Carl Jung: …even the enlightened person remains what he is…

The Christian Church has hitherto. . . [recognized] Christ as the one and only God-man.

But the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, the third Divine Person, in man, brings about a Christification of many, and the question then arises whether these many are all complete God-men. . . .

It is well to remind ourselves of St. Paul and his split consciousness: on one side he felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and, on the other side, a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him.

That is to say even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.

~Carl Jung, CW 11, Page 470.

Can Neuroscience understand free will?

by Brian Gallagher

In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral philosophy gets teased. On YouTube, the show released a promotional video, “This Is Why Everyone Hates Moral Philosophy,” that gets its title from a line directed at Chidi, a Senegalese professor of moral philosophy who suffers from chronic indecision: The pros and cons of even trivial choices have long paralyzed him. We see him, as a precocious boy, urged to get on with picking teammates for a soccer game. Flustered, Chidi explains, “I have to consider all the factors: athletic strategies, the fragile egos of my classmates, and gender politics! Should I pick a girl as a gesture toward women’s equality, or is that pandering? Or do I think it’s pandering because of my limited male point of view? I’m vexed!” The kids waiting to play shake their heads, facepalming. A friend later insists he “fix his brain.” An M.R.I., courtesy of a neuroscientist named Simone, shows he’s fine. “Wow, there are actual answers here—data you can observe, and learn from,” Chidi says. “Yeah, man! Science is all about getting answers,” Simone replies. “You philosophers can spend your entire life mulling over a single question. That’s why everyone hates moral philosophy professors.” Both of them chuckle and she adds, “No offense.”

This is mock-hate, born of love. Before Mike Schur, the show’s creator, started shooting scenes, he paid a visit to the UCLA moral philosopher Pamela Hieronymi for insight. She’s interested in the sort of control humans have over our intentions and emotions, and how it might differ from control over our actions. Her favorite thought experiment comes from a 1983 paper, “The Toxin Puzzle,” by Gregory Kavka. A delightful head-scratcher, it invites you to imagine that an eccentric billionaire has offered you a deal: If you merely intend to drink a toxin tonight, at midnight, that will make you painfully ill for a day, he will wire you a million dollars—it’ll be in your bank tomorrow morning. A sophisticated and reliable brain scanner will determine whether you really formed the intention to imbibe the toxin. After you have the funds in your bank account, you’re free to decide not to drink it. An easy way to become a millionaire, no? Just intend to drink it for the scanner and, once you have the cash, switch your intention.

The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break.

This is absurd, of course, and that’s Kavka’s point: We don’t have that sort of control over ourselves. If you intend to drink it (for the sake of the scanner) but also intend, later, to not drink it (to avoid the sickness), you’re really intending to not drink it. Our intentions are only “partly volitional,” Kavka says. “One cannot intend whatever one wants to intend any more than one can believe whatever one wants to believe. As our beliefs are constrained by our evidence, so our intentions are constrained by our reasons for action.” The sense that you have of being in control, of having free will, is just that—a sense. And it can break.

Clinical neuroscientists and neurologists have identified the brain networks responsible for this sense of free will. There seems to be two: the network governing the desire to act, and the network governing the feeling of responsibility for acting. Brain-damaged patients show that these can come apart—you can have one without the other.

Lacking essentially all motivation to move or speak has a name: akinetic mutism. The researchers, lead by neurologists Michael Fox, of Harvard Medical School, and Ryan Darby, of Vanderbilt University, analyzed 28 cases of this condition, not all of them involving damage in the same departments. “We found that brain lesions that disrupt volition occur in many different locations, but fall within a single brain network, defined by connectivity to the anterior cingulate,” which has links to both the “emotional” limbic system and the “cognitive” prefrontal cortex, the researchers wrote. Feeling like you’re moving under the direction of outside forces has a name, too: alien limb syndrome. The researchers analyzed 50 cases of this condition, which again involved brain damage in different spots. “Lesions that disrupt agency also occur in many different locations, but fall within a separate network, defined by connectivity to the precuneus,” which is involved, among other things, in the experience of agency.

The results may not map onto “free will” as we understand it ethically—the ability to choose between right and wrong. “It remains unknown whether the network of brain regions we identify as related to free will for movements is the same as those important for moral decision-making, as prior studies have suggested important differences,” the researchers wrote. For instance, in a 2017 study, he and Darby analyzed many cases of brain lesions in various regions predisposing people to criminal behavior, and found that “these lesions all fall within a unique functionally connected brain network involved in moral decision making.”

Nevertheless, the fact that brain damage affects moral behavior only underscores the reality that, whatever the “will” is, it isn’t “free.” The sense of freedom we have to act on our moral understanding is regulated and vulnerable, and can break. In a 2016 paper, Darby noted that people who have behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia “develop immoral behaviors as a result of their disease despite the ability to explicitly state that their behavior is wrong.” This complicates how moral responsibility should be understood, he explains. People can be capable of acknowledging wrongdoing and yet be incapable of acting accordingly. Responsibility can’t hinge on any simple notion of “reason responsiveness,” Darby says, which is a view of how free will can be compatible with determinism—the idea, in the case of behavior, that brain activity causes feelings, intentions, and actions, moral or not.

It’s still not clear whether lay people tend to lean toward “compatibilism” or not. Experimental philosophers have been trying to find out for years, but haven’t landed on a consensus. A recent study explains why: “People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral responsibility, and thus do not have stable, logically rigorous notions of free will,” the researchers found. After conducting a series of studies probing people’s philosophical intuitions, the researchers concluded that people seem to be flexible in their views. They don’t have “one intuition about whether free will is compatible with determinism,” the researchers concluded. “Instead, people report that free will is compatible with determinism when desiring to uphold moral responsibility.”

The concept of free will doesn’t make any sense to me. As Kavka’s thought experiment shows, we don’t have much control over our thoughts. Take this article I’m writing: The words I’m committing to print pop into my mind unbeckoned. It’s less me choosing them and more them presenting themselves to me. The act of writing feels more like a process of passive filtration than active conjuration. I’m also convinced that humans can sensibly hold one another morally responsible even if we jettison the idea of free will. The reason is that, as a social mechanism, it has salutary effects. Generally, if people know that they will be held to account for moral violations, they will be less likely to commit them; and if they don’t know what the moral rules are, they will be motivated to learn them. Indeed, in the study on compatibilism, the researchers found that “participants reduced their compatibilist beliefs after reading a passage that argued that moral responsibility could be preserved even in the absence of free will.”

In any case, the mystery of free will isn’t going away anytime soon. In March, a group of neuroscientists and philosophers announced that they’ve received $7 million to study the nature of free will and whether humans have it. Uri Maoz, a computational neuroscientist at Chapman University, is leading the project. “As a scientist, I don’t know what it entails to have free will,” he said in an interview with Science. That’s a philosophical puzzle. But once Maoz’s philosopher colleagues agree on a definition, he can get to work to see if it occurs in humans. “This is an empirical question. It may be that I don’t have the technology to measure it, but that is at least an empirical question that I could get at.”

Maybe, as Chidi said looking at his M.R.I. results, there will be answers there, data we can observe and learn from. Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime. Whatever the result, there’s always the ironic answer to the question of whether we have free will: “Of course we do. We have no choice.”

Is life a dream?

via Psychology Today

One of the strange things about dreams is that, most of the time, we aren’t aware we’re dreaming. Typically, our memory and our reflective ability are substantially limited within dreams (Fosse et al. 2003; Hobson et al. 1998), causing us not to notice incongruencies within the dream and to take for granted that what we experience is real. It simply doesn’t occur to us to consider whether it might not be.

Perhaps even more strangely, even when we do on occasion become aware that we’re dreaming—and according to various surveys carried out around the world, anywhere from 26% to 92% of people have had at least one lucid dream (Stepansky et al. 1998; Erlacher et al. 2008; Palmer 1979; Yu 2008)—the “sensory” experiences of the dream can remain just as convincingly real. I remember in one of my own dreams realizing that it was a dream and then marveling at how solid and real the cell phone in my hand still felt.

The ability of the dream world to appear real has led many thinkers—philosopher René Descartes (1641) being the most prominent Western example—to wonder whether the world we experience while awake might itself be a dream. If the dream world feels just as real as the waking one (at least while we are in it), how can we know for sure that we’re not currently living in a dream—a dream from which we may one day wake up?

One way that philosophers have tried to dispel such worries is by appealing to differences between the dream world and the waking one. For instance, our waking world has a coherence that the dream world often lacks. (For an example of a coherence-based argument against the skeptical hypothesis, see Norman Malcolm (1959).) You may recall that, in the feature film Inception, the characters learn to recognize that they’re dreaming by asking themselves how they came to be in a certain situation, then realizing that they can’t remember, because the dream just dropped them there.

But does the coherence of our waking world guarantee that it’s real?

I believe the coherence of our waking world does give us evidence that it is not merely a figment of our imagination. Specifically, it gives us evidence that, when we are awake, something is causing our experience that is independent of the experience itself. For instance, the relative permanence of the objects and environments we experience in waking life would appear to be best explained by there being something real and enduring that our experiences are reflecting.

However, the relative permanence of the objects and environments we encounter in the waking world is no guarantee that the waking world is as real as it gets. After all, a high degree of permanence is also found in the worlds of video games, in which the “environments” and “objects” one interacts with are merely the creations of computer code. So, while perceived permanence does seem to point to there being something objective/enduring out there, the true nature of whatever is “out there” might resemble our experience of it as little as computer code resembles the images we see when we play a video game.

In fact, physics teaches us that the objects we experience as being solid are actually made up almost entirely of empty space. And the results of quantum mechanical experiments indicate that, under certain conditions, the building blocks of matter do not behave as discrete particles at all, but rather as waves of probability. If we nevertheless experience the world as full of enduring, solid objects, this is due to the usual way that our senses interact with it and to the way these interactions are represented in consciousness.

This means that there is, in fact, an important sense in which all of us do live constantly within a dream—that is, within a world created by our own minds. It’s just that, when we’re awake, our minds conform our dreaming to a reliable set of patterns, which we assume to be determined by a reality that exists independently of our experience of it, though we have no way of knowing that reality except through the complex ways in which it affects our “dream.”

But might there be an even deeper sense in which our waking life is a dream?

Just as we often wake from sleep to realize that what we were experiencing in the sleep state was not nearly as coherent and “real” as what we experience when awake, could there possibly come a day when we will emerge from the dream of waking reality to experience a world that is even more coherent and vividly real, a state in which we experience levels of knowledge, memory, and other cognitive function that vastly surpass those we experience in our current lives?

In fact, a rather startling number of people report having already had experiences like this. That is, they report having had experiences that appear to them as even more real than those they have in their normal, waking state of mind. For example, “realer than real” is a description often used by those who have had near-death experiences (Moody 1975; Thonnard et al. 2013; Palmieri et al. 2014), those who have used psychedelic drugs such as DMT (Strassman 2001), and those who, by various other means, have experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Many near-death experiencers also report enhanced cognitive function and a sudden increase in knowledge (Owens et al. 1990; Greyson 2003). This perception of enhanced cognitive function and increased knowledge is often dismissed as an illusion by those who are unfamiliar with the scientific literature on near-death experiences, but careful investigation has shown that concrete, verifiable information has been obtained in these states that was not available to the experiencer by way of their five senses (Rivas et al. 2016).

The experience of those who have tasted non-ordinary states of consciousness raises the possibility that the age-old question of whether “life is but a dream” is more than the idle worry of a few philosophers comfortably ensconced in their armchairs by the fire. The answer to this question could very well have major empirical consequences, including startling implications for the types of experiences that are available to the human mind. We have every reason to stay alert to this possibility as we continue to investigate the true nature of the world that we take ourselves to be living in.

References

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy.

Erlacher, D., Schredl, M., Watanabe, T., Yamana, J., and Gantzert, F. (2008). The incidence of lucid dreaming within a Japanese university student sample. International Journal of Dream Research 1(2): 39–43.

Fosse, M. J., Fosse, R., Hobson, J. A., and Stickgold, R. J. (2003). Dreaming and episodic memory: a functional dissociation? Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 15(1): 1–9.

Remembering Sandy Hook

I will begin this article by stating forthrightly that I am a “conspiracy theorist” in the normative sense of the term. That is, I am someone who supposes that conspiratorial activity takes place between people of means and power in a way that is not a matter of public record. I contend that this is the default position of sanity and I assert that those who have a particular problem with the assertion I just made are what might be colloquially called “idiots”.

Taking my cue from 9/11 and the egregious violations of common sense that attended that event, I have come to see the “fourth estate” in North America as non-existent. In its place is, I contend, a sophisticated propaganda apparatus that supports the varied agendas of our plutocratic rulers, whose vested interest in endless war is furthered via the manifactured consent of the masses through strict narrative control.

I contend that most of the civilian mass shootings and killings in recent history in the Western democracies have been the result of a social engineering program(s) by various intelligence agencies in support of specific agendas. I have suspected this for a while. What really caught my attention was Sandy Hook, and it is that event which I wish to examine in detail in the remainder of this article. I realize it is past history, but in recent days there has been a disturbing sign that soon “conspiracy theorists” are going to be labeled as domestic terrorists just for entertaining such thoughts, so I thought I would lay out the case for Sandy Hook being fishy while it is still legal to do so.

Let me begin, then, by emphasizing that I don’t know what transpired at Sandy Hook. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t involved. What I do know is that the “official” narrative surrounding Sandy Hook as presented by various media sources was flawed and questionable. I am willing to have my mind changed about this, but to change my mind, someone would have to address the following points to my satisfaction. Much of the following text was borrowed from an article written by James Tracey which I can no longer find online.

1.> Details omitted. The New York Times, the “official historians” of the United States, concluded its final report on Sandy Hook with an article that did not include the names, ages, or gender of the alleged victims of the shooting. The only time in the history of crime reporting that such information has been omitted has been in the case of sex crimes.

2.> Twenty-eight people allegedly died: 27 children and adults, including Adam Lanza, at the school, and his mother, Nancy Lanza, in her home at 36 Yogananda Street, Newtown. However, there is no direct proof of their death: no photographic evidence or video footage was released to confirm the official story that these 28 persons actually died. In fact, no video surveillance footage shows anything — not even Adam shooting out the front plate-glass window or walking through the halls like Rambo, even though this is a school that had updated its security system at the start of the 2012–13 academic year.

Compounding the situation, the parents were not even allowed to view their children’s bodies to identify them. Instead, they were reportedly shown photographs of the deceased. This was done, according to the Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, in order to “control the situation.” But what was there about the situation that required “control”? No parent of our acquaintance would have agreed to accept the death of a child without viewing the body. James Tracy has published a discussion of the medical examiner’s performance. According to Carver:

Uh, we did not bring the bodies and the families into contact. We took pictures of them, uhm, of their facial features. We have, uh, uh — it’s easier on the families when you do that. Un, there is, uh, a time and place for the up close and personal in the grieving process, but to accomplish this we thought it would be best to do it this way and, uh, you can sort of, uh … You can control a situation depending on the photographer, and I have very good photographers. Uh, but uh —

Remarkably, the state has done its best to avoid releasing the death certificates and even recordings of the 911 calls. Death certificates were eventually “released” but not to the public or those who might want to investigate the case further, where only a short, general summary was available. According to The New York Times, in relation to the 911 calls, “no children are identified by name, no callers indicate that they can see a child being shot, and the only injury described is that of an educator’s being shot in the foot.”

Moreover, the funerals were all “closed casket,” with one exception — that of Noah Pozner, which supposedly included a private viewing before the public ceremony.. As recounted in interviews with the families, the circumstances of their last encounters with their children (or with their caskets) are strange to say the least.

3.> There is no evidence of any frantic effort to save lives or to remove bodies to hospitals; instead the scene outside the school looked calm and largely bloodless — with police and other personnel milling around casually and a severe shortage of dead or injured victims.

In a Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) like Sandy Hook, the proper protocol is START triage (Simple Triage and Rapid Treatment) using tarps of different colors with the aim being to save lives and get the injured to the hospital for treatment. Not even the black tarps for the dead were used, much less the red ones for those who needed immediate treatment.

Sandy Hook Fire Chief Bill Halstead was ready to help the victims but could recall only two wounded people. A few survivors were reportedly taken to the hospital, but, oddly, these people were never interviewed. There were no first-hand accounts that proved anyone was killed or injured. Nonetheless, according to Lt. Vance, 18 children were pronounced dead at the scene, two children were removed to “an area hospital” and were pronounced dead at the hospital, and seven adults were pronounced dead at the scene, including the shooter (NBC).

No emergency vehicles were present at the school or even lined up in the fire lane for a rescue attempt — the parking lot was filled with parked cars, police cars and possibly media vehicles. Such rescue activity as occurred was centered, not on the school premises, but at the nearby Firehouse. Emergency vehicles at the Firehouse were jammed together impeding access to the school, in case anyone might have thought about attempting a rescue. The scene at the Firehouse was quite peculiar, with people milling around and circling through the building, walking out one door and into another.

4.> According to initial reports in the media, weapons used in the shooting included four handguns recovered at the scene, the only guns taken into the school (NBC). Then an AR-15 was said to have been found in the trunk of Lanza’s car (NBC). Then it was reported that Lanza may have carried only two handguns and that a rifle was also found in the school (NBC).

Wayne Carver, the Medical Examiner, said that all the victims were shot with the “long weapon.” Lt. Paul Vance then said that a Bushmaster AR-15 assault weapon with high capacity magazines was used “most of the time” and that Lanza was carrying “many high-capacity clips” for the weapon (Huffington Post).

In January 2013, Connecticut state police released a statement indicating that they had found four guns inside the school: a Bushmaster .223 caliber XM 15-E2S semi-automatic rifle with high capacity 30 round clips, a Glock 10-mm handgun and a Sig-Sauer P226 9mm handgun. They said they also found an Izhmash Canta-12 12-gauge shotgun in Lanza’s car (NBC).

Lt. Vance then asserted that Lanza had killed all his victims with the .223-caliber semi-automatic rifle (ctpost.com). Regarding the confusion, Vance told reporters, “It’s all these conspiracy theorists that are trying to mucky up the waters.” Perhaps “The Top Prize for Fantastical Reporting” goes to Fox News, however, which announced that a 12-gauge shotgun along with two magazines containing 70 rounds of Winchester 12-gauge shotgun rounds had been found in the glove compartment of Adam Lanza’s Honda Civic — that’s right, in the glove compartment.

5.> Adam Lanza can’t have carried out the shooting. Adam Lanza, reportedly a frail young man weighing 120 pounds with Asperger’s Syndrome, is said to have carried massive weaponry on his person when he shot his way into the Sandy Hook school and proceeded to kill 26 people and then himself. This after he supposedly killed his mother before driving to the school.

According to State’s Attorney Stephen Sedensky, Lanza killed his 26 victims with the Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle and then killed himself with his Glock 10-mm handgun. Lanza was also supposedly carrying three 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster as well as a Sig-Sauer 9 mm handgun (see above). The victims were shot multiple times each in a fusillade of bullets from these military-style weapons. In order to wreak this havoc, he fired more than 150 rounds, and he must have carried more rounds in addition. Lanza was reportedly found dead wearing a bulletproof vest and military-style clothing (AP).

As Mike Powers, a professional military investigator and ballistics expert, has observed, this young man of slight build could not have carried all these heavy, bulky weapons and ammunition on his person. Furthermore, since first responders were supposedly inside the school within seven minutes, there was not enough time for Lanza to have carried out the shooting as reported. In an interview with Joyce Riley, Powers states that Lanza could not have fired so many times continuously without destabilizing himself from the intense noise from the Bushmaster. As a novice, he could not have shot an AR-15 with such speed and accuracy, supposedly changing magazines 8–10 times without a stoppage.

According to Lt. Vance on the night of the shooting, one victim survived. So in less than seven minutes — or less than five minutes according to the media — Lanza killed 26 people and then himself, producing only one injured victim. This is a 96% kill ratio, which is unheard-of accuracy among the most experienced marksmen. Powers thinks the whole scenario is a physical impossibility. He is not even convinced that Adam Lanza was a real person. The story of the shooting should not be taken seriously.

The final travesty involves the weapons and other paraphernalia that were allegedly found in the Lanza house. The “arsenal” supposedly included guns, Samurai swords, knives, a bayonet and more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, according to search warrants released. Other items of interest were ear and eye protection, binoculars, holsters, manuals, paper targets, a military-style uniform and Lanza’s NRA certificate (Fox). Lanza had reportedly compiled a spreadsheet 7 feet long and 4 feet wide in 9-point type detailing 500 victims of other mass murders (CBS). We are supposed to believe this, and, at the same time, that Adam Lanza was a shy, quiet kid who didn’t like noise and chaos, as promoted by the PBS Frontline Special,“Raising Adam Lanza.”

6.> A man dressed in black was seen fleeing into the woods from the site of the incident. Police chased him, apprehended him, and put him in handcuffs in the back of their squad car. Video of this is readily available on Youtube for the time being. Seem plausible to you that none of the news networks had any interest in covering this angle of the story?

7.> Key participants displayed bizarre behaviour. There are many bizarre media reports and interviews of those associated with the “shooting.” Some examples:

Wayne Carver — Medical Examiner Wayne Carver’s surreal press conference is one of the most startling of all the media offerings. Widely available on youtube, this event shows H. Wayne Carver II, a public official of some standing, clowning and acting outlandish — grinning strangely, making irrelevant comments, and basically appearing unknowledgeable and unprofessional.

Robbie Parker — Perhaps the most famous press conference is that of Robbie Parker, the alleged father of victim Emilie Parker, speaking on a CNN report of December 15, 2012. He chuckles as he walks up to the camera, then gets into character by hyperventilating, and finally feigns distress as he talks about his daughter — and about the fund set up to help raise money “for Emilie.”

The families — In addition to Robbie and Alissa Parker, other parents and family members take their turn in the spotlight, including (but not limited to) Mark and Jackie Barden, Jimmy Greene and Nelba Marquez-Greene, Ian and Nicole Hockley, Neil Heslin (alleged father of Jesse Lewis), Chris and Lynn McDonnell, Veronique Pozner, Carlee Soto, and David and Francine Wheeler. Anderson Cooper is the interviewer in two notable instances: his conversation with the McDonnells mentioned above, and an interview with Veronique Pozner, remarkable for its green-screen effects such as Anderson’s disappearing nose.

The school nurse — Numerous reports offer detailed and totally fictitious information, some of which was later abandoned in favor of more tenable versions. On the evening of December 14, a USA Today reporter said she had spoken with the school nurse, whom she had met on the street. The nurse told her that the gunman had come into her office, “they met eyes, she jumped under her desk,” and he walked out. The nurse said that the gunman was the son of the kindergarten teacher, who was known to her and “an absolutely loving person.” It later developed that Nancy Lanza had not been a kindergarten teacher at all, and that neither Nancy nor Adam had any connection to Sandy Hook school whatsoever.

Dawn Hochsprung — In an embarrassing fiction, The Newtown Bee reported on 14 December 2013 that Dawn Hochsprung, the Sandy Hook school principal, told the paper that a masked man had entered the school with a rifle and started shooting multiple shots — more than she could count — that went “on and on.” Of course, Dawn Hochsprung was allegedly killed by Adam Lanza and so could not easily have provided this statement. In fact, Dawn was said to have acted heroically, dying while lunging at the gunman — although one wonders who witnessed and reported this act of heroism. On 17 December 2013, The Bee retracted the report and apologized:

An early online report from the scene at the December 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School quoted a woman who identified herself to our reporter as the principal of the school. The woman was not the school’s principal, Dawn Hochsprung, who was killed in the Friday morning attack. The quote was removed from subsequent online versions of the story, but the original story did remain in our online archive for three days before being deleted. We apologize for whatever confusion this may have caused our readers and for any pain or anguish it may have caused the Hochsprung family.

Now, let’s be clear. None of this is proof that “nobody died at Sandy Hook” or that “crisis actors” were involved in creating a dramatic spectacle. I am not a fan of trying to figure out what did actually happen in these cases, because theories can be tenuous and become low-hanging fruit for people to debunk or make straw men out of. All I know is what didn’t happen at Sandy Hook, and I know Adam Lanza didn’t single-handedly murder multiple children in the way we were led to believe. The evidence to say otherwise doesn’t exist.

I’m not sure any of this will matter to those who are determined to ignore it because of cognitive dissonance or whatever, but I thought it was worth the effort to preserve some of this information for those who in the coming days need to know the history of what appears to be an ongoing effort to engineer consent for an enhanced police state.

Two things stick in my mind about the Sandy Hook ordeal more than anything else. One was the photo of Adam Lanza that was circulated… his eyes vacant, his face expressionless, his cheeks hollow and sunken… due to a very very obvious photoshopping of his likeness. The other thing that sticks in my mind was Barack Obama breaking down in tears while discussing the event, and again four years later… a career politician, a hard-nosed pragmatist, bomber of 8 countries, surely no stranger to political theatre. One might well imagine his teleprompter at the time read: “weep here”. I don’t know much, but I know when someone is trying to manipulate my feelings and jerk me around. I’ve worked in sales enough to be that cynical.

I can only conclude that we’ve been conditioned to be duped and that we’re being not-so-subtly played by people even more cynical than I am. Perhaps it takes a cynic to see the handiwork of others, I donno. Anyways, from the looks of things, the other shoe is about to drop. Perhaps it’s best that it does… it seems like those who aren’t already awake to this kind of thing have made a choice to stay asleep. I’m not sure it’s my place to tell them that’s a bad idea.

 

Changing your mind about "Pizzagate"

I have been wondering for quite some time now about whether to try writing about this topic, how I would approach it, and what the repercussions might be for making the attempt. In recent days, having had some time to reflect on the topic and take some renewed interest in it, I guess I have decided that the best thing to do is just go for it, even though I am not gleefully anticipating the blowback I imagine I’ll take from friends and acquaintances.

The difficulty I’m having here is, I want to change your mind about something, but I don’t really think I can. As you might have noticed from your own forays into using the internet, changing people’s minds about things is notoriously difficult… and that sad situation is only getting worse. There are reasons for this… some of them have to do with basic human psychology, some of them have to do with the increasing deadening of our critical faculties by bombardment from questionable information sources, some of them have to do with our own intellectual laziness and willingness to go along with propaganda.

Of course, it has been noted that ‘literacy’ in the 21st century will be a word used to describe those whose opinions can remain fluid enough to change with new information. But that can and must be a gradual process. Drastic changes of opinion in a short period of time are extremely disorienting.

So with that out of the way, what I’d like to do is pitch a really absurd, far-out, wild-sounding idea that you’ve probably already encountered, and been so offended or short-circuited by that your brain just immediately went ‘nope, not having that’ and switched itself off, allowing you to get on with your life. It’s a shocking idea, a horrendous idea, a heartbreaking idea, and at first glance, a seemingly absurd idea so alien and repulsive that it feels ethically wrong to even contemplate it. And I don’t want you to believe me, or take me at my word. I’m asking you to empathize with me when I tell you the story of how and why I changed my mind.

You see, I am an average middle-aged Joe from Canada. Never married, no kids. I struggle with my weight and my mental health. I like science fiction and I like playing board games with my buddies and I like take-out food. I have been diagnosed with schizo affective disorder, and anyone who cares to do away with my opinions on that basis can doubtlessly do so easily. I’ve had a lot of trouble coming to terms with what I know and with what I think I can prove. It’s hard to keep a sunny perspective about the human species or its prospects sometimes. You see, I have come to be of the opinion that our civilization appears to be run, at the highest level from behind the scenes, by literal Satan-worshipping child molestors. And I sometimes wonder how to live in a world like that.

Yes, I know. Many of you think this is alt-right troll chatter from the bowels of neckbeard 4chan, and I’ve lost my mind, and there’s all sorts of reasons why it just can’t be so. I hear you. I mean, what can I say? I could start by saying I skew politically left-libertarian in terms of my ideology. I think it’s important to falsify the notion that this is a ‘right wing’ talking point. I could then point to examples of UK pop culture icons who were high-ranking Freemasons and friends of the Royal family who are documented to have worn robes, chanted Satanic prayers, and raped children, but what you want is proof. You want to hiss at me that I’m a kooky conspiracy theorist. You want to get on with your life and pretend this is just nonsense.

Well, I mean, I wish you were right. I really do. And man, I really feel for you, because there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now than smoking a joint and playing a video game and saving the world from imagined alien menaces. I mean, I don’t have kids, so I have no actual personal investment in what kind of world this turns out to be in the long run, it might be argued. I guess I’m thinking about those of you who do have something to live for though. I mean, hypothetically, I guess, I have to say that I find myself wondering, if this kind of, well, let’s call it ‘evil’, is actually, factually, loose in the world, doesn’t our refusal to acknowledge it kind of, like, make us complicit?

I think pondering questions like the one I just posed will give you some indication of why so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ are so invested in their hobby of trying to get people to think outside of their current abstractions.

Let’s talk, briefly, about that ‘conspiracy theorist’ thing. If you find the words ‘conspiracy theory’ coming to mind as you read this, you kind of need to be honest with yourself that that’s a knee-jerk reaction. Ask yourself this; are you using the term in the pejorative or normative sense? If it’s the pejorative, then please admit to yourself that it’s intellectually dishonest by definition to construct a criticism of another’s position that is founded on pejorative epithets. If you are using the term in the normative sense, intending to allege only that I am supposing that human beings occasionally can be observed to collude in their own best interests in ways which aren’t a matter of public record, then I am in agreement with you. You and I are both conspiracy theorists in the normative sense, and well we should be, for that is the default position of sanity. So now we are just arguing about how far along things have gone downhill.

My perspective on such things shifted gradually over the course of many years, having taken a steep turn into less-familiar territory around the time of 9/11 in 2001. I had always thought of governments as stupid and myopic, but I was initially slow to embrace the idea that the powers that be could be deliberately malevolent. I think many of us hide from facing the idea that things aren’t all on the up-and-up because it becomes an exercise in recognizing evil in oneself. But, for example, if we contemplate war and its nature for very long, it becomes fairly obvious that the people who profit from such activity are deeply unhealthy and malevolent. The question then becomes not “How could anybody think the world works this way?”, but rather, “How could anybody think otherwise?”

“Pizzagate” was a term given to a putatively debunked ‘conspiracy theory’ that a child molestation ring was being run out of a Washington, D.C. Pizza parlour. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you will find a detailed outline of the ‘facts’ surrounding this bizarre controversy and you will be soundly assured in no-nonsense language that it has all been thoroughly discredited by everyone, not least of which by that stalwart defender of reason and right-thinking snopes.com

I don’t believe it has been ‘debunked’ at all, and I am presenting forthwith the facts that changed my mind on the topic.

1.> Wikileaks published John Podesta’s emails. Some allege these publications were falsified. People who say so are ignoring the fact that John Podesta has admitted via Twitter that the emails are in fact his.

2.> The emails contain multiple examples of Podesta and his allies emailing each other strange gibberish involving what appear to be food-related codewords. Stuff like “Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?” Some folks think these code words relate to some clandestine activity, and some specifically allege they relate to pedophilia. One letter indicates Obama, for one function, spent 65,000 dollars of public funds to fly “hot dogs” in from Chicago.

3.> James Alefantis, a friend of Podesta’s, is mentioned multiple times in those emails. Alefantis runs an ostensibly family-friendly pizza joint in Washington named Comet Ping Pong. He is well-connected politically, considered (by GQ Magazine at least) a Washington power player for some reason, and is the former partner of David Brock (described by Time as “one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic party”) who runs the Democratic “media watchdog group” Media Matters.

4.> People visiting Alefantis’ public profile in Instagram for his restaurant found a great deal of disturbing imagery. You can easily see it for yourself with a cursory search engine lookup. Pictures of babies taped to tables with stacks of cash behind them. Kids wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo “Pizza Slut”. Comments by Alefantis and his employees, including “#hotard”, adorned the pictures. Alefantis’ instagram profile picture was (and still is) an image of Antinous, the greek boy sex slave of Emperor Hadrian from ancient legend. All of this is verifiable by using a search engine to look up images tagged “James Alefantis Instagram”. Though some have alleged that these images are fake and do not originate from his Instagram account, Alefantis has never denied the images’ authenticity, and in fact has confirmed their legitimacy on camera in an interview he did outside his restaurant with several picketing ‘conspiracy theorists’.

5.> Alefantis immediately reached out to the media for support against the defamation of his character by the crazy conspiracy theorists who took issue with the contents of his Instagram page. Major newspapers including the Washington Post ran articles defending Alefantis as the innocent victim of insane kooks run amok. None of the articles made an issue out of the contents of the Instagram account or of Alefantis’ connections with John Podesta. Nobody thought to say, “Gee, Mr. Alefantis, it seems like maybe your family friendly pizza restaurant shouldn’t have a child sex theme if you want people to not get the impression that you’re running a sex shop out if it.”

6.> Not a single newspaper, radio, or television show anywhere in the Western world had a reporter on staff apparently willing to look into the matter critically, by, say, spending 45 seconds doing a search engine lookup on Alefantis’ Instagram. With one exception. Ben Swann of CBS did a five-minute television news segment about Pizzagate where he mentioned this issue. Ben Swann had been an award-winning journalist with a history of doing slightly fringe newscasts. Within a week, his social media accounts were cancelled, and Swann was pulled off the air.

Excitable ‘conspiracy theorists’ are not always well known for their restraint, and some have badly overreached in their attempts to prove that there’s a secret dungeon underneath Comet Ping Pong or what not. This is a tenuous claim, and thus is low-hanging fruit for debunkers who want to sweep all this stuff under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. But the fact that tenuous claims have been advanced and falsified around the ‘pizzagate’ narrative should not serve as the straw man that allows one to dismiss the information provided in this article out of hand. The facts presented here are just that, and the only claim I am making is the one they seem to support: that these are weird, disturbing pictures for a politically connected businessman to have associated with his family-friendly pizza restaurant.

So, look. This is a deep rabbit hole. Ted Gunderson was a lauded and accomplished FBI agent who late in life made it a mission to spread the word about satanist child molesters operating through the alphabet agencies of the United States Government. The Jeff Ganon story during the W Bush years hinted at a massive behind-the-scenes sex trade. During the Reagan years a story broke about a White House sex ring… a story which quickly vanished.

I’ve already alluded to the Jimmy Savile case. Every so often a woman will go on a talk show and discuss her background as a victim of ritualistic sex abuse, and then never be heard from again. Usually any mention of “satan worship” brings the bible thumpers out of the woodwork, leaving most modern sophisticates to conclude that this is the delusion of fundie Christian nutbars, and pay it no further mind.

My contention is that the astute observer will have noticed that the persistence of this rumour, and the trail of verifiable cases which appear to have broken through to the surface world, hints at a terrifying truth, most significantly because the breadth and scope of it, were it to be true, should leave us with serious questions about how we could be so blind as to be letting this happen right in plain sight.

I can point to any number of examples in history when the nobility got carried away with satisfying debauched appetites. The French nobility comes to mind. Roman orgies come to mind. What makes anyone think human nature has changed that much? And should we suppose that the war profiteers who bomb other countries as part of their business model have healthy personal interests and appetites?

What I’m trying to do is point out that what may at first seem like an implausible idea is in fact entirely plausible. In all honesty, you shouldn’t need training in critical thinking to put two and two together based solely on the information I’ve just provided to you. When a guy is posting pedo images on social media and then yelling foul when he’s called out on it, you are really on the wrong side of history to be defending his virtue. And of course, Alefantis’ putative guilt in this matter isn’t by itself sufficient evidence of a worldwide conspiracy of evildoers. I want to be very clear on this. But we also need to consider that the deafening silence of the sockpuppet corporatist mainstream “media” sources on this very alarming issue most certainly is indicative of a cover-up of sorts on a large scale. These facts I have presented are, I want to reiterate, not obscure or hard to discern. Everything is right there in plain sight for any journalist worth his or her salt to bring to our attention. So why are major publications like The Washington Post instead intent on defending Alefantis’ honour? These are questions one should ponder at length.

If you just can’t get your head around it, well, ok. I couldn’t either for a long time. There are people who couldn’t come to terms with OJ Simpson being a murderer. They wanted x to be true, so could not be convinced that it wasn’t. Once I realized I was making the same mistake, I began to have second thoughts about this stuff.

The difference, really, is that in the former case, nobody’s affected by our silence or misinformed opinion. In this case, presumably, innocent children are suffering horribly partly because of our collective refusal to see the facts, admit to them, engage with them, and backtrack on our falsified narratives. That means that despite this being a horrible, ugly thing to contemplate, we are morally obligated, it seems to me, to contemplate it.

The good news is that a lot of people are aware that this is taking place, and are involving themselves in the fight to get the word out. I would encourage you to search your own soul, think hard about the issue, and see if there’s anything that you can do. We all want the world to be a better place. I’m not sure myself how to bring that vision to life… but if the world is, as it appears to be, being run by horribly corrupt soulless psychopaths who literally worship the mythological incarnation of evil, maybe getting them out of the way would be an important first step.

What do you think?

Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong

by Brian Resnick on Vox

Why it’s so hard to see our own ignorance, and what to do about it.

Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong.

To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings. The effort recently yielded a paper that includes six admissions of no confidence. And it’s accepting submissions until January 31.

“I do think it’s a cultural issue that people are not willing to admit mistakes,” Rohrer says. “Our broader goal is to gently nudge the whole scientific system and psychology toward a different culture,” where it’s okay, normalized, and expected for researchers to admit past mistakes and not get penalized for it.

The project is timely because a large number of scientific findings have been disproven, or become more doubtful, in recent years. One high-profile effort to retest 100 psychological experiments found only 40 percent replicated with more rigorous methods. It’s been a painful period for social scientists, who’ve had to deal with failed replications of classic studies and realize their research practices are often weak.

It’s been fascinating to watch scientists struggle to make their institutions more humble. And I believe there’s an important and underappreciated virtue embedded in this process.

For the past few months, I’ve been talking to many scholars about intellectual humility, the characteristic that allows for admission of wrongness.

I’ve come to appreciate what a crucial tool it is for learning, especially in an increasingly interconnected and complicated world. As technology makes it easier to lie and spread false information incredibly quickly, we need intellectually humble, curious people.

I’ve also realized how difficult it is to foster intellectual humility. In my reporting on this, I’ve learned there are three main challenges on the path to humility:

   1. In order for us to acquire more intellectual humility, we all, even the smartest among us, need to better appreciate our cognitive blind spots. Our minds are more imperfect and imprecise than we’d often like to admit. Our ignorance can be invisible.
   2. Even when we overcome that immense challenge and figure out our errors, we need to remember we won’t necessarily be punished for saying, “I was wrong.” And we need to be braver about saying it. We need a culture that celebrates those words.
   3. We’ll never achieve perfect intellectual humility. So we need to choose our convictions thoughtfully.

This is all to say: Intellectual humility isn’t easy. But damn, it’s a virtue worth striving for, and failing for, in this new year.

Intellectual humility is simply “the recognition that the things you believe in might in fact be wrong,” as Mark Leary, a social and personality psychologist at Duke University, tells me.

But don’t confuse it with overall humility or bashfulness. It’s not about being a pushover; it’s not about lacking confidence, or self-esteem. The intellectually humble don’t cave every time their thoughts are challenged.

Instead, it’s a method of thinking. It’s about entertaining the possibility that you may be wrong and being open to learning from the experience of others. Intellectual humility is about being actively curious about your blind spots. One illustration is in the ideal of the scientific method, where a scientist actively works against her own hypothesis, attempting to rule out any other alternative explanations for a phenomenon before settling on a conclusion. It’s about asking: What am I missing here?

It doesn’t require a high IQ or a particular skill set. It does, however, require making a habit of thinking about your limits, which can be painful. “It’s a process of monitoring your own confidence,” Leary says.

This idea is older than social psychology. Philosophers from the earliest days have grappled with the limits of human knowledge. Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-century French philosopher credited with inventing the essay, wrote that “the plague of man is boasting of his knowledge.”

Social psychologists have learned that humility is associated with other valuable character traits: People who score higher on intellectual humility questionnaires are more open to hearing opposing views. They more readily seek out information that conflicts with their worldview. They pay more attention to evidence and have a stronger self-awareness when they answer a question incorrectly.

When you ask the intellectually arrogant if they’ve heard of bogus historical events like “Hamrick’s Rebellion,” they’ll say, “Sure.” The intellectually humble are less likely to do so. Studies have found that cognitive reflection — i.e., analytic thinking — is correlated with being better able to discern fake news stories from real ones. These studies haven’t looked at intellectual humility per se, but it’s plausible there’s an overlap.

Most important of all, the intellectually humble are more likely to admit it when they are wrong. When we admit we’re wrong, we can grow closer to the truth.

One reason I’ve been thinking about the virtue of humility recently is because our president, Donald Trump, is one of the least humble people on the planet.

It was Trump who said on the night of his nomination, “I alone can fix it,” with the “it” being our entire political system. It was Trump who once said, “I have one of the great memories of all time.” More recently, Trump told the Associated Press, “I have a natural instinct for science,” in dodging a question on climate change.

A frustration I feel about Trump and the era of history he represents is that his pride and his success — he is among the most powerful people on earth — seem to be related. He exemplifies how our society rewards confidence and bluster, not truthfulness.

Yet we’ve also seen some very high-profile examples lately of how overconfident leadership can be ruinous for companies. Look at what happened to Theranos, a company that promised to change the way blood samples are drawn. It was all hype, all bluster, and it collapsed. Or consider Enron’s overconfident executives, who were often hailed for their intellectual brilliance — they ran the company into the ground with risky, suspect financial decisions.

The problem with arrogance is that the truth always catches up. Trump may be president and confident in his denials of climate change, but the changes to our environment will still ruin so many things in the future.
Why it’s so hard to see our blind spots: “Our ignorance is invisible to us”

As I’ve been reading the psychological research on intellectual humility and the character traits it correlates with, I can’t help but fume: Why can’t more people be like this?

We need more intellectual humility for two reasons. One is that our culture promotes and rewards overconfidence and arrogance (think Trump and Theranos, or the advice your career counselor gave you when going into job interviews). At the same time, when we are wrong — out of ignorance or error — and realize it, our culture doesn’t make it easy to admit it. Humbling moments too easily can turn into moments of humiliation.

So how can we promote intellectual humility for both of these conditions?

In asking that question of researchers and scholars, I’ve learned to appreciate how hard a challenge it is to foster intellectual humility.

First off, I think it’s helpful to remember how flawed the human brain can be and how prone we all are to intellectual blind spots. When you learn about how the brain actually works, how it actually perceives the world, it’s hard not to be a bit horrified, and a bit humbled.

We often can’t see — or even sense — what we don’t know. It helps to realize that it’s normal and human to be wrong.

It’s rare that a viral meme also provides a surprisingly deep lesson on the imperfect nature of the human mind. But believe it or not, the great “Yanny or Laurel” debate of 2018 fits the bill.

For the very few of you who didn’t catch it — I hope you’re recovering nicely from that coma — here’s what happened.

An audio clip says the name “Laurel” in a robotic voice. Or does it? Some people hear the clip and immediately hear “Yanny.” And both sets of people — Team Yanny and Team Laurel — are indeed hearing the same thing.

Hearing, the perception of sound, ought to be a simple thing for our brains to do. That so many people can listen to the same clip and hear such different things should give us humbling pause. Hearing “Yanny” or “Laurel” in any given moment ultimately depends on a whole host of factors: the quality of the speakers you’re using, whether you have hearing loss, your expectations.

Here’s the deep lesson to draw from all of this: Much as we might tell ourselves our experience of the world is the truth, our reality will always be an interpretation. Light enters our eyes, sound waves enter our ears, chemicals waft into our noses, and it’s up to our brains to make a guess about what it all is.

Perceptual tricks like this (“the dress” is another one) reveal that our perceptions are not the absolute truth, that the physical phenomena of the universe are indifferent to whether our feeble sensory organs can perceive them correctly. We’re just guessing. Yet these phenomena leave us indignant: How could it be that our perception of the world isn’t the only one?

That sense of indignation is called naive realism: the feeling that our perception of the world is the truth. “I think we sometimes confuse effortlessness with accuracy,” Chris Chabris, a psychological researcher who co-authored a book on the challenges of human perception, tells me. When something is so immediate and effortless to us — hearing the sound of “Yanny” — it just feels true. (Similarly, psychologists find when a lie is repeated, it’s more likely to be misremembered as being true, and for a similar reason: When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. And that fluency is confused with truth.)

Our interpretations of reality are often arbitrary, but we’re still stubborn about them. Nonetheless, the same observations can lead to wildly different conclusions.

For every sense and every component of human judgment, there are illusions and ambiguities we interpret arbitrarily.

Some are gravely serious. White people often perceive black men to be bigger, taller, and more muscular (and therefore more threatening) than they really are. That’s racial bias — but it’s also a socially constructed illusion. When we’re taught or learn to fear other people, our brains distort their potential threat. They seem more menacing, and we want to build walls around them. When we learn or are taught that other people are less than human, we’re less likely to look upon them kindly and more likely to be okay when violence is committed against them.

Not only are our interpretations of the world often arbitrary, but we’re often overconfident in them. “Our ignorance is invisible to us,” David Dunning, an expert on human blind spots, says.

You might recognize his name as half of the psychological phenomenon that bears his name: the Dunning-Kruger effect. That’s where people of low ability — let’s say, those who fail to understand logic puzzles — tend to unduly overestimate their abilities. Inexperience masquerades as expertise.

An irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that so many people misinterpret it, are overconfident in their understanding of it, and get it wrong.

When people talk or write about the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s almost always in reference to other people. “The fact is this is a phenomenon that visits all of us sooner or later,” Dunning says. We’re all overconfident in our ignorance from time to time. (Perhaps related: Some 65 percent of Americans believe they’re more intelligent than average, which is wishful thinking.)

Similarly, we’re overconfident in our ability to remember. Human memory is extremely malleable, prone to small changes. When we remember, we don’t wind back our minds to a certain time and relive that exact moment, yet many of us think our memories work like a videotape.

Dunning hopes his work helps people understand that “not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition,” he says. “But the problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don’t see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”

In 2012, psychologist Will Gervais scored an honor any PhD science student would covet: a co-authored paper in the journal Science, one of the top interdisciplinary scientific journals in the world. Publishing in Science doesn’t just help a researcher rise up in academic circles; it often gets them a lot of media attention too.

One of the experiments in the paper tried to see if getting people to think more rationally would make them less willing to report religious beliefs. They had people look at a picture of Rodin’s The Thinker or another statue. They thought The Thinker would nudge people to think harder, more analytically. In this more rational frame of mind, then, the participants would be less likely to endorse believing in something as faith-based and invisible as religion, and that’s what the study found. It was catnip for science journalists: one small trick to change the way we think.

But it was a tiny, small-sample study, the exact type that is prone to yielding false positives. Several years later, another lab attempted to replicate the findings with a much larger sample size, and failed to find any evidence for the effect.

And while Gervais knew that the original study wasn’t rigorous, he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of discomfort.

“Intellectually, I could say the original data weren’t strong,” he says. “That’s very different from the human, personal reaction to it. Which is like, ‘Oh, shit, there’s going to be a published failure to replicate my most cited finding that’s gotten the most media attention.’ You start worrying about stuff like, ‘Are there going to be career repercussions? Are people going to think less of my other work and stuff I’ve done?’”

Gervais’s story is familiar: Many of us fear we’ll be seen as less competent, less trustworthy, if we admit wrongness. Even when we can see our own errors — which, as outlined above, is not easy to do — we’re hesitant to admit it.

But turns out this assumption is false. As Adam Fetterman, a social psychologist at the University of Texas El Paso, has found in a few studies, wrongness admission isn’t usually judged harshly. “When we do see someone admit that they are wrong, the wrongness admitter is seen as more communal, more friendly,” he says. It’s almost never the case, in his studies, “that when you admit you’re wrong, people think you are less competent.”

Sure, there might be some people who will troll you for your mistakes. There might be a mob on Twitter that converges in order to shame you. Some moments of humility could be humiliating. But this fear must be vanquished if we are to become less intellectually arrogant and more intellectually humble.

But even if you’re motivated to be more intellectually humble, our culture doesn’t always reward it.

The field of psychology, overall, has been reckoning with a “replication crisis” where many classic findings in the science don’t hold up under rigorous scrutiny. Incredibly influential textbook findings in psychology — like the “ego depletion” theory of willpower or the “marshmallow test” — have been bending or breaking.

I’ve found it fascinating to watch the field of psychology deal with this. For some researchers, the reckoning has been personally unsettling. “I’m in a dark place,” Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychologist, wrote in a 2016 blog post after seeing the theory of ego depletion crumble before his eyes. “Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?”

What I’ve learned from reporting on the “replication crisis” is that intellectual humility requires support from peers and institutions. And that environment is hard to build.

“What we teach undergrads is that scientists want to prove themselves wrong,” says Simine Vazire, a psychologist and journal editor who often writes and speaks about replication issues. “But, ‘How would I know if I was wrong?’ is actually a really, really hard question to answer. It involves things like having critics yell at you and telling you that you did things wrong and reanalyze your data.”

And that’s not fun. Again: Even among scientists — people who ought to question everything — intellectual humility is hard. In some cases, researchers have refused to concede their original conclusions despite the unveiling of new evidence. (One famous psychologist under fire recently told me angrily, “I will stand by that conclusion for the rest of my life, no matter what anyone says.”)

Psychologists are human. When they reach a conclusion, it becomes hard to see things another way. Plus, the incentives for a successful career in science push researchers to publish as many positive findings as possible.

There are two solutions — among many — to make psychological science more humble, and I think we can learn from them.

One is that humility needs to be built into the standard practices of the science. And that happens through transparency. It’s becoming more commonplace for scientists to preregister — i.e., commit to — a study design before even embarking on an experiment. That way, it’s harder for them to deviate from the plan and cherry-pick results. It also makes sure all data is open and accessible to anyone who wants to conduct a reanalysis.

That “sort of builds humility into the structure of the scientific enterprise,” Chabris says. “We’re not all-knowing and all-seeing and perfect at our jobs, so we put [the data] out there for other people to check out, to improve upon it, come up with new ideas from and so on.” To be more intellectually humble, we need to be more transparent about our knowledge. We need to show others what we know and what we don’t.

And two, there needs to be more celebration of failure, and a culture that accepts it. That includes building safe places for people to admit they were wrong, like the Loss of Confidence Project.

But it’s clear this cultural change won’t come easily.

“In the end,” Rohrer says, after getting a lot of positive feedback on the project, “we ended up with just a handful of statements.”

There’s a personal cost to an intellectually humble outlook. For me, at least, it’s anxiety.

When I open myself up to the vastness of my own ignorance, I can’t help but feel a sudden suffocating feeling. I have just one small mind, a tiny, leaky boat upon which to go exploring knowledge in a vast and knotty sea of which I carry no clear map.

Why is it that some people never seem to wrestle with those waters? That they stand on the shore, squint their eyes, and transform that sea into a puddle in their minds and then get awarded for their false certainty? “I don’t know if I can tell you that humility will get you farther than arrogance,” says Tenelle Porter, a University of California Davis psychologist who has studied intellectual humility.

Of course, following humility to an extreme end isn’t enough. You don’t need to be humble about your belief that the world is round. I just think more humility, sprinkled here and there, would be quite nice.

“It’s bad to think of problems like this like a Rubik’s cube: a puzzle that has a neat and satisfying solution that you can put on your desk,” says Michael Lynch, a University of Connecticut philosophy professor. Instead, it’s a problem “you can make progress at a moment in time, and make things better. And that we can do — that we can definitely do.”

For a democracy to flourish, Lynch argues, we need a balance between convictions — our firmly held beliefs — and humility. We need convictions, because “an apathetic electorate is no electorate at all,” he says. And we need humility because we need to listen to one another. Those two things will always be in tension.

The Trump presidency suggests there’s too much conviction and not enough humility in our current culture.

“The personal question, the existential question that faces you and I and every thinking human being, is, ‘How do you maintain an open mind toward others and yet, at the same time, keep your strong moral convictions?’” Lynch says. “That’s an issue for all of us.”

To be intellectually humble doesn’t mean giving up on the ideas we love and believe in. It just means we need to be thoughtful in choosing our convictions, be open to adjusting them, seek out their flaws, and never stop being curious about why we believe what we believe. Again, that’s not easy.

You might be thinking: “All the social science cited here about how intellectual humility is correlated with open-minded thinking — what if that’s all bunk?” To that, I’d say the research isn’t perfect. Those studies are based on self-reports, where it can be hard to trust that people really do know themselves or that they’re being totally honest. And we know that social science findings are often upended.

But I’m going to take it as a point of conviction that intellectual humility is a virtue. I’ll draw that line for myself. It’s my conviction.

Could I be wrong? Maybe. Just try to convince me otherwise.

The Blind Spot

via aeon

It’s tempting to think science gives a God’s-eye view of reality. But we forget the place of human experience at our peril

The problem of time is one of the greatest puzzles of modern physics. The first bit of the conundrum is cosmological. To understand time, scientists talk about finding a ‘First Cause’ or ‘initial condition’ – a description of the Universe at the very beginning (or at ‘time equals zero’). But to determine a system’s initial condition, we need to know the total system. We need to make measurements of the positions and velocities of its constituent parts, such as particles, atoms, fields and so forth. This problem hits a hard wall when we deal with the origin of the Universe itself, because we have no view from the outside. We can’t step outside the box in order to look within, because the box is all there is. A First Cause is not only unknowable, but also scientifically unintelligible.

The second part of the challenge is philosophical. Scientists have taken physical time to be the only real time – whereas experiential time, the subjective sense of time’s passing, is considered a cognitive fabrication of secondary importance. The young Albert Einstein made this position clear in his debate with philosopher Henri Bergson in the 1920s, when he claimed that the physicist’s time is the only time. With age, Einstein became more circumspect. Up to the time of his death, he remained deeply troubled about how to find a place for the human experience of time in the scientific worldview.

These quandaries rest on the presumption that physical time, with an absolute starting point, is the only real kind of time. But what if the question of the beginning of time is ill-posed? Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature.

Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.

Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.

This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.

This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.

The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.

To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.

This problem is known as Hempel’s dilemma, named after the illustrious philosopher of science Carl Gustav Hempel (1905-97). Faced with this quandary, some philosophers argue that we should define ‘physical’ such that it rules out radical emergentism (that life and the mind are emergent from but irreducible to physical reality) and panpsychism (that mind is fundamental and exists everywhere, including at the microphysical level). This move would give physicalism a definite content, but at the cost of trying to legislate in advance what ‘physical’ can mean, instead of leaving its meaning to be determined by physics.

We reject this move. Whatever ‘physical’ means should be determined by physics and not armchair reflection. After all, the meaning of the term ‘physical’ has changed dramatically since the 17th century. Matter was once thought to be inert, impenetrable, rigid, and subject only to deterministic and local interactions. Today, we know that this is wrong in virtually all respects: we accept that there are several fundamental forces, particles that have no mass, quantum indeterminacy, and nonlocal relations. We should expect further dramatic changes in our concept of physical reality in the future. For these reasons, we can’t simply legislate what the term ‘physical’ can mean as a way to get out of Hempel’s dilemma.

Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself. By forgetting that these perspectives are a philosophical bias, not a mere data-point, scientific materialists ignore the ways that immediate experience and the world can never be separated.

We’re not alone in our opinions. Our account of the Blind Spot is based on the work of two major philosophers and mathematicians, Edmund Husserl and Alfred North Whitehead. Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Whitehead, who taught at Harvard University from the 1920s, argued that science relies on a faith in the order of nature that can’t be justified by logic. That faith rests directly on our immediate experience. Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.

Nowhere is the materialistic bias in science more apparent than quantum physics, the science of atoms and subatomic particles. Atoms, conceived as the building blocks of matter, have been with us since the Greeks. The discoveries of the past 100 years would seem to be a vindication for all those who have argued for an atomist, and reductionist, conception of nature. But what the Greeks, Isaac Newton and 19th-century scientists meant by the thing called an ‘atom’, and what we mean today, are very different. In fact, it’s the very notion of a ‘thing’ that quantum mechanics calls into question.

The classic model for bits of matter involves little billiard balls, clumping together and jostling around in various forms and states. In quantum mechanics, however, matter has the characteristics of both particles and waves. There are also limits to the precision with which measurements can be made, and measurements seem to disturb the reality that experimenters are trying to size up.

Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.

According to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device. Other approaches, such as the ‘many worlds’ and ‘hidden variables’ interpretations, seek to preserve an observer-independent status for the wave function. But this comes at the cost of adding features such as unobservable parallel universes. A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. In other words, making a measurement is like making a bet on the world’s behaviour, and once the measurement is made, updating one’s knowledge. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world. From this viewpoint, the equations of quantum physics don’t refer just to the observed atom but also to the observer and the atom taken as a whole in a kind of ‘observer-participancy’.

Participatory realism is controversial. But it’s precisely this plurality of interpretations, with a variety of philosophical implications, that undermines the sober certainty of the materialist and reductionist position on nature. In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world.

This brings us back to the Blind Spot. When we look at the objects of scientific knowledge, we don’t tend to see the experiences that underpin them. We do not see how experience makes their presence to us possible. Because we lose sight of the necessity of experience, we erect a false idol of science as something that bestows absolute knowledge of reality, independent of how it shows up and how we interact with it.

The Blind Spot also reveals itself in the study of consciousness. Most scientific and philosophical discussions of consciousness focus on ‘qualia’ – the qualitative aspects of our experience, such as the perceived red glow of a sunset, or the sour taste of a lemon. Neuroscientists have established close correlations between such qualities and certain brain states, and they’ve been able to manipulate how we experience these qualities by acting directly on the brain. Nevertheless, there’s still no scientific explanation of qualia in terms of brain activity – or any other physical process for that matter. Nor is there any real understanding of what such an account would look like.

The mystery of consciousness includes more than just qualia. There’s also the question of subjectivity. Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question.

At a deeper level, we might ask how experience comes to have a subject-object structure in the first place. Scientists and philosophers often work with the image of an ‘inside’ mind or subject grasping an outside world or object. But philosophers from different cultural traditions have challenged this image. For example, the philosopher William James (whose notion of ‘pure experience’ influenced Husserl and Whitehead) wrote in 1905 about the ‘active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us’. That active sense of living doesn’t have an inside-outside/subject-object structure; it’s subsequent reflection that imposes this structure on experience.

More than a millennium ago, Vasubandhu, an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the 4th to 5th century CE, criticised the reification of phenomena into independent subjects versus independent objects. For Vasubandhu, the subject-object structure is a deep-seated, cognitive distortion of a causal network of phenomenal moments that are empty of an inner subject grasping an outer object.

To bring the point home, consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question. And yet, without such phenomenal presence, science is impossible, for presence is a precondition for any observation or measurement to be possible.

Scientific materialists will argue that the scientific method enables us to get outside of experience and grasp the world as it is in itself. As will be clear by now, we disagree; indeed, we believe that this way of thinking misrepresents the very method and practice of science.

In general terms, here’s how the scientific method works. First, we set aside aspects of human experience on which we can’t always agree, such as how things look or taste or feel. Second, using mathematics and logic, we construct abstract, formal models that we treat as stable objects of public consensus. Third, we intervene in the course of events by isolating and controlling things that we can perceive and manipulate. Fourth, we use these abstract models and concrete interventions to calculate future events. Fifth, we check these predicted events against our perceptions. An essential ingredient of this whole process is technology: machines – our equipment – that standardise these procedures, amplify our powers of perception, and allow us to control phenomena to our own ends.

The Blind Spot arises when we start to believe that this method gives us access to unvarnished reality. But experience is present at every step. Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment. They are idealisations, not actual things in the world. Galileo’s model of a frictionless plane, for example; the Bohr model of the atom with a small, dense nucleus with electrons circling around it in quantised orbits like planets around a sun; evolutionary models of isolated populations – all of these exist in the scientist’s mind, not in nature. They are abstract mental representations, not mind-independent entities. Their power comes from the fact that they’re useful for helping to make testable predictions. But these, too, never take us outside experience, for they require specific kinds of perceptions performed by highly trained observers.

For these reasons, scientific ‘objectivity’ can’t stand outside experience; in this context, ‘objective’ simply means something that’s true to the observations agreed upon by a community of investigators using certain tools. Science is essentially a highly refined form of human experience, based on our capacities to observe, act and communicate.

So the belief that scientific models correspond to how things truly are doesn’t follow from the scientific method. Instead, it comes from an ancient impulse – one often found in monotheistic religions – to know the world as it is in itself, as God does. The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific.

Recent philosophers of science who target such ‘naive realism’ argue that science doesn’t culminate in a single picture of a theory-independent world. Rather, various aspects of the world – from chemical interactions to the growth and development of organisms, brain dynamics and social interactions – can be more or less successfully described by partial models. These models are always bound to our observations and actions, and circumscribed in their application.

The fields of complex systems theory and network science add mathematical precision to these claims by focusing on wholes rather than the reduction to parts. Complex systems theory is the study of systems, such as the brain, living organisms or the Earth’s global climate, whose behaviour is difficult to model: how the system responds depends on its state and context. Such systems exhibit self-organisation, spontaneous pattern-formation and sensitive dependence on initial conditions (very small changes to the initial conditions can lead to widely different outcomes).

Network science analyses complex systems by modelling their elements as nodes, and the connections between them as links. It explains behaviour in terms of network topologies – the arrangements of nodes and connections – and global dynamics, rather than in terms of local interactions at the micro level.

Inspired by these perspectives, we propose an alternative vision that seeks to move beyond the Blind Spot. Our experience and what we call ‘reality’ are inextricable. Scientific knowledge is a self-correcting narrative made from the world and our experience of it evolving together. Science and its most challenging problems can be reframed once we appreciate this entanglement.

Let’s return to the problem we started with, the question of time and the existence of a First Cause. Many religions have addressed the notion of a First Cause in their mythic creation narratives. To explain where everything comes from and how it originates, they assume the existence of an absolute power or deity that transcends the confines of space and time. With few exceptions, God or gods create from without to give rise to what is within.

Unlike myth, however, science is constrained by its conceptual framework to function along a causal chain of events. The First Cause is a clear rupture of such causation – as Buddhist philosophers pointed out long ago in their arguments against the Hindu theistic position that there must be a first divine cause. How could there be a cause that was not itself an effect of some other cause? The idea of a First Cause, like the idea of a perfectly objective reality, is fundamentally theological.

These examples suggest that ‘time’ will always have a human dimension. The best we can aim for is to construct a scientific cosmological account that is consistent with what we can measure and know of the Universe from inside. The account can’t ever be a final or complete description of cosmic history. Rather, it must be an ongoing, self-correcting narrative. ‘Time’ is the backbone of this narrative; our lived experience of time is necessary to make the narrative meaningful. With this insight, it seems it’s the physicist’s time that is secondary; it’s merely a tool to describe the changes we’re able to observe and measure in the natural world. The time of the physicist, then, depends for its meaning on our lived experience of time.

We can now appreciate the deeper significance of our three scientific conundrums – the nature of matter, consciousness and time. They all point back to the Blind Spot and the need to reframe how we think about science. When we try to understand reality by focusing only on physical things outside of us, we lose sight of the experiences they point back to. The deepest puzzles can’t be solved in purely physical terms, because they all involve the unavoidable presence of experience in the equation. There’s no way to render ‘reality’ apart from experience, because the two are always intertwined.

To finally ‘see’ the Blind Spot is to wake up from a delusion of absolute knowledge. It’s also to embrace the hope that we can create a new scientific culture, in which we see ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature’s self-understanding. We need nothing less than a science nourished by this sensibility for humanity to flourish in the new millennium.











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Adam Frank is professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester in New York. He is the author of several books, the latest being Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth (2018).

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where he is the Appleton professor of natural philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy, and the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement (ICE). He is the author of The Island of Knowledge (2014).

Evan Thompson is professor of philosophy and a scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His latest book is Waking, Dreaming, Being (2015).