength of society, and we need to understand the pros and cons of admitted drug use. Honesty would seem integral to a strong society because it promotes trust and trust promotes collaboration and empathy. Admissions of drug use in and of themselves would seem to diminish taboos about drug use by our elders or those in authority, but this in turn would seem to remove one of the strongest impulses for the young person deciding whether to try drugs — the desire to rebel and be different from those in authority.

We could further flesh out this trivial inspection to include other perspectives and layers of insight, digging down into the subordinate impulses to relate them to the persistence of life. The deeper we go, the more nuanced will be our insight. And if we use the principle of persistence as our guide, we will run less risk of going astray.

Until we have a solid foundation for arriving at conclusions about people’s motivations, the science of psychology will remain messy and maleable, and pretty much useless as a vehicle for helping society move forward. But if we adopt a rational, reality-based foundation, guided by the principles of existence, we can take our understanding on a new, productive and fascinating path.

(If you want to read more, LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive further explains the origin, elaboration and application of the principle of persistence.)

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“Expediters” exist as a wonderfully bizarre byproduct of the inefficiency of the NY City Buildings Department. For a mere few thousand dollars the expediter can help your application jump the queue, furnishing you with a work permit in a few days rather than a few months. Raking in money from the relatively wealthy for doing something that wouldn’t be necessary if the city’s bureaucracy worked better has a tragi-comic element to it. Add to that the down-to-earth nature of your average expediter (how else can he successfully negotiate the underbelly of the buildings department?) and you can readily imagine that a vulgar sense of irony might pervade the expediter’s workplace… You’d be right. My wife, being a venturesome soul, didn’t flinch at being the one to engage an expediter on our behalf earlier this week (I think she quite relished the prospect). And our expectation of scoring some low comedy along with our work permit didn’t go unrewarded. Here’s an example: “I’d be gay,” said the expediter to my wife at one point, “if it wasn’t for the gross sex.”

Which is a long preamble to my point of inquiry. I’ve been thinking about the inevitable infusion of levity into everyday life, the capacity and craving we seem to have for all things fluffy, amusing, and distracting.

CNN’s list of most popular stories today features “Diet Tricks of The Stars,” “Guess Who Bought a Huge Diamond?” and “Celine Dion Tries Some New Things” at numbers 6, 7 and 8 respectively (ahead of stories about quake aftershocks in Chile and torture and murder allegations in Columbia). Our capacity for meaningless distraction is seemingly insatiable.

The fashion designer Marc Jacobs has been broadly pilloried in the last couple of years for not being serious enough (in the fashion industry?) A lovely quote from Mr. Jacobs in an interview with the NY Times amplifies both the silliness he strives to represent and the silliness of the outcry against that silliness. “People don’t really want reality,” the NY Times quotes Marc Jacobs as saying. “They want surgically enhanced, scripted reality. The perversity of life today is so thrilling to me. It’s like a circus out there. It’s cartoon land.” It’s hard to imagine that those who have been lambasting poor Marc Jacobs don’t otherwise relish the very unreality he’s been reflecting in his work.

From the other direction, a profile on Mit Romney reveals the coexistence of Mit’s burgeoning passion for serious issues at an early age with his penchant for quoting cartoon characters in his letters home from a Mormon mission in France.

From a philosophical and psychological perspective such things as getting wrapped up in how the stars lose weight, or finding humor in the minor tragedy of our everyday lives, or wanting reality to be surgically enhanced and scripted as Mr. Jacobs so eloquently puts it, seems to stem from the same urge that we have to engage in play. We play because we want a safe place to experience activities that wouldn’t be safe if not wrapped in the distancing of acting out. Animals and children wrestle and play-flight as a low-risk mechanism for learning how to wrestle and fight. Such things as humor, gossip, and fantasy serve a similar purpose for adults. When we’re not wrapped up in our own angst, we can reflect on the serious matters of everyday life with a more balanced perspective.

(If there were ever any doubt that playfulness extends to animals, it would be eradicated, I think, by a look at this NPR slideshow of a wild polar bear playing with huskies.)

Of course, when we take things too lightly we risk avoiding the appropriate weight of difficult experiences. If we go through life evading hardship and pain, physical or emotional, we will live a stunted and “unreal” life. Likewise, if we suppress the urge to play, we will go through life without enjoying the fulfillment that we can find through an objective, playful perspective.

In summing up the inverse of this sentiment, Mel Brooks perhaps said it best: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

Judging by a report on the California wildfires, some residents seem intent on refusing to see things logically. They want the world to be other than it is. Angry that wildfires again have put their homes in danger they don’t accept any responsibility for continuing to live in what is a well-known and, for the forseeable future at least, incurably hazardous danger zone.

Another story got me wondering whether, as Merrill Lynch’s CEO, E. Stanley O’Neal steps down, those who have fostered ire at the company’s recently slumping stock price have stopped to consider what part O’Neal played in lifting that stock price in the first place. Under O’Neal’s more aggressive leadership, for instance, the company made $7 billion in 2006 using capital to trade for itself and clients, compared with $2.2 billion in 2002. The stock that recently slumped, slumped from a dramatic peak. Was O’Neal responsible for the slump but not the peak? Or was he the victim of those now in denial about whether they were getting what they asked for — a more agressive and therefore more volatile company. These are finance types, they surely know that it cuts both ways.

And President Bush, still in denial about his administration’s culpability for the lousy federal preparation for and response to hurricane Katrina, this week siezed the opportunity of California’s tremendous response to its wildfires to again shift Katrina blame from himself to the Louisiana governor. “It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead,” Mr. Bush said. (The same could be said of the White House, Mr. Bush.)

The concept of being in denial presents us with a curious psychological and philosophical circumstance. To be in denial one must be aware of the logic or reason of a situation, or at least aware that one could find such logic or reason, and suspend that awareness in order to act contrary to it. It is a willful refusal to accept reality.

As an evolutionary function, being in denial may be a technique that has helped us survive. When facing the reality of a situation means that we must admit that life isn’t worth living, it must have helped us as a species to be able to ignore the unhappy truth and carry on. In the course of human history countless millions of people’s lives haven’t been worth living and still aren’t today. People have put up with hopeless situations of drudge, oppression, hunger, war, drought, poverty, you name it, living wretched lives that ultimately end… well, wretchedly. If we had seen this for what it was and given up, we wouldn’t have survived long as a species.

Denying one’s perception of reality must mean that one creates and holds a conceptual framework of the world in one’s mind. This seems like a lot of work when you don’t have to do it. I’m an advocate for less denial and more reality in the cases cited above. It doesn’t help the California homeowner to deny that he or she has picked a lousy spot to live. Nor does it help the investor, employee or director of Merrill Lynch to ignore the fact that the leader they’re kicking out has been doing quite well by them up until recently. And although Bush can’t hope to salvage any political legitimacy at this point in his tenure, as a person he would do well to start admitting that, yes, even he can make mistakes.

I saw a news clip today about a New York City stockbroker assaulting a fellow spinner in a spin class (he pushed him and his bike against the wall). The reason: he was enraged by the man’s grunting.

And yesterday I was introduced to the term “Dumbfounding.” As reported in the science section of the New York Times, Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, has proposed that human beings have an innate and pre-rational sense of judgment about right and wrong that evolved as useful to our survival, but leaves us “dumbfounded” when our rational mind can’t explain why we feel that something is abhorrent or wrong.

I would guess that the NYC stockbroker’s ire derived from a pre-rational response; when he wakes up tomorrow he’ll wonder how he could have been so enraged as to assault another person for grunting, and get himself into so much hot water in the process.

Haidt’s hypothesis concurs with my own thinking on the origin and evolution of our moral sense. In LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do to Survive I propose that our sense of morality has been baked into our genes through evolution, and came about for the very simple reason that if we are to persist as an organsim we need to react in certain ways that will help us survive (all of which I tie to the very concrete principles that shape the universe). This also gives us a very concrete basis by which to understand and discuss our sense of morality.

But upon reading about the poor stockbroker and his unfortunate victim I was struck again by something that occurs to me regularly. We live in a world, in a society, that has evolved very rapidly, and evolves ever more rapidly. We are evolved but we’re less evolved than sometimes we’d like to think. We step out into the world feeling that we are equal to its challenges, but it’s like stepping out onto a moving sidewalk. Whether it’s the grunting of a fellow spin class member, or a jittery stockmarket, or a pair of dirty socks left lying on the bedroom floor, we’re not always as psychologically well-equipped as the world demands. Our rational minds have created a mental world that has a dizzying range of customs, procedures, laws, etiquette, social and workplace demands, and underneath the surface our innate urges and responses sometimes can’t keep up.