Human Happiness

There is a longstanding disputation between the acquisition of material comforts and possessions and the attainment of personal and interpersonal happiness; but even as we might write about or think about these things symmetrically, they are not at all in symmetry.  It is possible to attain material possessions while having little or no personal or social happiness; on the other hand, it is impossible to attain happiness without some reasonable, though often small, measure of material comfort and safety.  This difference is at the root of a terrible confusion.

Because some level of material ‘wealth’ is necessary for happiness, a weakness in human logic accepts the possibility that increases in wealth might be the very basis of that happiness: if a little wealth is required to be happy, then perhaps greater wealth will allow even greater happiness…because, ultimately it is happiness, in all its various forms, that we desire to be the primary condition of our lives. 

Who would not agree with this: “If I could be fully satisfied with the conditions of my life, comfortable with its past and happy with its continuing form, there is little more that I could think to wish for beyond perhaps having these experiences with a pleasurable passion.”  Since this leaves out any detail of what might insure these forms of happiness, I might be led to assume that any opportunities in life that would lead to the greatest personal satisfaction would be our most desired options.

But, you can imagine that many people would say: “If I had to choose between the perfect new car and being really happy, I’d pick being happy for sure!”  Then they go right on doing a wage-slave job with an authoritarian boss, damaging their health with stress and lack of sleep, and try to soothe their discomfort by getting the perfect new car. 

Their neighbors see the early moments of excitement and pleasure and assume that the new car really made them happy, since even though they live only a few feet away they have never talked about anything of personal importance.  Its ‘Joe Versus the Volcano’ without the (unhappy) rich guy sending Joe on an ocean trip with a (unhappy) beautiful woman.

Of course, it is not this simple, while, of course, being just this simple.  First, the not so simple part: the complexities of the world that we have made – for we have made it, there is no getting away from that – have made the discovery of and the recognition of happiness and satisfaction difficult, even without the temptations of material possessions. A remarkably large number of people don’t even know what happiness is or what they might do to pursue it.

This has come about by both accident and design. The accident is that humans have the capacity to change faster than they can keep up, but do not have the capacity to realize it or to slow down; of course, some individuals do, just not the species as a whole.  The design is that a confused, unhappy public is much easier to prey upon than an engaged, informed public.  The accident is that as the world gets more complex due to our numbers, technologies, economics and politics the effort required to keep the public grounded in reality grows exponentially and finally beyond possibility.  The design is that the power of the masses is nullified by their confusion and disarray to the studied advantage of an elite; an elite no more grounded in reality, but more organized to dominate – controlling the world is their ‘new car.’

And just as simple…  The life in the body is the same life that animated a Cro-Magnon, the same life that first crossed the Bering land bridge, the same life that buried the dead of the black plaque, the same life that marched with Grant or Lee to Appomattox, the same life that gave birth to all the billions born and the same life as in all the billions born.

We cannot live life for another, we never could.  If we take the abundance of life that we are born with and demand that it have opportunity, we will be living in a way to honor those that carried life to us through the struggles of time.  We are born without a promise other than the chance to live as the species that we are; the rest is peacock feathers and foolishness.

Understanding in this way will not change the world, but may change your life; and changing your life is the only way to change the world.  If you stay the same and most others follow suit, then how ‘in the world’ could there be any change?  If change is left to others, then the changes will derive from their understanding, needs and desires, not yours.

See your life as large; it has come to you from 4 billion years of unbroken struggle and determination, through the billions of individual lives and the millions of species that formed it and allowed it to be.  Realize what it is for; it is not to be miserable, but blissful, and if it is not blissful – and in these times it will often not be – then begin the process of discovery to make your life as happy and blissful as possible in this time.  A hint to begin: blissfulness will not come by doing more of what makes you miserable.

Origin of Agency

Humans typically understand the events of the world in terms of agency – the source of an action or process. This is slightly different than the idea of cause and effect, but it is an important difference. For example, those cause and effect relationships assignable to Newtonian physics, billiard balls and planets, are not normally thought of in terms of agency, or our ideas of agency are a separate consideration in those actions.  We understand that momentum, gravity, friction, elasticity, mass, rotational forces, etc. predict the detail the movements, yet we still ask about the “reasons for the motion,” the agent; who or what set them in motion.  We are not especially satisfied with the answer that ball ‘B’ is in motion for the reason that it was struck by ball ‘A’; we want then to know what caused ball ‘B’ to be in motion in a particular direction.  And again we are not satisfied if we are told that it was ball ‘Z’ that struck ball ‘A’ and set it in motion, quite at random, toward ball ‘B’.  Simple cause is not enough; we are asking questions of agency.

The need and habit of assigning agency to events, not only serves our immediate purposes; that is, we organize complex events, about which we can know little, into speculations of simple agency as a way of predicting the behaviors of biophysical events, plants, animals and other humans; but we also have been led, by the complexity of the world, into attempting to assign agency to events well above our pay-grade as really really smart forest hominids.

To understand our larger relationship with agency, we must first deal with what many have come to think of as the First Agent; really the last agent of all; the human notion of agency ultimately desires an agent:

New Oxford American Dictionary: God, noun, 1 [without article ] (in Christianity and other monotheistic religions) the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being.

2 ( god) (in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshiped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity : a moon god | an incarnation of the god Vishnu.

The typical view of Christians and many others is that God is an actual entity, a conscious entity with qualities not unlike those of human beings: desires, interests, concerns, goals, powers for action, empathy, capacities, but all greater, grander and more mysterious than held by humans.  In the most simplistic form this God is an ageless male person, “living” in some undefined domain in the universe, generally assuming an appearance of late middle age, often with a beard, but capable of any form –  not unlike the “pagan” gods of the Greeks and many others (and sometimes resembling Charlton Heston or Morgan Freeman).

Alfred North Whitehead’s view of God was as the absolute unity of all actuality.  This can be taken to mean a sort of Grand Unification Theory of the physical and moral universe, the most basic organizing principle, but definitely not an entity in any way limited to the human pattern; in point of fact, utterly unlike and unrelated to any human aspect and, as such, completely inaccessible to human understanding.

Contrast Whitehead’s view with the particular Christian view of Jerry Falwell, that God was a supernatural entity that sent plagues, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and tornados to smite people who pissed ‘him’ off.  Coincidentally, the people who pissed off God were the same as those that pissed off Falwell; it is unclear to the rational person who was guiding whom.

How can the organizing principle that relates all the forces of the universe into the orderly lawful system upon which our planet and its special living passengers ride, so utterly beyond human comprehension, be the same as the childish imaginings of a sick son of a bitch who sees justification for his prejudice and meanness in those imaginings. Giving them the same name is just nuts!

Falwell makes a good foil, but I could just as easily use the God of my mother: an old bearded man who protects her in the night, and has since she was orphaned at an early age, and who gathers the dead who have left her around him in a wonderful afterlife.  It is not as dramatic, and not at all mean-spirited, but still just as contrasting.

But this is not a missive to deny the existence of the supernatural, though it is in part about the confusion created for us by these ideas.  I take it as a certainty that humans are an organism evolved as part of the overall process of evolved life on this planet, though an organism with a new adaptation for the handling of information.  A property of this adaptation is imagination; in fact, imagination is one of the central forces of the adaptation.

It is natural and useful for imagination to create Stories about power centers that “explain” how the world works. Human action, from individual disease response to collective action in adversity, can be strongly influenced by such stories – giving such stories great power in human life, quite independent of their ultimate veridicality – so of course, humans have created stories of Gods, that once believed, become essential for a sense of stability and safety.

What this really teaches us about is how humans organize the ideas of agency and belief – how we imagine the forces that make things happen in the world – and nothing about the existence or non-existence of anything supernatural.

It seems both reasonable and “clear” that agency works in the world; that is, each moment is not in random relationship to the previous moment, but is in some causal relation; it is in our comprehension of the nature of that causal relation that our differences and confusions occur.  The greatest error is to take a complex system like human experience and apply it, uncritically, to the rest of world’s working.  First of all, we have almost no clue as to the actual workings of human experience and so applying the “lessons” about which we know nothing to less complex situations about which we know little is a poor beginning indeed: this is, of course, what we have done.

Assigning causes is one of the most common activities of human cognition.  Most intelligent animals assign causes over short distances and within very narrow time frames; we, on the other hand, do so over the greatest of distances imaginable and for the duration of the known universe.  We have made the assigning of cause an essential part of our responses to the world.  But, this is not an easy, obvious or direct process; and the ways in which we do it are not always strongly related to the actual processes and structures we are trying to comprehend with causal statements. The cognitive processes by which we assign causes (or agency) are limited by either the quality of the information that we enter into the considerations, the weak, often distorted, existing structures of understanding upon which we make judgments or both.

It is also obvious (a combination of ‘reasonable and clear’) with a little refection that the “causes” of any, even a simple, event spread out rapidly into an unfathomable infinity if we try to trace them in detail.  And then we are led to attempt the distinguishing of the causes of substance from the causes of happenstance.  How much easier it is to say that “Johnny (or Sergio or Wong or the dog or the god) did it.”

As a way of putting a little flesh on these bones, I’m reminded that Aristotle, all those many years and thoughts ago, puzzled with these ideas.  He produced a model of causality made up of 4 parts and we are still benefited by being familiar with them:

Aristotle’s four causes: Material Cause – the material used in the change or event; Formal Cause – the rules by which the change or event occurs; Efficient Cause – the agent or agency which performs the change or event; and Final Cause – the motive for the change or event.  (example: the growth of a tree: Material Cause – CO₂, H₂O, minerals, sunlight; Formal Cause – DNA, ecosystem conditions; Efficient Cause – sexual process that produced the seed; Final Cause – momentum of life force.)

This is confusing enough as it is, even when honest efforts are made to make clear the causes of any event, but when we add the human tendency to use complexity as a cover for self-advantage this becomes extremely dangerous.  I know of a child (even children do it) who when slapped for taking a cookie surreptitiously from the cooling rack said, “Don’t slap my face, it didn’t take the cookie; slap my hand, it took it.”  Almost needless to say this bit of cleverness from a tiny tot got the child off with only minor troubles and still in possession of the cookie.  This same gambit is used in much more grievous situations.

Using Aristotle’s model for understanding causes immediately puts us onto seeing cause arising from a system rather than from a single event.  I would think that understanding the systemic causes, untangling the web of types and complexity of causes would be a priority for an animal that lives by its wits – correctly understanding the world’s events being the most wit-ful thing we could do.  But I would seem to be wrong.

It is the long time, and perhaps biological, habit for humans to fold the complexity of systemic cause into a version of Aristotle’s Efficient Cause and to look for and be satisfied with assigning agency; this has a natural origin in human experience where a human person seems to generate the motive, collects the knowledge, tools, materials and then performs the action.  We then see this as model for how the world works when, in fact, it is not even the way humans work.

And so we are presented with our two primary ways of assigning causal agency: the naïve ‘direct agency’ in which a single identifiable agent does the deed, and ‘systemic agency’ in which a collection of causes are arranged in a particular way to account for the change or event.  We have come to a time in our history and our power over the world when the naïve use of direct agency with its creation of religious behaviors and beliefs, its usefulness in political expediency and its unacceptable levels of injustice, must be understood and replaced except for the most benign occasions.

Since you have read this far, you will have no difficulty in seeing how these ideas relate to Trayvon Martin’s killing, Fukushima, lying Limbaugh’s limp laments, the general state of political crudity, the madness of the religious right, the rejection of science and enlightened knowledge in general and more.  The conflict between direct agency and systemic agency, the use of direct agency in controlling perceptions and power advantages, the tendency of systemic agency understanding to expose such controls, these and more are seen as the layers are peeled back on understanding our relationship to agency.

Note 1: George Lakoff discusses these same ideas of direct agency and systemic agency in his book ‘Whose Freedom.’ He relates them to strict father and nurturant parent families and seems to see them as secondary effects.  My view is that how our societies relate to agency and the most basic processes by which humans form concepts of agency are critical to the nature of our societies.  It is my suspicion that strict father v nurturant parent families are not the direct agents in defining political differences.

Understanding Consciousness

There are three great order giving systems functioning in our world – by ‘our world’ I mean, quite simply, the place in the universe where life, and consciousness, are possible.  They are: the Physical System of Order (PSO) which is all of the processes, known and unknown, of an orderly universe.  The Living System of Order (LSO) which is made up of the specialized applications of principles and physical structures that, under very particular conditions of physical order stability, organize matter into the discrete, self replicating units of living things.  And the Consciousness System of Order (CSO) which is a way of organizing information, using a variety of supporting physical structures, such that it resides both within and beyond the confines of a living structure. Initially the consciousness order was mediated by the human nervous system, but increasingly is being both stored and implemented beyond it.

The Living Order organizes in ways that are impossible (extremely low positive probabilities) for the Physical Order, but, under the special concentrated conditions of the living state of matter, living organization can produce an immense variety of different forms all on the same basic pattern: a paramecium and an elephant are essentially the same thing when compared to a quartz crystal. 

The central process of the Living Order is evolution and the information nexus is DNA/protein.  By this I mean that life is primarily an information phenomenon that organizes molecular structures and processes through the designs of molecules that have been so situated in the process that information about the functional continuity (success) of certain structures is selected and stored in them and that their designs function to implement the information that they contain [1].

The Consciousness Order organizes in ways that are impossible for both the Physical Order and the Living Order – again, impossible means extremely low positive probability.  But, as with our understanding of the living state from a few hundreds of years ago, still largely a confused concept in our thinking: thinking about the tool that is doing the thinking, we are drawn immediately into a metaphysical realm since there seems to be no physical handles to hold.  The brain is clearly the underlying instrument, but its pink and grey white jelly doesn’t translate easily into the myriad activities that it has organized out of our biological actions in the material world.  And such language and ‘ideas’ have led to the most massive misunderstanding and misguided functioning associated with any organism – ever.

It is my argument that we need to step back a bit – actually quite a bit – from the ways that we have considered consciousness and awareness; we need to first understand consciousness as a system for handling and ordering information.  The first step forward again is to see the consciousness order in its relationship to the other “new” system of order in the universe, the Living Order.  The Living Order presents the model: information that was never collected, that was never consistent enough, dense enough or never relational is the general and vital information of life.  This information is manipulated in a system of order that selects what information will be stored, the form in which it will be stored and the form and manner in which the stored information will be implemented: the nature of the DNA/protein nexus establishes the forming and limiting conditions.  Processes and structures as distant from each other as the citric acid cycle, the actions of a hummingbird’s wing and an octopus eye all find their way to fruition through these same molecular narrows.

Since humans have created an immense variety of ‘things’ and behaviors that seem so unlikely in the Living Order, the immediate suspicion must be that a new system of order is functioning…and so it must have analogous properties, but made up on different patterns.  There must be processes of selection, organization, storage and implementation that are all related through some information nexus that holds the system together as a system.

Just as life has taken on a “life of its own” in relation to the physical world, then it can be expected that, at least, the possibility exists that a new system of order – if it is a fully functioning system of order – might take on a new place in the universe.  And a new place it is in the sense that a new order of probability relations exists that did not exist before.

What makes this view important is that these designs for the ordered handling of specific classes of information generate consistent systems within which orderly and understandable classes of outcomes can be expected.  As such it is a pragmatic and evocative “theory of consciousness”, not one intended to assign physical order processes, living order processes and consciousness order processes together into a common consensus or, at another extreme, seek for some ‘vital principle’ and ‘infusion of soul’ to explain the patterns of action that arise from ways of organizing information that did not exist previously.

The basis of the Consciousness System of Order requires only the PSO and the LSO, as we currently understand them, and the specialized consistencies that allow for a complex nervous system; questions of the subjective experiences of conscious awareness are not the central concerns of this idea.  However, leaving aside awareness in no way renders the consequences of this idea trivial.

Most of the academic considerations of consciousness have to do with issues of dualistic and monistic “theories”, the mechanical, chemical or structural correlates of “conscious” behavior and increasingly the attempt to find some deep physical basis, often in quantum phenomena, that “explains” the subjective experience.  The CSO in the model presented here is concerned with the consequences in evolution, the behavioral products and the ecological consequences, of this new way of selecting, organizing, storing and implementing information.  Most studies of consciousness are concerned with making awareness sensible (a tautology?); this model is concerned with making religion, politics, economics and human ecological relations sensible.

I will, in later essays, look at some of the academic arguments about the nature of consciousness: Pinker vs. Fodor, some of the implications that quantum mechanics may have, various field theories and some of the larger “universal” notions; but it is the properties of the CSO as it functions in the world that are ultimately the most compelling.  I will end this essay with an example.

The element Iron, Fe, functions in the PSO in a variety of ways.  It is the largest element formed commonly by stellar nuclear behavior, has quite stable isotopes and is therefore one of the most common of the heavier elements.  As a “heavy” element it tends to accumulate at gravitational centers and so seems to make up the core of “cool” astronomic bodies like planets.  The transitional nature of its electron structure allows it to combine with a number of other elements in several different “oxidation states.”

In the LSO iron atoms are captured in macromolecular cages and their capacity to exist in several oxidation states are exploited in a variety of ways, most significantly, to allow a liquid to be supersaturated with oxygen at levels orders of magnitude over normal saturation levels; and thus animals can be large and their blood is red.  Iron is not “used” in this way in the PSO outside of the LSO.

In the CSO iron is mixed with a variety of other materials, other metals and some non-metals in exact proportions in precisely controlled procedures to produce irons and steels with defined properties (as well as used in thousands of chemicals).  These materials are used to produce structures and objects in the millions and billions that could not exist in the universe without the intervention of a specialized information handling system capable of selecting, organizing, storing and implementing information of the properties of the iron atom.

Life, the LSO, has existed on this planet for nearly 4 billion years as a system of organizing and handling information in the ways unique to life.  The CSO has existed on the planet for, at most, a little over one hundred thousand years; and has been for that time expanding its information base as it develops and more fully inflates its structural designs.  It is this understanding that we must contend with; that we are made in part of a new way of organizing information, a way that is untried in the history of the universe and clearly – just look at how we deal with a single element – one of immense and unprecedented power.

Just as the organizing power of life seems to be irrepressible when in conditions of sufficient stability to allow it at all, the organizing power of the CSO is similarly irrepressible – and its most irrepressible qualities may be quite independent of the subjective qualities that we have been so eager to understand.  It is the properties of consciousness as a process that selects, organizes, stores and implements information in ways, new to the universe, with which we must come to grips.

Here are links to some more of my essays that deal with these ideas:

Most Things Must Be Explained Together

It is Really Pretty Simple

A New Way of Understanding Our Situation, Part Two

Living Well in Specieshood

[1] It should be noted that one of the conditions that allows the PSO and LSO to function in sustaining relationship is compatibility of time frame.  Large scale PSO changes on the earth take place over durations to which LSO system can adapt and integrate.  The adaptive processes of the LSO are sensitive to levels of change in the PSO that allow the LSO to extend its adaptive range rather than constantly being overwhelmed by them.  It will be seen that this cannot be said for the adaptive designs of the CSO.

A Meta-trip To Video Game Land

When beginning a metacognitive journey one should be at least as diligent as the mapping application on a mobile phone and ask whether to use one’s present location as a reference – or not.

The first and most important recognition (cool! re-cognition!) is the fluidity of meaning associated with words.  Every word is a potential point of bifurcation in a journey of understanding, but some words just jump out and slap you as you read (and think).  In those cases you are presented with two options: attempt to discover the active field of meaning intended, expected or that limits the producer of the words; or to, more or less rigidly, apply your own field of meaning and see how the conceptual structure develops within your limits of present understanding.

I have just read a rather astounding interview article that offers most forms of opportunity to practice these skills: it is called ‘Can Computer Games Save Us All? New Research Shows How Gaming Can Help Cure Our Social Ills.’

Terrance McNally interviews game designer Jane McGonigal.  Applying my mapping tool, I find that my present location is quite far from the destination that the article is describing; the road is both long and with unmapped regions.  Though I am willing to be shown the way, in fact, I lack confidence that such a place exists at all.

*  *  *

Let us begin with this simple assertion: that experience – and the form of experience – matters in the subsequent behavior of a person.  A person whose experience is primarily associated with hunting and gathering essential food and material with the assistance and company of intimate, life-long associates will be different in important ways from a person whose experience is more fragmented into a wide variety of ways to obtain essential needs and whose associations are also highly varied in form.

In other words, it is axiomatic that people who do not spent 20 to 40 hours a week playing video games will have a different experience of life than someone who does.  The question should be: “How are these experiences different?” and not only: “Are there bad consequences associated with, especially violent, video games?”

A second axiom can be called forth: as an evolved organism, humans have, albeit of considerable latitude, consistent traits that define expected patterns of species’ behavior.  In other, somewhat less academic sounding, words: “Does a bear shit in the woods?” Well yes, unless it is taught to ride a bicycle and use a toilet – we’ll not get into the hazards associated with claws and toilet paper.  The problem for humans is that most of us have been taught to ‘ride a bicycle!’  All of our many forms of bicycle riding cloud our perception and understanding of ourselves as a bear in the woods.

And so, just what sort of bicycle riding is video gaming?

Academic research is its own form of bicycle riding, but that is the importance of metacognitive practice – to remain aware of the bicycle we are on as we roll around in our cognitive space.  One of the first and most important of metacognitive recognitions is that we habituate very quickly to consistent and common practices; this is one of those ‘expected patterns of species’ behavior’ and a damned useful one until it isn’t; and it isn’t when habituation prevents us from realizing what is most important in a question.

Social scientists are wary of ‘big picture’ questions; they are extremely difficult to research well, often requiring expensive, large, longitudinal correlative studies.  Most real social questions have political and economic implications, and thus those same dangers.  It is easier, safer and more rewarding to pick narrowly defined questions that can be studied with reasonable budgets in reasonable amounts of time.  This doesn’t mean that ‘big picture’ questions don’t get attention, only that they must be sewn together from often ill-fitting pieces cut out for other purposes.

With these thoughts as background, let us begin.  First the title of the interview article, ‘Can Computer Games Save Us All? New Research Shows How Gaming Can Help Cure Our Social Ills.’  The words themselves DEMAND attention: “save us all”, “new research”, “cure our social ills.”

I’ve seen the TED Talk by Ms. McGonigal, and I have to say that it looks like a propaganda piece conflating the fact that spending many hours a week doing anything will have powerful consequences, the supposition that ‘socially positive’ experiences can (and should) be designed into video games and that if everyone played such games for something like a full-time job, the world would be a better place.

Before getting into the research, what is my present location on the cognitive map?  First and foremost I don’t assume that all experiences are essentially neutral accept for duration; I think there are great differences between hiking for 3 hours in the desert and 3 hours playing a video game based on desert warfare.  I think that 20 hours a week spent working with 2 or 3 other people on a farm producing much of one’s own food would have dramatically different consequences for a person’s general thought process and sense of self compared to 20 hours a week spent sitting at a computer ‘earning’ the money to buy that same food (this is not to ignore potential differences in food quality, but that is not the subject).  I do assume that how, and with whom, one spends one’s time is vital to what a person ‘is.’ I also predict that there can be little objection to these views since I am only assuming that the different conditions of life would produce differences in experience and self-expression.

I further have a few expectations for the people around me, expectations that may or may not relate to the above assumptions.  And that is key, what experiences do the people around you need to have so that they meet your expectations, and what experiences do you need to have so your expectations are reasonable in light of what humans are.

Now we can talk about video games and how they might fit into the human experience.

The research is largely uninforming regards the questions that I have, primarily are video games in general good for our lives or not?  (if you think such a question inappropriate, remember that we arrogantly ask and answer that kind of question for other species all the time.)  Research questions are more like: do specific types of violence (or helping behaviors) increase or decrease in relation to specific amounts and types of video game playing? 

And the results are in for that one: specific types of violence increase and helping behavior decreases with increasing amounts of exposure to violent video games (An update on the effects of playing violent video games, Craig A. Anderson, Journal of Adolescence 27 (2004) 113–122).  The effect is stronger than a number of health relationships for which, we as a society, have taken serious action.  But like so many of the forms of experience in which we engage today, there is vast infrastructure and wealth associated with their continued delivery.

But Ms. McGonigal’s message, a message I have largely rejected above, contains another much deeper aspect; it is made of two parts.  First the trivial, though powerful: the digital world is here to stay and will develop more and more powerful forms.  The second is the one: that digital experience, understanding and daily practice will both enhance our human understanding and change who and what we are – that games are just the weak secondhand smoke of the deep full-lunged drag on the digital universe.

I can see that I’m going to have hit the ‘locate’ feature on my metacognitive mapping application, though I am certain that I will not be in Ms. McGonigal’s town; I will be some place other than where I think I am right now.

Dangerous Moves

In the French movie Dangerous Moves, two soviet era Russian chess masters, one a young expatriate and one an old man, play for the world championship in Geneva.  The deeply insightful ending contains the real and perhaps not fully intended meaning of the film.  The old man is dieing from a failing heart muscle.  The young man, with whom he has a long and very complex competitive relationship comes to see him in hospital.  They exchange no greeting and no wishes seemingly appropriate to the moment.  The old man’s wife is ushered out of the room and the two, one seated and one on the bed, begin. The old man, “You Start.” The young man, “K4.” (White, king’s pawn to king’s 4).

This is an intersection of realities: Life and death. Love and cynicism. Companionship and isolation.  Experience and habit.  Responsibility and self-indulgence.

In the history of the human species certain occasions standout as significantly more real than others.  Many of them have to do with staying alive and with passing on one’s genetic material; passing on one’s skills, intellectual attainments and aspirations have become important to us also.  Underlying these expectations are the assumptions – unspoken and unspeakable – that allow a wolf to chew off its own foot to escape a trap or send a man who cannot swim into a raging torrent to try to pull his child to safety.

It has been, for most of the time humanity has been evolved into something like our present form, these kinds of events that anchored our existence [1]. There is nothing like the perspective of walking among a pride of lions, dodging a charging bison or needing to dive in shark-thick waters to gather one’s food to focus the mind.  These define a relationship with living in the world unattainable in the typical course of life in economically “developed” societies, and account for the surprise and incapacity to act appropriately when some part of serious Reality finds us [2].

We talk with some certainty, and glibly, about how the pressures of the modern world are just another form of survival like the past, perhaps even more demanding, challenging and “manly” than the “easy” troubles of life in the immediate.  I say, hogwash.  It is the difference between a video game and a real sword-wielding madman; “defeating” him and moving on to find the secret ring would be the last thing on your mind.

The Real of reality eventually comes to all of us – or almost all of us, it is possible to never have a real experience and then be taken unawares from behind by a speeding bus – but most of us have few brushes with reality in our bubble-lives of ease and safety; we seldom get wet in the rain, travel any considerable distance on the power of our own legs or know the motivating lash of hunger.

For most of us the Real of reality comes only in overwhelming and ‘unavoidable’ moments; birth, death and the traumas of life, injuries and accidents of fate, that are supposed to visit others, yet sometimes find us.  This form of relationship with Reality is distorting beyond all understanding: living in the mini-reality of economic activity, only occasionally intruded upon by the vast machinery of the biophysical Reality that is the underlying truth and finally dominating presence of this earth.

This is not to say that what happens to us is not real to us. Making the mortgage payment, finding well-compensating employment, buying the car that is just the right amount more desirable than the neighbor’s, winning the chess tournament: these are all real to us.  But they are so completely abstracted and distant from the forces that organize and allow life to exist on the earth that our being cloistered in them, these human constructions seemingly larger than Reality itself, is a madness exploded into the firmament.

As the old man’s heart muscle is tearing itself to pieces, he answers back, “B3.” (and the younger man’s only and deepest response is to calculate the next move!)

[1] Disclosure: I have been in two absolutely life threatening situations while mountaineering.  Both of which had to be worked out over some time, with considerable effort and an unwillingness to die.  Also once I spent a delightful 30 or so minutes with a mountain lion following me: I alone and on foot, in perfect ambush country, many miles from any form of shelter; it trying to decide how much work I would be to invite to lunch, and me explaining with my every motion that I was way too much trouble to take on.

[2] Like the danger of ecosystem collapse, for example.  A people living in touch with Reality would be adapting to it even before they see it coming.  We, on the other hand, have so organized our ways of gathering experience and our systems of power that we don’t even realize that our food comes from the soil or that a high quality life is different from being devoted to fending off death by any means necessary.

The Metacognition Project: A project to change the way we think

We, the all inclusive ‘we’ of living things, are faced with what is really a simple fact: if the beliefs and corresponding behaviors of the earth’s billions of humans do not change, drastically and quickly, then the earth’s biophysical systems will soon be perturbed beyond their levels of tolerance; the average conditions of the earth’s surface will no longer support the present diversity and complexity of life [1].

This is true regardless of human culpability in increasing global temperature and climate change; climate change is but the tip of a melting iceberg.  Human activity has become so extreme that it touches every place on the earth from many meters into the earth’s crust to the top of the atmosphere and beyond.  Its greatest region of concentration is not very much compared to the total earth volume, but it is 100% of the living space and concentrated where life is concentrated: in the most rare and remarkable set of stable conditions that we know of in the whole universe; the wellspring of life.

The list of our impacts is long: direct mechanical destruction of ecosystems with dams, fire, plows, explosives, strip mining, roads, other over-paving and much more; unprecedented energy use and development by taking nearly half of the photosynthetic product of the earth, creating a dependence on limited and damaging fossil fuels, developing and implementing nuclear power sources that generate ‘eternal’ poisons with no antidote and “renewable/sustainable” energy sources with largely unconsidered consequences; the waste and pollution from our activities is spreading over the earth as floating islands of plastic waste, long lived chemical by and breakdown products in every space and living thing from the north to the south poles, biocides and fertilizers spread over millions of hectares in the billions of tons per year.  And there is more, much more.

The common “wisdom” is that humans must do these things to live, must increase in number, must increase the use of the earth’s resources, must have industry, development and ‘growth’.  Another long list can be compiled of the things that humans believe to be true, essential and unquestionably absolute, beliefs that function to support and drive our damaging impacts. 

The most central belief is some variation on ‘humans are not animals and have rights to the earth’s living space and resources beyond animals.’  Certain groups of Christians claim that (their) God gave humans the earth to do with as they wish.  Many Jews have the more complex belief that they are chosen by (their) God among all the other peoples.  In fact, almost all human communities and their religious component claim some similar special status in the world – one exception is the formal nature of Buddhism, but even there, individuals and sects do not always avoid this description.

It is in the animal nature to act to its own benefit; our protestations of exceptionalism are only the application of our consciousness processes to that nature.  This consciousness supported biological nature, which served the species so well for 90% of its existence, has been confounded by its very successes.  We have used the process of thought and belief to dominate the earth and now we must use the process of thought and belief to reconstruct a relationship with the ecology that will allow the present abundance, complexity and diversity of life on earth to continue. 

The only way for that to happen is for humanity to retreat from its present dominating and destructive activities, and the only way we would desire for that to happen is for there to be fundamental changes in what we believe and the behaviors generated; the other options for ending our activities would be considerably less pleasant.  A few minor, conciliatory changes will no longer be enough.

Given the human track-record for making major adjustments over relatively short time-frames, a certain amount of pessimism is to be expected.  But, “where there is a will, there is a way,” is a belief that we can consider keeping in the repertoire since giving up is both silly and atypical of the species. When faced with a slim chance of living or certain death, humans have very often tried to squeeze through a narrow window of opportunity to continue living.

* * *

If we are to change the way and what we think and believe, a significant number of us must begin to understand thinking.  We can begin with the metaphors of walking, on the one hand, and digestion on the other.  Thought can be viewed as a form of transport, a way of getting from one place to another in the terrain of ideas.  It can also be like digestion, that is, it happens constantly whether we are aware of it or not and is dependent on the quality of material delivered for its machinations [2].

Billions of people do it, and have done it.  Many non-human animals do it.  And yet we have only a pale anecdotal understanding of it.  Perhaps we do not need to understand thinking on the same order as we understand digestion – and we certainly do not. We know little to nothing of it. But we do need, as with digestion, to give the processes of thought the right conditions and contents for it to function well.  Unfortunately, cognitive science, for all its accomplishments, is in a form and language that may be a bridge too far for our immediate needs [3].

We can be quite confident that thought is a physiological process and, therefore, there would be physiological consequences from the contents of thought, but I will come to that later, initially it is the more pedestrian view that needs clarity.  Often thinking about thinking finds its way quickly to the study of logic, paradoxes and such.  I ‘think’ there is a much more efficacious beginning: it is simply to ask one’s self questions and quite simple questions at that: “Is that idea true?”  “Why do I think it true?”  “How did I come to that idea?”  And taking the general stance that the more obvious an idea is, the more deeply one needs to delve into those questions.

The first and most important action to begin the process of thinking about thinking is to have our thoughts and ideas (dare I suggest beliefs) pass through the short gauntlet of questions above. With practice, more, but not too many, questions can be added: “How does that idea benefit me?”  “Why do I like that idea?”  “What are the competing ideas of merit?”

If, when reading this, you agree with these suggestions especially for others and exclusive of a set of things that you know to be true without question, then you have a lot of work to do.  I add myself to that group.

There are many other questions to consider such as why humans attach with such ferocity to ideas, what we presently understand about how ideas and beliefs change under pressure and over time and what might be the most effective ideas and beliefs should humans actually make the effort of this new form of consciousness driven adaptation.  These concerns and more will populate these pages.

[1] Soon refers to the changes over the next 20 to 80 years – within the life span of most humans presently alive. There are a number of interconnected factors: greater amounts of solar energy are being retained in the oceans, land mass and atmosphere; the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere and surface waters is increasingly changing the physics and chemistry of both.  The resilience of ecosystems is being reduced by habitat loss and the imbalance of species due to both loss of species and the introduction of invasive species.  The increasing amount of energy in ocean and atmospheric systems is resulting in shifting pattern of rainfall and other weather events; these shifts affect human agriculture as well as ecosystem integrity.  The increasing amounts of CO₂ absorbed in the oceans is not only affecting organisms that use calcium carbonate for shells and skeletons, but seems to be damaging some fish nervous systems so they can’t find their way around. This would suggest that the increasing amounts of CO₂ in the water might be having systemic affects throughout the physiology of all or nearly all water bound organisms.

[2] It can also be seen as a fixed prescription, a rulebook for action in which the process of thought is largely replaced with what is considered appropriate to think. There are those who would rather that people in general take on a package of ideas and beliefs and perform the package “religiously”, where the flexibilities of thought are devoted to rooting out deviations from the accepted order rather than questioning it.

This is how societies have most often been organized throughout our history; it is how certain groups have become ascendant while others have taken on various forms of servitude; it is how we have come to our present state.  This may be the only way that humans can function in the world, but I don’t know that to be true and would come to believe in such inevitability only by accepting it without question.

[3] This blog will look to current work in cognitive psychology and psychotherapy for relevant material.