Invicta Mens

There’s a new cognitive psychology article that’s been buzzing around the interwebs. It particularly seems to have struck a cord with the obfuscationist crowd; folks like Deepak Chopra and the salesman of healing crystals. However, even Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert, and recently baptized pundit) asserted that it would blow our collective minds about the context of reality.
The amazing article in question is titled “The Evolutionairy Argument against Reality” and consists of an interview with Donald Hoffman, a professor of cognitive science. In it, Hoffman argues that a focus on truth could never have been selected for by evolutionairy processes, and the world of our perceptions must therefore be fundamentally different from reality.

It is a truly bizarre interview.

To start with a main disclaimer: I wasn’t able to track down any paper that would explain his position in-depth. But given the size of his claims, I think I’m justified in critizing based on the public arguments he’s come forward with.

Here’s the general gist of Hoffman’s thesis (printed in Quanta Magazine):

“The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be quite confident that we’re the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that it’s about fitness functions — mathematical functions that describe how well a given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never.

Suppose in reality there’s a resource, like water, and you can quantify how much of it there is in an objective order — very little water, medium amount of water, a lot of water. Now suppose your fitness function is linear, so a little water gives you a little fitness, medium water gives you medium fitness, and lots of water gives you lots of fitness — in that case, the organism that sees the truth about the water in the world can win, but only because the fitness function happens to align with the true structure in reality. Generically, in the real world, that will never be the case. Something much more natural is a bell curve  — say, too little water you die of thirst, but too much water you drown, and only somewhere in between is good for survival. Now the fitness function doesn’t match the structure in the real world. And that’s enough to send truth to extinction. For example, an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won’t see any distinction between small and large — it only sees red — even though such a distinction exists in reality.”

On its face, the structure of Hoffman’s thesis is actually not that ground-breaking. Greek philosophers already played with the idea that the ‘real world’ might not be what it seems. And more concretely we’ve known for over a century that the colours we see are visual representations of objects’ differing electromagnetic reflections; as such, colour mainly exists as a visual tool in our brain and there’s no reason to suspect it is ‘true’ in any deeper sense. And there are many other examples that make our hold on reality appear tenuous.

Still, Hoffman could either be making a modern restatement of this basic insight (that our experience doesn’t perfectly reflect reality), or a far more radical claim (that objective reality isn’t real at all). While he seems to skip back and forth between these throughout the interview, his most striking statements definitely fall in the second camp. For instance: “Neurons, brains, space… these are just symbols we use, they’re not real. It’s not that there’s a classical brain that does some quantum magic. It’s that there’s no brain!”

I see two massive problems with Hoffman’s thesis. The first is with the simulation-based “proof” he’s trying to add to the philosophical discussion; the second is a general objection to this class of worldviews.

1) Hoffman makes a big deal out of the fact that an organism that sees water concentrations based on their survival value (so that both too little and too much water would get rendered as red without distinction), will outcompete an organism that expends resources representing the amount of water exactly. Thus “truth is driven to extinction”.

But the organism he describes in his simulation is clearly NOT an organism that is not aligned with truth, evidenced by the fact that the color red is still giving true information about objective reality. Granted, a ‘red’ environment would no longer be a true representation of the absolute amount of water in an environment, but it would still be a true (albeit binary) representation of whether the amount of water fit the fitness function of the organism.
Truth has been simplified, sure, but it is not extinct. Any actual move away from truth (e.g. starting to see a lethal water concentration as green rather than red) would still be swiftly selected against.

So yes, our sensory faculties are going to be heuristics at best and won’t get the world exactly right. But once you start looking at the concrete implications of that, it’s not all that different from what we knew all along: some aspects of our experience (like colors) are there as shortcuts for the brain but do not perfectly reflect their physical underpinnings (electromagnetic wavelengths). And often they may deceive us.

That complicates our search for truth, but by no means cancels it.

2) It’s always simple enough to make nonsensical claims about what you believe. As an example, it’s easy to say that you can imagine a round triangle or a square circle. But what’s much harder is to explain your view of the world in a way that makes any kind of sense. Hoffman takes a crack at it, and this is where the thesis shifts from locally insightful to slightly ridiculous:

“The idea that what we’re doing is measuring publicly accessible objects, the idea that objectivity results from the fact that you and I can measure the same object in the exact same situation and get the same results — it’s very clear from quantum mechanics that that idea has to go. Physics tells us that there are no public physical objects. So what’s going on? Here’s how I think about it. I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you’ve had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it’s relevantly similar to mine. That’s an assumption that could be false, but that’s the source of my communication, and that’s the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science.”

The thing is, we are not that dependent on our senses being perfect (or perfectly in sync) to learn things about the world. Partly because we now have machines which are able to reinforce our senses. We can argue all day whether my perception of your mom’s weight is accurate, but at the end of the day, we can now test that hypothesis with three weighing scales created by different laboratories. And they will provide us with functionally the same result. What does it then practically mean to say that “you see your own moon” (or mom)?

[There’s a tangential but useful insight here, which I first heard from Dawkins in the context of establishing the Earth’s age. In their desperation, Young Earth Creationists are often found insisting that the dozen radiometric dating estimates we have of the Earth (which all point to an age of roughly 4.5 billion years), do not qualify as convincing evidence. After all, radiometric dating works by calculating the extent to which a radioactive elements have decayed over time, and thus relies on the assumption that each element’s decay rate is constant. But how could we ever know that all these differing rates have stayed constant across these hundreds of millions of years? Checkmate, atheists!
Well, because the proof is in the pudding. The proof of the assumption is that different elements do in fact make estimates consistent with each other. If there was really some contaminating process changed decay rates, it’s extremely unlikely that it all affected them equally¹. It’s like telling your friends to come over at 9 over Whatsapp, and having a skeptic question whether Whatsapp can really be trusted to deliver that message. The retort to the skeptic is obvious: if everyone does show up at 9, the message must have been delivered correctly.]

So back to reality, and Hoffman’s denial of it. The proof that reality does exist (at least at the macro-level, regardless of whatever strangeness happens at the quantum level) is that all of us consistently manage to communicate correctly over the same objects, and that we are able to functionally navigate through an ever-changing world.
In fact, since the modern age we have invented machines that presumably do not share our evolutionary biases. We can use machines, computers and various contraptions to double-check our perception of reality. And it invariably turns out that our perceptions are largely accurate².

There are really only two explanations: per Hoffman we could imagine that all these devices and methods are somehow still contaminated by our evolutionary biases (e.g. in our tuning of weighing scales, we program them with the same faults that we have). And this must somehow be true across the board, with many cognitive biases colluding to make us see reality in the wrong way, and at the same time make us wrongly program all our varying tools and methods so as to not provide the correct results. Just as in the Truman show, collusion must be happening all around us but none of our experiments ever provide a hint.
This seems spectacularly unlikely to me.

Or perhaps. Perhaps reality isn’t that far from our grasp after all, and the real obfuscation happens when we buy into farfetched quantum theories…

When bringing the quantum world to the macroscopic level, there’s always a thin line between useful observations and overly ambitious drivel. For now, Hoffman’s thesis remains firmly in superposition between the two.

Footnotes:

Yeah yeah, it took a while for me to write an article 🙂 Blame it on a conference and vacations, but also some laziness!
I also took some time typing this post because it was time to take on a bigger target. Conspiracy thinking proved too small targets for my rants, so I figured one of the building blocks of human rationality was a better target: this rant is about logic.

Which is pretty illogical! Badum-tssschchkkchkkkkchkk *dropped my drumsticks*

Now, the colloquial meaning of “logic” is a blend of all the things that are good in the world: intellectual honesty, common sense, scientific reasoning and so on. This is actually an overly broad and not at all useful definition of logic, and so not what I’ll be writing about in this post.
In mathematics and philosophy, logic has a far more narrow definition: it is a way to study arguments and contrast the truth value of certain propositions.
Simple example: if A ⇒ B; and B ⇒ C; and if A is true; then C must also be true.
Or: ‘All humans are mortal. I am part of the set humans, therefore I am mortal.’

In real life we use logic very often¹ to analyse statements and figure out what they imply.
And in many debates simplistic forms of logic form the main arguments, as debaters seek to show that the propositions of the opposing camp either don’t follow or contradict. But I believe logic of this kind is far overused.
In fact, it seems that many people have a large set of logical propositions in their head, which they try very hard to not bring into conflict with each other (if this does happen, we get the spectacle of cognitive dissonance). They imagine that these propositions form their worldview, and they are only willing to accept other beliefs that are in full logical accordance with the ones already held.

This strong reliance on naive logic is actually a problem, because logic by itself is a tool that’s rather disconnected from reality.
‘Quayles are eaten at Easter; I am a quayle; therefore I will be eaten at Easter.’ This is a logically correct proposition (as in: the conclusion follows from the premises), despite the fact that all those propositions are false.

Far from being the central building logic of life for which it is often seen, logic is really just a kind of glue to connect some of the facts in our world, and compare the truth values of statements.
However just like glue doesn’t work equally well on all surfaces, logic is fully dependent on the accuracy of whatever it’s connecting, and it can’t be relied on by itself.

Try to make this with glue, and you’re gonna have a bad time.

One of my favourite examples involves how we might have discussed physics 150 years ago:
‘If you give an object in motion more energy, it will go faster. Some particles travel at close to the speed of light.
Thus if we give them extra energy: they will exceed the speed of light.’
Both statements above are pretty much true, the syllogism is valid, however in the real world, the conclusion is false. We know from experiments that the molecule will never exceed the speed of light (but only asymptotically approximate it).
What’s happening here is that because we don’t fully understand how physical rules work close to the speed of light, we are smuggling in extra assumptions without being aware of it (in this case: that there is nothing special about the speed of light; but there is). Yet the proposition certainly seems to be valid and would probably have been taken to be correct 150 years ago… until the point we were able to empirically check it and figure out we were wrong.²

Another simple example might be that the transitive property of logic (A ⇒ B) is generally not applicable to the real world. An alien viewing human sports for the first time, might very well theorize that if soccer team A beats team B, and team B beats team C; then team A will almost certainly beat team C. Yet sports is rarely that simple.
Now of course, sports fans know that there are many more variables that cause this syllogism to very often be incorrect (good counterplay, more knowledge about specific teams, self-confidence). But once again: we only notice that because we have an extensive, empirical and in-depth understanding of soccer.

As illustrated above, only using logic to guide our beliefs would lead us astray very often. In fact, our logical syllogisms only tend to be accurate when they are informed by a lot of empirical facts and closer understanding.
When we don’t have this, we go for extremely sloppy thinking. We imagine that the logical propositions we believe, work 100% of the time, and if something contradicts them, then that something must be 100% wrong. A recent example:

If real muslims never kill muslims; and terrorists kill muslims; then terrorists can’t be real muslims!

Compared to this strict demand for all-or-nothing, airtight logic, I find that thinking in terms of probability tends to be a far more accurate approach.
Rather than seeing the world as tightly connected causal chains (“Y always comes after X. So if Y happened, X must have happened too”) I find it more productive to think about probability curves.

We should be slow to assume that any two variables X and Y are logically (causally) linked; but we might very quickly notice that X and Y are correlated and they often occur together. The first encourages one to create a massive spider-web of logical connections which must be brought in accordance; the other is more empirical.

For instance: let’s not analyse the relation between poverty and crime as a direct causal link, alleging that poor conditions lead to poor choices in life (which is then always open to the retort: “Well my uncle was poor and he never went into poverty!”). Instead we might think about the chance that someone becomes a criminal as a quasi-random process with a mean of 2%. And perhaps growing up in poverty means that the mean shifts from 2% to 5%. This immediately makes it clear that anecdotal evidence will not sway the decision either way, and it leads to both better informed questions and better solutions.

Or when we consider the impact of government help; the debate is typically framed around the opposing views that it is either an entirely corrupting influence (“giving people money for doing nothing”), or a necessary component of lifting people out of poverty. Perhaps the truth could be more nuanced: government support could help for the majority of people, but for the 25% or so in the most abject poverty, it no longer suffices and is actually taken advantage of. We could then visualise the overall effect as a kind of bimodal distribution where there’s few people in the center but lots on the edges. Once again, this would make it clear that we expect to find both a relatively large number of success stories, but also a significant number of very negative cases.

To be clear: both above views are examples and I am not attached to their truth value. But I do believe that they are more nuanced (and realistic) hypotheses than the ones based on simplistic logic.

So yeah, logic is overrated and purely logical beliefs are risky business.
Or perhaps I should say: in areas where we don’t have a detailed empirical understanding yet, the accuracy of purely logical beliefs drops to 50-50 😉

See you next time!

Footnotes

¹ Not as often as generally thought, but still often. It doesn’t really take ‘logic’ to hunt down mammoths, drive to work or determine that I am not a quayle.

² There are ways to argue against this example, for instance that we should have been more specific with the difference between “moving faster” and “moving faster than a specific speed”. But this is precisely the point: we would never pay close enough attention to notice these imprecise formulations, until experimental data forces us to do. We only notice these kinds of logical syllogisms to be false, once we observed them to be false.

³ During this post my criticisms will often overlap with the problem of “anecdotal thinking”, i.e. taking a limited amount of evidence as evidence for a belief. While the two are definitely very related, I believe the problem there is not necessarily that only a small amount of evidence is considered (we often have to make a decision based on little evidence) but that the decision is immediately formalised into a logical propositions (“X leads to Y, because I have experienced it”) which must then be brought into accordance with the whole web of other logical propositions someone has. If we just used our anecdotal evidence in a probablistic model (and assigned a low weight to anecdotal evidence) there wouldn’t be much of a problem.

“Every politican wants every voter to believe that he was born in the log cabin he built himself.” — Robert Strauss

The philosophical debate on free will is one of the most interesting and consequential topics around. It lies at the center of many discussions on religion, the nature of right and wrong, and it may even have implications on how we practically treat others.
Most people on Earth are walking around with an intuitive sense that they are the conscious authors of their thoughts and actions, and they assume the same of others. If we do the right thing in a difficult situation, we are proud for having triumphed over our instincts. If others commit immoral acts, we may think them evil for not taking a better path.
These judgements are all underpinned by the concept of free will: the idea that we are all free to make our own choices, and that whatever our actions, we were free to do otherwise.

I don’t believe in free will.
Just like many philosophers and scientists, I believe that our thoughts and actions are ultimately constrained by factors beyond our own control. That does’t mean we don’t have a will or a mental life; clearly we do. But the mental life we have, is ultimately not of our own choosing; it is the product of unconscious factors that lie beyond our control.
The short-hand definition for this view on the brain is determinism.
(An important note here is that the universe must not be ultimately deterministic, for the deterministic view of the brain to be true. ¹)

My own views on determinism and free will were mostly formed by the old Reasonable Doubts Podcast, and more recently by Sam Harris’ treatises on the subject.
Sam Harris in particular has made interesting contributions in his short 2012 book on the topic. Notably: we often think that what’s weird about free will is that we strongly feel that we have it, but yet we can’t make sense of it in the real world. So it must be an illusion.
But Harris contends that once you pay close attention to this supposed “feeling of free will”, you notice that it’s not even there. In any particular moment, it’s clear that your thoughts are constrained by all kinds of preceding factors and traits, and you’re not capable of freely thinking at all.
Thus the idea that we feel a sense of free will, is itself an illusion.

I want to zoom in on a what for me is the crux of (the confusion in) the free will debate. It came up in a Q&A during the Bon Mot Club in 2012. Harris was asked to “explain” Oprah from the perspective of determinism.
And in my opinion, Oprah is indeed the answer to everything (these are words to live by). Funny as it may seem, she actually hits the centerpiece of what most of us imagine under the concept of free will.

Never thought I’d research Oprah for my blog, but there you go.

Oprah was born in 1954 to an unmarried teenage mother, who worked as a housemaid. Soon after her birth, Oprah’s mother left her to live in rural poverty with her grandmother for six years.
One of her early memories is wearing a potato bag to school, as her grandmother couldn’t afford any actual clothing. She ran away from home at age 13, got pregnant and had a miscarriage at age 14.
But finally, after some hard high school years and jobs at the local grocery store, she was noticed by a local radio station who hired to do part-time news. With her media career slowly taking off, things would finally begin looking up for her.
Putting it mildly: Oprah grew up extremely underprivileged, in a bad family, with bad role models. It would seem that all the forces in the universe conspired to deliver her to a life of poverty, unhappiness, and potentially crime. Yet against all odds, she went on to become the first (and still only) black multi-billionaire in the US, and many regard her as the most influential woman in the world.

The attempted moral behind these and many other ‘self-made’ stories, is that external factors ultimately don’t matter. A horrible upbringing, a toxic environment, a lack of opportunities; these are no excuses for behaving badly. You could have done otherwise. Oprah did!
Yet from a logical perspective, this clearly can’t not true. Oprah ultimately made her choices for a reason; and whatever reason it was, it must have been strong enough to counteract the negative influences. Ultimately, she was lucky.
Most of us strongly push back here: surely this is the one situation where it can’t be luck? Everything around her went wrong,… If Oprah succeeded, it must be because of her own merits.

But here’s the crucial point: even if her choices were innately hers, remained uninfluenced by any and all outside pressures, and she simply woke up one day with the innate drive to improve herself… she didn’t pick that either. Even in the case where a choice was completely yours, you can take no more credit for the initial state of your brain and the way outside influences misfired their potential for impact, than for anything else.
If we are going to claim that Oprah woke up one day with the unbreakable motivation to build herself a better life -then that is where she got lucky.
There is no escape from the iron rule of determinism, and common sense: your decisions are the product of either your natural impulses and desires (whom you did not construct) or the outside influences that shaped you (whose success in shaping, you did not control). Neither is something you can truly claim responsibility for, and no combination of them offers respite.

Hearing people defend free will is rather amusing though.

There are many stories we can tell about the decisions at the core of our life, and about how we changed our destiny and what our environment was molding us to become. These stories are always filled with many details and emotions, and delivered as if they fundamentally change the deterministic arithmetic. They don’t.
Perhaps the defining moment in your life was when at 16, when your naturally rebellious tendency prompted you to reject the conditioning from your parents and environment. You did not create your rebellious tendency.
Perhaps you were in a store and your gaze fell upon a self-improvement book that you knew instantly you had to read, and it became the center of your life. You did not direct your gaze, nor the certainty you felt in wanting to read it.
Perhaps the shift in your life came when you decided to try to build your own mind, using the tools you had picked up on Dr. Phil.  You didn’t chooose that this impetus popped up for you, or that you were impressed by some TV techniques.

We do not ultimately control the things that influence us. And we don’t control why influence sometimes works and sometimes fails. And even when we do make conscious decisions, these conscious decisions are themselves influenced by prior factors.
Despite our pretenses, we are at the mercy of what our deterministic brain has cooking for us.

This philosophy (and this fact, really) is not about negating the importance of effort, or about becoming a fatalist (that’s also a choice).
It is about humility.
We must be more aware of the role that luck plays in our own life, and the potential lack of it in others.

Seeing people not as individual agents but as inextricably linked to their environment, makes you far more compassionate and understanding in dealing with your fellow humans. And it also happens to be true.

¹ Determinism in the free will context mostly just means “brain determinism”, i.e. what happens in the brain, can be explained based on the laws of nature and previous states of the universe.
It’s possible that there are in fact many places in nature where chance and quantum states play a significant role; rendering the universe indeterministic. But for the deterministic view on free will, all that is required is that the states of the brain are constrained by nature and not by ourselves -to what extent nature consists of deterministic vs indeterministic components, is a moot point.