We Can’t Handle The Truth

David Brooks writes about Daniel Kahneman and his book – “Thinking, Fast and Slow” – in Who You Are (full article below).  The research essentially says that we’re still apes. Which explains why religion, guns, nationalism, ignoring climate change, giving corporations rights, and budget cutting in a depression all still reign.

We like to think that we’re in control, that we have free will, and that we’ve conquered evolution, assuming you believe in it.  We proactively lead our lives through that relatively newfangled piece of wetware, the logical neocortex part of our brain.

Yeah, right.  That’s not really thinking.  It’s feeling.  The primitive limbic system that evolved over millions of years is what rules.  This part of our noggin is responsible for emotion, behavior, long-term memory, and obsessing on reality shows.

We think we’re smart.  Warning labels work.  Advertising can be ignored.  Companies will police themselves. But none of that works.  That’s the just the tip of the subconscious iceberg.  The patterns and rhythms of jungle and tribe are our blood music, embedded  in the fabric of human existence and our very thoughts. We’re just clever monkeys.

Reality is not objective.  It’s not subjective.  It’s social.

Truly we can’t handle the truth.  We’re just built that way.  The power of memes is a direct descendent of the power of our genes.

So there is no one truth.  The truthsayers are not the logicians, scientists, and engineers.  They are the writers, preachers, and marketers like me.  We are the storytellers.  And we own you in ways you will never know.

 

David Brooks:

Daniel Kahneman spent part of his childhood in Nazi-occupied Paris. Like the other Jews, he had to wear a Star of David on the outside of his clothing. One evening, when he was about 7 years old, he stayed late at a friend’s house, past the 6 p.m. curfew.

He turned his sweater inside out to hide the star and tried to sneak home. A German SS trooper approached him on the street, picked him up and gave him a long, emotional hug. The soldier displayed a photo of his own son, spoke passionately about how much he missed him and gave Kahneman some money as a sentimental present. The whole time Kahneman was terrified that the SS trooper might notice the yellow star peeking out from inside his sweater.

Kahneman finally made it home, convinced that people are complicated and bizarre. He went on to become one of the world’s most influential psychologists and to win the Nobel in economic science.

Kahneman doesn’t actually tell that childhood story in his forthcoming book. “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is an intellectual memoir, not a personal one. The book is, nonetheless, sure to be a major intellectual event (look for an excerpt in The Times Magazine this Sunday) because it superbly encapsulates Kahneman’s research, and the vast tide of work that has been sparked by it.

I’d like to use this column not to summarize the book but to describe why I think Kahneman and his research partner, the late Amos Tversky, will be remembered hundreds of years from now, and how their work helped instigate a cultural shift that is already producing astounding results.

Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.

Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.

Kahneman reports on some delightful recent illustrations from other researchers. Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35 percent of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65 percent of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads “Limit 12 per customer.”

Kahneman and Tversky were not given to broad claims. But the work they and others did led to the reappreciation of several old big ideas:

We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition).

We are not blank slates. All humans seem to share similar sets of biases. There is such a thing as universal human nature. The trick is to understand the universals and how tightly or loosely they tie us down.

We are players in a game we don’t understand. Most of our own thinking is below awareness. Fifty years ago, people may have assumed we are captains of our own ships, but, in fact, our behavior is often aroused by context in ways we can’t see. Our biases frequently cause us to want the wrong things. Our perceptions and memories are slippery, especially about our own mental states. Our free will is bounded. We have much less control over ourselves than we thought.

This research yielded a different vision of human nature and a different set of debates. The work of Kahneman and Tversky was a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.

They also figured out ways to navigate around our shortcomings. Kahneman champions the idea of “adversarial collaboration” — when studying something, work with people you disagree with. Tversky had a wise maxim: “Let us take what the terrain gives.” Don’t overreach. Understand what your circumstances are offering.

Many people are exploring the inner wilderness. Kahneman and Tversky are like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.

Music, Evolution, and Man

DarwinTunes is a magical experiment in computer music that illuminates evolution in music, culture, and even ourselves.  A simple sine wave is genetically combined in a myriad of patterns and broadcast over the Internet. The music is looped for 15 seconds and then a new variant played.  Listeners just like you and me rate whether we like it.  Our ratings determine which loops live and which die.

After just two months over 20,000 ratings have evolved 275 generations into wonderfully sweet music (to this US-cultured listener) that is surprisingly sophisticated with tempo changes,  intertwining melodies, counterpoint, bass and treble lines, and color.  The mutating music occasionally plays lemons but more often surprises and even delights with daring combinations and creative leaps  You can even download the tunes.  I like to use it as uptempo background music.

The premise that music, like all complicated forms of life and beauty, can be evolved is proven. Where does it end?  And what does the experiment say about us?

Is man a simple beast?  Will the music evolution flatten out, reaching a plateau that’s maximally suited to the human animal, a scientifically-definable level that corresponds to the capacity of our neural and aural wiring and sensors?

We already know that music has special properties to bypass the conscious mind and directly moderate and even manipulate moods and unconscious thought.  I can hear that in DarwinTunes.  Already it occasionally hits a loop that is “on” and engages both body and mind beyond the straightforward tones.  It’s not much of a leap to  imagine music like this (though far calmer) doled out in Orwell’s 1984 as aural pablum to control the masses.

Almost 30 years ago (yikes!) I wrote a story about music  that had evolved so perfectly in tune with the human organism that it directly tapped into the pleasure centers.  The result – catatonic fugue, a case of technology surpassing man.

But there is another future. Perhaps DarwinTunes will continue to climb the evolutionary path … and take us for the ride.  Higher-order composition and complexity, unknown today, could break music boundaries, surpass the random stylings of human composers, and open our minds.

Human evolution has essentially stalled.  Civilization has removed the process of natural selection, save the occasional buffoon cleaning his gun,  drunk walking in front of a bus, or neanderthal starting a war.  Evolution has jumped to another plane with cybernetic and networked life.

Yet we know that our brains from babies in the womb to seniors are plastic and constantly growing.  Music has the potential not just to tap into our meat to make us happy, calm, angry, or zombies, but to program the wiring itself, building a higher order platform or operating system on our primitive wetware. Instead of a being limited beast, we would have unlimited godlike potential.

Or maybe the music itself, having achieved its own evolved sentience, influenced me to write this essay to ensure its parasitic existence.  I’m sure it will have more precise instructions in the next generation.

In any event there is artifice aplenty in how the experiment is set up.  I hope the researchers extend it by making all aspects of the music experience evolvable.